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The Anthropology of Populism: Beyond the Liberal Settlement; William Mazzarella

What is the value of anthropological expertise in an antiexpert climate, especially when the
rejection of expertise takes place in the name of the ordinary people whom anthropologists have
generally claimed as their first and most important interlocutors?

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Week 8,9 & 10: People, Populism and Elections

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Week 8,9 & 10: People, Populism and Elections

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This interview contains a number of interesting elements that I thought particularly relevant to the recent elections and the course's attention to populism. One of the main points that Barack Obama vocalizes in this interview is how the role of the media and the news has become a monopoly on people's minds and views. He talks of how uncertainty  fuelled the 2016 elections and how this exacerbated in this last year. I thought he made an interesting point about American identity: he says that after his election, there was a widespread anxiety for many Americans who feared racial progress, reason as to why Trump's populism was able to reach so many people. From Walley's (year) piece one understands how the main social group that Trump directed himself towards was white middle class Americans, and how that was created as the only idea of the 'American people', a social rhetoric that Trump uses continuously.

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In a UK exclusive, Barack Obama encounters historian David Olusoga to discuss his long-awaited memoir A Promised Land, and how he may have cast a spotlight on the racial fault lines in America.

In a UK exclusive, former American president Barack Obama encounters historian David Olusoga to discuss his long-awaited memoir A Promised Land, his reflections on the volatile racial divide in the US, his steadfast refusal to abandon American ideals, and how the sight of a black president and black first family in the White House may have cast a spotlight on the depth of racial fault lines in America.

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BBC One - Barack Obama Talks to David Olusoga

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In a UK exclusive, Barack Obama encounters historian David Olusoga to discuss his long-awaited memoir A Promised Land, and how he may have cast a spotlight on the racial fault lines in America.

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Cas Mudde Articles and Lecture on Populism
1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPt__1iALJo
2) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/17/problem-populism-syriza-podemos-dark-side-europe

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How populism became the concept that defines our age | Cas Mudde

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"Populism" as a term was rarely used in the 20th century; it was limited to US historians describing, in highly specific terms, the original agrarian populists of the mid-19th century. Latin American social scientists (often Marxists) focused it primarily on the Peronists in Argentina.

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The Media and Populism
During the Black Lives Matter protests on early 2020, that carried on for months, I was struck, like many others, by the horrifying narratives and language that was adopted by the media in describing the protests. I decided to include this short report which responded analytically and statistically to the claims of violence present in these protests. American media, to nationals and international public, were portraying protestors as violent, aggressive, out of control, dangerous and damaging. The peaceful protests were very often labelled 'riots' and paid strict attention to the occurence of violent acts, rather than explaning and discussing what was at the heart of the moment, a crippling racial inequality deeply embedded in the United States. Granted some protesters turned violent, the role of the media in such a portrayal only exacerbated negative perspectives on BLM, and hindered a comprehensive understanding of the enormous social issue. I decided to include this issue after noting the observations on Venezuelan populism made by Gottberg in terms of racialization of crowds, and Samet's observation of the terms 'malo' and 'sano' attributed to individuals. There was a constant attribution of negative characteristics to BLM proteters, one that perpetuated racial inequality and hierarchy.

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A report from the US Crisis Monitor found that 93% of protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement have been peaceful, despite a highly polarized political climate and reports on the news emphasizing instances of destruction, looting and overall lawlessness.

The report analyzed recent protests spurred by the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and it also analyzed differences between the data and public opinion of the Black Lives Matter movement.

93% of Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S. were peaceful, according to a report from the U.S. Crisis Monitor.

- UberFacts (@UberFacts) September 4, 2020

News of the reports' findings has caused "93% of Black Lives Matter" to trend on Twitter.

What Is the US Crisis Monitor & What Did Researchers Find?

The Crisis Monitor and the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University identified over 100 instances of non-state actors, including at least 20 distinct far-right militia groups, intervening in BLM demonstrations, sometimes violently, since May 24 https://t.co/njBftUuPSY

- rungirlrun🛹🌱 (@rungirlrun07) September 1, 2020

The US Crisis Monitor is a collaboration between two entities. One of those entities is The Armed Conflict Location Event Data Project (ACLED), which is a global nonprofit that collects voluminous data on political violence. The other entity is Princeton University's Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI), which is part of the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination at Princeton's School for Public and International Affairs; this initiative tracks political activity, demonstrations and violence around the world, according to the website.

The collaborators found that there were 7,750 demonstrations affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement around the U.S. between the day after George Floy'd death, May 26 and August 22. According to their research, there were roughly 10,600 demonstrations between May 24 and August 22, 80% of which were either related to Black Lives Matter or the COVID-19 pandemic.

They also found that, of the 10,600, 95% involve peaceful protesters and "fewer than 570 - or approximately 5% - involve(d) demonstrators engaging in violence." The research went on to state:

The vast majority of demonstration events associated with the BLM movement are non-violent (see map below). In more than 93% of all demonstrations connected to the movement, demonstrators have not engaged in violence or destructive activity.

Violent demonstrations, meanwhile, have been limited to fewer than 220 locations - under 10% of the areas that experienced peaceful protests. In many urban areas like Portland, Oregon, for example, which has seen sustained unrest since Floyd's killing, violent demonstrations are largely confined to specific blocks, rather than dispersed throughout the city.

Several Polls Show Declining Support for Protests & Black Lives Matter

These #BLMAntifaTerrorists do not care about Black lives, all they care about is loot, arson, attack the Police, and above all prove that their illogical failed Ideology works. Period https://t.co/8unb86iJHo

- Aga$tya (@TruthMattr) September 1, 2020

Researchers have pointed to a number of studies, including some of the following, that indicate Americans' positive view of protests, Black protesters and the Black Lives Matter, has been declining:

A Morning Consult poll found that among all U.S. adults, support for the statement "When Black Americans speak up and protest injustice in the United States, it always makes the country better" was always lower than support for the statement, When Americans speak up and protest injustice in the United States, it always makes the country better."

Another Morning Consult poll found that only 54% of U.S. adults (49% of white Americans and 77% of Black Americans) supported the protests taking place after Floyd's death. In that same poll, researchers found that 42% of Americans believe that "most of the current protesters are trying to incite violence or destroy property, even though some are peaceful and want to bring about meaningful social reform."

A Civiqs opinion poll of registered voters on Black Lives Matter found that support for the movement - which had been rising steadily and peaked to 24% in June - precipitously dropped to 12% after July.

Researchers Say Media Framing & Disinformation May Be Driving the Public Perception That BLM & BLM Protests Are Violent

A reporter who was on the scene during the riots said that she saw an entire block on fire. Was the entire block a bank?Do they make banks that big? https://t.co/em4F9R7KXE

- pedantic killjoy (@pedantickilljoy) August 27, 2020

Researchers noted that some news channels have manipulated coverage to make violence appear more ongoing or widespread. Business Insider reported on a Fox News segment that recycled old footage of fire in Minneapolis to "imply that violent unrest is still unfolding, with the present tense overshadowing the smaller time signature visuals."

Researchers also said that the declining support may be attributed to disinformation, such as that Black Lives Matter protesters were urging violence against white people. The Anti-Defamation League noted that these fliers, some of which included the messages "White men women and children You are the enemy!" and "Hate is OK if directed at WHITE FAMILIES" were disinformation pieces intended to discredit the Black Lives Matter movement. Snopes identified the fliers as originating from the right-wing conspiracy theory group QAnon and not Black Lives Matter. However, the fliers continued to be circulated, even reaching conservative pundit Tomi Lahren.

The report also addressed that in some media reports, instances of violence are generally attributed to Black Lives Matter, with a failure to acknowledge the presence of saboteurs of the movement and insufficient follow-up to correct that narrative, such as in the case of "umbrella man":

Despite the media focus on looting and vandalism, however, there is little evidence to suggest that demonstrators have engaged in widespread violence. In some cases where demonstrations did turn violent, there are reports of agents provocateurs - or infiltrators - instigating the violence. During a demonstration on 27 May in Minneapolis, for example, a man with an umbrella - dubbed the 'umbrella man' by the media and later identified as a member of the Hells Angels linked to the Aryan Cowboys, a white supremacist prison and street gang - was seen smashing store windows (Forbes, 30 May 2020; KSTP, 28 July 2020). It was one of the first reports of destructive activity that day, and it "created an atmosphere of hostility and tension" that helped spark an outbreak of looting following initially peaceful protests, according to police investigators, who believe the man "wanted to sow discord and racial unrest" (New York Times, 28 July 2020).

In Minnesota and more recently in Kenosha, Wisconsin, violent behavior was attributed to out-of-state actors with hidden/no license plates and no affiliation with the Black Lives Matter movement.

The report also noted that escalating responses from law enforcement have contributed to the narrative of protests being violent. You can read the entire report here.
READ NEXT: Fact Check: Was Joe Biden Ever a 'Professor in College'?

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A New Report Says 93% of BLM Protests Have Been Peaceful

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A report from the US Crisis Monitor found that 93% of protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement have been peaceful, despite a highly polarized political climate and reports on the news emphasizing instances of destruction, looting and overall lawlessness.

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This short BBC feature delves further into the rising right-wing populism and popularity of the Lega Nord, led by Salvini, in the north of Italy. More specifically it looks to the change in political stance observed in Ferrara, a historically left-wing town that recently voted for the Lega. The interviews demonstrate a very common and popular conversation around migration and security, one that has allowed for right-wing populism to thrive in the country. Salvini's discourse, and the Lega's more broadly, has really focused on creating a strong dichotomy with migrants, and more generally non-Italian citizens. In the video one of the interviewees says: 'italians first', which is something I have personally come across numerous times. The video also made a point of highlighting how the effect of right-wing populism has shifted previously left-wing voters to the right, as many of them in Italy are at loose ends and feel like they had no other choice. This resonates with Boris' win in many small labour counties in the last election as well, and demonstrates the vast appeal and effective rhetoric of appealing to national identity and making individuals feel as if they are being heard and prioritized.
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Why is Italy swinging to the far right? - BBC News

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Media in Belarus
Considering Gottberg's and Samet's observation on the role of the media in Venezuelan populism, I looked at this video with such ideas in mind. The short video demonstrates the crucial role of photojournalists in the protest of Belarus, who are witnesses and share information about what is currently happening in the country, Because of this position, they are rendered extremely vulnerable and are targeted by the state for their capacity to change state propagated narratives. The vulnerability of photojournalists speaks largely to Samet's considerations on the death of Tortoza. What I found particularly interesting is Samet's piece was the idea of the journalist embodying the body politic while also representing the very real and corporeal body of a citizen.  I believe that more widely, it speaks to enormously influential role of the media and the power of information, and how this influences the identity of a nation and what is portrayed on the political stage.

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Belarus. Media and the Revolution (SUBTITLES)

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The TED talk below expands on the element of Bolivarianism touched upon in the lectures. It expands on the contemporary presence of Bolivarianism in Latin American society.  More specifically, it shows the universal character of such a movement, including pictures of street art where Bolivar appears to never be of the same race or ethnicity. I thought this particularly interesting given the racial construction of chavismo  and ethnopopulism discussed by Gottberg and Samet, as it demonstrated Bolivar's changing ideal as a symbol of national identity.

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The impact of Simón Bolivar | Marie Arana

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Boris's Populism, Chantal Mouffe

To be sure, such an “us” will never include everybody. It does, of course, require a “them” and the drawing of a political frontier. But we can have a frontier that makes democracy more radical – one that pits the people against the oligarchy, and the many against the few.

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n his determination to deliver Brexit " do or die ", Boris Johnson is planning to launch an election campaign that will pit "the people" against "parliament". He promises to take sovereignty back from the political elites - and return it to "the people". The announcement of these tactics has caused alarm among those who fear democracy will be threatened by a "populist" politics of polarisation between "us" and "them".

But this fear of populism reveals something troubling about how we currently understand democratic politics. What most people seem to find shocking about Johnson's strategy is that it involves an "us v them" confrontation - as if democratic politics could avoid conflict between irreconcilable political projects.

Since Thucydides and Machiavelli, we have known that politics involves conflict and antagonism and that it has, by definition, a partisan character. In politics, therefore, we are always dealing with an opposition between "us" and "them" - which means it will always be necessary to draw a political frontier between the two sides.

This is still the case in a democracy: contrary to what is often asserted, democratic politics is not defined by the absence of such a frontier. In fact, what characterises a liberal pluralist democracy is the way this line is drawn - so that the "them" are not seen as enemies to be destroyed, but as adversaries engaged in a confrontation between competing conceptions of the common good. When it is formulated in terms of an opposition between left and right - rather than in religious or ethnic terms - this frontier is crucial for democracy, because it provides the necessary framework for a confrontation between two legitimate positions.

With the advent of the third way in the 1990s, it became fashionable in some quarters to declare that the adversarial model of politics was now obsolete - so categories of right and left were no longer needed. But even the champions of a post-political consensus cannot avoid drawing a frontier between themselves and their rivals. Since they refuse to draw it in an adversarial way, they create a moral divide, which does not permit a true agonistic debate. Tony Blair pitted the modernisers against the traditionalists; for Emmanuel Macron, the frontier is between the progressives and the conservatives.

As traditional social democratic parties were converted to neoliberalism in the 1990s and 2000s, this non-adversarial conception of politics - which was deemed to be progress for democracy - became dominant across western Europe. Centre-left parties convinced themselves there was no alternative to the hegemony of financial capitalism, and implemented the policies favoured by finance capital - which have led to an exponential increase in inequality and the emergence of new forms of subordination, not only among the working classes, but also in significant sectors of the middle classes.

Since the economic crisis of 2008, however, there has been growing resistance to an economic order that has produced a new class of oligarchs and a growing precariat. After decades of "post-politics", during which citizens were deprived of a voice in the way they were governed - under the pretence there was no alternative - we are now living through a populist moment. Political frontiers that were said to have vanished are now being reinstated, in the name of recovering democracy and popular sovereignty.

This is the context in which we must understand the recent success of rightwing populist parties. By repudiating the centrist consensus, and redrawing a political frontier between "the people" and "the establishment", they have promoted a challenge to the status quo that resonates with the feelings of many different constituencies who have been negatively affected by the consequences of neoliberal post-democracy.

In Britain, much of this resistance was given shape by the Brexit vote in 2016. The great success of the leave campaign was to link the grievances of a number of disparate groups by articulating anti-austerity and anti-establishment sentiments with a nationalistic flavour. The slogan "Take back control" provided a rallying cry for these various demands. By blaming the EU for the deterioration of social and political conditions in the UK, Brexit became a hegemonic signifier - one around which a new "people", identified as leavers, has coalesced. These are the "people" Johnson pretends to represent and whose will he accuses parliament of disregarding.

How can we respond to such an offensive? We must not be tempted to counter Johnson's populism with a return to centrist politics. It is precisely such a centrist politics that is at the origin of the current democratic crisis in western Europe.

Similarly, we should not demonise all Brexiters as deplorables, or dismiss them for being unable to recognise the intellectual and moral superiority of the European project. The campaign to leave succeeded in part because there was a democratic kernel at the core of these demands - which reflected a widespread discontent with post-democracy.

In Britain, as in the rest of Europe, the way to answer the rightwing populist offensive is the construction of another "people" - through the articulation of a project that can link together various demands against the status quo. A project in which both leavers and remainers could feel that they have a voice and that their concerns are taken into account. One signifier for such a project could be a Green New Deal - which articulates multiple environmental and economic struggles around a demand for equality and social justice.

To be sure, such an "us" will never include everybody. It does, of course, require a "them" and the drawing of a political frontier. But we can have a frontier that makes democracy more radical - one that pits the people against the oligarchy, and the many against the few.

* Chantal Mouffe is professor of political theory at the University of Westminster

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Centrist politics will not defeat Boris Johnson's rightwing populism | Chantal Mouffe

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n his determination to deliver Brexit " do or die ", Boris Johnson is planning to launch an election campaign that will pit "the people" against "parliament". He promises to take sovereignty back from the political elites - and return it to "the people".

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Weeks 5, 6: Understanding Violence and Political Violence

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Weeks 5, 6: Understanding Violence and Political Violence

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Can Israelis and Palestinians See Eye to Eye? || Creators for Change | Middle Ground

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This video is interesting in the way that it looks at populism by offering two different examples. The first looks to Italy's Five Star Movement,  which gained momentum before Italy's referendum in 2016 by 'offering real answers' for the italian 'people'. Beppe Grillo seems to provide the figure sometimes characteristic of populism that is charismatic and anti-elitist (Canovan), having been a comedian prior to entering the political sphere and appealing to Italians with this background. In the video we can see him singing, playing the piano and chanting 'blues of the no' about the referendum; these charming ways work to unite a people together and give them a sense of direction and unity (Canovan). Most importantly, I thought that the 'blues of the no' encapsulated the joyful presentation of a simple answer to extremely deep rooted issues of inequality, functioning on the deep mistrust of insitutions (Canovan). Meanwhile, the second half of the video looked at the truck driving industry in the United States and how truck driving with recent technology has also become automated. During my time in America I met a man who had been a truck driver for 45 years, he told me his life story; he was a lovely person but when it came to politics my conversations with him about Trump completely and utterly clarified how Trump's populism was able to engage the masses. This last part of the video speaks to the role of technology and neoliberalism in spurring economic and social inequality, rendering certain industries vulnerable and susceptible to Trump's populism that appealed to the 'white working class' (Walley).

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This video demonstrates how the despair in Italy, followed by impatience and disappointemnet has fuelled the five star populist movement led by Beppe Grillo.

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S OME SEE Italy's anti-establishment Five Star Movement ( M5 S) as a destabilising force which, by refusing to ally itself with mainstream parties, logjammed Italian politics for years. Others see it as an eccentric but original group that genuinely cares about corruption, the environment and using digital technology to give ordinary people a voice in politics. Depending on which view you take, the online referendum of M5 S 's members held on August 13th-14th was either a triumph or a disaster, because they ditched two of its core principles.

The M5 S voted by four to one to modify a rule that limits members to a total of two terms in all elected offices. Henceforth, serving as a local councillor will not count-a change that will allow Virginia Raggi, the mayor of Rome and previously a city councillor, to run for a second term. The movement also voted 60% to 40% to drop its opposition to formal alliances with traditional parties, at least locally. That means M5 S can link up with its government coalition partner, the centre-left Democratic Party ( PD), at municipal elections on September 20th-21st. The poll represents a step back from populism in a country that has been pioneering it ever since Silvio Berlusconi, a media tycoon, came to power in the 1990s.

The two-term limit was central to Five Stars' contention that ordinary people make better politicians than the allegedly corrupt professionals. But dropping the taboo on alliances may have more effect. It is seen as a step towards a long-term partnership with the PD, which emerged out of parties including the former Communists. In the region of Liguria, which also votes next month, the two parties have already agreed on a joint candidate for governor: Ferruccio Sansa, a journalist. "What we aim to do in this campaign is to put flesh on the bones of a coalition that until now has existed largely on paper," he says.

In some ways the time is ripe. Italy's other populist movement, the far-right Northern League, is in deep trouble. Its poll ratings have plunged from 37% last summer to below 25%. Many of its followers have switched to backing the Brothers of Italy ( Fd I) party, led (despite its name) by a woman, Giorgia Meloni. The Fd I, which has roots in Italy's neo-fascist movement, is as conservative as the League, but more conventional and less hostile to the EU.

Ms Meloni is not as fond of social media as the League's leader, Matteo Salvini, nor of the publicity stunts which have undermined his credibility. (Last year he played the national anthem while DJ ing bare-chested at a beach club, surrounded by bikini-clad dancers.) Mr Salvini's non-stop criticism of the government for its handling of covid-19 also seems to have cost him support. Ms Meloni has carped too, but has sounded more responsible.

"She is more subtle than Salvini and knows better how to play the game," says Sofia Ventura of the University of Bologna. But, she notes, Ms Meloni shares many of the League's ideas, like hatred of immigration and conspiracy theories about George Soros, a billionaire philanthropist. Between the League and the Fd I, "almost 40% of Italians support the radical right."

Much will depend on how Giuseppe Conte's coalition government manages the EU recovery money about to wash through Italy. If the PD and the M5 S can stay in office until the funds begin flowing next year, they will gain a formidable instrument for patronage. But the financial advantage still rests with their opponents, who have wealthy backers. Mr Sansa discovered this when he tried to hire a comedian for a campaign rally: "He told me he'd already been offered more money by the other side than I have for the entire campaign." ■

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "Welcome to normal politics"

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Italy's populist Five Star Movement is becoming a more normal party

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S OME SEE Italy's anti-establishment Five Star Movement ( M5 S) as a destabilising force which, by refusing to ally itself with mainstream parties, logjammed Italian politics for years. Others see it as an eccentric but original group that genuinely cares about corruption, the environment and using digital technology to give ordinary people a voice in politics.

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The Growing Danger of Political Violence Threatens to Destabilize America

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American polarization and rage have grown so great that a recent poll showed that we believe we're two-thirds of the way to a civil war.

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Just before sunrise in Istanbul on 11 November 2019, a determined thumping on her iron front door stirred Emma Winberg from a brief sleep. Blurry-eyed, she grasped at the empty space in bed next to her, pulled on a pair of trousers, fumbled with a bedside lamp, then ran across the bedsit to the kitchen next door. "James wasn't there," she said. "And that's when I just knew."

Winberg had slept briefly after an anxious night. As she drifted off, at about 4.30am, she had seen her husband staring at her from near the bedroom window of their third-floor flat. Now, startled awake, she dashed towards the same spot, her dread rising with every step. "I looked down and thought: 'Thank God, nothing there.' And then I looked left."
How Syria's disinformation wars destroyed the co-founder of the White Helmets - podcast
Lying naked in the gloom below was James Le Mesurier, 48, a co-founder of the White Helmets, an organisation dedicated to rescuing civilians caught in the Syrian war. Worshippers who had been on their way to morning prayers at the nearby Kılıç Ali Paşa mosque now gathered silently around the body of a foreigner lying on a cobblestone lane. Plastic wrappings and bandages left by medics littered the scene. Not far away, freighters laden with cargo carved white wakes through the grey waters of the Bosphorus. Seagulls watched from a wall as the crowd of onlookers and police continued to swell. The autumn sun crept above the horizon.

Winberg stumbled down the staircase and opened the first of two security doors. She was reaching for the second door when five policemen rushed towards her. "I've since heard from someone else that I was crying 'No, no, no, no, no'," Winberg told me recently, speaking publicly for the first time about her partner's death. "I grabbed a blanket because I wanted to cover him up. I could see him through the door and they wouldn't let me touch him. I tried to get them to take the blanket to put it over him and they refused, and pushed me back upstairs. And then it just started. It was the worst moment of my life."

News of Le Mesurier's death travelled fast; it was quickly the talk of political circles in Istanbul and northern Syria. London and Moscow, where he was even better known, woke to reports two hours later. Senior officials in both capitals, including Boris Johnson, were briefed before breakfast; this was global news, with widespread ramifications. Johnson had met Le Mesurier during an earlier sweep through Turkey as foreign minister in 2014, and had remained a supporter of his work.

Since late 2013, Le Mesurier had been helping to coordinate teams of volunteers in north-western Syria, where most of those who opposed the country's leader, Bashar al-Assad, were located. The region was beyond the reach of state-backed rescuers, and so, out of desperation, local people - teachers, carpenters and other civilians - had begun organising themselves into groups to dig out family members and neighbours from the aftermath of airstrikes. Some of the rescuers had sought help from a UAE-based humanitarian consultancy, Ark, which Le Mesurier was then working for. After a decade in the Middle East, he had become disillusioned with big-budget foreign security firms, which he felt did more to enrich foreign contractors than empower locals. He thought that grassroots organisations, staffed by civilians on the ground, could do more good. The work of the Syrian civilian rescuers seemed to be a perfect fit. So Le Mesurier quit Ark, taking the project with him, and relocated to Turkey.

The idea quickly grew. Le Mesurier, who had served as a captain in the British army during the 1990s, would help train volunteer rescuers and secure international funding for their work. In early 2014, he established Mayday Rescue as a foundation to channel aid to rescuers, and made it his sole focus for the next five years.

Soon a concept became a brand. The White Helmets, as they became known, began using head-mounted cameras to record what was happening on the ground. Images of Syrian volunteers in white helmets, with gas masks and head torches, scrambling through rubble to save lives, resonated around the world. Footage of babies being lifted alive from bombed-out buildings and children being carried out of the smoking ruins of homes cut through the public's fatigue surrounding the war. The White Helmets were celebrated by film-makers, celebrities and global leaders. At its peak, the organisation was funding 200 teams across Syria, totalling 4,000 rescuers and medics. It was also providing rescue trucks, ambulances and digging equipment.

Funding flooded in, with Britain, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Qatar and Canada donating a total of about $30m a year, as hundreds of thousands of people crammed into north-western Syria were bombed by Syrian and Russian jets. By mid-2015, around 500,000 people had been killed in the conflict. Those figures spiked when the Russian airstrikes intensified in late 2015, and since then the death toll has continued to rise.

All around, Syria was unravelling - a disaster that followed the monumental failings of the joint US-British invasion of Iraq, which hung like a pall over Whitehall and Westminster. For states with no appetite for military intervention, funding the White Helmets seemed like a risk-free way to help. A collaboration between the British government and Mayday Rescue became one of Britain's few known interventions in the Syrian war.

The White Helmets' work soon earned global accolades. The organisation was nominated multiple times for the Nobel peace prize. In 2016, Le Mesurier was awarded an OBE "for the protection of civilians in Syria". The Netflix documentary, The White Helmets, won an Oscar the following year. But as the organisation's international fame grew, it also attracted powerful enemies intent on destroying its reputation and hounding the people behind it.

As forensic specialists tended to Le Mesurier's body, more police arrived at Mayday Rescue's offices, which were located on the floor below the bedsit. Soon the work space was teeming with officials. Upstairs, Winberg was being swabbed by detectives, who were taking her fingerprints and DNA, and treating her as a murder suspect. Across town, at the White Helmets offices, employees were waking to the shocking news of Le Mesurier's death. So, too, was the internet, where much of the organisation's work, and that of Le Mesurier, had been contested since its earliest days.

n the years before Le Mesurier's death, he and the White Helmets had become the focus of an online disinformation campaign led by Russian and Syrian officials and peddled by pro-Assad bloggers, alt-right media figures and self-described anti-imperialists. As their work in Syria expanded, the group became one of the most scrutinised and vilified organisations in the world.

The motivation was not hard to grasp. Here was a group that worked solely in areas of Syria controlled by the anti-government opposition, helping to save the victims of attacks carried out by Assad's backers. At the same time, footage of rescue missions undermined the regime's narrative and humanised its victims. These provocations were seen as intolerable.

From September 2015, when Russia entered the war to save Assad from defeat, bombing raids on civilian areas reached unprecedented levels. Vivid scenes of men, women and children suffering terrible injuries gave the lie to Russian and Syrian claims that their campaign to recapture Idlib province and the suburbs of Damascus only targeted Islamist terrorists and their sympathisers. Instead, as the videos showed, they were bombing civilian areas indiscriminately.

The disinformation campaign quickly grew, its aim to sow doubt about the White Helmets and the footage they collected. As the war progressed, north-western Syria became a magnet for extremists bent on using the chaos to launch a global jihad. Propagandists exploited the confusion on the ground. Soon, claims appeared online that the White Helmets had been infiltrated by al-Qaeda, which had supposedly seized on the group as a way to obtain foreign funds. There were also accusations that the group had been created by governments determined to remove Assad from power, and that the White Helmets volunteers were "crisis actors" staging scenes to discredit Russia and Syria.

Useful idiots promoting such conspiracy theories on YouTube, Twitter and their own fringe websites were given profile and flattering coverage by Russian and Syrian media outlets. Le Mesurier was himself the subject of near-daily state-sponsored attacks on Russian television and social media, calling him a terrorist, spy, paedophile and organ trafficker, among other scripted slurs. He was called an agent of western intelligence, using a rescue organisation as a Trojan horse for regime change. The smears even got an airing at the UN security council, via a panel put together by Moscow.

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James Le Mesurier during training exercises in southern Turkey in 2015. Photograph: AP

The aim was to flood the media ecosystem with falsehoods that would erode trust among supporters, especially donor governments. And it did indeed take a toll, both on the White Helmets' reputation and on the morale of its volunteers and supporters. In September 2018, when I first met Le Mesurier, he talked about the growing burden and stress of the disinformation campaign. From then on, I followed his story closely.

In the last few years, the geopolitics of the Syrian conflict and the nature of the war itself grew more challenging than ever. North-western Syria had become the most densely populated corner of the country, as displaced populations from all regions sought refuge there among local communities. Some hardline Islamist groups had found their way to the area and based themselves there. The question of who controlled Idlib - the region where the White Helmets were most prevalent - had become increasingly fraught for governments, who demanded clarity on where their aid dollars were going.

"The situation on the ground had become increasingly complex," said Ethan Wilson, Mayday Rescue's former programme director. "From 2017-19, the [growing global] aversion to Syria, Russian disinformation and increasing western paranoid isolationist far-right politics were all contributing factors that led to much higher scrutiny than was the case in 2015-16."

Throughout 2019, Mayday would come under increasing pressure. Diplomats dealing with the organisation faced more and more questions from politicians about how and where its money was being spent. Every penny of donor funding needed to be accounted for, and there were concerns that Mayday did not have adequate systems and structures to keep tabs on its many funding streams and accounts. An audit was requested by the British Government's then aid arm, the Department for International Development (DfID) in late 2018, and delivered in June 2019.

In the last week of Le Mesurier's life, the years of stress came to a head. On 7 November, four days before he died, he sat with a new team of auditors for a fateful meeting. He walked away fearing that somehow he had lost control of Mayday Rescue. In his mind, all that he had worked for was about to be suddenly and shockingly challenged in unfathomable ways. Worse still, the reputation of his foundation, and the White Helmets, appeared to be at stake. He feared that history might judge him as the man who destroyed their legacy and jeopardised aid for embattled Syrians. By the time Le Mesurier fell to his death, in what friends, family and the Turkish police believe was a suicide, the pressure had become unendurable.

The life and death of James Le Mesurier is the story of a man who became a lightning rod in a war of narrative over the Syrian conflict - someone who helped build one of the war's most iconic groups, and unwittingly became a central figure in a global information war fought over the ruins of a crumbling world order. It is also the tale of how a foundation that ran one of the most successful collaborative aid interventions in recent times collapsed, and how, in his final days, Le Mesurier unravelled under the weight of claims that would later prove to be false.

hen Cornelis Vrieswijk arrived in Istanbul in the second week of January 2020, he had little idea of what to expect. A veteran of business in the Netherlands, Vrieswijk had made his name rescuing companies in financial trouble. Over the course of a long corporate career, he had evolved into a finance version of Pulp Fiction's Mr Wolf - a go-to guy who fixes the trickiest problems. This assignment appeared to fit the bill.

The 62-year-old Dutchman had been called in to go through the accounts of Mayday Rescue, a foundation he knew nothing about, operating in a field he had no exposure to. "But no matter the background, it was a good fit for my experience," Vrieswijk told me. "I work in a world where everything is under stress."

Vrieswijk had been hired by Mayday Rescue's chief financial officer, Johan Eleveld, at the urging of donors. They had become alarmed by an email sent by Le Mesurier in the days before his death, in which he raised several financial issues that had been flagged during a meeting with Eleveld and the audit firm. On 7 January 2020, Vrieswijk met with Eleveld in Rotterdam, and on 12 January they travelled to Istanbul with another Dutch businessman, Rob Van Eck. In both meetings, Vrieswijk was presented with a series of concerns about Mayday's finances. They stemmed partly from the preliminary findings of an advisory assessment presented to Le Mesurier in November by the Dutch auditor SMK - in that fateful meeting four days before his death - which was later summarised in draft minutes. The assessment raised questions about a number of cash transactions and identified several areas of concern in Mayday's books. According to Vrieswijk, Eleveld raised further questions in addition to those covered by SMK.

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Members of the White Helmets search for survivors following an airstrike on a rebel-held neighbourhood on the outskirts of Damascus in 2016. Photograph: Msallam Abdalbaset/AFP/Getty Images

"I sat down for that first meeting, and I must say my impression was that James and Emma were really bad people; that James was the leader of a mob," Vrieswijk said. "I was told by [Eleveld] that Emma had spent $90,000 on a wedding dress, they'd both spent $250,000 on a speedboat, and they'd enjoyed a year-long honeymoon with pearls and handbags, all at the expense of Mayday. I thought this was going to be quite a challenge." Eleveld told the Guardian that he did not recognise the description of the meeting, insisting he did not mention anything that wasn't covered in the SMK minutes.

Vrieswijk was to chair a three-person supervisory board - along with Van Eck and a lawyer - to get to the bottom of things. (Le Mesurier had, at the time of his death, been attempting to relocate Mayday Rescue from Istanbul to Amsterdam, hence the Dutch connection.) "There were allegations of remuneration benefits being extreme, of unauthorised cash payments for personal reasons, of differences between the amounts received and disbursed by Mayday, and of income tax liabilities," said Vrieswijk.

The allegations, if proven, would be ruinous for Mayday, and damaging for donor governments, who had, until late 2019, maintained their support for the foundation - and crucially the White Helmets - despite the disinformation surrounding the group's work.

Not long before he died, a distressed Le Mesurier had told friends that the claims had seemed to come from nowhere. While the June 2019 audit, conducted at the request of DfID, had recommended introducing more stringent accounting controls and tighter governance, there had been nothing to suggest that Mayday's future might be at stake. The November 2019 meeting with SMK, the Dutch auditors, raised questions about cash withdrawals, tax positions and grant agreements, but made no formal findings. Nevertheless, the nature of the issues it flagged shocked Le Mesurier to his core.

One transaction in particular had remained unresolved since the June audit, and was raised again by SMK in November: $50,000 in cash that Le Mesurier had withdrawn from the Mayday safe in July 2018, to support a mission to evacuate up to 400 White Helmets members and their families from southern Syria to Jordan. Whether that money had been properly accounted for was flagged earlier by the DfID-ordered review, and was now being scrutinised once more.

Both audit teams had wanted to see the paper trail. In a wartorn country like Syria, where everything runs on cash, the lack of electronic records made old-school bookkeeping essential. According to Mayday's former head of compliance, Nadera al-Sukkar, the balance of the money that Le Mesurier had not used - $40,800 - was returned, but was recorded in a ledger that had made it hard to locate on Mayday's books. Le Mesurier had not kept receipts for the incremental sums, comprising the $9,200 he had spent in Jordan, and he couldn't remember returning the balance.

In late May 2019, Le Mesurier met his finance team to try to resolve the issue, and decided to backdate a receipt to provide to the auditors. "It was not illegal, but it was shady," al-Sukkar told me.

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On 8 November, after being presented with draft minutes of the meeting with the Dutch auditors, Le Mesurier, facing what he feared could be an unravelling of Mayday, chose to tackle what seemed to him to be a quick win: explaining the circumstances behind the $50,000 withdrawal and the decision to backdate a receipt. Ignoring the reservations of his colleagues, he wrote a long email to donors in which he acknowledged that the bookkeeping in relation to the $50,000 had technically constituted fraud. Le Mesurier believed that by being transparent about what was ultimately a case of sloppy bookkeeping, he could reassure donors and safeguard future funding.

According to multiple sources, Eleveld made the mea culpa about the apparently missing $50,000 central to his discussions with Vrieswijk and others. The forensic accounting firm Grant Thornton was retained in the week after Le Mesurier's death. For the next four months, the firm's investigators pored over emails and logs of phone chats, and interviewed staff, including Eleveld.

In the week before Christmas, Winberg received a letter from Mayday's lawyers, accusing her of "unlawfully enriching yourself and others at the expense of the foundation" and suspending her from her position as chief impact officer. "The Mayday Rescue Foundation, represented by its board member, Mr Johan Eleveld, has requested me to inform you as follows," the letter began. Eleveld was the sole board member at the time. It went on to suggest that "following a recent investigation a serious suspicion had arisen" that Winberg had withdrawn $55,000 in three sums in June and July 2018, and not returned them.

So, in mid-January, Vrieswijk began the most politically sensitive role of his life, as chair of the supervisory board of Mayday Rescue, largely oblivious to the political scrutiny that had been a constant drumbeat to Mayday's work. An organisation funded by so many governments, each answerable to their own politicians, was complex enough. Add in a series of transactions that may be irregular, and this could have implications for the future of aid in Syria.

On 21 January, amid the investigations by Vrieswijk and Grant Thornton, the shutters at Mayday Rescue came down. "The donors collectively told me that none of them would support Mayday any longer," said Vrieswijk. "From that point, it became all about a closure plan."

One of the first things Vrieswijk looked into was the missing $50,000 and the allegations of other withdrawal for personal use. "I kept my opinions to myself until around mid-March," said Vrieswijk. "And then I began to interact with the donors on a one-to-one basis."

From then, Vrieswijk's views began to shift.

rom the moment that Emma Winberg first sat down with Le Mesurier, their lives changed. It was March 2016, and Winberg had sought a meeting in Istanbul with a man to whom she had twice been briefly introduced to at garden parties, and had considered charming, and intense. Winberg, a former British diplomat, arrived at Mayday's Istanbul offices with work in mind. At the time she was working for a communications firm in northern Iraq, devising grassroots strategies to disrupt Isis, which was running rampant through the region. She hoped to convince Le Mesurier to help with a project raising teams of locals to safeguard communities above the Mosul dam, which engineers had feared might collapse.

The plan went nowhere, but the meeting lasted long into the night. "By the time we finished our fourth bottle of wine, I knew we were going to be together," Le Mesurier said in late 2018. "She was the partner I wanted."

Le Mesurier's two previous marriages had ended in divorce, and Mayday had become his sole focus. "I gave up on love," he told me in November 2018. So, too, had Winberg. "I'd basically given up on 'life' when I met James," she told me months later. "We'd both accepted our fates of being warrior nun/monk types. We had chosen purpose over personal fulfilment. And then we met and it all changed. Hope returned."

They married in the summer of 2018 in the stateliest hotel on the island of Büyükada, two hours from Istanbul by ferry. The White Helmets' leader, Raed Saleh, was one of Le Mesurier's best men. Representatives from donor countries travelled from all over the world to be there. So did friends from the earlier incarnations of the couple's lives, including officers from Le Mesurier's 1993 class at Sandhurst, where he had won the Queen's medal for leadership. Holding a ceremonial sword, the groom was carried around the reception on the shoulders of his friends. Contrary to the later claims, Winberg wore a £1,795 dress, a gift from her mother, who bought it from a secondhand shop in west London. After the ceremony, the reception spilled on to the waterfront lawns of their nearby home, where friends, colleagues, and family celebrated into the early hours.

The couple's connection was obvious to anyone who visited their rented home on Büyükada, which Winberg painstakingly redecorated and filled with furnishings and knick-knacks, some shipped over from London and others bought in Istanbul bazaars. Their lives became integrated in nearly every aspect, including the running of the foundation. Winberg had taken a seat on the Mayday board in February 2018, before standing down in May 2019. From that point on, she had joined the payroll as an executive.

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Raed Saleh, the leader of the White Helmets, pictured in 2016. Photograph: Bernd von Jutrczenka/AFP/Getty Images

For several years, even under the relentless attacks of vested interests, it seemed Le Mesurier, Winberg and the White Helmets were managing to navigate the constant disinformation. "But it was always there. James, without knowing it, had woken an army," said Eliot Higgins, the founder and CEO of Bellingcat, an investigative journalism organisation that has focused on Russian influence in Syria and elsewhere. "The core of the provocateurs was a fringe anti-imperialist community that existed for a while alone. Russia took these people under their wing and used them to start lying constantly about the White Helmets." Dealing with these critics was difficult, Higgins said, "because the more you engage with them, the more people were hearing what they were saying".

"For me personally, I can't ignore the weight of the disinformation, not only on me but on all of us at the White Helmets," said Saleh. "We put all our energy into saving lives and easing the living conditions in Syria. But this humanitarian work threatens Russian and Syrian regime narratives of what is really happening on the ground. We get called terrorists that are funded by the west. This is a burden that affects us emotionally and it takes a tremendous effort to deal with."

While the disinformation seemed containable, management issues at Mayday Rescue were mounting. The foundation had grown quickly, and was handling millions in donor funding each month. By mid-2018, when donor funding reached its peak, it was clear that Mayday required more robust financial supervision, and that its executive team needed to be expanded. Eleveld was hired by Le Mesurier in August 2018 to help achieve that.

But the problems persisted. There were delays in grant reporting, and headaches about sourcing equipment for the White Helmets and paying suppliers. On top of that, Mayday's executive salaries had been higher than industry standards. "They were not off-the-scale high," said a source familiar with the details of the Grant Thornton forensic audit report commissioned after Le Mesurier's death. "They were acceptable, but they added to the noise. They were using Excel to run the finances of a multi-million-dollar NGO," the source said. "They had never done 'periodical closings' - checking assets and liabilities every month - until the end of 2018."

Other stresses had been piling up, too. Working in Turkey was becoming fraught, as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government grew less tolerant of foreign NGOs, forcing some of them to close. Although Ankara supported the anti-Assad opposition, its sympathies had been tested by their failure to get organised, and its tolerance for the nearly 3 million Syrian refugees in its territory was waning as hopes of an end to the war dwindled.

By November 2019, Le Mesurier was exhausted and emotionally frail. The meeting with the Dutch auditors had become a catalyst for a breakdown. "It's been a very rough couple of days," he told me at the time. "It's looking like the end of us, and possibly Mayday as well."

Winberg watched helplessly as her husband disintegrated. "We had both been so stressed for so long," she said. "The stakes were so high and the operating environment was getting riskier by the day. We felt as though we were just trying to dodge the bullets, but always anxious about the one that would ultimately get through."

Nadera al-Sukkar, the Mayday compliance officer, met Le Mesurier the next day. "James was very stressed," she said. "On Friday [8 November 2019], we all had a meeting and at the end of it he gave me a hug and said: 'I've really enjoyed working with you.' I got goosebumps then, and I get goosebumps now thinking about what happened."

n the weeks after her husband's death, Winberg, then under house arrest, took refuge by herself in what used to be their marital home. Framed photos of Le Mesurier were all around. Wooden floors that had creaked under the feet of friends and guests were silent. A long dinner table remained unused, and the couple's old German shepherd sprawled across an antique carpet. The house echoed with a crippling loss.

Although still officially a suspect in Le Mesurier's death, Winberg was allowed to leave Turkey to attend his funeral, held in a tiny chapel in Surrey near the family home on 27 December 2019. His body was cremated, and she keeps his ashes with her. In late January 2020, back in Turkey, Winberg received a call from her Turkish lawyer, who informed her that she was no longer being investigated for murder and she was free to leave for good. Winberg packed up the house and moved to Amsterdam, where she remains, trying to pick up the pieces nearly a year on.

"James was everything I had always longed for," she said from her new home, surrounded by the memorabilia of the life they built together. "He inspired me, made me howl with laughter, made me believe anything was possible, and made me feel so loved I knew I would never be lonely again. His integrity, his passion and his deep belief in the power of human courage and industry has left a unique signature on everyone who knew him. The impact of his death cannot be measured, cannot be told.

"The world is suffering from a crisis of hope. Our hope that a normal person can be heroic, that they can make a profound difference, is constantly under attack by dark and powerful forces. James stood up to those forces unflinchingly time and time again in the name of what was right. That he was ultimately felled by petty jealousy and grave injustice makes his loss even more absurdly painful."

As Winberg was trying to restart her life, Vrieswijk was making headway in the investigation of Mayday Rescue's finances. By mid-March, he was starting to doubt the tales of fraud and self-enrichment that he had heard when he first arrived in Istanbul. "It gradually became obvious that these allegations could not be true," he said.

"We could not find a single penny spent that was not justified, or could not be explained," he added. "My impression of James and Emma changed wholeheartedly. In the end, it was obvious that neither Emma, nor James, or any of the staff had embezzled money. I went 180 degrees on this. From starting out thinking he was a mob leader who had enriched himself in outrageous ways, I came to see him as somebody I really admire."

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How Syria's disinformation wars destroyed the co-founder of the White Helmets

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Just before sunrise in Istanbul on 11 November 2019, a determined thumping on her iron front door stirred Emma Winberg from a brief sleep. Blurry-eyed, she grasped at the empty space in bed next to her, pulled on a pair of trousers, fumbled with a bedside lamp, then ran across the bedsit to the kitchen next door.

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Weeks 5 & 6: Violence & Power; Understanding Violence

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Weeks 5 & 6: Violence & Power; Understanding Violence

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This blog post discusses the journal article: "Structural vulnerability to narcotics-driven firearm violence: An ethnographic and epidemiological study of Philadelphia's Puerto Rican inner-city" available open-access: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0225376
The United States has astronomical rates of firearm violence compared to other high-income nations, and to explain this discrepancy it is important to consider what is unique about the US, and the deep roots of the ongoing crisis. To understand our country's violence, we must understand its history, and the social and economic structures that engender violence, especially: poverty, racism, and the war on drugs. These are some of the main structural drivers of American violence.

Although large-scale mass shooting events garner the most press and public outrage, they represent a small fraction of all firearm homicides in the US. Across the US, gun homicide is startlingly common, and in some areas, it has become a fact of daily life. Too often, these most-affected areas are economically marginalized and racially segregated in inner-city neighborhoods, which have been rendered structurally vulnerable to violence.

The concept of "structural vulnerability" opens the black box of the social determinants of health, helping identify the policies and social forces that drive adverse health and social integration outcomes, such as premature mortality by firearm homicide, low educational levels, and exclusion from legal employment opportunities. A structural vulnerability perspective also highlights how these factors are systematically distributed along lines of race and class, and result in the large magnitude of health disparities prevalent across the United States.

The central role of racism and poverty in driving firearm violence are evident in the numbers: black men in America are 14-fold more likely to be murdered with a firearm than white men. In Pennsylvania, where our recent study was situated, that disparity rises to 30-fold. Furthermore, a clear "poverty-violence gradient" can be seen nearly ubiquitously in the US, and across the world, with a dose response curve between increasing levels of poverty and increasing risk of being victimized by violence.

, published recently as part of a special collection on narcotics in PLOS ONE, took a multi-methods approach to understanding the drivers of urban gun violence, and especially the connection to prohibition and the narcotics economy. We combined a statistical analysis of trends in violence- and narcotics-related crime by race and poverty levels, with participant observation ethnography among the participants in drug-selling and firearm violence. For more than six years, our ethnographic team was immersed in the heart of Philadelphia's most-impoverished, majority Puerto Rican neighborhood. We rented an apartment on a block surrounded by multiple heroin and cocaine sales points, and two of our co-authors ( George Karandinos and Fernando Montero ) lived there full-time. We were able to directly observe the sale of heroin and cocaine and participate in the routine activities of daily life in the neighborhood (e.g., hanging out in the neighborhood, talking about recent events). This approach, we hoped, would allow us to develop a more detailed and humanistic picture of the lives underlying the numbers.

Statistically, we recognized stark racial disparities in gun violence rates in Philadelphia (figure 1). From 2006 to 2017 the city-wide murder rate was 20.0 per 100,000 persons per year. Looking by neighborhood race, it was 5.8 for majority-white areas, 30.8 for majority-black areas, and 39.0 for majority-Puerto Rican areas. The murder rate in the narcotics-laden area that was our field site (identified in figure 2) was even higher, at 62.0.

We also observed what numbers like this mean in the daily realities of a community. As we tape-recorded interviews with residents, the sound of gunshots sometimes punctuated the flow of conversation. On nearly every block in the area, at least one homicide occurred during the time we studied this neighborhood (Figure 2, part B). In this small, approximately 10 square block area, it was rare for a month to pass without a homicide (Figure 2, part C) and at least half a dozen armed assaults and robberies. Nevertheless, the violence in our field site was not "random" or "totally senseless." In fact, it was baked into the logic of the narcotics market that represented the main source of employment in the neighborhood.

Contextualizing the statistics, our article recounts the story of a young man, who we refer to here as Leo. He grew up in the poorest corner of Puerto Rican Inner-City Philadelphia, which was struggling in the wake of deindustrialization and neoliberal cuts to social programs . He was a bright young man, motivated to succeed. Leo had virtually zero local examples of successful male role-models in his social network; he knew almost no men who achieved economic stability and social mobility without engaging in the retail sale of narcotics. Furthermore, all of Leo's immediate family and almost all of the young men and boys in his extended social network were either employed selling heroin and cocaine, incarcerated, or prematurely deceased. In short, the only "equal opportunity" employer that was available to him was the narcotics economy, which was ubiquitously found on every street corner in his neighborhood.

Leo got a job in the narcotics economy, selling heroin and cocaine, and ambitiously worked his way up to controlling a corner. By definition, Leo's job exposed him to high risk of violence. The prohibition of narcotics inherently creates a highly lucrative market that can only be protected with violence. In a single day, hundreds of thousands of dollars of untraceable cash routinely flow through a neighborhood where the majority of residents live well below the poverty line. In this context, Leo was constantly under threat; he could be attacked at any time for his profit, product, or control of his sales location. He therefore needed to be able to perform violence at a moment's notice, to protect his reputation and profits. In a clandestine market there is no legal recourse should product or profit be stolen by an employee or a competitor. Order, therefore, is generally maintained with violence or the threat of violence. Ultimately it was this need to maintain control that tragically resulted in the near-death of Leo's employee. When a $500 stash of heroin went missing, a disagreement broke out among Leo and the employee who had been in charge of sales at the moment. Leo's employee was joined by a group of friends, and Leo, outnumbered and fearing for his own life, drew his weapon and fired. Though Leo narrowly avoided being victimized himself, he lost 10 years of his life behind bars with no access to vocational, educational, drug treatment, or mental health services. Once in prison, Leo again found that the performance of violence was similarly necessary for his survival, if not more so.

We hope that the data presented in our analysis, both quantitative and qualitative, can paint a humanized and nuanced picture of the forces that push a large number of Americans into situations that expose them to high levels of firearm violence. We are energized by recently re-invigorated efforts in the medical community and general society around reducing the burden of gun violence in our communities. Here, we emphasize that much of the gun violence in the United States is not random. These deaths often represent nearly predetermined tragedies, baked into the policies and institutions of our constructed society, and therefore require structural solutions. They are also an urgent priority from a racial and class justice perspective.

We call for a " Marshall Plan " level of development in the urban inner-city. If a fraction of the currently spent on policing and incarcerating low-income people was spent on formal education and employment opportunities, it could make a meaningful and positive impact on the structural contexts that push people into narcotics retail and the associated violence. Investing in jobs and schools in inner-city America is a social justice issue and a public health issue.

To read more about these solutions, hear these stories in the words of those who lived through them, and see the results in much more detail, read the open-access study here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0225376

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The Structural Roots of Gun Violence: Poverty, Racism, The War on Drugs - AFFIRM Research

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Authors: Joseph Friedman,1 Philippe Bourgois1 1Center for Social Medicine and Humanities, UCLA This blog post discusses the journal article: "Structural vulnerability to narcotics-driven firearm violence: An ethnographic and epidemiological study of Philadelphia's Puerto Rican inner-city" available open-access: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0225376 The United States has astronomical rates of firearm violence compared to other high-income nations, and to explain ...

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disclaimer: distressing images

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Opinion | Far-right militias and domestic terrorism in America: 'This threat got ahead of us'

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Leniqueca A. Welcome talks about fugitive anthropology and what anthropology should look like given its problematic colonial past. She opens with referencing Touillot: "To ask where anthropology is—or should be—going today is to ask where anthropology is coming from and to assess critically the heritage that it must claim.".  I think fugitive anthropology, scholar activism and these forms of academia that are being brought forward by groups of American anthropologists echoes the ethnography amongst anthropologists that Pandian talks about. It encourages a real understanding of positionality, identity, and privilege within the field.

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To ask where anthropology is-or should be-going today is to ask where anthropology is coming from and to assess critically the heritage that it must claim. But it is also to ask about changes in the world around us, inside and outside of academe, and how these changes should affect our use of that heritage, and what is best left behind as obsolete, redundant or simply misleading in this new context of global transformations. - Trouillot (2003, 117)

How do we create an alternative future by living both the future we want to see, while inhabiting its potential foreclosure at the same time? - Campt (2017, 107)

The California wildfires and bombastic authoritarian speeches of 2018 were the apocalyptic omens that urged a conversation in Ryan Jobson's 2020 essay " The Case For Letting Anthropology Burn." The multi-scalar social and economic losses due to the US' mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, the uprisings against anti-Blackness around the country, and continued ecological disasters induced by capitalism in 2020 have further confirmed the uncertain future of anthropology and the world at large. The toxicity of deep systemic racism registered for white liberal audiences as images of militarized law enforcement enacting violence on protestors against murderous anti-Black policing circulated in the media this past June. Following this mass awakening, university letters responding to the moment were sent out to faculty and students already contending with the isolation and ramifications of the mitigation processes for the spread of the pandemic. As many well-meaning US anthropology department letters addressed a "we" as a cohesive community of scholars of the human and mused on the ways "our" research on race and politics could be helpful for the times, it became abundantly clear that many anthropologists thought the violence of white supremacy operates out there in the streets and not in here within the walls of the academy (Beliso De Jesús and Pierre 2020). As Nahir I. Otaño Gracia (2020) pointed out in her essay "On Hidden Scars and the Passive Voice," many anthropologists, similar to other academics, were quick to engage with their peers and students as if "trauma is [solely] a [shared] theoretical exercise and not a lived experience" for many of those with whom they share a classroom. Furthermore, many anthropologists embodying whiteness refused to acknowledge that they are often responsible for perpetuating this trauma. The Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA) Statement Against Police Violence and Anti-Black Racism sharply tore down any facade of neutrality within the discipline as it addressed non-Black, especially white anthropologists and asked them to move past "soul searching, despondency and white guilt" and enact material changes within their scholarship, teaching, and administrative practices that will actually contribute to the true decolonization of the field. This was not the first time transformation of the field as a whole was demanded.

Despite numerous calls by Black, Indigenous, and person of color scholars over the past (at least) three decades for anthropology as a discipline confront its colonial roots and contribute to critical theory on racism and processes of racialization (see especially Allen and Jobson 2016; Baker 1998; Harrison 1995; Mullings 2005; Todd 2016; Trouillot 2003; Visweswaran 1998), "the trained inability of many in the discipline to understand-and treat-race and racialization as constitutive of all modern relations" remains apparent (Beliso De Jesús and Pierre 2020, 66). The unwillingness of members of a discipline whose primary ethical obligation is " to do no harm" to abandon extractive models of fieldwork, explore white supremacy in their research, and address racism, classicism, ableism, hetero-patriarchy, sexual assault, labor exploitation, and other acts of oppression within their departments, itself makes a case for letting the mainstream form of institutionalized anthropology burn, as Ryan Jobson (2020) suggests in his review article. As Jobson shows us, the old "Boasian fix," and newer suggested fixes, such as
"the virtual fix," cannot save anthropology from its past and present evils, particularly when many anthropologists remain committed to business as usual, even as this business is repeatedly proven to be harmful to others within and outside the field (for evidence of this commitment, one only needs to glimpse the American Anthropology Association's "Communities" page).

It is even clearer now than when Jobson first wrote his review article that mainstream US Anthropology as "a 'white public space' that maintains a liberal myth of perfectibility through the progressive incorporation of historically subordinated peoples into the comforts and privileges of property and citizenship" (Jobson 2020, 7; drawing on Brodkin, Morgen, and Hutchinson 2011) has to be abolished along with the institutional structures that make it. And as Savannah Shange reminded us in a recent interview with Transforming Anthropology (2020), as well as in her book Progressive Dystopia (2019), abolition is a bipartite project that entails both destruction and construction. She says, regarding abolition, "you bring the wall down so then you can clear the rubble and build something to live in-build something worth living" (Shange 2020). What needs to be abolished may seem formidable. However, if we turn our attention to those who are already operating under different modes of anthropological work that contribute to a living future in which work that illuminates and dismantles the logic of white supremacy will no longer be necessary, we may draw hope. This is not the hope that anthropology as an institutionalized field will be rebuilt anew after its current dominant form is hopefully destroyed along with the racial capitalist world order that produces the neoliberal and increasingly financialized organization of the university, but hope generated from the fact that necessary freedom work is already happening within anthropology, that the fruits of this labor will live beyond the discipline, and that, if only in this way, anthropology still matters.

Jobson addressed some of this work in his essay, particularly through the lens of research aimed at dismantling liberal humanism's idea of a coherent subject. In what remains of this piece, I seek to expand his contribution and highlight Black and Indigenous feminist work within anthropology that continues the long fight against anthropology's own "fictive coherence" (Jobson 2020). These scholars and activists continue to do the work that needs to be done, whether or not the formal channels of academic evaluation choose to recognize it. This work at once aspires to better futures and lives those futures as if they were possible now because those who do it know from the bodies they inhabit and the experiences they live through that "ignoring politics becomes a luxury that only the privileged few can afford" (Ulysse 2019).

In 2017, Maya J. Berry, Claudia Chávez Argüelles, Shanya Cordis, Sarah Ihmoud, and Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada published their collaborative article/manifesto "Toward a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender, Race, and Violence in the Field" in Cultural Anthropology." This group of self-identified "black, brown, indigenous, mestiza, and/or queer cisgender women" placed at the forefront their critical transnational feminist praxis "grounded in black feminist analysis and praxis and inspired by indigenous decolonial thinking" that entails embodied processes of activism, scholarship, and pedagogy. They put out an urgent call for anthropology to abandon the following: its institutionalized notion of "fieldwork as a masculinist rite of passage or an exercise of one's endurance," its perpetuation of the academy's hetero-patriarchal culture that even self-declared activist anthropologists often perform, its reliance on women of color within the academy to mediate the racialized and hetero-patriarchal violence of the academy by providing unpaid affective labor to students, and the superficial diversity hiring fix and other reformist agendas. The authors-speaking as survivors of racialized gender and sexual violence and as people who conduct collaborative activism and scholarship with transnational feminist groups rooted in an understanding that, though differently positioned, oppressions and liberatory struggles within the academy are inseparable from those outside the academy-present a nonprescriptive model for doing anthropological work that resists the inside/outside academy binary, learns and shares with alternate forms of praxis existing in the world, and at its core is about forging a different world. The fugitive form of anthropology they practice and promote understands the academy as a means, not the end. In their own words, "The outline of this fugitive anthropology is, in essence, one that seeks to advance a decolonized discipline, yet at the same time takes flight from that contested space we claim as our intellectual home."

I foreground this article here because, better than I ever could, it lays out the stakes of doing anthropology and our continued investment in this work for those of us who remain "outsiders within" (Harrison 2008) the discipline. I claim part of this "us" as a Black Caribbean cis-gendered woman who is trained in the United States and works against gendered anti-Black violence in Trinidad. Ethnographic work facilitated by the material resource of the university (made necessary by the very racial capitalist system we work against), has always been anthropology's treasure. For many, it has been a treasure because it offers an opportunity to travel to distant places to learn more about other peoples and systems for the development of philosophical projects. However, for others of us who occupy bodies that demand with urgency that any anthropology we do must matter outside itself (Trouillot 2003), the real treasure of ethnographic research is the time and space it affords for deep listening, learning, laughing, mourning, grounded theorizing aimed at material transformation, archiving, community building, and other forms of activist work with others whose lives continue to matter to us. Though, to paraphrase Savannah Shange (2020), this is the work in the world one would be doing as part of one's political praxis anyway even if one were not an anthropologist, it is very much tied to the ways we as "outsiders within" choose to practice anthropology now and, thus, are the only facets of anthropology that continue to have resonance.

What I have tried to communicate here is this: the world is on fire, anthropology as a discipline tethered to whiteness is on fire, and while some within the discipline throw buckets of water on the flames with futility, and some sit idly by yet are choking on the smoke, others are already involved in building reciprocal relations of learning and pedagogy rooted in care that will persist when the ash and rubble are cleared. The only appropriate anthropology for our times is anthropology involved in dismantling our current white supremacist, imperialist, hetero-patriarchal, ableist, and capitalist formations and building a world where scholarship and activism against the like are no longer necessary. Anthropology aimed at material transformation is the only anthropological work that continues to be worth doing. Any other way of doing anthropology we can let burn.
REFERENCES CITED
Allen, Jafari Sinclaire, and Ryan Cecil Jobson. 2016. "The Decolonizing Generation: (Race and) Theory in Anthropology since the Eighties." Current Anthropology 57 (2): 129-48.

Baker, Lee D. 1998. From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha M., and Jemima Pierre. 2020. "Special Section: Anthropology of White Supremacy." American Anthropologist 122 (1): 65-75. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13351.

Berry, Maya J., Claudia Chávez Argüelles, Shanya Cordis, Sarah Ihmoud, and Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada. 2017. "Toward a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender, Race, and Violence in the Field." Cultural Anthropology 32 (4): 537-65.

Brodkin, Karen, Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson. 2011. "Anthropology as White Public Space?" American Anthropologist 113 (4): 545-56.

Campt, Tina. 2017. Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press.

Harrison, Faye V. 1995. "The Persistent Power of 'Race' in the Cultural and Political Economy of Racism." Annual Review of Anthropology 24:47-74.

Harrison, Faye V. 2008. Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age. University of Illinois Press.

Jobson, Ryan Cecil. 2020. "The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019." American Anthropologist 122 (2): 259-71. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13398.

Mullings, Leith. 2005. "Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology." Annual Review of Anthropology 34:667-93.

Otaño Gracia, Nahir I. 2020. "On Hidden Scars and the Passive Voice." Pree, April 22. https://preelit.com/2020/04/17/on-hidden-scars-and-the-passive-voice1/.

Shange, Savannah. 2019. Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco. Durham: Duke University Press.

Shange, Savannah. 2020. "Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Anti-blackness, and Schooling in San Francisco." Transforming Anthropology, September 2. https://www.instagram.com/p/CEpV3mgppgh/.

Todd, Zoe. 2016. "An Indigenous Feminist's Take on the Ontological Turn: 'Ontology' Is Just Another Word for Colonialism." Journal of Historical Sociology 29 (1): 4-22.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ulysse, Gina Athena. 2019. "Homage to Those Who Hollered before Me/Meditations on Inheritances and Lineages, Anthropological and Otherwise." Anthropology News website, April 8, 2019. doi:10.1111/AN.1133.

Visweswaran, Kamala. 1998. "Race and the Culture of Anthropology." American Anthropologist 100 (1): 70-83.
NOTE
Jobson (2020) describes how the "virtual fix"-the use of digital technology to mitigate the carbon footprint of anthropological practice-only works to absolve anthropologists from culpability in climate change rather than transform the disciple. For Jobson, it operates similar to the Boasian fix, which prevented any radical reckoning of the field as a whole with processes of racialization and racism.

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After the Ash and Rubble Are Cleared: Anthropological Work for a Future

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To ask where anthropology is-or should be-going today is to ask where anthropology is coming from and to assess critically the heritage that it must claim. But it is also to ask about changes in the world around us, inside and outside of academe, and how these changes should affect our use of that heritage, and what is best left behind as obsolete, redundant or simply misleading in this new context of global transformations.

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In this interview Butler really elaborates on the structural violence inherent to the coronavirus pandemic. The issues of race and class that she addresses are important in understanding how different groups of people are being affected in diverse ways during the pandemic, this is particularly the case in the United States where access to healthcare is limited based on class and wealth lines which also means it discriminates based upon race. Health factors also contribute to the structural violence experienced by people of colour in the United States, as residential segregation makes access to healthy food and green spaces much harder, leading to health issues of diabetes and heart problems that can be compounded by covid19.

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Judith Butler: on COVID-19, the politics of non-violence, necropolitics, and social inequality

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The Stone

By Brad Evans and

Adrian Ghenie, Burning Books 2014 Credit... Private Collection, Switzerland, via Galerie Judin, Berlin

This is the fifth in a series of dialogues with philosophers and critical theorists on violence. This conversation is with Henry A. Giroux, a professor in the department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. His latest book is "America at War With Itself" (City Lights).
Brad Evans: Throughout your work you have dealt with the dangers of ignorance and what you have called the violence of "organized forgetting." Can you explain what you mean by this and why we need to be attentive to intellectual forms of violence?

Henry Giroux: Unfortunately, we live at a moment in which ignorance appears to be one of the defining features of American political and cultural life. Ignorance has become a form of weaponized refusal to acknowledge the violence of the past, and revels in a culture of media spectacles in which public concerns are translated into private obsessions, consumerism and fatuous entertainment. As James Baldwin rightly warned, "Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."

The warning signs from history are all too clear. Failure to learn from the past has disastrous political consequences. Such ignorance is not simply about the absence of information. It has its own political and pedagogical categories whose formative cultures threaten both critical agency and democracy itself.

What I have called the violence of organized forgetting signals how contemporary politics are those in which emotion triumphs over reason, and spectacle over truth, thereby erasing history by producing an endless flow of fragmented and disingenuous knowledge. At a time in which figures like Donald Trump are able to gain a platform by promoting values of "greatness" that serve to cleanse the memory of social and political progress achieved in the name of equality and basic human decency, history and thought itself are under attack.

Once ignorance is weaponized, violence seems to be a tragic inevitability. The mass shooting in Orlando is yet another example of an emerging global political and cultural climate of violence fed by hate and mass hysteria. Such violence legitimates not only a kind of inflammatory rhetoric and ideological fundamentalism that views violence as the only solution to addressing social issues, it also provokes further irrational acts of violence against others. Spurred on by a complete disrespect for those who affirm different ways of living, this massacre points to a growing climate of hate and bigotry that is unapologetic in its political nihilism.

It would be easy to dismiss such an act as another senseless example of radical Islamic terrorism. That is too easy. Another set of questions needs to be asked. What are the deeper political, educational, and social conditions that allow a climate of hate, racism, and bigotry to become the dominant discourse of a society or worldview? What role do politicians with their racist and aggressive discourses play in the emerging landscapes violence? How can we use education, among other resources, to prevent politics from being transformed into a pathology? And how might we counter these tragic and terrifying conditions without retreating into security or military mindsets?

B.E.: You insist that education is crucial to any viable critique of oppression and violence. Why?

H.G.: I begin with the assumption that education is fundamental to democracy. No democratic society can survive without a formative culture, which includes but is not limited to schools capable of producing citizens who are critical, self-reflective, knowledgeable and willing to make moral judgments and act in a socially inclusive and responsible way. This is contrary to forms of education that reduce learning to an instrumental logic that too often and too easily can be perverted to violent ends.

So we need to remember that education can be both a basis for critical thought and a site for repression, which destroys thinking and leads to violence. Michel Foucault wrote that knowledge and truth not only "belong to the register of order and peace," but can also be found on the "side of violence, disorder, and war." What matters is the type of education a person is encouraged to pursue.

It's not just schools that are a site of this struggle. "Education" in this regard not only includes public and higher education, but also a range of cultural apparatuses and media that produce, distribute and legitimate specific forms of knowledge, ideas, values and social relations. Just think of the ways in which politics and violence now inform each other and dominate media culture. First-person shooter video games top the video-game market while Hollywood films ratchet up representations of extreme violence and reinforce a culture of fear, aggression and militarization. Similar spectacles now drive powerful media conglomerates like 21st Century Fox, which includes both news and entertainment subsidiaries.

As public values wither along with the public spheres that produce them, repressive modes of education gain popularity and it becomes easier to incarcerate people than to educate them, to model schools after prisons, to reduce the obligations of citizenship to mere consumption and to remove any notion of social responsibility from society's moral registers and ethical commitments.

B.E.: Considering Hannah Arendt's warning that the forces of domination and exploitation require "thoughtlessness" on behalf of the oppressors, how is the capacity to think freely and in an informed way key to providing a counter to violent practices?

H.G.: Young people can learn to challenge violence, like those in the antiwar movement of the early '70s or today in the Black Lives Matter movement.

Education does more than create critically minded, socially responsible citizens. It enables young people and others to challenge authority by connecting individual troubles to wider systemic concerns. This notion of education is especially important given that racialized violence, violence against women and the ongoing assaults on public goods cannot be solved on an individual basis.

Violence maims not only the body but also the mind and spirit. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, it lies "on the side of belief and persuasion." If we are to counter violence by offering young people ways to think differently about their world and the choices before them, they must be empowered to recognize themselves in any analysis of violence, and in doing so to acknowledge that it speaks to their lives meaningfully.

There is no genuine democracy without an informed public. While there are no guarantees that a critical education will prompt individuals to contest various forms of oppression and violence, it is clear that in the absence of a formative democratic culture, critical thinking will increasingly be trumped by anti-intellectualism, and walls and war will become the only means to resolve global challenges.

Creating such a culture of education, however, will not be easy in a society that links the purpose of education with being competitive in a global economy.

B.E.: Mindful of this, there is now a common policy in place throughout the education system to create "safe spaces" so students feel comfortable in their environments. This is often done in the name of protecting those who may have their voices denied. But given your claim about the need to confront injustice, does this represent an ethically responsible approach to difficult subject matters?

H.G.: There is a growing culture of conformity and quietism on university campuses, made evident in the current call for safe spaces and trigger warnings. This is not just conservative reactionism, but is often carried out by liberals who believe they are acting with the best intentions. Violence comes in many forms and can be particularly disturbing when confronted in an educational setting if handled dismissively or in ways that blame victims.

Yet troubling knowledge cannot be condemned on the basis of making students uncomfortable, especially if the desire for safety serves merely to limit access to difficult knowledge and the resources needed to analyze it. Critical education should be viewed as the art of the possible rather than a space organized around timidity, caution and fear.

Creating safe spaces runs counter to the notion that learning should be unsettling, that students should challenge common sense assumptions and be willing to confront disturbing realities despite discomfort. The political scientist Wendy Brown rightly argues that the "domain of free public speech is not one of emotional safety or reassurance," and is " not what the public sphere and political speech promise." A university education should, Brown writes, " call you to think, question, doubt" and " incite you to question everything you assume, think you know or care about."

This is particularly acute when dealing with pedagogies of violence and oppression. While there is a need to be ethically sensitive to the subject matter, our civic responsibility requires, at times, confronting truly intolerable conditions. The desire for emotionally safe spaces can be invoked to protect one's sense of privilege - especially in the privileged sites of university education. This is further compounded by the frequent attempts by students to deny some speakers a platform because their views are controversial. While the intentions may be understandable, this is a dangerous road to go down.

Confronting the intolerable should be challenging and upsetting. Who could read the testimonies of Primo Levi and not feel intellectually and emotionally exhausted? Or Martin Luther King Jr.'s words, not to mention those of Malcolm X? It is the conditions that produce violence that should upset us ethically and prompt us to act responsibly, rather than to capitulate to a privatized emotional response that substitutes a therapeutic language for a political and worldly one.

There is more at work here than the infantilizing notion that students should be protected rather than challenged in the classroom; there is also the danger of creating a chilling effect on the part of faculty who want to address controversial topics such as war, poverty, spectacles of violence, racism, sexism and inequality. If American society wants to invest in its young people, it has an obligation to provide them with an education in which they are challenged, can learn to take risks, think outside the boundaries of established ideologies, and expand the far reaches of their creativity and critical judgment. This demands a pedagogy that is complicated, taxing and disruptive.

B.E.: You place the university at the center of a democratic and civil society. But considering that the university is not a politically neutral setting separate from power relations, you are concerned with what you term "gated intellectuals" who become seduced by the pursuit of power. Please explain this concept.

H.G.: Public universities across the globe are under attack not because they are failing, but because they are they are considered discretionary - unlike K-12 education for which funding is largely compulsory. The withdrawal of financial support has initiated a number of unsavory responses: Universities have felt compelled to turn towards corporate management models. They have effectively hobbled academic freedom by employing more precarious part-time instead of full-time faculty, and they increasingly treat students as consumers to be seduced by various campus gimmicks while burying the majority in debt.

My critique of what I have called "gated intellectuals" responds to these troubling trends by pointing to an increasingly isolated and privileged full-time faculty who believe that higher education still occupies the rarefied, otherworldly space of disinterested intellectualism of Cardinal Newman's 19th century, and who defend their own indifference to social issues through appeals to professionalism or by condemning as politicized those academics who grapple with larger social issues. Some academics have gone so far as to suggest that criticizing the university is tantamount to destroying it. There is a type of intellectual violence at work here that ignores and often disparages the civic function of education while forgetting Hannah Arendt's incisive admonition that "education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it."

Supported by powerful conservative foundations and awash in grants from the defense and intelligence agencies, such gated intellectuals appear to have forgotten that in a democracy it is crucial to defend the university as a crucial democratic public sphere. This is not to suggest that they are silent. On the contrary, they provide the intellectual armory for war, the analytical supports for gun ownership, and lend legitimacy to a host of other policies that lead to everyday forms of structural violence and poverty. Not only have they succumbed to official power, they collude with it.

B.E.: I feel your recent work provides a somber updating of Arendt's notion of "dark times," hallmarked by political and intellectual catastrophe. How might we harness the power of education to reimagine the future in more inclusive and less violent terms?

H.G.: The current siege on higher education, whether through defunding education, eliminating tenure, tying research to military needs, or imposing business models of efficiency and accountability, poses a dire threat not only to faculty and students who carry the mantle of university self-governance, but also to democracy itself.

The solutions are complex and cannot be addressed in isolation from a range of other issues in the larger society such as the defunding of public goods, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, poverty and the reach of the prison-industrial complex into the lives of those marginalized by class and race.

We have to fight back against a campaign, as Gene R. Nichol puts it, "to end higher education's democratizing influence on the nation." To fight this, faculty, young people and others outside of higher education must collectively engage with larger social movements for the defense of public goods. We must address that as the welfare state is defunded and dismantled, the state turns away from enacting social provisions and becomes more concerned about security than social responsibility. Fear replaces compassion, and a survival-of-the-fittest ethic replaces any sense of shared concern for others.

Lost in the discourse of individual responsibility and self-help are issues like power, class and racism. Intellectuals need to create the public spaces in which identities, desires and values can be encouraged to act in ways conducive to the formation of citizens willing to fight for individual and social rights, along with those ideals that give genuine meaning to a representative democracy.

Any discussion of the fate of higher education must address how it is shaped by the current state of inequality in American society, and how it perpetuates it. Not only is such inequality evident in soaring tuition costs, inevitably resulting in the growing exclusion of working- and middle-class students from higher education, but also in the transformation of over two-thirds of faculty positions into a labor force of overworked and powerless adjunct faculty members. Faculty need to take back the university and reclaim modes of governance in which they have the power to teach and act with dignity, while denouncing and dismantling the increasing corporatization of the university and the seizing of power by administrators and their staff, who now outnumber faculty on most campuses.

In return, academics need to fight for the right of students to be given an education not dominated by corporate values. Higher education is a right, and not an entitlement. It should be free, as it is in many other countries, and as Robin Kelley points out, this should be true particularly for minority students. This is all the more crucial as young people have been left out of the discourse of democracy. Rather than invest in prisons and weapons of death, Americans need a society that invests in public and higher education.

There is more at stake here than making visible the vast inequities in educational and economic opportunities. Seeing education as a political form of intervention, offering a path toward racial and economic justice, is crucial in reimagining a new politics of hope. Universities should be subversive in a healthy society. They should push against the grain, and give voice to the voiceless the powerless and the whispers of truth that haunt the apostles of unchecked power and wealth. Pedagogy should be disruptive and unsettling, while pushing hard against established orthodoxies. Such demands are far from radical, and leave more to be done, but they point to a new beginning in the struggle over the role of higher education in the United States.

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Opinion | The Violence of Forgetting (Published 2016)

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The Stone By Brad Evans and This is the fifth in a series of dialogues with philosophers and critical theorists on violence. This conversation is with Henry A. Giroux, a professor in the department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

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New Delhi Protests
Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/26/violence-delhi-modi-project-bjp-citizenship-law
student protests: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/06/students-injured-in-india-after-masked-attackers-raid-top-university
women's protests: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/21/modi-is-afraid-women-take-lead-in-indias-citizenship-protests
NBC:
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/india-s-new-anti-muslim-law-shows-broad-allure-right-ncna1112446

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muslims risk being branded infiltrators - cnn

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In Hindu-nationalist India, Muslims risk being branded infiltrators

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Fears are growing among India's 200 million Muslims that they could soon be classified as "illegal immigrants" under a far-reaching new proposal.

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This interview is interesting in the way that it brings into tension the civil rights movements in the United States and the different approaches that were being adopted at the time. Thinking of Abu-Lughod's piece on 'Romance of Resistance' and what resistance can look like for different people and the different forms it can take. Malcom X expressed his dissapointment with the non-violent nature of MLK's movement, considering it a subversion to the slavery and racism that people of colour had to endure.

Nobody should teach the black man in America to turn the other cheek, unless someone is teaching the white man in America to turn the other cheek. And no one should advocate any peaceful suffering to black people, unless the black — white man is going to practice the same kind of peaceful suffering.

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Remembering Malcolm X: Rare Interviews and Audio | WNYC | New York Public Radio, Podcasts, Live Streaming Radio, News

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WNYC presents a rare interview with Malcolm X conducted by reporter Eleanor Fischer in 1961 when Malcolm X was still an active spokesman for Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam.

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I was unfamiliar with the fact that there are some individuals who are convicted/in prison and still have access to vote in the United States and it is clear that even those that could have the possibility to vote, are excluded from political authority of any kind. The article recalls how an individual in prison was being helped by an advocay organization to receive his mail-in ballot only to see his opportunity to vote in the elections be ostructed by his prison officers. It is clear that trying to prevent a portion of the population from voting is beneficial for Trump's campaign, as this is represented by imprisoned individuals who are largely represented by people of colour. It demonstrates the absolute ostracization from society that mass incarceration tries to achieve.

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Whether or Not You're Able to Vote in Jail May Come Down to Where You're Incarcerated

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"I haven't been convicted... My voice should be heard, even from the incarcerated state," says Frank Baker, a 43-year-old detainee in Texas' Harris County Jail.

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The pitched battle over lockdowns is missing the point: Covid-19 is a class issue | John Harris

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The UK coronavirus crisis – even more so in its second phase – is all about basic inequalities – and lockdown makes these worse, says Guardian columnist John Harris

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Here we see the way in which progress is being made to fight gender stereotypical assumptions that lead to the misconstruction of rape cases and the failure of conviction of rapists. The mysogynist discourse that depicts sending nude photographs and being on a dating hook-up app as sexual consent is being confronted, highlighting a need for new legislation and prosecutor's knowledge in regards to what sexual consent actually looks like, and how this is not predetermined by previous actions that may be alluding to a sexual interest. Up until now there are so few rape prosecutions for a series of reasons, amongst the highest is the fact that victims feel uncomfortable entering a system where they will be scrutinized instead of protected and where they feel like they are rendered culpable of the trauma they have experienced. I feel like the deep lying issues around rape prosecution, sexual assault and gender violence in general speaks to criminalizaiton of gender and the distance between the state and its individuals that Aretxaga talks about.

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Prosecutors in England and Wales are being given new guidance over nude selfies and dating apps in rape and sexual assault cases.

Guidelines for Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) lawyers have been fully updated for the first time in eight years and include advice on challenging assumptions over victims sharing naked pictures or having met their attacker via a so-called hook-up app.

The legal guidance, which comes into effect on 1 November, includes a list of 39 myths and stereotypes that prosecutors should be prepared to challenge when bringing a case to court.

The list of false statements includes "If you send sexual images or messages prior to meeting someone, then having sex is inevitable", and "If you meet men online or through hook-up apps you want sex and should be ready to offer sex".

Siobhan Blake, the rape lead for the CPS, said explicit photos and use of such apps should not be taken as "blanket consent" for sexual contact.

She said: "The critical issue is around consent and the giving and understanding of consent. We must not as a society, or indeed as prosecutors, get distracted by some of the peripheral behaviours that might seem quite unusual to us.

"In essence, a person can send a naked selfie, for instance, one day, that is not any sort of blanket consent to a sexual encounter on another day. Simply because somebody's on a hook-up app, it doesn't mean that they're giving some sort of blanket consent to any sort of sexual contact."

The guidance also highlights the increasing number of rapes and sexual assaults associated with "chemsex", which may mean victims are concerned about being prosecuted for drug use.

It says: "Chemsex is the term used to describe sexual activity that occurs when the parties are under the influence of drugs taken immediately preceding and/or during the sexual activity. It is particularly commonplace within the homosexual community.

"Prosecutors should be aware that victims of rape and/or sexual assaults committed within the chemsex setting may be reluctant to engage with a prosecution for fear of disclosing offences they have committed with respect to the use or supply of prohibited drugs."

It stresses the impact of trauma on victims that can hamper their ability to remember or give a consistent account of what happened.

Blake said: "We're on the cutting edge of understanding the impact of trauma and the impact that has on memory and the way people behave after suffering a horrific trauma.

"It never can be forgotten that in the case of rape and serious sexual offences, they are really some of the most traumatic offences that people survive."

Claire Waxman, the London victims' commissioner, called for the CPS to undergo trauma training and update their guidance after she carried out research in the capital that showed only 3% of rape allegations resulted in a conviction.

She said: "This is a much-needed update that will help to tackle pervasive myths and stereotypes around rape and the culture of disbelief. For too long, evidence of trauma, such as inconsistencies in memory, has been misinterpreted as victims being unreliable which has influenced charging decisions."

At the end of July, CPS figures showed the number of rape convictions had fallen to a record low in England and Wales.

Just 1,439 alleged rapists were convicted of rape or lesser offences in 2019-20, down 25% from 1,925 the previous year.

The number of completed prosecutions also reached a record low, with 2,102 in 2019-20, compared with 3,034 in 2018-19, a fall of about 31%.

The CPS has a five-year plan to try to boost prosecution and conviction rates and will unveil a joint strategy with the police in the coming weeks.
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Rape prosecutors in England and Wales given new advice over dating apps

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Prosecutors in England and Wales are being given new guidance over nude selfies and dating apps in rape and sexual assault cases. Guidelines for Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) lawyers have been fully updated for the first time in eight years and include advice on challenging assumptions over victims sharing naked pictures or having met their attacker via a so-called hook-up app.

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Re-reading Mahmood's piece on the politics of piety, the series unorthodox came to mind. I thought that the production brilliantly depicted the constraints of religion, the choices that are made within it and what it means to gain freedom. Esti, the main character, decides to break away from the Orthodox community in Brooklyn, but we still see her struggle with separating herself from numerous elements of her religion that have been fundamental and significant to her life. I think the ideas that Mahmood vocalizes about autonomy and freedom created through social interactions and not just individualized bounded characteristics really speak to Esti's story.

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She had her foot in two different worlds, but trying to leave one completely for the other will take all the strength she has. Watch trailers & learn more.

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Week 2 & 3, Crime & Punishment and Migration

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Week 2 & 3, Crime & Punishment and Migration

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This case really brings to light the tension between politics, humanitarianism and migration borders of nation states. I remember when this took place in summer and the conversation fuelled from the far-right in Italy around anti-immigrant discourse. This culminated in the arrest of a German captain for deciding to rescue a migrant ship. The captain, Carola Rackete, made clear that she was willingly acting according to maritime laws that entail a commitment to the saving of human lives that are deemed at risk. This meant bringing the migrants to Lampedusa and going against the Italian government and Matteo Salvini, far-right politician.

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How rescuing drowning migrants became a crime - podcast

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The Iuventa ran hundreds of missions to save migrants from drowning off the coast of Libya. But after Europe cracked down on migration, its crew found themselves facing prosecution

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Week 2 & 4, Crime & Punishment and Resistance

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Week 2 & 4, Crime & Punishment and Resistance

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This article covers one instance of misconduct in mass producing factories, this case surrounds the jeans factories in Lesotho whose worker force is mostly female. The case delves into the sexual assault suffered by women workers. I thought this brought into question themes of power relations, gender inequality and lack of accountability.

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At one of the biggest garment factories in Maseru, the capital city of Lesotho, the managers never hired enough regular workers to complete the clothing orders that flooded in from Europe and the US. Instead, every morning, a few hours after the sewing machines had started whirring, a male supervisor would stroll out to the factory gates where dozens of women waited. As he approached, they would surge forward, pressing themselves close to the railings and calling out their names.

These women were known as the "dailies" - unemployed cutters and machinists who went from factory to factory looking for a few hours of casual work. Everyone knew what the women had to do to get picked from the crowd. Many would endure repeated harassment and sexual assault to secure a daily wage of just over £6 a day.

"A woman whose babies are going hungry will do anything to put food on the table," said Thebelang Mohapi, who worked in the payroll department. She regarded the women outside the gate with pity and fear: she understood that the invisible line between her and the "dailies" could vanish at the smallest misstep. The supervisors knew they held all the power. "Nobody ever stopped them. They did whatever they wanted to do."

Mohapi, at 23, knew that regular workers were also being forced to have sex with their managers to keep their jobs, but she thought that if she worked hard and kept her head down, she would go unnoticed. When she passed her probation period and her supervisor recommended her for a full-time job, she felt years of stress lift from her shoulders.

Then, a few weeks later, just before her shift was due to end, her supervisor came looking for her. He told her to follow him to his office and she watched mutely as he closed the blinds and asked her to shut the door.

"At first he tried to say that he'd fallen in love with me and wanted us to be in a relationship. When I said no, he said I had to show him some gratitude," she said. He became angry and aggressive, shouting and advancing on her in the gloom. Mohapi fled from his office and, shaking, went straight to the head of human resources at the factory to complain that she was being harassed. By the end of the day she had been fired.

"Everything changed in an instant," she said. She and her husband had just rented a small one-bedroom house, and she had dreams of saving up to go to nursing college. Her husband was struggling to support her and their baby daughter; he had worked in the garment factory, rubbing holes in the knees of new pairs of jeans to make them look distressed, but had to quit after he got sick from inhaling denim fibres. "I thought this job was the start of something good for us. I knew of the bad things happening at the factory but I was foolish enough to think it wouldn't happen to me," she said.

When I met Mohapi in Maseru late last year, she had not worked since the day she was fired, almost 12 months earlier. The factory's HR manager had put a letter on her file saying she was insolent and insubordinate, and that her work was unsatisfactory. "That letter," she said, "it has followed me from place to place. I feel angry every day that I was punished and this man is still there, taking home a salary. Nobody cares what is happening to us women there."

Last year, a report by an NGO, the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), revealed a widespread incidence of rape, sexual assault and harassment at multiple garment factories in Maseru. More than 120 women from three different factories testified that they had been forced to have sex with male supervisors in order to keep their jobs. Some alleged that they had been raped on the factory premises. Some said they had contracted HIV from supervisors who withheld their salaries until they agreed to have unprotected sex. Those who complained were sacked.

These factories in Lesotho supply some of the most famous denim brands in the world. The Taiwanese company Nien Hsing, which owns the factories investigated by WRC, is a major supplier to Levi Strauss, Wrangler and US retailer The Children's Place. The brands had all carried out social audits and factory inspections, which are supposed to detect human rights and labour violations, but none had picked up the degrading and abusive conditions the female workers endured.

The WRC report was the first to link major brands directly to sexual violence in Lesotho, but garment workers in India, Brazil, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Turkey, China, Bangladesh and Vietnam have also reported being assaulted, stalked, groped, harassed and raped in factories making clothing for international brands. An ActionAid report in 2019 estimated that 80% of all Bangladeshi garment workers had faced sexual violence in the workplace.

"Sexual harassment is the fashion industry's dirty secret. Brands are rarely called to account for what is happening to women making their clothing," said Aruna Kashyap, a campaigner and legal advocate for Human Rights Watch.

Levi's was initially reluctant to take action. But faced with such clear evidence of a culture of rape and sexual harassment in their supply chain, they decided they couldn't ignore it. They negotiated a legally binding agreement with Nien Hsing, the owners of five major factories, unions and women's groups to put measures in place to protect workers, including stopping the use of "dailies" and creating an independent body to investigate allegations of harassment.

But these gains are now in jeopardy. "At the beginning of this year we genuinely felt optimistic that what happened in Lesotho would create real change for women across the global fashion industry," said Scott Nova, the executive director of WRC. "But now the world feels like a very different place."

Covid-19 has hit the global garment industry hard. As the virus kept consumers at home and shuttered high streets, fashion brands responded by using "force majeure" clauses in their contracts with suppliers to cancel an estimated £8bn of orders. Many refused to accept shipments of finished clothing they would no longer be able to sell.

The knock-on effect has been swift and brutal: more than 1 million workers have aleady lost their jobs in Bangladesh. Many are already facing destitution. As wages are slashed and factories close, there has been a wave of attacks on labour rights campaigners and vulnerable workers, including pregnant women in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Myanmar. Already, the sexual abuse of women garment workers who desperately need jobs is on the rise.

"What we are now facing is nothing short of a human rights catastrophe for millions of women," said Nova. "When we released the Lesotho report, we really felt like we'd found the very worst of what could happen to women workers at the bottom of our supply chains. Now, as workers get more desperate to keep their jobs, they will be less able to speak out."

ompared to the multi-billion pound garment powerhouses of Bangladesh and China, the small, landlocked country of Lesotho, an enclave within South Africa, is an industry minnow, exporting just 90m pieces of clothing a year, compared with the 10bn pieces of clothing exported by Bangladesh each year. Yet one thing that Lesotho specialises in is denim. More than 26m pairs of jeans are made here every year, many of them for Levi's, and this has become the fuel that keeps the country's faltering economy running.

"Without the garment industry, the economy would just break down," said Sam Mokhele, from the National Clothing and Textile Workers Union (NACTWU) union in Lesotho. The export garment industry accounts for more than 20% of the country's GDP. "The Taiwanese clothing companies are now our biggest employer. There are 46,000 people working in the factories, most of them women whose families wouldn't be able to eat if they closed."

Lesotho's ready-to-wear apparel industry started in the 90s when Taiwanese and Chinese clothing companies were attracted by the country's geographical proximity to the roads and ports of South Africa and favourable trading arrangements offered by the government. The Nien Hsing group is one of Levi's major suppliers.

The vast majority - about 80% - of garment workers in Lesotho are female. Women are the main breadwinners for many families in Lesotho, often supporting extended families. Since the factories came to Maseru, the number of women employed in Lesotho has doubled. Yet the garment industry has not delivered the economic emancipation for women that it promised. Most of the women I interviewed in Lesotho last year were paid less per month than the cost of a single pair of Levi's jeans - about £60. And yet, for many, it is either this or nothing.

"At the end of the day, garment workers across the world are stigmatised and marginalised because they are poor women," said Bobbie Sta Maria, a senior researcher at the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. "It is overwhelmingly women who do the badly paid, low-skilled manual labour, and almost universally men who are in positions of power over them. The brands benefit from this model and its lower production costs, because they know that women will accept poorly paid work to support their families."

The fashion industry's fast-moving production model exerts relentless pressure to produce more for less. The burden falls on suppliers in some of the world's poorest countries, where there is high unemployment and little enforcement of labour and human rights standards. Now, as brands struggle to claw back lost profit from the coronavirus pandemic, that pressure is only likely to get worse.

"In March, when the pandemic hit, brands immediately started refusing to pay for orders already in production in factories. Now things are re-opening, we're seeing retailers expecting to get significant discounts," said Nova.

Mohapi said that even before the pandemic, factory supervisors were always stressed by the constant pressure to hit targets, and often took it out on the women. They would walk up and down the line screaming at them to work harder. It was a process of dehumanisation. "They would abuse us, calling us prostitutes and dogs," she said. "If we had a big order, it got worse."

Outside the factories, Lesotho has one of the highest rates of rape and sexual violence in the world, and most women do not trust the police. "Inside our factories women didn't report, because the management didn't care and the women saw what happened to people like me who did speak out," said Mohapi. "The people from the WRC were the first to ever ask us what was really happening, and to listen to what we had to say."

ethelile Nthakana had just finished her master's degree in South Africa in the spring of 2018 when she got a call from WRC about a research job. Nthakana's original brief had nothing to do with sexual harassment. The Nien Hsing group had recently ejected labour unions from all their factories, and WRC was worried that there were pay and health and safety violations going on behind closed doors.

"We set up a whole load of anonymous off-site interviews, and spent hours asking all these questions about pay packets and fire exits, and then - almost as an afterthought - we asked the women what their main problem was at work, and they started talking about their supervisors," Nthakana said. She realised pretty quickly that these were not isolated cases. "Every single person who walked through the door was saying the same thing."

Nthakana and a male colleague started focusing almost exclusively on the issue of sexual violence in the factories supplying Levi's. "Look, I am a Lesotho woman," she said. "We've all been harassed and propositioned in the workplace - but what these women were telling me was another level." Most of the women had never spoken about their ordeals. Some told Nthakana they had contracted HIV from their supervisors, and could not tell their husbands. "It was so hard to deal with that level of trauma and pain," she said. "Our hearts were broken every single day."

Kabelo Sello is one of the women who spoke to Nthakana in early 2019. Sello moved to Maseru in 2018, leaving three young children and an elderly mother waiting for her paycheck. After months of searching for work, she eventually got offered a short-term contract at a Nien Hsing factory, packing Levi's jeans into boxes. "It was really hard - we had to pack minimum 90 boxes of jeans a day, so it was very stressful," she told me when we met in downtown Maseru. As Sello's contract neared its end, her supervisor started propositioning her in the factory and following her home from work at night.

Sello understood the transaction he was proposing. In exchange for sex, she would get a permanent job and better conditions at work. "All the time I was thinking about how I needed to support the three children and my mother," she said quietly. "I did it and I got my job, but I feel very ashamed," she said. "And he's still harassing me - I'm still expected to do it whenever he wants."

In Lesotho, I spoke to 10 women working at factories producing jeans for Levi's and other western brands. One woman, Mamello Makhetha, broke down when she talked about being raped by her boss. She hid her face in her sleeve as she described the smell of his cheap aftershave as he lay on top of her, and how she felt her mind slowly unravelling in the weeks after. "He acted like nothing had happened," she said. "I realised maybe he has done this to lots of other women. Maybe to him this was just lunchtime recreation, but for me it was like death."

When Makhetha eventually complained, she was demoted and moved to a lower-paid job in another department. "I know what happened to me is wrong, but if I lose this job I won't get another one, so in the end you just accept that this is the way that life is," she said.

The culture that allows sexual harassment and violence against women is deeply troubling for some of the male workers. Joseph Tlali, a father of four with more than 20 years of experience on the factory floor, is a supervisor at one of the factories exposed by the WRC report. "The supervisors just did what they wanted," he said. "Even the junior managers were abusing women during their lunchtime. The factory manager would actually be watching them having sex on CCTV, but would not do anything to stop it. It was more like watching porn, you know? I would go home and look at my daughters sleeping and think: 'You will never work in one of these places.'"

The solution, Tlali said, had to start with fair pay. "The [women] need to be paid more, so that they feel they have a choice, and are not constantly just days away from destitution.". He said the Taiwanese bosses didn't care about how the supervisors were treating the women as long as they completed the orders, and the brands didn't care as long as they got their clothes. "Nothing was done to keep the women safe," he said. "They couldn't tell their husbands because they thought they would be blamed. So really, they were completely on their own."

evi Strauss & Co is celebrated across the industry for its ethical procurement, and was one of the first fashion brands to demand that suppliers uphold human rights and labour standards. Yet its supply chains in Lesotho had still become infested with sexual violence. As one campaigner put it to me: "If it's happening in Levi's supply chain, then it's happening everywhere." While every retailer has its own approach to ethical procurement, most, including Levi's, use factory inspections and social auditing to show they are taking active steps to police the implementation of their codes of conduct.

The fashion industry started relying on social audits after the damaging sweatshop exposés of the 90s, which revealed the exploitation of workers making goods for global brands such as Nike and Gap. But for years campaigners have been warning that codes of conduct and social audits not only don't work, but can be misleading. By creating a veneer of corporate accountability, they allow brands to palm off responsibility for bad working conditions on to suppliers.

"These audits are not there to protect the worker - they are there to protect the reputation of the clothing companies," said Aruna Kashyap of Human Rights Watch. Kashyap recalls disasters that led to garment workers losing their lives in unsafe buildings: in 2012, the Ali Enterprises factory fire in Pakistan killed 250 workers who were trapped behind barred windows. In 2013, in the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh, a factory building collapsed, killing 1,134 people and injuring thousands more.

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The Rana Plaza factory disaster in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2013. Photograph: ZUMA/Rex Features

"In both cases these factories had been declared safe by corporate social audits shortly before disaster struck. If audits can't pick up that a building is about to collapse then there is no way they could identify something as hidden and nuanced as gender-based violence," Kashyap said. Regardless, when it comes to sexual harassment, fashion brands are not even asking the questions. "They simply don't want to know."

All of the factories named in the WRC report had been audited and inspected, and no problems had been found. The women I talked to in confidence, on condition of anonymity - who also complained of unsafe working conditions and problems with pay and targeting of union organisers - had all been on the factory floor when audits were being carried out. They all said they would never disclose any problems they were having to auditors, especially not sexual harassment.

"When the inspectors come, they only ever talk to us in groups, and usually in front of our managers," said Kabelo Sello. "Even if they talk to us alone, the management is watching, so if there is a complaint afterwards they know who who has talked. They never ask us any questions - they only say, "Are you happy at work?", and we all nod."

I asked Levi's why their social audits had failed to pick up any of the abuse that had been uncovered by the WRC researchers. Kim Almedia, director of Levi's "worker wellbeing" programme, said: "Gender-based violence is a complicated issue and is very hard to detect in the workplace," she said. "I think this is a very specific incident that happened at one supplier with very specific conditions."

Levi's has said it intends to create women-led teams to do the audits. However, Nthakana, who interviewed many of the garment workers, said that brands have to gain the trust of women who will be scared to speak out. "We're a relatively small NGO, and we just hired a hotel room away from the factory floor and asked workers if they wanted to come and speak to us. You have to create the conditions in which women feel safe to talk."

hen WRC first put the women's allegations to the management at Nien Hsing, they denied it all. "They said that no cases of sexual harassment or abuse had been reported for two years, and that no manager or supervisor had been disciplined for sexual harassment since 2005," said Rola Abimourched, the lead campaigner on the Lesotho campaign. "Which was exactly the point the women had been making - there was no safe way for them to report."

Levi's worked with Nien Hsing, the local labour unions and women's rights groups to improve conditions for women in the factories. "For us this was a huge moment, because before it would be unthinkable that international brands would sit at the same table as a local labour union," said Sam Mokhele, from the NACTWU union in Lesotho.

Out of these negotiations came the Lesotho Agreement, hailed by campaigners as the first credible attempt to tackle gender-based violence in the garment industry. Nien Hsing has agreed, among other measures, to implement a zero-tolerance approach to sexual harassment, recognise the labour unions, hire more female supervisors and put all workers on official contracts. An independent body with full-time staff has been set up to investigate complaints of sexual harassment, which has the power to dismiss perpetrators. If Nien Hsing fails to honour any of these conditions, it will lose its contracts with Levi's and the other brands.

"We strive to ensure a safe and secure workplace for all workers in our factories and are therefore fully committed to implementing this agreement immediately, comprehensively, and with measurable success," said Richard Chen, the chair of Nien Hsing, at the launch of the agreement.

Levi Strauss & Co, The Children's Place and Kontoor Brands (owners of Wrangler) jointly stated: "We are committed to working to protect workers' rights and foster well-being at third party supplier factories, so that all workers at these facilities, especially female workers, feel safe, valued and empowered ... We believe this multi-faceted program can create lasting change and better working environments at these factories, making a significant positive impact on the entire workforce."

The unions told me before lockdown that things have already dramatically changed for the women at the factories that signed up to the agreement. "Before, it has always been the workers who are desperate. Now it is the factories who are desperate not to lose the brands," said Mokhele. "The power dynamic has shifted dramatically back to the workers. The supervisors can no longer touch them."

Mamello Makhetha and Kabelo Sello, two of the women who faced sexual assault at the hands of their male supervisors, agree that the factories feel safer. "Everyone is on proper contracts now," said Sello. "And a lot of the harassment has stopped."

What happened in Lesotho has, said Levi's senior programme manager, Kim Almedia, been a "huge learning curve" for the brand. She said Levi's is proud to have been part of the creation of the "groundbreaking" Lesotho Agreement. As a brand, Levi's is, she said, dedicated to the wellbeing of the women working in its supply chain. "We recognise that 70-80% of our workers are women, and given the power imbalances that exist, this leads to issues," she said. "The global awakening around #MeToo is an opportunity to seize this moment and use it as momentum to be a leader in this space. It has taken a while for the [garment] industry to wake up to the severity of the issue [of sexual violence], but now there is no time to waste in addressing it."

The Lesotho Agreement had only just started being implemented when the pandemic hit. One of the factories named in the WRC report has closed, but the unions have managed to negotiate unprecedented exit packages for workers and the management has promised to rehire as soon as the orders resume.

"We're standing on the brink of a potential catastrophe in worker's rights, as brands and suppliers try and recoup the losses they've incurred throughout the pandemic," said Abimourched. "When women in our global supply chains are already suffering increasing suppression and desperation, Lesotho offers a model of how to build back better."

But the impact the agreement will have outside of the handful of Nien Hsing factories in Lesotho may be limited. To date, the agreement is the fashion industry's one and only attempt to stop the sexual abuse of garment workers. Levi's says it has no plans to roll out similar initiatives across the rest of its supply chain. Not one perpetrator has faced criminal charges for sexual assaults committed at the factories.

"What has happened because of the women at the Nien Hsing factories coming forward and speaking out is incredible, but it's painful to know that just down the road women in other garment factories are facing the same harassment. With Covid, the situation now in Lesotho is just getting worse for women every day," said Sethelile Nthakana. "There are more than 45,000 garment workers in Lesotho, and more than 40 million more across the world. Each act of sexual violence that they face is a crime and must be stopped."

Just before lockdown, I spoke to Thebelang Mohapi by phone from Lesotho, and she told me how her life had changed since the WRC report came out. When she saw what the women at her factory had managed to achieve for themselves and thousands of others, she took her case to an employment tribunal, and got her job back. Now she is training to be a union representative at her factory.

"It is still hard," she said, "but at least here in Lesotho everybody is listening to us now. I want to try and make sure that no other woman in the factories has to come to work and suffer like that again."

The workers' names in this piece have been changed.

* Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, and sign up to the long read weekly email here
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Fashion's dirty secret: how sexual assault took hold in jeans factories

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At one of the biggest garment factories in Maseru, the capital city of Lesotho, the managers never hired enough regular workers to complete the clothing orders that flooded in from Europe and the US. Instead, every morning, a few hours after the sewing machines had started whirring, a male supervisor would stroll out to the factory gates where dozens of women waited.

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I thought that this piece encapsulated the power and beauty of protest and the unification it can bring, the momentum that it creates for groups of people coming together to make their voices heard. The article makes the point that even though it was not successful in political or policy terms, it made enormous efforts for the women's movement and the recognition of their status and presence in society. This in itself has the power to encourage more resistance amongst social groups and encourage activism in different ways.The understanding of activism as creative, powerful and political in the way that it dissects social structures is important because it also depicts the way in which it evolves and adapts to political contexts (Dave) .

But whether or not the protest movement succeeds in ousting Mr. Lukashenko, it has already shattered deeply entrenched gender stereotypes built up over generations.

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The women who organized the political campaign and the subsequent protests against President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko may ultimately be defeated. But society may never be the same.

Belarusian women protesting in Minsk last month. Credit... EPA, via Shutterstock

MINSK, Belarus - With masked riot police officers massing nearby, threatening to attack protesters like him with batons and fists, Aleksei D. Zulevsky felt safe for the first time in weeks of anti-government unrest in Belarus: He was surrounded by hundreds of women he knew would shield him.

"I feel protected here," said Mr. Zulevsky, as fellow protesters, many holding red and white flags, the banner of the opposition, chanted at a rally last month. "Only cowards beat women!"

In a country whose strongman president, Aleksandr. G Lukashenko, has openly scoffed at women as too weak for politics and told them their place was in the kitchen, Belarusian women have become the face and driving force of a movement aimed at toppling a leader known as "Europe's last dictator."

That effort may be flagging, with Mr. Lukashenko refusing to give up power even though tens of thousands of people continue to come out to the streets of Minsk to protest every weekend. On Saturday many women, holding flowers in their hands, again protested in the city. They avoided forming a single crowd in fear of being arrested by police officers.

But whether or not the protest movement succeeds in ousting Mr. Lukashenko, it has already shattered deeply entrenched gender stereotypes built up over generations.

"Women were stronger in this situation," said Tatiana N. Kotes, a film production designer and activist. "We had to assume a more significant role. Men's dominating role in the society has collapsed."

The collapse began even before an Aug. 9 presidential election that Mr. Lukashenko claimed to have won by a landslide, setting off two months of almost nonstop protests. To his obvious distaste, Mr. Lukashenko faced an unexpectedly strong challenge from a woman candidate, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the wife of a popular blogger who had hoped to run himself but was imprisoned before he could register as a candidate.

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The opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya in Berlin on Monday. Credit... Hayoung Jeon/EPA, via Shutterstock

Mr. Lukashenko mocked his rival as a housewife, a meek mother ill-equipped to debate serious issues of state with a veteran leader like himself.

"She just cooked a tasty cutlet, maybe fed the children, and the cutlet smelled nice," Mr. Lukashenko said in an interview shortly before the election. "And now there's supposed to be a debate about some issues."

Adding to his rage and, perhaps, consternation, was the fact that the opposition, previously led by men and prone to bitter internal feuding, had united around three women - Ms. Tikhanovskaya, whom they backed as the candidate; Veronika Tsepkalo, the wife of a would-be candidate who fled the country to avoid arrest; and Maria Kolesnikova, the campaign manager for Viktor Babariko, a jailed banker who had also hoped to challenge Mr. Lukashenko.

With all the main male opposition figures knocked out of the race by arrest or flight abroad, Ms. Tikhanovskaya and her two colleagues ran a strategic and successful campaign, holding large rallies across the country while Mr. Lukashenko confined himself to Soviet-style visits to factories and military bases.

"At our first rallies, we were amazed to see how many people turned up," Ms. Tsepkalo, 44, said in an interview. "It was a symbol of the unity of Belarusians against the dictatorship."

Ms. Kolesnikova, the only one of the women to remain in Belarus after the election, achieved hero status when she tore up her passport to foil the government's plan to deport her to Ukraine, and was then imprisoned.

Maria Kolesnikova in Minsk in August. Ms. Kolesnikova is one of three women leaders around whom the opposition has united. Credit... Dmitri Lovetsky/Associated Press

The emergence of women in the protest movement - while surprising to many and, to Mr. Lukashenko, an affront to the natural order - drew on an important feature of the country's national psychology left by the traumas of World War II, when a quarter of the population, mostly men, was wiped out.

Olga Shparaga, a feminist and lecturer in philosophy at the European College of Liberal Arts in Belarus, said the shortage of males left women to play an outsize role in rebuilding the devastated country once the war ended in 1945. Memories of this, she said, left even the most misogynistic Belarussians aware, deep down, of what women could accomplish.

Wartime memories have been kept alive and introduced to younger Belarusians with no recollection of the war or its aftermath by Svetlana Alexievich, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who has made the role of women one of the main topics of her work.

"After the war, we children lived in a world of women," Ms. Alexievich said in her Nobel lecture in 2015. "What I remember most is that women talked about love, not death."

But it is perhaps Mr. Lukashenko himself who, inadvertently, has done more than anyone to advance the cause of feminism. Casting himself as a classic Slavic "muzhik," or real man, Mr. Lukashenko has sneered at women with such abandon that he has become a caricature of boorish misogyny and an easy target for attack.

A rally in Minsk on Sunday. Belarusian women are the driving force of the movement to topple the leader of Belarus. Credit... Reuters

Sergei Chaly, a Belarusian political and economic analyst who worked with Mr. Lukashenko at the beginning of his political career in the 1990s, said Ms. Tikhanovskaya made a smart decision to portray herself as "a simple woman that just needs her husband and children, but who was selected by fate to fulfill a political role."

That appealed to voters wary of the dominating and masculine style presented by Mr. Lukashenko throughout his 26 years in power.

"He got used to dealing with men by means of bullying and boorishness, but this didn't work with women," Mr. Chaly said.

After their leading role in the campaign it was only natural that women would step up in the protests that broke out after Mr. Lukashenko claimed an implausible 80 percent of the vote in the Aug. 9 election. In the days that followed, the streets of the capital, Minsk, became a perilous conflict zone. Thousands of protesters, mostly men, were arrested, and hundreds were beaten and tortured.

With the country in danger of sliding into violent strife as groups of aggressive young men appeared on the streets calling for revenge, women again took center stage. A small group of women activists organized a protest so conspicuously peaceable that, they calculated, even the most brutish riot police officer would hesitate to use force.

Hundreds of women descended hand-in-hand on the central market in Minsk, forming a human chain that left the police clearly baffled about how they should respond.

Beating unarmed women publicly risked embarrassing the law enforcement apparatus and opening up officers not only to public condemnation but perhaps even punishment by their superiors.

A rally in Minsk last month. After the election, thousands of women took to the streets in Minsk and other cities across Belarus. Credit... Associated Press

"Our government is always looking for organizers, but this idea was in the air, it was a feeling shared by all women in Belarus," said Irina G. Sukhiy, an activist who joined the women's protest.

The day after the first women's march ended peacefully, thousands of women took to the streets in Minsk and other cities across the country. Mr. Lukashenko, who was counting that brute force would be enough to crush the protests, was thrown off balance and sought help from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

The immediate answer was to isolate the women leading the protests and drive them out of the country. More recently, masked police officers, many of them visibly embarrassed, have made mass arrests of women demonstrators. But most of those taken into custody were released after fingerprinting and a mug shot. Even the leaders, like Ms. Sukhiy, were sentenced to only several days of administrative arrest.

"They didn't expect that a woman could stand against them," said Ksenia A. Fyodorova, 47, an entrepreneur and activist, of the security forces. "We realized that you can only counter them in a way that would be diametrically opposed to what they did."

Speaking with reporters in Berlin Wednesday after meeting with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, Ms. Tikhanovskaya said the role women have played in the uprising was as determined as it was unexpected.

"They are fighting for the future of their children," she said. "They don't want their children to be slaves of this system in the future."

In the face of official brutality, she said, the women have responded by showing "peace and love." As a broad smile broke across her face, she added, "Now, Belarusian women are world-known, and this is wonderful."

Melissa Eddy contributed reporting from Berlin.

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In Belarus, Women Led the Protests and Shattered Stereotypes

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The women who organized the political campaign and the subsequent protests against President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko may ultimately be defeated. But society may never be the same. MINSK, Belarus - With masked riot police officers massing nearby, threatening to attack protesters like him with batons and fists, Aleksei D.

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This personal story of immigration to the UK and the journey of fighting for citizenship calls upon the themes of week 3. In many ways it made me think of the Windrush documentary and the issue of citizenship, what this entails and how this is defined legally; the construction of citizenship is often very detached and different from what it is in reality, as demonstrated by the thoughts expressed below in the article.

“They don’t want you to integrate,” Farsani had told me. “They want you to fail so they can point their fingers at you and say, ‘Look, immigrants do not integrate’.” But we do, because the country, in spite of its broken immigration system, slowly, organically, casually, naturalises you in ways that cannot be validated by a Life in the UK test, citizenship ceremony or exhaustive application dossier"

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I first landed in England in September 2004. I took the underground from Heathrow and sat in the carriage with my luggage, face plastered to the window, as the train made its way through the late summer greenery of west London. Culture shock blended with a counterintuitive sense of ease and familiarity with a country - in fact, a whole hemisphere - that I had never visited. I had lived my entire life in Sudan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and had come to the UK to study for a postgraduate degree at the University of London. Over the next weeks, I found the city and its people both bewilderingly cool and enthusiastically welcoming. That duality would go on to be the central theme of my life in the UK - confusing impenetrability accompanied by a yielding accommodation.

I settled in quickly, squatting in a relative's spare bedroom until I could make arrangements. But I had severely underestimated the expense of London and, already impoverished by the high overseas student tuition fees, I began working while I was studying, my student visa allowing for 20 hours a week. I temped in offices across London, using an A-Z to find my way around. My topography of London is still anchored in the locations of those anonymous office blocks across the city. At the end of my course I extended my student visa in order to finish my dissertation and meanwhile was offered a contract as a research assistant at an investment bank where I had been temping. I went into the interview with precisely £15 to my name. Had the position not paid by the end of the week, I would not have been able to get through the first month.

A few weeks into the job and with a little disposable income for the first time in my life, I rented a room on a Bethnal Green council estate. Standing on the balcony, looking out at east London, I remember thinking that it was a sort of Valhalla. After a year or so, in 2007, a combination of student visa extensions and a partner visa by virtue of a relationship I was in at the time meant that I was granted limited leave to remain (ie with no recourse to public funds). After five years, I would be eligible for permanent residency.

My problems with the Home Office began in 2012. What should have been a routine application for permanent residency was turned down. I don't remember the exact wording of the letter because my concentration shattered while trying to process what my lawyer was saying. The reason seemed to be that the right to permanent-after-temporary residency had been circumscribed. The laws had changed. "We'll need to appeal immediately," she said. "You don't have to leave right away."

It is hard to describe what it feels like to confront the possibility of leaving a country in which you are settled. I had by then been living, working (in emerging markets private equity) and paying taxes in the UK for nine years and enjoyed all the natural extensions of that investment - a career, close friends, a deep attachment to the place, a whole life. It is almost as if the laws of nature change, like gravity disappears and all the things that root you to your existence lose their shape and float away. I remember thinking, "I can't leave, I've just bought a sofa." It was a ridiculous thought, but that secondhand sofa from the local flea market was the first item of furniture I had ever bought. Suddenly, it signified the folly of nesting in a country that had no intention of letting me make a home.

In January 2010 David Cameron, backed into a tough stance by the looming election, announced a "no ifs no buts" pledge to bring immigration down to the tens of thousands. Theresa May took the helm at the Home Office in May and immediately set about making as big a dent in the net migration number, then about 244,000, as possible. Despite the Liberal Democrats making an attempt to dilute some of the crueller aspects of immigration law, condemning the "Go home" billboard vans May sent through the streets of London and publicly challenging Cameron on the tens of thousands figure, immigration policies continued to harden. They culminated in the 2013 immigration bill that declared the country would become a "hostile environment" for illegal immigrants.

The resulting legislation represented a fundamental dismantling of the means by which all migrants could challenge Home Office decisions, despite around half of appeals ultimately being successful. By the time the 2015 immigration bill was introduced, the Conservatives, unfettered by coalition, introduced a host of measures that meant a hostile environment policy was surreptitiously rolled out against legal migrants as well.

Unable to tackle EU migration due to freedom of movement, the Home Office, while cutting its numbers of immigration case-workers, focused on non-EU migrants and their families, even when they were legal. "Discretion" - a word that sends chills down the spine of many a Home Office application veteran - became the governing principle. As with Nadir Farsani, a 27-year-old Saudi engineer who has lived in the UK most of his adult life and whose parents have British citizenship. He nevertheless had his student visa rejected by a case worker who decided a quirk of Arabic naming convention meant Nadir's father's supporting financial documents were not legitimate. Nadir was not informed nor asked to provide additional evidence and was asked to leave the country. While waiting for his application to be processed, his grandmother in Saudi Arabia fell ill and died. He could not travel to say goodbye.

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As home secretary in 2010, Theresa May immediately set about making a dent in the net migration number. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Since 2010 I have experienced a constant attrition in the ranks of friends who did not have the means or the time to challenge often unfair decisions. Damned by discretion, rather than the law, they left.

The right to appeal decisions was curbed. The tier-1 visa, which had allowed for highly skilled migrants looking for a job or wishing to become self-employed, was abolished. Students' right to work after graduation was limited and the Life in the UK test became a residency requirement. And British citizens began to be affected. In 2012 May announced rules that allowed only those British citizens earning more than £18,600 to bring their spouse to live with them in the UK. The figure is higher where visa applications are also made for children. She also made it all but impossible for people to bring their non-European elderly relatives to the UK. "Skype families" can spend years on opposite sides of the world, watching their children grow up on video.

New UK data protection rules are a cynical attack on immigrants | Claude Moraes

Incentivised to reject, the Home Office grew ever more brutal and incompetent. Satbir Singh, CEO of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, is one of many British citizens whose application for his spouse to join him in the UK was rejected. They had satisfied all the requirements, but the Home Office lost their documents. In one of JCWI's cases, a British citizen on a zero hours contract had a nervous breakdown due to the long hours he had to work in order to satisfy the income requirement. He needed hospitalisation but refused - two weeks off would mean that his income would fall under the threshold.

The principle of reject and hope no questions are asked has given rise to instances of unfathomable cruelty. In one case, reported in February, an interviewee began hallucinating. When her rejected case went to the supreme court, the judge said, "Reading that interview, it is apparent that the claimant was very unwell at the time ... She appeared to be talking to people who were not there and the interview nonetheless continued, including beyond a time when she asked whether or not she had wet herself."

The hostile environment also began to chew up those who had lived their entire lives in the UK. Commonwealth citizens who arrived in the country decades ago have discovered that in a hardened immigration climate they are without the necessary papers. So Paulette Wilson, a 61-year-old former cook in the House of Commons, was sent to Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre last October and taken to Heathrow for deportation to Jamaica, a country she had not visited since she was 10. A last-minute legal intervention prevented her removal, and, following media coverage in the Guardian, she was granted a residency permit.

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The Home Office grew ever more brutal and incompetent ... Lunar House in Croydon. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

In most cases, the speed with which the Home Office capitulates when challenged is a clear giveaway that decisions were made in the hope they would not be appealed. In my case, I appealed my residency extension and prepared a case with a litigation lawyer - only for permanent residency to be granted days before my appearance in court. There was no explanation and we had not provided, yet, any new information. My joy was followed by a nausea of fury. I had bankrupted myself trying to pay the £30,000 legal fees and lived in a constant anguish of instability, paralysed and yet tensed for action, only for the decision to be overturned because it was wrong in the first place, and because the Home Office couldn't be bothered to fight it.

Forty per cent of cases brought before a judge on appeal are overturned. Consider that this applies only to the small number of individuals who have the means to appeal, and the scale of the wider miscarriage of justice becomes apparent.At one point, the government was proposing that the rule of "deport first, appeal later" that currently applies only to foreign national criminals be applied across the board; thankfully, this was eventually overturned by the supreme court, which declared it unfair and unlawful.

The original sin, the motivation for so much of the inhumanity being visited on applicants, is the " tens of thousands" target, an unrealistic and arbitrary number, backed by no intelligence or research. But the heart of the dysfunction throughout the past eight years isn't that immigration laws have tightened, it is that they have become unpredictable, as new rules are introduced or scrapped. There have been 45,000 changes to immigration rules since May took over at the Home Office. Both applicants and immigration officials are navigating the system using a map whose contours and geology shift constantly. Farsani compares the process to "climbing a crumbling staircase".

At the same time, the public tone, led by the Tory populism on immigration, became sharper and the idea that the UK had a soft-touch immigration system grew stronger. By the time the Brexit referendum campaign was under way, the national perception of the country's immigration rules was in fantasyland. It was surreal to watch when, at the same time, I was unable to secure a residency, let alone a passport.

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One of home secretary Theresa May's 'Go home' vans. Photograph: Home Office/PA Wire

And the ignorance culminated in Brexit. The mainstreaming of lies was complete. A points-based system? We already have one. It's called a tier-2 visa and to avail yourself of it you have to have sponsorship and a job offer from a UK employer, as well as sufficient funds to sustain you until your first salary. An NHS surcharge? We already have one. Every non-EU citizen who takes up a job or student position in the UK pays £150-200 before the visa is issued. They also pay national insurance, taxes that go towards the Home Office, plus high and escalating fees to process routine applications - in addition to fees paid to all the outsourced affiliated agencies that administer peripheral processes such as English tests and interviews.

Sometimes, going through that third-party machinery was like being in some dark comedy. The £150 English language test I had to book last-minute (or my naturalisation application would have been refused) took place in a lugubrious, privately run testing centre in Holborn, in London. Examinees were kept apart by a complicated, completely over-the top system. The examiner and I chatted amiably for a few minutes before she started the test. Then the frequency changed. Loudly and very slowly, she began: "Have. You. Been. To. Any. Festivals. Recently?" I said no and then she began to painfully explain what a festival was. I assured her that I knew, but just hadn't been to any recently. She looked down at the subject notes where we had been asked to pick a topic we would like to speak about. I'd written down "Canada" as I had just arrived back in London that morning after delivering a keynote speech at a labour union event in Toronto. "Canada!" She said. "What. Can. You. Tell. Me. About. Canada?"

The really dirty secret is that the government can stop non-EU migration dead whenever it wants. Of the 170,000 non-EU migrants who came to the UK in 2016, about 90,000 were granted tier-2 employment. These are visas that we can simply stop issuing. But the economy needs the labour, something the government will not admit, instead choosing to treat applicants as people who somehow manage to come to the country against its will. If anything, the UK needs more non-EU migrants to plug skills gaps, particularly in the NHS - yet doctors offered jobs in hospitals are being blocked from coming to Britain because monthly quotas for skilled worker visas have been oversubscribed.

And, if Brexit finally goes through, into this inflexible immigration system will march three million EU citizens whose status will need to be registered and regularised. It is simply, for those of us who have been through it, a terrifying prospect. And May still doubles down, running the Home Office from Downing Street. In mid-February she overruled the Home Office in order to insist that EU citizens who arrived during a Brexit transition period would not have the automatic right to remain in the country. The move has caused alarm in the Home Office, with government sources admitting that work on a separate registration scheme had "barely begun" and "almost certainly" would not be ready in time. May then backed down.

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'I felt a nausea of fury' - how I faced the cruelty of Britain's immigration system

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first landed in England in September 2004. I took the underground from Heathrow and sat in the carriage with my luggage, face plastered to the window, as the train made its way through the late summer greenery of west London.

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This demonstrates simply another way that power relations build up in layers. The protests in Hong Kong began with the power to suppress freedom of speech, and now this is being manifested in a different reality with the exhibition being shut down in certain locations. The reality of the protests and its photographs is contrasted with the inability to demonstrate the atrocities of the government and what Hong Kong protesters have suffered at the hands of the state. Here we see power that renders these individuals invisible, renders their cause invisible and unheard, and an individual's work unseen too.

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A prestigious international press exhibition, featuring photographs of the Hong Kong protests, has been abruptly taken down in Macau, with organisers refusing to explain why, prompting speculation of political pressure.

The World Press Photo exhibition opened on 25 September and was scheduled to run until 18 October but was closed early. Local media quoted the government-run Macau Foundation denying any political pressure, and an organiser told local radio it was due to "internal management problems", but declined to elaborate.

The exhibition featured images of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests which wracked the city through much of last year, taken by AFP photographer Nicolas Asfoiuri. The content of the exhibition - chosen by a jury from thousands of global photojournalism submissions - remains the same in every country it is displayed.

The World Press Photo Foundation, based in the Netherlands, said it hadn't been able to confirm the reason for the Macau exhibit's closure.

"While the reasons for the closing remain unclear, we are following local media reports suggesting that it might be the result of external pressure on the content of the exhibition," said the foundation's director of exhibitions, Laurens Korteweg.

"Supporting the conditions for freedom of expression, freedom of inquiry, freedom of the press is a fundamental part of our work. We regret the premature closing of our annual exhibition in Macao. Our collaboration with the Association Casa de Portugal Macao has always been a positive one and we hope to be able to come back to Macao."

The Macau Portuguese and English Press Association said if the closure was due to pressure over any included photographs they would consider it "a serious and worrying incident that signals an erosion of freedom of expression".

Macau, like Hong Kong, lives under the "One Country Two Systems" principle, but has not seen a pro-democracy movement like Hong Kong. Earlier this year it banned the display of a photo exhibition commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

In June Beijing implemented a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong, which broadly outlined acts it considered to be secession, sedition, foreign collusion or terrorism. The wording of the law extended its jurisdiction globally, and human rights and legal experts have expressed concern that it could be used to persecute pro-democracy figures abroad, and to crush dissent and freedom of speech in places like Macau.

This week it was revealed a Hong Kong primary school teacher had been deregistered for showing students materials from the pro-democracy movement to teach them about freedom of speech. The secretary for education, Kevin Yeung, said the incident happened prior to the introduction of the national security law, but for future cases they would consult with law enforcement agencies. The bureau said it would work to find other "black sheep" accused of professional misconduct.

More than 20,000 schoolteachers, students and parents have lobbied the government in protest of the firing.

While the Hong Kong government sought to reassure residents that the national security law was aimed only at a small group of criminals, it has had an alarming impact on Hong Kong's media, education, and academic sectors, and has targeted even benign forms of activism. Successive police operations have also arrested at least 28 people under the law, although only one has been charged.

The crackdown has prompted many to flee, including 12 people linked to the protest movement, who were arrested while attempting to take a boat to Taiwan. Their families and lawyers have accused mainland authorities of holding them in detention without access to legal assistance and medication. On Thursday activists accused Hong Kong police of colluding with mainland authorities, claiming leaked logbooks showed a government plane was flying under police orders, over the location where the activists allegedly departed from.

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Photo exhibition featuring Hong Kong protest images shut down in Macau

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A prestigious international press exhibition, featuring photographs of the Hong Kong protests, has been abruptly taken down in Macau, with organisers refusing to explain why, prompting speculation of political pressure. The World Press Photo exhibition opened on 25 September and was scheduled to run until 18 October but was closed early.

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A short note on resistance
'be like water' is the idea conveyed in this that I liked. Resistance is ever changing, it adapts and has to change under its political circumstances by the very nature of what it is. Political contexts aren't stationary, they move and merge and evolve and therefore resistance adapts. I feel like Abu-Lughod really conveyed this in her piece looking at the Bedouin communities where we see how generationally resistance takes different forms as the social contexts and matters of subversion change.

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Bravery is not about never being afraid, but about feeling fear and still choosing to do the right thing. Facing batons, pepper spray, teargas and armed forces, protesters from Hong Kong and many other places in the world have perfectly demonstrated the meaning of courage.

Fighting a mighty regime is always terrifying, given the resources and forces at its disposal. After a year of persistent protests in Hong Kong, more than 9,000 protesters have been arrested have been arrested and 1,000 of them prosecuted. However, our demand for democracy has not been fulfilled. Instead, police brutality has intensified; one judge praised knife-wielding pro-Beijing thugs for their "noble sentiments"; and worst of all, Beijing has scrapped its "one country, two systems" promise by unilaterally imposing a draconian rule over the city. Chanting "long live Liverpool", carrying stickers emblazoned with Bible verses, waving other countries' flags and holding blank placards have been framed as breaching the new security law. Books and TV shows containing critical voices have been censored, and liberal teachers reprimanded or fired. Each time China has sunk its claws deeper into this last beacon of liberty on its soil, our hope for democracy has faded.

On the same day the new law was put in place, tens of thousands of Hong Kongers took to the streets. More than 610,000 citizens cast their ballots in the city's primary polls, despite Beijing's warnings. When Beijing tightens its red lines and sends a chill through the city, our message to the world is clear: we will never surrender. "Be water" - the guiding principle of the anti-extradition protests last year - still inspires us. Forms of resistance need to be fluid and flexible; to evolve amid new political circumstances. When certain slogans and songs are forbidden, the city's protesters use wordplay, songs with Morse code messages, and blank sticky notes to express our grievances. Others even subvert the Chinese Communist party's own dogma, or the first line of the Chinese anthem "Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves". Since political organisations are the primary targets of the law, resistance must now go underground, with some, like Nathan Law, fleeing the city to keep speaking out in the international arena.

When authoritarian leaders blanket the city in fear and desperation, courage and creativity are the most potent weapons we have.

* Glacier Kwong and Joshua Wong are activists; he is the author of Unfree Speech: The Threat To Global Democracy And Why We Must Act, Now
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Joshua Wong: 'Forms of resistance need to be fluid and flexible'

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Bravery is not about never being afraid, but about feeling fear and still choosing to do the right thing. Facing batons, pepper spray, teargas and armed forces, protesters from Hong Kong and many other places in the world have perfectly demonstrated the meaning of courage.

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The problem with brand activism
This article written by a friend of mine touches upon a rather sensitive and problematic topic that emerged in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Being involved online and on social media it was impossible not to notice how numerous brands were showcasing their support of the BLM movement, even when facts demonstrated racial discrimination within their companies day-to-day working. Brand activism then became a phenomenon that rests upon performativity and brings into question what activism and resistance should look like.

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As for many, being trapped in the house during lockdown was emotionally taxing. Sure, not being able to see people for months really impacted my social skills and gifted me constant cabin fever induced headaches, but it reminded me of what I do best: consume vast amounts of food-related online content in the hopes of suppressing the faults of the world, one recipe at a time. With the aim of respiting my passion for cooking, I rediscovered one of my all-time favourite types of food content, which comes in the form of the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen YouTube videos.

If you don't know BA, let me clue you in. Bon Appétit began in 1956 as a food and entertaining subscription magazine based in New York City and owned by mass media company, Condé Nast, which boasts the influential publications The New Yorker, Allure, and Vogue, amongst others. The BA charm in 2020 is translated into their favoured YouTube channel which features different series, hosted by different cast members. The participation of celebrities and influencers, along with the diversity in the poster faces, made BA the "millennial kitchen," legitimizing its presence in the food industry and attributing significant amounts of credibility to it, both from food experts and non. Therefore, saying I was disappointed to learn of the pressing inequalities that contaminate the company, many of which were blatant to the naked eye, does not cut it. It made me ask myself why I was so interested in BA, and why I completely overlooked the APPALLING red flags, ultimately encouraging me to focus on the broader concept of brand activism, in particular during the recent Black Lives Matter movement protests. So, let me unpack this for you.

Controversy arose when BA staff member, and guiding light to many, Sohla El-Waylly publicly exposed the pay inequality within Bon Appétit editors, suggesting how the company favours her white counterparts, allegedly paying fan-favourite Claire Saffitz $20,000-30,000 per video, whilst she rests on a $50,000 salary. The Instagram story posted by El-Waylly this past June responds to a resurfaced picture of BA editor-in-chief Adam Rappaport in brown face, which she states to be outraged by, and took as an opportunity to shine a light on the phony-natured diversification and tokenism of the company which is reflected in its internal policies and regulation. First of all, while all white editors have their own show, even those without the same level of qualifications as El-Waylly, no POCs have a series on the YouTube channel and, according to the editors, are not paid for their contribution to the videos.

Now, I've been watching BA for a while and I can tell you that Sohla Is truly everyone's helping hand. She appears in most videos, often saving the day, or the recipe, like the superhero she is, and constantly shares her wisdom which is often reflected in her recipes. Her response served as a catalyst for her fellow non-white colleagues to reaffirm the same treatment and lack of compensation. Furthermore, fellow chef Hawa Hassan, the only black chef at BA (let that sink in), spoke out on the unfair treatment she endured after filming two videos for Black History Month (and this) and was paid a mere $400 for (and THIS).

To me, Bon Appètit served as a gateway into my focus on the perils and inconsistencies of brand activism, especially with regards to the recent Black Lives Matter Movement protests, which rebel against the systematic racism and oppression within our society. Given the importance of social media in our everyday, followers and likes are our new currency, and Instagram is the platform where performative representations of support are shared in the aim of appeasing the masses or finding some kind of ultimate spiritual absolution of sin. Brands nowadays have to take a stance because the consumerist market, mainly made up of Gen-Z and Millennials, cares about what they have to say. A company's policy can make it or break it. We can see this with the widespread growth of cruelty free makeup industry which has seen a 175% sale boom since 2013. That's because our personal principles are what we look for in a brand and we have learned how to detect real from fake activism and, let me tell you, it's not that hard. A brand taking a stance can sometimes be done "right" or can come across as completely tone death, but ultimately, there is little difference between the two if a company's internal policies straight up contradict the heart wrenching message they want to convey on their aesthetically pleasing Instagram infographic, or on their multimillion-dollar, Kardashian-infused TV commercial. So, is it really much more than a marketing plan? Well, no - if what is on the surface does not reflect what's underneath.

As imagined, another huge culprit lies within the fashion industry. Let's think about how high-end, sustainable clothing brand Reformation came under fire days after stating their support for the Black Lives Matter movement. The minimal Instagram post, sharing a list of organisations to support the movement, backfired into a myriad of the company's employees condemning racist treatment and depicting their experience at the company as traumatizing and fearful for people of colour. In particular, then CEO Yael Aflalo was victim of backlash from her former employees, which accuse her of racial discrimination and for the perpetration of an environment which blatantly favoured white workers through substantial pay disparities and inequality in advancements. Ok, what now? Well outrage erupted for a couple of weeks, hashtags were created, and donations were made and, yeah, that's amazing but it just shows you how performative activism can be. So, is it really much more than a marketing plan? Well, no. If what is on the surface does not reflect what's underneath.

This begs the question: how do you know when a company is being fake and just pandering? Of course, there is a difference between brands that are now choosing to adopt the performative action of posting a trendy Instagram post, those who contribute to the morbid mosaic of the black squares instead of effectively providing any resources, to companies that have always supported the movement, even when it was not as convenient for them. Let's think of Nike for example. Nike chose to publicly support NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2018 after he took a knee two years prior in protest of the unjust treatment of African Americans in the USA during the Trump Administration. That, as you will remember, led to chaos within trainer enthusiasts. There was a strong dichotomy between those who chose to keep buying more shoes in support of the brand, - thus Kaepernick, thus the movement - and those who decided to #JustBurnIt. The former clearly won because Nike sales surged by 31% in just a matter of days and, to this day, they keep donating to the movement and have amounted more than £30m in 2020. So that's amazing, right? Finally, a huge multinational standing up for the good. Well... don't count your chickens before they hatch. As of last month, various employees are stepping up with allegations of racist micro-aggressions and unbalanced power dynamics between white employees and employees of colour. I'm not saying Nike doesn't believe in Kaepernick and what he was protesting against when he kneeled during the anthem in 2016, but putting wool or, in this case, catchy slogans, won't suffice in the long run.

Will a slew of CEOs resigning make a difference? Maybe. But is it more than just performance art? That's up to us. COVID-19, and the global economic hardship it bought with it, gave us an outlet. We, as consumers, have more power now than we have ever had. The future of a company is truly in our hands as we can actively choose who to support and who to boycott in the comfort of our own home. These issues aren't new, but a light is being shed on them, one so bright that a performative black square on Instagram wont dim. It leaves me to wonder if these companies really do think Black lives matter or if, instead, they believe consumers who believe "Black lives matter" matter more. Well, I guess CWBBLMMM is not quite as catchy.

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Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is - Ensemble

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As for many, being trapped in the house during lockdown was emotionally taxing. Sure, not being able to see people for months really impacted my social skills and gifted me constant cabin fever induced headaches, but it reminded me of what I do best: consume vast amounts of food-related online content in the hopes of suppressing the faults of the world, one recipe at a time.

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Week 1 & 4, Power, Protest & Resistance and Politcal Anthropology

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Week 1 & 4, Power, Protest & Resistance and Politcal Anthropology

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Anthropology & Protest
I thought this was a really interesting piece that brought together the theoretical and academic nature of the discipline and brought it into tension with the physicality that protest involves. The way it dealt with themes of privilege, being able to put your body on the line because of that is an important concept to understand.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273331009_Laying_the_Body_on_the_Line_Activist_Anthropology_and_the_Deportation_of_the_Undocumented

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Ticktin on Gendered Humanitarianism

"gender-based violence makes it clear that the suffering body – while purportedly universal – requires certain political, historical and cultural attributes to render it visible and worthy of care."
"Yet on the other hand, humanitarianism is necessarily built on difference – the difference between two populations – those who have the power to protect, and those who need protection – those who suffer, and those who recognise and address suffering."

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Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers.

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Rights for undocumented migrants in Italy
It has been interesting to see the way this decree has been discussed on international news media, with many praising Italy for its steps towards a more humanitarian and integrative immigration process. All the meanwhile, it was barely discussed on Italian news. These steps that are being considered have made me think of how and under what criteria new laws such as these are implemented. For example, in this case, the decree is under attack for its seemingly self-serving character, with political parties like Italy's Movimento 5 Stelle judging it to be only an economic ploy to advantage the state and not actually help integrate immigrants into society. This can only point to the hidden reasonings  behind government decisions of deterrence or care, deciding who is valuable in a country's environment and who can be spared.

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Italy has paved the way for tens of thousands of undocumented migrants to become legal residents by applying for work permits. The move came as part of a 55 billion euro ($59.6 billion) stimulus package approved on Wednesday by the coalition government to help the sagging Italian economy, which has been battered by the effects of the coronavirus.

Italy has seen one of largest outbreaks of the virus in the world, with over 220,000 confirmed infections and 31,000 deaths, as of 14 May, and is slowly starting to loosen social distancing rules following a two-month lockdown.

There are around 560,000 migrants living in Italy without work permits or residency documents, according to 2019 estimates. The new policy creates a path to regularisation for undocumented people working in agriculture and as domestic helpers. Residency permits issued under the policy will be valid for six months.

Representatives of human rights organisations praised the move on Twitter as "a major step forward" for the " visibility and dignity of migrants." But before it passed, the measure strained Italy's four-party governing coalition, with three centre-left parties supporting the move and the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement opposing it.

Prior to the formation of the current government, the Five Star Movement was allied with the far-right League Party led by Matteo Salvini, a central figure in anti-migrant and refugee politics in Italy and Europe.

The Five Star Movement opposed the path to legal residency for undocumented migrants on the grounds that it would benefit employers who had engaged in illegal employment practices. Supporters of the move argued that it would protect undocumented workers by giving them access to healthcare and social services during the pandemic and help combat labour exploitation.

Italy is also facing a potential food shortage and a labour crisis in its agricultural sector as migrant workers from eastern Europe who usually travel to Italy to work during seasonal harvests are either choosing to stay home or unable to make the trip this year. The organisation ActionAid criticised a draft of Italy's regularisation decree calling it "utilitarian", and saying it put "market interests before the rights and lives of foreign citizens".

Italy has long been at the centre of Europe's ongoing debates over migration. The creation of a pathway to legal residency for undocumented people during the coronavirus crisis may be seen as a positive development for migrants' rights. But Italy has also declared its ports unsafe due to the virus, impeding efforts to rescue asylum seekers and migrants fleeing Libya during the pandemic.
- Eric Reidy

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Italy to grant undocumented migrants work permits

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Italy has paved the way for tens of thousands of undocumented migrants to become legal residents by applying for work permits. The move came as part of a 55 billion euro ($59.6 billion) stimulus package approved on Wednesday by the coalition government to help the sagging Italian economy, which has been battered by the effects of the coronavirus.

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The 'deserving' and 'underserving' discussion
This article succintly argues for the dissipation of the distinction between political and economic migrant that has often led to one being favoured against the other. It argues about the intertwined nature of political and economic contexts from which individuals need to flee, and how making distincition between these has led to a discourse which treats migrants unequally. It fits into the discussion of government differentation between deserving and underserving migrants that Ticktin addresses in her piece on the 'sans papiers' in France, who are seen as deserving because of their ill bodies. There seems to be reluctancy and issue in interfering in political spaces, and the way that humanitaranism fills that gap appears to be apolitical but still relies political affiliation and thinking (Ticktin, 2006).

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Protesters hold a banner reading "Freedom of Movement for all" during a demonstration in Berlin on September 20, 2020 | Stefanie Loos/AFP via Getty Images

Stefan Schlegel is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the law faculty of the University of Bern, Switzerland who specializes in refugee and immigration law.
The migrants trapped in the overcrowded Moria refugee camp that burned down earlier this month were waiting for a decision that really shouldn't matter: Are they political "refugees" meriting protection? Or "economic migrants" who deserve to be sent back home to suffer in poverty after their perilous journey to Europe.

This artificial distinction - between the supposedly virtuous and the allegedly duplicitous - deserves to be done away with. Given that political and economic drivers for migration are nearly always intertwined, our attempt to cut a clean line between them is unnecessarily burdensome and ultimately futile. It's also a practice that causes unnecessary suffering, as the events on the Greek island of Lesvos, where the camp was located, have demonstrated.

To be sure, governments have strong motives for trying to make this distinction - and ever stronger motives for letting other governments, such as the Greek government, try to make the distinction for them. They are legally required to host people who fled their countries because they face political persecution back home, but free to expel those who would only be subject to crushing poverty and hunger.

(There is also a third category for which a special status of admittance has been vividly debated in the last decade: People whose perceived reasons to migrate are related to climate change.)

It is impossible to pinpoint just one reason a person decides to leave their country. The necessary questions have multiple answers, not just one.

And yet, there are good reasons for taking a different approach.

To begin with, checking a person's reasons to migrate is expensive and time-consuming. The inevitable backlog creates the kind of humanitarian disaster we've seen in Greece and elsewhere, with vulnerable people languishing in camps with little hope.

There's a fundamental reason why the process is so arduous: Authorities are asking a question that makes little sense in the current global political context.

It is impossible to pinpoint just one reason a person decides to leave their country. The necessary questions - of why, and why now, and why somebody has chosen to come to this place in particular - have multiple answers, not just one.

People have mixed reasons to migrate. Poverty is created and perpetuated by dysfunctional political settings. Persecution is often foreshadowed by economic marginalization, and poverty leaves people substantially more vulnerable to political pressure.

Climate change complicates things further. It typically leads to poverty long before a region becomes outright uninhabitable. And the poorer a population, the less resilient it tends to be to the pressure created by a changing climate.

Even when it is possible to isolate a specific reason a person has fled their country, it's impossible to classify that reason as political or economic.

Sometimes there may be a clear triggering event: a civil war, an economic collapse or an extreme weather event, for example. But are those events political, economic or ecological?

Many armed conflicts have ecological roots that contribute to their outbreak and their intensity. All armed conflicts have an economic ratio. Many extreme weather events do not lead to any displacement, but those that do usually displace politically and economically deprived communities.

There is a better way: Drop the distinction between "political" and "economic" and instead focus on the necessity to migrate in the first place.

As such, the question that migration officers ask when admitting migrants for humanitarian reasons should become: Is migration essential to improving this person's life? The clearer the lack of alternatives to migration in a person's life, the stronger their claim to special protection should be.

Refugee lawyers tend to cringe at such a suggestion, because it challenges the special protection granted to refugees, a group of people defined by their persecution for specific political reasons. Yet this proposal would strengthen the protection of victims of persecution - because persecution is especially corrosive to alternatives to migration - while extending the umbrella of protection to other migrants of necessity.

Most importantly, it would save us from the pitfalls of making arbitrary moral distinctions between groups of migrants, which - beyond being impossible to identify - create the kind of moral disasters we witnessed on the island of Lesvos.

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Stop discriminating against economic migrants

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Stefan Schlegel is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the law faculty of the University of Bern, Switzerland who specializes in refugee and immigration law. The migrants trapped in the overcrowded Moria refugee camp that burned down earlier this month were waiting for a decision that really shouldn't matter: Are they political "refugees" meriting protection?

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Youth Justice System
Within discussions of inequality present in the criminal justice system, I find it important to think of the youth who are involved and treated within this broken system. The youth justice system has needed reform for years, needing to adapt the way that  young individuals are treated and how they should be encouraged to re-enter society, given that they often enter this system at such a young age, making it an extremely impactful and debilitating experience for years to come. Findings on the youth justice system have analysed the racial and economic disparities present in the statistics of youth entering the justice system. Racial profiling and targeting, racism awareness and reform in the justice system should include an understanding and conscious comprehension of social contexts and family settings that youth come from. It  speaks to the idea of  individual liability that Fassin discusses. The reliance of the criminal justice system on this notion has faults as it completely disregards social contexts and instead relies on the assumption that the individual has the environmental capacities not to fall into a system they are destined to enter given the political structures they are surrounded by (Fassin, 2018).

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The proportion of children convicted of a crime who are from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds has nearly doubled in eight years, an increase experts have described as an urgent problem.

The steep rise comes despite a drastic drop in the overall number of youth cautions or sentences handed down, which one academic described as an indictment on the whole justice system.

In 2018, 27% of the 10 to 18-year-olds who received a youth caution or sentence were from a minority ethnic background, compared with 14% in 2010, according to official figures from the Ministry of Justice released earlier this year.

Just 26,681 children were cautioned or sentenced in 2018 compared with 106,969 in 2010, thanks to a shift toward dealing with less serious offenders out of court. The increased use of "diversion", however, in which minor offenders and those deemed at low risk of reoffending are steered away from the courts, seems to have disproportionately benefited white children.

Custodial sentences for BAME and white children

When the Guardian monitored all cases passing through Greater Manchester youth court in August, of those defendants whose ethnicity we could establish, 36% were from a black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) community. All were male, and many were also in the care system. Only 22% of Greater Manchester's youth population are not white.

Children in the dock is an investigation into the youth justice system in England and Wales, which in 2018 saw 26,881 children aged 10-17 cautioned or convicted of crimes ranging from shoplifting and joyriding to rape and robbery.

No other EU country puts such young children on trial. Most other nations do not use an adversarial system which can see children separated from their parents and lawyers via bulletproof glass in what is essentially an adult courtroom with a different sign on the door.

Officially, the focus in youth courts is on rehabilitation, tackling the underlying causes of youth offending. But although there has been an 88% drop in the number of children cautioned or convicted since 2007, reoffending rates have increased. Just over 40% of children who go to court reoffend within a year; for those sent to youth custody, that figure rises to 71.6%.

Children who end up in trouble now are disproportionately likely to be of black, Asian or minority ethnicity. They are vastly more likely to be in care and they are extremely likely to have ADHD, autism spectrum disorders and communication difficulties. This series examines how the court system deals with these vulnerable children and explores whether there is a better way to break the cycle of offending and help them build productive and fulfilling lives.

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The Labour MP for Tottenham, David Lammy, published a review of the overrepresentation BAME individuals in the criminal justice system in 2017. He said the figures had got worse since and that "the fact that half of our youth prison population comes from a black or ethnic minority background would [attract] far more comment and scrutiny" had the political debate not been so focused on Brexit.

Becky Clarke, a senior criminology lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, said the "failure to act, given these issues of racial injustice have been known and worsening for many years, is an indictment of the whole justice system".

She said the increase in levels of disproportionality was a direct consequence of BAME children being dealt "different treatment by practitioners across the criminal justice system", and called for wholesale changes to policing, transparency in the charging and prosecution of cases, and an end to the unequal application of laws such as joint enterprise.

Clarke welcomed the overall reduction in criminalisation of children but said negative racial profiling meant it "hadn't benefited all groups equally, meaning BAME children cannot be diverted out of the system in the same ways as their white counterparts". She put this down to "perceptions of risk and criminality" in the police, Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), courts and youth justice service.

Proportion of BAME children among juvenile prosecutions

The Guardian spoke to senior representatives of all four groups and few could point to positive changes in outcomes since the Lammy review, which cited youth justice as the "biggest concern".

Olivia Pinkney, the chief constable for Hampshire and national policing lead for children and young people, conceded there was still "so much more to be done" and "none of us should rest and be comfortable" with the rise in the proportion of young BAME people criminalised. "It's certainly something that will be unwitting, but we need to understand why."

She said the police were taking steps to tackle the problem, pointing to the increased focus on the use of stop and search and mandatory equality and inclusion training.

Gerry Wareham, a senior prosecutor and CPS lead for young people, said the CPS could only choose to prosecute from the cases that the police brought to it. "We're in a demand-led position. We get what the police bring to us," he said.

Lammy said his review not only showed the disproportionate criminalisation of black youth, but also similar trends for young Muslims and a "historic problem" of overrepresentation of young people from Gypsy and Traveller backgrounds.

The youth justice system is in need of further reform, he said. "There's a real need to get a grip on how we're supporting families, how we're supporting young people, what second chances they are getting.

"Those are big questions that obviously affect all young people who fall into the criminal justice system, but they are generally young people from working-class and poor socio-economic backgrounds and most definitely young people from ethnic

He said the government had accepted the "lion's share" of his recommendations, but had chosen not to impose targets for improving diversity in the judiciary, where he believed there were "still real issues". Only 12% of magistrates and 7% of district judges are from BAME backgrounds, according to figures published in July. Youth cases are either heard by three magistrates or a district judge. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) puts the UK's minority ethnic population at 13.8%.

John Bache, the chair of the Magistrates Association, said some magistrates had found it "very difficult to accept the results" of the Lammy review. He said the reason for that was "absolutely obvious, because every magistrate believes that they are acting with scrupulous fairness ... so to be given a report that suggests that that might not be the case is first of all surprising, but also very upsetting because none of us want to be unfair to anybody who appears in front of us." Unconscious bias training for all magistrates and legal advisers launched in June this year.

The Magistrates Association, which represents the 15,000 justices of the peace in England and Wales, has recently convened a group to address disproportionality, including representatives from the Ministry of Justice, the CPS, the Youth Justice Board and charities. The group agreed it was an "urgent problem, especially in relation to the alarming disproportionality illustrated by the proportion of BAME children and young people in custody". It proposed recruiting more diverse magistrates and promoting awareness among magistrates of the different factors that BAME individuals face.

The Ministry of Justice said: "The issues that lead to black, Asian and ethnic minority children being overrepresented in youth custody begin before they enter the criminal justice system, which is why work is under way across the system to change race disparity."
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Share of convicted children who are BAME doubles in eight years

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The proportion of children convicted of a crime who are from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds has nearly doubled in eight years, an increase experts have described as an urgent problem. The steep rise comes despite a drastic drop in the overall number of youth cautions or sentences handed down, which one academic described as an indictment on the whole justice system.

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Prison Labor
This short episode refers to the horrifying context of prison labour in the United States, which is expanded on by the Netflix documentary 13th. Both show how deeply embedded slavery is in the constitution of the United States and demonstrates how far US society is from achieving equal rights for all. Understanding these contexts allows us to see how racism is institutionalized and exercised from the very political governments that claim to defend and advocate for all.  The Comaroff's reading on the state, sovereignty and the illegal really emphasised the power of private players in the US prison industrial complex and how within the modern state politics are influenced and determined by the power of economics. Private companies are able to invest in their private interests and see the implementation of policies through political parties (Comaroff Jean and John, 2016).

Could it be that this reconfiguration made manifest in changes in the nation-state form, in its rapid privatization, and in the assault on it by an aggressively rising corporate sector  is recasting the line between the political and the il/legal? - Comaroff Jean and John

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Prison Labor: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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Chanel Miller and the Stanford rape trial
The memoir of Chanel Miller describes her experience of the trail of her sexual assault. I thought of this because in the memoir, Miller not only delves into the personal trauma and agony that accompanied the horrible events in 2015, but she paints a very stark picture of how the US Criminal Justice system functions and what this looks like in actuality. The case was publicised on media outlets, and the whole world read about how the 'perfect grades Stanford swimmer' had been accused of being found raping a victim. Writing this memoir was born out of a need for Miller to have her name recognized, said, remembered; and to re-write the narrative of her experience. The unprofessionality of the courts and the games that are played within them reminded me of Koenig's podcast. Reading the piece by Fassin I wondered what this would have looked like if the accused had not been a white wealthy straight man, and what a different identity would have meant for his sentence and the treatment and narration of the trial. Fassin's discussion on the criminal, expanding on Durkehim's idea of common consciousness and crime, depicts what happens in rape prosecutions and trials, particuarly when the accused is a white man who is seen as being able to do no wrong in the eyes of the law (Fassin, 2018). I also thought the Comaroff reading on criminality spoke to this, particularly "while every crime was a sin, not every sin or breach of morality, was a crime". (Comaroff, 2016)

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It could have been an entirely different story, one so ordinary in its violent diminishment of a woman. The script is well-worn. An assault at a student party; a disorienting walk through hospital clinics and police stations; panic attacks; a forensic examination of your character. How much did you drink? Why did you go to that party? Did you have a stable relationship with your boyfriend? You react by receding further into yourself. Perhaps you drop the charges; perhaps the judge is lenient. Your assailant soon gets on with his life, free to walk the halls of power. Trust the system, you were told.

But sometimes there are facts that bring you closer to something resembling justice. For a 22-year-old recent university graduate known to the world as "Emily Doe", there were a few. Fact: Brock Turner, the man who assaults her behind a fraternity house skip in January 2015, is a Stanford University student and swimmer. Spiralling media attention in what is deemed the "Stanford swimmer case" means her rape forensic evidence kit receives expedited processing, thus avoiding, she later relates, the fate of a hundred others collecting dust in a slow-moving backlog. Fact: there are two witnesses to the assault, male graduate students who happen to be cycling past. They chase Turner away, and testify in Doe's favour. Fact: after Turner is found guilty on three felony counts in March 2016, Doe, now 23, writes a powerful 7,000-word letter addressed to her attacker that she reads aloud at his sentencing. It is published on Buzz Feed in June and goes viral, receiving 15m views within a week.

The letter is read aloud by congresswomen in the House of Representatives and, in response, California's laws for sexual assault are amended to support future victims. Its opening line is often cited: "You don't know me, but you've been inside me, and that's why we're here today." When I first read it, I was also haunted by two other lines: "Sometimes I think, if I hadn't gone, then this never would've happened. But then I realised it would have happened, just to somebody else." What a strange world it is in which 23-year-olds are reflecting on the randomness of the cruelty inflicted on them.

Earlier this month, "Emily Doe" revealed herself to be Chanel Miller, a half-Chinese artist and writer from California. Miller, now 27, looks back at her high-profile sexual assault case in Know My Name. In the three years since the sentencing, she has gathered court transcripts and witness testimonies withheld from her during the case, which inform her memoir. The book blends Miller's meditations on her life over the past few years with a discussion of the institutions that handle sexual assault cases: the police, the courts, and, in this instance, the university. Courtroom interrogations, ostensibly seeking objective facts, become contests over whose narrative draws the most sympathy. University administrators offer, then withdraw, their support in the face of potential litigation. The neutral faces of institutions, her story shows, so easily slip to reveal highly subjective battles over whose pain counts for what.

The title of the book denotes declarative self-affirmation, something constantly denied to Miller after she woke up at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Centre in January 2015 with a police deputy and Stanford dean at her bedside. The last thing she remembers is stepping outside the fraternity house with her sister the night before. From then on, her life no longer feels like it is hers. In a daze at the medical centre, she is told there is reason to believe she has been assaulted and signs a stack of papers consenting to an immediate examination. Ten days later, on coming across an article online at work, she learns the full story of what happened to her. She reads of Turner's life as an "Olympic hopeful" and discovers she is referred to as an "unconscious woman". This dynamic will carry over into the courtroom, where, she relates, Turner's ambitions, past accomplishments and present pain are magnified in testimonies from swimming coaches and ex-girlfriends. She, on the other hand, becomes a woman who failed to adequately protect herself against the natural lechery of the world that night in January, her use of alcohol thoroughly questioned. "His history included his childhood, education, summer jobs, sweet relationships," she writes. "My history was blackouts one through five."

Know My Name stands unapologetically large, asking others to reckon with its author's dazzling, undiminishable presence

The book unveils what those on the outside can't see. Miller recalls the repeated postponement of her trials, which leaves her schedule agonisingly beholden to someone else's whims; her recurrent feelings of panic and dread that emerge long after the attack; the rebuilding of her life, as she takes art classes and joins comedy troupes to recover a sense of self. In the midst of all this, she navigates a byzantine legal system, often having to sit in the same courtroom as her attacker. One of the many lessons that comes across is how sexual assault victims need greater guidance through these worlds. When Miller agrees to press charges against Turner, she does so casually over the phone to a detective, right after she is discharged from the hospital. She does not realise what that will entail, thinking it to be the "equivalent to signing a petition". A year and a half later, Miller is talking to a probation officer about Turner's sentencing and confuses jail with prison (jail typically holds people awaiting trial or serving short sentences while those in prison tend to be serving longer sentences for more severe offences). She is sure that the officer twists her meaning, playing down the anguish in her testimony to recommend a short county jail sentence for Turner.

When it was published in 2016, Miller's letter stunned readers with the clarity of her voice, acuity of her rage and expansiveness of her empathy towards those in need of support. Her story offered other victims a shared language; Miller recalls receiving thousands of supportive letters from women recounting their own stories. Her memoir has this same mix of the intimate with the communal, placing her own pain against a backdrop of shared suffering. At the end of Turner's sentencing, she feels as if she has climbed a high mountain of justice, a climb that many fellow victims have not been able to scale. Exhausted, she imagines looking down, "where I imagined expectant victims looking up, waving, cheering, expectantly ... What could I tell them? The system does not exist for you." Against a system that leads victims to recede into their own spheres of private suffering, Know My Name creates a space where this pain can sit and receive support from others.

The last few chapters discuss the #MeToo movement and its landmark moments: the Harvey Weinstein revelations; the US gymnastics case; Christine Blasey Ford's testimony in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. When listening to women tell their stories, Miller stresses, it is important to let them sit with their hurt and anger and resist the urge to pre-emptively tie up their suffering with a bow through platitudes of courage. There is a final irony in how Stanford University, after agreeing to mount a plaque memorialising her story on campus, proposed as the inscribed quote: "I'm right here, I'm okay. Everything's okay, I'm right here." (Stanford had rejected Miller's suggestions, finding them too emotionally charged.) These were the words, she tells us, she told her sister after being released from the hospital, hiding her own panic for her sister's comfort. Even after cases are concluded, the pain of victims is diminished by the false friend of commemorating one's bravery. In a world that asks too many survivors to keep their experiences to themselves and shrink their suffering to preserve someone else's potential, Know My Name stands unapologetically large, asking others to reckon with its author's dazzling, undiminishable presence. To read it, in spite of everything, inspires hope.
* Know My Name is published by Viking (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15. Topics

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Know My Name by Chanel Miller review - memoir of a sexual assault

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It could have been an entirely different story, one so ordinary in its violent diminishment of a woman. The script is well-worn. An assault at a student party; a disorienting walk through hospital clinics and police stations; panic attacks; a forensic examination of your character. How much did you drink?

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'When They See Us', story of the Central Park Five and racial injustice
The story of the Central Park Five has been widely discussed in the media and more so after the production of the Netflix TV show 'When They See Us'. The story focuses on the injustice that five young black men suffered at the hands of the criminal justice system and its inherent racial discrimination and profiling in the handling of a rape case. The five boys were accused with no evidence and the way that they were abused and coerced into 'confessing' was absolutely immoral and brutal. Much of the coercive effort by the prosecution rested on fundamental understanding that the court had the power to convict them simply because they were black. The case  demonstrates the effects of colonial mentality, the criminalization of the black man and how colonial representations of race still remain embedded in contempoary political and social institutions.