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Use the padlet to research knowledge & politics (and the other elements of the course) in a real-world context, via a huge range of articles, videos, and podcasts from media sources all over the world.

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You can use the resource to develop a clearer understanding of this optional theme, grasp how TOK concepts manifest in the real world, and gather examples to support arguments in the essay and exhibition.

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We have arranged the media sources by 'Big Question' (one of our ways of structuring TOK - see this page of the site for more details), and by the Knowledge Framework (the IB's suggestion for how to approach the course).

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The 12 key terms are highlighted - and feature in separate Padlet here.

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Yellow posts indicate a quick post. These are media sources we have not unpacked, but which we have come across during our media-watching and still think are worth including in the Padlet.

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A Conversation article*, contending that Socrates’s approach to wisdom can help reduce the negative effects of political polarization. 

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A Conversation article*, contending that Socrates’s approach to wisdom can help reduce the negative effects of political polarization. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Is humility the most essential step in the search for truth?

KEY TERMS Polarized deadlock, Epistemic humility, Dangerous, Power holders, Certainty, Absolute truth, Open to being wrong

LINKS TO Human sciences, Politics, Knowledge & the knower

*We're proud to work in partnership with The Conversation. To sign up for their newsletter, which we draw on widely to create TOK lesson material, follow this link.

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A common complaint in America today is that politics and even society as a whole are broken. Critics point out endless lists of what should be fixed: the complexity of the tax code, or immigration reform, or the inefficiency of government.

But each dilemma usually comes down to polarized deadlock between two competing visions and everyone's conviction that theirs is the right one. Perhaps this white-knuckled insistence on being right is the root cause of the societal fissure - why everything seems so irreparably wrong.

As religion and philosophy scholars, we would argue that our apparent national impasse points to a lack of "epistemic humility," or intellectual humility - that is, an inability to acknowledge, empathize with and ultimately compromise with opinions and perspectives different from one's own. In other words, Americans have stopped listening.

So why is intellectual humility in such scarce supply? Of course, the quickest answer might be the right one: that humility runs against most people's fear of being mistaken, and the zero-sum view that being right means someone else has to be totally wrong.

But we think that the problem is more complex and perhaps more interesting. We believe epistemic humility presents something of a twofold danger that makes being humble frightening - and has, ever since Socrates first put it at the heart of Western philosophy.

Knowing you don't know

If your best friend told you that you were the wisest of all human beings, perhaps you would be inclined to smile in agreement and take the dear friend for a beer. But when the ancient Athenian Socrates was delivered this news, he responded with sincere and utter disbelief - even though his friend had confirmed it with the Delphic oracle, the fortune-telling authority of the ancient world.

This nascent humility - "No, get out of here, I'm definitely not the wisest" - helped spark what became arguably the greatest philosophical life of all time. Despite relative old age, Socrates immediately embarked on a journey to find someone wiser than himself and spent many days seeking out the sages of the ancient world, a quest Plato recounts in his " Apology of Socrates."

The problem? He discovered that the sages thought they knew more than they actually did. Eventually, Socrates concluded that he himself was, in fact, the wisest of all men, because at least he "knew that he didn't know."

This is not to say that Socrates knew nothing: He demonstrates time and again that he knows a lot and routinely demonstrated good judgment. Rather, he acknowledged there were definite limitations to the knowledge he could claim.

This is the birth of "epistemic humility" in Western philosophy: the acknowledgment that one's blind spots and shortcomings are an invitation for ongoing intellectual investigation and growth.

Provoking the powerful

But this mindset can feel dangerous to other people - especially if they feel absolutely certain in their convictions.

In ancient Athens, as much as in the U.S. today, being perceived as right translated into money and power. The city-state's culture was dominated by the Sophists, who taught rhetoric to nobles and politicians, and the Poets, ancient playwrights. Greek theater and epic poetry were closely related to religion, and their creators were treated as mouthpieces for aesthetic and moral truth.

What's more, theater and poetry were also major moneymakers, which motivated artists to adopt a mentality of "fail fast, fail better," with an eye to eventually proving correct and getting paid.

By critically interrogating the idols and polarized views of his culture, Socrates threatened the power holders of his city. A constantly questioning figure is a direct threat to individuals who spend their lives defending unquestioned belief - whether it's belief in themselves, their superiors or their gods.

Take Euthyphro, for example, one of Socrates' principal interlocutors. Euthyphro is so sure that he knows the difference between right and wrong that he is bringing his own father to trial. Socrates quickly disabuses him of his certainty, famously debating him about the true meaning of piety.

Or take Meletus, the man who eventually brought Socrates to trial on accusations of corrupting youth. In Plato's account of the trial, it takes Socrates no time to show this "good patriot," as Meletus calls himself, that he does not understand what patriotism truly means. Without any pretensions to knowing the absolute truth, Socrates is able to shed light on the underlying assumptions around him.

It's frustrating to read the Platonic dialogues, the works of philosophy that recount Socrates' life and teaching, in part because Socrates rarely claims the final word on any subject. In short, he gives more questions than answers. But what remains constant is his openness to uncertainty that keeps his inquiry on the move, pushing his inquiries further and deeper.

Paying the price

The second danger of epistemic humility is now probably in view. It's the danger that Socrates faced when he was brought to trial for corrupting Athens' youth - the danger to the humble skeptics themselves.

He is brought up on two very serious charges. The first was an accusation that he taught students to make the weaker argument appear to be the stronger - which is actually what the Sophists did, not Socrates. The second was that he had invented new gods - again, he didn't do that; poets and playwrights did.

What was he really guilty of? Perhaps only this: Socrates criticized the arrogant self-assertion of his culture's influencers, and they brought him to trial, which concluded in his death sentence.

Socrates taught that being humble about one's own views was a necessary step in searching for truth - perhaps the most essential one. That was and perhaps still is a revolutionary view, because it forces us to challenge preconceived ideas about what we believe, what we worship and where we tap meaning. He placed himself in the middle of Athenians' sharply polarized debates about what truth and goodness were, and he was the one who got hit.

"Humility like darkness," wrote American philosopher Henry David Thoreau, " reveals the heavenly lights." Put another way, humility about the verity, accuracy and wisdom of one's ideas can reveal the fact that others have understandable reasons for thinking as they do - as long as you try to see the world as they are seeing it. In contrast, arrogance tends to extinguish the "heavenly light" about what we still don't fully understand.

Being humble about one's position in the world is not an invitation for a post-truth, anything-goes opinion free-for-all. Truth - the idea of truth - matters. And we can pursue it together, if we are always open to being wrong.

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What Socrates' 'know nothing' wisdom can teach a polarized America

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Athens was deeply polarized over big-picture questions, and Socrates was never hesitant to question both sides' assumptions - or his own.

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A CNN article, looking at why there are different interpretations of science related to whether or not masks reduced the spread of Covid-19.

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A CNN article, looking at why there are different interpretations of science related to whether or not masks reduced the spread of Covid-19.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is meta-analysis, and how has it been used to ascertain whether mask-wearing was effective in controlling the spread of Covid-19? Why has there been disagreement about the results of this meta-analysis? Why does the author, Kent Sepkowitz say that he doubts that anyone will change their mind about this issue? Why does he say, “Everyone who is focused on the politics or media hype… at the expense of the actual science… should kindly shut up”? Overall is it possible to make decisions about public health issues that are based purely on science?

KEY TERMS Retrospective questioning, Conflicting evidence, Meta-analysis, Uncertainty, Political ax to grind

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Politics

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Editor's Note: Kent Sepkowitz is a physician and infectious disease expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

Three years after the Covid-19 pandemic changed the lives of all Americans, we are witnessing a retrospective questioning of whether masks-and mask mandates-decrease the risk of Covid-19 spread.

To try to clarify the issue, the venerable Cochrane Library led a meta-analysis of available data. Meta-analysis often is used to try to help reconcile conflicting evidence, though the approach has its doubters.

The premise is that, using a strict approach to determine which previous studies are clear enough for inclusion, experts can cobble together the results from years of work done by different investigators and published in different journals. Then, using the bigger statistical punch provided by the many, they can find a significant conclusion not evident in the few.

Cochrane's study-of-studies, combined with its prestige, has re-animated the pens of a troupe of anti-mask-mandaters including current New York Times columnist Bret Stephens and former New York Times reporter John Tierney.

The "money quote" comes from an interview that esteemed data scientist Dr. Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane study, gave in an interview: "There is just no evidence that (masks) make any difference, full stop." If his statement were an accurate reflection of what the article found, the launching of a thousand op-eds would be understandable.

But this emphatically is not the conclusion of the twelve authors, of which Jefferson was just one voice. The actual Cochrane article concludes something directly at odds with Jefferson's statement: "The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions... The low to moderate certainty of evidence (in favor of masks) means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect," the article notes.

In plain English, this, at least to me as a veteran reader of these types of reviews, translates to: The primary studies are not strong enough for us to say much of anything except that we may be wrong no matter what we say.

A lead author such as Jefferson is of course free to speak his mind but, at least in the interview, he apparently did not distinguish his personal view from the consensus view of the authors. There may be a back-story to this: A professor at Oxford University, Jefferson seems to long have had his doubts about masks, writing articles in The Spectator and other journals to air out his sometimes curmudgeonly views.

Given their awareness of his strong personal opinions on the topic, the Cochrane Library, in the section of the recent meta-analysis called " Authors' Declarations of Interest" writes the following: "TJ (Tom Jefferson): reports declaring an opinion on the topic of the review in articles for popular media. TJ is an Editor at the Cochrane Acute Respiratory Infections group but was not involved in the editorial process for this review. See full statement here: https://restoringtrials.org/competing-interests-tom-jefferson/."

Though half of the 12 authors were "not involved in the editorial process," for this particular article, the additional characterization by Cochrane of Jefferson, the opinionated citizen ("declaring an opinion on the topic ... for popular media"), is quite unusual for the medical literature.

Furthermore, several meticulous experts active on social media have unpacked every square inch of the article to reveal many possible flaws in the analysis itself that may have blunted evidence of mask efficacy. This sort of back and forth adopts the tone of "my expert is bigger than your expert" and never leads to any resolution of differences.

Personalities and spokespeople aside, there may be an even larger issue at play here. I have long found the meta-analyses of public health studies such as masking to be uniquely challenging. Meta-analysis seems better suited to randomized placebo-controlled trials comparing this drug to that. The uncertainties in public health studies seem too great for the bigger data of a meta-analysis to overcome.

For example, for masking trials, those randomized to wearing a mask or not wearing a mask cannot be blinded: A person in the unmasked arm may have snuck a mask on here and there or conversely, the masked group may have spent a day or two, or ten, unmasked. This introduces enormous and irreducible uncertainty regarding just what is happening.

Plus, focus on this particular meta-analysis-and it alone-is misguided. Other meta-analyses by experts found a " significant protective effect " from masks.

And perhaps most important of all, we have witnessed masks at work over the last three years. Yes, this is anathema to the purists who require evidence, not observation, but how else can we explain the unprecedented low (almost zero) rates of influenza in the 2020-2021 respiratory season other than by close adherence by the many to the protective measures taken to prevent disease transmission.

Despite all the current kerfuffle, I doubt anyone will change their mind about the issue. Maskers like me will continue to believe and the anti-maskers, though perhaps walking a little taller for a moment, will continue to blame masks for everything from childhood development delays to crashing economies to a dulling of the public sensitivity to the ever-encroaching State that will, when completed, supposedly deprive everyone of all freedoms.

More alarming than the mask debate is to note that this seems to be the latest in a disturbing trend of those with a political ax to grind revisiting the three-year history of the pandemic in a way that needlessly casts doubt or misdirects attention.

Already this year, we have heard that one US agency finds weak evidence that the viral strain that overwhelmed the world was released from a lab in China; we hear ever more about how vaccines are causing a global increase in deaths albeit from a discredited source and we see more focus on the profit motive as an explanation for how the pandemic played out.

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Opinion: Were masks useless? The deceptive interpretation of what science tells us | CNN

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Editor's Note: Kent Sepkowitz is a physician and infectious disease expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN. Three years after the Covid-19 pandemic changed the lives of all Americans, we are witnessing a retrospective questioning of whether masks-and mask mandates-decrease the risk of Covid-19 spread.

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A Big Think article, considering whether we should redraw the world map, to better reflect power and influence in the 21st century. 

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A Big Think article, considering whether we should redraw the world map, to better reflect power and influence in the 21st century. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How familiar is this map to them - and why might it seem rather strange (or, depending on their cultural background, familiar!)? What has driven the ‘cartographic rectification’ of this map? Why does the article say that “no world map is totally right”, and that the center of any map is “a matter of purely subjective choice”? Which version of the world is more valid - and why? Overall, are all map projections equally valid (and equally flawed) when it comes to accurately representing the world?

KEY TERMS Normal, Vertical representation, Cartographic rectifications, Perspective, True center of the world

LINKS TO Human sciences, Politics

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This article was first published on Big Think in August 2019. It was updated in December 2022.

The world, but not as we know it

Europe is tucked away in a corner, an appendage of Asia dwarfed by neighboring Africa. North America is stood on its head, facing the rest of the world from the top of the map - cut off from South America, which cuts a solitary figure at the bottom. Africa is justifiably huge, but equally eccentric.

The eye scouts elsewhere for a place to land: not the Indian Ocean, which dominates the middle of the map, but some terra firma. Antarctica and Australia are too small, mere stepping stones for the land mass of Asia. Ultimately our gaze is drawn toward China, the lynchpin of this unfamiliar world.

Managing to leave both poles intact, this "vertical" world map is about as far away as you can get from the classic Mercator projection, which slices up both, giving center stage to a puffed-up Europe. Perhaps this new map will become more familiar soon: It may do more justice to the world of the near future, dominated by China and determined by shipping routes across the iceless Arctic.

China's 'ten-dash line'

While there's no indication that this map represents the Chinese government's "official" worldview, it is no secret that China has a thing with maps - and more specifically, the country's representation on them.

In China, the country's current economic success is seen as a redress of the unequal treatment meted out by western superpowers in the 19th century. China's world dominance is a return to a more natural state of world affairs, many feel. Cartographic rectifications are a symbolically significant corollary of that sentiment.

Fines are regularly imposed on companies - domestic and foreign - that fail to represent China to the fullest extent of its external borders, disputed though they may be by others (e.g. India, Taiwan and any of the countries with claims overlapping China's in the South China Sea). But the People's Republic's cartographic obsession doesn't end at China's territory itself. It also includes the country's position on the world map.

The Kingdom at the Middle of the World

China's name for itself is Zhōngguó, which means 'Central State' or 'Middle Kingdom', reflecting its ancient self-image as the civilized center ( Huá) of the world, with wild tribes ( Yí) at the edge. That view is not unique to China. Vietnam, for example, at certain times also styled itself as the "central state" ( Trung Quóc) - considering the Chinese in turn as the uncouth outsiders.

It may be surprising to recall, but Europeans themselves once considered their own continent a relative backwater, viewing Jerusalem as the true center of the world. That changed with the Age of Discovery, which placed Europe at the center of an ever-expanding world. Maps reflected that worldview, and largely continue to do so. That's why today's standard world map still has Europe at its center - with China off toward the periphery on the map's right-hand side.

The most notable feature of the very first major modern world map produced in China, the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (1602), is that it places China firmly at the center of the world. Produced for the Chinese emperor by Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, it was the first map ever to combine that perspective with modern western knowledge: it was the first Chinese map to show the Americas, for instance.

That representation may not have taken off elsewhere, but it will be instantly recognizable to Chinese students, as it's the standard format for world maps in China's schools today.

America on its head

For those used to "classic" Eurocentric world maps, Europe's marginalization may come across as a bit of an upset. America's new position on the horizontal Chinese world map is less jarring: It merely moves from the left- to the right-hand side of the picture. But then there's this vertical world map, which deals a similar blow to the American land mass: divided in two and pushed to the upper and lower edges of the map.

Unfamiliar? Sure. Shocking? Perhaps. Wrong? Not really. First off, no world map is totally right, since it's mathematically impossible to transfer the surface of a three-dimensional object onto a flat surface without some distortion. And since the world is a globe, where you center that map is a matter of purely subjective choice.

Those choices have historical reasons. Mercator's map was not specifically designed to put an inflated Europe at the center of the world. That was just a side effect; its main purpose was to aid shipping: Straight lines on the map correspond to straight lines sailed on the seas.

The vertical world map, showing the relative proximity of China (and the rest of Asia) to Europe and (even the East Coast of) North America, has a similarly maritime raison d'être, or it will have by mid-century. Experts project that by 2050 (if not sooner), the Arctic will be sufficiently ice-free to enable the so-called Transpolar Passage, i.e. shipping straight across the North Pole.

That would shave more than three weeks off a traditional sea voyage between Europe and Asia, via the Suez Canal - and even be significantly faster than other northern alternatives like the Northwest Passage (via Canada) or the Northern Sea Route (hugging the Siberian coast). Since ships would not need to go through locks or pass over shallow waters, it would also remove current restrictions on tonnage per ship.

The only country seriously preparing for such a future: China. None of the other Arctic powers is giving the Transpolar route any strategic thought. On the other hand, China's Arctic Policy document, released in January 2018, already matter-of-factly refers to the Transpolar route as the 'Central Passage' - one of several 'Polar Silk Roads' that China seems to want to develop. And they already have the world map to go with it.
Strange Maps #984 Got a strange map? Let me know at [email protected] .

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The world map of the future might be vertical

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This article was first published on Big Think in August 2019. It was updated in December 2022. Europe is tucked away in a corner, an appendage of Asia dwarfed by neighboring Africa. North America is stood on its head, facing the rest of the world from the top of the map - cut off from South America, which cuts a solitary figure at the bottom.

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A Conversation article, analyzing how people from both sides of the political spectrum only detect bias when it supports the opposing party.  

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A Conversation article, analyzing how people from both sides of the political spectrum only detect bias when it supports the opposing party.  

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What does it say about the way Democrats and Republicans perceive bias?  Why is this the case? How does rethinking the way we define ‘the media’ help us to understand bias? What is the significance of the fact that “we are the audience whose attention media outlets want to attract”? Overall, what responsibilities do we have in order to ensure the media provides us with accurate and informative information about what really matters?

KEY TERMS Brainwash, Bias, Perspective, Objective journalism, Audiences, Attention

LINKS TO Politics, Knowledge & the knower, Human sciences

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Charges of media bias - that "the media" are trying to brainwash Americans by feeding the public only one side of every issue - have become as common as campaign ads in the run-up to the midterm elections.

As a political scientist who has examined media coverage of the Trump presidency and campaigns, I can say that this is what social science research tells us about media bias.

First, media bias is in the eye of the beholder.

Communications scholars have found that if you ask people in any community, using scientific polling methods, whether their local media are biased, you'll find that about half say yes. But of that half, typically a little more than a quarter say that their local media are biased against Republicans, and a little less than a quarter say the same local media are biased against Democrats.

Research shows that Republicans and Democrats spot bias only in articles that clearly favor the other party. If an article tilts in favor of their own party, they tend to see it as unbiased.

Many people, then, define "bias" as "anything that doesn't agree with me." It's not hard to see why.

'Media' is a plural word

American party politics has become increasingly polarized in recent decades. Republicans have become more consistently conservative, and Democrats have become more consistently liberal to moderate.

As the lines have been drawn more clearly, many people have developed hostile feelings toward the opposition party.

In a 2016 Pew Research Center poll, 45% of Republicans said the Democratic Party's policies are "so misguided that they threaten the nation's well-being," and 41% of Democrats said the same about Republicans. A poll conducted in midyear 2022 by Pew showed that "72% of Republicans regard Democrats as more immoral, and 63% of Democrats say the same about Republicans."

Not surprisingly, media outlets have arisen to appeal primarily to people who share a conservative view, or people who share a liberal view.

That doesn't mean that "the media" are biased. There are hundreds of thousands of media outlets in the U.S. - newspapers, radio, network TV, cable TV, blogs, websites and social media. These news outlets don't all take the same perspective on any given issue.

If you want a very conservative news site, it is not hard to find one, and the same with a very liberal news site.

First Amendment rules

"The media," then, present a variety of different perspectives. That's the way a free press works.

The Constitution's First Amendment says Congress shall make no law limiting the freedom of the press. It doesn't say that Congress shall require all media sources to be "unbiased." Rather, it implies that as long as Congress does not systematically suppress any particular point of view, then the free press can do its job as one of the primary checks on a powerful government.

When the Constitution was written and for most of U.S. history, the major news sources - newspapers, for most of that time - were explicitly biased. Most were sponsored by a political party or a partisan individual.

The notion of objective journalism - that media must report both sides of every issue in every story - barely existed until the late 1800s. It reached full flower only in the few decades when broadcast television, limited to three major networks, was the primary source of political information.

Since that time, the media universe has expanded to include huge numbers of internet news sites, cable channels and social media posts. So if you feel that the media sources you're reading or watching are biased, you can read a wider variety of media sources.

If it bleeds, it leads

There is one form of actual media bias. Almost all media outlets need audiences in order to exist. Some can't survive financially without an audience; others want the prestige that comes from attracting a big audience.

Thus, the media define as "news" the kinds of stories that will attract an audience: those that feature drama, conflict, engaging pictures and immediacy. That's what most people find interesting. They don't want to read a story headlined "Dog bites man." They want "Man bites dog."

The problem is that a focus on such stories crowds out what we need to know to protect our democracy, such as: How do the workings of American institutions benefit some groups and disadvantage others? In what ways do our major systems - education, health care, national defense and others - function effectively or less effectively?

These analyses are vital to citizens - if we fail to protect our democracy, our lives will be changed forever - but they aren't always fun to read. So they get covered much less than celebrity scandals or murder cases - which, while compelling, don't really affect the ability to sustain a democratic system.

Writer Dave Barry demonstrated this media bias in favor of dramatic stories in a 1998 column.

He wrote, "Let's consider two headlines. FIRST HEADLINE: 'Federal Reserve Board Ponders Reversal of Postponement of Deferral of Policy Reconsideration.' SECOND HEADLINE: 'Federal Reserve Board Caught in Motel with Underage Sheep.' Be honest, now. Which of these two stories would you read?"

By focusing on the daily equivalent of the underage sheep, media can direct our attention away from the important systems that affect our lives. That isn't the media's fault; we are the audience whose attention media outlets want to attract.

But as long as we think of governance in terms of its entertainment value and media bias in terms of Republicans and Democrats, we'll continue to be less informed than we need to be. That's the real media bias.
This story is an updated version of an article that was originally published on Oct. 15, 2020.

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Republicans and Democrats see news bias only in stories that clearly favor the other party

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Many people define 'bias' as 'anything that doesn't agree with me.' But are the news media really biased?

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A Conversation article, discussing how fact-checking won’t help people to discuss different viewpoints and ideas. 

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A Conversation article, discussing how fact-checking won’t help people to discuss different viewpoints and ideas. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How can focusing on the facts prevent us from overcoming the problems that divide society?

KEY TERMS Shared sense of reality, Fact-checking, Scientific consensus, Mutual learning vs. being right, Disagreement checks

LINKS TO Politics, Knowledge & the knower

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Entering the new year, Americans are increasingly divided. They clash not only over differing opinions on COVID-19 risk or abortion, but basic facts like election counts and whether vaccines work. Surveying rising political antagonism, journalist George Packer recently wondered in The Atlantic, "Are we doomed?"

It is common to blame people who are intentionally distributing false information for these divisions. Nobel Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa says Facebook's "[bias] against facts" threatens democracy. Others lament losing the " shared sense of reality" and " common baseline of fact " thought to be a prerequisite for democracy.

Fact-checking, the rigorous independent verification of claims, is often presented as vital for fighting falsehoods. Elena Hernandez, a spokesperson for YouTube, states that "Fact checking is a crucial tool to help viewers make their own informed decisions" and "to address the spread of misinformation." Ariel Riera, head of Argentina-based fact-checking organization Chequeado, argues that fact checking and "quality information" are key in the fight against "the COVID-19 'infodemic.'"

Many people, including TV commentator John Oliver, are demanding that social media platforms better flag and combat the "flood of lies." And worried Twitter engineers sought to " pre-bunk " viral falsehoods before they arose during the United Nations' Glasgow climate summit in 2021.

As a social scientist who researches the role of truth in a democracy, I believe this response to Americans' deepening political divisions is missing something.

Fact-checking may be vital for media literacy, discouraging politicians from lying and correcting the journalistic record. But I worry about citizens hoping for too much from fact-checking, and that fact checks oversimplify and distort Americans' political conflicts.

Whether democracy requires a shared sense of reality or not, the more fundamental prerequisite is that citizens are capable of civilly working through their disagreements.

Curing misinformation?

Misinformation is no doubt troubling. COVID-19 fatalities and vaccine refusal are much higher among Republicans, who are more likely to believe unproven claims that COVID-19 deaths are intentionally exaggerated or that the vaccine harms reproductive health. And studies find that exposure to misinformation is correlated with a reduced willingness to get vaccinated.

Brookings Institution researchers found fact-checking mostly influences the politically uncommitted - those who do not have much information about an issue, rather than those who have inaccurate information. And debunking can backfire: Informing people that the flu shot cannot cause the flu or that the MMR injection is safe for children may make vaccine skeptics even more hesitant. Some participants in a study appeared to reject the information because it threatened their worldview. But some scientists say that fact-checking only very rarely backfires.

A 2019 experiment found that carefully crafted rebuttals to misinformation could dull the effects of false claims about vaccines or climate change, even for conservatives.

Still, a 2020 meta-analysis, a study that systematically combines dozens of research findings, concluded that fact-checking's impact on people's beliefs is " quite weak." The more that a study looked like the real world, the less fact-checking changed participants' minds.

Not that simple

The task of fact-checking also comes with its own set of problems. In my view, when the science is complex and uncertain, fact-checking's biggest risk is exaggerating scientific consensus.

For example, the idea that COVID-19 might have emerged, or escaped, from a Wuhan, China, laboratory was labeled as " doubtful" in 2020 by The Washington Post's fact-checkers. Facebook flagged it as " false information" in early 2021. But many scientists think the hypothesis merits investigation.

Or consider how USA Today has labeled as "false" the idea that "natural" immunity protects as well as vaccination. The newspaper's fact-checkers only cited a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study and did not address earlier Israeli research suggesting the exact opposite. When fact-checkers show limited views of the facts in a scientific debate, they can leave citizens with the impression that the science is settled when it really may not be.

Exaggerating the certainty of science can undermine public trust in science and journalism. When fact checks about masking flip-flopped in 2020, some people wondered whether the experts behind the fact checks were being genuine.

Also lost in worries about the dangers of misinformation is the reality that factually dubious speech can be politically important. A screed against the MMR vaccine might repeat a discredited claim about immunization causing autism, but it also contains vital political facts: Some people distrust the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the pharmaceutical industry and resent the amount of control they feel that state health officials wield over them.

Citizens don't just need to be alerted to potential misinformation. They need to know why other people are skeptical of officials and their facts.

No winners, no losers

The problems that Americans face are often too complex for fact-checking. And people's conflicts run far deeper than a belief in falsehoods.

Maybe it is better to let go, at least a little, of the idea that Americans must occupy a shared reality. The point of political systems is to peaceably resolve conflicts. It may be less important to our democracy that the media focus on factual clarity, and more vital that it helps people to disagree more civilly.

Psychologist Peter Coleman studies how people discuss contentious issues. He has found that those conversations aren't constructive when participants think of them in terms of truth and falsehood or pro and con positions, which tend to spur feelings of contempt.

Rather, productive discussions about difficult topics happen by encouraging participants to see reality as complex. Simply reading an essay highlighting the contradictions and ambiguities in an issue leads people to argue less and converse more. The focus becomes mutual learning rather than being right.

But it isn't clear how best to bring Coleman's findings out of the laboratory and into the world.

I propose that news outlets offer not only fact checks but also "disagreement checks."

Rather than label the "lab leak" hypothesis or "natural immunity" idea as true or false, disagreement checkers would highlight the complicated sub-issues involved. They would show how the uncertain science looks very different depending on people's values and level of trust.

Disagreement checks would be less concerned, for instance, with the correctness of calling ivermectin a "horse dewormer". Instead they would focus on exploring why some citizens might favor untested treatments over the vaccine, focusing on reasons other than misinformation.

Maybe some combination of fact-checking and other tools can curb the public's susceptibility to being misled. But by focusing a little less on the facts and more on the complexities of the problems that divide them, Americans can take one big step back from the abyss, and toward each other.

[ Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.]

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Fact-checking may be important, but it won't help Americans learn to disagree better

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Entering the new year, Americans are increasingly divided. They clash not only over differing opinions on COVID-19 risk or abortion, but basic facts like election counts and whether vaccines work. Surveying rising political antagonism, journalist George Packer recently wondered in The Atlantic, "Are we doomed?"

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A Vox article, looking at the way misinformation proliferates during major crises - focusing on the Israel-Hamas war. 

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A Vox article, looking at the way misinformation proliferates during major crises - focusing on the Israel-Hamas war. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What reasons does the author of the article give for people ‘flocking’ to social media during times of crisis? Why is it difficult for journalists to verify or confirm reports posted on social media? What are the implications of many social media platforms choosing ‘engagement over reliability’? What four tips does the article offer, and how effective do you think these are? Students can also explore this article, which looks at the case of two children who were killed in the conflict - and whose deaths social media users falsely insisted had been faked. To wrap up: How do we balance our natural sense of outrage at what’s going on in the world with a responsibility to ensure we don’t fuel online misinformation about events?

KEY TERMS  Trust, Verification, Misinformation, False confirmations, Engagement vs. reliability, SIFT

LINKS TO Politics, Technology, Human sciences, Language

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Don’t believe everything you see and hear about Israel and Palestine

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Misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war is easy to find online. Here’s how to avoid spreading it.

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A Time article, looking at the debate over whether to rename India ‘Bharat’, and the political motivations behind this change.

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A Time article, looking at the debate over whether to rename India ‘Bharat’, and the political motivations behind this change.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE  Why is there talk of a name-change to India? What is the historical background to changing the country’s name? From the information here, do you think this is an example of a country distancing itself from its colonial past and finding a more ‘appropriate’ name, or a “nationalist push” that indicates “pettiness & intolerance”? To wrap up: What is conveyed by a country’s name, and what relationship do they have with the management of power?

KEY TERMS Controversy, Nationalist push, Colonial past, Appropriate, Intolerance, Authentic

LINKS TO Politics, Language, History

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Why Some Hindu Nationalists Want to Rename India

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An official invitation to a G-20 Summit dinner with the President of India referred to the country as “Bharat.”

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A Guardian article, examining how AI is impacting on democracy in both positive and negative ways.

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A Guardian article, examining how AI is impacting on democracy in both positive and negative ways.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How is AI affecting the way we interact with democracy?

KEY TERMS Truth and trust, Information ecosystems, Verified information, Facilitate dialogue, Incentives, Distrusted information

LINKS TO Politics, Technology, Human sciences

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he YouTube clip I return to most often is David Bowie being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight in 1999. Bowie is talking about what the internet might do: "I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think that the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we're on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying."

"It's just a tool, isn't it?" condescends Paxman. "It's an alien life form," insists Bowie. "Is there life on Mars? Yes, and it's just landed here."

At the time of that Bowie interview I was writing a university dissertation titled Freedom of Speech in Cyberspace: the Challenge the Internet Poses to the Constitution of the United States. It was a heady time. The peak of internet utopia, with tech idealists promising that the decentralising nature of the internet would radically reform power dynamics, and democracy could be reborn.

Fast forward 25-odd years and we know the opposite has happened: truth and trust have been eroded, democracy has failed to reform for the digital age and the relationship between those in power and those who elect them is strained to breaking point. It's at this moment that we are seeing the proliferation of generative AI, and understandably the response has been a mixture of hysteria and hope.

The hysteria about killer robots risks masking the real societal impacts that industrial revolutions inevitably have, sifting winners and losers, and disrupting ways of living in more subtle and sometimes pernicious ways. But there is hope for democracy in the AI revolution - if we put the right guardrails around it.

If we make AI work for democracy, then in 10 years' time our information ecosystems could be vastly improved to support democratic decision-making. We could train AI to value verified information, and serve it in ways that make the most complex information more accessible to more people.

Jim Knight, then minister of schools, launches a technology campaign in a London school in 2008. Photograph: Adrian Brooks/Imagewise/PA Wire/PA Photos

Politicians could be more trusted to do the right thing by people, because they've learned new ways to involve people in decision-making. AI citizens' assemblies could help people and politicians to navigate through the trade-offs required to tackle the big problems. These concepts are not entirely outlandish. Polis is one such tool, developed in the US and used to shape policies most extensively in Taiwan, including to design regulation for Uber. Deceptively simple, Polis maps people's views according to consensus, rather than division, and gives people options to suggest policy ideas. In the UK, we at Demos have worked with the Cabinet Office on Polis projects to engage experts and the public in the 2021 integrated review of security, defence, development and foreign policy. Andrew Gray, an independent candidate in July's Selby and Ainsty byelection, is using it to power all his policies, declaring himself the first AI-powered politician.

In a decade's time we could repair the relationship between state and citizen. It could facilitate dialogue between MPs and constituents, enabling elements of direct democracy to supplement our representative system. AI could also allow for the better use of citizens' data to target public services, interventions and support people on a more human level. AI could be used to guide people to access help from the state.

But this will only happen if we make it happen. Because right now the incentives to develop generative AI are all commercial, with investors steering the development of the technology in ways that threaten to further leave democracy behind - not least because the talent, expertise and infrastructure follows the money, rather than where it could be used for common good.

The Labour peer Jim Knight, who has been close to the latest digital bills going through parliament, makes a startling point: there are four legislative processes regarding digital under way at the moment, if you include the AI white paper published earlier this year. None of them mention protecting or promoting democracy as an explicit aim. Instead, they are concerned with online safety, digital markets and data protection. Democracy is the elephant in the room.

Without focusing explicitly on the potential for AI to improve democracy - or at least do no harm - it will most probably corrupt. Distrusted information will proliferate, further eroding trust. But without explicitly updating our democracy to encompass more participatory activities that could be facilitated through these technologies, we will increasingly be left in a system that is centuries out of date, trying to govern in a world that moves at completely different speeds and in completely different ways. We have to learn this time.

Polly Curtis is chief executive of the cross-party thinktank Demos

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Artificial intelligence is powering politics - but it could also reboot democracy | Polly Curtis

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Generative AI can involve citizens directly in decision-making, but not while developers' incentives are only financial, says Polly Curtis, chief executive of Demos

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A BBC article, looking at how emojis are being used to avoid the increasingly restrictive censorship laws introduced in Russia. 

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A BBC article, looking at how emojis are being used to avoid the increasingly restrictive censorship laws introduced in Russia. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This article highlights the importance of language in how we are able to express ourselves during periods of repression by governments. How are Russians using emojis, and other coded phrases to communicate their resistance to the war? What does this indicate about the inherent meaning of words, and how they can be substituted for other representations of concepts and ideas? What does this reveal about the relationship between power and language?

KEY TERMS Coded phrases, Self-censor

LINKS TO Politics, Politics, Technology

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On 24 February, as Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, an image started to spread on social media - a picture of the Russian poet Pushkin, the number seven and rows of the "person walking" emoji.

To those in the know, the meaning was clear - a location (Pushkin Square, in Moscow), a time and a call to protest against the government's actions.

The emojis made reference to a code used for years in Russia to refer to protests - one so well known to the authorities, it is barely a code at all, according to human rights group OVD-Info.

Why use code?

Unauthorised protests have been banned in the country since 2014 and breaches of the rules can lead to up to 15 days detention for a first offence. Repeat offenders can receive prison sentences of up to five years.

Since then, it has been common for activists to use various coded phrases to organise online.

"It's like, 'Let's go for a walk to the centre,' or, 'The weather is great for a walk,'" Maria says. This is what she will text her friends to let them know she plans to attend a protest.

What started as a way to evade government censors has almost become an inside joke or a meme, Maria tells BBC News.

Nevertheless, the consequences of not using this language can be serious.

Alexander attended a protest in Moscow, having posted about it on social media.

The following morning, plain-clothes officers picked him up outside his girlfriend's building and took him to the local police department. He was detained for several days and compelled to sign a document listing what the authorities said he had done.

We cannot be certain his attendance at the protest or his social media activity led to Alexander's detention. He was later arrested for a second time, while using the Moscow Metro, on a day he had not been attending a protest.

BBC News has learned of other detentions based solely on social media activity, including one woman arrested for a tweet.

On 24 February, she posted: "I haven't walked in the centre for a long time," and quoted another account's tweet containing a more explicit call to rally.

Five days later, she was arrested while taking a train.

She believes she was detected by facial-recognition software active on the Moscow Metro system - and in her court hearing, a document containing her tweet was presented, showing the authorities had taken a screenshot of it almost immediately after she had posted it.

In another case, Niki, a blogger, described how a close friend's brother had been detained twice - once for a few hours after attending a protest and a second time, for a whole week, for sharing the details with his friends on VK, Russia's equivalent of Facebook.

Almost 14,000 people have been detained across Russia since the conflict began a fortnight ago, mainly for attending protests according to OVD-Info - which provides legal advice.

So far, most have been held for a matter of hours or days.

Is the situation changing?

A law was introduced in Russia on Friday 4 March, with the stated aim of tackling "fake news" about the military but it is expected to be used to crack down even further on anti-war protests - including prison sentences of up to 15 years, significantly longer than previous sanctions.

For young people such as Maria, this has "already changed things, because now I'm afraid to go to protest and also I'm afraid to post about this 'special operation' [Russia's invasion of Ukraine]".

And there are clear indications arrests have increased since the new law was introduced, OVD-Info says.

Where are Russians now posting?

The shuttering of independent media outlets, blocking of Facebook and restrictions on Russians posting on TikTok have taken away key routes to access information, OVD-Info co-ordinator Leonid Drabkin says, and people will self-censor out of fear.

"Now if you go to your Instagram, there are like 10 times fewer posts," he says.

Many of his contacts have deleted their social-media profiles altogether.

And coupled with the stringent penalties, this has already affected the number of people "brave enough to protest".

Some contributors' names have been changed to protect their identities.

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The Russians using emojis to evade censors

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On 24 February, as Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, an image started to spread on social media - a picture of the Russian poet Pushkin, the number seven and rows of the "person walking" emoji. To those in the know, the meaning was clear - a location (Pushkin Square, in Moscow), a time and a call to protest against the government's actions.

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A Moscow Times report on how the words ‘war’ and ‘invasion’ have been banned by the Russian authorities. 

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A Moscow Times report on how the words ‘war’ and ‘invasion’ have been banned by the Russian authorities. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This story highlights the power of language, how authoritarian states seek to control it, and whether a concept can exist without the words to signify it. Which words has the Russian government outlawed, and how does this relate to events in Ukraine and Europe? Do students feel that suppressing a word also suppresses the idea that is associated with it (much like what happens in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four)? What other words might be under threat by this, and other, regimes? Check out this video featuring Vladimir Kara Murza, in which he also talks about the banning of these words.

KEY TERMS Unreliable, Untrue, Reliable, Official

LINKS TO Politics, Politics, Knowledge & the knower, History

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Russia's communications regulator on Saturday ordered media to remove reports describing Moscow's attack on Ukraine as an "assault, invasion, or declaration of war" or face being blocked and fined.

In a statement, Roskomnadzor accused a number of independent media outlets including television channel Dozhd and the country's top independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta of spreading "unreliable socially significant untrue information" about the shelling of Ukrainian cities by the Russian army and civilian deaths.

On Thursday, Russian leader Vladimir Putin unleashed a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that has killed dozens of people, forced more than 50,000 to flee Ukraine in just 48 hours and sparked fears of a greater conflict in Europe.

Citing a request from the General Prosecutor's Office, the communications regulator said the media outlets that also include Echo of Moscow radio will be blocked unless they remove the "unreliable information."

"Roskomnadzor also launched an administrative investigation into the dissemination of unreliable publicly significant information by the above-mentioned media," the watchdog said.

The offence is punishable by a fine of up to five million rubles ($60,000), it said.

Roskomnadzor also said that "reliable information" could be found in "official Russian information outlets."

Moscow has not so far provided any details of Russian losses in the fighting in the face of statements from Kyiv that they have inflicted heavy casualties on Moscow's forces.

The invasion of Ukraine is taking place during an unprecedented crackdown on the Russian opposition, with top protest leaders assassinated, jailed or forced out of the country.

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Russia Bans Media Outlets From Using Words 'War,' 'Invasion' - The Moscow Times

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Russia's communications regulator on Saturday ordered media to remove reports describing Moscow's attack on Ukraine as an "assault, invasion, or declaration of war" or face being blocked and fined.

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A Conversation article, looking at how dubbing in films can be used to censor ideas, or insert messages to manipulate audiences. 

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A Conversation article, looking at how dubbing in films can be used to censor ideas, or insert messages to manipulate audiences. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a fascinating article, which, as it says in the final paragraph, highlights how “seemingly minor, technical or banal elements of film production can serve very concrete and significant political ends.” What does it indicate about how political agendas can interfere with the aims of artists? Why is the power of art often harnessed in order to communicate political messages? How important is it to be aware of the background of a work of art in order to understand it? Students can also watch the very cool video about translating Stranger Things!

KEY TERMS Censorship, Familiar habit, Language and cultural imperialism

LINKS TO Politics, The arts, Language, Technology

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English-speaking audiences rarely come across dubbed films and television programmes. This probably explains why they tend to find dubbing so, well, weird. Dubbed voices usually sound a bit flat and never quite sync up with the mouths we see onscreen. This can be off-putting and perhaps even a bit unsettling.

But since the birth of sound cinema in the late 1920s and 1930s, dubbing has been commonplace in many countries, including (looking just at Europe) Italy, Spain and Germany. Dubbing is still used in many of these countries as a way of translating foreign films and television. In Italy, the dubbing system became so developed in the 1930s that it was even used to add voices to Italian films, right up until the 1980s when the growth of TV (which used directly recorded sound) led to changes in standard industry practice.

So why did such a seemingly bizarre practice gain a foothold in these countries' burgeoning film industries? After all, aren't subtitles a better way to keep the original film intact and translate it at the same time? There are a few reasons.

Nationalist voices

In the early 20th century, much of Europe's film-going population had low literacy levels. Subtitles are useless if you can't read them (or read them fast enough). There's also the argument that subtitles ruin a film's images and keep the viewer's eyes glued to the bottom of the screen. However, perhaps the most important reason for dubbing's favour was political.

Dubbing is a brilliant tool for film censorship. Sound films began to appear in the early 1930s, a time when many countries were falling under the sway of totalitarian regimes. In Europe, these included those of Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco and the Nazis. Censorship had been a feature of film production and distribution in Italy, Spain and Germany since before these dictatorships took power, but it increased markedly after they did so.

Italy and Spain, in particular, found dubbing ideologically useful. Mussolini's Fascists, for example, manipulated foreign films during the dubbing process by changing dialogue to remove any unflattering reference to Italy or Italians. They also used dubbing to alter morally undesirable elements of film plots. For example, the Italian dub of the 1931 American film Men in Her Life was altered to remove a reference to Mussolini.

Perhaps even more nefariously, they also insisted that films be dubbed into standardised national Italian (the official form of the language that was generally understood around the country). This was an effort to stop people in different regions from speaking local dialects and minority languages, and to prevent foreign words from entering Italian culture. Dubbing became a key nationalist tool that could unify and isolate Italy at a fundamental socio-cultural level.

The same story played out in Franco's Spain where dubbing kept films ideologically acceptable and marginalised minority languages like Catalan, Basque and Galician. In post-Nazi Germany, dubbing was used to alter film dialogue to play down references to the country's Nazi past and the atrocities it entailed. For example, the Nazis in Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 Notorious were rebranded as generic drug smugglers.

International voices?

In the post-second world war period, western Europe (with the exception of Spain) broke free of totalitarianism and literacy began to increase, but dubbing remained. This was partly because it had become an established and familiar habit. But dubbing had also become vital to the system of co-production, which European cinema was increasingly reliant upon. Co-production basically involved two (or more) production companies in different countries teaming up and making a film together. It was popular with producers as it meant they could pool resources and access grants and tax relief from multiple governments.

Like censorship, co-production had been around since the early days of commercial cinema. It was (and still is) a key initiative that allowed relatively small European countries to team up and push back against the ever-growing domination of Hollywood imports. Again, dubbing was crucial here as these co-produced films usually featured casts from several countries.

Dubbing meant that each actor could act in the language of their choosing on-set (if you watch an old dubbed film closely, you can often tell that actors are speaking different languages. Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a clear example of this practice). The films were shot without sound and a range of different dubs in different languages were produced in post-production, using various teams of voice actors.

Many film directors hated this system, seeing dubbing as a way of erasing films' national origins. And some claimed it was part of a wider political drive to homogenise Europe (NATO and the Common Market were also driving European integration at this time). In other words, totalitarianism may have waned, but for many dubbing was still a political tool.

Dubbing is still used as a key method of audio-visual translation in many countries and it still attracts politicised debates. For example, the film market in French-speaking Canada has argued that dubs produced in European French are not appropriate for that territory. Dubbing frequently and unsurprisingly ends up at the centre of debates around the politics of language and cultural imperialism, the imposition of one country's culture onto another country or people.

What the political history of dubbing tells us is that even seemingly minor, technical or banal elements of film and television production can serve very concrete and significant political ends. In a world increasingly saturated with audio-visual media, we should take this lesson seriously.

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The political history of dubbing in films

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Governments could use dubbing to censor ideas they didn't like or insert messages in line with their propaganda.

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A long BBC article, considering whether national boundaries need to be rethought to help cope with the pressures of mass-migration. 

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A long BBC article, considering whether national boundaries need to be rethought to help cope with the pressures of mass-migration. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why does Gaha Vince refer to political borders as ‘inventions’? How is the climate crisis putting pressure on the world’s current borders? What are the arguments for viewing the world as a ‘global commonwealth of humanity’ - and is this a viable mindshift for people to make? How and why does Vince suggest we rethink our ‘national pride’? Overall, ask students if they agree with the following statement: In order to create a more harmonious and fully functioning world, we need to “clear from our mind the idea of people being fixed to a location they were born in, as if it affects your value as a person or your rights as an individual.”

KEY TERMS Borders, Cleanly defined, Invention, Livability limits, Meaningless, Controlling vs. managing, Reinvent, Power, Divisive tribalism

LINKS TO Human sciences, Politics, Language, History

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With up to three billion people expected to be displaced by the effects of global warming by the end of the century, should it lead to a shift in the way we think about national borders, asks Gaia Vince?
I've had an obsession with maps ever since I first sought my bearings in Winnie the Pooh's "Hundred Aker Wood", trying to discover where was "nice for piknicks", and the locations of the characters' houses. My childhood was spent studying and drawing treasure maps, charting imaginary lands and plotting routes to faraway places I longed to visit.

Today, my home is plastered with the maps I've collected or been given - reminders of places that are special to me. By my desk, I have a large world map, the continents distinguished from the oceans by their mosaic of colours. Each coloured patch is a country, separated from its neighbour by a neat line drawn onto this two-dimensional representation of our world.

The borders are cleanly defined, ink separating nationalities destined for different fates. For me, these lines mark exciting possibilities, with the potential for exploration and adventure, to visit foreign cultures with different foods and languages. For others, they are prison walls that limit all possibilities.

Borders define our fate, our life expectancy, our identity, and so much more. Yet they are an invention just like the maps I used to draw. Our borders don't exist as immutable facets of the landscape, they are not natural parts of our planet, and were invented relatively recently.

It can be argued, however, that most of these imaginary lines are not fit for the world of the 21st Century with its soaring population, dramatic climate change and resource scarcity. Indeed, the idea of keeping foreign people out using borders is relatively recent. States used to be far more concerned about stopping people from leaving than preventing their arrival. They needed their labour and taxes, and emigration still poses a headache for many states.

There are, however, true human borders set not by politics or hereditary sovereigns, but by the physical properties of our planet. These planetary borders for our mammal species are defined by geography and climate. Humans cannot live in large numbers in Antarctica or in the Sahara Desert, for instance. As global temperatures increase, causing climate change, sea level rise and extreme weather over the coming decades, large parts of the world that are home to some of the biggest populations will become increasingly hard to live in. Coastlines, island states and major cities in the tropics will be among the hardest hit, according to predictions by climate scientists.

Unable to adapt to increasingly extreme conditions, millions - or even billions - of people will need to move.

Borders are often now a barrier to movement, but might that have to change in the future? (Credit: Nicolas Economou/Getty Images)

The most densely populated areas of the planet are clustered around the 25-26th north parallels which has traditionally been the latitude of most comfortable climate and fertile land. An estimated 279 million people are packed into this thin band of land, which cuts through countries including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, the United States and Mexico.

But the conditions here are changing. On average, climate niches - the range of conditions at which species can normally exist - around the world are moving polewards at a pace of 1.15m (3.8ft) per day, although it's far faster in some places. Adapting to the changing climate will mean chasing our own shifting niche - which for much of human history has been within the temperature range -11C to 15C (12F to 59F) - as it migrates north from the equator. True livability limits are the borders we must worry about as the world warms over this century, bringing unbearable heat, drought, floods, fires, storms, and coastal erosion that make agriculture impossible and displace people.

Already record numbers of people are being forced to flee their homes with each passing year. In 2021, there were 89.3 million people, double the number forcibly displayed a decade ago, and in 2022 that number reached 100 million, with climate disasters displacing many more people than conflicts. Floods displaced 33 million people in Pakistan this year, while millions more in Africa have been affected by drought and the threat of famine, from the Horn of Africa to the continent's west coast.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi appealed to global leaders at the COP27 climate change conference to take bold action to tackle the humanitarian consequences of global warming. That change needs to be "transformational" according to the UNHRC. "We cannot leave millions of displaced people and their hosts to face the consequences of a changing climate alone," says Grandi.

Migrants contribute around 10% of global GDP or $6.7tn (£5.9tn)

Without action, hundreds of millions people will have to leave their homes by 2050, according some estimates. One study from 2020 predicts that by 2070, depending on scenarios of population growth and warming, " one to three billion people are projected to be left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 years".

With so many people on the move, will this mean that invented political borders, ostensibly imposed for national security, become increasingly meaningless? The threat posed by climate change and its social repercussions dwarf those surrounding national security. Heatwaves already kill more people than those who die as a direct result of violence in wars.

Compounding this, the global population is still growing, particularly in some of the regions worst hit by climate change and poverty. Populations in Africa are set to almost triple by 2100, even as those elsewhere slow in growth. This means there will be a greater number of people in the very areas that are likely to be worst affected by extreme heat, drought and catastrophic storms. A greater number of people will also need food, water, power, housing and resources, just as these become ever harder to supply.

Meanwhile, most countries in the Global North are facing a demographic crisis in which people are not having enough babies to support an ageing population. Managed mass migration could thus help with many of the world's biggest problems, reducing the number of people living in poverty and climate devastation, and helping northern economies build their workforce.

But the main barrier is our system of borders - movement restrictions either imposed by someone's own state or by the states they wish to enter. Today just over 3% of the global population are international migrants. However, migrants contribute around 10% of global GDP or $6.7tn (£5.9tn) - some $3tn (£2.6tn) more than they would have produced in their origin countries. Some economists, such as Michael Clemens at the Center for Global Development in the US, calculate that enabling free movement could double global GDP. In addition, we would see an increase in cultural diversity, which studies show improves innovation. At a time when we have to solve unprecedented environmental and social challenges, it could be just what is needed.

After WW2, Britain encouraged migration from Commonwealth countries to help make up for labour shortages (Credit: Haywood Magee/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Removing borders or making them far more flexible, especially to labour flows, has the potential to improve humanity's resilience to the stresses and shocks of global climate change. Managed well, migration could benefit everyone.

What if we thought of the planet as a global commonwealth of humanity, in which people were free to move wherever they wanted? We'd need a new mechanism to manage global labour mobility far more effectively and efficiently - it is our biggest economic resource, after all. There are already wide-ranging global trade deals for the movement of other resources and products, but few that deal with labour movement.

Some 60% of the world's population is under the age of 40, half of these (and growing) under 20, and they will form most of the world's people for the rest of this century. Many of these young, energetic jobseekers are likely to be among those moving as the climate changes - will they add to economic growth to build sustainable societies, or will their talents be wasted?

The conversation about migration has become stuck on what ought to be allowed, rather than planning for what will occur. I believe nations need to move on from the idea of controlling migration to managing migration. At the very least, we need new mechanisms for lawful economic labour migration and mobility, and far better protection for those fleeing danger. Everyone could be offered an official form of United Nations citizenship in addition to their birth citizenship. For some people, such as those born in refugee camps, lacking papers, or citizens of small island states that will cease to exist later this century, UN citizenship may well be their only access to international recognition and assistance, even though citizenship is a human right. Passports could be issued on the back of this.

The political theorist David Held argued that we have outgrown our national boundaries through increasing globalisation, and now live in "overlapping communities of fate" from where we should form a cosmopolitan democracy at a global level. Today, we are experiencing a planetary crisis and I believe it is time to see ourselves as members of one globally dispersed species that must cooperate to survive. The scale of the climate crisis requires new global cooperation and, I believe, new international citizenship with global bodies for migration and for the biosphere - new authorities that are paid for by our taxes and to which nation states are accountable.

Currently, the United Nations has no executive powers over nation states, but that may well need to change if we are to bring down global temperatures, reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and restore the world's biodiversity. Global governance could also be useful in coordinating the vast new mobile workforce, perhaps using an international quota system to help allocate people to positions during the mass climate migrations of this century. But it would also face challenges created by bureaucracy, corruption and lobbying by powerful corporations.

Nations are communities that do things together - David Miller

Underpinning global governance, however, there also needs to be strong states. The tension between the desires and needs of the individual and society are very real for us all, and hard enough to reconcile when our society is a small, closely knit group, let alone the population of the whole planet. It's hard to care, for example, about a nameless, faceless stranger in a country you've never visited when making choices about your own life in a city thousands of miles from them. Most people find hard to balance the needs of a stranger one street away. Successful nation states help to manage this with structures and institutions that ensure a useful level of cooperation between strangers that nurtures a strong society in which we all can succeed. We willingly make small, daily sacrifices of time, energy and resources as individuals - paying taxes, for instance - to ensure our societies operate. Most of us do this because it's our society, our social family, our nation state.

The invention of the nation state has been a very powerful tool in enabling us to cooperate so well. As the political theorist David Miller put it: "Nations are communities that do things together."

It would seem unwise, then, to try to completely dismantle or abandon our existing geopolitical system in the brief time we have to prepare for the massive disruption that is expected to occur over the course of this century.

Only strong nation states will be capable of setting up the systems of governance that will help our species survive climate change. Only strong nation states will be able to manage a massive movement of migrants from different geographies and cultures to the native population.

It may instead require a blend between internationalism and nationalism.

In recent decades, the growth of globalisation has led to greater internationalism - a citizen of London may often feel more commonality with a citizen of Amsterdam or Taiwan than with someone from a small country town in Britain. This may not matter for many successful urbanites, but natives of more rural areas can feel left behind by their own country as once dominant industries decline, and social spaces and cultural traditions dwindle away. This creates resentment and fear of the kind that can lead to prejudice against immigrants, as was seen in parts of the UK during the Brexit debate.

Flooding in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan have displaced millions of people in 2022 (Credit: Biju Boro/AFP/Getty Images)

Open borders do not have to mean no borders or the abolition of nation states, though. It may be necessary to explore different types of nation states, with different governance options. Will states that are most affected by climate change buy or rent territory in safer places? Or will we see charter cities that operate under different jurisdictions and rules to the territory surrounding them, or floating states that build new territory on the waves?

It will take work to reinvent the concept of the nation state so it becomes more inclusive so that it strengthens local connections while forging greater and more equitable global networks. There are multiple benefits in encouraging commonality, a kinship with our fellows, based on our shared societal project, language and cultural works. These traits matter to people enough to make patriotism a powerful source of identity.

So why not also engender patriotic feeling about our nations' air, land and water, to encourage people to look after them.? One approach, since we all face environmental threats, might be to enlist military and other security institutions in the struggle against climate change. National service for younger citizens and immigrants to help with disaster relief, nature restoration, agricultural and social efforts could be another solidarity-creating step. And we may need to restore or invent new national traditions that are environmentally or socially beneficial, and for which citizens can feel pride and respect. These could include social groups and clubs that sing, create, play sport or perform together, and to which members can belong for life. These traditions can help maintain dignity in hard times and provide patriotic meaning for immigrants to assimilate to.

The new patriotic narrative could be about civic nationalism, based on the common good, with rights and duties, and a passionate cultural attachment to nature, and to protecting and conserving places of national (or international) importance.

Costa Rica, for instance, embraced the term pura vida, broadly meaning "good life", as a national ethos, mantra and identity. Its use became widespread from the 1970s, when refugees from the violent conflicts in neighbouring Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador relocated to the country in large numbers. Costa Rica, a small Central American country that has no standing army and instead invests heavily in nature protection and restoration alongside social services such as health and education, used this outlook on life to help define its character and integrate new immigrants.

"A person choosing to use this phrase thus is not only alluding to this shared ideology and identity, he/she is at the same time constructing that identity by means of expressing it," says Anna Marie Trester of New York University. "Language is a very important tool of self-construction."

See these lines as fusions of cultural richness, transitions rather than barriers

This offers us a new way of looking at national pride. It doesn't have to mean seeing "your people" as better than other nations', nor does it mean a centralisation of meaning and power. Instead, it can involve the devolution of traditions and an appreciation of regionality and of the enormous cultural value of new citizens. The European Union is an example of supranational identity that allows citizens to feel they are European and identify with the values of the EU, but without having to give up their national identity.

A similar idea can apply within nations as well as between them. In the UK, for instance, London's Chinatown is rightly a much-visited tourist destination, as is Little India - they are part of the nation's identity, even though Chinese Brits and British Indians often face prejudice and socioeconomic disadvantage.

To earn national pride rather than suffer divisive tribalism, a nation needs to reduce inequality. The state must invest in the people for the people to feel invested in the state. That means putting social and environmental issues first in ways that are for the benefit of all, rather than a small tribe of global aristocrats. The Green New Deals proposed in the European Union and the US are examples of policies aimed at restoring economies, providing jobs and boosting dignity while helping unite people in a bigger social project of environmental transformation.

Try, if you will, to clear from your mind the idea of people being fixed to a location they were born in, as if it affects your value as a person or your rights as an individual. As if nationality were anything more than an arbitrary line drawn on a map. See instead these lines as fusions of cultural richness, transitions rather than barriers across the possibilities that Earth's lands offer us all.

* Gaia Vince is the author of Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval and a freelance science journalist and broadcaster.

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Is the world ready for mass migration due to climate change?

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With up to three billion people expected to be displaced by climate change by 2100, does there need to be a shift in the way we think about national borders, asks Gaia Vince?

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An Aeon video, applying ‘moral foundation theory’ to political perspectives in order to understand the relationship between politics and ethics.

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An Aeon video, applying ‘moral foundation theory’ to political perspectives in order to understand the relationship between politics and ethics.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE First, get students to understand the five different categories that form the ‘moral foundation theory’, thinking about whether they are sufficient to explain human motivation when it comes to politics. Next, explore how the researchers applied them to people with different political outlooks. Did this produce any new insights? Are people’s political and moral outlooks indivisible – and in which case, are they based on valid foundations?

KEY TERMS Liberal, Conservative, Moral foundations theory

LINKS TO Politics, Human sciences

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Facts and reason are not enough. If you want to understand politics, look to morals | Aeon Videos

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Facts and reason are not enough. If you want to understand politics, look to morals

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This BBC article asks a very simple question that has a complex answer: why are same-sex relationships supported within some countries, and opposed in others?

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This BBC article asks a very simple question that has a complex answer: why are same-sex relationships supported within some countries, and opposed in others?

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This article provides students with a good opportunity to explore the impact of ethical thinking on the ‘real world’, and explore how different societies have evolved different perspectives in relation to this moral question. What are the three factors that the article identifies as determining a society’s outlook towards same-sex marriage? How do they shape the production of our ethical knowledge? Should we think in terms of ‘progress’ in terms of ethical understanding?

KEY TERMS Economic development, Democracy, Religion, Cultural values, Strong group loyalty

LINKS TO Politics, Human sciences

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When Taiwan became the first place in Asia to legalise same-sex unions, hundreds of gay people marked the occasion by registering to marry.

In many other places there has also been a shift - often a rapid one - towards more liberal attitudes.

Attitudes among the public also appear to have softened in other places including Argentina, Chile, the US, Australia, India and many in Western Europe.

But these changes do not always mean full equality. In Taiwan, for example, the government stopped short of granting full adoption rights.

Elsewhere, some nations are bringing in stricter anti-gay laws and same-sex relationships remain illegal in about 69 countries. On Friday, Kenya's High Court upheld a law banning gay sex.

Pockets of opposition

In some countries, opposition towards gay relationships is deeply entrenched and may be growing.

Elsewhere, official punishments for gay sex may provide insights into how residents, or at least their leaders, view homosexuality.

So, why does support for gay and lesbian people vary so much around the world?

One theory is that a nation's economy shapes the attitudes of its people - including how they feel about LGBT rights.

When people are concerned about things like clean water, food, shelter and safety, they can become more reliant on others.

People living in richer nations, by contrast, tend to have a lot more security.

As a result, they are more likely to have freedom to make the decisions that suit them, and to believe in self-expression.

Democracy is also thought to play a role.

In democracies, principles like equality, fairness, and the right to protest are more likely to form part of the actions of government and residents.

But people can need time to adapt to democracy.

Another factor is the role of religion.

Western Europe, with its relatively low levels of religious belief, has been at the forefront of legalising same-sex marriage. Denmark, Belgium, Norway, Spain and Sweden were among the first countries to do so.

Some Middle Eastern and African nations, where Islam or conservative Protestant religious faiths are most commonly practised, have some of the least tolerant attitudes.

But while richer, more democratic and less religious nations tend to be more tolerant, there are many exceptions.

China, for example, has low levels of religious beliefs, but polls suggest its people are a lot less supportive of gay rights than their Taiwanese neighbours.

Shift in attitudes

Nations have always differed in terms of economic development, democracy and religion. So, why have attitudes and policies changed so much over the last 20 years?

Nevertheless, it cannot be assumed that all countries will, sooner or later, introduce laws that are more gay-friendly.

For example, in 2009 Uganda considered a bill which would have made gay sex punishable with death in some circumstances. In response, several nations threatened to cut their funding, and the World Bank postponed a $90m (£70.7m) loan.

Elsewhere, political candidates may back harsh laws as a way to generate publicity and gain public support.

Attitudes and policies in many nations have clearly been shifting.

But the suggestion that more will follow in their footsteps is not a foregone conclusion.

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Why are some places gay-friendly and not others?

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Attitudes towards gay people are more tolerant in some countries, but others buck the trend.

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Now that in many countries marijuana is legal, our perception of this ‘drug’ is changing. This Conversation article examines the way in which this process is occurring.

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Now that in many countries marijuana is legal, our perception of this ‘drug’ is changing. This Conversation article examines the way in which this process is occurring.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE The question of whether morality determines the law, or if it’s the other way around, is a fascinating one, and possibly the best real-life situation to explore that is the use of drugs such as cannabis. Many people have strong beliefs about this substance, instinctively identifying its use as being something inherently ‘wrong’. So what happens when the legal and political system changes, and this drug is legally available? Does this inherent ‘wrongness’ change also? What does this tell us about the way we should construct our ethical principles? What is the relationship between the way we express our ethical stance, and the political status of that stance?

KEY TERMS Legal

LINKS TO Politics, Human sciences

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Pharmacy or marijuana dispensary? Scott Sonner/AP Photo

For decades, the marijuana industry operated underground, outside the confines of the law.

But even though at the federal level, possession and the use and sale of marijuana remain illegal, 29 states and the District of Columbia now allow medicinal marijuana to be sold for the treatment of specific diseases. Moreover, nine states now permit its recreational use.

As a linguist, I've been interested in exploring how legalization has changed the way we talk about the drug - specifically, how new dispensaries are marketing their product.

A drug that's ripe for slang

Marijuana terminology is vast, with as many as 1,200 slang words used to describe the drug and its various strains.

Slang develops for several reasons. It's a form of in-group signaling - a way for people who share a similar set of interests to communicate with one another. But it also allows people engaged in criminal activities to conceal their illegal pursuits.

Slang can quickly change. Once the general population becomes aware of the meanings behind certain words - and they become adopted in everyday speech - users feel compelled to create new lingo in order to remain subversive (or mask unlawful behavior).

Given marijuana's decadeslong status as an illegal drug - and its popularity relative to other drugs - it's no surprise that a rich lexicon has developed over time.

Some of marijuana slang is ephemeral, while others have endured for decades and tend to still be used in popular culture. They can be organized into six categories: Strains that reference geographical designations (Kona gold, Texas tea), names that reflect the strand's color (blue sage, green goddess), terms derived from the word "marijuana" (Juanita, Mary Jane), words that reference the effects of the strain (giggle weed, dry high), how the marijuana is packaged (bale, doobie) and deceptive code words (astro turf, broccoli).

These words are metaphoric and graphic, conjuring up striking images that allude to the distinctive features of the drug and its iterations.

Weed goes mainstream

But now that marijuana has become legalized, there's been a shift in the way the drug is marketed and sold. No longer is it peddled in parking lots and apartments. Instead, storefronts are cropping up on main streets in cities and towns across the country. And many of these dispensaries have vague, clinical-sounding names that are the exact opposite of weed's vibrant, slangy jargon.

A few years ago, linguist Will Styler wrote about a gift certificate he had received from a family member for a "Wellness Center" in Denver. He immediately thought it was a gift certificate to a marijuana dispensary, but it was actually for a therapeutic massage. He wondered why he had made the assumption. After looking up how often the word "wellness" was used by dispensaries, he found that 65 out of Colorado's 424 dispensaries (at the time) used the word.

His blog post inspired me to write an article that analyzed the names of Colorado's medical marijuana dispensaries.

I found that many have vague names that don't exactly alert the passersby to the product being sold. If you were to drive by "Advanced Medical Alternatives," "Alameda Wellness Center," "Kind Pain Management," "New Age Management" or "Colorado Care Facility," you might think you were passing a doctor's office, physical therapist or homeopathic treatment center.

Other dispensaries allude to the organic nature of marijuana - the fact that it's a plant cultivated just like tomatoes and corn that you purchase at the market: Emerald City Organics, Lucky Farms and LEAF Locals Emporium Farms.

Why are dispensaries advertising themselves this way?

Terms that make reference to the organic nature of marijuana might be signaling the fact that the marijuana is locally grown, which is good for the community and environment. Other dispensary names - those that include words like "wellness" and "care" - could be highlighting the product's medicinal value. Together, they signal that stores are serious, legitimate enterprises - which is a way to avoid antagonizing locals who might not be fully on board with legalization.

Nevertheless, there are still subtle nods to the drug's linguistic tradition of deception. For example, two dispensaries - Tender Healing Care and Total Health Concepts - have the initials "THC," an abbreviation for tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient in marijuana.

And because Colorado was at the forefront of the legalization movement - in 2012, it was the first state to authorize the legal sale of marijuana for recreational use - some of the state's dispensaries have quirkier names that could appeal to tourists: Happy Camper Cannabis Company, Smokey's 420 House and Bud Hut.

Marijuana™

The potential branding of marijuana and its strains creates another new aspect of the language of cannabis. A brand name assigns a specific and unique personality to a product; it also creates a stable image so consumers know exactly what they are purchasing.

But since marijuana is an illegal drug at the federal level, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office doesn't grant requests from marijuana producers for trademarks.

Nevertheless, as a 2017 Forbes article points out, even though the trademarking of cannabis isn't legal, the issue of branding will need to be addressed at some point. Without rules in place, it will be too easy for competitors to deceive consumers and advertise knock-offs, especially as competition grows.

In the meantime, from a linguistic perspective, these language tweaks taking place signify changes in not only how the public views marijuana, but also how marijuana marketers want the public to view their product: as a safe substance used to alleviate pain, nausea and anxiety.

As a once-illicit drug becomes folded into the mainstream, so does the language used to describe it. And so while people once needed to buy "dimebags" from their "kushman," they can now purchase a package of cannabis cookies at their local "wellness center."

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As marijuana goes mainstream, what's happening to the way we talk about weed?

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For decades, the marijuana industry operated underground, outside the confines of the law. But even though at the federal level, possession and the use and sale of marijuana remain illegal, 29 states and the District of Columbia now allow medicinal marijuana to be sold for the treatment of specific diseases.

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An FT article, looking at the ‘real problem’ of political populism, in terms of its effects on the societies which embrace it. 

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An FT article, looking at the ‘real problem’ of political populism, in terms of its effects on the societies which embrace it. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why do many liberals believe that populism is doomed to failure - and how valid is this view? (hint -  find out why they think “the problem of populism solves itself”) Why is it a mistake to assume that ‘learning from history’ is only ever a positive thing (find the section discussing the “manipulation of legal and political systems”)? Why does the article argue that it is so hard to dislodge populist leaders? To wrap up: “In order to avoid being manipulated by political leaders, it is vital that we move beyond a simplistic understanding of democracy.” Do you agree? Support your response with examples.

We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

KEY TERMS Simplistic, Narrative, Breaking the norms, Image, Manipulation, Public opinion, Lessons

LINKS TO Politics, Human sciences, History

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News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

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A Conversation article, looking at the findings of a research report about the quality of national elections all over the world.  

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A Conversation article, looking at the findings of a research report about the quality of national elections all over the world.  

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How do we effectively evaluate the integrity of electoral systems?

KEY TERMS Global assessment, Perceptions of electoral integrity

LINKS TO Politics, Human sciences, History

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A disappointing slide for the US after an election blighted by disinformation. Aaron Burson/Unsplash

Defending democracy has suddenly become one of the central challenges of our age. The land war in Ukraine is widely considered a front line between autocratic rule and democratic freedom. The United States continues to absorb the meaning of the riot that took place on January 6 2021 in an attempt to overthrow the result of the previous year's election. Elsewhere, concerns have been raised that the pandemic could have provided cover for governments to postpone elections.
You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, here.
Elections are an essential part of democracy. They enable citizens to hold their governments to account for their actions and bring peaceful transitions in power. Unfortunately, elections often fall short of these ideals. They can be marred by problems such as voter intimidation, low turnout, fake news and the under-representation of women and minority candidates.

Our new research report provides a global assessment of the quality of national elections around the world from 2012-21, based on nearly 500 elections across 170 countries. The US is the lowest ranked liberal democracy in the list. It comes just 15th in the 29 states in the Americas, behind Costa Rica, Brazil, Trinidad & Tobago and others, and 75th overall.

Why is the United States so low?

There were claims made by former president Donald Trump of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Theses claims were baseless, but they still caused the US elections ranking to fall.

Elections with disputed results score lower on our rankings because a key part of democracy is the peaceful transition of power through accepted results, rather than force and violence. Trump's comments led to post-election violence as his supporters stormed the Capitol building and sowed doubt about the legitimacy of the outcome amongst much of America.

This illustrates that electoral integrity is not just about designing laws - it is also dependent on candidates and supporters acting responsibly throughout the electoral process.

Problems with US elections run much deeper than this one event, however. Our report shows that the way electoral boundaries are drawn up in the US are a main area of concern. There has been a long history of gerrymandering, where political districts are craftily drawn by legislators so that populations that are more likely to vote for them are included in a given constituency - as was recently seen in North Carolina.

Voter registration and the polls is another problem. Some US states have recently implemented laws that make it harder to vote, such as requiring ID, which is raising concern about what effect that will have on turnout. We already know that the costs, time and complexity of completing the ID process, alongside the added difficulties for those with high residential mobility or insecure housing situations, makes it even less likely that under-represented groups will take part in elections.

Nordics on top, concern about Russia

The Nordic countries of Finland, Sweden and Denmark came out on top in our rankings. Finland is commonly described as having a pluralistic media landscape, which helps. It also provides public funding to help political parties and candidates contest elections. A recent report from the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights found a "high level of confidence in all of the aspects of the electoral process".

Cape Verde has the greatest quality of electoral integrity in Africa. Taiwan, Canada and New Zealand are ranked first for their respective continents.

Electoral integrity in Russia has seen a further decline following the 2021 parliamentary elections. A pre-election report warned of intimidation and violence against journalists, and the media "largely promote policies of the current government". Only Belarus ranks lower in Europe.

Globally, electoral integrity is lowest in Comoros, the Central African Republic and Syria.

Money matters

How politicians and political parties receive and spend money was found to be the weakest part of the electoral process in general. There are all kinds of threats to the integrity of elections that revolve around campaign money. Where campaign money comes from, for example, could affect a candidate's ideology or policies on important issues. It is also often the case that the candidate who spends the most money wins - which means unequal opportunities are often part and parcel of an election.

It helps when parties and candidates are required to publish transparent financial accounts. But in an era where "dark money" can be more easily transferred across borders, it can be very hard to trace where donations really come from.

There are also solutions for many of the other problems, such as automatic voter registration, independence for electoral authorities, funding for electoral officials and electoral observation.

Democracy may need to be defended in battle, as we are currently seeing in Ukraine. But it also needs to be defended before it comes to all-out conflict, through discussion, protest, clicktivism and calls for electoral reforms.

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Elections: a global ranking rates US weakest among liberal democracies

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Defending democracy has suddenly become one of the central challenges of our age. The land war in Ukraine is widely considered a front line between autocratic rule and democratic freedom. The United States continues to absorb the meaning of the riot that took place on January 6 2021 in an attempt to overthrow the result of the previous year's election.

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A Conversation article, looking at the reasons why political polls are often inaccurate – and why this problem is increasing in the Internet age.

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A Conversation article, looking at the reasons why political polls are often inaccurate – and why this problem is increasing in the Internet age.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Political polls are a major type of evidence used to study and understand this branch of human sciences, but stories about how unreliable they are appear after virtually every election. Should we put any store in the knowledge they provide us? Does this show that characteristics of society cannot be represented in this way? What does the article suggest in order to increase the reliability of poll reading – and do you find this convincing? How should we approach information about public opinions? How and why is public opinion research changing over time? How far can knowledge in politics be represented in statistical form?

KEY TERMS Polling aggregation, Forecasters and media prognosticators, Internet surveys, Political models

LINKS TO Politics, Technology

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On the morning of Nov. 8, 2016, many Americans went to bed confident that Hillary Clinton would be elected the nation's first female president.

Their confidence was driven, in no small part, by a pervasive message that Clinton was ahead in the polls and forecasts leading up to the election. Polling aggregation sites, such as Huffington Post's Pollster and The New York Times Upshot blog, reported that Clinton was virtually certain to win. It soon became clear that these models were off the mark.

Since then, forecasters and media prognosticators have dissected what went wrong. The finger-pointing almost inevitably landed on public opinion polling, especially at the state level. The polls, critics argued, led modelers and the public to vastly overestimate the likelihood of a Clinton win.

With the 2018 elections coming up, many in the public have expressed their skepticism that public opinion polls can be trusted this time around. Indeed, in an era where a majority of American adults no longer even have landline telephones, where many people answer only when calls originate from a known number, and where pollsters' calls are sometimes flagged as likely spam, there are lots of reasons to worry.

But polling firms seem to be going about their business as usual, and those of us who do research on the quality of public opinion research are not particularly alarmed about what's going on.

Looking back

One might be tempted to think that those of us in the polling community are simply out to lunch. But the data from 2016 tell a distinctly different story.

The national polls were fairly accurate both in their national estimate of the popular vote in 2016 and in historical perspective. In the average preelection national poll, Clinton was ahead of Donald Trump by 3.3 percentage points. She proceeded to win the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points. Pollsters missed the mark by a mere 1.2 percentage points on average.

The polls in the Upper Midwest states missed by larger margins. These polls were conducted in ways that pollsters widely know to be suboptimal. They relied heavily on robocalls; on surveys of people who volunteer to take surveys on the internet; and on samples of respondents from voter files with incomplete information.

What went wrong

So why was the 2016 election so shocking? The big reason wasn't the polls, it was our expectations.

In the last few years, members of the public have come to expect that a series of highly confident models can tell us exactly what is going to happen in the future. But in the runup to the 2016 election, these models made a few big, problematic assumptions.

For one, they largely assumed that the different errors that different polls had were independent of one another. But the challenges that face contemporary polling, such as the difficulty of reaching potential respondents, can induce small but consistent errors across almost all polls.

When modelers treat errors as independent of one another, they make conclusions that are far more precise than they should be. The average poll is indeed the best guess at the outcome of an election, but national polling averages are often off by around 2 percentage points. State polls can be off by even more at times.

In addition, polling aggregators and public polling information have been flooded by a deluge of lower-quality surveys based on suboptimal methods. These methods can sometimes produce accurate estimates, but the processes by which they do so is not well-understood on theoretical grounds. There are lots of reasons to think that these methods may not produce consistently accurate results in the future. Unfortunately, there will likely continue to be lots of low-quality polls, because they are so much less expensive to conduct.

Research out of our lab suggests yet another reason that the polls were shocking to so many: When ordinary people look at the evidence from polling, just as with other sources of information, they tend to see the results they desire.

During the 2016 election campaign, we asked Americans to compare two preelection polls - one where Clinton was leading and one where Trump was ahead. Across the board, Clinton supporters told us that the Clinton-leading poll was more accurate than the Trump-leading poll. Trump supporters reported exactly the opposite perceptions. In other studies, we saw the same phenomenon when people were exposed to poll results showing majorities in favor of or opposed to their own views on policy issues such as gun control or abortion.

What polls really say

So, what does this all mean for someone reading the polls in 2018?

You don't have to ignore the results - just recognize that all polling has some error. While even the experts may not know quite which way that error is going to point, we do have a sense of the size of that error. Error is likely to be smaller when considering a polling average instead of an individual poll.

It's also a good bet that the actual result will be within 3 percentage points for an averaging of high-quality national polls. For similarly high-quality state polls, it will likely be within more like 5 percentage points, because these polls usually have smaller sample sizes.

What makes a high-quality poll? It will either use live interviewers with both landlines and cellphones or recruit respondents using offline methods to take surveys online. Look for polls conducted around the same time to see whether they got the same result. If not, see whether they sampled the same kind of people, used the same interviewing technique or used a similar question wording. This is often the explanation for reported differences.

The good news is that news consumers can easily find out about a poll's quality. This information is regularly included in news stories and is shown by many poll aggregators. What's more, pollsters are increasingly transparent about the methods they use.

Polls that don't use these methods should be taken with a big grain of salt. We simply don't know enough about when they will succeed and when they will fail.

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You can trust the polls in 2018, if you read them carefully

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How do you know whether to trust a poll? Look carefully at how it was conducted - and examine your own biases.

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An Aeon video, which tries to figure out whether the success of democracy can be mathematically proven. 

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An Aeon video, which tries to figure out whether the success of democracy can be mathematically proven. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What were the ideas of Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Nicolas de Condorcet on the best way to govern a state? How did de Condorcet try to justify his theories? What counter arguments can we offer to his ideas - and what are the implications of these? To wrap up: To what extent can we apply a mathematical, data-driven approach to understanding political and social realities?

KEY TERMS The jury theorem, Philosophical speculation vs. mathematical truth, Empirical and philosophical complexities, Consensus

LINKS TO Politics, Mathematics, Human sciences

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Plato believed that public policy should be the purview of a small group of wise leaders; in his view, ordinary citizens couldn't possibly be well informed enough to arrive at the decisions that would best align with the common good. Jean-Jacques Rousseau disagreed, countering that normal people, voting for their opinions en masse, could indeed arrive at the 'general will'. The French philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-94) went even further than his contemporary Rousseau, proposing that, not only could the wisdom of the crowd be trusted to reach the most beneficial conclusions, but that it was mathematically provable that this was the case. This animated explainer from Wireless Philosophy (or Wi-Phi) details the logic of Condorcet's so-called 'jury theorem', while also identifying weaknesses in the perhaps overly optimistic assumptions embedded in his logic.

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Is the idea that democracy always benefits society misguided, or just mathematics? | Aeon Videos

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Can an argument for democracy be based on a mathematical theorem? From Plato's tyrants to Condorcet's 'jury theorem'

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A Project Syndicate article by Ian Buruma, exploring the ‘history trap’ of using lazy parallels to understand the past. 

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A Project Syndicate article by Ian Buruma, exploring the ‘history trap’ of using lazy parallels to understand the past. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why is historical manipulation particularly common at the moment? To what extent are all sides responsible? What are the pros and cons of ‘detecting historical parallels’ in order to understand the world? What is the significance of the two quotes in the article, by George Santayana and LP Hartley? Overall, how can being aware that things never repeat themselves in the same way help us to avoid falling into the ‘history trap’?

KEY TERMS History trap, Malicious distortion of history, Lazy parallels, Exploited and manipulated, Wrong conclusions, Ignorance

LINKS TO History, Politics, Human sciences

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An Atlantic article by Francis Fukuyama, arguing that recent events serve to prove his assertion that we have arrived at the ‘end of history’. 

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An Atlantic article by Francis Fukuyama, arguing that recent events serve to prove his assertion that we have arrived at the ‘end of history’. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Look for the paragraph where Fukuyama discusses what Hegel meant. What evidence does he offer that we are, indeed, at the ‘end of history’? Are you convinced by his argument? Students can extend this by researching more about the work of Fukuyama, and organizing a debate in class. Overall, do you think that there are underlying patterns to history? Is there an ‘endpoint to historical progress’?

KEY TERMS Proof, Endpoint of historical progress, Underlying narrative

LINKS TO Politics, History, Human sciences

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Over the past year, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of seemingly strong authoritarian states.

Over the past decade, global politics has been heavily shaped by apparently strong states whose leaders are not constrained by law or constitutional checks and balances. Russia and China both have argued that liberal democracy is in long-term decline, and that their brand of muscular authoritarian government is able to act decisively and get things done while their democratic rivals debate, dither, and fail to deliver on their promises. These two countries were the vanguard of a broader authoritarian wave that turned back democratic gains across the globe, from Myanmar to Tunisia to Hungary to El Salvador. Over the past year, though, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of these strong states.

The weaknesses are of two sorts. First, the concentration of power in the hands of a single leader at the top all but guarantees low-quality decision making, and over time will produce truly catastrophic consequences. Second, the absence of public discussion and debate in "strong" states, and of any mechanism of accountability, means that the leader's support is shallow, and can erode at a moment's notice.

Supporters of liberal democracy must not give in to a fatalism that tacitly accepts the Russian-Chinese line that such democracies are in inevitable decline. The long-term progress of modern institutions is neither linear nor automatic. Over the years, we have seen huge setbacks to the progress of liberal and democratic institutions, with the rise of fascism and communism in the 1930s, or the military coups and oil crises of the 1960s and '70s. And yet, liberal democracy has endured and come back repeatedly, because the alternatives are so bad. People across varied cultures do not like living under dictatorship, and they value their individual freedom. No authoritarian government presents a society that is, in the long term, more attractive than liberal democracy, and could therefore be considered the goal or end point of historical progress. The millions of people voting with their feet-leaving poor, corrupt, or violent countries for life not in Russia, China, or Iran but in the liberal, democratic West-amply demonstrate this.

The philosopher Hegel coined the phrase the end of history to refer to the liberal state's rise out of the French Revolution as the goal or direction toward which historical progress was trending. For many decades after that, Marxists would borrow from Hegel and assert that the true end of history would be a communist utopia. When I wrote an article in 1989 and a book in 1992 with this phrase in the title, I noted that the Marxist version was clearly wrong and that there didn't seem to be a higher alternative to liberal democracy. We've seen frightening reversals to the progress of liberal democracy over the past 15 years, but setbacks do not mean that the underlying narrative is wrong. None of the proffered alternatives look like they're doing any better.

The weaknesses of strong states have been on glaring display in Russia. President Vladimir Putin is the sole decision maker; even the former Soviet Union had a politburo where the party secretary had to vet policy ideas. We saw images of Putin sitting at the end of a long table with his defense and foreign ministers because of his fear of COVID; he was so isolated that he had no idea how strong Ukrainian national identity had become in recent years or how fierce a resistance his invasion would provoke. He similarly got no word of how deeply corruption and incompetence had taken root within his own military, how abysmally the modern weapons he had developed were working, or how poorly trained his own officer corps was.

The shallowness of his regime's support was made evident by the rush to the borders of young Russian men when he announced his "partial" mobilization on September 21. Some 700,000 Russians have left for Georgia, Kazakhstan, Finland, and any other country that would take them, a far greater number than has actually been mobilized. Those who have been caught up by the conscription are being thrown directly into battle without adequate training or equipment, and are already showing up on the front as POWs or casualties. Putin's legitimacy was based on a social contract that promised citizens stability and a modicum of prosperity in return for political passivity, but the regime has broken that deal and is feeling the consequences.

Putin's bad decision making and shallow support have produced one of the biggest strategic blunders in living memory. Far from demonstrating its greatness and recovering its empire, Russia has become a global object of ridicule, and will endure further humiliations at the hands of Ukraine in the coming weeks. The entire Russian military position in the south of Ukraine is likely to collapse, and the Ukrainians have a real chance of liberating the Crimean Peninsula for the first time since 2014. These reversals have triggered a huge amount of finger-pointing in Moscow; the Kremlin is cracking down even harder on dissent. Whether Putin himself will be able to survive a Russian military defeat is an open question.

Something similar, if a bit less dramatic, has been going on in China. One of the hallmarks of Chinese authoritarianism in the period between Deng Xiaoping's reforms in 1978 and Xi Jinping's accession to power in 2013 was the degree to which it was institutionalized. Institutions mean that rulers have to follow rules and cannot do whatever they please. The Chinese Communist Party imposed many rules on itself: mandatory retirement ages for party cadres, strict meritocratic standards for recruitment and promotion, and above all a 10-year term limit for the party's most-senior leadership. Deng Xiaoping established a system of collective leadership precisely to avoid the dominance of a single obsessive leader like Mao Zedong.

Much of this has been dismantled under Xi Jinping, who will receive the blessing of his party to remain on as paramount leader for a third five-year term at the 20th Party Congress. In place of collective leadership, China has moved to a personalistic system in which no other senior official can come close to challenging Xi.

This concentration of authority in one man has in turn led to poor decision making. The party has intervened in the economy, hobbling the tech sector by going after stars such as Alibaba and Tencent; forced Chinese farmers to plant money-losing staples in pursuit of agricultural self-sufficiency; and insisted on a zero-COVID strategy that keeps important parts of China under continuing lockdowns that have shaved points off the country's economic growth. China cannot easily reverse zero-COVID, because it has failed to buy effective vaccines and finds a large part of its elderly population vulnerable to the disease. What looked two years ago like a triumphant success in controlling COVID has turned into a prolonged debacle.

All of this comes on top of the failure of China's underlying growth model, which relied on heavy state investment in real estate to keep the economy humming. Basic economics suggests that this would lead to massive misallocation of resources, as has in fact happened. Go online and search for Chinese buildings being blown up, and you will see many videos of massive housing complexes being dynamited because there is no one to buy apartments in them.

These authoritarian failures are not limited to China. Iran has been rocked by weeks of protests following the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police. Iran is in terrible shape: It faces a banking crisis, is running out of water, has seen big declines in agriculture, and is grappling with crippling international sanctions and isolation. Despite its pariah status, it has a well-educated population, in which women constitute a majority of university graduates. And yet the regime is led by a small group of old men with social attitudes several generations out of date. It is no wonder that the regime is now facing its greatest test of legitimacy. The only country that qualifies as even more poorly managed is one with another dictatorship, Venezuela, which has produced the world's largest outflux of refugees over the past decade.

Celebrations of the rise of strong states and the decline of liberal democracy are thus very premature. Liberal democracy, precisely because it distributes power and relies on consent of the governed, is in much better shape globally than many people think. Despite recent gains by populist parties in Sweden and Italy, most countries in Europe still enjoy a strong degree of social consensus.

The big question mark remains, unfortunately, the United States. Some 30 to 35 percent of its voters continue to believe the false narrative that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and the Republican Party has been taken over by Donald Trump's MAGA followers, who are doing their best to put election deniers in positions of power around the country. This group does not represent a majority of the country but is likely to regain control of at least the House of Representatives this November, and possibly the presidency in 2024. The party's putative leader, Trump, has fallen deeper and deeper into a conspiracy-fueled madness in which he believes that he could be immediately reinstated as president and that the country should criminally indict his presidential predecessors, including one who is already dead.

There is an intimate connection between the success of strong states abroad and populist politics at home. Politicians such as Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Matteo Salvini in Italy, and of course Trump in the U.S. have all expressed sympathy for Putin. They see in him a model for the kind of strongman rule they would like to exercise in their own country. He, in turn, is hoping that their rise will weaken Western support for Ukraine and save his flailing "special military operation."

Liberal democracy will not make a comeback unless people are willing to struggle on its behalf. The problem is that many who grow up living in peaceful, prosperous liberal democracies begin to take their form of government for granted. Because they have never experienced an actual tyranny, they imagine that the democratically elected governments under which they live are themselves evil dictatorships conniving to take away their rights, whether that is the European Union or the administration in Washington. But reality has intervened. The Russian invasion of Ukraine constitutes a real dictatorship trying to crush a genuinely free society with rockets and tanks, and may serve to remind the current generation of what is at stake. By resisting Russian imperialism, the Ukrainians are demonstrating the grievous weaknesses that exist at the core of an apparently strong state. They understand the true value of freedom, and are fighting a larger battle on our behalf, a battle that all of us need to join.

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brand of muscular authoritarian government

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long-term progress of modern institutions

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vanguard of a broader authoritarian wave

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core of these strong states.the weaknesses

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More Proof That This Really Is the End of History

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Over the past year, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of seemingly strong authoritarian states.

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 A Conversation article, looking at the problems associated with people thinking they know more about politics than they actually do.

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 A Conversation article, looking at the problems associated with people thinking they know more about politics than they actually do.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How does ‘political overconfidence’ affect our ability to understand politics and human sciences?

KEY TERMS Emotion-laden, Overconfidence, Defensive, Partisanship, Experts, Experimental treatments, Reality check, False claims, Humility

LINKS TO Politics, Human sciences, Knowledge & the knower

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Americans think they know a lot about politics – and it’s bad for democracy that they’re so often wrong in their confidence

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Many Americans think they know much more about politics than they really do. That overconfidence can thwart democratic politics.