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While looking at the internal process of elections and the impact they have on society. It's important to also understand the impact they don't have on many people. In recent years, there has been a push on voting as a 'moral duty'. If you look at the 2020 US election, many celebrities took to social media with pictures of them at polling stations or with their postal vote telling others that they need to vote.

The zine attached is central to understanding elections and concepts of the people as it argues that voting is not always an expression of freedom or an opportunity to improve their lives. As discussed this week and in the lecture from week 8, voting can also be regarded as submission to political systems and reaffirms government control.

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Voting is Not Harm Reduction

An Indigenous Perspective
February 2020 - www.indigenousaction.org

Zine format printable PDF download: Voting is Not Harm Reduction Zine-FINAL-PRINT (9.8MB)

When proclamations are made that "voting is harm reduction," it's never clear how less harm is actually calculated. Do we compare how many millions of undocumented Indigenous Peoples have been deported? Do we add up what political party conducted more drone strikes? Or who had the highest military budget? Do we factor in pipelines, mines, dams, sacred sites desecration? Do we balance incarceration rates? Do we compare sexual violence statistics? Is it in the massive budgets of politicians who spend hundreds of millions of dollars competing for votes?

Though there are some political distinctions between the two prominent parties in the so-called U.S., they all pledge their allegiance to the same flag. Red or blue, they're both still stripes on a rag waving over stolen lands that comprise a country built by stolen lives.

We don't dismiss the reality that, on the scale of U.S. settler colonial violence, even the slightest degree of harm can mean life or death for those most vulnerable. What we assert here is that the entire notion of "voting as harm reduction" obscures and perpetuates settler-colonial violence, there is nothing "less harmful" about it, and there are more effective ways to intervene in its violences.

At some point the left in the so-called U.S. realized that convincing people to rally behind a "lesser evil" was a losing strategy. The term "harm reduction" was appropriated to reframe efforts to justify their participation and coerce others to engage in the theater of what is called "democracy" in the U.S.

Harm reduction was established in the 1980s as a public health strategy for people dealing with substance use issues who struggle with abstinence. According to the Harm Reduction Coalition (HRC) the principles of harm reduction establish that the identified behavior is "part of life" so they "choose not to ignore or condemn but to minimize harmful effects" and work towards breaking social stigmas towards "safer use." The HRC also states that, "there is no universal definition of or formula for implementing harm reduction." Overall, harm reduction focuses on reducing adverse impacts associated with harmful behaviors.

The proposition of "harm reduction" in the context of voting means something entirely different from those organizing to address substance use issues. The assertion is that "since this political system isn't going away, we'll support politicians and laws that may do less harm."

The idea of a ballot being capable of reducing the harm in a system rooted in colonial domination and exploitation, white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, and capitalism is an extraordinary exaggeration. There is no person whose lives aren't impacted everyday by these systems of oppression, but instead of coded reformism and coercive "get out the vote" campaigns towards a "safer" form of settler colonialism, we're asking "what is the real and tragic harm and danger associated with perpetuating colonial power and what can be done to end it?"

Voting as practiced under U.S. "democracy" is the process with which people (excluding youth under the age of 18, convicted felons, those the state deems "mentally incompetent," and undocumented folx including permanent legal residents), are coerced to choose narrowly prescribed rules and rulers. The anarchist collective Crimethinc observes, "Voting consolidates the power of a whole society in the hands of a few politicians." When this process is conducted under colonial authority, there is no option but political death for Indigenous Peoples. In other words, voting can never be a survival strategy under colonial rule. It's a strategy of defeat and victimhood that protracts the suffering and historical harm induced by ongoing settler colonialism. And while the harm reduction sentiment may be sincere, even hard won marginal reforms gained through popular support can be just as easily reversed by the stroke of a politician's pen. If voting is the democratic participation in our own oppression, voting as harm reduction is a politics that keeps us at the mercy of our oppressors.

If voting is the democratic participation in our own oppression, voting as harm reduction is a politics that keeps us at the mercy of our oppressors.

While so many on the left-including some Indigenous radicals-are concerned with consolidation of power into fascists hands, they fail to recognize how colonial power is already consolidated. There is nothing intersectional about participating in and maintaining a genocidal political system. There's no meaningful solidarity to be found in a politics that urges us to meet our oppressors where they're at. Voting as harm reduction imposes a false solidarity upon those identified to be most vulnerable to harmful political policies and actions. In practice it plays out as paternalistic identity politicking as liberals work to identify the least dangerous candidates and rally to support their campaigns. The logic of voting as harm reduction asserts that whoever is facing the most harm will gain the most protection by the least dangerous denominator in a violently authoritarian system. This settler-colonial naivety places more people, non-human beings, and land at risk then otherwise. Most typically the same liberal activists that claim voting is harm reduction are found denouncing and attempting to suppress militant direct actions and sabotage as acts that "only harm our movement." "Voting as harm reduction" is the pacifying language of those who police movements.
Voting as harm reduction is the government issued blanket of the democratic party, we're either going to sleep or die in it.

To organize from a position that voting is an act of damage limitation blurs lines of the harm that settler and resource colonialism imposes.
Under colonial occupation all power operates through violence. There is absolutely nothing "less harmful" about participating in and perpetuating the political power of occupying forces. Voting won't undue settler colonialism, white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, or capitalism. Voting is not a strategy for decolonization. The entire process that arrived at the "Native vote" was an imposition of U.S. political identity on Indigenous Peoples fueled by white supremacy and facilitated by capitalism.

The Native Vote: A Strategy of Colonial Domination

Prior to settler colonial invasion, Indigenous Peoples maintained diverse complex cultural organizations that were fairly unrecognizable to European invaders. From its inception, the U.S. recognized that Indigenous Peoples comprised distinct sovereign Nations. The projection of Nation status was committed on the terms of the colonizers who needed political entities to treaty with (primarily for war and economic purposes). As a result, social organizations of Indigenous Peoples faced extreme political manipulation as matriarchal and two-spirit roles were either completely disregarded or outright attacked. The imperative of the U.S. settler colonial project has always been to undermine and destroy Indigenous sovereignty, this is the insidious unnature of colonialism.

In 1493 the Papal Bull "Inter Caetera," was issued by Pope Alexander VI. The document established the "Doctrine of Discovery" and was central to Spain's Christianizing strategy to ensure "exclusive right" to enslaved Indigenous Peoples and lands invaded by Columbus the year prior. This decree also made clear the Pope's threat to forcibly assimilate Indigenous Peoples to Catholicism in order to strengthen the "Christian Empire." This doctrine lead to successive generational patterns of genocidal and ecocidal wars waged by European settler colonizers against Indigenous lives, lands, spirit, and the living world of all of our relations. In 1823 the "Doctrine of Discovery" was written into U.S. law as a way to deny land rights to Indigenous Peoples in the Supreme Court case, Johnson v. McIntosh. In a unanimous decision, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that Christian European nations had assumed complete control over the lands of "America" during the "Age of Discovery". And in declaring "independence" from the Crown of England in 1776, he noted, that the U.S. had in effect and thus by law inherited authority over these lands from Great Britain, "notwithstanding the occupancy of the natives, who were heathens..." According to the ruling, Indigenous Peoples did not have any rights as independent nations, but only as tenants or residents of the U.S. on their own lands. To this day, the "Doctrine of Discovery" has not been repudiated and Johnson v. McIntosh has not been overruled.

The genealogy of the Native vote is tied to boarding schools, Christian indoctrination, allotment programs, and global wars that established U.S. imperialism. U.S. assimilation policies were not designed as a benevolent form of harm reduction, they were an extension of a military strategy that couldn't fulfill its genocidal programs. Citizenship was forced onto Indigenous Peoples as part of colonial strategy to, "Kill the Indian and save the man."

There was a time when Indigenous Peoples wanted nothing to do with U.S. citizenship and voting.

Katherine Osborn, an ethnohistorian at Arizona State University states, "[Indigenous] polities hold a government-to-government relationship with the United States. Thus, their political status is unique, and that means that they are not just another minority group hoping for inclusion in the U.S. political order. For indigenous communities, protecting their sovereignty as tribal nations is the paramount political concern."

When the U.S. constitution was initially created, each state could determine who could be citizens at their discretion. Some states rarely granted citizenship and thereby conferred the status to select Indigenous Peoples but only if they dissolved their tribal relationships and became "civilized." This typically meant that they renounced their tribal affiliation, paid taxes, and fully assimilated into white society. Alexandra Witkin writes in To Silence a Drum: The Imposition of United States Citizenship on Native Peoples, "Early citizenship policy rested upon the assumption that allegiance could only be given to one nation; thus peoples with an allegiance to a Native nation could not become citizens of the United States." The preference though was not to respect and uphold Indigenous sovereignty, but to condemn it as "uncivilized" and undermine it through extreme tactics of forced assimilation.

When the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1868, it granted citizenship only to men born or naturalized in the U.S., this included former slaves but was interpreted to not apply to Indigenous Peoples except for those who assimilated and paid taxes. The 15th Amendment was subsequently passed in 1870 to ensure the right of U.S. citizens to vote without discrimination of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude" but was still interpreted to exclude Indigenous Peoples who did not assimilate. In some ways this was an act of disenfranchisement, but more clearly it was a condition imposed upon Indigenous Peoples facing scorched-earth military campaigns and the threat of mass death marches to concentration camps. The message was clear, "assimilate or perish."

In 1887, U.S. Congress passed the General Allotment Act, more commonly known as the Dawes Act, which was designed to expedite colonial invasion, facilitate resource extraction, and to further assimilate Indigenous Peoples into the colonial social order. The Dawes Act marked a shift from a military strategy to an economic and political one where reservations were separated into individual lots, with only male "heads of households" to receive 160 acres with any remaining lands put up for sale to white invaders who flocked in droves to inherit their "Manifest Destiny." Indigenous Peoples who accepted allotments could receive U.S. citizenship, and although this was the first congressional act to provide the status, it came at the expense of sacrificing Indigenous People's cultural and political identities in many ways, particularly by further fracturing the integrity of Indigenous matriarchal societies. Under the Dawes Act, Indigenous lands were reduced from 138 million to 52 million acres. In 1890, the overall Indigenous population was reduced to about 250,000 from tens of millions at the time of initial European invasion. In contrast, the colonizer's U.S. population had increased to 62,622,250 the same year.

The legal destruction of Indigenous sovereign nations was fulfilled in Supreme Court decisions by judge John Marshall who wrote in 1831 that the Cherokee Nation was not a foreign nation, but rather that "They may, more correctly, perhaps, be denominated domestic dependent nations... Their relationship to the United States resembles that of a ward to its guardian."

The U.S.'s genocidal military campaigns known collectively as the "Indian Wars" supposedly came to an end in 1924. That same year U.S. Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act (ICA) which granted citizenship to Indigenous Peoples but still allowed for states to determine if they could vote. As a result, some states barred Indigenous Peoples from voting until 1957. Until passage of the ICA, which was a regulatory action approved with no hearings, Indigenous Peoples were considered "Domestic Subjects" of the U.S. Government.

The Haudeneshonee Confederacy completely rejected imposition of U.S. citizenship through the IAC and called it an act of treason.

Joseph Heath, General Counsel of the Onondaga Nation, writes, "The Onondaga Nation and the Haudenosaunee have never accepted the authority of the United States to make Six Nations citizens become citizens of the United States, as claimed in the Citizenship Act of 1924. We hold three treaties with the United States: the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the 1789 Treaty of Fort Harmor and the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua. These treaties clearly recognize the Haudenosaunee as separate and sovereign Nations. Accepting United States citizenship would be treason to their own Nations, a violation of the treaties and a violation of international law..."

They rejected the ICA and "resisted its implementation immediately after its adoption, because they had the historical and cultural understanding that it was merely the latest federal policy aimed at taking their lands and at forced assimilation."

Heath further adds, "For over four centuries the Haudenosaunee have maintained their sovereignty, against the onslaught of colonialism and assimilation, and they have continued with their duties as stewards of the natural world. They have resisted removal and allotment; they have preserved their language and culture; they have not accepted the dictates of Christian churches; and they have rejected forced citizenship."

It's important to note, and paradoxical, that the colonizing architects of the U.S. constitution were influenced heavily by the Haudeneshonee Confederacy.

Zane Jane Gordon of the Wyandotte Nation critiqued the ICA at the time it was passed, "No government organized . . . can incorporate into its citizenship anybody or bodies without the[ir] formal consent...The Indians are organized in the form of 'nations,' and it has treaties with [other] nations as such. Congress cannot embrace them into the citizenship of the Union by a simple act."

In Challenging American Boundaries: Indigenous People and the "Gift" of U.S. Citizenship, Kevin Bruyneel writes that Tuscarora Chief Clinton Rickard, who strongly opposed passage of the ICA, "was also encouraged by the fact that 'there was no great rush among my people to go out and vote in white man's elections.'" Rickard stated, "By our ancient treaties, we expected the protection of the government. The white man had obtained most of our land and we felt he was obliged to provide something in return, which was protection of the land we had left, but we did not want to be absorbed and assimilated into his society. United States citizenship was just another way of absorbing us and destroying our customs and our government. . . . We feared citizenship would also put our treaty status in jeopardy and bring taxes upon our land. How can a citizen have a treaty with his own government. . . . This was a violation of our sovereignty. Our citizenship was in our own nations."

Haudeneshonee also voiced opposition to imposition of U.S. citizenship policies due to separation of their Nation by the Canadian border. These impacts are still faced by Indigenous Peoples whose lands are bisected by both the Canadian and Mexican borders. The imposition of citizenship has politically segregated their people along colonial lines.

Perhaps one of the clearest illustrations of assimilationist strategies regarding citizenship and voting comes from Henry S. Pancoast, one of the founders of the Christian white supremacist group, the Indian Rights Association (IRA). Pancoast stated, "Nothing [besides United States Citizenship] will so tend to assimilate the Indian and break up his narrow tribal allegiance, as making him feel that he has a distinct right and voice in the white man's nation."

The IRA's initial stated objective was to "bring about the complete civilization of the Indians and their admission to citizenship." The IRA considered themselves reformists and successfully lobbied Congress to establish the boarding school system, pass the Dawes Act, reform the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and pass the Indian Reorganization Act of 1834.

U.S. citizenship was imposed to destroy Indigenous sovereignty and facilitate mass-scale land theft. To this day, the "Native vote" is bound to assimilationist conditions that serve colonial interests.

Assimilation: The Strategy of Enfranchisement

Historic acts of voter suppression appear to contradict the strategy of assimilation, after all, if white settler politicians desired so much for Indigenous Peoples to become citizens, why then would they actively disenfranchise them at the same time? This is the underlying contradiction of colonialism in the U.S. that has been articulated as the "Indian Problem," or more bluntly, the question of annihilation or assimilation?

As previously mentioned, it wasn't until 1957 that Indigenous Peoples could vote in every U.S. state.

According to Katherine Osborn, "Some states borrowed the language of the U.S. Constitution in Article 1, Section 2, which bars 'Indians not taxed' from citizenship and used it to deny voting rights. Legislators in Idaho, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico and Washington withheld the franchise from their Indigenous citizens because those who were living on reservation lands did not pay property taxes. In New Mexico, Utah and Arizona, state officials argued that living on a reservation meant that Indians were not actually residents of the state, which prevented their political participation."

Osborn adds, "Article 7, Section 2, of the Arizona constitution stated, 'No person under guardianship, non-compos mentis, or insane shall be qualified to vote in any election.' Arizona lawmakers understood this as prohibiting Indians from voting because they were allegedly under federal guardianship on their reservations."

Early U.S. citizenship policy regarding Indigenous Peoples was clear; disenfranchisement would remain until we assimilated and abandoned our tribal statuses. Disenfranchisement was and is a strategy that sets conditions for assimilation. Suppression of political participation has historically been the way the system regulates and maintains itself. White supremacists that controlled the politics of areas where large Indigenous populations feared that they would become minority subjects in their own democratic system. They often subverted enfranchisement in violent ways, but this was never really a threat due to how embedded white supremacy has been in the totality of the U.S. settler colonial project.

It's not that settler society has capitulated to Indigenous interests, it's that Indigenous Peoples-whether through force or attrition-have been subsumed into the U.S. polity.

Perhaps no place is this more clear than through the establishment of Tribal Councils. For example, in 1923, the Navajo Tribal Council was created in order to legitimize resource extraction by the U.S. government. According to a report filed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the tribal council was "created in part so that oil companies would have some legitimate representatives of the Navajos through whom they could lease reservation lands on which oil had been discovered. The Navajo Nation Oil and Gas Company's website states, "In 1923, a Navajo tribal government was established primarily for the Bureau of Indian Affairs to approve lease agreements with American oil companies, who [sic] were eager to begin oil operations on Navajo lands."

In order to fulfill and maintain colonial domination and exploitation, colonizers shape and control the political identity of Indigenous Peoples. Capitalists facilitated and preyed on the dissolution of Indigenous autonomy. The cost of citizenship has always been our sovereignty, the conditions of citizenship have always been in service to white supremacy.

The cost of citizenship has always been our sovereignty, the conditions of citizenship have always been in service to white supremacy.

That Indigenous Peoples were granted the right to vote in 1924, yet our religious practices were outlawed until 1979 is one of many examples of the incongruency of Indigenous political identity in the so-called U.S.

Suffrage movements in the U.S. have fought for equal participation in the political system but have failed to indict and abolish the systems of oppression that underpin settler-colonial society. After decades of organizing, white women celebrated suffrage in 1920, which was granted in part as a reward for their service in World War 1. Hetero-patriarchy was not dismantled and Black folx were purposefully disregarded in their campaigning.

Lucy Parsons, an Afro-Indigenous anarchist was among many who critiqued suffrage at the time. Parsons wrote in 1905, "Can you blame an Anarchist who declares that man-made laws are not sacred?...The fact is money and not votes is what rules the people. And the capitalists no longer care to buy the voters, they simply buy the 'servants' after they have been elected to 'serve.' The idea that the poor man's vote amounts to anything is the veriest delusion.The ballot is only the paper veil that hides the tricks."

Black folx suffered decades of white supremacist "Jim Crow Laws" that enforced racial segregation and were designed to suppress their political power. These racist laws didn't end until the powerful mobilizations of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The U.S. government handed down legislation in the 50s and 60s including the 1965 voting rights act, which was critiqued by revolutionary Black Nationalists such as Malcom X, "The ballot or the bullet. If you're afraid to use an expression like that, you should get on out of the country; you should get back in the cotton patch; you should get back in the alley. They get all the Negro vote, and after they get it, the Negro gets nothing in return."

Radical movements have either faced extreme state violence and repression or have been systematically assimilated into the U.S. political milieu. The non-profit industrial complex has operated as an unspoken ally of U.S. imperialism in efforts of suppression and pacification (see The Revolution Will Not Be Funded by INCITE!). Perhaps this is the U.S. political machinery's method of reducing harm or impact from effective social and environmental justice movements. If they can't kill or imprison the organizers, then fold them into the bureaucracy or turn their struggles into businesses. At the end of the day, not everyone can be white supremacists, but everyone can be capitalists.

So long as the political and economic system remains intact, voter enfranchisement, though perhaps resisted by overt white supremacists, is still welcomed so long as nothing about the overall political arrangement fundamentally changes. The facade of political equality can occur under violent occupation, but liberation cannot be found in the occupier's ballot box. In the context of settler colonialism voting is the "civic duty" of maintaining our own oppression. It is intrinsically bound to a strategy of extinguishing our cultural identities and autonomy.

The ongoing existence of Indigenous Peoples is the greatest threat to the U.S. settler colonial project, that we may one day rise up and assert our sovereign position with our lands in refutation of the Doctrine of Discovery.

In Custer Died for your Sins, Vine Deloria Jr. idealized "Indigenous peoples not as passive recipients of civil rights and incorporation into the nation-state but as colonized peoples actively demanding decolonization."

You can't decolonize the ballot

Since the idea of U.S. "democracy" is majority rule, barring an extreme population surge, Indigenous voters will always be at the mercy "of good intentioned" political allies. Consolidating the Native vote into a voting bloc that aligns with whatever settler party, politician, or law that appears to do less harm isn't a strategy to exercise political power, it's Stockholm syndrome.

The Native vote also seeks to produce Native politicians. And what better way to assimilate rule then with a familiar face? The strategy of voting Indigenous Peoples into a colonial power structure is not an act of decolonization, it's a fulfillment of it. We have a history of our people being used against us by colonial forces, particularly with assimilated Indigenous Peoples acting as "Indian Scouts" to aid the enemy's military. In only one recorded instance, Ndee (Cibicue Apache) Army Scouts mutinied against the U.S. when they were asked to fight their own people. Three of the Ndee scouts were executed as a result.

No matter what you are led to believe by any politician seeking office, at the end of the day they are sworn to uphold an oath to the very system that was designed to destroy us and our ways of life. The oath for members of Congress states, "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God."

Even if we assume that their cultural values and intentions are in line with those of the people, it is rare that politicians are not tied to a string of funders. As soon as they get elected they are also faced with unrelenting special interest lobbying groups that have millions and millions of dollars behind them and, even if they have stated the best intentions, are inevitably outnumbered by their political peers.

A less harmful form of colonial occupation is fantasy. The process of colonial undoing will not occur by voting. You cannot decolonize the ballot.

Today we have candidates that were elected making promises to stop the mass scale kidnapping and murdering of Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people and what do they propose? They don't indict the resource colonizers destroying our lands whose very industry is precipitating this crisis of human trafficking and extreme gender violence. They don't propose ending capitalism and resource colonialism. They propose laws and more cops with more power to enforce those laws in our communities, so although we have an epidemic of police violence and murders against our peoples, Indigenous politicians address one violent crisis by making another one worse for our people. It's the fulfillment of the assimilationist cultural genocide of "killing the Indian to save the man." With that vote, the willful participation and sanctioning of the violence of this system, you kill the Indian and become "the man."

Tribal, local, and regional politics are situated in the same colonial arrangement that benefits the ruling class: politicians are concerned with rules and ruling, police and military enforce, judges imprison. Regardless of who and on what scale, no politician can ever represent Indigenous lifeways within the context of a political system established by colonialism.

A less harmful form of colonial occupation is fantasy. The process of colonial undoing will not occur by voting. You cannot decolonize the ballot.

Rejecting settler colonial authority, aka not voting.

Voting in the colonizer's elections keeps Indigenous Peoples powerless.

Our power, broadly speaking, does not come from non-consensual majority rule top-down man-made laws but is derived in relation with and proportion to all living beings. This is a corporeal and spiritual power that has been in effect since time immemorial and is what has kept Indigenous Peoples alive in the face of more than 500 years of extreme colonial violence.

The late Ben Carnes, a powerful Choctaw advocate, is quoted in an article about the Native vote by Mark Maxey stating, "My position is that I am not a citizen of a government who perpetuates that lie that we are. Slavery was legal just as well as Jim Crow, but just because it is law doesn't make it right. We didn't ask for it, the citizenship act was imposed upon us as another step in their social and mental conditioning of Native people to confiscate them of their identity. It was also a legislative method of circumventing the 'Indians not taxed' clause of the Constitution, thereby justifying imposing taxes. The U.S. electoral system is a very diseased method where candidates can be purchased by the highest corporate (contributor) bidder. The mentality of voting for the lesser of two evils is a false standard to justify the existence of only a two-party system. Checks and balances are lacking to ensure that public servants abide by the will of the people. The entire thing needs to be scrapped as well as the government itself."

Voting will never be "harm reduction" while colonial occupation & U.S. imperialism reigns. In order to heal we have to stop the harm from occurring, not lessen it. This doesn't mean simply abstinence or ignoring the problem until it just goes away, it means developing and implementing strategies and maneuvers that empower Indigenous People's autonomy.

Since we cannot expect those selected to rule in this system to make decisions that benefit our lands and peoples, we have to do it ourselves. Direct action, or the unmediated expression of individual or collective desire, has always been the most effective means by which we change the conditions of our communities.

What do we get out of voting that we cannot directly provide for ourselves and our people? What ways can we organize and make decisions that are in harmony with our diverse lifeways? What ways can the immense amount of material resources and energy focused on persuading people to vote be redirected into services and support that we actually need? What ways can we direct our energy, individually and collectively, into efforts that have immediate impact in our lives and the lives of those around us?

This is not only a moral but a practical position and so we embrace our contradictions. We're not rallying for a perfect prescription for "decolonization" or a multitude of Indigenous Nationalisms, but for a great undoing of the settler colonial project that comprises the United States of America so that we may restore healthy and just relations with Mother Earth and all her beings. Our tendency is towards autonomous anti-colonial struggles that intervene and attack the critical infrastructure that the U.S. and its institutions rest on. Interestingly enough, these are the areas of our homelands under greatest threat by resource colonialism. This is where the system is most prone to rupture, it's the fragility of colonial power. Our enemies are only as powerful as the infrastructure that sustains them. The brutal result of forced assimilation is that we know our enemies better than they know themselves. What strategies and actions can we devise to make it impossible for this system to govern on stolen land?

We aren't advocating for a state-based solution, redwashed European politic, or some other colonial fantasy of "utopia." In our rejection of the abstraction of settler colonialism. we don't aim to seize colonial state power but to abolish it.

We seek nothing but total liberation.
Sources:
Principles of Harm Reduction, Harm Reduction Coalition
The Citizenship Act of 1924, Joseph Heath, Esq. General Counsel of the Onondaga Nation
To Silence a Drum: The Imposition of United States Citizenship on Native Peoples, Alexandra Witkin
Challenging American Boundaries: Indigenous People and the "Gift" of U.S. Citizenship, Kevin Bruyneel
Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, Vine Deloria Jr
Indian Rights Association, Encyclopedia.com
Indigenous Act helped complete the work of the 19th Amendment, asunow.asu.edu
The Ballot Humbug, Lucy Parsons
The Ballot or the Bullet, Malcom X
Act Responsibly: Don't Vote!, Wendy McElroy
Voting vs. Direct Action, CrimethInc
Anarchists, Is It Really Our Duty To Vote, Worker Solidarity Movement
Indigenous votes matter, Mark Maxey

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Voting is Not Harm Reduction - An Indigenous Perspective

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Voting is Not Harm Reduction An Indigenous Perspective February 2020 - www.indigenousaction.org Zine format printable PDF download: Voting is Not Harm Reduction Zine-FINAL-PRINT (9.8MB) When proclamations are made that "voting is harm reduction," it's never clear how less harm is actuall

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There has been contrasting debates on the effect that coronavirus will have on populism within both academia and the media. Some have argued that coronavirus could hinder populist movements because  the pandemic has reinforced the importance of institutions and expertise (Wright & Campbell, 2020). The guardian article below suggests on the contrary, that we may see a rise of a new wave of populism.

He looks comparatively at the economic crisis we are entering to the 2008 crash and shows that economic and political failures are almost always linked.

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A global wave of injustice could follow the global pandemic. Pre-existing tendencies towards monopoly, Chinese dominance and predatory capitalism will explode unless governments take measures to contain them. I accept that it is hard to imagine public fury at a rigged economy when voters are rallying to their leaders and lockdowns are enjoying overwhelming support. Solidarity cannot last, however, as the crisis accentuates the division between insiders and outsiders.

You see them now. Employees with staff jobs, and the ability to work from home, are coping, for the moment. A few might experience lockdown as something close to a holiday and rhapsodise on the joys of home baking and box sets. As insiders stay inside, they save the money they would have spent in shops, restaurants, hotels and travel agents - the places where the insecure, the luckless nine out of 10 in the bottom half of earners who cannot work from home, once made their livings.

What applies to individuals applies to corporations and private equity funds that are strong enough to buy up distressed assets at a fraction of their pre-crisis value. I sat up and paid attention last week when I heard Sebastian Mallaby of the US Council on Foreign Relations warn that private equity is likely "to play both sides": soaking up government largesse and profiting from market mayhem. It won't, he concluded, "look great when we consider the political economy of the pandemic a year from now".

You catch a glimpse of the future in the manoeuvres of the US private equity firms thinking of deploying hundreds of billions of dollars they hold in reserve as high-interest loans to struggling companies. The arguments this month about a Chinese state-owned investment firm buying up the British chip manufacturer Imagination Technologies are a further harbinger of a possible world to come. The Chinese Communist Party's " 2025 Made in China " strategy sees it leapfrogging the west by taking over companies and establishing a global lead in smart manufacturing, digitisation and emerging technologies. Covid-19 gives the party the opportunity it needs. Funds and states are operating in a market where the tendency towards monopoly was already established.

The 2008 crash, like recessions before it, concentrated economic power, as large firms used their resources and access to finance to ensure their survival. But, unlike in the last century, a multitude of rival businesses did not emerge once recession had passed, to provide competition and new employment opportunities for workers wanting to raise their wages by switching firms. In 2016, according to the Resolution Foundation, Britain's 100 biggest firms accounted for 23% of total revenue across the economy, up by a quarter since 2004. As the economic crisis we are entering looks worse than 2008, worse indeed than anything anyone alive can remember, the rise of corporate giants seems assured. Big governments - and this crisis is making governments bigger than ever - will welcome them, because they want the convenience of dealing with big businesses, not with tens of thousands of small and medium-size firms.

Complaints about tax-exile billionaires wanting other people's money are a warning

Do you begin to see how popular fury might build? Vulture capitalists swooping on undervalued assets. Chinese communists, who censored news of Covid-19 rather than alerting the world, benefiting rather than suffering. Big business trampling over all who might challenge it. It's not a recipe for social peace.

Superficially, the crisis of 2020 does not appear anything like the financial crisis of 2007-08 and not only because it threatens to bring an incomparably greater level of impoverishment. Then there were human villains: bankers and captured regulators who broke the financial system, northern Europeans who congratulated themselves as they let southern Europe collapse. Now there's just an invisible infectious agent that wants only to replicate itself. The similarities remain striking, for all that. Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, like leaders across the west, weren't interested in jailing bankers or making them pay back their bonuses. Their sole concern was to stop the collapse of the banking system. The morality of the bailout could wait - forever, as it turned out. Everywhere in the west, the public reaction was the same. Democracy was a racket. Taxpayers had to rescue the richest people in the world and then suffer years of stagnant wages and cut public services to meet the bill. If you need a one-line explanation for populism, this is the best there is.

Yet again, vast amounts of public money are being committed, but instead of stagnation we face catastrophe. Nervous commentators reference how the Great Depression of the 1930s fuelled nazism and communism, as 2008 fuelled populism, and dread what awaits us. They should know there is no necessary link between economic and political failure. Far from enabling tyranny, the economic crisis of the 1970s, for instance, saw the end of the rightwing tyrannies in Spain, Portugal and Greece and the beginning of the decline and fall of the Soviet empire. Our future depends not only on the work of scientists but on the efforts of governments to stop democracy turning into a swindle.

The EU says countries must ensure that big business doesn't use state funding to buy out rivals and adds that nation states should take stakes in companies threatened with Chinese takeovers. However the UK's relationship with the EU ends, that's good advice.

Governments should not forget natural justice as they did in 2008. Complaints about tax-exile billionaires in the Richard Branson mould wanting other people's money are a warning, not a tabloid distraction. If, as seems likely, the government moves from subsidising wages to direct loans to big business, the first question must be what do taxpayers, employees and wider society gain in return.

Sociologists talk of the " Matthew effect ", an idea lifted from Saint Matthew's account of the most unChristian words Jesus uttered: "For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away." Our task is to make sure this miserable prophecy is not now vindicated.

* Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist
Topics

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Beware a new wave of populism, born out of coronavirus-induced economic inequity | Nick Cohen

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A global wave of injustice could follow the global pandemic. Pre-existing tendencies towards monopoly, Chinese dominance and predatory capitalism will explode unless governments take measures to contain them. I accept that it is hard to imagine public fury at a rigged economy when voters are rallying to their leaders and lockdowns are enjoying overwhelming support.

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This week, I am sharing the 2016 documentary 'politics, instructions manual' which follows the spanish left-wing political party 'Podemos' into parliament. Podemos quickly rose to power only two years after their creation and many would attribute to Pablo Iglesias, the leader of podemos. Podemos in spain, for many are seen as representatives of the people, their name literally translates to 'we can'.

This probes us to think about the horseshoe theory in populist discourse, in which some would argue that we can have both left wing and right wing populism and at the extreme end of both they begin to look the same. However, it also evokes the question of what the differences and similiarities of populism and nationalism are. Also what the key differences are betweem left-wing populism and right-wing populism and why this is important to understand in anthropology.

This is also linked to my other padlet post this week on social media and populism. Populism relies heavily on symbolism and the defining of a single symbol people can relate to. In this case,  Iglesias is seen as the symbol of the movement, and this has been amplified mainly through social media.

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POLITICS, INSTRUCTION MANUAL Trailer | Festival 2016

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The podcast linked below questions social media's impact on the rise of populism by looking specifically at memes.

Memes (defined here as simplified messages known to spread virally online) can act as powerful tools for political propaganda. Memes have the ability to simplify political discourse into things  being 'good' or 'bad', with little room for nuance.

Social media can be seen as the 'voice of the underdog', a space where people with no organisational affiliation can share their voices and find others who have a shared interest. This can be a breeding ground for populism.

Social media was a huge factor in Donald Trump's rise to power and a good example of how social media and memes can act as a tool for populist movements.

"Memes are central to group identification" which means they can be the perfect way to elevate a populist movement.

I would argue that social media is a big factor in the rise of populism due to many online users occupying online echo chambers. This means that voters no longer have a shared reality as they are often living in seperate online bubbles which have formed a new reality. This makes it easier for populist leaders to thrive.

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The people's memes: how social media and populism are changing our lives - tech podcast

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"People Make Glasgow" is a slogan created in 2013 by the city council. The image below is the sign installed on the Met Tower for the 2014 commnwealth games.
This branding as generally be a popular one, it pays homage to the idea that people literally made glasgow by building many of the famous establishments and also through industry. It also places 'people' at the heart of what makes Glasgow Glasgow.

In Glasgow, roughly 1 in 3 children are living in poverty and, as discussed in week 5's padlet, it is home to 'the glasgow effect'. The branding of 'people make glasgow' is focused within the city centre around high end shopping areas and restaurants. Many of the 'people' who make glasgow through industry are absent from these places and have been pushed to the outskirts of the city. The shops that surround this branding are not owned by people of Glasgow but instead big profit businesses such as Apple, Nike.

Although this is not the same usage of the people that we see in populism. I think it's still interesting to look at the ways concepts of 'the people' are used through marketing.

This reaffirms the notion that many bodies of power (in this case Glasgow council) rely on being seen to represent 'the people' as a single homogenous group.

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This week, following the discussions on the consequences on violence and looking at how anthoroplogists have grappled with this topic often without showing or talking explicitly about violence, I wanted to share this 1993 art installation By Chris Burden titled 'uniform'.  This piece was made after the attack on Rodney King in the US which sparked riots. It is made to fit someone 7ft 4, signifying dominance and authority. Art like this instigates interesting points within the topic of violence- as the uniform becomes a symbol of violence without ever explicitly seeing forms of violence and their consequences. However, as Chris Burden, was a successful and wealthy artist at the time, who had not felt the direct impact of police violence due to his position, it leads us to question whether it is appropriate that he base so much of his work on police violence. I think this is an important question for anthropology too: Where is the line between your work being the voices of your informants, to profiting from and appropriating the violent experiences of others?

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L.A.P.D. Uniform, 1993

Fabric, leather, wood, metal and plastic

New York, Beverly Hills, San Francisco, London, Paris, Le Bourget, Geneva, Basel, Rome, Athens, Central, Hong Kong

© 2017 Chris Burden / licensed by The Chris Burden Estate and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Los Angeles-based conceptual artist Chris Burden is well-known for his performance art pieces of the 1970s, including Shoot (1971), a response to the Vietnam War in which he had a friend shoot him in the arm with a .22-caliber rifle. In other works of self-peril, the artist was electrocuted, kidnapped, nailed, drowned, or lay immobile under a sheet of glass. Influenced by Marcel Duchamp and Dadaism and his interest in science and engineering, Burden has also created installations, models, toys, and kinetic and static sculptures, such as a rubber-band-powered model plane launched within a Concorde in flight.

Los Angeles-based conceptual artist Chris Burden is well-known for his performance art pieces of the 1970s, including Shoot (1971), a response to the Vietnam War in which he had a friend shoot him in the arm with a .22-caliber rifle. In other works of self-peril, the artist was electrocuted, kidnapped, nailed, drowned, or lay immobile under a sheet of glass. Influenced by Marcel Duchamp and Dadaism and his interest in science and engineering, Burden has also created installations, models, toys, and kinetic and static sculptures, such as a rubber-band-powered model plane launched within a Concorde in flight.

L.A.P.D. Uniform, 1993

Fabric, leather, wood, metal and plastic

New York, Beverly Hills, San Francisco, London, Paris, Le Bourget, Geneva, Basel, Rome, Athens, Central, Hong Kong

Skip to beginning of content

Other works by Chris Burden

Other works from Gagosian

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Chris Burden | L.A.P.D. Uniform (1993) | Artsy

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Fabric, leather, wood, metal and plastic New York, Beverly Hills, San Francisco, London, Paris, Le Bourget, Geneva, Basel, Rome, Athens, Central, Hong Kong © 2017 Chris Burden / licensed by The Chris Burden Estate and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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I would argue that Trump's denounciation of the 2020 election result is a form of populist tactic. However, that is not to say that elections are representative of democracy. The below article from April this year, discusses how one apolitical women fought to end 'gerrymandering' in Michigin.

"While the practice of politicians redrawing district lines in their favor dates to the early 1800s in Massachusetts, recent technology has taken gerrymandering in America to the extreme. Now, following each decennial census count, it’s legal for state politicians to hire mapmakers to use software that precisely manipulates bizarrely squiggled districts"

Gerrymandering highlights just one way that the electoral college fails to accurately represent voters.

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or many years Michigan was divided evenly along party lines - a checkerboard of red and blue every election. Then, in 2011, Michigan's Republican party legally rigged the system. Charged with drawing new district lines, the lawmakers did so with unprecedented precision - carving unnatural boundaries to keep their favored voters and locales in hand - to guarantee a majority for their party.

It worked perfectly. The process of creating these doctored maps, known as gerrymandering, resulted in widespread victories for the Republicans. The party controlled almost every level of government, from the state supreme court to municipal workers. And with tangible impact on Michigan's people: the Flint water crisis, which killed 12 people, happened because party legislators appointed emergency managers whom voters opposed.

But in 2016, a then 26-year-old with no political experience uprooted the system.

Katie Fahey hates politics. She can't stand cable news punditry. She has little confidence in any of the 2020 presidential candidates. And she refuses to identify with a political party. But she dedicated two years of her life to launching and leading a grassroots campaign that started with a Facebook post and, against the odds, ended gerrymandering in Michigan.

"Part of the problem we have right now is everybody's looking for a savior, whether it's an individual politician or a political party," Fahey said. "We as a whole aren't working as hard to make sure that our voice is staying at the table and that we are watching what's being done."

In hindsight, it's easy to see why thousands flocked to her passionate message in Michigan - and why film-makers found Fahey the perfect anchor for their gerrymandering documentary Slay the Dragon, named for the oddly shaped district in Massachusetts created by the man who gerrymandering its name, former vice-president Elbridge Gerry. The film arrives on demand on 3 April.

But for Fahey, being a young woman and a political outsider meant she faced an uphill battle to reform the redistricting process every step of the way.

***

Fahey's political frustration reached a boiling point after the 2016 presidential election. She had flown from Michigan to New York in a red pantsuit on 8 November, expecting to celebrate the first female president at Hillary Clinton campaign's watch party. Instead, she was left stunned by Donald Trump's victory. And she dreaded spending Thanksgiving with her extended, politically divided family in their home town just outside Detroit.

Born Katie Rogala, her family mostly steered clear of politics during her childhood in Livonia, Michigan, though her dad's veteran status meant patriotism surrounded them. Fahey considered herself an independent, and worked at a recycling coalition after college, doing improvisational comedy - even starting an improv festival from scratch. (She married her improv co-star Sean Fahey in 2013, but the pair recently divorced.)

That year, eager to find a unifying topic to focus on over turkey and stuffing, Fahey turned her attention to gerrymandering. "I didn't want to talk about who we voted for because that was always leading back to literally people being like, 'You're evil for thinking that way,'" Fahey said. "So I thought, man, I wonder if systemic reform, getting back to one person, one vote would be something that appeals to everybody."

Katie Fahey in Slay the Dragon. Photograph: Participant Media

While the practice of politicians redrawing district lines in their favor dates to the early 1800s in Massachusetts, recent technology has taken gerrymandering in America to the extreme. Now, following each decennial census count, it's legal for state politicians to hire mapmakers to use software that precisely manipulates bizarrely squiggled districts - resembling everything from a praying mantis to Goofy kicking Donald Duck - to cram their opponents into a limited area or otherwise guarantee votes.

Michigan is one of the most gerrymandered states in the US. Leaked emails have even revealed a Republican aide boasted about packing "Dem garbage" into select districts during the 2011 GOP legislative redrawing.

On 11 November 2016, Fahey posted a Facebook status: "I'd like to take on gerrymandering in Michigan, if you're interested in doing this as well, please let me know :)." Within hours, she'd created a new Facebook group and soon, the non-partisan Voters Not Politicians (VNP) was born. Fahey was the face of a movement. Well, almost.

For the next few months, Fahey never met her supporters. They strategized and bonded online, something Fahey said helped build her confidence because "it's easier to be vulnerable behind a screen". But by March 2017, she and her fellow volunteers were ready to hold meetings across the state asking residents how they would like to see a new redistricting system work.

"Everybody just thought that was absolutely absurd that you would talk to people before changing the constitution," she said of the skepticism her plan received from political insiders. "[I thought] isn't this how democracy works?"

It's in those meetings that Fahey's improv experience came in handy. She had an ease onstage, and in front of crowds - rumors even circulated that she was a paid actor, a plant supplied by the Democrats and that her whole Facebook-origin story was an elaborate hoax. "A lot of people were more skeptical and more dismissive of us being able to be the 'real deal' because of my age and gender," she said.

A lot of people were more skeptical and more dismissive of us being able to be the 'real deal' because of my age and gender

Katie Fahey

Voters Not Politicians' final proposal emerged after 33 days: take the power out of the politicians' hands, starting with the 2021 redistricting, by creating a 13-person citizens' committee, composed of four Republicans, four Democrats and five unaffiliated people.

But that was just the beginning. To get it on the ballot as a proposed constitutional amendment in the November 2018 midterm election, they would need 315,000 signatures in the next 180 days and, with limited funds and virtually no experience, they were starting at a huge disadvantage. "Normally, before you'd announce, you'd have your constitutional language written and you would have raised millions of dollars," Fahey says. "Literally, we had just opened our bank account the day before because we couldn't figure out how."

An undeterred and perpetually smiling Fahey led 4,000 volunteers, many of whom had also never been politically active, to contribute their skills, down to the woodcarver who helped make their clipboards. Jennifer Lawrence and Arnold Schwarzenegger chimed in with support. Even Republican voters and legislators were eager to sign and "the only people who would ever say no were usually people who were involved in the redistricting process before or somehow really, really involved in partisan politics".

"Without Katie, I believe, we would not have been successful," said Hal Gurian, a Republican from Traverse City who volunteered for the campaign. "She was a hands-on leader who worked diligently with as many volunteers as she had time to meet personally or talk with on the phone."

Defying predictions, Voters Not Politicians managed to get more than 425,000 signatures two months before the deadline. On election day, the proposal, Prop 2, passed with a sweeping 61% of the vote.

"People don't realize their own power. A lot of people, especially women, in the campaign, were so reluctant to go into leadership positions," Fahey says, noting that after the campaign ended "we had, like, 17 people who ended up running for local office".

Next year, Michigan's district lines will be redrawn by voters, not politicians for the first time.

***

Slay the Dragon will be released this week during a census year - when the US population will be carefully counted in order to determine the size of electoral districts next year.

It's clear that Fahey's hard-won movement is a threat to Republicans across the country during that process. Michigan's Republican party and activists continue to try and block the change with multiple lawsuits, claiming it is unconstitutional and discriminatory.

But Fahey is hoping the momentum from VNP can be replicated in the 35 other states that still use congressional redistricting. She self-identifies as a "democracy entrepreneur". (That label worn by anyone else could seem insufferable, but on Fahey, who radiates an infectious earnestness, it works.) And she founded a national not-for-profit last year called the People, which hopes to create Katie 2.0s across the country by giving frustrated citizens the tools to tackle systemic issues they care about, such as the partisan primary process and election security.

To be successful, those initiatives might need people like Katie at the forefront. "She is an inspiring, motivating and tireless leader," Gurian said.

I'd be more excited about governing than I would about running or feeling like I have to follow the party line because that's just not me

Katie Fahey

While the impact of her work can't be measured quite yet, the ripple effects are clear. In early March, the Democrat-majority Virginia senate voted to relinquish their power in favor of a committee. Groups in Nebraska, Oregon, Arkansas and Oklahoma are currently pushing for reform.

Meanwhile Fahey keeps a surprisingly low profile from her home in Grand Rapids, which she shares with three rescue dogs. Though her platform started with a Facebook post, she has no public Instagram and a modest Twitter presence. Even the fact that she's the face of Slay the Dragon doesn't sit well with her. And don't expect her to run for office anytime soon. "I'd be more excited about governing than I would about running or feeling like I have to follow the party line because that's just not me," she said.

For now, she spends what little free time she has taking her dogs to the park or escaping from "real-world problems" with video games. Role-playing fantasies are her favorite, including, of course, Dragon Quest.

"I think what I like about them is - this is so dumb - you have these different characters who all play their role and even if there is a main character, your team is only stronger because everybody's bringing their strengths to the table," she says.

"That is just so how I live my life."

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How do you stop politicians from rigging the ballot? This woman knows

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or many years Michigan was divided evenly along party lines - a checkerboard of red and blue every election. Then, in 2011, Michigan's Republican party legally rigged the system. Charged with drawing new district lines, the lawmakers did so with unprecedented precision - carving unnatural boundaries to keep their favored voters and locales in hand - to guarantee a majority for their party.

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A few weeks ago, I listened to this episode of BBC 4 radio, in which they discuss Donald Trump's claims that he knows how to handle coronarvirus better since catching it himself as it is now his 'lived experience'. Although a very literal example of the term 'lived experience' being appropriated for politicalo purposes, it serves as a good place to discuss the limitations to this concept. I would argue that there are certain things that people have to experience to get a deep understanding of; structural racism, misogny, poverty,  or in this case violence. However, everything is contextual and I would argue that lived experience is only one form of authority. I would argue that having lived experience of violence in many cases will help us understand the roots of violence and those who commit acts of violence, however it's not the only value of understanding. In many cases, this claim of 'lived experience' can undermine politics as it is used as a tool of power. For example, the case of Donald Trump.

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Donald Trump claims to have a better understanding of coronavirus following his own diagnosis and treatment. In a video message he said, "I learned it by really going to school. This is the real school. This isn't the let's read the books school. I get it and I understand it."

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Farmer's analysis of structural violence this week made me think of this talk with Judith Butler discussing biopolitics and necropolitics and COVID-19.

Butler shows how the pandemic has higlighted structures of violence in which there is a fugitive form of sovereignty. This can be seen through the unequal stastics of deaths, with people of colour being more likely to die from covid. They also dicuss how covid may change the way many 'everyday' people view violence. Many of us now make daily decisions which could harm and even kill others- going out in large groups, wearing/ not wearing a mask, going to bars where we know we could pass on the virus to workers- Butler explains how although it is not as explicit as shooting people, we are constantly makking choices that could lead to anothers death. In this sense, I think covid has altered the way many people, mostly people in priviledged positions both economically and racially, see violence. We are constantly being made aware of 'sanatized deaths'.

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

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This recording of a UN seminar discusses political violence targeted at women. Although this seminar focuses generally on the victims of political violence (women), they look at the language used when peope talk about this issue. They discuss the fact that often when we talk about this issue we say 'violence against women' which situates the perpotrator outside of the picture. Whilst it's important to centre the victim/s of violence, we need to understand and engage with the people who commit acts of violence.

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Actors Or Victims? Understanding Political Violence Targeting Women

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This seminar presents novel data on political violence targeting women and discusses what these findings mean, both for Norway's efforts in the United Nations on protection and on women's participation in peace processes, and for research on political violence.

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Devji's paper on the terrorist in search for humanity reminded me of when the CIA released the contents of Osama Bin Laden's hard drive. Instantly this was shared across social media channels and made into edited memes and videos as many of the things downloaded were rather comical. For example 'cars' , 'chicken little 2'  and 'where in the world is osama bin laden'.

Understandably, it is funny. However I also think it's interesting that we see terrorists as being so far removed from humanity and what we think of as normality, that the idea of them enjoying a film is hilarious yet also quite disturbing. I feel that many people see terrorists as disney- style villians who only serve to plot evil acts, therefore the idea that they seek pleasure or find humour in the same ways we do can be hard to wrap our heads around.

However, you could also argue that we often find it harder to understand violence that comes from an 'other'. When our own politicians commit acts of terror on other countries, we still see them as multifaceted human beings carrying out a job. However, we very rarely humanise IS members, for example, in the same way. Understanding violence is not something that happens in a vacuum. It is almost always tied to concepts of race and power and it is these very concepts that build our understanding of violence and its perpetrators.

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1 November 2017

LANGLEY, VA - The CIA today released to the public nearly 470,000 additional files recovered in the May 2011 raid on Usama Bin Ladin's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. CIA Director Mike Pompeo authorized the release in the interest of transparency and to enhance public understanding of al-Qa'ida and its former leader. The files released today are available at: https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/

Today's release builds on prior releases of materials from the Abbottabad collection by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). In keeping with the 2014 Intelligence Authorization Act, which required ODNI to conduct a review of the documents for release, ODNI previously released documents from the collection on May 20, 2015, March 1, 2016, and January 19, 2017 after an interagency review spearheaded by CIA. These previously-released materials are available at https://www.dni.gov/index.php/features/bin-laden-s-bookshelf.

"Today's release of recovered al-Qa'ida letters, videos, audio files and other materials provides the opportunity for the American people to gain further insights into the plans and workings of this terrorist organization," said CIA Director Pompeo. "CIA will continue to seek opportunities to share information with the American people consistent with our obligation to protect national security."

The material contains audio, document, image, video and software operating system files. The material is posted in the original Arabic and in as close to the original form as possible, modified only so the files cannot be edited. Among other things, this release includes:

Usama Bin Ladin's personal journal and more than 18,000 document files.

Approximately 79,000 audio and image files, which include practice reels for public speeches, audio correspondence, and imagery gathered or generated by al-Qa'ida for a variety of purposes.

More than 10,000 video files, which include a video of Hamza Bin Ladin as a young adult, al-Qa'ida "home videos," draft videos or statements by Usama Bin Ladin, and jihadist propaganda.

These materials, like those in previous releases, provide insights into the origins of fissures that exist today between al-Qa'ida and ISIS; as well as strategic, doctrinal and religious disagreements within al-Qa'ida and its allies; and hardships that al-Qa'ida faced at the time of Bin Ladin's death. Other themes in the materials include:

Al-Qa'ida's preparations to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and the group's attempts to promulgate its message through Western media.

Al-Qa'ida's efforts to exploit the Arab Awakening for its benefit and that of the global jihad.

Bin Ladin's efforts to maintain unity within the group and among its affiliates, despite disagreements over tactics and doctrine.

Al-Qa'ida's efforts to rehabilitate its tarnished image among Muslims due its mistakes and negative media portrayals.

With today's release, the information remaining in the Abbottabad collection that has not been released publicly includes materials that are sensitive such that their release would directly damage efforts to keep the nation secure; materials protected by copyright; pornography; malware; and blank, corrupted and duplicate files. For example, some of the material being withheld from public release are the following copyrighted videos:

Antz

Batman Gotham Knight

BBC Great Wildlife Moments

Biography - Osama bin Laden

Cars

Chicken Little

CNN Presents: World's Most Wanted

Final Fantasy VII

Heroes of Tomorrow

Home on the Range

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

In the Footsteps of bin Laden - CNN

National Geographic: Kung Fu Killers

National Geographic: Inside the Green Berets

National Geographic: Predators at War

National Geographic: World's Worst Venom

Peru Civilization

Resident Evil

Storm Rider - Clash of the Evils

The Kremlin from Inside

The Story of India

The Three Musketeers

Where in the World is Osama bin Laden

The entire Abbottabad collection has been available to the U.S. Intelligence Community and to the Department of Defense for years.

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CIA Releases Nearly 470,000 Additional Files Recovered in May 2011 Raid on Usama Bin Ladin's Compound

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1 November 2017 LANGLEY, VA - The CIA today released to the public nearly 470,000 additional files recovered in the May 2011 raid on Usama Bin Ladin's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. CIA Director Mike Pompeo authorized the release in the interest of transparency and to enhance public understanding of al-Qa'ida and its former leader.

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"It is as if a malign vapour rises from the Clyde at night and settles in the lungs of sleeping Glaswegians" (The Economist, 2012).

"The Glasgow effect" refers to the fact that there is a line in Glasgow that if you pass the life expectancy rate decreases drasticly. Men in glasgow die on average a full seven years younger than UK counterparts. The main reason being poverty and high rates of suicides and drug overdoses (which many would argue are both symptoms of poverty). The Guardian article below suggests that the post-war urban planning in which they created various new and overpopulated towns has lead to poorer mental health and livelihood.

Many residents of these areas have lived there their whole life and have been exposed to violence, abuse and drug use from a young age. This has led  mental health problems and higher suicide rates and often works in a cycle.

The idea that poor urban planning will shorten the life span of many glasgwegians who have little to no choice in the matter expemplifies structural violence.

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If you live in Glasgow, you are more likely to die young. Men die a full seven years earlier than their counterparts in other UK cities. Until recently, the causes of this excess mortality remained a mystery.

"Deep-fried Mars bars," some have speculated. "The weather," others suggested. For years, those reasons were as good as any. In 2012, the Economist described it thus: "It is as if a malign vapour rises from the Clyde at night and settles in the lungs of sleeping Glaswegians."

The phenomenon has become known as the Glasgow effect. But David Walsh, a public health programme manager at the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, who led a study on the excess deaths in 2010, wasn't satisfied with how the term was being used. "It turned into a Scooby-Doo mystery but it's not an exciting thing," he says. "It's about people dying young, it's about grief."

You have to understand what sort of shape Glasgow was in. They thought the best approach was to start afresh

David Walsh, Glasgow Centre for Population Health

He wanted to work out why Glaswegians have a 30% higher risk of dying prematurely - that is, before the age of 65 - than those living in similar postindustrial British cities. In 2016 his team published a report looking at 40 hypotheses - from vitamin D deficiency to obesity and sectarianism. "The most important reason is high levels of poverty, full stop," says Walsh. "There's one in three children who are classed as living in poverty at the moment."

But even with deprivation accounted for, mortality rates in Glasgow remained inexplicable. Deaths in each income group are about 15% higher than in Manchester or Liverpool. In particular, deaths from "diseases of despair" - drug overdoses, suicides and alcohol-related deaths - are high. In the mid-2000s, after adjusting for sex, age and deprivation, there was almost a 70% higher mortality rate for suicide in Glasgow than in the two English cities.

Walsh's report strongly suggested a theory: that radical urban planning decisions from the 1950s onwards had made not just the physical but the mental health of Glasgow's population more vulnerable to the consequences of deindustrialisation and poverty.

Studies have consistently linked city living with poorer mental health. For example, growing up in an urban environment is correlated with twice the risk of developing schizophrenia as growing up in the countryside. And the unintended legacy of some urban planning exacerbates the already considerable challenges of living in a city - something 68% of the world's population will be doing by 2050, according to UN projections.

Are these urban dwellers doomed to poor mental health, or can planners design cities that will keep us healthy and happy? Can we learn from what happened in Glasgow?

New Towns, new problems

Postwar Glasgow was severely overcrowded. The 1945 Bruce report proposed solving this by housing people in high-rises on the periphery, while the following year's Clyde Valley report suggested encouraging workers and their families to move to new towns. In the end, the council did a combination of both: New Towns like East Kilbride and Cumbernauld are now among the most populous towns in Scotland; many of those who stayed in Glasgow were relocated to large housing estates such as Drumchapel, Easterhouse and Castlemilk.

This rapid change in the city's makeup was soon recognised as disastrous. Relocating workers and their families to new towns was described in mid-1960s parliamentary discussions as "skimming the cream". In an internal review in 1971, the Scottish Office noted that the manner of population reduction was "destined within a decade or so to produce a seriously unbalanced population with a very high proportion [in central Glasgow] of the old, the very poor and the almost unemployable..."

Housing estate in Drumchapel, Glasgow. Photograph: Alamy

Although the government was soon aware of the consequences, these were not necessarily intentional, says Walsh. "You have to understand what sort of shape Glasgow was in, in terms of the really lousy living conditions, the levels of overcrowded housing and all the rest of it," he says. "They thought the best approach was to just start afresh."

Anna left the tenements for a high-rise in Glasgow's Sighthill estate, where she has lived on and off since the mid-60s. She was a teenager when she moved with her mother and sister to a brand-new fourth-floor flat, picked from a bowler hat. It had two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen and a glass partition in the hallway. "It was like Buckingham Palace," remembers Anna. She is now 71, dressed in jeans and a denim shirt, with a blonde bob and a raspy cough that doubles as a laugh.

You're more likely to have violence, you're more likely to have conflict; even sexual abuse is much higher in households where there are drinkers

Carol Craig, author and researcher

Sighthill's 10 20-storey tower blocks were meant to herald the future. Set in parkland, with a view over the city, they would house more than 7,000 people drawn from the tenements and the slums.

Until then, the family had lived in a tenement building in nearby Roystonhill. "I slept with my mammy and my sister in a recess," she says. The toilet was shared.

But when the tenements went, something else went, too. "There were communities which had a social fabric, if you like, which were then broken up by these processes," says Walsh.

Anna recalls the change. "When we were in the tenements, you'd shout up to the window: 'Mammy, I want a piece of jam!' Before you knew it there was a dozen of them being thrown out of the window." In the tower block, she did not let her own children play unsupervised. Neighbours only spoke if they took the same lift. Her daughter was threatened with a bread knife.

Tenements in the Gorbals, Glasgow, in 1968. Photograph: David Newell Smith/The Observer

By the 2000s, the tower blocks were infamous for deprivation, violence and drugs. Many residents had moved out, including Anna and her family. Empty flats were used to rehouse asylum seekers. Fractures within the community were worsening. Glasgow Housing Association eventually decided to condemn the buildings, and the towers were demolished over eight years; the last one came down in 2016.

But the roots of Glasgow's excess mortality stretch back further - to the Industrial Revolution, argues Carol Craig, who has written two books on the subject. In Glasgow, then called the Second City of the Empire, factories and the docks needed workers. Overcrowding coupled with a culture of drinking produced an explosive situation.

Faced with the prospect of returning to a cramped tenement, many men preferred to visit the pub; there were few other public meeting places. "You're more likely to have violence, you're more likely to have conflict; even sexual abuse is much higher in households where there are drinkers," Craig says.

Being exposed in childhood to stressful events like domestic violence, parental abandonment, abuse, or drug and alcohol addictions is thought to be linked to poor mental and physical wellbeing in later life. The higher a person's number of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), the more likely they are to suffer from mental illness or addiction. In turn they are more likely to expose their children to similar types of experiences, she says: "ACEs tend to cascade through the generations."

High-rise brought low

In the early 20th century, cities were meant to show us how to live. Modern urban planning would make people in the world's cities healthier and happier. In 1933, the influential Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier published his blueprint for the ideal city. In contrast with the past, he said, the city would now be designed to benefit its residents "on both the spiritual and material planes".

In his "Radiant City", industrial, commercial and residential zones would be segregated to allow workers to escape pollution; homes would be surrounded by open green spaces to allow residents to meet; wide roads would be set out in a grid system; and high-rise blocks would help clear the slums, overcrowded and unsanitary places where the inhabitants were, as the architect put it, "incapable of initiating ameliorations".

Glasgow enthusiastically adopted these new buildings. In 1954 a delegation of councillors and planners visited Marseilles to see the Le Corbusier-designed Unité d'Habitation, an 18-storey block of flats and amenities resting on concrete stilts. Glasgow soon had the highest number of high-rise dwellings in the UK outside London.

Le Corbusier's 'Radiant City' project in Marseille. Photograph: Boris Horvat/AFP/Getty Images

Since Le Corbusier, we have learned more about how the design of buildings can affect behaviour. In an oft-cited study from 1973, the psychologist Andrew Baum looked at how the design of two student dormitories changed how the residents interacted. In the first design, all the students shared common lounge and bathroom facilities along a corridor. In the second, smaller groups of four to six each shared bathrooms and lounges.

Baum found that the first design was a "socially overloaded environment" that did not allow residents to regulate who they interacted with and when. Being faced with too many people, at times not of their choosing, led students to experience stress; they became less helpful and more antisocial than those in the second design as the year went on.

Mental health is almost uniformly worse in cities ... that's just what the data shows

Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, psychiatrist

Perhaps the most famous example of buildings' effects on their inhabitants still referenced today is the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St Louis, USA: 33 towers of 11 storeys each, inspired by Le Corbusier and designed by the modernist Minoru Yamasaki. Finished in 1956, it was initially seen as a miracle solution to inner-city living. Less than 20 years later, the social problems the blocks seemed to have spawned were deemed so irreparable that the local authorities imploded the buildings.

The architect Oscar Newman toured Pruitt-Igoe in 1971, a year before demolition started. He argued that the design of a building affected the extent to which residents contributed to its upkeep. If people feel responsible for both keeping an area clean and controlling who uses it, it is likely to be safer. He called this sense of ownership over a territory "defensible space".

"The larger the number of people who share a communal space, the more difficult it is for people to identify it as theirs or to feel they have a right to control or determine the activity taking place within it," Newman wrote. Pruitt-Igoe was not designed to accommodate defensible space, he argued. "Landings shared by only two families were well maintained, whereas corridors shared by 20 families ... were a disaster - they evoked no feelings of identity or control."

Part of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing development in St. Louis, Missouri, being demolished by dynamite charges in 1972. Photograph: Fred Waters/AP

Tower blocks with wealthier residents are less likely to have issues with defensible space: they can pay for cleaners and security guards. Children, on the other hand, are often most affected: these common areas - communal corridors, or landings, or the nearby park - are usually spaces for play.

During his inauguration as rector of Glasgow University in 1972, the Clydeside trade unionist Jimmy Reid argued powerfully that working-class communities left behind by economic advancement were being stored out of sight. "When you think of some of the high flats around us," he said, "it can hardly be an accident that they are as near as one could get to an architectural representation of a filing cabinet."

Newts in the city

Inequality is at its most conspicuous in cities: the very poor and the very rich live side-by-side yet separately. Relative social status is more likely to be the first measure by which we judge people in places where communities are more transient and inequality starker. This has been shown to have an impact on our psychological wellbeing.

In their book The Inner Level, epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard G Wilkinson argue that inequality not only creates social rupture by highlighting people's differences but also encourages competition, contributing to increased social anxiety. They cite a 2004 paper by two psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles - Sally Dickerson and Margaret Kemeny - who analysed 208 studies to find that tasks involving some threat of social evaluation affected stress hormones the most.

Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson: 'Inequality strikes at our health and happiness' | Dawn Foster

Pickett and Wilkinson argue that this type of stress harms our psychological health: "The more unequal countries had three times as much mental illness as the more equal ones." This affects people of all social classes. In high-inequality countries, such as the USA and the UK, even the richest 10% of people suffer more anxiety than any group in low-inequality countries except the poorest 10%.

Research has also shown that living in a city can alter our brain's architecture, making it more vulnerable to this type of social stress. In 2011, a team led by psychiatrist Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of Heidelberg University's Central Institute of Mental Health looked at the implications of urban living on brain biology, scanning the brains of students while they were given arithmetic tasks and simultaneously subjected to criticism on headphones.

The results of the test, designed to simulate social stress, were stark: the participants who lived in a city demonstrated a greater neurophysiological reaction, with the amygdala, an area of the brain which processes emotion, activated more strongly. Those who'd grown up in cities also displayed a stronger response in their perigenual anterior cingulate cortex, which regulates the amygdala and is associated with stress and negative emotion, than those brought up in towns or the countryside.

Meyer-Lindenberg's previous work on risk mechanisms in schizophrenia focused on genes. But these are only thought to account for a 20% increased chance of developing the illness at most - and growing up in a city is associated with double the risk. His research has shown that stressful experiences in early life correlate with reduced volume of grey matter in the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex, a factor often seen in people with schizophrenia.

"Mental health is almost uniformly worse in cities ... that's just what the data shows," Meyer-Lindenberg says. "There isn't really a bright side to this."

Lack of agency - the feeling that we don't have control over a situation - is one of the core mechanisms determining how strongly social stress is experienced, says Meyer-Lindenberg, adding: "People who are in leadership positions tend to cope better with a given amount of stress."

If you can see children, it's probably a healthy and happy city

Liz Zeidler, Happy City Initiative

In a city, and particularly if you are poor, you are far more dependent on other people and the urban infrastructure, whether waiting impatiently for a bus or a lift, wondering who you'll have to share a lift with in your high-rise complex, or hoping the local council will not choose your neighbourhood for redevelopment.

Cities can also of course be liberating. "The flip side of being more stressful is that they may be more stimulating," Meyer-Lindenberg says. "This tighter community that you have in a village, say, can be very oppressive if you don't feel like you belong, if you're an outsider of some sort."

Inequality has been shown to lower trust in others and damage social capital - the networks between people which allow societies to function effectively. People are so worried about security that they're mentally building walls around themselves, says Liz Zeidler, chief executive of the Happy City Initiative, a research centre based in Bristol. "We need to be doing the opposite: we need to be creating more and more spaces where people can connect, learn across their differences."

Happy City has designed a way to measure the local conditions shown to improve well-being. Its Thriving Places Index looks at housing, education, inequality, green space, safety and community cohesion.

Perhaps a good measure for the happiness of a place, Zeidler says, is the status of the "indicative species", an idea borrowed from the author and urbanist Charles Montgomery. For ponds, she says, it might be that the presence of a certain type of newt tells you whether or not the water is healthy. In cities, the newts are children: "If you can see children, it's probably a healthy and happy city."

The way a city is laid out can foster this environment, she says, by "closing of streets, making it more pedestrianised, more green spaces, having more what urban planners would call 'bumping spaces', where you can literally bump into people. Slowing places down is really good for everybody's wellbeing and, obviously, you then see more children on the streets."

'The city will get what it invites'

Without looking at the car swinging towards him, the urban planner Christopher Martin crosses the road. Thankfully, the car slows down. Martin continues, blithely, discussing the priority of pedestrians and rule 170 of the Highway Code.

The Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman used to perform a similar trick in the early 2000s. He would walk, usually with a journalist in tow, backwards, eyes closed, into a four-way crossing with no traffic lights or signs. Monderman believed roads were safer without traffic signs; in order to navigate unfamiliar routes, cars would slow down. The common sense of the drivers would act as a more powerful safety guard than any sign.

"What we're trying to do is to get people to interact with each other - be human beings," Martin says as we continue to walk up Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow.

View looking west along Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow. Photograph: Alamy

Sauchiehall Street is the first area to be worked on as part of the Avenues, a £115m project to form an integrated network of pedestrian and cycle routes on 17 roads and surrounding areas in the city centre between the Clyde and Glasgow's infamous motorway, which forms a near noose around the area.

Glasgow's central grid is mostly made of four-lane roads. When you walk across the city, the roads, some at a steep incline, others stretching towards a grey horizon, seem solely taken up with cars and buses. "The city will get what it invites," says Martin. Now parts of these roads will be given over to those walking and biking, and to trees and benches.

It's very antisocial being sat in a metal box by yourself. The rise of urban loneliness and mental health [issues] to do with that disconnection is vast

Christopher Martin, urban planner

City planners the world over have a history of favouring the needs of cars. In 1955 Robert Moses, New York City parks commissioner, was planning to build a four-lane road through Washington Square Park. Some of the residents demurred, including the journalist Jane Jacobs. In 1958, three years into what would become a successful 14-year fight to save Greenwich Village, she wrote an article in Fortune magazine that eventually formed the basis of her book The Death and Life of American Cities.

To keep downtown activities "compact and concentrated", Jacobs advocated removing cars: "The whole point is to make the streets more surprising, more compact, more variegated, and busier than before - not less so." She argued against grand schemes that sought to demolish and redevelop, instead saying that cities should grow in line with what people want and how they use the spaces that already exist: "There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit o

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The 'Glasgow effect' implies cities make us sad. Can the city prove the opposite?

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If you live in Glasgow, you are more likely to die young. Men die a full seven years earlier than their counterparts in other UK cities. Until recently, the causes of this excess mortality remained a mystery. "Deep-fried Mars bars," some have speculated. "The weather," others suggested.

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The video below outlines the tactics deployed for the ongoing Hong Kong protests.
This video went viral on facebook earlier this year, people were mesmerised by the exhaustive detail and organisation that these students have been using.

Ardent's concept of the 'revolutionary moment' interested me this week and provoked me to question what sparks a protest. However, this video pushes this question further and makes me wonder what makes a good protest vs a failed protest.

Most people would consider this protest to be incredibly tactile and organised. So what sparks a city- wide protest to be so streamlined when others can fail so badly?

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Hong Kong protest tactics: occupy, disrupt, disperse, repeat

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I would consider the Netflix film 'The Platform' to be a good analogy of structural violence. The platform is a prison which you can be sent to for crimes or enter voluntarily in exchange for some kind of reward (in this case, the main character enters the platform in exchange for a diploma). Everyday a table of food is passed down through over 300 levels and it is up to the people at the top if they leave anything for the people at the bottom. This is a very literal and obvious analogy for capitalism and social heirarchies in which those at the top of society are responsible for the lives of those at the bottom. In the film there is a lot of graphic violence, with the people at the bottom partaking in gruesome acts of murder in order to save themselves. The main protagnist in the film becomes corrupted by violence for no other reason other than survival. At the beginning of the film he is shocked at the inhumane way people treat each other but ends up taking part. You could argue that this is an analogy for structural violence because the system he is living in gives him no other choice but to both experience and partake in violence.

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In 'discipline and punish',  Foucault discusses 'normalisation' ; a form of social control in which we are controlled due to being too afraid to step out of the status quo.

Rebecca More and Sophie Anderson (aka 'the cock destroyers') are a symbol of resistance to normalisation, as porn actors and sex workers who have resisted against the stigmatisation that comes with these roles.

Sex work is constrained through disciplinary power but also through normalising power, sex workers are 'supposed' to hide their work and feel ashamed.

The cock destroyers are known for being vocal online and open about their work, both past and present.

This photo of them in their Netflix series in which they teach sex education best symbolises this resistance because a) they got onto a mainstream, family-friendly streaming service,  B) they are educating people about the one thing they have been stigmatised for doing.

In 'The romance of resistance', Lila Abu-Lughod (1990) shows that often when we resist against one form of power,  we reproduce other types of power. I would argue that since power is omnipresent,  when you resist against one form of power, it is likely you will have to submit to another form of power. However, I do not think it's always true that you create new forms of power.

You could argue that this is true for the cock destroyers. They have resisted normalisation and overstepped the boundaries of what it means to be a sex worker. However, by pushing porn & sex work into a more 'mainstream' environment they now have to submit to new forms of power such as living up to peoples expectations and perceptions of them and being 'entertainers'. Especially on a hugely dominant platform such as Netflix.

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The Cock Destroyers Teach Sex Education | Netflix

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https://www.itv.com/hub/stephen-lawrence-has-britain-changed/10a0470a0001

Above is a link to a ITV panel special titled "Stephen Lawrence: Has Britain changed?" which was broadcast July 2020.

This one hour segment discussed the case of Stephen Lawrence; a British teenager who was murdered in a racially- motivated attack in 1993. It took 19 years for the perpetrators to be punished.

In Fassin's "who gets punished?" he shows that punishment exists to differentiate between those who are 'good' and those who are 'bad'. Stephen Lawrence's murder and aftermath shows clearly the disparities among who the police serve to protect and who they deem to be a threat. The police are not only more likely to punish people of colour but are also less likely to protect and bring them justice. The recent Black Lives Matter protests have highlighted that these disparities haven't been shifted in the UK.

The panel discusses the police as an institution and what (if anything) can be done to fix institutional racism within the police. One quote that stood out to me from the discussion was from Chante Joseph:

"I think policing as an entire institution is just rotten to the core "It’s not an issue of bad apples, the whole tree is rotten. Our whole justice system is rotten. The way that we prosecute white people and Black people for the same crime but a Black person will get a longer sentence".

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This weeks readings pushed me to think about 'who gets policed' but also 'who do the police protect?'. The latter question reminded me of a book I read this year 'Revolting Prostitutes' by Juno Mac and Molly Smith  (2018).  This book tackles the idea of the police as an institution and questions who the police are actually there to protect.
The police state that they are there to protect sex workers from trafficking and bodily harm. Mac & Smith explain how in practice the police do the exact opposite as they criminalise the everyday lives of sex workers, taking away their workers rights. By criminalising sex workers, it means that the police no longer serve them and they cannot rely on the police for protection or security.

All sex workers are policed. However we cannot ignore that for people of colour, transgender people and immigrants, the consequences of  being policed are usually much higher. This means that the police only serve to protect a small proportion of society and act as a danger to the rest. This book, along with Didier Fassan's "who gets punished" has helped me understand that who society deems to be a victim and who it deems to be punishable.

Below I have left a quote from the book which I feel sums up my thoughts on this weeks questions.

“A sex worker who is living precariously or in poverty, who is at risk of criminalisation or police violence, or who is being exploited by a manager or lacks negotiating power is not likely to be particularly 'sex positive' at work. These factors are structural, not a function of the worker's state of enlightenment.”

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Week 3- Migration, citizenship & borders

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Week 3- Migration, citizenship & borders

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Apologies for using the same source as last week. However the chapter "Borders" in 'revolting prostitutes' has strongly influenced my thinking on borders and migration.

Molly Smith & Juno Mac call for a complete abolition of borders; something which many people would consider radical. They argue that if we want to completely absolve sex work, we would first need to abolish borders.

In Shamran Khosravi's "The 'illegal' traveller",  he discusses his journey of being smuggled across borders and the fact that many different people along the way profited off of him being 'illegal'. However, if he were caught it would be him who would get reprimanded not the various others who broke the law to smuggle him.

Smith & Mac state that most victims of trafficking are not taken from inside of 'their' country. Most pay a smuggler to illegally take them into the country, and since they are already doing something illegal, the smugglers will sell & traffick them.

Both Khosravi and Smith & Mac give evidence to support the fact that borders danger people. They also show that borders create an opportunity for smugglers to criminalise themselves for profit.  Until borders are abolished or controls are substantially eased, trafficking, smuggling and migrant sex worker will continue in a cycle.

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Week 3- Migration, Citizenship & borders  

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Week 3- Migration, Citizenship & borders  

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This week's discussion on citizenship led me to think about Shamima Begum and her ongoing fight to regain UK citizenship and return home. Having left the UK in 2015 to join IS in Syria.

For me, Shamima Begum highlights the idea that citizenship is not any one fixed thing. In Shamran Khosravi's  The 'illegal' traveller, he describes how even after years of living as a Swedish citizen, when he goes through border controls at an airport in the UK he is treated with suspicion. This highlights the point that citizenship is not just a passport or a document, it is also whom is perceived to deserves to live in certain countries and who doesn't.

The image below shows just some of the media narrative that surrounds Shamima Begum. A large proportion of newspaper and social media posts surrounding her case have racist and islamaphobic origins.

I would argue that if Shamima Begum was white, the UK government would have granted her citizenship and felt a obligation to accept her back into the country. This shows not only that citizenship is based around who is perceived to be 'deserving' but also that this deservingness is largely based around race.