< Back Free Exercise and Identity in Conflict: The Future of Parental Free Exercise Claims in Public Education Max Choi Author Lucy Kaplan Sienna Jaroszewski Emily Walsh Editors I. Abstract This paper discusses a 2025 Supreme Court case that raised the question of whether elementary public school instruction on LGBTQ+ topics infringes upon the rights of parents who object to their children learning such content. The case Mahmoud v. Taylor serves as a development of religious free exercise and anti-discrimination precedent, extending parental rights established in Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972). However, the case also introduced broader complexities regarding exposure to controversial ideas to elementary school students. In recent cases, the Supreme Court has increasingly ruled in favor of free exercise claimants, so it is no surprise that they ruled in favor of the Petitioners in Mahmoud . Academics and advocates have debated the classroom and judicial implications of granting parents broader discretion to remove their children from curricular instruction. This decision may disrupt the delicate balance between parental free exercise rights and classroom teachings on morals and inclusivity. This essay will begin by introducing the case Mahmoud v. Taylor in detail. It will outline the religious rights guaranteed under the First Amendment and the relevant case law that frames the context of Mahmoud. Then, it will present the arguments of both the Petitioners and Respondents, analyzing how each side seeks to build upon existing precedent. Finally, the paper will assess how the Supreme Court structured its ruling and explore the broader social implications that may follow from their decision. II. Introduction Since 2000, the Supreme Court has generally ruled in favor of religious free exercise arguments against gender identity anti-discrimination. The case Mahmoud v. Taylor presented the question of whether it is a burden upon parents’ religious free exercise rights to compel their elementary-aged school children to participate in classroom instruction relating to gender and sexuality. In 2022, the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) district in Maryland incorporated the use of storybooks relating to sexual and gender orientation into the elementary K-5 curriculum. The school board had initially permitted an opt-out policy in which parents could remove their children from lessons using the books. However, the board removed this policy in March 2023, eliminating the opt-out for parents. A religiously diverse group of parents, including Ukrainian Orthodox, Muslim, Catholic Christian, and Judaic backgrounds, sued the school district on the grounds of religious burden claims. Both the district court and Fourth Circuit ruled in favor of the school district, however, the Supreme Court overturned their decisions. The question then presented to the Supreme Court was whether public schools pose a burden to parents’ free exercise rights when schools compel elementary students to participate in lessons on gender and sexuality. Even more so, the court needed to determine whether exposure to storybooks that contain LGBTQ+ identifying characters constituted such compulsion. In light of their consistent rulings, which have backed religious liberty claims under Chief Justice Roberts and the current conservative majority, the Supreme Court, in June 2025, ruled in favor of the Petitioners’ claims. While the court only issued a temporary order requiring the school district to provide opt-outs, the ruling nonetheless limited the power of school districts to mandate a diverse array of perspectives in the classroom, giving parents a stronger basis to excuse their children from certain classroom instruction under religious reasons. III. Overview of First Amendment Precedent A. Free Exercise and Establishment The First Amendment of the Constitution reads that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” Under this clause, individual citizens enjoy the right to practice their religion without interference from the government. Furthermore, the government may not sponsor or “establish” any religion, or favor one over another. To understand how the First Amendment is applied in the context of a school environment, it is important to understand how the interpretation and application of case law has evolved free exercise and establishment rights. Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) established that students do not “...shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Tinker set the precedent that, even considering the special characteristics of the school environment, students still maintain their First Amendment rights on schoolhouse grounds. However, these rights are not unlimited. School officials may restrain constitutional rights on school grounds if “...the students' activities would materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.” Parental rights regarding children’s upbringing and education also hold a share of case law. Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) decided that through the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, parents may not be forced by states to send their children to public school, nor force their children to accept instruction exclusively from public school teachers. This case recognized parental rights as a broader liberty protected by the Constitution. Then, in Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), the Supreme Court incorporated the First Amendment to apply to the states, ruling that Amish parents may remove their children from school entirely through religious exemption. The Burger Court wrote that a “State’s interest in universal education, … is not totally free from a balancing process when it impinges on fundamental rights and interests.” While the Wisconsin mandate for child participation in education was compelling, it ignored the Amish community’s right to educate and raise their children according to their belief system. This case saw that the free exercise rights of individuals outweigh a state’s interest in having students attend school beyond eighth grade. Thus, parents maintained the right to remove their children from school beyond eighth grade if school attendance conflicted with the tenets of their religion. In Sherbert v. Verner (1963), the court ruled that a law is rendered unconstitutional if its purpose or effect impedes the observance of one or all religions. This established a new constitutional test which extended strict scrutiny to the Free Exercise Clause: burdens on religious observances must possess a compelling government interest through the least restrictive means. However, in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), Justice Scalia wrote in the majority opinion that individual free exercise rights do not excuse individuals from complying with an otherwise valid law, thus narrowing the scope of Sherbert and weakening free exercise protections overall. This established the Smith test, stating that laws incidentally inhibiting religious practice must be (1) a neutral law that does not target religion and (2) generally applicable to everyone. If both criteria are established, the government does not need to provide a compelling interest under strict scrutiny to justify a law, and a law would be constitutionally permitted even if it burdens religion. However, Smith did not define what it meant for a law to “target religion” in itself. Furthermore, the new Smith test redefined and narrowed Yoder by distinguishing it as a hybrid rights case that involves both free exercise and parental rights. The court’s ruling offered little guidance on how broadly a law would need to “target religion” and to what extent. Lower courts have thus struggled to determine how the Smith test should be applied, and the degree of scrutiny which should be used on free exercise claims. Later cases such as Lukumi have highlighted the confusion of its interpretation. In the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah (1993), Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority that the City of Hialeah’s “... ordinances' texts and operation demonstrate that they are not neutral, but have as their object the suppression of Santeria's central element, animal sacrifice.” The court ruled that Hialeah passed ordinances which were non-neutral against Santeria's religious observances and were underinclusive to the Santeria Church in the context of this case. By striking down the ordinances under strict scrutiny, the court signaled a willingness to bypass Smith when government action targets a particular faith. In this way, Lukumi Babalu Aye partially revisited the doctrinal pathway that Smith seemed to restrict. Justice Kennedy noted that a law will lack “...facial neutrality if it refers to a religious practice without a secular meaning discernible from the language or context.” Here, the court ruled that the aim of a law is also dependent on its context, expanding the Smith test’s definitions of what neutrality and general applicability meant. In the case of Lukumi, the court extended Smith by noting that the city of Hialeah’s ordinances were in response to the church’s religious actions, thus targeting their religion even if religion was not explicit in the law itself. This shed light on the difficulties of applying Smith ’s broad language to specific cases, and would foreshadow later cases where the court would again take a more proactive stance towards free exercise claims, circumventing Smith. A number of cases have also shaped the ways that schools can establish religious practices. In West Virginia v. Barnette (1943), the Stone Court ruled that public schools may not compel students to salute or pledge allegiance to the American flag, nor can schools force individuals to speak a message contrary to their ideological, religious, or political beliefs. Mandating students in schools to salute or recite the pledge of allegiance constituted compelled communicative action that directly conflicted with student and parent free exercise rights. So the court ruled that the school district’s actions unconstitutionally coerced students to speak the government’s message, violating the First Amendment. Engel v. Vitale, (1962) and Abington v. Schempp (1963) further built upon this by ruling that school-sponsored prayers or bible readings, even if voluntary or non-denominational, are unconstitutional. These acts inhibit students’ liberty from religious compulsion. However, in Zorach v. Clauson (1952), the court upheld schools’ abilities to establish hours in which students may leave campus to engage in religious activity. In Clauson, off-campus activity does not constitute an Establishment Clause violation as it does not necessarily coerce students to engage in religious activity. To test for Establishment Clause violations, the Supreme Court in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971) introduced the Lemon test, where a law must have: (1) a secular legislative purpose, (2) a primary effect that neither advances nor prohibits religion, and (3) an avoidance of excessive government entanglement with religion. This framework was used in Establishment Clause cases until 2022. The Lemon test was abandoned in Kennedy v. Bremerton (2022), where the Roberts Court distinguished that permitting private prayer in a public setting, such as a school’s football field after a game, is not school coercion of students. Rather, it is a free exercise right that school staff and students maintain. Through this case, the court shifted religious doctrine and replaced the Lemon test with the history and traditions test. In other words, the court established the framework of evaluating whether the government is coercive in a way that resembles historical establishments of religion, and the extent to which religious expression aligns with the American free exercise tradition. Notable cases have also established boundaries or expansion of rights regarding religious liberty and public funding. Blaine Amendments are provisions in many state constitutions that prohibit the use of public funds to support nonsecular institutions. However, in Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer (2017), the Roberts Court ruled that government funding and services cannot be denied based on an institution’s religious status. Doing so interferes with members’ free exercise rights, as it denies access to public goods and penalizes members for religious affiliation. Then, in Espinoza v. Montana Dep’t of Revenue (2020), the court ruled that the State of Montana may not deny generally available public funds to a parent who wishes to send their children to a religious private school. The court further reaffirmed these concepts in Carson v. Makin (2022), when the State of Maine denied funds to be used to send schoolchildren to religious institutions. The court held that excluding publicly available programs from individuals based on the use of funds for religious purposes violates both the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause. While the previous cases discuss the Supreme Court’s evolving Free Exercise and Establishment Clause doctrines, Mahmoud v. Taylor also holds implications regarding LGBTQ+ discrimination colliding with religious precedent. Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) first considered the recognition of gay marriage protections under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. Justice Kennedy wrote that the Due Process Clause “promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.” Here, the court had recognized gay marriage as a liberty. However, the court did not recognize the right to marriage as a constitutionally enumerated freedom established by due process. In other words, Obergefell recognized same sex marriage as a constitutional liberty, but it did not resolve how this right interacts with competing religious claims. Before Obergefell, in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000), an adult member of the Boy Scouts organization had his membership revoked after the organization discovered he was homosexual and a gay rights activist. The suspended member sued under the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination (LAD), and the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that Dale’s membership must be reinstated. After the case was appealed and argued to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Rehnquist Court recognized that “...States have a compelling interest in eliminating discrimination…” on the basis of gender and sexuality. However, the ruling also stated that “...public or judicial disapproval of a tenet of an organization's expression does not justify the State's effort to compel the organization to accept members where such acceptance would derogate from the organization's expressive message.” This case directly addressed the question of anti-discrimination against gay individuals and the right to expressive association. The court maintained that the Boy Scouts, being an expressive organization, could not be compelled to include the member if doing so would contradict their organization’s expressed values. This case, while it did not explicitly balance religion against anti-discrimination, demonstrated how the court may value other First Amendment rights over anti-discrimination. Similarly, in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado (2018), a bakery owner refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, citing his religious opposition to gay marriage. The couple took their complaint to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which charged the cake shop with discrimination under the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA). The Supreme Court had to reconcile the religious rights of the owner and the compelling interest that the state had in protecting gay marriage. Like in Lukimi, Justice Kennedy stated that “...the Colorado Civil Rights Commission’s consideration of this case was inconsistent with the State’s obligation of religious neutrality.” The court ruled that the owner’s religious rights were violated because of targeted conduct by the state. The Commissioner of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had made remarks about religion which the court found “as inappropriate and dismissive comments showing lack of due consideration…” for the bakery’s claims. The court noted that the State of Colorado had demonstrated religious hostility towards the baker through its comments, which ultimately led to the court ruling in the baker’s favor. Yet, the court did not rule on whether the baker had the right to refuse service based on religious claims. The case left the question of this conflict with the Free Exercise Clause open, as it did not outweigh free exercise and anti-discrimination against one another. Similarly, in Fulton v. Philadelphia (2021), the City of Philadelphia banned Catholic Social Services from placing children into foster homes. Catholic Social Services had refused to place children into homes with same-sex couples, thus leading the city to terminate the service’s contract. Here, the court applied the Smith test to determine whether Philadelphia’s actions were neutral and generally applicable. The Roberts Court applied strict scrutiny and found that the “...provision is not generally applicable as required by Smith” as the City Commissioner had discretion to pick and choose exemptions as to who can receive foster home status. Thus, the court ruled that the city had no compelling interest in denying Catholic Social Services status. The court held that the city had violated the free exercise rights of Catholic Social Services by excluding it from the foster care system for its religious beliefs. While Smith initially confined the scope of religious exemptions, Fulton and Lukumi demonstrated the court’s inconsistent application of Smith’s precedent. Yet, the court still had not addressed the conflict of how anti-discrimination laws weigh against free exercise rights. Finally, in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis (2023), a website designer refused to create marital websites for gay couples, citing it was against her religious beliefs. In this case, Justice Gorsuch wrote that the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act was unconstitutional, as it compelled “...an individual to create speech she does not believe.” While Masterpiece avoided a broad ruling on free exercise against anti-discrimination claims, Fulton and 303 Creative indicated the court’s willingness to constrict Smith and strike down generally applicable laws when they conflict with religion. Furthermore, Masterpiece, Fulton, and 303 Creative all demonstrate that the court leans towards religious free exercise over anti-discrimination laws. These cases gave insight for the direction the court would eventually rule. They demonstrated that the court’s jurisprudence had to balance the collision between adherence to anti-discrimination laws and religious beliefs, often leaning towards the latter. These precedents provided a foundation for the Petitioners’ arguments. As they based their claims within the court’s recent religion-privileging rulings, the Petitioners sought to extend parental and free exercise doctrinal trends. IV. Arguments for Petitioner A. Free Exercise Burden First, the parents established the court’s precedent in recognizing parental rights over their children’s upbringings. They laid out the court’s history in allowing parents to have a say in selecting their child’s education through Espinoza v. Montana Dep’t of Revenue and Meyer v. Nebraska. They then cited Pierce, noting the court held that “...a law mandating public education violated ‘the right of parents to choose’ for their children an ‘appropriate mental and religious training’ in a private religious school.” The Petitioners continued by citing the Barnette case, “...emphasizing that ‘compelling little children to participate in a ceremony which ends in nothing for them but a fear of spiritual condemnation’ ‘fails to accord full scope to the freedom of religion…’” Here, the parents asserted a broader conception of coercion that treats exposure of children to the LGBTQ+ books as religiously objectionable. By making children sit in on lessons that present LGBTQ+ identities, the Petitioners argued that schools compel an impressionable endorsement of such ideas, even without explicit verbal affirmation. Furthermore, the Petitioners argued that by claiming ideas of gender and sexuality as a fact of life, it coerces elementary students to believe ideas contrary to the religious beliefs of their parents’ upbringings. Most notably, the parents drew a parallel between the facts in their case and the Yoder case. The parents asserted that “...subjecting their children to instruction contrary to their religious beliefs could ‘endanger their own’ standing before God ‘and that of their children.’” As it was ruled, the Amish faced a burden on their free exercise rights over their children’s religious upbringing by having to send them to school after the 8th grade. Similarly, the Petitioners here claimed that “...in response to the Petitioners’ requests to opt their children out for religious reasons, the Board ultimately prohibited that religious exercise.” The Petitioners treated Yoder as affirming religious parental opt-out claims as a broad constitutional right. As a result, the Petitioners claimed they can no longer “...direct their children away from religiously objectionable instruction on gender and sexuality.” Furthermore, the Petitioners argued for an expansion of the rights set by Yoder. As Yoder only applied to religious objections beyond the 8th grade level, Mahmoud v. Taylor sought to broaden parental opt-out rights beginning with K-5 elementary schools. The Petitioners also noted that their claim was supported by the history and traditions test outlined in the Kennedy case. The parents contended that children lack the maturity to comprehend gender and sexuality, and that they are the most prone to making ill-considered decisions as a result. They added on by claiming that Yoder outlined its ruling “...based on the student’s age”and “the realities of adolescent development…” The Petitioners used this to illustrate that Yoder had recognized the need to protect children from exposure to topics appearing controversial to parents. Additionally, they argue that “...further ‘exposing… children to worldly influences’ would substantially interfere with the religious development of children.” The Petitioners fitted this into a Kennedy-Yoder framework by demonstrating that jurisprudence has maintained a history of granting parents the right to protect their children from topics that conflict with their religion, as it would impair the religious development of a child. B. Non-Neutrality and General Applicability Next, the parents claimed that MCPS’s actions regarding the removal of the opt-out policy are targeted at religion and thus fail the generally applicability requirement under the Smith test. The parents claimed that under Fulton, “The existence of a ‘formal mechanism for granting exceptions…’” is a discretionary policy which was used in this case to burden the parental religious upbringing of their children. Furthermore, they claimed under Kennedy, government policies that “...include categorical exceptions that treat religious requests for accommodation differently than ‘comparable’ secular requests” also fail the general applicability prong. In the case of MCPS, the parents claimed that the removal of the opt-out policy is based on an arbitrary system of discretionary classification, similar to the system contested in Fulton, to incorporate discussion of sexuality into the K-5 curriculum. The parents also used the Lukumi framework to claim the removal of the opt-out policy as biased. They claimed that “Masked discrimination can be shown through ‘the effect,’ ‘design,’ and ‘net result’ of a government policy.” The Petitioners argued that the Board’s abrupt notice to withdraw the opt-out option solely for the LGBTQ+ storybooks—an area with an abundance of religious controversy—burdens predominantly religious families. Additionally, the Petitioners argued that under Masterpiece Cakeshop, “‘Official expressions of hostility to religion,’ especially when ‘not disavowed’ by the decisionmaker ‘ at any point…’ are also inconsistent with what the Free Exercise Clause requires.” Here, the parents asserted that Board members made open comments expressing such hostility to the parents, and at no point were they ever disavowed. Pulling from Lukumi and Cakeshop, the Petitioners argued that repealing the opt-out system was a form of religious discrimination and hostile targeting of opposing views. C. Interpretation of Strict Scrutiny Finally, the parents claimed that the removal of the opt-out policy does not satisfy strict scrutiny. They argued that MCPS’s interests in a desire to promote inclusive civic values should not succeed when placed against the history and traditions framework. Parents have historically maintained a strong presence in guiding their children’s moral and civic upbringing. Even if the school district held a compelling interest in wanting to ensure a safe learning environment, the Petitioners claimed that “an interest unjustified by history or tradition is presumptively not compelling” as the Board has not demonstrated classroom disruption as a result of the religious opt-outs. Thus, the Board has an obligation to continue its opt-out policy. V. Arguments for Respondent A. No Established Cognizable Coercion In response, the Respondents alleged that the Petitioners’ misinterpreted the standards of coercion. The Respondents asserted that there is no cognizable burden on religion that constitutes true coercion. They argued that the Petitioners omit from their analysis that coercion is “...government action that ‘deters or discourages’ religious beliefs or practice…” Under this construction of coercion, the Respondents moved to demonstrate that “...public-school students and their parents are not cognizably coerced by students’ exposure in the classroom to religiously objectionable ideas.” In other words, the Respondents argued that cognizable coercion must involve the discouragement of religious beliefs and that mere exposure does not constitute such. They reject the claim that MCPS overlooked parents’ sincere beliefs about which the storybooks violated their religious rights. Rather, they asserted the evidence that parents are “...not cognizably burdened by virtue of their belief… that their children’s exposure to ideas in public schools conflicts with their obligation to raise their children in accordance with their faith.” Citing Barnette, MCPS focused on how the court clarified that “...parents and their children would not have been cognizably ‘coerced’ if the students were ‘merely made acquainted with the flag salute…” Here, the Respondents distinguished this case from Barnette in which flag saluting was merely an exposure to an idea when it was performed in schools. Flag saluting only became coercion once students were required to communicate acceptance of the ideas. Where Barnette involved coercion by compelling students to engage in communicative action, the Respondents in Mahmoud contend that students were merely required to engage in passive listening. The Respondents used this framework to distinguish that they were not undermining the religious beliefs of the parents by merely exposing students to the storybook characters. The Respondents then moved to counter the Petitioners’ interpretation of compulsion. Whereas the Petitioners argued that the storybooks compel their children to learn about gender and sexuality at the elementary level, the Respondents claimed that the storybooks “...merely introduce students to characters who are LGBTQ or have LGBTQ family members and those characters’ experiences and points of view.” In other words, MCPS’s policy contemplated only exposure to certain identities rather than explicit instruction or coercion resembling Barnette that would force children to change their beliefs about gender and sexuality. By contrast to the Petitioners, the Respondents claimed that coercion only arises when students are forced to adopt or affirm ideas. They distinguish that the Petitioners misinterpreted Barnette, and that Barnette instead would have “...approved of instruction through which elementary-school students are ‘merely made acquainted with’ material to which their parents object.” The Respondents drew a different interpretation of the Barnette framework, asserting that exposure to controversial ideas such as the ones posed by the storybooks are constitutionally permissible. The school district maintained that the storybooks served a broader purpose for lessons on mutual respect, consistent with the school’s “obligation to promote civic virtues…” established in Ambach v. Norwick. The school district also affirmed the Sixth Circuit ruling in Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education that held the court has “...never taken the ‘significant step’ of ‘imposing on school boards the delicate task of satisfying the ‘compelling interest’ test to justify each instance of not dealing with students’ individual, religiously compelled, objections.’” The Respondents argued that if Hawkins County were overturned, that “public schools simply cannot accommodate opt-outs and create alternative lesson plans any time these or countless other religiously objectionable concepts arise…” B. Opt-Out Precedent MCPS claimed that Yoder is distinguishable from what the parents assert as the extent of parental rights to control the upbringing of their children. The district claimed that the parents in Yoder made a convincing claim of coercion, whereas the parents in the case at hand have not. They claimed that the Petitioners “seek to pick and choose among curricular elements at public schools in which they have chosen to enroll their children.” Meanwhile in Yoder, it was “...compulsory ‘high school attendance with teachers who are not of the Amish faith… [that would] expose the plaintiffs’ children to ‘worldly’ influence in conflict with their beliefs.” The Respondents thus distinguished the difference of removing a child from schooling holistically, rather than from individual classroom instruction. They argued that the Petitioners “...ignore this fundamental aspect of Yoder , [which] ‘strongly showed’ that the challenged law prohibited the plaintiffs from imparting their religion to their children at ‘home…’” In contrast to Yoder , the district showed that the Petitioners do not refute the claim that the exposure to classroom materials interferes with their ability to freely impart their religion on their children at home. Therefore, the Respondents did not see Yoder as a comparable precedent to evaluate the Petitioners’ claims. Instead, the school district confines Yoder to specifically pertain to withdrawal from school entirely as opposed to individual classroom lessons. C. History and Tradition The Respondents claimed that the Petitioners’ analysis of the history and traditions test is incorrect. They claimed that the Petitioners relied on “...the historical treatment of ‘instruction on gender and sexuality…’ [which] is beside the point because the storybooks are not used for such instruction.” The Respondents continued by asserting the correct application of the history and traditions test “...is that of courts approving public schools’ denial of parental opt-out requests.” The Respondents listed various state-level cases rejecting parental requests to excuse children from individual lessons. They note that courts have recognized the impracticality of allowing parents to pick and choose the curriculum of their children, and that it “would be a power of disorganizing the school… rendering it substantially useless.” D. Policies Are Both Neutral and Generally Applicable The Respondents asserted that the no-opt-out policy “...treats religious and secular conduct the same.” The school district contested that “...the conduct MCPS forbids (opt-outs from the storybooks) is not religious, nor is the conduct MCPS permits (opt-outs from the health-education curriculum) secular” as opposed to the opposite claims made by the Petitioners. Additionally, MCPS granted all requests for opt-outs from sex education but none for English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum including the challenged storybooks. Furthermore, MCPS also contends that the no-opt-out policy is not discretionary, unlike in Fulton. Given this, the school district maintains that the Petitioners are not being singled out for any harsh treatment, nor does the Board of Education’s history “...compromise[s] the general applicability of its no-opt-out policy….” Unlike the Petitioners’ arguments based on Lukumi and Cakeshop, the Respondents rely on the Smith framework and emphasize that their policies apply equally to all ELA content regardless of viewpoint. Therefore, the school district asserts that neutral and general applicability is satisfied under Smith. VI. Direction of the Court On June 27th, 2025, the Roberts Court ruled in favor of the Petitioners. The court granted a preliminary injunction for Montgomery County Public Schools to continue the opt-out policy. In other words, the court mandated that the status quo—the opt out policy— continue while the case moved back to the lower courts. Given the Roberts Court’s previous ruling in 303 Creative, Masterpiece Cakeshop, and Fulton, this was expected as the court has consistently placed parental religious exercise as a higher priority than many other rights. The ruling substantially expanded parental free exercise rights within the Yoder framework. During the oral arguments, several justices posed questions about what it meant for children to be exposed to controversial material, such as the storybooks, as opposed to what it means for their beliefs to be actively coerced. Justice Barrett, who joined the majority in favor of the petitioners, raised the point during the oral arguments that “Presentation of an idea as fact, such as telling students that ‘this is the right view of the world,’ … is different from exposure—such as telling students that ‘some people think’ a particular thing.” Justice Gorsuch built upon this by claiming that a teacher telling children a normative stance on a subject goes beyond mere exposure. In the context of the storybooks, Justice Gorsuch implied that teaching children that views are hurtful or non-inclusive meets the definition of coercion against the Petitioners’ religions. Justice Alito also sided with the parents, noting that “...under the county’s current policy a school can teach children moral principles that are ‘highly objectionable to parents and they can’t opt out.’” These questions alluded to Justice Alito’s majority opinion, ruling that the storybooks presented to elementary students in MCPS “...are clearly designed to present certain values and beliefs as things to be celebrated and certain contrary values and beliefs as things to be rejected” which Yoder found unacceptable. The majority rejected the Respondent’s interpretation of Yoder, which they saw unnecessarily “confined Yoder to its facts.” Ultimately, the storybooks’ biased presentation of ideas and values led the majority to understand their compulsory exposure to students as a threat to parental religious upbringing. Mahmoud v. Taylor had the potential to directly address the conflict between school discretion to expose children to certain perspectives and free exercise rights. The court instead focused narrowly on the context of the case. Alito stated that the court could not accept “...the Board’s characterization of the ‘LGBTQ+-inclusive’ instruction as mere ‘exposure to objectionable ideas’ or as lessons in ‘mutual respect.’” This poses the question of what schools should consider as mere exposure against religious infringement going forward. However, no precedent or doctrine was established to determine how to evaluate these types of cases. The court had rejected the Respondents’ interpretation of Barnette that coercion only occurs when students are forced to accept ideas that are contrary to their religious beliefs. While Barnette dealt with the type of coercion that required students to make affirmations against their religious beliefs, Justice Alito asserted that Free Exercise Clause protections do not exclusively apply to this specific context. The court has “held that the Free Exercise Clause protects against policies that impose more subtle forms of interference with the religious upbringing of children.” Here, the majority expanded the definition of coercion in the classroom. Coercion may extend beyond mere affirmation of ideas. The exposure of LGBTQ+ identifying characters to students is a subtle form of coercion which directly conflicts with parental religious childrearing. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sotomayor argued that the court “has made clear that mere exposure to objectionable ideas does not give rise to a free exercise claim.” She argues that simple exposure to ideas contrary to one’s beliefs does not directly nor indirectly compel an individual “to give up or violate their religious beliefs.”However, Justice Alito disagreed with this interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause, and saw it as too narrow. “The dissent sees the Free Exercise Clause’s guarantee as nothing more than protection against compulsion or coercion to renounce or abandon one’s religion.” Rather, the majority saw that the First Amendment’s protections extend to less obvious forms of coercion. The issue raised by the storybooks in Mahmoud is what Alito and the majority view as subtle coercion. During his questioning in the oral arguments, Justice Kavanaugh seemed unconvinced by the Respondent’s argument that opt-outs are administratively infeasible. He brought up the point that eliminating opt-outs seem inconsistent “...when ‘every other school board has opt-outs for all sorts of things.’” This concern was affirmed in the court’s ruling, claiming “the Board cannot escape its obligations under the Free Exercise Clause by crafting a curriculum that is so burdensome that a substantial number of parents elect to opt out.” VII. Social Implications A. LGBTQ+ Books in Schools The implications of the court siding with the Petitioners may raise questions about how much control parents can maintain over their children’s exposure to LGBTQ+ topics in the classroom. Since 2021, “‘Parental rights’ bills, [have sought] to increase parents’ ability to control their children’s access to information about race and racism, comprehensive sexuality education, and discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity.” Specifically, “...school boards and parent groups have increased their efforts to ban books from school and public libraries, with a special focus on books that discuss LGBTQIA+ identity.” The question of the LGBTQ+ identity in conflict with parental beliefs and religious rights persists, especially after the court’s ruling in June. The court’s ruling may preserve parental childrearing control by giving them more say in their children’s curriculum. However, the court’s ruling also creates challenges on how schools will approach lessons on inclusivity to young students. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sotomayor stresses the civic importance of teaching children how to live in a multicultural society in harmony with ideologies such as those presented in the storybooks. “Yet it will become a mere memory if children must be insulated from exposure to ideas and concepts that may conflict with their parents’ religious beliefs.” On the other hand, many parental rights advocates would claim that state police powers are “...limited to what is ‘plainly essential to good citizenship,’ such as literacy, numeracy, and civic knowledge. Controversial sexual ideologies don't meet this bar.” There still remains a lingering debate between parents' rights and LGBTQ+ advocates as to whether learning about the LGBTQ+ identity furthers or hinders civic virtues, and the extent to which it should be included in classroom material. It seems that with the ruling, at least at the elementary level, lessons exposing students to LGBTQ+ identity do not imperatively further civic knowledge in the classroom. This ruling still leaves questions as to how inclusivity is defined in teaching students civic morals, and how LGBTQ+ identity plays a role. Critics of the majority opinion would argue that exposure to LGBTQ+ identity should play a larger role in children’s education. They “...contend that [measures reducing exposure to LGBTQ+ identity] infringe on children’s right to education and undermine the state’s responsibility to provide comprehensive and inclusive education.” In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed the “Don’t Say Gay” law, which Pro-LGBTQ+ supporters claim is aimed to “...chill the discussion of LGBTQ issues in public schools.” Pro-LGBTQ+ activists and student plaintiffs may claim “...(1) First Amendment claims for violations of a student’s right to receive information and (2) Fourteenth Amendment claims for Equal Protection violations.” The ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor could have potentially served as a “...binding precedent that guides lower courts in assessing a right to receive information claim.” However, given the narrow scope of the majority opinion, the case does not provide a clear guiding precedent that can be applied in other cases. B. Exigency of the Classroom Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson raised concerns over what parental dictation could mean for public educational curricula. Justice Sotomayor, in her dissent, noted that “The crucial word in the constitutional text is ‘prohibit,’ for it makes clear ‘the Free Exercise Clause is written in terms of what the government cannot do to the individual, not in terms of what the individual can exact from the government.’” The dissenting justices’ attempted to bring the expansion of the Free Exercise Clause into question by asserting that the purpose of the Free Exercise Clause should solely be to protect individuals from religious coercion rather than accommodate the individual for their practices. Essentially, they see the majority’s expansive interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause as an overreach of what constitutes religious rights. However, the majority refuted this by alleging that under the dissent’s interpretation, “...even instruction that denigrates or ridicules students’ religious beliefs would apparently be allowed.” Notably, “the parents’ proposed rule would have a wide sweep, giving them broad discretion to opt out.” Justice Kagan also expressed concern that such a ruling would permit parents to “...decide that it is unfair for their children to have to leave the classroom to avoid the materials to which they object, leading to a challenge to the materials themselves.” For instance, after the State of Florida banned Advanced Placement Psychology in high schools, the American Psychological Association claimed that “understanding human sexuality is fundamental to psychology, and an Advanced Placement course that excludes the decades of science studying sexual orientation and gender identity would deprive students of knowledge they will need to succeed in their studies…” Giving parents broader leeway to parse out subjects from their children’s curriculum based on their objections could undermine the integrity of certain curricula. The court’s ruling is presumably narrow enough to encompass only elementary lessons on LGBTQ+, gender, and sexuality-related topics. However, it still leaves questions as to how much latitude schools have to teach lessons on civic knowledge or inclusivity at the elementary level. Furthermore, many critics have expressed concern over the ruling’s impact in establishing safe learning environments and teaching students to treat one another with respect. Some scholars suggest the inclusion of picture books or story books with LGBTQ+ characters could “...help children develop tolerance for different lifestyles…” Thus, critics were wary of the precedent that the outcome could set for viewpoint discrimination against topics on gender, sexuality, and exposure to LGBTQ+ perspectives. Previously, Justice Brennan noted in Keyishian v. Board of Regents that “The classroom is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas.’ The Nation's future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth ‘out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative selection.’" However, other scholars assert that even the most knowledgeable teachers can have difficulty guiding elementary-level conversation and curiosity surrounding perceptions of sexual identity and gender. C. Equal Protection LGBTQ+ activists argue that the “Don’t Say Gay” laws, “violate the Constitution’s equal protection guarantees, regardless of what level of scrutiny applies to them.” They recognize the potential for viewpoint discrimination that would target the LGBTQ+ experience. The Mahmoud case does not directly address such a question of equal protection nor does it determine if laws against LGBTQ+ viewpoints count as viewpoint targeting. However, the majority’s ruling for parents’ rights could still hold future implications for viewpoints of the LGBTQ+ community to be taught in schools. While schools still maintain the power to teach civic lessons on inclusivity— including on gender and sexuality in a literary context—parents may now remove their children from these lessons. This raises the question of the extent to which parents may remove their children from various lessons that interfere with their religious upbringing. VIII. Conclusion The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Petitioners in Mahmoud v. Taylor setting the precedent that parents maintain the right to opt their children out of classroom instruction pertaining to LGBTQ+ characters in storybooks. The Roberts Court expanded upon Yoder, thereby giving parents broader discretion over the information to which their children can be exposed. While this ruling did not serve as a revolutionary doctrinal shift to free exercise and parental rights jurisprudence, it continued the court’s trend of giving greater weight to free exercise rights in school environments. It reaffirmed that schools must accommodate when elementary lessons interfere with parental religious exercise rights. Questions regarding how hybrid rights, general applicability and non-neutrality are to be defined under the Smith test remain unanswered by this decision. Furthermore, the ruling presents unanswered questions as to how education on civic values can occur within schools when parents are granted more power over their children’s exposure to potentially religiously disagreeable viewpoints. Finally, the decision furthers a trend among First Amendment cases in which free exercise rights are favored over LGBTQ+ perspectives and viewpoints. IV. Bibliography Primary Sources U.S. Const amend. I. U.S. Const amend. XIV. Boy Scouts of America v. Dale , 530 U.S. 640 (2000). Carson v. Makin , 596 U.S. 767 (2022). Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah , 508 U.S. 520 (1993). Engel v. Vitale , 370 U.S. 421 (1962). Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith , 494 U.S. 872 (1990). Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, 591 U.S. 464 (2020). Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, 593 U.S. 522 (2021). Kennedy v. Bremerton School District , 597 U.S. 507 (2022). Keyishian v. Board of Regents , 385 U.S. 589 (1967). Lemon v. Kurtzman , 403 U.S. 602 (1971). Mahmoud v. Taylor, 606 U. S. ____ (2025) Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission , 584 U.S. 617 (2018). Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015). Pierce v. Society of Sisters , 268 U.S. 510 (1925). School District of Abington Township v. Schempp , 374 U.S. 203 (1963). Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398 (1963). Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District , 393 U.S. 503 (1969). Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer , 582 U.S. 449 (2017). West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette , 319 U.S. 624 (1943). Wisconsin v. Yoder , 406 U.S. 205 (1972). Zorach v. Clauson , 343 U.S. 306 (1952). 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, 600 U.S. 570 (2023). Brief for Petitioner, Mahmoud v. Taylor , No. 24-297 (U.S. Mar. 3, 2025). Brief for Petitioner, Mahmoud v. Taylor , No. 24-297 (U.S. Mar. 3, 2025). Secondary Sources American Psychological Association. “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Are Not Being Discussed in Many Florida High Schools, Survey Finds.” Press release, June 6, 2023. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2023/06/sexual-orientation-gender-identity-florida-high-school . Cassaro, Thomas M. “LGBTQ Parent Concerns and Parent–Child Communication About the Parental Rights in Education Bill (‘Don’t Say Gay’) in Florida.” Family Relations 73 (2024). Howe, Amy. “Supreme Court Likely to Rule for Parental Opt-Out on LGBTQ Books in Schools.” SCOTUSblog . April 12, 2025. https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/04/supreme-court-likely-to-rule-for-parental-opt-out-on-lgbtq-books-in-schools/ . Mahmoud v. Taylor , Oyez, www.oyez.org/cases/2024/24-297 . Moschella, Melissa. “Nonreligious Parents Have Rights Too; In Mahmoud v. Taylor , the Supreme Court Should Hold That No Declaration of Faith Is Required to Opt Children Out of Sexual Indoctrination Lessons.” Wall Street Journal , April 21, 2025. ProQuest. Petterson, Hadyn. “Blaine Amendments: An Overview for Religious Educators.” Napa Legal Institute, October 6, 2025. https://www.napalegalinstitute.org/post/blaine-amendments-an-overview-for-religious-educators . Pohlman, Zachary. “Oral Argument: Mahmoud v. Taylor – Petitioners.” The Federalist Society . April 5, 2025. https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/oral-argument-mahmoud-v-taylor-petitioners-supreme-court . Pori, Bella Mancini, and Edward Stein. “Multi-Generation Queer Families: Foregrounding the LGBTQIA+ Children of LGBTQIA+ People.” Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law 26 (2024). www.law.georgetown.edu/gender-journal/in-print/volume-xxvi-issue-1-fall-2024/multi-generation-queer-families-foregrounding-the-lgbtqia-children-of-lgbtqia-people/ . Reingold, Rebecca, et al. “SCOTUS Takes Up Inclusive Education: Mahmoud v. Taylor in a Global Context.” April 16, 2025. https://oneill.law.georgetown.edu/scotus-takes-up-inclusive-education-mahmoud-v-taylor-in-a-global-context/ . Rosky, Clifford. “Anti-Gay Curriculum Laws.” Columbia Law Review 117 (2017). https://columbialawreview.org/content/anti-gay-curriculum-laws/ . Smolkin, Laura B., and Craig A. Young. “Research Directions: Missing Mirrors, Missing Windows: Children’s Literature Textbooks and LGBT Topics.” Language Arts 88, no. 3 (2011). https://www.jstor.org/stable/41804253 Previous Next

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< Back Divergent Colonial Memories Danny Ly Author Aaditya Das Narayan Arjun Ray Amelie Tsao Editors Abstract Both Taiwan and South Korea have a shared colonial past under Imperial Japan and formed post-war authoritarian regimes that eventually democratized in the latter half of the 1980s. Yet, these two countries have extremely divergent perspectives on Japan post-democratization. This begs the question: what factors explain differentiated colonial memories and interpretations of those memories between two former colonies of the same regime? Through a most-similar cross-case study analysis, I argue that cultural and educational colonial institutions were the root of modern-day sentiments toward Japan, as colonial institutions intended to “Japanize” the colonized population in Taiwan were far more successful in eliciting acceptance of colonial rule than in Korea. This meant that post-war authoritarian actors in Taiwan and Korea were constrained in their ability to advance narratives that challenged Japanese cultural hegemony, in the case of Taiwan, or affirmed closer relations with Japan, in the case of Korea. Introduction Both Taiwan and South Korea have a shared colonial past under Imperial Japan and formed post-war authoritarian regimes that eventually democratized in the latter half of the 1980s. Yet, these two countries have extremely divergent perspectives on Japan post-democratization. According to a Gallup Korea poll conducted in 1992, when asked whether they thought Japanese people felt remorseful for atrocities committed during World War II, 80.1%, a large majority of those surveyed, answered “not at all” or “not so much.” In stark contrast, in a poll conducted in 2009 in Taiwan about Japan, 52% of participants responded that their favorite country other than Taiwan was Japan. This begs the question: what factors explain differentiated colonial memories and interpretations of those memories between two former colonies of the same regime? In answering this question, I do not attempt to give an exhaustive reading of Taiwanese, South Korean, or Japanese history, but instead focus on the long-term effects of colonial institutions and their effects on post-war state actors. Through a most-similar cross-case study analysis, I argue that cultural and educational colonial institutions were the root of modern-day sentiments toward Japan, as colonial institutions intended to “Japanize” the colonized population in Taiwan were far more successful in eliciting acceptance of colonial rule than in Korea. This meant that post-war authoritarian actors in Taiwan and Korea were constrained in their ability to advance narratives that challenged Japanese cultural hegemony, in the case of Taiwan, or affirmed closer relations with Japan, in the case of Korea. Resistance that formed in response to these authoritarian narratives on Japan reinforced these differentiated views on Japan and allowed pro-democracy opposition movements in both countries to associate themselves with prevailing societal views of Japan. LITERATURE REVIEW Previous literature on the impact of colonial experiences in shaping modern-day attitudes toward Japan in its former colonies is still developing. Some scholars, especially those conducting comparative analysis of Japan’s former colonies, pay closer attention to pre-war factors. For instance, Lai (2024) compares Taiwanese and Japanese colonial experiences to explain their responses to island disputes with Japan in the 21st century. However, a newer strand of literature in this domain more rigorously analyzes the role of South Korean domestic politics and nationalism as a catalyst for negative attitudes toward Japan. For instance, Jo (2022) argues that contemporary anti-Japanese sentiment in South Korea is rooted within “how South Korean struggles for democracy became bound up in understandings of Japan.” Similarly, Deacon (2024) asserts that the “history war” between South Korea and Japan continues to persist because “each side’s…representations of the other…constitute an important element of their national identities.” This is similar to the approach taken by Taiwanese-Japanese relations scholars, who have similar conclusions on the role of post-war domestic politics in shaping how collective memory is apprehended. For instance, Suzuki (2011) suggests that the brutality of the Kuomintang (KMT) regime in Taiwan, in combination with contestations over Taiwanese national identity during democratization, led to the silencing of narratives of gendered violence under Japanese imperialism. METHODOLOGY To bridge together scholarship on exclusively the colonial period itself and scholarship that covers solely post-colonial regimes, I place analytic weight on both the impact of the colonial period itself and the post-war authoritarian regimes that succeeded it. To accomplish this, I employ a most similar cross-case analysis of South Korea and Taiwan, as these cases are similar in “background conditions,” such as the time range in which they were acquired, the length of the colonial period, and types of post-war regimes, but differ significantly in terms of the independent variable of interest, colonial memory. In acknowledging these similarities, I do not claim that South Korea and Taiwan’s shift from authoritarianism into democracy are identical to one another nor that Japanese domination impacted these two former colonies in equivalent fashions. Rather, I argue that the broad swath of institutional changes in South Korea and Taiwan, from Japanese colonization to democratization, are analogous to one another and fruitful for comparison. In analyzing my case studies, I apply Jo (2022)’s concept of collective memory as “intersubjective understandings of the past,” as well as Bernhard and Kubik (2014)’s concept of mnemonic actors as actors, particularly state actors, that frame the past in terms that “will generate the most effective legitimation for their efforts to gain or hold power.” These mnemonic actors are constrained by “a historically formed repertoire of cultural (mnemonic) forms and themes” that are generated through both state-led institutions that espouse certain narratives about the past and unofficial narratives that are “generated and reproduced within personal networks.” CASE STUDY 1: TAIWAN Following the Qing Dynasty’s loss to Japan in the Sino-Japanese War, Taiwan was formally integrated into the Japanese Empire. After Japan’s defeat at the end of World War II in 1945, Taiwan fell under the control of the Kuomintang (KMT) and became the KMT’s site of retreat after its loss in the Chinese Civil War. For the next four decades, the KMT imposed martial law and curtailed forms of political opposition until democratization in Taiwan occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I argue that throughout this historical trajectory, Japanese influence became deeply entrenched in Taiwanese society during the colonial era, meaning the KMT faced a high gradient in erasing the effects of Japanese imperialism on collective memory. Because of this, resentment from the Taiwanese public built up as the KMT attempted to sinicize Taiwan, which was mobilized against the KMT through opposition and pro-democracy movements near the end of Taiwan’s authoritarian period. A. Colonial Subjugation (1895 – 1945) The imposition of an education system that privileged Japanese customs, language, and knowledge early on in Japanese colonization of Taiwan, alongside a lack of resistance to Japanese domination due to the dependence of Taiwanese elites on Japanese imperial governance, facilitated the success of kōminka policies in Taiwan. An exodus of former Taiwanese elites to mainland China created a new elite class that was “dependent on — and loyal to — the alien regime” due to the opportunities granted to them. The response of Taiwan’s elite class after Japan had acquired Taiwan can be analyzed through the lens of Lake’s (2007) conceptualization of political authority, where a dominant state “provides the order demanded by subordinates” in exchange for acceptance of its authority. Under this framework, Taiwanese elites post-annexation had become reliant on Japanese imperialism to create order and maintain their local authority. Therefore, Taiwanese elites were incentivized to maintain Japanese colonial rule, which constrained the conditions under which elite-led resistance against the Japanese imperial government could occur. This aversion of Taiwanese elites to resistance against Japanese colonization was exacerbated by education policies that mandated conformity to colonial rule. The imperial education system imposed by Imperial Japan onto Taiwan was primarily concerned with teaching the Japanese language and preparing students for public service or business occupations,, magnifying Japanese cultural hegemony in Taiwan and the prestige of conforming to Japanese customs. Although the Japanese education system also inadvertently fueled Taiwanese anti-colonial movements, Tsurumi (1977) argues that the “assimilation message of Japanese education” was mostly accepted and that anti-colonial movements remained “entirely within Japanese legal and constitutional frameworks while fighting for reform.” Thus, the dependence of Taiwanese elites and assimilationist education policy weakened resistance to Japanese imperial policies in two ways: the former created incentives for Taiwanese elites to conform to colonial rule, while the latter developed broad acceptance of colonial rule amongst the Taiwanese population. Because previous cultural policies had reduced resistance to Japanese rule, the implementation and success of kōminka (“Japanization”) policies were possible. These policies were far more restrictive and further entrenched Japanese influence on Taiwanese collective memory. Near the end of Japanese rule over Taiwan, Japan imposed harsh cultural policies that “enforced the adoption of Japanese customs, religion, language, and even names” in 1936. During kōminka, the Japanese imperial government formed specialized language schools that mandated the use of Japanese and large youth clubs to cultivate “civic virtues and public spirit.” As the Japanese war effort during World War II moved southward into Southeast Asia, the imperial government mandated the conscription of Taiwanese men, and created a “girls agriculture volunteer corps” for industrial labor. Although there existed resentment toward colonial rule during this period, Japanization policies were accepted by younger members of the Taiwanese elite and Taiwanese indigenous groups, even those who had previously participated in anti-Japanese violent resistance movements. Thus, kōminka-era policies strengthened the general acceptance of colonial rule built by previous colonial policies, and therefore, entrenched Japanese influence on Taiwanese society. B. Post-War Collective Memory (Post-1945) As a result of the success of Japanization, the KMT experienced immense difficulty in supplanting the legacies of Japanese rule. He (2014) argues that because of restrictions on Mandarin and Taiwanese dialects of Chinese during kōminka, the Japanese language and education had integral parts of the Taiwanese elite identity. Thus, applying Bernhard and Kubik's (2014) theory of memory politics, Japanese imperial cultural policy had expanded “the available set of narratives about the past that constitutes a ‘nation’s heritage.’” Mnemonic actors that wish to propagate narratives post hoc must conform to this “repertoire of ‘traditional forms’” to be “politically effective”. Therefore, because Japanese cultural hegemony during the imperial period had expanded this repertoire, the post-war KMT regime was faced with a high degree of entrenched Japanese influence in Taiwanese society and collective memory. In other words, espousing narratives that challenged the legacies of Japanese colonialism would be more difficult for the KMT. This relationship between Japanese colonial rule and the constraints that it produced for the KMT’s ability to shape collective memory is depicted in Figure 1 below. [Insert Figure 1 Here] Because the KMT faced such a high gradient in challenging Japanese influence, the KMT’s attempt to “sinicize” Taiwanese society in building its legitimacy was met with fierce opposition. Immediately after the end of Japanese colonial rule over Taiwan in 1945, the incoming KMT regime restricted the use of Japanese and mandated the use of Mandarin in its place, eliciting strong resentment from the Taiwanese public through “large demonstrations and riots” in 1947. Outright displays of frustration from the Taiwanese public would decrease following the KMT’s loss in the Chinese Civil War and the beginning of PRC-initiated purges in mainland China, which energized anti-PRC sentiment in Taiwan. However, distrust continued; for instance, in 1951, “politically articulate native Formosans and mainlanders” urged U.S embassy officials to carefully review aid sent to the KMT, claiming the “Nationalists had ‘sighted the gravy train.’” It could be argued that the KMT’s ban on Japanese was similar to the kōminka-era bans on the use of Mandarin and Taiwanese dialects. Thus, under this logic, KMT cultural policies should have been met with similar levels of resistance. However, analogously to the Taiwanese education system’s gradual implementation, which limited backlash against the Japanese imperial government, kōminka policies followed decades of more moderate Japanese cultural policy. Therefore, in comparison to the KMT’s attempts at Sinicization, kōminka did not constitute as heavy a shift from the status quo, explaining why the KMT’s cultural policy was met with more resistance. This resentment, created by Sinicization, fueled opposition movements to KMT rule, causing a propagation of positive sentiment toward Japan during Taiwan’s democratization. During the KMT regime’s gradual liberalization and the beginning of supplementary elections in the 1970s, the dangwai opposition movement appealed strongly to the offspring of Taiwanese elites that had benefited from Japanese rule, as well as members of the working class. As a result, the dangwai movement was able to foster an association between opposition to the KMT regime and fondness toward Japanese colonial rule within Taiwanese collective memory. This affinity with Japan came to a head as the process of democratization occurred in Taiwan during the early 1990s, becoming both a “weapon to address historical grievances under the KMT’s authoritarian rule” and a “celebration of Taiwan’s democratic achievement.” This association between the Taiwanese pro-democracy movement and colonial Japan facilitated the forgetting of Japanese atrocities during the colonial era, further bolstering positive attitudes toward Japan. For example, Suzuki (2011) argues that narratives surrounding the sexual abuse of comfort women in Taiwan during World War II have been supplanted by “memories of KMT wrongdoing” due to the association between anti-Japanese narratives and the KMT regime’s brand of Chinese nationalism. In summary, the effects of both colonial cultural policy and the dependency of Taiwanese elites on colonial institutions caused the KMT to face difficulties in supplanting deeply entrenched Japanese influence. Opposition movements to the KMT utilized the resulting resentment to appeal to the Taiwanese public, creating an association between Japanese colonialism and opposition to the KMT. This relationship between Japanese influence as developed during colonialism and positive attitudes toward Japan in the authoritarian period is shown in Figure 2. [Insert Figure 2 Here] CASE STUDY 2: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SOUTH KOREA Similarly to Taiwan, Korea was acquired as a protectorate during the turn of the 19th into the 20th century through the 1905 Eulsa Treaty, and then fully annexed into the Japanese Empire five years later. After Imperial Japan’s defeat in World War II, Korea was hastily partitioned along the 38th parallel, and war erupted between the newly formed Republic of Korea (ROK) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) that led to the lasting division of the Korean peninsula. Starting with the Syngman Rhee government, South Korea experienced multiple authoritarian regimes for the next four decades, until democratization started at the end of the 1980s.. I argue that, unlike in Taiwan, Korean colonial institutions failed to engender a sense of acceptance amongst the Korean population, resulting in the entrenchment of resentment ininto Korean collective memory. Although the authoritarian Park regime attempted to subvert this perception of Japan, it instead fueled mass demonstrations and the formation of a pro-democracy movement that capitalized on negative perceptions of Japan, resulting in the strengthening of negative colonial memories of Japan during democratization. A. Colonial Subjugation (1905 - 1945): Similarly to the Taiwanese colonial education system, Japanese colonial officials intended Korea’s system to facilitate the assimilation of the Korean population. However, unlike in Taiwan, where education bolstered acceptance of colonial rule with the exception of smaller anti-colonial movements, the Korean education system exacerbated resistance to Japanese rule amongst the middle and upper strata of Korean society. Because of annexation, Korean students whothat had studied in educational institutions in Japan came to understand Japanese rule as a threat, but Japanese education as a necessity in advancing nationalist goals; Wells (1989) argues that Japanthe Japan had become “a haven to Korean nationalists” in the first decade of Japan’s rule over Korea. The Japanese-imposed education system in Korea had thus become a driver of resistance to colonial rule. It could be argued that because education also fueled smaller pro-reform movements in Taiwan, the imposition of a Japanese education system alone cannot fully explain why Taiwanese and Korean responses to colonial rule diverged. While this is true, educational institutions in Korea itself were more developed before its annexation than in Taiwan, and thus, Japanese imperial officials in the first few decades of colonization could not completely impose their educational system upon Korea. As a result, the Japanese education system had to compete with already existing educational institutions, mitigating the legitimacy of these Japanese educational institutions and hamstringing the ability of this system to encourage assimilation in comparison to Taiwan. Thus, Japanese colonial officials in Korea were constrained in their ability to utilize education to their advantage, compared to their counterparts in Taiwan. Because of this, education in Korea had the opposite effect that it had in Taiwan, despite being framed to achieve similar goals. As a result of this failure of the Korean education system to promote assimilation to the same extent that its counterpart did in Taiwan, mass resistance movements mobilized against Japanese rule. Following the release of a Korean declaration of independence, a wave of initially peaceful protests for Korean independence spread throughout Korea in March 1919, which was violently curtailed by April. In response to the March 1st movement, the Japanese government shifted away from explicitly calling for assimilation. It instead began to espouse an ideology of unity between Japanese and Korean peoples and utilized promises of increased opportunities in “education, enterprise, politics, and other realms of public life” to strengthen the legitimacy of its colonial rule. However, because the March 1st movement had made the issue of Korean nationalism salient, even amongst Koreans who were politically disengaged, this response from Japan would fail to root out resentment against colonial rule. A 1930 report written by a British embassy located in Tokyo notes that though these policies reduced outright dissent to colonial rule, discontent toward “Japanese domination and…dependence [of Koreans on Japan]” remained. As a result, unlike in Taiwan, Japanization of Korean society during kōminka would not be as effective due to this entrenched resentment. While kōminka policies in Taiwan were able to appeal to a base of Taiwanese youth despite the violence associated with them, kōminka policies enforced in Korea furthered the resentment already felt by Koreans as a result of the suppression of independence movements. Kōminka-era policies implemented in Korea involved similar restrictions in comparison to those implemented in Taiwan; similarly to Taiwanese cultural policies, kōminka in Korea led to bans on public displays of Korean cultural practices starting in 1937. Furthermore, as the Japanese war effort progressed into Southeast Asia at the same time as kōminka-era policies were implemented, Koreans were coerced into forced labor to address labor shortages, and Korean women were forced into sexual slavery as comfort women. Although Taiwanese people were subjected to forced labor, and Taiwanese women to sexual slavery, the number of forced laborers and comfort women from Korea was far greater than that from Taiwan. The gravity and commonality of this violence committed by Imperial Japan in Korea during World War II, in combination with the already contentious reputation of Japan within Korea pre-WWI, deepened negative perceptions of Japan within Korea. Therefore, unlike in Taiwan, an acceptance of Japanese colonial rule did not entrench itself into the “repertoire of traditional forms,”, unlike in the Taiwanese case. Rather, an overt association between Japanese colonialism and violence did. This process is shown in Figure 3. [Insert Figure 3 Here] B. Post-War Collective Memory (Post-1945) Because of the resentment toward Japan produced by cultural colonial institutions, the shift from the Rhee government’s tough stance on Japan to the Park regime’s more amicable approach led to even greater entrenchment of negative views of Japan within Korean collective memory. Similar to the KMT’s attempts at Sinicization, the Syngman Rhee regime reversed the impacts of Japanization policies that had been enforced during Japanese rule. However, these cultural policies were implemented at a slower rate and to a lesser extent due to geopolitical and economic crises caused by the Korean War. Despite this more lax approach to de-Japanization in comparison to Taiwan, the Rhee regime nevertheless took a hard line on relations with Japan. For example, in 1955, Rhee floated the idea of severing all diplomatic ties with Japan, claiming that Japan had been emboldened by U.S. financial backing. Similarly, in 1956, the South Korean government “persistently refused to go along” with Japan’s claim over Takeshima (Dokdo) island. This contrasted heavily with the succeeding Park Chung-hee regime’s approach to South Korea-Japan relations, provoking open displays of resentment from the South Korean public, especially students, and furthering the resentment that had developed in collective memories of Japan during colonization. Eschewing the Rhee regime’s tougher stance on Japan, the Park regime advanced a form of what Kim (2017) terms “statist, authoritarian…developmental nationalism” that emphasized affinity with Japan and energized discontent from the Korean public. This South Korean developmental nationalism was driven by the creation of a distorted economic system during colonization, which fueled the creation of a small echelon of capitalist elites post-colonization that formed a “mutual dependence” with the Park regime. Therefore, in espousing a “pragmatist” rhetoric on its relations with Japan, the Park regime had failed to create an opposing narrative that could challenge entrenched anti-Japanese sentiment in Korea, like the KMT’s inability to supplant the influence of Japanese customs on Taiwanese collective memory and society. Furthermore, the Park regime’s stance toward Japan did not follow a precedent of previous amicable foreign relations between Japan and the ROK, constraining the extent to which the Park regime could shift public opinion. Because of this, the Park regime’s choice to normalize relations with Japan energized student movements and opposition parties that disapproved of closer South Korea-Japan relations, exacerbating resentment toward Japan. In response to negotiations over a proposed treaty between the ROK and Japan that would normalize relations, over 200,000 middle school, high school, and university students participated in rallies during March of 1964. By September of 1965, more than 3 million people had joined these protests. The sheer number of protestors demonstrates the extent to which the negative sentiment of Japan had entrenched itself into Korean collective memory during the authoritarian period and points to the difficulty caused by this entrenched sentiment in the Park regime’s attempts to change public opinion. Furthermore, the response to the Park regime’s moves toward normalization with Japan demonstrates the creation of an association between opposition to the Park regime and a negative stance toward Japan in public discourse. As a result, opposition parties aligned themselves with pro-democracy activists, which was crucial in reinforcing negative sentiment toward Japan within Korean collective memory. During the late 1970s, due to hikes in the Park regime’s authoritarianism, the minjung populist ideology, which framed South Korea as a state opposed to colonial forces such as Japan and the U.S, became increasingly popular. By 1979, the movement had “become the focal point” of opposition to the Park regime, resulting in the New Democratic Party (NDP) winning a majority of seats in the South Korean National Assembly. Thus, opposition parties such as the NDP played key roles during the South Korean protest movements in 1964-1965 and the democratization movement in the following decade. This allowed progressive politicians who had been involved in anti-authoritarian movements to, as Jo (2022) argues, interweave together “grievances against Japan and grievances against the state” during democratization from 1988 onwards. As a result, formerly opposition politicians reinforced the association between opposition to authoritarianism and a negative stance toward Japan, meaning that the negative collective memory of Japan that had persisted throughout colonization and the authoritarian period continued into the 21st century. The effects of authoritarian-era policies and the ensuing backlash on colonial memory are shown in Figure 4. This association between anti-authoritarian movements and relations with Japan is remarkably similar to the Taiwanese case, despite differences in the outcome on collective memory. In Taiwan, pro-democracy actors utilized an affinity toward Japan to mobilize resistance against an authoritarian regime, while in South Korea, pro-democracy actors utilized resentment toward Japan to accomplish the same goal. Thus, in both cases, democratization reinforced anti-authoritarian resentment and facilitated either an affinity with or resentment toward Japan. [Insert Figure 4 Here] FINDINGS OF COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS Appraising the historical trajectories of South Korea and Taiwan at large, what is immediately apparent is that Japanese colonial institutions differed significantly between the two; in South Korea, cultural and educational institutions were not as effective in “Japanizing” the colonized as deeply as their counterparts in Taiwan. As a result, the bounds of Korea and Taiwan’s “repertoire of traditional forms”, or the intersubjectively accepted historical narratives belonging to these nations’ history, differed significantly between the two. Because of this, the legacies of these institutions constrained the succeeding post-war authoritarian regimes. Applying Bernhard and Kubik's (2014) theory of memory regimes, the Park regime and KMT, respectively, attempted to act outside the bounds of their nations’ repertoire of traditional forms through advancing pro-Japan or anti-Japan policies. This resulted in political failure and the creation of pro-democracy movements that eschewed relations with Japan, in South Korea’s case, or embraced them, in Taiwan’s case. These pro-democracy movements, although oriented in different ways in terms of their stances on Japan, were similarly successful insofar as they reinforced colonial memories of Japan. This focus on colonial institutions provides more explanatory power to existing explanations of the collective opinions of Japan within South Korea and Taiwan. For instance, although some scholars have argued that the threat posed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to Taiwan facilitates positive attitudes toward allies like Japan, these explanations fail to fully explain why the South Korean public, who face a similar adversary in the form of the DPRK, does not gravitate toward so easily toward Japan, even when accounting for Taiwan’s unrecognized status. Thus, this comparative analysis contributes to a fuller account of South Korea-Japan and Taiwan-Japan relations in the contemporary context. CONCLUSION The most important factor that differentiated Taiwanese colonial memory from its South Korean counterpart was the effects that colonial institutions had on the acceptance of Japanese rule during colonization. This is because Taiwanese institutions deeply entrenched a positive association with Japan, while Korean institutions entrenched resentment of colonial rule into collective memory. As a result, the post-war KMT regime’s attempts to “sinicize” the Taiwanese population resulted in the formation of an opposition movement that capitalized on the positive collective memory of Japan, while the Park regime’s attempt at fostering closer relations with Japan resulted in the mobilization of an anti-authoritarian opposition movement that aligned itself with an ideology opposed to Japan. During democratization, these opposition-led sentiments prevailed, resulting in differentiated collective sentiments toward Japan across the two countries. Because stances toward Japan became associated with democratization, South Korea’s negative sentiment toward Japan and Taiwan’s generally positive outlook on Japan will persist in the long run. Democratization was a watershed moment for both South Korean and Taiwanese national identity, and therefore, narratives of Japanese colonialism affirmed by pro-democracy movements in both countries are likely to have a lasting impact. However, the fact that democratization had a silencing effect on narratives about Japanese atrocities in Taiwan suggests that sufficient upheaval in domestic politics could result in changes to colonial memory. This is especially important because the People’s Republic of China (PRC) continues to contest “the U.S.-led hegemonic order in East Asia.” In combination with the U.S. Trump administration’s willingness to risk its economic partnerships through a catch-all trade policy, this could create a crisis within South Korea and Taiwan stark enough to facilitate that process. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates the importance of colonial institutions in shaping colonial memory decades down the line and the role of post-colonial regimes in strengthening previously held notions of colonial rule. Thus, future scholarship should seek to more rigorously examine cases where authoritarian regimes had the effect of weakening or subverting colonial memory. 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Ward, Thomas J. “The Comfort Women Controversy - Lessons from Taiwan.” Asia-Pacific Journal 16, no. 14 (April 2018): e4. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1557466018014274. Wells, Kenneth M. “Background to the March First Movement: Koreans in Japan, 1905-1919.” Korean Studies 13, no. 1 (1989): 5–21. https://doi.org/10.1353/ks.1989.0007. Wong, Timothy Ka-ying. “From Ethnic to Civic Nationalism: The Formation and Changing Nature of Taiwanese Identity.” Asian Perspective 25, no. 3 (2001): 175–206. “갤럽리포트 1992년 9·10월(통권 제3호),” Gallup Reports. Seoul: Gallup Korea, 1992. https://www.gallup.co.kr/gallupdb/reportContent.asp?seqNo=3. DAILY REPORT. FOREIGN RADIO BROADCASTS FBIS-FRB-44-246 (October 12, 1944): NF2. FIGURES Figure 1. Effects of Colonial Institutions on Taiwanese Post-War Regimes Figure 2. Effects of Taiwanese Authoritarian Responses to Colonial Legacies Figure 3. Effects of Colonial Institutions on South Korean Post-War Regimes Figure 4. 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< Back From Dank to Diplomacy Jasper Finlay Burnside Author Miriam Davison David Lubin Faith Suh-Yoon Park Editors Abstract In 1976, Richard Dawkins introduced the idea of a meme. Like a gene, it could proliferate and spread cultural information. In the subsequent decades, the meme has become a commonplace method of transmitting information online, commonly referencing popular culture. This article takes seriously the power of memes as a device of information warfare. It builds upon previous research conducted in fields from communication to immunology and war studies to argue that memes act as white rabbits, drawing people towards conspiracy theories and misinformation. This article argues from a Realist Constructivist theoretical basis. It assumes that states will act out of self-interest to defend their strategic objectives through memes and information warfare, and that powerful actors will work to construct memes to spread ideas and ideology. However, this article also understands that there are limits to state power and acknowledges that other actors may play a key role in memetic and information warfare. "You can resist the invasion of armies, "You can't resist the invasion of ideas" - Victor Hugo What’s in the meme? Since Dawkins' first description of the meme in The Selfish Gene , various competing definitions have developed with varying levels of helpfulness and colloquial appeal., Dawkins later refined his definition, adding coadaptive ideas, such as law and justice. The same can be said of modern warfare, where memes have evolved alongside other forms of informational attacks. However, this addition fails to deliver a logical distinction. Following Dawkins’ general definitions leads the reader to a strange, undefined no man's land between digital virality and the meme. It is evident that both share some traits; the meme, to be effective, requires a level of virality that allows it to share information. However, it possesses niches which virality does not. For this, it is far more useful to examine the usage of memes in conflict and international relations by using Shifman’s definition, with certain caveats: “(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which (b) were created with awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users.” The final part of Shifman’s definition is the most critical, as it includes an element of virality. Memes share many of these characteristics, most notably the consistent trait of virality, in that they are massively popular. Yet even Shifman’s definition lacks something fundamental about the nature of memetic warfare: memes operate like a mind virus, and once released into the wilds of the internet, they spread, mutate, and adapt much like pathogens. To understand memetic warfare, it is essential to note that after an actor releases a meme, they lose control over how the meme works or functions. It can be modified beforehand and tailored to influence a given subculture or group. After the meme is injected into the internet, it spreads, with its impact being more profound in certain areas than others. It is important to point out that, unlike the Frankfurt School and the hypodermic needle theory, this article does not suggest that culture is homogeneous, or that the observer is passive, as Stuart Hall and other sociologists have discussed. Rather, memetic warfare requires that those observing the meme are active, becoming vectors for the spread of more memes and information to destabilise or disrupt the target state. Before proceeding, it is important to understand that memetic warfare need not be waged within the guise of a traditional declared war. Rather, like other forms of information warfare and the spreading of disinformation, it is waged constantly as actors attempt to undermine others and further their own goals. Critically, actors with the means to do so construct the messages to be conveyed by these memes. Given the ubiquity of computers, global internet access, and the recent proliferation of public A.I. models, an actor of almost any size can, with minimal technical knowledge, start a large-scale disinformation campaign. However, states and other large actors, such as terrorist groups, have the advantage of manpower, computing power, and willingness to counter these attacks. These actors construct the meme and the message behind it, and then spread it across the internet. Theoretical conceptualisation of the meme Soft power: Beyond sharp interpretations of memes, there is also a basis to suggest that memes are foundational in actors' abilities to increase their soft power capacities. This follows Nye’s understanding of soft power as the ideational, economic, and cultural exports of a country that give it influence. Given the proliferation of social media platforms, the ability to create memes that resonate with tens of millions, if not billions, of people is an irresistible prospect for generating soft power. While it is difficult to prove that states themselves have been responsible for the proliferation of memes, memes themselves have become part of the organic creation of culture, which, beyond a certain point, the state cannot control due to limitations in resources. It nevertheless amplifies state influence within the system, allowing them to leverage other states and create images, perhaps for self-preservation among domestic audiences, but also as a manipulative tool. This is because memes are intrinsic to a nation’s culture. Memes, and what is considered to be funny, are linked to the various and inherent cultural views within a nation. Take, for example, the rise of the “keep calm and carry on” meme. While initially this meme had been locked firmly within the British Isles, it was designed to reinforce the idea of Britishness and stoicism. It has since become a global phenomenon and effectively extends British soft power and influence, taking up a similar position to cultural exports that came from traditional media organisations such as the BBC. Given that studies into the cultural impact of memes are in their cultural infancy, it is difficult to argue the significance of this point. However, it is essential to consider which states have the largest presence on social media, which memes (templates) are the most popular, and to explore various interpretations of memes and their meanings. Sharp power: Memetic warfare provides an opportunity for manipulation beyond standard cultural exports. They have, in recent years, played an increasingly important role in the maintenance of US hegemonic power around the world, allowing for the continued export of US culture, as well as the continuation of seemingly liberal values on a global level. Fundamentally, hegemonic powers can spread their cultural values through the use of memes, influencing populations for strategic advantage. These values and norms are constructed by powerful actors, with the hegemonic power acting as the heaviest centre of norm creation. While there is undoubtedly a nature of free-floating, the ideas embodied in memes are linked to constructed cultures. That is to say, the Liberal constructivist conception of decentralised information and values is disconnected from the reality of memes, which are inherently tied to the powerful and their ideational power, which stems both from their military strength and cultural prowess. Memes, therefore, stand as a new form of statecraft, low-cost and enabling powerful actors to use more methods to shift and destabilise the nature of other states. While previously influencing cultures and populations directly was difficult, the democratisation of the internet benefits the strongest actors in the international system, providing them with a mostly passive method of influence. Of course, it would be incorrect to argue that powerful actors have full control over the information space, as individuals do not all bend to the will of actors and are distinctly separate from them in terms of living their lives. However, if a culture has been constructed that believes in certain values, it provides a bank of ideational influences to change the way others think. While much of the action can be state-directed, often, particularly in domestically liberal societies, there is a consistent presence of memetic warfare, not directed by the state, but by universalising ideologies such as liberalism. This argument, however, does not devalue Realism, but rather disputes much of the argument made by neo-realists and neo-liberalists. In the online space, it is difficult to make the argument around state control and action in the same way as traditional geopolitical IR. Of course, liberals may place more emphasis upon non-state actors, such as NGOs or IGOs. However, it is difficult to foresee the need for these organisations to use memetic warfare. While they may attempt to influence actors and populations of the need for their existence, it would be extremely unlikely for the WHO to promote memes that taunt a state or attempt to subvert a domestic political process. This is both because they are largely dependent upon states to provide funding, but also because they are often beholden to state demands for certain actions. The argument can also be made that other non-state actors, such as technology companies, have a powerful role. This is indisputably true. Yet, it is difficult to disconnect these companies from the states in which they are based. This is, as Zuboff has argued, because there has been an increased domestic security integration between states and technology companies post 9/11. Taking this argument further, there has been increased cooperation between companies and states on a national and international security level, which has allowed states to attempt to control the internet and counter its decentralised nature in order to further their own aims. We can see this link most starkly in China, where government intervention in social media platforms is overt, as opposed to the more inconspicuous nature of many Western governments. Having established this theoretical framework, the following sections will apply it to the practical actions of domestic and foreign actors in the memetic battlespace. Using the meme? When discussing memetic warfare, it is essential to recognise that it cannot wholly transform the entirety of a state's political and information systems. Through various pieces of research, it has been established across various fields that culture, and therefore information, is not homogeneous. Furthermore, it would be difficult to make the argument that memes alone would make massive changes. It is impossible for one information device to make such profound changes to the understanding of international actions, or indeed the ability to change the minds of a domestic population. Rather, the meme is intended to find susceptible groups who are more likely to believe what the meme suggests. This is aided by mechanisms within social media algorithms which target retention and aim to keep individuals engaged. It is these features that make well-placed memes easier to disseminate and self-spread, allowing them to have a disruptive capacity. Rather than changing the opinions and minds of individuals, memes act as a white rabbit; they are to be followed down the information rabbit hole, in the hope of changing or modifying the way people perceive the world in some way. Because of the nature of algorithms, individuals who engage with distributed meme content are likely to find more. This is why it is rare to see states creating new conspiracy theories or disinformation through memes, but rather clinging to already conceived disinformation and disruption, which actors may have already created. Memes, therefore, are not a strategy in themselves, but rather a large part of information warfare. Having described what memes cannot do, the question stands: what can memes do? Fundamentally, this is challenging given the diverse nature of memes and their content. Actors have the ability to construct the initial meme, allowing them to craft a narrative that they would like to proliferate. This can help to modify some of the domestic population's perceptions around the state, and typically feed into nationalist feelings in order to provide some basis to their claims, such as British First World War propaganda depicting the Germans as “the hun”. This is just one example of a pre-social media meme designed to change perceptions. However, in a modern setting, it is more useful to examine the Russia-Ukraine war (began in 2014). Fundamentally, while there have been efforts at disinformation and offensive memetic warfare to advance a foreign actor's position, there has been large-scale defensive memetic warfare, which has aimed to maintain domestic security and national identity from external threats. While states wish to push their position on the international stage, they also need to protect their identity and domestic populations. This requires them to produce narratives to insulate or protect themselves from physical and psychological threats from abroad. Of course, it is not a dialectical matter; states can both preserve their identities and their physical security by rallying troops with memetic propaganda. Memes also do not exist in a vacuum; individuals operate on the basis of competing information sources and disputed facts. This means that there is an opportunity for actors to compete for attention with their memes and information warfare. This requires more people power than simple memetic warfare; it requires information updates, constant attention, and resources to be used. There will be competing ideational concepts produced by different actors, which they will directly counter with memes shared by others in an attempt to produce more competitively attractive information to serve their own ends. This entails actors finding specific groups who are being targeted and redoubling their efforts towards them, enabling them to better counter the actions of others. However, it is worth noting that defensive memetic warfare most often takes the form of memes to reinforce national identity. This can be done by pulling on national myths or heroes. For example, following US attacks early in 2025, the Iranian government used images of archers. Fundamentally, these pull on preconstructed notions which are linked to contemporary issues, and draw upon collective memory, which has been passed down generationally. This, however, requires a strong national link between various groups, and for memory to be highly concentrated. Yet, certain groups will likely have weaker connections between the nation and the community for myriad reasons. Take, for example, separatist groups. These may be the most susceptible groups due to more tenuous links to the state; this is the white rabbit. The memes act as a link to continued conspiracy or alternative views, allowing individuals to move into a different understanding of the world because of the vehicle of the meme. The domestic position: Building from the Iranian position, domestic actors will always attempt to reinforce their own images and protect their own standings with their own populations. State actors will often use memes to further the image they are trying to convey. They do this by targeting specific groups with memes, tailoring their message to draw disparate groups into the state’s way of viewing the world. Memes allow state and domestic actors to reinforce the messages they wish to promulgate. They can be distributed through official channels or through bots and other less traditional distributions. Bots can be particularly useful for disseminating information in dubious ways, especially when they cannot be traced due to manipulation, which in turn leads to easier modification of understanding. Bots can be of further use in mass dissemination to multiple groups, which can prove critical in countering foreign actors, particularly when riots erupt. By releasing thousands of rabbit colonies - each with their own particular subtexts and understandings - domestic actors can exert control over certain online spaces to move individuals towards a certain position. It is this same mass dissemination that enables states to counteract the efforts of foreign actors to destabilise them. By using the same tactics, domestic actors are able to reduce the effects of foreign actors. Moreover, using memes allows domestic actors to reinforce their own images and ideology. In pressing their own ideas through memes, they can target those who might be susceptible to influence by foreign actors. This is, however, not an infallible strategy as information warfare can overcome a domestic actor's ability to contain it, usually because of the volume of accounts and devices used to influence populations. While actors can attempt to block individual accounts, this remains ineffective for mass-scale attacks. These counterattacks will target individual subcultures and groups that the state has an interest in preserving from foreign actors. This operates in a similar manner to parties during election campaigns, where memes and messaging are targeted towards specific groups. When examining states such as Russia and China, there have been instances of mass domestic memetic functions designed to maintain popular support. However, there is a difference between democratic regimes and authoritarian regimes. These differences are not merely to do with legal structure, but also with surveillance. Following 9/11, most Western states have developed a digital security apparatus, as outlined by Zuboff and others. Authoritarian regimes have far more expansive social surveillance systems, which enable them to more accurately assess groups and, therefore, target them. This is further aided by state-controlled social media companies, which can enable the censoring of certain terms. In comparison, social media companies in democracies are less incentivised to cooperate with states. As a result, there is a globally critical ideational role to be played by media companies in memetic warfare. Given that these companies are able to set the rules of the game, they have the ability to prohibit certain information or types of information from certain sources. Notably, the state still has leverage over these companies, which allows them to act within domestic and international settings to conduct memetic and broader information warfare. It is also important to note that certain populations may have an increased level of susceptibility. The popularity of a regime will play a large part in the success or failure of a memetic device. If a government is broadly unpopular, it would be difficult for a memetic device to succeed, given that its narrative is unlikely to be believed. This may lead to an increased likelihood of the usage of bots for memetic purposes. Doubtless, the same unpopularity which makes domestic actors' memetic actions less feasible makes the actions of adversarial actors more feasible. This is because memes are reliant upon pre-constructed narratives and ideas. They can simply act like white rabbits, meaning that unpopular actors are less likely to have their interpretation understood. In these instances, foreign actors will likely choose to exploit this unpopularity anonymously. The foreign actor: Foreign actors are never wholly reliant upon memetic warfare to influence others. Memetic warfare comprises a vast array of information war tactics that foreign agents can use to destabilise, alter, or change the way others engage in international politics. Foreign actors may wish to destabilise the political landscape of adversarial states to further their own interests. This, to an extent, explains the nature of information control within states such as China. Governments will seek explicitly to prevent the spread of memes because of the damaging and disadvantageous effects that they can have on domestic populations as they rally against government officials. This partly explains why the CCP moved to remove images of Winnie the Pooh from Chinese social media networks, something which quickly became associated with President Xi and poor leadership from the CCP. This can also be seen with the spread of the Gay clown meme: “Dean Cooper-Cunningham’s visual analysis of the Gay Clown Putin meme in Russia, for instance, demonstrates how this rhizomatic structure of the memescape creates a queer disruptive space for ‘critical political interventions that might challenge [the] international security policy’ of Russia, which relies on the articulation and securitisation of cisheteronormative nationhood.” Because of the nature of memes, they can use humour, which in a sense is highly political, but due to the often satirical nature, it lacks much of the scrutiny and oversight of other forms of information distribution. “Comedy itself is ‘serious politics’ – a productive, imaginative, and relational ‘practice of political resistance in its own right’ that demonstrates individual and collective inclination to contest hierarchies, hold differing opinions, and critically reflect on politics. Consequently, as Brassett argues, humour can (de)legitimate political structures, contest power relations, or encourage reimagination of various aspects of politics and society.” Brassett’s argument provides nuance that helps us to understand the power of the meme. By nature, humour can be disarming, particularly since politics can often appear comical because of its seeming disconnection from the lives of most individuals living within a given polity. Foreign actors can attempt to spread their message through social media channels, using domestic cultural identities to influence subculture groups, attempting to move them further from what their governments wish them to believe. Effectively, foreign actors can reinforce existing discontent through the use of memetic warfare. Foreign actors must ensure that they integrate local culture and customs by paying close attention to historical memory. This means that historical memories of shame and destruction in war are critical to an effective memetic campaign. A failure to heed cultural differences will lead to poorer memetic performance. Foreign actors, therefore, need to spend time tailoring the nature of memes. However, when memes are deployed, it is impossible for actors to control them. They are therefore reliant upon social media algorithms, as much as they are by good design and action. Furthermore, there is a need to consider the volume of memes used. Actors can attempt to flood the zone, pushing an enormous number of memes through bots. Actors wish to control the information space, squeezing out other information and deceiving users into believing their account. By releasing droves of white rabbits, actors are able to systematically take over online space, removing opposition to their ideas. While this will not be completely successful, countermeasures can be deployed both by oppositional actors and by social media companies, which likely cooperate with state actors. HoweverIn addition, sheer volume alone will not convince everyone. Research from Pew has found that only 28% of individuals say that social media is important in keeping up to date with the news. Conversely, a study from Manchester University has found that there is a kind of blind trust in the information which individuals see online. The chances of success are relatively high for foreign actors. Of course, if effectiveness is measured as a percentage of the total population converted to a given belief or led down a given rabbit hole, it will seem less effective. However, the primary purpose of memetic warfare is more about information disruption than wholesale societal destruction. The nature of memetic warfare is not one of a solo strategy of destabilisation, but rather as one combined with various other features of information, traditional war and disinformation. It acts as a powerful enabler for a state's broader strategic actions. Before or during conflicts, we can observe upticks in memetic warfare, when actors attempt to disrupt the information space and reduce individuals' ability to understand what is happening around them. This can be particularly effective when targeting subcultures which are disconnected from central governments. These groups may be oppressed, poor, disparate, or ethnic minorities who do not share the national identity with those in power. Memetic devices offer other actors the opportunity to damage collective identities and shift strategic positions to their benefit. Fundamentally, memes are a device which forwards the needs of foreign actors. Countermeasures While much of this paper might give the impression that memetic warfare is an insurmountable challenge to the state, that would be an overstatement of the power which memes and information warfare have for the state. There are various countermeasures that may be deployed by actors to avoid some of the effects of memetic warfare. At a state level, actors can establish agencies to identify and address misinformation, as well as implement digital literacy programs and logic education. These kinds of passive defence can be exceptionally useful in reducing the potency of the memetic devices. Furthermore, states can set up rapid support agencies to counteract the spread of misinformation online. Of course, more traditional paths such as sanctions and the potential use of force are options to counter the effects of memetic warfare. This does not mean that any of these strategies will be completely effective; however, in the eyes of states seeking to maintain order and domestic legitimacy, it is better than nothing. Given the nature of the internet, direct government action and its effects are severely limited. Most of the countermeasures are limited to and by social media companies. The role of the state is not diminished, but rather that social media companies have to act as an intermediary between the state and memetic devices. There are, of course, differences between authoritarian and liberal democratic states. Where authoritarian states have more control over social media and the internet, liberal regimes may have ideational difficulty with using some of the same tactics. Those who control social media and internet algorithms are able to divert traffic and prevent certain kinds of information from being shared on their platforms, thus, stemming the flow of memetic devices and information warfare. These companies also have the power and the resources, without the review of courts, to ban and disable accounts which appear to be sharing memes or seem to be attempting to share false information. There are also various passive measures that allow states to counteract information warfare. Educating citizens in internet safety, similar to Finland, and ensuring access to reliable information from traditional media sources on both social and traditional broadcast mediums can help dispel false information and enable states to develop passive countermeasures, reducing the impact of constant information warfare. These processes and this education mean that the power of memetic warfare shifts, moving agency from the aggressor to the defender, allowing them to construct countermeasures that can largely banish, in combination with active defences, the worst effects of memetic warfare. While it is still largely dependent upon the ability of governments and organisations to remain popular, there can be a high level of diffusion. Beyond this, companies may revert to recently abandoned practices such as information warnings and labels attached to content. These solutions doubtless raise questions around the nature of liberty and for the internet to be free from control. However, we can already see that internet companies, at the request of states, have acted to curb some of these freedoms and liberties in the name of countering misinformation. The future? Given the nature of the internet and the current state of technology, it seems obvious that some changes will be necessary in the future. With the advent of publicly available generative AI, it will become easier to create memes. Furthermore, while the public has had access to AI for a number of years, states and companies have had access for a little over a decade. AI provides an opportunity for significantly easier memetic and information warfare. The ability to create information and generate lifelike videos (deepfakes) and then disseminate them using AI agents to specific groups, means that there can be increased precision in memetic warfare, as well as wider applicability. Publicly available AI models will allow non-state actors such as terrorist groups to engage in large-scale memetic warfare in ways that we have yet to see. While Daesh, at the height of its power as ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), used videos and messaging groups to recruit individuals, the use of AI-created memes deployed by AI agents will allow groups to target subcultures and more accurately find new recruits. This will doubtless prove to be deeply problematic for domestic policing and will require new levels of regulation and cooperation both within and outside states. It will also allow them to flood the zone, pushing massive numbers of white rabbits, enabling individual small-scale acts to do what previously was only possible for state or large organisational actors. While concepts of the metaverse have largely failed to inspire popular imagination, with MetaMETA largely rolling back much of its investment, should the metaverse begin to encroach upon the real-world experience of individuals, it is possible that memetic and information warfare may become increasingly effective. The increasing amount of time spent in the metaverse would allow actors to influence people and the perception of their reality. If an individual is surrounded for hours per day, not just through a screen, but in their perception of the room they stand in, it is not difficult to imagine that they could become influenced. Furthermore, the idea that immersion in digital zones will increase disinformation is something we have already observed with increased time spent on social media and the internet. Given that individuals' perceptions of reality are altered by screen time, the likelihood that the metaverse will influence them seems almost inevitable. The final, and likely most important development, relates to the fragmentation of the internet. While many will be aware of the effects and nature of the ‘Great Firewall of China’ , around the world today, we see the division of the internet, with countries being split into different zones. While China’s control is the most profound example of this, the demise of net neutrality is spreading globally. The UK's ‘Online Safety Act’ is the most prominent within liberal democratic societies. Government regulation of the internet means that cross-border flows of information will become increasingly obstructed. While this will prove useful for State governments, it may significantly hinder the actions of foreign actors attempting to influence foreign populations. Yet, it also proves to be a dampener for the ability of internet companies to exist, and will likely be subject to much tumult in democratic societies, provided that the public takes notice. Should the internet continue to fragment, due to algorithms and regulation, memetic warfare will likely become more difficult. However, this is far from clear. It is entirely possible that the division of the internet will lead to internal proliferation of memes, and it is important to consider that it only takes one rabbit to lead individuals down the rabbit hole. Case study: Post-2014 Russia/Ukraine conflict: Ukraine: Defensive Memetic Warfare and Soft Power: Since the advent of the most recent conflict in Ukraine, there has been an uptick in the usage of social media and information warfare, both to rally and attack. Broadly, Ukraine has attempted to use memes and informatic warfare around the world, but with particular effect in neighbouring countries and other Western allies, in an attempt to increase international support and gain access to advanced weapon systems. Conversely, Russia has sought to reduce international support and use disinformation both within Ukraine and around the world to increase complexity and further confuse the nature of the conflict on a global level. “Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the social media presence of both Ukraine and Russia has been closely scrutinized by researchers in communications, media studies, and human-computer interaction. The separatist movement in the Donbass region has intensified a battle of narratives: both sides employed five contextual frames, namely historical, geographical, religious, ethnic, and political. A popular framework for the analysis of memes relies on identifying the overarching narratives, whereby each meme constitutes a partial element. Boatwright and Pyle studiedstudy 163 tweets by the verified @Ukraine and @Kyiv Twitter accounts posted in February 2022, finding pre-invasion promotional content as well as myth-making. Similarly, Yehorova et al. identifiedidentify different humorous elements in the early wartime tweets. A more structured framework of narrative analysis is that proposed by Stephen Karpman and expanded by de Saint Laurent et al. to include two dimensions: moral quality (benevolent or malevolent) and power (strong or weak). In our study, we employ this framework and the resulting four archetypes: Hero (benevolent, strong); Victim (benevolent, weak); Villain (malevolent, strong); and Fool (malevolent, weak).” Within the conflict in Ukraine, it is easy to see the use of memes as devices to support ideational claims made by states, such as the Russian claim over swathes of territory, as well as ontological ideas about the nature of these states. Relating particularly to the damage done during war, to the concept of safety, security, and nationalism. When states are attacked, it is not merely physical; it is an attack on their identity and ability to continue to exist, as Mitzen has described. It remains necessary for states to defend their core strategic interests at all costs, including ontological goals, in times of conflict. Moreover, these memetic devices are not merely designed to protect, but also to inspire. They are, in many cases, forms of propaganda. This allowed states to reach disparate groups and attempt to improve their connection to the national ideal. They function as traditional propaganda pieces, designed to link to traditional ideas and interpretations of the national myth. This, as discussed above, allows them to be so potent. In times of crisis and conflict, the nature of the meme can shift from a passive ideational idea to something which is designed to strengthen resolve and prevent the faltering of minds with the weight of bombs falling. The best example of the Ukrainian countermeasures is likely NAFO (North Atlantic Fella Organisation), which has been dedicated to countering the spread of Russian information during the course of the war. Many have observed that it is likely the best example of information warfare globally: “Negative historical associations (e.g., with Stalin or Hitler) are often employed. Extreme evilness is attributed to the Russian army… a cartoon shows Russian pilots gloating as they kill Ukrainian babies, a typical atrocity frame employed in propaganda. Even Russian civilians are portrayed as evil: in the rightmost example, they happily play with bloodied toys taken from Ukrainian children.” Memes enable Ukraine to reinforce a shared national understanding of its enemies. Releasing these defensive white rabbits allows for a further level of villainisation, which enables there to be a stronger resonance within the Ukrainian population. This allows for more rallying and an increased uptick in soldiers joining the military due to the damaging image provided by the memes to the population. Furthermore, it allows for the promotion of historical memoriesy in allies, particularly those in Europe. The triggering of these memories allows for the activation of a transgenerational memory, and therefore moves both individuals and governments to act to support the Ukrainian government. The idea of evil, and the framing of Russia as a historical enemy, and the centre of a kind of ideational evil. This idea of memory, and the links to historical circumstance, particularly the unspoken nature of much of the trauma and damage which was experienced, is what makes these memes particularly potent in the international sphere. This is dependent upon shared experience, and a kind of collective memory, or collective cultural understanding, but it is something that Ukraine has mastered during the course of this conflict, enabling it to connect with the diasporic nationalities of Europe. Russia: Offensive Memetic Warfare and Sharp Power: Meanwhile, Russia has continued to use memes within conflict zones.; Iits use in Ukraine is, however, is likely the most advanced. Russia has used various memetic devices to spread disinformation around Ukraine for its own ends. Releasing white rabbits claiming control over various regions in the east, or encouraging individuals to leave or return to certain territories, or inspiring the idea of de-Nazifying Ukraine. Since 2014, Russia has used various memetic devices to undermine accusations by foreign governments. “Russia’s strategic narrative that the 2018 Salisbury poisoning was staged by the West not only deflects accusations of responsibility, but contributes to Russian popular suspicion towards democratic states, presents events as a Western plot to be expected because of Russia’s return as a global power, and mobilises a particular form of domestic patriotism and support for authorities. However, US and European narratives about Russian misinformation and interference can discredit Russia’s other actions that do not involve misinformation, contribute to broader discourses around ‘fake news’ and rising global threats to democracy, and enable particular policy responses. Strategic narratives, as Roselle et al. (2014) argue, should therefore be regarded as a powerful resource, vital to contestation and a complex media ecology, and key to understanding influence.” Memes can be used as a justification and as something which can undermine the accusations from foreign actors, enabling future actions. Similar actions can be seen in Ukraine, where Russia has used memes as part of false flag operations and to direct the domestic and Ukrainian populations. Putin’s domestic popularity at the intensification of the conflict in Ukraine in 2022 meant that memes designed for the Russian population were significantly more influential than they otherwise might have been. 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< Back Mine Provides the Coffin Philip Maxson Author Samantha Gerber Maya Martinez Eleanor Triedman Editors Abstract To stay below 2.0 °C of anthropogenic warming, the globe must push for the rapid development of clean energy technologies. To mobilize this development, a significant emphasis is being placed on critical mineral extraction for green energy and national security purposes. However, this extraction has been shown to have significant detrimental human rights effects. This paper analyzes the role critical minerals have in clean energy, and the role China plays as the dominant producer/processor of critical minerals. Theoretically, this paper posits 4 categories of human rights violations: (1) Environmental Issues, (2) IPLC Rights, (3) Labor Issues, and (4) Violence. By drawing on Kara’s (2023) fieldwork in Katanga, as well as various NGO (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch) reports, Government Reports, and UN documentation, this paper uses the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a case study to examine human rights abuses in the cobalt mining supply chain through storytelling. This paper suggests that the energy transition must be coupled with policy tools to address human rights abuses, ensuring the globe commits to not just a clean transition, but a just transition. The paper suggests three focus areas to help couple the clean energy transition with a just transition: Shared Governance and Legalized ASM, Shared Prosperity and Economic Benefits, and Effective Due Diligence. Introduction: Critical minerals have increasingly been the focus of domestic and international policy within the United States. Since taking office in 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump has directed significant focus on the acquisition of critical minerals and the national security imperatives of critical mineral access. In February, controversy surrounded a proposed U.S. bilateral agreement with Ukraine, wherein Ukraine would pay back U.S. aid and military assistance by signing over rights to their critical mineral deposits; which, according to the most recent estimates, total $126 trillion worth. Following, on March 20th, the President signed an executive order increasing domestic production of minerals under the guise of national security.,Additionally, on April 24th, the White House signed an executive order directing the Department of Commerce to “pursue the exploration and exploitation of deep-sea resources both within the U.S. exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and areas beyond national jurisdiction.” Critical minerals have become part of a broader policy goal of the Trump Administration to “Unleash American Energy,” and to localize critical mineral mining and processing within the United States. But the fascination with critical minerals is increasing around the globe, with many countries seeking to increase access to these vital resources. The control of critical minerals has become a national security priority for many countries in the “West.” Their use in technology, specifically weapons and security tech, as well as infrastructure and manufacturing, has made securing access to mining rights, processing strength, and stockpiles a critical defense strategy against unanticipated demand spikes or supply chain disruptions. Currently, China has global control over critical mineral mining and processing, which has left countries such as the U.S. and the EU wary of supply chain risks and security. As a result, many countries have sought to expand their control over these sources. And, the increasingly rapid cycle of commodity use in the 21st century has led to a clear spatial expansion of extractivism across the globe. This expansion of the critical mineral extraction and processing industry is increasingly dangerous for local actors. Human rights abuses, sexual violence, child labor, and environmental destruction are rampant throughout extractivist industries; especially those that are linked to critical minerals. Despite this, critical minerals are also positioned as vital for a clean energy transition and a post-carbon world. This paper seeks to explore the connection between critical minerals, the global supply chain, and human rights abuses. First, this paper traces the need for critical minerals in the clean energy transition and the role of China’s control over resources. Following, this paper goes in depth into the political ecologies of the extractive industry and the violence inherent in critical mineral extraction. By focusing on the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a case study, this paper details how histories of colonialism and resource extraction have been exacerbated by the clean energy transition, and how on-the-ground local ethnographic knowledge can provide critical information on the violence of extraction. Finally, this paper concludes with policy recommendations for the industrial and political world of the U.S., while acknowledging the multifaceted and opaque nature of extractivist violence. This paper hopes to contribute to the ongoing literature surrounding a just clean energy transition. What Are Critical Minerals? Critical minerals (also called ‘critical materials’ and ‘green metals’) are elements necessary for advanced technologies central to our contemporary lives. They are vital for the twin–green and digital–transitions, as new technologies utilise far higher amounts of minerals than more traditional technologies. For example, critical minerals have become necessary for the production of everyday technologies, such as iPhones, device batteries, computer chips, as well as green technologies: solar panels, wind turbines, and battery storage. While often referred to as “critical minerals,” the concept is slightly in flux when it comes to these materials. Elements such as these are predominantly metals, but can be non-metal elements and minerals, as is the case with arsenic (a metalloid). The criticality, in this instance, refers specifically to their vitality for various energy and technological uses, and their risk in the global supply chain. Minerals that have become necessary for our smartphones and batteries, for instance, are considered critical due to their importance in the U.S economy, but also because of the heightened chance of supply chain disruption. Supply chain disruption refers to a vast array of issues, but the most prominent is a small concentration of minerals and global monopolies. For example, ruthenium, rhodium, and palladium are all present in very minimal concentrations as by-products of platinum processing; they can, then, experience disruption of the supply chain due to how limited production capabilities are. Additionally, some minerals are market concentrated at the processing stage, such as copper, cobalt, and lithium as China holds over 40% of the global smelting and refining capacity. Critical minerals can also be viewed in contrast with “traditional minerals,” which often have well established extraction and refining processes and supply chains; gold, nickel, and coal all fit within the more traditional mineral model, but notably have very little place in a green energy transition. Our use of critical minerals is expected to increase drastically as a result of the clean energy transition. To put emissions on track with the Paris Agreement would require a significant scaling up of clean energy deployment across the globe. Annual installation of solar photovoltaic cells, wind turbines, and electricity networks must expand by about 3x their current levels by 2040. In the same period, electric car sales must expand 25x over. As a result, our reliance on critical minerals will increase. A typical electric car requires 6x the mineral inputs as a traditional car, and an offshore wind plant requires almost 9x the mineral resources as a gas plant of the same capacity. Additionally, the construction of wind farms and electric cars uses seven different types of minerals, while a natural gas power plant and a conventional car use only two. While demand forecasts do fluctuate over time, the best estimates show that, to reach net Zero demand is expected to triple for copper and cobalt, more than triple for zinc, and grow more than fivefold for lithium and manganese. Since 2010, our mineral demand per new unit of power generation capacity has increased by 50%. Suffice to say: the clean energy transition means a shift to a material-intensive system from a fuel-intensive system. China’s control over critical minerals China is the dominant player in global mineral processing. It holds a majority of rare earth elements, and dominates the midstream (processing and refining) and downstream (manufacturing) stages of critical minerals supply chains. Apart from processing the minerals mined within, China is also the destination for the processing of minerals mined in other countries. Additionally, China is the primary producer of a majority of technologies that come from critical minerals, such as solar PV cells. This vast control over the production and export of critical minerals has shaken other countries. There is concern that the high level of dependence on China for these minerals will create energy security risks. The U.S. and the EU have both grown increasingly wary of this issue and have moved to build out their own critical mineral supply chains and production facilities. Despite this, currently, China still holds a strong grasp on the critical mineral industry. Globally, China refines 68% of nickel, 40% of copper, 59% of lithium, and 73% of cobalt and is by far the world’s leading producer (60% of the global production share, but down from 95% in 2010) and processor of rare earth elements (REEs), such as neodymium, which are used in motor technologies for EVs and wind power technologies. The U.S. The Department of Energy projects that “demand for rare earth elements for wind power alone could exceed the supply for all uses by 1.6 to 3.5 times over. China has also become the globe’s most strategic player in the production of battery cells. They produce 70% of cathodes, which are the most important component and can account for half the cost of a manufactured cell, 85% of anodes, 66% of separators, and 62% of electrolytes. For electric vehicles, China holds 78% of the world's cell manufacturing capacity for batteries and hosts three-fourths of the world's lithium-ion battery megafactories. This makes China the largest consumer of the minerals it refines. Despite the lack of direct domination in mining for critical minerals, China (and Chinese companies) has made several moves to secure raw mineral inputs globally through investments and deals. Chinese firms have moved to make direct investments into international mining projects and companies, and have acquired part-equity stakes in major operations in emerging economies. For example, in 2018, China's Tianqi Lithium purchased a 24% stake in SQM, a major lithium producer in Chile. Ganfeng Lithium has acquired stakes in mining projects in Argentina, Ireland, Chile, and Australia. CATL, a major EV battery manufacturer, has acquired Canada-based Millennial Lithium and stakes in Australian lithium mining companies, as well as copper-cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Finally, Suzhou CATH Energy Technologies is investing in a lithium and tin project in the DRC through a joint venture, earning a 24% equity interest. These deals have also been beneficial for cornering partnerships with electric vehicle manufacturers and the industry that requires these minerals. Some foreign automakers seeking to secure supplies have collaborated with Chinese companies, such as Volkswagen, forming joint ventures with Huayou Cobalt and Tsingshan Holding Group to secure nickel and cobalt. In this regard, a company may feel forced to make a deal in partnership with a Chinese firm to secure access to vital minerals. China’s control over critical minerals has also developed a distinct spatial factor. As part of its Belt and Road Initiative, China has taken a distinct interest in African nations for resource extraction. No other country serves as such a dramatic example as that of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Chinese-backed companies own or have a financial stake in 15 of the 19 cobalt-producing mines in the DRC. In the cobalt supply chain, Chinese control over mining and intermediate production comes almost entirely from outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) in cobalt-producing facilities in the DRC. After purchasing the majority shares of Tenke Fungurume in 2016 and 2017, Chinese-controlled production was over half of the DRC's chemical refinery production. China has shown little desire to show proper due diligence in its critical mineral supply chain. Despite having two legal frameworks to ensure responsible sourcing and compliance with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards, regulation is lacking. The China Chamber of Commerce of Metals, Minerals & Chemicals Importers & Exporters (CCCMC)’s Guidelines for Social Responsibility in Outbound Mining Investment and the CCCMC’s Due Diligence Guidance, both call for a commitment to human rights in mining efforts, and to identify, address, prevent, and mitigate risks associated with their activities or sourcing decisions. In actuality, however, these regulations have not been deemed enforceable. And, as this paper will explore later, the global critical mineral supply chain is so opaque that many efforts to ensure proper due diligence fall flat. Human Rights and the Critical Mineral Trade The mining sector has a long history of improper treatment of human rights. From histories of colonialism, blood diamonds, land grabbing that displaces indigenous groups, food contamination that affects nearby communities, and fatal force against workers protesting for livable wages, mining has often failed to be grounded in the principles laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UDHR is the bedrock for standards and principles that govern the mining sector, including the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights, and the International Council of Minerals and Metals Mining Principles. And, while many global mining companies have committed themselves to respecting human rights laid out in the UDHR, more work is still needed to ensure a human rights-based approach in mining. For example, despite article five of the UDHR, which states that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family,” Mining companies continue to fail to address long-term environmental and health impacts of their commercial activities. Public information surrounding the human rights impacts of critical mineral mining has often been sparse, and used to justify further reliance on fossil fuels. Despite this, focus on the human rights aspect of the clean energy transition is vital for ensuring a just transition for all. A significant portion of critical mineral hot spots are located in countries that are at risk for human rights violations. And, according to a report by the IEA in 2023, over 40% of cobalt, lithium, and copper come from mines with verified human rights abuses. That number, however, is expected to be greater, as human rights abuses are often poorly reported and tallied due to fear of further assaults. Across a majority of mines, there remains a risk for gender based violence (GBV), violence against Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs), environmental degradation, extrajudicial killings, child labor, and a number of other issues. Since the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises were released, more human rights complaints have been filed against companies in the mining and manufacturing sectors than in any other sector. Due to the spatial realities of mining, human rights abuses become more realized. A majority of mining operations take place in remote areas, with local communities that have poor access to basic standards of living, exacerbating issues. Concerns surrounding human rights violations can most easily be broken into 4 categories: (1) Environmental Issues, (2) IPLC Rights, (3) Labor Issues, and (4) Violence. Environmental Issues: There is primarily concern surrounding the environmental devastation that occurs as a result of critical mineral mining. Most methods used to mine critical minerals today require significant amounts of water for separating minerals, cooling machinery, and controlling dust. Additionally, water contamination from chemicals and mineral tailings is commonplace. Take, for example, lithium extraction. In large areas of Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia – often referred to as the lithium triangle – lithium is acquired through evaporation brine pools in the region's salt flats. This evaporation method uses up to half a million gallons of brine water to extract just one ton of lithium carbonate. And, while the brine water is unfit for other uses, reports have shown that this form of extraction has led to contamination of local freshwater sources and vast depletion of groundwater. In addition to water contamination, ecosystem devastation is commonplace in mining. Just one example is copper, where vast open-air pits carve holes into the crust of the earth, and pollute the air with dust and mine tailings. In a report done by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, the leading tracker of mining human rights abuses, environmental devastation makes up almost 29.5% of all tracked violations – the second largest category in their 2024 report. IPLC Rights: The largest category for the report? Infringements on Local Communities. Over 50% of the current critical mineral supply falls in indigenous lands, with 29% of these projects on or near lands over which Indigenous peoples are recognized as managing or exercising some form of control or influence over land for the purposes of conservation. IPLCs are disproportionately at risk for displacement and forced relocation thanks to critical mineral mining. In Indonesia, for example, the PT Vale Indonesia (PTVI) nickel mine has consistently been under scrutiny for its impacts on IPLCs in Sorowako. For more than 50 years, indigenous peoples, local farmers, and fisherfolk have been displaced from their land due to the development of this mine, and reports of harassment by local law enforcement have raised concerns of grave human rights violations. These broader inequities and attacks against IPLC communities are commonplace across mining operations, and thanks to rising demand, more mining is forecasted to take place on IPLC land over the next 50 years. Forced Labor: Forced labor in supply chains is a pervasive issue for the critical minerals sector, and makes up a large amount of human rights violations across the globe. Many miners are paid measly sums – upwards of $1 USD a day for mining – with many being trafficked to their current operation. At nickel processing plants in Indonesia, many workers have been deceptively recruited in China, and once they arrive, they receive a lower wage than promised and work longer hours. Workers regularly experience having their passports confiscated by overseers, having their wages deducted for no obvious reasons, and being subjected to restriction of movement, forced isolation, and constant surveillance. Child labor has also become commonplace across the critical mineral sector. Children as young as six have been made to haul heavy ore, work in narrow and dangerous mines, and come in close proximity to explosives, toxins, and dust; often without proper personal protective equipment. Child miners often work in informal artisanal and small-scale mines, which usually fly under government radars, and leave workers vulnerable to exploitation and dangers. While obviously child labor is abhorrent, the choice is often the lesser of two evils. The choice isn't simply sending a kid to work in the mines or sending a kid to work at school. It's often between putting a kid to work or starving. Violence: Violence is perhaps too broad a category to lump together. It can better be split into its own three distinct categories: Sexual Gender Based Violence (SGBV); torture, cruel and inhumane treatment; and attacks against activists. Women make up upwards of 15% of the global mining workforce, and gender -based inequalities remain pervasive. There continues to be a longstanding masculine dominance in the structures, systems, and policies that make up critical mineral operations. From ‘everyday sexism’ to sexual harassment, assault, and rape, women are subject to gender based violence on an everyday basis. According to the International Institute for Environment and Development, one study that surveyed 12 African countries found that women and girls are exposed to “rape, sexual harassment, sexual exploitation, physical violence, spousal abandonment at the end of their assignment, [and] unwanted pregnancies and abortions” during their time mining. Additionally, economic violence, including failure to promote women and inequitable sharing of resources and income, is pervasive, and harmful gender stereotypes “combine to limit women’s access to resources, capital, education, higher-paying roles, equality in professional and domestic roles, and fair remuneration.” Due to their precarious position, many women often feel forced or coerced to provide sexual favors in exchange for access to work, protection, or payment. Many feel they have no alternative. State forces and paramilitary contractors have repeatedly engaged in cruel and inhuman punishment for dissidents and protestors fighting against mining operations. Workers who protest conditions in the mines are often subject to government repression, arrest, or even slaughter by government forces. In 2016, the Venezuelan government authorized expansion into the Arco Minero del Orinoco, which authorized mining for critical minerals in previously protected lands. Since the authorization, the area has become heavily militarized, and armed groups and criminal syndicates have come to control mining operations and populations. These groups, while the state has turned a blind eye, have consistently been found to be complicit in or committing large-scale human rights violations and crimes against the local populations, including: unlawful deprivation of life, disappearances, extortion, corporal punishment, and sexual and gender-based violence. Additionally, in 2012, during a protest against mining conditions in the Republic of Guinea, state officers fired on protestors, killing 6, and resulting in the unlawful arrest, injury, or torture of 15 others according to the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Court. Human rights defenders, environmental defenders, and activists specifically bear the brunt of these attacks. While widespread extrajudicial violence against protestors and angry miners is commonplace, activists and defenders experience specific targeted attacks against them and their family members by the state. According to a report by Global Witness, the mining sector has been the main driver of killings against land and environmental defenders. Attacks can include killings, physical violence, harassment, and even SLAPP suits, all of which prove detrimental to the livelihoods and civic rights of activists. Unfortunately, most of these attacks are done by or for the state and go unpunished, fostering a culture of fear for activists. While these human rights abuses are pervasive across the critical mineral industry, no country bears more responsibility than China. Of the mines tracked in the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre report, Chinese-owned mines were responsible for almost a third of violations reported, and almost 80% of direct reports of violence. Additionally, a majority of other mines in the report have some direct ties to Chinese-owned operations or investments. However, due to the opaque nature of the critical mineral supply chain, it is distinctly difficult to track violations back to direct parent companies, and as a result, many more attacks may have had direct ties to Chinese operations. Cobalt: The Blood of the Congo One of the broader challenges in extractivist literature is tracing the connection between the global supply chain and local actors in the commodity chain. The supply chain of critical minerals is often viewed as disconnected and static. As a result, there is a discursive understanding of the actors and interconnections in the critical mineral supply chain. Consistent with Calvão et. al.’s (2023) methodology, the following section of this paper works to place relational and material understanding of natural resource extraction that directly examines the human and social experience through a case study of cobalt extraction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. By incorporating local, ethnographic knowledge, research, and stories, this section aims to demystify human rights abuses that take place in mining operations. This section draws on Kara’s (2023) fieldwork in Katanga, as well as various NGO (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch) reports, Government Reports, and UN documentation to illuminate the grave abuses taking place in the DRC. One cannot truly understand the history of Cobalt mining in the DRC without first understanding the nation's history. From 1855 to 1960, King Leopold II embarked on a brutal conquest of the region, laying the groundwork for over a century of genocide, violence, and apartheid. He unleashed one of the more brutal colonial regimes, designed specifically to extract maximum wealth from the Congo and maximum labor from the Congolese people. He turned the territory into a machine. Forced labor, amputations, and genocide under Leopold laid the groundwork for violent extractive industries to run rampant through the Congo. Under the command of Leopold, the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK) was founded, and became responsible for copper mining within the country, compelling the Congolese to almost triple their production of copper. Following World War II, the African nations became engulfed in anti-colonial protests. The Belgian Congo’s quest for independence of the late 1950s was led by four charismatic figures: Patrice Lumumba (the nationalist leader) and his three right hands – Joseph Mobutu, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, and Moise Tshombe. Lumumba was elected prime minister in 1958, but the Belgians embarked on a desperate last-minute plan to save the minerals of the Katanga province, and the resulting combat, infighting, and CIA-sponsored coups led to Mobutu seizing control of the country. By 1965, Mobutu had control of the country, renamed it Zaire, and had become a despot in his own right. He nationalized the UMHK under the banner of Gecamines and took direct ownership of the mines. Under his control, the Katanga region became the premier exporter of Cobalt, and the Katanga province became one that many countries sought to seize control of. Following Mobutu’s fall, the Rwandan Genocide, and the two Congo Wars, cobalt had become deeply ingrained in the DRC’s economy. Gecamines experienced a drastic institutional collapse and could no longer pay wages, leading many miners to turn towards artisanal mining. When new leadership under Joseph Kabila took power in 2001, instead of revitalizing Gecamines, the mining code was updated to attract foreign investment, and specifically emphasized Chinese investment with the SICOMINES deal in 2009. Throughout Kabila’s presidency, he continued to engage in wide-scale corruption and kickbacks through Chinese banks, putting his own profit above his people’s. Due to the collapse of Gecamines, artisanal mining surged, and state dysfunction left people with no other livelihoods. The cobalt supply chain has become increasingly informal and dominated by artisanal mining. Creuseurs (diggers) mine by hand in dangerous tunnels or sort tailings from industrial mines. They are searching for heterogenite, a composite of cobalt, copper, nickel, and sometimes uranium. They mine with whatever tools are available, and rarely any PPE. Miners fill large sacks with the ore, which are then tied to ropes and pulled by hand out of the mine shafts, which can be tens of metres deep, or carried up the walls of a large open pit, where miners often fall, breaking their legs or arms. One such case is the story of Tshite and Lubo. Tshite, Lubo’s father, worked every day in a mine at Tilwezembe, making just enough money a day to send his son to school. When Tshite was exiting a mineshaft, it collapsed, shattering his arm. Lubo, despite his father's pleas, was forced to mine to support his family. Lubo began mining under the control of the trafficker Arran, who had upwards of 200 boys locked in contracts and extortive violence at Tilwezembe. When one day Lubo did not return from the mine, Tshite went looking for him. When he arrived, he had guns pointed at him by armed soldiers, and they beat and kicked him while he pleaded, “Where is my son. Show me my son .” After a while, the soldiers took pity on him, revealing that a mine had collapsed, killing 7 of the 40 children in it (almost all of whom had been trafficked by Arran), Lubo included. SAEMAPE, the mine, provided the coffin, but that was all. “I miss Lubo so much. He was my best friend,” Tshite recalls. Similar stories are commonplace in Haut-Katanga. Children are forced to mine in horrific conditions, and many are killed, maimed, or seriously injured in the process. Many of these incidents go unreported as miners may not want to come into contact with the authorities because they are working without licenses in unauthorized mining areas. It is commonplace for miners to die in collapses and to remain there: “They die and are forgotten.” After the heteroginite has been mined, it must be washed. Women and children stand in knee-deep water, contaminated with lead, uranium, and toxic chemicals, washing the dust tailings off the ore. Nothing lives in these ponds. Many miners complain of constant respiratory issues from breathing in the dust, and those washing ore complain of sores and burns from where they must stand in the water. 63% of all workers suffer injury or illness; at artisanal sites, the injury rate reaches 72%. Following the washing of ore, it is delivered to the Negociant, who pays the miner for their product. These negociants then deliver cobalt to depots, which are often upwards of 10 miles away from artisanal mining operations. The introduction of a third-party seller poses risks for distinct inequalities in the mining sector. Negociants offer a fixed price that artisanal miners must accept: usually about $1-$2USD per day's load. However, women are offered lower prices for the same amount of ore – usually only $.80 for a day's work. Women endure significant hardship in the artisanal mining sector. Sexual assault by males in the pit is commonplace. Artisanal miners often drink to distract from the pain and hardship of mining, and drunken rages and assaults have become the norm. Additionally, soldiers and paramilitary forces have been known to assault women, extorting them with the power they wield. Almost every woman in the sector knows someone who has been raped or has been raped herself. But, many have no other alternative. Child labor is pervasive throughout the artisanal mining sector in the DRC. Children make up around 40% of the artisanal mining workforce. Many have been forced to drop out of school to take over mining, as school fees have become too expensive (almost $5-8 a month), or their families are not making enough to support themselves. Children as young as 9 work up to 12 hours a day in the mines, carrying heavy loads, earning very little. Even those who attend school work in the mines during the weekends, on holidays, and in between school hours. On top of the arduous working conditions, children are distinctly at risk of trafficking, sexual assault, and physical assault. To reach the mines, many children must enter mining concessions that security guards patrol – some independent and some employed by the state – who often catch children and physically abuse them. One child, Mathy, described to Amnesty International her experience with the Gecamines’ security guards: “They asked for money, but we didn’t have any…They grabbed my friend and pushed her into a tank containing diesel oil. I was able to run away and hide, but I saw what happened. I cried. I was scared, I ran away and hid, so I saw what happened. ” Children also routinely are extorted by negotiants, guards, and other miners, and forced to pay others to free themselves of harassment, or assault. Child trafficking is also prolific in the mining industry. Due to the increased paramilitary presence of the Mai Mai militias, M23 insurgents, and other members of the 120 active armed groups in the country, paramilitary violence is commonplace. In Le Triangle de la Mort, Mai Mai militai men have reportedly trafficked many children into the artisanal mining sector, forcibly removing them from their parents, or extorting family members with violence. Peter, a young boy from Manono, recounts how Mai Mai militia men “took us from our home… and sold us to a Lebanese man named Ahmed. He made us dig, and he took all of the money. ” Peter escaped from the triangle, but many children do not. The town itself has received its macabre name thanks to the tactics the Mai Mai militia men have used to extort locals to mine. Reports describe torture, murder, and the chopping off of hands and feet – a tactic that is directly descended from Leopold's brutal torture regime. Following the negociant’s purchase of ore, they sell it to Depots, who collect cobalt from artisanal mining and sell it to processors. Almost all depots in the DRC are owned and operated by Chinese nationals. Artisanal cobalt and industrial cobalt are not separated in the Depots, and as a result, there is no way to verify if your cobalt has been tainted by child labor. Eventually, it is bought primarily by CDM, a Chinese-owned smelter and subsidiary of Huayou Cobalt. After smelting, cobalt is shipped to China for further processing and assembly. Of the 70% of the global cobalt supply that comes from the DRC, and although estimates are tricky, it's possible that upwards of 78% of production comes from forced labor. Of that 78%, 92% is sold to foreign-owned entities, with 52% going specifically to Chinese buyers. Policy Recommendations The world is careening towards the mobilization and upscaling of critical mineral production and processing. Bipartisan support backs increasing access to critical minerals for national security and industry uses. Throughout this, though, there remains a persistent cry from human rights activists and protestors urging corporations to do more to prevent gross human rights violations during the scramble for critical minerals. Corporations have committed to several due diligence policies and internal oversight mechanisms to ensure they follow current human rights standards. Despite this, most humanitarian groups claim that due diligence policies are ineffective and humanitarian-washing. International businesses have a responsibility to ensure their practices are upholding international human rights standards. Based on the foundations set out in the UN ‘Respect, Protect and Remedy’ Framework study, these rights include the right to rest, the right to reasonable standards of living, access to education, the right to express oneself, and the right to be involved in decisions affecting one's life., Protection against infringement of these rights comes from two places: the state and the corporation. The state has a duty to protect against human rights abuses by third parties through governance mechanisms such as policies and adjudication. In essence, the state must act to create a legal framework that protects the human rights of its citizens. Businesses have the responsibility to respect the rights of their workers, which essentially means acting with due diligence to ensure rights aren't being violated and provide recompense for victims of rights violations. Despite these responsibilities, it is clear that human rights are continuing to be systematically violated in pursuit of the clean energy transition. The following section details the current international due diligence standards and provides three focus areas to help couple the clean energy transition with a just transition: Shared Governance and Legalized ASM, Shared Prosperity and Economic Benefits, and Effective Due Diligence. Shared Governance and Legalized ASM: One of the primary avenues suggested for advancing the human rights of mineworkers is the legalization of artisanal-scale mining (ASM). Through the legalization of ASM, policymakers hope to ensure that abuses from traders, public officials, or armed groups become less common, and when it does happen, there are legal options for miners. This goal, however, remains misguided. Simply put, the legalization of ASM fails to accomplish its goals: artisanal miners often place more weight on customary law and follow historical social rules regarding mining; artisanal miners are still often not given proper sites to mine on, meaning they must remain tied to corrupt mining companies or bosses; and lastly, it fails to provide artisanal miners with other forms of safer production. More work must be done to formalize practices in dialogue with various stakeholders, miners, and governments to incentivize actors to prioritize human rights. Additionally, larger economic policies must be designed to lift artisanal miners out of poverty and open up other economic avenues to miners. Significant research has shown that the inclusion of affected stakeholders in negotiations around the economic, social, and environmental conditions of mineral exploitation has positive effects on balancing both economic and decision-making resources among stakeholders. For example, Local Benefit-Sharing Trust Funds can be a way to combine democratic decision making, through the use of vertical accountability mechanisms (elections or consultation), and economic benefits for AS miners. One prime example of community-based decision-making aiding in the legalization of ASM is through the Côte d’Ivoire government/village co-management approach for diamonds. Communities take 12% of sales for local development at the expense of allowing the nationalized mining companies to define boundaries for ASM. These agreements “resulted in the formalization of most mine sites and the majority of diamonds registered at the mine level as part of the chain of custody.” Shared Prosperity and Economic Benefits: Critical mineral demand will continue to grow. This growing demand presents an ideal development opportunity for emerging resource-rich economies, if they’re able to utilize proceeds to diversify their economies. However, this opportunity has yet to manifest itself. African countries only possess 1% of the global installed photovoltaic capacity and are estimated to generate only about 40% of the revenue they could potentially collect from critical minerals. Ensuring that prosperity is shared equitably across the commodity chain is vital for ensuring a just clean energy transition. On a more local level, as well, economic and development benefits must be shared. Mining provides a number of value streams into a country: job creation, commodity chain development, and increasing reliance on domestic goods and services, which offers the chance to boost local economies. Additionally, infrastructure developments such as power, water, transportation, education, and healthcare can bring long-term benefits to communities. Through the legalization of shared use of mining infrastructure, extractive industry investments in infrastructure can help close the infrastructure development gap. That being said, extractive industries should continue to operate within sustainable development guidelines and human rights guidelines. This includes, first and foremost, proper wages, decent jobs, and the right to collective bargaining. Co-ownership may be the solution for shared prosperity between miners and the extractive industry. Corporate Due Diligence : Corporate due diligence is challenging in the context of the human rights violations of extractive industries. Due to the complex and extended nature of critical mineral supply chains, even the most proactive companies struggle to determine the origin of their products. Additionally, once a company has become aware of a violation, the solution isn't always to immediately cease business with the responsible party. Stopping trade often brings other forms of harm to the same communities. There are a number of tools available to companies to prevent harm to communities. For example, companies might pay higher prices to those that require miners to wear personal protective equipment. First and foremost, corporations must engage in stakeholder/rightsholder engagement across the commodity chain. Corporations should also engage in capacity building for local communities and workers. This can take the form of vocational training, increasing education access, and upgrading facilities and infrastructure. Additionally, companies must work to address the current transparency issues within the critical mineral supply chain. Companies must ensure human rights tracking across the full supply chain; a task easier said than done. One solid step companies can take to begin this work is rejecting the use of certificates of origin as sole proof of origin for critical minerals. The cobalt supply chain is muddy, and oftentimes, ASM cobalt is mixed with company-mined cobalt. This means cobalt origin data is often unreliable for determining how free from rights violations it is. Rejecting the use of certificates of origin requires companies to spend more time ensuring minerals are free from human rights violations. Additionally, activists, citizen groups, and governments should push for legal requirements of transparency from corporations. Corporations should make data on their supply chain, efforts to reduce human rights violations, and engage in capacity building, and blind spots, publicly available. This accomplishes two goals: first, it requires companies to identify potential blind spots; additionally, it allows consumers to choose between corporations engaging in effective due diligence versus ineffective due diligence; essentially, it provides a financial incentive for proper due diligence. These recommendations are far from exhaustive and are limited in their assessment of effectiveness. However, they offer a strong jumping-off point for future research into remedying human rights violations within the critical mineral trade. More work is necessary to ensure remedies take into account local humanitarian and political contexts and don't cause more harm than good. Conclusion There is a term used by critical scholars in the environmental field: climate colonialism. Our ways of addressing climate change are directly entangled with historical and present-day practices of colonial extraction, ecological degradation, and uneven and unfair international arrangements, which disproportionately negatively affect the global south compared to the global north. This paper has illuminated the ways in which the current extraction industry of critical minerals is directly tied to modern-day colonialism: the global north is tearing up economically developing countries for resources, often breaking bodies in the process, but this time, we’re solving a crisis, so it’s allowed. This paper is not attempting to argue for a deprioritization of critical mineral access; these minerals are necessary for the clean energy transition and are essential for ensuring global warming stays below the 2.0 °C mark. However, the rush for critical minerals must be a just transition, centering the voices of those it most impacts. This transition must be taken with a climate justice and decolonial approach. Proper payment and human rights-centered policies have the opportunity to lift countries out of poverty and directly work to decouple carbon from development. The environmental movement must work to ensure a just transition; without it, we’re just destroying the people who will be the most affected by climate change. Extraction of critical minerals has drastic consequences on the environment and on the people who mine them. We must not destroy the planet in the process of saving it. 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The Brown University Journal of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (JPPE) is a peer reviewed academic journal for undergraduate and graduate students that is sponsored by the Political Theory Project and the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society Program at Brown University. The Brown Journal of Philosophy, Politics & Economics Volume VII, Issue I scroll to view articles Featured Articles Philosophy Body Ethics: Moving Beyond Valid Consent Christine Chen Non-Self Through Time Anita Kukeli Divisive Identities Exploring the Interplay of Personal and Social Identities Ella Neeka Sawhney The Captain and the Doctor George LeMieux Read More PoLitics Mine provides the coffin: An Examination Into Human Rights Abuses During the Extraction of Critical Minerals Philip Maxson free exercise and identity: The Future of Parental Free Exercise Claims in Public Education Max Choi Divergent Colonial memories in south korea and taiwan: Institutional Legacies Danny Ly Read More Economics Read More Not Paying income tax timely leads to significant financial losses for the governments. What design changes could be made to tax collection policy to minimize these delays? Aryan Midha One Planet, One Oklahoma: Exploring a Framework for Assessing the Feasibility of Localized Energy Transitions in the United States Anna Hyslop Applications for JPPE will resume in the fall! See Available Positions

Author Name < Back Refuting the Myth of Progressive Secularism: An Analysis of the Legal Frameworks Surrounding Religious Practice in France and Bahrain Bridget McDonald This paper explores the idea that a secular state is inherently more progressive than a religious nation (a country with a designated state religion). Looking through the lens of freedom of religious expression, I argue that having a secular clause in a country’s constitution does not necessitate a higher degree of religious freedom. Decades of Western discourse linking secularism to modernization has created the notion that religious countries cannot foster free and prosperous societies to the level of secular nations. To refute this view, this paper builds on Talal Asad’s critiques of the contemporary secular model as Eurocentric. Additionally, I expand on the policy overlap discussed in John Bowen’s article comparing the French and Indonesian judicial systems. I employ a comparative case study model to evaluate the legal frameworks surrounding religious practice in France (a secular state) and Bahrain (a Muslim state). Findings indicate that although the two countries differ in terms of religion’s place in government, significant overlap exists between their laws impacting religious practice. I argue that in certain cases, Bahrain exhibits a higher degree of tolerance for religious expression than France. I conclude that religious states can value religious identity more than a secular country, therefore enabling select religious nations to foster religious freedom to equal or higher levels than their secular counterparts. However, more comparative research needs to be done to fully evaluate the dimensions of religious freedom in secular and religious countries. Introduction In the 2022 French presidential elections, news coverage of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen’s outlined platform – titled 22 Measures for 2022 – highlighted the second goal on her list: “Eradicate Islamist ideologies and all of their national territory networks.” Le Pen closely tied this sentiment to laïcité (secularism), a French value developed during the Revolution that established the foundation for a formal separation of church and state. Le Pen’s rhetoric has brought forth discussion on the role of secularism in the government and the impact of secular policies on the French Muslim community (Ataman, 2022). Though initially a primarily Western ideology, a clause pertaining to secularism now appears in 71 countries’ constitutions (World Population Review, 2022). These nations, referred to as constitutionally secular countries, are typically associated with higher GDP (Ruck, Bentley & Lawson, 2018), more socially progressive policies, and increased freedom. However, the recent ban on burqas and niqabs in secular countries has brought into question the progressive nature of secularism. France, Switzerland, Belgium, and Bulgaria have fully banned burqas, while various other European countries have banned the burqa to differing degrees. This trend, which has been criticized for discriminating against Muslims, demonstrates the complicated relationship between secularism and minority religious groups. France, the first European country to ban the burqa via a law prohibiting facial coverings (Erlanger, 2011), has taken further steps to target the Muslim community, including fining women for wearing a “burkini”– a full body swimsuit for Muslim women, that, unlike a burqa, does not have a facial covering (The Guardian, 2016). Labeled as a tactic to fight extremism, the burqa ban is one of many laws regulating Muslim practices and expressions of Muslim identity, such as pressuring imams to sign a charter of republican values (Williamson, 2020). The targeting of the Muslim community in France challenges the idea that secularism entails socially progressive policies. If secularism suppresses religious freedom, then perhaps it is not as progressive as many Westerners believe. This paper seeks to refute the idea that a secular country is inherently more progressive than a religious nation. I will evaluate the legal frameworks of a secular state and a religious state, focusing specifically on areas of law that impact religious expression. This study will center on France, a vocal supporter of secular values, and Bahrain, a Muslim state that has placed emphasis on improving religious freedom over the past decade. Ultimately, this paper argues that the inclusion of a secular clause in a nation's constitution does not necessitate a higher degree of religious freedom. Theoretical Framework In 1870, the term “secularism” was coined by British writer George Holyoake to describe a moral code that exists independently from religious doctrine. Today, secularism is defined as “ the principle of separation of the state from religious institutions” (Oxford Languages), though the degree to which secular countries separate church and state varies widely . For example, while Indonesia is constitutionally secular, the Aceh region of the country is under Sharia law. The discrepancies in how secularism manifests in countries’ legal structures necessitates further exploration on how secularism has historically been conceptualized and defined. Though many scholars have addressed secularism, much of the discourse has been from a Western perspective, which led to significant bias in early secular theory. Max Weber and Emile Durkheim’s work hypothesized that secularism and modernity were tied (Cannell, 2010); the authors identified the decline of traditional religious belief in Europe as the result of technological advancements and economic growth. One notable criticism of this theory came from Talcott Parsons, who claimed that the patterns of religious participation in Europe should not serve as an indicator for global secular trends (Cannell, 2010). Parsons further argued that Weber’s essay, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , exhibited a Eurocentric perspective (Cannell, 2010). Additionally, Protestant Ethic displayed sentiments of Western supremacy and presented capitalism as the ultimate economic system (Weber, 1905). Peter Berger is another critic of the theory that secularism is connected to modernization. He argued that traditional religious beliefs were not being abandoned and were instead evolving, and cited the development and upsurge of evangelism in the United States as evidence (Berger, 1999). Despite criticism, however, Weber and Durkheim’s theory remained prevalent for several decades (Cannell, 2010). This skewed academic perceptions of secularism and linked the concept to a Western and capitalist definition of progress. The absence of an internationally accepted definition of secularism, and varying religious, social, and governmental structures across the world further complicate how secularism is defined. However, newer discourse on secularism has reflected a more comprehensive view of the concept. In his 2003 book, Formations of the Secular, Talal Asad posited that the Western perception of secularism as progressive is inaccurate and underscored the Western European origins of contemporary secularism. Asad emphasized that liberal secularism should not apply to all societies and that it allows for the prohibition of certain religious practices; this paper adopts Asad’s stance and argues that the prohibition of religious practices legitimizes discriminatory policies. Further, Asad states that “the ideology of political representation in liberal democracies makes it difficult if not impossible to represent Muslims as Muslims … Because in theory the citizens who constitute a democratic state belong to a class that is defined only by what is common to all its members and its members only.” Using this lens, this paper asserts that French laws limiting religious practice in the public sphere further isolate religious minority groups. Asad’s contributions to secular discourse and his discussion on belonging and identity in a liberal democratic state lead to the question of whether constitutional secularism offers a higher degree of religious tolerance within a country when compared to a nation that has an established state religion. Through the collection and analysis of laws impacting religious practice in France and Bahrain, this paper seeks to support Asad’s conclusions and determine the degree to which constitutionally secular nations are able to promote religious freedom. Although previous comparative case studies on secular and Muslim countries are extremely limited, John Bowen’s article , Religious Discrimination and Religious Governance Across Secular and Islamic Countries: France and Indonesia as Limiting Cases (2010) offers a selection of preliminary findings and sheds light on areas in need of additional study. In the article, Bowen concluded that there is notable overlap in policy between France and Indonesia. Bowen argued that despite having different governmental structures and views on religion’s place in the public sphere, similar policies appeared in both countries. Additionally, Bowen called for further comparative study on the scope of this phenomenon to expand upon his research into other aspects and applications of secular policy. Building on observations on policy overlap between France and Indonesia, this paper explores the similarities and differences between France’s religious policies and those of Bahrain – a Muslim state. This comparison provides further insight into the legitimacy of the theory that secularism fosters higher levels of religious freedom. A. Measuring Religious Freedom The United Nations guarantees religious freedom in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief. The UDHR and ICCPR incorporate a number of components into their definition of religious freedom: the freedom to adopt, change, or renounce a religion, freedom from coercion, the right to manifest one’s religion, the freedom to worship, the ability to establish and maintain places of worship, the right to display religious symbols, the ability to observe holidays, and protection from discrimination on the basis of religion. While there is no single, defined approach to measuring religious freedom, the definition provided by the UDHR and ICCPR allows for guidance in evaluation. Additionally, multiple non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have used different metrics to measure religious freedom, which, when combined with international standards for defining religious freedom, aid in understanding how to accurately assess the subject. For example, the Pew Research Center (PRC) measures religious freedom by analyzing both social and governmental restrictions on religious action (2016). Since constitutional secularism exists within the confines of state law, this paper focuses solely on governmental policies surrounding religious expression. The social perception of other religions and religious freedom, while important, does not relate directly to the argument and would be best analyzed in further studies. A second way of measuring religious freedom is through the framework used in Freedom House’s annual freedom reports, which ranks countries on a scale of 1 to 4 (1 being the lowest possible score) in a number of categories, including freedom of religious expression. In its 2020 reports, Freedom House asks, “Are individuals free to practice and express their religious faith or nonbelief in public and private?” to determine the level of religious freedom in a country. This paper uses this question, the presence of governmental restriction on religious action (as outlined by the PRC), and the components of religious freedom listed by the UDHR and the ICCPR as a definition of what religious freedom looks like in practice and utilizes the definition for legal analysis. Though there are many laws governing religion in France and Bahrain, this paper focuses on laws that directly impact religious practice. The paper highlights seven categories of law as markers of religious freedom. The groups of law reflect a combination of the approaches used by the Pew Research Center and Freedom House, as well as relevant components of the UDHR and ICCPR’s definition of religious freedom; each section examines an aspect of government restriction imposed on free religious practice (apart from Constitutional Status, which offers critical context on the legal setting in the countries), and categories selected answer whether individuals are free to practice in public and private. III. Background France’s deeply entrenched notion of laïcité, which allows for extreme criticism of religion in the public sphere, is contrasted by Bahrain’s stringent anti-blasphemy policies that protect all registered religions from criticism. Each of these ideologies is rooted in the history and culture of the two nations. This difference in approaching public discourse is one of various examples where France and Bahrain diverge in their policies surrounding religion. To understand policy-making relating to religious practice in France and Bahrain, it is necessary to establish baseline knowledge on the histories of the nations. A. France Religious History and Laïcité — Before the French Revolution, Catholicism was the official religion of France. The conversion of Clovis I in the late 400s tied France to the papacy, and later monarchs enjoyed close relations with the Church. Hundreds of years of Catholic influence on the French monarchy and corruption within both institutions contributed to growing resentment towards the Church, which peaked during the early stages of the French Revolution and subsequent Reign of Terror. Demands for a secular government were followed by the persecution and murder of Catholic clergy members in the late 1700s. Though Napoleon Bonaparte reconciled with the Catholic Church in 1801, France did not reinstate Catholicism as the national religion. Over the next century, France continued to dechristianize the public sphere, culminating in the Loi du 9 décembre 1905 concernant la séparation des Églises et de l'État (1905 law on the separation of churches and state). Since the Revolution, France has developed a unique brand of secularism, laïcité, that goes beyond the separation of church and state, arguing that religious expression should remain outside the view of the public eye. This ideology has manifested itself in laws that prohibit the wearing of religious symbols in public schools and ban face coverings. The concept of laïcité has changed, however, since its original conception. As discussed by Eoin Daly (2012), secularism has moved beyond separating church and state and now acts as a justification to move differing religious identities into a private sphere and promote a French identity embedded in shared national values. A 2020 report by the French government offered clarification on the country’s reasoning surrounding laïcité: The freedom to express one’s religious convictions can be limited for the sake of public order, under conditions defined by the law. Freedom must, however, always be the rule, and the limitations the exception, in view of the constitutional principles enshrined in our Republic and France’s international commitments, with which such legal restrictions must be compatible. An additional outcome of laïcité is the prohibition of data collection pertaining to religious affiliation; this policy makes it somewhat difficult to gain a holistic picture of France’s religious landscape. The Religious Futures Project at the Pew Research Center (2016) estimates that 58.1% of the population is Christian, 8.3% is Muslim, and 31.9% is unaffiliated as of 2020. Notable trends include growth in France’s Muslim population (due to increased immigration from former French colonies in Africa), a consistent decrease in people identifying as Catholic, and increased growth in those identifying as unaffiliated. Of the 12 national holidays in France, 7 celebrate Catholic events, which seemingly contradicts France’s strict separation of national and religious affairs. France is currently scored as 3 out of 4 on freedom of religious expression by Freedom House (2020). Recent Events and Political Climate — Law surrounding religious practice in France has been heavily influenced by numerous terrorist attacks over the past decades. During the 1980s and 90s, France saw various attacks by numerous groups: Hezbollah, an integrist Catholic group, the Armed Islamist Group, and other non-religious groups like Action Directe (Shapiro & Suzan, 2003). The 2000s brought more deadly attacks, the majority of which had connections to Islamist groups. Following a series of bombings, shootings, and stabbings by various Islamist groups in 2014 and 2015, France enacted laws increasing government surveillance (Law Nº 2669, 2015) and anti-terrorism efforts (Law Nº 1353, 2014). Terrorist attacks led to a renewed emphasis on laïcité in the political sphere. Far-right isolationist parties led by politicians like Marine Le Pen incorporated anti-Muslim messaging in their campaigns, promising French voters safety from radical Islam (Fieschi, 2020). In this climate of frequent terror attacks and the rise of far-right parties, France created and amended legislation surrounding religious practice. B. Bahrain History — Bahrain, located off the coast of Saudi Arabia, fell under the control of various empires before declaring independence from the British in 1971 (Gardner, 2017). Known for its pearl beds and freshwater springs, the island was seen as highly desirable by political entities. This caused numerous changes in leadership. From the 1400-1800s, the territory of Bahrain was controlled by the Omanis, Portugal, Persia, the ‘Utub (a Sunni tribal confederation), and the United Kingdom (Gardner, 2017). Throughout the centuries of changing leadership, Bahrain developed a diverse population. The pearl trade brought merchants from all over the world, and the territory was exposed to many ideologies, religions, and cultures as a result of the various empires that had taken control of the island. Though small populations of Jewish, Hindu, and Christian people have lived in Bahrain over past centuries, Islam has been the predominant religion since its introduction to the indigenous population in the 640s (Gardner, 2017). The majority of Muslim Bahraini people identify as Shi’a. However, a smaller Sunni elite has ruled the country since the arrival of the Sunni al-Khalifa family, who came with the ‘Utub. Bahrain was declared a monarchy in 2002, headed by King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, who remains in power today. According to the Religious Futures Project at the Pew Research Center (2016), 69.7% of the population is Muslim, and within that group, roughly 60% is Shi’a and 35-40% is Sunni; 14.1% of the population is Christian, 10.2% is Hindu, and 2% is unaffiliated as of 2020. Bahrain is currently scored as 1 out of 4 on freedom of religious expression by Freedom House (2020). Recent Events and Political Climate — In 2011, Bahrain served as a starting point for the Arab Spring in the Gulf countries. The country saw massive protests from the Shi’a community, who decried unfair treatment by the Sunni government. The government reacted by killing and arresting protestors, destroying Shi’a mosques, and dismantling the traffic circle that had served as the uprising’s epicenter. Following condemnation by the international community and human rights organizations, King Hamad launched an investigation and resolved to enforce policies to improve tensions between the Shi’a and Sunni groups (U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom Report on Bahrain, 2020). While the initial success of these policies was contested, the government has taken significant steps in the past decade to ameliorate the state of religious freedom in Bahrain (USCIRF, 2020). The government, which had rescinded the citizenships of 1000 Bahrainis (most of whom were Shi’a) due to alleged security threats, reinstated over half of their citizenships in 2020 (USCIRF, 2020). While typically met with government hostility, the Shi'a holiday Ashura remained largely peaceful in 2020 and 2021; discourse concerning Ashura between the Sunni government and Shi’a clerics has eased tensions between the parties to allow for the celebration of the holiday. However, despite improvement, tensions remain between the Sunni and Shi’a communities. In terms of relations with non-Muslim groups, the Bahraini government is notably tolerant of other religions. There are 19 recognized religions in the country, all of which are able to practice their respective beliefs freely. IV. Methodology A. Overview This study aimed to determine whether the legal framework of a secular state fosters higher degrees of religious freedom than that of a religious state. This paper uses a comparative case study approach to ensure a balanced review of France’s domestic policy concerning religious practice. Further, the comparative case study model offers critical insight into the caveats of secular policy when implemented on a national scale. Bahrain was chosen as a comparative subject because it is a Muslim state in which members of various other religious groups reside. The primary goal of data collection was to gain a deeper understanding of the laws impacting religious practice in both countries. To effectively compare the two countries, specific areas of policy were chosen (listed in Table I) following the combined framework of Freedom House and the Pew Research Center described in the Theoretical Framework section. Primary qualitative data concerning policy was taken from law databases published by the French government. Secondary qualitative data was extracted from reports on Bahrain and France by the United States Commission for Religious Freedom (USCIRF), the United States embassy, and Freedom House country reports. The search process yielded a number of pertinent laws surrounding religious practices in France and Bahrain. B. Comparing Policy on Domestic Religious Practice Information on France’s laws was sourced from the government. Translations were provided by the author unless indicated otherwise. The United States State Department reports informed general knowledge on the legal framework surrounding religious practice. Due to the general inaccessibility of translated laws from a Bahraini government source, information about religious laws in Bahrain was obtained from United States government reports. Recognizing the potential bias of the United States government, only objective data (such as the description of laws) was used in this paper. Areas of crucial law were chosen after general study on legal frameworks surrounding religious practice; the categories of policy listed in Table I were selected because they represent the most direct interaction between the government and religious groups and reflect international standards for religious freedom as expressed by UDHR and ICCPR documents. It was imperative that both countries had laws falling under each assigned category, otherwise, policies could not be compared. Laws were evaluated based on the level to which they promoted or inhibited freedom of religious expression, and a compare and contrast approach was used, reflecting the style of Bowen. Larger implications and enforcement of the laws were not considered, as the repercussions of policy were too far-reaching to effectively encompass in this comparative case study. Instead, analysis of laws consisted of identifying common themes and key similarities and differences between the legal frameworks of France and Bahrain. Other peripheral areas of law could be colored by religious or secular ideologies, such as marriage laws. However, to keep the scope of this study appropriately narrow, peripheral policies were not considered. V. Results: Analysis of Legal Frameworks of France and Bahrain A. Constitutional Status The constitutional statutes of France and Bahrain are, as discussed earlier, on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum. These religious designations are detailed below for context. (i) France Article 1 of the French constitution states “France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic.” (ii) Bahrain Article 2 of the Bahraini constitution states “The religion of the State is Islam. The Islamic Shari’a is a principal source for legislation.” B. Anti-Discrimination Laws (In Reference to Religion) Both France and Bahrain have clauses in their constitutions prohibiting discrimination against others on the basis of faith. Beyond their respective constitutions, both countries have enacted laws forbidding hiring and workplace discrimination in relation to religious affiliations, as listed below. (i) France [The internal regulation] may not contain provisions which would prejudice the employees because of their sex, morals, sexual orientation, age, family situation, origins, opinions, religious beliefs, physical appearance, name, or disability, when they have equal professional capacity capability (L. 122-35, 2008). (ii) Bahrain The labor law prohibits discrimination in the public sector on grounds of religion or faith. The law also stipulates recourse through a complaint process to the Ministry of Labor and Social Development to legal bodies in the event of discrimination or dismissal in the work place on the basis of religion (U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Bahrain, 2019). Analysis — The anti-discrimination clauses in both the countries’ constitutions have been further developed into active laws. The overlap of anti-discrimination policy in France and Bahrain shows that, in this case, a secular country and a religious state are able to promote religious freedom in the same capacity. C. Registration with the Government and Government Funding Both the French and Bahraini governments have registration processes in place for religious organizations. Recognition of a religious group by the respective governments allows for financial support, whether that comes in the form of subsidization or tax-exempt status. As government registration is tied to financial support in each country, the process allows the state to maintain relative control over the religious makeup of the nation; this is achieved to varying degrees in accordance with the requirements of the law. (i) France According to the 2019 USCIRF report on France: In France, religions are not required to register with the government. However, in order to receive official recognition, tax-exempt status or financial aid, religious groups must go through a number of processes. To receive tax-exempt status and official recognition as a religion, groups must apply as associations of worship, and to receive government funding, groups can apply as cultural associations. Religious organizations are able to qualify as both an association of worship and a cultural association, thus receiving tax-exempt status and government funding. It should be noted, however, that government funding is permitted only to go towards non-religious activities hosted by a religious group, such as educational programming. Despite Article 2 of the Law of 1905 Concerning the Separation of Church and State stating “ The Republic does not recognize, pay or subsidize any religion”, the French government owns and operates religious buildings built before 1905. Approximately 90% of Catholic buildings in France are subsidized by the government, while 12% of Protestant churches and 3% of Jewish temples are subsidized as a result of the law. There are no Buddhist or Muslim centers of worship subsidized by the government (French Senate report, 2015). (ii) Bahrain According to the 2019 USCIRF report on Bahrain: Bahrain’s government requires that religions register in accordance with their faith. Sunni and Shi’a organizations register with the Ministry of Justice and Islamic Affairs and Endowments and register further with the Sunni and Shi’a Waqfs to receive funding. Non-Muslim groups must register with the Ministry of Labor and Social Development, during which they must provide a number of details (including minutes from meetings, personal information on founders and the group’s bylaws). Religious groups (Muslim and non-Muslim) are not allowed to receive funding from foreign donors, and money collection is monitored by the government. Analysis — Bahrain’s laws surrounding the funding of religious groups and registration with the government are more stringent than France’s. However, while France does not require registration, restrictions from funding and tax-exempt status for non-registered groups act as significant incentives in pushing organizations to submit an application to the government. In both cases, the government seeks access to information on religious groups, though Bahrain attempts to monitor activities to a more extreme extent than France. While this does not necessarily infringe on the status of religious freedom, the laws in both countries allow significant room for discriminatory funding. An example of this was displayed in a 2015 French Senate report that noted the vast majority of France’s 2,500 mosques receive little to no public funding while Catholic institutions are almost entirely subsidized, but pointed to Muslims’ inability to organize and register with the government as the reason for funding inequality (2015 French Senate report, 23). As this claim is difficult to quantifiably prove, it allowed the government plausible deniability on the lack of funding for Muslim organizations. In Bahrain, disproportionate funding for Muslim organizations is enshrined in the country’s laws. While France’s legal framework surrounding registration is not as strict as Bahrain’s in this case, policies in both countries enable an unequal distribution of funding. D. Religion in the Public Sphere: Freedom of Speech and Religious Symbols The French and Bahraini approaches to religion in the public sphere offer vastly different interpretations of the promotion of religious freedom. Nevertheless, both countries are stringent in their application of the law. (i) France France has various laws protecting freedom of speech. In reference to religion, Article 10 of the 1789 Declaration of Human and Civic Rights states that “no one may be disturbed on account of his opinions, even religious ones, as long as the manifestation of such opinions does not interfere with the established Law and Order.” According to the 2019 USCIRF France report: In accordance with secular law, people employed by the government are not allowed to wear signs of religious affiliation in the workplace or in public spaces. A 2010 law prohibits face coverings in public places, including the wearing of a niqab or burqa; refusing to remove the face covering can result in a 150 euro fine. (ii)Bahrain Bahrain has anti-blasphemy laws that apply to all religions. The penal code calls for punishment of up to one year’s imprisonment or a fine of up to 100 dinars ($270) for offending one of the recognized religious groups or their practices, or for openly defaming a religious figure considered sacred to members of a particular group. The law stipulates fines or imprisonment for insulting an institution, announcing false or malicious news, spreading rumors, encouraging others to show contempt for a different religious denomination or sect, illegally gathering, and advocating for a change of government, among other offenses. The law prohibits anti-Islamic publications and broadcast media programs and mandates imprisonment of no less than six months for ‘exposing the state’s official religion to offense and criticism (USCIRF, Bahrain, 2019). Non-Muslims are not required to wear traditional Muslim clothing. The law allows non-Muslim places of worship to display religious symbols. Analysis — In summary, French law allows for extensive freedom of speech in reference to religion while Bahrain maintains strict laws on speech in reference to religion. Both of these policies purport to uphold religious equality; in France, one may critique any religion, while in Bahrain there is no tolerance for criticism of any religion. These laws are a clear example of where France and Bahrain diverge ideologically, but the difference in approach does not mean one policy is more effective than the other in promoting equal access to religious expression. In France, varying definitions of hate speech and the government’s high tolerance for criticism of religion can be exploited to target minority religions. In Bahrain, anti-blasphemy laws protect all religious groups from hate speech, but policy blatantly favors the interests of Muslim groups. While the laws in France and Bahrain are opposites in intention, they both result in bias towards the dominant religious group. When comparing the two countries, Bahrain allows for more freedom in expressing religious affiliation in public spaces. French laws prohibiting face coverings directly infringe on Muslim women’s abilities to fulfill religious duties, and the ban of ostentatious religious symbols in public settings does not allow citizens to express their religion freely. Religious dress is a significant aspect of many traditions, including Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The prohibition of wearing religious garments violates an adherent’s beliefs and negates religious freedom. Bahrain does not have specific laws regarding religious dress, though it should be noted that societal norms dictate a culture of modesty. That being said, as this paper is reviewing formal law, Bahrain is significantly less stringent in the ruling of religious dress from a policy perspective. E. Religion in Education (i) France France’s attempts to keep religion out of the public sphere are clearly reflected in policies surrounding religion in the public school system. Public schools are secular. The law prohibits public school employees from wearing visible signs of religious affiliation and students from wearing “conspicuous religious symbols,” including the Muslim headscarf, Jewish skullcap, Sikh turban, and large Christian crosses (USCIRF, France, 2019). In terms of private education: By law, the government subsidizes private schools, including those affiliated with religious organizations. In 98 percent of private schools, in accordance with the law, the government pays the teachers’ salaries, provided the school accepts all children regardless of their religious affiliation. The law does not address the issue of religious instruction in government-subsidized private schools or whether students must be allowed to opt out of such instruction (USCIRF, France, 2019). (ii) Bahrain Because Bahrain is a Muslim state, religious instruction is heavily incorporated in the school system. The law regulates Islamic religious instruction at all levels of the education system. The government funds public schools for grades 1-12; Islamic studies are mandatory for all Muslim students and are optional for non-Muslims. Private schools must register with the government and, with a few exceptions (for example, a foreign funded and foreign operated school), are also required to provide Islamic religious education for Muslim students. Private schools wishing to provide non-Islamic religious education to non-Muslims must receive permission from the Ministry of Education (USCIRF, Bahrain, 2019). In terms of private education: The government also permits non-Muslim groups to offer religious instruction to their adherents in private schools (USCIRF, Bahrain, 2019). Analysis — While France maintains secularism within the educational system, the banning of religious symbols in schools infringes on religious freedom. As addressed earlier, the prohibition of religious garb violates the ability of an individual to freely practice their belief. Although Bahrain emphasizes Islam in education, the ability for non-Muslim students to opt out maintains religious freedom. Therefore, Bahrain allows for a higher degree of religious expression within the education system. F. Anti-Terrorism Policy The other sections of law described above have direct influence on the ability of religious adherents to practice their belief in the public and private spheres. Though anti-terrorism policy may not initially appear as an area of law that has an impact on religious freedom, both France and Bahrain have employed discriminatory practices labeled as tactics to fight extremism. (i) France The French perception of religion’s ties to terrorism is demonstrated by legislation that specifically targets religious institutions. Counterterrorism legislation grants prefects in each department the authority to close a place of worship for a maximum of six months if they find comments, writings, or activities in the place of worship “provoke violence, hatred or discrimination or the commission of acts of terrorism or praise such acts of terrorism.” The management of the place of worship has 48 hours to appeal the closure decision to an administrative court. Noncompliance with a closure decision carries a six-month prison sentence and a fine of 7,500 euros ($8,400) (USCIRF, France, 2019). In March 2021, a bill aimed at combating radicalism and separatism (titled Supporting Respect for the Principles of the Republic) was passed through the lower house of Parliament and went to the Senate. On April 13th, 2021, the Senate added stipulations to the bill that were viewed as harsher than the initial proposals (Woods, 2021). The original bill would, among other things, restrict people from home-schooling their children, crack down on polygamy and forced marriages, and make the sharing of someone’s private life and location illegal (N° 3649 rectifié, 2021). Excerpts from the edited bill are detailed below: If passed, the bill would, among other things, prohibit the wearing of the veil and other ostentatious religious symbols to persons accompanying school trips, allow the internal regulations of swimming pools and public bathing areas to prohibit the wearing of the burkini, and prevent the issuance and renewal of residence permits for individuals who are found to have expressed a rejection of the principles of the Republic (Loi confortant le respect des principes de la République, 2021). (ii) Bahrain There are penalties of up to five years in prison for encouraging or possessing materials that support “terrorist activities.” Bahrain imposed one round of sanctions against individuals and entities affiliated with the Iranian regime’s terror-support networks in the region. The government is also able to expel individuals who are suspected of terrorist activity (U.S. State Department, Report on Terrorism, Bahrain, 2019). In terms of reconciliation efforts between the Sunni and Shi’a communities: In coordination with the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, a team of Ministry of Education-appointed experts routinely reviews and develops the Islamic studies of the public school curriculum to emphasize shared Islamic values between different Sunni and Shi’a schools of thought, reject extremism, and promote tolerance and coexistence (USCIRF, Bahrain, 2019). Analysis — In both countries, many of the laws surrounding anti-terrorism efforts can be easily exploited to target specific groups of people. In France, the closing of worship centers has solely impacted mosques, while Bahrain’s expulsion policy has primarily impacted leaders of the Shi’a community. France’s new bill comes on the heels of a speech by President Macron condemning separatism in the country. While the legislative language does not name any religion directly, the explanatory statement preceding the bill states the following: An insidious but powerful communitarian entryism is slowly destroying the foundations of our society in certain areas. This entryism is essentially of Islamist inspiration. It is the manifestation of a conscious, theorized, politico-religious political project, the ambition of which is to make religious norms prevail over the common law that we have freely given ourselves (Loi nº 3649, 2021). Because the bill refers to Islamism as the reason for the legislation, much of the proposal is aimed directly at Muslim communities. The recently added stipulations show a harsher, more direct targeting of the Muslim community in France. Anti-terrorism policy in Bahrain targets members of the Shi’a community who are seen as causing separatism. This was prevalently displayed when the kingdom expelled a number of Shi’a individuals, who were eventually granted re-entry when no evidence of terrorist activity was found. In this sense, Bahrain and France are notably similar in their reasoning and justification for anti-extremist laws. VI. Discussion The results support the argument that a constitutionally secular country does not necessarily foster a higher degree of religious freedom than a religious state. Despite being ideologically opposed in reference to religion in government, France and Bahrain share overlaps in policy, as seen in the Anti-Discrimination Laws, Registration with Government and Government Funding, and Anti-Terrorism Policy sections of the analysis. Beyond policies that target or disproportionately impact a specific religious group, France and Bahrain employ inclusive anti-discrimination laws in their labor codes. In this case, both countries pledge to condemn religious discrimination in the hiring process or workplace. The countries employ similar registration policies for religious groups, directly tying legal access to practice and tax incentives to cooperation with state entities. A third overlap is in anti-terrorism efforts, often labeled as anti-extremist policies. France and Bahrain have enacted a number of alarming anti-extremism laws, often using vague wording (such as “terrorist activities” or “rejection to the principles of the Republic”) that hand significant power to the government’s interpretations of actions or words; the wording of laws allows for exploitation of the policies to fulfill specific agendas, as seen by Bahrain’s expulsion of Shi’a individuals and French policymakers’ justification for the “Supporting Respect for the Principles of the Republic” bill. While not all of the measures taken to combat extremism negatively impact specific religious communities, both countries have used anti-terrorism policies to target religious groups perceived as threatening to the state. A clear demonstration of the negative impacts of legislative rhetoric is reflected in the interchangeability of anti-terrorist and anti-extremist policies; in both countries, the targeted religious groups have become synonymous with terrorism. The similarities in the justifications and immediate outcomes of laws surrounding religious practice in France and Bahrain aid in showing that the label of “constitutionally secular” does not equate to increased levels of religious freedom, as both states are equally capable of implementing policies that positively and negatively impact religious expression. In the sections Religion in Education and Religion in the Public Sphere , France and Bahrain display significant differences in approach. In both cases, Bahrain exhibited higher degrees of tolerance for religious practice in public and for minority religious groups in general. France’s policies on wearing ostentatious religious symbols in public spaces disproportionately impact the Muslim and Jewish communities, all of whom have integrated religious garb into their belief systems. Further, while Bahrain emphasizes Islam in education, the country allows for non-Muslim students to opt out of those classes and does not prohibit students from wearing alternative religious symbols. France has yet to create laws around the ability of students to opt out of religious instruction at private schools, despite most private schools being funded by the government. France’s integration of discriminatory secular policy into the public sphere and the education system strengthens the argument that states with official religions, like Bahrain, can allow for higher levels of religious freedom in some areas of society. A potential explanation for this is how France and Bahrain approach religious identity. At its core, France’s secular ideology attempts to ignore religious identity altogether. Nonetheless, the rise of radical Islam in the country, a Christian-majority population, and the dynamics between France and Muslim-majority former colonial countries led to the French Muslim community becoming an easily-targeted scapegoat. In Bahrain, however, the historical presence of non-Muslim religions and a national understanding of the importance of spiritual affiliation have allowed for a legal framework cognizant of religious identity. This is not to say that Bahrain has created the ideal legal structure, but instead that the recognition of religious affiliation’s significance allows for development in the realm of religious freedom. France has shown regression in freedom of religious expression where Bahrain has displayed consistent progress; this trend further supports the theory that some religious states are appropriately situated to cultivate a society that offers higher degrees of religious freedom. The findings of this paper are consistent with Asad’s theory on secularism’s potential to be discriminatory and builds on Bowen’s observations of the French and Indonesian judicial systems. As showcased by secular laws in France disproportionately targeting and impacting Muslim individuals, the label of laïcité creates a wall of Western liberal ideology for policymakers to hide behind. Bowen argues that France and Indonesia, despite opposing views on the role of religion in the judicial system, adopt very similar policy positions. Bowen’s focus on how each of the countries deals with religious discrimination in the courts yields primarily positive observations, and he notes that the foundations of both systems attempt to promote fairness and equality. Bowen’s findings differ from the analysis of laws in this paper, which is likely because this paper focused on policy reaching beyond anti-discrimination laws and did not note the outcomes in judicial proceedings concerning religious discrimination. Even with the differences in tone between Bowen’s findings and the analyses in this paper, the outcomes of the study are in alignment with Bowen’s conclusion; despite being on different ends of the ideological spectrum, a secular state and a religious state bear significant resemblance to each other in terms of the legal framework. A. Addressing Inconsistencies with Freedom House The laws explored in this study paint a picture of France and Bahrain as both employing policies that negatively impact a specific religious group. In some instances, Bahrain displayed higher degrees of religious tolerance, despite the West’s view of secularism as more progressive. However, the findings of this paper are not reflected in Freedom House’s scoring of France and Bahrain on religious freedom in their respective 2020 reports. As discussed earlier, the NGO ranked France a 3 out of 4 and Bahrain a 1 out of 4 in response to the following question: “Are individuals free to practice and express their religious faith or nonbelief in public and private?” The laws discussed in the analysis portion of this paper display France’s various policies against public displays of religious affiliation; these laws blatantly interfere with expression of religious faith in public, implying that France should be scored lower than a 3 within the Freedom House framework. In the case of Bahrain, while there have been numerous infringements on religious freedom (specifically to target the Shi’a community), the report did not provide sufficient evidence to rank the country significantly below France. The report even notes that “non-Muslim minorities are generally free to practice their faiths.” Freedom House then discusses government discrimination against the Shi’a population by citing the events of the Arab Spring in 2011 (a reference that does not reflect the contemporary political atmosphere in Bahrain) and the arrest of Shi’a clerics accused of spreading messages of separatism. However, the report also states that “Shiite communities are free to carry out religious observances, such as the annual Ashura processions,” which exhibits a governmental commitment to religious freedom. Conversely, the 2020 French report describes current tensions saying, “Islamophobic rhetoric from prominent politicians and public figures on both the left and right is not uncommon. Multiple attacks at mosques throughout the country occurred in 2019.” After a review of the 2020 Freedom Reports for France and Bahrain, it appears that there is inconsistency in the way Freedom House scores religious freedom. While there are numerous valid criticisms of the state of religious freedom in both countries, Freedom House ignored many laws in both France and Bahrain when scoring, resulting in a potentially skewed and inaccurate representation of the legal frameworks that unjustifiably favors France. B. Limitations of Study This was a limited case study, so these findings are merely a reflection of the laws and policies addressing religious practice in France and Bahrain. While the framework used in this study could be applied to comparing religious freedom in other nations, other cases were not considered in this paper. Further limitations include the scope of the study, which consisted of governmental restrictions and focused on legal frameworks but did not address political rhetoric involvement in international treaties or agreements, or relations with secular and religious states. Further, this paper did not consider societal restrictions, which include the presence of anti-religious attacks, non-governmental groups that target religious communities, online rhetoric, and general hostility towards certain religious groups. Studies that explore these factors are necessary to gain a holistic understanding of the differing degrees of religious freedom in secular and religious countries. VII. Conclusion Comparing seven key areas of law within the French and Bahraini legal frameworks shows that there is significant overlap in legislation, intention, and policy outcomes. But how does this comparison link to the larger discussion around religious freedom and the validity of secularism? France, a country that prides itself on the value of laïcité, implements a number of discriminatory policies that predominantly impact Muslim citizens. In the public sphere, individuals who belong to faiths that utilize clothing as an expression of affiliation cannot practice their religions to the full extent. The idea of separating the religious self from the public self displays an understanding of religious belief as a secondary identity. For many, spiritual affiliation is a primary identity. Therefore, French laws surrounding religious practice are not applicable in a universal sense, nor do they foster a wide breadth of religious freedom for all faiths. Religious states, who are typically viewed as unable to foster high degrees of religious freedom, have equal opportunity to promote a religiously pluralistic society through legislation. While not all religious states choose to foster a space for minority religious groups, nations like Bahrain have made significant efforts to advance religious freedom. Though this study was limited to France and Bahrain, the countries are not outliers. While Bahrain deviates somewhat from other Gulf nations, Qatar, and to a lesser extent Oman, have legal frameworks in place to support spiritual pluralism and religious freedom. Other countries, such as Bhutan, Liechtenstein, Thailand, Andorra, and Brunei, are religious states viewed as fostering religious freedom. While there are religious states that suppress religious freedom, the analysis suggests that religious countries may be uniquely positioned to create legal frameworks inclusive of a population that views religious affiliation as a primary identity. Although Bahrain has not yet reached the point of fostering equal religious freedom for all groups, national policies show an understanding of the importance of ritual practice and religious identity. Beyond supporting the hypothesis, the findings of this paper suggest the need for a shift in thinking when evaluating secular and religious states. As displayed by the inconsistencies in scoring throughout the Freedom House annual reports on France and Bahrain, the West remains biased in favor of secular European systems of government. Moving forward, Western NGOs and government agencies should consider viewing religious affiliation as a primary identity when assessing legal frameworks and government policies instead of using a secular lens as the default perspective. 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A Gravity Model of Civic Deviance: Justice, Natural Duties, and Reparative Responsibilities Woojin Lim Harvard College Author April 2021 Abstract: This paper presents a ‘gravity model’ of civic deviance and the principle of reparative responsibilities, addressing the question of when citizens are justified in shirking their civic obligations. Provided an unjust state, I raise the proposal that principled civic deviance (CD) should be, at the very least, permissible to varying levels as determined by a gravity equation. In select cases, I argue that CD may be obligatory. The gravity model, which sets to define the degree of permissible CD, features considerations such as the unfairness of the basic social structure, the individual extent of injustice faced, and the balance of CD-enabling natural duties against CD-restricting natural duties. In responding to one’s natural duty of justice, I claim that reparative responsibilities (RR) consign varying degrees of CD obligations, depending on the individual’s stake in injustice, beneficiary and contributory status, capacity to prevent and respond. Hence, individuals affected by an unjust state may permissibly, or necessarily, shirk their civic obligations only in line with their natural duties and RR. “[O]ne has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” — Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail What conditions justify a citizen’s deviance from their civic obligations in a constitutional democracy? And more importantly, whom does the scope of justified civic deviance encompass? A common way of justifying uncivil actions is to accept that we are only under a prima facie duty to obey particular laws (i.e. when incivility poses seriously untoward consequences or involves an act that is mala in se) and that we have no such obligation to obey all its laws. When some laws surpass a given threshold of injustice, we may be justified in disobeying those laws. On this justification, some have argued that all individuals who are subject to unjust institutions in some manner should be allowed to challenge injustice by shirking their civic norms of reciprocity. Others have argued that only those who fall beyond the scope of tolerable injustice should be allowed to shirk their civic obligations. So, where should the threshold for justified civic deviance be drawn among members bound to a scheme of reciprocity and social cooperation? Is there a way to account for the level of injustice suffered individually along some sort of tolerability gradient while also extending the scope of justified civic deviance to all those within the broader scope of unjust institutions? In this paper, I explain why an approach that selectively permits civic deviance (henceforth ‘CD’)—proposed in Tommie Shelby’s “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto”—has to be reconsidered. I then outline the structure of what I have come to think is the correct one. My most significant response to Shelby’s argument focuses on his failure to offer details on setting thresholds as to when deviant behavior is justified or at least excused. That said, I recognize that the main aim of Shelby’s paper is only to stake out the conceptual grounds for these claims and to illustrate that these are conceptual categories worth mining. I aim to engage further in that mining process and to offer an original contribution to the debate by re-examining Shelby’s threshold account. I introduce what I call a ‘gravity model’ of CD and the principle of reparative responsibilities to permit varying degrees of CD for particular oppressed groups, while sustaining permission for all to exercise CD—provided an unjust social structure, and a positive difference of natural duties wherein CD-enabling natural duties outweigh CD-restricting natural duties. By CD-justified, I will come to mean ~ (CD-forbidden) or CD-permissible, and in select cases, CD-obligatory. This paper is organized as follows. In Part I, I draw upon Shelby’s article, “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto” and review some of the basic building blocks of CD. In section 1, I outline Shelby’s Rawlsian justification for CD, and in section 2, I reconstruct his application of CD to the “black ghetto underclass” of the United States. Section 3 is dedicated to pinpointing the inadequacies of Shelby’s view. When only a particular subset of the population is permitted to deviate from their civic obligations, there arises an imbalance of burden-sharing. I claim that it is unfair for those who do not suffer from intolerable injustice (and those who suffer from greater levels of intolerable injustice) to continue upholding reciprocity wherewith unjust institutions, especially if continuing to do so clashes with their natural duties. In Part II, I lay out the elements of what I believe is a more adequate approach. I begin by advancing on Shelby’s conception of the natural duty of justice. In this light, I come to understand CD as that which extends to those within the limits of tolerable injustice, and the differences in the level of intolerable injustice will be accounted for through the gravity model of CD along with the principle of reparative responsibilities (RR). Provided an unjust social structure, all affected individuals are justified in shirking civic obligations but nonetheless remain bound to natural duties and reparative responsibilities. I will finally elaborate on what I take to be the guiding conditions of permissible and obligatory CD, drawing from the modern analytical political philosophy literature. Part I: Reflections on “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto” 1. Let me begin with an explanation of the preliminary concepts underlying CD. In “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto,” Shelby advances on Rawls’s apparatus of justice as fairness. Shelby builds his argument from the premise that within a liberal framework, justice, at least in part, is rooted in the political value of “reciprocity between persons who regard each other as equals,” bound together under a cooperative scheme for mutual advantage (p. 129, emphasis mine). The social, political, and economic institutions of the basic structure of society fix an individual’s initial position within society, more or less favoring some individuals in the distribution of benefits and burdens—of liberties, duties, opportunities, and material advantages. Given that the basic structure bears an immense and wide-ranging influence over an individual’s lifetime prospects, which are deeply shaped by a social structure each individual did not choose, Shelby argues that the social arrangement should be formed by institutions, i.e., governments, schools, firms, markets, and families, as to provide each individual with a “fair chance to flourish” (p. 130). In this grander scheme of reciprocity, each participant of the social structure has a legitimate claim to a fair chance not to have their life prospects diminished by the social scheme in ways that cannot be justified on impartial grounds. It is in virtue of this groundwork of reciprocity, or the principle of fair play, that ‘civic obligations’ have normative force. As a beneficiary of the primary goods afforded by the cooperative enterprise, each citizen is expected to shoulder an obligation to do their share as the arrangement requires, such that costs and benefits are divided in an equitable way. Citizens then have a duty to bear a share of the costs that are involved in the production of collective public goods. For example, they should pay taxes, obey the law, and so forth. This obligation is owed to those with whom one is cooperating, in order to maintain a fair basic structure. Each citizen of a democratic polity is ipso facto bound to civic obligations as required by the basic institutions. When a citizen evades or refuses to fulfill her civic obligations, she attempts to gain from or exploit the cooperative labor of others (‘free-riding’) without doing her fair share. The law-breaker acquires an unfair advantage over her fellow citizens, and this, in turn, warrants punishment to remove this advantage and re-establish a fair distribution of benefits and burdens among all members of the society. Shelby further claims that an individual’s fair chance to thrive is a necessary condition for reciprocity. Each citizen is bound to civic obligations only “when these institutions are just” (p. 145). Citizens therefore are modus tollens not obligated to submit to unjust institutions, or at least not to institutions that “exceed the limits of tolerable injustice” (p. 145). Institutions that bring about injustice that is so serious as to be intolerable allows special civic permissions for disadvantaged individuals, that is, deviance from civic obligations or—as I term it—CD. Since those who suffer from intolerable injustice have been deprived of their fair share of benefits from the social scheme, they are not bound by the civic norms of reciprocity they have as citizens. As to determine who falls beyond and beneath the radius of intolerable injustice, Shelby proposes the constitutional essentials standard, based on a loose criterion of adequacy. These include the basic rights of a liberal democratic regime, such as freedom of speech, conscience, assembly and association, political rights and other supplementary rights. For all citizens to be provided adequate exercise of these rights, Shelby adds, these rights should be impartially and effectively enforced, not merely codified in law, such that all citizens can have confidence that their rights will be respected by those with institutional power (p. 150). Consider a society wherein constitutional essentials remain unsecured for certain peoples, that is, the social structure deprives certain peoples of their fair share of benefits. Shelby contends that in such a society, those affected by intolerable injustice should not be expected to fulfill the civic obligations demanded by unjust institutions. This is not to say, however, that those affected by intolerable injustice should be released from moral duties altogether. Here, Shelby provides a clear distinction between civic obligations required by all proper citizens, versus natural duties, which unconditionally bind to all moral persons regardless of their associational or institutional ties. Thus, while an individual beyond the limits of tolerable injustice may deviate from civic obligations, at no point in time can any person permissibly abandon natural duties. One striking natural duty that Shelby highlights is the natural duty of justice. Drawing from the Rawlsian project, the two sub-principles of this natural duty are as follows: for each individual (1) to uphold and comply with just and efficient institutions when they do exist, and (2) to support the establishment of just and efficient institutions when they do not yet exist. The ‘positive’ natural duty of justice provides reason for CD, while its ‘negative’ form provides reasons for individuals not to deviate from their civic obligations. 2. Implementing these concepts into practice, Shelby pictures the plight of the black ghetto underclass in the United States. Shelby describes a widely assumed narrative about the urban poor, wherein residents live in the dark ghetto due to their self-defeating attitudes and malicious conduct, and thus violate legitimate expectations for civic reciprocity, including a duty to obey the law and support themselves through licit jobs. Under such misinformed narratives, when the ghetto poor engage in criminal activity (i.e., theft, drug-dealing, prostitution) or refuse to accept menial, low-paying, unsatisfying jobs, these actions appears to be “a failure of reciprocity on their part” (p. 146). Such attitudes call for acts of CD to be characterized as irresponsible lawbreaking and unenterprising criminality, and for such acts to be rightfully prosecuted and punished. Shelby contends that this is the wrong conclusion to draw, however, since the mere existence of the dark ghetto—with its “combination of social stigma, extreme poverty, racial segregation… and shocking incarceration rates”—proves its incompatibility with any meaningful form of reciprocity among free and equal citizens (p. 150). There is sufficient reason to believe that the constitutional essentials standard is not currently met in dark ghettos of the United States. Since the black ghetto poor live under the rule of institutions that exceeds the limits of tolerable injustice, they thereby have a legitimate claim of deviance from civic obligations. That is to say, when the ghetto poor engage in criminal activity, refuse to accept menial jobs, or bear contempt for society, disrespecting the authority of the law qua law, they do not “violate the principle of reciprocity or shirk valid civic obligations” (p. 151). If the social scheme miserably fails to embody the value of reciprocity for a certain group of peoples, those who are deprived of their fair share of benefits from social cooperation should not be required to reciprocate in civic obligations. There exist no valid civic obligations demandable from the victims of intolerable injustice, especially when the unaffected others—albeit unknowingly—profit from the unjust social structure. Again, even if a society is deeply stained by injustice, moral duties remain owed to one another in the form of natural duties. Natural duties, including the duty not to be cruel, to help the needy and the vulnerable, not to cause unnecessary suffering, to respect the moral personhood of others, to help bring about just institutions, must be satisfied in the enactment of CD. Forms of deviant behavior that are compatible with natural duties, for instance, shoplifting and petty theft, may be conceived as permissible. Other extremes of deviance—for instance, some forms of gangsterism, which involves the use of “violence, threats, and intimidation, to forcibly extract money, goods, and services from others... [maiming] and even [killing]” (p. 137)—violate natural duties, namely the duty not to be cruel, not to cause unnecessary suffering, to show respect for the moral personhood of others, etc., and thus are always morally unjustified for all people, regardless of the inequity of a social scheme. On this regard, we may rule out forms of CD that involve mala per se, while still permitting CD acts that involve mala prohibita. To briefly recapitulate, Shelby’s discussion brings into light a discussion of fairness and political obligations. Shelby’s view is that the empirical facts show that the conditions of political obligations do not hold. He proposes that in unfair, oppressive, or unjust social structures, individuals are no longer bound to a scheme of reciprocity, while nonetheless having natural duties. 3. Up to this point, my discussion—and certainly that of Shelby’s—has revolved around the implications of justifiable civic deviance for the ghetto poor, or those beyond the threshold of intolerable injustice. The question now extends to what civic obligations, permissible deviance, and natural duties are to be for those within the limits of tolerable injustice, including the benefactors of the unjust social regime. For individuals who are not themselves affected by intolerable injustice, Shelby’s understanding of CD asserts that they should nonetheless remain bound to the duties of the unjust regime, and they would not be justified in shirking their valid civic obligations. On Shelby’s account, such individuals remain bound to a cooperative reciprocal scheme to do their fair share as a beneficiary of the primary goods afforded by the social scheme, even if there are those who may not be bound to it (i.e. the ghetto poor). Let me invoke a hypothetical example to illustrate this point. Imagine a team of laborers— Dongbaek, Yongsik, and Jongryul—who sign a contract to work cooperatively under a scheme of mutual advantage in a table-lifting business. If laborer Dongbaek does not receive a fair share of benefits for the work that she performs in lifting an equivalent proportion of the table’s weight, and if this were to amount to Shelby’s standard of intolerable injustice, then Dongbaek may permissibly deviate from her civic obligations, that is, to drop her end of the table and walk away without being subject to moral criticism on this basis. Shelby’s argument continues in the implication that Dongbaek’s deviance does not render null the civic obligations (to move the table) owed by laborers Yongsik and Jongryul, who remain fairly compensated for lifting the table. Since Shelby’s standard of fairness is merely that of adequacy, let’s imagine that Yongsik well-beyond meets the fairness requirement (i.e. Yongsik receives an attractive bonus on top of his standard compensation), whereas Jongryul barely meets the adequacy threshold (i.e. Jongryul is provided with minimally adequate wage compensation for his labor). Regardless of Yongsik’s and Jongryul’s differing proximities from the threshold of tolerable injustice, insofar as they are fairly compensated—according to Shelby’s definition, not the Rawlsian standard—as beneficiaries of the (unjust) reciprocal scheme, Yongsik and Jongryul, who are not themselves affected by intolerable injustice, may not exercise CD. There seems to arise an interesting conflict here. Shelby’s initial words on what establishes civic obligation is as follows: “[E]ach citizen has an obligation to fulfill the requirements of the basic institutions… when these institutions are just” (p. 145, emphasis mine). This implies, in converse, that when these institutions are unjust, each citizen bears no obligation to fulfill the civic requirements of the basic institutions. Extending on this suggestion, perhaps the standard of appropriate CD should be set at a lower bar, more broadly, such that the mere existence of unjust institutions invalidates a baseline of civic obligations for all citizens. As to delineating precisely what set of civic obligations consists of this threshold is a subject for further study. When Yongsik and Jongryul—after Dongbaek’s departure—now must lift heavier weights of the table for the same wage, they may decide that this entire table-lifting venture is fundamentally exploitative, skewed from the ground up, since the social structure generates enormously unfair distributions. In continuing to uphold this scheme along with its unjust institutions, Yongsik and Jongryul sustain injustice, perhaps contravening on positive natural duties, notably that of justice. All the while, other negative natural duties, for instance, the duty not to cause unnecessary suffering, prevent an extended of abuse of CD for the wrong reasons. There is sufficient reason to think that those unaffected by intolerable injustice may be permitted to shirk a baseline of civic obligations given a persisting unjust social structure (defined by some standard of unfairness). On the other side of the spectrum, imagine workers Sangmi and Gyutae, who similar to Dongbaek, suffer from Shelby’s conception of intolerable injustice: the lack of constitutional essentials. Both Sangmi and Gyutae suffer from great intolerable injustice, falling far beyond adequacy conditions. Whereas Sangmi exercises CD, Gyutae does not. Here, Dongbaek’s exercise of CD, which seems to extend symmetrically for all those affected by intolerable injustice, takes advantage of Sangmi and Gyutae (and Yongsik and Jongryul), while Sangmi’s exercise of CD gains from the persisting social cooperation of Gyutae (and Yongsik and Jongryul). Imagine a case where Dongbaek steals a loaf of bread for herself, having starved for three days. For the purpose of illustration, let’s presume that the number of days starved—of one’s and one’s dependents—is the dimension by which we measure ‘unfairness.’ If Sangmi also hopes to steal a loaf of bread for himself and his entire family who have starved for seven days, but if Dongbaek’s deviance necessarily prevents Sangmi from doing so, it seems as if Dongbaek’s CD (indirectly) takes advantage of Sangmi, and wrongly so. Both Dongbaek and Sangmi would be taking advantage of Gyutae, who, having already completed one excruciating day of work, still has no purchasable food from the bakery to feed himself and his family, starving for 12 days. Given that Gyutae continues to hold onto the table while suffering from greater intolerable injustice—defined by a more pressing need for constitutional essentials—than compared to Dongbaek and Sangmi, it seems that Dongbaek harms the innocent Sangmi and Gyutae, and Sangmi takes advantage of Gyutae, and in both cases, the worst off is harmed. Thus, a CD permissibility condition of proportionality to one’s status of injustice faced appears relevant here. Given an initial baseline of permissible CD, I find it necessary that an additional permission to CD considers the level of intolerable injustice each individual suffers as a result of the unjust basic structure, establishing a gradient of tolerability. Part II: Outline of a more adequate approach The real puzzle of CD is, then, not how to draw a threshold line for the fairness of institutions and for the adequacy of constitutional essentials, but instead, how we should be accounting for the level of injustice suffered by individuals while also extending the scope of justified CD to all individuals within the broader scope of unjust structures and institutions. I thus propose a gravity model of justified CD. This model is not intended to be taken as a literal, mathematic formula that citizens can employ to meticulously calculate their degree of permissible CD. Rather, I provide this model in the spirit of opening up alternative ways to think about CD and its implications. The model (first pass), taking into account the discussion on burden-sharing (§I.3, supra) is as follows: Permissible CD (first pass) = extent of the unfairness of the basic structure (measure of unfairness of institutions) • extent of injustice faced (measure of tolerability) The first equational factor is the baseline concerning the fairness of the rules, laws, principles, and institutions that constitute the basic social structure, or the fairness of the basic structure itself. Since this first factor is more broadly applicable, Rawls’s somewhat more demanding standard of justice as fairness could be applied here. The second factor refers to the individual measure of injustice faced: those who are subject to greater forms of (intolerable) injustice may be allowed greater CD permissions. This relation is modeled in Figure 2.1. Both Rawls’s and Shelby’s standards of fairness, the FEO and DP versus constitutional essentials, are not mutually exclusive, for they may be modeled on the same gradient as follows in Figure 2.2, with steeper inclines for each threshold crossing. Other models of fairness could be introduced here (i.e. insert dimension-D along the x-axis or add in threshold-T in place of Rawls and Shelby’s standards). In Figure 2.2, Rawls’s threshold is positioned to the left of Shelby’s since it is an ideal of justice that makes it harder for unjust societies to fulfill: it is more likely for unjust institutions not to meet the requisites of Rawls’s standard of justice as FEO and DP (footnote 7, supra) than to achieve Shelby’s fairly looser standard of adequacy. Natural duties, particularly that of justice, also play a significant role as a factor regulating CD. The second sub-principle of the natural duty of justice holds that each moral agent has a duty—in helping to bring about just rules, laws, principles, and institutions—to fight against unjust rules, laws, principles, and institutions, plausibly by means of CD. These CD-enabling (positive) natural duties may also be limited by CD-restricting (negative) natural duties, for instance, to not be cruel, etc., which impose restrictions on the exercise of CD. Considerations of alternative (i.e. legal) forms of resistance to the unjust basic structure (i.e. peaceful protests, petitions, authorized public events, and other law-respecting acts of solidarity) also fall under the category of CD-restricting natural duties. On this basis, indiscriminate and unwarranted forms of ex ante violence on the innocent can be restricted. What I call the difference of natural duties (ND difference) thus permits CD if and only if the CD-enabling factors outweigh the CD-restricting factors; if the natural duty of justice to upturn severely unjust structures compels the exercise of CD over all other natural duties. If the CD-restricting factors override the CD-enabling features, then CD may, at the very least, face moral limits. If the CD-restricting factors are so great as to cancel out the extent of the unfairness of the basic structure and the extent of intolerable injustice faced, then CD may not be justified. At this point, there arises another relevant concern on whether or not CD could be, in select cases, not only permissible or encouraged but also necessary or required. Building upon the brief mention of alternative forms of action (subsumed under ND difference), I have come to believe that certain forms of CD may be morally necessary to fulfill natural duties when all other alternatives to CD and its weak forms have been completely exhausted (footnote 26, supra). When a member of the ghetto poor, having exhausted all other (i.e. legal) alternatives of securing adequate resources to feed himself and his family, decides to steal a morsel of bread from the bakery next door, he may not merely be permitted but rather obligated to do so. For if he refuses to steal bread and feed his family, he violates the natural duties of self-respect, respect for the moral personhood of others, and duty not to cause unnecessary suffering, among others. The pressing immediacy of respect and preventable suffering for his family outweighs the dues of respect for the bakery-owners. Under some circumstances, a failure to exercise CD represents a failure to do one’s own part in upholding one’s natural duty of justice: those who blindly obey, rather than those who disobey the law, may be accused of perpetuating and sustaining vehement forms of injustice, and be accused of free-riding on their fellow citizens’ cooperative moral efforts. The need for solidarity may call upon CD not merely as a supererogatory act but rather as an obligation: when Gyutae, for instance, fails to exercise CD—which incurs on his, others’, and their shared natural duties—he might be contravening valid CD obligations. By invoking familiar normative categories, we may formulate ‘CD-justified’ in the following forms: CD-permissible or ~(CD-forbidden), and CD-obligatory. At the very least, provided an unjust social structure with its set of unjust institutions and so forth, we necessarily have CD-permissible—though to varying degrees depending on the gravity model equation—and ~(CD-forbidden). In select cases, determinable by when a neglect of CD seriously contravenes on ND, we may have CD-obligatory. I propose a further original condition to CD: the principle of reparative responsibilities (RR). Provided a case of justified CD, not only do citizens retain their natural duties (i.e. to respect others’ humanity, etc.) but also come to bear a new set of obligations—in varying degrees—to restore or re-establish reciprocity, trust, and civic cooperation in the long run. This need not be immediate. Let’s return to the table-lifting example. When a member drops their portion of the table, and when others express solidarity by dropping their portion of the table in an act of radical reform, all members are still due respect to another as equal moral persons (and perhaps the table-dropping is a vehement expression that this has not been the case), and now may be tasked with another duty to work in reallocating the burdens (or benefits) so as to provide for a fairer share of benefits (or burdens). In addition, all individuals—including those who do not eventually engage in CD—now bear the responsibility to amend these damaged social bonds, restore justice, and provide closure to affected victims. RR imposes a duty on all to work towards the adjusting and redrafting of the fundamental social conventions so as to reduce unjust laws and practices in a continued process of reflective equilibrium. In carrying forth the duty of justice, individuals equipped with greater powers and benefits (as a result of unjust institutions) should be bound to a correspondingly greater set of RR to countermand injustice; individuals (i.e. Yongsik in the table-lifters case) with a greater capacity and ability to prevent or counter injustice, in a better situated position to influence change, as well as those who are greater beneficiaries of and contributors to injustices, should be held to a greater degree of responsibility in amending unjust institutions. That said, the underlying RR extends also to the victims of intolerable injustice, as they play a part, albeit small, in sustaining unjust social structures. The ghetto poor, for instance, may not be held to the same degree of RR as the uber rich, provided that RR varies depending on an individual’s relational status in the social scheme. Since justice as fairness demands an unequal distribution of primary goods, RR extends unequally depending on the individual stake in injustice, capacity for political sway, beneficiary, and contributory status until at least society is tolerably just. RR, like any obligations, compel individuals to take action. Given these additions, my gravity model of CD may be revised as follows: Justified (Permissible/Obligatory) CD = [extent of the unfairness of the basic structure • extent of (intolerable) injustice faced] • [ND difference] in line with [ND • RR] An act of CD is justified if and only if—and to the extent that—the basic structure is unjust and the individual faces an extent of intolerable injustice, or CD-enabling factors override CD-preventing factors. Acts of CD should be undertaken with natural duties of justice and reparative responsibilities in mind, which—to varying degrees—impose the normative considerations of respect for humanity and the (eventual) restoration of social cooperation. Acts of CD are obligatory, as opposed to merely permissible, provided the exhaustion of non-CD alternatives and of the least harmful forms of CD, or when unanimously called for by the natural duty of justice. Working together, the ND difference and RR ensure that CD does not arise out of cathartic or exploitative motivations or aims (supra footnote 20) but rather occurs in line with ND and RR. It is important to note that in the equation of justified CD, I preclude concerns of political effectiveness or pragmatism. Similar to Rawls’s reasoning, the effectiveness of CD does not establish the right of deviance, but once that right is independently established, CD should be shouldered with political effectiveness in mind. As Shelby declares, if street capital is to be converted into “political capital in a resistance movement” (p. 160), the oppressed should, whenever possible, publicly register dissent. The justification of CD provides an inquiry into the nature of justice, civic obligations, natural duties, and reparative responsibilities. My gravity model of CD provides a different way of thinking about questions of civic and moral agency, and the duties that individuals should carry depending on the justness of their social structure, alongside the special obligations and responsibilities that follow from their unique standing in the basic structure. Members within unjust structures who exercise CD with respect to their natural duties and reparative responsibilities should not be, echoing Shelby’s words, “demonized, stigmatized, or otherwise dehumanized, just as surely as they should not be romanticized” (p. 160). The ultimate goal is, after all, to shape meaningful bonds of solidarity, to build meaningful political alliances, and to invite the joint action needed to establish and maintain justice.

Two Forms of Environmental-Political Imagination: Germany, the United States, and the Clean Energy Transition Realism, Perspective, and the Act of Looking A Comparison of Chinese Cinematic Representations of the Second Sino-Japanese War Isaac Leong Brown University Author Zoe Zacharopoulos Alexander Vaughan Williams Lillian Schoeller Nicole Tsung Editors Spring 2019 Download full text PDF (28 pages) Introduction Jiang Wen’s Devils on the Doorstep (2000) and Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death (2009) belong to a new generation of Chinese cinema representing the traumas of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). As sixth-generation Chinese filmmakers, Jiang (born 1963) and Lu (born 1971) both began their filmmaking careers in China’s post-socialist era when the gradual opening of China’s film market to foreign investment transformed the landscape of Chinese cinema.[1] Their films, in many ways, reflect on the social contradictions of their time—not only in regard to China’s unequal economic rise, but also to the amnesia that celebrates China’s spectacular imperial past while ignoring its more recent and less glorious history.[2] In this context, China’s “War of Resistance against Japan” is perhaps the most brutal part of its “century of humiliation and exploitation.”[3] Undeniably, the atrocities inflicted on the Chinese people during the Sino-Japanese War have left a lasting wound on the national psyche. Yet, collective memory of this period—more specifically, its cinematic representations—has evolved alongside the changing priorities of the Chinese government. With fierce contestations for political legitimacy between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the exiled Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) party, early Chinese films depicting the war tended to glorify the CCP as the only resolute and successful force fighting Japanese imperialism. Simultaneously, these films typically portrayed the KMT as corrupt, incompetent, or otherwise traitorous collaborators.[5] Echoing the Japanese narrative that pinned wartime responsibility on a narrow “military clique,” the socialist “Red Classics” of this period also avoided elaboration on Japanese war crimes for fear of “disseminating sentimentalism and capitalist humanism.”[5] It was not until the 1980s, with the attempt to heal the Communist-Nationalist fissure, that the official narrative of the war began to sharply change emphasis, stressing the Chinese-Japanese conflict much more than the domestic, ideological one. In these representations, the nationalistic message of popular resistance against the Japanese enemy is emphasized, and anyone who collaborates with the Japanese is quickly and uncritically denounced as an unpatriotic traitor. This narrative of righteous resistance offers a kind of vindication for the Chinese nation who, while remaining historically defeated by the Japanese, can find celebration of victorious battles on screen. As Chinese writer Yu Hua notes, there is “a joke that more Japanese have been ‘killed’ at Hengdian (China’s largest film studio) than at all the actual battlefields put together—more, even, than the total population of Japan.”[6] Set against this new backdrop of Chinese war films, Devils on the Doorstep and City of Life and Death seem to depart radically from traditional cinematic representations of the War of Resistance, and perhaps as a consequence, caused significant controversy in China. The former was banned from formal release in China, with the Chinese Film Bureau citing “errors in historical representation” and labelling the film as being “insufficiently patriotic.”[7] The latter, although not banned, was criticized by the Chinese media for its sympathetic portrayal of, and even identification with, its protagonist: a Japanese soldier plagued by guilt for witnessing the atrocities committed by his fellow soldiers against the Chinese. In this regard, the strong reaction to both films indicates how uneasily they sit with usual nationalist narratives about the Chinese “self” and Japanese “other.” Not only is the Japanese enemy humanized in some way, both films also problematize the issue of wartime collaboration and sideline the CCP’s role in leading the national resistance. The relationship between both films extends beyond the content of their similarly controversial and unconventional representations of the war. Though utilized for somewhat different purposes, Lu Chuan’s use of the black-and-white format in City of Life and Death owes a certain “creative debt” to Jiang Wen’s Devils on the Doorstep , which pioneered the use of the medium to represent the Second Sino-Japanese War in an age of color cinema.[8] Undoubtedly, this aesthetic decision to film in black and white is an attempt by both films to grapple with the broader issues of realism and artificiality, especially within the context of historical trauma. In representing the traumas of the war, both films also employ first-person perspectives and narratives, albeit in different ways. While Devils on the Doorstep depicts the experiences of war from the narrow perspective of an ordinary Chinese peasant, City of Life and Death adopts an approach common in the genre of docudramas by switching between different perspectives, though focusing on the experiences of a conscience-stricken Japanese soldier. Despite both films showing some commitment to representing the ordinary and subjective experiences of the war, the latter’s approach effaces individual histories and uses the victim’s perspective merely as melodrama in a more conventional narrative of Chinese victimhood.[9] By comparing both films in their relationship to realism and nationalist remembrances of the war, I argue that while the representation of the war in City of Life and Death reflects predominant historiographical problems concerning the Sino-Japanese War, Devils on the Doorstep is a more self-reflexive attempt to subvert and deconstruct nationalist narratives of the war. Set in the last year of the war in the Japanese-occupied part of northern China, Devils on the Doorstep captures the horrors and absurdity of the war from the perspective of a group of Chinese villagers who are mysteriously tasked by the Communist resistance to house and interrogate two captives—a Japanese soldier and his Chinese translator. Among the villagers, Ma Dasan—a strong, straight-minded, credulous and bumbling peasant—becomes the unwilling protagonist. Initially a farcical comedy depicting the confusion of the villagers who are unsure about how to deal with this unexpected and unwanted disruption of their lives, the story takes a darker turn when Dasan is tasked with killing the two prisoners. Partly because Dasan is unable to do the deed, and partly because the executioner he employs turns out to be a fraud, Dasan and the villagers eventually agree to return the prisoners to the Japanese army in return for food. While this deal is initially honored by the Japanese army, the celebratory banquet unexpectedly turns into a cold-blooded massacre of the entire village by the carousing Japanese soldiers, leaving Dasan as the sole survivor and witness of the massacre. When the war ends and the Japanese soldiers are pardoned by the returning Nationalists, Dasan finds himself unable to deal with the guilt and tries to kill every Japanese soldier he can in revenge. However, he is quickly subdued and in an ironic turn of events, executed, at the order of the returning Nationalist government by the same Japanese soldier that he saved. As a docudrama about the Nanjing Massacre, City of Life and Death adopts a vastly different approach to represent the traumas of the Sino-Japanese War. Switching primarily between the perspectives of the ordinary Japanese soldier Kadokawa Masao, the Nazi Party member John Rabe, and his fictional secretary Tang, the film tells a “collaged” story about the fall of Nanjing and the establishment and subsequent dissolution of the Nanjing Safety Zone.[10] Without a coherent dramatic narrative, three plot points stand out in the film, each centering around one of the three main characters: Rabe is pressured into providing the Japanese army with one hundred Chinese comfort women from the Safety Zone he sets up; Tang collaborates with the Japanese in an attempt to protect his family after Rabe announces his recall to Germany; and Kadokawa, stricken by guilt after witnessing the horrors and brutality of war, releases two Chinese prisoners and commits suicide at the end of the film. Given Lu Chuan’s style of realistic representation, it is needless to say that scenes of executions, mass shooting, and rape form the mise-en-scène of the film. The Gaze in Cinematic Realism Borrowing from Daniel Morgan, I propose that cinematic realism can be thought of in two different ways that correspond with the two films discussed in this paper.[11] Following the canonical understanding of André Bazin’s theorizations of film realism, the first conception, corresponding with Lu Chuan’s interpretation in City of Life and Death, sees realism as “a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time.”[12] On the other hand, as Morgan argues, realism need not be understood as a set of stylistic conventions that have come to define the realist aesthetic. Instead, he suggests that Bazin “sees a more complicated relation between style and reality. Though a film, to be realist, must take into account… the ontology of the photographic image, realism is not a particular style, lack of style, or a set of stylistic attributes, but a process and mechanism.”[13] Seeing realism as a way of interpreting reality thus enables “realist” films, like Devils on the Doorstep , to explore alternative stylistic and imaginative resources in their representation of reality. Discussing the use of black and white in City of Life and Death , the film’s cinematographer Cao Yu explained how the use of black and white not only provided the film with “a sense of reality” and “spiritual abstraction,” but was also necessary in avoiding the gory excesses and pornographic pleasures of the horror genre.[14] However, when mediating between these sometimes conflicting goals, the film seems to prioritize the achievement of authenticity and realism. In conducting research for the film, Lu Chuan and the rest of the production team spent weeks on end at the Jianchuan Museum Cluster in Sichuan combing through close to five hundred thousand photographs depicting the Sino-Japanese War with the main purpose of imitating the “reality effect” of the most compelling historical photographs.[15] The pursuit of realism and authenticity in cinematic representations of the Nanjing Massacre is not new and is perhaps, in the context of Japanese denial of the massacre for more than half a century, a symptom of a broader national anxiety to “‘prove’ that it actually happened.”[16] A comparison can be made here between City of Life and Death and its cinematic precedent, Mou Tun-fei’s Black Sun (1995). Blurring the line between documentary and fiction, Black Sun integrates documentary footage of the Nanjing Massacre into its dramatized and fictional narrative. In one of the most shocking images of the film, the meticulously reenacted execution of an elderly Chinese monk by a Japanese soldier cuts to the actual photograph which the scene is based on just as the gunshot is heard. In many ways, the recreation of such gory and violent images seems to be, at best, an attempt to bear testimony to the most excessive, horrific, and spectacular scenes of the Nanjing Massacre, and at worst, an exploitative atrocity film. Even though Lu Chuan disavows the medium of horror in representing the Nanjing Massacre and does not use archival footage to shock the audience in the same way that Black Sun does, there is a similar attempt to mimic reality in City of Life and Death . Using the existing visual culture of the Sino-Japanese War to create the film’s “aura of authenticity,” Lu Chuan develops the setting of the film by drawing on documentary photographs that would be familiar to a Chinese audience exposed to scenes of a war-ravaged Nanjing.[17] The appropriation of and reference to archival footage in the name of historical realism, however, poses its own problems. In referring to “historical analogues” in the name of realism, there is an underlying assumption that archival photographs and film footage can capture the past as it happened—an objective, dispassionate record of scenes and events.[18] Yet, as Susan Sontag suggests, this is an impossible task for photography as “people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same thing, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what’s there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world.”[19] In the context of war and genocide, however, the issues of realism are not only a theoretical debate, but have implications for our attempts to understand that past. Aside from film footage taken by the American missionary John Magee and a few other exceptions, the vast majority of all surviving visual records of the massacre were produced by the Japanese.[20] The collection of photographs that City of Life and Death was based on was in fact acquired from Japan and taken by Japanese soldiers and camera crew during the invasion of and subsequent massacre in Nanjing.[21] Although the motivations that lie behind the production of these images were very different from those of contemporary filmmakers like Lu Chuan, the mimicking of these photographic visions risk reproducing the very gaze of the perpetrator. As Elie Wiesel discusses in the context of the Holocaust: For the most part the images derive from enemy sources. The victim had neither cameras nor film. To amuse themselves, or to bring back souvenirs back to their families, or to serve Goebbel’s propaganda, the killers filmed sequences in one ghetto or another…The use of the faked, truncated images makes it difficult to omit the poisonous message that motivated them…Will the viewer continue to remember that these films were made by the killers to show the downfall and the baseness of their so-called subhuman victims?[22] Yet as Wiesel recognizes, these photographs serve an important purpose, whether for “eventual comprehension of the concentration camps’ existence” or as a representation of how the perpetrators perceived their role in war and genocide.[23] In this context, the problem with Lu Chuan’s appropriation of the photographic record is how it treats these photographs as an objective truth that allows one to unproblematically access the past. Rather than acknowledging the limits of the visual archive for our understanding of the Nanjing Massacre, City of Life and Death seems to reproduce the gaze of the perpetrators without self-reflexivity. In a startling sequence, hundreds of disheveled Chinese men, mistaken by the Japanese to be Chinese soldiers, are passively herded to the execution grounds and later mowed down by a barrage of bullets. At the end, the audience is almost made to identify with the Japanese perpetrators as the camera zooms in on the back of a Japanese soldier looking down on a sea of individually indistinguishable corpses, accompanied by non-diegetic and somewhat triumphant martial music. A Japanese soldier, standing on a pedestal, gazes out on a sea of Chinese corpses after a mass shooting. Scene from City of Life and Death. In relying on historical photographs, the realist cinematography of City of Life and Death also runs the risk of being tacitly pornographic in its depiction of sexual atrocities committed as part of the Nanjing Massacre. By transforming grainy photographs of women’s bodies into the aesthetic medium of cinema, the naked bodies of rape victims become a spectacle to fulfill the “public fantasies” associated with watching rape on-screen.[24] The relationship between reality and interpretation must again be problematized, and the gaze of the perpetrator is even more pernicious in inscribing meaning onto sexual atrocities. As film scholar and feminist Tanya Horeck argues, since the same scene of rape can be interpreted differently depending on the viewer and context, representations of rape in cinema are “battles over the ownership of meaning and of reality.”[25] In the context of City of Life and Death , sexual assault survivors are depicted as passive and disenfranchised victims whose voices never get heard. The subjectivity of the rape victim is not only effaced by the photographic gaze of the Japanese perpetrator, but continues to be suppressed in representations of rape within national discourse. As Chungmoo Choi convincingly argues in reference to the comfort women issue in Korea, “comfort women discourse displaces the women’s subjectivity, which is grounded on pain, and constructs the women only as symbols of national shame. As such, the primacy of the discourse on comfort women attends not to the welfare of women’s subjectivity but to the national agenda of overcoming colonial emasculation.”[26] Applying Choi’s analysis to the context of the Nanjing Massacre, it is telling how the “Rape of Nanking” continues to persist as a popular moniker for the “Nanjing Massacre,” which has been for many years the standard in both English and Chinese language scholarship. By conflating actual experiences of sexual atrocities with the metaphorical rape/penetration of the national homeland, the name appropriates rape into a masculine national discourse that obfuscates individual experiences of pain and trauma. In its representation of rape, City of Life and Death operates firmly within this national discourse. Depicting most of the Chinese characters in the film as an indistinguishable mass, Lu again represents the massive scale of sexual victimization at the cost of reducing the nature of these women to mere victims of rape. Like the “numbers game” which dominates national contestations over the history of the Nanjing Massacre between China and Japan, it is not the individual and subjective experiences of trauma, but its scale that counts towards the national narrative of victimhood.[27] Images of rape and sexual abuse abound in the film, but two female Chinese characters seem to stand out: Xiao Jiang, a prostitute, and Jiang Shuyun, a teacher. In one of two moments of dramatic self-sacrifice in the film, Xiao Jiang is the first to volunteer herself as one of the “100 comfort women” given to the Japanese army so as to spare the rape of other girls within the Safety Zone. While in the other sequence the Nationalist soldier Lu Jianxiong calmly stands up to face a certain but heroic death, Xiao Jiang’s sacrifice of her body is “naturalized by virtue of her being a prostitute in the first place.”[28] Raped to death, Xiao Jiang’s nude body is tragically and unceremoniously tossed into a pile of other bodies. Conversely, Shuyun’s death happens in a far more merciful and sympathetic manner. Captured by Japanese soldiers near the end of the film, Shuyun begs Japanese soldier Kadokawa to shoot her so as to save her from being sexually abused. It is thus implied that while Shuyun’s chastity is more important than her survival, for Xiao Jiang the sacrifice of her body and ultimately her life to protect the “pure” schoolgirls is an expectation. In doing so, the film fetishizes both the chastity of the schoolgirls and the illicit sexuality of the prostitutes. Such a portrayal fails to explore the individual subjectivities of the female characters, instead presenting them as symbolic rather than real figures. Like the discourse surrounding comfort women that prioritizes “a narrative of virgins forcefully kidnapped and raped over other experiences of victimhood,” the filmic representation of rape in City of Life and Death marginalizes the traumas suffered by individual rape victims, as it is the “compromised” and “indecent” women who are raped and their deaths neatly mark the national humiliation as a distant past.[29] Objectivity and Authenticity Entangled with the film’s quest to “recreate the world in its own image,” the pursuit of an objective representation of the Nanjing Massacre seems to be the film’s raison d’être. In this regard, a significant portion of City of Life and Death is framed from the perspective of the detached and presumably impartial Western observer.[30] Without a coherent narrative arc, the film is framed by a series of postcards written in English, by the American missionary Minnie Vautrin.[31] The film opens with a series of postcards that establish the historical background of the Nanjing Massacre, narrating the progress of the Japanese army from Beijing to Shanghai and finally to the then-capital Nanjing. Interestingly, there is no evidence that Vautrin actually wrote and sent postcards like these during the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, even though she and Rabe—the two Westerners central to the film—detailed the fall of Nanjing extensively in their own diaries.[32] It is thus revealing that the film chose to imagine what Vautrin, rather than any Chinese character, would have written in her correspondence. In this case, the film’s quest for authenticity is implicated by the same notions of objectivity and detachment that plague the historiography of the Nanjing Massacre. Even though a vast collection of oral testimonies given by survivors has been collected, historical scholarship on the Nanjing Massacre has been slow to acknowledge and use these testimonies as reliable evidence.[33] Significantly, when Japanese reporter Honda Katsuichi published an extensive collection of interviews with Chinese survivors of the Nanjing Massacre and other Japanese war crimes, he was accused of “presenting the Chinese side of the story uncritically” and deniers were quick to seize on any discrepancies in the testimonies as “evidence of the fabrication of the Nanjing Massacre.”[34] While there are undoubtedly limits to the ability of oral testimonies to serve as unquestionable facts, the testimonies of victims illuminate a particular contingent and subjective truth that cannot otherwise be understood. The fetishization of objectivity and neutrality thus leads one to prioritize the written records of detached Western observers, consequently obscuring a historically significant part of the Nanjing Massacre. Considering how Western foreigners were either expelled from the city by December 15 or otherwise confined within the Safety Zone, they could have only witnessed at best “a fraction of what actually happened afterwards in a larger area with hundreds of thousands of residents.”[35] In the face of continuing Japanese denial, reflected most notably in a statement made in 2012 by Mayor Takashi Kawamura stating that the “so-called Nanjing Massacre is unlikely to have taken place,” the quest for objective detachment is simultaneously understandable and obfuscating.[46] On one hand, the eyewitness testimonies of detached Western observers like John Rabe and the American missionaries present at the scene of the Nanjing Massacre are perceived, even within China, to provide an objective account of the massacre that can be used in the battle against denial. Yet on the other, the testimonies of Western observers can only be testimonies of themselves and of their immediate context. If, as Leo Tolstoy suggests, the gap between a real event and the various fragmentary and distorted recollections of it can only be overcome “by collecting the memories of every individual (even the humblest soldier) who had been directly or indirectly involved in the battle,” then the attempt to frame and understand the Nanjing Massacre from the narrow perspective of Western observers elides the voices of Nanjing residents and survivors who undoubtedly experienced and remembered very differently from foreign bystanders.[37] Even though the choice to emphasize the role played by Western observers may not have been an ideal one for Lu Chuan, it is nonetheless an inadvertent effect of historiography that relies on written-documentation generated by Western observers—the famous The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang is one prominent example.[38] Belonging to a different world, the computer-animated yet realist postcards written in Vautrin’s hand reveal the limits of a Western perspective in representing the trauma of the Nanjing Massacre—its language is detached and devoid of the emotions that often underlie the testimonies collected from Nanjing residents and survivors. One of the postcards written by Minnie Vautrin shown immediately after brutal scenes of massacre and rape. Scene from City of Life and Death. Rethinking Realism Even though City of Life and Death and Devils on the Doorstep share the distinctive stylistic feature of black-and-white cinematography, its use in the latter film subverts the canonical understanding of realism and reveals the constructed nature of the photographic image. Jiang’s endeavor is an interesting and ambitious one, not only because cinematic realism originated in black-and-white cinematography, but also because, as highlighted earlier, war newsreels are frequently incorporated into documentary and docudrama films to enhance the authenticity of historical narratives. In a similar way, historical documentation is often perceived to possess a certain realist quality as a black-and-white text with fixed meaning, even though like photography, it is mediated by layers of language and interpretation.[39] Like City of Life and Death , Jiang’s film shares a close relationship with historical photographs of the Second Sino-Japanese war. In an interview, Jiang revealed how, in preparing for the film, they “took photographs of our actors in their costumes and made Xerox copies of them and placed them next to Xeroxes of actual historical photographs. No one could distinguish between them.”[40] Yet, unlike City of Life and Death , Devils on the Doorstep makes neither pretension to being a documentary nor attempts to imply the historicity of the narrative.[41] Instead, the film uses the visual medium associated with realism to make a self-reflexive critique of the relationship between history as the past and history as a representation. In the final moments of Devils on the Doorstep , the black-and-white aesthetic switches to color just as Ma Dasan is beheaded in an execution ordered by the returning Nationalist government. In this scene, we are shown Dasan’s execution first from the perspective of a Chinese villager watching the public execution, and then, in the only subjective shot in the entire film, from the disturbing perspective of Dasan’s decapitated head, watching as the crowd cheers.[42] Unlike scenes of execution and death in City of Life and Death , the depiction of violence in this scene is swift and hardly pornographic. The lack of sentimentality and horrific excess—the two elements that characterize portrayals of violence in City of Life and Death —makes this scene, in some ways, even more brutal and disturbing. On one level, by shifting attention away from the violence and to the act of watching it, Jiang criticizes the passive act of spectatorship that the surrounding Chinese villagers are guilty of and that we, as the audience, are complicit in. The spectating peasants exhibit no sympathy for Dasan, laughing and howling in a manner reminiscent of how the Japanese soldiers laughed and watched while butchering Dasan’s entire village. While parallels can be drawn between the reactions in these two situations, the contexts and the actors within it are obviously not analogous. Yet it is also the semblance of law and order in the case of Dasan’s execution that makes this scene especially troubling. While the Nationalist government claims to restore civilization to a village previously ruled by the savage Japanese devils,[43] they are guilty of what Michael Taussig calls “mimetic excess” by appropriating the very savagery they are meant to abolish.[44] Of course, this critique folds back on and implicates the spectators, who are not troubled by the brutality but behave with a veneer of civility which they believe divorces them from the plight of the victims. On another level, the shifts in perspective in this final scene expose the inherent gap between representation and reality, and consequently, the appropriation of wartime suffering and trauma by national narratives of the past. As the camera shifts away from Dasan’s perspective and to a frontal shot of Dasan’s decapitated head, the moving picture transforms into still photography and then into iconography.[45] Not only is this implied by the woodcut-like texture of the final shot, the image itself closely resembles widely-circulated atrocity photographs that have become a cliché in depicting Japanese wartime cruelty. In this way, the multiple shifts in perspective force the audience to question the truth and reliability of each perspective and to eventually acknowledge the gap between these different representations of reality and reality itself. Jiang further interrogates the relationship between representation and reality using Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q, to which Jiang frequently compared his film.[46] The novella tells the story of an ordinary Chinese peasant with the ability to transform personal humiliations and defeats into victories through deliberate renaming and misnaming. Though Ah Q is eventually publicly executed for committing theft, the narrator turns away from his satirical tone and presents this moment in a sympathetic and reflective manner. Lu Xun writes at the end of the novella: “Naturally all agreed that Ah Q had been a bad man, the proof being that he had been shot; for if he had not been bad, how could he have been shot?”[47] Turning the target of satire from Ah Q to the villagers, Lu Xun highlights the artifice of allegedly true representations: whether Ah Q’s stories of his defeats/victories, the court’s narrative of Ah Q’s guilt, or even, in a self-reflexive turn, the narrator’s/ Lu Xun’s “true story” of Ah Q.[48] While the motivations for Lu Xun’s literature must be read against the social and intellectual milieu of the May Fourth Movement, his critique of the “violence of representation” and of the privileging of certain voices over others remains highly relevant to the study of Chinese representations of the War of Resistance.48 In this regard, Jiang’s dialogue with The True Story of Ah Q highlights how conventional historical narratives about the war, framed as narratives of heroic national resistance and eventual triumph, ultimately purge history of its horrors and violence. Deconstructing Nationalist Tropes Like Lu Xun’s novella, Devils on the Doorstep must also be situated within the social context in which Jiang grew up. In various interviews, Jiang reveals how the images of Japanese “devils” in the film are based on “their looks, as I remembered them.”[49] Born in 1963, Jiang obviously did not see Japanese soldiers firsthand, but nonetheless had a certain image of them based on the representations of the war he grew up with. Growing up during the Cultural Revolution, Jiang was familiar with images of the Japanese devil created in the “Red Classics” and other revolutionary films of that time. In these black-and-white propaganda films, such as Railroad Guerrillas (1956) and Mine Warfare (1962), the Japanese soldiers, always referred to colloquially as guizi,[50] were treacherous but ultimately silly and comical figures that would be easily ambushed and defeated by patriotic villagers.[51] Cognizant of the problems with such representations, Jiang resists conventional stereotypes of the Chinese peasant as ones which would avenge the nation for Japan’s brutal occupation. Devils on the Doorstep attempts to do this by considering how ordinary people experienced the war and faced up to the “prospect of imminent death during wartime.”[52] Like “Survival,” the novella from which the film was adapted, Devils on the Doorstep shifts away from the dominant perspective of patriotic Chinese soldiers and focuses on ordinary peasants’ quotidian struggle for survival.[53] Even though the mysterious resistance fighter catalyzes the tragic chain of events, he is ultimately a marginal figure in the film, appearing only once to drop off the two prisoners and, unlike in the “Red Classics” that Jiang alludes to, is never a heroic figure that leads the peasant resistance. Thus, resistance against the Japanese, the arch-signifier of the Chinese war mythology, is represented in the film as an abstract ideology foisted on the reluctant peasants, with a heavy and palpable dose of the absurd.[54] Rather than portray heroic and martial resistance, the film depicts the daily life of a Chinese village under Japanese occupation as if told from the perspective of the peasants themselves.[55] Devils on the Doorstep opens not with a scene of soldiers fighting or of Japanese “devils,” but of daily life in an ordinary village in Japanese-occupied China. It is clear from the opening sequence that despite having been a base for Japanese navy reservists for eight years, the village has been relatively untouched by the war. As Japanese sailors parade through the village playing their jaunty naval song, local Chinese children clamor in excitement while waiting for the Japanese commander to hand out candy. The commander then stops to bark instructions at one of the adult villagers to bring him clean water that night and the latter responds pliantly, like one of the children, even calling the Japanese soldier sensei (Japanese for “teacher”). While there is certainly a clear sense of hierarchy governing their interactions, and perhaps some fear in the peasant receiving the orders, there is no hatred and vengefulness as one might expect. Instead, the villagers adapt to the occupation with ingenuity, compromising with Japanese soldiers so as to create for themselves a space of autonomy and local “resistance.” From this perspective of the peasants, one can appreciate how the daily life of the war was motivated by a palpable sense of survival more than any abstract and ideological notion of nationhood. Yet it is also the everyday struggle for survival that reveals both the cruelty of war and the resilience of humanity, whose historical struggles against violence often get drowned in “black-and-white versions of history that pay attention only to the grand schemes of antagonism, such as class, nation, and ideology.”[56] Chinese peasant children dancing to the tune of the Japanese naval song, excitedly awaiting candy from the Japanese naval commander. Scene from Devils on the Doorstep. By representing the War of Resistance from below, Jiang also blurs the lines between wartime collaboration and resistance, perhaps explaining state and popular censure against Devils on the Doorstep .[57] The issue of collaboration during the War of Resistance has been a thorny issue in Chinese national memory. Broadly remembered as a “good war” which legitimized the nation, the party and the experiences of some who lived through it, national remembrances of the Second Sino-Japanese War tend to emphasize the Chinese as “positive and patriotic figures who are at the same time victims of savagery by others, rather than authors of their own misfortune.”[58] In this national narrative, collaborators, like the translator Dong Hanchen in Devils on the Doorstep and Rabe’s secretary Mr. Tang in City of Life and Death , are dismissed and demonized as hanjian, a term that is conventionally used to mean “traitor” but literally means a “betrayer of the Chinese race.”[59] Even though both films address the issue of collaboration, the discourse of salvation in City of Life and Death ultimately places the nation above the individual and fails to challenge nationalistic representations of collaboration. Hoping to protect the rest of his family from the brutality of the Japanese army, Tang collaborates with the Japanese by informing on Chinese “soldiers” living within the Safety Zone, simultaneously earning for himself the titles of tomodachi (Japanese for “friend”) and hanjian.[60] While this portrayal of Tang humanizes him far more than most representations of collaborators in Chinese cinema, and consequently seems to put him in a moral gray zone, the film ultimately adopts the nationalist narrative as Tang redeems himself and sacrifices his life for the sake of another, morally untainted Chinese compatriot.[61] By making Tang atone for his sin of collaboration, Lu projects patriotic heroism as a form of fantasy and an imaginative attempt at self-salvation. By telling the story of wartime collaboration as a heroic narrative of salvation, City of Life and Death not only obfuscates individual narratives and understandings of collaboration, but also suggests that the individual may somehow lose his life to save the nation to which he belongs. It is telling that Tang’s last words to his Japanese executioner were “my wife is pregnant again,” suggesting again that his patriotic death ensures the longevity of the Chinese nation.[62] In this regard, the film seems to be an attempt to “undo Japanese imperialism and injustice through a patriotic narration of the unity of the Chinese nation,” subordinating the individual to the nation, and ultimately failing to uphold collaboration as a possible moral choice.[63] In contrast, Devils on the Doorstep problematizes the meaning and morality of collaboration. Even though the most obvious collaborator—the translator Dong Hanchen—dies at the end of the film, his death is not a heroic one that absolves him of his guilt or puts the Chinese nation on a pedestal. It is instead an absurd execution filled with grim irony. When the KMT soldiers return and replace the Japanese dictatorship with a Nationalist one, the first order of business is the punishment and execution of wartime collaborators. Made an example by the Nationalist government, Hanchen is denounced as “scum who aided the Japanese to slaughter their own compatriots.” He is portrayed by the KMT military spokesperson, a comical figure speaking with a high-brow accent that distinguishes him from the village folk, as having “aided tyranny and avoided arrest,” his hands “stained with Chinese blood,” and “only execution will quell the masses anger.”[64] The irony of the KMT’s statements cannot be more clear—not only are Hanchen’s hands not “stained with Chinese blood,” Hanchen himself is not the typical opportunistic collaborator who has betrayed his people to serve the enemy. Rather than acting strictly as a translator for Hanaya, the Japanese soldier for whom he works, Hanchen deliberately mistranslates Hanaya in an attempt to preserve the peace. For example, the comical opening encounter between the villagers and the prisoners reads something like this: Village head: So, what’s his name? Have him tell us himself. Hanaya (in Japanese): Shoot me! Kill me! If you’ve got the guts, cowards! Villagers: How come his name is so long? Village head: Has he killed Chinese men? Violated Chinese women? Hanaya (in Japanese): Of course, that’s what I came to China for! Hanchen (translating): (hesitating) He’s new to China. Hasn’t seen any women yet. He’s killed no one. He’s a cook. (turning to Hanaya) Why are you doing this? Hanaya (in Japanese): I want to anger these cowards! I won’t cooperate with swine! Hanchen (translating): He begs you not to kill him! From this sequence, it can be observed how Hanchen is not a spineless stooge of the Japanese and does not merely “turn Japanese into Chinese and Chinese into Japanese.”[66] Through his mediation of language, he instead opens up a “humane channel of communication” that offers some hope of rapprochement between the Chinese and the Japanese.[67] In contrast, without a translator, the town square becomes like the Tower of Babel when the Chinese KMT first return. It is comical how the KMT representative and the accompanying American and British soldiers, despite their military rank, are unable to “order” a Japanese peddler to move his goods off the road or even just to stand still. Unable to communicate with each other whatsoever, they eventually drive their military jeep over his goods and use the language of force to achieve their goals. Seen in this context, Hanchen is not merely a passive translator who is servile to his Japanese masters but is instead an active agent who uses language as a way to shape reality and avoid violence. In his use of language, Hanchen can perhaps be compared to Guido in Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997), a controversial film that similarly used both humor and surreal scenes to represent the Holocaust. As the main character who generates most of the comedy of the film, Guido turns the threats issued by concentration camp guards into instructions for a game so as to shelter his son from the horrors of their experience. Unable to stop the perversity of the camp and the likely death that awaits both of them, Guido’s translations are at least an attempt to protect his son’s childhood and innocence. In this regard, Guido and Hanchen both purposefully severe the link between words and their signified reality so as to seek a way out of an otherwise entrapping situation and to reclaim the possibility of survival.[68] Crucially, Hanchen’s “translations” help the peasants overcome the social and cognitive distance that Hanaya strives to enlarge with his racist vitriol and yearnings for martyrdom, possibly avoiding violent confrontation and defusing the situation. Dong Hanchen and Hanaya Kosaburo panting after frantically shouting over each other during the interrogation – Hanaya shouting in Japanese and Hanchen in Chinese. The latter deliberately mistranslates Hanaya’s demands to be killed. Scene from Devils on the Doorstep. By looking at the discourse surrounding collaboration (hanjian) from the perspective of the villagers, Devils on the Doorstep also exposes the ambiguous and populist aspects of the label. Even though the Nationalist legislature established the hanjian crime as early as August 1937, in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese attack in Beijing, the term was broadly defined and indiscriminately used.[69] In part, this may have been because positions about collaboration and resistance were constantly evolving. Despite its efforts to present itself as a resistance government, the KMT practiced a policy of non-resistance towards Japan for years and did not completely reject the idea of peace talks with Japan until August 1937.[70] Combined with the encouragement of popular vigilantism in the prosecution of collaborators, the label of collaboration gained a populist valence that empowered passive victims of the war with “an opportunity to redeem their passivity with a display of patriotic fervor.”[71] Not only is this evident at Hanchen’s public execution, the villagers in the film constantly throw around the term hanjian, struggling to reach a stable meaning for the term and to reconcile that meaning with their own understandings of right and wrong. Is it collaboration to return the prisoners to the Japanese? Is it collaboration to feed the prisoners? Conversely, what if one were to starve them to death instead? What about the simple act of referring to the Japanese soldiers as “teacher” (sensei)? Eventually, however, the decisions made by the villagers remain outside the demands of nationalistic loyalties and discourse. When they find out the Japanese prisoner Hanaya is a peasant like them, the villagers, rather than “coming out with hackneyed expressions of hatred for a despised enemy,” acknowledge respect for someone with whom they have common ground and find solidarity with.[72] While their identification with Hanaya and exchange with the Japanese army may be seen through the nationalist lens as collaboration and fraternization with the enemy, the villagers ultimately complicate the nationalist dichotomy between collaboration and resistance, and open up the possibility of acknowledging the indiscriminate use of the demonizing label hanjian.[73] Unlike in City of Life and Death , collaboration in Devils on the Doorstep is always presented as an active choice, albeit under the oppressive conditions of war and occupation. By representing the war from the perspective of a single village, Jiang Wen confronts the complexity of communal decision-making in the village and avoids portraying his characters as one-dimensional and passive victims of the war. In contrast, the capacity for choice is evaporated in City of Life and Death when a kaleidoscope of perspectives is presented without interrogating any single one. Tang’s collaboration with the Japanese is presented as a natural consequence of his fear and uncertainty upon hearing about Rabe’s recall to Germany. Likewise, even the film’s protagonist—the sympathetic Japanese soldier Kadokawa—is presented as a character stripped of choice. In many ways, he is the morally upright and pure Japanese soldier corrupted by the brutality and arbitrariness of war. In the only scene where he kills, his shooting is an impulse without any lethal intention.[74] He is also only an observer to the brutal scenes of rape and massacre, seemingly absolving him of responsibility by attributing these acts to the universal character of war. Forced to witness the brutality, yet in no position to stop it, Kadokawa endures the trauma and guilt of war, himself becoming a victim of the war he is complicit in perpetrating. Confronted with this choiceless situation, Kadokawa ultimately commits suicide to rid himself of his guilt.[75] Such representations of the dehumanizing aspect of the Sino-Japanese war are, however, neither new nor exclusive to cinematic depictions of the war. Many soldiers who testified to the atrocity in Nanjing put the blame squarely on the war, and while these statements are truthful and useful to some degree, ...blaming everything on the war is at best inadequate and at worst can be used as an excuse to avoid confronting the crucial issue of agency, for even in the most brutal of wars not everyone killed or raped civilians. Acknowledgment of the dehumanizing impact of war, although highly important, cannot replace a critical analysis of the individual decisions as well as the particular political institutions.[76] Even though Devils on the Doorstep focuses more significantly on the Chinese experience of the war, it can be considered a cinematic attempt at critically analyzing the individual decisions made during the war. Jiang’s attempt at doing so can be appreciated by comparing his film with the original novella on which it is based. Told using the mode of heroic resistance, You Fengwei’s “Survival” presents the village chief who receives the two prisoners as acting primarily out of a sense of political duty. As kind-hearted folks, the villagers treat the prisoners humanely; but when it is revealed by the communist leadership that the prisoners are no longer of use and should be executed in situ, the villagers eventually carry out what amounts to a military command.[77] When confronted by the interpreter-prisoner, the chief’s only defense is: “Tell you what, you and the Jap devil’s capital punishments were decided by the resistance fighters, not us. We are just carrying out their orders. Understand?”[78] By justifying their actions as an order, the villagers are able to relieve themselves of the moral burden. In contrast, the film version presents the choices available to Dasan even amidst the oppressive conditions of occupation. Even though the mysterious resistance fighter forced Dasan to take in the prisoners at gunpoint, Dasan is later conscious of the choices available to him and his fellow villagers. For example, he speaks out against the option of killing the two prisoners even though they present a palpable and constant threat to the lives of the villages. To Dasan, killing the prisoners is “just not right” and he insists that “we [the villagers] can’t just decide to kill them. It’s just not good.”[79] Even though he eventually fails to convince the other villagers and it is decided through the drawing of lots that the task of executing the prisoners would fall on him, Dasan is still able to carve out space for himself to do what intuitively feels right to him. Acting against fate, he chooses to hide the prisoners instead of killing them as was ordered by his fellow villagers. Thinking of himself as an active agent rather than a passive victim, Dasan ultimately blames himself for the Japanese massacre of his village and attempts to seek revenge for it. While holding himself responsible for the deaths of his fellow villagers denies him “the complication of moral luck,” it is nonetheless clear that attributing what happened purely to luck “voids the subject of moral responsibility.”[80] In this context, Devils on the Doorstep presents the possibility for choice, no matter how limited, under the conditions of war and occupation. For Jiang, the conditions of nationalism and war are no longer adequate or exculpatory justifications for acts of violence—not only did Dasan choose to shelter the prisoners in spite of an execution order, the Japanese soldiers also chose to commit the senseless acts of violence even after the Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s surrender. In the final scene of the war, the burning village is disturbingly set against Hirohito’s radio announcement of unconditional surrender, ironically asserting: “Should we continue the fight, not only would the Japanese nation be obliterated, but human civilization would be totally extinguished.”[81] Framed in this way, the orgy of violence at the end of the war is not so much a direct military command even if it is linked symbolically with the Emperor, but is instead a choice made by Japanese soldiers, having fraternized with the Chinese, to purge themselves of the polluting effects of proximity. Conclusion By visualizing wartime atrocities, cinema claims a place in the public consciousness of history by recording, re-envisioning, and investigating the past. For City of Life and Death , the representation of trauma is an indisputable testament to the violence and brutality of the Second Sino-Japanese War. In adopting the aesthetics of conventional cinematic realism, the film posits that the past can be recreated in its own image and that the audience can thus be somehow transported back into that past. Referring to the use of three-dimensional dioramas in the War of Resistance Museum just outside Beijing, the museum guide states that by “cleverly taking models, artifacts and tableaux and making them into one, so that the eye cannot distinguish between what is painting and what is a model, [it feels] as if you were placing yourself on the battlefield at the time [of the event itself].”[83] While used in a different context, the realist sensibilities of dioramic representation seem to be equally characteristic of City of Life and Death . Yet as Hayden White argues, the scale and intensity of the traumatic events of the twentieth century make it impossible for any single human agent to have a full and conscious view of the causes, effects and moral implications of such events. Consequently, any expectation of representational objectivity must be set aside as well. The failure of humanist historiography for White means abandoning realist storytelling techniques and seeking literary modernism, which “provide the possibility of de-fetishizing both events and the fantasy accounts of them which deny the threat they pose, in the very process of pretending to represent them realistically.”[84] Nonetheless, the relationship between realism and other modes of representation are far more complicated. In this regard, Devils on the Doorstep is realistic without necessarily being realist.[85] By acknowledging that the past cannot be recreated in its own image, the film forces a critical rethinking of cinematic realism that achieves, in some ways, a more truthful representation of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Endnotes [1] Vivian Lee, “The Chinese War Film: Reframing National History in Transnational Cinema,” in American and Chinese-Language Cinemas: Examining Cultural Flows, eds. Lisa Funnell and Man-Fung Yip (New York: Routledge, 2014), 101. [2] Gary Xu, Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 38-39. [3] Yinan He, “History, Chinese Nationalism and the Emerging Sino-Japanese Conflict,” Journal of Contemporary China 16, no. 50 (February 2007), 8. [4] Timothy Tsu, Sandra Wilson and King-fai Tam, “The Second World War in postwar Chinese and Japanese film,” in Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War, eds. King-fai Tam, Timothy Tsu and Sandra Wilson (New York: Routledge, 2015), 2-3. [5] Yinan He, “Remembering and Forgetting the War: Elite Mythmaking, Mass Reaction, and Sino-Japanese Relations, 1950-2006,” History & Memory 19, no. 2 (Fall 2007), 49. ‘Red Classics’ (translated from the Chinese term hongse jingdian) refer to art works that reflect the ideological underpinnings of the CCP and often are used with reference to works that were approved during the Cultural Revolution. [6] Yu Hua, “China Waits for an Apology,” New York Times, April 9, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/opinion/yu-hua-cultural-revolution-nostalgia.html. [7] Timothy Tsu, “A genealogy of anti-Japanese protagonists in Chinese war films, 1949-2011,” in Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War, 23. [8] Jie Li, “Discolored vestiges of history: Black and white in the age of color cinema,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, no. 3 (2012), 250. [9] Dai Jinhua, “I Want to Be Human: A Story of China and the Human,” Social Text 29, no. 4 (2011), 141-142. My understanding of melodrama is borrowed from Amos Goldberg’s exploration of the relationship between the victim’s voice and melodrama. See Amos Goldberg, “The Victim’s Voice and Melodramatic Aesthetics in History,” History and Theory 48, no. 3 (Oct 2009), 220-237. [10] Yanhong Zhu, “A past revisited: Re-presentation of the Nanjing Massacre in City of Life and Death,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, no. 2 (2013), 87-88. While most of Lu’s characters are ostensibly “historical analogues” inspired by real characters that have been written about, the two Western foreigners in the film—John Rabe and Minnie Vautrin—are actual people who lived in Nanjing during the massacre and documented it extensively in their diaries and correspondence. Together with other foreigners, they helped to set up the Nanjing Safety Zone. [11] Daniel Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 3 (Spring 2006), 443-481. [12] André Bazin, What is Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 25. [13] Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin,” 445. [14] Li Yue, “Dancing with the Camera: A Special Interview with Nanjing! Nanjing!’s Cinematographer Cao Yu” (in Chinese), May 11, 2009, http://old.pku-hall.com/WYPPZZ.aspx?id=456. Note that Nanjing! Nanjing! is the alternative English-language title for Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death. [15] He Xi, “Nanjing! Nanjing!’s Sichuan Connection” (in Chinese), April 24, 2009, http://www.cinema.com.cn/YingYuTianXia/2245.htm. I borrow the concept of the “reality effect” from Roland Barthes, who argues that what we call “real” is “never more than a code of representation.” See Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 80. [16] Michael Berry, “Cinematic Representations of the Rape of Nanking,” East Asia 19, no. 4 (2001), 88. [17] Rebecca Nedostup, “City of Life and Death (Nanjing! Nanjing! 2009) and the Silenced Nanjing Native” in Through a Lens Darkly: Films of Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing, eds. John Michalczyk and Raymond Helmick (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 64. [18] Shao Yan, “In the film we have kept our integrity: Exclusive interview with Lu Chuan” (in Chinese), Dianying shijie, April 2009, 24-29. [19] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 88. [20] Berry, “Cinematic Representations of the Rape of Nanking,” 95. [21] He Xi, “Nanjing! Nanjing!’s Sichuan Connection.” [22] Elie Wiesel, “Foreword” (trans. Annette Insdorf) in Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xii. [23] Wiesel, “Foreword,” xii. [24] Amanda Weiss, “Contested Images of Rape: The Nanjing Massacre in Chinese and Japanese Films,” Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 2 (Winter 2016), 437. [25] Tanya Horeck, Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film (New York: Routledge, 2013), 13. [26] Chungmoo Choi, “The Politics of War Memories towards Healing” in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), eds. Takashi Fujitani, Lisa Yoneyama and Geoffrey White (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 399. [27] Daqing Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre: Reflections on Historical Inquiry,” in The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, ed. Joshua Fogel (Berkley: University of California Press, 2000), 151. See also Fujiwara Akira, “The Nanking Atrocity: An Interpretive Overview,” in The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-38, ed. Bob Wakabayashi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 51-52. [28] Nedostup, “City of Life and Death,” 65. [29] Weiss, “Contested Images of Rape,” 437. [30] As Michael Berry notes, the reliance on presumably impartial and objective foreigners to authenticate the Nanjing Massacre is not new to Chinese cinema, and he traces this “legitimizing power of the West” to Luo Guanqun’s Massacre in Nanjing (1987). See Berry, “Cinematic Representations of the Rape of Nanking,” 90-91. [31] Kevin Lee, “City of Life and Death,” Cineaste 35, no. 2, Spring 2010, https://www.cineaste.com/spring2010/city-of-life-and-death/. [32] John Rabe, The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe, trans. John Woods (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). Minnie Vautrin, Terror in Minnie Vautrin’s Nanjing: Diaries and Correspondence, 1937-38 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008). [33] Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre,” 139-143. Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking also describes the Chinese trauma of the Nanjing Massacre primarily through the lens of Western observers, relying heavily on the diaries of American missionaries Minnie Vautrin and John Magee, as well as the German businessman and Nazi Party member John Rabe. See Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic, 1997). [34] Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre,” 142; Honda Katsuichi, The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1998). [35] Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre,” 139. [36] Paul Armstrong, “Fury over Japanese politician’s Nanjing Massacre denial,” CNN, February 23, 2012, https://www.cnn.com/2012/02/23/world/asia/china-nanjing-row/index.html. [37] Carlo Ginzburg, “Just One Witness” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 95. [38] Lu Chuan declined an offer to direct a film about the Nanjing Massacre that, according to him, “valorized” the role of John Rabe. See Keen Zhang, “City of Sorrow: Competing film portrayals of the Nanjing Massacre,” China.org.cn, April 30, 2009, http://china.org.cn/culture/2009-04/30/content_17702091.htm. Interestingly, the heavy influence of Western-centric historiography on City of Life and Death can be observed from how the main character Kadokawa Masao was reconstructed from a “historical analogue” found in Vautrin’s diaries. See Vautrin, Terror in Minnie Vautrin’s Nanjing. [39] This is encapsulated in the Chinese phrase “白纸黑字” (baizhi heizi), which literally means “white paper with black words” and refers to the fixity/conclusiveness of written evidence. [40] Li, “Discolored vestiges of history,” 250. [41] Jerome Silbergeld, Body in Question: Image and Illusion in Two Chinese Films by Director Jiang Wen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 150. [42] In doing so, the film departs the realm of conventional realism and into the realm of surrealism. See Kristof Van den Troost, “War, Horror and Trauma: Japanese atrocities on Chinese screens,” in Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War, 62-63. [43] This is, of course, a reference to the eponymous “devils” in the film. In fact, Jiang Wen’s connection of the “devils” to the Japanese soldiers is even clearer in the original Chinese-language title of the film “鬼子来了” (guizi lailie), with the guizi (literally “devils”/”ghosts”) being frequently invoked in both wartime and postwar parlance to refer to the Japanese. See Julian Ward, “Filming the anti-Japanese war: the devils and buffoons of Jiang Wen’s Guizi Laile,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 2, no. 2, September 2004, 107-108. [44] Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1992). David Wang applies the same concept to his analysis of Lu Xun’s literature, who was traumatized by his experience of the First Sino-Japanese War and subsequent turned to writing literature as a way of ‘saving China’s soul’. See David Wang, The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 35. [45] Li, “Discolored vestiges of history,” 254. [46] Lu Xun, “The True Story of Ah Q,” in Call to Arms (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2010), 141-212. Cheng Qingsong and Huang Ou, My Camera Doesn’t Lie (in Chinese) (Beijing: Zhongguo Youyi, 2002), 72-73. [47] Lu Xun, “The True Story of Ah Q,” 209. [48] Feng Zongxin, “Fictional Narrative as History: Reflection and Deflection,” Semiotica 170, no. 1, 2008, 189; Andrew Jones, “The Violence of the Text: Reading Yu Hua and Shi Zhicun,” Positions 2, Winter 1994, 593. See also Martin Huang, “The Inescapable Predicament: The Narrator and His Discourse in ‘The True Story of Ah Q’,” Modern China 16, no. 4, October 1990, 435. [49] Cheng and Huang, My Camera Doesn’t Lie, 75. [50] A derogatory term referring to the Japanese and other foreigners. See note 42. [51] Ward, “Filming the anti-Japanese war,” 107-108. See also Xu, Sinascape, 43-44. [52] You Fengwei, From ‘Survival’ to ‘Devils on the Doorstep’ (in Chinese) (Beijing: Beijing Publishing House, 1999), 5. [53] You Fengwei, “Survival,” in Life Channel (in Chinese) (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue, 2005). [54] Haiyan Lee, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 256. [55] Much of the film is shot within the claustrophobic interiors of village houses, where the villagers discuss and deliberate what to do with the prisoners. The use of language and poetry also reflects the playfulness and lyricism of peasant storytelling methods. See Ward, “Filming the anti-Japanese war,” 112. [56] Xu, Sinascape, 44. See also Ward, “Filming the anti-Japanese war,” 113. [57] Even though Devils on the Doorstep won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, Jiang’s success was almost completely ignored in China. His film was later banned for release in China. Chinese critics have argued that the film was “insufficiently patriotic” and had “grave errors in the representation of historical truth.” See Wang Fanghua, “Devils on the Doorstep’s Black and White Emotions through a Color Filter” (in Chinese), Dianying Pingjie, August 2013, 36-37. [58] Rana Mitter, “China’s ‘Good War’: Voices, Locations, and Generations in the Interpretation of the War of Resistance to Japan” in Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia, eds. Sheila Miyoshi Jager & Rana Mitter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 188-189. [59] Yun Xia, Down with Traitors: Justice and Nationalism in Wartime China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), 5. [60] Not only is the line between “soldier” and “civilian” blurred in the film and in reality, where a significant portion of the Chinese resistance army was composed of poorly trained and ill-equipped conscripts, most of the “soldiers” in the Safety Zone were also injured and disarmed, as Tang makes clear. [61] Zhu, “A past revisited,” 102. [62] Lu Chuan, Nanjing! Nanjing!: City of Life and Death, 2009. [63] Siu Leng Li, “The theme of salvation in Chinese and Japanese war movies,” in Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War, 82. [64] Wen Jiang, Devils on the Doorstep, 2000. [65] Paola Voci, “The Sino-Japanese War in Ip Man: From miscommunication to poetic combat,” in Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War, 46. [66] Jiang, Devils on the Doorstep. [67] Silbergeld, Body in Question, 93. [68] Paola Voci, “The Light out of the tunnel: Re-thinking Chinese cinema’s war film realism,” Parol XXVII, no. 25, 2014, 93. See also Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “The Secret Histories of Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1, 2001, 255. [69] Xia, Down with Traitors, 11-12. [70] Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally (London: Penguin Books, 2013), 203. [71] Xia, Down with Traitors, 7. [72] Ward, “Filming the anti-Japanese war,” 114. [73] Xia reaches a similar conclusion from the analysis of postwar trial records of Chinese hanjian. See Xia, Down with Traitors, Chapter 2. [74] Stephanie Brown, “Victims, Heroes, Men, and Monsters: Revisiting a Violent History in City of Life and Death,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 32, no. 6, 2015, 531. [75] Zhu, “A past revisited,” 95-97. [76] Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre,” 157-158. [77] Tian Yu, “From Red Sorghum to Devils on the Doorstep: Conceptual evolution in Chinese film adaptations,” Postscript 23, no. 3, Summer 2004. [78] Translation from Haiyan Lee. See Lee, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination, 258. [79] Jiang, Devils on the Doorstep. [80] Translation from Haiyan Lee. See Lee, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination, 262. [81] Jiang, Devils on the Doorstep. [82] Silbergeld, Body in Question, 105. See also Xu, Sinascape, 49. [83] Rana Mitter, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum: Nationalism, History, and Memory in the Beijing War of Resistance Museum, 1987-1997,” China Quarterly 161, March 2000, 288. [84] Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 32. [85] Silbergeld, Body in Question, 82-86. Bibliography Armstrong, Paul. “Fury over Japanese politician’s Nanjing Massacre denial.” CNN. 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In the Augenblick, Not the Moment: A Heideggerian Critique of Temporal Inauthenticity Lukas Bacho Author Gabriel Gonzalez Alexander Gerasimchuk Matthew Wong Editors “Be in the moment!” In our chronically online and attention-deficient age, this admonition is a constant refrain. It usually means: “Focus on neither the past nor the future, but rather the present—what is happening right now. ” A favorite instruction of guided meditations, it may also be heard as a protest against the impulse to sully a beautiful view with a photo shoot. Too often, our minds are clouded by remorse for past events or anxiety about future events that we are unable to appreciate the present for what it is. Clearly, there is some truth to this. However, the normative force of “Be in the moment!” relies on the misleading descriptive claim that we are only ever in the moment (so why try to exist outside it?). This, in turn, rests on a conception of time as a series of punctual moments, as on a timeline, that seem linked only because we perceive them as such. Martin Heidegger had a name for this understanding: “now-time,” or the “ordinary” (Vulgär ) conception of time. I seek to argue, with Heidegger’s help, that the admonition to “be in the moment” obscures essential features of our temporality, thereby diminishing our potential for authentic living. My primary aim is to reconstruct Heidegger’s accounts of now-time, world-time, originary temporality, and the authentic mode of relating to all of these. What emerges is the foundation for a more authentic way of relating to time whose explanatory priority lies not in one’s present situation but in one’s future possibilities. Now-time (Jetzt-Zeit ) is the most proximal conception of time according to which we humans, as Dasein , live our lives. On this understanding, Heidegger writes, “time shows itself as a sequence of nows which are constantly ‘present-at-hand,’ simultaneously passing away and coming along. Time is understood as a succession, as a ‘flowing stream’ of nows, as the ‘course of time.’” The language of “sequence” and “succession” indicates that time is here understood as a series of discrete moments so short that their continual coming and going seems to constitute a flow, but in fact does not. Each moment, or “now,” is “present-at-hand” in the sense that it has an objective (and thus constant) duration. One can quibble about how long exactly the “now” is, but most would say a fraction of a second. Heidegger calls this conception “now-time” because it views time as nothing but these infinitesimally short “nows,” linked by nothing but one another; for “the sequence of nows is uninterrupted and has no gaps.” Now-time resembles a popular position in contemporary philosophy known as the cinematic or snapshot view of time, which holds that “neither our awareness itself nor its contents have temporal extension.” But now-time is also the idea we live by in our everyday lives, most obviously in our use of clocks. The convention of designating the current “now” with clock-time reflects our conception of time as a series of discrete moments: 4:17 comes after 4:16, the fourth second of a minute comes after the third, and so on. Heidegger emphasizes that now-time existed far before the invention of clocks, for Dasein has always measured its time, whether by the sun or some other means; the only difference is that the units of measurement have changed. If time were divided into sufficiently short instants, the logic goes, there would be nothing between them. Indeed, now-time is so integral to our everyday existence that it is hard to imagine any other way to conceive of time. Now-time is implicit in our telling someone to “be in the moment.” To show how, let us begin by acknowledging that the imperative asks one to exist in the present, at the exclusion of both the past and the future. What is the present? Although the word “moment” seems to leave the present’s length ambiguous—it could be a split second, or the multi-hour duration of an activity—the statement’s exclusion of the past and future actually requires that the “moment” be infinitesimally short. If one were to “be” in the next minute or even the next second—that is, anticipate or worry about what will happen then—one could not claim to be in the moment. Thus, the perception of time as a succession of constantly fleeting nows underlies “be in the moment.” But that is not all: the insistence upon the singularity of the moment betrays the idea that there is only ever one moment to be in. In fact, the moment has no duration: like the instants of now-time, the moment is a point . Thus, “be in the moment,” as a statement of now-time, objectifies the present in such a way that there is nothing significant about it except the fact that it is the present. Why should we be in the present? Because it is the present—because it is all that is. Heidegger complicates this picture by introducing the notion of world-time (Weltzeit ). If now-time is responsible for our sense of the present’s punctuality, world-time is responsible for our sense of the present’s universality, and is thus explanatorily prior to our conception of now-time. As Heidegger puts it, world-time is “that time ‘wherein’ entities within-the-world are encountered.” In other words, it is the kind of time that enables us to encounter things in the world. We can clarify what world-time is by examining its four constitutive aspects in turn: publicness, datability, spannedness, and worldhood. The most accessible of world-time’s four aspects is publicness (Öffentlichkeit ). Indeed, Heidegger often calls world-time “public time.” Publicness is the characteristic of world-time whereby we take ourselves to be in the same “now” as one another at any given time. Publicness allows me to say to another person, “Now it is twelve o’clock,” knowing that if they are in the same time zone, it is now twelve o’clock for them, too. If they are not in my time zone—if we are talking on the phone, for instance—I still understand that while it is currently another time for them, we are fundamentally in the same now . And publicness extends beyond the now: only because we understand time as public, as shared, as out there in the world, can we say that we “use,” “buy,” or “borrow” time. Publicness is perhaps the aspect of world-time that is least concealed in now-time, since the measurement of time with clocks and timeliness obviously presupposes that any quantified time will be intelligible as the same “now” by everyone. Still, the fact that we take ourselves to be in the same now remains hidden in now-time. We take for granted that “now” is simply now —that when one person says “be in the moment,” the other will know what time they mean. A second aspect of world-time is datability (Datierbarkeit ), the structure by which Dasein assigns a temporal structure to its experience. In practice, datability refers to our assignment of times to events and events to times, even “before” we impose the numerical values of now-time (like “November 8” or “9:15 a.m.”) on those events. For example, when we say “It is cold,” we mean “It is cold now ,” just as when we say “It was cold,” we mean “It was cold formerly .” Conversely, time has content for us, for “When we say ‘now,’ we always understand a ‘now that so and so.’” Although datability includes the word “date,” it has nothing to do with numerical dates. Instead, datability simply means that all that happens is happening at a time, and every time is a time when something is happening. Clearly, datability enables the conception of now-time, since interpreting time as a sequence of nows makes sense only if Dasein has an intuitive idea of its existence within a structure of past, present, and future. If Dasein could not date itself, time could not seem to be a “flowing stream,” since Dasein would not be fixed in relation to it. In this admittedly murky way, now-time reveals datability as a feature of world-time. Mostly, however, now-time covers up datability, for the now of now-time is not understood to be “now, when x ,” but rather simply “now.” This is especially glaring in “Be in the moment!” In the moment when you are doing what? The admonition suggests that the moment is a space where you need not do anything, when in fact every moment is always a moment when you are doing something. The aspect of world-time which may be most obscured by now-time is spannedness (Spanne ), which affords every “now” the property of duration. Heidegger introduces the concept of spannedness by observing that we understand there to be a length of time—not just a series of nows—between any “now” and a future “then.” This liminal length is itself datable with expressions like “during” and “meanwhile,” which shows that we can conceive of a future “now” (and by extension, any past or present now) with a duration we ourselves have determined. Spannedness accounts for how I can simultaneously say “Now I am writing,” “Now I am a student,” and “Now I am alive,” even though these nows are of vastly different lengths. In fact, no now to which we refer is ever punctual; every now is temporally extended. Even the clock, our paradigmatic instrument of now-time, reveals the spanned nature of world-time by designating as an hour an arbitrary number of minutes and as minute an arbitrary number of seconds. Seconds may be in turn divided into milliseconds, nanoseconds, and so on—there are infinite nows between one second and the next—though the clock does not show this directly. Assigning numbers to time requires that we pin down the now as if it were punctual, when in fact it is spanned. Much like a clock obscures the spannedness of seconds, the statement “be in the moment”—in its exclusion of anything that might be called past or future—obscures the spannedness of said moment, despite the fact that “moments” are by definition variable in length. The fourth aspect of world-time is worldhood (Weltlichkeit ), which situates every time in a normative structure of significance. As Heidegger explains, “The time which is interpreted in concern is already understood as a time for something. The current ‘now that so and so…’ is as such either appropriate or inappropriate .” He returns to the sun for a primitive example: depending on the context, the now of dawn is understood implicitly as the time for waking up or the time for going to work. The clock, as an instrument of now-time, obscures this aspect of world-time by seeming to give every “now” equal status. But it is in light of the worldhood of time that clocks are useful to us: 8:00, for example, is not just a string of numbers—“the time it is now”—but “the time for waking up,” or whatever the case may be. Moreover, the design of a clock—which assigns the hour and half-hour to the extreme points of its vertical axis, and the fifteen-minute intervals between these to its leftmost and rightmost points—reflects our taking certain numerical times to be more appropriate than others as times for anything. For instance, 9:00 is a more “appropriate” time than 9:03 or 9:10 not by itself, but rather for setting an alarm to wake up, holding a meeting, etc. The statement “be in the moment” similarly covers up the worldhood of time by suggesting that the moment is not “for” anything but itself. When someone leading a meditation says it, they want the one hearing to “forget” that they have made the moment significant as a moment for meditating. When a photo-averse person says it, it is because they have designated the moment as a moment for enjoying the scenery, not a moment for taking photos. The worldhood of time entails that by doing anything, I am implicitly asserting that now is the right time to do it. As we have seen, the admonition to “be in the moment” covers up all four aspects of the kind of time (world-time) from which we derive our ordinary conception of time (now-time). Yet Heidegger shows us that world-time is in turn explicable only by an even more basic kind of time, originary or primordial (ursprünglich ) time. Primordial time is the kind of time that Heidegger has been working to uncover throughout Being and Time ; it is “the condition which makes the everyday experience of time both possible and necessary.” In Division II, Chapter 6, he gets primordial time into view by observing that Dasein is not just Being-towards-the-end (i.e., death), but also Being-towards-the-beginning (i.e., birth). To see this, we need not look further than Dasein’s characteristic activity of thrown projection, by which Dasein claims the circumstances it has been thrown into from birth , even as it reinterprets them by projecting its own possibilities until death. Because of the bidirectional gaze of thrown projection, “Dasein does not exist as the sum of the momentary actualities of Experiences which come along successively and disappear.” In other words, Dasein does not exist exclusively in now-time, for Dasein is not just the sum of its experiences at a series of present-at-hand nows. Rather, Dasein is also its past circumstances and future possibilities. As Heidegger puts it, Dasein “is stretched along and stretches itself along ” primordial time via its own activity. The scope of primordial time is Dasein’s entire lifetime, without which the four aspects of world-time could not exist. The now could not be public, datable, spanned, or worldly without the finite being that discloses the now as public, dates the now, relates the now to the broadest now of its own life, and renders the now a time for something in light of its finitude. Therefore, primordial time is the kind of time that makes Dasein a whole and undergirds its Being as care (cf. ). Encouraging someone to “be in the moment” obfuscates primordial time, thereby exemplifying an inauthentic relation to time that Heidegger calls “making-present” (gegenwärtigen ). Making-present describes a state of “falling into the ‘world’ of one’s concern”—the everyday realm where Dasein’s perspective is confined to the objects it encounters as equipment for fulfilling immediate ends. In making-present, Dasein’s attention becomes myopic: it seems to forget its Being as thrown projection, which is to say it forgets that it goes about all its everyday tasks in the context of broader priorities. Of course, the most global context Dasein forgets in making-present is its own finitude, in virtue of which all its priorities matter. The imperative to “be in the moment” epitomizes making-present because it disallows making sense of what one is doing now in light of anything futural; thus, it stands opposed to the maxim “live every day as if it were your last,” even though similar sentiments may motivate the two statements. To “be in the moment” is to forget not only that one has priorities, but also that everything one does is an implicit articulation of those priorities. Consequently, one’s experience of time becomes “an inauthentic awaiting of ‘moments’—an awaiting in which these are already forgotten as they glide by.” Time seems never to arise, but only to pass away; one conceives of oneself not as stretching oneself along time, but rather passively lost in its flow. What making-present makes present, then, is primordial time itself, whose past and futural aspects are subjugated to the cult of the present “moment.” Heidegger reveals our potential for a more authentic relation to primordial time and world-time by contrasting making-present with his concept of the Augenblick , in which Dasein recognizes its past, present, and future as inseparable aspects of its own wholeness. The Augenblick is “the resolute rapture with which Dasein is carried away to whatever possibilities and circumstances are encountered in the Situation as possible objects of concern.” Bearing in mind both its possibilities (projection) and its circumstances (thrownness), Dasein does not lose sight of its priorities amid the world of its concern, but sees those priorities themselves as objects of concern to be constantly actualized and reevaluated. In the Augenblick, Dasein understands its Being as care and itself as finite, but not in such a way that it is afraid of its own death; its rapture is resolute , at once unflinching in its acknowledgment of mortality and steadfast in its commitment to living. The Augenblick is an “ecstasis” in the sense that it allows Dasein to stand outside the world of its concern—outside the punctual present of now-time—and grasp world-time and primordial time, if only implicitly, as the grounds of its temporal experience. Crucially, the Augenblick does not mean an escape from the present—where all experience occurs—but rather expands the present to include one’s whole life. If we translate it as “moment,” we had better bear in mind the English word’s other meaning of “importance,” from which we get “momentous.” The Augenblick renders the present important—i.e., consequential—precisely by being the “gaze of the eye,” for it is in the present (both right this second and during one’s life ) that one judges practically what is worth attending to by focusing on certain things rather than others. The Augenblick, then, could not be more different from the “moment” of “be in the moment,” for while the former imbues the now with momentous stakes by maximally dilating it, the latter deflates the stakes of the now by maximally contracting it. Even the English word “moment” obscures the essential relation between Dasein and time, whereas the German word Augenblick identifies Dasein’s caring activity—its gaze—as the precondition for temporal experience and Dasein’s sense of continuity from one moment to the next. It is an inevitable consequence of the Augenblick’s expansion of the now that the future acquires explanatory priority over the present in the question of Dasein’s Being. While the inauthentic understanding of one’s potentiality-for-Being “temporalizes itself in terms of making present,” Heidegger observes, the Augenblick does so “in terms of the authentic future.” This means that while making-present confines the implications of one’s activity to the punctual now of now-time, the Augenblick discloses those implications as primarily futural. Thus, the Augenblick is explicable not in terms of the vulgar “now” (dem Jetzt ), but in terms of future possibilities: as the “gaze of the eye,” it “permits us to encounter for the first time what can be ‘in a time’ as ready-to-hand or present-at-hand.” In the Augenblick, Dasein discovers itself in the equipment that constitutes the world of its concern, which in turn leads it to recognize that it is the one responsible for stretching oneself along and projecting itself toward certain possibilities rather than others. The worldhood of time becomes particularly apparent, for the current “moment” no longer seems trivial; every “now” becomes significant in terms of what it is a time for , which is to say in terms of its bearing on the future. So while “be in the moment” suggests that the present is all that matters, the Augenblick insists that the present matters only because the future does. In Heidegger’s categories of inauthenticity and authenticity we find the foundation I promised for a more authentic way of relating to time. “Be in the moment” exemplifies an inauthentic mode of relating to time—i.e., making-present—that obscures world-time and primordial time as the fundamental structures of our experience. To be in the Augenblick, on the other hand, is to relate to the now authentically : it means to own up to the present as datable, public, spanned, and worldly; and to understand it as inseparable from the past and future. In the inauthentic mode, one is lost in one’s immediate concerns rather than seeing the “big picture,” and passively awaits the future rather than owning it as the ground of one’s priorities. Thus, although “be in the moment” seems to inflate the status of the present, it actually diminishes the present into a kind of hollow shell. But in the authentic mode, one owns up to both the past and future—stretching back to one’s birth and forward to one’s death—as constitutive of who one is and what one does. Heidegger’s authenticity is proto-ethical in that it denotes appropriation of one’s own temporality as the ground of one’s reasons for doing this rather than that in any given case. Yet authenticity is not fully ethical, for while it describes a relation to one’s reasons (the “subjective ought”), it fails to prescribe specific actions (the “objective ought”). The extent to which one could derive the latter from the former is doubtful, at least within the framework of Being and Time. Yet authenticity, if proto-ethical, is far from irrelevant. We could retort that relating authentically to time is further than most people get in life—never mind living ethically. By saying things like “be in the moment,” we evacuate ourselves from the now, only to reinsert ourselves in it as passengers. We say that time is a flowing stream, forgetting that we are the ones stretching ourselves along. At worst, we pretend indifference, when in fact—as being in the Augenblick reminds me—there is nothing more fundamental to our experience than that we care. References Hägglund, Martin. “Lecture 25: Now-Time, World-Time, and Originary Temporality.” Lecture. PHIL 402: Being and Time, Yale University, 24 April 2024. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time . 1927. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper Perennial, 2008. Phillips, Ian, editor. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience . Routledge, 2017.

Editorial board Foreword Volume II Issue II Introducing the fourth issue of JPPE In recent years, inequality has been discussed at an increasing rate in academic and political spheres. There is a growing rate of inequality along every method of measurement. Within the United States, there is growing income and wealth inequality. On an international level, global inequality studies find that a large portion of the world’s wealth is held by a shockingly small portion of the world’s population. This problem has grabbed the attention of numerous academic and nongovernmental organizations. Inequality has come to the forefront of numerous 2020 US presidential campaigns. Within the Democratic primary, many candidates cited inequality as a central concern and offered a wide variety of solutions. Brown alum Andrew Yang introduced the concept of a Universal Basic Income plan to the global stage, while Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a wealth tax as one part of his sweeping economic policy. This edition of the Brown Journal of Philosophy, Politics and Economics is intended to help contribute to the conversation on inequality through our feature interviews and submissions. In our conversations with Former Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis and American Economist Paul Krugman, we discussed the prevalence of inequality and its potential causes. While we have some recurring themes in our issue, it is our hope that this issue holds something of interest for all its readers. The Brown Journal of Philosophy, Politics and Economics continues to discuss a wide variety of topics that are analyzed through the distinct yet complementary lenses of philosophy, politics and economics. Pieces like “John Taylor and Ben Bernanke on the Great Recession – Who Was Right About What Went Wrong?” examines historical events, while “Respect for the Smallest of Creatures: An Analysis of Human Respect for and Protection of Insects” applies the lens of PPE to the theoretical. We believe that the distinct topics examined, and the insights gleaned from them, are enhanced when combined

A Fair Free Lunch A Fair Free Lunch? Reconciling Freedom and Reciprocity in the Context of Universal Basic Income Olivia Martin Stanford University Author Noah Klein Christopher Lingelbach Orly Mansbach Editors Spring 2019 Download full text PDF (13 pages) A society that relies on generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter. Honesty and trust lubricate the inevitable frictions of social life. – Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Introduction In the 1970s, the Canadian federal government ran a large randomized experiment in giving citizens a basic income called “Mincome.” When Mincome participants were asked “Why wouldn’t you go on welfare, even if it would improve your income?” 37% responded that they would rather support themselves, giving explanations such as, “Welfare to me was accepting something for nothing,” or, “I feel more useful working.”[2] Similarly, in a survey of 121 working Germans, most participants rejected the provision of a basic income, because it was independent of level of need or contribution.[3] In both the scholarly discussion of basic income and in public opinion surveys, the unconditional freedom granted by universal basic income (UBI) seems to directly contradict the social norm of reciprocity. Reciprocity, most generally, is the idea that those who enjoy a share of the benefits of social cooperation owe a corresponding contribution to that society in return, as long as they are able.[4] This concept of reciprocity is central to the idea of the social contract itself: citizens owe to each other some degree of cooperation in order to receive social benefits. Is it possible to reconcile reciprocity and freedom in this context? If so, how? I argue that UBI succeeds in reconciling reciprocity and freedom by making its definition more inclusive, and by restricting our definition of freedom to a more morally defensible conception of republican freedom, all while endowing trust in participants. First, I briefly define basic income. Second, I explain the ethical conflict inherent between freedom and reciprocity as discussed by contemporary basic income scholars, primarily Stuart White and Philippe Van Parijs. Third, I argue that republican freedom deserves moral priority over real freedom in a non-ideal society. Fourth, I argue that a more egalitarian and inclusive conceptualization of reciprocity is required for justice in a non-ideal society. Finally, I compare UBI’s efficacy in achieving this reconciliation to Anthony Atkinson’s proposal of participation income. Defining Basic Income and This Paper’s Normative Framework UBI generally has five definitional features: basic income is in cash, unconditional, universal, individual, and consistent. In this way, UBI is a significant departure from most welfare benefits in the United States. Existing benefits are almost all means tested and often in-kind (e.g., food stamps) rather than cash, given on a household basis (allowing for potential domination of one spouse over another), and conditional on the performance of paid work for a period of time—as is required by the Earned Income Tax Credit, Social Security, and Unemployment Insurance. There are also features of UBI that vary dramatically across proposals: the specific cash amount given, the frequency with which it is given, how it is funded, and the package of policies it entails. The exact features of basic income greatly affect the extent of the tension between freedom and reciprocity—for example, the larger the grant is, the greater the freedom of the individual, but also the smaller the impetus to reciprocate. For the sake of this paper, I will assume a UBI as a $1,000 monthly grant, as is being tested by Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and I will assume that UBI will be in an addition to existing welfare, save for the most redundant programs. I will limit this paper to considering UBI in the context of the United States. As this is a primarily conceptual paper, I will not construct my argument from a specific full-bodied normative framework, such as republican or libertarian political theory. Rather, I will rely on the normative framework of an egalitarian policymaker interested in the principles of justice required for a non-ideal society, and I will hold that a nonideal society is one without institutions that fully correct for unequal access to the means of production and inequalities of natural ability.[5] The United States, of course, is one such nonideal society. As such, I write from a framework that (1) recognizes the inability of current institutions to meet the basic requirements of a social contract that requires all citizens, regardless of race, gender, or class, to be treated equally, and (2) strives to evaluate policies by their success in treating all citizens as moral equals while still protecting citizens’ basic freedoms. The Conflict Between Freedom and Reciprocity While UBI offers a radical but simple proposition to provide a basic level of economic security for all regardless of one’s history of paid work, it also appears to contradict the social norm of reciprocity: the idea that those who enjoy a share of the benefits of social cooperation owe a corresponding contribution to that society in return, as long as they are able. The idea of reciprocity is often incorporated as a central tenet in theories of justice, such as in John Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness, as well as in economic theory, as in Adam Smith’s theory that reciprocity serves as a social invisible hand that allows the free market to function. On a societal level, one might say that citizens internalize the idea of reciprocity by performing paid work, paying taxes, and performing civic duties, while receiving government benefits in the form of public services, protection, and the insurance of government transfers in times of need. Stuart White, in his book The Civic Minimum, provides a useful account of justice as fair reciprocity. In society’s nonideal form where institutions are incapable of correcting for inequalities of natural ability, society must only meet the “threshold of basic fairness”—meaning that class inequality is minimized to the extent possible and that all citizens have access to jobs with above-poverty wages, opportunities for self-realization, and security against abuse and vulnerability. In a society that has met this threshold, citizens are required to reciprocate either in the form of paid labor or specific kinds of care work. One reason that White finds fair reciprocity to be essential is that it is both a product and stimulus of a society of democratic mutual regard, in which “individuals seek to justify their preferred political and economic institutions to others by appealing to shared basic interests, and to related principles that express a willingness to cooperate with their fellow citizens as equals.”[6] As such, White finds this form of reciprocity necessary to the social cooperation inherent in a functioning social contract. Justice as inextricably connected to reciprocity seems to be critically at odds with the unconditional freedom granted by UBI. It is most at odds with Philippe Van Parijs’s account in “Why Surfers Should be Fed,” in which Van Parijs argues that the most central tenet of justice is not reciprocity, but rather “real freedom.”[7] Under this conception of justice, society ought to maximize individuals’ ability to pursue their own conception of the good life, including what they might want to do in the future. This would imply that even able-bodied individuals who decide to spend all their time surfing (i.e., not concretely contributing to society) deserve a basic income just as much as those who spend time working in various ways to contribute to society and the funding of basic income. His argument centers on the following provocative thought exercise: Consider Crazy and Lazy, two identically talented but rather differently disposed characters. Crazy is keen to earn a high income and works a lot... Lazy is far less excited by the prospect of a high income and has decided to take it easy. With the Basic Income at the highest feasible level… Crazy is rather miserable because her net income falls far short of the income she would like to have. Lazy however is blissful.[8] Our traditional understanding of reciprocity would say that Crazy is being exploited by Lazy, whom we might see as free-riding off of the hard work of Crazy. Van Parijs turns this argument on its head with his Job Assets Argument, in which he asserts that jobs are an asset essential to real freedom, and that in our arguably non-Walrasian world, there will remain “morally arbitrary inequality in opportunity” between those lucky enough to be employed, and the involuntarily unemployed.[9] Thus, it might be Crazy, not Lazy, who has unsustainable preferences, and perhaps individuals like Lazy deserve to live off of their share of capital rents that have been monopolized by individuals like Crazy. Whether or not one believes Van Parijs’s Job Assets argument, Lazy is still exploiting Crazy by free-riding off of the work of Crazy, thereby violating the norm of reciprocity. Van Parijs does not try to imply that Lazy is not exploiting Crazy; rather he argues that Crazy has also exploited Lazy in an equal if not more severe way. Crazy’s exploitation of Lazy, however, is an issue that White finds to be based in the structural inequalities of society that cannot be directly solved by basic income. Regardless of whose understanding of asset distribution one believes, the debate between White and Van Parijs demonstrates that there is a clear and serious tension between reciprocity, as it has been traditionally defined, and real freedom. Real freedom, by definition, places the individual’s ability to realize their own potential above all else, including reciprocal obligations. Thus, a basic income that prioritized individuals’ real freedom could make no promise that recipients would make specific contributions in return if these contributions conflicted with the recipients’ ability to realize their real freedom. To resolve this tension, it is necessary to critically examine what definitions of reciprocity and freedom are those most necessitated by the pragmatic justice of an egalitarian policymaker. A Republican Re-Conception of Freedom In this section, I assert that real freedom is the inappropriate freedom to be juxtaposed with reciprocity, both because real freedom is nearly impossible to measure and because republican freedom deserves moral priority over real freedom in a nonideal society. Republican freedom is defined as freedom from nondomination and independence from arbitrary power. Real freedom, as defined by Van Parijs, necessitates not only the negative freedom required by republican freedom, but also the resources and capacities to carry out one’s will.[10] First, it seems nearly impossible to measure whether or not real freedom is being maximized in a society, unless one makes the assumption that income can be translated to real freedom on a one-to-one basis. How is it possible to measure the achievement of individuals being as free as possible to do what they might want to do? While there are some ways to estimate achievement of republican freedom, such as the number of workers with basic protections or changing poverty rates, it seems impossible to measure real freedom without assuming that income and real freedom share a monotonic relationship.[11] Though we cannot expect an exact measurement of whether or not a society is meeting the goal set by a theory of justice, such as equality, it does seem important to be able to at least approximate the extent to which we are meeting that goal in order to reassess and reevaluate policies. For real freedom, this process of approximation seems impossible. Second, republican freedom deserves moral priority over real freedom even under the most base egalitarian framework. Philip Petit defines republican freedom as nondomination, or the absence of unreasoned control.[12] Under a republican conception of freedom, the protection of individuals’ negative liberty (e.g., the freedom from exploitation and violation) is prioritized over the protection of individuals’ positive liberty—like the freedom to choose to spend one’s day surfing. Elizabeth Anderson critiques Van Parijs for not considering the fact that certain freedoms might deserve to be considered more worthy of defense than others. In explaining what freedoms are worth defending, Anderson says: What we owe [to each other] are not the means to generic freedom but the social conditions of the particular, concrete freedoms that are instrumental to life in relations of equality with others. We owe each other the rights, institutions, social norms [and] public goods … to exercise the capabilities necessary for functioning as equals in a democratic state.[13] In stating this, Anderson asserts that in the context of UBI, republican freedom is more morally defensible than real freedom. To an extent this seems to be true. An argument for real freedom could easily be co-opted by the wealthy asserting that any form of taxation is an affront to their real freedom, which may consist of purchasing multimillion-dollar yachts. Cases such as this would seem to erode the foundation for a social contract grounded in some idea of reciprocity, as any level of tax or contribution necessary to fund the freedom of the disadvantaged could be seen as an undeserved attack on the real freedom of the advantaged. It would seem more morally desirable to an egalitarian policymaker to first protect individuals from base levels of oppression—such as a woman who can leave an abusive relationship or an immigrant who can leave an exploitative job due to UBI—before protecting an unmeasurable freedom to do that which one might want to do. In Stuart White’s ideal world, in which all citizens already possess egalitarian social rights and in which institutions have the capacity to correct for inequalities of ability, there seems to be a reason for thoughtful debate on the relative moral priority deserved by real freedom and republican freedom. Increasing equality in individuals’ sense of real freedom constitutes a necessary later step in treating all citizens as moral equals. However, in the nonideal society of the United States, republican freedom is both the freedom most deserving of moral prioritization for anyone concerned with egalitarian values and the freedom that is most compatible with reciprocity. As demonstrated by the yacht example, real freedom will often create conflict with even the broadest definition of reciprocity. However, republican freedom will rarely create this same conflict. In fact, one might even argue that protecting people from base levels of oppression and domination empowers people to better reciprocate, rather than removing the impetus to do so. Once society moves closer to White’s ideal society, it will be appropriate to reconsider the prioritization of real freedom. Until then, there is a hierarchical order of priority in which, to meet Stuart White’s “threshold of basic fairness,” republican freedom ought to be prioritized over real freedom. An Egalitarian Re-Conception of Reciprocity Although prioritizing republican freedom over real freedom has brought us closer to reconciling freedom and reciprocity, there remains the issue of what precisely we ought to mean by reciprocity. Reciprocity, most generally, is the idea that those who enjoy a share of the benefits of social cooperation owe a corresponding contribution to that society in return, as long as they are able.[14] If we take the existing structures of welfare benefits in the US as a model of what it means to reciprocate in our society, then reciprocation largely means to have paid work, to have recently had paid work, or to actively be in search of paid work. Paid work, as valued by the current structure of policies, is elevated as the most—if not the only—legitimate form of reciprocity. This constitutes an unacceptably exclusive form of reciprocity for a theory of justice concerned with treating all individuals as moral equals. Large parts of society are excluded from a narrow definition of reciprocity that focuses on the economic contributions made through paid labor in the form of taxes. The most excluded cohort is the severely disabled, who are mostly unable to obtain paying jobs to economically contribute to society. According to Eva Kittay, to assume (as does John Rawls) that individuals are “normal” and cooperating members of society and that justice for disabled individuals can be determined at a later point is to fail to meet a standard of justice in which principles apply equally to citizens capable of fully cooperating and those unable to cooperate.[15] That standard of justice is one which treats all citizens as moral equals. A second cohort that is excluded by a narrowly-focused definition of economic reciprocity is those who perform unpaid labor in the home, primarily women. This exclusion has been noted by feminist proponents of basic income who lament the androcentric basis of the current social safety net.[16] The US welfare system is almost entirely built on such androcentric norms; a number of benefits are conditioned on whether the recipient engages in paid work outside the home, including the Earned Income Tax Credit, Unemployment Insurance, the Child Tax Credit, and to an extent, Social Security. Single mothers are particularly penalized by the system’s current structure. These women are often forced to choose between taking care of their child and not having enough to live off, or working enough to pay for child care, not seeing their child enough, and still barely having enough to live off. Unsurprisingly, the poverty rate for single-mother families in 2016 was 35.6%, or five times the rate for married-couple families.[17] A narrow definition of reciprocity that excludes the disabled, women performing unpaid labor, and others such as children and the elderly, is unacceptable under an egalitarian framework in which humans are to be treated as moral equals. To solely focus on reciprocity as an economic activity is to neglect the fact that such economic participation would be impossible without the unpaid and socially necessary caregiving work within homes. In fact, one could argue that such a narrow-minded definition of reciprocity performs the precise injustice that reciprocity seeks to avoid: exploitation, in which those performing unpaid and socially unrecognized contributions to society are exploited by those who are performing paid contributions enabled by unpaid, unrecognized care givers. Lastly, the number of people excluded from a narrow definition of reciprocity as purely economic will only grow to be more unsustainable in a future scenario in which available employment decreases and more are employed involuntarily or part time. Basic income, by definition, does not depend on a form of reciprocity that only recognizes monetary contributions. Instead, basic income recognizes a more inclusive form of reciprocity in which recipients can reciprocate in a number of ways: child care, volunteering, civic participation, accepting lower paying jobs, and more. In this way, basic income not only acknowledges that there are multiple ways to contribute to society, but also is forward-looking in recognition of the fact that access to dependable, well-paying wage employment may decrease in future scenarios of technological unemployment. Participation Income vs. Universal Basic Income: A Matter of Trust We have now clarified the moral priority of republican freedom over real freedom under the framework of a pragmatic, egalitarian policymaker, as well as the need for a more inclusive definition of reciprocity. A policy that prioritizes republican freedom over real freedom would presumably first focus on offering a basic level of income (i.e., an amount sufficient to offer citizens the ability to “say no” to oppressive environments and situations, but perhaps not enough to do all that which they might want to). A policy that rejects the current exclusive definition of reciprocity would either explicitly expand reciprocity beyond financial contributions to include specific forms of participation or be entirely value neutral in allowing for a variety of interpretations of reciprocity. At first glance, Anthony Atkinson’s participation income appears to be the version of UBI which most directly addresses the tension between freedom and reciprocity inherent in basic income. Participation income is basic, like in UBI, but is conditional on “participation,” which includes a broad range of activities ranging from employment or self-employment to education, training, care-taking, or volunteer work. The condition necessitates “neither payment nor work,” and thus greatly expands what is meant by social contribution, despite not quite being value neutral.[18] Conceptually, participation income succeeds at addressing the serious concern regarding basic income’s threat to reciprocity by making reciprocity a condition of UBI. Furthermore, Atkinson’s broad definition of participation mitigates most concerns about the groups that are arbitrarily excluded from current interpretations of reciprocity. Of course, practically enforcing the conditions of participation income would be a public administration nightmare. It would be impossible for a government to measure whether or not a citizen made their “quota” of contribution hours for a month without enacting an immense surveillance state that would deprive from citizens the very freedom that basic income is supposed to expand. Nevertheless, participation income succeeds in providing a useful framing mechanism by which UBI proponents can assuage public concerns regarding the effect of basic income on traditional reciprocity. However, there is also a normative trade-off for this improved political framing. By making income conditional on immeasurable outcomes, rather than trusting citizens’ own sense of justice to constructively contribute to society, participation income fails to endow citizens with trust. This notion is both unreasonable and undesirable. It is unreasonable to think that citizens will wholly stop constructively contributing to society if the cash amount is in fact “basic”; one would only be able to live an extremely simple life off of $12,000 per year (it should be noted that the federal poverty level income for a family of four is $24,600, or about $12,300 per adult). It is undesirable because participation income continues to rely on the norm of distrust that is a foundation for today’s conditional welfare system. If UBI is to constitute the beginnings of a new, more just social contract, that contract cannot be created without the development of trust. In his essay “How can we trust our fellow citizens?” Claus Offe defines trust as “the belief that others, through their action or inaction, will contribute to my/our well-being and refrain from inflicting damage upon me/us.”[19] Offe notes that trust is often self-stabilizing; in other words, being trusted creates within us moral obligations that make us act in a trustworthy fashion in return. There is already some degree of empirical evidence that unconditional income creates self-stabilizing trust. For example, in a World Bank report reviewing 19 global experiments in unconditional cash income, only one study showed a statistically significant increase in the purchase of temptation goods such as alcohol and tobacco. Many studies actually showed statistically significant decreases in consumption of alcohol and tobacco. This result seems to further suggest that when people are trusted, they often act according to the moral obligations that receiving that trust creates.[20] Furthermore, in the Canadian Mincome experiment, participants stated they felt greater trust in their government and in themselves, with one respondent saying that “[basic income] trusts the Canadian people and leaves a man or woman, their pride.”[21] Alaska’s Permanent Dividend program offers insights similar to those of the Canadian Mincome experiment. Due to abundant oil production and revenue, the Alaskan government has, since the 1980s, paid out an annual dividend of around $1,000 to all eligible Alaskan residents. The majority of residents in Alaska now say that that they would prefer higher taxes as opposed to ending the Alaska Permanent Dividend,[22] indicating a new trust in government and fellow citizens. Economic research has recently showed that the Alaska Permanent Dividend has had no effect on full-time employment, and has actually increased part-time work by 17%.[23] The experiments in Canada and Alaska not only show that basic income has the potential to increase trust in others and the government, but also that there is little evidence of unconditional basic income negatively affecting economic reciprocity. As early experiments in basic income are beginning to show, the statement of trust made by unconditional income may reinforce the very reciprocity that many are concerned the unconditionality in basic income will destruct. Thus, while participation income provides useful political framing that connects basic income to reciprocity and boldly expands our definition of reciprocity, it fails to constitute either a practicable policy solution or an ideal toward which we ought to strive as a society. If we truly desire to create a fairer, more inclusive social contract, it must begin with trusting our fellow citizens. UBI is precisely the policy with which to create that new standard of trust. As experiments demonstrate, that trust will likely pay off. Conclusion I have shown that, for a theory of justice striving to treat individuals as moral equals, a republican conception of freedom is more appropriate than a conception of real freedom. I have also shown that current definitions of reciprocity are inadequate in treating all individuals as moral equals. I have compared the capacity of unconditional basic income and participation income to respond to this tension, and have asserted that only unconditional basic income succeeds in rectifying an exclusionary social contract by endowing all participants with trust. As the social contract currently exists, UBI may not be the most efficient way to reduce inequality. However, only UBI provides the groundwork for a new social contract in which not only freedom and reciprocity are reconcilable, but citizens are also trusted to meaningfully contribute to society. If current experiments in basic income continue and do not significantly diverge from the findings of ones previously conducted in Africa, Alaska, and Canada, this normative conclusion will continue to be furnished with empirical evidence about the self-stabilizing nature of trust endowed by UBI. Endnotes [1] A play on Philippe Van Parijs’s book title, What’s Wrong with a Free Lunch? [2] David Calnitsky, “‘More Normal than Welfare’: The Mincome Experiment, Stigma, and Community Experience,” Canadian Sociological Association 53, no. 1 (February 2016): 54. [3] Stefan Liebig and Steffan Mau, “A Legitimate Guaranteed Minimum Income?” in Promoting Income Security as a Right: Europe and North America, ed. Guy Standing, 210-224. (London: Anthem, 2004), 210. [4] Catriona Mackenzie, The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, s.v. “Reciprocity,” Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2013. [5] Stuart White, The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and Obligations of Economic Citizenship, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 17. [6] White, The Civic Minimum, 17. [7] Philippe Van Parijs, “Why Surfers Should Be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income,”Philosophy and Public Affairs 20, no. 2 (1991): 103. [8] Van Parijs, “Why Surfers Should Be Fed,” 105. [9] White, The Civic Minimum, 156. [10] Van Parijs, “Why Surfers Should Be Fed,” 104. [11] Brian Barry, “UBI and the Work Ethic,” The Boston Review, October, 2000, http://bostonreview.net/archives/BR25.5/barry.html. [12] Philip Petit, “A Republican Right to Basic Income?” Basic Income Studies 2, no. 2 (2007): 4. [13] Elizabeth Anderson,“Forum Response: A Basic Income for All,” The Boston Review, October, 2000, http://bostonreview.net/forum/basic-income-all/elizabeth-anderson-optional-freedoms. [14] Mackenzie, The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, 1. [15] Mackenzie, The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, 7. [16] Almaz Zelleke, “Institutionalizing the Universal Caretaker Through a Basic Income?” Basic Income Studies 3, no. 3 (2008): 2. [17] Kayla Patrick, “National Snapshot: Poverty Among Women & Families, 2016,” National Women’s Law Center: Washington, D.C., 2017. [18] Anthony Atkinson, “The Case for a Participation Income,” The Political Quarterly 67, no. 1 (January 1996): 69. [19] Claus Offe, “How Can We Trust Our Fellow Citizens?” in Democracy and Trust, ed. Mark Warren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 47. [20] David Evans and Anna Popova, “Cash Transfers and Temptation Goods: A Review of Global Evidence,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 6886, The World Bank Africa Region, Office of the Chief Economist, Washington, D.C., 2014: 23. [21] David Calnitsky, “‘More Normal than Welfare’: The Mincome Experiment, Stigma, and Community Experience,” Canadian Sociological Association 53, no. 1 (February 2016): 61. [22] Michael Coren, “Alaska Shows Even People in the Most Conservative States Prefer a Basic Income to Lower Taxes,” Quartz, June 30, 2017. [23] Damon Jones and Ioana Marinescu, “The Labor Market Impacts of Universal and Permanent Cash Transfers: Evidence from the Alaska Permanent Fund,” NBER Working Paper No. 24312, The National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2018. References Anderson, Elizabeth. “Forum Response: A Basic Income for All.” The Boston Review, October, 2000, http://bostonreview.net/forum/basic-income-all/elizabeth-anderson-optional-freedoms . Atkinson, Anthony. “The Case for a Participation Income.” The Political Quarterly 67, no. 1 (January 1996): 67-70. Barry, Brian. “UBI and the Work Ethic.” The Boston Review, October, 2000, http://bostonreview.net/archives/BR25.5/barry.html . Calnitsky, David. “’More Normal than Welfare’: The Mincome Experiment, Stigma, and Community Experience.” Canadian Sociological Association 53, no. 1 (February 2016): 26-71. Coren, Michael. “Alaska Shows Even People in the Most Conservative States Prefer a Basic Income to Lower Taxes.” Quartz, June 30, 2017. Evans, David and Anna Popova. “Cash Transfers and Temptation Goods: A Review of Global Evidence.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 6886, The World Bank Africa Region, Office of the Chief Economist, Washington, D.C., 2014. Jones, Damon and Ioana Marinescu. “The Labor Market Impacts of Universal and Permanent Cash Transfers: Evidence from the Alaska Permanent Fund.” NBER Working Paper No. 24312, The National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2018. Liebig, Stefan and Steffan Mau. “A Legitimate Guaranteed Minimum Income?” In Promoting Income Security as a Right: Europe and North America, edited by Guy Standing, 210-224. London: Anthem, 2004. Mackenzie, Catriona. The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, s.v. “Reciprocity.” Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2013. Offe, Claus. “How Can We Trust Our Fellow Citizens?” In Democracy and Trust, edited by Mark Warren, 42-87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Patrick, Kayla. “National Snapshot: Poverty Among Women & Families, 2016.” National Women’s Law Center: Washington, D.C., 2017. Petit, Philip. “A Republican Right to Basic Income?” Basic Income Studies 2, no. 2 (2007): 1-8. Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Van Parijs, Philippe. “Why Surfers Should Be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 20, no. 2 (1991): 101-131. White, Stuart. The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and Obligations of Economic Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Zelleke, Almaz. “Institutionalizing the Universal Caretaker Through a Basic Income?” Basic Income Studies 3, no. 3 (2008): 1-9.