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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Moral Manipulation A Kantian Take on Advertising and Campaigning Sylvia Gunn The Australian National University Author Ebba Brunnstrom Grace Engelman Matthew Flathers Editors Fall 2018 Kantian moral philosophy applied to appeals to emotion in advertising and campaigning; analysis, comparison and critique. The ethics of manipulation are important for anyone whose goals rely on changing people’s behavior, but who do not wish to violate moral laws. Kant’s emphasis on avoiding the violation of others’ humanity makes his philosophy particularly applicable to this topic. Although Kantian philosophy tells us that lying is immoral, the status of appealing to animal instincts is unclear. This essay will define a common maxim to describe these appeals in advertising and campaigning, and analyze this maxim under each formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative. Previous work has considered the ethics of advertising, Kantian and otherwise, without making the comparison to campaigning. This article will shine further light on the importance of understanding the value of emotion in Kantian philosophy, rather than rejecting appeals to emotion entirely. Kantian philosophy requires that we define a maxim to describe the action, and its context, and its intention, in order to analyze an agent’s choice and its moral implications. This essay takes ‘appeals to emotion’ and ‘appeals to animal nature’ to refer to the same behavior, namely the use of persuasive techniques to create an instinctual or emotional response in our target, rather than a purely rational response. In the Kantian sense, rationality refers to one’s deliberate actions, which can take into account emotions, higher order desires, and moral considerations. The examples of advertising and campaigning will aid in this discussion. To avoid consideration of a ‘cool-off period’ during which the emotional response might wear off or be rationally processed, we will assume that the target can act immediately in response to the appeal. The advertiser wishes to convince people to buy their product or service, and uses appeals to serve this purpose. For example, an insurance salesperson might appeal to fear, recounting tales of disasters to compel potential customers to buy the most comprehensive plans. Alternatively, a company may use associative advertising, which involves portraying someone who uses the product or service as happy, successful, or otherwise benefitted, without explicitly claiming that the product creates this result. Conversely, the campaigner may make an appeal to empathy, displaying images of starving children in order to compel potential supporters to donate. The maxim, in both cases, is “Where it serves my purpose, I will make an appeal to my target’s animal instincts, to encourage them to do what I want”. In order to determine whether my maxim is permissible in Kant, we shall put it through all three formulations of the categorical imperative in the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals. The categorical imperative is intended to be a universal concept of morality, acceptable to all moral beings. Kant claims that there is “only a single categorical imperative”[1] which is the formula of universal law. The other formulations, that of humanity and that of the kingdom of ends, are alternative ways of spelling out the same moral ideals. Each provides guidance, particularly when maxims are vague and manipulable, or when some formulation does not produce clear results. The first half of this essay analyses the maxim under Kant’s three formulations, concluding that appeals are only ethical in the Kantian sense when there is a certain degree of certainty that the target knows that those appeals are occurring. The first formulation, the formula for universal law, tells us that maxims are only acceptable if it would be possible and acceptable for them to become universal law. According to this formula, emotional appeals are not wholly unacceptable, but they may in some cases interfere with my other ends. The second formulation, the formula for humanity, tells us that one must never violate another’s autonomy or rational capacity. Thus, appeals are only acceptable if my target is aware of their occurrence. Finally, the third formulation, the kingdom of ends, requires me to act on the expectation that others are generally rational, although they can be temporarily overcome by emotion. Thus I should make appeals only when the context makes it clear that appeals are occurring – such as in advertising slots. Moreover, in situations where I can gauge whether the person is engaging rationally, I need not exercise the same caution before the appeal is made. This implies that direct interactions, such as campaign conversations, may allow for stronger appeals to emotion than broadcast communications such as adverts. This does not draw out a clear distinction between the use of appeals in advertising and their use in campaigning, but it does give both campaigners and door-to-door salespeople some extra scope. The second section of this essay discusses two issues with this conclusion. Firstly, it fails to distinguish between appeals to harmless emotions and emotions that reflect harmful societal norms. Secondly, it does not take into account the larger good consequences of an action, particularly relating to campaigning. These objections constitute a rejection of Kantian philosophy, which does not allow for any sacrifice of human rationality for the greater good, in favor of a pluralist philosophy. Rather than a weakness, this second objection could describe a strength of Kantian philosophy: it provides a framework for a theory of slow and sure social change, which does not rely on human’s animal instincts, but only their rationality. Existing Literature Philips considers the question of emotionally manipulative advertising in relation to multiple ethical frameworks and concludes that the Kantian perspective would rule it out. His consideration of the formula of universal law finds that you should not engage in manipulative advertising that would work on you, as the universalization of this maxim would see you manipulated, which conflicts with your other ends. Interpreting Kant’s formula for humanity to mean that one must not override the will by appealing to emotion, he initially finds that his maxim does not treat humanity as an end in itself. He then provides a reshaped maxim that characterizes appeals as an argument that the target engages with rationally. To Phillips, it is unclear which of these maxims is correct under the Kantian account.[2] My account, in contrast, will apply Kantian moral psychology to appeals, incorporating the target’s engagement with the appeal. Partially because of this, and partially because my maxim only includes appeals that will work to some extent if the target is aware of its occurrence, my conclusion is different from Phillips' version. In contrast, Phillips’ maxim includes subliminal messaging, which works exclusively when the target does not know that they are occurring. Kant addresses some related topics that aid the discussion of this question, without directly addressing the issue at hand. These examples provide context to the question, and allow for assessment of our interpretation of Kant. If an interpretation changes the conclusions that we have already accepted, that interpretation is not hugely accurate to the original ideas. Beyond that, Herman’s perspective on interpretations is a good guide: it is enough to argue that one can [interpret it that way]. The rest should be decided by the fruitfulness of the concept.’[3] Rather than try to find the opinion that Kant would have held, particularly considering that his views on many issues were inconsistent with his philosophy,[4] we should develop an interpretation based on the parts of Kant’s philosophy that we accept. Kant’s discussion of the false promise finds it immoral under each formulation of the categorical imperative. The maxim ‘[I will,] when hard pressed, make a promise with the intention not to keep it’ is not universalizable, as it would not be possible if everybody applied it by law, and everyone thus became aware that promises held no value.[5] Moreover, it violates the target’s humanity on two counts. Firstly, they are unable to give or withhold consent to the lie, and secondly, they would not agree to the promise if they knew it were a lie. Deception is comparable but not equivalent to appeals to animal instinct, which can involve deception of the will. If levels of manipulation can be placed on a scale, depending on the extent that informed choice is taken from the target, the lying promise is a well-defined immoral upper bound. Kant’s discussion of our duties towards animals and children are also relevant to this discussion; they give insights into our treatment of irrational actions. Rather than interacting with less rational beings, my maxim involves appealing to the less rational instincts within rational beings. In doing this, we should acknowledge that people have different capacities for rationality. In relation to animals, one’s duty is to avoid unnecessary mistreatment, but this is primarily to protect our own moral senses. Some interpretations of Kant have expanded on these duties based on animals’ partial rationality.[6] It is also acceptable to treat children and the mentally impaired differently from fully rational adults, but with more restrictions again, noting their partial or changing levels of rationality. In valuing rationality, we should promote and enhance the rationally of such beings,[7] without holding them as responsible as we do fully rational adults. The Formula for Universal Law According to Kantian analysis, there is no perfect duty against the maxim of appeal to emotion. A perfect duty exists against a maxim where it would not be possible to will it if it were universal law.[8] Although the concept of a maxim being universal law is contested, it essentially means that any rational agent who found themself in the same context with the same intention would perform the same action. Unlike in the example of the lying promise explained above, appeals to animal nature can still be effective even when people are aware that they might be occurring, and even when people know for sure that they are happening. In our insurance advertising example, awareness of an emotional argument does not dissipate our fear that the same disasters could befall us. Knowledge that an appeal is occurring makes us more critical of the appeal in the same way that knowledge of a news publication being biased will make us more critical of the way it presents the facts. Thus, the maxim may be less likely to make the target do what I want if the maxim is universalized, but it will still encourage them. For example, a rational response to an associative advertisement for perfume would be to acknowledge that the positive emotions evoked might make me enjoy the product more, allowing this to influence my decision to buy it, along with the actual smell of the perfume, its price and my perception of the company. Universalization of my maxim would weaken its effect, but allow it the same meaning and similar result. Whether there is an imperfect duty against this maxim is indeterminate. The imperfect duty exists where the establishment of my maxim as universal law conflicts with my other end(s). A world where people, as universal law, appeal to animal instinct rather than rationality whenever it suits them could inhibit the realization of one’s other ends in a range of ways. The most obvious of these is if others used the appeals to change my behavior and in the process abandon my original ends. Phillips argues that this would only rule out making appeals that I know would work on me, which would not make for universal moral duty between different people.[9] However, this interpretation simplifies universalization, which would be a rather complex process. As Rawls argues, the formula for universal law creates an “adjusted social world” wherein agents practice such appeals as though it is inherent to their nature.[10] The existence of such a social world could involve a range of things, depending on how the idea of universal law is understood. At one extreme, we would not be able to tell when we ourselves are making these appeals, and they thus would be almost unrecognizable when others were making them to us. This would make us more susceptible to them and thus more likely to be swayed against our will. The opposite extreme, that we are aware of these appeals but still unable to stop ourselves from making them, would have different implications. The appeals would still work in some cases, but they would presumably fail whenever they were not adequately appealing to the will, which would be aware of the appeals, and decide rationally to accept them on the basis of emotional desires. However, the best interpretation seems to be somewhere in between these: although we would recognize these appeals sometimes, we would not understand them well enough to always recognize them. If this maxim were to be taken as a universal law like gravity or Pythagoras’ Theorem, it would gradually be increasingly understood through science – in particular, psychology and behavioral science. The exact effect of universalizing this maxim is, due to this complexity, unclear. The Formula for Humanity Kant’s formula of humanity as an end in itself gives us significantly clearer guidance for the maxim. Kant requires not that we never use other rational beings as means, as that would be near impossible, but that we never use them merely as means.[11] Any act where someone uses another as a means to an end consensually is acceptable. For example, if Alice buys a coffee from a barista at a mutually acceptable rate, they have both acted morally, despite Alice using the barista as her means to acquire a coffee, and the barista using Alice as their means to acquire money. However, we do not owe the same duty to irrational beings. It is the presence of a will that makes someone human, and it is this humanity to which one owes consent. Two different characterizations of humans’ decision-making capacities, which we shall respectively call ‘irrational’ and ‘rational’, point us to similar conclusions, but with slightly different implications. Kant describes our decision-making as generally rational, except in the cases where our emotions become “affects” and “passions”, and we lose some control of our actions, in which case we are irrational[12] . Under the irrational characterization, the will can be overridden by our animal nature. This occurs when people are under stress, or otherwise incapacitated, such that their emotions can override their rational sense. One common example of this phenomenon would be the ‘fight or flight’ response. In this case it is clear that my maxim conflicts with the formula of humanity. In the contexts described, I am using the target’s humanity as a means, as without it I could not get what I want. That is to say, I could not get money or political support from a child, robot or animal. However, rather than treating their humanity as an end, I am bypassing their humanity to appeal to their animal instincts, and gaining from their humanity in the process. Even if I ask for consent to make my appeal, or they have full knowledge that the appeal is occurring, if my target is behaving irrationally, the appeal can change their behavior by overriding the will and thus violating their humanity. It could be argued, as a rebuttal, that irrational persons are not deserving of this protection, as we have no moral duty to one without rational capacity. However, this would not constitute the protection of rational nature, which deserves regard even when it is incomplete or temporarily incapacitated.[13] This is why we have different duties surrounding addictive substances, and selling alcohol to the intoxicated. Like children, people behaving irrationally have latent rationality, and we should try to engage with that, rather than taking advantage of their irrationality. Under the second characterization, people are consistently rational, but animal instincts form inclinations that influence our behavior. Kant’s distinction in the original German between the willkür and wille helps aid this discussion. The willkür (will) ultimately makes the decisions, but animal inclinations and the wille (moral faculties) make up the arguments for the action. This concept is regularly characterized as ‘autonomy of the will’, which ‘is not the special achievement of the most independent, but a property of any reasoning being’.[14] Thus, the ‘appeal’ to animal instincts in my maxim does not make animal instincts decide for us, but strengthens the argument on behalf of those instincts. In this case, the target is able to consider their emotional response through their will, but surely only if they are aware that the argument is affecting their emotions. The target can only rationally engage with the appeal if they are aware of it, and this is a key factor to whether my maxim violates the target’s humanity. This has similarities with Phillips’ second interpretation of his maxim, wherein people treat emotional arguments as logical ones, assessing them from that perspective using the will. The maxim can be split into two scenarios to accommodate this change: “Where it serves my purpose, I will use persuasion to appeal to another person’s animal instincts without their knowledge, to encourage them to do what I want”. “Where it serves my purpose, I will use persuasion to appeal to another person’s animal instincts with their knowledge, to encourage them to do what I want”. In the first case, I consciously appeal to their animal instincts without their knowledge, using their humanity merely as a means to an end – they are furthering my political or economic goal in a way that a child or animal generally could not. However, in the second, the appeal to animal instincts is only as immoral as indulging one’s own animal instincts: it is an instance of a will allowing the animal instincts inherent in the human form to influence its behavior. The question that remains, on what counts as knowledge, deserves focused attention in the discussion of how this maxim would be treated by Kant’s formulation of the kingdom of ends. The Kingdom of Ends As we move into a discussion of the kingdom of ends, we have essential questions left to answer. The first formulation does not clarify our duty, but analysis of the second has ruled out appeals that my target is not consciously aware of. We still need a contextual definition of knowledge, and an account of how I may know my target possesses it. Clearly, appeals where they are completely unexpected are not allowed, as they involve a violation of trust and no opportunity for the will to make a decision. Thus, using subtle messaging to convince your friend to come to 350.org meetings is out of the question. Conversely, appeals where active consent has been gained are clearly acceptable. A door-to-door insurance salesperson who gains active consent to tell her tales of tragedy, noting that they may incite fear, should feel no qualms in doing so. However, the target’s knowledge does not necessarily require active consent. Advertising and campaigning occur in marked zones, like in television advert slots and conversations at stalls. People are aware of the norms in these areas, and not only are they able to physically tune out, they are also able to think and react critically. It would be overstepping the Kantian mark to say that we should only ever appeal to our target’s autonomous will, and never engage directly with their emotions. Abiding by such a rule would severely decrease one’s persuasive ability.[15] In a sense, this would constitute failure to respect one’s own subjective ends – the ends one desires to bring about, but which do not necessarily hold moral worth. Moreover, it is not our duty to make sure others act rationally – only to ensure that we are not violating their autonomy. While the easiest answer for the moral stickler is to consistently ask for the consent, or avoid emotional appeals altogether, those who do not wish to dampen the results of their business or campaign with unnecessarily bad persuasion should push further. Kant’s final formulation, the kingdom of ends, by his own account combines the preceding two formulations for a ‘systematic union of several rational beings through universal laws’.[16] In this moral kingdom, only humanity has ultimate worth, but rational beings’ subjective ends have substitutable value, which we have a duty to respect. Acting as though one were in the kingdom of ends involves interacting with others as though they are autonomous rational agents, giving them some degree of responsibility as well as some charity.[17] The weighing up of responsibility and charity is essential to determining the moral value and practical application of my maxim. Treating others as ends in the kingdom means not only allowing them consent, but also holding them responsible for their actions because they are a rational agent. In doing this we should be charitable, by taking into account moral education and relevant personal history, and by realizing that ‘even the best of us can slip’.[18] Korsgaard discusses judgments of rationality after someone else has acted, but the same judgments can be extended in considering the moral acceptability of an action that changes others’ actions. We have a moral obligation to judge people primarily using the second characterization of decision-making, which allows my maxim wherever the target has knowledge of the appeal. However, when we have good reason to believe their rationality is incapacitated, we should judge them under the first characterization. Within certain contexts, namely advertising and campaigning spaces, the consent to appeals to animal instincts are implicit – people are aware that these appeals happen, and they have freedom to opt out of these interactions. Moreover, in knowing that the appeals occur, they are able to engage critically with these appeals, using their will. However, a charitable view means realizing that sometimes my target will be irrational. Even though my intention is not to manipulate, a badly developed view of their rational capacities could mean that my appeal inadvertently treats them merely as a means. This is especially likely if my appeal is done with a parochial lack of awareness of the target’s culture and moral education.[19] We thus have a responsibility to gain knowledge of which maxims are likely to violate another’s human dignity, even if they would not do so if committed against us. For advertisers and campaigners, the target’s knowledge as a moral necessity means ruling out some forms of advertising, and making a concerted effort to consider the specific target audience, and avoid practices that would likely violate their autonomy. Although there will still be some risk of the target having a purely emotional response, dedicated and genuine engagement with this issue is in itself treating them as an end. Such consideration will also result in better engagement with the will, and has practical implications in terms of duty. Although these distinctions do not clearly separate campaigning and advertising, they do leave the tactics usually used by campaigners with more latitude. Advertising that purposely engages only with animal instincts is immoral. This means we have a perfect duty against advertising that tries to stimulate ‘impulse buys’, or similarly, campaigning that manipulates the weak-willed to support a campaign. Moreover, relating to the question of the target’s knowledge, it is worthwhile to consider the difference between direct appeals and broadcast appeals. Direct appeals involve interpersonal interaction where the agent witnesses the reaction of their target, while broadcast appeals do not. Although both advertising and campaigning use direct and broadcast methods, campaigning often makes more use of the first, and advertising more of the second. In interpersonal engagements, the persuader will notice many characteristics of the target. They can gauge the target’s apparent state of mind, and whether their engagement seems rational or emotional. On account of this knowledge, the persuader has heightened power to manipulate the target. However, the moral response is, rather than exploiting this power, creating the perfect balance between making a convincing case, and ensuring that their target is behaving responsibly. For broadcast methods, appeals to animal instinct must necessarily be more explicit, and practiced with caution appropriate to the situation. Evaluating the Kantian Account The Kantian treatment of this issue reveals some controversial issues with Kantian ethics in the way it avoids any consequentialist considerations. Such considerations involve weighing up the consequences of an action in analyzing its moral worth. One problem with the Kantian account lies in its lack of differentiation between different types of emotional responses. I would have liked this analysis to develop a duty against advertisements for beauty products that manipulate an irrational connection between image and self-worth. The appeal can still work even if the target knows that it is occurring, because the association gains strength from societal norms. Even with a pre-warning saying ‘this ad associates beauty with worthiness’ the advertisement will only remind the target of their experience of this association. In this way, it plays on emotions caused by social anxiety, and amplifies harmful norms in a way that appeals to hunger or empathy do not. Moreover, this appeal’s effectiveness does not depend on whether society actually values people according to aesthetics; it is about the rational, but potentially uninformed view of the target. Furthermore, the association between beauty and worthiness is not a lie, but an opinion, albeit a harmful one. There is some room to argue that such appeals normalize irrational associations, in effect decreasing the rational capacity of individuals over time. However, this relies on a subjective characterization of irrationality, verging on paternalism, and does not hold rational agents responsible for engaging with their own emotions. It would be more accurate to say that such appeals, although respecting rationality, have harmful consequences – a concept that Kantian philosophy does not incorporate. A full account of ethical appeals in advertising needs to rule out any appeals that lazily amplify existing but harmful social norms – but this consequentialist goal does not fit within Kantian ethics. In other areas, the Kantian approach rules out some appeals that a consequentialist might accept. Although this could be seen as an issue with the Kantian approach, it is also one of its strengths. Any Kantian would accept the argument that certain persuasive methods have no moral worth, no matter what their larger aim is. However, pluralist philosophies, in rejecting the primacy of rationality to place a substitutable value on the target’s autonomy, may find that the campaigner should be allowed more scope to manipulate their target emotionally. Given that their campaign has a sufficiently good end, and sufficiently high chances of success, and given that Kantian reasoning would be significantly less effective, a pluralist philosophy incorporating Kantian reasoning and and consequentialism would allow some manipulation in a campaigning context that would not be allowed in a purely selfish advertising context. The Kantian emphasis on universalization and non-interference is at odds with the goals of the campaigner, who is trying to right some wrong often caused by the immoral behavior of others. In fact, Sher’s discussion provides a framework in which the amount the product benefits the consumer may be a sufficient defense for using manipulative advertising.[20] A pluralistic view of morality would likely permit more manipulative appeals in advertising or campaigning, if the campaign or product were sufficiently good. Even accepting pluralism, the above account may not hold for campaigns, because appeals to animal instincts can have wider negative consequences. Firstly, the increased success, or likelihood of success, of the campaign may not be large enough to outweigh violation of people’s autonomy. Secondly, the recruitment of emotionally driven supporters could lead to a less principled campaign base, or a less enduring campaign. Making a moral decision incorporating such factors would require a thorough assessment of risk and benefit. The Kantian approach precludes these empirical considerations, in turn encouraging a slow, reliably moral approach to social change. This firm adherence to avoiding harm acts as a kind of safeguard to prevent blindly emotionally driven, badly considered campaigns, with supporters that are ultimately being exploited.[21] Even if my campaign is one that aims to protect others’ autonomy, for example, by freeing people from torture, my perfect Kantian duty is to not violate others’ autonomy, while the duty to protect rationality from others’ interference is an imperfect duty, and can only be achieved through moral means. Kantian ethics provides a clear account of our moral duties in the sphere of appeals to animal instincts. In some cases, where I have no reason to think that the target might engage rationally with emotional appeals, they are indefensible. In cases where the context allows for rational engagement, my duty is to consider the target as both responsible and manipulable, and genuinely consider whether I need to adapt my tactics to ensure their humanity is not violated. My intention should always be to strengthen the emotional argument, giving them ample opportunity to engage rationally with the appeal, rather than making emotions control my target. The Kantian account of duty is largely acceptable, but weakened by its failure to differentiate between benign and harmful animal instincts. Although the pluralist might find some issues with the Kantian account as it relates to campaigning, its clear conclusion provides us with a useful, albeit incomplete guide to social change without adverse consequences. Endnotes [1] Kant, Immanuel. (1997). Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals (GMM) In Gregor, Mary J. Practical Philosophy. Cambridge University Press. (4:421) [2] Phillips, Michael J. (1997) Ethics and Manipulation in Advertising: Answering a Flawed Indictment. Greenwood Publishing Group. [3] Herman, Barbara. (1997). ‘A Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends’. In Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman, Christine M. Korsgaard & John Rawls (eds.). Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls. Cambridge University Press. pp. 187-213 [4] Louden, Robert B. (2000). Kant's Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings. Oxford University Press. [5] Kant, Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, (4:402) [6] Korsgaard, Christine M. (2004). ‘Fellow creatures: Kantian ethics and our duties to animals’. Tanner Lectures on Human Values 24: 77-110. [7] Wood, Allen W. (1998). Kant on Duties Regarding Nonrational Nature. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 72 (1):189–210. [8] Wood, Kant on Duties Regarding Nonrational Nature, 189–210 [9] Phillips, (1997), Ethics and Manipulation in Advertising. [10] Rawls, John. (2000). ‘The Four-Step CI Procedure’ In Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. Harvard University Press. p. 169. [11] Kant, Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, (4:429) [12] Formosa, Paul. (2013). ‘Kant’s Conception of Personal Autonomy’. Journal of Social Philosophy 44, no. 3. pp. 193-212.p. 198. [13] Wood, (1998) ‘Kant on Duties Regarding Nonrational Nature’. [14] O'Neill, Onora. (1989) Constructions of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 76. [15] Baron, Marcia. (2002). ‘Acting from Duty’ In Wood. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Yale University Press. pp. 92-110 [16] Kant, Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, (4:433) [17] Korsgaard, Christine M. (1992). ‘Creating the Kingdom of Ends: Reciprocity and Responsibility in Personal Relations’. Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 6 Ethics. pp. 305-332 [18] Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends: Reciprocity and Responsibility in Personal Relations, 324 [19] Herman, (1997) ‘A Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends’. [20] Sher, Shlomo. (2011). ‘A Framework for Assessing Immorally Manipulative Marketing Tactics’, Journal of Business Ethics 102, pp.97–118 [21] One contemporary example of such a campaign is the KONY 2012 movement, which initially avoided scrutiny by motivating people’s support by appealing to their emotions. References Baron, Marcia. (2002). ‘Acting from Duty’ In Wood. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Yale University Press. pp. 92-110 Formosa, Paul. (2013). ‘Kant’s Conception of Personal Autonomy’. Journal of Social Philosophy 44, no. 3. pp. 193-212. Herman, Barbara. (1997). ‘A Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends’ In Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman, Christine M. Korsgaard & John Rawls (eds.), Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls. Cambridge University Press. pp. 187-213 Kant, Immanuel. (1997). Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals (GMM). In Gregor, Mary J., Practical Philosophy. Cambridge University Press. Korsgaard, Christine M. (1992). ‘Creating the Kingdom of Ends: Reciprocity and Responsibility in Personal Relations’. Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 6 Ethics. pp. 305-332 Korsgaard, Christine M. (2004). ‘Fellow creatures: Kantian ethics and our duties to animals’. Tanner Lectures on Human Values 24: 77-110. Louden, Robert B. (2000). Kant's Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings. Oxford University Press. O'Neill, Onora. (1989). Constructions of Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Phillips, Michael J. (1997) Ethics and Manipulation in Advertising: Answering a Flawed Indictment, Greenwood Publishing Group. Rawls, John. (2000). ‘The Four-Step CI Procedure’ In Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. Harvard University Press. Sher, Shlomo. (2011). ‘A Framework for Assessing Immorally Manipulative Marketing Tactics’. Journal of Business Ethics 102. pp. 97–118 Wood, Allen W. (1998). Kant on Duties Regarding Nonrational Nature. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 72 (1):189–210.

Editorial board Foreword Volume II Issue I Introducing the third issue of JPPE In recent years, the world’s attention has increasingly turned to environmental issues. Once a subject that interested only a few committed activists and academics, climate change and other related issues have now gained the interest and concern of a large number of people all around the world. In recent years, we have witnessed the signing of a landmark protocol – the Paris Agreement – that seeks to tackle some of the causes of climate change. Moreover, world leaders of the caliber of Pope Francis, French President Emmanuel Macron and former US Vice President Al Gore have attempted to draw attention to the harm humans cause to the environment. Yet, concurrently we have seen the rise of those who deny the existence or minimize the importance of a concerning rise in world temperature, most notably President Donald Trump. Aside from the political debate on climate change, academics have started engaging with the issue more and more often. Universities all over the world now have departments that focus on environmental studies. Pioneering scholars like Wallace Broecker, Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Susan Solomon and Veerabhadran Ramanathan have devoted their entire career to the study of various aspects of this important issue. Notably, the work of Yale economist William Nordhaus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2018 for “integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis.” This edition of the Brown Journal of Philosophy, Politics and Economics is, in part, devoted to climate change both as a political and academic issue. To explore this guiding theme, we feature a submission by United States Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, from Brown’s home state of Rhode Island, who has led the charge to raise awareness about climate change in the American political arena. In addition, one of our submissions examines and compares how the environment fits into the political imagination in Germany and the United States. It is our hope that these two pieces will help our readers better understand this crucial global issue. Yet, this edition of this Journal also features pieces on a number of other topics. Amongst others, our submissions explore subjects that range from realism in Chinese cinema to the value of shareholder activism, from gerrymandering in the United States to the ethics of using drones. Indeed, it is our sincere hope that by reading this semester’s edition our readers will be exposed to a number of distinct yet interrelated topics and that the value and insights of these papers will be enhanced when looking at them together rather than individually.

*Feature* JPPE INTERVIEW, WALTER SCHEIDEL: Coronavirus and Why Inequality is Only Ever Reduced by Disaster Walter Scheidel (pictured) is a historian at Stanford University as well as the author of eighteen books, including “The Great Leveler”, which presents a history of economic inequality from “the stone age to the twenty-first century”. In the book, which won a number of awards, Scheidel argues that inequality has historically only ever been reduced by “four horsemen”: plague, civil war, mass military mobilization, and government collapse. You can buy “The Great Leveler” here . May 2020 JPPE: The Great Leveler presents this very ambitious thesis that inequality only ever gets reduced by mass military mobilization, plague, civil war, or government collapse. Your previous work dealt with demography, political economy, ancient history, and the classics. Why was a book studying the history of inequality something that you wanted to work on? Scheidel : Well, I should say I’m not much of a classicist. I’ve always considered myself a historian, and even though I specialize in ancient and premodern history, I’ve always been interested in world history and comparative history, more generally. And I guess the short answer is that I wrote this book because nobody had ever tried to write it before, and it would not have been possible even ten or fifteen years earlier because there simply weren’t enough case studies of the pre-modern period to piece together a broad survey of the evolution of income and wealth inequality across hundreds and even thousands of years. And then my more immediate inspiration was Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”. I had been familiar with his work already even before this book came out, and when the book actually did come out and was a huge success, I figured that if I didn't sit down now and write the book, then someone else is going to do it. And so, I got going, and I had the thesis already in the back of my mind—Piketty had the same thesis that I did but just for the twentieth century. And what I was trying to do was see if it applied to world history, more generally, and somewhat to my surprise, it turned out this was the case. And because I didn’t run into any obvious counterexamples, I was able to write up a whole book in the course of about two years. JPPE: Do you believe that high levels of inequality might be partially responsible for producing the shocks that ultimately reduce it? Scheidel : What I focused on was the impact of violent shocks on existing levels of inequality. And I think, in that respect, we are on pretty solid ground in that there are long term patterns regardless of what stage of development you are. Whether you are dealing with an agrarian society or an industrial society, the underlying principle and the underlying dynamics assert themselves again and again—it’s this idea that certain types of violent shocks would drive down inequality. Now, it is tempting to think that there could be some sort of homeostatic system where, if inequality goes up and exceeds a certain level, it triggers violent events that then reduce inequality. And then inequality rises again, and you have a never-ending series of cycles. That’s intellectually quite appealing. I don’t think that theory is fully borne out by the evidence that I have been able to put together. I think the evidence is much stronger in terms of a consistent effect of violent shocks on inequality, but not in quite the same way the other way around. JPPE: Are there certain instances in which inequality is responsible for causing the leveling force that ultimately brought it down? One example that seems to speak to this is the case of Germany prior to the Second World War. The high inequality that took place during that time and the decline in German purchasing power seems to have contributed to the socio-political conditions that would ultimately lead to the Second World War and the leveling that took place then. Scheidel : I’m not familiar with that particular case study. I think that it is perfectly plausible and possible to tease out this conclusion by statistical analysis. Yet, if you look at world history more generally, you become very wary of cherry-picking. It’s easy to identify individual cases where you can observe such a connection. There are very powerful counterexamples that should give us pause, however. So, for instance, if you just looked at France in the late eighteenth century, you could say, ‘of course the French Revolution was driven in part by extremely high levels of inequality’, and that makes perfect sense. Yet then you have to bear in mind that France was surrounded by other countries—Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Germany—that were just as unequal as France and had no revolutions. You also have to bear in mind that the revolution in Russia occurred in a country that was not only not very industrialized, contrary to what Marx expected; it was also not very unequal by the standards of the time. The most unequal countries were the only industrialized ones—Britain, for example. The same is true of China when Mao took over. So, once you put all of these individual cases in context, it’s very difficult to say that a particular level of inequality triggers some kind of societal breakdown, ferments revolution, or leads to other kinds of leveling. JPPE: In your book, you argued that leveling would not have happened without the presence of a violent shock. You conclude, however, by discussing the possibility that we have moved to a point in history where the “four horsemen” are no longer necessary to reduce inequality. What do you think now? Scheidel : I think the evidence supports the belief that violent shocks are necessary to bring about leveling. They may not be sufficient, and they also act as catalysts. So, if you go back a hundred years or over one hundred years, there were already trends on the way in favor of increasing education, unionization of the workforce, the spread of democracy, and certain kinds of progressive taxation. All these things already existed but they got an enormous boost by World War One, the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War Two. And the counterfactual is to think about if they would have gotten an equally big boost had these shocks not occurred, and I’m very pessimistic about that. It’s not a black and white picture; it’s not to say nothing ever changes in the absence of such shocks. It’s just to say the changes would be far less dramatic, and I think that this is quite easy to substantiate empirically. Now, as for your other question, when I concluded the book, I had to look forward to the future and I came to the conclusion that the traditional four horsemen were dormant right now. We no longer fight mass military mobilization wars; there are no credible revolutionary movements (at least in high-income countries); states are much more stable in most of the world than they used to be; and pandemics, such as the one that we are encountering right now, are nothing like the pandemics of the past that leveled by reducing the workforce and driving up wages. We’ll see the exact opposite in this case with respect to wages. What I neglected to include is that climate change might become a fifth leveling force. I’m sympathetic to that view. It needn’t be a fifth leveling force, but it could revive some of the others. It could lead to conflict, to state breakdown, to more pandemics, and to all kinds of things along those lines. So that’s something I should have perhaps considered more systematically. Otherwise I never really said that you can’t do anything at all in the absence of such violent shocks. I just wanted to remind people how difficult it is, and I think that’s important to bear in mind when we develop policy programs. We can’t just say ‘let’s go back to the way things were in the fifties’, for a number of reasons. We have to be aware when we develop policy initiatives what the structural impediments are and what very special conditions had to be in place in the past to bring about significant leveling. That’s not a call to defeatism. But I think it’s the historian’s job to put those things in perspective, and in this case, I think our job is to remind people over and over again that it’s really hard work to reduce inequality. JPPE: Are there instances of policy successfully reducing inequality that we can try and mimic in the future? Scheidel : That’s a very good question. I think there are two cases to consider. One is historically Scandinavian countries—not just Denmark, but also Sweden and Norway—, which used to be highly unequal two hundred years ago with extreme inequality in land ownership and so on. And that already started to get a little better in the course of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Those countries were not very heavily touched by the world wars. They were in some sense, however, and we see major contractions of inequality during those periods, but that’s clearly only part of the story. So, there is something going on in those countries, in particular, that put them on a trajectory towards lower inequality, and that was amplified and accelerated by the shocks in the first half of the twentieth century. Now, to what extent you can extrapolate from this is a very difficult question because those countries were—especially then— relatively small, not very populous, and they were extremely homogenous in a great many ways—linguistically, ethnically, socially, culturally, and so on. They were the exact opposite in many ways from the United States, which has historically always been very diverse, and there are studies that show that high levels of diversity can obstruct ambitious redistributive programs because there is simply less widespread popular support for those kinds of policies. So, we are talking about apples and oranges. It’s not quite clear to what extent you can transfer some examples and apply them to different kinds of societies. And I think this is where the case of Latin America comes in. Latin America is very interesting. It’s a major outlier because it never experienced a major reduction in inequality; inequality has always been very high because of its colonial past—slavery, plantation economies, for example. It also never experienced any major leveling shocks. It wasn’t really touched by the World Wars. There were hardly any revolutions outside of Cuba. And so, you had status quo for a really long time and not very many changes. And in terms of diversity, some of those societies are more similar to the United States. What you saw there in the first decade of this century was a quite significant trend towards lower inequality in most Latin American countries—such as Brazil—by peaceful means, and that’s very encouraging. It really depended on the concatenation of circumstances that may be hard to replicate—gains from increased investment in education, political changes, a commodities boom in China that shored up certain sectors of the economy. All kinds of things were coming together in just the right way to reduce historically high levels of inequality. As I was writing this book, I was wondering whether this peaceful trend might be sustainable, and there were already clouds on the horizon. There was a major economic downturn a number of years ago. And the trends seemed to have stopped in many countries. With what’s happening right now and will be happening as a result of the current pandemic, we can be pretty sure that this trend is not going to continue or be sustainable in the long term. We will have to wait for a revival of this trend. JPPE: It strikes me that when you ask scholars what the causes of inequality have been, people who study finance will blame financialization or the democratization of credit. Others will blame trade or technology. And others will blame policy. What do you believe the causes of inequality have been? Scheidel: It’s really like the story of the elephant and the blindfolded men who touch different parts of the elephant, and they try to describe the animal and come up with very different descriptions. In the existing scholarship on the reasons for the increase in inequality from the 1980s onwards, different studies identify different components— as you say, automation, globalization, deregulation, financialization, all kinds of “ations”, the weakening of unions, and the fact that enormous numbers of workers came online with the opening up of China. All of these effects really refashioned the post-war order in ways that revived economic growth, which had been flagging in the 70s, but also led to a higher concentration of income and wealth. And all these many factors have been interacting ever since, and this makes it so much more difficult to address the problem because there are so many different factors that are operational and active now and have been for a generation. So, if you just address globalization, or robots, or tax reform, you would only really touch one part of the elephant, so to speak. And it would be very difficult to implement comprehensive reforms without at the same time transforming the entire economic system that we live in and depend on. It may be possible in theory, but it doesn’t strike me as a very plausible policy goal in the short run. JPPE: You also argue that major economic transitions (e.g. the Industrial Revolution), often increase in inequality in the “short-run”. Do you think that we’re in the middle of something like this as we embrace digital technology? Scheidel: Yes, I’ve seen this argument a number of times and it makes perfect sense to me. I mean, at the beginning of agriculture, if you have a plow and someone else doesn’t have a plow, then you are better off than the other person. Now if you work in Silicon Valley, then you are well off, and if you don’t, then you are in trouble. So, these transitions—regardless of what they were like and what the specifics were like— certainly have disequalizing potential in the sense that they might make society overall richer, but they reward certain groups disproportionately. And frankly, the current pandemic is an excellent example. There are people who can work from home; their jobs are more secure; they have higher incomes on average. And there are people who do more traditional kinds of work, for lack of a better word, and they are much more heavily exposed to the economic downturn. You have students who can participate in online instruction because they have broadband access and laptops and those who can’t. All these inequalities already existed, but they are now actually amplified and made more painful by the existing crisis. And I think ultimately this is a symptom of the effects of a broader transition towards a more digital economy. JPPE: When we consider past plagues, do you think that there is anything fundamentally different about the Coronavirus Pandemic? Scheidel: Well, the most obvious difference is that even in a worst-case scenario, the coronavirus is going to kill a far smaller share of the population than pandemics of the past and even than the Spanish Flu did a hundred years ago. And mortality is, of course, concentrated among people in advanced ages and spares most of the active workforce and people who are about to enter the workforce. So, there won’t be any kind of demographic shock or Malthusian reset. Real wages are not going to go up because there won’t be a shortage of wages. In fact, mass unemployment is going to depress wages, if anything. So, we can mercifully forget about this. Nobody wants that kind of pandemic to ever happen again. And frankly, even if it did happen again in some future year, AI and automation would actually absorb some of those effects. We wouldn’t necessarily have to pay people more; we might just automate more, which aging societies are already doing if you look at Japan. So that’s a fundamental difference. In the short run, I think this pandemic is going to increase inequality for all the reasons we touched on and because unemployment is unevenly distributed. This is maybe not that different from earlier pandemics because, in the immediate aftermath of a pandemic, things tend to be quite chaotic. So, the real question is if the current pandemic has the potential to lead to some kind of equalizing change down the line—not tomorrow, but maybe a couple of years from now. That’s a very good question, and I think it depends ultimately on how severe this crisis is going to be because historically, the worse the crisis was, the harder the shocks and the greater the potential for equalizing change was. So if quantitative easing works and scientists come up with a decent vaccine within a year or so, there is a pretty good chance we will return to some modified version of the status quo, at least with the respect to inequality—i.e. that the existing inequalities will survive and maybe even be reinforced, which is what happened in 2008 after the Great Recession. The alternative is that things really get out of control, that creating new money turns out to be insufficient, that there will be a global depression that lasts for a long time, and that the virus turns out to be intractable—it mutates, and all kinds of horrible things happen. And, as a result of this, we may end up with levels of dislocation, misery, and despair that would drive our policymaking in a certain direction, which would be more like what we had in the 1930s, when conditions were so terrible and the social safety net so rudimentary or nonexistent that all kinds of measures had to be taken that would have been considered too radical just a few years before. So, it is quite possible that we find ourselves on the cusp of this sort of change. The ideas are already out there. There was no Bernie Sanders twenty years ago, and much of this will depend on how this is actually going to play out—just how big and disruptive this shock is going to be. JPPE: Are there specific policies you would like to see implemented? In your NYT op-ed, you called for a new era of progressive policy. Very practically, what are some of your positions? Scheidel : Well, I think outcomes are going to vary quite a lot by country. In the US, we live in a kind of low hanging fruit society, in the sense that inequality is higher than it needs to be and is higher than in other western capitalist countries for a number of reasons specific to the US—the political system, the fiscal structure, the weakness of unions, and so on. So, there are certain things the US could do that would have an effect longer-term on inequality. This includes campaign finance reform; there’s a clear connection between plutocratic influence and certain inequality outcomes. This includes providing better access to health care, improving access to education, protecting and reenabling collective bargaining and unionization. Whether it is tweaking the tax code to make it a bit more progressive and a bit more like what we see in Western Europe. None of these approaches would be radical. It’s not a new deal kind of scenario. It’s not a Green New Deal kind of scenario but it would certainly contribute to a reduction in inequality. It wouldn’t take us back to where we were after World War II, but that’s not to be expected anyways. It would certainly improve the situation. JPPE: Are there areas of the study of inequality that you believe are under covered by researchers and that you would like to see people work on? Scheidel: Well, that’s actually a very good question. Going back to what we talked about initially, it is still an open question to whether inequality can destabilize society in a systematic way. There have been studies on developing countries (low-income countries)—especially in post-colonial settings in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—that show high levels of inequality are associated with an increased risk of civil war, for instance, or some kind of societal breakdown. It seems that crossing a certain GDP threshold protects more affluent societies from these kinds of dislocations, but that doesn’t mean that inequality can’t lead to less extreme forms of social unrest and problems. And that’s something that has not been as well researched as maybe it should be. And if it could be shown that there is such an effect, that should galvanize policymakers and make them think twice about propping up the existing structures that enable the very high degree of inequality that we see right now.

Georgian-South Ossetian Conflict Is secession a viable solution? Tathyana Mello Amaral Brown University Author Miles Campbell Ryan Saadeh Ethan Shire Editors Fall 2018 This paper assesses the viability of secession as a possible solution for the Georgian-South Ossetian conflict. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 resulted in the creation of weak and unstable states that sought to establish their identity and place in the world. It triggered a wave of pervasive ethno-nationalism in Eastern Europe, led to a number of lasting military conflicts, and brought about the question of self-determination of minor ethnic groups like the Armenians, Chechens, and Kosovians. The Yugoslav Wars marked an important turning point in the history of the post-Soviet region because it resulted in the secession of Kosovo from Serbia in 2008 and created legal precedent for separatist groups. While the right to secede offers an answer to the resolution of ethnic conflicts, some scholars and theorists find it troubling. [1] The dispute between Georgia and ethnic Ossetians of the Transcaucasian region, now known as South Ossetia, highlights how the right to secede is still a point of controversy in international law. Historical Background: Nature of the Conflict Though the enmity between ethnic Georgians and ethnic Ossetians dates back to the 13th century when Ossetians were driven South from the Northern Caucasus Mountains to Georgian territory, it greatly intensified during the Soviet period.[2] During this period, South Ossetia was an autonomous administrative unit within the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). As historian George B. Hewitt discusses, language policy was an important point of contention between the ethnic groups since Georgia pursued discriminatory policies against its ethnic minorities.[3] The Soviet Union’s early language policy granted a lot of freedom to ethnic groups as part of a “nativization” effort that sought to liberate and win over oppressed peoples. By the late 1930s, however, fears of emerging nationalism within the federation led to a change in policy to one of “Russification”. Georgia, however, was exempted from such policies until 1953 since its leader Joseph Stalin was a Georgian native. In 1936 Georgian was declared a state language and Georgianization became the policy of the day. In 1938 the state imposed the Georgian alphabet on the Ossetian language and prohibited minority language schooling, causing great tensions between the government and the ethnic minorities.[4] When the Russification policies reached the Georgian SSR, the Georgian Nationalist Movement proposed the 1988 Draft Language Law which aimed to oblige ethnic minorities to master the Georgian language.[5] These Georgian language policies, along with other discriminatory practices, thus created deep resentment among South Ossetians towards Georgians. It is important to note that the small state of Georgia is home to other separatist ethnic minorities, including Abkhazians in the West and Adjarians in the South. Although the Abkhazian-Georgian conflict has paralleled the Georgian-South Ossetian conflict since 1991 when violent conflict first erupted during the Georgian independence movement, this paper will exclusively focus on the South Ossetian conflict. The violent experience of the 1990s was a culmination of hundreds of years of conflict. Political scientist Stefan Wolff writes that “South Ossetians wanted to preserve and remain within the Soviet Union. The Ossetians believed that their survival as ethno-cultural communities distinct from the Georgian majority would be in acute danger in an independent Georgian state.”[6] The relationship between Russia and South Ossetia was reinforced by the fact that ethnic Ossetians had their own autonomous republic within Russia, namely North Ossetia-Alana. With the support of Russia, the South Ossetian separatists managed to put up a strong resistance against the Georgians.[7] In June 1992, shortly after the election of former Soviet Foreign Minister Edvard Shevardnadze as Georgian president, a ceasefire was signed in Sochi under Russian supervision.[8] The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) sent a mission composed of troops from Georgia, Russia, South Ossetia, and North Ossetia to facilitate negotiations toward a political agreement.[9] The OSCE mission successfully maintained peace until 2003 when President Mikhail Saakashvili rose to power through the popular Rose Revolution, and made the restoration of Georgian territorial integrity a major goal of the new government.[10] The administration’s policy led to a violent flare up in 2004 when the government cracked down on a symbol of interethnic cooperation: the Ergneti Market.[11] Though the black market was a major point of contraband trade, the introduction of a harsh taxation system in the market, as a part of Saakashvili’s anti-contraband operation, significantly harmed Georgian relations with Ossetians. The market was one of the only sites of direct interaction between the two ethnic groups. Relations were made even worse by the fact that one of the targeted groups in this operation was comprised of local officials and businessmen who profited from Russian and Ossetian trade connections.[12] Violence erupted during and after the shutting down of the market. Even more detrimental to interethnic relations, in 2006 it became public that the smuggling operation still existed, but that it was now run but the ruling Georgian elite.[13] The closing of the Ergneti Market was labeled a “missed window of opportunity” for conflict resolution by academic Doris Vogl. She argued that “during the rigorously implemented state-building process of the early Saakashvili government, the informal Georgian-Ossetian relations immediately lost momentum.”[14] The events of 2004 polarized and radicalized both Georgians and Ossetians and intensified the clashes between the ethnic groups in the prelude of the war of 2008. Though Georgia offered South Ossetia federal status in 2004, the leadership rejected this possible resolution.[15] Georgian policies in the early 2000s allowed Russia to offer more substantial and public support to the separatist Ossetians. Russia distributed passports to ethnic Ossetians and intensified political, economic and military ties with the separatist region. Arguably even more important, Russia observed growing relations between Georgia and Western powers like the United States. Georgia received 1.3 billion dollars of American financial aid and oversaw the construction of BP operated Baku–Supsa oil pipeline which runs through Azerbaijan and Georgia.[16] As Georgia began to pursue NATO membership, Russia was threatened by the possibility of having the Western coalition present in its own backyard. Svante E. Cornell and S. Frederick Starr comment that before the 2008 war, “Georgia was moving rapidly toward Euro-Atlantic integration, and was doing so at a time when an increasingly assertive Russian foreign policy was being shaped by sphere of influence-thinking.”[17] With fears of further NATO expansion and growing US presence in the Caucasus, Russian policy was driven by global security concerns, dynamics of European and global geopolitical power. Also significant is the fact that dominant Western powers such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and France supported and legitimized the secession of Kosovo from Serbia in February 2008. This allowed President Putin to cite the “Kosovo precedent” when signing a presidential decree on April 16th that established political, economic and social relations with both South Ossetia and Abkhazia.[18] Rising tensions between the two sovereign nations resulted in a five day war in 2008. Controversy surrounds who actually initiated the war on August 7th 2008,[19] as reports by the European Union and the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center agree that while Georgia made the first move, Russia significantly increased the number of troops and armaments in Abkhazia, and later in South Ossetia in the prelude to the war.[20] After five days of violent conflict, Georgia and Russia agreed to sign an armistice and engaged in peace talks sponsored by the European Union, the United Nations and OSCE. Russian military troops remained in South Ossetia in order to prevent Georgia from recovering the territory.[21] On August 25th, Russia recognized the sovereignty of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Western powers and institutions such as NATO, the European Union, and the United Nations strongly condemned this move as they believed it undermined the sovereignty of the Georgian state. In response, Georgia ceased all diplomatic relations with Russia. This made the peace process slow and ineffective as the co-sponsored EU-UN-OSCE talks in Geneva were the only mechanism for multilateral talks.[22] Since 2008, Russia has increased governmental, economic and social ties with the secessionist regions. The administrative border between South Ossetia and Georgia has also been pushed southwards and since the summer of 2015, South Ossetian-held territory includes a section of the Baku-Supsa pipeline. As Andrews Higgins puts it, the secessionist region is part of Russia’s “Frozen Zone”, which includes areas under Russian control that officially belong to neighboring states, such as Georgia’s Abkhazia, Moldova’s Transnistria, and Ukraine’s Crimea. Higgins also adds that these regions are “useful for things like preventing a NATO foothold or destabilizing the host country at opportune moments.”[23] Issues with the Secession of South Ossetia In his essay “The Cracked Foundations of the Right to Secede”, law professor and political scientist Donald Horowitz outlines a set of assumptions that are made about secessionist states which justify the right to secede. This right assumes that secession will produce a “homogenous successor” that will “respect minority rights,” and where “republican democracy is viable.”[24] It also assumes that secession will “result in a diminution of conflict.”[25] The case of South Ossetia can be analyzed as a natural secessionist experiment of history because the region has been a de-facto independent state for many years. The question then arises: have these assumptions materialized in the case of South Ossetia? In short, they have not. As Horowitz points out, secession “merely proliferates the arenas in which the problem of intergroup political accommodation must be faced.”[26] In the case of Georgia, ample evidence shows that ethnic conflict continues to haunt both Georgia and the de-facto independent state of South Ossetia. There were many reports concerning violations of human rights from both sides during the 2008 war. For example, a Human Rights Watch report showed that there was intentional destruction of Georgian villages by Russian-South Ossetian troops.[27] The majority of ethnic Georgians who resided in South Ossetia fled during the August 2008 conflict, but an estimated 20,000 still live in the disputed territory.[28] The Ministry for Internally Displaced Persons from the Occupied Territories, Accommodation and Refugees of Georgia reported that there were 34,274 internally displaced persons (IDPs) from South Ossetia as of October 2014.[29] A UN survey shows that 56.9% of IDPs from South Ossetia are unable, but would like to return to their place of origin in cities like Tskhinvali, Znauri, Java, and Shida Kartli. This demonstrates how interethnic accommodations have failed to unfold with the creation of a separate state. Additionally, with no access to the territory except in preparations for the Geneva Discussions, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and Georgian authorities have been unable to implement conventions regarding rights of refugees, stateless persons, and IDPs.[30] Russian troops regularly detain Georgian civilians for illegal crossings of the “administrative boundary line” (around 320 villagers were detained in 2015 alone).[31] In fact, the Freedom House Organization states that ethnic Georgians are barred from returning to the region unless they “renounce their Georgian citizenship and accept Russian passports.”[32] Therefore, the freedom of movement of Georgian citizens is constantly threatened in South Ossetia. In July 2017, the South Ossetian authorities also shared plans “to abolish the Georgian language schooling in the region’s ethnic Georgian populated areas beginning from the 2017/2018 academic year.”[33] The language policy proposed by the South Ossetian government recalls the discriminatory policies Ossetians were subjected to at the hand of Georgians during the Soviet period. Regarding the meaningful political participation of ethnic minorities, the Freedom House states that ethnic Georgians have refused or been barred from participating in the electoral process.[34] Freedoms of expression and of organization are also threatened.[35] As Horowitz argues, the treatment of this new ethnic minority is highly discriminatory. Therefore, in the case of South Ossetia, secession does not create a homogenous successor nor does it guarantee the respect of minority rights. In the case of South Ossetia, secession does not seem feasible unless the authorities make a commitment to guarantee the rights of its ethnic minorities. But, as Horowitz warns, “guarantees of minority protection in secessionist regions are likely to be illusory.”[36] While South Ossetia is considered a de-facto independent state, the viability of an independent republican democracy in South Ossetia is questionable when considering its high dependence on Russia. Historians Andreas Gerrits and Max Bader argue that “the economic and intergovernmental linkages with Russia … directly undermine the autonomy of the region.”[37] With a dual executive system, South Ossetia maintains political institutions based on those of Russia. The 2011 presidential election demonstrates the grip of Russia on the region’s politics and shows how the South Ossetian political process is highly susceptible to Russian influence. When a candidate who criticized strong ties with Russia won the popular vote, the Supreme Court annulled the results. Elections were repeated in 2012 with four new candidates, all pro-Russia.[38] As a result of the bilateral agreements signed in 2009, 2010, and 2015 that established economic, governmental and military links between Russia and South Ossetia, South Ossetia developed a high level of dependence on Russia.[39] Russia is South Ossetia’s only relevant trade partner, the ruble is the official currency, and South Ossetia’s imports and investments are exclusively from Russia.[40] More significantly, 91% of South Ossetia’s government budget is made up from Russian financial aid.[41] These limitations arguably derive from a lack of international recognition and from the consequences of the 2008 war. However, as Russian economist Mikhail Delyagin states, “South Ossetia does not exist as an independent economic entity due to its small size and extremely low-level management,” as well as due to its reliance on Russia’s long-term military presence to protect its territory.[42] As a result of this significant dependence on Russian aid, South Ossetia does not have a sustainable future as an independent nation. Another assumption that can be contested is that secession will lead to a diminution of violent conflict. This inevitable reality is highly flawed because devolution merely turns domestic conflicts into international ones. While a political divorce has not officially occurred, South Ossetia has been de-facto independent for at least 10 years. Though ethnic enmities linger, the recent history of the conflict shows how ethnic conflicts can mutate into primarily geopolitical ones when separatist movements thrive. University of Edinburgh Professor Emeritus John Erickson writes that the implications of Georgia’s Western push “are consequently dire for those [including high level Russian officials] who insist doggedly that the post-Soviet ‘space’ in its entirety, encompassing the former states of the Soviet Union, is and must remain a closed Russian geopolitical preserve.”[43] For Russia, the possibility of NATO encroachment on the South Caucasus precludes any significant decision concerning the separatist regions. As historian David J. Smith argues, German Chancellor Angela Merkle sealed the region’s fate when she said that the resolution of internal conflict was a prerequisite for NATO membership.[44] From that moment onwards, South Ossetia became a pawn in Moscow’s foreign policy strategy, described by Svante Cornell as a “revival of a classically modern, Realpolitik culture of security.”[45] The South Ossetian “secessionist” experience, along with that of other separatist states in Eastern Europe, illustrates how ethnic conflicts can be used to further geopolitical interests of powers like the Russian Federation in the post-Soviet space. The internationalization of the Georgian-South Ossetian conflict shows how secession does not necessarily lead to a diminution of violence. Therefore, the failure of South Ossetia to protect the minority rights of ethnic Georgians, its continued dependence on Russia, and likely mutation of ethnic conflicts into geopolitical ones suggests that secession is not a viable solution for this conflict. Implications There are no clear answers to Georgian-South Ossetian conflict. Though the director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies Cory Welt argues that “the reintegration of South Ossetia…poses no challenges to conventional understandings of democracy and human rights,” as time passes, the collective consciousness of both South Ossetians and Georgians acquires increasingly negative perceptions of the opposing ethnic group, making future interethnic cooperation difficult to achieve.[46] Additionally, the social linkage between South Ossetia and Russia continues to grow through the Russian domination of the media, the use of Russian as the lingua franca, and the promotion of educational exchange programs.[47] A symbolic link also comes from the large Ossetian diaspora in North Ossetia, an autonomous region within Russia. Thus, South Ossetia’s reintegration into Georgia becomes more unlikely by the day. With most citizens having dual citizenship to South Ossetia and Russia, further integration of South Ossetia into Russia can be anticipated. While Russia has not stated that it will pursue the annexation of the territory, its aggressive support of South Ossetia has managed to destabilize the region, prevent Georgia from joining Western organizations such as NATO. Moreover, through its involvement in Georgia, Russia has reasserted its influence in the Caucasus region. If secession occurred and South Ossetia was recognized as independent state by the international community, Russia would be encouraged to engage in even more aggressive foreign policy in the post-Soviet sphere of influence, possibly resulting in a domino effect of secessionist movements and a higher occurrence of violent conflicts. Georgia is a multiethnic country with two separatist movements (the experience of Abkhazia is very similar to that of South Ossetia), so the secession of one region would likely lead to that of the other. The disputed territories make up about one quarter of the Georgian territory, which means secession would severely destabilize the already weak country. The fear of a domino effect, not only in Georgia, but in other disputed territories that are currently under Russian control (i.e.: Crimea and Donbass, Ukraine; Transnitria, Moldova), is already a reality shaping international geopolitics. If the right to secede is accepted in relation to the South Ossetian dispute, the legal precedent set by Kosovo’s independence will be reaffirmed. With Russia’s “Frozen Zone” in mind, the emergence and legitimization of separatist movements of small and unsustainable regions can lead to the expansion of Russian sphere of influence in the post-Soviet territory and the further polarization of the present international political dynamics. Conclusion Peace talks and conflict resolution efforts have proven ineffective for almost 25 years, since both sides are committed to achieving predetermined preferential outcomes.[48] Both sides have been haunted by the impatience of political leaders such as President Saakashvili and by a lack of trust from both sides due to the lack of interethnic communication. But, most of all, the sides have been haunted by a pro-separatist Russian mediator. Cory Welt writes that Russia’s “function as a ‘hegemonic balancer’ interposed between conflicting parties resulted in the establishment of a level playing field for negotiations, allowing Abkhazia and South Ossetia to consider themselves equals to Georgia, not subordinates.”[49] While Georgia attempted to reach an acceptable political solution, the support from a major power endowed separatist group with a decisive sense of confidence and security that hindered the resolution of the conflict. Meanwhile, Western states and institutions failed to devise a coherent response to Russian policies that threaten stability and Europe’s own interests in the region. The de-facto independence of South Ossetia encountered a continued threat to rights of ethnic minorities, a strong dependence on Russia, and the quick escalation of violence in 2008 due to the internationalization of the conflict. The region’s experience thus supports the argument that secession is not a viable solution for ethnic conflict in the Caucasus. Endnotes [1] Donald L. Horowitz, “The Cracked Foundations of the Right to Secede,” Journal of Democracy, 11. [2] George Hewitt, Discordant Neighbours: A Reassessment of the Georgian-Abkhazian and Georgian-South Ossetian Conflicts, (Leiden: 2003), 22 -23. [3] Hewitt, 41. [4] Sonya Kleshik, "I Am My Language: Language Policy and Attitudes Toward Language in Georgia" (Master's thesis, Central European University, 2010), 11 - 12 [5] Hewitt, 57 – 58. [6] Stefan Wolff, "Georgia: Abkhazia and South Ossetia," Encyclopedia Princetoniensis. [7] Ibid. [8] Ibid. [9] Marietta Konig, "The Georgian-South Ossetian Conflict ," OSCE Yearbook 2004 (Hamburg: 2004), 242. [10] Ibid, 238. [11] Doris Vogl, "Missed Windows of Opportunity in the Georgian-South Ossetian Conflict – The Political Agenda of the Post-Revolutionary Saakashvili Government (2004-2006)," Failed Prevention: The Case of Georgia (Vienna: 2010), 68 – 71. [12] Vogl, 70. [13] Ibid. [14] Ibid, 72. [15] Wolff. [16] Cory Welt, “Balancing the Balancer: Russia, the U.S., and Conflict Resolution in Georgia,” Global Dialogue 7, no. 3-4 (Summer/Autumn 2005), 24. [17] Svante E. Cornell and S. Frederick Starr, eds., The Guns of August 2008: Russia's War in Georgia (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2015), 4. [18] Ibid, 7 – 8. [19] "The Blame Game," The Economist, October 03, 2009. [20] Ibid; Cornell, Popjanevski and Nilsson, “Russia’s War in Georgia”, 23 – 24. [21] Luke Hardinng and Jenny Percival, “Russian troops to stay in Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” The Guardian, September 09 2008. [22] Wolff, "Georgia”. [23] Andrew Higgins, “In Russia’s ‘Frozen Zone,’ a Creeping Border With Georgia,” The New York Times, October 23 2016. [24] Horowitz, “Cracked Foundations,” 8. [25] Ibid. [26] Ibid, 9. [27] Up In Flames: Humanitarian Law Violations and Civilian Victims in the Conflict over South Ossetia (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2009). [28] "World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples: Ossetians," Minority Rights Group International. [29] UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Intentions Survey On Durable Solutions: Voices Of Internally Displaced Persons In Georgia, June 2015. [30] UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Submission by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees For the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights' Compilation Report Universal Periodic Review: Georgia, January 2015. [31] Vicenews, The Russians Are Coming: Georgia’s Creeping Occupation, VICE News, November 04, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv00Weif0Sw . [32] “Freedom In The World: South Ossetia," Freedom House, 2016. [33] Georgian Schools to be Abolished in S. Ossetia," Civil.Ge, July 28, 2017. [34] “Freedom In The World: South Ossetia”. [35] Ibid. [36] Horowitz, 6. [37] Andre W. M. Gerrits and Max Bader, "Russian Patronage Over Abkhazia and South Ossetia: Implications for Conflict Resolution," East European Politics 32, no. 3 (July 19, 2016). [38] “Freedom In The World: South Ossetia”. [39] Gerrits and Bader, “Russian Patronage”. [40] Ibid. [41] Paul Rimple, “Economics Not Impacting Russian Support for Georgian Separatists,” Eurasianet.org, February 13, 2015. [42] Mikhail Delyagin, "A Testing Ground for Modernization and a Showcase of Success," Russia in Global Affairs, March 8, 2008. [43] John Erickson, “Russia Will not be Trifled With: Geopolitical Facts and Fantasies,” in Geopolitics: Geography and Strategy, ed. Colin S. Gray and Geoffrey Sloan (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1999), p. 260. [44] David J. Smith, "The Saakashvili Administration’s Reaction to Russian Policies Before the 2008 War," in The Guns of August 2008: Russia's War in Georgia (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2015), 126. [45] Cornell and Starr, The Guns of August 2008, 196. [46] Cory Welt, “Balancing the Balancer: Russia, the U.S., and Conflict Resolution in Georgia,” Global Dialogue 7, no. 3-4 (2005), 12. [47] Gerrits and Bader, “Russian Patronage”. [48] Oksana Antonenko, "Failures of the Conflict Transformation and Root Causes of the August War," Failed Prevention: The Case of Georgia (Vienna: National Defence Academy and Bureau for Security Policy at the Austrian Ministry of Defence, 2010), 83. [49] Welt, “Balancing the Balancer,” 2. References Antonenko, Oksana. "Failures of the Conflict Transformation and Root Causes of the August War." In Failed Prevention: The Case of Georgia, 79-93. Vienna: National Defense Academy and Bureau for Security Policy at the Austrian Ministry of Defense, 2010. "The Blame Game." The Economist. October 03, 2009. http://www.economist.com/node/14560958 . Cornell, Svante E., and S. Frederick Starr, eds. The Guns of August 2008: Russia's War in Georgia. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2015. Cornell, Svante E., Johanna Popjanevski, and Niklas Nilsson. Russia’s War in Georgia: Causes and Implications for Georgia and the World. Singapore: Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program, August 2008. Delyagin, Mikhail. "A Testing Ground for Modernization and a Showcase of Success." Russia in Global Affairs. March 8, 2008. Accessed August 19, 2017. http://eng.globalaffairs.ru/number/n_12538. Erickson, John. “Russia Will not be Trifled With: Geopolitical Facts and Fantasies.” Geopolitics: Geography and Strategy. Colin S. Gray and Geoffrey Sloan ed. (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1999). "Freedom In The World: South Ossetia." Freedom House. 2016. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2015/south-ossetia. "Georgian Schools to be Abolished in S. Ossetia." Civil.Ge. July 28, 2017. http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=30309. Gerrits, Andre W. M. , and Max Bader. "Russian Patronage Over Abkhazia and South Ossetia: Implications for Conflict Resolution." East European Politics 32, no. 3 (July 19, 2016): 297-313. Goble, Paul A. "Russian 'Passportization'." The New York Times. September 09, 2008. Accessed August 17, 2017. https://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/russian-passportization/?_r=0. Hardinng, Luke and Jenny Percival. “Russian troops to stay in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.” The Guardian. September 09 2008. Hewitt, George. Discordant Neighbours: A Reassessment of the Georgian-Abkhazian and Georgian-South Ossetian Conflicts. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Higgins, Andrew. “In Russia’s ‘Frozen Zone,’ a Creeping Border With Georgia.” The New York Times. October 23 2016. Jentzsch, Greg. "What are the main causes of conflict in South Ossetia and how can they best be addressed to promote lasting peace." The BSIS Journal of International Studies (2009). Kleshik, Sonya . "I Am My Language: Language Policy and Attitudes Toward Language in Georgia." Master's thesis, Central European University, 2010. Konig, Marietta . "The Georgian-South Ossetian Conflict ." OSCE Yearbook 2004 (Hamburg: 2004). Rimple, Paul. “Economics Not Impacting Russian Support for Georgian Separatists.” Eurasianet.org. February 13, 2015. UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Intentions Survey On Durable Solutions: Voices Of Internally Displaced Persons In Georgia. June 2015. http://www.refworld.org/docid/55e575924.html UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Submission by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees For the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights' Compilation Report Universal Periodic Review: Georgia. January 2015. Up In Flames: Humanitarian Law Violations and Civilian Victims in the Conflict over South Ossetia. New York: Human Rights Watch, 2009. Vicenews. The Russians Are Coming: Georgia’s Creeping Occupation. VICE News. November 04, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv00Weif0Sw. Vogl, Doris. "Missed Windows of Opportunity in the Georgian-South Ossetian Conflict – The Political Agenda of the Post-Revolutionary Saakashvili Government (2004-2006) ." In Failed Prevention: The Case of Georgia, 59 - 77. Vienna: National Defence Academy and Bureau for Security Policy at the Austrian Ministry of Defence, 2010. Welt, Cory. “Balancing the Balancer: Russia, the U.S., and Conflict Resolution in Georgia.” Global Dialogue 7, no. 3-4 (Summer/Autumn 2005), 22-36. Wolff, Stefan. "Georgia: Abkhazia and South Ossetia." Encyclopedia Princetoniensis. "World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples: Ossetians." Minority Rights Group International. http://minorityrights.org/minorities/ossetians/.

*Feature* John R. Allen John R. Allen is a retired United States Marine Corps four-star general, and former commander of the NATO International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces - Afghanistan (USFOR-A). He was appointed by President Barack Obama as the special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). He is currently the President of the Brookings Institution, and his most recent research addresses the effects of artificial intelligence in a variety of sectors. Allen’s piece in JPPE’s second issue explores the effects of artificial intelligence on the future of education. Fall 2018 Artificial intelligence (AI) and emerging technologies (ET) are poised to transform modern society in profound ways. As with electricity in the last century, AI is an enabling technology that will animate everyday products and communications, endowing everything from cars to cameras with the ability to interact with the world around them, and with each other. These developments are just the beginning, and as AI/ET matures, it will have sweeping impacts on our work, security, politics, and very lives. These technologies are already impacting the world around us, as Darrell West and I wrote in our April 2018 piece “How artificial intelligence is transforming the world ,” and I highly recommend that anyone just discovering the topic of AI policy read it thoroughly. There, Darrell and I describe several important implications related to AI/ET, but chief among them is that these technology developments are on the cusp of ushering in a true revolution in human affairs at an increasingly fast pace. As AI continues to influence and shape existing industries and allows new ones to take root, its macro-level impact, particularly in the realm of economics, will become more and more apparent. Control over the research and development of AI will become increasingly vital, and the winners of this upcoming AI-defined era in human history will be the countries and companies that can create the most powerful algorithms, assemble the most talent, collect the most data, and marshal the most computing power. This is the next great technology race of our generation and the stakes are high, particularly for the United States. If American society is to embrace the full range of the social and political changes that these technologies will introduce, then it is the education and training we provide our youth and workers that will fuel the engines of future AI, and therefore geopolitical success. I've studied and written extensively about the effects of AI/ET on the evolving character of war toward a concept I’ve called hyperwar – or, a new era of warfare in which, through AI, the speed of decision making is faster than anything that has come before. At a superficial level, this topic often devolves into a discussion of “killer robots,” or at the very least the impending use of AI in lethal autonomous weaponry. While those discussions are relevant and inextricably linked, they represent a narrow understanding of the greater issues at hand. The concern over AI’s potential or theoretical military applications must not distract us from how far-reaching the impact of AI will be in nearly all other policy domains. Health care, education, agriculture, energy, finance, and yes, national security, will all be reshaped in some way by AI – with education being the pivot point around which the future of the United States revolves. This is not solely a matter of social redress – which is by itself is extremely important – but in fact is a larger national security issue. The way we use education to prepare our next-generation of leaders will directly determine whether the US retains its leadership in critical fields of relevance in the emerging digital environment. Without a sufficiently educated population and workforce, the US likely will slip behind other states for whom AI/ET is not only means for improved social organization, but for strategic superiority, and potentially for digital and physical conquest. A future in which the United States is second in the race for AI technology would create a situation of national technological and digital/cyber inferiority, which could in turn result in national strategic subservience – something simply unimaginable in a world of growing strategic competition with systems of government very different from ours. Many Americans grew up with the understanding that the US’ capacity to fight and win a nuclear war was defined by its superiority in the Strategic Triad, the three legs of our strategic deterrence: our missile squadrons, our bomber fleet, and our ballistic missile submarines. Behind that dizzying array of hardware was the undisputed power of US intellectual and technical capabilities, and behind that was a near unlimited supply of talented engineers, each trained by a system of education undisputed in its excellence. That system was built from the ground up to produce crucial STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) protégés in the quantities needed to ensure American strategic superiority, which contributed directly to the US and its allies prevailing in the Cold War. For the health of our American way of life, our competitive advantage, and the strategic security of our nation, the basis for tomorrow’s system of education must reflect a deliberately tuned and calibrated system that proactively emphasizes AI/ET, big data analytics, and super-computing. Unfortunately, in both relative and absolute terms, the US is falling behind in the race for superiority in these key technologies and AI. Where the US strategic advantage of the 20th Century was secured by American nuclear superiority, US superiority in the 21st Century will likely be preserved, safeguarded, and sustained through a system of education that envisages the changes necessary and is sufficient to embrace and apply relevant technologies. It will also be underwritten by educators who grasp the profound shifts in the pedagogical skills essential to the educational needs of the 21st Century. The need to adapt is great – and for this system to be fully embraced it must come in the form of a comprehensive and national US strategy for education in the digital age, to include the resources necessary to bring education into the digital classroom, and to educate and train entire generations of educators to be relevant in the 21st Century and beyond. The United States must at all costs preserve its position of primacy in AI, big data, and super-computing through leaders who understand these issues on a fundamental level and have the political will to develop and resource a comprehensive plan for reimagining our national education efforts. In thinking about the essence of a US national education strategy adapted to the digital age, several important questions arise pertaining to the way we think about education and develop the next generation of leaders: What will be the implications for how we educate, train, and develop teachers? A discussion on the impact of AI on education will point dramatically to those who facilitate the process in our schools. The very term “teacher” may be insufficient to adequately capture the role of this key individual in the educational experience. Teaching and learning requirements may be substantially re-ordered and the dynamic of learning versus teaching in an AI-based system of education will be very different. And while teachers today are in many ways the unsung and underappreciated heroes of the American workforce, the teachers of the digital age may define the future of America. This will raise important questions about requirements for teaching degrees and related certificates in this new environment, and the necessary adaptation of the science of pedagogy to these changes. Ultimately, the key question will be “are the teachers of today ready to develop the leaders we will need tomorrow?” A difficult question, to be sure, and the answer today is no. The national education strategy must focus on their development as it focuses on the students as well. What will the AI-based classroom look like? With AI, every aspect of the traditional learning environment is up for reimagining. Will classrooms continue to be physical spaces? Or instead, will it be a virtual "space" using networked augmented or virtual reality technologies? The answer is yes to both, and the student in tomorrow’s AI based educational experience will be exposed to an immersive, digital education heretofore unimaginable. The distributed, networked, virtual reality classroom is both enormously exciting, and at the same time frightening for the enormity of its potential. There are major challenges to measuring success in an AI-based educational process. For instance, if our students can become more deeply involved in the pathways of their own learning through AI, measurement will occur moment to moment, as well as the success of remediation. In the best-case scenario, we will know at the end of each student’s day if s/he is meeting academic requirements and quickly correct deficiencies as necessary to stay on track. In any case, there are profound moral questions to consider with a system such as this, and policymakers must understand the underlying dynamics of the technologies at play if they are to fully support society. What will this kind of system of education do to reduce inequalities in our society? One of the most profound aspects of education in the AI environment is that these technologies could unleash the potential and productivity of a huge sector of American and global society hitherto constrained by their educational experience and resulting lack of opportunity. Local governments, schools, and especially the private sector will need to routinely intersect to create synergy and symbiosis to enhance our educational processes. Through the AI-powered digital space, “opportunity for all” may become a reality for those who previously had little means of achieving their own piece of the American Dream. The profoundly limiting feature of these opportunities lies in internet and 4G and 5G penetration within the United States, and the sometimes appallingly scarce educational resources committed in some areas in America. There are large segments of the US where our education systems, and our youth, have limited-to-no access to the internet and to Wi-Fi. If we hope to achieve our digital potential, and to continue to maintain our lead in AI and other emerging technologies, a national program to bring Wi-Fi and the internet to all our citizens is absolutely essential, and will in any case help to close the sometimes yawning gaps created by racial and income inequality in the US. AI/ET promise to usher in a bold new era of human history, one where the machines we create will oftentimes be smarter, faster, and more powerful than those who created them. This reality has profound implications for the field of education and introduces complex ethical, legal, and societal implications that academics, policymakers, and average citizens alike will need to contend with as every aspect of society reshapes around them. Further, the United States risks strategic inferiority if it does not embrace a full reconsideration of education in the digital environment, to include a comprehensive strategy for reimagining our education system at the national level. Today, we are not training our young leaders with the tools required to be successful in the digital age, and that has deeply troubling implications for the future of American society. Nevertheless, just as the United States persevered through the Cold War through technological superiority, I am hopeful that the 21st Century will yet again be one defined by American leadership – with our best and brightest from across the entire society leading the charge in digital era.

Transparency and Compliance The Strength of EU Lobbying Regulations Abigail Borges Brown University Author Miles Campbell Audrey McDermott Sydney Munro Editors Fall 2018 This essay discusses the outright robustness of the European Union's lobbying regulations in comparison to the regulations in the EU countries, concluding that it is on par with or surpasses regulatory strength in the states. The interactions between politicians and lobbyists present a challenge to governments’ transparency and accountability, and affect supranational entities like the European Union. Before evaluating a lobby’s influence, it is necessary to understand what exactly defines these groups and how they interact with governments. ‘Lobbyists’, which will be used synonymously with ‘interest groups’, are defined as those seeking to influence the outputs of a given policy-making process. Lobbyists attempt to support their interests by affecting policy outputs through methods like maintenance of a status quo or the implementation of a new policy. In response to lobbyist manipulation, recent policy trends have been in favor of controlling lobbying by creating level playing fields for interest groups to operate. Such policy trends include an expansion of the European Union’s lobbying rules over time. In 1996, the European Parliament introduced provisions for simple yearly passes for lobbyists seeking access to the Parliament building. The European Commission implemented its own rules that likewise lacked teeth in 2008 by instituting a voluntary lobbyist register.[1] The bodies’ recent replacement regulation, the Joint Transparency Register (JTR), has prompted a re-evaluation of the EU’s robustness in terms of lobbying controls, especially when considering the precedents set by national governments. Scholars in the field take robustness to mean “the capacity of the regulation to increase transparency and accountability,” which reflects the rules’ level of usage and reliability.[2] Though there is certainly room to strengthen its provision of regulations regarding lobbyists, the EU is holistically and comparatively more robustly regulatory than EU member nations in managing interest groups. This lead is earned both by having regulations in the first place and by these rules’ ability to equal or surpass the robustness of lobbying regulations in the EU’s member states. First, a brief overview of the implications of the JTR for the EU and its lobbyists is necessary to more clearly understand how the regulations imposed by the JTR compare with the regulations enacted its constituent states. The JTR’s stated goal was to increase transparency, replacing regulatory structures in the Parliament and Commission for a joint registration for all lobbyists.[3] Transparency and accountability are the two main goals associated with lobbying regulation. These standards aim to let voters know who influences whom and allow them to see the degree to which a given politician or lobbyist is responsible for a policy. The EU’s definition of a lobbyist expanded “to include law firms, NGOs, think tanks - indeed any organization or self-employed individual engaged in influencing EU policy making and implementation.”[4] This expansion ensures that no agents seeking to affect policy can find a loophole or excuse to avoid the option of registering for the JTR. The most crucial detail about the JTR in this sense is its voluntary nature: since it allows the option for groups not to register, one can question the extent to which such a transparency register can be effective. Still, the JTR did strengthen disclosure provisions and data accessibility with measures such as necessitating yearly reports on personal and organization information and financial details at the time of register (though notably not in regular reports thereafter). All of this information was then made available to the public online. Finally, registration required compliance with a code of conduct that includes pledges against dishonesty, incentives for disclosure, and mechanisms to handle breaches of the code.[5] Scholars Chari and Crepaz maintain that interest groups have largely complied with the JTR system, suggesting that many of the goals the JTR had in its launch have proven successful.[6] In several ways, the regulations imposed by the JTR are on par with other European countries. In terms of the Centre for Public Integrity’s index of lobbying regulation robustness, the JTR’s regulations fall directly in the middle of the EU nations’ regulation ratings, with a score of 31. Slovenia, Hungary, Lithuania, and Austria received higher scores, and Poland, the UK, France, and Germany received lower.[7] This measure indicates that the JTR is indeed more robust than some, but falls short of others, with almost a twenty-point difference between it and the most regulated European lobby (Slovenia at 49). Notably, the JTR proposes more stringent regulations than the major constituent EU states, suggesting that the EU does more to control the actions of its lobbyists than the national entities that wield much of the power within it. This is especially true for Italy, who has no interest group regulation at all. Additionally, if judging instead by specific provisions of the JTR, the EU’s system again proves to be average in many dimensions. All states mentioned above in the CPI index have a register for lobbyists of some kind, which defines the substance of the JTR. Additionally, provisions like its code of conduct and voluntary nature are mirrored in countries like France and the UK.[8] Like the public lists of lobbyists found in Poland and Germany, the individuals and groups registered under JTR are openly accessible on the internet.[9] These measures all help establish the rules of the game and increase transparency and accountability in the overall process of lobbying. These aims are desirable because they give actors more information and require justification of one’s actions to the public. Thus, the EU and its JTR prove to be just as strong in a range of provisions as the other member states regulating interest groups. As much as the EU is on par with member nations that regulate lobbying, it is distinctly advanced among the other countries in Europe that do not have rules at all. Of the about fifty European nations, including the EU, only nine have enacted laws to regulate lobbying to speak of.[10] Thus, in its implementation of any regulations at all, the EU proves to be ahead of the curve. Some may argue that many of the states lacking lobbying rules do not need them because they do not have the same scope of lobbyists present as those systems with laws; this may be true, but not relevant to the question at hand evaluating outright robustness. Additionally, there have been many calls for increased regulation throughout Europe in general, to achieve the stated aims of increased transparency and accountability. Transparency International, a group centered on fighting corruption, released a 2015 report evaluating lobbying in Europe, its effectiveness, and its future. It concluded that the EU Commission’s rules are among one of only two of the nineteen European entities that score above 50% on its measures of transparency, integrity, and equality of access.[11] The authors also note that only seven of the entities feature any lobbyist-specific regulations, a fact which in the report it finds problematic and wishes to see changed.[12] Hence, the EU already surpasses many nations in its rule robustness simply by having regulations, regardless of what the regulations entail. Still, it becomes clear upon scrutiny that the details of the JTR’s regulation also prove more stringent than those of its European counterparts. This finding is true especially regarding the disclosure of financial information, the level of compliance, and the scope of lobbyists to which the rules apply. The JTR requires an initial submission of information concerning an organization’s spending and activity, and each type of lobbyist must disclose varying levels of financial information at this stage.[13] Though it does not require yearly spending reports, this documenting of finances is equivalent with, or stronger than, all other governments with registers. For comparison, Germany requests no information at all, nor does Poland.[14] Lithuania requires yearly spending and salary reports, which appears more robust than the EU, but compliance with its register is thought to be very low; 2004 estimates place the number of lobbyists registered at about one in seven of those who operate within the state.[15] Austria, too, requests yearly reports, but, similarly, this regulation does not effectively apply to many lobbyists.[16] By these terms, then, the manner in which the JTR requests financial information makes it stronger in interest group transparency, who cannot in theory spend considerable sums of money without at least some documentation. Money often captures influence in government, so it follows that financial disclosures are also significant in terms of accountability at the EU level. The JTR provides an effective medium for this disclosure, unlike most of its peers. Also related to this discussion are issues of compliance levels, for disclosures of any type do not matter if no one complies. In their recent comparative study of the JTR, Crepaz, and Chari found that based on the registration and spending disclosures of the largest corporations seeking to influence the EU, it can be concluded that firms are taking the JTR more seriously, with all examined firms registering and giving seemingly more accurate spending disclosures.[17] Comparatively, this is quite remarkable, as many other registration systems see low levels of compliance. Chari, Hogan, and Murphy find that in Lithuania, Hungary (whose 2003 regulations have been removed), and Poland, regulations are often ignored or maneuvered around, often because the term ‘lobbyist’ retains negative connotations.[18] The 2013 Venice Report on the Role of Lobbying puts forward a similar argument about Germany, explaining that “not being on the register is no real barrier to being in contact with Parliamentary committees or members of the Bundestag.”[19] With ability and ease to get around lobbying regulations, then, the regulations prove somewhat ineffective in Germany as well. Yet, as Crepaz and Chari point out, the JTR has in fact seen increased registration by EU interest groups since its adoption.[20] Low effectiveness in complying with registration could also be related to the scope of lobbyists to which the legislation applies, which in the EU is all activity, but in most other nations is narrowly defined. This scope and compliance indicates success on the part of the JTR in terms of transparency over the aforementioned countries, as it comes closer to the ideal of providing the most information about influence in political systems. Finally, the EU does feature less regulation for lobbyists in some dimensions of transparency and accountability that at first glance makes it seem like the JTR is not very robust, yet in practice this observation proves untrue. The first such category which the JTR lacks is a set of provisions regarding the so-called ‘revolving door’, preventing civil servants from immediately working as lobbyists and vice versa. The JTR fails to prevent such capacity for corruption. However, of the four European nations studied by Chari, Hogan, and Murphy, only Lithuania has these rules.[21] Further, Transparency International explains that most of the countries it studied have some sort of “cooling-off period” for officials, but Slovenia was the only one to implement the period for legislators. And yet, it also reports that none of these countries had “effective monitoring and enforcement of the revolving door provisions,” calling into question the effectiveness of the laws even where they exist.[22] Furthermore, Crepaz and Chari recognize that the EU Commission, top officials, and the EP all have internal revolving door regulations.[23] Therefore, even if the JTR itself does not provide cooling-off periods, the issue is effectively dealt with in other ways, which is not the case for the EU countries that on paper seem more regulated. Despite appearances, then, the EU still emerges with more robust and effective regulations than most, if not all, of its EU counterparts. For its strengths and advances, however, the JTR does have several other comparative drawbacks that leave room for improvement in relation to other European state entities. Primarily, it could make its law mandatory, as Austria and Slovenia have sought to do, to improve relative robustness. Transparency International analyzed the effective impact of Slovenia’s mandatory register and found that it operates on a “wholly inadequate scope covering only a small proportion of lobbyists,” because it defines interest groups so narrowly.[24] An analysis of the Austrian system found similar results.[25] In this way, the EU regulations are still arguably as strong as Slovenia’s and Austria’s laws, because they apply to a much broader scope of lobbyists and are complied with, as evidenced earlier by Chari and Crepaz. This engenders more compliance with and operation within the register in the EU. Aside from implementing a mandatory register, another way the JTR is comparatively less robust involves its sanctions and enforcements, of which it has few. Slovenia, Lithuania, and Austria score higher on the CPI index much for this reason.[26] For example, Slovenia has a Commission for the Prevention of Corruption (CPC) that provides oversight on many types of lobbyists, such as professional, in-house, and lobbyists from private sector interest organizations.[27] Though the JTR has a Secretariat intended to watch activity, its only effective power is naming and shaming, which Crepaz and Chari find especially problematic given the voluntary nature of the register.[28] As always, though, one must keep in mind that although the JTR is less regulated in oversight, its high compliance and the often low enrolment in other countries problematizes deeming the JTR less robust due to its less strict enforcement and sanction rules. Still, in these areas there is room for improvement of the JTR in comparison to other EU nations. Ultimately, on most dimensions the JTR proves generally stronger than, if not at least as strong as, its counterpart laws in EU member nations. In providing a voluntary register, public internet accessibility, and a code of conduct, the EU regulations are in line with the rules of its peers. In fact, in even having a register at all, EU lobbying laws are more robust than the lobbying regulations found in the majority of EU nations. When one examines precedents of financial disclosures, levels of compliance, scope of application, and even revolving door rules, the JTR is arguably strongest among its counterparts in effectively handling them. One must note that the voluntary nature of the JTR and its enforcement mechanisms could be improved considering the rules of countries scoring higher than the EU on the CPI index, even if these rules are not effectively followed. Overall, regardless of the diverse characteristics of distinct regimes, lobbying regulation systems seek to achieve the ideals of transparency and accountability. Considering the totality of the strengths mentioned above, by increasing public access to the entities and insight into their inner workings, the JTR moves the EU much closer to these goals than other regulating systems have proven to accomplish. Still, even if the EU is more regulated, it is not precluded from needing to further strengthen its provisions. A mandatory system of registration, for example, would ensure maximum transparency and accountability through behavioral regulation, as argued by Direnc Kanol.[29] In the realms of financial disclosures and sanctions, too, the JTR could seek improvement by strengthening its policies, further augmenting transparency and accountability. However, the aim of this study was to evaluate comparative, rather than outright, robustness, and by this measure the EU and its lobbying regulations prove decidedly strong. Endnotes [1] Michele Crepaz and Raj Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives to Regulate Lobbyists: Good or Bad Administration?,” Cuadernos Europeos de Deusto 82, no. 5 (2014): 77, accessed December 7, 2016, https://www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/assets/pdfs/eu_lobbyist_regulation_crepaz_ chari_2014.pdf. [2] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 81-82. [3] European Commission, Commission and European Parliament launch Joint Transparency Register to shed light on all those seeking to influence European policy, 2011, accessed December 7, 2016, http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-11-773_en.htm?locale=en . [4] European Commission, Commission and European launch Joint Transparency Register. [5] European Commission, Commission and European launch Joint Transparency Register. [6] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 89. [7] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 82. [8] Assemblée Nationale, "Interest Representatives in the National Assembly," Assemblée Nationale, accessed December 7, 2016, http://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/14/representant-d-interets/repre_interet and UKLR, "About the Register," UK Lobbying Register, accessed December 7, 2016, http://www.lobbying-register.uk/about-.html. [9] Deutscher Bundestag, "Public List of Associations Registered with the Bundestag," Deutscher Bundestag, November 24, 2016, accessed December 10, 2016, http://www.bundestag.de/parlament/lobbyliste/ and OECD, Lobbyists, Governments and the Public Trust, Volume 2: Promoting Integrity through Self-Regulation (OECD Publishing, 2012), 62, accessed December 7, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264084940-en . [10] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 82. [11] Suzanne Mulcahy, Lobbying in Europe: Hidden Influence, Privileged Access (Berlin: Transparency International, 2015), 8, accessed December 7, 2016, http://www.transparencyinternational.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Lobbying_web.pdf . [12] Mulcahy, Lobbying in Europe, 8. [13] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 79. [14] Raj Chari, John Hogan and Gary Murphy, Regulating Lobbying: A Global Comparison (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010), 61, 173. [15] Chari, Hogan, and Murphy, Regulating Lobbying, 75-76. [16] Peter Köppl and Julia Wippersberg, “The State of Public Affairs in Austria,” Journal of Public Affairs 14, no. 1 (2014): 35-36, accessed December 9, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/pa.1503 . [17] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 88-89. [18] Chari, Hogan, and Murphy, Regulating Lobbying, 76, 80, 84. [19] Venice Commission, Report on the Role of Extra-Institutional Actors in the Democratic System (Strasbourg: Venice Commission, 2013), 16, accessed December 8, 2016, http://www.venice . coe.int/webforms/documents/default.aspx?pdffile=CDL-AD(2013)011-e. [20] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 90. [21] Chari, Hogan, and Murphy, Regulating Lobbying, 168, 177. [22] Mulcahy, Lobbying in Europe, 9. [23] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 80. [24] Transparency International Slovenia, Lifting the Lid on Lobbying - Call for Transparent and Ethical Lobbying (Ljubljana: Transparency International Slovenia, 2014), 35, accessed December 1, 2016, http://www.transparencyinternational.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/TI_SLO_LLL_report_ANG_web.pdf . [25] Köppl and Wippersberg, “The State of Public Affairs in Austria,” 36. [26] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 90. [27] Transparency International Slovenia, Lifting the Lid, 14. [28] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 80. [29] Direnc Kanol, “Should the European Union Enact a Mandatory Lobby Register?,” Journal of Contemporary European Research 8, no. 4 (2012): 524, accessed December 8, 2016, http://www.jcer.net/index.php/jcer/article/view/460/371 . Works Cited Assemblée Nationale. "Interest Representatives in the National Assembly." Assemblée Nationale. Accessed December 7, 2016. http://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/14/representant-d-interets/repre_interet. Chari, Raj, John Hogan and Gary Murphy. Regulating Lobbying: A Global Comparison. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010. Crepaz, Michele and Raj Chari. “The EU’s Initiatives to Regulate Lobbyists: Good or Bad Administration?” Cuadernos Europeos de Deusto 82, no. 5 (2014): 71-97. Accessed December 7, 2016. https://www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/assets/pdfs/eu_lobbyist_ regulation_crepaz_ chari_2014.pdf . Deutscher Bundestag. "Public List of Associations Registered with the Bundestag," Deutscher Bundestag, November 24, 2016, accessed December 8, 2016. http://www.bundestag.de/parlament/lobbyliste/ European Commission. Commission and European Parliament launch Joint Transparency Register to shed light on all those seeking to influence European policy, 2011. Accessed December 7, 2016. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-11-773_en.htm?locale=en . Kanol, Direnc. “Should the European Commission Enact a Mandatory Lobby Register?” Journal of Contemporary European Research 8, no. 4 (2012): 519-529. Accessed December 8, 2014. http://www.jcer.net/index.php/jcer/article/view/460/371. Köppl, Peter and Julia Wippersberg. “The State of Public Affairs in Austria.” Journal of Public Affairs 14, no. 1 (2014): 31-43. Accessed December 9, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/pa.1503 . Mulcahy, Suzanne. Lobbying in Europe: Hidden Influence, Privileged Access. Berlin: Transparency International, 2015. Accessed December 7, 2016. http://www.transparencyinternational.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Lobbying_web.pdf OECD. Lobbyists, Governments and the Public Trust, Volume 2: Promoting Integrity through Self-Regulation. OECD Publishing, 2012. Accessed December 7, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264084940-en . Transparency International Slovenia. Lifting the Lid on Lobbying - Call for Transparent and Ethical Lobbying. Ljubljana: Transparency International Slovenia, 2014. Accessed December 8, 2016. http://www.transparencyinternational.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/ 12/TI_SLO_LLL_report_ANG_web.pdf. UKLR. "About the Register." UK Lobbying Register. Accessed December 10, 2016. http://www.lobbying-register.uk/about-.html. Venice Commission. Report on the Role of Extra-Institutional Actors in the Democratic System. Strasbourg: Venice Commission, 2013. Accessed December 8, 2016. http://www.venice . coe.int/webforms/documents/default.aspx?pdffile=CDL-AD(2013)011-e.

*Feature* JPPE INTERVIEW, PASCUAL RESTREPO: Pascual Restrepo is an assistant professor at Boston University. His research focuses on the impact of technology on inequality, as well as labour markets and economic growth. Prior to joining BU’s faculty, he was a Cowles Foundation Fellow at Yale University, and earned his PhD in Economics at MIT. Besides research work, he has given numerous lectures at conferences, workshops and seminars across the country. October 2020 JPPE: Hi, everyone. I'm speaking right now with Professor Pascual Restrepo, who is an Assistant Professor at Boston University, whose research focuses on the impact of technology on inequality, as well as labor markets and economic growth. Hi, Pascual. How are you? Restrepo: Hi, Julian. How are you? Thanks for inviting me. JPPE: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me. So, the first thing I wanted to talk about is how you got into automation and inequality, and I saw that in your earlier work you tended to focus on the illicit economy--and from what I could tell, within that, the illicit economy in Colombia. And I wanted to know how you shifted from that towards automation and inequality. Restrepo: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm from Colombia, you know, and when I was doing my undergrad, I started doing my undergrad in mathematics, but then I got interested in economics. And the key topics in the public discussion in Colombia was always about violence, always about state capacity, always about corruption and political economy. And at the center of all of that, you always have these big illegal markets that were reinforcing, if not causing many of these things. So as a Colombian, it's natural to be interested in that, because it's a topic that is very close to our hearts, our history, and our future. And that's why I started doing research on that topic. Then when I moved to the US to start my PhD, the focus shifted a little bit. I guess that doing a PhD is a great opportunity to start seeing the world from a more global perspective, perhaps, and so I became more interested in problems that were perhaps not as important for Colombia. I mean, Colombia, I wouldn't say right now that automation, it's a big concern there. There's a lot of inequality, but for very different reasons. And so I became interested in these topics that I saw were very relevant for the developed world. And so I think that it's kind of nice that you get to do research on topics that you hear people talking about, right? So like, you open a newspaper, you read The Economist, and they're always talking about, you know, automation, inequality, technology, and so on, but when I was in Colombia, it was the case with illegal markets, so I guess that I'm just trying to follow that trail. You know, like, interesting stuff. JPPE: So the shift towards a more global topic, with far-reaching implications. So, do you remember, was there a specific thing that you read? That made you interested? Do you remember the moment when you thought that this is something you wanted to focus on? Restrepo: Yeah, I don't think that it was anything specific. I just think that it was like an accumulation of stuff. And you know, when I was starting my PhD, there was all of the fuss about Artificial Intelligence. Everyone was fussing about what it was going to be. And I was, like, listening to podcasts by, I don't know, Sam Harris and other people, or the book by Yuval Noah Harari, and I started reading all of these things, and I was like, "Oh, this is super interesting, I wonder if you can analyze this from an economics perspective," right? JPPE: Right. Restrepo: And then, like, Daron--who was my advisor--and Daron apparently was also super interested in this thing, so we started this collaboration. JPPE: Yeah, yeah. So, I- and I think that this is one of the things that is so interesting about the topic, too, is that it is something that gets discussed in these journalistic spheres like The Economist or more central, mainstream publications, but also in academia. And also in a slightly more sensationalistic way by futurists and so on, because the name 'Artificial Intelligence' is kind of, you know, some people think of Blade Runner, or cyborgs walking down the streets. So I think cutting through that is very interesting, which is why one thing I did want to ask is where you stand on the question of automation. And I have four or five studies that you wrote that I just wanted to briefly mention, in case some people aren't familiar with that. One is a piece that you co-authored called "Demographics in Automation," where--and correct me if any of these takeaways are wrong, but--you showed that robots tend to substitute for middle-aged workers. In the paper "Automation of New Tasks," you showed that there is a reinstatement effect of labor, these new digital, labor-saving technologies. In "Competing With Robots," you showed that the overall impact of robot adoption on an industry tends to reduce the employment in that same industry--the number of jobs, at least in the short run. And in "Unpacking the Skill Bias," which I believe is the most recent paper you showed that there is this powerful impact on inequality, and that there is a reduction in real wages. And that productivity increases might not even be that high relative to inequality, which I thought was a very interesting point. So to the extent that you can, where do you stand on automation and AI? Restrepo: Perfect, so let me try to reframe this question a little bit. One of the questions that you sent me earlier on--and feel free to tell me if you're going to discuss it later on, or where this is a good moment to discuss it, because you asked what's wrong with public discourse about automation, right? JPPE: That was my next one, so we can do that now. Restrepo: Perfect. So I guess that what would be useful for me is to tell you how I see public discourse, and where I see myself into the public discourse, and why I think that some of the perspectives that Daron and I have brought are different from the main views that you would find out there, right? Because you see that you are asking me where do I stand on automation. And I think that that's part of what's the problem with this topic, is that people want to divide themselves into two groups. There's kind of a false dichotomy, so either you believe in the robot-apocalypse: you know, robots are going to come and are going to take over all of jobs or you are a firm believer that this has happened before, and that we have already seen this, and technology is great, and nothing is going to happen. And I think that the reality's in the middle. Undoubtedly, technology is the only thing that has allowed us to achieve our standards of living. But I also think that there's no denying that technology sometimes achieves that at the expense of some groups of society. And I think that that's where I stand. Technology is a great force. Technology allows us to live better lives. But some technologies--not every technology, because technologies are all so different, right? Like, I wouldn't say that automation is the same thing as inventing new products, right? Those two things do different things. Some technologies, like automation in particular, have this peculiar feature that the way that they generate productivity--that the way that they generate additional capacity to produce--is by substituting very specific types of human labor. And those workers that get replaced and that get substituted, from their perspective, technology is a bad thing. Socially, technology is a good thing, but there are going to be losers--net losers. And I think that my thing is just to put the spotlight on those losers, and try to identify them and quantify those losses. The idea that technology generates winners and losers--I mean, people have that around, but we tend to think that the gains are so large that this is okay, we just need to redistribute. I don't know, the losses sometimes might be much more problematic than what you can compensate for with the gains. JPPE: Right, certainly. I think even in the way that people phrase it: 'short term losses,' 'disruption.' Some people might say that there's a slight underselling of what the human costs of that disruption are. But I wanted to ask about whether or not AI is fundamentally different in your view, because you said it's somewhere in the middle. And it sounded like you were saying it's not going to be "a temporary loss of some jobs, but it's fine because we'll create new ones" or "a complete joblessness apocalypse." It might be somewhere in the middle. And that seems to me very much in line with what past labor-saving technologies did during the Industrial Revolution. You know, the classic example where you had a spike in the automation- or, a spike in labor-saving devices that increased inequality in the short run--and we can talk about the extent to which that was tolerable--but in the long run, those jobs came back. So do you think that it is fundamentally different from how devices in the past performed, or is it in line with that history? Restrepo: Perfect, so that's a great question. You know, we talk a lot about Artificial Intelligence, but we don't really know what it does. Right? JPPE: [laughing] Yeah . Restrepo: Right, so I can talk about technologies that I know what they do. So for instance, automation of manufacturing via industrial robotics, or automation of white-collar jobs via software, right? So let's just start there, and then we'll speculate a little bit more about AI. So I think that industrial robotics and automation of white-collar jobs via software--the economic forces are very similar to what we saw in the past, let's say, with the mechanization of agriculture. Or the mechanization of textile production in England during the Industrial Revolution, right? You have very artisanal techniques where it took a bunch of people, kids and women, to weave and knit a particular piece of clothing. And then you come out with these machines where you just need one person to operate the whole machinery, and essentially what you did is you replaced all that artisanal and labor-intensive technique that used to be the main technique before. Like with agriculture, you see the same thing, right? Before it was like people with rudimentary tools, such as a scythe, or whatever who would reap the land. And then you have a tractor, right? And the tractor, there's just one person; and that person, the only thing that he has to do is drive the tractor. Nowadays they don't even need to drive the tractor, because these tractors are becoming increasingly self-driving tractors. And so, you can see that, essentially, we are moving to technologies that are more, more, more capital-intensive and that rely less and less and less on human labor. And I think that the consequences, to some extent, are similar. So like, many people say, "Oh no, we have a lot of mechanization in history, and we still have a bunch of jobs, so that's not bad." But then you look at historical records; that argument is not exactly right. Because for instance, England around the Industrial Revolution, there were about 60 years where wages were essentially stagnant. So yes, this technology created more bounty, they created higher incomes per capita, but most of this income went to the hands of capital owners: people who owned the machinery, people who owned the land. And those gains didn't trickle down to wages until after 60 years of these developments. 60 years is a long time. During these years we had a lot of unrest. We had many, many social reforms to appease, some of the unrest that resulted from these. We had the Luddites, right? That was kind of a response to all of these developments. So, you know, it was not a rosy- it was not an easy transition. Now, of course, that puts us into a fantastic path where eventually, people acquire skills; we came out with new industries, products, and so want to employ a bunch of people. But that was kind of like a choice, right? I mean, maybe that wouldn't happen. And so I guess that that's the next question: what are we going to be able to come out with? The jobs, the ideas, the tech force, the tasks, or all of the people that we displaced from manufacturing and all of the people that we are displacing from services. I mean, what are we going to employ all of these people, right? And perhaps, what if the future is one where we're going to have fewer jobs? JPPE: You really think that there's a chance that the future could look like, on aggregate, there are fewer jobs that the economy requires. Restrepo: Yeah. JPPE: So in essence, the whole principle of efficiency gains creating jobs in new industries, that that principle might break down. Restrepo: I mean, I think that that principle has worked in the past, but the fact that it has worked in the past does not guarantee that it's going to keep working in the future. I think that at least theoretically, conceptually, I mean, it's possible. I'm not saying that it's going to happen, but it's possible that we go into a future where the economy uses less labor. So you know, like, only 20% of the population works, and that's enough to supply all of the labor that the economy needs. I mean, this is a great thing if all of us only work one day per week. But the problem is that we might be going to a future where only 20% of us work the entire week. And that's very different because the implications for inequality are quite different, right? So I guess that that's kind of the challenge. The challenge to me is not so much whether the level of employment that you need to produce something is going to go down--for sure that's going to go down. I mean, we're going to produce much more with fewer workers. The question is, who's going to provide those hours of human labor, and who are the people in a position to benefit from that demand for labor that's going to be out there? JPPE: Mm. So, I'd love to talk more about the social and political implications of what you just said, but first I want to ask about a pandemic-related question. Restrepo: Yep. JPPE: So, The Wall Street Journal just ran a headline where they said that, essentially, meatpackers were, all of a sudden, beginning to automate more and more labor, and that that automated technology was not necessarily doing as good a job as the humans were, but the coronavirus had essentially hastened that shift. And I believe there are other instances of that in manufacturing as well. So is this something that you view as bringing automation much faster? Restrepo: Totally. One of the papers that you mentioned earlier on was this paper on demographics. And in that paper, what we showed is that a lot of what you see in terms of industrial automation--that is, automation by industrial robots and machinery in car manufacturing plants, for example--is driven by the scarcity of work. This is technology that responds to incentive. So what are the most automated countries in the world? Japan, Germany, Italy, countries where the population is aging very rapidly--where young workers with the muscle to weld a car are scarce. And so it's that scarcity of labor, in some sense, what has fueled a lot of this automation. And you can think of the pandemic as doing something similar; it's generating a scarcity of labor. Because workers--on the one hand, they cannot go to work because of either concerns or lockdown measures--but also, there's also some safety measures that might make some automation technologies more safe than human workers, right? So there's an element of that. On the other hand, you know, this pandemic also gave me another reflection that many of us- or, many people thought that humans were already kind of obsolete, and humans were no longer needed, and this pandemic kind of made me revisit that view because it does suggest that humans are still extremely important for the country. JPPE: [laughing] Yeah. Restrepo: Extremely important, right? You take out the human element, and the economy completely gets destroyed. JPPE: And human contact too. Restrepo: Yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, it's not only about production, but so much of our economy is about humans interacting with other humans, and human contact that- it also kind of gives me some pause. Yeah, maybe, sure, maybe we're going to automate a lot of jobs, but maybe there's- you know, the economy's increasingly becoming more intensive in the sort of activities that, by their nature, they're just not automatable. Or we don't want to automate them because the quality of the goods that we are consuming then, they're dependent on human interaction, right? JPPE: Mm. And certainly I think there are instances- I mean, the skeptics that I've talked to about AI have definitely brought up instances; they'll pull up a treasure trove of articles where someone says, "We can now automate kindergarten teachers." Restrepo: Exactly. JPPE: And then we could do some polling on the number of moms and dads that would be happy with a robot teaching their kids- or, their kindergarteners. Restrepo: Yeah. Absolutely. JPPE: [laughing] But, so, I did want to ask more about the social and political side of this as well, and I don't mean to be flippant with this question, but I wanted to know why inequality is necessarily a bad thing. Restrepo: Great. I think that that's a great question, and I think that the answer is that it's not necessarily a bad thing, at least in my mind. Let me tell you the feature about current inequality that I think is absolutely a bad thing. I think that the problem with current inequality is not- I mean, you can have inequality for two reasons. You can have inequality because everyone's incomes are growing, but some incomes are growing much more rapidly than others. Right? Maybe there are some political, philosophical, or ethical reasons to be opposed to that type of inequality. Okay. But there, I don't think there's a very strong argument that everyone should agree that that type of inequality is very bad. Because that type of inequality might reflect, "Oh, maybe the people whose incomes are growing more, it's because they started a business." Right? You know, like Bezos. But Bezos has- is like a billionaire. But I would say yeah, if you ask me, I think that--well, maybe I'm more stating my case here, but--yes, he deserves to be a millionaire because-and a billionaire, because the product that he created delivers a lot of value, right? So I think that there's a chunk of inequality that is good and that I'm not opposed, at least, in terms of first principle. But. I do think that the nature of contemporary inequality is very different from that story that I was telling. Contemporary inequality is not just about some people who came up with great ideas, and their incomes grow a lot, and all of our incomes kind of grow just if we happen to work hard, and so on. Contemporary inequality, if I had to describe it, has this feature that we see groups of society who are worse off than before. So it's not just how incomes are growing. It is that some incomes are falling in real terms. And for me, that is something that is just... the biggest contemporaneous problem. That we have people who are worse off than their parents, than their previous generation. So if, in the U.S., you are a person who has high school or less than a high school degree, who comes from a poor background, actually your parents were better off than you in terms of labor market income. And that's kind of the scary aspect of inequality, that it's not even progress, but sometimes it means no progress at all for some society. That's the reason that makes me worry. And those groups, of course--I mean, that's going to have political implications, everything. But just from a humanity perspective, I think that as a society we can afford- I mean, we should aspire for trying to make everyone gain from technology, everyone gain from globalization, there shouldn't be anyone who is worse off than a person like him or her 30 years ago. JPPE: Mm. Mm. Yeah, and so, I mean, there is the data from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez that tries to quantify how that inequality is today; and from what I have seen, it shows that it's roughly where it was at in the early 20th century. And so when you think about automation in conjunction with the general financialization of the economy, the rise of private debt, the extension of credit in the economy, do you feel like now is a particularly vulnerable moment for a shock to inequality through digitally-enabled automation? Restrepo: Yeah, absolutely. I think that part of the problem is that there's no safety net in this country. I mean, the safety net is kind of like- I mean we are seeing that with COVID, right? There's people whose finances are in an incredibly vulnerable position. And so imagine that you're in your 30s, you're in 40s, you have some debts, you don't own a lot of assets, and then they come out with this software that can do exactly what you're doing at your work, right? You are screwed! There's nothing you can do. JPPE: [laughing] Yeah. Restrepo: And then we turn to economists and the economists said, ‘no, because people can re-train, and people can relocate, and we're going to take that person and make that a coder, right? Or a software engineer.’ That's not going to happen! That's kind of like a lost generation there. And I think that we should care more about that potentially lost generation. JPPE: Mm. And in terms of reducing inequality, I actually- a month ago, I got to speak with historian Walter Scheidel on his thesis and The Great Leveler, that inequality only gets reduced or leveled by mass military mobilization, civil war, plague, or government collapse. And what was so striking about reading his book and talking with him was, it seemed to--on some level--be in opposition to a lot of the language in economics that seems to frame inequality and shocks as almost cyclical in nature, where there's a short run and a long run. And it seemed like Professor Scheidel's point was essentially that actually, there's been these exogenous forces in the form of, essentially, catastrophe, that have reduced inequality. And I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that. Restrepo: Yeah. So I think that for economists in general, I wouldn't say that inequality's just a cyclical phenomenon. I mean, if you read the labor economics literature, there's a lot of literature kind of emphasizing these trends and it's long-run trends. So like, over the long run, what we are seeing is that someone who has a college degree is earning much more than someone who does not have a college degree. And that just keeps expanding and expanding and expanding, and decelerated a bit and so on. But you know, there are these big trends. I wouldn't say that it's only about shocks. But I do think that economists emphasize much more the role of technology than politics. Right? I mean, there are some fields in Economics that emphasize much more the role of politics, and I think that in these shocks that you're mentioning, what needs to happen is a big shock, so that it triggers political reform, and so on. And that perhaps hasn't been so much included into the language of economists. The other thing that I would like to say is that, while I think that thesis is kind of interesting, you also see a lot of variation across countries. When you look at the data that are countries that technology is kind of universal- I mean, I was telling you about, you know, the Germans were the ones who invented industrial automation, same as Japan. And they don't have as much inequality as we do here in the U.S., right? That's also kind of a choice; I don't think that you need to have a war to reduce inequality. But you need to have more progressive taxation, and I mean when you think about inequality, that's the first thing that you should do! I mean, it's very simple. I mean, simple, technically. Politically, it might be difficult, but the solution is clear. JPPE: Right. And so, what do you think about proposals like a universal basic income, or a progressive basic income, or any variation of that? Negative income tax, and so on. Restrepo: Yeah, I think that anything that looks like a negative income tax, I think that would be greatly beneficial. Anything that looks like an earned income tax credit, that is subsidizing work for low-wage workers would be very beneficial. Also because it helps convince firms not to automate those jobs, so part of those jobs are subsidized. Anything like a universal basic income, I mean, I think it's- again, I like the idea; I don't like the idea of a universal basic income essentially substituting the whole safety net. I think that still having a government that buys insurance and that supplies all our programs that are more targeted to whoever it's useful. But I think that the spirit of all of these things is the same. We need a better safety net, right? And so, if you implement it one way or the other; if politically this is more feasible than this...I don't know. I'm fine. I just think that we do need some more safety net. JPPE: Right. So the last question I wanted to ask is: looking to the future, what are some open questions that you think would be really interesting to look at, either on inequality alone, or on automation and inequality and so on? And also, if not questions, some areas of research that you think, thus far, have been untapped. Restrepo: Perfect. So let me start with the first one. I think that one of the things that I find more puzzling about current technologies is that if you look at the labor market, you would conclude that there is a lot of disruption. You would conclude that there's inequality; the prices of different skills are changing the nature of jobs is changing; the types of jobs that we are posting are changing the skills that the labor market is valuing are changing. From looking at that, you would think, "Oh, technology is advancing at this amazing pace," but when you look at productivity, there's not a lot of productivity growth. And you know, this lack of productivity growth has been used by many to argue that automation, or that technology, is not a concern. So like, I saw that you did an interview with Paul Krugman at some point. JPPE: Yeah. He brought it up. Restrepo: Yeah, and I think he made that point. And I think that that point is kind of misguided. Because I think that one of the interesting things about automation technologies is that--and you already mentioned that this is something that we emphasize a lot--is that you can have automation without big productivity gains. And let me just give you an example of why that is the case. Imagine that I'm a worker working in a supermarket checkout machine, right? And then someone comes and invents a self-service kiosk, or whatever, right? That innovation is going to substitute me; but in terms of cost, how much is it going to reduce the cost for the supermarket? Very little! Because the worker was already very cheap; the machine itself is very cheap, but not as much! Right? Installing all of the equipment, programming, all of that--at the end of the day, the productivity gains is, I don't know, 1%? Something even smaller than that, that's just a small part of the cost? So at the end of the day, you unroll this technology, you deploy this technology, you substitute all of the checkout clerks, right? So that's a chunk of the population, and what are the productivity gains from doing that? Not that big. They're not that big; it's just like, you saved a little bit on costs. So automation has this thing that as long as you save a little bit on costs, you're going to adopt it. So you can have the adoption of a lot of automation technologies that have very small efficiency gains. And I think that that principle has escaped current discussions about automation. People equate productivity or technology with automation. Automation is just one particular type of technology--concerning one particular component of productivity--that has this feature that it can generate big distributional impacts just by having small productivity gains. But I think that the interesting research question there is to try to understand, why are we adopting automation technologies that have such, very low productivity gains? And that our candidate- one candidate is perhaps taxation. Maybe we're doing this because we're taxing labor a lot so that's inducing us to adopt more automation, even if that's not very profitable, from an engineering perspective. Or maybe it's a cultural thing. So I think that those are the big, important questions. What determines the direction of technology? Are we going to keep focusing on automation, automation, automation? Or are we going to have a more balanced element of technologies that, in the long run, it's going to end up being more beneficial for all of those people--that I already discussed--that have experienced net losses in their income in the last 30, 40 years? JPPE: Professor Restrepo, thanks so much. Restrepo: Thanks. Thanks for having me, Julian.

Health/Disease Distinction Normative Uses Margot S. Witte Brown University Author Matthew Flathers Fengyi Wan Alex Vaughan Williams Editors Fall 2018 I consider the question of whether or not it is permissible to intervene, given a particular medical condition. Typically, we argue that healthy conditions do not permit interventions, while disease conditions do. In this paper, I argue that the distinction between “healthy” and “diseased” is too slippery to be practically useful, and suggest that we should do away with it in clinical practice, substituting a model of asking whether an individual needs help. Introduction Every time a physician faces a condition in clinical practice, they must determine whether or not to intervene. This is an ethical question: “When ought I to intervene?” The centrality of the question in the practical world means that it merits philosophical consideration. In this essay, I will be focusing on the distinction between conditions for which intervention is permissible and conditions for which it is not permissible. The first category of conditions can be further divided into conditions for which intervention is required and conditions for which it is merely permissible, but I will not be addressing this second distinction. It is also important to note that I am concerned in this paper with the question of whether or not intervention is permissible, not whether or not a physician will intervene. The answer to the second question relies on issues like resource allocation and standard practices, which are outside the scope of this paper. The distinction we draw between conditions that do and do not permit intervention ought to align with our general intuitions. There are two main reasons to pick an intuitive distinction over an unintuitive one. First, intuition is acceptable evidence in ethical decisions. We can see one simplistic reason for accepting this by considering ethical propositions that we take to be true independent of ethical analysis. For example, someone who isn’t familiar with moral theory would say that, all things being equal, it is worse to kill indiscriminately than not to kill indiscriminately. This person’s primary evidence is their moral intuition, and we think that they are justified in their conclusion. The second reason we should accept intuition as evidence in finding a normatively useful distinction between conditions that permit and do not permit intervention is that we require a practical theory. The intention of this distinction is for it to be used practically by real physicians in real clinics. If the distinction goes against general moral intuition, it will not be followed by the majority of physicians. Often, the distinction between “health” and “disease” is used to make decisions about intervention, where intervention is permissible in the case of disease and impermissible in the case of health – or, in some theories, we should be agnostic about whether to intervene in cases of health . The primary purpose of this paper is to investigate how helpful this health/disease distinction is and whether we need an alternative. I will consider various conceptual analyses of disease and see which, if any, are most helpful. Just as there are different definitions of what qualifies a state as diseased, there are different definitions of what qualifies a state as healthy. The World Health Organization defines health as more than just “the absence of disease and infirmity.” It is also a “complete physical, mental and social well-being” that every human has the right to.[1] This creates three categories: diseased, healthy, and an in-between category, in which people are neither diseased nor infirm, but lack complete well-being. Because I am focused on whether health/disease distinction works to guide us in determining whether or not it is permissible to intervene, a situation with only two options, I will be discussing the theories that have only two categories: healthy and diseased. The first part of my paper will be concerned with different versions of the health/disease distinction and specific counterarguments to each distinction. I will then consider the possible problems that arise from using the health/disease distinction, however it is drawn, to make the normative decision about whether or not it is permissible to intervene. Finally, I will propose another way to make this distinction and evaluate the shortcomings and potential areas of further investigation for this new theory. The “Health”/“Disease” Distinction There are three primary approaches to conceptualizing disease: naturalism (sometimes called objectivism), constructivism (sometimes called normativism), and the relatively recent addition of embedded instrumentalism. In this section, I will consider these three theories of disease and analyze their abilities to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for disease, with the assumption that if there are serious weaknesses with the theory as a definition, it is not advisable to employ it as a normative guide to distinguish between conditions that do and do not permit intervention. The first theory I will consider is naturalism. Naturalists believe that the label “disease” represents an objective, intrinsic category of conditions and that we can determine whether a condition falls into the category by making empirical observations. Proponents of the theory claim that it is completely value-free and non-normative.[2] Dominic Murphy summarizes naturalism with a two-step classification system meant to determine whether a condition is a disease.[3] The first step is to determine whether a biological organ or system is malfunctioning. The second step is to determine whether the malfunction is harmful to the person it is affecting. As Murphy formulates naturalism, a condition is a disease if and only if the answer to both questions is yes. Most accounts of naturalism follow a similar structure, even if they do not break it down as clearly as Murphy. There is some variation within naturalism about what counts as a “malfunction.” While some theorists appeal to a common sense notion of “functioning,” most argue that a system is functioning if it is working in the way it was evolutionarily intended to work. Under this definition, the structure of the eye was naturally selected for because of its ability to pick up a given range of wavelengths and activate the optic nerve in a given way. Christopher Boorse, a major figure in naturalism, argues for what he calls a “Bio-Statistical Theory” of what qualifies as normal functioning.[4] He claims that, for any system, we can determine a species-specific standard based on a reference class with an acceptable level of variation. If a particular organism’s system significantly varies from the standard, it is malfunctioning. So, if an eye fails to pick up a wavelength that the statistically standard eye in the appropriate population picks up, it would be considered malfunctioning. Boorse defends his Bio-Statistical Theory on the grounds that it allows us to determine whether or not a system is malfunctioning in an objective manner without inserting our own beliefs about what constitutes “normal.” The philosopher Elselijn Kingma points out that naturalism, especially as formulated by Boorse’s Bio-Statistical Theory, is not at all free of subjective value-judgments. She claims the organisms that we choose to include in the reference class are determined through normative ideas about what proper functioning is, so it would be circular to use the standard class to make determinations about what qualifies a system as properly functioning.[5] The Bio-Statistical Theory only moves the value judgment problem up a level: instead of making a value judgment about what functioning is normal, we make a value judgment in selecting which organisms are normal and should constitute our reference class. Besides the problem of circularity, general naturalists face another problem: an organ can be functioning in its proper way according to evolutionary biology, but still be considered “diseased.” Kingma gives the example of an overdose of paracetamol, an over the counter pain reliever that causes liver damage. A properly functioning liver will reduce in function when flooded with the drug. In this case, the liver certainly is not healthy, but it is functioning appropriately, given the unfortunate situation it is in. Even if an organ is functioning properly, external conditions that Kingma calls “stressors” can cause an organ to become diseased.[6] If someone came into a clinic with an overdose of paracetamol and the physician extended the naturalist theory of disease to a normative theory, she would find that the liver was not diseased and that it would be impermissible to treat the patient. The problem of circularity and the practical problem of a somewhat limited idea of diseased both seem to be major weaknesses that stand in the way of using naturalism as a normative guide in clinical practice. The second conceptual analysis of disease I will consider is constructivism, which makes no attempt to shy away from a value-based, normative conception of disease. Constructuralists see disease categories as formulated based on social constructions about which physical conditions are healthy and which are not. They claim that we cannot understand disease independent of social concepts like “culture, history, meaning, and the constructed nature of medical phenomena.”[7] Because this definition of disease is so rooted in social constructions, constructivists accept (and expect) that the conditions that are diseases will vary across cultures. Some constructivists, like Lawrie Reznek, explicitly reject the idea that a malfunction is necessary for a condition to be a disease. To support their theory, constructivists often cite conditions that used to be considered diseases but are no longer. A common example is that of homosexuality. Reznek explores the way that conditions can move between the categories of disease and healthy across time and space and uses that as evidence that these are not mere category mistakes, but that the categories themselves are variable.[8] Naturalists respond to this claim by maintaining that they really are category mistakes, and that the removal of homosexuality from the “disease” category was an example of psychologists realizing that they had mislabeled a condition in which all systems are properly functioning a disease, not that the category “disease” had changed to exclude homosexuality.[9] Constructivists claim that while a disease can be traced back to a real biological process, the determination of whether a specific biological process is a disease relies on social considerations. This determination is based on a shared idea of what constitutes a “normal” and “valued” state. The problem with this approach is that there is variation about what these states are even in a specific community. This begs the question, “What counts as a community?” which naturalists disagree on. It seems excusable that the variation of “normal” across cultures might bleed into a sense of variation of “normal” within a culture, but the theory is meaningless without an idea of “normal” specific to a culture. There are also structural problems with the constructivist position. Constructivists are most likely correct that some diseases, particular psychological disorders, are based on social ideas about what conditions are valuable, but are they right that the entire category of disease is socially constructed without any naturalistic basis? It seems possible that there are some conditions that are classified as disease merely due to social factors, but that there are others that are true biological malfunctions. This means that constructivists cannot make their case by pointing out individual conditions that have moved into or out of the “disease” category; they need to prove that the entire category is based on social norms and that there are no diseases that can be categorized as such by only empirical evidence without social judgment. The constructivists do not seem concerned with making that sort of argument, though. Constructivist Peter Conrad writes that he is “not interested in adjudicating whether any particular problem is really a medical problem… I am interested in the social underpinnings of this expansion of medical jurisdiction.”[10] This structural problem of constructivism may be accounted for by the fact that most constructivists are more concerned with social issues than with philosophical definitions, so their arguments sometimes read more as descriptions of the medical method, rather than “necessary and sufficient condition” based arguments. This problem may dissolve if we read constructivism in the tradition of social critique rather than philosophy, but if we are to consider using the theory as a normative – and necessarily philosophical – guide that can help us determine which conditions permit intervention, we must read it as a philosophical theory, and its structural problems become unavoidable. The second structural problem of constructivism is that society already makes a distinction between those who we think are diseased and those that we disapprove of for other reasons. We do not pathologize every norm-breaking condition (general laziness, ugliness, poor taste in house decor, for example) and when people do things we ethically disapprove of, we often question their morals, rather than their sanity. So if constructivists want to argue that those we classify as having diseases are merely breaking social norms, they need to account for why we classify them differently from other norm-breakers who we don’t classify as diseased. They must explain why those who are diseased are norm-breakers in a health-related way without appealing to biological notions of “health.”[11] This is a difficult explanation to provide, and there is no standard constructivist answer. The third and final analysis of disease I will consider is that of embedded instrumentalism. Kenneth Richman, who developed embedded instrumentalism, borrowed some elements from constructivism but worried that any theory of disease that is based on culturally-contingent factors could not be universal. He proposed a theory in which health is indexed to goals, such that how healthy an agent is determined by how well they can fulfill their goals. He wanted to propose “a theory of health which characterizes certain states as being valuable neither intrinsically nor merely because they are useful, but rather because of their being in an appropriate relationship to an individual’s actual values.”[12] Richman rejects the view that certain goals are intrinsically valuable. He argues that if we begin with fairly agreeable goals like “The proper functioning of a heart is an intrinsically valuable goal”, we will eventually get to more troubling organs and will have to make claims like “The proper functioning of a set of ovaries is an intrinsically valuable goal.” Of course, about 41.5% of reproductive-age people with ovaries in the United States use some form of hormonal birth control, with the specific goal of ensuring their ovaries are not functioning.[13] Richman thinks that it is impossible to form a coherent argument that a heart functioning is intrinsically good but a set of ovaries functioning is not. One possible objection to this argument is that someone with very low ambitions might be considered healthy merely by virtue of their laziness. Richman tries to account for this problem by introducing the Richman-Budson view of health. According to this view, a person’s health is not indexed to their actual goals, but to the set of goals they would choose for themselves if they were fully aware of their “objectified subjective interests,” by which he means the goals they would set for themselves if they were perfectly rational and had full knowledge of themselves and their environments. There is a counterexample to the Richman-Budson view, however. What if the goals we have are unreasonable? If I have the goal of playing 48 simultaneous chess games while blindfolded, but I can’t achieve that goal due to my poor visual memory, lack of practice, etc., am I ill? It seems like obviously, I am not, but that goal is compatible with a full (though generous) understanding of myself and my environment. Is a concept of disease helpful in deciding whether to intervene? Beyond the specific problems that each individual theory of disease faces, the structure itself of the healthy/disease distinction may not be a helpful guide for clinicians trying to decide whether or not it is permissible to intervene when faced with a specific condition. I will look at four potential issues with using the health/disease distinction to determine whether to intervene in a specific condition. First is the threat of circularity. Some philosophers of medicine explicitly use the normative distinction of whether or not a condition allows intervention to ground their healthy/disease distinction, which would make it circular for us to use the health/disease distinction as an ethical guide to determine whether intervention is permissible, and most implicitly use it. One example of the explicit use is John Harris’ “ER test,” in which he argues that a condition is a disease if the condition makes someone worse off and if we would think medical personnel would be negligent if they did not treat this person if they came into an ER.[14] If we were to try to use such a distinction to determine whether or not to treat someone, we would be stuck in a circular argument. Germund Hesslow makes a related argument that the concept of disease is not normatively useful in clinical practice because it “does not coincide with any clinically important or morally relevant categories.”[15] Regardless of what theory of disease we choose, there are examples of conditions that are not diseased that permit intervention and diseases that do not permit interventions. Hesslow considers three types of conditions where this nonequivalence surfaces. First, doctors regularly treat patients in healthy states. He cites the examples of plastic surgery, gender affirmation surgery, and vaccination. Surely, we do not think that a too-big nose, gender, or a natural susceptibility to infection make a person diseased. Second, there are conditions that are technically pathological which physicians rarely treat, including benign tumors like birthmarks. Third, physicians sometimes intentionally induce pathological symptoms. Hasslow gives the example of sterilization, but we can also consider Richman’s argument about birth control. According to Hasslow, if disease was a clinically useful category, then physicians would never intentionally induce disease-symptoms. A third argument against using the healthy/disease distinction to guide clinical practice is that the version of the distinctions discussed so far includes too much information in some ways and too little information in others. A theory of disease gets caught up in all the issues of a conceptual analysis. For instance, every theory requires a value-laden discussion of “norms” and “normality.” (Recall that naturalism claims that norms are biologically determined, constructivism claims that they are socially determined, and embedded instrumentalism that they are indexed to personal goals.) If we are only concerned with deciding whether or not it is permissible to intervene, it would be ideal to develop a theory that we can use as a clinical guide without having to develop an entire theory of disease. In other ways, the theory has too little information to provide practical clinical guidance. If we only consider “disease,” we have no way of determining whether to intervene in cases of disability or injury. But there is no obviously philosophical, ethical, or even ontological distinction between disease and injury or disability. It seems likely that the ethical norms that govern disease should also govern disability and injury, and conceptual analyses of disease fail to provide guidance in these cases. Ereshefsky makes a fourth argument again the entire project of a conceptual analysis of disease. He claims that there is a structural problem with the health/disease distinction.[16] The distinction must take into account at least two factors: the physical state of the individual and the social value or disvalue of that state. On one extreme is naturalism, which values only the former, and on the other is staunch constructivism in the vein of Conrad, which values only the latter. There are some approaches that try to balance the two, like instrumentalism. But like any philosophical problem of distinction, however we try to balance the two factors, there will always be counterexamples. In this way, Ereshefsky thinks that the project is doomed to fail. The distinction between health and disease does not map onto a permissible/impermissible intervention distinction. At best, it distinguishes between conditions that permit intervention (diseases) and conditions that require more consideration (health). If we say that all healthy conditions do not allow for intervention, we make preventative medicine impermissible. It would be much neater if we had a single theory that could give us normative guidance on whether or not it is permissible to intervene. A New Theory: “Do you want help?” I propose a new approach that is still normatively useful in that it helps decide between when intervention is permissible and when it is not, but it does not run into the same difficulties as a conceptual analysis of disease. On my account, the distinction between whether or not intervention is permissible comes down to the question of whether an agent wants help. If they do want help, one is permitted to intervene. If not, one is not permitted. This approach is most closely related to that of embedded instrumentalism but tries to eliminate the aspects of it that are not relevant to the normative distinction between intervening and not intervening. For now, I will take a relatively general view of what qualifies as “wanting help.” I imagine the theory would be used in clinical practice in which a particular symptom is brought to a clinician's attention and they have to determine whether or not it is permissible to intervene. Whether or not help is wanted would be determined by the agent, and “help” would be whatever the intervention the physician is considering. Typically, we think that the phrase “I need help” as remedying some status that the agent considers troubling, but what qualifies it as troubling is up to the agent. This approach solves some intrinsic problems of using a theory of disease as a moral guide. Although it may seem that this approach is just as circular as using a conceptual analysis of disease, it is not. To see this, we can consider the difference between asking whether someone wants help and whether one ought to help them. The first is a practical question, and therefore can be used to answer an ethical question – “Will I intervene?” – without the threat of circularity. The second is an ethical question and results in circularity when we try to use it in this case. With this new distinction, we are not substituting one distinction in for another; we are using the question of whether someone wants help as a guide to help us understand when we are permitted to intervene. Additionally, the question of whether someone needs help has exactly as much information as we need to determine whether or not to intervene. It is not bogged down by the complications of a conceptual analysis, but it covers disability and injury. Because the theory is not supposed to be used as a definition, only as a guide for action, there is no need to hold onto any “intrinsic idea of health” and we can limit the scope of our consideration to the agent’s desires. The theory is also immune to Hesslow's criticism that theories of disease are irrelevant to clinical practice. This approach is built with use in mind such that part of the theory itself is a normative guide for clinicians that clearly determines whether or not they are permitted to intervene. Although the theory draws significantly on instrumentalism, it doesn’t face the same problems. The primary counterarguments to instrumentalism are that it fails to provide a coherent conceptual analysis, which simply is not a problem for a theory that is explicitly not a conceptual analysis – the theory doesn’t have the same definitional burdens. Unlike instrumentalism, this theory doesn’t have to provide necessary and sufficient conditions to classify a condition as a disease. This new theory also aligns better with our intuitions about intervention than the normative extensions of the conceptual analyses of disease. As discussed in the introduction, it is in our interests to develop an intuitive theory both because intuition is valid evidence for ethical reasoning and because a theory that is unintuitive is much less likely to be followed and therefore considered useful. We can use case studies to test our intuitive distinction between who wants help and who does not. We can compare how closely the “help” distinction and the normative extension of the theories of diseases align with our intuitions. Case 1 : A person who knows they are pre-diabetic Intuition: Intervention (education, for example) is permissible. Case 2 : A person seeking an abortion for themselves Intuition: If we put aside the abortion debate, intervention is permissible. Case 3 : A person with delusion and hallucinations who is isolated from society (i.e. not a danger to anyone; harm to him does not impact others) and does not want help Intuition (crowd-sourced for three college students): Intervention is impermissible. A theory that relies on an evolutionary biology definition of “function” would respond that intervention is impermissible in both Case 1 and Case 2 because no system is (yet) malfunctioning. They would likely answer that intervention is permissible in Case 3 because some element of the delusional person’s psychological or physical systems is malfunctioning. These responses are the exact inverse of our intuitive responses. A constructivist based in a community similar to the one at Brown would respond that intervention is permissible in Cases 1 and 3 and not in Case 2. In Case 1, we value the condition of being pre-diabetic as undesirable. In Case 2, while we do not necessarily value the state of someone who has an unwanted pregnancy, we certainly do not pathologize the state as a disease. In Case 3, we generally see hallucinations and delusions as unacceptable. An instrumentalist would most closely align with our intuitions. They would likely respond that intervention is permissible in Case 1, assuming the person has some goals that would be more attainable if he were not diabetic. They would certainly respond that intervention is acceptable in Case 2 because we can conclude from the fact that the person is seeking an abortion that they have goals that would better be accomplished if they were not pregnant. The answer to Case 3 would depend on whether the instrumentalist subscribed to the Richman-Budson theory. If they accepted it, they would say that intervention is permissible because if the person had perfect knowledge of themselves, they would most likely have goals that would be better attained if their delusions and hallucinations stopped. If the instrumentalist accepted a more basic idea of instrumentalism where health is indexed to an individual’s actual desires, then they would claim that intervention is impermissible because the person does not have any occurrent goals that are better achieved by the cessation of their delusions. Independent of its comparison to the theories of disease, there are other reasons to adopt the “wants help” approach to intervention. By focusing on whether or not someone wants help, we are zeroing in on the normatively useful part of the much wider question of whether or not someone is in a diseased state. That is to say, when we ask whether or not someone has a disease in the context of deciding whether or not it is ethical to intervene, what we are really asking is whether or not they need help. Additionally, the theory is more humane and less pathologizing and paternalistic. It focuses on the individual and their self-determination, rather than a particular diagnosis, and it assumes that most people can properly practice their right to bodily autonomy most of the time. Shortcomings and areas of further investigation In this paper, I have laid out a new way of determining whether or not it is permissible to intervene in certain conditions, and there, of course, are major shortcomings of this theory. Some of them can be patched up, but most will require substantial consideration and reworking of the theory. The first potential problem is that if we keep the vague definition of “wants help” that makes paternalistic, value-laden ideas of “normal” and “healthy” unnecessary, we have to accept that some degree of “enhancement” (genetic, pharmaceutical, etc.) is morally permissible. If the agent finds their current situation troubling and wants an intervention that would help them, assuming that they understand the side effects, this theory would permit the intervention. This may be an acceptable conclusion, though, because the “wants help” question would be asked in a clinical setting and would not overrule any external rules or laws. So for example, a “neurotypical” person could not get a cognitive enhancer like Adderall for their SAT because it is against the rules of the College Board, but they could maybe get a prescription to keep themselves focused during a grueling day-long interview at a tech company. Another more serious problem is that our intuition about who needs help can sometimes differ from who actually wants help. Admittedly, there are significant benefits of posing the question as whether someone wants help, rather than whether someone needs help. It solves the problem of having to determine what it means for someone to need help, and it centers the agent’s autonomy and self-determination. However, someone who we may intuitively think “needs help” may not “want help.” The theory is threatened when we question someone’s ability to decide whether or not they need help. There are four types of cases in which we might think the agent lacks the ability to make these decisions: Someone who had the ability and lost it (e.g. someone with dementia) Someone who never had the ability (e.g. someone with a rare genetic disorder) Someone who may have the ability in the future but lacks it now (e.g. very young children) Someone who may be a reliable decision-maker but cannot communicate it (e.g. someone in a coma) When faced with these situations, we have two possible options. We could try to determine whether the person (or some proxy for them) wants help for themselves, or we could appeal to an idea of who “needs” help. In the first case, we have a reference of who the person was before they lost this ability, and they may even have a written account of what they want. Even though this is unlikely to answer the specific question of whether they want help in that moment, it may serve as a guide. The problem with trying to use what someone expressed in a previous state is that desires and values can change. Someone who we may not think can properly exercise their right to bodily autonomy due to illness may still be able to express feelings about whether or not they want help. The occurrent views may differ from those that they expressed in the past. In these situations, it is not necessarily clear which account to use. In the second, third, and fourth cases it seems reasonable to use a surrogate, ideally someone who has the agent’s best interests at heart and who we have reason to believe would make similar decisions to the agent if the agent had the ability (i.e. people in their normative community, family members, etc.). We could then base our action on whether the surrogate wants help for the agent. The benefit of this solution is that it resists a didactic idea of who “needs” help and places the responsibility as close to the agent as possible. On the other hand, there is no way of knowing who really has someone’s best interests at heart, and it opens up too much room for variation between what a surrogate wants and what the agent would have wanted in a counterfactual in which they could express whether or not they want help. Using a surrogate in the third case of the young child introduces new problems. The agent will actually regain the ability to express whether or not they want help, so having someone else make that determination for them is riskier because both the surrogate and the clinician are more accountable to the agent than in the first or second cases. On top of the accountability, it is difficult to determine whether an agent can exercise their bodily rights. With children especially, there is disagreement about what rights children at various developmental stages can exercise, and there is contentious literature to match.[17] ,[18] ,[19] How much bodily autonomy children, and particularly adolescents have, varies greatly across cultures and even across philosophical theories within cultures. Using a surrogate in the fourth case of the person in a coma introduces even more problems. In this case, a clinician would be overruling someone’s occurrent wants, even if they were to make the decision to intervene or not intervene that corresponded to the person’s wanting or not wanting help. Despite the fact that we have no access to them, there is something intuitively troubling about this. This new approach of asking whether or not an agent wants help and making a decision based on that information has advantages over appealing to a conceptual analysis of disease. The question of wanting help cuts straight to the normative question without being caught up in categorical issues and it aligns better with our intuitions. However, the theory has some structural problems, and it cannot account for any situation in which it is not clear what someone wants or in which we have reservations about what they want. Not only that, but fitting the theory into clinical practice would be difficult, if not impossible. Before we can consider what the theory would look like in practice, we must develop a coherent response to the situations in which what the person wants differs from what we think the person ought to have. Endnotes [1] Preamble to the Constitution of WHO as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, 19 June - 22 July 1946; signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives of 61 States (Official Records of WHO, no. 2, p. 100) and entered into force on 7 April 1948. [2] I mean “normative” in the sense of prescribing a specific state as “normal,” as opposed to “normative” in the sense of prescribing a specific course of action. [3] Murphy, Dominic. Psychiatry In the Scientific Image. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. [4] Boorse, Christopher. “On The Distinction Between Disease and Illness.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 58, no. 45 (1975): 49–68. [5] Kingma, Elselijn. "What Is It to Be Healthy?" Analysis 67, no. 2 (2007): 128-33. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25597789. [6] Kingma, Elselijn. “Paracetamol, Poison, and Polio: Why Boorse's Account of Function Fails to Distinguish Health and Disease.” Br J Philos Sci 61, no. 2 (2010): 241-264. [7] Gaines, A.D. “From DSM-I to III-R; Voices of Self, Mastery and the Other: A Cultural Constructivist Reading of U.S. Psychiatric Classification.” Social Science & Medicine 35, no. 1 (1992): 3-24. [8] Reznek, L., 1987. The Nature of Disease, New York: Routledge. [9] Murphy, Dominic. "Concepts of Disease and Health." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Spring 2015. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/health-disease/ . [10] Conrad, Peter. The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. [11] "Concepts of Disease and Health." [12] Richard, Kenneth A. and Budson, Andrew .E. “Health of Organisms and Health of Persons: An Embedded Instrumentalist Approach.” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 339, no. 21 (2000). [13] "Contraceptive Use in the United States." Guttmacher Institute. September 23, 2016. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-use-united-states . [14] Harris, John. Enhancing evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. [15] Hesslow, Germund. “Do We Need a Concept of Disease?” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 14, no. 1 (1993). [16] "Defining ‘Health’ and ‘Disease’." [17] Diekema, Douglas S., M.D., M.P.H. "Parental Decision Making." Parental Decision Making: Ethical Topic in Medicine. 2014. https://depts.washington.edu/bioethx/topics/parent.html [18] Worthington, Roger. “Standards of Healthcare and Respecting Children’s Rights.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 99, no. 4 (2006): 208–210. [19] Ruccione, Kathy; Kramer, Robin; Moore, Ida K; Perin, Gail. “Informed Consent for Treatment of Childhood Cancer: Factors Affecting Parents' Decision Making .” Journal of Pediatric Oncology Nursing 8, no. 3 (1991): 112-121.

Respect for the Smallest of Creatures An Analysis of Human Respect for and Protection of Insects Grace Engelman Brown University Author Nidhi Bhaskar Zoe Zacharopoulos Nicole Tsung Naima Okami Nicole Fegan Editors Fall 2019 Download full text PDF (19 pages) Abstract: Humans have a complicated relationship with insects. Fearing them, we are quick to kill spiders and stomp on ants. Benefitting from them, we raise honeybees and silkworms and use their products for our enjoyment. Depending on them, we try to save bee populations, realizing that many of our food sources would be lost if bees died out. My goal in this paper is to find ways to justify respecting and protecting insects. They have been systematically excluded from animal rights theories because we tend to believe that they lack sentience, the main criterion used to extend rights to nonhumans. As I will argue, the sentience criterion relies on anthropocentric thinking about the ways that animals experience the world. Choosing an alternative to the sentience criterion—one that does not rely on commonalities between insects and humans—is a necessary step in finding a motivation for respecting insects. I will test two approaches to respecting insects—one that involves granting them rights and another that requires thinking of them as possessing inherent worth. Then, I will use my analysis of insects to answer some broader questions in environmental political theory. Mainly, what is the basis for respecting nature even when it does not directly benefit us? Finding a way to respect the creatures that we consider the most difficult to live alongside and relate to serves as a useful test for determining the limits and scope of our respect for nature. "If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos." -E.O. Wilson Insect populations have declined rapidly in the last twenty years, and no one seems to care. As we gain more knowledge about the disappearance of insect species, some scientists and media outlets have publicized the news of a climate change-driven insect decline. But the vast majority of us remain unaware of the importance and vulnerability of the insect world. Given the abundance and variety of insects, it may seem as though the loss of certain species is insignificant. And yet, the complex web of life suggests otherwise. Almost every type of insect interacts with plant and animal species, providing necessary food, pollination, or fertile soil. These small creatures maintain life. Despite their importance, insects have been systematically excluded from theories of animal rights. We often fail to recognize in insects the qualities—such as sentience or the ability to feel pain—that we use to establish the rights of other animals. Our ignorance of insect sentience stems from the practical difficulty of studying their tiny nervous systems, along with an evolutionarily ancient aversion that creates barriers to understanding and relating to them. This failure to connect with insects often leads us to think of their death and suffering as insignificant. My goal in this paper is to analyze how we should interact with insects and find ways to justify respecting and protecting them. Overcoming the instinctual fear and repulsion many of us feel for these creatures is a necessary aspect of any proposal for respecting insects. Additionally, approaches to insect protection require adopting ecocentric views of conservation. Usually, arguments for protecting insects rely on their benefit to us. Many people care about saving bees, for example, because they pollinate plants that we eat. But given some of the shortcomings of anthropocentric approaches, it is necessary to think of alternative theories that guide us to respect insects apart from their relation to us. Finally, our consideration of insects challenges some of the criteria that we often use to extend rights and consideration to nonhuman animals. As I will argue, the popular sentience criterion relies on anthropocentric thinking about the ways that animals experience the world. Choosing an alternative to the sentience criterion—one that does not depend on commonalities between insects and humans—is another necessary step in finding a motivation for respecting insects. In sum, I will argue that respecting insects requires overcoming stigma, adopting an ecocentric approach, and abandoning the sentience criterion. After describing our current relationship to insects and their importance to various ecosystems, I will test two approaches to respecting insects—one that involves granting them rights and another that entails thinking of them as possessing inherent worth. I will assess each theory in terms of its treatment of stigma, ecocentrism, and the sentience criterion. Finally, I will discuss some of the implications of our treatment of insects for broader questions in environmental political theory. I. Our Relationship With Insects We use insects for a variety of purposes. In labs, scientists experiment on fruit flies to study ageing, genetics, human disease, and countless other topics. In gardens and on farms, we depend on bees and butterflies for the pollination of crops and flowers. It would not be possible to produce silk fabric and clothing without the labor of silkworms, nor would it be possible to break down soil or compost materials without various flies and maggots. Some people eat high-protein insects such as crickets and grasshoppers, and claim that entomophagy, or bug-eating, will become a necessity in the future as other food sources run out. Despite our dependence on and benefit from a wide range of insects, we tend to respond to them with fear or repulsion. Our nicknames for bugs—"creepy-crawlies and pests"—capture this attitude. Part of our aversion may stem from our negative associations with insects and the harm they cause. Ticks, mosquitoes, and other insects carry diseases such as Lyme, the Zika virus, and malaria. Parasites, including lice and bed bugs, encroach on our personal space and threaten the sanctity of our homes and bodies. Various types of locusts, worms, and beetles damage crops, threatening the livelihoods of farmers and those who rely on them for food. In contrast, the vast majority of insects neither pose a direct threat to us nor even benefit us in some way. And yet, our aversion to harmful insects usually extends to all insects. Many people are quick to kill the ants, spiders, and flies that appear in their homes, even when these insects pose no immediate threat. The ease with which we kill these insects stems from our fear (phobias of spiders, for example, are fairly common) and from our inability to relate to them. Perhaps we fail to connect with them because of their divergence from mammalian bodies—their wings, shells, and antennae contrast with the appendages of more familiar animals. Insects' size and abundance also seem to play a role in our tendency to discount them. How could an ant—a being as small as a crumb—possibly matter, especially when there are millions more of them? Most of all, it is difficult for us to recognize sentience in insects—the main attribute used to determine the degree to which an animal can be likened to humans. Our simultaneous dependence on and inability to relate to insects merge to form our complicated relationship with them. II. The Necessity of Insects What would the world look like without insects? Not only do insects benefit us in certain ways, but they also serve a vital role in ecosystems more generally. The naturalist E.O. Wilson refers to insects as "the little things that run the natural world." Though we are often unaware of their presence and necessity, their disappearance would spark a cascade of additional extinctions. Vital to the food chain, insects serve as a food source for most bird and fish species. Plants also benefit from insects in numerous ways, mainly through enhanced soil quality and pollination. Some plants depend on specific bee species for pollination, and some bee species can only acquire food from certain types of plants. This symbiotic relationship entails that when either partner—plant or insect—becomes endangered, the other suffers as well. Climate change has caused a massive decline in insect populations that humans are only just beginning to quantify and analyze. Given the size and abundance of insect species, it is difficult to track their decline. Additionally, there are millions of species that humans have never studied or counted before. But recent experiments that involve catching and recording large quantities of insects in certain areas have demonstrated that their numbers are declining quickly. For example, researchers studied arthropod populations in Puerto Rico's Luquillo rainforest between 1976 and 2012, a period in which maximum climate temperatures increased by two degrees Celsius. The decline of the arthropods mirrored a loss of lizard, frog, and bird species in the same forest. As the authors of this study write, "climate warming is the major driver of reductions in arthropod abundance," and leads to the "collapse of the forest food web." The decline of insects has caused a similar cascading effect in other parts of the world as well. Pollinators of all types (mainly bee and butterfly species) are declining at an unprecedented rate. Many native bee species in New England have become endangered due to disease, pesticides, and a reduction in the plants they require for food. As the bee species go extinct, native plant species die as well, and this dual decline harms bird populations in return. As biologist and bee ecologist Robert Gegear explains, the resulting lack of biodiversity could cause gardens and fields to transform into endless, green lawns. Vibrant gardens full of plant and animal life will wither away without pollinators. III. Approaches to Respect How should we interact with these creatures which we depend on but cannot relate to? Broadly, there are two categories of approaches that we could take. First, there are anthropocentric approaches, or strategies, that frame motives for conservation around human interests. There are at least two forms of anthropocentrism: (1) viewing the world from the perspective of humans without considering the perspectives of other beings or the natural world as a whole or (2) prioritizing the interests of humans over everything else. An example of (1) would be failing to grant moral consideration to insects because they may lack consciousness, a trait we sometimes use to determine whether we should extend moral rights or standing to other beings. As conscious animals ourselves, we often believe that consciousness is a key feature of a being that is "advanced enough" to receive our consideration. There are multiple examples of (2) in relation to insects. Some people believe that we should protect insects because they contribute to biodiversity, making the world more aesthetically pleasing to us. On a more drastic scale, some people argue that we should protect insects because ecosystems will collapse and we will lose food sources without them. One of the main dangers of anthropocentric thinking is that it leads us to exclude from our consideration the aspects of nature that do not (as far as we know) directly benefit us. This exclusion entails that we should not attempt to avert the suffering or extinction of plant and animal species that we have not decided benefit us in some way. Ironically, this exclusion fails to achieve the goals of anthropocentrism: it is likely that, due to our limited knowledge of nature and ecosystems, we will fail to save a species that we need. Given the complex web of organisms that makes up the natural world, it is not possible to foresee all of the consequences of failing to respect and protect a particular species. Additionally, this anthropocentric approach to conservation is dangerous in the sense that it could easily lead to more environmental harm in the future. As biologist Jeffrey Lockwood acknowledges, it was an anthropocentric view that "created the environmental problems confronting us today." Even if we could successfully use anthropocentrism and our fear of human extinction to motivate ourselves to reverse the trends of climate change, our lingering dominance over nature and prioritization of our immediate interests will lead to additional environmental problems in the future. A more radical shift in our relationship with nature is necessary to ensure lasting, positive change. Anthropocentric views contrast with ecocentric approaches to conservation, or approaches that take into account the needs and interests of beings besides humans by treating nature as an end in itself. An example of an ecocentric approach to conservation is arguing for the protection of a species of bees not because that species is necessary for human food sources or enjoyment, but simply because the bees matter inherently. When considering ways to interact with insects, we should prioritize ecocentric approaches over anthropocentric approaches, given the pitfalls of anthropocentrism. An ecocentric approach to interacting with insects involves some form of respect for insects and a motive for their protection beyond their relation to us. If insects are inherently valuable, then we owe them respect and should care about their interests. Theories of respect guide our actions and the way we treat other beings. For centuries, Western political theory framed humans as the only creatures deserving of respect. For example, the Kantian theory of respect features humans as the only rational beings, and thus the only entities that we should treat as ends in themselves. But this theory of respect entails that nonhumans can be exploited for the benefit of rational beings. The theories that I will analyze call into question this assumption, and provide us with alternative grounds for respecting nonhuman animals and aspects of nature. A) Insects as Citizens, Denizens, and Sovereigns One approach to respecting insects is to grant them rights. There are many different types of rights, including moral rights, legal rights, civil rights, and political rights. It may benefit insects and elevate their standing to extend some of these rights and protections to them. In their book Zoopolis , Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka propose a model for animal rights that ensures that animals' "basic interests cannot be sacrificed for the greater good of others." Even though Donaldson and Kymlicka label these rights "inviolable," they also acknowledge that there are situations in which these rights are not "absolute or unconditional," including when animals harm or threaten to harm humans. By centering animal rights in political theory, Donaldson and Kymlicka demonstrate ways to integrate animals into our existing models of citizenship and sovereignty. One of their strategies is to separate animals into three broad categories based on our levels of interaction with them: domesticated, liminal, and wild animals. Domesticated animals such as dogs, pigs, and chickens are oppressed in many ways; they are held in captivity, their labor is exploited, and some of them are killed and eaten on a daily basis. Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that, because we have integrated these animals into our society, we have certain obligations to them—mainly to listen to and interpret their interests and needs. The best way to reverse their oppression and ensure that their needs are met is to grant them full citizenship rights. Using comparisons to children and mentally disabled people, Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that humans can extend assistance and representation to animals by noticing their interests and then communicating them to the rest of society. Nonhuman animals are capable of communicating to us in nonverbal ways, and with the support of human companions, these expressions of their interests can be translated into the political system. Based on this citizenship theory of the rights of domesticated animals, humans should not harm them or exploit them for food or labor. Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that liminal animals should be allowed to live near and around us without subjection to extermination or harm. Even though they are not granted the rights of full citizens, they are still guaranteed the right to not be harmed and the right to have their interests included in decision-making and urban planning. Additionally, fully wild animals are granted rights to be protected from human destruction of their habitats. As sovereign beings, they are members of their own communities that humans cannot disrupt or harm. Their needs must be taken into account any time that humans build on or otherwise disrupt the land they inhabit. According to Donaldson and Kymlicka, the basis for granting these rights to animals is their sentience, which "has distinct moral significance because it enables a subjective experience of the world." Sentient creatures possess interests and goals; in other words, they "care about how their lives go." Based on this theory of animal rights, the possession of interests differentiates certain animals from rocks or trees. Though there may be reasons to protect and care about forests, we do not need to grant forests inviolable rights because trees are not sentient. When we look at them, we do not feel as though there is "someone home," or a person there. Thus, we only have obligations towards animals with subjective experiences of the world. If we apply this animal rights model to insects, then it is necessary to determine whether insects are sentient. Donaldson and Kymlicka explicitly exclude insects from their analysis, explaining that current evidence and scientific analysis suggests that insects are not sentient. Thus, insects are not granted inviolable rights or included in our conceptions of citizens, denizens, or sovereign beings. As Lockwood proposes, however, insects are more intelligent and aware than we might think, and our tendency to think of insects as "genetically programmed robots" has contaminated our ability to consider their sentience. In contrast with the view of insect sentience that Donaldson and Kymlicka propose, there exists evidence that suggests that insects can experience pain, form relationships, and solve problems. Testing whether a being has a subjective experience of the world is not a simple task; there is no standard set of attributes that determine sentience. To solve this issue, we can rely on some of the common criteria for sentience including consciousness, awareness, the capacity to feel pain, the ability to communicate, and the potential to problem-solve. Based on many definitions of sentience, if a living being possesses one or more of these attributes, we can regard it as sentient. Many scientists suggest that, at a bare minimum, insects have interests. For example, they try to avoid painful stimuli, including dangerous temperature changes, toxic chemicals, and electrical shock. They also writhe in response to pesticides, and they try to escape if they are physically restrained. It is possible that insects do not feel pain in response to these stimuli (pain is subjective, and therefore difficult to study in other beings). However, multiple studies indicate that insects can experience some form of visceral pain. It is also possible that insects communicate with each other. For example, honeybees use "an elaborate form of symbolic communication" or the "dance language" to share information on the "distance, direction, and desirability" of food sources and nesting sites. If, as this research suggests, insects possess the capacity for language, pain, and awareness, then they meet some of the criteria for sentience. Humans, however, tend to find it difficult to accept this conclusion. Regardless of our scientific advances in studying insect behavior and nervous systems, we remain quite removed from the insect world. No matter what we learn about insects, they are still (at least for most of us) difficult to relate to. Once again, the size of insects becomes a barrier to understanding them. It is difficult to imagine that such a small creature could have a complex enough nervous system to possess any criteria for sentience. Additionally, we may find it difficult to believe that insects are sentient because we tend to study pain, consciousness, awareness, and language in vertebrate animals. Many of our tests for sentience, for example, rely on verbal language or other human-centered ways of thinking about sentience. In order to adequately study insect sentience, we need to develop ways to test for consciousness and awareness that do not depend on our understanding of language. As Gegear explains, studying insect behavior and consciousness is akin to "studying a group of people where you don't know the language." In his book How Forests Think , Eduardo Kohn presents us with ways to think about human-insect communication. Based on observations of the rainforest in Ecuador's Upper Amazon as well as the people who live there (the Runa), Kohn suggests that "seeing, representing, and perhaps knowing, even thinking, are not exclusively human affairs." Kohn develops an expanded and flexible definition of selfhood; according to him, anything that interprets or represents the world in some way possesses a form of selfhood. For example, as flying ants in the rainforest relate to the environment and the beings around them in a certain way, he would argue they possess selfhood. One feature of their selfhood is their ability to communicate with other animals and to behave in a manner dependent on factors in the external world. Humans enjoy eating these flying ants, and are able to predict when the ants will emerge from the ground by paying attention to various signs from nature. These predictions are the result of "treating ants as the intentional communicating selves they are." The humans in this example use this form of communication to interact with the insects by hunting and eating them. It would not be possible to predict the ants' flight without implicitly acknowledging the ways that they understand and react to the world. With this example, Kohn demonstrates that in paying attention to and understanding the interests of insects, communication with them is possible. If we take all of these examples to suggest that insects have some form of sentience, then we can apply the Zoopolis theory to them. There are not many domesticated insects, but honeybees and silkworms would be extended full citizenship rights. Liminal animals such as spiders and ants would be denizens, and insects that live exclusively in the wild (the vast majority of them) would be sovereign beings. The rights of each of these groups may entail that we must avoid "unnecessary or insensitive handling or restraint" and refrain from killing them. Additionally, we could not use them as a food source or exploit them for their labor. The purpose of this paper is not to compile a comprehensive list of the rights of insects under this model, but rather to suggest that we could extend to them the rights of citizens, denizens, and sovereigns. Although it is possible to use the Zoopolis model to grant rights and protections to insects, this approach has two major shortcomings. The first involves barriers to communicating with and relating to insects. Based on this theory, taking into account the interests and needs of nonhuman animals requires crossing an inter-species communication barrier. As Kohn and Gegear argue (from an anthropological and biological view, respectively), insects are capable of communication. However, learning how to predict insect flight or studying insect behavior in a lab does not necessarily entail a full understanding of insects' interests. Donaldson and Kymlicka propose relying on humans to represent their animal companions in the political sphere. But do there exist willing and adequate human translators for insects? It is useful to consider as candidates the human members of our society who appear to know the most about insects. One group of candidates includes the farmers and gardeners who rely on certain species of insects for the pollination of crops and flowers. Their intimacy with plant life includes their knowledge of insect biology and behavior. Despite their reliance on (and perhaps respect for) pollinators, earthworms, and other "beneficial insects," many farmers and gardeners also engage in a constant battle with the insects that sabotage their plants. A farmer who cares about saving bee populations may simultaneously kill potato beetles, locusts, or other insects that damage crops. Although there may exist some exceptions, it seems as though most farmers and gardeners only engage with insects so far as they benefit or hurt plants, which is not an adequate foundation to build the type of relationship or companionship required for use of the Zoopolis theory. The Runa and other people who eat insects relate to them in a similar way. While they may learn a great deal about insects in order to predict their movements or learn how to raise them, the ultimate goal of their interactions is to hunt and eat the insects. It is important to note that eating insects does not necessarily entail a lack of respect for them. It may be necessary or justifiable in some situations to use insects as a food source. However, if the only goal of one's interactions with insects is to eat them, then the insects are used as a means to assuage human hunger; in other words, the insect serves a purpose for the human. Given the nature of this interaction, a person who eats insects is not in an ideal position to advocate for the insects' interests. Another group of humans who interact with insects frequently are entomologists and other scientists who study insects. Although these scientists may possess the best understanding of the biological mechanisms behind possible insect sentience, their scientific knowledge does not entail respect or a willingness to translate the needs of insects to the rest of society. In fact, many scientists who study insects keep them confined in tanks and cages for long periods of time and expose them to painful stimuli. Analyzing these various human-insect relationships reveals that, at least at present, it would be difficult to find adequate human representatives for the insect world. Even if it is possible to find some willing and knowledgeable humans, it is doubtful that there are enough of them to sufficiently represent the vast number of insect species that we interact with. There are far fewer domesticated animals in the world than there are insects, so domesticated animals are easier to accurately represent. However, it may be possible to overcome these difficulties by focusing our attention on a few of the species that we interact with most frequently or tend to exploit for resources and labor, such as honeybees and silkworms. The most significant barrier to finding human translators is the stigma associated with insects. Donaldson and Kymlicka write that "most humans come to understand and care for animals by having a relationship with them—observing them, hanging out with them, caring for them, loving and being loved by them." But we do not tend to think of people as "loving" insects or developing caring relationships with them. Because of our difficulty relating to them, which often takes the form of fear or disgust, our relationships with insects are not comparable to our interactions with dogs, cats, and other domesticated animals. This stigma against insects may begin to fade away. It is possible that, with more research on invertebrate nervous systems, we will gain enough knowledge of insect sentience to be able to relate to them. This scientific knowledge, however, may not succeed in helping us overcome the instincts that have led us to fear insects for centuries. Additionally, even if our view of insects changes, and we find a way to relate to them, it will only be because we recognize in them something that resembles us. A major flaw with our theories of respect is that each time we grant it to other creatures, it is often only because we see ourselves and aspects of our humanity in them. Even with enough research, it is possible that insects will never be considered similar enough to us to be included in this group. Therefore, we must overcome our dependence on relatability as a necessary criterion for respect. This shift in justification is a fundamental first step towards learning how to interact with insects in a more respectful way. The version of animal rights theory that Donaldson and Kymlicka articulate offers us no way to move beyond our narrow focus on resemblance as a basis for respect. The second problem with using the Zoopolis theory as the model for our treatment of insects is that, despite the extensive rights it grants to animals, it remains a fundamentally anthropocentric approach. The citizenship and sovereignty model that Donaldson and Kymlicka propose depends on existing political structures and concepts. As Donaldson and Kymlicka explain, "for many legal and political purposes, advancing an animal rights agenda will require using the pre-existing language of persons and extending it to animals." This dependence on human-designed models means that treating animals like citizens and sovereigns entails bringing them into a political landscape that was developed with humans in mind. The categories of citizen, denizen, and sovereign reflect language and political theory that is familiar only to humans. Thus, animals might be forced into a system that they ultimately cannot consent to, and that hinges on philosophical and moral principles that are inaccessible to them. To extend the human concepts of law, rights, and citizenship to animals entails viewing our relationship with them through an anthropocentric lens. Additionally, this theory's dependence on the concept of sentience allows the exclusion of many beings, including insects (at least until more scientific research is conducted and accepted). Humans have decided that sentience is a criterion for moral considerability because a subjective experience of the world is a core feature of humanity. Thus, when we recognize sentience in other animals, we begin to care about them as well. Donaldson and Kymlicka acknowledge that moral theories often fall into this anthropocentric trap by taking "humanity as [their] standard." Based on an anthropocentric view, animals "achieve moral standing only if they can be seen as possessing or approximating some aspect of [the] essence of humanity." Donaldson and Kymlicka believe that their theory avoids this trap by focusing on the protection of vulnerable beings rather than the protection of beings that relate to humans. Possessing sentience is a form of vulnerability because a being with sentience possesses interests that can be unfulfilled or harmed. But this response fails to demonstrate why the Zoopolis theory is not anthropocentric. Instead, it replaces sentience (an anthropocentric criterion for moral considerability) with another criterion that is equally anthropocentric: vulnerability. A human understanding of vulnerability suggests that a being must be sentient to have interests or be harmed. Again, this view of vulnerability is based on our own experiences of the world and fails to take into account the experiences or perspectives of other living beings. Thus, focusing on vulnerability does not demonstrate that this version of animal rights theory avoids anthropocentrism. B) Respecting Nature Another approach to understanding the way we should interact with insects is to rely on ecocentric views of their worth. In his article "The Ethics of Respect for Nature," philosopher Paul Taylor presents us with an alternative to anthropocentric environmental ethics. Taylor argues that we have moral obligations to plants and animals to "protect or promote their good for their sake." These moral obligations include respecting the "integrity of natural ecosystems," saving endangered species, and minimizing environmental pollution. The reason we should care about the well-being and survival of plant and animal species is that each living thing possesses an "inherent worth" and a "good," or well-being. In contrast with theories that depend on sentience as a criterion, Taylor's theory relies instead on these two features of living beings. According to Taylor, "every organism, species population, and community of life has a good of its own which moral agents can intentionally further or damage by their actions." Humans, plants, insects, and other animals all possess interests that can be protected or harmed (notice that inanimate objects such as rocks do not fall into this category). Generally, these interests include staying "strong and healthy." Thus, even if a plant is not necessarily aware of being harmed or benefited, it can still be injured or helped in certain ways. The second main feature of Taylor's argument is that all living things possess inherent worth. Part of this inherent worth stems from the fact that living things deserve moral consideration as "members of the Earth's community of life." Granting all living beings moral consideration does not mean that they possess inviolable rights; it only entails that every living being must be considered when making decisions. Establishing the inherent worth of living things also involves considering it "intrinsically valuable" to protect the interests of living things whenever possible. Taylor argues that granting each living being inherent worth and moral considerability allows us to develop a certain attitude towards all of nature that he labels "respect for nature." Taylor's theory accounts for some of the shortcomings with the Zoopolis theory. The respect for nature that he articulates does not entail granting consideration to living things based on their similarities to humans. For example, consciousness is not a necessary criterion for moral considerability. Rather, we begin to respect each living thing simply because it possesses intrinsic value. This theory allows us to transition away from the sentience criterion and other human-centric criteria for respect. Additionally, and more broadly, Taylor's theory outlines an ecocentric approach to respecting nature. When applied to insects, his theory entails that we should respect them because we understand that they possess a good and inherent worth. Thus, we are obligated to respect their interests by refraining from harming them, and we need to take into account their interests when interacting with them or making decisions that influence them. C) The Limits of our Respect How might we decide which species' well-being to prioritize when those interests come into direct conflict? The main problem with Taylor's theory is that he does not articulate the limits of our respect for insects or other aspects of nature. If we adopt Taylor's theory, then we must treat all living beings with equal respect. How then, can we determine whether and how to prioritize our interests above the interests of insects? This account of respect cannot effectively guide us in situations in which insects pose a threat to our wellbeing or survival. There are many situations in which it might be necessary to harm or kill an insect (or insects) in order to protect ourselves or others. In Zoopolis , Donaldson and Kymlicka present us with a way to think about potential conflicts between our rights and those of animals. Their solution to the human-animal conflict of interests is to apply what Rawls refers to as the "circumstance of justice." This principle, based on Hume's statement that "ought implies can," suggests that "humans only owe justice to each other when they are in fact able to respect each other's rights without jeopardizing their own existence." Thus, justice only applies in certain situations—when one's life is not at stake. If a mosquito that is likely to carry a disease is biting us, we are justified in killing it given that it has the potential to kill us. Our relationships with insects may also change over time. An insect that currently poses no threat may evolve to carry a fatal disease, changing the circumstances of justice. Thus, "assessing and sustaining the circumstances of justice is...an ongoing task." Another approach to recognizing the limits of our respect for or protection of insects is to "shift the burden of proof" onto humans. Lockwood establishes the moral considerability of insects by arguing (like Taylor) that they possess certain interests that can be harmed or helped by humans. Based on this moral considerability, Lockwood proposes a minimum ethic for our treatment of insects: We ought to refrain from actions which may be reasonably expected to kill or cause nontrivial pain in insects when avoiding these actions has no, or only trivial, costs to our own welfare. Lockwood describes a circumstance of justice; so long as insects pose no threat to our well-being, we should not kill or harm them in any way. This minimum ethic places the burden on humans to demonstrate the necessity of harming an insect before acting. Notice that this minimum ethic fails to grant any positive rights or protections to insects—it does not show us how we should help or protect insects in ways that exceed simply avoiding directly harming them. Instead, it demonstrates a baseline of respect for insects: it is not morally justifiable to kill an insect for no reason. These theories give different accounts of the type of situations in which we can justifiably harm insects. Donaldson and Kymlicka measure insects' threat to human existence, while Lockwood draws our attention to insects' threat to human welfare more generally. Lockwood's articulation of the limits to our respect is a more useful and practical approach. With their theory, Donaldson and Kymlicka ignore the fact that humans possess interests other than survival. Our health and happiness, for example, are additional human interests that may weigh into our decisions about how to treat insects. Lockwood presents us with a way to integrate some of our other interests besides survival into our consideration of human-insect conflict. Although Lockwood's theory provides us with a more useful account of the limits of our respect, it also complicates our decisions. When we expand our list of relevant human interests past survival, it becomes more difficult to measure them and to use them in decision-making. Determining whether an insect will kill us is more straightforward than determining the degree to which an insect will affect our quality of life or overall health. If one has a choice between eating insects or dying of starvation, the decision they should make is clearer than deciding whether to endure hunger for a short period or eat insects. Lockwood offers us no limit on the types of interests that we can take into account when prioritizing our wellbeing. He acknowledges that "the control of insects to prevent cosmetic damage" to crops is not justified by his minimum ethic. Additionally, he explains that major threats to our health justify harming insects. But many cases, including the consumption of insects as food, do not clearly fit into the categories of cosmetic harm or serious health threat. Thus, Lockwood's minimum ethic fails to offer us guidelines for navigating these more nebulous conflicts of interest. IV. Humans and Nature The current dominant approach to protecting insects is to articulate their benefit for humans. People might rally to save honeybees because of our reliance on their labor or our enjoyment of their honey. Similarly, people might feel motivated to protect insects in order to save certain plant or bird species they like. In each situation, the desire to protect insects stems from our needs and interests. Even when humans discuss the protection of insects in the context of climate change, their goals remain anthropocentric. A negative consequence of adopting anthropocentric views is that we tend to anthropomorphize nature. It is only when we believe we have recognized a "human" aspect of an animal (or plant) that we begin to view it as deserving of our moral consideration. But this approach to respecting nature fails to extend respect and protection to multiple nonhuman animals and plants, including insects. Until recently, we have assumed that insects are mere robots without any sort of consciousness or feelings. And even with the advent of promising research into the subject, we are not confident that insects are sentient. Our requirement that “respectable” creatures must fulfill a sentience criterion has led us to invest an insufficient amount of resources and energy into protecting insect species that are now endangered or extinct. The great insect decline of the last twenty years is a sobering reminder of the consequences of that perspective. Understanding the shortcomings of the sentience criterion leads us to understand that, more broadly, we cannot pick and choose the aspects of nature we want to respect. Each individual organism, plant and animal species, and community should be afforded the same baseline respect in terms of moral consideration. Even if there are reasons to prioritize one species' interests over the interests of another species, we must, at a minimum, consider the interests of all affected creatures before acting. We should not base our moral consideration of nature on arbitrary principles such as sentience. Nor should we base our moral consideration on the degree to which we fear or avoid certain species such as insects. Fear and a lack of understanding or relatability should not entail disrespect. To gain our respect and protection, it is enough just to exist. Taylor's theory encapsulates this message and offers us an ecocentric approach to respecting insects and nature more broadly. Adopting his theory would allow us to abandon the sentience criterion and respect insects even when we cannot find an aspect of resemblance or similarity between them and us. However, Taylor's theory leaves us with unanswered questions about how to balance our interests with the interests of nature, and how to determine the situations in which we can use insects for certain purposes. It is necessary, therefore, to piece together aspects of Taylor's theory with other theories that outline methods for weighing our interests against those of insects. Using Taylor's theory, we can think of our respect for insects as independent of the sentience criterion, and we can find inherent value in their existence. If we also draw upon Lockwood's minimum ethic, we can describe some of the situations in which it may be necessary to harm or kill insects, and we can find the justification for prioritizing our interests when our welfare is at risk. This blend of theories requires us to take into account the interests of insects and consider our effect on them when acting or making decisions. V. Conclusion Drawing to a conclusion our centuries-long domination of nature will require a change in our theories and our practices. In particular, it requires abandoning anthropocentric approaches to conservation. How can we convince people to adopt a more ecocentric view of nature in place of an anthropocentric one? One strategy is to acknowledge the degree to which the two approaches converge. Although their intents differ, their results may be similar. Saving the human species probably requires finding a way to protect and respect the environment so that our habitats, ecosystems, and resources are preserved. And, as I have argued, it is not possible to protect the environment without adopting a fully ecocentric approach. Thus, adopting an ecocentric view and learning to care about the environment for its inherent worth would directly benefit us and improve our chances of survival. Unfortunately, acknowledging the convergence between the two approaches seems to require an ecocentric view in the first place. If we continue to view ourselves as separate from the rest of nature, then we will not notice the myriad ways in which we are woven together with the natural world and share the same habitat and desire for survival. In contrast, if we begin to see ourselves as more connected with nature, then a clear delineation between anthropo- and ecocentric views will fade away; all efforts to care for the environment will benefit nature (which includes us). But how can we break down this barrier that we have established? For inspiration, we can look to the pollinating bee and the pollinated flower. As Gegear explains, the two beings are not individuals—rather, they are a combination, an interdependent relationship, an assemblage. Neither one can exist without the other species. The bee and the flower represent the interconnectedness essential to all ecosystems and the strength of a relationship rooted in common interest. If we similarly begin to see our interests in survival as intertwined with the interests of nature, then it will be far easier to overcome anthropocentric barriers to respecting nature. Even if some of our interests come into conflict, our ultimate interest in preserving the natural habitat that is common to all living things. We are forced to share the same space and resources. Acknowledging the areas in which our interests merge helps us to understand that we are not separate from this network of life. Even the smallest of creatures—the ants, bees, and worms of the world—depend, like us, on the health of the environment, and thus deserve our respect. Works Cited Chittka, Lars and Catherine Wilson, "Bee-brained." Aeon . November 27, 2018. Donaldson, Sue and Will Kymlicka. Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights . New York, Oxford University Press, 2011. Interview with Robert Gegear, November 29, 2018. Jarvis, Brook. "The Insect Apocalypse is Here." The New York Times Magazine , November 27, 2018. King, Barbara J. "The Joys and Ethics of Insect Eating." NPR, April 3, 2014. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human . Berkeley, University of California Press, 2013. Lister, Bradford C. and Andres Garcia. "Climate-driven Declines in Arthropod Abundance Restructure a Rainforest Food Web." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA , September 2018. Lockwood, Jeffrey A. "The Moral Standing of Insects and the Ethics of Extinction." The Florida Entomologist 70, no. 1, 1987, pp. 70-89. Smith, Jane A. "A Question of Pain in Invertebrates." ILAR Journal, vol. 33, no. 1-2, 1991, pp. 25-31. Taylor, Paul. "The Ethics of Respect for Nature." Environmental Ethics , vol. 3, 1981, pp. 197- 218. Wilson, E. O. The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth . New York, W.W. Norton, 2006.

Cannabis Latent Effects of Cannabis Legalization: Racial Disproportionality and Disparity in Washington State Drug Convictions, 2000-2015 Kaid Ray-Tipton University of Washington Author Danai Benopoulou Matthew Dowling Bastien Ibri Shreya Raghunandan Editors Spring 2018 Understanding if racial disparities in drug convictions decreased post the implementation of cannabis legalization in Washington state. Introduction There has been a great amount of research analyzing racial disparities in drug arrests (Beckett, Nyrop, Pfingst and Bowen, 2005; Kutateladze, Andiloro, Johnson and Spohn, 2014). Findings show that black people have disproportionate arrest rates compared to Whites. In fact, “Blacks are 3.73 times more likely than Whites to be arrested for marijuana possession” (ACLU, 2013). These statistics are surprising given that Blacks and Whites use cannabis at a comparable rate (ACLU, 2013). Hispanic communities are also impacted. Racial disparities in drug crimes in this group are harder to measure quantitatively because some agencies group Hispanic or Latinos with Whites. This causes the White conviction rate to increase, thus deflating the racial disparity present. In New York City where Latino arrest rates are available, “Latinos are arrested at 2.5 times the rates of Whites for marijuana possession” (ACLU, 2013). Richard Nixon’s declaration for the “War on Drugs” that began in the 1970’s has had many negative latent effects on communities of color and has contributed greatly to racial disproportionality in mass incarceration (Sharp, 1994). For example, “arrest for marijuana possession… accounted for nearly 80 percent of the growth in drug arrest in the 1990s” (Alexander, 2010). Images within media have reinforced the link between people of color and their involvement with drugs (Bullock, Wyche and Williams, 2001). These socially constructed depictions have influenced prejudices and stereotypes which in turn create implicit biases. These biases have been shown to have profound effects on police enforcement tactics and decision making (Levinson, 2007). Currently, police across the nation have the discretion to stop and search people under “reasonable suspicion” that an individual may be in possession of illegal drugs (Yankah, 2011). These so called “Terry” stops allow police officers to use the notion of reasonable suspicion to stop and frisk individuals (Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 1968). Such inquiries frequently rely on police officers’ own intuition - an intuition often affected by the aforementioned implicit biases. Scholars have suggested that this policing is not evenly distributed among neighborhoods and across socioeconomic statuses. To be more specific, racially and ethnically diverse areas may be subject to over-policing while predominantly white neighborhoods may be more likely to be under-policed (Beckett, Nyrop and Pfingst, 2006). Therefore, more police enforcement in communities of color leads to more stops and searches among people of color. These outdoor drug busts may lead to a disproportionate increase in convictions for Blacks and Hispanics. Blacks are disproportionately convicted for cannabis related offenses, which disrupts many areas of life including family, employment opportunities, housing, and well-being (Massey, 2007). It is important to note that even stops and searches that yield no results for the police may lead to continued harassment and embarrassment for members of the community due to the “War or Drugs”. Recently, cannabis has been highly debated as a substance that could be legalized for medical and/or recreational purposes (Coulkins, Kilmer, Kleiman, MacCoun, Midgette, Oglesby, Paucula and Reuter, 2015). The federal government has yet to lift the national prohibition of cannabis but many states have begun to revise their laws regarding it. There are currently 23 states and the U.S. territories of Guam and Puerto Rico that have passed laws to legalize medical cannabis. There are only nine states and the District of Columbia that have legalized recreational use as well; these states include Alaska, California, Colorado, Oregon, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Vermont, and Washington (Guttmannova, Lee, Kilmer, Fleming, Rhew, Kosterman and Larimer, 2016). Cannabis being decriminalized in these states may have profuse positive outcomes for people of color. Policing would be reduced for cannabis use and possession within these states. Blacks and Hispanics in these areas may be subject to fewer convictions by police because of the nature of the fledgling laws. In this paper, I will analyze latent outcomes of the legalization of cannabis. More specifically, I will examine racial disproportionality in drug conviction pre and post the legalization of cannabis for recreational use in King County and Washington State. I expect to find reductions in racial disproportionality in drug convictions post cannabis legalization at the county and state level. Background History of Cannabis in the United States and Its Links to Race/Ethnicity Scholars suggest that cannabis was first brought to the United States in the beginning of the 1600s. The Jamestown settlers primarily used this plant in hemp production and cultivation until around 1850 (Anderson, Hansen and Rees, 2013). The uses for hemp ranged from clothing and oil to edible nuts. Subsequently following the end of hemp cultivation was the use of hemp for medicinal purposes. The use of herbal medicine did not last very long. As the alcohol prohibition gained support in the 1850s, so did the movement to outlaw cannabis. The first prohibition of recreational cannabis use was passed in 1913 by California. By 1936, the rest of the 47 states decided to do the same (Anderson, Hansen and I. Rees, 2013). In the years to come, these policies led to immense consequences for the consumer, including the label of felon with a stigma that restricted occupational attainment, and included hefty incarceration time and large monetary sanctions. For instance, possessing one joint (cannabis cigarette) in Arizona could lead to up to 10 years in prison with a fine of $50,000 (Inciardi, 1981). Policies and laws such as these became monolithic because “those who have actively promoted these laws, the moral entrepreneurs of drug legislation, have relied on racial slurs and allusions to bolster their arguments for criminal controls” (Provine, 2007). In 1970, cannabis was classified as a Schedule I substance along with heroin and LSD. For a substance to be listed as a Schedule I drug, it must not be accepted for medical use, have a high potential for abuse, and be considered a dangerous drug that can cause psychological and physical dependence (United States Drug Enforcement Administration, 2015). As time moved on, groups began to consider cannabis for medicinal purposes. The Food and Drug Administration began to allow cannabis for medical use in 1978. The number of medical cannabis patients flourished and California eventually passed the Compassionate Use Act in 1996 to allow for personal use of the plant (N. Yankah, 2011). Two years after, Washington State passed Initiative 692 titled Washington State Medical Use of Marijuana Act (Washington State Medical Association). This allowed for the growing, possession, sale, and use of cannabis for medical patients. It is worth noting that this initial stance against cannabis did not necessarily happen out of fear of the potential negative effects of the drug, such as addictive, psychological, and physiological damage. Instead, the prohibition on cannabis developed as a result of anti-minority feeling (Bonnie and Whitebread, 1970). Inciardi (1981) conducted a social constructionist analysis of newspapers about cannabis published in the late 1800s and early 1900s and showed that headlines negatively linked cannabis with communities of color. For example, the New York Times published an article in 1972 titled “Mexican Family Go Insane”. This particular article detailed how a widow and her four children accidentally ate cannabis as part of their vegetables for dinner. In the neighbor’s account, they described hearing “crazed laughter” and rushed to the house to see the entire family “insane”. The doctors said that there would be no hope for the mother and children and that they would be insane for the rest of their lives. These early depictions linking race and drugs have lasting effects on media consumers. For example, results from a study done in 1995 asked respondents to imagine what a typical drug user looks like. Analysis indicates that 95% of the respondents thought of an African American person (Burston, Jones and Robertson-Saunders, 1995). The acceptability of illegal substance tended to rely on the social position of the consumers (H. Skolnick and Dombrink, 1978). The perceived deviance of cannabis intensified once linked with racial/ethnic minorities. Whites were seen as upper class and angelic. People of color were paired with a lower social class, at times considered non-human in the early 1900s. This helps explain the overstated deviance of cannabis. The deviance also increased when the effects were dramatized and exaggerated. In 1936, the American Journal of Nursing said that a cannabis user may “suddenly turn with murderous violence upon whomever is nearest to him. He will turn amuck with knife, axe, gun, or anything else that is close at hand, and will kill or maim without any reason" (Musto, 1991). Articles such as these from professionals are an example of the control around cannabis use and how it was perceived by the general public. Cannabis Laws in King County and Washington State and Implications for 2012 As Seattle is the most populated city in King County and thus Washington State, I will give emphasis to their policies and the city will have the most influence per this discussion. In 2003, Seattle, Washington voters passed the Marijuana Law Enforcement or “Initiative 75”. This initiative required all cannabis offenses for adult personal use to be the lowest priority for the Seattle Police Department (SPD) (Atherly and Baird, 2014). This change in the Seattle municipal code was a huge step towards decriminalization of cannabis in Washington State (Seattle, Washington Municipal code 12A.20.060). Subsequently, on November 6th 2012, Washington Initiative 502 was approved by a majority vote (Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board, 2015). The cannabis reform had many different components that took over a year to be fully established. The passing of I 502 legalized the recreational use of cannabis for individuals 21 and older. A 21 year old may possess up to one ounce of usable cannabis, seven grams of cannabis concentrates/extracts, 16 ounces of cannabis infused in a solid form, up to 72 ounces of cannabis infused in liquid form, and also paraphernalia related to cannabis. Only cannabis producers, processors, and retailers with a license are permitted to distribute cannabis. Seattle’s massive drug market has been analyzed and researched during these years to learn if there are disparities among race and ethnicities in drug convictions. Katherine Beckett demonstrates that Seattle is unique in many ways. During the 2000s, Seattle was estimated to have the fourth largest drug market in the country. The predominantly white city has a white population of about 70% and 8% black population. Despite the low proportion of Blacks, during a 28-month investigation in Seattle, black people represented 51.1% of drug violation arrests (Beckett, Nyrop, Pfingst and Bowen, 2005). Beckett et. al (2005) attribute most of these arrests to the focus on crack cocaine by the SPD. This may be due to the fact that crack cocaine has been represented through media as a “Black” drug (Kutateladze, Andiloro, Johnson and Spohn, 2014). Another reason for the high number of arrests is explained by the location of the drug market. Beckett et. al suggest that the SPD tends to focus on racially diverse outdoor drug markets, such as Downtown Seattle, compared to indoor and/or outdoor White drug markets, such as a neighborhood named Capitol Hill (Beckett, Nyrop and Pfingst, 2006). Previous research on Seattle’s drug market indicates that Blacks and Hispanics do not necessarily use or sell at higher rates than Whites, and yet, the SPD tends to focus on people of color. These results of racial disparity are consistent with other states as well. New York data shows that there are not just disproportionate percentages in possession/delivery arrests, but that Blacks and Hispanics are also more likely than Whites to be arrested for smoking cannabis in public and cannabis misdemeanor sales. They are also likely to spend more time in jail or prison for these cannabis offenses (Golub, D. Johnson and Dunlap, 2007). Thus, it is clear that people of color—primarily Blacks and Hispanics—are being convicted disproportionately for drugs. Given that cannabis is legal in the state of Washington, I want to first investigate if the legalization has had a significant impact on the number of drug convictions for people of color. Second, I will examine how much of an impact a prior conviction has on one’s probability of being convicted of a drug offense for each race and ethnicity. This is done by first illustrating drug conviction rates and then examining drug convictions on the condition that the offender has a prior conviction. I also compare the results from King County to Washington as a whole. Lastly, I have computed multivariate logistic regressions to analyze the likelihood of being convicted of a drug offense in Washington State and King County. There have been reports that show cannabis-related arrests and convictions have decreased 81% between 2011 and 2014 (Drug Policy Alliance, 2015). There may be racial/ethnic differences, which I will attempt to contextualize. Subsequently, I will examine the association between the 2012 legalization of cannabis in Washington State and drug conviction rates between different racial/ethnic groups. Methods In the following analysis, I focus on racial/ethnic disproportionality and disparity in drug convictions in Washington State. Unfortunately, the data does not allow me to break out cannabis-related convictions from other types of drug convictions. I use the term disproportionate in convictions to refer to the overrepresentation of certain groups of defendants compared to their representation in the general population. I use the term disparity in convictions to refer to the portion of overrepresentation in convictions of one subgroup that can be explained by differences in the institutional processing of that specific racial/ethnic group as compared to other racial/ethnic groups. That is, racially motivated differences in processing and treatment explains disproportionate overrepresentation of certain groups in drug convictions. Data I examined all convictions within the state of Washington from January of 2000 to June of 2015 using data from the Database and Sentencing of Washington State Caseload Forecast Council Sentencing Data (Washington State Caseload Forecast Council, 2000-2015). My data includes 409,455 convictions of which 36,521 were drug convictions. Variables The dependent variable for analysis is drug conviction (1) or non-drug conviction (0). The primary independent variable of interest is the race/ethnicity of the convicted defendant. The racial/ethnic categories used are White (reference group), Black, Asian, Native American, and Hispanic. The control variables included in the analysis are year of conviction, 2000 (reference year) to 2015, sex (0=Female, 1=Male), county of conviction (King County is reference county), and whether the defendant had any prior convictions (0=no prior offense, 1=prior offense). Each of the control variables will be needed to test the robustness of the influence that the dependent variable has on the independent variable. The year of conviction is relevant because there are many fluctuations over the years in drug convictions. In 2012, Washington State legalized recreational cannabis usage for individuals over 21 years old. There are also gender differences in risk of arrest and convictions (Rodriguez, Curry and Lee, 2006). The counties of Washington State contain differing police practices and demographics. We predict that if a defendant had prior convictions, that might increase the likelihood of a subsequent conviction. These individuals may be targeted as the “usual suspects” (Kutateladze, Andiloro, Johnson and Spohn, 2014). Analytical Approach I compute several bivariate and multivariate logistic regression models. Model A includes all Washington State conviction cases, and Model B includes only convictions in King County, the largest county in this state. The full-state logistic bivariate regression is: The logistic multivariate regression for Washington will be computed as: The King County logistic bivariate regression is formulated as: The King County formula logistic regression is computed as follows: To test for significance of the data, I have conducted a two-tailed 95% confidence interval. When p-values are below a α level of .05, this will indicate that we reject the null hypothesis. The HO is as follows, there is no difference by race or ethnicity in the number of drug convictions when compared to whites (β=0). The HA can be understood as the number of drug convictions is different for each race or ethnicity when compared to whites (β≠0). Findings I will present the findings under three categories. I first examine the racial and ethnic disproportionality in drug conviction. I then discuss the relationship between prior drug convictions and new drug convictions. Finally, I discuss the racial and ethnic disparity in drug conviction. Table 1 presents the summarized statistics for the racial, ethnic, and gender characteristics of convicted defendants in Washington State and King County, averaged between the years 2000 and 2015. Comparing pie charts 1 and 2, and 3 and 4 above demonstrate clear disproportionate numbers when comparing Whites and Blacks in Washington, King County in particular. As the pie charts show, in the state of Washington, Whites comprise 80.7% of the population and 65.49% of drug convictions. Blacks make up a small percentage of the Washington population (4.1%), but an astonishing 5th of the drug convictions (20.08%) - clearly disproportionate. On the other hand, all the other races, i.e. Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians all have drug convictions relative to or less than their population size in the state. Table 1: Variables and Summary Statistics for Washington State and King County Drug Convictions, 2000 - 2 Note: The median, mean and standard deviation are each the median value across all years (Washington State Caseload Forecast Council) Racial and Ethnic Disproportionality in Drug Convictions Figure 1 is a line graph showing the number of drug convictions by race and year in the whole state. In terms of aggregate numbers, Whites have a larger number of convictions than non-Whites. For most years, Whites remain above 1,300 drug convictions and display 464 convictions halfway through 2015. Native Americans and Asians are convicted at similar rates in Washington State, staying below 75 drug convictions every year. Native Americans hold 9 drug convictions and Asians have 20 for 2015. Hispanic drug convictions have been on a steady decline since 2000. 2015 shows that Hispanics have 69 drug convictions. Blacks peak with 758 drug convictions in 2000, slowly decrease over time hovering around the 500 line until 2010, and then are convicted of a drug offense 87 times in 2015. When first looking at Figure 1, there does not seem to be a significant disparity in drug convictions for Blacks. However, examination of the proportions of convictions suggest racial disproportionality in conviction rates. I will do this by analyzing the proportions of drug convictions regardless if there has been any prior conviction in Figure 2. Throughout all sixteen years, Whites in Washington are convicted well under their 2014 population size. In 2012, the year of legalization, and beyond, Blacks experience their all-time lows in conviction rates for drugs. However, despite their smallest percentage at 13% of the drug conviction rate in 2014 and 2015, it is still about double their population size of 6.7%. On the other hand, Asians, Native Americans, and Hispanics are convicted of a drug offense relative or under their population size. The story changes dramatically when we analyze King County. Figure 3 represents drug convictions in King County. Although Blacks only make up 6.7% of the population in King County, they still have up to about half of the drug convictions for most years. This shows immense disproportionality in conviction rates. On the other hand, other ethnic and racial groups are convicted at rates under or comparable to their population. Relationship Between Prior Drug Convictions and a New Drug Conviction Looking at the Washington drug convictions show that an individual with prior convictions has significantly higher chances of future conviction. Figure 5 illustrates that every year excluding 2015, Blacks with a prior conviction comprise 50% or more of drug convictions. Again, Blacks are 6.7% of the population in King County. Yet among drug convictions annually, Blacks with a prior conviction comprise up to 65% of those convicted of subsequent drug crimes. This data indicates that Blacks are being re-convicted at much higher rates if they have a prior offense than are Whites, who comprise a majority (70%) of the population. Figure 5 shows that the two lowest fractions for Blacks are in years after legalization. The data set shows an increase in 2013 (60%) but then lows in 2014 (50%) and 2015 (45%). Figures 4 and 5 suggest that convictions may have been influenced by the passing of Initiative 75 in King County. Both graphs show that in 2002, there were high proportions of Black people who were convicted of drug-related offenses, and the percentage decreases by a few percentage points in 2003. This could be the result of the de-emphasis of cannabis arrests in King County. This percentage drastically reduced after the passing of I-75, from 29% to 13% in Washington, and from 62% to 45% in King County. Racial and Ethnic Disparity in Drug Conviction Figures 6 and 7 present the odds ratios computed from the multivariate logistic regression. The model compares each racial and ethnic groups probability of being convicted of a drug offense in King County or Washington to Whites’ probability of being convicted. For example, a value of 1.00 means that a person of that race has the same probability of a White individual being convicted. This would mean that in the year 2000, the odds ratio of 2.68 means that Hispanics in Washington State had a 168% higher probability of being convicted of a drug offense than Whites. The Washington and King County multivariate logistic regressions are surprisingly different. Figure 6 presents findings for the likelihood of a drug conviction in Washington State. It shows that Hispanics hover above the odds ratio of 1.50 for every year except for 2006. These numbers show that Hispanics are consistently convicted at higher rates than Whites. Blacks also have higher conviction rates in Washington State. Post cannabis legalization, the likelihood of conviction for a drug offense has decreased for Blacks, bringing the rate to almost that of Whites. In recent years, Blacks’ likelihood of conviction has decreased to about 56% of their White counterparts’ likelihood of being convicted. Asians are convicted around the same rate as Whites, never showing disparity. Figure 7 presents findings for the likelihood of a drug conviction in King County. Asians are convicted at the lowest rates next to Native Americans. For the first ten of the sixteen years of data, Hispanic individuals have over 200% higher likelihood than their White counterparts of being convicted of drug offenses. In 2007, however, the higher likelihood was 673%. Similarly, for most years, Black individuals are 100% more likely to be convicted of a drug offense. However, comparable to the other racial and ethnic categories, post 2012 we see a decrease in the rates of disparity. The logistic regression shows that the probability of getting a drug conviction in King County if you are Black still ranges between 70% and 108% higher likelihood than Whites. Washington State data shows otherwise. Three of the lowest probability ratings come in 2012 and beyond. This data could potentially mean that legalization is having a continuing positive effect on Black communities in Washington. Fewer individuals may be subject to harassment and patrolling because of the nature of the new laws. I have also the statistical significance for each race indicator variable using the multivariate logistic regressions. I have conducted a two-tailed hypothesis test with a 95% confidence interval. Figure 8 shows the distribution of how many years each coefficient on race/ethnicity were statistically significant in Washington and King County. In Washington State, the race indicator for Blacks is statistically significant for 13 years out of 16. This means that the p-value of the observations is below the e α level of .05. Thus, one would not expect these observations to occur by chance more than 1 in 20 times. We fail to reject the null hypothesis for the years 2012, 2014 and 2015. It is noteworthy that these are all years during or post the legalization of cannabis. For every year in King County, the coefficient on a Black race indicator variable is statistically significant. In Washington, the race indicator variable for Hispanics is statistically significant every year. On the other hand, in King County, the race indicator variable is statistically significant for only five years. The variables associated with Asians and Native Americans have a lower frequency of statistical significance. For Native Americans, eleven out of the sixteen years in Washington State are statistically significant. Disparities seem to vanish for Blacks at the state level in 2012 and during the post-legalization period. Hispanics experience this same alleviation of inequality in King County post-legalization. The data shows that Asians are convicted of drug offenses significantly less than Whites. Conclusion The United States is currently facing a problem of mass incarceration. Jails and prisons are disproportionately populated with people of color. Prior research has shown that Blacks and Hispanics are convicted at higher rates for drug offenses. Some scholars have attributed this to the negative media portrayals of these communities. These biases may have been internalized by police departments and have created unequal enforcement regarding drugs. For example, crack cocaine is seen as more deviant and penalized much heavier than cocaine. The difference is that crack cocaine is associated with poor urban Blacks (Beckett, Nyrop, Pfingst and Bowen, 2005). In this paper, I conduct a longitudinal study of drug convictions in Washington State and King County. My findings suggest that drug convictions in Washington and King County have decreased over time. Further research should be conducted to understand if this decrease in drug convictions may be attributed to a decrease in cannabis convictions specifically. A major limitation of my data is that all drug convictions are grouped together. Different drugs are not penalized the same way by criminal justice systems. Racial and ethnic groups may also be convicted at different rates depending on the substance. Overall, the data shows that in Washington and especially in King County, there is a great deal of racial and ethnic disproportionality in drug conviction rates, and racial disparity in drug convictions. Whites have an extremely low probability of being convicted than Blacks and Hispanics. Figure 4 and 5 shows that there is a significant impact of having a prior conviction on the probability of being convicted for a drug offense. In King County every year, Blacks have the highest proportion of drug convictions with the condition of having a prior conviction. This supports prior research in New York City that indicates the likelihood of a conviction increases substantially with the number of prior arrests (Golub, D. Johnson and Dunlap, 2007). Further investigation is necessary to explore why Blacks with a prior offense are being convicted at such higher rates within King County than Whites. Despite the unequal conviction rates, post-legalization in King County does seem to alleviate the racial disparity in drug convictions. The high proportions of non-White individuals convicted for drug offenses in King County may indicate that the policing practices are much different than other counties in Washington. Individuals of color have historically been under heavy surveillance by law enforcement that have institutionalized racial inequality and is perpetuated in conviction after conviction. The effects of the legalization of cannabis may benefit communities of color. The legalization of cannabis may lead to a decrease in racial and ethnic disproportionality and disparities in criminal justice contact for communities of color. References American Civil Liberties Union. “The War on Marijuana in Black and White: Billions of Dollars Wasted on Racially Biased Arrests.” ACLU, 2013. (https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/aclu-thewaronmarijuana-rel2.pdf ) Alexander, Michelle. 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(https://www.drugpolicy.org/sites/default/files/Drug_Policy_Alliance_Status_Report_Marijuana_Legalization_in_Washington_July2015.pdf ) Golub, Andrew, Bruce D. Johnson and Eloise Dunlap. “The Race/Ethnicity Disparity in Misdemeanor Marijuana Arrests in New York City.” National Development and Research Institutes, Vol. 6(1), 2007: 131-164. Guttmannova, K., Lee, C. M., Kilmer, J. R., Fleming, C. B., Rhew, I. C., Kosterman, R., & Larimer, M. E. “Impacts of Changing Marijuana Policies on Alcohol Use in the United States.” Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 40(1), 2016: 33-46. H. Skolnick, Jerome and John Dombrink. “The Legalization of Deviance.” Criminology, Vol. 16(2), 1978: 193-207. Inciardi, James A. “Marijuana Decriminalization Research.” Criminology, Vol. 19(1), 1981: 145- 158. King County. Statistical Profile on 2000 Census. 2000. Retrieved on May. 13, 2016. (https://www.kingcounty.gov/exec/PSB/PerformMgmt/~/media/exec/PSB/documents/AGR/09AGR/KC_all/KC_prof09.ashx ) L. 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The European Union Trust Fund for Africa: Understanding the EU’s Securitization of Development Aid and its Implications Migena Satyal Author Jason Fu Sophie Rukin Editors Abstract Migration policies in the European Union (EU) have long been securitized; however, the 2015 migration crisis represented a turning point for EU securitization of development aid to shape migration outcomes from various African countries. In 2015, the European Union Emergency Trust Fund for Stability and Addressing Root Causes of Irregular Migration and Displaced Persons in Africa (EUTF) was created at the Valletta Summit on Migration to address the drivers of irregular migration such as poverty, poor social and economic conditions, weak governance and conflict prevention, and inadequate resiliency to food and environmental pressures. The duration of this fund was from 2016-2021. Central to the strategy of the EUTF was addressing “root causes” however, the fund came with security dimensions. Under its objective of improved migration management, the EU directed capital to various security apparatuses in Africa to limit the movement of irregular migrants and prevent them from reaching Europe. This method diverted aid from addressing the existing problems faced by vulnerable populations in the region and contributed to practices and organizations that are responsible for implementing coercive measures to limit movement of migrants and committing human rights abuses. This paper examines the political and ideological motives and objectives behind the EU's securitization of development financing via the EUTF, how it has strategically used the “root causes'' narrative to secure these arrangements, and the ways in which this pattern of interaction is inherently neo-colonial. Introduction: The European Union Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF) The European Union Emergency Trust Fund for Stability and Addressing Root Causes of Irregular Migration and Displaced Persons in Africa (EUTF for Africa) was passed in November 2015 at the Valletta Summit on Migration where European and African heads of state met to address the challenges and opportunities presented through the 2015 migration crisis. African and European heads of state recognized that migration was a shared responsibility between the countries of origin, transit, and destination. They were joined by the African Union Commission, the Economic Community of West African States, states parties to the Khartoum and Rabat Process, the Secretary General of the United Nations, and representatives of the International Organization for Migration. The Valletta Summit identified the root causes of irregular migration and forced displacement which became the guiding narrative to create and implement the EUTF. The Action Plan of the Summit stated, “the Trust Fund will help address the root causes of destabilization, forced displacement, and irregular migration by promoting economic and equal opportunities, strengthening the resilience of vulnerable people, security, and development.” Therefore, addressing these issues via development aid would limit irregular migration. The European Commission claimed that “demographic pressure, environmental stress, extreme poverty, internal tensions, institutional weaknesses, weak social and economic infrastructures, and insufficient resilience to food crises, as well as internal armed conflicts, terrorist threats, and a deteriorated security environment” needed to be addressed within the EUTF framework. However, the root cause narrative itself was partially based on assumption rather than empirical evidence. Economic data analyzing the correlation between economic development aid and migration show that the two variables have an inverse relationship. Economic and human development increase peoples’ ambitions, competencies, and resources, encouraging them to emigrate. Migration has a downward trend only when a country reaches an upper-middle income level. This concept is also known as a migration hump. Although EU officials were aware of this phenomenon, they ignored the underlying issues of the root causes narrative and proceeded to create the fund. Between 2016 and 2022 the EUTF dispersed approximately EUR 5.0 billion across 26 African countries in the Sahel and Lake Chad, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa. This funding was on top of pre-existing EUR 20 billion annual aid from the EU to these geographical regions. Despite packaging the EUTF as development aid and extracting the money almost exclusively from the European Development Fund (EDF), which specifically targets economic, social, and cultural development programs, the EUTF fell within the 2015 European Agenda on Migration, introducing a security dimension to development financing. The EU and African partner countries used a significant amount of aid from the EUTF to bolster migration management initiatives via the funding and strengthening of security apparatuses that are responsible for targeting migrants within Africa, before they could embark on their journeys to European states. Under the EUTF, improved migration management constitutes “contributing to the development of national and regional strategies on migration management, containing and preventing irregular migration, and fight against trafficking of human beings, smuggling of migrants and other related crimes, effective return and readmission, international protection and asylum, legal migration, and mobility.” It includes increasing logistical capabilities by providing capital to train border agents, and bolstering surveillance infrastructure to monitor citizens’ movement, and expanding logistical capacities. In some cases, it also relies on encouraging certain policies in recipient countries to align with the priorities of the donor countries. As shown in EUTF annual reports (Figures 1.1-1.6), there was an increasing diversion of capital towards funding migration management projects in Africa, which came at the expense of economic development projects. By using aid to fund security goals, the EU securitized and politicized development financing. Securitization in migration policy refers to the externalization and extra-territorialization of migration control through border controls and reclassification of various activities like drug trafficking, illegal immigration, and delinquency of migrants as national security concerns. Still, some EUTF funding went towards projects geared at economic development. As stated in the Action Plan and shown in subsequent annual reports, the EUTF implemented programs that promoted job creation, education, entrepreneurship, and building resiliency. However, they also used the money from the development package to strengthen migration management initiatives and shift responsibilities to third countries in Africa, ultimately creating “legal black holes” where European norms about human rights did not apply. Despite the clear evidence of the EU’s contribution to abuses towards African irregular migrants, the EU continues to implement repressive policies through various externalization mechanisms and faulty narratives that have been empirically proven to not work – such as the root causes narrative – in order to further its own interests in the African continent. Research Question The practice of funneling capital toward security-related migration management projects raises the following question: Why has the EU opted to securitize its development aid through EUTF in the aftermath of the 2015 migration crisis? Furthermore, what are the implications of aid securitization in terms of development aid effectiveness, human rights practices, and the EU’s external legitimacy as a normative actor? To answer these overarching questions and understand the promotion and proliferation of migration policies through pacts like the EUTF requires an inward look into the European Union and its political and ideological interests in the migration policy domain. Therefore, I propose that the EUTF was a neo-colonial mechanism through which European member states could further their migration policy priorities into certain African states thereby reinforcing their colonial legacy hierarchies. Methodology First, I will provide background information about the EUTF, highlighting its objectives and strategies for development aid implementation and effectiveness. Then, I will provide quantitative data regarding the dispersion of money from the EUTF to show the increasing investments toward migration management schemes. Understanding these specificities and inherent challenges of the EUTF will contextualize my hypotheses. Next, I will support my hypothesis through case studies of specific EUTF security operations in African countries, analysis of the EU’s previous migration policies, interviews with African and European Union stakeholders about EUTF’s development and impact, and various theories to help explain how the EU navigates its migration policies. Finally, I will assess the implications of aid securitization in both Europe and Africa. My research will rely on official documents from the EU about its migration agenda and policies. It will also use data from academic journals and previous literature that have examined the trajectory of the EU’s migration-development nexus, specifically through the EUTF. Assessing the current nature of the EU’s migration policies will be useful in helping guide future policies. As migration becomes an increasingly salient issue, it is crucial to determine strategies or “best practices” that are humane and sustainable to address it. Adhering to human rights norms should be at the center of these policies. Background The Action Plan of the Valletta Summit was based on five priority domains: Reducing poverty, advancing socio-economic development, promoting peace and good governance. Facilitating educational and skills training exchanges between EU and EU member states as well as the creation of legal pathways of employment for migrants and returnees. Providing humanitarian assistance to countries needing food assistance, shelter, water, and sanitation. Fighting against irregular migration, migrant smuggling, and trafficking. Facilitating the return, readmission, and reintegration of migrants. During Valletta, Martin Schulz, the former President of the European Parliament stated, “By boosting local economies through trade, for example through economic partnership agreements and through ‘aid for trade’ programs, by investing in development and by enhancing good governance people will be enabled to stay where they want to be ‘at home.’” He reiterates that the purpose of the EUTF is not “fight the migrants” but rather, “fight the root causes of migration: poverty and conflict.” This seemingly proactive approach underscores the belief that addressing the primary drivers of migration by promoting development measures will empower people to remain in their respective countries by choice rather than feeling compelled to migrate elsewhere. “Root Causes”: Overlooking Evidence The problem with the EU’s understanding and use of the “root causes” narrative is that it ignores how wage differentials contribute to migratory patterns. Wage differentials refers to the discrepancy in wages for similar jobs due to factors like industry or geography. While development aid can be effective, it is not enough to redistribute wealth and address the deep structural inequalities of the global economy that drive migration to more developed and wealthier countries. Subsequent sections will elaborate further on the adoption of the root causes framing. EUTF Annual Aid Reports (2016-2022) As stated in the Valletta Summit political declaration, the EU was committed to “address the root causes of irregular migration” through the EUTF. However, aid allocation data (Figures 1-1.6) from EUTF annual reports, which highlight the distribution of aid in amount and percentage terms by geographical window and five of the EUTF’s objectives, show an increased prioritization of implementing migration management schemes at the expense of development projects between 2016 and 2022. In 2016 (Figure 1), when EUTF was in the implementation phase, EU officials distributed significantly more funds for economic development projects across North Africa, the Sahel, and Horn of Africa than any other domains which aligned with the root causes narrative that was emphasized at Valletta. In 2017 (Figure 1.1), the allocation for improved migration management significantly increased across the three regions. In North Africa, funding for economic development, strengthening resilience, and conflict prevention was eliminated while EUR 285 million was given to migration management. This pattern is strategic due to the geographic proximity of the region to southern European borders. In 2018 (Figure 1.2), North Africa remained the biggest recipient of migration management funds but did not receive funding for development projects. In 2019 (Figure 1.3), 31.56 percent of total funding was invested in migration management. In 2020 (Figure 1.4), 2021 (Figure 1.5), and 2022 (Figure 1.6), improved migration management projects continued to receive most funding at the expense of other objectives. The funding patterns outlined in these reports show the EU’s increased focus towards its migration objectives. Figure 1: EUTF Projects Approved in 2016 Figure 1.1: EUTF Projects Approved in 2017 Figure 1.2: Projects Approved in 2018 Figure 1.3: Projects Approved in 2019 Figure 1.4: Projects approved in 2020 Figure 1.5: Projects approved in 2021 Figure 1.6: Projects approved in 2022 Taking the background information and data into account, I will prove my hypothesis, explaining why the EU increasingly invested in migration management projects in the following sections. Defining Neo-Colonialism The concept of ‘neo-colonialism; was coined by Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, in which he argues that neo-colonialism is a contemporary form of colonialism that is perpetuated through less traditionally coerciece methods, such as development aid. This theory can be applied when assassing relations and interdependency between former colonial states with formerly colonized states. Interdependence is manufactured by former colonial powers that “[give] independence” to their subjects, only for them to follow up by allocating aid.” They speak about guaranteeing independence and liberation but never implement policies to preserve them in an effort to maintain their influence and objectives via unobstrusive and monetary means rather than directly coercive ones. As a result, these countries’ economic system, and thus their political policy, is “directed from outside” through foreign capital.” EUTF as a Neo-Colonial Instrument In the 19th and 20th centuries, European powers reshaped all aspects of African society, through colonialism, for their own strategic imperatives. These included, but were not limited to, extraction of material resources, manufactured dependency, and assertion of European institutions and policies at the expense of indigenous cultures and institutions. The complete overhaul of pre-colonial Africa interrupted economic and political development in the region and led to its continued structural subordination despite achieving independence from European colonial states in the 21st century. As a result, the repercussions of colonialism have contemporary implications in EU-Africa relations. During the colonial era, colonial powers used military power and additional forms of coercive strategies to assert foreign influence; currently, former colonial powers capitalize on the weaknesses of African countries and use political and economic measures to gain influence. Colonialism never disappeared, but rather, evolved into neo-colonialism. This concept is demonstrated in the framework of the EUTF which, despite being a development aid package and product of a seemingly coordinated multilateral process, imposed conditionalities and security measures on African states to achieve political goals in the field of migration. Under the EUTF, patterns of cooperation between European countries and their former colonies to limit migration are also prevalent, especially in the case of Libya and Niger. These initiatives safeguard colonial-era power structures and undermine the sovereignty of the respective African states. The EU took advantage of its status as a donor institution through three mechanisms that enforced hierarchies between African and European powers: The governance structure,designed to dismiss African stakeholder engagement EU’s imposition of positive and negative conditionalities to certain African states The strategic partnerships between European and African states to implement migration management programs These steps demonstrate the EU’s broader goals to assert their influence in the region’s migration policies by implementing security schemes, jeopardizing the needs of African states and the preservation of human rights in the process. The use of EUTF to conduct such projects signals the “de facto policy purchase” on the African government’s stance on migration. Consequently, African states become an “instrument” for European neo-colonial policies, especially in the migration domain. Eurafrica to Modern EU-Africa Relations The legacy and discourse of colonialism and neo-colonialism are not equal among EU member states. Many European countries were colonial powers, with the exception of Ireland and Malta, along with several central European countries that were subjugated to the authority of larger imperial powers. However, specific past actions hold little significance when discussing the broader nexus between European integration, the European Union, and colonialism. In Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism , Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson argue that there was a vast overlap between the colonial and European projects. Several African countries, under colonialism, have historically played a key role in efforts towards European integration and unity from the 1920s to the 1950s under the geo-political concept of Eurafrica. According to this idea, European integration would only occur through “coordinated exploitation of Africa and Africa could be efficiently exploited only if European states cooperated and combined their economic and political capacities.” The pan-European movement in the interwar period was based on conditions for peace through a “united colonial effort” in Africa. Eurafrica turned into a political reality with the emergence of the European Economic Community (EEC) made up of Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany, along with colonial possessions that were referred to as “overseas countries and territories” (OCTs). For the EEC, Africa served as a “necessity,” “a strategic interest,” “an economic imperative,” “a peace project,” “a white man’s burden,” and “Europe’s last chance.” Put differently, “Africa was indispensable for Europe’s geopolitical and economic survival.” Africa became the guiding force of European integration and Eurafrica became a system through which colonial powers could preserve their empires. Eurafrica, in its original form, did not materialize because African countries took back control from European colonial powers, but its legacy is crucial to the development of the EEC and modern EU-Africa relations. Today, the EU describes its relationship with Africa in terms like “interdependence,” and “partnership of equals.” Nonetheless, the EU’s colonial past still plays a significant role in its foreign policy with Africa as it promotes the adoption of European rules and practices in its “normative empires.” The continuation of these empires has cemented core-periphery dynamics of interaction, which ultimately advances European interests, especially in the migration domain. Specifically, the EU’s externalization of border and migration management efforts to transfer the European model of governance to third countries have transformed them into “southern buffer zones” to curtail unwanted migration and enhance Europe’s sense of security. Such measures demonstrate the separation of physical borders from functional regimes in Europe’s fluid borderlands, which are antecedent to imperial practices when control was extended beyond territorial boundaries. These practices are evident in the EU’s security operations through pacts like the EUTF, EU-Turkey Deal, and Operation SOPHIA. These externalization policies ensure the continuity of the vision derived from the Eurafrica project in the 21st century. Conditional aid The EUTF was conditional as it leveraged development aid to finance security-related migration projects and imposed positive and negative conditionalities that were used as leverage for African cooperation. When the European Commission announced its Migration Partnership Framework in 2016, it stated that development and trade policies will use positive and negative conditionalities to encourage cooperation on EU’s migration management projects. The “more for more, less for less” framework embedded into development financing means that “African governments use migration cooperation as a bargaining chip for procuring finance through renting inherent powers of state sovereignty to control entry and exit.” This coercive and concessional method contradicts the nature of cooperation that was emphasized at the Valletta Summit in 2015 and undermines the autonomy of the African states as these conditionalities perpetuate neo-colonial practices. EUTF Governance Structure and Oversight The EUTF was a product of a multilateral decision-making process. However, its governance structure, which limits proper stakeholder engagement from African representatives, signals the EU’s push to prioritize its policies over development in Africa. The European Commission claims that it is taking a bottom-up approach where the EU delegations play a key role in identifying and formulating the EUTF through consultations and dialogues to build partnerships with local stakeholders (civil society organizations, national and local authorities, and representatives). Subsequently, proposals are created by the EUTF for African teams based on EU Commission Headquarters and EU delegations. Then, the proposal is submitted to the Operational Committee for approval. Once approved, the proposals are implemented via EU member states’ authorities, developmental and technical cooperation agencies, civil society organizations, international or UN organizations, and private sector entities. The governance of the EUTF is dependent upon the Strategic Board and Operational Committees for each of the three regions where the EUTF distributed funds. The Strategic Board is responsible for “adopting the strategy of the EUTF, adjusting the geographical and thematic scope of the EUTF in reaction to evolving issues, and deciding upon amendments to the guiding document establishing the internal rules for the EUTF.” The board is chaired by the European Commission and composed of representatives and contributing donors. The Operational Committee is responsible for “reviewing and approving actions to be financed, supervising the implementation of the actions, and approving the annual report and accounts for transmission to the Strategic Board.” In the Board and the Committee, the African partner countries can only act as observers and do not hold decision-making powers. This management framework is ineffective as it is designed to limit the participation of African parties that have more comprehensive knowledge regarding the needs of the continent and areas where funds need to be directed. However, they are structurally silenced. The classification of the EUTF as development aid from the EU to Africa also provided a loophole under which parliamentary oversight was not required. The European Development Fund, which operates outside the EU budget, funded most of the aid, bypassing conventional parliamentary procedures, allowing for swift implementation of the fund. As a spokesperson for the European Commission’s DG DEVCO claimed that simplifying the procedures allows for more flexibility so projects can be implemented earlier. Proponents of the fund believe that the easy implementation process is what makes it advantageous. However, opponents of the fund like Elly Schelien, a member of the European Parliament’s Development Committee, claimed that the EU Parliament has not been given “the right democratic scrutiny” of the fund. The framing of the fund as an “emergency instrument” led to retracted bureaucratic measures to increase effectiveness as project cycles were much shorter than traditional development programming. The consolidation of power to the EU institutions and representatives meant that EUTF projects were “identified at the country level under the leadership of the EU Delegations, discussed and selected by an Operational Committee.” Engagement from African stakeholders and civil society was not required. An interview with a representative from the Operational Committee revealed that EUTF “projects were simply approved without discussion. Negotiations took place upstream between EUTF managers, European agencies, EU delegations, and partner countries.” This form of decision-making amplifies hierarchical structures between European and African representatives. Strategic Partnerships Certain EU member states partnered with African states to implement migration management programs in which they exercised authority over the movement of migrants within Africa, especially in the origin and transit countries. Not only do these policies directly conflict with the EU’s stated commitments regarding development aid and cooperation with partner countries, but the EU’s agenda is antecedent to European empires leveraging local African officials to undertake security operations in the continent. Today, this exploitative relationship is parallel to the EU’s allocation of capital, military equipment, and capacity-building instruments to African representatives who adhere to the needs of EU leaders. This pattern is visible in various projects and funding executed under the EUTF. Though reluctant to enter into such agreements with Europe, African policymakers are forced into a “perpetual balancing act, juggling domestically-derived interests with the demands of external donor and opportunity structures.” This concession stems from inherent power asymmetry between relatively weak and powerful states, upholding colonial legacy hierarchies. Case Studies on Libya and Ethiopia In the following section, I use Libya and Ethiopia as case studies to provide evidence that EUTF’s prioritization of funding migration management projects, increasing policing and surveillance in these countries, and imposing positive and negative conditionalities are reflective of neo-colonial practices to assert dominance over the movement of African irregular migrants. I chose these countries to study because each one falls within one of the two geographical windows and serves either as a popular departure or transit country where the European Union is heavily involved in migration management projects. Libya Libya is a major departure country for migrants from West African countries of origin such as Nigeria, Guinea, Gambia, Ivory Coast, Mali, and Senegal. Italy demonstrated strategic interest in Libya due to its geographical proximity and colonial legacy. Between 2017 and 2022, the Italian Ministry of Interior (MI) led implementations of various migration management projects that sought to curb the arrival of migrants into Italy. In 2017, MI led the first phase of its project called “Support to Integrated Border and Migration Management in Libya” with a budget of EUR 42.2 million and a EUR 2.23 million co-financing from Italy. The principal objective of this phase was migration management. Focus areas included strengthening border control, increasing surveillance activities, combatting human smuggling and trafficking, and conducting search and rescue operations. The second phase of this project was launched by MI in 2018 until 2024 for EUR 15 million. This phase was focused on capacity-building activities and institutional strengthening of authorities such as the Libyan Coast Guard and the General Administration of Coastal Security. It also advanced the land border capabilities of relevant authorities and enhanced search and rescue (SAR) capabilities by supplying SAR vessels and corresponding maintenance programs. The beneficiaries of this project included 5,000 relevant authorities from the Libyan Ministry of Interior (MoI), Ministry of Defense (MoD), and Ministry of Communications. The indirect beneficiaries include “future migrants rescued at the sea due to the procession of life-saving equipment to Libyan Coast Guard and General Administration for Coastal Security for them to be able to save lives.” Italy’s actions under the EUTF compromise the proper use of development financing tools by diverting them for the use of security-related projects. Its engagement and strengthening of Libyan security apparatuses such as the Libyan Coast Guard also undermine the values of human rights that EU member states claim to promote in their foreign policies as the Libyan Coast Guard is notorious for violating non-refoulment principles and committing human rights violations such as extortion, arbitrary detention, and sexual violence against migrants and asylum seekers. Recognizing brutal actions by the border authorities and the deplorable living conditions in detention centers in Libya, the Assize Court in Milan condemned the torture and violence inflicted in these centers. In November 2017, the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights released a statement criticizing the EU’s support for the Libyan Coast Guard as “inhumane” as it led to the detention of migrants in “horrific” conditions in Libya. Despite institutional disapproval of the EU’s and Italy’s involvement in Libya, funding for these security projects continued. Ethiopia While Ehtiopia was never formally colonized, it remained under Italian occupation from 1935-1941 and subsequently fell under (in)formal British control from 1941-1944. The EUTF initiatives in Ethiopia do not show the same patterns of cooperation as seen in Libya and Niger, since Ethiopia served as a key interest to the EU due to its status as one of the main countries of origin, transit, and destination for migrants and refugees. EUTF report from 2016 highlighted that Ethiopia hosts over one million displaced people. It is also the biggest recipient of EUTF funding in the Horn of Africa. Its geographical proximity to countries like Eritrea, Somalia, and South Sudan has vastly affected its migration demographics, making it a focus area for the EU’s development aid under the EUTF. While there pre-existing migration management schemes in Ethiopia, they were concerned with the returns and reintegration of irregular Ethiopian migrants and refugees rather than building up the capacity of various security actors as seen in other regions. This objective was linked with positive conditionalities as the Third Progress Report on the Partnership Framework with third countries under the European Agenda on Migration links progress in the returns and readmissions field with more financial support for refugees that reside within Ethiopia. Additional projects in Ethiopia were geared towards economic development and focused on addressing the root causes as outlined in Valletta. Some of these initiatives included job creation, providing energy access, healthcare, and education to vulnerable populations which are in line with development cooperation. However, the European Union’s increasing focus on returns and readmission of Ethiopian migrants can decrease revenue derived from remittances which contribute three times more to the Ethiopian economy than development financing. This approach ensures the fulfillment of the EU’s migration interests while undermining Ethiopia’s economic needs. Ethiopian officials also expressed disappointment with the EUTF measures because they were guided by the EU’s focus on repatriation, thereby eroding migration cooperation with Ethiopia. In regards to EU interests in Ethiopia, an EU official claimed: “We can pretend that we have joint interest in migration management with Africa, but we don't. The EU is interested in return and readmission. Africa is interested in root causes, free movement, legal routes, and remittances. We don't mention that our interests are not aligned.” This non-alignment in interests is irrelevant to the EU because it is the more dominant actor and has the power to assert its priorities by using money as leverage. However, this pattern of interaction comes at the cost of losing cooperation with Ethiopian stakeholders and diverging finances from refugee and migrant populations in Ethiopia who need humanitarian assistance. Perspectives from Africa African representatives and ambassadors displayed suspicion about the fund’s motives and called on the EU to fund projects that increase economic opportunities in their respective countries. As Nigerien mayor of Tchirozerine Issouf Ag Maha stated, “as local municipalities, we don’t have any power to express our needs. The EU and project implementers came here with their priorities. It’s a ‘take it or leave it’ approach, and in the end, we have to take it because our communities need support.” Maha’s statement highlights the role the EU plays in shaping the direction of development money and how its priorities overshadow decisions and input from local officials, who are significantly more knowledgeable about the needs of their communities. Despite diverging interests and priorities, African officials concede to their demands because their communities require financial resources to alleviate hardships. President Akufo-Addo from Ghana claimed that “ instead of investing money in preventing African migrants from coming to Europe, the EU should be spending more to create jobs across the continent.” Similarly, Senegalese President Mackey Sall and former Chairperson of the African Union warned that the trust fund to tackle the causes of migration is not sufficient to meet the needs of the continent stating, stated that “if we want young Africans to stay in Africa, we need to provide Africa with more resources.” The allocation of aid to security-related projects comes at the expense of funding genuine development projects that align with the needs of African communities. It also takes advantage of the ‘cash-starved’ governments.” These statements underscore the necessity of the EUTF to direct capital towards structural and sustainable economic development as opposed to combatting, detaining, or returning migrants. However, the EU has not been responsive to these inputs from its African stakeholders despite stressing the importance of cooperation and partnership during the Valletta Summit. Reinforcing Power Imbalances The imposition of European policies and priorities through the EUTF takes advantage of African nations' relatively weaker economic standing and agency, showing that the political and security needs of powerful states and institutions determine where and how development aid is designated. It also shows the continued influence and intervention of European interests into their ostensibly independent former colonial holdings, therefore reiterating Nkrumah’s theory that foreign capital, such as development aid, can be used for the exploitation of developing countries by their former colonial powers. This hypocrisy goes against the EU’s normative approaches to its foreign policy while also continuing to reinforce power imbalances and colonial-era hierarchies between Europe and Africa. Discussion Critically examining the European Union Trust Fund in the broader context of EU-Africa relations demonstrates how EUTF represents a complex intersection of historical legacies, political interests and expediency, and political ideologies that determine attitudes towards migrants and refugees and thus, shape policy outcomes. These factors reinforce each other by showing the multifaceted nature of migration governance. The neo-colonialism lens in my hypothesis provides historical context to show how enduring colonial legacies continue to guide policies today. This lens also forms the basis for discourse about EU-Africa relations because of the visible power imbalances that are sustained through policies like the EUTF which are structurally designed to achieve European political interests at the expense of the needs of African states. As seen through the case studies on Libya, Niger, and Ethiopia, development aid is not always allocated for the benefit of the recipient. Rather, aid can be abused as a political tool to reach the objectives of the donor institutions. Despite the rhetoric of cooperation between stakeholders, preservation of human lives, equal partnership, and addressing root causes, as stated in Valletta, the strategic policy design of the EUTF highlights the persistence of neo-colonialism because it continues historical patterns of exploitation and hierarchies between Europe and Africa. Conclusion The findings in this paper show that EUTF was not merely a development instrument but also a political one that came with negative consequences for African irregular migrants. The securitization of aid along with the EU’s other externalization policies have not effectively solved the problems that have caused the migration crisis. Instead, it has reinforced them. The model of the EU’s migration policies under the EUTF has also created issues beyond the realm of migration. As discussed, it continues to sustain power imbalances between Europe and Africa, shift aid priorities, and undermine development goals.Addressing the migration crisis will require a paradigm shift in the EU migration policy domain. The EU needs to deviate away from a security-based approach to a holistic and rights-based approach. This ideological reform requires the EU to look inward to address its own limitations and failures by recognizing its neo-colonial practices, acting out of mutual rather than political interests, and lastly, collectively humanizing migrants and refugees arriving to Europe for safety and opportunities. Through these measures, the EU and African stakeholders can address the true root causes of migration – which stem from structural global inequalities. References “A European Agenda on Migration.” European Commission. 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