Tag: Politics

  • Reforming the World Bank

    In this brief published by the Center for Global Development, the authors discuss the calls for setting a reform agenda for the World Bank aimed at “enabling the institution to respond to today’s global development challenges.”

    “The reform agenda is being negotiated by representatives of World Bank shareholders and the institution’s management, which  put forward an evolution roadmap laying out key issues for discussion. Among these issues is whether the World Bank should take on a bigger and stronger role in addressing major global challenges. The United States has been a leading voice in the push for World Bank evolution […]. However, some shareholders have voiced concerns that the evolution agenda could detract from the bank’s core development mission or create financing trade-offs in the absence of significant new resources.”

    Read/download the full document here.

  • Free Downloads of Carl Menger's On the Origins of Money

    The Mises Institute provides (totally legal) free downloads of digital copies of Carl Menger’s book On the Origins of Money here.

    Carl Menger was the founder of the Austrian school of economics.

    About the book: 

    “Written in the same year that he testified before the Currency Commission in Austria-Hungary, and published in English in 1892, Carl Menger explains that it is not government edicts that create money but instead the marketplace. Individuals decide what the most marketable good is for use as a medium of exchange. “Man himself is the beginning and the end of every economy,” Menger wrote, and so it is with deciding what is to be traded as money.”

    About the Mises Institute: 

    “The Mises Institute, founded in 1982, teaches the scholarship of Austrian economics, freedom, and peace. The liberal intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) guides us. Accordingly, we seek a profound and radical shift in the intellectual climate: away from statism and toward a private property order. We encourage critical historical research, and stand against political correctness. The Institute serves students, academics, business leaders, and anyone seeking better understanding of the Austrian school of economics and libertarian political theory.” 

    Find the download link of the book here.

  • Japan's Intelligence Ambitions

    This piece in SpyTalk.co, a popular Substack where Founding Editor Jeff Stein and a “team of veteran reporters” provide “original reporting, scoops and analysis on national security topics, with an emphasis on U.S. intelligence operations, both foreign and domestic,” talks about the problems Japan is facing in strengthening its spy program: 

    “Japan’s efforts to re-arm in response to escalating threats from China and North Korea are well-known. Less understood are controversial efforts by some in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to reestablish world class intelligence and counterespionage capabilities.” 

    Apart from the resistance that such efforts have historically faced from the public in view of “World War Two memories” of “militarism, neighborhood informants, and other mass spying against the population,” there are geopolitical concerns: 

    “Though further efforts to consolidate and strengthen Japan’s intelligence and counterintelligence organizations might seem logical in Washington, such plans face significant opposition from those government institutions, politicians, and parts of the business community that support closer relations with Beijing.” 

    Interestingly, “[t]hose opposed to strengthening intelligence perceive China as rising and America in decline.” The author says that the “prickly challenge” ahead for Washington is “to persuade not only Japanese elites, but the country’s voters, of American resolve, reliability, and support.” 

    It is yet to be seen if a third, “more independent policy dubbed “autonomous defense,”” advocated by the late Shinzo Abe, is totally out of the window. 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Similarities Between India and China

    This piece in the Asian Labour Review compares the economic histories and current economic policies of India and China, arguing that the two countries are very much mirror images of each other. 

    Historically speaking, the author argues, the two countries have “more similarities than often acknowledged.” For instance: 

    “From inheriting largely rural, agrarian societies, to seeking similar goals for their population in terms of development and industrial modernisation or adoption of command planning strategies, there are striking patterns of convergence between India and China. 

    One prominent aspect in this comparison is the global neoliberal turn from the latter half of the 1980s and the restructuring of labour. 

    The advent of market reforms, along with the state’s retreat from an interventionist role, is predominant in labour relations for both India and China. Despite minor variations, the changing nature of the state-labour relations and the declining power of labour as a political subject is conspicuous across the spectrum.”

    The competition between the two countries is related to the larger global economic system: 

    “As transnational corporations outsourced their production, there has been tremendous competition among countries in the Global South to attract these investments. Governments in the Global South provide companies with infrastructure, resources and incentives to embed their production facilities in their territorial jurisdiction.”

    This is why we see (sometimes failed) “attempts to weaken labour protections for the sake of attracting transnational corporations” like trying “to extend working hours per day from 8 to 12.”

    The author makes this interesting observation about China: “‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ may continue to hold ground as a political-ideological euphemism, but capitalism is living reality in China’s economic transformation.” Recently, “[i]n response to rising labour costs, supply chain disruption and labour unrest, Apple and Foxconn have tried to diversify their manufacturing facilities to other geographies away from heavy dependency on China.” India is very much “in the race to parallel China, if not completely eclipse it,” with Indian policymakers “increasingly looking to copy the China playbook to shape the country’s growth and development.”

    The following lines perfectly sum up the central argument of the piece:

    “The nation-state narratives about India and China, centering on their geopolitical competition and itinerant border tensions, tend to emphasize differences and divergences more than convergences and parallels. There are admittedly vast differences in their political and social systems. But recognising points of convergence allows us to more fully explore their trajectories in all their complexities.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Buying Russian Oil with Chinese Currency: Pakistan Flirts with De-dollarisation

    As widely reported, including in this report in The Cradle, “Pakistan paid for its first imports of discounted Russian crude oil in Chinese currency.”

    As the report goes on to point out, this is significant because:

    “Pakistan’s purchase takes advantage of new opportunities arising from the war between Russia and Ukraine. Due to western sanctions, Moscow lost its European markets for oil and natural gas exports and has instead redirected its sales toward other nations, notably India and China.

    Large quantities of oil paid for in non-US denominated currency and at reduced prices comes at a crucial time for Pakistan, which suffers from a balance of payments problem that risks the country defaulting on its external debt. The Pakistan central bank’s foreign exchange reserves are currently only sufficient to cover a month of controlled imports.”

    Read the full report here.

  • What is Black Sociology?

    This post on the blackfeminisms.com blog is a useful short introduction to Black sociology.

    According to the author: 

    “Black sociology analyzes society from the standpoint of Black people to highlight how historical social structures affect them today. It offers a non-eurocentric perspective to address the interrelatedness of racial and economic inequality affecting society, making its practitioners scholar-activists who bridge the gap between academia and the masses.”

    The post gives a quick outline of the historical evolution of Black sociology, along with some of the key figures associated with it.

    Read the full blog post here.

  • The Long Road to Peace in Colombia

    This piece in The New Humanitarian, “the trusted news source on humanitarian crises,” by Bogotá-based journalist Joshua Collins is a useful resource in understanding the durability and effectiveness of long-term peace efforts. The writer reports on the aftermath of the 2016 peace deal in Colombia: 

    “Despite a historic peace deal between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) ending more than a half-century of civil war in 2016, conflict has been surging since in many rural areas of the country. 

    New armed groups have moved into the vacuum left behind when FARC fighters laid down their weapons and are now vying for territorial control with other older criminal organisations, with the lucrative production and smuggling of cocaine continuing to drive the violence.” 

    Even though the government of Gustavo Petro, famously the first leftist President of Colombia, “announced ceasefires with four of the five largest armed groups in Colombia,” the problem is that “none of the groups signed official written agreements.”

    Civil society organisations were reportedly “cautiously supportive of the ceasefire strategy.” While the government had claimed that the ceasefires “will allow for much-needed assistance to reach civilians in conflict zones,” humanitarian organisations raised questions about “whether they will actually improve conditions on the ground for civilians.” What makes matters worse is that many of the affected regions “are also effectively stateless as they’ve been neglected for decades – across administrations – by the national government in Bogotá.” 

    The scale of the problem is sobering: 

    “The UN estimates that 7.7 million Colombians are in need of some type of immediate humanitarian assistance, including hundreds of thousands of people who have suffered due to rising levels of conflict in recent years, in particular displacement and confinement.”

     The issues raised in the article take on more significance in light of recent reports that “[t]he administration of Colombian President Gustavo Petro has announced it is suspending a ceasefire agreement with a rebel group accused of killing four Indigenous people in a recent attack.” 

    Read the full article in The New Humanitarian here.

  • Degrowth and the UK Economy

    This article in The Conversation discusses the current state of the UK economy and the idea of degrowth that has been gaining traction around the world in the recent past. 

    The author points out that the two main political parties of the UK are presenting economic growth as a solution to the country’s current economic problems based on “conventional economic wisdom that “growth, growth, growth” increases incomes and standards of living, employment and business investment.” But according to the author, “economic growth on its own is not going to solve these multiple and intersecting crises.” 

    The article goes over some of the main ideas behind the degrowth movement, like “abandoning our obsession with growth at all costs” and instead “orienting the economy towards social equality and wellbeing, environmental sustainability and democratic decision making.” 

    The author argues that while “for many people the word smacks of misery and the type of frugality they are trying to escape from during the cost of living crisis,” actually “degrowth, if successfully achieved, would arguably feel better than a recession or a cost-of-living crisis.” 

    Importantly, “degrowth is not the same as negative GDP growth”: 

    “Instead, degrowth envisions a society in which wellbeing does not depend on economic growth and the environmental and social consequences of its pursuit. Degrowth proposes an equitable, voluntary reduction of overconsumption in affluent economies.

    Equally important is to shift the economy away from the ecologically and socially harmful idea that producing more stuff is always good.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Authoritarianism and Neoliberal Education in Indonesia

    This article in Inside Indonesia discusses the “[l]egacies of Indonesia’s authoritarian past” in how “the Indonesian government continues to exert influence over how knowledge is consumed and produced within academic institutions.” 

    According to the author, “the state’s education policies have actively enforced an ideology of neoliberalism.” The author is concerned that “[a]cademics are shaping their ways of producing knowledge to conform with the expectations of a growing neoliberal authoritarian state.” This is concerning because: 

    “Knowledge that is produced within a neoliberal authoritarian environment deprives people of their economic and political rights, sustaining the state’s power. Controlling the people who produce knowledge is to control knowledge.”

    But the author draws hope from “the many examples of collective forms of education and knowledge production” and “a number of examples of collective resistance” to the Indonesian government’s authoritarian “marketisation of curriculum.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Senegalese Parliament Refuses to Make Existing Anti-gay Laws Harsher

    As reported on Erasing 76 Crimes, ” [a] news site [that] focuses on the human toll of 68+ countries’ anti-LGBTI laws and the struggle to repeal them”:

    “On Friday, April 28, Senegal’s Parliament rejected a series of proposals, including a text that would toughen the criminalization of homosexuality, already punishable by one to five years in prison and a fine (Article 319 of the Penal Code, dating from 1966).”

    Even though the existing anti-LGBTI laws were not repealed, activists have welcomed this move considering the wave of anti-gay hysteria sweeping through some African countries.

    It is promising that the Senegalese “[p]arliament had already rejected a similar bill in January 2022” and that one legislator was quoted as saying “[w]e don’t need a law based on emotions that fills up our prisons.”

    Read the full report here.

  • End of the Road for Erdogan?

    Is Recep Tayyip Erdogan about to lose political control in Turkey? The Economist sounds optimistic.

    As this article points out, Erdogan has had a tight grip over power in his country:

    “He was jailed and barred from public office, yet managed to overturn the ban and came to dominate Turkish politics. He has won five parliamentary elections, two presidential polls and three referendums. He has even faced down a military coup.” 

    And yet, the article reports, “the polls suggest that the united opposition could wrest control of parliament from Mr Erdogan’s Justice and Development (AK) party and its allies” in the upcoming elections and “Erdogan himself appears to be trailing in the presidential election to be held on the same day.” 

    And as this article, also in The Economist points out, “[w]ere he to lose, it would be a stunning political reversal with global consequences” and it could provide a reason for hope for democrats around the world: 

    “The Turkish people would be more free, less fearful and—in time—more prosperous. A new government would repair battered relations with the West. (Turkey is a member of NATO, but under Mr Erdogan has been a disruptive actor in the Middle East and pursued closer ties with Russia.) Most important, in an era when strongman rule is on the rise, from Hungary to India, the peaceful ejection of Mr Erdogan would show democrats everywhere that strongmen can be beaten.” 

    Read these two opinion pieces on the upcoming Turkey elections in The Economist here and here. 

  • The Conflict in Myanmar

    According to this report in The Diplomat, “a group of Myanmar’s neighbors, India, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Laos, seem adamant about treating the junta like a single sovereign entity and nursing it back to strength.” This is the same “military junta that attempted to seize control of Myanmar in February 2021.” 

    While the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which had “been placed by the United Nations and the wider international community in the driving seat of international Myanmar policy,” had been “inching towards a more moderate and critical position on Myanmar,” Thailand is reported to have “launched a separate track of talks aimed at undermining this approach.” 

    According to the author, an obvious flaw in this approach is that the “junta is just not able to implement its political or economic decisions across most of the country’s territory.” Some maps are said to “demonstrate just how limited the Myanmar army’s movement has become since the coup, as a result of the widespread nationwide uprising.” Having been on the ground, the author reports: “The situation varies greatly on the ground, but the maps provide an accurate bird’s eye picture.” 

    Meanwhile, the army has resorted to all sorts of violence including rape and terror attacks. “Millions of people in resistance areas live under constant remote surveillance by drones, knowing that at any moment this could be followed by a devastating air force sortie.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Social Media, Disinformation, and the Sudan Conflict

    This newsletter from Coda Story paints a grim picture of how “Big Tech is ‘failing the Sudanese people.’” 

    Reportedly, the conflict in Sudan has led to a situation on social media platforms “that bore many hallmarks of a coordinated disinformation campaign.”

    A Twitter account with a blue checkmark that “looked like the official account of the RSF” falsely announced the death of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, “the leader of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces — the paramilitary organization formerly known as the Janjaweed, notorious for carrying out the genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s”: 

    “In the current situation, the disinformation — whether it’s a bogus tweet claiming the general is dead or one claiming that attacks have taken place where they haven’t — could affect how the fighting plays out and how civilians make decisions about where to take shelter or how to traverse dangerous territory.”

    Adding to the chaos of the conflict are factors like internet connections “faltering or collapsing altogether” and social media being “a jumble of real news, hearsay and propaganda.” 

    “With blue ticks available to anyone for a fee, it’s become exponentially harder to know who’s really speaking.” 

    Read the full report in the Coda newsletter here.

  • Bernie Sanders Calls for A Reduced Workweek

    In this piece for Leftist magazine Jacobin, philosophy professor and author, Ben Burgis argues in support of Bernie Sanders renewing “his long-standing call to reduce the workweek to thirty-two hours.” 

    Burgess discusses state-level efforts in California and the federal attempt in Congress to make this reduced workweek a reality. “Right now, these efforts face an uphill battle to say the least.”

    Burgis writes: 

    “There was a 299 percent increase in labor productivity from 1950 to 2020. As Senator Sanders rightly suggests, the benefits of that increase largely went to the top of society. It certainly didn’t automatically generate a shorter workweek.”

    and

    “Technology and productivity have advanced to an astonishing degree since President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act. But the limitation on how many hours workers can be made to spend on the job if they want to be able to make a living has stayed in place.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Irresponsible Nuclear Posturing by Politicians in India and Pakistan

    This piece in South Asian Voices, “an online policy platform for strategic analysis on South Asia” published by the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., argues that “irresponsible statements” about the use of nuclear weapons by politicians in Pakistan and India over the last few years “contribute to cultivating nuclear war psychology” instead of promoting a responsible “stigmatize the bomb” strategy. 

    Politicians from Pakistan and India making irresponsible remarks about nuclear weapons is said to “reinforce South Asian atomic culture”: 

    “This atomic culture has facilitated the acquisition of nuclear technology with chauvinistic pride and a symbol of supreme power for political independence. It has limited space for negotiating potential threats of nuclear exchanges and shared responsibilities of hostile SNW [strategic nuclear weapon]. For instance, New Delhi and Islamabad have not been able to build robust institutional arrangements for Nuclear Confidence Building Measures (NCBMs).” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Politically Motivated Anti-gay Hysteria in East Africa

    In this “letter” for BBC, Sammy Awami, a freelance journalist based in Tanzania, talks about the “wave of anti-homosexuality sentiments sweeping through” East Africa. 

    Awami argues, as have others, that this anti-gay sentiment is being whipped up “by politicians and political parties who have not delivered on their promises to their voters.” Ugandan journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo is quoted as making a similar argument in a tweet: “There is currently no anti-gay hysteria in African countries with high economic growth rates or which are able to manage their debt”. 

    About the bogus claim of homosexuality being un-African, Awamy writes: 

    “It is interesting that these politicians ignore the fact that it is actually the harsh anti-homosexuality laws – not homosexuality – that were imposed on us by the colonial government. 

    Indeed, the original anti-homosexuality law was first introduced across Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda by the British colonialists, after successfully using it in India about 150 years ago.” 

    Read the full article here. 

  • San Francisco After the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

    This piece on Bloomberg takes a look at San Francisco in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. While all the usual issues that come up when talking about San Francisco – the city’s fiscal deficit, cost-of-living, tech slump, post-pandemic economic recovery, layoffs, vacant offices, homelessness, drug use, etc. – are touched upon in the article, it doesn’t give a conclusive picture on whether or not there is any cause for optimism in the sombre picture that the quoted figures paint. Even as the mayor of the city is said to have “pointed to cataclysms from the 1906 earthquake to the bursting of the dot-com bubble that brought in a spate of naysayers, only to have the city rebound stronger than ever”, an investor at a venture capital firm is quoted as having said that “the renewed interest in San Francisco is more in spite of the city, not aided by it”. 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Backlash Against Campaigns to Ban Caste Discrimination in North America

    In this report, Time covers the backlash to the attempt to explicitly ban caste discrimination in California, part of a growing number of such efforts across North America. As the report points out:

    “Caste is a system of social hierarchy that has been especially pervasive in South Asia. It dates back more than 3,000 years but even today is the basis of discrimination for those considered to be lower caste or falling outside the system, including Dalits, who have been ostracized as “untouchables.”

    Caste discrimination has made its way overseas to the U.S., too. A 2018 survey by Equality Labs—a nonprofit that advocates for Dalits—found that one in four Dalits in the U.S. say they faced verbal or physical assault and two out of every three reported facing discrimination at work.”

    Read the full report here.

  • The Mathematisation of Political Science

    In this book review of Foundations and American Political Science: The Transformation of a Discipline, 1945-1970 by Emily Hauptmann, political science professor Lee Trepanier talks about how “the discipline of political science has been almost completely colonized by mathematical models, data analysis, and numeric reasoning.” The analysis is important in light of the fact that, in the US, “[s]ince 2017, the economics major has surpassed the political science major in popularity—something that last happened 56 years ago in 1961.”

    According to Trepanier, “Hauptmann shows how private philanthropic foundations like Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller played an instrumental role in changing the practice and values in political science.”

    The effect that the resulting “predominance of behavioralism” has had on the discipline is described by Trepanier as:

    “Political science consequently has become boring to students. Professors see the fulfillment of their academic lives in scholarly publications that only a few people read rather than introducing students to the study of politics or explaining to communities why political science is a public good. Because of their training, professors want to teach hyper-specialized and esoteric topics that almost nobody is interested in, other than their five academic friends. Topics that students get most excited about, like political theory and public administration, are marginalized because they cannot be quantified and therefore do not qualify for political analysis. Instead, students are required to enroll in more courses in Bayesian analysis. But, if you are going to do that, then you might as well study a field that is entirely mathematized, like economics, and work on Wall Street.”

    Read the full book review here.