Category: Americas

Bye Bye, Trump!

America has beaten its chest for decades claiming to be the world’s “greatest democracy”, at the top of its lungs, loud and clear, for everyone to hear. It has portrayed itself as the saviour and purveyor of peace, often to those evil Middle-Eastern folks who might have some naughty toys they shouldn’t have (by toys I mean Weapons of Mass Destruction).  However, has America really ever been a peaceful democracy?

There has long been a discussion of the relationship between democracy and peace. The democratic peace theory tells us that democratic countries tend to have relative peace since they share ideological similarities and would not be interested in fighting one another, as well as with other states. America has proven such a concept wrong in several ways.

First, America has taken it as its mission for decades to expand democracy in order to bring peace, which helped justify its international campaigns on the “War on Terror” since 2001. Such missions have worsened the situation in countries such as Iraq or Afghanistan. When Trump took office, he promoted an agenda of “leaving the wars”, and one can say he left some wars. As we speak or sit down with our morning tea, the Taliban and the Afghan government are discussing peace talks with little US intervention. However, under the Trump administration, several acts such as airstrikes in Syria or the killing of a senior Iranian general were made as an executive order outside Congress, which (normally) passes the legislation, especially in matters of war. 

Second, peace is a controversial concept within America’s own borders. Is America really peaceful when extrajudicial killings and further human rights violations take place? Is America really peaceful when Black Lives Matter supporters and Trump supporters are treated in very different ways? As we saw last month, white supremacists and far-right movements stormed the Capitol and walked through its corridors, parading confederate flags, while months before, Black citizens couldn’t even walk the streets of their neighbourhoods without police assault. If anyone had any doubt that racism still existed in the US, well, let us just assume this would be (even more) evidence that it is very much alive and well. If we understand peace in line with the great scholar Johan Galtung, as not merely negative peace – the absence of war – but as positive peace – the absence of structural violence – then is America peaceful?

Now that Trump has left, we wonder, what will Biden’s position be on matters of foreign policy? And, particularly, how will he position the US in terms of international peace? If we look at Biden’s Mandate under the Obama administration, it is important to remember that Obama entered not one, not two, but nine international military interventions – Libya being one of them -, with Biden serving as Vice-President. While Obama might have done some good – signing the Paris Agreement, which is now back on Biden’s to-do list – his time in office was hardly peaceful

And since (unfortunately) the power of the North still looms over the world, we must be alert to what Biden imagines peace and democracy to be. 

Playing with the Terrorist Label

Photo: Tribal fighters loyal to Yemen’s government during fightings against Houthi rebels

On Sunday 10th January 2021, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo designated the Houthi rebels as terrorists.
The Houthis are fighting a civil war in Yemen – with roughly 70% of the population living under their control – both to win power across the country and to resist Saudi Arabia’s influence. Pompeo’s decision to label the Houthis as terrorists has major consequences for the future trajectories of this conflict. 

It is unclear exactly what the Houthis did to irk the US to change its official stance on the group. The likeliest explanation is that it was not what the Houthis did, but what Joe Biden did – win the US election. 

In recent weeks, Pompeo has embarked on what has been described as a round-the-world tour of diplomatic vandalism. He began official diplomatic relations with Taiwan, declared Iran to be the new Al-Qaeda base, and has now labelled the Houthis terrorists. Officially, the decision is part of the “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran. In reality, these last-minute foreign policy changes are nothing more than thinly veiled attempts to sabotage the incoming administration. 

If Biden reverses these decisions, the response from Republicans will be painfully predictable. End diplomatic relations with Taiwan and you’re soft on China, correct Pompeo’s fictional Al-Qaeda story and you’re soft on Iran, reverse the decision on the Houthis and you’re soft on terrorism. 

The decision to brand the Houthis as terrorists has very real repercussions for the Yemeni population who live under Houthi control. These people rely on humanitarian aid to survive, but humanitarian aid becomes extremely difficult to deliver in areas considered to be governed by terrorists. The Yemeni people living under Houthi control have no choice but to rely on outside help to access food and water. The extent of the damage to Yemen’s water infrastructure has resulted in two cholera outbreaks since 2015. In addition, Yemen imports 90% of all its food.  Pompeo’s decision has created the conditions for what the UN predicts will be “The worst famine in 40 years”.

This potential calamity demonstrates the destructive potential that declaring a group as terrorists has on a chronically vulnerable population. It also highlights the inherent hypocrisy of the Trump administration. Trump labelled the Houthis terrorists in the same week that he described a mob of white supremacists who carried out an attack on Capitol Hill to be “very special people”.

The terrorist label has real consequences and should not be used lightly. This change in US foreign policy demonstrates how terrorism is constructed to meet a political end. Terrorism has been heavily theorised since the declaration of the War on Terror. One theory is that terrorism is a socially constructed term deployed by states to exercise further social control or to justify policy changes. 

When declaring a group as “terrorists” the state has actively identified an existential threat that can only be overcome through greater social control, thus legitimising measures such as increased surveillance, immigration controls, and indefinite detention. To justify these further controls, the state must continue to identify threats that it must protect its citizens from.

For years, the Trump administration has actively constructed threats to justify state control. The list of threats is seemingly never ending: Muslims, Mexicans, BLM, Antifa, Democratic Party pedophile rings in pizzeria basements – the list goes on. In the case of Yemen, the end goal of labelling the Houthis terrorists seems far pettier than state control. Instead, it’s a case of state sabotage. 

Now, we shouldn’t romanticise the Houthis, who have been responsible for serious human rights violations in recent years, including persecuting minorities and using civilians as human shields15. However, Pompeo’s declaration demonstrates that the terrorism label can be constructed not only out of security concerns, but out of a desire to deliberately cause instability. If the US were motivated by human rights violations, then it certainly wouldn’t support the Saudi-led coalition. It is now up to Biden to pick up the pieces of the Trump administration’s recklessness by reversing this decision. 

Yemen is experiencing the world’s most pressing humanitarian crisis. By carelessly playing with the terrorism label, the US is wilfully deepening this disaster.

Refugees Welcome? Islamophobia and the US Refugee Admissions Program

Author’s photo

There was a time, not long ago, when demonstrating support for the United States refugee resettlement program was not considered an overtly political statement. This is no longer the case. 

The issue has gained unprecedented political salience in the last five years. In the US, the Trump administration used Islamophobia to systematically dismantle the United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP). How have these Islamophobic policies impacted international and domestic refugee partners? And how can the program rebuild? 

Anti-Muslim discourse has been growing in the US since 2001. As Hanna Uihlein pointed out in a recent piece, politicians on both sides of the Congressional aisle have frequently used coded Islamophobic discourse as policy justification. This Anti-Muslim rhetoric was operationalised more explicitly under the Trump administration. As the anti-immigration platform led to shouts for a wall and the proliferation of derogatory stereotypes, ‘refugee’ and ‘Syria’ became articulated alongside calls for a ‘Muslim ban’ (1). Fueled by an administration vehemently opposed to the USRAP, the ban became official US policy. The presidential order prohibited the entry of foreign nationals from a number of Muslim-majority countries and simultaneously halted all refugee resettlement to the US for 120 days. A subsequent order blocked the resettlement (and all entry) of Syrian and Somalian individuals indefinitely. 

These executive orders were followed by years of historically low numbers of individuals approved for resettlement under the annual presidential directive. USRAP had experienced a high degree of bipartisan support since its inception in 1980, and resettlement numbers had remained relatively stable regardless of the party in power.  USRAP was already the most difficult and extensively vetted channel by which an individual could enter the US. Nevertheless ‘extreme vetting’ became a Trumpian trope-cum-policy that introduced processes so restrictive as to be effectively prohibitive. New restrictions targeted nationals from “high-risk countries” to submit to additional screenings. The removal of the ‘needs-based’ component in favor of categories such as ‘certain religious minorities’ also served to limit prospects for resettlement among Muslim refugees. Domestic resettlement agencies were intentionally dismantled through the introduction of several arbitrary restrictions. In some instances, agencies were forced to closed as a result of these new policies.  

As a result of Islamophobic policies aimed at destroying the USRAP, many individuals and families previously approved for resettlement have been left in limbo for years. Time-sensitive security clearances and medical checks have since expired and will have to be re-administered before departure. More troubling, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that it would be closing the agency’s international offices, and in doing so recalling agents who conduct required interviews for refugee applicants. 

This startling national reversal had the presumably desired impact of drastically reducing both overall refugee admissions and further slashing arrivals from Muslim countries. This is an especially startling trend considering that in “each year over the past decade, about two-thirds of refugees living outside of their birth country have come from Muslim-majority countries” (Pew). Now, only a handful of individuals are currently approved for departure via the US resettlement pipeline. The COVID-19 pandemic has only compounded the situation. Here it is worth returning to the point that hateful rhetoric and discrimination on the grounds of religion were the primary, if not the exclusive, basis and justification for this legislation.

The impact of Islamophobia on USRAP will have far-reaching implications for the resettlement program for years to come.Rebuilding this program will require dedicated policy changes. Although the incoming administration faces a number of daunting challenges in the coming weeks, Joe Biden has not ranked the USRAP as a priority for his first 100 days in office. This is regrettable as the program will require ample time to resume operations at its previous capacity. International processes have to be restaffed before the backlog of applications can be addressed. Domestic agencies will need additional support to reinstate operational capacity. Finally, rebuilding USRAP will require inclusive rhetoric on every level to dismantle the Islamophobic discourse – coded and overt – propagated by the Trump administration in an effort to build more welcoming communities.

(1)This articulation relied heavily on misconstruing and manipulating tragic events to fit amongst existing anti-Muslim and anti-immigration framework/discourse. This ability of discursive power to spread misinformation through brute force and repetition was recently demonstrated at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

Prove Me Wrong… I’ll Wait

You present your argument with such confidence and stand by it with such arrogance. Yet you miss the factual evidence standing in front of you. 

You claim to try to be an ally, which for one, isn’t a title you can bestow on yourself, yet the closest title I would give you is racist. But for kicks, I’ll play along. 

Let’s see if you can prove me wrong. Because there’s no doubt in my mind how this conversation will end.

Tell me how it’s a figure of my imagination.  That I tend to make problems out of nothing. 

Tell me that I’m overreacting or too critical. That like my fellow sisters, my aggressive tone drowns out any sense I make and I just need to take it down a notch. 

Tell me that that perception does not demonstrate a larger issue of societal disproportion as when you speak, it’s considered enlightened and an example of feminist exceptionalism. 

Tell me that it takes the partnership of educated and outspoken black and white women to accomplish anything. But let’s not forget Sojourner, Rosa, Angela, Assata or Michelle and the lack of space for any of us at your Women’s March. 

Prove me wrong…. I’ll wait.

Tell me that rights are universal, equitable, and fair. That no matter who you are, people are born with the same indiscriminate privileges to survive in the world. Yet poverty, ailment, and lack of education wreak havoc on post colonized lands across continents. 

Tell me we haven’t been trapped in a Eurocentric system of supremacy for a millennium and the ownership of black bodies doesn’t keep getting passed from one white hand to another. 

Prove me wrong… I’ll wait.

Tell me that the land of opportunity is not only for the pale majority, but for all who worship the United Racists Under Trump. That good things happen to those who abide by the system, the same one engulfed in the flames still burning from KKK crosses. 

Tell me racism is over and the noose I struggle through daily was psychologically woven, not made by hands of former slave owners. But then how do me and my black brethren wear matching ones, I wonder? 

Prove me wrong… I’ll wait.

Tell me that the justice system is built on fairness. That law sees no color. 

Tell me that a black homeless mother seeking a better education for her child calls for a five year sentence but that same action by a rich white Hollywood actress violating several other laws only calls for ten months, for which she only served 14 days. 

Tell me that mass murderers deserve bullet proof vests but an aid worker sleeping deserves 8 bullets. That justice shouldn’t be Just Us and law doesn’t stand for “Lethal Amongst Whites”. 

Prove me wrong…. I’ll wait.

Tell me that these cases are just one in a million….oh no wait, a thousand….okay, more like a hundred. Out of the BILLIONS of people in the world! Because the saying  “once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action” is just philosophical mumbo jumbo. 

Tell me it happens to all people and our coffee toned wrapping doesn’t also serve as target practice for the country’s most lethal assassins. 

Prove me wrong… I’ll wait.

But while I’m waiting you know what I can bet? That you have continued to go on about your day, strutting the same walk, spewing the same talk and doing nothing to actually challenge what we BOTH know. 

I can bet you scrolled past every post, ignored every tweet, and drove straight past that protest you saw on your way home without a second look. And why? Because your desire to prove me wrong extends further than the tunnel vision that is your outlook on societal structures. It prohibits you from seeing an even deeper superiority complex you hold over a fellow woman with the major difference being that of skin. 

So while you are able to take the time to construct a cleverly crafted rebuttal to this assessment, I must continue my fight against the system you say fights for me. I don’t have the luxury of time to devote to your white fragility. 

At the end of this, you’ll go into your cozy condo up Northwest where they never ask you if you live there, kickback with your favorite Kendrick playlist, and let the trivial, privileged worries of your day fade away. While others pray they make it home, you pray nothing changes because your life is just perfect. You’re a complacent bystander in a world of murder. Bet that’ll look great on your resume. 

So keep talking, prove me right…. I’ll wait.

Silence = Inaction = Betrayal

Image: CC – 0  Free Stock Photo

Slow Violence and Disaster Capitalism: Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria

In September 2017, the category five Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, a small Caribbean island just east of the Dominican Republic and a territory—or, as many recognize, a colony —of the United States. The colonial relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico has left the island in an incredibly vulnerable position, which has been compounded by forced privatization and general government corruption.

When Hurricane Maria left the island in a complete state of shock, it opened the doors for further attacks on Puerto Rican sovereignty. It also served as a wake-up call for the island’s residents, many of whom were no longer able to turn a blind eye to either the impending and catastrophic privatization efforts or the total and devastating effects of climate change. The case of Puerto Rico—both its relationship to the U.S, as well as in the aftermath of Maria—serves as an important example of the ways that slow violence can render a population vulnerable to more overt forms of violence after a natural disaster.

Puerto Rico has already been subjected to imposed debt, as well as tax breaks for the hyper-rich, and after Hurricane Maria it is clear that the U.S. is capitalizing on the shock of the devastation.

In his book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Rob Nixon posits that slow violence is “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” Not only does climate change disproportionately impact “the poor”—most often brown and black poor communities, and very frequently in places far away from white Western societies—in a visceral way now, it also impacts their ability to thrive in the future. Therefore, slow violence should be understood as exacerbating existing hardships and limiting opportunities that have not yet occurred. For people who have had no say in policies that accelerated natural disasters, exposing the role of slow violence also exposes the ways that their vulnerability is made in the not so distant politics of U.S. capitalism.

In the case of Puerto Rico, this can be seen in the compounding effects of debt and austerity measures pre-Maria, and the complete lack of urgency devoted post-Maria—the combined effects of which caused more deaths than the hurricane itself and caused many Puerto Ricans to flee the island entirely. Puerto Rico has already been subjected to imposed debt, as well as tax breaks for the hyper-rich, and after Hurricane Maria it is clear that the U.S. is capitalizing on the shock of the devastation.

Naomi Klein calls this the “shock doctrine,” describing the phenomenon of disasters, natural or man-made, being exploited for profit. In the aftermath of disasters, the public is often immobilized in a state of “shock” and the private sector exploits this moment of paralysis to monopolize discussions around rebuilding. This quickly turns into a pretext for implementing harsh neoliberal policies in favor of steep profits—or “disaster capitalism.” In the case of Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria provided exactly the shock disaster capitalists needed to finally push through the privatization and austerity measures they had been working on for years.

That, as Klein argues, is the deadly combination: “not just a storm, but a storm supercharged by climate change slamming headlong into a society deliberately weakened by a decade of unrelenting austerity layered on top of centuries of colonial extraction, with a relief effort overseen by a government that makes no effort to disguise its white supremacy.”

Thus, it is important to recognize what is happening in Puerto Rico today for what it is: disaster capitalism at its finest.

Centuries of colonialism and environmental degradation, coupled with the island’s forced economic dependence by the U.S., created perfect conditions for a slow violence that kept Puerto Ricans disadvantaged enough to remain vulnerable to any sort of natural disaster

The emphasis on disaster capitalism and its agents is crucial because it allows us to identify perpetrators of the violence to which Puerto Rico has been subjected—namely, the U.S. government and its private sector. Centuries of colonialism and environmental degradation, coupled with the island’s forced economic dependence by the U.S., created perfect conditions for a slow violence that kept Puerto Ricans disadvantaged enough to remain vulnerable to any sort of natural disaster that might come its way—a reality that has become more threatening as time goes on. Therefore, seen as a climax of Nixon’s slow violence, Hurricane Maria was a convenient opportunity for the U.S. government to force through a program of privatization measures at a time when Puerto Rico was more vulnerable than usual, opening the door for fossil fuel companies, and many others, to take advantage of the newly minted tax haven.

Nixon argues that because of the intersection of different forms of power and oppression within structural and slow violence—especially for those who fall into his category of “the poor”—communities “can seldom afford to be single-issue activists” (Nixon 2011). This is exactly the spirit of Puerto Ricans organizing in the wake of hurricane Maria. The groups that were resisting privatization and austerity before the hurricane are now using the this as an opportunity to tackle the root causes that allowed Maria to go from a devastating weather problem to a disastrous systemic problem—from the poor-quality electric system, to the colonial nature of governance, to the potentially illegal debt imposed by the U.S.

Puerto Ricans have begun to organize and ask hard questions about what they want Puerto Rico to look like in the future, relying on community ties and organizations to help sustain relief efforts as well as build a plan for the future. The various organizations that existed before the hurricane have come together to create JunteGente (People Together), and have begun drafting a people’s platform in order to represent their cause.

Before Hurricane Maria, it seemed as though the shock doctrine was nearly impossible to resist effectively, but it seems as though Puerto Rico may be able to break this cycle.

How can we ensure that slow violence captures public attention in the same way that other types of violence do? Perhaps we should start by looking to Puerto Rico. The island’s inhabitants have treated Hurricane Maria as an opportunity to fundamentally transform society into a Puerto Rico that works for Puerto Ricans. As promising as this may seem, it does not answer the question of how to turn people’s attention to slow violence before an event such as Hurricane Maria happens.

One starting place would be to pay attention to grassroots organizing such as what is happening on the ground in Puerto Rico, and use this work to exploit the shock on these activists’ own terms. Rather than allow disaster capitalists to win, activists are desperately fighting to manipulate this unique moment of shock and transformation in order to create something we have never seen before. Theirs is a unique situation, currently suspended outside of the parameters of slow violence because the detrimental effects have been so glaringly exposed. However, as they continue fighting for sovereignty over their land and to tackle the root causes of the current crisis, this endeavor must be amplified and supported much more widely.

A lack of attention to the issue, or worse, the U.S. winning this tug of war for control of the island, would allow Puerto Rico to slide back into the haze of slow violence until the next disaster strikes.

Photo Credit: Sgt. Jose Ahiram Diaz-Ramos, U.S Department of Defense

From Low-Level Crimes to Murder: The Failure of the Retributive Criminal Justice System in the United States

In October 2018, my 23-year-old brother was charged with first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. This accusation came only a few months after he was released from a correctional facility for possession of marijuana and theft of the amount between $100 and $750.

In the days that followed his arrest, I grappled with a plethora of questions. Why did my brother escalate from low-level crimes to murder? Was this acceleration related to his history of drug abuse? Did I do enough to support him when he got out of the correctional facility? My brother went into a correctional facility having committed minor infractions, but exited with severe psychological issues and an untreated drug addiction. He re-entered society incredibly unstable and went on to perpetrate a much more serious violation.

This is not to say that my brother should not be held accountable for his actions, but rather that his experience in the system had quite the opposite effect of its intention: instead of rehabilitating him, incarceration helped make him into a murderer.

My brother is a stark reminder that the retributive criminal justice system, which holds that the proper response to criminal activity is a punishment equivalent to their offense, is both inefficient and detrimental to individuals and communities. And he is just one case in a sea of millions of other vulnerable people who now share the same fate.

The Prison-Industrial Complex of the United States

The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. A disproportionate number of people of color and individuals with lower socioeconomic status represent the majority of the population behind bars. Acclaimed legal scholar, advocate, and civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander (2010) writes about how mass incarceration in the U.S. is a form of racial and social control in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. She contends that the U.S. targets marginalized communities through the executions of “the drug war” and the “get tough movement.” Supposed crime reduction strategies–along with the ever-expanding policies of targeting undocumented immigrants–allow private prisons to receive a per diem from the U.S. government for each inmate incarcerated. In turn, corporations exploit these individuals for cheap labour, a practice known as the prison-industrial complex (PIC). This is clearly problematic. As the retributive criminal justice funnels mostly black and brown bodies into prisons, companies profit off of their presence in prisons.

The entire retributive system is based on an assumption that once an inmate is released from incarceration, they will reintegrate into society with a better understanding of how to respect the rights of others and follow the societal norms associated with responsible citizenship, but this assumption is unfounded. It is highly evident that the retributive criminal justice system is failing to prevent future crime. In fact, the retributive system tends to induce reoffending at an enormous financial, emotional, and social cost to individuals and communities.

If incarceration actually facilitated rehabilitation, then the assumption that inmates would afterwards reintegrate as ideal citizens might make sense, but there is ample evidence that shows otherwise. Individuals that re-enter their communities after incarceration face myriad challenges, such as stigmatization, barriers to housing and employment, and mental health and/or addiction issues. Alexander describes these challenges as a form of permanent, second-class status in which those who have been incarcerated can be legally discriminated against, denied the right to vote and automatically excluded from juries. While individuals and organizations have diligently tried to aid individuals reintegrating into society, the consistently high rates of recidivism provide insight into the disturbing reality that sending people to jail doesn’t work.

Reform vs. Transformation

In order to confront the failed U.S. carceral state, we should pursue three objectives. First, we ought to follow Alexander’s call-to-action to continue to add and diffuse information on the devastating effects of mass incarceration. Second, we must mobilize a broad-based movement to dismantle the current racist and futile retributive criminal justice system. Third, we need to follow the leaders and organizations–Angela Davis, INCITE!, generationFIVE–who have been calling for the implementation of an interpersonal or community-based model for years.

The transformative justice model challenges the retributive criminal system, which is primarily responsible for the violent oppression of marginalized communities, and policies that serve to legitimize the existing system of crime control. Transformative justice instead relies upon the leadership and interests of marginalized communities who understand that forms of violence take place within the structural conditions of poverty, racism, sexism, transphobia, xenophobia, etc., and seeks resolutions within the more personal systems of community or civil society. According to Mimi E. Kim, “Communities are…sites for prevention, intervention, and transformation, spaces where interventions can be imagined, initiated, and implemented.” While the transformative justice model may take more time, it may provide opportunities for the victim-survivor, perpetrator, and community at large to find healing after a crime has been committed, healing that a retribution-based system prevents.

Drug decriminalization and prison reform is not enough. We instead must strive to dismantle the entire PIC, the entire retributive criminal justice system, and replace it with a model that has a firm grasp of the real conditions of people’s lives and how we can hold individuals accountable for their wrongdoings without contributing to structural violence. We owe it to ourselves and our communities to create conditions that can prevent future harm, including harm perpetrated by incarceration and policing. It is easy for many to disregard individuals who have been swept up by the PIC and see them only as defined by the worst moments of their lives, but we must see past the singular act of a crime. It is in our best interests, and in the interests of victims and perpetrators, to commit to holistic approaches that foster the rebuilding of individuals and communities. Rather than reacting to the damage after crimes are committed, we need to begin to reconsider the conditions that led to them in the first place.

In light of what my family has been through, I can continue to spread awareness about what this system does to ordinary people with drug addictions–and hope that one day we, as concerned citizens, may be able to deliver other individuals and communities from bearing the excruciating pain that a retributive justice model inflicts.

Photo Credit: Luis Argerich CC-BY 2.0