Extrajudicial arrest, termination from employment, suspension of university enrollment, being declared persona non-grata (Karl 2025), police violence at demonstrations, harassment at airports, online doxxing, and, in the case of six-year old Wadea al-Fayoume, a martyrdom in a strange land—these are some of the ways in which solidarity with Palestine has, since October 2023, been rebuked in the Global North in unprecedented ways. We do not yet know the longue durée of how the annihilation of Gaza and the genocide of its people will recalibrate the way in which the world relates to Palestine. In the darker continents, and especially in the lands immediately surrounding Palestine—lands with which Palestine has historically been organically linked and nurtured—punishment for resisting injustice has been more damning. Al-Hudaydah Port in Yemen has been repeatedly targeted by American and Israeli weapons of mass destruction in retribution for the country’s military operations against Israel, and entire towns and villages in Lebanon have been wiped off the map, and thousands of its people martyred. Regardless of how one evaluates the political efficacy of Hezbollah’s involvement in the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation, it is difficult to argue that any people on earth have paid a higher price for standing with Palestine than the Lebanese. Elsewhere, for much of the last half-century, Palestine solidarity at the level of state policy has been neutralized by economic sanctions and has sometimes been engineered toward permanent instability through regime change wars, bringing poverty and civil conflict upon millions of people, particularly the Arab and Iranian people. Indeed, in the weeks during which I began writing these words, Iran fought for its survival, perhaps its survival at the level of civilization, in the face of an unprecedented Israeli aggression coordinated with much of the Global North.
This forum is an inquiry into what it means to stand with Palestine. It is an exploration of how Palestine has stayed-with “local” political contexts, and how it has survived setbacks and tribulations, and ultimately inspired a commitment. The five essays in this forum explore disparate contexts, each with its own geopolitical history and postcolonial trajectory, that has negotiated its commitment to Palestine in spite of this principled position having invited hardships and at times catastrophic consequences. Moreover, the essays are penned by scholars—a literary scholar, a historian, an anthropologist, and a philosopher—whose respective research is outside the geographic boundaries of Palestine, but which intersects in irretractable ways with Palestine. What to make of this irretractibility?
Inspired by the anthropologist Nazan Üstündağ’s (2023) remarkable recent ethnography of the Kurdish Movement, I term the affective and political committing to Palestine as a mode of “camaraderie.” Üstündağ translates the Kurdish hevalti, the semantic equivalent of the Arabic rifqa, as “friendship,” but, for reasons I will elaborate on shortly, it may be more accurate to expand its semantic range also to “companionship;” a richness of meaning most succinctly captured by “camaraderie.” Indeed, in leftist movements in Kurdish, Arab, and Anglophone worlds, a partner in revolution is, respectively, heval, rafiq, or comrade.
Üstündağ sees hevalti as designating a “position in a particular revolutionary grammar,” and the revolutionary movement as an “organization of relationships.” Camaraderie emerges from an “accumulated perspective and knowledge of the ways in which these relationships will be molded.” (Üstündağ 2023:142) I find this semantic sketch of camaraderie as a useful reference for how to think through committing to Palestine, particularly in the world’s leftist movements—historically the natural home of camaraderie with Palestine—in the sense that a commitment to the Palestinian cause organizes one’s more immediate political life in all kinds of practical ways. As Omid Mehgran writes in this forum, Palestine is a “mode of relating to the politics of material conditions of life that touches all forms of politicization in the globalized ecologies of war and of remnants of life today.”
The essays in this forum may very well evoke a certain melancholy. A hundred years of the Palestinian cause, and the support that it has received from various actors from various stages, has not resulted in the liberation of Palestine. Yet, Palestine has accompanied these actors and stages, as a comrade that becomes a part of one’s own life and politics, but without resolution. It is in part because of this (among other reasons) that I find the paradigm of “solidarity” to be useful but incomplete in theorizing state-level affects with Palestine as a world-leftist issue. This paradigm has been closely examined in scholarship in recent years, often focusing on the 1968-1982 period as the zeitgeist of a globalizing Palestine solidarity (Thompson & Olsen 2023, Randall 2023, Harrison 2016, Haugbolle & Olsen 2023), and also appears in the essays in this forum, particularly that by Olivia Harrison. At the same time, solidarity as a symbol of a mythologized world-leftist revolutionary moment—now gone—now appears often in a romantic lens conditioned by temporal distancing (see Abu Hatoum, & Assali 2024). While not negating the importance nor the veracity of the solidarity framework, the essays in this forum search for deeper epistemologies, placing emphasis on Palestine as a tragedy that inflicts its pain also onto other stages and contexts. It is also a creative and generative force; a point of inspiration for political mobilization (leftist, Arab nationalist, Islamist) for over half a century, lending its companionship to debates, impasses, countermovements, and a negotiating of local paradigms. It is in this sense a camaraderie, a companionship or a staying-with.
This forum mostly concentrates on “other” worlds—known by various names: postcolonial, Third World, Global South—because those are the ones whose entanglements with Palestine have been more direct and, in some cases, devastating. However, as the essays by Olivia Harrison and Nico Putz show, these worlds are not bounded, and interact in dynamic and complex ways with European and North American metropoles. Harrison traces discourses around decolonization in Algeria (the “Mecca of revolutionaries”) to anti-immigrant fervor in contemporary France, where “yesterday’s indigène has been transformed into an immigrant, and the settler of old has become a native.” In these discursive transformations from indigenous-immigrant and settler-native, it is Palestine that links the two ends of this transformation, saturating the time in between through its camaraderie with revolutionary cultural production by North African intellectuals. Putz, in his essay, shows how contemporary German leftist politics has been informed by a trajectory in which its ethical self-making has been in close dialectic with events in the postcolonial/Third world—Iraq, Yugoslavia, and above all Palestine—particularly in the reactionary Anti-Deutsche movement. Beginning as a communist-tinged leftist movement but the self-proclaimed vanguard of the politics of antisemitism, the Anti-Deutsche is a compelling case of how the Palestine question continues to interrupt and disorient European political life. Although ostensibly exiled from mainstream German politics, Putz shows how the exaggerated police repression of Palestine demonstrations in Germany since October 2023 is an embodiment of a decades-long German political trajectory in which Anti-Deutsche has found an unconscious place.
Discussing the multi-layered interplay between class, sectarianism, and the Palestinian Revolution during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), Aaron Eldridge reviews a major work by the iconic Lebanese leftist intellectual Mahdi Amil, who theorized the infestation of sectarianism in Lebanon, and all the mythic violence that it entailed, to be a metonymic expansion of class ideology. For Amil, the Civil War, if the reader allows my simplification of Eldridge’s complex and close reading of Amil, was a confrontation between the “dominant class,” composed of the Lebanese bourgeoisie dominated by those with material interests to protect, and the “revolutionary class,” the wretched of the Earth composed of the Palestinian revolutionaries and their allies. Materialist analysis of this kind, a long-held position by Lebanese (and generally Arab) leftists, locates the Palestinian cause embedded into the broader class politics of Lebanon and the region. Here, Palestine is not a site of “solidarity” between two struggles, but, rather, an index that organizes the politics of a given place, accompanying it at every step. Around 150,000 Lebanese were killed during the Civil War, and another 6,000 in the Israeli war campaigns since 2006. If one is to take Amil’s analysis seriously, to abandon the Palestinian cause in the Lebanese context would mean to abandon the materialist basis of society itself—an impossibility that Israel and the wider West is unwilling or unable to understand.
The fourth essay in this forum, by Omid Mehrgan, overviews the Palestinian cause as a central tenet of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and Palestine’s staying-with in Iranian politics as a principled commitment often to the detriment of the Revolution’s standing even to its own public. Mehrgan does not give cover to the many repressive policies of the Revolutionary government (nor do I), but he makes a lucid case linking a detachment from the Palestinian cause on the part of many anti-government activists in Iran since at least 2009 to a certain “apolitical radicalization;” a certain worldlessness that I think is perhaps best shorthanded by Alain Badiou’s (2009) critique of politics sometimes becoming mere “bodies and languages” without a militant commitment to a revolutionary Idea.
The final essay is a commentary on the forum by Laura Adwan. Commenting on the points discussed in the essays (as well as on this introduction), by exploring the case of Iraq since 2003 Adwan argues that Palestine does not only stay-with local contexts but also but also stands-in-for them, showing how echoes of Palestine ring out from Iraq since the American invasion. But these echoes do not only reverberate between bodies. As Adwan claims, the pain of Iraq is the pain of Palestine severed from what was once a possible singular political community. As such, the fragments of Palestine explored in the previous four essays are also fragments of a dismembered region, of which Iraq and Palestine are victims of a closely related human geography.
This forum was conceived in exceptional times. On the one hand, these essays are a response to the longevity and inextricability of the Palestinian question in a time in which Palestine is, in a very literal sense, undergoing destruction on an unprecedented scale. Of course, they do not come close to comprehensively surveying the entirety of the world scene, but they do illuminate the entanglements of the Palestinian question into other world-political questions. As Edward Said (1979) noted, a “question,” as a strictly political term, is something that is long-standing, intractable, and insistent, and, as such, it is something that stays-with us. This forum is also a friendly rejoinder to our comrades in the Global North, newly under duress in the bosom of Empire, to take stock of the global scene: a dismemberment of the political and social bodies nearest to Palestine—Lebanon and Syria—an unforgivable Gulf betrayal, and a late-stage Zionist colonialism making a desperate grasp for hegemony between the Nile and the Euphrates. Decolonization, to borrow again from Üstündağ (2025: 143), means “transforming life and death into offerings, thereby initiating new communications.” The task of committing to the emergency of the Palestinian cause, it seems to me, is to withstand the present ruptures. The five essays in this forum are invitations, albeit difficult, to old and new possibilities.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Ahmad Moradi and Aaron Eldridge, conversations with whom inspired this forum.
Arpan Roy is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. He is the author of Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference (University of Toronto Press, 2024) and the co-editor of Naseej: Life-Weavings of Palestine (Pluto Press, 2025).
References
Abu Hatoum, Nayrouz. & Assali, Hadeel (2024). Becoming Al-Mulatham/a: Fedayee Art, Abu Oubaida, and Palestinian TikTok. In D. Matar & H. Tawil-Souri (Eds.), Producing Palestine: The Creative Production of Palestine Through Contemporary Media (pp.51-62). Bloomsbury.
Badiou, Alain (2009). Logic of Worlds: Being and Event 2. Continuum.
Harrison, Olivia (2016). Transcolonial Cartographies: Kateb Yacine and Mohamed Rouabhi Stage Palestine in France-Algeria. In Singh, J. & Kim, D. (Eds.), The Postcolonial World (pp. 243-259). Routledge.
Haugbolle, Sune. & Olsen, Pelle (2023). Emergence of Palestine as a Global Cause. Middle East Critique *32* (1), 129-148.
Karl, Rebecca E. (2025). What Does It Mean to Be Declared Persona Non Grata by My University? Journal of Palestine Studies 54 (1), 77-81.
Randall, Jeremy (2023). Global Revolution Starts with Palestine: The Japanese Red Army’s Alliance with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East *43* (3), 358-369.
Said, Edward (1979). The Question of Palestine. Vintage.
Thomson, Sorcha & Olsen, Pelle (Eds.). (2023). Palestine in the World: International Solidarity with the Palestinian Liberation Movement. Bloomsbury.
Üstündağ, Nazan (2023). The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla: Women‘s Political imagination in the Kurdish Movement. Fordham University Press.
Cite as: Roy, Arpan 2025. “Introduction: Staying-With Palestine. Making and Remaking Postcolonial Worlds” Focaalblog September 26. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/09/26/arpan-roy-introduction-staying-with-palestine-making-and-remaking-postcolonial-worlds/
Image 1: Jason Hickel’s research focuses on political economy, inequality, and ecological economics
On 15 May 2025, Jason Hickel – economic anthropologist, leading degrowth theorist and author of popular works such as The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions and Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World – delivered a provocative lectio magistralis as the Third Annual Global Research Programme on Inequality (GRIP) Lecture at the University of Bergen, sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Brussels Office (RFL). In his lecture, “The Struggle for Development in the Twenty-First Century”, Hickel rejected the idea that the development of the Global South can take place within the logic of extractive capitalism and economic imperialism. Only through movements for economic sovereignty and eco-socialist transition will it be possible to escape the traps of neo-colonial exploitation.
After the conference, he spoke with Don Kalb, GRIP director, Maria Dyveke Styve, GRIP affiliate, and Federico Tomasone of the RLF about the struggle for climate and redistributive justice, reflecting on the contradictions of liberalism, the ecological and social crises of global capitalism, and the possibilities for a democratic socialist future. In the discussion, Hickel shared his evolving perspective on Marxist theory, critiqued the limits of horizontalist politics, and underscored the urgency of building new political vehicles capable of responding to the planetary emergency.
DK: Yesterday, you argued that it’s essential to rethink the Russian Revolution and China’s history – not only for international politics, but also for working-class politics and global freedom. It struck me that your narrative has evolved into a more explicit anti-liberal reading of recent history. That wasn’t so clear in The Divide, but it was evident in your lecture. Have you shifted toward a more Marxist interpretation?
Yes, I think that’s fair. Two things are happening. First, my analysis has sharpened over time. Second, when I wrote The Divide, I was addressing an audience largely unfamiliar – and often uncomfortable – with Marxist or socialist language. I wanted to communicate effectively with people working in international development, many of whom are wary of what they think are ideological labels.
That strategic decision had a cost: The Divide largely bypasses the question of socialism, even though many of the countries I discuss were socialist or engaged in Communist revolutions. That absence weakens the analysis. You can’t fully understand the history of global inequality without addressing the attempts of socialist revolutions and the Non-Aligned Movement to break from capitalist imperialism and implement alternative development models, followed by the violent Western backlash that took the form of the Cold War.
Since then, I’ve increasingly used concepts like the capitalist law of value, which I now see as central to explaining our ecological and social crises. We live in a world of immense productive potential, and yet we face deprivation and ecological breakdown. Why? Because under capitalism, production only happens when and where it’s profitable. Social and ecological needs are secondary to the returns to capital.
DK: That’s precisely what struck me. I compared your work with that of David Graeber. You both start from anthropology and expand into politics, but the crucial difference, I think, is that you grasp the law of value – whereas Graeber, as an anarchist, tends to evade it. Would you agree that contemporary conditions compel us to reclaim key Marxist concepts and communicate them to a younger public?
Absolutely. As scholars, we should use the best tools available to explain material reality – and Marxist concepts remain analytically powerful. We’re in a moment where those tools can be reintroduced and popularized in new ways.
David Graeber was a brilliant and wildly creative thinker, and I learned a lot from him – both as a friend and a scholar. But you’re right, he approached political economy differently. In his later work, especially The Dawn of Everything, he began to acknowledge the limitations of anarchist organizing models like horizontalism. He saw the need for functional hierarchies – structures that can actually get things done without betraying egalitarian principles.
DK: That connects to another question. In 2011, the populist left failed to anticipate what I would call a global counter-revolution. What we’re seeing today isn’t just a resurgence of fascism – it’s a broader anti-liberal and anti-neoliberal insurgency. Some forces are anti-woke, others anti-globalist, and they don’t always share a coherent ideology, but some of the undertow is anti-liberal and potentially anti-capitalist, too. How does your work engage with this complex reaction?
It’s paradoxical. In one sense, this seems like the worst moment to talk about socialism. But in another, it’s precisely the right moment – because liberalism is visibly collapsing, and the rise of far-right populism is a symptom of that failure.
Liberalism claims to champion universal rights, equality, and environmentalism, but it also clings to a model of production dominated by capital and profit maximization. Every time those two commitments clash, liberal leaders choose capital – and everyone sees the hypocrisy. That’s why liberalism is losing legitimacy. The danger is that, in the absence of a compelling left alternative, disaffected workers gravitate toward right-wing narratives – xenophobic conspiracy theories, scapegoating immigrants, and so on. Fascists don’t offer real solutions, but they’re filling a void left by liberal and even social democratic parties, which have abandoned any structural critique of capitalism.
We need a democratic socialist alternative that addresses the root contradictions of capitalism, including its ecological irrationality. But building that alternative will require real political vehicles – not just protest movements, but mass-based parties with deep roots in the working class.
DK: Let’s return to the idea of the law of value. You touched on it earlier, but can you explain why it’s so essential to understanding the crises we face today?
The law of value explains why we experience shortages of socially and ecologically essential goods, even in an age of unprecedented productive capacity. Under capitalism, production is guided not by human or ecological needs, but by profitability. If something isn’t profitable, it doesn’t get made – no matter how necessary it is.
Take the green transition. We have the knowledge, the labour, and the resources to rapidly build renewable energy infrastructure, retrofit buildings, and expand public transit. But these aren’t profitable investments, so capital doesn’t fund them. Meanwhile, we continue producing luxury goods, fossil fuels, and weapons – things that actively harm people and the planet – because they are profitable. This contradiction is at the core of our ecological breakdown.
It’s funny, when people talk about shortages, they often refer to the socialist world, ignoring the sanctions and blockades those economies faced, even while their social outcomes were better than capitalist ones. Today, capitalism itself produces chronic shortages – of affordable housing, healthcare, education, and green technologies. This is a direct result of the law of value. We must overcome it if we are to survive.
FT: That brings me to Europe. The European Union tried to push a green capitalist agenda in recent years, but now we’re seeing a major shift towards militarization. What’s striking is that this agenda is being led by self-described liberals. Starmer in the UK, for instance, is at the forefront. The same is true in the European Parliament. How do you interpret this development?
It’s deeply disturbing. For years, European leaders told us there was no money to invest in decarbonization, public services, or social protections – because we had to uphold deficit and debt-to-GDP ratios to ensure price stability. But suddenly, when it comes to militarization, those rules are tossed aside. They’re ready to spend trillions on weapons and defence.
This reveals something critical: the deficit rules were never about economics. They were political tools used to block investment in social and ecological goals while maintaining an artificial scarcity of public goods. Now that military spending is politically expedient and profitable, the limits disappear. It’s a betrayal of the working class and future generations.
Moreover, their analysis is flawed. They seem to think that militarization will bring sovereignty and security to Europe, but true sovereignty would require a complete rethink of Europe’s geopolitical role. It would mean distancing from the United States and pursuing integration and peaceful cooperation with the rest of the Eurasian continent – including China – and the Global South. Instead, European elites remain trapped in the logic of US hegemony. Western Europe has been treated as a forward base for US military strategy for decades. Germany, for example, is filled with American bases. The US wants Europe to antagonize the East – but this is in the US interest, not in Europe’s. We must reject this. Europe’s true interests lie in peace and cooperation with its neighbours.
FT: That’s a perfect segue to my second question: the historical burden of European imperialism. Europe’s ruling classes have inflicted enormous harm over the past few centuries. How do we move beyond that legacy? Is there a real contradiction between the interests of the European working class and those of capital when it comes to foreign policy?
It’s an important question. First of all, yes – policies like the current wave of militarization are clearly aligned with the interests of European capital. That’s why they’re happening. But they run directly counter to the needs of ordinary people and to the stability of the planet. This reveals a deeper truth: there is a fundamental conflict between the interests of working people and those of capital. It forces us to confront the myth of European democracy. We are told that Europe is a beacon of democratic values, but in reality, the interests of capital dominate our institutions.
Democracy was never a gift from the ruling class – it was fought for by working people. Even then, we only got a shallow version of it. The original democratic demands – decommodification of essential goods, workplace democracy, control over finance – were abandoned. Instead, we get elections every few years between parties that all serve capital, in a media environment dominated by billionaires. If we want real democracy, we need to extend it to the economy. That means overcoming the capitalist law of value and redirecting production toward social and ecological needs. That means democratizing the creation of money.
DK: Let’s pick up that thread – money. One of the more original aspects of your work is the focus on the production of money itself. Could you explain how monetary sovereignty fits into your broader critique of capitalism?
Under capitalism, the state holds the legal monopoly over currency issuance, but in practice, it franchises that power out to commercial banks. Banks create the big majority of money in the economy through the process of issuing loans. But they only issue loans when they expect them to be redeemable and therefore profitable – when they serve the accumulation of capital. This means that the power to create money, and thereby mobilize labour and resources, is subordinated to capitalist profitability. It’s a direct expression of the capitalist law of value. Productive capacities are only activated if they yield returns to capital. That’s how banks steer the economy: not toward what we need, but toward what is profitable.
To change that, we need two things. First, a credit guidance framework – a set of rules that direct bank lending away from destructive sectors like fossil fuels and luxury emissions, and toward socially necessary investments. Second, we need to expand the role of public finance. The state must directly create money to fund essential goods and services – renewable energy, housing, public transit – even if these aren’t directly profitable to private capital.
There’s a myth that we can only produce what is profitable. But in reality, as long as we have the labour and resources, we can produce anything we collectively decide to. The only barrier is political. Once we democratize money creation, we can liberate production from the profit imperative and organize it according to human and ecological needs.
DK: That’s compelling. Many of my left-wing friends in Europe argue that the euro is the main obstacle. They advocate for returning to national currencies to regain sovereignty. I take a different position: we should democratize the euro itself. These are small, interdependent states. Returning to national currencies risks division and renewed dependence on external powers like the US, who will play us off against each other. What do you think?
I’m very sympathetic to that argument. I understand the appeal of monetary sovereignty through national currencies – it offers more direct control over production and spending. But it also fragments the struggle. If every Eurozone country must independently wage its own class battle for economic transformation, progress will be at best uneven and vulnerable. A more strategic route is to reform the rules of the European Central Bank. That could be done quickly, at the institutional level. We could enable member states to expand public investment immediately by suspending austerity constraints.
Critics will say this risks inflation, and yes, if you simply inject public finance without adjusting the rest of the economy, you may drive up demand for limited labour and resources. But eco-socialist degrowth offers a solution: scale down harmful and unnecessary production – SUVs, cruise ships, private jets – and reallocate labour and resources toward socially beneficial activities. This stabilizes prices while transforming the structure of the economy.
Inflation isn’t a technical obstacle – it’s a political one. The real reason austerity rules exist is to preserve space for capital to accumulate unchallenged. If we shift productive resources toward public goods, we threaten the dominance of capital in the system. That’s what elites are trying to prevent when they invoke debt ratios and deficit limits.
DK: There was a strange moment recently. Trump said, in reference to inflation, something like: “Instead of 18 Barbie dolls, your kids will have two.” His argument was that economic sovereignty is more important than material abundance. I found it thrilling – in a way, he’s articulating a kind of anti-consumerist message. Isn’t that part of the danger of fascism today? It sounds anti-neoliberal, but it’s not anti-capitalist.
That’s exactly right, and I found that moment interesting, too. Some people even claimed Trump was embracing degrowth, which is completely false. Degrowth is a fundamentally anti-capitalist idea. It means scaling down ecologically destructive and unnecessary production while scaling up public goods, ecological regeneration, and social equity. Trump is doing none of that.
But there’s something we can learn from this moment. He managed to sell the idea of material sacrifice – “fewer Barbie dolls” – in the name of sovereignty and national pride. That tells us something important: people are willing to accept limits to consumption if they’re framed within a broader, meaningful vision. Too often, we on the Left assume that people won’t accept any kind of material constraint. But that’s not true. What matters is the narrative. If we offer people a coherent vision of freedom, dignity, economic democracy, and a habitable planet, we can make the case for transformation. The challenge is crafting that narrative in a way that’s emotionally and morally compelling.
Of course, for degrowth to be just, we must ensure that basic needs are met. That’s where a public job guarantee comes in. It would allow us to redirect labour from harmful sectors to beneficial ones, with dignified wages and workplace democracy. That’s the difference between an eco-socialist transition and authoritarian austerity.
MDS: That makes me think about how to build a truly democratic socialist alternative. Especially in the Global North, how do we convince the working class that this future – based on global solidarity, limits, and justice – is like you said, better than what they have now?
It’s a critical question. We must help people understand that consumer abundance in the North is built on unequal exchange – on exploitation of the Global South’s labour and resources. The fast fashion, the cheap electronics, the frequent product replacement – all of it depends on a global system of appropriation. But more importantly, we must show that the working class in the North doesn’t actually win under this system. What they’ve gained in cheap consumer goods, they’ve lost in political agency, autonomy, and collective freedom. Their demands for decommodification, workplace democracy, and control over production have been abandoned.
Capital has used cheap imports to pacify working-class dissent, while consolidating its own power. So, the real prize for workers isn’t another iPhone – it’s democracy, dignity, and a liveable future. We need to reignite that vision, grounded in shared interests with the Global South. The key is to frame eco-socialist transformation not as a loss, but as a liberation – from exploitation, precarity, and ecological collapse. And that’s where solidarity becomes real: not charity, not development aid, but shared struggle for a better world.
MDS: Exactly. That’s the tension I see. Western elites are clearly the main culprits of imperialism and ecological destruction. But in countries like Norway, working-class people also materially benefit from unequal exchange – our welfare state is funded by oil rents, cheap imports, and global extractivism. How do we build anti-imperialist solidarity under those conditions? How do we support revolutionary change in the South while mobilizing the North?
It’s an essential and complex challenge. First, we have to recognize that the landscape has changed since the 1960s. Back then, many leaders in the Global South came to power through mass-based anti-colonial movements. They had mandates for socialist transformation. But over time, those movements were repressed, co-opted, or overthrown – often with Western backing – and replaced by comprador elites who benefit from the current imperial arrangement. These elites are not interested in liberation. They’re aligned with global capital, even if their own populations suffer. That’s why today’s emancipatory movements in the South must confront not only Western imperialism but also their own domestic ruling classes.
This is where national liberation comes in. It’s not a matter of aid or development; it’s about political sovereignty and collective power. Western progressives must support these movements – not through charity, but through solidarity. That means breaking with the logic of the development-industrial complex and backing grassroots revolutions that seek to reclaim control over resources, production, and governance. You’re right: workers in the North do benefit in some material ways. But they are also deeplydisempowered. They’ve cheap consumer goods but not democratic control of production. Capital has used unequal exchange to buy off demands for autonomy and dignity. So, the working class doesn’t really win. They’re offered illusions of prosperity, while their fundamental rights and freedoms erode.
We need a double-front strategy. In the Global South: national liberation movements that dismantle neo-colonial dependency. In the Global North: movements that demand democratic control over production and finance. Together, that’s the path to ending capitalism. It’s not optional – it’s an existential necessity.
DK: That makes sense, but it raises a real problem of political timing. If national liberation in the South cuts off value flows to the core, that would trigger inflation, shortages, and political backlash. Will working-class movements in the North be ready to respond fast enough – with public investment, social protections, and a new vision? Or will the far right get there first?
That’s the critical danger. If we don’t prepare, we could see a very grim outcome. Imagine a scenario where the Global South begins to successfully delink – whether through China’s Belt and Road Initiative, regional trade blocs, or other means. That cuts off flows of cheap labour, resources, and profits to the imperial core. Suddenly, consumption in the North contracts. If the Left hasn’t built a coherent post-capitalist plan, capital will act to preserve its dominance. And what does that look like? Fascism. Crushing labour at home, cheapening domestic wages, repressing dissent. That’s the path I think Trump is preparing for – not because he has a clear plan, but because the logic of empire’s decline demands it.
That’s why we must present a real alternative path. The good news is, we have the data. Research shows that we can maintain or even improve living standards in the North with much lower levelsof energy and resource use. But that requires decommodifying key services – housing, transit, health, education – to shield people from inflation and secure well-being outside of market dependencies. This is the Left’s task: to make sure the collapse of imperial consumption doesn’t become a gateway to authoritarianism, but a springboard to democracy and liberation.
DK: That brings us to a key issue: political organization. I think we all agree that protest alone is no longer sufficient. We saw enormous mobilizations over the past decade – Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion – but they didn’t result in real change. What comes next?
Exactly. The protest culture of the past decade, while incredibly energizing, has hit a wall. Massive climate demonstrations brought millions into the streets. For a moment, it felt like the political class would have to respond. But they didn’t. Nothing substantial changed.
We’re now in a moment of reckoning. People feel disillusioned because they realize these actions weren’t enough. The energy dissipates, and the system remains intact. That’s why I believe we need to return to something that many have been reluctant to talk about: the party. Not the traditional parties that operate within the confines of liberal institutions, but mass-based, working-class parties – vehicles for building real power. These must be rooted in unions, communities, and popular organizations. They must operate with internal democracy but also with strategic coherence. That may mean a return to something like democratic centralism, which proved more effective than horizontalism in achieving structural change.
FT: That resonates deeply. Many of us from our generation saw the rise and fall of the “movement of movements.” We believed in horizontalism – in assemblies, autonomy, consensus. But over time, it became clear that these forms were not durable or effective enough to confront capital. They were easily neutralized or repressed. Now we’re facing a crisis of mass demobilization, especially among the working class. After decades of neoliberal attacks, unions and labour organizations have been hollowed out or co-opted. But at the same time, the promises of social democracy are clearly dead. Capital no longer shares anything with workers. So, the old bargain is over, and the big question is: how do we rebuild?
That’s the question of the century, and it begins with clarity about what the working-class movement should be fighting for. Right now, many unions are trapped in a defensive posture – trying to preserve jobs by aligning with capital, hoping that growth will trickle down and keep their members afloat. But this logic is a trap. It’s embarrassing, frankly, that unions in 2025 still see capitalist growth as the solution to working-class precarity.
We need to move beyond shop-floor struggles for wages and conditions and reclaim the transformative ambitions of the labour movement. That means fighting for public job guarantees, for universal public services, for democratic control over production. Unions should be at the forefront of the ecological transition, not an obstacle to it. They must break from the logic of capital and align with the broader interests of humanity and the planet. Imagine: we can bring hundreds of thousands of people into the streets for wage demands. But why not go further? Why not demand the decommodification of higher education, or worker control over industry? We have the numbers. We have the power. What we need is the political vision.
MDS: I want to build on that. If we’re serious about rebuilding mass parties, how do we ensure that they’re internationalist in outlook? The far right has no problem organizing across borders. They collaborate. They strategize globally. But the left often retreats into national frameworks — especially in places like Norway, where people tend to focus on just protecting the welfare state. How do we organize transnationally, especially across global supply chains, where most of the world’s labour exploitation actually happens?
That’s such a crucial point. The Left’s political imagination is still largely confined by the nation-state, but capital is global. Supply chains are global. Fascism is increasingly global. Our response must be, too.
We should be organizing along supply chain lines – coordinating strikes and campaigns not just within countries, but across them. Global South workers, especially women in factories and agricultural sectors, are the backbone of the world economy. If we build solidarity between them and workers in the North – based on shared struggles rather than pity or charity – we can disrupt the system at its core. Imagine the power of coordinated actions across production nodes – from Bangladesh to Germany, from Mexico to Norway. That’s the level of strategic vision we need to develop. It’s not just possible – it’s necessary, and it begins with rebuilding internationalist institutions of working-class power.
FT: Yes, and to bring this home – our movements are facing a major generational question. We’ve seen waves of mobilization crash, time and again. The old forms don’t work anymore. But how do we reconstitute organization under current conditions, when the working class seems demobilized, and the Left’s institutions are still captured by liberalism?
It’s true. We’ve been through a long process of disorientation. The neoliberal assault dismantled the organizational infrastructure of the working class – its parties, its unions, its media platforms. So, we’re not starting from zero, but we are starting from a much weaker place, and you’re right: many institutions that still exist are stuck in a defensive mind-set. They’re clinging to social-democratic promises that no longer hold. Capital no longer needs to compromise. It’s offering nothing to the working class – not even stability.
The challenge is to rebuild —-not just react. We need a new organizational paradigm. That means clarity, discipline, long-term vision. It means being unapologetically political. And yes, it probably means a return to mass-based parties – but rooted in contemporary conditions, learning from both the strengths and the mistakes of the past.
DK: That reminds me of something from an earlier generation. In the Netherlands, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we had massive horizontalist squatter movements – tens of thousands of people willing to take the streets, occupy buildings, and physically resist police repression. It was revolutionary in energy, if not always in strategy. But we had no party structure. And eventually, the state responded with brutal repression and a cross-party political crackdown. The movement was dismantled, and within a few years, the Netherlands became one of the first “third-way” neoliberal democracies. That history is a warning.
Exactly. We’ve seen this pattern again and again. Horizontalism is great for mobilizing people quickly, for creating moments of radical imagination. But it’s not enough. When push comes to shove, it gets swept away. We need durable structures – organizations capable of holding ground, advancing demands, and taking power. We must learn from past failures, but also reclaim past strengths. Organization, discipline, clarity of vision – these aren’t authoritarian. They’re necessary. If we don’t build vehicles that can carry the struggle forward, we’re leaving the field open for authoritarian reaction.
FT: Finally, to loop back to the beginning – this really is a bifurcation moment, isn’t it? As Immanuel Wallerstein used to say, world-systems eventually reach points where their trajectories split. Either we find a way forward through transformation, or we spiral into fragmentation, repression, and ecological collapse.
Exactly. That’s what makes this moment so serious. Even if the far right isn’t fully aware of what it’s preparing for, the logic of global decline is pushing us in that direction. As the imperial core loses access to cheap labour and resources, the ruling class will respond by turning inward -crushing domestic labour and militarizing society. We’re already seeing this happen and if the left doesn’t offer an alternative – a post-capitalist vision rooted in justice, democracy, and ecological stability – then capital will manage the transition through violence and repression.
But we do have a chance. We know that human needs can be met with dramatically less energy and material throughput. We can build universal public services. We can stabilize prices without growth. We can reorganize production to serve life rather than profit. That’s the vision we must fight for. Not in the abstract, not one day, but now. Because the world we could live in is still possible, but it’s slipping away.
This interview was first published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Our gratitude for the right to republish.
Jason Hickel is a professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and the author of several books including The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions and Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.
Don Kalb is founding editor of Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology and FocaalBlog, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen and director of GRIP.
Maria Dyveke Styve is a Max Weber Post-Doctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence and GRIP affiliate. Her research interests span the political economy of development, dependency theory, economic anthropology, decolonial epistemologies, racial capitalism, critical race theory and economic history.
Federico Tomasone is Project Manager for Social Rights and Labour Policies atRosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Brussels Office
Cite as: Hickel, J., Kalb, D., Dyveke Styve, M., & Tomasone, F. 2025. “Reorganize Production to Serve Life, Not Profit” Focaalblog 8 July. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/07/08/jason-hickel-don-kalb-maria-dyveke-styve-and-federico-tomasone-reorganize-production-to-serve-life-not-profit/
Image 1: “No Kings Day” call to action poster, by nokings.org
From large cities to small towns, “No Kings Day” will counter Trump’s birthday spectacle with people power.
“Nah, he wouldn’t really do that.”
I’ve lived in the Upper Delaware Valley for five years, first in Pike County, Pennsylvania, and now in Sullivan County, New York. My county went 58% for Trump last November, and several of my pro-Trump neighbors made remarks like that in the lead-up to the election. Deep down, they know Trump is a liar and con artist, even if they find him entertaining and thrillingly transgressive (Gaufman & Favero 2025).
They didn’t take his bombast and grandiose promises seriously. Like establishing high tariffs. Abolishing the Department of Education. Arresting diverse “enemies,” including a federal judge, a congressional representative, a mayor and a student journalist. Or slashing funding for Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) and the National Institutes of Health. Or demolishing federal government agencies, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Board, Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, National Weather Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Federal Drug Administration, Occupational Safety and Health Administration or Environmental Protection Agency. Who’s going to warn you if a wildfire, tornado or hurricane is headed our way? Who will bring emergency relief if you’re unlucky enough to be in its path?
It wasn’t only my upstate New York neighbors or people like them elsewhere—small business owners, farmers, service sector employees, teachers and retired workers—who declared, “Nah, he wouldn’t really do that.” Sophisticated Wall Street titans wanting tax cuts and deregulation muttered the same thing and then freaked out when Trump imposed tariffs that tanked the stock market. Republican members of Congress have stood idly by letting Trump run roughshod over the limits of executive power, insisting that he is “only joking” when floating ideas like running for a third term. This may be a way to “flood the zone with shit,” as Steve Bannon once put it, but such jokes often have serious consequences.
“I don’t know.” That’s what Trump responded when NBC reporter Kristen Welker asked him whether he was obliged to uphold the U.S. Constitution. They were talking about due process for migrants, but Trump’s ignorance of and contempt for the Constitution go way beyond that. Accepting Qatar’s gift of a $400 million jet plane, for example, violates Article 1, Section 9, of the Constitution, which states that “no Person holding any Office … shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
It’s not just that Trump is reveling in Qatar’s gift of the opulently appointed Boeing 747 (which will have to be torn to pieces if it is to be brought up to Air Force One’s security standards). The Emir of Qatar—formerly a prince, now a king—personifies a foreign state. It’s that Trump too aspires to be a king like the Emir, with all the dictatorial powers that absolute monarchy implies. In December 2023, when Trump remarked to Sean Hannity that he would only be a dictator on “day one,” his aides dismissed the comment as a joke. Fast forward to February of this year, the White House even posted a mock TIME magazine cover that showed Trump wearing a golden crown. In place of the magazine’s name was “TRUMP” and below the words, “Long live the king.”
Many of those people who used to say, “Nah, he wouldn’t really do that” will probably insist, “C’mon, he’s just joking.” But is he?
“Make America Think Again” (Edelman 2024) is what I hoped for in the days before the 2024 election. What I’d say to my neighbors today is: If you’re having trouble finding affordable housing, low-income immigrants doubling up in substandard apartments aren’t screwing you as much as those private equity firms that snapped up so many foreclosed properties following the 2008 crisis and jacked up rents and sales prices.
Like most rural counties, Sullivan County, in the western Catskills, receives far more in federal funds than we pay in taxes. In our county, 37.2% of the population is on Medicaid, the third highest proportion of any county in New York State. Federal cuts to Medicaid affect not just Medicaid beneficiaries, who lose medical insurance, but also the solvency of local clinics and hospitals. When nurses and physician assistants are laid off, or health care facilities close because of falling reimbursements, the diners where employees bought their meals will also suffer.
Effects like these cascade through entire regional economies. Farmers are already complaining that the USDA’s cancellation of contracts they signed for reimbursement of infrastructure and conservation improvements on their properties has saddled them with massive debt, having spent money for planting or infrastructure and conservation improvements expecting reimbursement from the government. USDA also halted procurement programs that sourced fresh, local foods for school cafeterias. Together with the cuts to SNAP and dismantling of USAID, both programs that purchased huge amounts of food, farmers are reeling—and will be spending less at our region’s businesses. The kids in school will be eating less nutritious food. It’s hardly Making America Healthy Again.
At the same time that the administration is abandoning rural America, it is fighting tooth and nail to get Congress to pass enormous tax cuts for the rich, promoting the $TRUMP meme coin and its gala gazillionaires’ dinner. Meanwhile, Elon Musk and the DOGE boys have eviscerated entire federal agencies with impunity. Do people remember that Trump and his cronies once yapped incessantly about “Drain the Swamp”?
Two hundred fifty years ago the American colonists revolted against Britain’s George III, the “mad king” who governed them. This year, a new mad king (Rubin 2025) plans to celebrate his birthday on Flag Day with an expensive, over-the-top military parade, paid for by you, the taxpayer.
On June 14, people throughout the United States are taking to the streets to celebrate “No Kings Day,” They will remind the Trump regime that no one is above the rule of law and say: no thrones, no crowns, no kings.
Marc Edelman is professor of anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Cite as: Edelman, Marc 2025. “This Year in the United States, Flag Day Is No Kings Day” Focaalblog 11 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/06/11/marc-edelman-this-year-in-the-united-states-flag-day-is-no-kings-day/
Image 1: The reinstated Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University, 23 April 2024. Photo by Abbad Diraneyya.
Cancelling Mbembe
On June 6 2024 I was present in the grand hall that is the University Aula of the University of Bergen in Norway when my friend Achille Mbembe received the prestigious Holberg Prize from the University of Bergen (UiB). I had been there in the same hall when Mbembe, arguably the most widely read and cited Africa-based intellectual of his time, first visited Norway for the annual Holberg Debate on December 1, 2018. Back then, he had made Africans in the audience gasp in recognition as he narrated that, as the only black passenger on the incoming flight from Schiphol in Amsterdam to Flesland Airport in Bergen, he been held up by local police at the airport for over an hour. I had as a member of a sub-committee working under the auspices of the Holberg Committee at the UiB nominated Mbembe to come to Bergen. By nominating Mbembe, my co-nominator and I wanted to make a statement about the importance of open engagement with prominent theorists from the ‘Global South’ in a Norwegian academia in which we felt this was lacking. Two years later, Mbembe would be cancelled from the Ruhrbiennale in Germany, after the federally funded arts festival had come under severe criticism from the Federal Commissioner Against Antisemitism in Berlin, Felix Klein, assorted German newspaper editors, and pro-Israeli diaspora organizations. He had, based on tendentious readings of some of his shorter texts, and a signature on a call for an academic boycott of Ariel University, an Israeli university linked to an illegal Israeli settlement on the Occupied Palestinian West Bank, in effect been labelled an “antisemite” (Assmann 2021). Mbembe decided to fight back, but the media campaign would ultimately silence him: in the five years that have passed, he has not been back to Germany, and has adamantly refused to comment on the Israeli war on Gaza.
In another prominent case, the Lebanese-Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage was fired from a visiting position at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) in Halle in 2024 after a concerted media campaign had brought the same Felix Klein’s attention to a series of Facebook posts after Hamas’ terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the ensuing Israeli war on Gaza. Hage had inter alia used the forbidden term “Zionism”; and worse, still, the forbidden term “genocide”; and analogized Israel and Nazi Germany. In a statement, the MPI (not the Halle institute) implied that Hage was guilty of “antisemitism.”
I had heard of similar cases in which academic careers had been threatened and academic freedom undone from the UK, where a US-born Jewish scholar, Prof Rebecca Ruth Gould (Gould 2023), had in 2017 been one of the first victims of a university investigation into allegations of “antisemitism.”
On International Women’s Day, March 8, 2025, the thirty year old Syrian-born Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil was arrested outside his Columbia University apartment in Morningside Heights in New York. As a student at Columbia Khalil had acted as mediator for the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia at the height of the student protests against the Israeli war on Gaza in 2024. He had not been arrested for any illegal activity; he was arrested for exercising his right to freedom of speech under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Try as they might, no one has found any traces of contact with, or support for Hamas, in his record: instead, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had signed his warrant of arrest based on a provision in the McCarthy-era Immigration and Nationality Act (1952) which provided him with the right to declare that Khalil’s presence in the US was “contrary to US foreign policy interests.” Khalil’s arrest was the culmination of a federal blackmail of Columbia University involving US$ 400 million in federal funding and contracts due to the university’s alleged “failures” in addressing antisemitism on campus. Following the dark precedent of university administrators during the McCarthy era, Columbia University’s Interim President Katrina Armstrong rapidly yielded to the blackmail: not only did Columbia expel, suspend, or rescind the degrees of some twenty-two students who had been involved in pro-Palestinian protests; she also committed the university to full co-operation with federal authorities; and agreed to put the department of South Asian, Middle Eastern and African Studies (MESAAS) under external administration, and hire new faculty on the basis of their pro-Israeli views rather than their academic credentials. For as Sheldon Pollock noted in an op-ed in The Guardian, Middle Eastern Studies faculty at Columbia University are not generally known to be loyal supporters of Israel and its record on human rights and international law. Columbia even has a Center For Palestine Studies, led by the outspoken Palestinian-American anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj. The March 13 letter from the Trump administration which listed a set of demands Columbia University had to fulfil as conditions for further negotiations, had also demanded that Columbia adopt a “formal definition of antisemitism”; though this was offered as a “helpful suggestion”, the letter referenced the 2016 IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism (WDA).
The Palestinian exception to academic freedom and the 2016 IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism
Scholars have long been talking about a “Palestinian exception to academic freedom and freedom of speech” (Tatour 2024). And so, I wondered what the connecting thread was in all these attacks on academic freedom, freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech for scholars and students committed to a Cesairean/Gilroyean “planetary humanism made to the measure of the world” as applied to Palestinian rights to life, freedom, and dignity. It was at this point that I discovered the so-called “non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), adopted at a plenary meeting of the IHRA in Bucharest in Romania in 2016.
“Non-legally binding working definition” sounded innocuous enough; it conveys the impression that this has nothing to do with actual law. Furthermore, this suggested that a more refined and consensual definition would emerge at some foreseeable point in the future. That turned out not to be the case. As the scholar Rebecca Ruth Gould, herself one of the first targets of enquiries into alleged “antisemitism” while a young lecturer at Bristol University in 2017, has noted, in many of the 43 countries that to date have formally adopted the IHRA working definition it has turned into what is for all practical purposes a “soft law” (Gould 2021), with severe potential consequences for academics or activists who have somehow ended up in its crosshairs. Furthermore, despite the many obvious and much criticized shortcomings of the definition, and the eleven accompanying “contemporary examples of antisemitism”, there have not been any revisions. No less than seven out of eleven examples of “antisemitism” relate to speech about Israel. These include characterizing Israel as an “apartheid state” (like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem and Forensic Architecture has long done) and thus implying that Israel underwrites “a racist endeavor”; arguing with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that what the IDF has been doing in Gaza since October 2023 amounts to a “plausible genocide”, suggesting an analogy between Israel and Nazi Germany; calling for an academic boycott of Israel with reference to the close interlinkages between the Israeli military-industrial complex and Israeli universities (Wind 2024), which is de facto “antisemitic” in Israel and Germany. Anti-Zionism, whether Jewish or gentile, is “antisemitic” in the US after Executive Order 13899 of 2019 and a subsequent resolution in the US Congress of 2023. In the view of proponents of IHRA, to be Jewish is to support Israel, never mind Jewish and/or Israeli anti-Zionists from Hannah Arendt via Avi Shlaim to Eyal Weizman.
We know from the by now extensive secondary literature that the suggestion of a formal definition of antisemitism came from an Israeli historian at Tel Aviv University and at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. This must be seen in the context of the US-Israeli concern over the 2001 Durban Conference on Racism of the UN; the rise of antisemitism in the context of the Second Intifada (2000-05); and the emergence of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) in 2005. The IHRA 2016 working definition was almost identical to a definition developed by a team of academics working under the auspices of the American Jewish Committee (AJW) led by Prof Kenneth Stern of Bard College in New York in 2004-05. Though never formally adopted, it was used by various European bodies (EUMC, OSCE) until the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) removed it from its website in 2013. Stern had by then become outspoken in his criticism over the ways in which the definition was being weaponized and applied in civil lawsuits and campus speech regulations. By the time of the plenary meeting of the IHRA in 2014, Mark Weizman, then the chair of the Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial Committee of IHRA, and a Director at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in the USA, had proposed that IHRA could simply copy the EUMC definition, and started lobbying for IHRA to adopt it at the plenary meeting scheduled to take place in Bucharest in 2016. Weizman would later claim that the plenary meeting in 2016 adopted both the core definition and the eleven examples. However, Jamie Stern-Weiner (2021) demonstrates that this was not the case, and that delegates from Denmark and Sweden openly opposed the eleven examples at the plenary meeting. Countries that have adopted the IHRA 2016 working definition of antisemitism have for the most part either not taken an active stance with regard to the examples (UK), or adopted it without the examples (Germany, France). The blackmailing of universities in the name of “combatting antisemitism” did not start with the Trump administration in the USA, however. The “honor” of pioneering that strategy goes to the then Tory Minister of Education Gavin Williamson who threatened British universities with severe budget cuts should they refuse to adopt the IHRA 2016 working definition.
The Israeli far-right government has invited several European far-right political leaders to a conference on “combatting antisemitism” in late March. It is a fair assumption that the assembled delegates from National Unity (RN), the Swedish Democrats, Vox, and Fidesz, will not be discussing with Israeli President Herzog and Prime Minister Netanyahu the antisemitism of far-right actors making fascist salutes and denying the Holocaust. The 2016 IHRA working definition enables an historical shift whereby antisemitism becomes identified almost exclusively with Left pro-Palestinian activism, while classical far-right antisemitism is excused as long as it publicly performs loyalty and support for Israel. The record clearly shows that Israel was not only actively involved in designing the 2016 IHRA working definition, but also played a pivotal role in lobbying for it at IHRA, in various EU organs and at the UN. We live in dark times, as Hannah Arendt said, and the greatest surprise is how easy it has been for illiberal speech regulations in advanced liberal democracies to be introduced with hardly any public or legislative debate. It is also a ‘time of monsters’, and it will take both courage and integrity to defend academic freedom and freedom of speech for all in the years ahead.
Sindre Bangstad is Research Professor at KIFO (Institute for Church, Religion & Worldview Research) in Oslo, Norway.
References
Assmann, Aleida (2021). ‘A Spectre is Haunting Germany: The Mbembe Debate and the New Antisemitism’, Journal of Genocide Research 23 (3): 400-411.
Gould, Rebecca R. (2021). ‘Legal Form and Legal Legitimacy: The IHRA Definition of Antisemitism as a Case Study in Censored Speech’, Law, Culture and the Humanities 18 (1): 153-81.
Gould, Rebecca R. (2023). Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom. London and New York: Verso.
Tatour, Lana (2024). ‘Censoring Palestine: human rights, academic freedom and the IHRA’, Australian Journal of Human Rights 30 (1): 106-114.
Cite as: Bangstad, Sindre 2025. “The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism and Academic Freedom” Focaalblog 28 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/03/28/sindre-bangstad-the-ihra-working-definition-of-antisemitism-and-academic-freedom/
Image 1: Screenshot from the Mariupol Memory Park website
“On the form, I ticked that I had got enough pads. I ticked that I had been instructed. I ticked that I had applied for microloans, more than once. I ticked that I had been encouraged. I ticked that I had nowhere to live. I ticked that I had nowhere to study. I ticked that I had nowhere to go. I ticked that I had nothing to lose. I ticked that I didn’t mind the NGO using my personal data for their future projects.”
This quote is an excerpt from a Sashko Protyah short story, where a citizen of Mozambique makes a deal with a people smuggler. The business offers an innovative method of (post)human trafficking, promising to turn their clients from the Global South into a bird, and flying them to European shores, where they can regain human form and continue their way to the European Union. To her ill fortune, the protagonist reaches European land in Mariupol, Ukraine, in the spring of 2022, when the Russian invasion of the city was in full force. Eventually, she manages to escape with a group of volunteers who evacuate pets from the occupied territory, but her transformation fails, and she is caught in a netherworld between being animal and human, with no acceptable form, identity or document to prove her belonging to any official entity. Falling through the cracks of state assistance, she is approached by humanitarian NGOs that work in the conflict zone and recruit vulnerable people for well-worded but questionable development projects. In the end, the protagonist is hired in an “apocalypse theme park” that recreates the siege of Mariupol as an infotainment experience, engaging the visitors with authentic scenarios of explosions, looting, and no running water.
The author of the short story, Sashko Protyah from the Freefilmerz art collective was one of the speakers at the workshop “REMEMBERING / RECLAIMING / RECONSTRUCTING SPACE: Working with local heritage in times of war and displacement” I organized at the University of St Andrews as a knowledge exchange event during my ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship., The workshop invited Ukrainian cultural practitioners working with precarious heritage during the Russian invasion to share their experiences with a group of international researchers studying similar topics. Besides broadening our knowledge about pragmatic aspects of heritage work in the context of war, the short lectures delivered by Ukrainian participants highlighted a set of ethical issues equally relevant in the work of ethnographers and other researchers working with vulnerable communities.
Protyah talked about his experience of creating Mariupol Memory Park, an online archive that commemorates and celebrate life in Mariupol. The website collects testaments about the city from a variety of authors in different genres, all of them affectionate while reflecting the multivocality of urban life and the complicated emotions elicited by the place. As Sashko pointed out, and his short story addresses in a critical self-reflexive manner, one of the major risks of creating this kind of archives is the exploitation of traumatic memories. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, refugees from Mariupol and other places have been asked on countless occasions by journalists, researchers, NGO workers and others to share their experiences of war and displacement for various projects. While these conversations require significant temporal and emotional investment from the participants and can have a re-traumatizing effect, interlocutors are rarely compensated or offered psychological support. The dynamics of this exchange reflect a deeper running process that Asia Bazdyrieva (2022) termed the “resourcification of Ukraine”, referring to the continuing tendency of Western and Soviet geopolitical thinking to reduce Ukrainian land and people to a “resource that qualifies for a long list of services.”
The idea of resourcification, when applied to people, recalls long-standing conversations in anthropology regarding the inequality of researcher and interlocutor. Even in times more peaceful than the current moment, academics need to confront the dilemma of waving goodbye to our interlocutors and returning to Western institutions to advance our careers using the knowledge they have shared with us, leaving them with… what exactly? In a context of war or other forms of violence, this situation gets complicated by concerns about personal safety, stigmatization and psychological trauma, reiterating the question: on what ground do we expect people to share their most difficult life experiences with us? How do we make participation beneficial for them in the short as well as the long term? What is our role as researchers in a time when the communities we work with are fighting for survival?
Image 2: Screenshot from the online workshop (image courtesy of Victoria Donovan)
While in certain cases, interlocutors think about sharing traumatic experiences as a politically or psychologically important act of giving a testament or gaining recognition of the injustices they have suffered (see Veena Das’ essay “Our work to cry: Your work to listen” (Das 1990)), the expectations of the research relationship can also become a source of frustration to the members of “over-researched and underserved” (Yotebieng 2020) communities.
Mariupol Memory Park addresses the problem of exploitation by commissioning new works to construct an archive, shifting the emphasis from the extraction of painful memories to the process of creation and reflection. Contributors retain the agency to tell their story in a way they feel appropriate instead of being used as information sources or credibility props in someone else’s project. Importantly, they are all paid for their work from the funding received by Western European NGOs and government research agencies.
In anthropological practice, financial compensation for research participation is rarely used due to issues around voluntary consent and authenticity of information. However, this should not discourage academics from contemplating the place of money in supporting interlocutors, especially in a time when communities face the ongoing existential threat of war and genocide. One way to do this is acknowledging the role of participants as co-creators and channelling institutional funding to financially honour their contribution. Another avenue might involve collaborative projects with local organizations using research funding from Western institutions. Area studies professor Victoria Donovan (2023) evokes the figure of the “trickster” to propose a strategy for academics to facilitate this process within the often rigid institutional hierarchies, suggesting “using the power (and, crucially, the funding) that we are assigned to manifest the changes that we want to see.”
Image 3: Screenshot from the City in the Suitcase website
Approaching the theme of collaboration from another angle, Kateryna Filonova from Mariupol Local History Museum and Iryna Sklokina from Lviv Center for Urban History presented during the workshop their initiative City in the Suitcase: Saved (Family) Archives. The project addresses the problem of museum heritage lost in the war due to physical destruction, looting, and the logistical problems created by relocating whole museums from the occupied territories. Attempting an alternative route to reconstruct lost local heritage, the curators published a call inviting residents from occupied cities of Eastern Ukraine to share their family photography collections. The call, while it received valuable material, had a relatively low response rate. Having worked with IDPs from the Donbas since 2014, Kateryna from Mariupol Local History Museum remarked that this was more or less expected: the experience of the previous ten years suggests that people who need to flee in a hurry do not prioritize taking family albums. As a result, the call received less material from Mariupol, and more from other places where residents had more time to prepare evacuation. The other limitation of the entries is related to the specific status of digital media in contemporary conflicts. While digital data becomes more important in conditions of material destruction and displacement, as people are often left with their phone memory as their only source of personal photos, phones and social media accounts were thoroughly examined by Russians at the military checkpoints. As a result, several people had to delete their photos and apps on the road, and many of them got locked out of their accounts, losing access even to the digital memories they had left.
In the end, the project received eighteen collections of family photography from different cities of Eastern Ukraine. The material collected this way offers “an alternative history of the Donbas”, featuring elements of Ukrainian culture, the democratic movement of the 1990s, as well as the pro-Ukrainian and Anti-Maidan demonstrations of 2014. Discussing the potential of representing “history from below”, Iryna emphasized the importance of reflexivity in their curatorial practice. Archives are instruments of power, and the decisions made by the archivist determine what story will be told for future generations of historians and the public. In the case of personal collections, the curators paid extra attention to avoid imposing their own interpretations while processing the data according to archival standards. To achieve this, they employed what they call a “non-institutional approach to documenting”, archiving what respondents chose to include and annotating the material in a continuous conversation with the owners of the photos. At the same time, they emphasized that the owners’ interpretation was also situated, reflecting their current position in relation to the post-independence political history of Ukraine.
Lessons from the project City in a Suitcase reiterate the idea that there is no “view from nowhere” during the creation of an archive (Zeitlyn 2012), making it inevitable to reflect on the position of each stakeholder. For an anthropologist, such an approach evokes familiar debates on reflexivity in social research. Both in archival and anthropological practice, discussions on reflexivity question the neutrality of knowledge produced within a hegemonic system of institutions by members of privileged social groups (Al-Masri et al. 2021). Restructuring the research process into an act of co-production, as it happened with the contributors of the photo archive, offers a way to decolonize the hierarchical relationship between the knower/known (Casagrande 2022).
Image 4: Screenshot from Contemporary History of Ukraine by Oksana Kazmina
The last major theme emerging during the workshop was the relationship of traumatic memories and global heritage regimes. The “apocalypse theme park” described in Sashko’s short story is an exaggerated version of memory parks that turn places of collective trauma into profitable tourist attractions, disregarding the needs of the affected communities (Meskell 2002). As Sashko said, similar projects are already taking place in relation to Mariupol, and it is important to speak up against the commodification of people’s loss and sorrow. However, as it was abundantly demonstrated in recent years in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere, the destruction of cultural heritage is not simply a by-product of contemporary warfare, but an integral part of genocide and cultural erasure (Tsymbalyuk 2022). The “dark heritage” of such cynical and calculated destruction demands a tactful approach of representation that allows the world to learn about what happened while prioritizing the needs of community members. Discussing the case of the 9/11 memorial in Manhattan, Lynn Meskell observes a growing “desire for grounded materiality” (Meskell 2002) in a moment when the broader public collectively encountered the experience of a virtually broadcasted, real time terror attack for the first time. The present context of urbicide and displacement can evoke a similar longing for tangible markers of commemoration, presenting the challenge to find new ways of representation that avoid commodification and the creation of genocide-disneylands.
The work of Oksana Kazmina, another member of the Freefilmerz art collective, offers a possible answer to this dilemma. Contemporary History of Ukraineis a series of “performative walks” composed of digital media fragments: video footage, online maps, zoom recordings and photos are combined on the screen to (re)construct landscapes of memory. In the virtual walk created for the workshop, Oksana explores the transformative potential of the “yebenya”, a concept denoting a place of abandonment and decay in the East European urban typology. Walking through the ruins of a former Soviet pioneer camp in a coastal village near Mariupol in 2018, she contemplates the role of these material structures in making sense of the past and our own place in it. “Maybe we did need these places of abandonment, which are also traces of how things used to be. We needed them to be conserved like this for us to come here and look in the mirror.” Similarly, to the debris of Soviet urban infrastructure, material traces of violence have a potential beyond erasure or sensationalism: approached with care, they can serve as an object of reflection in the difficult process of making sense of experiences that should have never occurred.
The initial aim of the workshop was to explore the strategies Ukrainian cultural workers use to address unprecedented experiences of destruction, displacement and trauma. The resulting dialogue about extractive humanitarianism, the commodification of traumatic heritage, and the politics of representation has shown alarming resonance with the geopolitical developments of the recent weeks. As I am finalizing this text, the Trump government has stopped all military and most of the humanitarian aid to Ukraine, while working out the details of a blatantly late-colonialist and exploitative rare minerals deal that would push the country further into economic deprivation. The projects presented during the workshop are highly critical regarding the role of Western assistance in local cultural practice. In the current circumstances, their critique offers a constructive alternative to the deliberate dismantling of vital support networks in the region.
The workshop was supported by ESRC UK (grant ID: ES/X006182/1). Video lectures by Ukrainian participants were commissioned and each speaker was paid an honorarium for their work. Many thanks to Sarah and Sandra from the Research Administration team of School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies at University of St Andrews for their help.
Anna Balazs is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University, Stockholm. She received her PhD in social anthropology at the University of Manchester in 2020. Her work focuses on the infrastructural and cultural legacies of socialism in Eastern European cities, and the temporalities of geopolitical conflict in Ukraine. The present text was written during the ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of St Andrews, UK.
References
Al-Masri, Muzna, Samar Kanafani, Lamia Moghnieh, Helena Nassif, Elizabeth Saleh, and Zina Sawaf. 2021. ‘On Reflexivity in Ethnographic Practice and Knowledge Production: Thoughts from the Arab Region’. Commoning Ethnography 4 (1): 5–22. https://doi.org/10.26686/ce.v4i1.6516.
Casagrande, Olivia. 2022. ‘Introduction: Ethnographic Scenario, Emplaced Imaginations and a Political Aesthetic’. In Performing the Jumbled City: Subversive Aesthetics and Anticolonial Indigeneity in Santiago de Chile. Manchester UK: Manchester University Press.
Das, Veena. 1990. ‘Our Work to Cry: Your Work to Listen’. In Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, 345-399. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Meskell, Lynn. 2002. ‘Negative Heritage and Past Mastering in Archaeology’. Anthropological Quarterly 75 (3): 557–74.
Tsymbalyuk, Darya. 2022. ‘Erasure: Russian Imperialism, My Research on Donbas, and I’. Kajet Digital (blog). 15 June 2022. https://kajetjournal.com/2022/06/15/darya-tsymbalyuk-erasure-russian-imperialism-my-research-on-donbas/.
Zeitlyn, David. 2012. ‘Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates’. Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (Volume 41, 2012): 461–80. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721.
Cite as: Balazs, Anna 2025. “War, displacement, and cultural heritage: reflections on a workshop” Focaalblog 18 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/03/18/anna-balazs-war-displacement-and-cultural-heritage-reflections-on-a-workshop/
Image 1: Pro-European integration manifestation in Kyiv on 29 November 2013. Photo by Mstyslav Chernov
Introduction
Soon after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in an earlier post on this blog (Hann 2022), I emphasized the geopolitical and economic interests of the west, especially US corporations. I extended my analysis in 2024 in the Focaal journal itself (Hann 2024a; 2024b), where my article benefited from the critical insights of Denys Gorbach (2024) and Volodymyr Ishchenko (2024).
But political outcomes are also shaped by emotions, moods and personalities. The world has recently witnessed dramatic tensions between the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and the US president, Donald Trump. Sooner or later the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, will also move to centre stage. These leaders strive simultaneously to mobilize mass sentiment in their respective countries and to win the battle for the moral high ground internationally. While media coverage focuses on the traits of these individuals, anthropologists tend to be more interested in the subjectivities of larger communities.
At present, Trump’s efforts to initiate peace negotiations are widely perceived as a crude capitulation to Putin, sometimes as appeasement. These unprecedented frictions have generated an outpouring of moral outrage and intensified support for the Ukrainian cause in western Europe. The solidarity of the European Community (minus Hungary) and the demonising of Putin follow 30 years of the humiliation of Russia and western hubris after congratulating itself on having won the cold war. The best word to describe the role of Ukraine right now is perhaps hamartia – a “fatal flaw” that leads to the downfall of a tragic hero. I argue that Ukraine is the nationalist hamartia sealing the fate of post-cold war Europe.
Humiliation in Moscow (and elsewhere)
German historian Ute Frevert (2020) has shown that humiliation is an emotion deeply rooted in European society as well as a significant political force. The cold war preserved a semblance of equivalence between the two camps, but the disintegration of the Soviet Union became a humiliation for Russia. Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision of a “common European home” was forgotten as he himself disappeared from the political scene. By the time Putin replaced Boris Yeltsin as president at the end of 1999, the Russian Federation was on its knees both politically and economically. Three former Soviet republics were on course to join NATO, which had already admitted other former satellite states to full membership.
After three years of warfare, humiliation remains a powerful emotion as events unfold. Donald Trump humbles Zelensky at the White House, but he also humiliates his nominal allies in western Europe as they scramble to save the agenda they were dragged into by previous US presidents and to avoid a humiliating defeat for Ukraine.
Hubris in Washington
The obverse of Russia’s humiliation was the sentiment of hubris in the United States, accompanied (as Jeffrey Sachs has repeatedly argued) by a refusal to consider a pluralist geopolitical world order. As Jonathan Haslam (2024) has documented in detail, this hubris began in the 1990s and has continued to shape US foreign policy in the new century. An early flashpoint came in 2008 when the leaders of the US and the UK argued in support of Ukrainian (and Georgian) membership of NATO. Other European members, principally Germany and France, opted to respect Moscow’s emphatic opposition and further enlargement was put on hold. It is important to note that Atlanticist sympathies did not in this period enjoy mass support among Ukrainian voters, who in 2010 elected a president more oriented toward Moscow (Viktor Yanukovych, who was deposed in the course of the Euromaidan revolution of 2013-14).
Russia’s annexation of Crimea and occupation of significant territory in Donbas in 2014 threw a spanner in the works. But throughout the ensuing violence (never effectively curbed by the Minsk agreements, which were transgressed by both sides), the US continued to promote ever closer integration into NATO. Volodymyr Zelensky’s election in 2019 as a “peace president” did not reduce the pressure: the intention remained to yank the whole of Ukraine away from Moscow’s orbit.
Irritation in Brussels
As Russia stabilized under Putin, European leaders too had to decide how to handle the former superpower. With admission to NATO precluded very early on, they had to determine who would be eligible for full membership of the EU and who would be allowed to snuggle up alongside as partners. Under Italian (Romano Prodi) and Portuguese (José Manuel Barroso) leadership, EU diplomats found it much easier to spread liberal messages and support NGOs in Kyiv than in Moscow, where all approaches seemed to generate only obstruction and irritation. Ukraine was granted preferential partner status and Russia consigned to its familiar position of otherness.
This negligence of Russia was short-sighted. It gave Vladimir Putin the perfect excuse to ramp up his repressive regime. Having sought closer ties with the west in the early years of his presidency, successive NATO enlargements were interpreted by Putin as aggression. The mixture of hubris and irritation in the west has distorted politics in Russia, deepened the east-west division of Europe and hindered the eastwards expansion of liberalism in a deeper societal sense.
To be fair, the EU has also experienced considerable irritation in the other direction. It was well illustrated by Angela Merkel when responding to state department official Victoria Nuland’s vulgar criticism of EU diplomacy during the Euromaidan crisis. The EU (and also the UK) may currently feel it has been left in the lurch by the change of course in Washington; but subscription to the Biden principle of “fight to the last Ukrainian” and concomitant emotional solidarities left them with little choice.
Charisma and the moral high ground
In December 2021 Russia stipulated its conditions for resolving the latest escalating crisis. Putin again highlighted the “red line” precluding Ukrainian membership of NATO. But this attempt to enter into negotiations was ignored in the west. Nobody should have been surprised when Putin launched his “special military operation” in February 2022. Western media have not ceased to speak of an “unprovoked invasion” but the long-term structural provocation of NATO expansion could hardly be denied.
Despite winning his presidential mandate as a peace monger, Volodymyr Zelensky soon put all his charisma and media skills in the service of those factions seeking to purge the country of Russian influence and to join not only NATO but also the EU. For large sections of the population, Putin’s invasion served to strengthen a national identification not strongly felt hitherto. His leadership also made an emotional impact on western audiences. A colourful David to Putin’s ugly Goliath, he has appealed to left and right alike. He is a hero to legal scholars who make holy writ out of national sovereignty. And he appeals to idealist enthusiasts of human rights and to students of postcolonialism, who have been taught to see Russia as an empire in urgent need of dismantling. This perspective, which attributes the war entirely to Russian “neoimperialism”, is also popular within western anthropology (Dunn 2022).
Zelensky and the Ukrainian cause have come to enjoy a monopoly of the moral high ground in western Europe. Russia is once again the barbaric other and anyone questioning this narrative is accused of being Putin’s “useful idiot.” This highly emotional mood of moral superiority grows with the uneasy prospect of sordid deals brokered by Trump, in which the ethical causes of freedom and the preservation of human life are contaminated by calculations of the value of Ukraine’s mineral wealth. A deep well of angry moralizing emotion now exists in the UK and the EU, powerful enough to countenance previously inconceivable increases in military spending (Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is the only EU political leader brave enough to question this consensus).
Towards uncivil society in a monoethnic state
A few academics have dared to critique the consensus by showing the political and moral stakes to be more complex. Perhaps the best known is Jeffrey Sachs, who makes a case for the “Finlandization” of Ukraine. However persuasive in cold rational terms, this is incompatible with fierce national pride, which has reached new heights in light of sacrifices on the battlefields. Volodymyr Ishchenko (2023) offers penetrating analyses of Ukraine’s post-Soviet political economy, its regional patterns, and ongoing class struggles in both Ukraine and Russia; but he too perhaps underestimates the importance of emotions. American political scientist Nikolai Petro (2023) has drawn attention to long-term civil society deficits in Ukraine and continuing discrimination against those who wish to hold on to an ancient Russian cultural identity. Does the holy writ of national sovereignty entitle power holders to make a considerable proportion of their population second class citizens by constraining the use they make of their mother tongue?
The nationalist objective is to force 40 million Ukrainians into a homogeneous container, as different as possible from the equivalent Russian container. This kind of homogeneity was the aspiration of 19th-century nation builders. It is hardly compatible with democratic flourishing in the 2020s.
Ukraine is the hamartia of post-cold war Europe. Whatever the eventual territorial compromises, this war has been a monstrous victory for nationalism, while cementing a modified east-west divide. It is tragic to observe western European leaders so caught up in this mood that they are prepared to undermine their own welfare states in order to produce more weapons and prolong violence in a remote location about which they know very little.
How many more east Slavs have to die on both sides? In the most optimistic scenario, it will take a very long time before the Ukrainian state qualifies for the EU. Is it not possible to return to the vision of Gorbachev and negotiate new pathways to a truly unified Europe, one that would allow military spending everywhere to be reduced?
An earlier version of this post was briefly published on 5th March by The Conversation. I thank Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor at The Conversation UK, for his help in shortening my original draft and changing the style to make it more accessible; of course, I alone am responsible for the final text. Jonathan was also helpful in locating some of the hyperlinks. He is not to blame for the fact that his more senior editors pulled the piece within hours.
Chris Hann is Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and a Former Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
Haslam, Jonathan. 2024. Hubris. The Origins of Russia’s War against Ukraine. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2023. Towards the Abyss. Ukraine from Maidan to War. London: Verso.
Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2024. ‘Class, values, and revolutions in the Russia-Ukraine war’. Focaal 98: 110-113.
Petro, Nikolai N. 2023. The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution. Boston: de Gruyter.
Cite as: Hann, Chris 2025. “Humiliation, Hubris and Hamartia: the emotional history of the Ukraine war” Focaalblog 13 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/03/13/chris-hann-humiliation-hubris-and-hamartia-the-emotional-history-of-the-ukraine-war/
One of the main strengths of ethnographic methodologies is immersed, long-term research, which enables in-depth learning and a holistic vision of a given issue. Restricted or volatile access to ethnographic field sites thus presents not just practical difficulties but it raises a host of important methodological, epistemological, ethical and other questions.
A roundtable discussion at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin brought together scholars working in the fields of anthropology and area studies sharing their experiences of conducting ethnographic research in places that appear increasingly inaccessible due to political conflicts, war and rigid authoritarian regimes. In such contexts, the study of minoritized populations (ethnic, religious) is often particularly unwelcome by the dominating regimes, as they may experience rigid security policies, second-class citizenship, and even persecution. At the same time, the predicament of minoritized groups may thus require greater outside visibility and scrutiny.
Roundtable participants discussed the contexts of contemporary Russia, China, and places in Central Asia such as Tajikistan, which had been relatively accessible for various forms of social scientific research but this has changed in recent years because of shifting domestic and international politics. These places, like many others around the world, can be thought of as “increasingly remote”, referring both to their relative inaccessibility to certain kinds of research as well as to the social and political processes that construct such remoteness (Harms et al 2014). Remoteness here is not an absolute category, but a relative and changing one, related to one’s positionality, perspective, power, and other factors, as well as related to processes of marginalization and minoritization. We are particularly interested in what this “return of remoteness” (Saxer and Andersson 2019) means for ethnographic research. How can scholars continue doing research in/on such settings? How are they being affected (professionally, personally) by the changing circumstances? What are the ethical challenges of such studies, especially with regard to the personal safety of research partners? And what political responsibilities does it entail for anthropologists and area studies scholars who do research in politically sensitive settings?
Image 1: Poster for roundtable discussion on 15 May 2024 (Transregional Central Asian Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin)
Methodologically, too, “increasingly remote” settings pose significant challenges. First-hand in-depth knowledge appears especially important in such contexts, while also being difficult to obtain. We thus asked: Which approaches or strategies do scholars opt for? Can remote ethnography, material culture studies, new area and mobility studies or other approaches provide substantial alternatives when in-person fieldwork is not possible? Roundtable participants reflected on how changing accessibility of their field sites has shaped their research questions and approaches.
Having started her ethnographic research in Buryatia – then part of the Soviet Union – in the late 1960s, Caroline Humphrey recalled selecting the seemingly least problematic topic of study – kinship – knowing many other issues like politics or religion were strictly off limits. However, she soon found that through kinship, she could indeed access many other important issues that could otherwise hardly be discussed, like tragic family histories due to communist policies. Over time, accessibility shifted in her field: from the initial Moscow-supervised official field visit to more informal visits in the 1970s, 1990s and early 2000s, where she found research participants to be more open about a wide range of topics, through to an officially permitted visit in the borderland region in the 2010s. Throughout these changeable circumstances, Caroline highlighted lasting friendships as key to successful fieldwork under uncertain conditions. More recently, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Buryatia has grown once again grown “remote” for fieldwork but, as Caroline suggested, it might be more accurate to say that it has been distanced from the perspective of the researcher, who chooses not to go there to ensure the safety of interlocutors. She highlighted a range of ethical challenges that have emerged doing research in the region, like choosing not to publish some of the data to protect interlocutors, highlighting a thread of fear and concealment among locals, especially minoritized groups, due to the history of repressions and their often precarious situation today. At the same time, she noted that the researcher’s position also changes over time, and with it access to various field sites, groups and resources shifts, too. Finally, Caroline noted she finds it important to keep in touch with colleagues in “increasingly remote” Russia and exchange with them professionally rather than engage in academic boycott.
Rune Steenberg’s field site in Xinjiang was rather difficult to access from the beginning of his field research in 2009, but still manageable for low-profile visits up to 2016. As China’s policies in the region grew more oppressive, in-person research for him was no longer viable. Since then, he has utilized a variety of approaches from doing Uyghur-related ethnography outside of Xinjiang, remote ethnography, textual and online research to working collaboratively with researchers, diaspora and others who could access the region in one way or another. Arguing that ethnographic research is always already limited as access is restricted by our positionality, cultural norms, and a range of other factors, Rune nonetheless believes that whenever possible, remote research should be supplementary rather than a substitute to in-person research. Currently, he leads a group project “Remote ethnography of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region”, combining a variety of remote methods to study this region inaccessible to most researchers, marked by extreme state violence and human rights violations. Through this multifaceted experience, Rune has found that remote ethnography is best as a group endeavor, multiple perspectives and approaches adding value to the whole.
Manja Stephan’s selected research topic of Muslim mobilities led her far outside of her initially selected place of study in Tajikistan. Due to the fear of Islamization, religious students she sought to do fieldwork with were increasingly marginalized and criminalized in the country, as securitization of Islam grew. As a consequence, she found translocality and mobility studies to be more suitable research approaches, rather than place-based ethnographic study. Mobility biographies she collected as part of her research led her not only to Dubai where she did in-person fieldwork with Tajik migrants, but also to places like the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Russia. Remoteness being a matter of power and a politically constructed condition, Manja’s fieldwork was framed by national policies, as her research participants themselves grew “remote” from mainstream Tajik life. This is one example of a situation of “authoritarianism paradox”: the more difficult it is to research a given minoritized group in an authoritarian setting, the more interest there may be in doing so, and the more necessary it is to undertake such research to draw attention to the position and voices of locals. At the same time, as in-person research in such contexts is severely limited, macro-level studies from afar, which have a tendency towards simplification, gain prominence over ethnographic research.
Conducting research in Bashkortostan, Russia, Jesko Schmoller has found his field site physically inaccessible since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Since his research primarily focuses on place, exploring Muslim place-making in Bashkortostan, restricted access appeared as an especially significant obstacle. While Jesko hopes to return to in-person fieldwork when it is once again possible, for now, he found textual studies to be unexpectedly eye-opening, providing insight into important aspects of Bashkir culture and religion previously unknown to him. He found that ethnographers should ideally be working with primary texts more even if they have good field access. Initially skeptical of relying on text too heavily, he now works with original Bashkir texts, such as Ufa-published “Bashkortostan: the land of Awliya [Friends of God]”, with a focus on religion and space. In his current research, he asks: What insight can be gained into sacred space through primary texts? Can they provide insight into a growing spatial marginalization of Muslims in Russia? Can one be in proximity to sacred places via text and gain insights into local ontologies (rather than discourses) without being there in person? From a local Sufi Muslim perspective, for instance, the Bashkir sacred landscape exists on yet another plane than the physical one. May such texts be regarded a medium to gain a sense impression of this kind of concealed geography?
Like Jesko, other speakers try to approach the newfound remoteness as an opportunity rather than a limitation. Rune and Manja both recounted that when they did research with participants outside of their repressive home country, they were much more open and research was more productive. Another opportunity provided by remoteness was various local publications as noted by Jesko Schmoller and Caroline Humphrey, who noticed an increase in local publications across Russia – as perhaps also in other regions – which provide a treasure trove to anthropologists who can rely on them as data, given their preexisting in-depth knowledge of the context. Another remote method that Caroline has made use of together with David Sneath (1999) in “The End of Nomadism? Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia” was remote sensing, namely using satellite photography to make visible the effects of contrasting land-use systems along the Russian-Mongolian border. While this method provided important insights into local environmental changes, Caroline stressed the difficulties involved in interpreting remote sensory data and the necessity to triangulate it with other kinds of knowledge. Rune Steenberg, too, regularly uses various kinds of remote sensing data in his research, extracting significant information even from tourists’ videos and travel accounts. He stressed that “epistemological care” is of utmost importance in remote research: transparency about the certainty of arguments made in remote ethnographic research provides an important corrective in precarious research contexts.
Moreover, Caroline argued that remote research widens the scope of ethnographic investigation, as it is no longer confined to the researcher’s physical presence. At the same time, it may become more similar to historians’ research techniques. Relatedly, Manja asked: if ethnographers lose access to in-person fieldwork and rely only on remote data, what is it that specifically ethnographic remote research contributes? To Rune, the answer lies in ethnography’s holistic approach and in the thick description that uncovers multiple layers of meaning and perspectives. This is enabled by deep immersion in a local context through ethnographic methods but if need be, one can even undertake artificial immersion away from the research area, through a period of intense engagement with local media, social media, communicating in the local language with people from there and other means. Also, “classical” ethnographic fieldwork outside of the inaccessible region is often part of remote ethnographic methodologies.
Caroline raised another important question: what can ethnographers doing remote research contribute that would differ from and add value to what the diaspora or other critical voices of the studied group are already saying? While this question requires a broader discussion, as preliminary remarks, Rune suggested that while cooperation with members of the diaspora is crucial, it is also important to note that they often have their own visions and agendas, so social scientific methodologies and analyses are a meaningful contribution. Manja added that working solely with members of the diaspora may provide little representation of the social, economic, cultural and other diversity of society in their homeland.
The role of institutions appeared as important to the speakers, all of whom strove towards strong connections on the ground rather than an official veil to their research. Yet this is not always possible, like in Caroline’s initial fieldwork, where Buryat collective farms could only be accessed with official approvals from both Moscow and the Buryat authorities. Manja spoke of a seemingly growing expectation institutions hold towards researchers to engage in “scientific diplomacy” along their research responsibilities, acting as representatives of their institutions and even nation-states in the field. These roles can be difficult to balance and even disadvantageous for some kinds of research, shaping ethnographer’s relationships in the field. Finally, Rune stressed the importance of critically engaging with the institutions we partake in, such as universities. Their growing neoliberalisation is a significant component of the broader, global political processes that reproduce the kinds of conditions for human rights abuses, surveillance, marginalisation and precarity in the places we study. Opposing structures that reproduce inequalities in our home societies is therefore important in beginning to oppose them in places of research.
Bibliography
Harms, Erik, Shafqat Hussain, and Sara Shneiderman. 2014. “Remote and edgy: new takes on old anthropological themes.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(1): 361–381.
Humphrey, Caroline, and David Sneath. 1999. The end of Nomadism?: Society, state, and the environment in Inner Asia. Duke University Press.
Saxer, Martin, and Ruben Andersson. 2019. “The return of remoteness: insecurity, isolation and connectivity in the new world disorder.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 27(2): 140-155.
Dr. Kristina Jonutytė is an associate professor at the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Vilnius University. Her research interests lie in political anthropology and the anthropology of religion, with an ethnographic focus on Buryatia, Russia and Mongolia. The present text was prepared during a visiting fellowship at the Central Asian Seminar, Institute of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin.
Cite as: Jonutytė, Kristina 2025. “Ethnographic research of minoritised groups in increasingly remote settings: A roundtable discussion” Focaalblog 20 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/02/20/dr-kristina-jonutyte-ethnographic-research-of-minoritised-groups-in-increasingly-remote-settings-a-roundtable-discussion/
Image 1: Derelict shaft used by so-called illegal miners in Stilfontein to access mining tunnels. Photo by Kimon de Greef
An uncaring government and a gang of unscrupulous criminals. Caught between them are people regarded as expendable – people who, pushed into a desperate situation because of poverty, turn to dangerous work that exposes them to a merciless police “service”. But then, in contrast to the aforementioned, there is also a community that tried to save lives, and non-governmental organizations trying to help on the basis of the Constitution.
The nightmare situation in which so-called illegal miners in Stilfontein in South Africa’s Northwest province found themselves, represents a perfect storm of contemporary power dynamics – not only in South Africa but across the world.
South Africa has tended in the past several years to feature in global news for all the wrong reasons. The situation at Stilfontein involved hundreds of men working illegally underground in an abandoned gold mine. The South African Police service (SAPS) blockaded the mine as part of a national operation called “Vala Umgodi”, the Zulu phrase for “close the hole”, which started in December 2023. It involves blocking the entrances to shafts to prevent provisions from reaching the miners to force them out from underground.
Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni’s aggressive statement that the miners would be “smoked out” of the mine, attracted worldwide attention even in these pitiless times. She seemingly wanted to underline that the miners would receive no help despite reports that they were starving because of the police’s purposeful blockading.
Finally, 87 bodies were brought to the surface at Stilfontein in January, and a total of 246 miners were rescued after spending several weeks underground with the dead. The rescue operation could only proceed after court actions by the community and civil society against the police. The police were at some point accused of disregarding a court order to allow food and other necessities into the mine. The Stilfontein standoff became a forced disaster with a death toll that eclipses the 2012 massacre of 34 miners at Marikana in the same province.
The actions and utterances of the police and the government were completely at odds with the central constitutional principle of human dignity in the South African Constitution, which government officials are compelled to uphold by virtue of their positions. Several years of rhetoric from government officials stigmatizing foreign Africans and promoting extreme violence against people who violate the law, irrespective of the type and circumstances of the crime committed, resulted in avoidable deaths at Stilfontein.
What makes this more outrageous, is the fact that several of the miners were underaged, that armed men kept watch over the miners, and that the situation underground may have been one of modern slavery.
The power dynamics in action at Stilfontein illustrate the massive economic shifts that have taken place over the past four decades due to the liberalization of capital flows and other policy changes associated with globalized neoliberal capitalism. The once mighty mining industry of South Africa is shrinking dramatically. Disinvestment has taken place due to a combination of factors including costs, the reduction in easily accessible mineral reserves, and government policies.
Along with liberalization and deregulation come the informalization of economic activities – a world-wide phenomenon. Alongside and intertwined with the informal economic sphere grows a shadow economy. The dividing line between legal and illegal activities becomes increasingly blurred. In the shadows, organized crime spreads its tentacles. Along with the smuggling of drugs and firearms, human trafficking gets worse. The poor, women and minors are targeted.
What makes human trafficking possible is the growing difficulty to merely survive, given current economic conditions. People grasp frantically at promises of work, only to find out in horrific ways that they have been duped. Human trafficking is aimed mostly at sexual exploitation, but at least one-fifth of victims worldwide are forced into modern slavery for labour purposes.
In addition to human trafficking, migration has skyrocketed worldwide. While the extent is frequently exaggerated in public discourse in South Africa, migration from the rest of Africa to South Africa has also increased. Starting back in the 19th century, South Africa’s mining industry was built on the backs of people from the rest of Southern Africa, especially from what is today’s Mozambique. The majority of the Stilfontein miners were Mozambicans.
Yet not all miners are foreigners. There are local people involved, as shown in media interviews with anxious family members. In the context of an economy dipping in and out of recession and an unemployment rate of over 40 percent (as per the extended definition that includes both active and inactive job seekers), options to earn a living have drastically dwindled.
No one chooses to work underground in an unsafe mine for months in life-threatening conditions. Apart from those who ended up there under false pretenses due to human trafficking, there are people who have no other way of feeding themselves. Illegal miners belong to a new underclass found worldwide: people for whom neoliberal capitalism has no use and who, due to impoverishment, are delivered into what Achille Mbembe (2019) calls “necropolitics.” This is a form of politics that makes millions of people redundant and condemns them to “death-worlds”, extreme conditions in which they become the “living-dead”.
Instead of addressing the socio-economic problems caused by neoliberal capitalism that are forcing people to seek refuge elsewhere, politicians around the world are blaming migrants. This is also how attention in South Africa is diverted away from the policy decisions that have caused current social and economic predicaments. Given that the ruling African National Congress could not muster a humane response in accordance with the Constitution’s requirement of respect for life, one would at least have expected a more sophisticated reading of the situation from a party that still engages in Marxist-Leninist analyses of social and economic conditions. But the government is adamant about its approach being correct – even as facts emerge that overturn the easy stereotypes that politicians rely on.
Crime syndicates are not separate from governments and law enforcement agencies. Politicians and the police are often implicated in organized crime. For example, Al-Jazeera investigative journalists found a direct link between Zanu-PF’s continued stranglehold on Zimbabwe and informal mining operations. The gold that workers extract in life-threatening conditions for a pittance is ultimately sold in Dubai and keeps Mnangagwa and company in opulent power and comfort.
The mine in Stilfontein where people lived underground for months, digging in the ground under armed guard, with restricted food and water, was literally transformed into a death-world by the South African police. Some corpses were well decomposed by the time they were finally removed.
This is a translated, revised and edited version of a media column that first appeared on Netwerk24.com
Christi van der Westhuizen is an associate professor at Nelson Mandela University, heading up the Research Programme at the Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy (CANRAD). Her views are her own and do not reflect those of the university.
References
Mbembe, A. 2019. Necropolitics. Duke University Press.
Cite as: Westhuizen, Christi van der 2025. “Necropolitics at South Africa’s Stilfontein Mine” Focaalblog 3 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/02/03/christi-van-der-westhuizen-necropolitics-at-south-africas-stilfontein-mine/
As three anthropologists working at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, Aotearoa (New Zealand), we experience anthropology in our daily work in the context of our local histories, communities and politics. While many anthropologists are familiar with the critiques of anthropology that play out in the USA or Europe, the narratives and practices of anthropology from places such as New Zealand are less well known. We argue that these local, diverse experiences of anthropology can enlarge our international understandings and imaginations of what anthropology can be, as well as the challenges it may face.
Anthropologists working in New Zealand today face the same plethora of academic pressures as those found in their counterparts in North America, Britain and Europe; pressures instigated by decades of neoliberal reform, managerialism, and the impact of new entrepreneurial and corporate models of universities that shape everyday identities and social relationships (Shore 2010). Similarly, the critique of anthropology as a discipline rooted in colonial imperatives and practices, resounds in a society whose imperial history and settler colonial present continues to imprint on educational institutions, pedagogy and research. In New Zealand, no neat historical trajectory marks a path from extractive research, wherein Indigenous knowledge and ways of life are pottled for export to the empire’s core, to one based on mutuality, co-creation and the indigenisation of anthropological knowledge.
A Long-Term Entanglement
Anthropology in Aotearoa (a Māori name for New Zealand), however, also has its own distinct history that shapes its practices. Importantly, Anthropology in Aotearoa has never been exclusively for a Pākehā (New Zealand European) or non-Māori audience. Undoubtedly, the origins of the discipline lie in the British School of Social Anthropology, and with it, accompanying theories and methodologies that have been determined as largely Eurocentric and at times, blatantly racist. Tsosie (2017) highlights that the cultural constructions of Indigenous peoples in colonial-era anthropology has an ongoing influence on legislation and federal policy that has often harmed, displaced or dehumanised First Nations groups (in the context of North America). Yet, it can also be argued that there is an increasing attempt to acknowledge the harms caused by colonial anthropological inquiry to colonised Indigenous peoples, and such a move is also apace in Aotearoa.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ethnographers such as Elsdon Best, Percy Smith, and Edward Treagear significantly contributed to the body of knowledge on Māori culture and life during the early years of colonisation. They also constructed narratives that would later be deemed harmful and disingenuous to Māori; for example, Treagear’s (1885) The Aryan Maori, which claimed that Māori and British Europeans were of shared Aryan ancestry and that colonisation was more of a ‘family reunion’ between kin. Treagar and Smith are also notably for aiding in the formation of The Polynesian Society, an organisation of mainly Pākehā amateur anthropologists, which had a number of Māori members and more Te Reo Māori speaking Pākehā members in its formative years than at any other point in its history (Clayworth, 2014).
Māori were often considered the ‘subject’ in early anthropological studies, yet the discipline also seemed to attract Māori scholars including Sir Peter (Te Rangihīroa) Buck, Mākareti Papakura, and Maharaia Winiata; while Āpirana Ngata (a prominent Māori leader and politician) was also an optimistic proponent of anthropology. To Ngata and Buck especially, anthropology was a significant discipline through which Māoritanga (Māori culture) could be preserved as well as a tool for political regeneration (Kahotea 2006). Kahotea, observing that no other colonised peoples engaged with anthropology as early as Māori, points to the strategic nature of this deployment; rather than challenging colonial power imbalances, anthropology was a tool for forging a place for Māori within a drastically changed social, economic and political environment.
The origin of anthropology was associated with Western imperial expansion into new worlds, and explanation of the peoples and cultures they encountered back to the west. Ngata and Te Rangihiroa saw anthropology as a tool for cultural recovery and for expressing and maintaining a deeply held sense of identity and cultural being… (Kahotea 2006:6)
Indeed, Ngata’s use of anthropological kinship theory to understand the colonising other, is an early exercise in decolonial anthropology. Some 100 years ago, Ngata made a critical connection between kinship and ways of owning, associating European kinship, a “rapid lopping off” of receding relatives, with a system of inheritance and succession to property rooted primarily in exclusivity. Conversely, he visualised Māori kinship as made up of vertical, horizontal, and oblique relationships, radiating from a common ancestor or a group of common ancestors, a circle of relatives. Ngata then links this kinship patterning to Māori communal systems, wherein the inheritance of rights, privileges and property is traced though both maternal and paternal links, noting that this evokes a tendency to embrace rather than exclude, “those related by blood” (Ngata & Ngata 2019). These observations on property and kinship are relevant to contemporary Māori claims for recognition of colonial alienations of their land and sea territories.
Contributing to our Kete Aronui
Māori Studies emerged as a separate discipline in Universities during the 1970s (a decade later than teacher’s colleges implemented Māori studies), separating from Anthropology following the Māori cultural Renaissance in the 1970s-80s. Webster (1998), commenting on this disciplinary split, posits that anthropology was perceived to not fully support Māori initiatives and to displace Māori peoples as the ‘true’ experts of their own culture. In recent decades, however, anthropology in Aotearoa has made a renewed commitment to uplifting Māori voices, highlighting relevant local issues, involving Māori peoples at all levels of research, and placing an emphasis on Kaupapa Māori (Māori-centred research methodologies), Te Tiriti-centric (centred on the ‘Treaty of Waitangi’) or co-governance research methodologies. Indeed, the whakapapa (genealogy) of anthropology in Aotearoa for Māori means that for many, it continues to persist alongside Māori studies, rather than in competition with it. Māori perspectives in anthropology not only enrich the discipline, but enable Māori anthropologists to acquire helpful tools to walk consciously ‘between two worlds’, Te Ao Māori (the Māori worldview) and Te Ao Pākehā (the western worldview). An ability to walk consciously is a struggle faced daily by many Māori, particularly those in academic institutions. Māori Anthropologists do this, while reconfiguring learnings from the discipline to promote the interests of their respective kin groups – whānau, hapū and iwi – an active attempt, we suggest, to decolonise anthropology.
Waikato Anthropology
The University of Waikato is physically situated on land that was illegally confiscated by the British Crown from iwi Māori (tribes) (in particular, Ngāti Wairere and Ngāti Hauā) following extensive wars between Māori and European colonists in the mid 19th century. The Māori King movement, Te Kīngitanga, emerged within the Waikato region in 1858, its aim to provide a national forum for politically uniting Māori in their confrontations with the Crown. The position of Ariki (paramount chief) has been continuously held in the Waikato Region by descendants of the first king, Pōtatau Te Wherowhero and is currently held by University of Waikato graduate, Ngā Wai Hono i te Pō. This history has significant bearing on how the University operates. In the mid 1990s the University’s land was returned to Waikato Tainui (the local iwi), who in turn agreed to lease the land back to the University. At this time, the University changed its motto and crest and increasingly adopted Māori symbols.
Over time, it has introduced a suite of special events (eg, Kīngitanga Day), infrastructure (such as the new Pā – a student, office and collective hub drawing on Māori architectural design and aesthetic features) and ceremonies that celebrate a partnership with Māori. All new staff undertake training in the history of Te Tiriti (also known by its English interpretation, The Treaty of Waitangi) and the University’s obligations to honour Te Tiriti in terms of recognising Māori sovereignty. This bureaucratic recognition of Māori and particularly, Waikato Tainui, does not rid the University of institutional racism or alter the arguably neoliberal decision making and partisan politics of senior leadership. Waikato Māori history does however provide a widely known political narrative against which everyday teaching, research and administrative practices take place.
Waikato anthropology was shaped more directly by Ngapare Hopa who became head of the department in 1994. Hopa, a Māori doctoral graduate of Oxford University, played an important role in advocating for anthropology to be active in everyday political activism and made New Zealand politics, especially Indigenous politics, a tangible issue for the discipline. While the economic insecurity and political disenfranchisement of Māori were Hopa’s key areas of focus, she was also influenced by previous generations of social science activism, such as Sol Tax’s work on self-determination and action research among the Meswaki Native Americans (Hopa 1988).
When Hopa returned to New Zealand in 1986, she did so with a political perspective on anthropological work which would offer a distinct challenge to most leading New Zealand anthropology of that time; in the mid 1980s New Zealand anthropology was working predominantly within culturalist and functionalist paradigms. Hopa wrote, “Whereas anthropologists have frequently returned from their vision quests to write about ‘their people’ and to somewhat romanticize the value and nobility of tribal life, some ‘native’ anthropologists like myself, raised in tribal contexts, have returned from a different vision quest, to ‘our people’ in response to their call and the clarion call of radical anthropologists for the need to decolonize the discipline” (1988:3). Hopa (2015) also fiercely criticised the “the competitive university environment” which prioritised publications and practical degrees before engaged action, quality education and the “wellbeing of our people”.
Competing legacies and histories of New Zealand anthropology, from the colonist’s desire to categorise savage and disappearing peoples, to early Māori scholars direct work within, and challenge to, the discipline from the early 20th century, was brought into a clearer theoretical debate in the 1990s. During this period, some anthropologists of European backgrounds ceased working with Māori communities altogether, accepting the request of some Māori academics that only Māori do research with Māori. Most famously, Linda Tuhiwai Smith who rose to become the Dean of the Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Studies at Waikato, like Hopa, directly criticised the work of anthropologists (among others) who undertook an unethical and hierarchical approach to research with Māori. Tuhiwai Smith (1999) called for decolonised research methodologies that would be shaped by Māori and benefit Māori instead of primarily benefiting the career of the researcher.
Professor Smith’s exit from Waikato University in 2020 occurred in the context of broader accusations of ongoing institutional racism, specifically its treatment of Indigenous staff. The demands for a decolonised research process she initiated, however, ultimately affected both institutional ethics processes and research funding bodies across the country. The primary research funding bodies demand that all research that affect Māori demonstrate their benefit to Māori and justify how Māori tikanga (protocol, customs) and knowledge be upheld. Indeed, all research conducted by New Zealand based academics in Aotearoa requires acknowledgement of Vision Mātauranga, that is, unlocking the “innovation potential of Māori knowledge, resources and people”. For Anthropologists from outside of New Zealand who wish to undertake field research in Aotearoa, the national Anthropological Association ASAANZ (Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa New Zealand) urges compliance with its ethical principles and offers an ethics review service..
Political history has ongoing effects in terms of everyday anthropological practice. In the Waikato, anthropological “subjects” are part of the daily life in which anthropologists practice. Many students majoring in Anthropology or doing Masters or PhD degrees at the University of Waikato are Māori or are Indigenous cousins from the Pacific region. We find that many students are politically active and are not afraid to push for decolonial research and the acknowledgement of Māori sovereignty. Similar to the ongoing relationships between anthropologists and research communities in South America, as described by Restrepo and Escobar (2005), for those who do research with Māori communities, relationships with research “subjects” are ongoing. Interview informants include respected political leaders who themselves may also be respected leaders in the academic space. Anthropology seminars at Waikato University provide a space for diverse stakeholders including Māori activists and students, Pacific scholars, and academics of European ethnicity to meet in a space that is intentionally focused on community. Indeed, in anthropology seminars, community is a priority over academic innovation, even as the latter is significantly valued. We hope that these practices push back against “disciplinary genealogies and boundaries” and “normalizing machines that preclude the enablement of different anthropological practices and knowledge worldwide” (Restrepo & Escobar 2005:104).
From Indigenous Scholars to Indigenous Students: Mona-Lisa Wareka
As a Māori anthropologist (Ngātiwai, Ngāti Rereahu), the disciplinary training I, Mona, have received provides me with the tools to reconnect with my ethnic identity in a meaningful way, whilst also opportuning a space to share that sentiment with upcoming Māori and Pasifika students as a tutor and lecturer. As with Professor Ngapare Hopa, in learning about other cultures and the parallel struggles of former settler colonies, anthropology has critically enriched my understanding of my own culture and inspires me to look towards cross-cultural connections between Indigenous peoples. Throughout my university career, I have observed anthropologists at Waikato foster myself and other Māori and Pasifika (Pacific Island-descent) students, and bring awareness to issues relevant to the Pacific, including academic staff presenting evidence to the Waitangi Tribunal on behalf of hapū (tribal kin groups), participating in hīkoi (marches) and protests, and promoting Te Tiriti-centric research in Aotearoa; these are not acts of performative allyship, but a genuine practice of mutuality and cooperation. This academic environment, alongside the ability to culturally reconnect and become a pou (ritual post) for my whānau (extended family), has significantly influenced my academic career trajectory as a first-in-family tertiary student.
The appeal of anthropology to Māori and Pasifika students lies in several factors that I have identified in the past eight years as a student and as a member of the teaching staff at the University of Waikato. BIPOC students enjoy, and perform discernibly better, when there is authentic representation within the classroom, especially when the curriculum is additionally supportive of Indigenous worldviews, experiences, and knowledge systems within the learning process (Kowlessar and Thomas 2021). In the third-year of my undergraduate degree, I became a tutor for undergraduate anthropology classes, and during my current PhD journey, I have taken on the role of teaching fellow, lecturing a large first-year course employing anthropological approaches to interpret the cultural history of Aotearoa and its relation to the wider Pacific. Many students – particularly of Māori, Pasifika, Pākehā (non-Māori Europeans) descent – have expressed their enjoyment of the subject matter and content, and further acknowledge anthropology’s ability to foster and validate their own cultural experiences in the world. At the same time, this fostering can also be perceived as an active preservation of the discipline’s whakapapa (genealogy) in Aotearoa, inspiring students to assert their own sense of tino rangatiratanga (self-determination/sovereignty). Anthropologists in the University of Waikato Anthropology programme emphasise the importance of nurturing Indigenous students’ ability to critically explore their own cultural identities, history, knowledge systems and actively engage in politics of change. This kaupapa (principle) is felt by students, which is in turn reflected in their significant enrolment in anthropology degrees at the University of Waikato.
Anthropology in Aotearoa: local and global
In the context of New Zealand’s tertiary institutions, local metrics for measuring and evaluating academic performance, however, continue to entrench the hierarchy of disciplinary knowledge for Euro-American markets over and above anthropology at/for home. Indeed, the idea of New Zealand anthropology as peripheral to that produced in imperial centres, that its significance is confined to national or regional concerns, is also periodically voiced by our international colleagues. Keith Hart, for instance, in a 2016 workshop in SOAS contemplating the contemporary relevance of The Gift (sponsored by the journal HAU), commented in frustration, “The point … is not so we can learn about the fucking Māori.” This, we argue, is an unfortunate distinction. Perhaps the point is not to learn about, but rather with, “the Māori”.
Image 1: Rotorua activation in November 2024 as part of the recent hikoi protest march against the Treaty Principle Bill being introduced in the NZ parliament by the ACT party (photo Mona-Lisa Wareka)
What is specific about Anthropology from New Zealand is the prominence of Māori as founding ancestors and their critical role in shaping its maturation, both from inside and outside of the discipline’s boundaries. The relationships forged with Māori – as students, teachers, colleagues, researcher and researched – provide an up and close critique of anthropological theories and methods, a pragmatic response to attempts to reify Indigenous culture and ways of life and generate lines of solidarity. In turn, anthropology provides some Māori with another gateway for participation in their respective hapū and iwi by utilising their learned anthropological skills to actively participate and advocate for relevant social and political change (Kahotea 2006). The ability to intervene theoretically in contemporary debates, grounded in the tradition of comparative research and notions of the universality of human experiences, is very much alive in New Zealand Anthropology. This global reach is combined with a deep commitment to local concerns.
In Aotearoa, the effects of colonial violence on Indigenous people are everywhere to be observed – in the unbudging disparities in health, education, employment, housing, suicide rates, infant mortality, life expectancy, and more. The advance of climate demise is also exacerbating existing lines of inequality, threatening Māori material culture and relationships with non-human kin. Since the new coalition government was elected in October 2023, New Zealand has witnessed a full pronged attack on its public health, education, welfare and environmental protections; a free market onslaught more accelerated than the neoliberalisation of New Zealand in the late 1980s. That this is now combined with moves to dismantle hard won Indigenous rights and recognitions and indeed deny colonial history, is of serious concern. As a national organisation, ASAANZ is actively confronting this challenge.
Mona-Lisa Wareka is a PhD candidate at the University of Waikato. Her PhD research studies Māori cultural values of conservation, wellbeing and Indigenous autonomy.
Dr. Fiona McCormack is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Waikato. Her research is based in marine and economic anthropology, drawing on field research from Aotearoa, Hawaii, Ireland and Iceland.
Dr. Bronwyn Isaacs is a lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Waikato. She specialises in the anthropology of labour, visual media and nationalism.
References
Ngata, Apirana., & Ngata, Wayne. (2019). The terminology of whakapapa. The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 128(1), 19-42.
Shore, Cris. (2010). Beyond the multiversity: Neoliberalism and the rise of the schizophrenic university. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 18(1), 15-29.
Kowlessar, K., & Thomas, C. (2021). “This space is not for me”: BIPOC identities in
academic spaces. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 58(3), 1-3.
Kahotea, Des Tatana. (2006). The ‘native informant’ anthropologists as kaupapa Māori research. MAI Review 1(1), 1-9.
Tsosie, Rebecca. (2017). Indigenous peoples, anthropology, and the legacy of epistemic injustice. In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (pp. 356-369). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315212043.
Webster, Steven. (1998). Patrons of Maori Culture; Power, Theory, and Ideology in the Maori
Renaissance. Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press.
Hopa, Ngapara Kaihina. 1988 Hopa, N. K. 1988. The Anthropologist as Tribal Advocate, American Anthropological Association, Phoenix, Arizona, November 1988, Centre for Maaori studies and research. University of Waikato, New Zealand.
Cite as: Wareka, Mona-Lisa, McCormack, Fiona and Isaacs, Bronwyn 2025. “Alternative Anthropologies: Kete Aronui from the Waikato” Focaalblog 23 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/01/23/mona-lisa-wareka-fiona-mccormack-bronwyn-isaacs-alternative-anthropologies-kete-aronui-from-the-waikato/
This text was originally published in Swedish in Arbetar Historia (No.191-192, 2024). Special thanks to the editors for granting permission to republish.
In 2015, during the peak of what became known as the “refugee crisis,” global attention turned towards an unexpected actor: Denmark. Long regarded as a liberal refuge and one of the first signatories of the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, Denmark experienced a significant policy shift under the ruling Social Democrats. i The country implemented some of the world’s strictest refugee policies, becoming the first nation to mandate that even resettled refugees must eventually return to their home countries.
Sjælsmark and Kærshovedgård, two semi-open “departure centres” established in 2013 to process rejected asylum-seekers, paradoxically became temporary residences for refugees who had already been granted permission to remain in Denmark. These deportation centres, which subject non-deported individuals to indefinite waits under conditions that verge on de facto incarceration, have become pivotal sites in Denmark’s deportation-focused asylum policy.
Danish migration scholar and documentary director Helle Stenum’s latest documentary, The Sad Truth (2023), takes viewers through the gates of these camps while situating them within Denmark’s broader historical context. The film focuses on young Syrian women confined to these camps, grappling with a harsh ultimatum: return to their war-torn homeland or remain indefinitely in a state of uncertainty. By interweaving their struggles with historical accounts of Danish deportation practices—such as the expulsion of Jews in the 1930s and the treatment of German war refugees between 1945-47—Stenum raises profound questions about historical memory: who gets to tell these stories, who is remembered, and who is forgotten? At its heart, the documentary interrogates the concept of agency, connecting past and present experiences.
This interrogation of agency plays out in several layers throughout the film, both in the personal experiences of the refugees and the broader political discourse. At the highest political levels, Danish prime ministers invoke refugee issues in their New Year messages, reducing complex human experiences to numbers in debates about national challenges. Next, these numbers gain a face. We meet the young refugee women awaiting their fate in prison-like deportation camps, their circumstances shaped by constraints that limit their agency. Yet, through their stories of resilience and hope, we see the enduring power of personal narratives to illuminate the human cost of political decisions. White Danish activists represent another form of agency, using their privilege to amplify marginalized voices and challenge dominant narratives. Among the refugees, Rahima Abdullah’s journey reflects a dynamic and evolving agency. Initially impressed by Denmark’s commitment to the rule of law, her disillusionment grows as she witnesses its violations first-hand.
Finally, the film highlights the agency of two older female historians, Kirsten Lylloff and Lone Rünitz, who wrestle with the challenges of confronting uncomfortable historical truths.ii One of them poignantly reflects on the backlash that arises when challenging a nation’s self-image, saying, “A bird does not shit in its own nest.” This sentiment about the difficulty of critiquing one’s own country echoes a broader public discomfort with such discussions. A recent Washington Post opinion piece captures this shift in Danish politics, titled “How Progressive Denmark Became the Face of the Anti-Migration Left.”iii The article chronicles Denmark’s dramatic turn in refugee politics, noting, “Denmark was not always like this. Thirty years ago, the country was relatively open and welcoming, with strong protections for asylum seekers and refugees. But that started to change in the 1990s, as the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the far-right Danish People’s Party proved politically potent.”
To this, our two historians might reply in present-day social media jargon: “Hold my beer! We need to go much further back than that to understand what’s happening now!” This is where the film’s second storyline comes in—the research of Lylloff and Rünitz on Denmark’s treatment of Jews in the 1930s and German war refugees between 1945-47, which provides crucial historical context to the contemporary refugee debate.
When the historians speak in the documentary, their presence closely aligns with what is often called the expository documentary format.iv This style typically features an authoritative voice-over or a historian presenting directly to the camera, acting as both narrator and objective assessor of evidence. However, Lylloff and Rünitz offer more than just authoritative voices. Their involvement goes beyond simply providing historical facts; they bring personal and professional insights into the conversation, adding depth and complexity to the film’s exploration of Denmark’s current refugee policies.
We first see these two women casually sitting on a bench, engaged in conversation with each other, sharing the personal and professional costs of their academic research. This intimate exchange adds a layer of depth to their authoritative roles, making them more relatable and humanized. In addition, another historian makes her presence felt in the film, though her face remains unseen—Helle Stenum herself. Through her academic writing and documentaries, including those that address the legacies of Danish colonialism, Stenum exposes her country’s troubling historical and contemporary record.v
In “The Sad Truth,” Stenum undertakes a challenging task—a diachronic historical comparison—that many historians are usually hesitant to pursue given the clear and significant structural and contextual differences between the late 1930s and the mid-2010s. Academically, the contemporary European (so-called) refugee crisis has not received sufficient historical contextualization. Historical analyses have been slow to integrate into refugee studies, a relatively new field dominated by social scientists with largely presentist concerns.vi However, outside academia, such comparisons have been made in public and political debates.
A notable example comes from Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who, in the autumn of 2015, during the height of the so-called refugee crisis, warned of the dangers of “amnesia.” In an interview with The Guardian, Al Hussein argued that contemporary public rhetoric about refugees echoed that used by Western leaders in the late 1930s.vii It is this amnesia that the two Danish historians are trying to confront by telling the stories of Jewish and German war refugees. “Both politicians and ordinary Danes have incredibly short-term memories,” says one of them. As I watched, I found myself answering back, “Well, which nation doesn’t?” But it is not only public forgetting or historical amnesia at stake here. A Danish retiree affiliated with Grandparents for Asylum, a coalition of activists who support refugees, offers another perspective. She notes that many Danes she encounters remain unaware—or unwilling to acknowledge—what is happening. “When I tell them what we are doing, people don’t believe me,” she says. “They say, ‘But we Danes don’t treat people like that.’”viii So, what we’re dealing with is not just public forgetting of the past, but also a wilful ignorance of the present.
But where lies the distinction between the two? How do these two forces intertwine in the everyday lives of those affected by them? The documentary poignantly links two refugees from different time periods through a powerful scene: Syrian refugee Rahima touching the Stolpersteine, the stumbling stone marking the home of German Jew Ruth Niedrig, who was handed over to the Gestapo by Danish authorities. This gesture made me wonder: Did Stenum have the chance to show this scene to Rahima and other Syrian refugees? If so, how did they react? What was Rahima’s understanding of this history? Given her initial view of Denmark as a bastion of the rule of law, how did she respond to the historical context unfolding before her?
Though both Ruth and Rahima have grappled with profound uncertainties during their time in Denmark—navigating what can be described as the Danish limbo—their experiences are rooted in vastly different historical contexts, both politically and economically. In 1930s Denmark, amid post-Depression economic hardship and widespread unemployment, concerns about refugees draining social policy resources were widespread. By contrast, Rahima and her fellow Syrian refugees arrived during a period of economic prosperity, within the context of a strong welfare state. Yet, how did a country with a tradition of social solidarity gradually adopt an anti-refugee stance? How did this tradition evolve into a protectionist and xenophobic form of welfare-state patriotism? The film starkly illustrates this shift, particularly when the Danish Minister of Migration proudly references the Danish welfare state tradition in defence of the new refugee policy at the European Parliament.
The discourse of welfare-state patriotism transcends racial, religious, and cultural boundaries, feeding into broader debates about immigrant integration into Danish society. Central to these discussions are concerns about immigrants’ socioeconomic status, their employment in low-pay jobs, and their reliance on social benefits. Refugees are often depicted within this narrative as a burden—requiring substantial long-term investment from the state, while struggling to enter the labour market effectively. As such, the aim of the current Danish refugee and asylum policyseems twofold: to pressure those already in the country into accepting voluntary return, while simultaneously sending a loud and clear message: “Don’t think about coming to Denmark.” But, then, who is this message truly directed at?
The influx of largely extra-European refugees raised concerns about the potential long-term impact of mostly young Middle Eastern males on the social stability of European democracies. In 2012, sociologist Sara Farris coined the term “femonationalism” to describe the alignment between nationalist ideologies and certain feminist ideas, particularly when driven by xenophobic motivations.ix Farris documents how some European right-wing parties and self-identified feminists exploit women’s rights and gender equality principles to justify discriminatory practices against Muslim and non-Western immigrants.
I raise this concept here for two reasons. First, femonationalism is particularly relevant to Stenum’s documentary, which selectively portrays only female refugees, despite Denmark’s ostensibly non-gender-discriminatory refugee policy. This selective portrayal invites an exploration of its implications within the context of femonationalism and the institutionalization of gendered integration policies. Second, in 2019, the Danish prime minister declared a goal of “zero asylum seekers.” However, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Denmark accepted Ukrainian refugees. Danish authorities and NGOs actively assisted these refugees, ensuring their integration into Danish society. What does this shift reveal about the political and societal consequences of categorizing, labelling, and stereotyping refugees?
As we continue to witness devastating acts of state-induced violence, most recently in Palestine, which flagrantly breach international law, the questions raised by Stenum’s documentary take on even greater urgency. Her work forces us to reckon not only with the memory of historical injustices but also with the present moment—where the way we treat refugees is inextricably tied to political ideologies, societal perceptions, and economic realities. This film serves as both a reminder and a challenge, asking us to confront the uncomfortable truths about how we view those who seek refuge, particularly when their needs clash with the dominant narratives of national identity and security. As Walter Benjamin wrote, “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”x Stenum’s documentary pushes us to recognize these images, to reckon with the past, and to engage with the present in ways that are both reflective and responsive to the demands of justice and humanity.
i During the Nazi occupation of Denmark, many Danish people played a crucial role in one of the largest and most exceptional rescue operations of the Holocaust, famously saving the lives of the vast majority of Jews living in Denmark, including several hundred German and “stateless Jews,” by helping them escape to Sweden. Levine, Paul A. 2011. “Sweden’s Complicated Neutrality and the Rescue of Danish Jewry.” In The Routledge History of the Holocaust, edited by Jonathan C. Friedman, 305-314. New York: Routledge.
ii See, for example, Lylloff, Kirsten. “Dødsårsager for tyske flygtningebørn i 1945 [Causes of death of German refugee children in 1945].” Ugeskr Laeger, vol. 162, no. 9, 2000; Rünitz, Lone. “Denmark’s Response to the Nazi Expulsion Policy, 1938-39.” Holocaust Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, 2005.
iii Rauhala, Emily. “How Progressive Denmark Became the Face of the Anti-Migration Left.” Washington Post, April 6, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/06/denmark-zero-asylum-refugees/. Accessed June 20, 2024. It is important to note that in this context, “the left” specifically refers to the Social Democratic Party. However, two parties to the left of the Social Democrats, which currently hold 24 out of 179 seats in parliament, are highly critical of the Social Democrats’ position on this issue. These parties advocate for a more “humanistic” approach to refugee policy and are poised to gain significant support, according to recent polls. Special thanks to Lars Kjølhede Christensen for bringing this point to my attention.
iv Bell, Desmond. “Documentary Film and the Poetics of History.” Journal of Media Practice, vol. 12, no. 1, 2011, p. 9.
v Stenum’s award-winning documentary “We Carry It Within Us” (2017) examines Denmark’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and explores how the colonial past continues to shape contemporary media, art, museums, education, and wealth distribution, alongside various practices of remembering and forgetting.
vi Ahonen, Pertti. “Europe and Refugees: 1938 and 2015-16.” Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 52, no. 2-3, 2018, p. 137.
ix Farris, Sara. In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Duke University Press, 2017.
x Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 2003, p. 391.
Görkem Akgöz is a research fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Her main research interests are global labour history, political economy, and women and gender history. She is the author of In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey(Brill, 2024). She is the co-chair of the Labour Network of the European Social Science History Conference, the co-coordinator of the Workplaces: Pasts and Presents working group of the European Labour History Network, and a member of the Editorial Committee of the International Review of Social History. More information can be found at www.gorkemakgoz.com.
Cite as: Akgöz, Görkem 2025. “’The Sad Truth’ Then and Now: Pasts and Presents of Danish Refugee Policy” Focaalblog 8 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/01/08/gorkem-akgoz-the-sad-truth-then-and-now-pasts-and-presents-of-danish-refugee-policy/
