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Maria Kastrinou: Looking at ethnic cleansing in Palestine from the occupied Syrian Golan

The unfolding genocide in Palestine today is a continuation of Israel’s 75-year-old occupation and ethnic cleansing. This article provides a perspective on the ongoing tragedy from the vantage point of the Golan Heights – often referred to as Israel’s ‘forgotten occupation.’ How are the stateless Syrians experiencing this war? And why do ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ reverberate as strongly here as in the rest of Palestine and Israel? By threading the current genocide to the story of occupation and ethnic cleansing in the Golan Heights, this article discusses the underlying settler-colonial assumptions about religious purity and war that have fuelled imperialist projects in occupied Syria and Palestine, and in the wider region.[1]

Fear and messages on WhatsApp

On Sunday, 8th of October, my friend Kamel[2] wrote on WhatsApp: ‘the kids are worried so much… I bought food and water for them… we are preparing ourselves for a big war in the area…’ With his wife and three young children, Kamel’s family have been staying inside for the past month, working and going to school on Zoom.

We became friends in Damascus in 2009. Kamel had just finished his degree in English Literature at Damascus University, while I was doing fieldwork for my PhD. We’ve kept in touch and I’ve visited him and his family in the Golan Heights. Last time this May, I promised Salam, his wife, that I’ll bring my own young children to Majdal Shams, the biggest of the occupied villages in the Golan, next time I visit in February 2024. Our kids are of similar ages, our families in similar stages. If we lived closer, we’d have playdates and family dinners.

Image 1: The border fence between occupied Majdal Shams and Syria, Druze flag [Photo taken by the author, 2015]

People, Kamel tells me, are really afraid to go outside their houses. Out of fear of arrests and, even more, out of fear of pogroms against Arabs, most dare not leave their villages to travel into Israel. For friends from the Golan Heights that live and work in Israel and in the West Bank, the situation is sheer terror. ‘We are afraid to go to work, we are afraid to speak Arabic in public,’ Kamel adds. People have been arrested by Israeli police for writing pro-Palestinian posts on social media. Throughout Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories people get arrested and held without charges, university students and workers, Arab and Jewish Israelis. Sara, one of the stateless Syrians in the Golan Heights, has stopped going to work in the Israeli eco-project that she was working with before the war on Gaza: ‘Israeli society has become, overnight, so extreme, so racist,’ she tells me.  

Others, especially from the older generation, are not surprised by the state of Israel’s genocidal attack on Palestinians. ‘The tree of occupation never bears good fruit,’ Salman tells me on the phone. The ‘tree of occupation’ is the 75 years of occupation, killing, dispossession, and apartheid that Palestinians have endured in the hands of the state of Israel. This is the ‘root cause’ of violence.

Salman is one of the community’s leaders and revolutionaries, also a former political prisoner in Israel. He is a friend and a co-author, whose field research and hospitality have shaped my own field visits in the Golan over the past years.  We speak on the phone often, he is worried about the ‘total siege on Gaza,’ and emphasises that Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a ‘complete siege on Gaza’ saying that they are fighting ‘human animals.’ In his speech, and throughout the past month, Palestinians have constantly been dehumanised in the Israeli press. ‘They don’t show any pictures from Gaza, nothing!’ Salman exclaims.’ In a state of war, Israeli public media focus on Hamas’ massacre and Israel’s ‘right of self-defence,’ egging on the ‘flattening of Gaza.’ Like many others, Salman is afraid because Netanyahu, Gallant and others sense that their time is up, and they want to cause as much destruction as possible. From academics to the UN, the word genocide is used to describe the collective punishment of Palestinians unleashed by Israel.

Back to Kamel, we send each other video messages and funny things that the kids do. I keep thinking: how do you keep young kids busy amidst a war? In what stories do you translate your fears? Do you speak to them about the killing of so many children? How do you contextualise the sound of rockets across the border, and the constant humming of drones over your head? Do you tell them that the Israeli soldiers in their streets use them as human shields when they fire from the military bases within the Golan, to Syria and Lebanon? Can you make the rockets that get intercepted by the Iron Dome seem like fireworks or early Christmas lights?

As human beings and anthropologists, how can we make sense of this brutality? We watch live the purposeful and vengeful collective punishment of the Palestinian people, the indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, schools, residential buildings, mosques and churches. We (mis)measure again the different value of being a human, where Palestinian children are cast ‘outside of humanity’ (Fernandez 2023). We bear witness to state terrorism and murder (De Lauri 2023), to starvation and siege, to war crimes, and to the genocide of a people by the machinery of one of the most highly armed nuclear states in the world. These techniques of extermination are a continuation of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that started with the al-Nakba, furthered through the wars of 1967 and 1973, and has continued unabated until today (Pappé 2007).

Although I don’t have answers to the above questions, this piece is a way to make sense of the pain, war, and defiant hope that come out of years of ethnographic fieldwork, and of the most recent genocidal war and the reign of fear. For, although the Israeli occupation in the Golan has been the least violent in comparison to the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), we can see that from ethnic cleansing to the religious engineering of a compliant minority, the sectarianism of the occupation is part of a larger arsenal, one of the means towards the same ends.

The weaponization of religious difference, or, how the Israeli occupation in the Golan was from the start ethnic cleansing and religious engineering

“If you live, live free. If you die, die standing like a tree.” These lines are carved onto the tombstone of Hayel Abu Zeid (1968-2005), who died, the epitaph continues, ‘for the resistance and hope.’ Hayel is one of the martyrs and revolutionaries from the Israeli occupied Syrian Golan Heights who dedicated their lives to the cause of liberation from Israeli occupation. Next to his tomb is a commemorative plaque for Amir Abu Jobal, a boy of 5 years who was killed by an Israeli mine near his home. In the cemetery in Majdal Shams, the largest remaining occupied village, there are many other tombstones commemorating resistance, heroism, and the unjust loss of life as a result of war and occupation.

Occupation, ethnic cleansing and resistance have deep roots among the indigenous stateless Syrian people. From the very start of Israel’s invasion during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, ethnic cleansing was an important strategy of war and occupation. 95% of the Syrian indigenous population was forcibly displaced and only five villages, out of 340 villages and farms, remained. These villages were predominantly Druze (the villages are Majdal Shams, Mas’ada, Buq’atha and Ein Qiniya. The village of Sahita was later destroyed by Israel, Ghajar is an Alawi village). Israeli army officials believed that the Druze, a religious community with historical links to Isma’ili Islam, would inflict a ‘stab in the back’ to Arabism. The sectarian logic of the Israeli occupation from the start, thus, was clear: displace the indigenous population, render them prostrate, or engineer them so that they cannot unite with Palestinian resistance and no longer pose a threat. Sectarianism is the more insidious continuation of ethnic cleansing outside of war.

Image 2: Much of the occupied territory is designated by Israel as military zones [Photo taken by the author, 2015]

The belief that the ‘Druze’ would be compliant peons in maintaining a state founded upon religious and ethnic difference was not unfounded. Israel had already by 1949 achieved an alliance with the religious Druze elites in the regions of Carmel and Galilee, in what became Northern Israel (Firro 1999). This alliance with the state of Israel isolated the Druze community in Israel from their co-religionists in Syria and Lebanon. In exchange for becoming political representatives of a new religious ethnicity (not unlike the created roles of tribal chiefs in other colonial settings), the sectarianisation of political identity in the greater context of Israeli ethnocracy (Yiftachel 2006) was moulded, and the ‘Israeli Druze,’ thus, created.  The creation of the ‘Israeli Druze identity’ became henceforth an ongoing project between local Druze elites and the Israeli state, a project of producing ‘ethnic difference’ in the process of ‘inventing religious traditions’ (Firro 2005).

And so, the ‘Israeli Druze’ were the first Arabs ‘to be trusted’ to serve in the Israeli Defence Forces, and until recently, they were the only Arabs to be conscripted to do so (Kanaaneh 2008). Their so-called loyalty to the state of Israel turned ‘Druze identity’ into a laboratory for the manufacturing of sectarian difference, as the Israeli state and military worked hand-in-hand with local elites to produce and fund new ‘Druze traditions,’ as well as a comprehensive and specifically ‘Druze’ educational curriculum to educate the new generations. While this project was successful in funding the architecture of religious politics, it has not done much to address the chronic poverty and impoverishment of this region. Indeed, the Druze in Israel continue to be second-class citizens living under a settler colonial apartheid state. As such, all state policies are essentially discriminatory on the basis of religion, as shown during the 2018 Druze protests against the Jewish Nation-State Law.

The Druze in the occupied villages of the Golan Heights are Syrians and different from their ‘Israeli Druze’ counterparts described above. As the tombs in the cemetery proclaim, the heroes and martyrs of this mountain community have fought Israeli occupation, sacrificing their lives to either Israeli bullets or inside Israeli jails. Although individuals can be killed, memories of such resistance, here as in Palestine (see Swedenburg 2003), are not easy to kill.

What is being Golani? The complexity of citizenship, belonging and resistance

‘Israel wants us to be Druze,’ explained Fahed, the president of a local autonomous organisation, during an interview in May 2023, ‘Israeli Druze.’  Here, being ‘Israeli Druze’ means being compliant to Israeli authority. For deeply pious shaykhly families in the Golan, being somehow connected, or dependent upon the worldly authority of an occupying power is a religious anathema, and the most religious among them, have abided by strict regimes of independence and autonomy (see Kastrinou et al 2020).

Nevertheless, Israeli propaganda posits that the Druze of the Golan do not take Israeli citizenship because they are afraid of repercussions from the Syrian regime, should the Golan return to Syria. Yet none of my interlocutors has ever mentioned this reason. Instead, during the height of the Syrian war in 2015 I heard that ‘We will still be Syrians, even if Syria ceases to exist!’ Like inside Syria, the stateless Syrians in the Golan Heights underwent a similar process of anti- and pro-regime protests, while more recently from this August, some have been protesting in solidarity to the Druze protests ongoing in the Syrian province of Sweida.

Image 3: Barbed wire at a UN post on the border [Photo taken by the author, 2015]

On the basis of estimates from local representatives and academics, between 10 and 25% of the stateless population has accepted Israeli citizenship. The vast majority of Syrians in the Golan Heights remain stateless. Getting Israeli citizenship is a contentious subject for a community that is known for its resistance to Israeli occupation (Mason et al. 2022). When I asked Nidaa, a member of the women’s committee in the Golan, whether she’d still want to be part of Syria while there is a war, she adamantly said: ‘I’m part of the Syrian body, I’ll go through what the people go through.’ Yet, taking Israeli citizenship has increased after the Syrian war, but it happens for complex, and sometimes contradictory reasons – out of losing hope at the aftermath of the Syrian revolution (Al-Khalili 2023), or to be able to work within the Israeli job market and advance one’s career, rather than because people ‘feel Israeli.’ Rabiah, a young man in his late 20s, for example, took Israeli citizenship so that he would not lose his land after living outside the country for three years – ‘I did it so that Israel does not confiscate my land,’ he told me.

In the 1980s and 90s it was the norm that people who took Israeli citizenship suffered social ‘death.’ Branded as being ‘traitors’ and ‘collaborators,’ they were excommunicated from social and religious affairs. Jawad’s father was one of the first people in Majdal Shams to publicly declare his support for Israel and also one of the first to get Israeli citizenship. He lost most of his business and social capital in doing so. Jawad mentioned bitterly that, when his father died, the local religious shaykhs refused to carry out the mortuary prayers and rituals; the family had to bring in Israeli Druze shaykhs from the Galilee. Yet, when I asked him where he feels his identity lies, to my surprise he replied that he feels ‘Syrian’ even though he has Israeli citizenship. And, like most people who have acquired Israeli citizenship from the Golan Heights, Jawad was exempt from serving in the IDF: ‘I don’t like the army,’ he says. ‘I’m a pacifist.’

Settler-colonial assumptions, imperialist projects

Underpinning the process of ethnically cleansing the Golan and the sectarianisation of political identities that Israel undertook lies a simple colonial logic, namely that religious groups are, basically, homogeneous. This logic assumes that there is one homogenous Druze community running through the occupied Golan Heights and the Druze villages in Northern Israel. This assumption is simplistic, filled with colonial connotations (i.e. same religion = same everything else), and simply not correct. We can see this assumption supported by Israeli policy and propaganda which has historically tried to imprint a sectarian logic and ‘Druzification’ on the occupied Syrians in the Golan Heights. The same colonial logic underpinned USA’s ‘tribal’ policies during the invasion of Iraq (González 2009).

It is the same logic, extended, that we see used by Israel to explain the large-scale genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. In the words of Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” The Israeli ex-defence minister Avigdor Liberman said that “there are no innocents in Gaza.” Indeed, this is the logic that was used from the very start of the Zionist project, with ethnic cleansing ongoing since its inception (Pape 2007). The murder in Gaza is blatantly obvious whilst the occupation of the Golan is, in comparison, less bloody. But the underlying assumption of homogeneity within religious and ethnic groups is the same. The settler colonial state, then, either engineers homogeneity or works to expel or exterminate it.

Image 4: Inside a civil building in the deserted town of Quneitra, now used as an Israeli military training ground [Photo taken by the author, 2015]

But “religion is precisely the recognition of man in a roundabout way,” wrote Marx whilst exploring how capitalist states, in general, pretend but essentially fail to keep their secular, emancipatory promises.  And creating a homogenous, religiously pure social entity is a risky, unstable business.

The French had already tried it. During their colonial mandate, they divided Syria into territorial chunks on the basis of the colonial assumption of obedience in exchange for religious homogeneity. It was at the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of Western colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East that what Ussama Makdisi (2005) calls the ‘culture of sectarianism’ was born, as a thoroughly new and modern phenomenon.  And, as it was born it was also resisted: the Syrian revolt against the French colonial rule was started in the Druze province by a Druze, Sultan Basha Al-Atrash, one of the greatest Syrian national heroes. The French collectively punished the Druze for their disobedience by burning down the village of Majdal Shams and collectively punishing its inhabitants. Indeed, it was this memory that was cited as a deterrent for villagers in leaving their village during the 1967 invasion (Kastrinou et al 2020). No one wants to be uprooted twice. The Israeli plan to move more than a million Palestinians from North Gaza to the south, along with the possibility of a further displacement in Egypt’s Sinai, could be a history repeated thrice: as tragedy, farce and genocide.

As with French colonialism and USA imperialism, the Israeli operation to ethnically cleanse the Golan Heights and to homogenise Druze identity in exchange for obedience, did not go to plan. When Israel decided to unilaterally and illegally annex the Golan Heights in 1981, the occupied people responded by going on a six-month strike. In their vast majority, the Syrian people of the four occupied villages, some 25,000 people, are stateless because they have not accepted Israeli citizenship. Their status is legally the same as that of Palestinians in East Jerusalem (see al-Marsad 2011, and Delforno 2019): they are ‘permanent residents’ in Israel and as such they do not serve in the IDF. Legally stateless, they don’t have passports but laissez-passer documents where their nationality is ‘undefined’. They have trouble travelling inside and outside of Israel, trouble getting jobs, accessing basic services, and they are constantly under the threat of the military occupation that steals their land (the ongoing conflict with the wind turbines is a point in green colonialism), and creates a host of other problems.

This experience of colonial taxonomical imposition, violence and ethnic cleansing resonates from French colonialism in Syria to Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank today.

Sowing resistance, sowing hope

A different heritage, that of resistance, is knitted into the town’s urban landscape, the most emblematic of which is Hassan Khater’s statue ‘The March’ (1987), which depicts Sultan Basha al-Atrash, the Druze leader of the Syrian revolt against the French in 1925, surrounded by contemporary figures such as a man of letters, next to a traditionally dressed man, a mother holding her dying son – a new martyr of the resistance. On the back of the statue there are three kids, the future, holding books and wheat. Instead of religious homogeneity, the threading theme is resistance to outside occupiers. The French missed that, and so did the Israelis.

Image 5: ‘The March’, statue by Hassan Khater (1987) at the central square of Majdal Shams [Photo taken by the author, 2023]

History teaches that colonial assumptions of religious purity lead to imperialist projects of ethnic cleansing and genocide, like the televised genocide in Gaza and the occupation of the Golan Heights. Look closer, though, in the continuities of everyday practices and the threads of another history become visible: the history of ordinary resistance, what the Palestinians have exemplified and gifted to struggles far and wide: ‘sumud’ – steadfastness. In combating the ‘bad fruit’ of occupation, the occupied people of the Golan Heights, and the occupied Palestinians, continue to sow resistance and hope, what the poet Mahmoud Darwish described in his poem ‘A state of siege’:

Here, where the hills slope before the sunset and the chasm of time

near gardens whose shades have been cast aside

we do what prisoners do

we do what the jobless do

we sow hope


Maria Kastrinou is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Brunel University London. Her research interrogates the politics of sectarianism, statelessness and resistance through the lives and stories of her ethnographic interlocutors from Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Author of Power, Sect and State in Syria (I.B. Tauris 2016), she is currently working on the project ‘Lives across divides: Ethnographic stories from the Golan Heights.’


Endnotes

[1] Acknowledgement: Many thanks to colleagues and friends in the Golan Heights who despite the war read through and made suggestions; to colleagues at Brunel University, especially Isak Niehaus, Gareth Dale and Mark Neocleous; to Vera Sajrawi, and to Steven Emery. Kastrinou’s current research about the Golan Heights is supported by the Druze Heritage Foundation, London.

[2] All names are pseudonyms and some details have been altered in order to ensure my interlocutors’ anonymity.


References

Al-Khalili, Charlotte, 2023. Waiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian displacement, time and subjectivity. London: UCL Press.

Al-Marsad, 2011. ‘Suggested issues for Consideration Regarding Israel’s third Periodic Report to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) To Be Held On November 14-December 2, 2011.’ NGO Report. (https://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cescr/docs/ngos/Al-Marsad_ISRAEL_CESCR47.doc) Accessed: Nov. 13, 2023.

Delforno, Alessandro. 2019. More shadows than lights: Local elections in the occupied Syrian Golan. Majdal Shams: Al-Marsad. (https://golan-marsad.org/wp-content/uploads/More-Shadows-than-Lights-Local-Election-in-the-Occupied-Syrian-Golan-1.pdf) Accessed: Nov. 13, 2023.

De Lauri, Antonio 2023 “The Courage of Historical Truths” Focaalblog 30 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/10/30/antonio-de-lauri-the-courage-of-historical-truths/

Fernandez, Júlia 2023 “Outside of Humanity: Palestinian Children and the Value of Life” Focaalblog 31 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/10/31/julia-fernandez-outside-of-humanity-palestinian-children-and-the-value-of-life/

Firro, Kais. 1999. The Druzes in the Jewish state: A brief history. Vol. 64. Brill.

Firro, Kais M. 2005. “Druze maqāmāt (shrines) in Israel: From ancient to newly-invented tradition.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 32, no. 2: 217-239.

González, Roberto J. 2009. “On “tribes” and bribes: “Iraq tribal study,” al-Anbar’s awakening, and social science.” Focaal 2009, no. 53: 105-116.

Kanaaneh, Rhoda Ann. 2008. Surrounded: Palestinian soldiers in the Israeli military. Stanford University Press.

Kastrinou, A. Maria A., Salman Fakher El-Deen, and Steven B. Emery. 2020. “The stateless (ad) vantage? Resistance, land and rootedness in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.” Territory, Politics, Governance 9, no. 5: 636-655.

Makdisi, Ussama. The culture of sectarianism: community, history, and violence in nineteenth-century Ottoman Lebanon. Univ of California Press, 2000.

Marx, Karl. 1843. The Jewish Question. Proofed and Corrected: by Andy Blunden, Matthew Grant and Matthew Carmody, 2008/9. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/) Accessed: Nov. 13, 2023.

Mason, Michael, Munir Fakher Eldin, and Muna Dajani, eds. The Untold Story of the Golan Heights:: Occupation, Colonization and Jawlani Resistance. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.

Pappé, Ilan. 2007. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Simon and Schuster.

Swedenburg, Ted. 2003. Memories of revolt: The 1936–1939 rebellion and the Palestinian national past. University of Arkansas Press.

Watenpaugh, Keith David. 2022.  “Kill the Armenian/Indian; Save the Turk/Man: Carceral Humanitarianism, the Transfer of Children and a Comparative History of Indigenous Genocide.” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 29, no. 1: 35-67.

Yiftachel, Oren. 2006. Ethnocracy: Land and identity politics in Israel/Palestine. University of Pennsylvania Press.


Cite as: Kastrinou, Maria 2023 “Looking at ethnic cleansing in Palestine from the occupied Syrian Golan” Focaalblog 16 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/11/16/maria-kastrinou-looking-at-ethnic-cleansing-in-palestine-from-the-occupied-syrian-golan/

Júlia Fernandez: Outside of Humanity: Palestinian Children and the Value of Life

The algorithm swiftly gets it –yes, I am sucked in by news about Gaza- and collapses my social media platforms’ feeds into a monothematic thread that mirrors my recently (re)ignited preoccupation with the genocide of the Palestinian people. A Middle Eastern, female illustrator’s art work I started following on Tuesday shows up at the top of the screen. Her drawing of Wadie Al Fayoume – white eyeballs, embraced in an arch of red flowers, the same gesture and the same happy birthday hat he wears in the pictures that have circulated online after his killing – precedes the onset of my scrolling through the tawdry spectacle of death with an uncanny allusion to what it might have looked like to be alive.

Image 1: A mural artwork in a town in West Bank features a person wearing a keffiyeh and holding a Palestinian flag. The words ‘Resist to Exist’ can be read in English. Photo by Júlia Fernandez, August 2017.

After him, startled faces of terrified children, blood-dripping foreheads, cheeks covered in trails of tears and dust unfurl a grotesque witnessing of suffering; I am not immune to their affective power. ‘You Muslims must die’, the news says Wadie Al Fayoume’s murderer said before stabbing him to death in his house in Chicago. The pungent rawness of blurry video footages from Gazan hospitals revolts me, as they become, like Wadie, animated traces of lives that might soon be, if they are not yet, lost.

The narrative and visual dimensions of social media portraits of ‘what is going on in Gaza’ invert the effacing of the traces of the living that numbers on the news do, but they do so through a grammar of compassion for ‘all souls lost’ – the recognition of those as (former) living beings, and thus, Judit Butler would argue, the assertion of their grievability – with which a staggering surge of posts unreflectively registers a moral inflection toward neutrality. What I find more disturbing is not the invocation of a denial of what is in fact the very real differential distribution of grievability that is at work in such sites of violence, but how the ‘both-sides’ -or ‘no sides’- rhetoric, articulated by people who bestow themselves with the title of ambassadors of a common humanity, is oblivious to the fact that Palestinian children are not really apprehended as living until they are dead.

When the suffering of some is rendered accessible only when it can be equalized to that of others, the presumably uncomplicated language of a universal value of lives carries in fact the implicit recognition, by virtue of its omission, of what the battlefield makes evident: not all lives are counted as livable.  Representations of common suffering elicit in fact interrogations of what counts as humanity, for they mobilise the term as if it were an empty signifier, sliding into ethically unfixed questions of what –and when this what– is a livable and grievable life, and what -and when- it is not. In positing a fantasy of equivalences, they omit the fact that in denying them the social conditions that enable the persistence, sustainment and thriving of life, Israel deprives Palestinians of life even before they are killed, inevitably tapping from a moral economy of suffering in which Palestinian deathis historically normalized and socially reified.

In a sort of collective aphasia (Stoler, 2011), accounts of suffering and pain are measured against each other through a grammar of false equality between what the colonizer’s absolute right to kill differentiates in terms of valuable and non-valuable lives. The long-standing pervasiveness of colonialism, dispossession and killing power becomes muffled; its monopolization of an unlimited right to self-defense denied in historically illiterate proposals of peacebuilding rooted in Solomonic repartitions of the territory and allocations of quasi sovereignties. Framings of the violence that often accompany such accounts as a ‘war’, or a ‘conflict’, often uncritically registering the tensions at stake through the performative solidarity of posting two flags together, raise unsettling questions about how the equation of the suffering of ones to the suffering of others – or the recognition of their shared humanity – seems so often to acquire meaning alongside a conceptual erasure of the long-standing power imbalances between the sides. To talk of suffering in order to speak about domination, Didier Fassin argues, is to do morals and politics with new words (2008: 532); but what kind of morals and politics are done by the omission of colonial domination that the articulation of frameworks of universal suffering seem to convey?

At the forefront of many calls for action, reflections on grief and loss, and denunciations of the ongoing violence ‘in and around’ the Gaza Strip are children whose suffering bodies, like those of Wadi or the children in hospitals in Gaza, seem to convey a sort of humanitarian discourse of ‘antipolitical moralism’ (Ticktin, 2011: 64). Children occupy, of course, a key place in dominant imaginations of the human and of the ‘world community’ (Malkii 2011), and they do so, in the case that concerns us here, by condensing very particular forms of violence into a moral problematization.

‘It is not a political view but a human response’ declares a dance school in London in their Instagram stories, now gone, imbuing the devastation felt for ‘the loss of innocent lives, especially children’, with a sort of affective affordance that attempts to justify a denial of the politics that are layered in the attribution of differential value to the lives of ones and the lives of the others. A pretension of depoliticisation that invokes in fact a very particular politics, one that reproduces the effacing of the precise context in which violence takes place. In those posts, the continued allegiance to the alleviation of suffering and the condemnation of violence emerges through a language of crisis and urgency that reproduces a particular genealogy of violence and reparation in abstract terms: victims are dispossessed of perpetrators; suffering bodies imagined outside of history and politics; they require help only out of a moral obligation (see Ticktin, 2011).

‘Let these poor innocent children be’ a Bristol based printmaker writes as a concluding demand, posting from the same city where I am. To be what? I wonder; what were Palestinian children being targeted by Israel’s last offensive? What kind of lives, if lives at all, were they living?

The idea of a morally legitimate suffering body collapses again in the figure of children in the words of Arab Israeli politician and journalist Aida Touma-Sliman: ‘a child is a child’; for which she is reprimanded by Knesset member Meirav Ben-Ari with invocations of a lack of symmetry that goes in fact the other way around. Toulam-Sliman is right, but she is also not; a child might be a child within the frames of humanitarian values, but in the rationality of occupation, a Palestinian child is not the same child.

Image 2: Two young girls in a pro-Palestine protest hold banners that read ‘Bombing kids is not self defense’ and what appears as ‘To stand with Palestine is to stand with humanity’. Photo from Dania Shaeeb in Unsplash

In a public endorsement of the ongoing collective punishment against the Palestinian population, Meirav Ben-Ari declares that ‘the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves’. In this rhetorical unravelling of a selective production and undoing of victims, Hamas’ attacks prove Gazan children’s culpability for their own victimization. Participants of war, children are a ‘category mistake’, Malkki (2010) would say, used in this case to deny the pretension of our shared humanity. Children are, in the colonizer’s rhetoric, perpetrators; they are Hamas’ human shields. They are, as Butler has argued, no children at all, ‘but rather bits of armament, military instruments and materiel’ (2016). The grammar of compassion with which the morally legitimate bodyof the child – and the fantasy of the equal grievability of its life in comparison to Israeli lives – is upheld fails to acknowledge that in the occupied territories, Palestinian children are not really alive as such. They are nothing but a threat against which an absolute power defends the lives of some and destroys the lives of others as it formulates itself. They are like rocks and steel, darkness in human form, a haunting specter of the pervasive threat of terrorism in its developing potentiality.

As highly politically charged sites, Palestinian children embody indeed the racial politics of reproduction that underpin Israel’s colonial settlement project. Perhaps because in the colonizer’s war on demographics Palestinian reproduction stands in the way of the continued success of colonization (Kanaaneh, 2002; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015), Palestinian children are produced through the inscription of colonial power in their mothers’ bodies not as made of flesh and bones, but as traces of an unruly destructive power. 

On October the 17th, the Israeli Prime Minister posts on Twitter: ‘this is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle’. In the now deleted post, a divide operates through a narrative of impossible dichotomies between light and darkness, between humanity and savageness, mirroring the ubiquitous distortion of Palestinian people that articulates the same discourses that reproduce the frames of recognition in which their lives are considered nothing else but a threat to the survival of others. Perhaps in his post Benjamin Netanyahu uses Niebuhr’s novel’s title to refer to such an existential battle, yet the mention of children reinforces its emergence as a powerful signifier that seams together, even if in complicated ways, universalist understandings of humanity and the precise denials of it.

In what terms can this ‘poetics of our common humanity’ (Malkki, 2011) that permeates social media feeds not lose sight of the context in which such disturbing category mistakes – the, literally, ‘children’ of darkness – are produced? In what ways can such calls for compassion – which reify the moral authority with which children, presumably holders of an innocent, unadulterated, presociality (Malkki, 2011; see also Butler, 2016), are often indexed – be attentive to the everyday forms of criminal brutality that deny their mere existence as humans?

That there is no justification for the targeting of children, or any civilian of any age, is unquestionable. Yet, the way such claims for equidistance seem so often to compress the history of racialized and settler colonial domination into a ‘war against humanity’, obscure the frames in which Palestinian children’s lives are lives that are not only constrained and cut short, but that are ontologically already lost, placed ‘outside of humanity’, ‘dark matter’.


Júlia Fernandez is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She specializes in reproduction, care and forced migration. She has conducted research in the West Bank before, focusing on gender and political resistance.


References

Butler, J. (2016): Frames of war: When is life grievable? Verso, London.

Fassin, D. (2008): The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification through Trauma in the Israeli: Palestinian Conflict. Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 531-558

Kanaaneh, R. (2002): Birthing the nation: Strategies of Palestinian women in Israel. University of California Press.

Malkki, L. (2010): ‘Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace’, in Ticktin and Feldman (eds): In the name of humanity: the government of threat and care. Durham, Duke University Press.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. (2015): The politics of birth and the intimacies of violence against Palestinian women in occupied east Jerusalem. The British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 55, No. 6, THEMED ISSUE: In the Aftermath of Violence: What Constitutes a Responsive Response?  pp. 1187-1206

Stoler, A. (2011): Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. Public Culture, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 121-156

Ticktin, M. (2011): Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitaranism in France. Berkeley, University California Press.


Cite as: Fernandez, Júlia 2023 “Outside of Humanity: Palestinian Children and the Value of Life” Focaalblog 31 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/10/31/julia-fernandez-outside-of-humanity-palestinian-children-and-the-value-of-life/

Antonio De Lauri: The Courage of Historical Truths

With the destruction of Gaza by Israel under way and the humanitarian situation in the occupied Palestinian territories worsening day by day, a recurrent question is raised in mainstream media, TV shows and many academic circles: Is Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks on October 7 proportionate or not? Some say it is. Others say only partially. Others say it isn’t. But the point is that the question itself is a trap. Any serious debate about the current escalation of violence cannot start from October 2023. To overlook the historical context is a violation of the truth: it pushes to one side the state of oppression that Israel has imposed on Palestine at a growing pace in the past decades, and it washes away the responsibilities of Europe in the root causes of the conflict and occupation.

Image: Graffiti on the West Bank wall in Bethlehem, photo by Benjamín Núñez González

Western governments and institutions have overwhelmingly shown support for Israel in its explicit attempt at annihilating Palestinians. “This is civilization against barbarity. This is good against bad”, claimed Israel’s Ambassador to Berlin, Ron Prosor. “We are fighting against human animals”, said Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. As the mainstream narrative goes, what is taking place is a broader battle of civilizations between “the only democracy in the Middle East” (as Israel has often been labelled by politicians and journalists) and authoritarianism (Hamas and, by extension, all Palestinians). Good vs evil. The civilized vs the uncivilized.

“You are either with us, or you are with the terrorist”, said George Bush in 2001, when the US was launching the War on Terror, which led to two catastrophic decades of human loss (hundreds of thousands of dead), devastation and destabilization. Us and them. The civilized vs the uncivilized. Yet if we really want to indulge in the depressing mantra of a battle of civilizations, we should recognize that the terms of reference are different from how they first appear to the Western intelligentsia. With  current events in Palestine and Israel in mind, if we compare the speeches of Joe Biden or von der Leyen, with that of the king of Jordan at the Cairo Peace Summit, the conclusion would be that the American and the German don’t make a good impression (to use an euphemism). Indeed, I’d challenge anyone in saying on what “side” reason, justice and humanity lie in that comparison.

The decline of values, ability and courage in Western political leadership, coupled with their arrogance and double standards, is a perfect symbol of our empty times, in which social media threads determine the relevance of social issues, and a significant portion of academia is complicit with power or anesthetized and irrelevant. As I write this blog post, a turmoil was generated among some research institutes in Norway for the decision of a group of researchers to publish a Statement on the Situation in Palestine, now available on Public Anthropologist blog and taken down from the website where it was originally published.

Over the past decades, we have seen wars conducted in the name of democracy, countries bombed in the name of human rights and regimes intermittently supported or fought depending on economic interests. In the US as well as in Europe freedom of expression has been dismantled, inequalities have increased and societal cohesion has eroded.

Polarizing discourses are used to generate clicks in ways that misrepresent reality. You raise questions about the opportunity to keep sending weapons to Ukraine? Then you are pro-Putin. You maintain that it is necessary to establish a dialogue with the Taliban? Then you support violations of human rights. Journalism is compromised or controlled. Dissidence is often mocked or even cancelled. Social problems tend to be oversimplified. Nuances are often unwelcomed in political debates. And so, horrors like the devastation imposed on Palestinians go on as Europe complicitly watches. Pro-Palestinians protests are banned. Voices outside the mainstream are silenced. European governments are far from being innocent in the protraction of this humanitarian tragedy. Once again, as with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 or the bombing of Libya in 2011 (to mention only two relatively recent examples), the current events will remain in the history books as a terrifying injustice.

It may be appropriate to recall how in 1993 the historian Howard Zinn introduced the essay “Terrorism over Tripoli”:

“In April of 1986, a bomb exploded in a discotheque in West Berlin, killing two people, one an American soldier. It was unquestionably an act of terrorism. Libya’s tyrannical leader, Muammar Khadafi, had a record of involvement in terrorism, although in this case there seemed to be no clear evidence of who was responsible. Nevertheless, President Reagan ordered that bombers be sent over Libya’s capital of Tripoli, killing perhaps a hundred people, almost all civilians. I wrote this piece, which could not find publication in the press, to argue against the principle of retaliation. I am always furious at the killing of innocent people for some political cause, but I wanted to broaden the definition of terrorism to include governments, which are guilty of terrorism far more often, and on an infinitely larger scale, than bands of revolutionaries or nationalists.”

The essay ends with these words:

“Let us hope that, even if this generation, its politicians, its reporters, its flag-wavers and fanatics, cannot change its ways, the children of the next generation will know better, having observed our stupidity. Perhaps they will understand that the violence running wild in the world cannot be stopped by more violence, that someone must say: we refuse to retaliate, the cycle of terrorism stops here.”

Unfortunately, we cannot say that lessons have been learned. Quite the opposite, as the situation in Gaza blatantly reveals.

Noam Chomsky once praised Zinn’s work (endorsement for Howard Zinn on History) in the following terms: “Howard’s life and work are a persistent reminder that our own subjective judgments of the likelihood of success in engaging human problems are of little interest, to ourselves or others. What matters is to take part, as best we can, in the small actions of unknown people that can stave off disaster and bring about a better world, to honor them for their achievement, to do what we can to ensure that these achievements are understood and carried forward.”

As Palestine burns, many scholars are still reluctant to speak out, established academic institutions avoid making a public stand, unverified information is used as communication tactics, investigative journalism is invisible. Along with Palestinians, truth dies. There are times when we need to create the space for the courage of historical truths to emerge. This is one of those times.

This text first appeared on AllegraLab and it is republished here with the permission of the author.


Antonio De Lauri is is Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway. He works on issues related to law, justice, war and humanitarianism. He is the founding editor and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Public Anthropologist and the Series Editor of Berghahn Books Humanitarianism and Security.


Cite as: De Lauri, Antonio 2023 “The Courage of Historical Truths” Focaalblog 30 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/10/30/antonio-de-lauri-the-courage-of-historical-truths/

Menara Guizardi: Notes on the Political Capitalization of Anguish and Hope in Argentina (and the American Southern-Cone)

In recent work, several authors in anthropology have analyzed how the extreme right is being configured and acquiring a considerable pull on the mainstream (see: Kalb, 2023a; Semán & Wilkis, 2023, https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/05/11/pablo-seman-and-ariel-wilkis-rebellion-of-the-bastards-the-rise-of-the-extreme-right-in-argentina/). I want to take their reflections further and focus on the uncomfortable question about the role of “traditional” political forces in paving the way for the emergence of this neofascism. I do this from a particular vantage point in Argentina and the Southern-Cone of the Americas.

This is not about denying the existence of geopolitical interests and (transnational) capital that provide funding and platforms for the extreme right. However, the situational configuration of their advance in each country cannot be explained without considering the failure of established political representations. Not only have they failed to generate new consensual programmatic agreements, but they are also disconnected – almost pathologically – from the political needs and sensitivities of people in life contexts of overwhelming precariousness and insecurity. Engaged in palace disputes for a little place in the sun, political coalitions of several South American countries have been speaking their own language, increasingly alien to the people on the street who are trying to get by with putting food on the table, for a start.

In 2018, anthropologist Silvina Merenson and I were carrying out fieldwork in two southern Brazilian states during the elections that brought Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency. Merenson dialogued with higher-income families while I interviewed female domestic workers, shopkeepers, smugglers, and trans-border farmers. To our surprise, these interviews with such different groups turned out to have common political denominators. Time and again, they expressed that living conditions had worsened, that expectations for the future were being destroyed, and that more and more sacrifices were demanded of them in aspects of life considered fundamental. They also expressed a loss of confidence in the political representatives of the Workers’ Party (PT) and the center-right parties due to the corruption scandals insistently reported by the media. Their narratives conveyed an ingrained weariness with representations from across the political spectrum’s inability to provide solutions to social anxieties.

In conversations with academic colleagues and militants of the then-PT candidate, we made clear our concern that the speeches on the good deeds of the PT governments were a mistake. People had reached a point of saturation: they needed to believe that something radically different was coming. This wish took on an almost messianic character in Brazil: the evangelical churches supported the extreme-right candidate and were key in constructing a collective “faith” in his smoothness and capabilities. In short, we had ethnographically identified a political “crossing point” for the sacrifice of people’s future horizons and their basic minimum needs. Once this limit is crossed, the weariness becomes multi-dimensional (social, psychological, physical), and society can no longer be asked to give more of itself. Exhaustion, anger, tiredness, faith, and hope: this is the combo of collective sensitivities provoked by crossing this limit, and the extreme right in Brazil knew how to capitalize on it by putting up a new messiah.

This July, I conducted fieldwork in cities in northern, central, and southern Chile, interviewing 50 female social science researchers in the country’s universities. These conversations revealed a state of fear on the part of the female colleagues on two fronts. First, regarding the stalking done by the extreme right and its slow and planned victory in the fight for Gramsci’s common sense, and second, the fact that the government was facilitating this process with “errors” (forced or not) that they found “inexplicable”.

In 2021, Gabriel Boric represented a left-wing coalition Apruebo Dignidad [Approve Dignity] made up of non-traditional political parties, organized by the student movements. His discourse was based on the criticism of the coalitions (center-left and right-wing) that had led the democratic transition since 1990 while ensuring the persistence of Pinochet’s neoliberalism. Boric won the presidential ballot in December 2021 (55.9% of the votes), beating the extreme-right candidate José Antonio Kast (44.1%). However, from the start of his government (in March 2022), strategic errors have caused widespread surprise. The first was the trip by the then Minister of Interior and Security, Izkia Siches, to mediate the Mapuche conflict in southern Chile with no prior agreements with Indigenous leaders or security planning. A female sociologist with extensive experience advising presidential administrations recounted her astonishment on seeing on television the minister being driven out of the area under gunfire: “They have a misplaced voluntarist vision. They assumed that they could discuss a territorial conflict that dates back 300 years, talk to a family whose son had been shot by state security forces, and say ‘you can trust me, I am a new type of State’”.

The director of a Chilean alternative media organization reported that he lost his best professionals in writing, audiovisual editing, and formulation of web content in the days of the convention for the proposed constitution in 2021. A network of organized businesspeople offered these professionals huge salaries to produce multimedia materials defaming the constituent process. This campaign was effective in the context of the post-pandemic crisis, inflation, rising food prices, and increased violence from drug-trafficking networks. With communicative astuteness, they managed to associate all of this with the new government and the new constitution (which was rejected in a plebiscite in September 2022).

Since then, the government has been involved in absurd corruption scandals. Allegations of several cases of fraud involved the Ministry of Social Development, headed by Giorgio Jackson, a preeminent figure of the government’s alliance. One of them concerns fraudulent agreements with NGOs led by political representatives of Jackson’s party in northern Chile. Another is about small funds for social works being used to purchase branded lingerie for a female political representative from the south of the country. On July 19, a man claiming to be the minister called a security guard of the Ministry of Social Development and ordered him to gather up 50 computers. The guard handed over 23 computers to three hooded subjects, who later returned and took away a safe. With all major media outlets aligned with the right or the extreme right, these events caused a media tsunami. Officially, the government sought to characterize this as part of a destabilization coup orchestrated by the right. This did not even convince the allied rank and file: Jackson resigned on August 11. Our female interviewees are now taking a Kast victory in the next presidential elections (in 2025) for granted. A female political scientist and militant in Boric’s front, now disillusioned, concluded: “The only way Kast will not win is if he doesn’t run”.

For a quick summary of the Chilean democratic mess: Three decades after the democratic transition, reigning political coalitions had sustained and deepened the neo-liberal model, blatantly failing to fulfill egalitarian promises of social ascent through personal effort. The social explosion of 2019 signified the outburst of dissatisfaction with these unfulfilled promises. Popular dissatisfaction was aggravated by the pandemic crisis and was capitalized on by young leaders who proposed a “new way of doing politics” and granting “dignity” to the people. This promise provided a representational outlet for popular anguish, but once in power, the new governing class was caught up by its promises and vulnerable for renewed accusations of corruption. The level of dissatisfaction with democracy grew, and people, desperate to get ahead after years of crushing and cyclical crises, turned to quick solutions that were easy to execute. Faced with adversity, complexity, and disappointment, people prefer to rely on the sense of predictability of the conservative social hierarchy that the far-right offers (see Kalb, 2023a). Talking with taxi drivers, concierges, domestic workers, and small shopkeepers in the Chilean cities I passed through during this spring, I heard again the same phrases that we recorded with Merenson in Brazil in 2018.

I returned to Argentina days before the August 13 “Simultaneous and Mandatory Open and Primary elections” (PASO). The country I returned to was even more distressed than when I had left. Argentina is going through dizzying political times, plunged into a swirl of agonistic conflicts. Institutional, economic, and political instability is linked to what they call here (borrowing from Gramsci) the “hegemonic standoff”. Between 2008 and 2022, the country was deeply divided between political forces with opposing visions. It was common to note a “grieta” [rift] between the picture of the country represented by these two blocs. This expression is not the result of poetic license. Its linguistic use has been consolidated in Argentina: it deals with the bellicose configuration of two sides in a latent state of permanent aggression. Since 2022, this latency has given way to episodes of de facto mutual violence.  

Until 2022, we had the Peronist coalition on one side of the grieta, based in a myriad of heterogeneous parties and forces, ranging from the left to the right, and whose pacts and configurations vary in different cities and provinces. In recent years, this coalition has been called Frente para la Victoria [Front for Victory], Frente de Todos [Front for Everyone], and the current Unión por la Patria [Union for the Homeland]. The most important political force within the front was, until 2022, Cristina Kirchner and the faction that bears the surname of her late husband (Néstor Kirchner), namely Kirchnerismo. Despite the heterogeneity, a transcendent Peronist identity allows transversal alliances in certain historical moments. Defining this identity is not easy, but it is generally associated with a redistributive perspective on the State, an anti-neoliberal discourse (although policies do not always reflect this), the continued expansion of social rights, development policies, financial sovereignty, and the idea that the popular sectors (=lower-income) are the identity core of the country.

On the other side of the “grieta”, again until 2022, there was Juntos por el Cambio [Together for Change], the coalition with a neoliberal perspective, also composed of heterogeneous national and provincial forces. The best known are the Propuesta Republicana [Republican Proposal] (PRO) of former President Mauricio Macri and the Unión Cívica Radical [Radical Civil Union]. Macri led this coalition and won the 2015 presidential elections initiating a government that brutally deteriorated living conditions. In his term, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) receded on average 4.3% annually; the annual inflation rate went from 30.5% to 60%. The dollar increased its value by 548% (sic!). In December 2019, 40.8% of people were living below the poverty line. Seeking his reelection, Macri signed the most important bailout in the history of Argentina and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the sum of 57 billion dollars (45 of which were delivered to the country). The IMF and the government agreed a policy of austerity which drastically worsened living conditions. The loan resources were basically siphoned off in unregulated financial speculation schemes.

In this context, the Peronist coalition closed ranks around a single candidate for the 2019 elections. Cristina Kirchner, with her unique political-electoral capital, appointed Alberto Fernández for this role. Peronism’s victory was a moment of hope, of relief: the promise that better days were coming, that the sacrifice and suffering of the four years of Macrismo would loosen their grip. On December 10, 2019, millions of people flocked to the Casa Rosada (the governmental palace in Buenos Aires) to celebrate what felt like the “end of being crushed” (Fig. 01 and 02).

Fig. 01. Massive popular celebration of the victory of Alberto Fernández in the surroundings of the Casa Rosada onDecember 10, 2019. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Photographer: Menara Guizardi.
Fig. 02. People on the walls around the crowded Plaza de Mayo. December 10, 2019. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Photographer: Menara Guizardi.

Three months after Fernández assumed power, the pandemic worsened an already extreme situation in Argentina. The government had to negotiate debt repayment with the IMF at the same time as it had to make social investments to face the pandemic. A key presidential document was written: the “present and caring State” of Peronism was going to be opposed to the “neoliberal State”. Initially, national support was massive (the President had 80% approval ratings when he announced the lockdown). However, the amount of social investment the country could afford turned out to be disappointing and insufficient. The Argentinian lockdown was extremely long. The State was present with measures to prevent layoffs by subsidizing private sector salaries. The health system was strengthened. Argentina performed better than her neighbors. However, all of this was done with a lack of hard financing, with ‘printing money’ like everyone else (‘quantitative easing’; See Kalb 2023b), and at the cost of higher private indebtedness. The agreement with the IMF was finally signed off when the pandemic was waning.

Between 2019 and 2021, Merenson and I carried out fieldwork in working-class neighborhoods in the north of the Buenos Aires conurbation and in the south of the city proper. Both areas have a political history of affiliation with Peronism. In one of them, a former enclave of railway workers, they told us that the joy felt at the return of Peronism in 2019 had turned to sadness (Merenson et al., 2022). There was disappointment, anger, uneasiness, lack of hope, and lack of belief in political leadership. Our interviews registered two clear political sensitivities. First, the expression of fear of a repetition of the 2001 Corralito disaster: The restriction of cash withdrawal from banks to USD 250 per week imposed by the government of Fernando de la Rúa on December 1, 2001 in Argentina. The measure triggered the so-called 2001 crisis that led to the resignation of the president, and a situation of macroeconomic destruction and serious sociopolitical instability. Second, the transition of disappointment and weariness into an incipient rejection of all existing political representations. The narratives showed the resurgence of the desire “for all [politicians] to go away”, a key slogan of the 2001 demonstrations. These sentiments heightened when photos of a birthday party at the Fernández’s residence were disseminated while he was asking the nation on TV to sustain the lockdown effort. Perhaps this was the final straw that broke the camel’s back. As we also observed in Brazil and Chile, social sacrifice can only be sustained under a symmetrical exchange pact: parties agree on ways to give, receive, and reciprocate. It is not possible to ask people for so much sacrifice without reciprocity.

While all this was happening, internal conflicts in the Peronist front surfaced and escalated. The vice-president, Cristina Kirchner, and the president, Alberto Fernández, began a two-year-long battle of mutual attacks. Public opinion began to sense that there was no basic consensus on how to govern. The campaign to take office had not included serious negotiations on the directions, perspectives, and visions to be adopted. The third most important figure of the coalition, Sergio Massa (at that time in charge of the Congress of Representatives), began negotiating the conflict between the President and the Vice President, in exchange for being the Peronist front candidate in 2023.  

While Cristina and Alberto were publicly airing their mutual grievances, the ministries and state agencies showed increasing difficulties to move forward in any direction. This was, partly because of a lack of consensus and partly because ministerial departments were distributed according to what has been called a “vertical lottery”. Each sector was handed over to different political forces in the coalition, which occupied (almost literally) different floors of each ministry building. There were bitter struggles for the appropriation of resources for different areas and competition for control of the other sectors. What one sector did, the other sector hindered. The government insisted with its publicity on the constant presence of a Caring State, but the daily experience of citizens was that anything that depended on the state was increasingly difficult to solve. It did not take long for the people to express this sentiment: “A present State, yes, but not this one”.

Signing the deal with the IMF (January 2022) caused dissatisfaction within Kirchnerismo and months of attack against the measure (by several representatives of this group) led to the resignation of the Minister of Economy, Martín Guzmán (a man of Alberto’s trust) in July of the same year. Immediately after, an exchange-rate race ensued, with the devaluation of the peso and an inflationary shock. The dollar’s rise provokes a multi-scale economic disaster in a country with no reserves or capacity to take out international credit and which depends on so many imported inputs, paid in dollars, to sustain the productive chains.

After comings and goings of ministers, Sergio Massa took over as Minister of Economy in July 2022, concentrating powers from several ministries and, in practice, displacing Alberto as de facto president. In his inaugurating statement, he promised what he could not deliver: to stabilize the macroeconomy, slow down the exchange rate slide, halt inflation, and accumulate reserves. Between July 2022 and June 2023, inflation went from 71% to 120% annually; the Central Bank’s net reserves went from 5 billion positive to 2 billion in the negative; and official poverty reached 43% of the population. The year-on-year Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth projections went from 5.2% to minus 3%.

To ensure imports of minimum inputs, the government supports the value of the peso against the dollar with an official exchange rate that is substantially higher than the informal one. Due to the lack of reserves, there are increasing restrictions to access these “official dollars” (as they are called). When Massa took office, the “official dollar” was worth $285 pesos; currently it is worth $365.5. But the dollar circulating in the informal markets (called “blue”) trades at $720 pesos, twice the official value. Faced with this exchange rate gap, the government had to implement other “official” dollar rates to guarantee the flow of different economic activities. Thus, we have the “card dollar” ($639.2 pesos), “tourist dollar” ($721), “MEP dollar” ($657,48), “CCL dollar” ($746,53), and a “wholesale dollar” ($349,98). This monetary situation creates an almost unmanageable complexity for the basic daily activities of all sectors. Recently the Central Bank’s net reserves reached their historical negative record of minus 5 billion USD. A credit from China was agreed to avoid a sharp devaluation of the peso until August’s vote. The loan has been used to curb speculation on the peso, selling cheaper dollars to speculators and trying to bring the various exchange rates down. These constant financial maneuvers and their technocratic explanations do not elicit much trust among the wider population in Sergio Massa, who has overseen them.  

The right-wing coalition, Juntos por el Cambio, did no better. Confident that the government’s disaster would ensure a wide-margin victory, the presidential candidates began their own debacle for the position of consensus candidate. Mauricio Macri announced that he would not be running: a reasonable decision given his high rejection rates among voters (Fig.03).

Fig. 03. In the celebration of the victory of Alberto Fernández, a man holds the poster: “Damn Macri. Your surname will be cursed and disowned for all eternity. The people will judge you”. December 10, 2019. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Photographer: Menara Guizardi.

However, Macri started an erratic negotiation with possible successors; Patricia Bullrich, representative of the extreme right, and Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, current head of government of the city of Buenos Aires and representative of a “moderate” right. The fights, cross-accusations, and scandals, were widely reported in the press and led to voter exhaustion for this bloc too.  

In the last three months, social suffering has reached new heights. The country is on the verge of a new hyperinflationary shock: it is a train at high speed with no brakes and on a collision course. Pre-electoral polls and focus groups began to point out (especially since June) that Javier Milei (see Focaalblog, https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/05/11/pablo-seman-and-ariel-wilkis-rebellion-of-the-bastards-the-rise-of-the-extreme-right-in-argentina/), an extreme-right candidate running outside the two coalitions that flank the “grieta”, was going to win the most votes in the preliminaries (with obligatory public participation). It is not just an “angry” vote: its thrust is multi-dimensional in terms of political sensitivities. As in Brazil and Chile, people want to believe something different can be possible. There is faith, hope, and the desire to believe in the irrational or improbable. Because everything probable and expected turns out to be too painful, unbearable, and unfair. 

On Sunday, August 13, the announcement of the results revealed that La Libertad Avanza [Liberty Advances], Milei’s party, won the most votes (30.1% of the votes), followed by Juntos por el Cambio (28.25%) and Unión por la Patria (27.15%). Milei won by a large margin in districts such as Córdoba, Santa Fe, and Mendoza and a comfortable margin in 16 provinces (Tucumán, Chubut, Jujuy, La Pampa, La Rioja, Misiones, Neuquén, Río Negro, Salta, San Juan, San Luis, Santa Cruz, and Tierra del Fuego). Recent polls for the first round put him in the lead in October’s elections. A victory for Milei would mean a much more serious social and institutional destruction of Argentina than the one Bolsonaro imposed on Brazil. Argentina starts from a much weaker position and Milei’s ultra-neoliberal proposals are much more virulent and aggressive than those of Bolsonaro.

After the PASO results on Monday August 14 Argentina plunged into another exchange rate slide. The government signed an update of the IMF agreement and further devalued the currency. In the working-class neighborhoods of southern Buenos Aires, businesses kept their doors shut until noon. It was impossible to foresee how prices would evolve. At the door of a closed supermarket, a retired woman, unable to buy bread, said in tears, “they all need to go away…”


Menara Guizardi is Adjunct Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina (CONICET) and an External Researcher at the University of Tarapacá, Chile.


References

Kalb, D. (2023a). Double devaluations: Class, value and the rise of the right in the Global North. Journal of Agrarian Change23(1), 204-219.

Kalb, D. (2023b). Two theories of money: on the historical anthropology of the state-finance nexus. Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, no. 95: 92-112

Merenson, S., Sánchez, L., & Guizardi, G. (2022). Imágenes paganas: Recurrencias, emergencias y autoidentificaciones de clase en un barrio ferroviario del conurbano bonaerense (2019-2021). Etnografías Contemporáneas8(15).

Semán, P. & Wilkis, A. (May 11, 2023). Rebellion of the bastards: the rise of the extreme right in Argentina. Focaal Blog. Retrieved from: https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/05/11/pablo-seman-and-ariel-wilkis-rebellion-of-the-bastards-the-rise-of-the-extreme-right-in-argentina/ (Accessed: August 20, 2023).


Cite as: Guizardi, Menara 2023 “Notes on the Political Capitalization of Anguish and Hope in Argentina (and the American Southern-Cone)” Focaalblog 24 August. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/08/24/menara-guizardi-notes-on-the-political-capitalization-of-anguish-and-hope-in-argentina-and-the-american-southern-cone

Markus Balkenhol: Apologizing for slavery: notes on a Dutch surprise

On 1 July 2021, 148 years after slavery ended in the Dutch West Indian colonies, Femke Halsema, the Mayor of Amsterdam, said: ‘For the active involvement of the Amsterdam City Council in the commercial system of colonial slavery and the global trade in enslaved people I, on behalf of the College of Mayors and Aldermen, apologize.’ Halsema was followed by the College of Mayors and Aldermen of Rotterdam (10 November 2021), Mayor Sharon Dijksma (Utrecht, 23 February 2022), Mayor Van Zanen (The Hague, 20 November 2022), and last but not least, Prime Minister Mark Rutte (19 December 2022). It is expected that King Willem Alexander will offer his apologies for the involvement of his family, the Oranje-Nassaus, in the slave trade in the Atlantic and Asia on this year’s (2023) abolition day (Keti Koti). Why, many wondered, should we apologize for slavery? It is so long ago, we are not guilty of it.

Memory politics

Before I get to the ‘why’ question, perhaps let me start with the question: why now? For many, the series of apologies may have come as a surprise. All of a sudden and out of nowhere, they may have thought, we need to apologize for something that has happened long ago and that has never been an issue before. Why should we make a point of it now? Although slavery has never before received as much public attention as it does now, the commemoration of slavery in the Netherlands is not new. In fact, that commemoration has had its own dynamic, and has changed in terms of the political message it carries. Already in the 1950s, African Surinamese students in the Netherlands celebrated Keti Koti, Abolition Day on July 1. In 1963 there was even a public manifestation in Amsterdam. More than ten years before Surinamese independence (1975), students in particular mobilized the commemoration in a framework of Surinamese nation-building. ‘Fri moe de’ (free we must be), in that sense, was not only a reminder of abolition, but also a claim to end colonial rule.

Image 1: Detail of the National Slavery Memorial, Oosterpark Amsterdam, 2009. Photo by the author.

The commemorations continued after independence, but for the main part remained private. That began to change in 1993, when a group of African Surinamese organized a public commemoration of ‘the shared history of the Netherlands and its colonies’ on Surinameplein in Amsterdam. That commemoration was meticulously modeled after the national memorial day on Dam square on May 4, commemorating the fallen in the war. Mirroring the national Committee 4/5 May, the group called itself the Committee 30 June/1 July. Like the Dam ceremony, the Surinameplein event also includes two minutes of silence at 8pm, the singing of the Dutch, Surinamese and Antillean anthems, and a performance by a child. Now, slavery had come to carry a different political message: no longer a plea for independence, but a claim for citizenship. Whereas many Surinamese in the 1970s had come to the Netherlands with the idea of returning to an independent and flourishing nation, political events in the 1980s (a coup d’état, civil war, and economic downturn) shattered these dreams. The 1980s therefore saw a re-orientation towards the Netherlands, stemming from a realization that the Netherlands would have to be a home for the foreseeable future. As a consequence, slavery was now re-framed as a claim to citizenship – hence the emphasis on a ‘shared’ history. Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s dictum: ‘we are here because you were there’ gained popularity. Their manifesto of 2002 also included demands about pensions, education, residency, radio and TV broadcasting licences, and health insurance. These demands, although they had been made throughout the 1990s, reached ever larger audiences after the unveiling of the national slavery memorial in Oosterpark, Amsterdam. This ceremony is usually attended by high-ranking representatives of the state, including the mayor, ministers, the Prime Minister, and the King.

Recent commemorations are increasingly embraced by young people of African-Surinamese descent (and to a lesser extent people of African Antillean descent), born in the Netherlands and exposed to racism in education, the housing sector, or work. They articulate slavery as a historical responsibility of the Dutch state and society at large.

What is changing now, is that slavery is less and less presented as a ‘Surinamese’ or ‘Antillean’ thing, but as something that concerns Dutch society as such. More and more, white Dutch citizens come to the realization that commemorating slavery is not only about someone else’s pain (although clearly that is also important), but that it concerns Dutch society as a whole. Now, one might argue that there are many ways of taking responsibility for that past. Why apologies? Why that particular form?

Apologies

In fact, apologies are notoriously difficult, especially when they concern collectives. As Michel Rolph Trouillot (2000) argued, in order for apologies to work one must establish the identity, or the self-sameness of two fundamentally different entities: a collective in the present and a collective in the past. One must show that the collective perpetrating an act is actually the same as the one apologizing – an impossible task according to Trouillot. Indeed, it is easy to dismiss this, as for instance the populist politician Pim Fortuyn has done: those who suffer from traumas should visit the psychiatrist, instead of sitting at a negotiating table, he wrote in 2002. Apologies may even be the flipside of this kind of right wing populism. Take, for instance, Rita Verdonk, who upon launching her political movement ‘Proud of the Netherlands’ (Trots op Nederland) in 2007, exclaimed that the Netherlands had been a hospitable country for centuries, and that it is not in the Dutch nature to discriminate. Verdonk imagines a nation characterized by unwavering goodness, a kind of völkische idea of an essentialized people characteristic for populist ideology.

In legal terms apologies are less of an issue. The present Dutch government and city councils are the legal successors of historical governments. This is why many apologies have been made by sitting governments on behalf of their predecessors. Think, for instance of Willy Brandt’s famous ‘Warsaw genuflection’, a gesture of both commemoration and apology in the context of the 1943 uprising in the Wasaw Ghetto (which at the time only 41 per cent of West Germans approved of).

Abortive rituals?

Nevertheless, Trouillot argues that apologies should be seen as ‘abortive rituals’: ‘collective apologies are meant not to succeed – not because of the possible hypocrisy of some of the actors but because their very conditions of emergence deny the possibility of a transformation’ (Trouillot 2000, 185). I’m not sure I agree with Trouillot that apologies are necessarily ‘abortive’. I do recognize the danger of essentializing collectives, and indeed, the slavery debate in places like the Netherlands does generate presumably clear cut identities of blackness and whiteness, victim and perpetrator, oppressor and oppressed. Looked at ethnographically, the picture becomes much more complex. Relations between African Surinamese and Ghanaians, for example, can sometimes be as tense, if not more, as those between African Surinamese and white Dutch; African Surinamese in Suriname think and feel differently about slavery compared to African Surinamese in the Netherlands; political outlook can be more important than racial-ethnic identification as black or white, and so on.

However, as an anthropologist I do not want to dismiss the power of rituals so easily. Trouillot argued that collective apologies are rituals that have a demonstrative and a transformative dimension. The goal of a ritual in general is to transform a person or collective from one state to another. Rituals of collective apology, according to Trouillot, fail to achieve such a transformation because these rituals rely not on transformation but on durable identities. My sense is that Trouillot was too quick to dismiss apologies purely based on their structural premises. It remains interesting to ask how such rituals may work in practice.

Collective rituals, to speak with Benedict Anderson, are also a space to imagine oneself. Collectives, one might say, do not exist outside of, or prior to these rituals, but they emerge out of these rituals in the first place. This means that collective rituals also present opportunities to imagine a collective subject in a new way. This is precisely what has been happening around the issue of slavery in places like the Netherlands in the past two decades.

Image 2: Winti priestess Marian Markelo pouring libation to the ancestors at the National Slavery Memorial, 2010. Photo by the author

Two examples may show this. The first is from the year 2006. During the Algemene Beschouwingen, a parliamentary debate about the government’s plans for the coming period, then Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, a Christian Democrat, said in reply to the critique by Femke Halsema, then a member of the oppositionof the GreenLeft: ‘I don’t know why you are being so negative and annoying about this. … Let’s be happy together! Let’s be optimistic! Let us say: Once more, The Netherlands can do it! This VOC-mentality, looking past borders, dynamism! Right?!’ By ‘VOC mentality’ he referred to what he perceived as the Dutch entrepreneurial spirit as embodied in the Verenigde Oost Indische Compagnie (United East India Company), a mindset that supposedly had made The Netherlands a great economic and political power in the world. Like Verdonk, he cherished Dutch colonialism.  

Although Mark Rutte, from a liberal party that has similarly been proud of Dutch imperial history, has long argued that you that you cannot hold people in the present responsible for what happened in the past, he now imagines the nation differently. In his apology speech, he said: ‘We, living in the here and now, can only recognize and condemn slavery in the clearest terms as a crime against humanity. … And we in the Netherlands must face our share in that past. … [The national archives are] the place for national examination of conscience.’ It was a rare moment of vision for this Prime Minister – a liberal to the bone – who has notoriously claimed that those who want vision should visit a doctor.

So, have these apologies been transformative? There are many who did not think so, especially because after years of rejection and hesitation, they came very suddenly, without consultation of societal partners, and deliberately on a date without any ritual significance in any of the countries involved. Nevertheless, many agree that it was a moment in which the Prime Minister showed unexpected statesmanship. In spite of considerable societal backlash, he chose to imagine the Netherlands differently, turning away from the classic nationalist narrative of a glorious imperial past to a certain humility, mindfulness, and care. It remains to be seen whether the cabinet will not just talk the talk, but also walk the walk, but it is possible that an important step has been made in the process of re-imagining the Netherlands.


Markus Balkenhol is a social anthropologist at the Meertens Institute, Amsterdam. He specializes on colonialism, race, citizenship, cultural heritage and religion. His 2021 book Tracing Slavery: The Politics of Atlantic Memory in the Netherlands is published by Berghahn Books.


References

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2000. “Abortive Rituals: Historical Apologies in the Global Era.” Interventions 2 (2): 171–86.


Cite as: Balkenhol, Markus 2023 “Apologizing for slavery: notes on a Dutch surprise” Focaalblog 28 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/06/28/markus-balkenhol-apologizing-for-slavery-notes-on-a-dutch-surprise/

Chris Hann: Thanks, Türkiye

How does Recep Tayyip Erdoğan do it? In Spring 2023, the economy is in a mess, inflation accelerating, and corruption rife. Government aid in the wake of a devastating earthquake in Southeastern Anatolia on 6th February was badly mismanaged. The natural disaster revealed the structural shortcomings of poorly regulated construction and real-estate markets, symptomatic of a political economy given over to short-term profit maximization. In the elections just a few months later, the opposition came together behind an attractive and eloquent candidate, the economist Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Yet in the second round of voting on 28th May the incumbent triumphed by over two million votes.

Image 1: Electoral poster for Erdoğan and his AKP party in central Rize, photo by author

If the polls ahead of the election were close enough to rattle Erdoğan, he betrayed no outward sign of discomfort. His imperturbable authority is one of his principal strengths. Critics highlight his control over swathes of the media and the mechanisms through which his Justice and Development Party (AKP) is able influence the votes of state employees. They point to illiberal policies on gender issues (particularly toward the LGTBQ community), arbitrary incarcerations such as that of philanthropist Osman Kavala, and more generally, the repression of a civil society. In his successful mobilization of Islamic sentiment against a secular “deep state” since the closing years of the last century, Erdoğan is categorized by many as a crude populist. In the centenary year of the republic established by Mustafa Kemal (later known as Atatürk), some critics allege that in his two decades of power Erdoğan has fatally undermined the fundamental principles of the secular state. With his AKP party dominating the newly elected National Assembly, the prospect of a more liberal form of democracy emerging in the next five years is tantamount to zero.  

Yet within a week of victory, before formally embarking on his new five-year term, Erdoğan made a well-publicized visit to the Atatürk Mausoleum in Ankara. He lauded the transformations of the inter-war decades, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The extraordinarily high turnout at the May elections, he declared, had once again demonstrated the vitality of the country’s democracy. This ritual occasion was reported in the official media as a ziyaret, a word that has religious connotations in Islam. Has Turkish nationalism been grafted onto Islam such that the mausoleum of Atatürk is now analogous to a religious shrine?

Islamic Capitalism

Erdoğan made his name as a Mayor of Istanbul, but nowadays he regularly loses the biggest cities. He owes his re-election primarily to constituencies in inner Anatolia – including even voters directly affected by the February quake. By unleashing market forces, Erdoğan has continued policies that date back to the very beginning of electoral politics in the wake of the Second World War. Market capitalism struggled to displace a “Jacobin” (Duzgun 2022) variant of modernity which emerged in the late Ottoman era and in secular form continued to dominate in the Kemalist republic. In the changing international climate of the 1980s, Turgut Özal abandoned protectionism and embarked on neoliberal privatizations of state industries. Özal’s Motherland Party demonstrated that capitalism could thrive in an Islamic ideological frame. There were further hiccups and another military intervention in 1997, the Motherland Party faded along with earlier “religious” parties, but in the new century the AKP has sealed the victory of Islamic capitalism: albeit in a political framework that has become ever more authoritarian in the last decade.

Image 2: “Thanks Türkiye” electoral poster for Erdoğan in Rize, photo by author

What does this mean in practice? It means first of all that the middle classes enjoy greater opportunities outside the public sector and that an entrepreneurial spirit is encouraged in town and countryside alike (For discussion and an anthropological analysis of how small businesses operate in a provincial city, see Deniz 2021). But incentives to invest and consume privately have been accompanied by huge public investments, both in material infrastructure (above all roads) and in social security. Public health provision has improved immeasurably and this contributes significantly to the electoral appeal of the AKP. These welfare accomplishments are seldom acknowledged by the regime’s liberal critics. But critics are right to insist that, far from stepping aside to allow private property and market forces to determine outcomes within an impartial legal framework, the AKP intervenes at every level to enable the proliferation of cronyism and rent-taking (Karadag 2013). Following the bloody attempt by sections of the armed forces and others to depose Erdoğan in 2016 and the transition thereafter from a parliamentary to a presidential system, the patron-client networks of the AKP have become a stranglehold across most of the country – even where a semblance of negotiating “agency” to citizens is allowed (see Evren 2022 for an analysis of how AKP-dominated networks shape the transformation of nature as well as property and power relations locally in a valley of northeast Anatolia).    

Nationalism and Ethnicity

Both presidential candidates played the national card. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu proved savvy in his use of social media, whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment on Youtube in a vain effort to make good his deficit after the first round of elections on May 14th. He had little choice. The party he has led since 2010 is the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which dates back to the era of Atatürk. Traditionally a statist party (“Jacobin” in the political Marxist analysis of Duzgun 2022), the CHP has a much smaller membership than the AKP and cannot generate the donations that might enable it to compete more effectively. In the present conjuncture of Islamic crony capitalism, why would any Turkish businessman be inclined to support the opposition? In the run-up to the elections, the public sphere was awash with posters of President Erdoğan.

Fuller explanations of the outcome of the elections require closer engagement with the decline in ethnic diversity since the emergence of the republic. The Ottomans ruled over an extraordinarily multicultural empire, but nationalist modernization has forged Türkiye (as the country now likes to be known in English) gradually into a more homogenous society. However, some forms of diversity have proved resilient. A common religion and similar experiences of socio-economic transformation have not been enough to endear Kurds to the Kemalist Turkish nation-state. Türkiye’s largest ethnic minority comprises roughly fifteen million members. Although significant internal differentiation persists, generations of conflict have consolidated national consciousness. Kurds outnumber ethnic Turks across most of southeast Anatolia. Many have migrated to the big cities of the west and to Europe in order to improve their economic situation (but not all mobility has been voluntary). Even if they lose their language in the second or third generation, most diaspora Kurds will vote for their own political party whenever they have an opportunity to do so, and seldom for the AKP.

Image 3: Electoral poster for Erdoğan in central Rize, photo by author

The East Black Sea Coast

These variables play out differently in other regions with smaller minorities and quite different economic conditions. In accordance with the Lausanne agreements, the Pontic Greeks of the Black Sea coast were deported in 1923 (an instance of ethnic cleansing avant la lettre). Their material traces have receded steadily ever since. The splendid Hagia Sophia in Trebizond (today’s Trabzon) functioned for centuries as a mosque before being carefully restored by the Kemalists and opened as a museum in 1964. It was converted back into a mosque in 2013.

The family of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan comes from Rize, which is the last major city on Türkiye’s Black Sea coast, roughly half way between Trebizond and the Georgian border. Its population has doubled to over 100,000 in recent decades and it now boasts a university named after President Erdoğan. In this province, he won over 75% of the vote on 28th May. Most of the east Black Sea coast region is historically conservative and pious. Its subsistence-oriented rural economy was radically altered by changed by the expansion of tea as a cash crop from the 1950s (see Bellér-Hann and Hann 2000). The tea industry was an example of top-down Kemalist modernization, but peasant beneficiaries showed little gratitude and did not change their world view. The CHP has never done well here; in some towns and villages, the principal opposition to AKP comes not from CHP but from extreme nationalists.

But the province of Rize is not homogenous. An hour to the east in the direction of the border crossing to Georgia at Sarp, languages related to Georgian and Armenian are still spoken in the villages. The number of speakers is small and declining (probably below 100,000). In the absence of state support, the prospects for the survival of Lazi and Hemşinli cultural distinctiveness are poor. Unlike the case of the Kurds, ethnicity here does not appear to have an impact on party affiliation and voting behaviour.

However, some minority citizens distance themselves from the Turks of Rize through their pride in being progressive in the Kemalist republican sense. They attach high value to a secular education and social mobility, which almost always implies geographical mobility. A few committed individuals hang posters of Atatürk on their balconies to proclaim their abiding loyalty to the revolutionary secular traditions of the Kemalists. In this way, the man who dominated the public sphere in the last century maintains a presence; but in this election period, it is a modest one in comparison with the Erdoğan images.

This progressive element is strong in the town of Fındıklı, with a population of barely 10,000, which is still run by the CHP. Erdoğan posters are less conspicuous here. In the first round, Fındıklı was the only district of Rize province in which the incumbent President failed to receive 50% of the votes cast. Recently, a new recreational zone including a Lazi cultural centre was created between the sea and the motorway that has transformed the ecology of the littoral (see Genç and Şendeniz 2022). In other towns of Rize and Trebizond, such an initiative would likely have been named after Erdoğan. That was out of the question here. There was pressure from above to bestow the name National Park, but it was finally named Atatürk Park.

Image 4: (Left) Poster of Atatürk in rural Çamlıhemşin and (Right) electoral poster for Erdoğan in a country lane in Fındıklı, photos by author

But though it is possible to fight the occasional rearguard action successfully, enlightened Lazi landowners nostalgic for Kemalism are not sufficiently numerous to generate an electoral majority against Erdoğan. The success of the tea industry has promoted mobility: the children of the well-educated migrate to the big cities and cast their votes there. Arduous harvesting labour in their native villages is largely undertaken by immigrants, most of whom come from poorer western regions of the Black Sea coast. Some have settled permanently, giving rise to a significant population replacement and hastening the demise of the Lazi language (even activists concede that it would make little sense to teach Lazuri to primary school children who are not of Lazi ethnicity). These sharecroppers retain their conservative worldview. Kemalism has not been as kind to them as it has been to their landlords and the appeal of Erdoğan is strong – sometimes strong enough for them to display posters on quiet country roads. Both owners and sharecroppers approve of the fact that the AKP has refrained from a full-scale privatization of the state enterprise that has set the standard and dominated this sector since the 1950s.

In the second round, after picking up the votes of a candidate further to the right, even in Fındıklı Erdoğan obtained a majority.

Conclusions

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a gifted politician whose calm autocratic persona goes down well with large sections of the population. He has consolidated his stature as a statesman who stands up for an independent Türkiye on the world stage, whereas his rival Kılıçdaroğlu did little to dispel the view that he would be a puppet of the West, in particular of the USA. Rather like the situation in Hungary in 2022, a fragmented opposition driven to uniting behind a single candidate succeeded only in enhancing the standing and aura of the incumbent.

President Erdoğan is especially popular among citizens with low education and few qualifications. This includes much of the European diaspora as well as post-peasants in Anatolia who continue to the cities but are also prepared to relocate to meet labour needs within the countryside. The evidence from the east Black Sea cost shows that multiple factors interact to shape voting patterns. Uneven development in the Kemalist era has led to new class divisions, while fostering socio-cultural homogenization through new processes of internal migration. The persistence of the state corporation regulating the tea industry symbolizes continuity with statist traditions.

Image 5: “Thanks Istanbul” (some citizens of Istanbul were scornful of post-election posters expressing the President’s thanks to a metropolis that actually gave a majority to his opponent), photo by author

In the centenary year of the republic, Erdoğan is frequently mocked by liberal critics at home and abroad as a throwback to the days of Ottoman Sultans. Comparisons with Mustafa Kemal are perhaps more appropriate. Like his illustrious military forerunner, Erdoğan has transformed his country. The two will blend seamlessly as centenary festivities build up in the second half of this year. Erdoğan’s version of the authoritarian state resonates better with both local religious heritage and global capitalism. He has mastered ways of communicating with the masses that work for this country in this century. Within days of his re-election, the AKP machine was putting up new posters all over the country: in trademark pose, the supreme leader has his right hand on his breast, his lips form a faint smug smile, and the text proclaims “Thanks, Türkiye.”


Chris Hann is Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.


References

Bellér-Hann, Ildikó and Chris Hann 2000. Turkish Region. State, Market and Social Identities on the East Black Sea Coast. Oxford: James Currey.

Deniz, Ceren 2021. The Formation of Peripheral Capital. Value Regimes and the Politics of Labour in Anatolia. Berlin: LIT Verlag.

Duzgun, Eren 2022. Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Evren, Erdem 2022. Bulldozer Capitalism. Accumulation, Ruination, and Dispossession in Northeastern Turkey. New York: Berghahn Books.

Genç Fatma and Özlem Şendeniz (eds) 2022. Beyond the Land. Looking at the Black Sea as a Marine Environment. Fındıklı: Gola Yayınları. Bilingual publication (Turkish title is Karadan Öte: Deniz Olarak Karadeniz’e Bakmak); pdf available at https://golader.org/projeDetay/36

Karadag, Roy 2013. “Where Does Turkey’s New Capitalism Come From? Comment on Eren Duzgun” European Journal of Sociology 54 (1): 147-152.


Cite as: Hann, Chris 2023 “Thanks, Türkiye” Focaalblog 16 June. Thanks, Türkiye https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/06/16/chris-hann-thanks-turkiye/

Pablo Semán and Ariel Wilkis: Rebellion of the bastards: the rise of the extreme right in Argentina

The growth of extreme right-wing forces in the Argentine political process expresses the combination of global trends and specific trends associated with local political history. It also expresses the need to understand the embeddedness of these political preferences in the social experiences shaped by the generalized decline of the middle and popular classes, sedimented in a long cycle of forty years and currently intensified by the derivations of the pandemic and the leaps in annual inflation in 2017 and 2021 (in which it passed, respectively, from 25% to 50% per annum and from 50% to 100% per annum).


It is impossible to deny the correspondence with those right wing processes taking place in different world regions and countries (see Engelen, 2023; Henkel et al., 2019; Kalb, 2020; Pasieka, 2018). The longer-term trend that explains these triumphs is the complex and contradictory reconfiguration of economics and politics since the fall of the Berlin Wall, if we need an iconic date. The global dynamics of capitalism no longer just erode national democracy but have started to generate alternative proposals to re-establish social order on a national scale, underwritten by the cultural fragmentation and economic discontent produced by economic (neo)liberalization.

Image 1: A 2002 demonstration against the financial “Corralito” in La Plata, Argentina, photo by Barcex

The expressions of the extreme right represent a form of illiberalism claiming political institutions at the limits of democracy that would overcome the fragmentation of national units suffering from the international mobility of capital. The accumulation of unresolved problems is changing the social structure and the political process: the rising vulnerability of working classes leads to the abandonment of traditional parties. The result is radicalizing tendencies within the elites as well as the replacement of incumbent political elites with new ‘populist’ ones.

Capitalism and democracy have become divorced from each other. Now, the crisis of the national states and their political systems has finally become politically visible, in a deep and organic sense.

What happens in Argentina or Brazil, in this context, involves patterns that are different from  the dynamics of the northern hemisphere.  In the region there are no transnational institutional aggregations such as the European Union. In Europe, the EU is both a target and a moderator of the illiberal turns in Poland, Italy or Hungary. The supranational powers, without being totally determinant, tend to moderate the character and pace of political and economic reforms. A coup d’état like those that occurred in Honduras (2009), Paraguay (2012) Bolivia (2019), or Brazil (2023) is highly improbable in Europe today.

This is due not only to a difference in the political regimes, but also to a socio-economic process that has been producing especially in South America a deep discontent among a very volatile electorate. In countries such as Brazil and Argentina, the transitions to democracy in the 1980s were accompanied by hyperinflation and external debt crises, followed by monetarist stabilization and exclusionary ‘modernization policies’ in the 1990s, followed by new compensatory policies in the 2000s. The overall result of these processes was transformation of social structures marked by the growth of inequality, the growth of economically fragile popular classes, and the polarization of the middle classes. The long cycle of social transformations in these countries has coexisted with short cycles such as the 2000s where an emerging “new” middle class experienced a social mobility. As a result, in countries such as Argentina and Brazil the states have less capacity to respond to growing popular demands, which themselves tend to be more urgent than in the global North.

Analysts have noted a rightward lurch in the political options available to Argentine voters in recent years. In the analysis, however, insufficient attention is given to the impact of the popular experience of high inflation: the constant tightening of belts, growing household debt, an inability to budget, a political tunnel vision focused exclusively on inflation, with great impact on the expectations for the future, which are  increasingly negative and desperate.

The pandemic triggered inflation in countries around the world that had experienced price stability for decades. In 2022, the war in Ukraine drove inflation even higher. The case of Argentina was exception: the country had been suffering from spiraling inflation for over a decade. After a relative drop in inflation in 2020, in which annual inflation reached 36.1%, Argentina suffered another year of high inflation (50.9%) in 2021 (INDEC, 2021). In 2022, it reached 94.8% for the year, leaving Argentina fifth on the ranking of countries with the highest inflation worldwide behind Venezuela (305.7%), Zimbabwe (244%), Lebanon (142%), and Sudan (102%) (Infobae, 2023). Local factors exacerbated the situation: a shortage of dollars (a historical problem magnified by the pandemic), the pressure from the IMF to address the fiscal deficit eliminating subsidies to public services and a monetary culture shaped by inflationary inertia contributed as well.

This inflationary dynamic intensifies the erosion of politics by multiplying the mismatch between social demands and state capacities. At this point it is necessary to underline the socio-political element that is part of the inflationary dynamics. The trade unions in the first Peronism (1946-1956), and the trade unions and social organizations in the later Peronism that was part of the “progressive wave” of the 2000s, have been the political agency of social and economic protections that guaranteed welfare levels for the working class. The flip side of these arrangements has been a lack of foreign exchange earnings (external restriction is the constant of the Argentine economy since the middle of the last century) to sustain them. Nor did the unions and social organizations have the necessary political strength to transform the performance of the economy. The scarcity of foreign exchange has turned the dollar price over time into the anchor of all prices in the economy without it being a dollarized economy in the strict sense of the term (Luzzi and Wilkis, 2023). The chronic devaluations of the Argentine peso – and the concomitant inflation – are the short term escape from the structural contradiction between strong working class forces on the one hand and an economic organization that hollows out their effective power at the same time.  

At the time of writing these notes and six months before the presidential elections, the libertarian candidate Javier Milei has a vote intention of around 20-25%. He is the main promoter of the dollarization of the Argentine economy. It is in this context that the rise of candidate Milei can be understood.  His position implies the rejection of “everything that is there” and its replacement by a utopian free competition that rewards the best without the parasitic intervention of the state. This program of denunciation channels towards the Right the multiple contemporary dissatisfactions. On the one hand, it is not clear at this stage of the electoral process that Milei will either triumph or just survive as a candidate. On the other hand, it is clear that he has extended the possibilities of political articulation so that other candidates, who perhaps have more potential, can follow his path. It reflects the popular exhaustion with inflation, relegating to a second place demands that used to occupy a central place in the public agenda, such as unemployment or insecurity. Dollarization continues and completes the exclusionary and polarizing dynamics of the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s. The promise of a stable currency is going to have a very high social cost.

The neo-liberal demands that after the 2001 crisis in Argentina had been left almost without an audience, are returning with a vengeance: dollarization is inevitably accompanied by demands for the privatization of institutions such as education and health care. They celebrate individual initiative and denounce the crisis of public services as of their own making. The mood of society towards the performance of the state – increasingly questioned before the pandemic, much more so by the end of it, and even more intensely after – is very favorable to the right wing libertarian privatizers: “si no me vas ayudar por lo menos no me molestes” (“if you are not going to help me, at least don’t bother me”). The promise of dollarization suits these sentiments. The U.S. dollar is a currency devoid of the arbitrariness of the Argentine state (and the governmental elite that commands it), a state that is perceived as guilty of disorganizing and worsening daily life through its inability to provide stability to the national peso. In a society in which people did the impossible to get through the long months of lockdown while weathering inflation, the pandemic left people with the distinct feeling that the state was coming up dramatically short. The controversial dynamics of an unknown virus affected the state and rendered it increasingly illegitimate. The pandemic, by damaging the civic bond of trust with the state, strengthened the anarcho-libertarian thesis.

Image 2: Javier Milei in 2014 at the World Economic Forum on Latina America in Panama City, photo by World Economic Forum

The pandemic and spiraling inflation are in Argentina intertwined processes in which sacrifice became a common currency. Argentine society emerged from the pandemic with an ideology that was family-oriented, anti-state, and anti-politics. More people had been convinced that government spending was the primary source of inflation, demanding in some cases extreme state cutbacks. The rise of right-leaning or extreme right options, the declining interest in politics, and a growing dissatisfaction with the political class all predate the pandemic and the high inflation, but the latter have profoundly accelerated existing trends.

The Right has renewed and sharpened its own repertoire of actions. During the last 12 years, a political consensus that established certain prohibitions began to be explicitly challenged: notes of racism, of vindication of the last military dictatorship, of macho vindictiveness in the face of gender agendas that many had believed to be in retreat are reborn with force in the public space. However, the growth of the Right is not only due to the ideological radicalism of some of its promoters, who have accumulated significant political capital to establish themselves as an autonomous force in relation to the mainstream right wing that governed in the period 2015-2019. That growth is also predicated on the weariness of the voters of the traditional parties (Left and Right).

Despite its cultural predominance, Peronism today in government has been losing since at least 2008 the battle for the interpretation of economic life in growing sectors of the population. A social majority, which includes part of the popular classes, identifies with its antipode in a dialectic in which the libertarian Right takes on a specific local meaning.

A great part of this electorate cannot be described as furious, pragmatic or reactive to all political positions equally. They want to improve economically, they believe in their own efforts, they demand order and market. And they do so less because of agreement with right-wing intellectuals and publicists than because of a long experience in which those right-wing ideas seem to become preferable.  There is an authoritarian liberalism which, following Richard Hoggart (1957), must be seen as a contemporary development of the subaltern classes. These, contrary to what the political elites expect, especially those of the left, embrace the Right. This is also a  reaction against the deference that the progressive forces have tried to impose on it, presuming moral superiority and capacity for leadership beyond the prosaic issues of everyday life.  Thus, the process in which inclusive consensus is dissolved clearly contains a popular reaction against the Left progressivism of the traditional Peronist leadership.

Politics in Argentina has a specific intensity that makes it more than a simple reflection of what is happening in the world. In the 1970s, few countries in the world took state terrorism as far as Argentina. In the 1980s, the trial of the defeated dictators became an exemplary case for human rights. In the 1990s, the intensity of the neoliberal experiment in the country was exceptional when compared to Brazil and Mexico in terms of the scope of privatizations and economic and financial openness. It is worth asking whether this right-wing emergence will not have the same exceptional intensity as its precedents. The antecedents are already in place.


Pablo Semán  is Professor at Universidad Nacional de San Martín and principal researcher at CONICET.

Ariel Wilkis is Professor and Dean at Escuela IDAES, Universidad de San Martín and  researcher at CONICET.


References

Engelen, Ewald 2023. “Another ‘populist’ shake-up in the Netherlands: the BBB revolt” Focaalblog 24 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/04/24/ewald-engelen-another-populist-shake-up-in-the-netherlands-the-bbb-revolt/

Henkel, Heiko, Sindre Bangstad, and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen. 2019. “The politics of affect: Anthropological perspectives on the rise of far-right and right-wing populism in the West.” FocaalBlog, 14 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2019/03/14/heiko-henkel-and-sindre-bangstad-the-politics-of-affect-anthropological-perspectives-on-the-rise-of-far-right-and-right-wing-populism-in-the-west/

Hoggart, Richard (1957) The uses of literacy: aspects of working-class life with special references to publications and entertainments. London: Chatto and Windus

INDEC (2021) “Índice Precio al Consumidor”, Vol. 6, No 1, december 2021

Infobae (2023) “La Argentina termino cuarta inflación del mundo”, 23 January 2023. https://www.infobae.com/economia/2023/01/13/la-argentina-termino-con-la-cuarta-inflacion-mas-alta-del-mundo-en-2022-detras-de-venezuela-zimbabue-y-libano/

Luzzi, Mariana and Wilkis, Ariel (2023) Dollar: How the U.S. Dollar Became a Popular Currency in Argentina (1930-2019). Alburqueque: New Mexico University Press.

Kalb, Don. 2020. “Covid, Crisis, and the Coming Contestations.” FocaalBlog, 1 June. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/06/01/don-kalb-covid-crisis-and-the-coming-contestations/

Pasieka, Agnieszka. 2018. “Who is afraid of fascists? The Polish independence march and the rise of the (far?) right.” FocaalBlog, 12 December. www.focaalblog.com/2018/12/12/who-is-afraid-of-fascists-the-polish-independence-march-and-the-rise-of-the-far-right.


Cite as: Semán, Pablo and Wilkis, Ariel 2023. “Rebellion of the bastards: the rise of the extreme right in Argentina” Focaalblog May 11. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/05/11/pablo-seman-and-ariel-wilkis-rebellion-of-the-bastards-the-rise-of-the-extreme-right-in-argentina

Ewald Engelen: Another ‘populist’ shake-up in the Netherlands: the BBB revolt

The shock among the Dutch chattering classes on 16 March was palpable. The right-populist Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) – established in 2019 by a small communications firm, bankrolled by the powerful Dutch agrifood complex and led by a former journalist for the meat industry – had in one go massively increased its vote share in the country’s provincial elections. It is now the largest party in all twelve provinces, and expected to achieve the same status in Senate in April. This would give BBB huge veto power at both national and local levels, potentially bringing an already hesitant green transition programme to a standstill. Faced with this prospect, an irate commentariat has begun to denounce the farmers as enemies of green progress, and speculate that voting restrictions – on the elderly, the lower educated, those in rural constituencies – might be necessary to override their resistance.

The casus belli for the farmers’ revolt was a 2019 ruling by the Dutch Supreme Court that the government had breached its EU obligations to protect 163 natural areas against emissions from nearby agricultural activities. This prompted the centre-right coalition government, led by Mark Rutte, to impose a nationwide speed limit of 100 km/h on highways and cancel a wide array of building projects intended to alleviate supply shortages on the Dutch housing market. Yet it soon became apparent that such measures could only be a short-term stopgap, since transport and construction contributed a pittance to national nitrogen emissions while agriculture made up a whopping 46%. A structural solution would therefore have to involve a substantial reduction of livestock. The suggestion long put forward by the peripheral ‘Party for the Animals’, to slash half of the aggregate Dutch livestock by expropriating 500 to 600 major emitters, was suddenly on the table. The unthinkable had become thinkable.

Image 1: Dutch farmers protesting in The Hague in October 2019, photo by Steven Lek

The number of Dutch workers employed in agricultural activities has declined precipitously since 1945, from around 40% during the Great War to only 2% today. Yet, over the same period, the Netherlands has become the second biggest food exporter in the world after the US. Its highly capitalized meat and dairy industry plays a pivotal role in global supply chains, which makes its ecological footprint unsustainably large. Hence the gradual realization among the Dutch political class – accelerated by the Supreme Court ruling – that meeting climate goals meant reorienting the national economy. For the rural and small-town oriented Christian Democrats in the coalition that was hard to swallow; for the eco-modernist, meritocratic social liberals in the coalition (D66) this came naturally; while for Mark Rutte’s own People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, even though naturally in favor of ‘growth’, it was simply the pragmatic thing to do. As one centrist MP remarked, ‘The Netherlands can’t be the country that feeds the world while at the same time shitting itself.’

These green proposals triggered a wave of farmer protests – farmers blocking roads with their tractors, occupying squares and other public spaces, breaking into government buildings and turning up at the homes of politicians – as well as the formation of the BBB. After a brief pause during lockdown, the movement has now reached new levels of intensity. Since spring 2022, along the roads and highways leading into the forgotten parts of the Netherlands, farmers have hung innumerable inverted national flags: a symbol of their discontent, sprouting up like mushrooms after an autumnal shower.

Almost one fifth of the electorate, approximately 1.4 million people, turned out to vote for the BBB – a significantly larger number than the 180.000 farmers who comprise its core constituency. This suggests that more is at stake here than simple nimbyism. Pensioners, the vocationally trained and the precariously employed are overrepresented among the BBB’s supporters, and its largest electoral gains were in peripheral, non-urban areas which have been hit by falling public investment over a long time. Such groups have rallied around a class of farmers who present themselves as victims, but who are in fact among the most wealthy and politically well-connected in the country: one in five of them is a millionaire. It is clear that this heterogeneous bloc could only be assembled as a result of deep disenchantment with mainstream politics in the Netherlands – which has long been blighted by the arrogance and incompetence of its ruling stratum.

A number of historical factors laid the groundwork for the farmers’ movement. First, the Netherlands underwent an extremely rapid neoliberal makeover since the early 1980s, resulting in the fire sale of public services, the marketization of childcare, healthcare and higher education, a steep decline in social housing, the emergence of globalized banks and pension funds, and one of the most flexible labour markets in the EU, with one in three employees on precarious contracts. Next, the 2008 financial crisis led to one of the most expensive banking rescues in per capita terms, followed by six years of austerity which punished the poor and served to redistribute wealth from everyone else to the rich. The four lockdowns imposed between 2020 and 2022 had the same effect: workers lost their jobs, saw their incomes fall and died in greater numbers. Rising consumer prices, sparked by the war in Ukraine, subsequently pushed many Dutch households in the provinces into fuel poverty.

All this was interspersed with constant bureaucratic failures across a range of government departments: childcare, primary education, housing, the tax office, transport and gas extraction. At the same time, regressive subsidies were handed out to middle-class environmentalists to reimburse heat pumps, solar panels and Teslas, which of course only they could pre-finance. Add a constant trickle of high-handed insults about the lower classes from the putative experts who dominate public debate, and you end up with a festering and combustible mixture of resentments. The situation was finally ignited in 2019 by the mentioned court ruling, after which latent regional-cultural identifications of the provinces against the city (the ‘Randstad’, the Western urban conurbation that accommodates circa half the Dutch population) provided the raw symbolic material for the farmers’ adversarial narrative: core versus periphery, elites versus masses, vegans versus meat-eaters. With the help of some savvy political entrepreneurs, this message began to resonate far beyond the farmlands.

The French writer Houellebecq once wrote that the Netherlands is not a country but a limited liability corporation. It perfectly captures the view of Mark Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy. For thirteen years now it has reimagined the Netherlands as a European Singapore on the Rhine. It is a form of mercantilist neoliberalism that aims to attract as much foreign capital, both financial and human, to the Netherlands as possible. The tax rule book is arranged with that goal in mind, transforming the Netherlands into one of the largest tax havens in the world. The social security regime has been redesigned to serve highly educated expats, turning the city of Amsterdam into an Anglophone outpost where shopping and dining requires one to speak English, while refugees and asylum seekers are locked away near some of the poorest villages in the Dutch outback. Public investment has been rechanneled into the shiny metropolitan areas in the West, while largely surpassing the peripheries along the German border. Last week it took me nearly four hours to go from Arnhem to Veenhuizen in the North of the Netherlands by public transportation, a distance of less than hundred miles.

As in the UK where everything goes to London and the home counties, this was legitimated by the mercantilist narrative of the triumph of the city and the creative class, peddled by hip geographers like Richard Florida and Edward Glazer, that told post-ideological, neoliberal politicians to stop backing losers and start picking winners and steer massive amounts of public funding to cities. For that is where human capital resides, so the story goes, and that is what is key to national economic success. And so it went: while hospitals, schools, fire stations and bus lines slowly but gradually disappeared from the periphery, the metropolitan core was sprinkled with massive public investments in glittering metro lines etc, Amsterdam on top.

The one that has overseen it all, Mark Rutte, who is in the race to become the longest sitting head of state in the two hundred years history of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, fits to a tee with the reckless opportunists so wonderfully described  by the New Zealand sociologist Aeron Davies (2018): Rutte is the ultimate expert in surviving the political game but totally lacks the vision that is required in times of crisis. In fact, Mark Rutte famously quipped that voters who want vision should better go to an optometrist.

The disaffection of a growing slice of the electorate is not a performative effect of media framing, as some maintain, but is based in real, material neglect. As was hammered home two days after the election results came in by a report from one of the Dutch public think tanks: there are large discrepancies in life expectancy between core and the periphery of the country as well as huge gaps in terms of wellbeing and trust in politicians (2013). The report concluded that this was the unintended effect of decades of underinvestment in the provinces: the places that, in the worldview of people like Mark Rutte, do not matter

Demography, balanced budgets, the euro, Covid-19, war, climate change: these are the imponderabilia that centrist politicians, backed by their battery of experts, have used to discipline voters into submission. Nitrogen emissions fit seamlessly into this technocratic pattern. The plan to halve livestock numbers in the Netherlands was not drawn up after a lengthy process of democratic debate; it was a summary decision made by politicians hiding behind an unaccountable judiciary and a set of scientific numbers.

Hence, it may be necessary to revise the famous observation by the German poet Heinrich Heine: ‘In Holland, everything happens fifty years late’. Here, it seems, the backlash against the green technocracy has come early (though France’s yellow vests had been there already). The Dutch (and French) conjuncture foreshadows the fate of other countries in the global north – as centrist governments, striving to assert their green credentials, begin to make heavy-handed policy reforms with major redistributive consequences. This, after forty years of neoliberal upward redistribution, and in a situation where governing elites in the preceding decade had already felt very uncertain in the face of the ‘populist’ revolts.

What Andreas Malm (2016)calls the ‘energetic regime’ of global capitalism has so far taken up most of our political attention; but as the environmental fallout of its ‘caloric regime’ becomes impossible to ignore, livestock farming (among other forms of industrial agriculture) will enter the crosshairs of governments and climate activists. Recent data from Eurostat show that livestock densities are particularly high in Denmark, Flanders, Piemonte, Galicia, Brittany, Southern Ireland and Catalonia. Soon enough, these regions will have to introduce measures similar to those currently under discussion in the Netherlands. And if the Dutch case is anything to go by, technocracy will hardly do the trick. A state that has imposed privatization, flexibilization, austerity, disinvestment and regressive environmental subsidies on its citizens for years cannot expect to be trusted when it comes to climate politics. Instead, it will have to redress the ruinous effects of these policies, while slowly building support for the green transition through a process of engagement that does not shy away from democratic disagreement and the hard work that entails.


Ewald Engelen is professor of financial geography at the University of Amsterdam and a feature writer for De Groene Amsterdammer.

This text first appeared on NLR’s Sidecar (6 April 2023).


References

Davis, Aeron. 2018. Reckless opportunists: Elites at the end of the Establishment. Manchester: Manchester University Press

Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso.

RLI. 2023. Elke regio telt! Een nieuwe aanpak van verschillen tussen regio’s, https://www.rli.nl/publicaties/2023/advies/elke-regio-telt


Cite as: Engelen, Ewald 2023. “Another ‘populist’ shake-up in the Netherlands: the BBB revolt” Focaalblog 24 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/04/24/ewald-engelen-another-populist-shake-up-in-the-netherlands-the-bbb-revolt/

Giorgos Poulimenakos & Dimitris Dalakoglou: Disaster Infrastructures and the Inverted Shock Doctrine in Greece

On March 1st 2023, an impromptu protest rally took place outside the headquarters of Greece’s only railway company, Hellenic Trains (HT). HT is the passenger carrier of the recently privatized and formerly publicly owned carrier of Hellenic Organization of Railways. The word ‘Assassins’ and the phrase ‘Your profits, our deaths’ were written on the walls of the headquarters amidst clashes with the police.

On the morning of that day, Greece had woken up to devastating news. During the night, a passenger train headed to Thessaloniki from Athens, mostly carrying students, collided with a freight train traveling in the opposite direction. The collision was so fierce that the first two wagons were literarily pulverized, leaving 57 dead. As it turned out, an inexperienced Stationmaster with limited equipment at his disposal had manually put the two trains on the same track by mistake. For a full twelve minutes, passengers and personnel on both trains were on collision course without any human or non-human intelligence detecting it. In the following days much more serious and larger rallies and riots followed.

 ‘Mitsotakis, fuck you!’ – the original condition

The crowd, amongst others, was chanting a melodic slogan ‘Mitsotakis, fuck yοu!’. This vulgar slogan had first emerged during the big forest fires of 2021 when the wooded northern region of Evia Island and the forests of Parnitha mountain in the north of Athens had been abandoned to burn due to a peculiar “general evacuation” policy. New Democracy, the conservative governing party, had won the elections of 2019 to an extent by utilizing another horrible catastrophe, the fires of Eastern Attica in 2018. At that time, New Democracy blamed the governing SYRIZA party for failing to save the lives of the 103 who died in the fire. However, instead of trying to reinforce the civil protection infrastructures and increase the budget for fire brigades and forestry service, New Democracy has preferred to recruit a few thousand new police officers and thus enforce a heavy policing of forest fires. With the new policy, entire municipalities are evacuated by force so as to avoid deaths by all means in order to come out with a lower body count than the previous government.

The consequence of this policy of evacuation and abandonment was not only the destruction of forests, but also of agricultural land, flocks of animals, bees and entire villages that burned to ashes as nobody was there to protect them (on the fires and the archaeological heritage see Poulimenakos & Dalakoglou 2021 in FocaalBlog). As TV channels sent their crews to report from the evacuated towns and villages of Evia, someone videobombed a live broadcast and stood behind the reporter shouting, ‘Mitsotaki, fuck you!’, in a spontaneous expression of anger towards the evacuation policy that had destroyed his livelihood. Soon, “Mitsotakis, fuck you!”, became a slogan with a melody, chanted by football fans during games and by audiences at music concerts. To understand the rapid nationwide spread and popularity of this anthem, we now take a closer look at the New Democracy government record.

The Mitsotakis government had applied the same principle of minimum death tolls at any cost during the Covid-19 pandemic by enforcing one of the hardest lockdowns in the western world with curfews and severely restricted mobility under state surveillance. For many months, every citizen had to send a text message to the Ministry of Interior Affairs and give a “valid” reason before leaving their house. Defectors were heavily fined by the police. As with the forest fires, now the systematic destruction of health care infrastructures under the austerity regime imposed after the financial crash was offset by calling in the police as a civil protection mechanisms and the government’s main tool for controlling the pandemic.

“Mitsotakis, fuck you!” – the current condition

These structural continuities of policing (rather than resolving) an infrastructural crisis explain why one week after the train crash tragedy, on March 8th, Greece saw the biggest popular mobilization since the 2010-2015 era of insurrections against the imposition of structural adjustment programs by the IMF-EU-ECB troika. The main rallying cry of the protests was the phrase “text me when you get there”, a reference to the overprotective Greek family relations symbolized by frequent parental requests to send messages when travelling (even for over-30s). Now used by the protesters, the phrase is a tragic and powerful reference to mourning parents who will never receive a reply from their children who were on the train.

Image 1: Photo from one of the many demonstrations on the 8th of March. The sign reads: “text me when you get there”. Source: alphavita blogspot

The protests were so massive and persistent that they forced the Prime Minister to postpone the upcoming elections for an undetermined period. Meanwhile, the government’s political communication experts massively underestimated the train tragedy’s impact on Greek public opinion. Mitsotakis’ initial government statement blamed the accident on the stationmaster and omitted any reference to years of chronic under-investment in traffic infrastructures during the privatization of the railway company. This only increased public anger. An alliance of trade unions declared a general strike, whilst pupils occupied their schools and students their universities. Within five days, the government’s public relations experts advised Mitsotakis to accept partial responsibility to calm things down. Yet again the obnoxiousness and arrogance of the PM and his cabinet led to another PR catastrophe when Mitsotakis stated that the 57 victims of the train crash had ‘sacrificed’ themselves in order to improve national railways, flanked by the Minister for Development who called the 57 deaths ‘an opportunity’ for the country. With no time left for the government or the railway company to come up with another damage control strategy, people on social media, in neighborhoods and work places saw the train crash as an emblem of the precarization of everyday life after more than 13 years of extreme neoliberal government budget cuts.

“Don’t you dare to put the blame on an isolated human error”, or, “we live by chance in this country”, and, “this was not an accident but a murder”, were popular expressions that linked mourning and anger with a demand for exposure of underlying causes of the incident such as chronic degradation of railway infrastructures, budget cuts, staff shortages, lack of automated security systems that could correct human errors and prevent accidents. The poor state of other hard infrastructures came to light, contradicting the neoliberal mantra that service standard would skyrocket after privatizations. The German-owned airports in Greece’s peripheral cities suffer from staff and electronic equipment shortages while foreign equity investment in the Chinese-owned port of Piraeus never reached the promised level. The carefully crafted hegemonic narrative of private sector supremacy over the old state-controlled economy that had gradually gained control of hearts and minds (Mavris 2017) since the Greek crisis fell apart like a house of cards. Recent opinion polls show a reversal of political preferences with the ruling party losing significant ground amongst a general decline of trust in capitalist democracy.

Greece’s Inverted Shock Doctrine

What is happening in Greece today seems to be the exact opposite of what Naomi Klein argued in her stellar book on the “Shock doctrine” (2007). According to Klein, the severity of an immense collective trauma leads to numbness and disorientation that freezes collective action and presents excellent opportunities for the ruling classes to impose otherwise highly unpopular policies. In Greece, disorientation and numbness characterized society during the long period of inflation, privatizations, budget cuts, and impoverishment since 2008. Yet, these processes seemed abstract, confusingly linked to both local and global economic processes, and, hence, difficult to pinpoint in space and time. That vagueness certainly ended with the collective trauma of the train crash. The tragic crumble of a very material and tangible element of public transport infrastructure, similar to the earlier case of the Evia Island forest fires, turned into a metonymy for the crumbling relations between the Greek public, society, on the one hand, and the alliance of private capital and the state apparatus on the other hand. As we know from ethnographic research, “infrastructures are a principle materialization of the relationship between people (citizens and non-citizens alike) and otherwise abstract state and supra-state authorities” (Dalakoglou 2016:823). Infrastructures consist of the realm where the social contract between a state and its citizenry is taking tangible forms and is felt in the everyday life. It is the realm where the game of hegemony is most likely to be gained or challenged (Srnicek 2014).

Another crucial dimension of the conjuncture within which the massive mobilizations against the state-capital ruling class alliance now take place is that in recent weeks Greeks learned that for the first time in history residential properties are no longer protected by law from dispossession even at rather insignificant household debt levels. The Greek Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of private equity funds, allowing property auctions to redeem household loans purchased from banks as initial lenders, leaving hundreds of thousands who have struggled to repay their mortgages in despair about their future and another crucial aspect of the national social fabric in distress.

The residential house in Greece is more than bricks and mortar that put a roof over one’s head. It represents intra-generational solidarity and strong family bonds, with parents struggling to buy a house to provide economic security for their children. In other words, the house represents a form of informal social security provided by the family rather than the state. Typical to the substitution of an absent welfare state with informal family solidarity in Mediterranean societies, Greece never had significant numbers of council housing like the UK for example. Family solidarity provided a safety net in difficult times and certainly so during the recent 13-years long crisis with people in their 30s or even 40s living with their parents or grandparents.

Infinite density and the specificity of neoliberal austerity

We argue that the tragic train crash made visible the specific and tangible failure of public infrastructure and thus gave austerity specificity in time and space. The disaster encapsulates an “infinite density” of societal deadlock between the protagonists of privatization and austerity on the one hand and the very fabric of the social contract in Greece on the other hand, in which every form of social consensus is collapsing. With the neoliberal state’s privatized public services failing to fulfill the promises of upgraded public infrastructures to the benefit all and the informal forms of social reproduction gradually dismantled, the Greek nation-state moves towards a power vacuum. It is no coincidence that the majority of protesters are young people from the so-called generation z. This generations feels that all aspects of the social contract are expiring and they will not enjoy the benefits and stability of the public sector that their parents had. Instead, they will have low-paid jobs in the private sector and will probably not inherit a house to live in because they cannot afford to pay the increased inheritance taxes (Knight 2018) or because their parent’s house will be disposed by private equity funds. The train accident made shockingly evident that in today’s Greece even a routine train journey is not safe, that nobody “is there” for the people. “We live by chance in this country”, one of the protest slogans states.

Yet, a careful observer of public transport users after the train disaster sees this realization of state negligence turn into an increased care for each other. People now help older passengers and others in need on and off busses in the absence of special ramps. They talk to each other and give courage to each other for the day ahead while ranting against the government (perhaps even using the public slogans discussed in this article). “We are the infrastructures” is what we are often told during recent ethnographic research. Maybe this new confidence will create a vision of new social organization beyond the state, capital and also beyond the family. One new slogan points in this direction; “Mono o laos tha sosei ton lao” (“only people can save the people”).


References

Dalakoglou, D. (2016) “Infrastructural gap: Commons, State and Anthropology. City, 20:6, 822-831, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2016.1241524.

Dalakoglou, D. and Poulimenakos, G. (2021). “The Past is on Fire: Wildfires, (Un)imagined Communities and the Shift to the Tourism of the 1%.” FocaalBlog, 30 September. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/09/30/dimitris-dalakoglou-georgos-poulimenakos-the-past-is-on-fire/

Klein, N. (2007) The shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism. London: Allen Lane.

Knight , D M 2018 , “The desire for disinheritance in austerity Greece “, Focaal , vol. 80 , pp. 30-42 . https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2018.800103

Mavris, G. (2017) “The Rise of Conservatism: Political Ideologies in Greece after the Memorandum” (in Greek), available online at https://www.mavris.gr/4943/political-ideology/.

Srnicek, N. (2014) “Infrastructures and Hegemony: The Matter of Struggle” in Fall Semester. Available at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56ec53dc9f7266dd86057f72/t/581f3f704402439b560ff0b4/1478442864809/BookletNS.pdf


Dimitris Dalakoglou is Professor of Social Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is director and PI of the research project infra-demos (funded from NWO-Vidi grant) and co-director of the Lab on Infrastructures Sustainability and the Commons.

Giorgos Poulimenakos holds a Bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology from Panteion University and a MA from University of Sussex, UK. He is currently a PhD fellow in the ERC-funded project PORTS, based in the department of social anthropology of the University of Oslo. He is investigating the increasing significance of ports and maritime logistics in globalized, contemporary capitalism through the case study of Piraeus, an emerging Greek port in the global market bought recently by Chinese interests.


Cite as: Dalakoglou, Dimitris & Poulimenakos, Giorgos 2023. “Disaster Infrastructures and the Inverted Shock Doctrine in Greece” Focaalblog 14 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/04/14/giorgos-poulimenakos-dimitris-dalakoglou-disaster-infrastructures-and-the-inverted-shock-doctrine-in-greece/

Tomaso Ferrando: Beyond Speculation

On May 21, 2022 the cover of The Economist left no space to the imagination: a set of skulls replaced the grains of a wheat straw, and the world was soon going to experience a ‘Coming Food Catastrophe’. Although there is no doubt that the prospect of world food security looks anything but pleasant, I cannot ignore the normative power of framing problems in a certain way. Depending on the questions that we ask and the elements that we consider, our thoughts and options will move in a certain direction. Therefore, even without questioning the idea that the world and its people are experiencing a food and climate related catastrophe, it is important not to normalize the most recurrent explanation.

There are at least three main interconnected reasons to question the approach adopted by The Economist and several other media and policy makers: for millions of small-scale producers and eaters around the world, almost a fifth of them, the food catastrophe is not just coming, it has been going on for a while; the absence of a critical reflection on the structural fragilities of a globalized food system for food commodities is translated into techno-optimist support for lab-based solutions and an intensification of free trade, without considering the way in which agrarian capitalism and the attempt to create a just-on-time global food system are the backbone of contemporary misery; the focus on high prices as a reflection of a sudden and exogenous shock overlooks the way in which food commodities’ price formation operates and, in particular, the role of financial actors and the financial return that they – and some corporations – have been accumulating.

Image 1: Grain elevator along the Tapajos river in Brazil, photo by author

My intervention focuses on speculation and speculative practices as the third overlooked point in mainstream accounts of the current state of food, but embeds them in the broader phenomenon of financialization of the food system as a transformation of all aspects of food into an asset class. Global food actors and institutional investors (including pension funds where we may have our savings) constantly extract rent from the food system, often profiting from hunger, food shortages and the consolidation of a food system that is unjust and unsustainable. Because there is nothing truly exceptional in what food prices have witnessed in the last months, it is important to start with a bit of history and go back to the period between 2008 and 2011, when the world faced a series of spikes in the price of grains and food riots.

Significant and persuasive evidence of excessive speculation

In 2009, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a Report concluding that:

“there is significant and persuasive evidence to conclude that these commodity index traders, in the aggregate, were one of the major causes of “unwarranted changes”—here, increases—in the price of wheat futures contracts relative to the price of wheat in the cash market. The resulting unusual, persistent, and large disparities between wheat futures and cash prices impaired the ability of participants in the grain market to use the futures market to price their crops and hedge their price risks over time, and therefore constituted an undue burden on interstate commerce. Accordingly, the Report finds that the activities of commodity index traders, in the aggregate, constituted “excessive speculation” in the wheat market under the Commodity Exchange Act.”

Despite the acknowledgment, financial actors with no interest in the actual trade of commodities continued to flood the commodity markets with bets and liquidity, aiming at scraping some percentage points and the consequent profits. This was the consequence of the liberalization of the financial markets and the creation of the possibility for everyone, including investors who would never like to receive a bag of coffee or a container of wheat, to trade in financial derivatives (e.g. futures) that had originally been conceived as a form of insurance for farmers, traders, elevators and processors. Rather than providing a guarantee against excessive fluctuations, the trading in future contracts by non-food actors left grain chains at the mercy of financial considerations and objectives, creating a domino effect that subverted the functioning of the supply chains and reverberated across the world. Especially given that futures prices for wheat remained “abnormally high compared to the cash prices for wheat,” a condition that pushed “real” cash prices up and significantly impacted people’s capacity to access food and feed themselves.

For the US Subcommittee:

“The inability of farmers, grain elevators, grain merchants, grain processors, grain consumers, and others to use the futures market as a reliable guide to wheat prices and manage their price risks over time has significantly aggravated their economic difficulties and placed an undue burden on the grain industry as a whole.”

While millions of people went hungry and rioted for their ratios, a bunch of financiers and shareholders registered unprecedented profits. A decade later, the lack of adequate policies and countermeasures means that history is repeating itself. However, with few exceptions, media and policy makers have given no attention to the role of finance and financiers in amplifying the effects of the invasion of Ukraine and artificially inflate prices. The world may be facing a “Coming food catastrophe” – to use the vocabulary of The Economist – but someone will be benefitting from it and has inherent incentives to make sure that it lasts as long as possible. Or, at least, the media continue blaming the high prices only on invasions, climate change and logistic, rather than speculation and higher profits on food-related investments.

Speculation, record profits and the radicality of the obvious

On January 7, 2022, an online magazine aimed at non-institutional investors published an article with a straightforward title: “It’s Time to Invest in Commodities. How to do it.” In the picture that was chosen, a pig is lifted high in the sky by a couple of balloons along with gold and a barrel of crude, a sign of the promising times for bullish investors and of the way in which finance sees food: like any other good that is internationally traded and where price differential across time can  be used to accumulate profit. Similar advices had been given for quite long time by specialized platforms, all convinced that a combination of dynamics, including uncertainty in logistic and climate change, would have created a condition of scarcity and a surge in prices, and that the increase in price of energy (oil and gas) would have also be driven up the price of producing food. The Bloomberg Commodity Index (i.e. a derivative product whose price mirrors the fluctuation of a combination of different commodities prices), for example, rose 27% in 2021, marking its best year in decades. The invasion of Ukraine was not the final straw that broke the back of the camel, but a windfall opportunity for anyone invested in energy commodities, food commodities and commodity indexes.

Image 2: The Chicago Board of Trade headquarter, the largest agri-commodity derivatives exchange in the world, photo by Marco Verch

Like in 2008-2011, there is clear evidence that February 24th was followed by an intensification of financial speculation, and that the surge in purchase of indexes and futures fueled by the expectation of higher prices provided a clear signal to the market:  that they should wait before selling or increase the price of their commodities to follow the trend of the financial market. Purchases of shares in agricultural and commodity funds, purchase of futures and AI-driven high frequency trading of derivatives intensified, and no immediate action was taken.

According to a May 2022 investigation by Lighthouse Reports, by early April 2022,

“the top five agriculture commodity-linked ETFs had received US $ 1.3 billion in net flows (or investment). Two funds – Invesco’s agriculture fund and Teucrium’s wheat fund – attracted net investor investment of US $ 1.2 billion dollars in the first three months of 2022 compared to US $ 197 million for the whole of 2021. Teucrium wheat fund, set up in 2011, saw net inflows of $ 377 million in March. Its previous monthly record high was $ 17 million in 2016. Invesco’s agriculture fund raked in US $ 273 million on March 7 alone, more than half of the total investment it received in the previous two years (US $ 478 million).”

As investors buy derivative products rather than the products themselves, each million that is invested represents hundreds of thousands of bushels of grain, sometimes manifold the amount of grain that that amount of money could actually buy.

The surge in speculative investments has not been exclusive to the United States, but has been an European affair too. According a study by The Wire, speculators’ share in the Paris milling wheat market, the benchmark for Europe, increased from 23% in May 2018 to 72% in April 2022. In particular, their presence in the buy side of the wheat futures market passed from 4% in 2018 to 25% in April 2022. Moreover, by April this year, seven in 10 buyers of futures wheat contract were speculators in the form of investment firms, investment funds, other financial institutions and commercial non-hedgers whose aim was to profit from the rise in prices. Furthermore, Euronext reported that between January 2020 and March 2022, investment funds increased their net buying positions by almost four times.

On both sides of the Atlantic, finance bet on the increase in the price of wheat and created the condition for this to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And this had a global repercussion given to the use of US and European prices as benchmarks for the real economy. As Luigi Russi already wrote in 2013, “investors’ expectations create conditions where the future price is higher than the price of the underlying commodity. If market participants believe that the price of a certain product will rise at a later date, this will also be reflected in the price of futures. This is a contango.” And contangos generate wealth for the few, create financial profits and produce food insecurity.

If food is life, it cannot just be a matter of ‘excessive speculation’

History often repeats itself. Sometime it is a tragedy, sometime it is farce. Often both together. Similar to 2008-2011, civil society organizations and academics have been pointing at the need to curb the role of financial investors in defining the price of food, asking for speculation to be identified as one of the drivers of the price surge. Yet, institutional voices – including the Chief Economist of the Food and Agricultural Organization – have rejected the idea that speculators were involved in the ongoing price spike, claiming that there were no evidence of ‘excessive speculation’ meaning the excessive increase in trading of futures by financial speculators vis-à-vis the rest of the market. Like several years ago, the response of financial actors is that speculation per se is providing liquidity and is reducing the risk, and that it is only the ‘excess’ in derivative trading that should be limited. Speculating on food is not a problem. The problem is when speculators who enter the market only to gain from fluctuations of prices and volatility, are too greedy.

However, what is ‘excessive’ in the case of speculation versus high prices and food insecurity? Who defines it and what are the implications? The answer is extremely technical, but at the same time political. As a matter of fact, since 2010 there have been some attempts to re-introduce position limits against excessive speculation, which have been the object of fierce (although never too visible) conflicts and lobbying efforts. The intensity of speculation in the last months shows, if needed, that the existing rules are not adequate and that – as discussed below – maybe the regulator is starting from the long premises.

In 2010, the Dodd Frank Act tasked the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to introduce “position limits” –  limits on the contracts which could be held by individual traders and classes of traders, such as index speculators. When the CFTC introduced a new position limits rule in 2020, however, then-commissioner Dan Berkovitz wrote that the rule “fails to achieve the most fundamental objective of position limits: to prevent the harms arising from excessive speculation” and that it, “appears more intent on limiting the actions and discretion of the Commission than it does on actually limiting such speculation.” As a matter of fact, what was considered to be ‘excessive’ for the CFTC was not consider to be enough for the commissioner. And what has been happening since February 2022 is the evidence that the Dan Berkovitz may have been right.

In Europe, since 2013 there have been reports highlighting the need to review the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID2) and introduce limits to excessive speculation that would limit the risk of food speculation. In 2016, the European Commission required the European Security and Markets Authority (ESMA) to increase the severity of the rules on position limits with regards to food commodities. In 2018 the ESMA issued new guidelines and identified that specific attention should notably continue to be paid to commodity derivatives with an underlying that qualifies as food for human consumption, as is currently the case. Spot month limits and open interest limits were set, considering the EU production, the export and the dynamics of the market. Moreover, despite the suspension of position limits in 2021 as an attempt to increase liquidity, position limits continued to apply to agricultural commodity derivatives and critical or significant commodity derivatives. Yet, the extra care paid with regards to food did not prevent the intensification of speculation on the French market, the generation of significant profits out of derivative trading and the

Slowly, the role of speculators in driving commodity prices (including of energy) is making its way back into political spaces and debates. As it stands, I envisage two options for policy makers, academics and the parties interested in this conversation. The first one is the easy response to a financial problem: it implies the technical attempt to define what is ‘excessive’ and what is ‘normal’, with the aim to find a way to curb a certain kind of speculation while still allowing the principle of speculating on food. Although not mainstream  – given the fact that the mainstream is not discussing the role of finance in the food crises – this is the only conversation that is gaining a bit of traction and gathering attention by Parliaments and international organizations. In this context, the solution is sought in the identification of the threshold that allows speculator and their liquidity to enter the commodity market and bet on future prices, but without reaching a level that could provide confusing or unsupported signals to the food actors and the underlying price. In continuity with the regulatory interventions that took place in the last years, the issue would thus be that of percentages, calculations and the identification of new position limits that still encourage speculative capital but are not seen as problematic. For example, the ECON Committee at the European Parliament voted in favor of an increase the level of transparency and reporting by clearing houses where commodity derivatives are traded.

On the other hand, there is the minority position of what is already marginal conversation: reconsidering the legal, economic and ethical acceptability of speculation over food commodities. At the core of this approach there is the recognition that food cannot be considered a financial commodity and that trading in derivatives by non-food actors is inherently incompatible with the content and processes of a food system aligned with fundamental human rights and the Sustainable Development Goals. If de-financializing food is the objective, there are some immediate steps that can be achieved by means of regulation, but the real game is a long-term one.

Image 3: Evolution of wheat price after the Ukraine war

The first action should thus be the prohibition of any form of food derivative trading by financial operators such as asset managers, pension funds and hedge funds that lack any connection with the physical trading in goods and with the underlying market. Secondly, the regulator should exclude the possibility of adding food to commodity indexes and ban agri-food indexes as artificial multipliers of opportunities for financial actors that provide an opportunity to bid on quantities of food that go significantly beyond the actual amounts that are produced on an annual basis. Thirdly, transparency should be key, with high level of disclosure required to the players who are actually allowed to invest in derivative products, so that existing positions are known for all players and it higher scrutiny can be exercised with regards to their link to actual underlying transactions and trading volumes. Fourth, de-financialization also means to curb the use of algorithms and high frequency trading when it comes to food, reducing the speed of trading and the risk of algorithmic induced spikes in prices. Fifth, governments should consider profits generated out of food speculation and the rapid increase in food prices as windfall events to be taxed heavily: if hedging is about protection from risk, the use of derivatives should not generate higher returns than the trading in the commodity would. Sixth, no company active in food derivative markets should receive or manage public fundings or incentives, including pensions. Seventh, public support should be provided to the use of alternative forms of risk management that do not impact prices and accessibility, such as climate change related insurance, and make sure that they are available for those players that are most in need.

Start with speculation, tackle financialization and promote a systemic transformation

Although limiting financial speculation in the food sector is urgent, the final goal must be a more ambitious one. Trading in derivatives and profiting from high index prices is just the tip of an iceberg of financial interests, motives and control over the food system. In its 2021 Annual Report, for example, Cargill registered the biggest profits in its 156-year history – up 64%. During the same financial year, Louis Dreyfus Company announced that their Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBIDTA) were up to US$1,623 million, 22.6% higher compared to the same period in 2020. In May 2022, when the invasion of Ukraine had intensified the inequality of the global commodity market, Bunge announced a 19%, increase in the regular quarterly cash dividend to per share as result of the fact that earnings per share were more than 25% higher than the first quarter of 2021. Bunge witnessed a “stronger-than-expected Q1 results.”

And exceptional financial returns on the ongoing collapse of the global food system are harvested also by companies operating at other levels of the food chains, with Canada-based Nutrien (the world’s largest fertilizer producer) declaring that net earnings in the first quarter of 2022 more than tripled to a record $3.60 billion, or $6.51 a share. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, while European farmers have been struggling to access fertilizers, K+S Group, a German leader in the sector, registered revenues of €1,510 million in the second quarter of 2022, up more than twice from the €664 million of the second quarter of 2022. Throughout the food systems, corporations have been utilizing their economic position to extract extra revenues and profits from commodity chains that were increasingly incapable of feeding the world population.

For months, while The Economist was talking about the impending catastrophe, dividends, bonuses and exceptional financial returns have not only been experimented by speculators and financial traders, but by the managers and investors behind the companies that prop the global food system, whose attitude has been to profit from scarcity and make sure to pass the exceptional circumstances onto consumers and their limited purchasing power. Asset managers like BlackRock, Vanguard and Fidelity, all of which administer commodity trading funds, have been extracting and appropriating dividends and revenues from holding shares of corporations that produce fertilizers and commodities, trade them and distribute them across the world. And the same may be the case with pension funds and other institutional investors. The problem is wider than just mere speculation, and has to do with the incompatibility between profit maximization and the essential role that food has for humans and the ecosystem.

If our worries concern that there are actors that benefit from high food prices and may have an incentive in creating or not addressing the conditions behind them, it is important that our attention moves beyond food speculation and addresses the role of financial capital in shaping and defining the global food systems. From the stock markets to the over the counter exchanges of derivatives that are not officially happening in regulated spaces, financial instruments are a key element of the global and commodity-based food system that has been created by centuries of trade integration, uniformization and competitiveness. For each speculative rush and record profits, a large percentage of the prices that people pay for food may thus be remunerating a bunch of actors, whether shareholders or speculators, who thrive out of scarcity. Speculation and financialization are forms of extracting rent that will always find fertile ground on the existence of a global market for a limited amount of homogeneous commodities, large-scale players that control its hubs, and the possibility of moving high volume of liquidity and receiving high returns. Beyond position limits and windfall taxes, the real matter of the game is, therefore, a transition away from a food system that feeds finance rather than people and planet.


Tomaso Ferrando is a Research Professor at the Faculty of Law and IOB, University of Antwerp. For more than a decade, he has researched the interactions between food, law and finance, and promoted policy and regulatory changes.


Cite as: Ferrando, Tomaso 2023. “Beyond Speculation” Focaalblog 29 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/03/29/tomaso-ferrando-beyond-speculation/