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In turbulent times...
be a Quaker
EDITOR’S LETTER

WHO KEEPS US SAFE? THIS MONTH’S

I was doomscrolling through social media when an
CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE:
ad caught my eye. ‘The LGBTQ+ community aren’t
Christina Ivey is
just part of our community, they’re part of us,’ said the
environmental policy editor
British Home Office tweet. The short police recruitment
at independent climate
video featured an officer in Cardiff saying how much he
change magazine It’s
enjoyed representing the force at the Welsh capital’s
Freezing in LA! She lives in
Pride event. ‘Be the difference,’ it proclaimed.
Kingston, Jamaica and also
I’m happy in my current role but this bit of
writes about mental health
AMY HALL for the ‘copaganda’ got me thinking. More LGBTQI+ officers,
and the Caribbean.
New Internationalist awareness training and rainbow squad cars hadn’t
Co-operative newint.org made a difference to Sam (not their real name), a Black, Kieron Monks is a feature
trans, disabled person who spent months on remand in writer for outlets including
prison. They were arrested while undergoing a mental CNN, the Guardian, and
health crisis in a hospital emergency room. Prospect with a focus on
A more ‘welcoming’ police force in South Wales social issues and movement.
hadn’t made a difference to Mohamud Mohamed
Hassan and Mouayed Bashir who died within weeks of Zahra Bei is a PhD candidate at
each other after contact with the police in early 2021. the UCL Institute of Education
Mouayed, who was experiencing an acute mental and a co-founder of the Coalition
episode, was restrained with ‘brutal force’ at his of Anti-racist Educators, as
Newport home after his parents called 999 for help. well as No More Exclusions, an
They expected an ambulance but got the police. abolitionist coalition movement
This Big Story explores the call for abolition of in education. Zahra is a former
prisons, police and the apparatus that support them. teacher with 20 years experience
Starting from a place that does not see harm, violence in the classroom.
and abuse as inevitable, abolition is a hopeful vision
focused on being preventative and not reactive. Patrick Gathara is a journalist,
Things could have been so different for Sam, columnist and political
Mohamud and Mouayed. cartoonist based in Nairobi,
Elsewhere, Roxana Olivera gets embroiled in a legal Kenya.
tussle to try and get an abusive image of a child removed
Cover: Hands image. from the internet and Kieron Monks reports on Nigeria’s
SHUTTERSTOCK long quest to bring back the looted Benin bronzes.

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MARCH-APRIL 2022 3
CONTENTS

THE BIG STORY CURRENTS

Stories making the news
8 Israeli firm sells British weapons factory
Plus: Borderlines
9 Introducing: Honduras president Xiomara Castro
Plus: Seriously?
10 Chips are down in Cambodia
Zimbabweans demand skull repatriations
Plus: Inequality Watch
Plus: Sign of the Times
Chile’s unfinished revolution
12 Blasphemy’s toll in Pakistan
Plus: Open Window

MARC DOZIER/HEMIS/ALAMY
13 Sierra Leone’s belt on China’s road
Plus: Reasons to be cheerful

REGULARS
6 Letters
ABOLITION Plus: Why I…

7 Letter from Buenos Aires

15 Beyond punishment A message to the powers that be – with a song and
Amy Hall explores the movement calling time a dance. Virginia Tognola joins in.
on prisons and the police, while offering an
alternative vision for the future. 38 Country Profile: Jamaica

21 Crime and punishment – THE FACTS 40 Cartoon History: Asma Jahangir

ILYA sketches the uplifting life-story of an
22 Colonize and punish inspirational legal defender of the rights of women
Britain honed its tools of control across the and religious minorities in Pakistan.
Empire. Patrick Gathara writes from Kenya on
the legacy of colonialism. 44 The Debate
Should emergency aid be neutral and unconditional?
25 Ten steps towards abolition The Myanmar democracy activist Khin Ohmar and
former senior UN humanitarian Toby Lanzer go head
26 Healed people heal people to head.
Jessie Milo imagines a world without prisons
and how his life could have been different. 51 Temperature Check
What will be the definitive climate battles of 2022?
28 Resisting the cop in our heads Danny Chivers shares global activists’ to-do list.
Abolition can be an everyday practice.
Sarah Lamble explores how. 52 The Interview
Bulgarian journalist Antoinette Nikolova speaks
31 Abandoned by the system to Jan Westad about the political distortion of the
England’s school-to-prison pipeline is being media and the influence of authoritarianism in the
shaken by abolitionist educators, writes Balkans.
Zahra Bei.
59 Southern Exposure
34 So, what’s the alternative? An intergenerational portrait from Myanmar with
Stopping off in Brazil, the US and Puerto Rico a tale to tell, by Singapore-based photographer
– the people keeping their communities away Grace Baey.
from police and out of prisons.
72 Hall of Infamy
Jair Bolsonaro: viciousness and vulgarity in Brazil.

4 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
80

81
The Puzzler

Agony Uncle
MIXED MEDIA
Is it acceptable for a white child to wear a sari? 74 Spotlight
Our Agony Uncle gives some advice. Novelist Silvia Moreno-Garcia pushes back against
the stereotypes associated with Latin American
82 What if… culture. By Graeme Green.
We took degrowth seriously? We would have a world
to gain, says Dinyar Godrej. 76 Book Reviews
Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde; Chilean Poet by

OPINION
Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell;
The Trial of Julian Assange by Nils Melzer; We
Slaves of Suriname by Anton de Kom, translated by
David McKay.
47 View from Africa
Europe’s moral imagination does not go as far as 78 Film Reviews
ensuring the safe movement of people, writes Flee directed and co-written by Jonas Poher
Nanjala Nyabola. Rasmussen; La Mif directed and co-written by
Plus: Kate Evans’ Thoughts from a Broad Fred Bailiff.

55 View from Brazil 79 Music Reviews

Leo Sakamoto laments the dawn of the climate era – Bahía by Ana Carla Maza; Ghost Song by Cécile
and worries for the fate of the most vulnerable. McLorin Salvant.
Plus: Marc Roberts’ Only Planet

73 View from India

Laughter has become a risky business, observes
Nilanjana Bhowmick. IN THE NEXT ISSUE: BIG OIL
Plus: Polyp’s Big Bad World

FEATURES
48 Feel the fear and carry on
ONLINE FEATURES newint.org

Adrian Margaret Brune reports 14.01.22 Old school adaptation

on the Iraqi women doing work Moushumi Basu reports from Assam, India, on
previously only done by men – the people turning to traditional ‘home grown’
removing landmines. strategies to keep their communities fed and deal
with the uncertainty of climate change.
56 A child’s right to be 13.01.22 ‘Anti-nationalism’: the spectre haunting Indian
forgotten higher education
A meeting with a woman Highly networked rightwing students, acting
MAG

haunted by an abusive with political patronage, are stifling academic

photograph taken of her as a
child leads Roxana Olivera into a legal maze when
she tries to get it removed from the internet.
60 Stolen treasures
Taken during a violent British raid, the Benin bronzes
have sat in Western collections for over a century.
Kieron Monks reports on Nigeria’s battle to get
them back.
64 The Long Read – The politics of futility
Neil Vallely explores how capitalism continually
subverts our deep desire for positive political change.
freedom, writes Sruti Bala.
30.12.21 Stay or go: villagers vs Big Coal
Germany may have committed to phasing out
coal but that hasn’t stopped energy giant
RWE’s plans to expand a mine and wipe out two
villages. Paul Krantz and Leo Frick report from
the edge of the pit.
20.12.21 ‘Let’s not make the same mistake again’
Ritu Mahendru speaks to Afghan aid
organizations who claim international sanctions
are making it harder to feed people in a country
on the edge of famine.

MARCH-APRIL 2022 5
LETTERS

SEND US YOUR FEEDBACK

The New Internationalist welcomes your letters, but please note that they
might be edited for space or clarity. Letters should be sent to letters@newint.org.
Please remember to include a town and country for your address.

Tweets of praise
@newint are doing what a lot
of publications fail to do –
discussing Roma experiences
& #humanrights, and giving
a platform for Roma voices.
FIL SYS ON TWITTER
Fantastic to see Left media
like @newint diving deep
into the contemporary
persecution of Roma in
Europe.
SEAN BENSTEAD ON TWITTER
Paying the piper
Re: ‘What if … we took money
out of politics?’ (NI 535)
The money that should be
removed from politics is the
donations from corporations
and unions. It’s people who
vote, so funding should only
come from people. Put a
$100 limit per person and
that will force parties to
off-load all the unnecessary
hoopla surrounding
elections and concentrate on
what really counts: platforms
and policies!
TERRY MCDONALD VIA SOCIAL
MEDIA
Corrections
In our Country Profile of Iraq (NI 535) we
printed an older version of the Iraqi flag.
This is how it should have been:
In View from Brazil, NI 535, an editing error credited Rio de
Janeiro as being the country’s capital. It is of course Brasilia.
It is mind boggling that
bribing politicians – let’s
call it ‘campaign funding’, or
‘lobbying’ – is legal.
MARK ENSTONE VIA SOCIAL
MEDIA
Whipped
Re: ‘Introducing… Jonas Gahr
Støre’ (NI 535) – rightwing
economics and neo-Marxist
on social policies. No change
there then: that’s been
the globalists’ policy that
they’ve whipped almost all
politicians into promoting or
at least acquiescing to since
Blair came in in 1997.
RICHARD ROBINSON VIA
SOCIAL MEDIA
Critical distinctions
Re: your review of The
Transgender Issue (NI 535).
Your reviewer writes that ‘the
“gender critical” faction insist
that biological sex is fixed at
birth and gender cannot be
changed’. My understanding
is that biological sex is fixed
at birth but that gender is
fluid, changeable and open
to choice. Only if we make
this distinction can we both
support anyone’s right to
choose what gender to live
and address the particular
body, health and social issues …or another
that being born a woman
brings. For example, it is From my experience being
extremely useful for medicine brought up to believe all sorts
to have at last understood of unconventional things, I’ve
how differently women’s found that the only way out is
bodies process medication, through. They – or I, a couple
manifest heart conditions, are of decades ago – feel as though
susceptible to disease. Such they – we – have discovered
recognition is vital to good something about the world
healthcare. which only a select few have
It serves no good purpose grasped. So, the answer is not
to so muddy the waters of a to argue, and entrench them
debate where clarity, trust and further, it’s to ask sincere
balance are so much needed.   questions. Eventually, the
ANNIE NELIGAN BENTHAM, UK accumulation of knowledge
will reveal the inconsistencies
One way… of the theory.
TOM DENTON VIA SOCIAL MEDIA
Re: Agony Uncle, NI 534
on Covid-19 conspiracist
thinking. ‘You might find
that spreading these spurious
ideas is his way of saying:
“Pay attention to me”’ is such
brilliant and useful advice –
thanks for it.
MARK B
Why I... support migrant solidarity
I’m a member of Thousand4£1000 (T4K), a very small
charity of volunteers welcoming all migrants. T4K is
determined to show that, as a community, Brighton &
Hove can defy the deliberate attempts to criminalize
people who want to cross our border, for whatever
reason. Our principle focus is providing homes for
people without leave to remain in the UK, or access to
public funds. We are entirely dependent on the amazing
generosity of local people who donate in their hundreds:
some £1 (around $1.35) a month, others somewhat more,
and some in-kind – for example by renting us a property
at below the market rate. Together we can show some
love and make a difference.
SUE WILLIAMS BRIGHTON & HOVE, UK
To share your passion, please email letters@newint.org

6 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
 LETTER FROM BUENOS AIRES

TAKING BACK THE STREETS

How do you protest against discrimination? With dancing and song
among other things, observes Virginia Tognola.

Protests are part of the landscape of

Buenos Aires. As a social activist I have
played my part in them for several years,
recording images and video as a member
of the press team for the Movimiento
Popular Nuestramérica. I am always on
the move, trying to cover what happens.
Recently the Cap March made a big
impact on me. It was an outpouring of
young people from the popular neigh-
bourhoods wearing their characteristic
caps, which are often accompanied by
sportswear and jazzy sneakers. Dressing
that way, being young and racialized, is
enough to be considered suspect by the
security forces, without having done any-
thing wrong, just for existing. The Cap
March denounced this view that some
lives are ‘good’ and others are not.
Even the language used by inhabitants
of the popular neighbourhoods is suspect:
their creative use of words and expressions
loaded with layers of meaning is looked
down upon by the more well-heeled citi-
zens of Buenos Aires. Part of my own job
is to play with language and try to think
up slogans that are both mischievous and
communicative to be used during such The reasons that cause us to mobilize problems and well-known campaigners,
gatherings. At times, along with the press are usually harsh, but there is always had to climb onto the stage using a chair
team, I will toy with words for days in music, dancing and celebration. The as a ladder, the extra effort to get some of
search of the impactful phrase. batucada ensembles were the first to get them up prompting laughter. Although
That day we had agreed that the march going with their percussive rhythms and they came from different political
would start at 3.00pm. This was two did not stop from the moment we started backgrounds and life experiences, the
hours before the hoped-for actual start out from Government House until we speakers strongly agreed on the need to
to ensure everyone would be on time, as arrived, nearing sundown, at the Palace eradicate institutional violence once and
lateness is a defining Argentine charac- of the Argentine National Congress. for all, and calling for state support to
teristic. I was guiltier than most. I arrived When I hear the drumming, an electric put an end to the problem of homeless-
late and the others had already started to emotion runs through my veins, taking ness. Following the speeches was difficult
put together the flags, banners and cos- me back to previous struggles – and some for many of those gathered due to the
tumes that gave colour to the action. of the victories that came from them. sheer size of the crowd. What was clearly
Little by little, the rest of the activ- The route we follow is a ‘classic’ one heard, though, was the closing of the
ists arrived. There were representatives for demonstrations by now; it takes in the event, when the volume was cranked up
of many groups affected by discrimina- institutions that have the main responsi- and cumbias were played. A cheer went
ILLUSTRATION: SARAH JOHN

tion: homeless people, sex workers, street
vendors, anti-racist campaigners.
My responsibility that day was to film.
I try to capture interesting moments and
images, something that will stand out,
because, in a sense, all protests are quite
similar to each other.
bility for delivering social rights.
At the end of the march, a stage was
improvised on the trailer of a truck
parked on the sidewalk. It was fes-
tooned with banners proclaiming ‘I will
never be a police officer’. The speakers,
a mix of people directly affected by the
up as people danced before eventually
dispersing. Volunteers then began the
clean-up. O
VIRGINIA TOGNOLA FOCUSES ON POLITICS,
CULTURE AND HUMAN AND ENVIRONMENTAL
RIGHTS IN HER WRITING. SHE IS AN ACTIVIST IN THE
MOVIMIENTO POPULAR NUESTRAMÉRICA.

MARCH-APRIL 2022 7
CURRENTS
UK
SHUT IT DOWN
Outside a red-brick factory
in Oldham, a large town near
Manchester in the north of
England, a diverse crowd of
people embrace, clap, cheer
and shed tears of joy. Together
they’ve succeeded in kicking
Elbit Systems – Israel’s largest
private arms firm – out of the
town. In January, that cam-
paign ended in victory when
the Israeli firm announced it
was selling its subsidiary Fer-
ranti Technologies Power and
Control, based in Oldham’s
Cairo House, a former cotton
mill, for a sum of £9 million –
£6 million less than it bought
it for in 2007.
The sale was announced as
part of a ‘company restruc-
ture’, but it has been received
as the first major victory
The struggle over Cairo House – a
former cotton mill – was complicated
by Oldham’s high unemployment and
post-industrial decline.
PALESTINE ACTION
8 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
against Elbit’s operations in
the UK. As a major supplier
of armed drones to the Israeli
military, Elbit has long been a
primary target of the pro-Pal-
estine movement. Its drones,
according to US monitor-
ing outlet Investigate AFSC,
have been used extensively in
Israel’s attacks on the besieged
population of Gaza, in 2014
and in 2021. While concrete
data is not yet available on
the 2021 attacks, Elbit drones
were used in 2014 as part
of Israel’s 6,000 airstrikes
in Gaza, which killed 2,251
Palestinians, including 1,462
civilians and 551 children.
Neither Elbit’s British nor its
Israeli offices responded to
New Internationalist’s request
for comment.
From 2016 the Oldham
Peace and Justice group filed
petitions, held street stalls
and lobbied local politicians.
Weekly rallies have been
held at the factory gates since
May 2021 – triggered by
anger at Israel’s onslaught on
Gaza that month, in which
254 Palestinians were killed,
including 66 children. Support
from Oldham’s South Asian
population has helped this
movement grow. ‘Knowing this
factory was killing our brothers
and sisters in Palestine, we
felt a duty to do something,’
says Navaid Afzal, who set
up the local United4Palestine
campaign group.
In August 2020, Palestine
Action burst onto the scene
with the aim of shutting down
Elbit’s 10 UK sites. There
have since been repeated
occupations of the Oldham
factory. But the latest news has
travelled far beyond Oldham.
Shahd Abusalama, who grew
up in Jabalia Refugee Camp,
northern Gaza, says the
closure has been celebrated
in Palestine and represents a
‘symbolic form of justice’ for
Palestinians.
Elbit’s exit from Oldham
will, however, lead to a loss of
skilled jobs in a town badly hit
by unemployment and dein-
dustrialization. Once known
as the cotton-spinning capital
of the world, Oldham was hit
hard by the deindustrializa-
tion of the 1960s and 70s. To
this day the town remains one
BORDERLINES
People, not numbers
Invoking a looming climate-
related migration ‘crisis’ has
become increasingly common.
But evidence suggests that the
rhetorical strategy around large
numbers of ‘climate migrants’
may not only be backfiring –
with border security budgets
growing in response – but also
overstating the reality.
New research suggests that
fewer people will be on the
move as a result of climate dis-
asters than previously thought.
Widely-cited climate scientist
Norman Myers predicted there
would be 200 million environ-
mental refugees by 2050 – but
much of this data was based on
global forecasts that attempt to
isolate environmental factors as
a cause of migration.
‘Attempts to isolate migra-
tion drivers related to climate
change, and to identify and
count “climate migrants”,
are at odds with most social
scientists’ understanding of
migration,’ researchers write in
Negotiating Climate in Crisis.
Moreover, the focus on
citing large numbers has
strengthened a racist motif in
news media, as they describe
migrants in terms of ‘waves’
or ‘floods’, ‘wherein the Global
North will be overwhelmed by
migrants from Global South
contexts’.
Of course, climate break-
down has impacted people’s
mobility – particularly through
‘sea level, drought, increased
frequency of wildfires and
storms, and the associated
declines in livelihoods’. But
researchers believe we should
be cautious around these data
sets, and affirm the rights of
migrants while recognizing
the multi-causal, seasonal and
complex nature of migratory
movement.
nin.tl/climate-migration
HUSNA ARA

of Britain’s most deprived, and
the far right has used poverty
and unemployment to stoke
divisions between Oldham’s
white and South Asian popula-
tions. The need to preserve the
few skilled jobs in the area has
often been cited as an argument
against the anti-Elbit campaign.
Meanwhile activists are
turning their attention to
other Elbit sites in the UK.
On 24 January a group of
campaigners scaled the roof
of Shenstone, Staffordshire,
where they hope to achieve
the same outcome as in
Oldham – a no-go zone for
Israeli arms.
BETHANY RIELLY
INTRODUCING...
IRIS XIOMARA CASTRO
SARMIENTO
Although it seems unlikely,
Honduras is now emerging
as the bright spot in a
Central American region
with an all too well-deserved
reputation for corruption
and authoritarianism. The
62-year-old Castro, the first
ever woman president and
a democratic socialist to
boot, swept to power in the
November 2021 Honduran
elections with over 51 per cent
of the vote. The socialist Libre
party candidate outpaced her
National Party rival by nearly
MARCH-APRIL 2022
15 per cent. It was a stunning
victory in the face of a political
culture poisoned by ballot
rigging, voter restrictions and
a generalized manipulation
that traditionally keeps wealthy
conservatives in power.
Honduras is the second
poorest country in the
Americas, trailing only
Haiti. It is plagued with Mara
gang violence, and dubious
mining and hydro-electric
developers have been given a
free hand. The country suffers
from a politics poisoned by
conservative officials helping
themselves to public wealth
while the poor majority are
subjected to round after
round of repression and
impoverishment. Honduras
has one of the highest murder
rates in the world, with
political assassination a risk
for any activist. The murder
of anti-dam environmentalist
Berta Caceres in 2016 is a case
in point. Tens of thousands
of Hondurans have fled the
country over the past decade
in the perilous trip to El Norte
(the USA) and some semblance
of a better life.
The Nationals had seized
power after a 2009 coup
against the government of
Manuel Zelaya – Castro’s
husband. The coup issued in a
long decade of theft and brutal
autocracy, latterly at the hands
of National President Juan
Orlando Hernandez. Zelaya
and Castro had previously
been active in Honduras’
Liberal Party. But after Zelaya
was elected under the Liberal
banner in 2005, he angered
conservatives in his own party
by swinging to the Left and
joining the ALBA alliance
founded by Hugo Chavez.
After he was toppled and
exiled, Castro led thousands
of Hondurans in street
demonstrations demanding
her husband’s reinstatement.
The demos were met with
brutal state repression, but out
of them sprung a new political
party, Libre, led by Castro.
The conservative Catholic and
Opus Dei member Hernandez,
supposedly devoted to God
and family, proceeded to turn
his country into a narco-state.
But in last year’s elections a
decade of movement-building
paid off.
Against some pretty
long odds, Hondurans –
particularly, although not
exclusively, the young – rallied
to throw out the US-backed
National Party. Castro won as
a massive turn out of nearly
70 per cent of the 5.2 million
Honduran voters showed up at
the polls to eject the ‘picaros’
(rascals).
Castro obviously has a
steep hill to climb in her
commitments to make
Honduras more equal and
democratic. She plans a
UN-supported anti-corruption
commission (based on one
in Guatemala) and also a
constituent assembly to rewrite
the Honduran constitution,
possibly inspired by the one in
Chile. The latter will no doubt
anger the country’s rightwing
establishment: it was a similar
proposal from Zelaya which
immediately preceded the 2009
coup. The US, used to treating
Latin America and Honduras in
particular as its playground, will
already be angered by Castro’s
plans to recognize China over
Taiwan. At home too, there is an
early indication that the going
will be tough. Castro’s Libre
Party split over the choice of the
speaker of the Assembly – with
renegade Libre member Jorge
Calix gaining the job, despite
it being promised to an allied
party. It remains to be seen if
this split can be overcome, or
whether it will be exploited by
Castro’s political opponents to
cripple her reform plans for
Honduras.
But Castro is far from alone,
as recent election results
in Peru and Chile show a
pink wave in Latin America
re-establishing itself.
RICHARD SWIFT
In the News
SERIOUSLY?
A viral tweet has exposed
what can only be described
as the ‘Great Pacific Garbage
Patch’ of cheap fashion
apparel, whereby dunes of
unsold stock have piled up
throughout the Atacama
Desert in Chile.
Almost 40,000 tonnes
of unsold clothes from US
markets end up in northern
Chile’s free zone of Alto Hos-
picio each year. Amid punitive
tariffs on stock removal from
the area as well as pandemic-
induced debt crises across
the continent, there is little
incentive to clean up this
mess. Worryingly, these
mounds of garments which
have blanketed over the
Chilean desert also release
harmful toxins – meaning
they face rejection even from
landfill sites. Researchers
Elyse Stanes and Christopher
Gibson of the University of
Wollongong argue that such
products can take up to 200
years to biodegrade.
A study conducted by the
Aalto School also suggests
that this is just the tip of the
rubbish dump. Around 92
million tonnes of fast fashion
is canned before sale each
year. On top of the systemi-
cally low pay of workers in
the Global South producing
ILLUSTRATIONS: EMMA PEER
the stock, the industry is also
responsible for 20 per cent of
the world’s water waste. The
price of fast fashion appears
to be piling up.
HUSNA ARA
9
CURRENTS
CAMBODIA
ALL BETS OFF
Before attending a strike at
Nagaworld Casino in January,
Chhim Sithar cropped her
hair short and photographed
herself holding a placard
stating, ‘I am imprisoned after
demanding Naga Corp respect
union rights’. The union leader
at the luxury Hong Kong-
owned complex is among
dozens arrested on charges
of ‘incitement to commit a
felony’ since strike action
began in December, following
an eight-month dispute over
the company’s decision to sack
more than 1,300 workers.
Announced last April,
Nagaworld justified the
lay-offs on the grounds of
pandemic-related revenue
falls. Yet employees and
activists claim the casino –
whose latest annual balance
sheet reportedly indicates a
turnover of $102 million – is
deliberately targeting union
activists. ‘The company
intends to discriminate and
destroy the union,’ says
Sophorn Yang, president of
the Cambodian Alliance of
Trade Unions. ‘It is clear that
Nagaworld does not want them
to raise and protect the rights
of workers in the country.’
Half-hearted attempts at
dispute resolution through
the Ministry of Labour
and the judiciary, which in
January declared the strike
illegal, have meanwhile
been criticized as bowing
to corporate and political
pressure. ‘Since the pandemic,
we have seen the state
co-operate with private
interests to ensure we do not
have unions in Cambodia,’
says Yang, pointing to similar
lay-offs in the country’s
expansive garment industry.
Nagaworld employees’
struggle comes amid a wider
curtailing of civil-society and
regression on human rights
since 2017, when Cambodia’s
10
formal opposition party
was forcibly dissolved. With ZIMBABWE
government-backed media
outlets attempting to frame
OPEN WOUNDS
workers’ action as part of In December a group of
a foreign-funded ‘colour’ Zimbabwean activists unfurled
revolution, Human Rights a banner in the grand hall of
Watch’s Phil Robertson has said the Natural History Museum
the crackdown ‘presents a scary in December, demanding
picture of how Cambodia treats the repatriation of human
workers [who are] peacefully remains. The activists believe
exercising their rights’. that the skulls of spiritual
ZOE HOLMAN leaders Mbuya Nehanda and
Sekuru Kaguvi – who led the
INEQUALITY resistance against colonization
in what is today Zimbabwe –
WATCH may be among the remains in
the London museum’s large
collection.
SINCE THE
Unconfirmed reports suggest
PANDEMIC BEGAN
THE WORLD’S the skulls were reportedly
shipped to Britain as war
10 RICHEST
trophies, after the leaders
were executed in 1898 for their
rebellion against the British.
While the museum is yet to
identify the remains through
MEN DNA testing, the group remain
HAVE DOUBLED concerned about the confirmed
THEIR WEALTH 11 Zimbabweans who they hope
to lay to rest back home.
99%
‘In our culture, the spirit will
hang in limbo because the body
has not been buried properly,’
said Vusi Nyamazana.
OF HUMANITY ‘It is about ensuring that
ARE WORSE OFF
these remains can be laid to rest
with the respect and reverence
Source: Oxfam they deserve,’ another activist
told New Internationalist.
STEFAN SIMANOWITZ
SIGN OF THE TIMES
24-year-old Georgia Mpika was drugged and raped during a new year’s
CHILE
eve party in Thessaloniki, Greece. At a demonstration in solidarity with
Georgia, this placard reads: ‘We are full of rage.’
UPHILL BATTLE
On March 11, Gabriel Boric
Font will be inaugurated as
Chile’s new president. A former
student leader, he beat the
far-right Republican Party’s
José Antonio Kast by a margin
of 12 per cent. His mandate
ZUMA PRESS/ALAMY
is to tackle Chile’s social and
economic inequality – the same
conditions that led to popular
mobilizations in 2019, dubbed
‘El Estallido’ or ‘outbreak’.
NEW INTERNATIONALIST

Typically, markets
responded fearfully to Boric’s
progressive agenda in the
run-up to the elections – as
did conservative sectors of
Chilean society, which since
1973 have enjoyed the fruits of
privatization. To affect any real
social progress, Boric will have
to persuade the armed forces
and the politically-influential
business elite of his agenda.
So Boric’s struggle is
multifaceted: he must unite a
politically polarized country,
convince the Left that he will
MARCH-APRIL 2022
alleviate inequality without,
to use his own words, compro-
mising ‘fiscal responsibility’.
Boric has critics on the Left:
the Trotskyite Revolutionary
Workers’ Party has accused him
of a ‘rapid rightward shift’.
The ghosts of Chile’s past –
and particularly the deposition
of leftwing president Salvador
Allende by Augusto Pinochet in
a military coup in 1973 – have
haunted this election more than
any other in recent history. Kast
is the son of a Nazi escapee,
his campaign spokesperson
was Pinochet’s great-great
niece, and he even claimed that
Pinochet himself would have
supported him.
Back in 2019 Pablo Sepúlveda
Allende, a doctor and Allende’s
grandson, criticized Boric for
calling on the Chilean Left to
‘condemn the human rights
situation’ in Cuba, Venezuela,
and Nicaragua. Now another
Allende grandchild, Maya
Fernández, has been appointed
to the symbolic post of defence
minister.
But without clear commit-
In the News
ments to decriminalizing
protest, demilitarizing indig-
enous Wallmapu territory
and nationalizing the copper
industry – which precipitated
the 1973 coup – breaking with
Pinochet’s legacy will be an
uphill battle.
CAROLE CONCHA BELL
Chile’s new president Gabriel Boric
of the Approve Dignity party faces a
number of challenges after defeating
far-right candidate José Antonio Kast.
FELIPE FEGUEROA/SOPA/SIPA
11
CURRENTS

PAKISTAN needed. As Awami Workers

Party president Ammar
had been sentenced to death
after being accused of sending
claimants. Without bold legal
reform, the problem looks set

‘WHATSAPP Rashid put it on Twitter:

‘Pakistan’s education system
defamatory anti-Islamic
WhatsApp messages by a
to continue.
HUSNA ARA

BLASPHEMY’ continues to produce students

Priyantha Kumara was a
Sri Lankan national and
textile factory manager, who
reportedly removed religious
posters from his workplace
in Sialkot, Pakistan. For that,
the 48 year-old was accused
willing to murder their
peers over religion without
hesitation.’
Blasphemy accusations
are commonly used to
settle old scores, shut down
minority-run businesses,
cast out minorities from
man whose courtship she
had rejected. While solicitors
Sri Lankan factory manager
of blasphemy defendants
Priyantha Kumara Diyawadanage
have been assassinated in
was beaten to death and set ablaze
courtrooms, a parallel sector
in Pakistan. Here his mother is
of ‘no-win-no-fee’ lawyers
pictured by his coffin at their family
are cold-calling citizens and
residence in Ganemulla, Sri Lanka.
acquiring business through
SAMAN ABESIRIWARDANA/PACIFIC PRESS/
touting for blasphemy ALAMY

of blasphemy – the charge neighbourhoods and, in

of insulting Islam and/or the
Prophet Muhammad – beaten
and burned alive by a mob of
other workers in December
2021. Some took selfies with
Kumara’s body while chanting
religious slogans and these
were swiftly broadcast to
social media.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister,
Imran Khan, has promised to
clamp down on such ‘vigilante
killings’ and, as it stands,
131 arrests have been made
in Kumara’s case. However,
Pakistan’s penal code allows
the death penalty as a
punishment for blasphemy.
A much deeper solution is
this case, commit murder –
often on the basis of hearsay
or social media posts. The
OPEN WINDOW
His royal lowness by Anthony Garner (Spain)
youngest person charged with
blasphemy was an eight-
year-old Hindu boy from
Punjab who eventually had
the case against him dropped.
Since 1990, 89 people have
been killed in similar mob
attacks, according to Pakistani
thinktank Centre for Research
and Security Studies. And
while no state-administered
executions have been carried
out for blasphemy, 40 accused
people are on death row.
At the time of writing,
26-year-old Aneeqa Ateeq

12 NEW INTERNATIONALIST

SIERRA LEONE
PAVED PARADISE
The pristine golden sands
of Black Johnson beach,
dramatically backed by dense
tropical rainforest on one side
and the vast blue expanse of the
Atlantic Ocean on the other, are
one of the most spellbinding
sights in Sierra Leone.
But this slice of paradise is
at the heart of a $55-million
deal between Sierra Leone and
China mired in controversy
and accusations of malpractice.
According to a government
press release last year, Black
Johnson is set to house a
252-acre industrial fishing
harbour for ‘tuna vessels and
other bigger fishing vessels’,
serving both domestic and
international markets.
But a World Bank screening
found Black Johnson ‘not
suitable’ for development,
after the Ministry of Fisheries
requested that it finance an
environmental and social
impact assessment (ESIA) for
the project. ‘It would remove
a wetland, a fundamental
conservation no-no,’ said
Stephen Akester, who worked
for the World Bank in Sierra
Leone until 2021.
Campaigners say the
government has instead pushed
ahead without following due
process. Namati Sierra Leone,
a legal NGO, said that neither
ESIAs nor land acquisition
processes have been carried
out, as required under law.
‘There’s no evidence that the
rules have been followed,’ said
Namati paralegal Daniel Sesay.
The organization has sent
‘right to access’ requests to the
government, which has so far
refused to make the deal public.
Black Johnson landowners
say they will be forced to
relocate, tourism will be
destroyed, local fishermen
will lose their livelihoods and
that the environment will be
polluted. In an open letter to
President Julius Maada Bio,
MARCH-APRIL 2022
they called the deal a ‘human
and ecological disaster’.
Tito Gbandewa, 47, who has
run an eco-lodge on the beach
since 2009, said the harbour
would be ‘disastrous’ for
biodiversity at Black Johnson,
which is home to sea turtles,
crocodiles and pangolins across
its wetlands, lagoon and five
fish spawning grounds. ‘This
is our place. We don’t want to
change our beautiful home,’ he
says. ‘That’s why we’re fighting
against them, that’s why I’m
angry. We’re called Tito’s Eco
Beach and Paradise. But it
would no longer be an eco-
beach or a paradise.’
Another landowner,
Jonathan Mammah, 57, said
that it would not be ‘feasible
or practical’ to build a large
harbour at Black Johnson.
‘The government isn’t talking
with us,’ he added. ‘These
people are landgrabbers. They
only communicate via press
release or television. We don’t
have a problem with national
development but procedures
must be followed.’
Dr Aliou Ba, Greenpeace
Africa political advisor, said
the project ‘will not benefit the
country but rather the Chinese,
with the consequences of
destroying Sierra Leone’s
fisheries’.
Emma Kowa Jalloh, Sierra
Leone’s fisheries minister,
did not respond to repeated
requests for comment. But
tourism minister Fatmata
Abe Osagie, insisted that the
government is ‘taking into
consideration the impact [of the
deal] on the environment’ and
that the development would be
‘an opportunity for tourism’.
PETER YEUNG
In the News
REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL
MET SACKS
SACKLER
New York’s Metropolitan
Museum of Art has finally
agreed to drop the Sackler
name from its exhibition
spaces, following extensive
scrutiny of the wealthy family
‘artwashing’ its involvement
in the US opioid crisis. The
Sacklers founded Perdue
Pharma, the manufacturer
of OxyContin – but have
fiercely denied allegations
that this product drove the
CASE DISMISSED
addiction epidemic. Nearly
half a million deaths were
recorded in the US as a A jury has acquitted four
result of opioid overdoses protesters put on trial for
between 1999 and 2019. pulling down the statue of
The Tate, the National Edward Colston in Bristol
Portrait Gallery in London last year. The monument to
and the Louvre in Paris the slave-trader was thrown
have already taken steps to into Bristol’s harbour last
distance themselves from June during a Black Lives
the family. Matter demonstration in the
city. Sage Willoughby, Rhian
SOLIDARITY BITES
Graham, Milo Ponsford and
Jake Skuse did not dispute
playing a role in pulling the
Cuba’s government is statue down, but said this
assisting in setting up a new did not amount to criminal
larvicide centre in Ghana damage – because its
to combat the spread of presence in the city was
malaria. The site, in the indecent and potentially
Savelugu Municipality in abusive.
the north of the country,
will develop larvicide CONRAD LANDIN
which can be dropped into
waters in which mosquitoes
breed. There is significant
co-operation in healthcare
provision between the two
countries, with around 300
Ghanaian medical students
ILLUSTRATION: EMMA PEER
currently studying in Cuba.
13
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 THE BIG STORY
ABOLITION

BEYOND PUNISHMENT
Can we create a world where we don’t turn to police and prisons for justice?
Amy Hall explores the movement offering a different vision for the future.

MARCH-APRIL 2022 15
 I
THE BIG STORY
t was a freezing cold, grey October day in
London. My hands and feet were numb
but, transfixed by what I was hearing,
I didn’t want to go home. It was 2018
and I’d travelled to the capital to join
the annual United Families and Friends
Campaign demonstration for the first
time. The procession, from Trafalgar
Square to Downing Street – the home of
the Prime Minister – was led by family
and friends of people who had died in
state ‘care’: police custody, prison, immi-
gration detention and psychiatric institu-
tions. One by one they took to the mic.
Every story was harrowing. Some were
about people who had approached the
state apparatus for help, only for their
loved ones to end up dead.
This was a catalyst for me to learn more
about the long-standing abolition move-
ment organizing to abolish prisons, police
and the systems that support them.
The term ‘abolitionist’ comes from the
movement to end the transatlantic slave
trade. As writer and activist Mariame
Kaba told the New York Times Magazine
in 2019: ‘This work will take genera-
tions, and I’m not going to be alive to see
the changes… Similarly I know that our
ancestors, who were slaves, could not
have imagined my life.’1
Abolition is a construction project and
the ground-works have already started.
Across the world people are working to
get others out of prison and reduce the
power of police. But they are also working
to build communities that are no longer
reliant on punitive state-run law enforce-
ment agencies.
‘I needed abolition,’ says Chelsea, a
member of UK-based collective Cradle
Community. When she first learned just
how bad prisons, policing and the entire
system were she felt hopeless. ‘Then I
learned about all the people who were
doing stuff about it… Abolition gave
me something to be joyous about, to be
excited about, to look forward to.’
Abolition is a process, and in part
involves pushing for ‘non-reformist
‘Abolition gave me something
to be joyous about, to be excited
about, to look forward to’
16
reforms’ that reduce – not expand or
give more power to – prisons, police or
the surveillance state. But there is no
one-size-fits-all solution. As Kelly Hayes
and Mariame Kaba write: ‘There is no
roadmap for justice, because under this
system, we have never seen it. But the
current system has been thoroughly
mapped, and it has already failed.’ 2
Unequal before the law
‘A lot of the time the reason you end up
in prison is much more to do with who
you are rather than what you’ve done,’
explains Kelsey, also from Cradle Com-
munity whose abolition book Brick by
Brick was published last year. ‘There
are plenty of people causing all kinds
of harm who are never going to see the
sharp end of that system.’
Indigenous, racialized and ethnic
minority people are disproportionately
represented in police killings across the
world. In 2021, a study published in The
Lancet medical journal described fatal
police violence in the US as an ‘urgent
public health crisis’. Researchers found
more than 17,000 deaths that had not
previously been accounted for in gov-
ernment data – 60 per cent of these were
Black people. 3
In Canada 30 per cent of prisoners are
indigenous people, who comprise just
4.9 per cent of the population, while in
Hungary, 40 per cent of those incarcer-
ated are Roma, who form just 6 per cent
of the general public.4
Similarly, LGBTQI+ people are tar-
geted by criminal justice systems and
disproportionally imprisoned. As of the
end of 2020, 69 of 194 UN member states
criminalized LGBTQI+ people, with life
prison sentences or the death penalty
possible in some countries. Once inside,
people face physical, sexual and psycho-
logical violence. 5
Many countries operate ‘two-tier’
criminal justice systems based on wealth.
As legal professor David Cole writes
about the US: ‘...on the face of it, the
criminal law is colour-blind and class-
blind. But in a sense, this only makes the
problem worse. The rhetoric of the crim-
inal justice system sends the message that
our society carefully protects everyone’s
constitutional rights, but in practice the
rules assure that law enforcement pre-
rogatives will generally prevail over the
rights of minorities and the poor.’6
‘The main work that capitalism, white
supremacy and imperialism do together
NEW INTERNATIONALIST

Previous page: Making friends at the Bomana
Prison, in Port Moresby City, Papua New Guinea
in December 2017.
MARC DOZIER/HEMIS/ALAMY
Below: Taking to the streets: Protesters call for
abolition of the police in New York, June 2020.
KEVIN RC WILSON/ALAMY
MARCH-APRIL 2022
is to create the “criminal” – a category
of people considered disposable and to
whom human rights are not supposed to
apply,’ says Chelsea.
Already let down by states and society
on so many levels, disabled people are
also massively overrepresented in crimi-
nal justice systems. In many countries
police have the power to detain anyone
perceived of being of ‘unsound mind’.
In the US, half of people killed by police,
over 50 per cent of adults in prison and
up to 85 per cent of incarcerated young
people are disabled – compared with 26
per cent of the general population.7 In
England and Wales it’s over one-third of
people in prison, while rates of disability
in the wider public are 19 per cent.8
Police and prisons also disable people.
Police use of ‘lethal’ and ‘non-lethal’
Abolition
weapons come to mind immediately. In
Palestine, one of the tactics of the Israeli
army is to shoot people in the legs. In
France hundreds of ‘yellow vest’ protest-
ers have been injured by police, including
losing eyes and hands.
Organized abandonment
The conditions in many prisons don’t
even meet the minimum international
standards. They are filled to bursting in
over 124 countries, far exceeding official
maximum occupancy rates, compounded
by the staggering numbers of people who
can be held without trial for years on end.
Prisons can also be incredibly violent
places lacking decent healthcare or basic
food and sanitary provisions. In most
countries, rates of infectious disease
such as HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis are
17
THE BIG STORY
far higher in prisons than in the rest of
the population. Imprisoned people often
face torture and solitary confinement is
increasingly being used across the world,
for increasingly longer periods of time.9
Reports from Haiti describe people
held in crowded cells without proper
ventilation or clean water, defecating in
buckets that are not regularly emptied,
getting just one daily ration of food and
with limited or no access to healthcare.10
In South Sudan researchers have found a
similar picture, with incarcerated people
often dying of treatable illnesses, routine
beatings and heavy shackles.11
Writer, organizer and geography pro-
fessor Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes
a process of ‘organized abandonment’
where government cuts to services such
as social welfare are made alongside
investment in police and prisons, which
expand to absorb those increasingly shut
out from the political economy.
As Gilmore explains: ‘It’s also abandon-
ment by capital, whether it’s abandon-
ment by real estate capital that produces
more and more luxury apartments but
not affordable housing… or tourism capital
that pushes certain kinds of people out
of certain areas of the city and only wel-
comes them in if they work as workers in
the service industry, delivering, serving,
taking care of and cleaning.12
If the goal is to reduce harm, then we
can’t just move money from the police
and prisons to schools and welfare pro-
vision without also examining how those
systems work and ensuring they don’t
replicate the logic of criminal justice
system or funnel people into it.
Kelsey points to the example of psy-
chiatric institutions: ‘I know people who
have gone between prison and psychiat-
ric units and sometimes begged to be let
out of those psychiatric units and be put
back into prison because they’re so bad.
To not just put a nicer face on prisons is a
big part of the struggle.’
Deadly legacy
When considering how we ended up here,
it’s worth looking at the history of how
modern policing and mass imprisonment
developed – and why.
‘Policing exists to manage the con-
sequences of regimes of exploitation,’
explains sociologist and author of The End
of Policing Alex Vitale. ‘Policing was created
mostly in the early 19th century in direct
relationship to the primary systems of
exploitation that were present during that
18
Focusing on individualized crime
makes it easier to avoid addressing
more structural violence. With the
‘dangerous’ people out of the way,
we can believe we are safe
time and that we associate with modern
capitalism – these are colonialism, slavery
and mass industrialization. In all of those
different regimes of exploitation there are
people who resist and policing becomes
the most efficient and legitimate tool to
manage that resistance.’
Ziyanda Stuurman, author of the book
Can We Be Safe? which explores policing
in South Africa, reflects on its history
there: ‘The function of the police since
its inception has been to remind the
working class, as well as specifically Black
people, of their place in South African
society. That place is at the bottom of the
pyramid that puts class and capital inter-
ests at the very top of it all.’
The concept of the criminal is used
as a dividing tool to define who is a
‘problem’ to society. But this category
is ever changing and not universal. As
Naomi Murakawa has highlighted, in 1787
there were just three federal crimes in the
US; in 2015 there were more than 5,000.13
Focusing on individualized crime
makes it easier to avoid addressing more
structural violence. With the ‘dangerous’
people out of the way, we can believe we
are safe. As Angela Y. Davis wrote in her
book Are Prisons Obsolete?: ‘The prison has
become a black hole into which the detritus
of contemporary capitalism is deposited.’14
‘Prisons do not disappear social prob-
lems, they disappear human beings,’ as
Davis has famously said. Putting people
in prison can also mean robbing families
of income, children of parents and com-
munities of neighbours.
Increasing incarceration has had little
impact on crime rates and we are not
any safer. This is starkest in El Salvador,
which has one of the largest per capita
prison populations, as well as the highest
murder rate in the world.
‘I don’t know anyone other than abo-
litionists who thinks so deeply about
violence: about how to prevent violence,
about what causes violence, about how to
respond to violence,’ says Chelsea.
Kelsey agrees: ‘Abolition has come from
Black feminists and indigenous commu-
nities who have always been at threat from
harm within those communities. They’ve
been experiencing domestic and sexual
violence from people who look like them
and they also can’t go to the police because
they might get assaulted by the police too
– or if they do, other kinds of harm are
going to be escalated.’
She explains that we need to think
about what actually brings us safety:
‘Most of the time, once you break it down,
it’s not going to be the police, it’s not more
laws; it’s going to be safe housing, mean-
ingful work, options to change things if
you need to, people to show up for you.’
What about places in the world where
there are very high levels of violence, but
little to no police presence? ‘The solu-
tion to this is not to say what we want is
a free for all,’ says Vitale. ‘What’s lacking
is a conversation about what kinds of
mechanisms need to be in place to create
real security and putting people with
machine guns on every street corner,
whether they’re wearing a blue, green or
a brown uniform is not really the issue.
‘The standard human rights narra-
tive imagines that if we just create the
trappings of a legal formalism, that will
produce a just, stable society. It’s certainly
possible that those trappings would create
some level of stability but it does not nec-
essarily produce real justice for people.’
What does accountability look like?
When it comes to keeping people safe
from gendered and sexual violence, the
police have failed miserably. Too often
survivors are not believed, or made to feel
like they are the ones being put on trial as
their behaviour is analyzed by police and
NEW INTERNATIONALIST

courts. If the perpetrator was someone
they knew – which is highly likely – they
may also have to deal with other outcomes
which won’t be solved by the criminal
justice system, such as losing a home.
Of course, people working in law
enforcement are also perpetrators of
sexual offences themselves. That was
clear last year when 33-year-old Sarah
Everard was kidnapped, raped and mur-
dered by serving police officer Wayne
Couzens in London. In September 2021 it
was reported that more than 750 officers
and staff from the capital’s Metropolitan
Police Service had faced sexual mis-
conduct allegations since 2010 with 163
arrested for sexual offences.15
‘I am not a particularly forgiving
person,’ writes Lydia Caradonna in a post
for Medium.com entitled ‘I don’t want my
rapists to go to prison’. She continues: ‘My
position is nothing to do with seeing the
good in people, or letting go of what has
happened to me… Instead, my aversion to
sending my rapists to prison comes from
a place of pain.
‘Incarcerating my rapists won’t erase
the fact that I have been raped. It won’t
make me feel better in any real way…
We’re supposed to believe the line that
prisons remove our rapists from society,
preventing further sexual violence. This
seems incompatible with the fact that
prisons themselves are hotbeds of sexual
exploitation, sexual assault and rape. All
MARCH-APRIL 2022
we really seem to be doing is shifting the
incidences of sexual violence onto people
we deem to be “acceptable” victims.’
She explains that what she wants
instead is to be supported and believed
by people around her – and for rapists to
own up to their actions. She also calls for
her rapists to be supported in the process
of ‘unlearning the entitlement and vio-
lence that caused them to hurt me’.16
Abolition is not about letting people ‘off
the hook’ for harmful behaviour. While
criminal justice systems usually focus on
punishment and punitive action, inflict-
ing suffering on people and stopping them
from accessing the basic things which
make life liveable, abolitionists believe
in reconciliation and accountability that
focuses on healing and restoring human-
ity. ‘We stop setting the value of a life by
how much time another person does in
a cage for violating or taking it,’ write
Mariame Kaba and Andrea J Ritchie.17
Transformative justice is a framework
that aims to respond to harm without
causing more. It does not rely on the state
and takes into account the wider context
in which the abuse or violence took place
and the interplay between wider systems
of oppression and interpersonal relation-
ships. It goes past the ‘victim’ and ‘per-
petrator’ binary that puts people in one
camp or the other without recognizing
that we can all hold both roles in different
situations.18
Abolition
Flowers laid in memory of Sarah Everard,
at Clapham Common, London. Sarah was
murdered by serving police officer Wayne
Couzens in March 2021.
WALDEMAR SIKORA/ALAMY
Transformative justice was created by
peoples who have been using these kinds
of practices for generations to reduce
harm, including indigenous people and
communities of colour. Around the world
people have developed accountability
processes which are used to deal with
a range of issues. For example, the Bay
Area Transformative Justice Collective in
California works with survivors, bystand-
ers and those who have caused harm to
build and support responses to sexual
violence and child sexual abuse.
An international vision
In 2020 the murder of George Floyd in
Minneapolis, followed by a global swell of
Black Lives Matter protests, brought the
phrase ‘defund the police’ from placards
on the streets to the airwaves of major
broadcasting networks. But it didn’t come
from nowhere and the call to defund had
grown out of a rich lineage of abolitionist
theory and organizing.
Elizabeth Alexander has written about
the ‘Trayvon generation’, named after
teenager Trayvon Martin who was killed
in 2012 as he walked home in Sanford,
Florida.19 He was shot by George Zim-
merman, a self-appointed neighbour-
hood watch volunteer. It took immense
public pressure to get Zimmerman
charged with murder, only for him to be
acquitted in court. The ensuing collective
grief and anger inspired the launch of the
Black Lives Matter movement.
I’m in the older cohort of this genera-
tion which has, in the words of lawyer,
writer and organizer Derecka Purnell,
‘watched the deaths of Black people go
viral’, projected onto our phones and
our computer screens. As Purnell writes
in her book Becoming Abolitionists: ‘I wit-
nessed activists of this generation organ-
ize to send Travyon’s killer to prison,
like I did, evolve into critical thinkers
19
THE BIG STORY

ACTION and budding revolutionaries who organ-

ized to close prisons and end policing
Stuurman. ‘There are plenty of South
African civil society organizations who

AND INFO
altogether.’ 20 are doing abolitionist work but who don’t
‘There was definitely a moment in necessarily subscribe to the idea that they
the summer of 2020 where I was taken themselves are abolitionists or explicitly
by how many people were out on the say they are working towards abolition.’
Britain and Ireland streets shouting “defund police” – not She emphasizes the need for discus-
just “fuck the police”,’ says Kelsey. But sions to be context specific. ‘In South
Abolitionist Futures
for some that’s where it stopped. ‘I think Africa we have to start with the fact that
abolitionistfutures.com
sometimes what’s missing is the fact that people have incredibly real fears of what
Sharing info and resources on abolition.
“defund the police” is one step, or one would happen and how would we organ-
Community Action on Prison demand, within a much wider context ize society, given the fact that there is
Expansion and a much bigger movement. just so much violence. So much of our
cape-campaign.org ‘It’s vital to understand that it isn’t just lives is dominated by constantly trying
“throw the doors open to the prisons and to navigate an unsafe and insecure
Cradle Community
let everyone do what they want”, expect- environment.
cradlecommunity.co.uk
ing that we’re all going to be fine, because ‘A lot of the assumptions that drive
Abolition and transformative justice.
those power structures have not been abolition from an American and Western
changed. I’m not saying that because all European system don’t necessarily exist
North America
the people in prison will start causing in South Africa, but many do. The idea
Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry loads of harm; it’s that we’re still not that our criminal justice system in and
Societies doing anything about the harm being of itself is unjust absolutely stands true.
caefs.ca caused by those in power.’ I would much rather pour energy, time,
Works with and for criminalized women Abolition is very much an interna- resources into that project than any kind
and girls. tionalist vision, but many of the big of ridiculous reform measures.’
name theorists have come out of the US. Abolition offers us a set of principles
Critical Resistance
However, as Vitale explains, conversations on which we can push for real justice. It
criticalresistance.org
are bubbling all over the world, including goes deeper and wider than prisons and
Building a movement to end the prison-
in the Global South: ‘There’s already this the police; it’s about building a world
industrial-complex.
strong postcolonial analysis that is deeply where we take care rather than vengeance
INCITE! sceptical of state authority and its routes as our starting point when dealing with
incite-national.org in colonialism and capitalism, resource problems. Where we focus on stopping
Radical feminists of colour organizing restraints, these deep systems of inequal- harm happening in the first place.
to end violence. ity enforced by policing.’ As organizer Rose Braz has said: ‘A
In Brazil, there’s a long-standing cam- prerequisite to seeking any social change
No Prisons Canada
paign to abolish military police and a is the naming of it… even though the goal
noprisons.ca
reported increase in people identifying as we seek may be far away, unless we name
Project NIA abolitionists.21 Cops not Flops is a South it and fight for it today, it will never
project-nia.org African group building support for prison come.’ 22
Working to end the incarceration of abolition and police demilitarization. Chelsea’s advice is to keep looking for
young people. ‘I always bristle when people say those abolitionist wins: ‘We are going to be
abolition is an American thing,’ says free. We are free because we’re fighting.’ O
TransformHarm.org
transformharm.org
A resource hub about ending violence.
1 Rachel Kushner, ‘Is prison necessary?…’, New York Times Magazine, 17 April 2019, nin.tl/rwg-nyt 2 Kelly
Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa Hayes and Mariame Kaba, ‘The sentencing of Larry Nassar…’, The Appeal, 5 February 2018, nin.tl/3GcQ3HB
3 GBD 2019 Police Violence US Subnational Collaborators, ‘Fatal police violence…’, The Lancet, Volume 398,
JustSpeak 2 October 2021, nin.tl/lancet 4 Statistics Canada, ‘Adult custody admissions…’, 2 November 2002,
nin.tl/can-prison ; Statistics Canada, ‘Aboriginal peoples in Canada…’, 25 October 2017, nin.tl/can-pop ;
justspeak.org.nz Jessica Jacobson, Catherine Heard and Helen Fair, Prison…, Institute for Criminal Policy Research and Fair
Youth-powered movement for the Trial, 2017, nin.tl/over-use 5 Penal Reform International and Thailand Institute of Justice, Global Prison Trends
2021, May 2021, nin.tl/GPT21 6 The Sentencing Project, ‘Report to the United Nations…’, 19 April 2018 7 Talila
closure of prisons. Lewis, ‘Disability justice…’, Medium, 7 October 2020, nin.tl/talila-lewis 8 Ministry of Justice, Estimating the
prevalence of disability…, March 2012, nin.tl/disability 9 Penal Reform International, ‘Solitary confinement’,
People Against Prisons Aotearoa nin.tl/solitary 10 Nathalye Cotrino Villarreal, ‘Prisoners in Haiti…’, Human Rights Watch, 30 June 2021,
papa.org.nz nin.tl/haiti 11 Human Rights Watch, ‘South Sudan…’, 21 June 2012, nin.tl/s-sudan 12 ‘The case for prison
abolition: Ruth Wilson Gilmore…’, Democracy Now! 5 May 2020, nin.tl/rwg-democ 13 Naomi Murakawa,
Sisters Inside ‘Liberals, guns and the roots…’, The Laura Flanders Show, nin.tl/murakawa 14 Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons
sistersinside.com.au Obsolete?, Seven Stories Press, 2003. 15 Amy Walker, ‘More than 750 Met Police employees…’, i, 30 September
2021, nin.tl/3o3SSoi 16 Lydia Caradonna, ‘I don’t want my rapists to go to prison’, Medium, 31 May 2020,
Advocating for the rights of women and nin.tl/3AAgUfw 17 Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie, ‘We Want More Justice For Breonna Taylor…’, Essence,
girls in prison. 16 July 2020, nin.tl/3nYWB6v 18 Mia Mingus, ‘Transformative Justice…’, TransformHarm.org, nin.tl/3u29dxu
19 Elizabeth Alexander, ‘The Trayvon Generation’, The New Yorker, 15 June 2020, nin.tl/34cGvzc 20 Derecka
Purnell, Becoming Abolitionists…, Verso, 2021. 21 Chloe Villalobos and Emily Zislis, ‘Beyond Reform…’,
RioOnWatch, 12 August 2020, nin.tl/3rYWnNV 22 Hans Bennett, ‘Organizing to Abolish…’, Dissident Voice,
11 July 2008, nin.tl/3IYSiAj

20 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT THE FACTS
EXPLODING POPULATION HEALTH HAZARD
11 million 3 million PRISONS ARE BURSTING 5

people are in prison worldwide. of these people are

Highest over-occupancy levels:
This is an 8% increase since 2020.1 awaiting trial.1
REPUBLIC OF CONGO 617%
BIGGEST PRISON POPULATIONS 2
HAITI 454.4%
GUATEMALA 367%

‘Overcrowding can be so severe that prisoners sleep in shifts,

TURKMENISTAN 576
US 629 on top of each other, share beds or tie themselves to window
bars so that they can sleep while standing’
CUBA 510 Prison Reform International6
EL SALVADOR 564

Number of prisoners
RWANDA 580 ½ of Brazil’s 1,422 prisons have no medical
offices or dedicated space to treat sick people.1
per 100,000 people

Racialized people are
disproportionately
imprisoned across
the world.
$2-$8 52%
38 out of 50 US states usually of prisoners in England
charge these fees for imprisoned and Wales have a mental
people to see a doctor.1 health problem but just
In the US Black men are imprisoned
at rates nearly 6x that of white men.1 80,000-100,000 22%
people in the US are being held in say that it’s easy to see a
some form of isolation.8 mental health worker.7

START ’EM YOUNG

7 years old
The official minimum age of criminal responsibility
COVID-19 44,588

in at least 7% of UN member states. RAMPANT

Cases per 100,000 people
SPREAD1
410,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander As of March 2021,
children are in prison.1 children are imprisoned at the highest reported
18,616
rates of Covid-19 in 18,190
17x 15,393
14 million the rate of non-indigenous
prisons were: 14,719
students in the US are in schools
children in Australia.1
that have a police presence
but no counsellor, nurse,
psychologist, or social worker.3 BARBADOS US COLOMBIA GUYANA SRI LANKA

PUNITIVE MEASURES1

23.5 hours In the Australian state of Victoria 4.7% of fines issued for violations
of Covid-19 restrictions were to Aboriginal people.
Due to Covid-19 measures, incarcerated young people (12-17 years old) Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up just 0.8% of
in the UK were held in solitary confinement for up to 23.5 hours a day.4 the state’s population.

1 Penal Reform International and Thailand Institute of Justice, Global Prison Trends 2021, May 2021, nin.tl/GPT21 2 World Prison Brief, ‘Highest to Lowest - Prison Population
Rate’, nin.tl/prison-pop 3 American Civil Liberties Union, Cops and No Counselors, 2019, nin.tl/schools 4 Harriet Grant, ‘“It’s just too long”…’, The Guardian, 21 July 2020,
nin.tl/children 5 World Prison Brief, ‘Highest to Lowest - Occupancy level’, nin.tl/occupancy 6 Penal Reform International, ‘Overcrowding’, nin.tl/overcrowding 7 HM Chief
Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales Annual Report 2020–21, July 2021, nin.tl/eng-wales-report 8 Penal Reform International, ‘Solitary confinement’, nin.tl/solitary

MARCH-APRIL 2022 21
THE BIG STORY

COLONIZE P
risons were among the first buildings the
British built wherever they colonized. Arriv-
ing in Kenya in 1895, within 16 years they had

AND
built 30 prisons, with on any given day over 1,500
inmates. Over the next two decades, the numbers
of both prisons and people inside them would more
than double. By the dawn of the Second World War,
Kenya was incarcerating a far greater proportion

PUNISH
Mass imprisonment and merciless
policing were the preferred tools
of control for European colonizers.
Patrick Gathara explores the legacy
left in Kenya.
of its population than British colonies elsewhere in
East and Central Africa.
Colonial prisons were, and to a large extent
remain, places of brutality, social exclusion and
abandonment. Kenyan prisons today carry the
DNA of their forebears. They brutalize people into
submission and, along with the police and military,
aim to scare the rest of society into compliance with
the state.
The incorporation of prisons and detention
camps into the ‘Pipeline’ (the system developed by
the colonial state to deal with anti-colonial insur-
gents) inevitably led to the institutionalization of

22 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
 Abolition

humiliation and torture. Sadly, since independence,

the prison regime has only become harsher.
According to the Kenya Human Rights Commis-
sion, prisons today are ‘characterized by overcrowd-
ing, congestion, poor diet, degrading clothing and
bedding, lack of clean water, poor sanitation and
infectious diseases’. This is in addition to the forced
labour which the Attorney General has described
as ‘an integral component of the sentence’. Kenyan
courts have provided little respite, ruling that it is
entirely compatible with the protection of funda-
mental rights for the prison service to deny incarcer-
ated people basic supplies such as soap, toothpaste,
toothbrushes and toilet paper.
This is a world of away from how things were
before the British seized power. The idea of mass
incarceration as punishment was novel at the time of
colonization in Kenya. Pre-colonial justice systems
‘were victim rather than perpetrator-centred with
the end goal being compensation instead of incarcer-
ation’, notes legal professor Jeremy Sarkin.1 Though
pre-trial detention was common in places across
Africa, only some centralized states, such as the
West African kingdom of Dahomey, had permanent
prisons. These were used to house people waiting for
trial or sentencing, not as sites for punishment.
In indigenous systems, corporal and capital pun- country of Kenya, along with much of the rest of the
ishments were similarly not unknown. However, African continent, they were quite unknown.
such brutal punishments were reserved for the This does not mean that there was no violence
worst acts of violence, while, according to Leonard or that societies did not develop means to enforce
Kercher’s 1981 treatise on the Kenyan penal system, common rules of behaviour – just that they did not
‘ostracism, religious sanctions and expulsion were require a policing organization to do so. According
… employed mainly against lesser habitual offend- to Florence Gaub and Alex Walsh: ‘Social discipline
ers who had outraged the conscience and exhausted in a given community was managed by the commu-
[society’s] patience’. Colonial prisons combined these nity itself through informal processes – indeed, even
concepts of brutality, retribution and ostracism and today closely-knit communities only resort to the
applied them to even the smallest violations. In fact, police when they cannot find a solution themselves.’ 2
Africans did not even need to break the law to be The East Africa Trading Company, which later
jailed. White settlers would collude with colonial became the Imperial British East Africa Company,
authorities to imprison workers they considered lazy established an administration with an armed secu-
for up to six months with hard labour. rity force in 1896 to protect its trading routes, trading
Opposite page: Riot Still, the introduction of prisons met with little centres, stocks and staff, especially the building of a
police hit protesters resistance, perhaps because they were initially railway to Uganda. This force officially became the
participating in a poorly funded ramshackle affairs. There was little Kenya Police in 1906, organized along military lines,
demonstration against segregation of the prison community from the rest staffed by recruits from India and governed by Indian
lawmakers’ salary of society, with incarcerated people in some cases statutes. It was little more than ‘a punitive citizen
demands outside the free to come and go as they pleased. However, these
parliament buildings in momentary escapes perhaps may not have made
Nairobi in May 2013. much difference as life outside the prison, under
THOMAS MUKOYA/REUTERS/ settler colonial rule, was increasingly coming to
ALAMY
mirror the conditions within it.
Top right: British
soldiers examine a
cyclist’s papers at
When the police show up Prisons were among
Kenya’s first police-like force was also an impe-
gunpoint in Nairobi,
1953, during the Mau
rial one. Whereas policing organizations set up to the first buildings the
enforce the dictates of rulers and collect taxes in
Mau Uprising.
RON HARVEY/EVERETT
various incarnations go back at least 5,000 years, British built wherever
they looked and functioned quite differently to the
COLLECTION HISTORICAL/
ALAMY police we know today. In the area today known as the they colonized
MARCH-APRIL 2022 23
THE BIG STORY
containment squad’, designed to keep the natives in
line and enable the process of colonial looting.3
The police were party to this looting from the
outset, and corruption was commonplace. In his
book Looters and Grabbers, veteran Kenyan journal-
ist Joe Khamisi cites Hugh Cholmondeley, a leader
of the British settlers popularly known as Lord
Delamere, describing the relations between the
public and police in 1907 thus: ‘Time after time, I
have had a native say they were stopped by an Indian
policeman. When I asked them how they got away,
they always said, “Oh, I gave him something”.’
Despite many attempts at reform, the Kenya
police continue to be a tool for oppression and
extraction by the ruling elite, more concerned with
preserving, rather than dismantling, the hierar-
chies of power inherited from the British. As noted
in the 2009 report of the National Task Force on
Police Reforms, at independence in 1963 Kenya ‘had
the same police units, the same police structures
and many of the same police officers in place. This
made it inevitable that the culture of supporting the
regime in power would be perpetuated and carried
over into the new post–independence era.’ In the
decades since, the police have continued to be little
more than ‘the enforcement wing of government
oppression against resistance groups… unaccount-
able to anyone outside the ruling regime’. 3
Corruption and extortion continue to be wide-
spread and endemic, as does brutality. Extrajudicial
killings, especially of young men living in urban
informal settlements, are rampant with 803 people
murdered by police between 2013 and 2016. More
recently, during April and May 2020, the police
killed 15 people and seriously injured over 30 across
the country, while claiming to enforce a curfew
brought in to curb the spread of Covid-19.
Imperial boomerang
Studying the history of policing shows that Britain
circulated practices and personnel between colo-
nies, as seen in the use of Indian police officers and
rules in Kenya. ‘Modern police history begins not in
Britain itself, but in Ireland,’ Britain’s first colony,
wrote Charles Jeffries, who served as Deputy Under-
Secretary of State for Colonies until 1956. Until the
1930s, Ireland (and then Northern Ireland) was a
training ground for colonial police officers and when
the Royal Irish Constabulary was disbanded in the
1920s, many of its officers were sent around the
world to places such as India and Palestine.4
Tactics borrowed from battling insurgencies in
Palestine and Malaya would be deployed to brutally
crush the Mau Mau uprising of 1952 in Kenya. Across
all its colonies, whenever Britain saw its power being
challenged, it used increasingly violent and oppres-
sive methods against the people it had colonized.
The Mau Mau uprising fundamentally changed
Kenya’s already brutal prison system. The British
detained hundreds of thousands of people in deten-
tion camps and militarized villages. Thousands of
24
Tactics borrowed from
battling insurgencies in
Palestine and Malaya
would be deployed to
brutally put down the
Mau Mau uprising
people were tortured, and the British state tried to
cover up the scale of the horror. The prison became
cemented within the popular imagination as a place
of physical desecration and social death.
As JM Moore notes, the lessons from the bru-
talization of Kenyans and others in British colonial
gulags also found their way back home to be used
against working class and racialized communities. 5
This feedback loop is an aspect of the ‘imperial boo-
merang’, the thesis that repressive techniques used to
control colonial territories were eventually deployed
domestically.
‘The convict in the metropole is now like the
convict at the colonial periphery, suitable for dis-
posal rather than recycling,’ writes Moore.
In Kenya, and much of the colonized world,
police and prisons have remained, to a large extent,
as the Europeans created and ran them. They are
still punitive tools for citizen containment, institu-
tions that function to protect the interests of a small
but powerful elite, rather than to dispense justice.
Their loyalty is not to the people, but to the rulers
– a stance captured in the Swahili slogan attributed
to police trainers in popular lore: mwananchi ni adui
(the citizen is an enemy). These aspects of crimi-
nalized justice will increasingly become familiar to
folks on the Old Continent as the imperial boomer-
ang keeps returning home. O
PATRICK GATHARA IS A JOURNALIST, COLUMNIST AND POLITICAL
CARTOONIST BASED IN NAIROBI, KENYA.
1 Jeremy Sarkin, ‘Prisons in Africa...’, International Journal on
Human Rights, December 2008, nin.tl/sarkin 2 Florence Gaub
and Alex Walsh, Relationship therapy..., European Union Institute
for Security Studies, November 2020, nin.tl/gaub-walsh 3 Philip
Ransley, Report of the national task force on police reforms,
Republic of Kenya, October 2009, nin.tl/ransley-report 4 Georgina
Sinclair, ‘The “Irish” policeman and the Empire...’, Irish Historical
Studies, November 2008, nin.tl/police-empire 5 J M Moore,
‘The “New Punitiveness”...’, Criminal Justice Matters, No 101,
September 2015, nin.tl/cjm
NEW INTERNATIONALIST
 10 STEPS TOWARDS ABOLITION
1 6
Stop criminalizing poverty
Poor and marginalized people are the most targeted by
legislation around things like homelessness and theft.
On the African continent alone, at least 42 countries
have laws, often dating back to colonial rule, on ‘petty
offences’ such as loitering or being a ‘vagabond’.1 In
England and Wales, a recent survey found that a quarter
7
of the prison population were homeless before entering
state custody and over two-thirds were unemployed.2
2
Meeting basic needs
Poverty, inequality and exposure to violence are among
the major contributing factors to criminal and harmful
behaviour. So why not focus resources on meeting
people’s needs for safety and decent food, housing,
education and healthcare? Abolition is about building
a society where prisons and the police are obsolete
because we have developed new ways to stop harm and
violence happening in the first place.
3
Legalize drugs
8
It is estimated that 2.5 million people are in prison
worldwide for drug offences – over 22 per cent for
possession of drugs for personal use. An additional 1.6
million are estimated to have drug related convictions.1
But prison doesn’t stop people using or selling drugs.
These people should be released, have their convictions
erased and the money that would be spent on their
imprisonment and legal cases put towards accessible
treatment programmes and provisions that focus on
safety and not punishment.
9
4
Decriminalize sex work
Research across various countries has consistently found
that criminalization makes sex workers more vulnerable to
violence as they’re seen as ‘easy targets… unlikely to receive
help from the police’.3 Criminalization also means that sex
workers are more at risk of harassment and violence from law
enforcement officers and less able to organize collectively.
10
Convictions not only wrap them up in the criminal justice
system, but also make it harder to find other employment.
5
Shrink prisons
More and bigger prisons are not the answers to
overcrowding. Extra prison space is followed by increases in
numbers of prisoners. Instead we can get behind campaigns
to stop building and expanding prisons – including prisons
by other names, like migrant detention centres – and push
for them to be shut down, and prisoners released.
1 Penal Reform International and Thailand Institute of Justice, Global Prison Trends 2021, May 2021, nin.tl/GPT21 2 Matthew Halliday, Bromley Briefings Prison
Factfile, Prison Reform Trust, 2021, nin.tl/factfile 3 Human Rights Watch, ‘Why Sex Work Should Be Decriminalized’, 7 August 2019, nin.tl/sex-work 4 Cradle
Community, Brick by Brick…, Hajar Press, 25 November 2021. 5 For A World Without Police, ‘Disarm’, nin.tl/disarm 6 Corporate Watch, Prison Island..., 31 October 2021,
nin.tl/island 7 Worth Rises, The Prison Industrial Complex..., April 2019, nin.tl/PIC 8 Eve L. Ewing, ‘Mariame Kaba…’, Adi Magazine, Fall 2019, nin.tl/adi
MARCH-APRIL 2022
Defund and reduce police forces
The police act as a gateway into the criminal justice system. An
increase in police officers leads to higher prison populations.
Police budgets need to be cut and the money redirected into
social good. A further step is to abandon legislation that expands
the power of law enforcement.4
Disarm and demilitarize
Weapons boost the police’s ability to maim and kill, to say nothing
of quashing dissent. Guns escalate tense situations and even
‘less lethal’ weapons – such as tasers – can lead to devastating
consequences and deaths. A start can be made by removing
arms from the police in settings such as schools and hospitals.5
Disarming police would ideally happen alongside disarming wider
society, but many other public workers – such as paramedics
and firefighters – frequently enter dangerous situations without
weapons. In Iceland, where there is a gun for every three people,
police do not carry them on regular patrols. Schemes that supply
military equipment to police forces could be closed down, as well
as military training programmes for cops.
Take down the prison-industrial-complex
A vast, multi-million-dollar network of state and corporate interests
overlap in the big business of surveillance, policing and prisons.
As Corporate Watch have noted: ‘Architects and engineers pore
over designs of cells and wings, construction companies build
the structures and a range of other businesses create locks, alarm
systems and fences.’6 In the US alone, it’s been estimated that 4,000
companies profit from mass incarceration.7 We can campaign for
the divestment of money from this web of beneficiaries.
Invest in alternatives
Across the globe, people have found their own ways to address and
prevent violence and harm in their communities (see page 34 for
some examples). But often this work lacks the funding and support
needed to make it sustainable and scale it up. Community-based
initiatives also need the same time and space to make mistakes –
and learn from them – that is given to the criminal justice system.
Build collective strength
While working for large-scale change we can also practice
everyday abolition (see page 28). This requires a radical shift
in mindset when it comes to how we deal with problems in our
communities, including how we approach relationships with the
people around us – and how we work collectively. We can also
work together to fight patriarchy, white supremacy, structural
classism and the other roots of much of the harm we face. After
all, as abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba has said: ‘Everything
worthwhile is done with other people.’8
25
THE BIG STORY
HEALED PEOPLE
Writing from a Californian prison, Jessie Milo sets out
his vision for a more caring society.
HEAL PEOPLE
‘C
an you imagine a world without
prisons?’
Yes, I can, but it was difficult at
first because these cages have been a
part of my life since the age of five when
police kicked in our door, took my dad to
jail and left me with my mom who was
suffering from a heroin addiction. In a
world without prisons, my dad would
have gotten help instead of a cage and
my mom would have gotten treatment
instead of being left alone to raise me.
In a world without prisons, young
people won’t feel like they have to kill
themselves because the prosecutor
won’t offer them a plea that’s less than a
25-year-to-life prison sentence.
In a world without prisons, people will
only be put in a safe room until they are
coherent, sober, and stable. Then treat-
ment would begin immediately. A pro-
fessional will assess the breakdown in
reasoning or logic that led to the crime
and create a plan, including the victim’s
and offender’s family, to set them on a
path to healing. All parties should be
asked what they want, what they need. We
should be willing to put the full amount
of money that we previously spent on
incarceration toward this new system. It
would perpetuate a new, healthier society
that would prosper over the long term.
Parents would be there for their children.
26
Siblings would be there to be role models
and support each other. Healed people
heal people.
I’d like you to know, world, that 365
days is a long time. That’s an average of
30 important family events – birthdays,
graduations, doctor’s visits, holidays – all
without you. This absence leaves holes
in the lives and hearts of our families
while we sit in prison far away. A decade
is a long time and so is half a decade. It’s
Unhealed
wounds fester
and get worse,
they manifest
themselves in all
sorts of unhealthy
ways like
addiction, anger,
and depression
enough time to earn a college degree and
graduate from five different rehabilita-
tion programs, go to therapy and become
a new person. Studies show a bachelor’s
degree reduces the rate of recidivism to
less than five per cent, while a master’s
degree reduces it to zero.1 So it would
make more sense to sentence someone to
education instead of prison.
Of course, people will come back to
prison if we don’t help them to be better.
We say things like, ‘That’s their fault, they
made the choice, what are we gonna do –
hold their hand?’ Well, yes, what’s wrong
with that? Sometimes holding someone’s
hand can save a life.
I wish someone would have grabbed
my hand and said, ‘Come on, let’s go this
way, Jessie.’
My cousin was killed when I was
little. He was like my big brother and it
destroyed my worldview. The guy who
killed him, I heard, was a cop’s son and
no charges were ever filed. My cousin’s
name was Anthony Northrup. What did
we need as a family for us to heal? We
didn’t need the murderer in prison; we
needed him to say he was sorry and to see
the hole he created in our life, to develop
remorse and change so he would not take
another life.
When you offend someone, the first
thing you owe them is an apology, and
NEW INTERNATIONALIST

then you have a duty to understand why
you did what you did, so that you can
make sure it doesn’t happen again. Then
you should have a conversation, asking
the victim what can be done to help them
heal, aside from vengeance. We should
avoid vengeance for a couple of reasons:
one, it is costly, at up to $70,000 a year
to cage one person in the US; and two,
vengeance doesn’t help anyone heal – in
fact, it perpetuates the cycle. Unhealed
wounds fester and get worse, they mani-
fest themselves in all sorts of unhealthy
ways like addiction, anger, and depres-
sion. Little children grow up angry at
the world and, without the tools to cope,
they repeat the cycle. Imagine what that
$70,000 a year for each prisoner could
do elsewhere. Imagine if we redirected
that toward the 270,000 homeless kids in
California alone?
We promulgate the myth that incar-
ceration is necessary to keep this dan-
gerous person off the street, but I haven’t
assaulted anyone during my entire 18
years in prison. It’s not that I can’t – I just
choose not to because it is not who I am.
Yet, around $1.2 million has been spent to
cage me thus far. And there are 128,000
other people in California prisons, not
including the county jails, federal insti-
tutions and juvenile detention centres.
True crime prevention would be to invest
MARCH-APRIL 2022
in our communities and create better
futures for us all.
During Covid-19, the topic of pris-
oner healthcare has been front and
centre, but it always seems strange to
me that the state has sent us here to die
and now people are concerned about our
health. The biggest threat to my health
and wellbeing is my 174-year-to-life
prison sentence. Incarceration has long
been a pandemic. It’s part of a culture
of devaluing human life, which includes
referring to us as ‘defendant’, ‘offender’,
‘criminal’, or my favourite, ‘suspect’. An
officer told me last week, ‘You choose the
crime, you choose the punishment!’ I
told him that sounds like a guy I know
who used to beat his wife then say, ‘If she
didn’t want to get beat, she wouldn’t have
stayed out late’. It’s terminology used to
justify abuse.
I’d also like society to change how
they refer to prisoners as ‘violent offend-
ers’, ‘non-violent offenders’, or ‘drug
offenders’. The crime a person commit-
ted 20 years ago is not indicative of who
they are today – it’s what they did and
not who they are. So how about we refer
to who they are today – for instance, to
release me, you would say: ‘Let’s release
the kitchen cook, who’s Christian, has
straight As in college, is always positive,
and values his family and kindness.’
Abolition
We can’t base laws on emotion.
Members of my family have been mur-
dered and nothing will bring them back.
Sadly, my uncle was killed on 17 Sep-
tember 2020, allegedly by my nephew. I
was heartbroken but I don’t wish prison
on him; it doesn’t help or make the pain
go away. I wish remorse on him – I wish
that he change and love himself so he
can love others. If we can see ourselves
in each other, then we can get beyond
the blame and vengeance. If I can see
your son as my son, and you can see
my son as your son, and the murderer
and victim – each of them as human –
then we can build a better world, a more
loving world, where treatment is valued
over vengeance, people get help instead
of death or cages, our resources are used
to care for the least of us and no children
are homeless tonight in our city, our
town, our world. O
JESSIE MILO IS INCARCERATED IN CALIFORNIA. YOU
CAN SIGN AND SHARE THE PETITION TO FREE JESSIE
AT NIN.TL/PETITION
This is a shorter version of a piece first published in
the September-October 2021 edition of Briarpatch
magazine which was written by imprisoned people
across Canada and the US. briarpatchmagazine.com
1 Christopher Zoukis, ‘Pell Grants for Prisoners…’,
Prison Legal News, 31 July 2015, nin.tl/education
Jessie jokes with his dad. Jessie wrote to
Briarpatch: ‘Growing up, my dad was in
prison. When I got a life sentence, he changed
his life and stayed out and has been my
support. This picture is me mimicking my
nieces, who pull on his beard – it’s something
I never got to do as a kid…’
JESSIE MILO
27
THE BIG STORY
EVERYDAY ABOLITION:
RESISTING THE COP IN OUR HEADS
Sarah Lamble explores the opportunities to challenge punitive
logic in our day-to-day lives and replace it with social justice.
I
t can be hard to fathom how we get
from the world we are in now to an
abolitionist future. But abolition is not
simply an abstract vision: it is about what
we build in the here and now to make
that future possible. It is an ongoing and
everyday practice, a political philosophy
and a way of life.
One of the reasons we continue to rely
on prisons and the police is that, when
faced with violence or a crisis situation,
it can be hard to know where to turn
instead – our default response is often to
fall back on the criminal justice system.
For this reason, abolitionist work is not
just about building alternative strategies
for reducing and responding to harm – it
is also about shifting the broader mindset
that presumes we must rely on violent
authorities and threats of punishment to
deal with social problems.
Everyday abolition is about shifting
the broader cultural norms that shape
such habitual responses and confronting
the ways we have internalized damaging
norms and practices – in other words,
how we kill the cop in our heads. As abo-
litionist organizer Mariame Kaba argues,
‘When we set out trying to transform
society, we must remember that we our-
selves will also need to transform.’
One of the biggest challenges is to
unlearn the ‘common sense’ logic that
equates justice with punishment. We are
repeatedly taught in school, at home,
at work and in popular culture that
‘ justice’ requires retribution. This often
involves responding to someone whose
behaviour has caused harm with  isola-
tion, exclusion, stigma and shaming.
Whether it is expelling the misbehaving
child from school, barring the person
28
with a criminal record from a housing
service, ‘cancelling’ someone on social
media who says something hurtful, or
calling the cops when a neighbour isn’t
complying with Covid-19 regulations,
many of us have learned to respond to
social problems by asking an ‘authority’
to deal with it for us, or by punishing and
exiling those who have done damage.
But punishment is seductively mis-
leading, as it rarely generates the resolu-
tion, healing or long-term change that is
needed to actually reduce harm. Instead,
it often exacerbates problems by escalat-
ing cycles of hurt and violence. The kid
who is excluded from school is far more
likely to end up in prison; the person with
the criminal record is more likely to end
up homeless; the neighbour you call the
cops on is at increased risk of facing state
brutality. These small everyday deci-
sions made in response to immediate
issues in our lives can end up inadvert-
ently feeding larger problems. A far more
effective tactic is to address the underly-
ing causes of violence in our communi-
ties, provide healing support to those who
were harmed and develop strategies for
repair and resolution.
This is not to say we must deny our
feelings of anger or suppress desires for
revenge in response to wrongdoing. Par-
ticularly when someone we care about
has been hurt, the impulse to lash out
can be strong. The desire to ‘get even’
can sometimes feel all-consuming, par-
ticularly if it comes from an expectation
that retaliation will somehow prevent the
harm from recurring. 
Abolition offers a pragmatic frame-
work to recognize that acting on these
impulses in a retributive way will not
actually get us where we ultimately want
to go. Retaliation and punishment are not
effective in preventing future harm. Such
responses  simply use one form of vio-
lence to respond to another. The desire
for retribution is often reflective of how
we’ve been conditioned to respond rather
than what we actually need in a given sit-
uation. As Angela Y. Davis has said: ‘The
retributive impulses of state punishment
are inscribed in our very individual emo-
tional responses.’ 
Punishment or compassion
Without a deliberate shift away from
punishment-based responses and towards
collective practices of care, support and
healing, even the most promising alter-
natives can easily replicate the systems
and logic they were meant to replace.
Across the world, local mutual aid
groups established so that people can
There’s no point
in dismantling
prisons and police
if we then act like
cops and prison
guards in our own
communities
NEW INTERNATIONALIST
ALONA SAVCHUK/SHUTTERSTOCK Abolition

MARCH-APRIL 2022 29
THE BIG STORY
support each other with basic needs – such
as food and medicines – during the Covid-
19 pandemic have been a vital lifeline.
But some groups quickly descended into
neighbourhood surveillance and snitch-
ing mode, turning community support
into community policing and monitoring.
There’s no point in dismantling prisons
and police if we then act like cops and
prison guards in our own communities.   requires us to be attentive to power
When not accompanied by trans-
formative justice principles, community
accountability processes can also slip
into punishment and exclusion, or even
vigilante justice, and can mirror the same
patterns of racism, discrimination and
social abandonment that characterize the
criminal justice system.
An important everyday abolition-
ist practice is to support each other in
working through punitive impulses and to
channel the urgency of ‘something must
be done’ into strategies that will actually
reduce violence in the long run. It means
collectively untangling ourselves from
harmful systems and the kinds of logic
that perpetuate cycles of violence.
We can start to challenge such punitive
logic in the places we find ourselves eve-
ryday – our schools, homes, workplaces,
neighbourhoods and community centres.
This might mean rethinking our
punitive impulses when we get into con-
flict or refusing to participate in cancel
culture politics or public shaming tactics
on social media. Or it could be about
encouraging a friend to consider an alter-
native response to calling the cops to deal
with their ‘problem’ neighbour. It might
mean questioning policies at your school
or workplace which use punishment as a
form of behaviour compliance.   cops – particularly if they require us to
Another key element of everyday abo-
lition is recognizing that we ourselves will
A key element of everyday abolition
is recognizing that we ourselves will
sometimes be the harm-doers - we too
need to practice accountability and
making amends
30
sometimes be the harm-doers or harm-
enablers – and we too need to practice
accountability and making amends. This
means approaching accountability as a
daily practice and skill we all need to cul-
tivate and foster, rather than something
that is delegated to others or reserved for
egregious situations.
Ultimately, challenging punitive norms
dynamics in situations of everyday con-
flict – and to respond with compassion,
care and support rather than punishment,
blame, defensiveness or retaliation.
Collective efforts
Being able to respond effectively in situ-
ations of harm and crisis also requires
us to build up our collective skills and
capacities. If we can train people in first
aid and emergency resuscitation tech-
niques, we can also teach safe bystander
inventions, violence de-escalation, con-
flict resolution and harm reduction. We
can learn the early signs of abusive rela-
tionships and support each other to inter-
vene before things escalate. We can find
ways to support each other to heal from
our own and collective traumas.
When a problem comes up, we can
consider all the ways we could potentially
address the situation without relying on
police or prisons (or by becoming police-
like or punitive ourselves). As Ann Russo
notes: ‘When people have an opportunity
to think outside of the box, many more
options emerge for taking an active role
in responding to everyday violence.’
Some of these alternatives may ini-
tially feel harder or more challenging in
the short term than simply calling the
play a greater role in proactively reduc-
ing or stopping violence. But if putting in
the work now means better outcomes in
the long run and more enduring resolu-
tions, then our efforts will be more than
worth it.
We can also take steps to use our collec-
tive power to resist attempts to expand the
powers of police and prisons (see page 25).
There are many ways to get involved in
local, regional and global campaigns that
move us closer to that abolitionist future.
We can work together to shift from crimi-
nal justice responses to social justice ones.
We can work collectively to rethink ideas
of what justice means. 
Doing everyday abolition work is an
ongoing practice that requires strate-
gies at different levels. As the LGBTQI+
group Community United Against Vio-
lence reminds us, violence exists inter-
nally (within ourselves), interpersonally
(between people) and institutionally
(between institutions and individuals).
Work to address this needs to happen
at all three levels so that our everyday
efforts are contributing to the broader
social, systemic and institutional change
that will make a world without prisons
and police become possible.
In the words of transformative justice
organizers GenerationFive, whose goal
is to end child sexual abuse within five
generations: ‘Meaningful change is only
possible when we are willing to face and
take action to address the gaps between
the future we long for and the realities we
are living.’ O
SARAH LAMBLE IS AN ORGANIZER WITH
ABOLITIONIST FUTURES, A GROUP WORKING IN
BRITAIN AND IRELAND TO BUILD A FUTURE WITHOUT
PRISONS, POLICE AND PUNISHMENT. LAMBLE ALSO
TEACHES AT BIRKBECK, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON.
NEW INTERNATIONALIST
 Abolition

ABANDONED
BY THE SYSTEM
England’s schools funnel its most marginalized
young people towards the criminal justice
system, writes Zahra Bei. But abolitionists are
reimagining what’s possible.

MARCH-APRIL 2022 31
THE BIG STORY
I
met Hal* during my second year
working as a teacher at a Pupil Referral
Unit. He had a propensity to walk out
of lessons. Sometimes he would pace up
and down the hallway of the small build-
ing, aimless and angry. Other times he
would peer in through the glass panels
of the classroom doors. On occasion Hal
would just sit in the hallway on his own,
quietly. All the staff were fond of Hal who
was a tall, handsome, sociable, funny,
smart Black boy in his mid-teens. Over
time, he became known as ‘Hallway Hal’
– affectionately, we were told by the head-
teacher. Hal could not articulate why he
preferred the hallway to the classroom
and neither could we.
In England, Pupil Referral Units
(PRUs) are ‘alternative provision’ schools
for children and young people who have
been excluded from mainstream educa-
tion. Placements in these units cost the
state, on average, over $18,300 more
per pupil than mainstream schools.1
Yet, only one per cent of PRU students
achieve the grades needed to progress
to further education after the age of
16. 2 Most children and young people in
PRUs are boys (although the numbers
of excluded girls are increasing), socio-
economically disadvantaged and, dis-
proportionately, racialized as Black.
Hal, like too many other children,
had found himself excluded from the
mainstream without having his educa-
tional needs met nor identified. No rea-
sonable adjustments (to which he was
legally entitled) were ever made for him
because no official assessment of need
was ever carried out. Hal was likely trau-
matized, not by his home environment
or upbringing in a single-parent house-
hold, but by the cumulative experience
of being excluded from ‘the norm’ for
simply being his Black, male, working-
class, disabled self. Hal’s referral from
mainstream school pointed to ‘wilful
refusal to comply with basic rules and
expectations’ and the only legal grounds
for permanent exclusion in England: per-
sistent disruptive behaviour.
School-to-prison pipeline
During my time at the PRU, I met many
Hals – students that we as educators were
unequipped to engage, understand and
32
ultimately care for appropriately. We
had inadequate resources, understanding
and analysis, and insufficient reserves of
humility. Many of us also made plenty of
assumptions, underpinned by isms. We
were never offered any training to begin
to meet the multiple and complex needs
of the students in our care – despite all
of them being automatically coded as
‘SEND’ (Special Educational Needs and
Disability) on arrival.
Educators should critically interrogate
the punitive nature of how schooling is
organized and how the school-to-prison
pipeline functions. 3 This process of
marginalization begins in schools, with
tactics like seclusion rooms, and is com-
pounded by structural discrimination
and inequality leading to children and
young people being funnelled towards
the criminal justice system.
In England, boys are three times more
likely to be excluded than girls. Children
with additional needs and disabilities are
up to six times more likely to be removed
from mainstream education, while for
the most socio-economically disadvan-
taged it’s four-and-a-half times more
likely.4 Black Caribbean and Gypsy, Roma
and Traveller children have continued
to be the most excluded ethnic groups
from mainstream education, in spite of
decades of reforms and initiatives.
Over 80 per cent of children in young
offender institutions have been excluded
from school and over 60 per cent of adult
prisoners in England and Wales were sus-
pended or excluded as children. 5
Many young people do not thrive
in mainstream education because they
are not supposed to – the system is not
designed to let them. We are told there is
no money for extra support, early inter-
vention and prevention, yet the money
earmarked for measures that punish,
stigmatize, and amputate children’s
futures is easily found.
New and recycled reformist initia-
tives in education come and go, each one
claiming to be closing whatever the latest
‘gap’ is but without addressing structural
barriers. Too many well-meaning teach-
ers, and other professionals, who enforce
seemingly benevolent policies, are ine-
quality supervisors within a system that
(re)produces inequitable outcomes for
Previous page: Shut out – Too many children are
young people are being discarded by England’s
education system.
IEVGEN CHABANOV/ALAMY
the same groups of children and young
people, year after year, by design.
As education psychologist Vanessa
Parffrey has said: ‘Naughty children
are bad news in a market economy. No
one wants them. They are bad for the
image of the school, they are bad for
league tables, they are difficult and time-
consuming, they upset and stress the
teachers.’6
No going back
I came to abolition because of excluded
children like Hal. For me abolition
was first and foremost a political act of
refusal to be complicit with the education
system and the many permutations of the
school-to-prison pipeline.
Over time I began to come to terms
with my own miseducation as an educa-
tor. I was uncritically trained and unpre-
pared in many ways to be the type of
teacher that truly liberates. I was deeply
invested in a so-called meritocratic and
colour-blind system. Like so many in
the profession, I precariously navigated
teaching some of the most historically
excluded children and young people with
good intentions, saviourism and rising
Abolition gave me
a way to go on
being an educator
at a time when
I was seriously
doubting it all
NEW INTERNATIONALIST

anxiety. Halfway through two decades
in the classroom, thanks to students like
Hal, I irrevocably shifted to the abolition-
ist stance that the system is not broken
and that it cannot be fixed or reformed –
it functions as intended.
Abolition gave me a way to go on being
an educator at a time when I was seriously
doubting it all. It gave me the hope that
things could be different. Learning from
other abolitionists has been part of this
journey. Lessons in liberation, an abolition-
ist toolkit from the Education for Lib-
eration Network and Critical Resistance,
urges educators to think about how we can
and must, collectively, build three things
both inside and outside the classroom: our
analysis, our knowledge and our power.
From a UK perspective, Brick by Brick by
Cradle Community is a truly pioneering
resource for anyone willing to engage with
abolition as more than just theory, setting
out what we need to dismantle, as well as
the building work in front of us.
Abolition may seem a far-fetched, ide-
alistic proposition to many, yet in recent
years the failures, inequalities and injus-
tices brought about by decades of neo-
liberal policies in education and beyond
– such as marketization, austerity, high-
stakes testing and institutional aban-
donment – have led to multiple calls for
abolition and system change in England,
even from the most liberal and ‘moderate’.
Those that have gathered momentum are
the ones making a clear case for disman-
tling existing educational structures that
do not serve the majority, alongside viable
radical alternatives. These include Abolish
Eton; Abolish Academies (academies
being government-funded schools run
by trusts); and Abolish Ofsted and League
Tables (a call to scrap the body responsible
for school inspections, backed by the UK’s
largest education union).7
MARCH-APRIL 2022
AS A PERSON AFFECTED
This is an excerpt from a poem by Kadeem Marshall-Oxley, No More Exclusions trustee
and Youth Lead. It’s based on his personal experiences of exclusion.
‘As a person affected I’m sick of running around not knowing my next step
As a person affected I’m marginalized and upset
As a person affected I’m up all night – insomniac getting no rest, but they excluded my protest
As a person affected I’m my own contest
As a person affected I expect accountability
As a person affected I feel like the world is angry and racial biases are killing me’
Abolish Exclusions by No More Exclu-
sions (NME) is part this groundswell.
Since its kitchen table inception at the
end of 2018, NME has come a long way. It
was founded by Black teachers (including
myself) and young Black excluded people
with a freedom-dream – one in which
education is anti-capitalist, anti-racist,
feminist and internationalist. Our mission
is ambitious, perhaps even radical: to
build a Black-led grassroots, abolitionist,
anti-racist movement in education, with
racial justice and free quality inclusive
education for all within five to ten years.
NME’s latest publication What about the
other 29? And other FAQs grapples with a
wide range of education-specific questions
through an abolitionist lens.
Radical alternatives
In spite of the pandemic, interlocking
crises, multiple state failures and the
bleak landscape in education policy,
there are also schools in England that
give real hope, led by courageous head-
teachers and with educators who are
willing to do things differently. Barrow-
ford, a primary school in Lancashire,
has no punishments and no rewards (as
decided by the pupils) and a strong focus
on relationships, children’s agency, criti-
cal pedagogy and restorative approaches.
Van Gogh Primary in South London also
foregrounds the importance of relation-
ships, with the school conceptualized as
both family and community, and behav-
iour as communication. The New School,
also in London, is a non-fee-paying dem-
ocratic school where the students do not
wear a uniform, have a say in what they
learn and how they learn, and commu-
nity and inclusion are embodied values.
All three schools represent success-
ful challenges to the dominant punitive
and exclusionary logics of education in
Abolition
England, and we need more of them. At
their centre are relationships, nurture,
love, care and restorative practices, with
The New School working with aboli-
tionist practitioners on developing and
embedding restorative and transforma-
tive policies and tools.
Education in England desperately
needs radical change. Exciting abolitionist
experiments are underway with teachers,
young people, parents and others build-
ing the necessary alliances and collective
power with the potential to transform
education. That might just free us all. O
ZAHRA BEI IS A PHD CANDIDATE AT THE UCL
INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION, RESEARCHING RACE/
RACISM IN EDUCATION, SCHOOL EXCLUSION, DIS/
ABILITY AND THE SCHOOL-TO-PRISON PIPELINE.
ZAHRA IS ONE OF THE CO-FOUNDERS OF THE
COALITION OF ANTI-RACIST EDUCATORS (CARE) AND
NO MORE EXCLUSIONS AND A FORMER TEACHER
WITH 20 YEARS IN THE CLASSROOM.
nomoreexclusions.com
* This name has been changed.
1 Department for Education, Alternative provision
market analysis, October 2018, nin.tl/costs1; National
Audit Office, School funding in England, July 2021,
nin.tl/costs2 2 Anne Longfield, ‘Excluded teens are
often the most vulnerable…’, HuffPost, 26 March
2019, nin.tl/excluded-teens 3 Karen Graham,
‘School to Prison Pipeline’, Connected Sociologies,
15 March 2021, nin.tl/school2prison 4 Tania
Tirraoro, ‘Exclusions 2018…’, Special Needs Jungle,
20 July 2018, nin.tl/SEND 5 Anne Longfield,
‘Too many children in England…’, Children’s
Commissioner, 30 July 2020, nin.tl/excluded;
Ministry of Justice, Prisoners’ childhood and
family backgrounds, March 2012, nin.tl/childhood
6 Vanessa Parffrey, ‘Exclusion: failed children or
systems failure?’, School Organisation, 1994.
7 National Education Union, ‘Abolish Ofsted and
League Tables’, 7 April 2021, nin.tl/ofsted
33
THE BIG STORY

34 NEW INTERNATIONALIST

SO, WHAT’S THE
ALTERNATIVE?
Community organizations are helping keep people safe
where the police fail. Here are some examples from
Puerto Rico, Brazil and the US.
POLICING ALTERNATIVES &
DIVERSION INITIATIVE
R
esidents of Atlanta, in the state of
Georgia, can now dial 311 instead
of 911 if they feel the need to call
someone when a person is panhandling
or looking for food and shelter, but don’t
want to call the cops.
Calls are received by a referral co-
ordinator from the Policing Alterna-
tives & Diversion Initiative (PAD), who
dispatches a two-person team of harm
reduction specialists. The team brings
food and hygiene items and speaks to the
person who prompted the call to gauge
their interest in receiving support.
Through partnerships with the city,
county and other nonprofits, PAD aims to
divert people away from jail and toward
resources. Instead of being traumatized,
they are connected to options for tempo-
rary and permanent housing, recovery
services and physical and mental health-
care. Currently, PAD operates on weekdays
between 7.00am and 7.00pm – but by the
end of 2022 will be assisting with a 24-hour
diversion centre in Southwest Atlanta.
PAD’s workers envision systemic
change while enacting material change
for our most marginalized neighbours
every day. It’s a labour of love. When I
began a legal internship at PAD in June
Opposite page top: Atlanta’s Policing Alternatives
& Diversion Initiative dispatches two-person
harm reduction teams, instead of the cops.
DUSTIN CHAMBERS
Opposite page bottom: Through Abraço Campeão,
Alan Duarte works with young people to see a
future amid the pressure of constant violence and
police raids.
JOSIANE SANTANA
MARCH-APRIL 2022
2021, the Georgia Department of Correc-
tions began taking a quarter of my stipend
as a ‘cost’ for incarcerating me – a fee paid
out of funding for non-carceral solutions.
I decided to go to law school as a means
of building power as an abolitionist. Never
in a million years did I imagine I would
be working closely with police officers and
prosecutors. Most of the people served
by PAD are diverted to us by officers who
come into contact them, recognize they
have quality-of-life needs that can’t be
properly dealt with by the police, and call
PAD instead of proceeding with an arrest.
One of our long-time participants, a
veteran named Antonio Bryant, always
thanks the Atlanta police officer who
introduced him to PAD. He openly shares
his experiences at police training sessions
and with those experiencing homeless-
ness right outside our office. ‘I have to let
them know that they can make a change
the same way I did,’ he says.
After someone consents to PAD’s ser-
vices, care navigators serve as holistic
points-of-contact. Sometimes partici-
pants come into the office to vent to them,
or to pick up mail, some food or a coat.
Other times, as care navigators Caroline
Henderson and Devona Martin explain
to me, ‘We meet them where they are.’
Roughly 90 per cent of PAD participants
are living on the streets.
For the last quarter of 2021, 82 per
cent of our people were arrest-free in the
six months after becoming PAD partici-
pants. Supporters like to see progress in
numbers, but our real success is in the
qualitative results.
PAD’s values remain rooted in its
origins – a Black trans women’s movement
Abolition
to stop police brutality and the criminali-
zation of sex workers in Atlanta.
It’s said that 50 per cent of winning is
showing up and that’s what PAD does – it
shows up for its people, whether to give
them bus fare, sit behind them in court
or just listen.
LUCILLA HARRELL IS A STUDENT AT ATLANTA’S
JOHN MARSHALL LAW SCHOOL AND AN ACTIVIST
WORKING INSIDE AND AGAINST THE PRISON
INDUSTRY IN THE US.
atlantapad.org
TALLER SALUD
F
ounded as a feminist collective in
1979, Taller Salud’s primary focus was
women’s access to healthcare. But things
changed for the Puerto Rican organiza-
tion in 2009 when one of the young people
they were working with was shot dead.
Executive director Tania Rosario-Mendez
explains: ‘We started having dialogues
with the women in the community – the
mothers especially – whose first health
priority was to prevent their kids from
being killed. Until that was solved, they
couldn’t really care about anything else.’
For the first time, Taller Salud initi-
ated a programme, named Acuerdo de
Paz (peace accord or agreement), where
the main participants – and programme
leaders – were men. Since it began, Taller
Salud have recorded a dramatic drop
in violence in Loíza, the Black majority
municipality where they are based – as
much as 80 per cent in 2018.
Acuerdo de Paz focuses on commu-
nity accountability, and not the police,
to address harm. It includes direct inter-
ruption of violence to try and de-escalate
heated situations. Community mediation
is deployed to bring back into the fold
individuals who are perceived as violent.
Taller Salud also works to challenge
‘toxic masculinity’ and expectations
around male behaviour. ‘It’s a very heavy
burden and it just kills our boys, because
if you are trying to prove you’re a man
while you’re still a boy.… They feel very
relieved once they can accept a new nar-
rative,’ says Rosario-Mendez.
The police are not involved. ‘The main
reason is because our mediators need to
be trusted,’ notes Rosario-Mendez. ‘But
the political reasons have to do with how
abusive the police have been, especially
in Afro-Caribbean Black communities in
Puerto Rico – Loíza is no exception.
‘The police are not our allies and have
not proven to be effective, or at least
more effective than we are, at preventing
violence.’
35
THE BIG STORY
But Taller Salud is willing to train
police officers and strengthen collabora-
tion as part of its separate gender violence
programme – although Rosario-Mendez
describes this as a bit of a ‘ juggling’ act.
She is staying optimistic: ‘If you want
to work in violence reduction and eradi-
cation you have to believe it is possible to
do. If you are cynical about it, you should
change your line of work.’
tallersalud.com
AMY HALL
ABRAÇO CAMPEÃO
A
lan Duarte had never seen a man in
his family die from natural causes
when he set up Abraço Campeão
(Embracing Champions) in 2014. Guns
had always got to them first.
In Complexo do Alemão, one of the
poorest areas of Rio de Janeiro, where
Duarte was born and raised, gun battles
rage between police, drug traffickers and
paramilitary gangs with ties to the state.
Over 100 people were killed in Com-
plexo do Alemão and its surrounding
areas between January and August 2019;
50 per cent of these by the police, most of
them young Black men.
Duarte came from a family involved
in drug trafficking, but he credits taking
up boxing in the nearby Complexo da
Maré with keeping him off the streets.
Here he attended personal development
classes with an organization called Luta
pela Paz (Fight for Peace). ‘I could express
my emotions, talk about how I was feeling
or things that I was going through – there
was no other space for this.’
Abraço Campeão started on a small
football pitch in Complexo do Alemão
with a pair of old boxing gloves. Duarte
would train a small group of young-
sters while games went on around them.
A nearby abandoned locker room was
a back-up space when they needed to
shelter from rain or shoot-outs.
Since then, over 1,200 young people
have come through Abraço Campeão’s
programmes which combine martial arts,
weekly personal development classes and
after-school tutoring.
Such is Abraço Campeão’s popular-
ity that there is now a satellite academy
in Complexo da Penha. They are cur-
rently fundraising to build a new training
academy and educational centre.
Duarte explains that sport is a way to
open dialogue with young people. ‘We
inspire critical thinking,’ he says. ‘We get
people to think about why these shootings
36
are taking place, why they face racism,
suffer sexual violence. This helps to give
them tools that will protect them; it gets
them to think and to reflect before they act.
‘Young people in this area don’t have
access to any quality education and this
works as another form of violence against
them because it means that they’re pris-
oners in the territory, they don’t see any
way out. This can lead young people to
turn to drug trafficking as their only form
of survival.
‘Public policies are incredibly impor-
tant,’ Duarte adds. ‘Instead of investing
in weapons that then spread through the
streets, the government needs to invest in
things like sports centres, health centres,
technology development centres. Young
people would probably spend their time
there rather than being on the streets.’
abracocampeao.org
Interpreting by Sandra Young
AH
SAFE OUTSIDE THE SYSTEM
‘I
believe outreach is the heartbeat of
movements,’ explains Kerbie Joseph,
the co-ordinator of the Safe OUTside
the System (SOS) anti-violence pro-
gramme, part of the Audre Lorde Project
in Brooklyn, New York City.
‘If we’re not talking to people about
abolition, about de-escalation, about
community security, about racism, about
oppression as much as we can, we’re
going to lose out, because the system’s
recruiting too.’
SOS is led by and for lesbian, gay,
bisexual, two-spirit, trans and gender-
non-conforming people of colour, and
trains households, businesses, churches,
community groups – anyone who’s
interested – in de-escalating situations
without involving the police. The founda-
tion of the training is political education
around topics like racism and sexism,
moving into strategies for communities
to keep themselves safe.
‘We are teaching people how to be their
own security,’ Joseph explains. ‘It’s not
about carrying weapons and looking tough.’
One queer shelter SOS worked with
managed to lower calls made to the police
by around 30 per cent after staff had de-
escalation training. ‘People learned that
there’s different ways of having conversa-
tions with people, or letting people calm
down, or allowing people to walk away
instead of calling 911,’ she says.
During the Covid-19 pandemic SOS has
trained rent-striking apartment residents
‘Instead of
investing in
weapons that then
spread through
the streets, the
government needs
to invest in things
like sports and
health centres’
in de-escalation and their wider legal
rights. Youth centres have also been asking
for training, particularly since the 2020
uprising and Black Lives Matter protests.
Local businesses are another major
point of contact. ‘We go to them and say,
“Ok you say you support queer commu-
nities? Come get trained. Because that’s
how you’re going to keep queer commu-
nities safe.” It’s not about just putting a
rainbow flag out.’
SOS produces resources like violence
intervention safety tips and a safe party
toolkit to support people who want to
build safety in party spaces without
relying on the police. They also organ-
ize the annual Bed-Stuy Pride event in
Brooklyn, which Joseph says is the only
LGBTQI+ Pride event in New York City
to not involve the police. Instead, SOS
trains everyone involved – even vendors
running stalls – in community safety.
The collective has a mutual aid fund
for people who have experienced vio-
lence and recipients develop safety plans
for themselves, in order to help them
deal with it in the future. ‘None of those
plans include calling the police,’ Joseph
explains. ‘And after putting them together
every one of those folks feel empowered
and secure.’ O
alp.org/programs/sos
AH
NEW INTERNATIONALIST
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 COUNTRY
PROFILE
O
n a recent Uber ride in Kingston,
Jamaica’s capital, my driver told
me about his three other jobs. On
the weekends, he worked as an air condi-
tioning repair technician. He also tended
to a small plot of land in the countryside
to grow food for his family, and sold the
surplus for extra cash. He picked up Uber
as a way to fill the downtime during his
day job as a police officer. In a country
with the highest homicide rate in the
Americas, it’s remarkable that police offic-
ers have enough spare time to drive taxis.
Another recent driver was a civil
servant: even the salaries of stable gov-
ernment jobs aren’t nearly enough to
cover the basics. Many welfare pro-
grammes fail to reach the poorest indi-
viduals, who tend to be informally
employed without access to proper iden-
tification or supporting documentation.
38
At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic,
the Jamaican government created the
largest stimulus package in the country’s
history, but many of the citizens it tar-
geted faced barriers to accessing its funds.
Throughout a pandemic that’s now been
raging for two years, people have largely
been left to their own devices to figure out
how to make ends meet.
JAMAICA
While it may be tempting to think
Jamaica’s current predicament is a mere
consequence of being a relatively poor
country, actually it’s the result of centu-
ries of having terms dictated by outsid-
ers: the Spanish, the British and finally,
the International Monetary Fund.
After a long history of indigenous
Taino settlement, Jamaica was colonized
by the Spanish starting in 1494. Disease
and overwork brought on the rapid
decline of the Taino population, and in
1509, the first enslaved Africans were
made to work on the island.
From 1655 the English (later British)
governed Jamaica as a colony of exploi-
tation, marked by high rates of absentee
plantation ownership. During the slave
trade era, more enslaved Africans arrived
in Jamaica than in the entirety of the
American South. Slavery was abolished
in 1834. After a rebellion of Jamaica’s
Black working class in 1865 against dele-
terious working conditions, the Jamaican
parliament voted to abolish itself rather
than submit to workers’ demands.
Jamaica became independent from the
NEW INTERNATIONALIST

United Kingdom in 1962, after a failed
political federation with other British
territories. A little over a decade later
the country began taking loans from the
IMF to cope with successive crises in its
balance of payments.
In 1980, Jamaica’s Prime Minister
Michael Manley broke off all ties with
the fund as he grew dissatisfied with its
level of economic control. Jamaica had
endured a managed decline of 25 per cent
in its standard of living over the previous
two years in order to continue receiving
payouts. It was in its eighth straight year
of negative growth.
That same year, an election was held,
which saw at least 844 people killed and
the rightwing opposition Jamaica Labour
Party win an overwhelming majority.
After more than a decade of economic
stagnation, Jamaica found itself once again
AT A GLANCE
LEADER: Prime Minister Andrew Holness.
ECONOMY: GNI per capita $5,231 (Barbados
$17,380; United Kingdom $42,130).
Monetary unit: Jamaican dollar.
Main exports: aluminium, bauxite, hard liquor,
sugar, coffee, and tobacco.
Jamaica maintains a hugely negative balance of
payments, importing ($1bn) nearly three times as
much as it exports ($354m). The United States is
its largest trading partner.
POPULATION: 2.7 million. Population annual
growth rate: 0.4%. People per sq km 272
(Trinidad and Tobago 273; UK 281).
HEALTH: Under-5 mortality 14.19 per 1,000
live births (Trinidad and Tobago 17.5). HIV
prevalence: 1.6%. Jamaica’s healthcare system
continues to suffer from labour shortages due
to healthcare workers migrating elsewhere for
better wages.
ENVIRONMENT: Per capita CO2 emissions: 2.9
metric tonnes. Jamaica continues to pursue
bauxite mining, which threatens freshwater
Photos (clockwise from top-left): A woman and her children walking along a street in Ocho Rios; St Mark’s
Anglican Church in Rio Bueno; street vendors outside the Main Post Office in Browns Town; an oyster
vendor in Port Royal reaches for his homemade ‘ganja sauce’.
ALL PHOTOS BY TIM SMITH/PANOS.
MARCH-APRIL 2022
turning to the IMF in 2010 for help with its
debts. It wasn’t until 2018, after harsh aus-
terity measures, that the country managed
to get its debt to GDP ratio under 100 per
cent. Yet, it was not a status it would hold
for long; the Covid-19 pandemic put paid
to that.
With an economic growth rate that
hasn’t surpassed two per cent since 2006,
the Jamaican government continues to
store its hopes in its tourism sector, now
more volatile than ever thanks to the pan-
demic. Yet a new, more ecologically devas-
tating prospect may be around the corner:
oil exploration. Jamaica is already predicted
to reach its own point of no return in 2023,
when its capital city Kingston will achieve
climate departure, from which point on its
coldest year is forecast to be hotter than the
hottest year between 1960 and 2005. O
CHRISTINA IVEY
reserves, and clear coastal mangroves for the
construction of new beachfront properties.
Deforestation continues to outpace any
reforestation efforts.
RELIGION: Protestant Christian 64.8%, Atheist
21.3%, Roman Catholic 2.2%, Jehovah’s Witness
1.9%, Rastafari 1.1%, Other 6.5%. The Jamaican
constitution establishes freedom of religion
and freedom from religious discrimination.
Conservative churches hold an unrivalled sway
in Jamaican politics.
LANGUAGE: English (official), Patois
(unrecognized vernacular language spoken and
understood by the majority of the population).
Holness has mooted making Spanish an
official language but refuses to give the same
recognition to Patois.
HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX: 0.734, 101st
of 189 countries (Barbados 0.814; Trinidad and
Tobago 0.796).
STAR RATINGS
INCOME DISTRIBUTION ++ ++,,,
,,,
Inequality in Jamaica is lower than
most countries in Latin America and the
Caribbean, but nearly a quarter (23%) of
the population lives below the poverty
line, a figure that was already on the rise
prior to the pandemic.
LITERACY ++++
++++,
Jamaica’s literacy rate stands at 88.1%,
and it is one of the few countries where
women’s literacy rates (92.7%) are higher
than men’s (83.4%).
LIFE EXPECTANCY ++++
++++,
74.5 years (Barbados 79, Trinidad and
Tobago 73.5).
POSITION OF WOMEN +++ +++,,,,
Often touted as having a greater
percentage of women managers
(59.3%) than any other country in
the world, Jamaican women still
face a significant gender pay gap.
Additionally, Jamaica maintains a near
complete ban on abortion, though
up to 22,000 illegal abortions are
estimated to take place yearly.
FREEDOM ++ ++,,,
,,,
The Jamaican government’s crime
fighting strategy has come at the cost of a
massive loss of freedom for many. States
of Emergency are frequently used as a
blanket crime-fighting measure, as well
as Zones of Special Operations (ZOSOs)
which came about as a means of getting
around legal challenges to indefinite
State of Emergency declarations. The
police have also clamped down on
social media criticism of the government,
forcing some citizens critical of curfew
measures to make video apologies.
SEXUAL MINORITIES ++ ++,,,
,,,
Jamaica criminalizes same sex conduct
and gives broad discretion to police
officers to determine what conduct
violates the law, with even holding
hands being valid grounds for arrest.
Employment and rental discrimination
are also significant barriers for LGBTQI+
participation in society. Nevertheless,
PRIDE celebrations have been organized
yearly since 2015.
POLITICS +++
+++,,,,
Voter turnout has been falling for
decades, reaching a new low of 37.8%
in the 2020 general election that saw
the Jamaica Labour Party, led by
Andrew Holness, remain in office. The
opposition People’s National Party lost
17 seats. Most Jamaicans don’t feel well
represented by either party.
+++++
+++++Excellent
++++,
++++,Good
+++,,
+++,,Fair
++,,,
++,,,Poor
+,,,,
,,,,Appalling
39
CARTOON HISTORY

40 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
 Asma Jahangir

MARCH-APRIL 2022 41
CARTOON HISTORY

42 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
 Asma Jahangir

MARCH-APRIL 2022 43
 THE DEBATE

SHOULD EMERGENCY
AID BE NEUTRAL AND
YES UNCONDITIONAL?
Khin Ohmar and Toby Lanzer explore the
complex trade-offs made by humanitarians
working under repressive regimes.

TOBY: When we talk about humanitar-
ian aid, we mean support that focuses on
the immediate needs of people and com-
munities struck by conflict or disaster.
It’s different to development aid, which
concentrates on governments, infra-
structure and broader issues such as the
rule of law.  with the illegal military junta that has
For the past 30 years I have worked
in both crisis and development settings,
most recently in Afghanistan. I believe
that humanitarian aid must be neutral.
By that I mean that it’s given to people
in need regardless of their ethnicity,
nationality, race, gender or political affil-
iation. It follows that humanitarian aid
should be unconditional: people receive
it with no strings attached – or actions
expected in return by them or their gov-
ernments – because a
war or disaster has struck
AID AGENCIES HAVE
OHMAR: In Myanmar, people did have
a say in the politics of their country, in
the 2020 general elections. Yet, most
humanitarian agencies will not work with
the legitimate National Unity Govern-
ment or individual liberation groups as
this is seen as ‘political’, whereas working
attempted to seize power through vio-
lence is not. 
Nothing is neutral about working
with the military junta. The junta
attempts to control the flow of aid to
communities in an effort to weaponize
humanitarian aid, making humanitar-
ian agencies party to a strategy of col-
lective punishment. Agencies also lend
the junta legitimacy – the one thing it
desperately wants – by engaging.
There are other ways
to help people displaced

TOBY LANZER
their lives. by the junta’s attacks and
As a humanitarian
operating under the prin-
TO WORK WITH THOSE made poor by the col-
lapse of the economy

Toby has 30 years’ experience in

international affairs, mostly with the
ciple of neutrality, you
must dismiss all politi-
IN POWER – BE IT A – all caused by the mili-
tary’s coup attempt –
cal considerations. This DICTATORSHIP, DE that do not require the

United Nations in various peacekeeping,
humanitarian and development roles,
which have taken him to South Sudan,
Darfur and Timor-Leste among other
places. He retired from the UN in
2020 after completing an assignment
as Assistant Secretary-General in
Afghanistan, and now works as a
consultant.
means you provide medi-
cine, food and shelter
regardless of which side
people are on – or whether
they live under a regime
that abuses human rights.
Most people in places
such as Afghanistan or
Myanmar have little or no
FACTO AUTHORITY, OR
co-operation and legiti-
mation of the junta. For
ELECTED GOVERNMENT example, assistance via
cross-border aid. 
– TO ENSURE Humanitarian agen-
cies must not cling on to
THAT LIFE-SAVING the principle of neutral-
ity, particularly when
ASSISTANCE CAN working with one side

REACH PEOPLE IN NEED

say in the politics of their or the other is inher-
country. Simply put, help ently political. What
should be provided simply
because the people need it.  – TOBY Myanmar needs is prin-
cipled humanitarian

44 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
 Emergency aid

engagement that genuinely ‘does no escalating violence against the Rohingya

harm’. Granting the junta legitimacy and
power to dictate who gets help is harmful
to the peaceful future that people in
Myanmar are striving for.
TOBY: When you say that aid agencies
that ended in genocide in 2017 and con-
tinue to play down the junta’s crimes.
You mention ‘opposing sides’. In
Myanmar, these are: the military and the
people. The junta is deliberately cutting
off aid, food and medical supplies to

are granting the junta legitimacy you
are asserting that aid agencies are not
neutral. This reinforces that emergency
aid should be neutral and I am pleased
that you agree on this score.
Too often, humanitarian aid is thought
to support regimes or help keep them
afloat. I have never provided humanitar-
ian aid to a regime – it goes directly to
communities.  people? Yes, people in Myanmar need
When opposing sides think that aid
shouldn’t be given in certain places, or
disbursed by certain people, at certain
times, it almost always means that aid
agencies have got it right.
In my own experience, for example in
Darfur, it is necessary to work with some
leaders or regimes that are unsavoury.
Personally, I negotiated almost non-stop
with the regime of Omar al-Bashir (for
whom an arrest warrant was issued for
his leadership of genocide) to gain access
to populations in need of protection and
assistance.
My talks with the regime were seen
by some to confer legitimacy on Khar-
toum, and cross-border operations from
Chad were often considered but impos-
sible to conduct logistically. But I was
comfortable in the knowledge that, to the
maximum extent possible, aid agencies
were providing emergency assistance to
the communities who needed it most.
OHMAR: Perhaps it
NOTHING IS NEUTRAL
NO
entire communities, and bombing camps
for displaced people. These people in
areas of resistance are the most in need
– but the military will never allow agen-
cies to help them – not unless it has killed
enough people to consider the commu-
nity ‘pacified’. 
What if, instead of working with the
military, UN agencies worked with the
emergency aid. But they are fighting for
a country where it will not be needed.
That country would be realized much
sooner if UN agencies worked to provide
emergency aid outside military channels,
across borders, as they did in Syria.
TOBY: I am empathetic to your view
regarding Myanmar and I do recognize
that each situation is unique. But the
principles that underpin emergency aid
should apply in each setting regardless of
politics.
The application of neutrality is dif-
ficult. Working in the most challenging
political settings, as I did in places such as
Afghanistan or Darfur, was fraught with
different authorities wanting emergency
aid to go (or not) to certain communities.
There were also times, and now is no
exception, in Afghanistan, when those
who finance humanitarian response try to
use it as a ‘carrot’ or a ‘stick’. Aid agencies
– whether part of the
UN or non-governmen-

would be better to ask
‘Can emergency aid be
neutral?’ My point is that
in a highly politicized
context, it can’t. The
principle sounds good,
ABOUT WORKING WITH
THE MILITARY JUNTA IN
MYANMAR. IT ATTEMPTS
KHIN OHMAR
tal – should not work
in favour of any politi-
cal outcome or regime,
short- or long-term.
But they do have to is the founder and chairperson
work with those in power of Progressive Voice, a Myanmar

but is almost impossible
in practice.
Misguided attempts
to be neutral can tip the
balance of an already
unequal conflict towards
the aggressor. Not by pro-
viding support to them,
TO CONTROL THE
FLOW OF AID, MAKING
HUMANITARIANS
PARTY TO A STRATEGY
– be it a dictatorship, de human rights research and advocacy
facto authority, or elected organization, and a leading voice
government – as well as
with donors to ensure
internationally for peace and security,
democracy, and human rights in
that life-saving assistance
can reach people who
Myanmar. She co-authored Trauma and
Recovery on War’s Borders: a guide for
need it, in time.
In doing so, agencies
global health workers in 2012.

but by kowtowing to their OF COLLECTIVE should also work ever

PUNISHMENT
demands and refusing to more closely with, and
speak out. UN agencies via, affected people and
in Myanmar turned a
blind eye to the military’s – OHMAR communities to ensure
that they are consulted,

MARCH-APRIL 2022 45
THE DEBATE

listened to and made part of the decisions
guiding the provision of assistance.
In Afghanistan and Darfur our con-
stant engagement with all in power as
well as the communities themselves, and
in particular heeding the principle of
neutrality, enabled us to help keep mil-
lions of people alive. That is what matters
the most.
OHMAR: Keeping people alive through
providing them food and healthcare is
vital. But Myanmar is a country that
has never known starvation or absolute
poverty on the scale projected by the
UN today.
We have natural resources and a
benign climate that should place it
among the wealthiest countries in the
region. We have a well-educated and
resourceful population, more than able
to provide for ourselves. And we know
what we want: for aid agencies to be
political in a way that upholds principles
of ‘do no harm’ and is in line with the
will of the people of the country. That is,
in the case of Myanmar, to be free from
military oppression. This is the outcome
that matters most to our people.
The UN is providing billions of dollars
in aid to assist people in need due to con-
flict, often for decades. Do humanitarians
consider whether their role is prolong-
ing the conflict, while other parts of the
UN do nothing to end it? Where is the
accountability to the affected people?
No-one wants people to be left to die
because of a war they did not create. But
equally, no-one who finds themselves in
that war should have decisions made for
them, without their involvement. To be
neutral, you must listen to the will of the
people and reject the military in favour
of local actors. O

WHAT YOUR VIEWS ON: DO ZOOS CAUSE MORE HARM THAN GOOD?
Readers respond to a debate in a previous issue (NI 534).

DO YOU We can get excited about the wildlife in front of us

I can see that zoos might be a useful education tool – where else are my kids going
to see lions and penguins? But thanks to technology they can still see and hear these

THINK?
Tell us here:
letters@newint.org
We will print a selection of
your views in the next issue.
animals online and via the television. They also don’t only get excited by things they
can see in real life.
Having said that, there are plenty of opportunities for children (and adults!) to
experience wildlife wherever they are – even in cities. And it doesn’t have to cost as
much as a zoo ticket.
I wholeheartedly agree with Linda when she says: ‘Zoos should not be considered
a substitute for in-situ conservation of endangered species. Instead, more effort and
resources should be directed towards securing the already existing natural habitats for
wildlife and creating policies that prohibit exploitation of wildlife resources.’
We should concentrate on fighting climate change and environmental destruction,
and keeping animals from going extinct where they are – not keeping specimens in
zoos while the planet dies.
ROBIN MANCHESTER, UK

What will we do with the animals?

One issue I don’t see explicitly addressed when this issue comes up is what we do with
existing captive animals. We see little success in reintroducing captive-bred animals into
the wild, so where will we keep these creatures who were born and raised in captivity?
CHRISTINE VIA TWITTER

46 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
VIEW FROM Support Forces (RSF), led by Mohammed
‘Hemedti’ Dagalo, have been implicated
in buying, selling and enslaving migrants

AFRICA
near the border with Libya. Yet they have
also received financial support from the
EU to allegedly stop these practices. The

ILLUSTRATION: KATE COPELAND

Migration: Europe’s
Achilles’ heel
When, at the end of last year, Belarussian
president Alexander Lukashenko lured
hundreds of people into Belarus, with the
unspoken promise of free passage to the
European Union through Poland, it fuelled
yet another refugee crisis on Europe’s
border (See Currents, NI 535). This latest
humanitarian crisis comes amid continu-
ing loss of life in the Mediterranean, as
well as in the English Channel.
The European Union’s borders con-
tinue to be a site for the punishment and
weaponization of people trying to find a
better life. Lukashenko’s actions appear
to be a retaliation for EU sanctions on
Belarus, imposed after the EU’s elec-
tion monitor alleged widespread human
rights abuses in the aftermath of the
2020 presidential poll. But this isn’t the
first time that a national leader has used
refugees as a political bargaining chip, as
leverage against Europe.
In 2001, Libyan strongman Muammar
Gaddafi promised to ‘send so many refu-
gees to Europe that they would turn
Europe black’ and got significant political
concessions from the bloc as a result – until
he was deposed. Similarly, Sudan’s Rapid
RSF have been directly implicated in some
of the worst human rights abuses in Sudan
including the violent clampdown on pro-
tests and resistance to the October 2021
military coup.
Authoritarians know very well that
the bodies of refugees and migrants are
so evidently the EU’s Achilles’ heel. It is
a weakness that is easy to manipulate
because mainstream politics across the
region has made room for the far right
to shape narratives around migration,
particularly migration from the Global
South. Those fears are an easy handhold
for anyone trying to get something out of
the bloc.
At the same time, FRONTEX, the EU’s
border force, has pivoted from humani-
tarian missions at sea to programmes
of criminalization and enabling death.
The insidious logic that Europe is being
‘invaded’ has enabled this to take root
across the bloc. Member states like
Hungary have militarized their borders
and the number of refugees taken in by
EU countries, excluding Germany, con-
tinues to plummet.
The big anxiety for countries that are
dependent on European Union funding
or patronage is that these violent border
logics will become normalized elsewhere.
Sudan’s autocratic regime was one of the
EU’s key partners in refugee and border
management in the Sahel. Arguably,
Lukashenko was angling for a similar
concession as he deepens his campaign of
reprisals and violence against the opposi-
tion and resistance to his continued rule.
So far, the bloc has refused to play ball,
but it remains unclear how long the situa-
tion will last given that the wars continue
and the refugees keep coming.
The border crisis in Europe is a moral
crisis. A region which positions itself as
a worldwide moral arbiter has demon-
strated that its moral imagination cannot
extend to the safe movement of people
who come through its borders. Until this
crisis is resolved it is only a matter of time
before the next Lukashenko emerges. O
NANJALA NYABOLA IS A POLITICAL ANALYST
BASED IN NAIROBI, KENYA. SHE IS THE AUTHOR OF
DIGITAL DEMOCRACY, ANALOGUE POLITICS: HOW
THE INTERNET ERA IS TRANSFORMING KENYA (ZED
BOOKS) AND TRAVELLING WHILE BLACK: ESSAYS
INSPIRED BY A LIFE OF TRAVEL (HURST).

MARCH-APRIL 2022 47
FEATURE
Feel the fear
and carry on
In Iraq a growing number of women are now doing the
dangerous work of removing landmines – previously a
male preserve. Adrian Margaret Brune reports.
L
andmines these days come in all
kinds of different forms, buried and
unburied. They range from round,
plastic-cased and waterproofed VS-50
anti-personnel mines mostly used in the
Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s; to much larger
anti-tank VS-500s; to improvised explo-
sive devices (IEDs) that can be tripped in
a home with the flip of a light switch or by
lifting the lid of a pot on a stove.
In Iraq the landmines problem is vast.
Since the early 1940s, the country has
been involved in some internal conflict,
mostly between the defunct kingdom
and pan-Arabists, then with the Kurds,
followed by a serious contest against
neighbouring Iran and culminating with
the two Gulf wars. But none has been as
deadly as the seven-year clash of Daesh
(or Islamic State) versus the Kurdish
Peshmerga, the Iraqi Army and, at one
point, the US. ‘Iraq is a hugely contami-
nated country. There are still more than
1,700 kilometres-squared of minefields
– an area larger than London – to clear,’
says Jack Morgan, the country director of
Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a British
NGO. ‘The government is about to unveil
a strategy to make Iraq mine-free by
2028, but the more we survey the more
[landmines] we find.’
48
Although demining work in Iraq had
traditionally been done by men, in 2016
MAG decided to open it up to women.
After all, the organization had first
recruited female deminers as far back as
1995 in Cambodia.
Since then all-female and mixed teams
have been hired to demine contaminated
areas in Sinjar, Telafar, Hamdaniyah and
other districts in the Nineveh plains pre-
viously occupied by Daesh. Work is also
ongoing to clear minefields dating back
to the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. In 2020
an open call for women to join demin-
ing teams in Mosul received 120 applica-
tions in two days. The area had been the
locus of the genocidal campaign waged
by Daesh against the Yazidi minority. In
2021, MAG hired the first female team in
Sulaymaniyah governorate, Kurdistan.
‘Women are not treated any differently;
they have the same courses, same equip-
ment and same supervision as the men,’
says Morgan.
‘Be aware of every step’
For the women involved it is a life-
changing experience to be doing work
that is as essential as that done by the
male deminers. ‘Women are incredibly
detail-oriented and conscientious,’ says
Sahar, 27, as she appears on a video call
in a tan hijab and black fur-lined puffer
jacket after a day’s work. ‘Out in the
field, you must be able to concentrate –
be aware of every step – because if you
make the wrong one, you could lose
your life or cause another person to lose
theirs.’ Sahar was an eight-year-old girl
when the US invaded Iraq to push out
Saddam Hussein. She hardly remembers
the era – aside from playing games in
her Mosul neighbourhood. These days,
she is up at 3.00am to arrive at the MAG
base at 5.00am, where she gathers the
day’s remit. She and her mixed-gender
team of 14 drive together to the con-
tamination site, where they don their
camo-patterned personal protective
equipment, flak jackets and helmets and
pick up mine detectors to begin clearing
the site. Work ends around 2.00pm.
‘Every day, I have a lot of feelings,’ say
Sahar. ‘Sometimes I feel fear, but I just
forget it. I think of the people that I save
when I go in. I am making a living for my
family. I feel like we are superwomen and
supermen to save people’s lives – to save
my country.’
The Directorate for Mine Action
(DMA) in Iraq has set an ambitious sched-
ule during this period of relative stability
NEW INTERNATIONALIST
 Iraq’s women deminers

Sanarya practices searching for explosive

ordnance as part of her training as a deminer in
Chamchamal, Sulaymaniyah, Iraq.
MAG

and, despite the level of contamination,

wants the country cleared of mines by
2028. Demining is supervised by two
main authorities: the DMA is in charge
in federal Iraq, while the Iraqi Kurdistan
Mine Action Agency (IKMAA) covers the
Kurdistan region. Daesh is ‘down, but not
out’, according to Morgan, and continues
to place more mines and IEDs, as well
as launch attacks against the Peshmerga
and Iraqi Security Forces. Country-
wide lockdowns, curfews and movement
restrictions in response to the Covid-19
pandemic resulted in a slowing of the
demining pace in 2020.
But more donor funding became
available in 2021, after a lull of four years,
and MAG keeps hiring. Sanarya, 28, a
deminer in Sulaymaniyah, who grew
up near a minefield, joined in August,
trading in her job at a medical lab for
the field. Since completing her four-
week training in late September, she has
helped clear a number of mortar bombs
left over from the Iran-Iraq war, as well as
Italian-made Valmaras and V69 bound-
ing fragmentation mines – mines that
shoot spikes or shrapnel.
‘When I was approved for the train-
ing, my mom was really hesitant to give ground, or puts any explosive where worked with the organization for several
me the green light,’ says Sanarya, ‘but an unsuspecting person can trip it, is decades, and I hope that Sanarya and
my father was a big supporter and con- merciless.’ Sahar will remain for the long term.’
vinced her. Despite can-do attitudes, a proven Sahar says that she ‘loves this kind
‘I know what it’s like to live near work record and the ‘excitement they of job and will be in it to the end, until
bombs – not only how it affects people’s bring to the field as trail-blazers’, Morgan all the mines are gone in Iraq’. But she
safety, but also their quality of life. They acknowledges that the work is long, also acknowledges societal pressure for
are afraid to leave their homes or go to arduous and – at times – traumatic. ‘That women to marry, have babies and give
nice places. Whoever puts mines in the said, many of MAG’s deminers have up work outside the home. ‘In Middle
Eastern societies women find it hard
to proceed with their jobs – they need
the permission of their fathers and the
support of the family,’ she says. ‘Women
need to get a stronger position in society.’
Sanarya reflects this when she talks about
her future, saying: ‘It’s important [for
me] to stay in the job now, so if I have to
‘Whoever puts mines in the ground, leave some day, it will have inspired other
women to do it.’ O
or puts any explosive where an ADRIAN MARGARET BRUNE IS A LONDON-BASED
AMERICAN JOURNALIST WHO HAS WRITTEN FOR
unsuspecting person can trip it, PUBLICATIONS SUCH AS AIR MAIL, THE NEW YORKER
AND THE GUARDIAN ON WORLD AFFAIRS, HUMAN

is merciless’ RIGHTS AND CULTURE.

MARCH-APRIL 2022 49
 WHY SUBSCRIBE?

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 TEMPERATURE
CHECK
THE ULTIMATE 2022 CLIMATE TO-DO LIST
It’s likely to be another pivotal year for
climate activism. Around the globe, we
can expect to see energy directed in these
five key areas:
1 Keeping fossil fuels in the ground
It can’t be said enough: all new fossil fuel
extraction and exploration has to stop to
keep global heating below 1.5°C.1 This year
will see a ramping up of grassroots action
to block extraction.
In South Africa, activists are challenging
Shell’s coastal drilling plan; in Senegal, BP’s
gas extraction interests are a target while in
Uganda and Tanzania, people are challeng-
ing the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline.
Long-running battles continue in the
Americas. In Argentina communities,
including the Mapuche people, are resist-
ing the expansion of fracking. In Canada,
the indigenous Wet’suwet’en nation is
opposing the Coastal Gaslink pipeline.
Australians are doing battle with
Woodside’s massive gas extraction plans
in Western Australia and Adani’s enor-
mous planned coal mine in Queensland.
2 Get finance out
All of the above projects need finance.
That’s why many activists are now focusing
on cutting money flows. They are calling
for banks – such as Citi, Barclays and the
MARCH-APRIL 2022
Royal Bank of Canada – to stop funding
pipelines and coal mines. And groups like
350 are piling pressure on central govern-
mental banks to change the rules, building
on the pledge made at Glasgow by almost
40 countries to end direct overseas funding
to fossil fuel projects by the end of 2022.2
3 Real zero
As I’ve talked about here before (NI 529,
NI 532) there’s a live public debate around
the idea of ‘net-zero’, which will have very
real consequences for climate action. On the
one hand you have those calling for slash-
ing global emissions in half by 2030 and an
immediate end to all new fossil fuels extrac-
tion, in line with the science. Then you have
those pushing the far woolier and loophole-
ridden target of ‘net-zero by 2050’.
Polluting industries and governments
have seized on this latter target, as it allows
them to claim to be taking the crisis seri-
ously while still pushing ahead with pol-
luting projects, by spending money on
initiatives that they claim will ‘cancel out’
their surplus emissions.
One of the biggest problems – among
many – with this approach is the time-
frame: there’s no way that tree-planting
or carbon capture can absorb the requi-
site amount of carbon quickly enough for
our needs.
Words — Danny Chivers
In South Africa, activists are challenging Shell’s
drilling plans along the country’s eastern coastline.
MIKE HUTCHINGS/REUTERS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
4 Cross-border work
Campaigns for a Green New Deal and a
Just Transition have been highly influ-
ential in countries like the US and UK. 3
Although not yet enacted in policy, there’s
a growing consensus that governments
should be crafting a transition to clean
energy that benefits people and workers.
Following the mass mobilizations at the
Glasgow climate summit in 2021, there is
renewed pressure to take this conversa-
tion a step further.
Growing numbers of activists are now
calling for a global green deal that requires
the historically polluting governments
of the North to pay their fair share to the
Global South, both to cover the costs of
the clean energy transition and for the loss
and damage already wrought. The inter-
national connections formed at Glasgow
will, I believe, encourage climate move-
ments to put forward more joined-up
global solutions in 2022.
5 Pivotal elections
While no election result is make-or-break
for the climate, there are a number of key
polls this year.
In Brazil and Australia, citizens will
have the opportunity to replace govern-
ments linked heavily to deforestation
and fossil-fuel extraction; these general
elections will also be a moment for activ-
ists to pressure opposition politicians to
strengthen their climate policy.
In Colombia, the current 2022 presi-
dential frontrunner, Gustavo Petro, has
called for a new economic model with
less reliance on coal and oil exports.
In countries like France and the US,
meanwhile, people will be organizing to
defend what small climate progress has
been made from the threat of far-right
authoritarian forces. O
1 ‘IEA’s first 1.5°C model closes the door on new
fossil fuel extraction’, May 2021, priceofoil.org
nin.tl/NoNewFF 2 nin.tl/COPstatement 3 ‘Public
backs transition to green jobs’, The Big Issue,
Nov 2021, nin.tl/attitudes
51
THE INTERVIEW

52 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
 THE INTERVIEW

Antoinette Nikolova
The Bulgarian journalist is director of the Balkan Free Media Initiative,
created in April 2021 to monitor and campaign for the protection of
media freedoms in southeastern Europe. She speaks to Jan Westad about
the growing political distortion of the media and the influence of
authoritarianism in the Balkans.

You’ve spent the last two decades working
as a journalist in Europe, beginning with
reporting on the Yugoslav wars and later
in Brussels focusing on the European
Union. What was it that led you to create
the Balkan Free Media Initiative (BFMI)?
Media freedom is being systematically
attacked by governments across the
Balkans and we need urgent action to
protect journalism and democracy in the
region. Despite these problems cover-
age from the Western media is limited.
Reporters might cover two days of pro-
tests in Bulgaria, for example, but without
addressing the issues that are creating the
need to demonstrate – much to the frus-
tration of local journalists.
BFMI was founded in Brussels by
a group of journalists, and policy and
media experts, with the aim of constantly
monitoring developments in the Balkans
and bringing them to the attention of
wider audiences.
‘The Balkan countries are at a
turning point. There is a growing
How is BFMI different from other
journalist associations and NGOs that
promote media freedoms in the region?
Many excellent organizations report on the
harsh reality for journalists in the Balkans
who face constant threats and attacks.
However, we felt that the more insidious,
invisible assaults on media freedom do not
receive the same attention. For example,
the laws that allow political ownership of
media assets, or the tactics used by gov-
ernments to manoeuvre allies into key
positions at supposedly independent regu-
lators. This kind of commercial manipu-
lation destroys pluralism and is just as
dangerous to freedom of information [as
attacks] … but can be harder to measure.
What are some of the main tactics you
uncovered for undermining media
freedoms?
Our first report, The Invisible Hand of
Media Censorship, looked at case studies in
Bulgaria, Serbia and North Macedonia.
The main practices identified were control
of public broadcasters and regulatory
authorities, abuse of weak regulation on
transparency of ownership and abuse of
government subsidies to foster clientelism
in weak, over-saturated media markets.
In some cases, there is outright politi-
cal ownership. For example, in Bulgaria
it is still legal for politicians to own media
outlets. Another powerful example is the
behaviour of Serbia’s state-owned tel-
ecoms company Telekom Srbija, which
is known to have close ties to the politi-
cal leadership of President Aleksandar
Vučić. The report looks at two examples
of where Telekom Srbija entered lucrative
partnerships with close political allies of
Vučić who then purchased private media
outlets for very similar amounts.
More recently, a Telekom Srbija subsidi-
ary made headlines for reportedly paying
an eye-watering $6.8 million for rights to
broadcast English Premier League football
matches. This is more than China pays, and
10 times more than the current deal held by
United Group, a rival which broadcasts one
of the few remaining critical channels in
Serbia called N1. This has led to speculation
that the deal is designed to force United
Group out of the market and weaken N1,
one of the last independent news channels.

tension between adherence to What made you choose to focus on those

three countries for the first report?
democratic standards and courting We chose them because they are at three
different stages of integration with the
more authoritarian influences’ European Union. Bulgaria is already a
member, Serbia has been in accession

MARCH-APRIL 2022 53
THE INTERVIEW

negotiations for some time and North
Macedonia has started the accession
process. Looking at the three countries
revealed that across the board the EU is
failing to hold countries to account. Bul-
garia, an EU member, is misusing EU
funds. Vučić presents himself as a demo-
cratic modernizer to the EU while criti-
cizing them constantly when addressing
his domestic audience. North Macedonia’s
government promised widespread media
reform, but progress has been slow. A free
media is essential to protect democratic
freedoms, and the EU and wider interna-
tional community has to do more.
What kind of things should they be doing?
The EU needs to use its leverage to hold
these countries to account. It has to put
direct pressure on the leadership and
make future EU financial transfers to
Balkan states conditional upon progress
on reforms with regard to media and rule
of law. EU funds to states should be redi-
rected to professional media outlets with
strong editorial standards.
Another potential avenue is US sanc-
tions, which have proven effective in
Bulgaria. In April 2021, three Bulgarians
were sanctioned for corruption, includ-
ing the most dominant media mogul in
the country Deylan Peevski, who at one
time controlled up to 80 per cent of the
media market in Bulgaria. It’s no coinci-
dence that after Peevski sold his media
assets the Boyko Borissov government
fell in the next elections.
Members of US congress called on Pres-
ident Joe Biden not to hesitate to impose
asset freezes against certain Serbian indi-
viduals, too. Vučić is an incredibly sophis-
ticated and experienced manipulator of
the media. Many people forget that he
was the propaganda minister for Slobodan
Milošević. Given the presidential and par-
liamentary elections in Serbia are due
to take place next year, further US inter-
vention to stop corruption and the stran-
gling of independent media could support
genuine democratic change. It’s impor-
tant for stability in the region, but also for
broader geopolitical stability.
What do you mean by that?
The Balkan countries are at a turning
point. There is a growing tension between
adherence to democratic standards rep-
resented by the EU and the West and
courting the more authoritarian influ-
ences of Russia and China.
Take the recent problems in Bosnia
and Herzegovina, for example. Hate
speech and genocide denial coming from
state-owned media has been allowed to
thrive and Bosnian Serbs are now threat-
ening secession. All the while, Milorad
Dodik, the Serb member of Bosnia’s tri-
partite presidency, dismisses the threat
of European sanctions and intervention
by suggesting he could turn to China and
Russia for support.
There is a real risk of conflict return-
ing to Bosnia and it is starting from
disinformation and hatred in the main-
stream media. This is symptomatic of
the wider situation for media in the
region. It is a scary time for us journal-
ists. We have to act. O

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ethicalshop.org

54 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
VIEW FROM
BRAZIL
The gathering storm
In December 2021, storms killed at least
26 Brazilians in southern Bahia state and
left nearly 100,000 people displaced or
homeless. This is the kind of extreme
weather event that environmental activ-
ists and scientists have in mind when they
speak about climate change.
Other regions of my giant country
were affected by a lack of water. Large
sandstorms engulfed towns in the state of
São Paulo, where the dry winds whipped
up the soil left bare since native vegeta-
tion was cleared for agriculture.
Year after year, the government justify
the tragedies caused by the rains in Brazil
by claiming that they were simply ‘above
average’. But the graphs charting the curve
of rainfall from decades ago are no longer
a reliable reference. While it rains more in
some regions, it rains less in others.
Extreme rains and drought do occur
even without global warming. But the
difference now is that, with climate
change, their frequency increases: from
every decade to annual events. Everyone
is affected but the people who lose their
lives are those who inhabit the poorest
and most vulnerable places.
Some of these deaths could be avoided
– if public authorities would stop seeing
climate change as a remote hypothesis
MARCH-APRIL 2022
and start urgently adapting Brazil to this
new reality.
The government needs to build decent,
affordable housing and adopt effec-
tive early-warning measures for storms.
Instead, we have seen federal government
and its supporters in Congress rushing
to bring in laws that make life easier for
business, not vulnerable people.
Ricardo Salles, the controversial Envi-
ronment Minister who served until June
last year, was nothing if not pragmatic.
He recommended to President Jair Bol-
sonaro, in a meeting on 22 April 2020,
that the government take advantage of
the media’s focus on Covid-19 deaths
to undermine rules and regulations
designed to protect nature.
What many have been calling ‘hell’
around here is just a taste of Brazil’s new
normal. And now – as a result of lack of
effective measures taken by governments
to reduce carbon emissions, as we saw in
the ‘blah blah blah’ of the COP26 climate
meeting in Glasgow (to quote Greta Thun-
berg) – more is right around the corner.
In fact, Brazil was one of the stars
of COP26. But there is a yawning abyss
between our stated grandiose goals and
the daily practice of destroying our pre-
cious ecosystems.
ILLUSTRATION: KATE COPELAND
The Amazon rainforest, Cerrado
grasslands, Pantanal wetlands and
Atlantic forest biomes are being gravely
damaged by the dismantling of law
enforcement and the advance of projects
that make indigenous populations vul-
nerable, facilitate the theft of public lands
and cause environmental destruction.
In the coming decades, we will see
environmental refugees. Productive
farms will turn into desert, raising the
threat of famine and conflict over water
and arable land. I fear that many people
will die in Brazil and across the world as
the planet becomes more inhospitable.
Every year, we see an updated list of
animals at risk of extinction in Brazil as
a result of human action. Our species,
however, will survive – at least the richest,
who will buy their protection, for a time.
And what will be the fate of the poorest?
Will they be left to drown, all the while
believing it’s God’s will, like the people in
Southern Bahia? O
LEONARDO SAKAMOTO IS A POLITICAL SCIENTIST
AND JOURNALIST BASED IN SÃO PAULO. HE IS
A CAMPAIGNER WITH THE INVESTIGATIVE NGO
REPÓRTER BRASIL, WHICH HE ESTABLISHED IN 2001.
55
FEATURE

A child’s right
to be forgotten

ANDY K

56 NEW INTERNATIONALIST

Roxana Olivera tells a cautionary tale of her dogged
attempts to get an abusive, intrusive photograph – taken
without its subject’s consent – removed from the internet.
S
omewhere out there, there is an
old photograph of a very young
child standing completely naked,
showing the marked signs of a most
unusual medical condition.
I met that child when she was well into
her old age, one winter afternoon over a
decade ago.
Mariana (not her real name) had just
returned from the cemetery where her
husband is buried. Dressed all in black,
her hands clutching a small-change
purse wrapped in a clear plastic bag, she
regarded me warily when she saw me
waiting by her front door.
‘I am not Mariana’, she protested when
I greeted her by name. ‘I am her sister.
What do you want from her?’
But I knew she was Mariana. There
were dark circles under her droopy eyes,
just as in the photo that had accompa-
nied the news of her medical case several
decades earlier. Her hands trembled as
she tried to unlock the door to her crum-
bling plastic-roofed shack.
I explained that I had just finished
reading a recent book about ‘her sister’
and that I only wished to speak to her
about conflicting information contained
in that publication, as I was conducting
research about her medical condition.
Throughout
her life, perfect
strangers have
invaded her privacy
without regard
for her emotional
wellbeing
MARCH-APRIL 2022
Mariana listened in perfect silence,
eyeing me suspiciously. Upon hearing
the name of the author of the book, her
nervousness turned to fury.
‘God knows whether that man is even
a doctor! Are you a friend of his? Did he
send you here? Why on earth should I
give a damn about your research?’ she
shouted, veins throbbing at her temples.
‘I am not a guinea pig!’
Mariana’s reaction startled me.
Unknowingly, I had opened old wounds,
and I felt profound guilt for making them
fresh again. My unexpected visit, as it
turned out, was just another one of those
harassing knocks at the door that she had
endured throughout her life.
‘I recognize you!’ she snapped, jabbing
a finger at my face. ‘You have been fol-
lowing me’.
I tried reassuring her that this was not
the case, but Mariana struggled to take
my word for it. Her privacy has been
repeatedly invaded by complete strangers
since childhood. Treating her as an object
of their curiosity, her emotional wellbe-
ing has been collateral damage. She now
finds it difficult to trust anyone.
‘Please forget me,’ she then said, her
voice cracking. ‘I just want to be left alone’.
Looking for answers
Mariana’s photograph was originally
taken without her consent in the course
of a medical examination, years before
the internet existed. Soon after, it was
published in a French medical journal,
along with her full name and medical
details. Her story then appeared in news-
papers and magazines around the world.
Decades later, when it was posted online,
the photograph quickly went viral, taking
on a life of its own. It has now been viewed
millions of times, making it impossible
for her to be left in peace.
Unquestionably, the circulation of
such sensitive material violates Mari-
ana’s privacy, dignity and family-life
interests as guaranteed by national laws
Digital privacy
and international human rights treaties.
Less clear, though, is the practical ques-
tion of how one goes about stopping the
infringement of these rights. What can be
done to stop the circulation of harmful
(and non-consensual) content of this
nature? Where does one even begin?
Haunted by Mariana’s lifetime of dis-
tress, and in search of answers, I landed
at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto.
As journalist-in-residence there, I
worked from 2017 to 2019 with a team
of 20 law students and 18 law professors,
alongside lawyers from several countries,
on a project entitled ‘A Child’s Right to be
Forgotten’. Our objective was to analyse
Mariana’s case and find a potential solu-
tion to this extraordinary situation.
After a careful examination of multi-
ple areas of law and a plethora of expert
opinion – from legal academics, jurists,
ethicists, medical professionals, trauma
psychologists and scientists – we pursued
several lines of approach.
Complicated matters
First, we considered copyright law to
try to stop the circulation of the photo-
graph. Given that it had been first pub-
lished in France, UK legislation presented
an opportunity to undertake corrective
measures. Through the Berne Conven-
tion, the UK and France recognize each
other’s copyright regimes. In France, the
copyright was technically still valid –
provided it could be established that the
photograph was an intellectual creation
under French law. If Mariana’s picture
was being published online without the
authorization of its owner, a request
could be made to the rights holder, we
reasoned, to revoke any use not bound by
contract.
But we ran into difficulties locating the
owner of the copyright as the image had
no credit line. We tried contacting the
medical journal in France, only to dis-
cover that it had since been acquired by
another publisher, Elsevier Masson.
57
FEATURE
We reached out to Elsevier, but, sur-
prisingly, they did not know whether or
not they owned the copyright.
In a baffling email response, an
employee from the company’s copyright
unit wrote: ‘[W]e are unable to confirm
that we are the legal copyright holders
of the figure… and that we are entitled
to deliver permissions to third parties.
Therefore, although Elsevier Masson
has no objection for you to use the
aforementioned material subject to suit-
able acknowledgement to the source, it is
important that you obtain, prior to use,
written permission from the author(s) (or
heirs) of the figure…’.
The only possibility of finding out who
held copyright for the photograph was to
ask the publisher if they had kept a copy
of the contractual agreement with the
photographer. But that turned out to be
a dead end.
Further into the maze
Next on our list was image rights leg-
islation. The island of Guernsey has
legislation for the protection of a per-
son’s image rights. This is a somewhat
niche course, used mostly by celebri-
ties, enabling them to register their
image rights there and bring legal action
against breaches. It sounded promising,
but only Mariana, or someone acting
on her behalf with her consent, could
assert those rights. Seeing how Mariana
avoided all contact with outsiders, and
determined to prevent exacerbating
her trauma by raking it all up again, we
couldn’t pursue this route further.
We then looked into data protection
and the right to be forgotten as a new line
of inquiry. As it is in the EU, personal data
is protected in Mariana’s country. Given
that Mariana has not consented to the
use of her personal information on the
internet, a request can be made to those
processing her information to remove it.
This can be accomplished pursuant to her
country’s Data Protection Act.
Better still, a request can be made
directly to search engines (as opposed
to individual websites) to remove search
results containing infringing content.
While this course of action normally
would require Mariana’s direct interven-
tion, there is a legal provision that makes
it possible for a third party to lodge a
formal complaint of infringement with
the National Authority for the Protection
of Data in that country. Mariana’s consent
was not required for this action.
58
Encouraged by this new window of
opportunity, we prepared to make our
move. But soon other complexities arose.
The complaint to the regulatory agency
had to be filed in person, which we did
– even though this required a long-dis-
tance trip. After securing the assistance
of lawyers with relevant experience in
Mariana’s country, we proceeded with a
complaint against Google for infringing
on her rights. But then, bureaucracy took
on a Kafkaesque turn.
Our case was deemed inadmissible.
Why? It turned out that Mariana’s consent
was required after all for any action ini-
tiated to remove the very
material that had been origi-
nally made public without
her consent. But had Google
Countless vulnerable
obtained Mariana’s consent
before making her personal
people are being
data public online? Of course
not. Could the regulatory
harmed by the online
agency make that inquiry?
They failed to address this
circulation of intrusive
question. Two appeals later,
our case was closed.
content, while internet
We then resorted to a
non-legal approach. Bearing
intermediaries profit
in mind that there is public
interest in this matter, as well as a legal
and moral obligation to put an end to
decades of harm, we brought the case
to the attention of five United Nations
special rapporteurs seeking their inter-
vention. Unfortunately, that avenue pro-
duced no fruitful outcome either.
A letter was then sent to Elsevier brief-
ing them on the serious privacy impacts
of the use of Mariana’s name and image
in their publications. Would they con-
sider removing them? Or at least blur-
ring her face when using that image
and anonymizing her details? It went
unanswered.
No matter what we tried, we came up
against hurdles.
The bigger picture
At the end of the day, this work is not
just about Mariana. Her story is part
of a much bigger picture. It is the story
of countless vulnerable people being
harmed by the online circulation of
intrusive content, while internet interme-
diaries profit from such material.
According to trauma psychologists,
Mariana will likely never be able to
develop trust in others. The consequences
of her childhood trauma and public
exposure are profound, dramatic and
long-lasting. And that is to say nothing
of the strangers interested in her story,
whose curiosity makes her relive her
trauma again and again.
The literature on image-based abuse
suggests that the re-posting of such
images is, in and of itself, a form of abuse.
The online availability of the images
causes great damage to survivors.
Taking into account Mariana’s lack
of agency, it is unreasonable to expect
her, or someone in a similar situation,
to stand up to tech giants and fight for
her right to privacy. Given that online
material can be shared globally, it is
challenging to identify the jurisdiction
in which infringements take place.
Even when there is agency, case law
shows that filing a take-down request
against search engines and social media
platforms is onerous. While they boast
about their global reach and pres-
ence, they can be quick to argue that
they are based in the state of California
and are not bound by laws outside that
jurisdiction.
Mariana’s story is a cautionary tale of
the consequences of failing to remove
harmful content from search engines and
the internet. Privacy matters. To protect
it, regulation is essential. But legislation
also needs strengthening to be sensitive
to the trauma of those suffering from the
unwanted online distribution of harmful
personal data.
Remember that behind a photo there
is a real person; it’s not just an image
waiting for a click of your mouse. O
ROXANA OLIVERA IS A TORONTO-BASED
INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST. HER REPORTING HAS
APPEARED IN HUFFINGTON POST, THE WALRUS, EL
PAÍS, REVISTA IDEELE AND THE UNITED CHRUCH
OBSERVER. HER WORK IS INFORMED WITH A PASSION
FOR THE RULE OF LAW, HUMAN RIGHTS AND SOCIAL
JUSTICE, AND HAS BEEN PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH,
SPANISH AND GERMAN.
NEW INTERNATIONALIST
SOUTHERN
EXPOSURE Highlighting the work of artists and
photographers from the Majority World

Grace Baey is a Singapore-based photographer and filmmaker who has been widely exhibited. Trained as a human geographer she
is especially interested in issues of migration and mobility, gender, identity and place. Her personal projects focus on transgender and
queer identity in Southeast Asia.
This image from her ‘Living Choices’ series has personal conflict bubbling under its serene surface. It portrays Chris, a 19-year-old trans
woman, posing with her doting grandfather in Yangon, Myanmar. She had moved into his house after facing family pressure back home in
Bahan Township (one of the more upmarket areas of Yangon), where her relatives insist on her living life as a heterosexual man. Although largely
accepting of her gender identity, Chris’s grandfather is particularly concerned for her future, as well as the potential health risks involved with
gender confirmation surgery. He insisted she change into male clothing to be photographed with him.
gracebaey.com

MARCH-APRIL 2022 59
FEATURE

Stolen
treasures
Taken during a violent British raid, the Benin bronzes
have sat in Western museums and private collections
for over a century. Kieron Monks reports on Nigeria’s
battle to get them back and what it means for the
wider push to return works robbed from Africa.

‘W
e are very happy and excited,’
said Abba Issa Tijani ahead of
the ceremony.
The director general of Nigeria’s
National Commission for Museums and
Monuments (NCMM) had arrived in
Cambridge with Prince Aghatise Eredi-
auwa, younger brother of the Oba (King)
of the Royal Court of Benin, the ancient
kingdom in what is now southern Nigeria.
Aides buzzed around the pair, attempting
to corral herds of TV crews.
The delegation was in town to receive
a 400-year-old bronze cockerel that was
looted by British soldiers during the
violent conquest of the Kingdom of Benin
in 1897. Thousands of masterfully-crafted
artefacts, some dating to the 13th century,
were stolen. These objects, dispersed to
museums and private collections across
the world, came to be known as the Benin
bronzes – although many are made of
brass and ivory.
With the handover of the cockerel on
27 October 2021, the University of Cam-
bridge became the first British institution
to return a bronze. The following day,
the Nigerian delegation travelled north
to the University of Aberdeen to receive
another – a sculpture depicting the head
of an Oba. And a few weeks earlier, an
agreement was struck with the German
government to transfer ownership of
around 1,100 bronzes.
‘The coming years are going to be
very busy for us,’ says Tijani as he reels
off a list of institutions in Europe and
the US that the Nigerian government is
at various stages of negotiation with. ‘We
are not going to relent.’
Devastating loss
Campaigns for the restitution of stolen
artefacts are growing around the world,
with Ethiopia and the Republic of Benin
among the nations to secure returns in
2021. But Nigeria has always been at the
vanguard of the movement, and no claim
has been harder-fought than for the
bronzes.
This is partly because of the shocking
violence of the raid of 1897. Dozens of vil-
lages were annihilated and Benin’s inhab-
itants were massacred with high-powered
weaponry. An empire that had stood for
centuries, and stretched from the Niger
Delta to Accra at its height, was crushed
and its territory annexed to Britain.
The campaign is also sustained by the
great importance of the bronzes to Nige-
rians, particularly Binis. ‘The idea that
they are simply artefacts is in many cases
misleading,’ says Palace Chief Charles
Edosomwan, spokesperson for the Royal
Court, explaining that some were used
for private rituals of supplication to the
ancestors. Others formed a visual diary
of life in the Court, depicting events and
characters.
Edosomwan believes the losses, in such
brutal and humiliating circumstances,
have inflicted lasting damage to the
national psyche. ‘You can’t fully recover,
you can only compensate,’ he says. ‘A lot
of children grew up not knowing their
history.’
Enotie Ogbebor, a Bini artist, explains
through analogy: ‘If the works of Da
Vinci, Michelangelo, Bach, Shakespeare,
Picasso, and Monet...were taken from
Europe,’ he asks. ‘Do you think European
civilization would be where it is today?’
Rightful returns
Nigeria has been seeking the return of
its heritage since before independence in
1960, with limited success.
Several factors have contributed to the
recent breakthroughs, including greater
awareness and activism about stolen
artefacts. The worldwide Black Lives
Matter movement has drawn connections
between the crimes of colonialism and

60 NEW INTERNATIONALIST

racial injustice today. Tijani also credits
the determination of the University of
Cambridge students who campaigned to
return the cockerel.
A flurry of new books has also laid bare
the brutality of the raid on Benin and the
negligent treatment of its spoils. In The
Brutish Museums, author Dan Hicks finds
centuries-old masterpieces used as door-
stops in forgotten basements, undermin-
ing Western museums’ argument that
they are the most assiduous guardians.
The Benin Dialogue Group (BDG) has
brought the Nigerian government and
Royal Court of Benin together with Euro-
pean museums to discuss plans for resti-
tution since 2007, laying the groundwork
‘You can’t fully recover,
you can only compensate...
A lot of children grew up
not knowing their history’
MARCH-APRIL 2022
for recent breakthroughs. The Group also
launched the Digital Benin project, which
tracks and catalogues the thousands of
works taken in 1897 alongside historic
photographs and documentary mate-
rial.1 This is particularly useful as many
museums have not made thorough inven-
tories of their African collections.
Nigeria is also working with civil
society groups such as the Art Loss Reg-
ister to pursue pieces stolen since inde-
pendence. A bronze from the city of
Ife was recovered via the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York after the
Register exposed a fake letter approv-
ing its sale, supposedly signed by Nige-
rian officials. The letter was typed on
Colonial looting
Swapsies: Nigerian artist Lukas Osarobo-Okoro,
photographed outside the British Museum in
London. Osarobo-Okoro and the Ahiamwen
Guild of Benin have offered to donate new
artworks to the institution.
DYLAN MARTINEZ/ALAMY
Microsoft Word but dated to before the
software was available.
Another avenue for the return of valued
works is UNESCO’s restitution committee,
at which Nigeria recently made its first
claim for an Ife head stolen in 1987. The
bronze, valued at more than $5.3 million,
was acquired by a Belgian trader before
being seized by police at a British auction
house. The trader has since dropped his
demands for the full value of the piece
down to about $53,000 but Nigeria is only
offering the $265 he paid for it. A resolu-
tion is expected shortly.
According to a report commissioned
by the French government, more than 90
per cent of ‘the material cultural legacy’
of Sub-Saharan Africa is held outside
the continent. 2 But while more Western
governments and museums are becom-
ing amenable to restitutions, many are
still resisting. The British Museum holds
the world’s largest collection of around
61
FEATURE
According to a report commissioned
by the French government, more than
90 per cent of ‘the material cultural
legacy’ of Sub-Saharan Africa is held
outside the continent
900 pieces and has long been a focus of
Nigerian campaigning. In October 2021,
Tijani served director Hartwig Fischer
with a formal request for their return,
which the British Museum says is being
‘reviewed and addressed’.
National museums in Britain and
other European countries often point to
laws that forbid them from ‘deaccession-
ing’ – permanently removing – works
in their collections. In 2020, former
UK Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden,
threatened the funding of museums that
return or remove controversial objects. 3
But there are inconsistencies in how
stolen works have been treated. Tijani
points to exceptions created for artworks
looted by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s,
and says Nigeria may lobby the British
government to change the law. Germany
and France have taken steps to override
similar statutes, for example in 2020
French senators approved a bill to return
27 colonial-era objects in museum collec-
tions to the Republic of Benin and Senegal
while Germany is implementing new leg-
islation for the return of the Bronzes.
‘On our terms’
Not every artefact has to come home.
Tijani emphasizes that Nigeria is primar-
ily seeking recognition of ownership and
some can stay in Europe on loan. There
can be collaborative exhibitions. The
objects have value as ambassadors abroad
showcasing the skill of Nigerian artists
and the richness of their traditions. ‘But
this must be on our terms,’ he says.
Western museums that have expressed
concerns that large-scale restitution
could decimate their collections need
only look to Germany for a chance to
see the benefits of such action, believes
62
Barbara Plankensteiner of the Museum of
Ethnology in Hamburg, and a co-founder
of the BDG.
‘I don’t think it will damage museums,’
she says. ‘Restitution will establish new
relationships and partnerships.’
One possibility is for Western museums
to acquire more contemporary Nigerian
and African art while letting go of historic
pieces. The Ahiamwen Guild of Benin has
made an offer to the British Museum of a
vast plaque weighing two tons to replace
bronzes. Ahiamwen co-founder Lukas
Osarobo-Okoro says they wanted to draw
attention to the quality of artisanship that
still exists in Benin.
‘[The bronzes] are portrayed like
dinosaur fossils from some desert, they
are not associated with living, breathing
people,’ he says. ‘But we never stopped...
We can create a new era of artefacts that
will have the same impact and amaze
people in the same way.’
The British Museum is open to the
proposal, says Osarobo-Okoro, and
further announcements will follow the
resolution of logistics planning.
Celebrating beauty
Nigeria has detailed plans for the long-
awaited return of the bronzes and to
capitalize on this historic moment.
The NCMM is developing several new
museums, including one in the capital
city of Abuja and the Royal Museum in
Benin next to the Oba’s palace. Tijani says
security is being finalized for travelling
exhibitions intended to maximize access,
while smartphone apps are being devel-
oped to appeal to young audiences.
The project that has attracted most
attention is the Edo Museum of West
African Art, designed by star architect
David Adjaye, under development by
the non-profit Legacy Restoration Trust
(LRT). This complex will include a
museum showcasing art of the region,
an archaeology site, storage facilities and
event spaces.
‘The idea is to try to attract creative
industries, as well as being relevant to
local audiences,’ says LRT director Philip
Ihenacho.
Ogbebor, a trustee on the LRT board,
believes the bronzes can be inspirational:
‘My hope is that they awaken the interest
of the people to find out more about their
history, to take pride in their history,
culture and tradition, and also to be influ-
enced by the sheer beauty of these works
to want to emulate it in their professions.’
The impact will register beyond
Nigeria. Tijani says he is in regular contact
with other countries seeking to reclaim
heritage and he hopes returns of bronzes
can set a precedent for further returns.
Tentative steps at a region-wide approach
are underway.
He also hopes this might prompt a wider
re-evaluation of relations between former
colonies and colonial powers: ‘Before, arte-
facts were stolen and taken to these coun-
tries. Now they are exploiting resources
like oil, gas, minerals,’ he says. ‘We should
be partners for advanced countries rather
than [suffer] this exploitation.’ O
KIERON MONKS IS A FEATURE WRITER FOR OUTLETS
INCLUDING CNN, THE GUARDIAN, AND PROSPECT
WITH A FOCUS ON SOCIAL ISSUES AND MOVEMENTS.
1 digital-benin.org 2 Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte
Savoy, ‘The Restitution of African Cultural
Heritage…’, November 2018, nin.tl/sarr-savoy 3 Peter
Stubley, ‘Museums risk funding cuts if they remove
controversial objects…’, Independent, 27 September
2020, nin.tl/funds-risk
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THE LONG READ

NEW INTERNATIONALIST
MINCER: SHUTTERSTOCK/MONTAGE: ANDY K
 Capitalist politics

Words: Neil Vallely

The politics
of futility
Our deep desire for change is continually thwarted
by the limiting political choices on offer. Political
theorist and philosopher Neil Vallely digs into the
roots of apathy and polarization.

O
n one of his many post-presi-
dential speaking tours, Barack
Obama told a 2017 summit
on food innovation in Milan: ‘People
have a tendency to blame politicians
when things don’t work, but as I always
tell people, you get the politicians you
deserve.’1 He bemoaned the low voter
turnout and leftist apathy that facili-
tated, he believed, the election of Donald
Trump. ‘If you don’t vote and you don’t
pay attention,’ he told the audience,
‘you’ll get policies that don’t reflect your
interest.’ We might counter that his eight-
year term was characterized by a set of
policies that did not reflect the inter-
ests of the majority who voted for him
– from the bailout of corrupt financial
institutions to the escalation of drone
warfare and US imperialism. We could
also suggest that his extension of a largely
neoliberal agenda throughout his term
could only lead to political apathy. Even
the extension of healthcare provisions
to millions of uninsured US citizens
under the euphemism of Obamacare –
the major political victory of the Obama
era – reinforced the marketization of
healthcare and further enabled insur-
ance and pharmaceutical companies to
capitalize on the ill-health of millions
of Americans. 2 The fact that parts of the
Affordable Care Act were written in col-
laboration with these very companies
was a warning sign. 3
If Obama represented hope, as his
initial 2008 election campaign promised,
then his decision to reinforce the very
economic and social system that engen-
ders hopelessness undoubtedly helped
stoke the rightwing anger and leftwing
apathy that permeated the 2016 US presi-
dential election. Also, if voter turnout
was the real problem with the 2016 elec-
tion, then the huge turnout for the 2020
election showed that Trumpism is built
around a sizeable anger against, and deep
desire to move beyond, the neoliberal
status quo in the US. While Biden won
the presidency, the Democrats will have
to reckon with this reality sooner rather
than later.
But, more significantly, Obama was
talking of a kind of mythical democracy,
where there exists a direct connection
between the people and their representa-
tives, and where legislation straightfor-
wardly reflects the will of the majority.
This imagined democracy of universal
inclusion, participation and unity is the
holy grail of contemporary liberal poli-
tics. We all have a say. Every voice matters.
The danger in promoting this simplis-
tic democratic vision is that it bears no
resemblance to the actual reality of con-
temporary democracy. Governmental
politics is increasingly influenced by a
whole host of unelected players – from
PR gurus and lobbyists to choice archi-
tects and nudge theorists – and legal and
bureaucratic systems routinely silence
voices through modes of exclusion and

MARCH-APRIL 2022 65
THE LONG READ
punishment. Moreover, Obama’s mythical
democratic image obfuscates the fact that
contemporary democracy is routinely
used to cement neoliberal hegemony –
especially a US democracy that has legal-
ized corporate bribing of political parties
– endlessly reinforcing the interests of
the wealthy and reducing the role of the
demos to the capacity to vote every few
years. How could we possibly get the poli-
ticians we deserve in such circumstances?
The more pertinent question being: what
have we done to deserve this?
Emily Apter provides an indirect
answer to this question in her book Unex-
ceptional Politics. Apter locates a discon-
nection between the relentless expression
of the political in everyday life and the
institutional practice of politics. Here,
she makes a distinction between ‘small
p’ politics – what might be described as
micropolitical expressions that antici-
pate large-scale political action – and ‘big
P’ politics, which deals with analyses of
power, governmentality, capitalism and
the like. Apter argues: ‘The abandon-
ment of “small p” politics to pundits and
members of the chattering classes risks
putting “big P” politics out of action.’4
In the spirit of Apter’s focus on ‘small p’
politics, I inspect micropolitical events to
emphasize how ‘emancipatory politics’
are negated, even by political acts that
aim at fundamental changes to the world
order. It’s a spectrum I call the politics of
futility, where politics routinely takes on
a futilitarian form that consolidates neo-
liberalism. Futilitarianism is the term
I use to describe how, in the neoliberal
decades, we are trapped in a cycle of
utility maximization that leads to the
worsening of collective social and eco-
nomic conditions. In some cases, political
expression mirrors capitalist behaviour;
in others, capitalism is relegated to the
background and the responsibility of
individuals is foregrounded. But what
ties the various examples of the poli-
tics of futility together is a negation of
emancipatory politics and a retreat into
the safety of political forms that do not
threaten the status quo.
Political disillusionment and
pretence
Before looking at some specific examples
of the politics of futility, I want to reflect
on the relationship between political
desire and the practice of politics. The
66
Covid-19 pandemic has not only exposed
the catastrophic impact of a decade of
austerity, it has also highlighted problems
with political systems and institutions and
the complete incompetence of many poli-
ticians. The pandemic has accentuated the
simultaneous decline of political delibera-
tion and increase of political desire. These
developments might seem paradoxi-
cal, but increasingly we are inhabiting a
political environment in which serious
political debate is negated – exemplified
by figures like Donald Trump – but there
exists a desire for some change in the
current state of affairs, which leads to the
election of leaders like Trump. William
Davies, professor of political economy at
Goldsmiths, University of London, high-
lights this paradox when discussing the
proliferation of political referendums and
binary choices in the last decade. Situat-
ing this development within the rise of
social media platforms, and specifically
the centrality of the ‘like’ function, Davies
illustrates that ‘clicking a button marked
“like” or “dislike” is about as much criti-
cal activity as we are permitted’, creating
what he calls ‘a society of perpetual ref-
erendums’. When this situation overlaps
with an increase in political engagement
– especially on fundamental questions of
national sovereignty, colonial histories, or
how to respond to a pandemic – the binary
choice simplifies political deliberation to
Increasingly we are inhabiting
a political environment in which
serious political debate is negated
but there exists a desire for some
change in the current state of affairs
- which leads to the election
of leaders like Trump
good versus bad and like versus dislike,
generating bitter divisions. Deliberation
takes a backseat and an instantaneous
rating system is prioritized. But as Davies
points out, ‘a polity that privileges deci-
sion first and understanding second will
have some terrible mess to sort out along
the way’, which, he notes, is evident in
the post-Brexit debacle. 5 This situation
is exploited by populist politicians, espe-
cially of the conservative variety, who can
mobilize an electorate by presenting them
with simple and extreme binary choices
that mirror their online behaviours. For
example, Stalinist Soviet Union or con-
temporary North Korea are seemingly the
only alternatives to capitalism, an elabo-
rate hoax is the flipside to climate change,
and burning down 5G towers is a substitute
for a coherent response to a pandemic.
Davies observes that ‘it is easy to lose
sight of how peculiar and infantilizing
this state of affairs is. A one-year-old has
nothing to say about the food they are
offered, but simply opens their mouth or
shakes their head. No descriptions, criti-
cisms, or observations are necessary, just
pure decision.’5 No one on Twitter, for
instance, wants to hear from the person
who asks how the UK is going to navigate
its way out of EU agricultural regulations.
It is much easier to write ‘Boris Johnson is
a knob’ or to rant against ‘woke warriors’
who have the temerity to raise the issue
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of colonization or child poverty. The rela-
tionship, then, between the desire for poli-
tics – actual deliberation and participation
– and the environment in which politics
is expressed is increasingly fractious. And
what develops in the space between politi-
cal desire and this environment is disil-
lusionment, not with the idea of politics
itself, but with the options for political
participation. If your desire to participate
in political discussion can only be met by
joining ranks with increasingly diverse
poles of political expression, represented
by objectionable politicians, then it is the
sense of futility that this situation precipi-
tates that brings about disillusionment.
Where the current political environ-
ment might entail an abandonment of
political participation, it can also breed
subcultures of political pretence, where
groups of people engage in small-scale
activities that they perceive to be politi-
cal, but instead either reinforce the status
quo or turn away from the stickier aspects
of the political altogether. These forms of
political pretence are often tied to con-
sumption practices, which deepens the
idea that politics can only be expressed
through capitalist behaviour. Thus, neo-
liberal hegemony is defended against
the political on two fronts. First, disillu-
sionment ensures that large swathes of
the populace see no means to change the
current state of affairs, even if they desire
to do so. Second, those who translate this
desire into forms of consumption or life-
style ethics reduce politics to a level that
is unable to challenge the universality
of neoliberalism. Stuck in this dilemma,
many glorify the heroic individual as the
archetypal political subject, who sees her
or his own reflection in systemic injustice.
Buycotting and the
consumer-activist
This heroic individual is exemplified
in the increasingly popular practice of
buycotting. Unlike consumer boycotting,
which entails avoiding purchasing prod-
ucts from a particular company, buycott-
ing is the process through which people
express their dissatisfaction with a par-
ticular company by ‘rewarding’ what are
perceived to be more ethical companies
through buying their products. As one
commentator puts it: ‘Political consumer-
ism is on the rise and presents an oppor-
tunity to bring serious social justice issues
to the marketplace.’6 Setting aside the fact
MARCH-APRIL 2022
that buycotting requires a certain amount
of disposable income and that companies
can exploit the desire for political con-
sumerism by marketing themselves as
ethical, the point of buycotting is it allows
us to spend money and still feel political.
Furthermore, if consuming certain prod-
ucts makes us good political and ethical
subjects, then why not consume more and
more of these products?
The buycott emerged in the 1990s as
a positive alternative to negative forms
of political consumerism, which usually
entailed boycotts of particular companies
or products. In a 1996 article, behavioural
psychologist Monroe Friedman observed
that evidence of the success of boycotts
was very limited, and that buycotts rep-
resent a promising alternative. Friedman
compares a series of buycotting events,
from the Florida Gay Rights buycott of
the early 1990s to the Twin Peaks buycott,
where in the wake of its cancellation by
ABC, loyal fans of David Lynch’s cult TV
series started buying products that were
advertised on the show, hoping that these
advertisers would persuade ABC to renew
it. But it is not so much the examples
of buycotting that are revealing about
Friedman’s analysis, but rather a point he
makes about the expectations of the con-
sumer engaged in the practice. ‘While it
may be reasonable in theory to employ
buycott campaigns to reward business
firms for their contributions to the com-
munity,’ he contends, ‘most consumers
would baulk at participating in such cam-
paigns if the products or services to be
purchased are deficient from a consumer
economic perspective.’ 7 The key differ-
ence between boycotting and buycotting,
therefore, is the relationship between
politics and consumerism. In the former,
the political is used against consumer-
ism, whereas in the latter, consumerism
becomes the condition for the politi-
cal, even to the point that the political is
abandoned if the products consumed are
not fulfilling enough.
It is hard to overestimate the conse-
quences of this subtle shift in forms of
activism in the late twentieth century.
As Jason Hickel and Arsalan Khan write:
‘Rebellious and virtuous consumption
are products of a neoliberal logic that
posits market solutions for political and
economic problems, celebrates “the con-
sumer” as the supreme agent of change,
and obscures the coercive dimensions of
Capitalist politics
capitalism that generate the very prob-
lems that these forms of consumer activ-
ism aim to remedy.’8 In this sense, the
phenomenon of buycotting reveals a futil-
itarian logic, where political interventions
in consumer practices perpetuate the very
conditions that precipitate the need for
such interventions in the first place.
Buycotting has now become a main-
stream form of consumer activism.
There is even an app called ‘Buycott’ that
matches users with products that reflect
their political and ethical concerns.
Buycotting is undoubtedly a form of
sociality, but it is reflective of the trans-
formation of the social in the neoliberal
decades, where social capital becomes a
synonym for social solidarity. In an essay
from the mid-1980s titled ‘The forms
of capital’, French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu argues that ‘it is impossible to
account for the structure and function-
ing of the social world unless one rein-
troduces capital in all its forms and not
solely in the one form recognized by
economic theory.’ 9 Alongside economic
capital, Bourdieu introduces cultural and
social capitals. Where cultural capital
entails a symbolic order that binds or
differentiates individuals – from one’s
taste in music to qualifications and edu-
cation – social capital is built through
relationships ‘of mutual acquaintance
and recognition … which provides each
of its members with the backing of the
collectively-owned capital’.9 These rela-
tionships are protected by what Bourdieu
calls ‘institutionalized forms of del-
egation’, which enable a spokesperson
to ‘shield the group as a whole from dis-
credit by expelling or excommunicat-
ing the embarrassing individuals.’ 9 This
delegation facilitates the ‘reproduction
of capital’ within the social group and
prevents the infiltration of that group by
others who do not hold the same amount
or kind of capital.
Bourdieu’s ultimate aim was to try and
explain the social reproduction of capital,
illustrating how power is maintained and
protected through social relationships
between the privileged. The concept
of social capital has come a long way
since. In his popular book Bowling Alone,
US political scientist Robert Putnam
reframed social capital around notions
of community and ‘civic virtue’. For him,
social capital referred to ‘norms of reci-
procity and trustworthiness’ that arise
67
THE LONG READ
from ‘connections among individuals’.
His point was that virtuousness could
only be expressed collectively when indi-
viduals were bound together by ‘recipro-
cal social relations’, which he felt were
rapidly disappearing from American
society.10 Putnam viewed social capital
as essential to ensuring communal bonds
and, consequently, to protecting democ-
racy. Such an analysis could have led to
a critique of neoliberalism, accentuating
how the neoliberal assault on the concept
of the social had dissolved commu-
nal bonds or how the inability to access
healthcare or affordable housing reduced
trustworthiness. Instead, in a study of
41 urban and rural communities across
the US, Putnam turned towards diver-
sity and immigration as reasons for this
decline.11 While he acknowledged that
diversity and immigration are likely to
be good things in the long run, his con-
clusion played into the hands of US con-
servatives. It gave them the sociological
evidence to directly tie notions of social
capital or civic virtue to race and cultural
homogeneity.
In our century, social capital has
become a buzzword at organizations like
the International Monetary Fund and
World Bank, and politicians routinely
throw it around when discussing policy.
In all these cases, social capital looks
much more like Putnam’s definition than
Bourdieu’s. Social capital is a helpful way
for governments to compartmentalize all
social relationships and institutions into
one concept, often obscuring the ways
in which specific policies are designed to
dismantle such relationships and insti-
tutions. Furthermore, the development
of social capital depends as much upon
who is excluded from a group as it does
on those included. Consequently, social
capital can be used to justify systems of
exclusion, from tight border regimes
to gated communities. But, perhaps
more significantly, social capital is often
employed to protect the rights of capital.
For instance, in his IMF Working Paper
on ‘Social capital and civil society’, the
liberal philosopher par excellence Francis
Fukuyama writes: ‘States indirectly foster
the creation of social capital by efficiently
providing necessary public goods, par-
ticularly property rights and public
safety.’ He continues: ‘States can have a
serious negative impact on social capital
when they start to undertake activities
68
that are better left to the private sector
or to civil society. … If the state gets into
the business of organizing everything,
people will become dependent on it and
lose their spontaneous ability to work
with one another.’12 So, in other words,
social capital works best when private
property is protected and the state either
steps aside for the private sector or gets
its nose out of our business. Sound famil-
iar? It is not hard to see why this term has
become ubiquitous under neoliberalism.
But why is it necessary to conceive of
the social as capital at all? Many economists
have asked this question, contending that
the social does not meet the criteria to be
defined as capital. More interesting is how
the term ‘social capital’ exemplifies cultural
theorist Mark Fisher’s definition of ‘capital-
ist realism’, what happens when ‘capitalism
seamlessly occupies the horizon of the
thinkable’.13 To think that social relation-
ships produce something tangible that
can be accumulated like capital funda-
mentally alters how we conceive of society
itself, much in the way that human capital
transforms the very idea of the human.
And, if social capital and economic capital
are interdependent, as the theorists above
would have it, then any attempts to change
the distribution of social capital can be
conceived as interventions in the accumu-
lation of economic capital. To enact social
change, therefore, becomes as much about
how one engages in the production and
accumulation of economic capital as it does
about how one relates to other individu-
als. This lays the foundations for a form of
political participation that prioritizes mar-
ketplace interventions over concrete social
relations. This is precisely why something
like buycotting becomes a desirable alter-
native to boycotting.
‘Vote with your dollar’
Buycotting is the kind of social move-
ment that develops when the social is fil-
tered through the lens of capital. Hence
we get statements like: ‘By continuing to
engage in acts of buycott, consumers can
support admirable or reject objectionable
marketplace practices while bringing
social change every time they take out
their wallets.’6 This statement reminds
us of Davies’s ‘society of perpetual ref-
erendums’, where people display their
admiration or disgust by ‘voting with
their dollars’, which is a sentiment that
has gained significant traction in recent
decades. For instance, the ethos of Green
America, a large non-profit member-
ship organization with over 140,000
members, is to ‘harness economic power
– the strength of consumers, investors,
businesses, and the marketplace – to
create a socially just and environmentally
sustainable society’.14 To help consumers
achieve this goal they have developed a
‘Vote with your Dollar Toolkit’, which
provides information on environmen-
tally friendly clothes and food shopping,
as well as socially responsible investment
opportunities. ‘Voting with your dollar
works,’ they tell us, ‘[because] if many of
us shift our spending at once – to prefer-
ence [sic] non-GMO foods, for example
– it can force large corporations to
scramble and drop harmful ingredients
from their products. And in the case of
small businesses, it helps them stay afloat
in a competitive, deal-driven market.’15
The use of a modal verb here leaves a lot
of wiggle room – ‘it can force large cor-
porations to drop harmful ingredients’ is
very different to ‘it will’.
The idea of voting with your dollar
presumes a simple relationship between
individual consumer behaviour and ‘big
P’ politics. That is, it is premised on the
idea that a series of individual behav-
ioural changes can directly initiate polit-
ical ruptures, skipping the frustrating
aspects of actual political organizing and
participation. Instead, Green America
tells us that ‘every time you buy organic,
you tell the world you want more farmers
to grow healthy, safe food’; ‘every time
you buy fair trade, you fight poverty.’ But
just because a shop sells organic food does
not mean that its employees are treated
well, as Nichole Aschoff illustrates in her
analysis of the militant anti-union prac-
tices of the organic supermarket Whole
Foods in the US.16 Likewise, the ethics
of fair trade has been a continual debate,
with Ndongo Samba Sylla showing how
the Fairtrade organization favours large
producers over smaller ones and the costs
of certification disadvantage those in
countries with low-income economies. As
Sylla notes: ‘FT does not partake in a logic
of international redistribution in favour
of the poorest countries. In reality, this
movement seems to follow a plutocratic
logic, in other words, one that serves the
government of the rich.’17 When we find
market solutions to problems caused by
the market economy, these solutions
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 Capitalist politics

Voting with one’s dollars means we do not

have to do any of the messy and mundane
aspects of actual politics. Instead, we can
simply get out our credit card and suddenly
the world becomes a better place

merely create new market problems that
will require new market solutions.
This vision of the world in which
money and credit cards carry magical
political properties allows us to believe
that every time we buy something, we
are either making the world a better place
or contributing to its downfall – another
referendum. Consequently, organizations
like Green America can pitch themselves
as a supposedly radical alternative to
the stagnation of governmental politics.
Witness this example from the Vote with
your Dollar Toolkit: ‘Green America’s
mission of creating a green economy that
works for all – one that preferences [sic]
social justice, environmental preservation,
and healthy communities, has been under
direct threat from Washington lately, but
no matter whether it’s election day or one
of the hundreds of days between casting
ballots, decisions we make every day cast
votes for our values.’ Here, Green America
proposes that we can change the world
by simply bypassing the minutiae of gov-
ernmental politics, sharing with the neo-
liberals a suspicion of such politics, and
confirming the neoliberal thinker Ludwig
von Mises’ conclusion that ‘the average
man [sic] is both better informed and less
corruptible in the decisions he makes as a
consumer than as a voter at political elec-
tions.’18 Not only that, voting with your
dollars means we do not have to do any of
the messy and mundane aspects of actual
politics, whether this is developing rela-
tionships, institutions, organizations, or
party structures. Instead, we can simply
get out our credit card and suddenly the
world becomes a better place.
This post-political fantasy draws a
straight line between capitalism and the
individual, failing to grapple with the
ways in which the state and governmen-
tal politics facilitate and sanction the
very problems organizations like Green
America attempt to confront. Green
America is by no means alone in this post-
political vision, especially when it comes
to environmental concerns. The implica-
tions of this shift towards the individual
are huge. American political theorist Jodi
Dean, for instance, argues that ‘the indi-
vidualization of politics into commodifi-
able “lifestyles” and opinions subsumes
politics into consumption. That consumer
choices may have a politics – fair trade,
green, vegan, woman-owned – morphs
into the sense that politics is nothing but
consumer choices, that is, individuated
responses to individuated needs.’19 When
politics becomes ‘nothing but consumer
choices’ – a variation of the like-or-dislike
binary – it becomes impossible to think
of it as anything other than a variant of
capitalist experience. This acceptance,
Dean notes, ‘enchains us to collective
failure, turning us ever inward as it holds
back the advance of a politics capable of
abolishing the current system and pro-
ducing another one’.20
The politics of babies
Voting with your dollar and the practice
of buycotting present two ways that the
politics of futility operates in the early
21st century – principally that we can buy
our way out of systemic social and eco-
logical problems. Another avenue is to
recast these systemic problems through
the prism of personal responsibility. This
is evident in another variant of the climate
change movement: anti-natalist environ-
mentalism. A cursory glance across some
major media outlets confirms the ubiquity
of this idea, where we have headlines such
as: ‘How to save the planet? Stop having
children’ (The Guardian); ‘Science proves
kids are bad for the Earth. Morality sug-
gests we stop having them’ (NBC News);
‘The couples rethinking kids because of
climate change’ (BBC); ‘Climate change
fears put young people off having chil-
dren, YouGov poll shows’ (The Times) –
and so on. The most obvious thing about
these headlines is that all of them focus on
individual moments of decision-making.
But a key difference is that some suggest
that individuals have to seriously ques-
tion the ethics of bringing another human
into a world that is heading towards a
climate apocalypse, whereas others imply
that the decision to not have children is
somehow going to save the world from
that apocalypse. The former understands
that the individual is constitutive of its
social and ecological milieu, to the point
where bringing a new individual into the
current milieu might seem unethical. The
latter sees society in the individual, and all
social and ecological issues are reduced to
the level of individual decision-making.
Like the idea of voting with your dollar,
this is another form of magical think-
ing, where individuals are encouraged to
believe that their daily life choices either
save or annihilate the world.
Much of the anti-natalist environmen-
tal movement characterizes the politics
of futility. It treats the carbon footprint
as a natural phenomenon and immutable
fact about the world, rather than some-
thing that is both the result of historical
processes of production, colonization,
extraction and exploitation, and a mani-
festation of neoliberalism’s translation of

MARCH-APRIL 2022 69
THE LONG READ
systemic problems into questions of per-
sonal responsibility. The trickier details
of Western imperialism, the power of the
fossil fuel industry and its hold over gov-
ernmental politics across the globe, and
the impotence of global climate accords
retreat into the background. In doing
so, this form of anti-natalism negates
any possibility of overcoming the very
system that makes climate change a
reality. Instead, it largely encourages us
to find individual ways to mitigate and
survive the oncoming apocalypse. This
is not only defeatist but extremely dan-
gerous, because it concretizes the social
and economic conditions that make
climate recovery impossible. Fisher is
particularly helpful on this point when
he argues: ‘Instead of saying that everyone
– ie every one – is responsible for climate
change, we all have to do our bit, it would
be better to say that no-one is, and that’s
the very problem.’13 But to admit that no
‘one’ is responsible for climate change
would be to undercut the ethos of trium-
phant individualism that fortifies neo-
liberal subjectivity. It is much easier to
believe that individual choices can effect
systemic change than to admit one’s life
has little impact on how the world func-
tions. If the choice is between saving the
individual subject or the climate, neolib-
eral rationality ensures that the former
will always win out.
In an essay titled ‘Don’t blame the
babies’, Liza Featherstone points out
that when the anti-natalists highlight
the carbon footprint of each individual
human, they do not ask: ‘Why does each
human have such a huge carbon foot-
print? It is not inherent to your (possibly
quite charming) baby.’ She continues:
‘A Zambian has nowhere near the envi-
ronmental impact of an American; even
though her nation has a much higher
birth rate, her society isn’t nearly as
carbon-intensive. The problem, then,
isn’t kids. It’s the carbon dependence of
our society, which is set up to ensure that
we drive, fly, heat, cool, shop, and eat in
all the most polluting ways possible.’ 21
Furthermore, fertility rates have been
steadily declining across the globe over
the last 70 years – mainly because of eco-
nomic pressures and inadequate child-
care provisions, and not environmental
consciousness – and yet, global tempera-
tures and sea levels have been heading in
the other direction in the same period.
70
Populist politicians, especially of the
conservative variety, can mobilize an
electorate by presenting them with
simple and extreme binary choices
that mirror online behaviours
Either we’re not reducing the fertility rate
quickly enough or there is something else
going on. That ‘something else’ is much
more difficult to confront because it con-
stitutes an entire social and economic
system that requires more and more
environmental plundering just in order
to repropagate.
To believe in the myth that individual
behaviour can change society is to cement
the logic of futilitarianism, where by
supposedly being useful – in this case,
refraining from having children in order
to save the planet – we actually facilitate
the worsening of collective social and eco-
logical wellbeing because we let capitalism
off the hook. As Featherstone puts it: ‘Exx-
onMobil doesn’t care whether you have
another kid. The actual “best thing you
can do” for the planet is anything that will
reduce the political power of the fossil fuel
industry, while “the worst thing you can
do” is try to convince people otherwise.’21
This is all a long way around to say that
any environmental politics that is not
fundamentally anticapitalist is ultimately
destined to futility. It is this problem that
undermined the initial rebellious energy
of Extinction Rebellion (XR). When one
protester turned up to a rally carrying
a sign reading ‘Socialism or Extinction’,
the official XR Twitter account in the
UK responded by saying: ‘Just to be clear
we are not a socialist movement. We do
not trust any single ideology, we trust
the people, chosen by sortition (like jury
service) to find the best future for us all
through a #CitizensAssembly. A banner
saying “socialism or extinction” does not
represent us.’22 Of course, direct action is
a legitimate form of rebellion, and it has
been shown to work in grassroots move-
ments, but a climate movement that
retreats from ‘big P’ politics, to the point
where it is moved to distance itself from
socialism, is one that is inevitably doomed
to failure. Many people responded to this
tweet with the words of the Brazilian trade
union leader and environmentalist Chico
Mendes, who reportedly said: ‘Ecology
without class struggle is just gardening.’ XR
has undoubtedly harnessed a disruptive
collective energy but without continually
tying climate change to capitalism, coloni-
alism, and global systems of exclusion and
exploitation, it will routinely retreat back
into the safety of the politics of futility.
Politics beyond futility
In his book The Death of Homo Economi-
cus, Peter Fleming asks a very pertinent
question: ‘Is resistance to capitalism still
possible after such a devastating process
of individualization has taken place?’ 23
If buycotting and anti-natalist environ-
mentalism are anything to go by, then the
answer would be a resounding no. Even
contemporary anticapitalist movements
have faltered precisely because of this
process of individualization. Dean gives a
good example in her experience of a 2011
Occupy Wall Street rally at Washington
Square Park in New York. She notes that
as police tightened the cordon around
the park, the energy of the crowd built.
‘Speaker after speaker,’ she writes, ‘ampli-
fied by the People’s Mic (where the crowd
repeats the words of a speaker so that those
who are farther away know what is being
said), urged us to take the park. We are
NEW INTERNATIONALIST
 Capitalist politics

many. We can do it. We must do it.’ And then
a young man stood up to speak through
the human microphone: ‘We can take this
park! … We can take this part tonight! …
We can also take this park another night
… Not everyone may be ready tonight …
Each person has to make their own auton-
omous decision … You have to decide for
yourself … Everyone is an autonomous
individual.’ As Dean notes, ‘The mood
was broken … We were no longer a “we”
… Collective strength devolved into the
problem of individuals aggregating by
choices and interests that may or may not
converge. Reducing autonomy to individ-
ual decision, we destroyed the freedom of
action we had as a crowd.’20 Exactly at the
moment the crowd threatened to inhabit
the political subjectivity of a ‘we’, it disap-
peared through fear of stepping on the
toes of individual autonomy. Despite the
Occupy movement naming its enemy –
the one per cent – neoliberal rationality
won out indirectly in the end.
The human rights movement is
another that routinely suffers from neo-
liberal intervention in its insistence on the
individual as the foundation of political-
economic life rather than on the more
difficult task of building a movement in
support of ‘open democratic governance
structures’. 24 Despite the rise of human
rights discourse, it seems like rights
abuses are only increasing, so we need
to think seriously about how the notion
of human rights neatly corresponds with
a neoliberal value system that stymies
the construction of political and social
solidarities, all in the name of freedom.
By placing the liberty of the individual
at the centre of politics, human rights
activists risk accepting the premise of
hyper-individuality that consecrates the
neoliberal project. A human right for
the neoliberals, generally speaking, is
basically the right to fend for one’s self
in a competitive world order.
There are, however, reasons to be
hopeful. Consider the important gen-
erational divide in the Global North
between what we might crudely call the
baby-boomers and the millennials. The
boomers, for the most part, are relatively
secure, especially if they bought their
houses at the right time and have seen
huge appreciation in the value of their
properties. The millennials, however,
have grown up into a deeply insecure
world, where work is increasingly sparse
and precarious, house prices are extor-
tionate, higher education requires the
absorption of serious debt, and the
natural environment is irrevocably
damaged. On top of this, Covid-19 has
shown that deadly viruses can bring the
world to a standstill at any moment and,
even then, the rich seem to get richer.
Some millennials are fine, of course,
especially if they have access to the assets
accrued by their boomer parents and
families. But many are not, and the most
precarious are the ones who are start-
ing to make their voices heard across
the globe. In this context, the economist
Grace Blakeley asks a simple but pow-
erful question: ‘Why … should young
people support capitalism when they
never expect to own any capital?’ 25 This
presents a deep dilemma for neoliberal
hegemony. The centralization of wealth
within an ever-decreasing few might
have worked for a few decades, espe-
cially in the wake of the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the momentary ‘end
of history’, where capitalism seemed to
answer every question posed against it.
But a new generation has emerged who
do not necessarily see capitalism as the
golden ticket. In fact, they find them-
selves excluded from and exploited by
capitalism every single day, whether it
is by their boss, landlord, university, or
government. Indeed, why would young
people support this system?
Futility is not ours, no matter what we
are told. Capitalism, especially in its neo-
liberal guise, creates the conditions for
futility to spread, but through its operat-
ing logic, it manages to pass the upkeep of
this futility on to us as individuals. Politi-
cal expressions like buycotting, voting
with your dollar, or anti-natalist environ-
mentalism are the kinds of politics that
emerge when we accept responsibility for
this futility. It is not that these movements
aren’t trying to make the world a better
place, but that by accepting responsibility
for the state of the world, they also accept
the fundamental premises of neoliberal
rationality, that the world is made in the
image of the individual.
Under such circumstances, where
people are ‘proletarianized alone’, in
Dean’s words, it is unsurprising that the
political forms that have come to domi-
nate the 21st century also situate the indi-
vidual at the heart of systemic problems.
The politics of futility is a symptom of
futilitarianism; individuals attempt to
make themselves as useful politically
as possible – often with genuinely good
and ethical intentions – but in doing so,
they end up reinforcing the logic of neo-
liberalism, which worsens the collective
conditions for the majority of people. No
matter what Obama and the like tell us,
we deserve better than this. O
NEIL VALLELY IS A RUTHERFORD FOUNDATION
POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW AT THE
UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO, NEW ZEALAND. HE IS
WORKING ON A HISTORY OF CAPITALISM AND
MIGRANT DETENTION.
This is an edited extract from his recent book
Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production
of Uselessness, published by Goldsmiths Press,
London, and distributed by MIT Press.

1 Madeline Conway, ‘Obama: “You get the politicians you deserve”’, Politico, 5 September 2017, nin.tl/Obama 2 Benjamin Day, ‘Why Obamacare didn’t work’, Jacobin, 16
September 2016, nin.tl/Obamacare 3 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Zone Books, New York, 2015. 4 Emily Apter, Unexceptional
Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic, Verso, London, 2018. 5 William Davies, ‘Who am I prepared to kill?’, London Review of Books, Vol 42, No 15, 30 July
2020, nin.tl/Davies 6 Orge Castellano, ‘Why “boycotting” is the new form of political activism’, Medium, 26 June 2018, nin.tl/boycotting 7 Monroe Friedman, ‘A positive
approach to organized consumer action: the “buycott” as an alternative to the boycott’, Journal of Consumer Policy, Vol 19, No 4, 1996. 8 Jason Hickel and Arsalan
Khan, ‘The culture of capitalism and the crisis of critique’, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol 85, No 1, 2012. 9 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The forms of capital’, in Handbook of Theory
and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed John Richardson, Greenwood, Westport, CT, 1986. 10 Robert D Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of
American Community, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2000. 11 Robert D Putnam. ‘E pluribus unum: diversity and community in the twenty-first century’, Scandinavian
Political Studies, Vol 30, No 2, 2007. 12 IMF, 1 October 1999, nin.tl/Fukuyama 13 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Zero Books, Winchester, 2009.
14 Green America mission statement, greenamerica.org/our-mission 15 Green America, ‘What does it mean to vote with your dollar?’, 20 June 2017, nin.tl/GAblog
16 Nicole Aschoff, The New Prophets of Capital, Verso, London, 2015. 17 ‘Fairtrade is an unjust movement that serves the rich,’ The Guardian, 5 September 2014, nin.tl/Sylla
18 Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, translated by J Kahane, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1962. 19 Jodi Dean, Democracy and
Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2009. 20 Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party, Verso, London, 2016.
21 Jacobin, 15 April 2019, nin.tl/Featherstone 22 Extinction Rebellion UK (@XRebellionUK), Twitter post 2 September 2020, nin.tl/XRtwitter 23 Peter Fleming, The Death
of Homo Economicus: Work, Debt and the Myth of Endless Accumulation, Pluto Press, London, 2017. 24 David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of
Uneven Geographical Development, Verso, London, 2006. 25 Grace Blakeley, Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation, Repeater Books, London, 2019.

MARCH-APRIL 2022 71
 HALL OF
INFAMY
JAIR BOLSONARO
JOB: President of Brazil
REPUTATION: Trump of the Tropics, also
known as Captain Chainsaw
As the world faces crisis upon crisis,
you can always count on Jair Bolsonaro
to do whatever he can to make matters
worse. Whether it is the climate or the
Covid-19 pandemic, the former mili-
tary officer turned politician relies on
conspiracy-based notions underpinned
by macho toxic masculinity. He is a cul-
tural warrior in the Trumpian mould:
loud in his opposition to same-sex mar-
riage, homosexuality, abortion, drug
liberalization, secularism and any kind
of affirmative action. He is a law-and-
order guy obsessed with the rights of
gun owners. In the three years since he
became president, he has been a tremen-
dously polarizing figure both at home
and abroad.
His 2018 electoral campaign against
the leftist Workers’ Party (WP) used
WhatsApp to great effect, and mostly
succeeded because the conservative Bra-
zilian judiciary engineered the impris-
onment of legendary WP leader Lula
Di Silva taking him out of the electoral
game. Bolsonaro had served for 22 years
as a federal deputy representing Rio di
Janiero State and was known for his ide-
ology of ‘national conservatism’ which
privileged liberal ‘free market’ solutions
and a foreign policy tilt towards the US
and Israel. During the presidential cam-
paign he was the victim of a lone wolf
knife attack of debatable seriousness.
Or perhaps the beneficiary: the incident
amplified his reputation as an outsider
fighting against entrenched elites who
would use any means to defeat him.
As President his list of failures and
missteps beggars belief, with Covid-
denial and encouraging the destruction
of the Amazonian rainforests top of the
pile. It’s as if Bolsonaro is deeply com-
mitted to the destruction of his own
species. The Brazilian senate certainly
thought so. It launched an investigation
72
into Bolsonaro for downplaying ‘the little
flu’ (Covid-19) and resisting vaccinations,
resulting in a crippled healthcare system
and 600,000 dead Brazilians. Through-
out the pandemic he pranced around
maskless (he caught a mild case) and pro-
moted so many anti-science myths that
YouTube found it necessary to yank 15 of
his Covid-related videos from the web.
By the spring of 2020 Brazil had lost two
health ministers, the last quitting in frus-
tration after only a month.
But it is climate degradation and par-
ticularly the ravaging of the rainforests
that may be his most lasting ‘legacy’. He
has managed to remove all the restric-
tions on illegal logging that the former
Workers’ Party administration of Dilma
Rousseff was pressured to implement.
He also worked to undermine the rights
of the Amazonian indigenous peoples
who serve as protectors of the region.
His nickname of Captain Chainsaw
is well-earned. The stakes are high
here. The US-based Natural Resources
Defense Council believes ‘the 1.5°C
target is probably out of reach’ if defor-
estation in Brazil is not tackled. Bol-
sonaro realizes the importance of the
Amazon as an essential carbon sink
and uses it as leverage for big payouts
to Brazil (read himself and his cronies):
he is only frustrated the money will
come with so many climate-related
restrictions.
BRAZIL GOVERNMENT/ALAMY
But it looks like everyone is tiring
of his antics. Even if he escapes all his
various legal troubles his popularity
has plummeted to 22 per cent from an
already low 33 per cent in the spring of
2020. If he is allowed to run again for
president later this year, Lula looks likely
to win. All the Tropical Trump can do
(much like his Yanqui namesake) is double
down to appeal to his shrinking and
increasingly rabid base. He simply lacks
the strategic flexibility to pivot away from
his brand of crude rightwing nationalism.
The world is holding its breath. O
LOW CUNNING: Bolsonaro has become
the champion of the double down. Accuse him
of human rights violations and he claims that
torturers during Brazil’s military dictator-
ship should have killed their opponents rather
than simply torturing them. Accused by NGOs
of despoiling the Amazon, he proclaims that
‘Brazil is the virgin that every foreign pervert
wants to get their hands on’.
SENSE OF HUMOUR: Two examples of
his ‘ jokes’. ‘Indians are undoubtedly chang-
ing … They are increasingly becoming human
beings just like us.’ Or in discussion with WP
member of congress, Maria do Rosário: ‘I
wouldn’t rape you because you’re not worthy
of it.’ Pretty funny, heh?
Sources: Huffington Post; NACLA Reports; Rolling
Stone; The Washington Post; The New York Times;
The Guardian.
NEW INTERNATIONALIST
VIEW FROM Kamra has said that the organizers of his
shows have also often threatened to cancel.

INDIA
Of course, authoritarian regimes have
traditionally been scared of comedy and
satire. The force of laughter, after all, can
penetrate even the politically unaware.

ILLUSTRATION: KATE COPELAND

No laughing matter
In January 2021, stand-up comedian
Munawar Faruqui was arrested just as he
was about to start a gig at a café in Indore,
in the central Indian state of Madhya
Pradesh, where the ruling Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) is in power.
A group of men, led by a BJP politi-
cian’s son, stormed onstage and accused
the young comic of making jokes offen-
sive to Hindu sentiments. They were
referring to material on Faruqui’s
immensely popular YouTube channel –
jokes that were irreverent irrespective
of creed. Faruqui, who is a member of
India’s beleaguered minority Muslim
community, tried reasoning with the
group, but wound up spending 28 days
in jail for a joke he didn’t even tell that
evening.
Since then, his shows have been forci-
bly cancelled due to threats by rightwing-
ers, with the police urging closure rather
than providing protection. Faruqui is not
the only comedian in their gunsights.
Rightwing groups have targeted others,
too. Ribald comic Kunal Kamra is fre-
quently trolled for being ‘anti-national’.
But the effort to silence these comics,
and the furious debates on social media
surrounding these incidents, draws my
attention to a wider problem.
To some extent we have always been a
country of ‘hurt sentiments’, with some
group or the other constantly taking
offence over issues that would not even
register if we had a more robust tradi-
tion of free speech. But the truth is that
seven years of an increasingly totalitarian
regime has silently seeped into our lives
making us edgy and nervous. Our sense
of offence has been weaponized. Our sen-
timents are hurt easily. We cannot admire
something artistic without searching for
something about it that offends us. We are
either censoring others or censoring our-
selves. Everything is controlled – either
by the government or by us. So much is
out of bounds. Religion, culture, books,
movies, music, art, it’s all a minefield. It
is just not enough anymore to be on the
right side, one has to be right all the time.
As the state’s grip over us has tightened,
we have become porcelain dolls – fragile,
über-sensitive and humourless.
We have forgotten to laugh – and this
has serious social repercussions, for when
we laugh together, it is difficult to hate
each other.
Contrarily, however, I also wonder if
being in this perpetual state of offence
is also a form of defence? After all, what
is there to laugh about anyway? We are
constantly being gaslighted by the gov-
ernment and fed half-lies and untruths.
We have lost too many people unneces-
sarily to Covid-19 owing to government
inefficiency, the conflagration of funeral
pyres still fresh in our nightmares. The
economy has tanked, vegetable and fuel
prices are skyrocketing by the day, the
government has begun to crack down on
our thoughts and actions, on our protests
– and our laughter.
In a country where comics are stopped
from telling jokes, it’s understandable
that people will forget to laugh. O
NILANJANA BHOWMICK IS A MULTI-AWARD-
WINNING JOURNALIST BASED IN NEW DELHI.
SHE TWEETS @NILANJANAB

MARCH-APRIL 2022 73
MIXED MEDIA
SPOTLIGHT
SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA
‘I
’m an abnormality,’ says Silvia
Moreno-Garcia. ‘It’s always been an
uphill battle for me and my agent.
The system isn’t designed to accept other
points of view.’
The other points of view she is talking
about are Mexican stories and perspec-
tives which land outside the limited sub-
jects the publishing world (and film and
TV) think audiences want: stories about
cartels and immigrants crossing the
border into El Norte (The North). Moreno-
Garcia’s bestselling novel Mexican Gothic
broke free from those restrictions: a his-
torical horror story, about a young woman
investigating her cousin’s claims that her
husband is trying to murder her.
Her new book Velvet Was the Night is a
shift away from her fantasy work. A his-
torical noir thriller about a bored sec-
retary and a gangster, the novel is set
against the backdrop of  1970s Mexico
City at the beginning of the Dirty War, a
period of violent repression of student and
leftist activism. 2021 marked the 50-year
anniversary of the Corpus Christi Mas-
sacre, which inspired Moreno-Garcia’s
book. Also known as El Halconazo, or the
Hawk Strike, because of the involvement
of government-trained paramilitaries Los
Halcones (the Hawks), the events of 10 June
1971, the day of the Corpus Christi festival,
saw around 120 student protesters killed.
‘There had been a previous large attack
against students in 1968, which people
are more familiar with, as it coincided
with the Olympics in Mexico,’ explains
Moreno-Garcia. ‘1971’s is less famous but
significant. After 1968, there was a new
guy in power, and people hoped the new
74
guard would be different from the old
guard. But from 1971, it became clear
nothing had changed, which intensified
the guerrilla activity and launched the
government into an even more aggressive
campaign against leftists. That would last
the whole decade.’
What happened in Mexico was part
of a global picture. ‘All over the world in
the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was
a focus on women’s rights and student
rights and young people wanting to do
things differently, and governments who
saw this as dangerous. They were saying
things governments didn’t want to hear
and asking for concessions governments
didn’t want to give.’
With support from the CIA, who
trained Mexican operatives in the
torture, capture and interrogation of
activists, the Mexican government was
successful in suppressing the demands
for change. ‘No one went to jail,’ says
Moreno-Garcia angrily. ‘All the people
involved in the massacres, violence or
torture, and all the politicians, they
died in their beds, happy, or went on to
bigger, better political careers. After 1971,
there was the same power structure in
place, the same players, and you didn’t
see change in the country. We had the
same party, the PRI (Institutional Revo-
lutionary Party), for decades. No one was
ever brought to justice. It’s even hard to
know how many people were killed, dis-
appeared or tortured because we don’t
have acknowledged counts. It was only
a few years ago that Mexican textbooks
included 1968 and the student movement
as something that happened. It’s as if the
Words: Graeme Green
Photo: Martin Dee
United States’ official textbooks didn’t
include the Vietnam War.’
Moreno-Garcia grew up in the north
of Baja California, close to the US border,
but now lives in Vancouver, Canada.
Through her books, she hopes readers
will discover there is more to Mexico
than common perceptions. ‘Nobody
should use my book as an encyclopae-
dia,’ she suggests. ‘But so many people
know so little about Mexico, and have
such stereotypical images and a limited
conception of the country, its history and
people, so hopefully when I write about it
they acquire something more expansive
and eclectic.’
The success of Mexican Gothic has
made life easier for her. But she doesn’t
believe the publishing world has sud-
denly become more open to diverse
voices. ‘As well as having this stereo-
type of only narco or immigrant stories,
there are narrow expectations of what
constitutes Mexican literature or Latin
American culture,’ Moreno-Garcia
argues. ‘For Latin America, people say
One Hundred Years of Solitude and Gabriel
García Márquez, and think that’s that.
People assume all our literature is “magic
realism”. There’s a massive body of
work that doesn’t fall into that category.
I have my own small micro print and
we recently put out The Route of Ice and
Salt, an English translation of Mexican
author José Luis Zárate’s erotic gay gothic
horror novella, set aboard the boat taking
Dracula to England. That’s the sort of
book no one associates with a writer from
Mexico or Latin America. Maybe that will
change one day.’ O
NEW INTERNATIONALIST
 ‘Nobody should use my book as an encyclopaedia.
But so many people know so little about Mexico,
and have such stereotypical images of the country,
its history and people’

MARCH-APRIL 2022 75
MIXED MEDIA

BOOKS
Vagabonds! Chilean Poet
by Eloghosa Osunde by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell
(Fourth Estate, ISBN 978 0008498016) (Granta, ISBN 9781783782888)
4thEstate.co.uk granta.com
++++, ++++,

The title Vagabonds! is the paternal role and what

Eloghosa Osunde prefaces her
debut novel with: ‘There are
simple and good and straightfor-
ward and well-behaved people,
I’m sure. But this is not a book
about them.’ On the face of it,
she does not disappoint. Set
in Lagos – though the city’s
ruthless spirit acts more as
prime mover than location
– greed, deception, violence,
hypocrisy, corruption and
killer-capitalism prevail. But
also breaking through – in
a wild, illegal way – are love,
tenderness and unflinching
honesty as the many charac-
ters that inhabit this sprawling
and exuberant novel strive to
live their lives and be them-
selves. Not an easy thing if
you’re queer in homophobic
Nigeria.
taken from the legal wording
used to describe sexual
outlaws in Nigeria’s 2014 Same
Sex Marriage Prohibition Act.
For Osunde it’s a starting point
for a work that’s transgressive
at many levels. Her characters
cross gender and sex bounda-
ries, of course; they also wear
masks and shape-shift, slip-
ping in and out of their bodies
and moving between life and
death and back again. Some
characters are clearly defined
and memorable: Johnny, the
‘dumb’ chauffeur to a human
organ trafficker; Waru, a
wise and cherished fashion
designer trying to die quietly;
Divine and Daisy, a loving
couple reconfiguring sex work
in a lesbian underworld. But
with so many characters and
narrative threads, especially
in the last third, it’s hard to
keep track of who is who and
whether one has met them
before. Maybe that’s the inten-
tion, but it can make for frus-
trating reading.
Such quibbles aside, this is
a book of tremendous inven-
tiveness and rebellious poetic
energy. At turns serious,
funny, sexy, moving, shock-
ing, mesmerizing – it con-
sistently delivers a sharp and
gleeful kick to patriarchy. VB
When Gonzalo reconnects
with high-school sweetheart
Carla and meets her cat-
food-eating six-year-old son
Vicente, he accepts the ‘beau-
tiful challenge’ of raising
someone else’s child. Though
he takes on the role of stepfa-
ther with gusto, the language
of (step)fatherhood is less easy
to assimilate, especially for a
would-be poet used to weigh-
ing every word he writes.
Then Gonzalo is offered a
grant to study for a doctor-
ate in New York. Carla refuses
to follow him and the family
breaks up – until a chance
meeting many years later.
The influence of fathers
runs deep in Chilean Poet
but the novel also questions
many assumptions about
a family is. Gonzalo under-
stands that he has been
Vicente’s father ‘in the fullest
possible way for someone who
is not a father’, while León
(Vicente’s biological father) is
mainly absent. So why does
León always remain ‘father’
while Gonzalo’s status as ‘step-
father’ is dependent on his
relationship with Carla?
Of equal importance in the
novel is Chile’s love affair with
poetry. The Chilean Poet of
the title is both Gonzalo and
Vicente – who inherits his
stepfather’s poetic genes in a
subtle rebuttal of nature over
nurture – but also the totemic
hero of Chilean legend in a
land of poets that boasts Nobel
prize-winners Gabriela Mistral
and Pablo Neruda among its
number. Alejandro Zambra
is himself an award-winning
poet, and though he describes
the poets’ world with more
than a little irony and depre-
cation, there is an undercur-
rent of familial acceptance
– poets too constitute a family,
with father figures and errant
children.
Zambra writes with wit and
warmth, and his characters are
penned with compassion and
humour. All of which makes
Chilean Poet an uplifting
and at times laugh-out-loud
read. JL

76 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
 MIXED MEDIA

Reviews editor: Dinyar Godrej

Reviewers: Vanessa Baird, Jo Lateu, Peter Whittaker, Dinyar Godrej

The Trial of Julian Assange We Slaves of Suriname

by Nils Melzer by Anton de Kom, translated by David McKay
(Verso, ISBN 9781839766220) (Polity Books, ISBN 9781509549023)
versobooks.com politybooks.com
++++, +++++

investigation, the seven Suriname’s more than 300

Julian Assange is an unargu-
ably divisive figure: to some a
free-speech hero for his part
in the Wikileaks saga, to others
simply a narcissistic hacker and
suspected rapist. Nils Melzer,
the UN Special Rapporteur
on Torture was of the second
opinion and, when approached
by Assange’s lawyers to inves-
tigate his case, he initially
refused. After visiting Assange
in prison, he changed his mind
and began his research. He lays
out his findings in this book
and his conclusion is unequiv-
ocal: that Assange has been
a victim of political persecu-
tion and psychological torture.
In measured and forensic
fashion, Melzer considers
in turn the rape allegations
and the subsequent Swedish
years of political asylum
Assange spent in the Ecua-
dorian Embassy in London,
his seizure by British police
in 2019 and incarceration in
the high-security prison, Bel-
marsh, where he remains.
Having persuasively argued
that Assange has been sub-
jected to repeated griev-
ous abuse of process, Melzer
makes the crucial point that,
beyond the violation of one
individual’s human rights,
there are grave dangers here
for press and political freedom.
Assange’s persecution serves
as a warning to any journalist
or whistle-blower as to what
awaits them if they should
challenge entrenched power.
Assange has recently suf-
fered a stroke, his health is
fragile, he is a suicide risk.
The threat of extradition to
the US and lifelong incar-
ceration remains. Nils Melzer
has given us an invaluable
record of the whole judicial
witch-hunt. His evolution
from sceptic to truth-seeker
is particularly admirable. As
he says, ‘My task is not to be
impartial between torturers
and victims. Instead I must
cry foul and insist on justice…
Anything else would make me
a traitor to my calling.’ PW
The main consolations of this
heart-breaking book are the
unfailingly humane vision
of its author and the fact that
the events it describes are
now history. Any sympathetic
reader will nevertheless feel
haunted by the presentness
of the past, as a major theme
running through We Slaves of
Suriname is capital’s compul-
sive devaluing and brutaliza-
tion of human life.
First published in 1934,
when Anton de Kom (1898-
1945), a passionate advocate
of Surinamese independence
from Dutch colonial rule, had
been forcibly expelled from his
home country to the Nether-
lands, the book is a curious but
always compelling amalgam.
It combines a history of
years of colonial subjugation
with elements of contempo-
rary reportage, sociological
insight and autobiography. De
Kom was an anti-racist, anti-
colonial political activist rather
than a professional historian –
indeed the research materials
at his disposal were limited.
But he succeeds in bringing
to painful life the savagery of
what is now widely considered
the most vicious colonization
project ever.
His voice is extraordinary
– by turns deeply lyrical, bit-
ingly ironic, patient, plaintive,
always appealing to the read-
er’s reason – and it is served
well by David McKay’s excel-
lent translation. De Kom’s
descriptions of the horrors
visited upon plantation slaves
are all the more piercing for
being worded so elegantly. His
juxtaposition of passages from
historical records that baldly
state the facts further magni-
fies the shock.
While he lauds historic
individuals who fought back,
De Kom’s vision of resist-
ance was of organizing, lis-
tening and working with
others. His call for worker
solidarity across class and
racial divides remains reso-
nant today. Essential reading
for the continuing project of
decolonization. DG

MARCH-APRIL 2022 77
MIXED MEDIA
FILM
Flee
directed and co-written by Jonas Poher Rasmussen
90 minutes
+++++
This is a unique feature film
about an all-too-familiar
occurrence. At its core are
audio-taped interviews with
a one-time refugee from
Kabul about his experiences
and their long-term effects.
Rasmussen has added simply
drawn, multi-viewpoint, vivid
animation, along with snippets
of well-chosen film footage
that give the historical context.
Amin Nawabi, a friend of
the director from secondary
school in Denmark, escaped
as a child from Afghanistan in
1996. The film opens with his
free-and-easy, exuberant early
years as the youngest child
and focus of his family’s atten-
tion. But we discover that his
oldest brother left the country
to escape service in the army,
and the police had arrested his
father, who’s imprisoned, then
‘disappears’. When the Taliban
take over Kabul, Amin flees
with his mother and siblings
on one of the last flights out
78
Their brother, now an office
cleaner in Sweden, meets
them in Moscow, rents a room
for them and sends them what
money he can. They can’t
work, and when their tourist
visas expire, they risk arrest
and deportation should they
go outside. The police harass
and rob them. Their hope is
to find a new home and build
a new life in Sweden. Their
only way to get there is to pay
people traffickers.
Amin’s voice, his hard-to-
tell narration and the contem-
porary news footage, give the
film a powerful authenticity.
It gets the stasis of limbo and
the deathly danger of crossing
guarded borders – on land, in
a small leaky boat, in a locked
container on a cargo ship. It’s
brilliant on commitment, fel-
lowship and the refugees ‘oth-
erness’ in exile. And, bringing
the story up to date, the
ongoing effect on Amin and his
husband in Copenhagen. ML
La Mif
directed and co-written by Fred Bailiff
110 minutes
++++,
Audrey doesn’t show her
feelings but always speaks
her mind, rarely smiles, but
watches people unflinchingly.
For two years, ever since her
parents died in a car crash,
she’s lived in a children’s home
with other teenagers. One
night, after a game of truth or
dare, she ends up in bed with
a much younger boy. A student
intern hears them and calls
the police, who arrest Audrey
and take her away. Her equally
vocal friend Novinha defends
her, attacks the intern, and one
consequence is that the home
becomes a place for girls only.
‘La Mif ’ means ‘the fam’ –
slang for ‘family’. It’s how the
teenage girls, all separated
from their birth families,
describe themselves. They
inevitably argue and scrap,
but they care for each other,
are loyal, and look out for
each other.
Writer-director Bailiff
worked in social care in
Geneva, made a couple of doc-
umentaries, then spent two
years workshopping this with
children’s home residents and
staff, and a sprinkling of pro-
fessional actors. The beautiful
Claudia Grob has a key role as
Lora, the kind-hearted, dedi-
cated, care-worn manager of
the home who has her own
abiding sense of loss. It’s her
continually changing replace-
ment family too.
The film focuses on seven
of the girls in turn, captur-
ing the desperation of their
circumstances and their
emotional insecurity.  When
Novinha goes home for a
weekend, her mother leaves
as she arrives. Lora has to tell
another, just 18, that her appli-
cation for residency has failed
and so, as she faces depor-
tation, she might consider
running away. It’s informa-
tive, involving, wrenching,
and raw. ML
NEW INTERNATIONALIST
 MIXED MEDIA

MUSIC
Reviews editor: Dinyar Godrej
Reviewers: Malcolm Lewis, Louise Gray

SHAWN MICHAEL JONES

DOMINIQUE SOUSE

Bahía Ghost Song

by Ana Carla Maza by Cécile McLorin Salvant 
(Persona Editorial Records, CD, DL) (Nonesuch Records, CD, LP, DL)
anacarlamaza.com cecilemclorinsalvant.com
++++, +++++

Born in Cuba, Ana Carla
Maza’s Bahía is a homage to a
district in Havana that throbs
with a multiplicity of musical
styles – son, jazz, samba,
bossa nova are a few of them
– which she carries into her
own compositional palate.
Maza also adds influences
from her classical cello studies
in France to this musical her-
itage. Bahía is a tribute to the
way in which these musics
overlay one another to create
newly balanced experiences
each time.
Maza comes from a fiercely
musical family – her Chilean
father, Carlos Maza, is a
pianist, her Cuban mother,
Mirza Sierra, a guitarist –
and so it’s not surprising that
several musical influences
run through Bahía. What
makes this album – her third
for this label – special is its
utter directness. It is a single-
handed enterprise – Maza
plays cello and sings in French
and Spanish – recorded in a
single take. There is an elegant
simplicity to it. ‘La Habana’,
the opening song, is a beau-
tifully spacious work that
expresses, through thrum-
ming cello lines, a yearning
of home in its soaring vocal.
We hear not only classical ref-
erences (there is a tiny bit of
Bach elsewhere on the album),
but flamenco, tango (there’s
an homage to Astor Piaz-
zolla, with the cello imitating
the accordion) and French
chanson (‘A Tomar Café’ is a
lovely example). Poignantly,
Maza ends with a song for
her childhood piano teacher,
Miriam Valdes, who died from
Covid-19 last year. The song
is a beautiful five minutes, in
which Maza briefly revisits
her early five-finger exercises
before heading up the scale to
a virtuosity that she dedicates
to her old teacher. LG
It’s a very, very brave singer
who would even think of cov-
ering ‘Wuthering Heights’ but
here comes Cécile McLorin
Salvant,  and her take on Kate
Bush’s timeless song about
ghosts, yearning and strange-
ness – even in the truncated
version presented here – is
a stunner. Ghost Song is the
debut album from Salvant,
who is of French and Haitian
heritage, though she was raised
in the US, and also a thriving
visual artist. That it has been
picked up by such a major label
as Nonesuch is an indication of
great things to come.
For the moment, though,
Salvant bookends this debut
with two songs of death
and haunting: Bush’s take
on the Emily Brontë novel
and ‘Unquiet Grave’, the old
English folksong covered
by luminaries far and wide.
Salvant spooks up both songs
by delivering them in the
unaccompanied Irish sean-nós
style (though there is minimal
instrumentation on ‘Heights’
along with some sound effects).
They are stark, unworldly,
laden with emotion, and their
positioning, as the first and last
tracks, suggests that the other
10 songs are, in their own
ways, also ghost songs. This is
most obvious in the title track,
which opens with a flattened
blues voice and ends, glori-
ously, with a youth chorus.
Salvant’s instrumentation is
often jazzy (the excellent key-
boards of Sullivan Fortner
feature in many of the songs)
until it isn’t. This swerving
– to folk song, to cumbia, to
blues – strengthens so much
that is already extraordinary
here. Worth checking out is
‘Dead Poplar’, a setting of a
letter from Alfred Stieglitz to
Georgia O’Keefe, and a break-
neck visit to Weill and Brecht’s
‘The World Is Mean’, which is
so agile that it blows other con-
tenders off the stage. LG

MARCH-APRIL 2022 79
 THE The crossword prize is a voucher for our online shop to the equivalent of £20/$30. Only the
winner will be notified. Send your entries by 15 March to: New Internationalist Puzzle Page,

PUZZLER The Old Music Hall, 106-108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JE, UK; or email a scan to:
puzzlepage@newint.org Winner for 254: Anna Waldron, Lincoln, England.

CROSSWORD 255 by Axe 15 Odd tale involving gold in the French

CRYPTIC ACROSS
9 Almost bucolic all over Italy, and in Rome
to the west, here it’s pre-Roman (7)
10 Turned up in panama hat – airy, not hot,
but cold in the desert (7)
11 American, a drifter, first to reach a
disputed island in the Gulf (3,4)
12 What Basques say to bringing Caribbean
music into Brussels academy (7)
13 Is Romania troubling for a little
continent? (4,5)
department (5)
16 From Sodom he arrived to face a fabled
court (7)
19 Russia’s OK backs killer kidnapping
British in the enclave (7)
20 Italian favourite featuring in recipes
today (5)
21 Long flower found by Greek character in
the Alexandria area (4,5)
25 Perhaps stole, to a point, an old part of
Lancashire (7)
26 Russian leader’s wife damaged Nazi
car (7)
28 Mayan ruin a junior officer finds 50%
unharmed... (5,2)
29 ...in the way of the French mine damage
at desert battle (7)
CRYPTIC DOWN
1 State of India a thousand years before
the French support (6)
2 Grape, for example, is restricted to one
line north of the Trieste area (6)
3 Black Sea port’s starting phasing out
subcontinent tongue – for Pashto in the
end (4)
4 California’s, whichever way you view it,
North America’s ‘Promised Land’ (6)
5 Ace Blair played concerning
Mediterranean islands (8)
6 One fractious Iraqi king suppressed
Lyallpur of old (10)
7 Someone in the NT Paul addressed after
show, one decked in brown (8)
8 California City Father’s unhappy over a
Nebraska trip (8)
14 Dual move on volatile peak in the
Transylvanian Alps (10)
16 Carolinas point to California fruit’s iron
content (4,4)
17 Libyan port, and one in Sumatra,
perhaps (8)
18 African capital’s sitting on one article (8)
22 Describing a Tuscan city where initially
captured, abducted, by elusive earl (6)
23 Student that’s returning to study at an
old Dutch university (6)
24 Egyptian site, a ruin on the borders of
Nubia (6)
27 People in the Balkans once with links to
a French department (4)
QUICK ACROSS
9 Pre-Roman region of Italy (7)
10 Chilean desert (7)
11 Island near the Strait of Hormuz
disputed by Iran and the Emirates (3,4)
12 Basque language (7)
13 Anatolia in Greek and Roman times (4,5)
15 French department and river valley
noted for its chateaux (5)
16 Legendary court of King Arthur (7)
19 Troubled exclave of Angola at the mouth
of the Congo River (7)
20 Italian sauce with basil (5)
21 Estuarine distributaries of the world’s
longest river (4,5)
25 Peninsula north of Morecambe Bay,
south of England’s Lake District (7)
26 Russian empress (7)
28 Remains of a Mayan ceremonial centre
in Belize (5,2)
29 Popularly-called tank battle(s) of World
War II (1942) (7)
QUICK DOWN
1 State of India’s Malabar Coast (6)
2 Area of Northeast Italy with its own
particular cultural and historical identity (6)
3 Turkish province on the Black Sea, and
its capital (4)
4 Land between the Jordan valley and
the Mediterranean whose indigenous
people were ousted by Israelites (6)
5 Mediterranean island group, the largest
being Majorca (8)
6 Industrial city of the Pakistani Punjab,
formerly Lyallpur (10)
7 Recipient in a province of 13 of a letter
from Paul (8)
8 Californian city, ‘where the grass is
greener’! (8)
14 Tallest peak in Romania, in the South
Carpathians (Transylvanian Alps) (10)
16 North Carolina headland spawning two
eponymous films noirs (4,4)
17 Third Libyan city and port (variant
spelling) west of the Gulf of Sidra (8)
18 Nationality of historic Tripolitania today (8)
22 Pertaining to a Tuscan provincial capital
known for its olive oil (6)
23 Seat of the first Dutch university in 1575 (6)
24 Egyptian site, also called el- or Tel el ------
today (6)
27 Turkic Black Sea people, subdued by
Charlemagne, 791-9 (4)
SOLUTION TO CROSSWORD 254
ACROSS: 1 Machilipatnam, 10 Redonda,
11 Nilgiri, 12 Sucre, 13 Amagasaki, 14 Great
Wall, 16 Bahai, 17 Olmec, 19 Amstetten,
21 Karamania, 24 Tonga, 25 Etonian,
26 Amorite, 27 New Zealanders.
DOWN: 2 Ardeche, 3 Hanseatic,
4 Liana, 5 Pinnacles, 6 Tulsa, 7 Aligarh,
8 Grossglockner, 9 Cilician Gates,
15 Acarnania, 16 Brentford, 18 Marmore,
20 Tangier, 22 Mainz, 23 Ayala.

ASSOCIATION Solutions here are alluded to by ‘association’ words or phrases, eg

ICE as a solution could have association words like ‘melting (ICE)’ WORDSEARCH 101 Find the 19 member countries
of NATO hidden here.

WORDS 22 or ‘(ICE) skating’, so the association words in each clue could appear
in a phrase before or after the solution word.
ACROSS
7 Saint: Kern (6)
8 Harry S: Capote (6)
9 New: Rock (8)
10 What are you: date (2,2)
11 French: cousins (7)
13 Acute: iron (5)
15 Kentucky: County (5)
17 Cartridge: of Secrets (7)
20 Falling: of David (4)
21 Delta-wing: carrier (8)
23 Nuclear: of the
Clones (6)
24 Ocean’s: Years’
Tyranny (6)
DOWN
1 As sound as a: Book
and Candle (4)
2 Inverted: and colons (6)
3 Many happy: on one’s
investments (7)
4 And Scratchy: feet (5)
5 Ode to: Leaves (6)
6 The storming of the:
Day (8)
12 Change of: parade (8)
14 Atlantic: flight (7)
16 Writing: of Indian
Affairs (6)
18 Common: Economy (6)
19 Quarter: to the wall (5)
22 Chicken: the World (4)

SOLUTION TO ASSOCIATION WORDS 21

ACROSS: 1 Aces, 3 Bachelor, 9 Harbour, 10 Bates,
11 Earth, 12 Actors, 14 In time, 16 Avenue, 19 Couple,
21 Limit, 24 Angel, 25 Emerson, 26 Interest, 27 Asks.
DOWN: 1 Athletic, 2 Error, 4 Aerial, 5 Habit, 6 Lateran,
7 Risk, 8 Gotham, 13 Meetings, 15 Thought, 17 Valley,
18 Aeneas, 20 Polar, 22 Mists, 23 Taxi.
SOLUTION TO WORDSEARCH 100
Ain, Aisne, Ardennes, Ariege, Aube, Aude, Cher, Doubs,
Drome, Essonne, Eure, Gard, Gers, Indre, Isere, Jura,
Loire, Lot, Manche, Marne, Nievre, Nord, Oise, Orne, Paris,
Savoie, Somme, Tarn, Var.

80 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
 AGONY
UNCLE
Ethical and political dilemmas abound these days. Seems like
we’re all in need of a New Internationalist perspective.
Enter stage: Agony Uncle
Q: My 7-year-old daughter
goes to a multicultural school.
It’s really diverse, with stu-
dents from across Europe
and Asia. They are planning
their first ever ‘international
day’ to bring all the different
communities together and
celebrate diversity. Kids are
invited to dress up in national
dress for the day. My daugh-
ter is British, though one of
her grandparents is Israeli.
But she’s dead set on coming
to school in a sari from Bang-
ladesh that I was given by a
Bangladeshi friend.
Should I let her? Does that
distract from celebrating the
children from minority cul-
tures who are usually side-
lined in mainstream British
culture? Or should all kids be
encouraged to explore other
national identities?
Worried of Luton
A: Luton – which was the
birthplace in 2009 of the
English Defence League, an
Islamophobic street move-
ment – was recently identified
as one of 52 places in England
and Wales that may be at risk
of an increase in far-right
political activity.1 The eco-
nomic downturn triggered by
the pandemic, the researchers
suggest, coupled with ‘less than
liberal’ attitudes to migration
and multiculturalism in these
places, could be laying the
ground for a racist backlash.
So, it’s commendable that
your daughter’s school is
taking respecting differences
seriously. That said, I can’t
MARCH-APRIL 2022
help but think that there’s
something antiquated – a bit
old-school anthropology –
about ‘national dress’ as a ped-
agogical tool. It brings a risk
of exoticizing people, treating
them like objects of curiosity.
It also begs the question
for ‘white British’ people:
what is the UK’s national dress
anyway? An Old Etonian may
be able to rustle something
up that speaks to their social
class, but there’s hardly any-
thing that captures the nation.
This means that those school
children who aren’t (recently)
descended from immigrants
will either see themselves as the
neutral category – as if national
dress is for other people, and
they are ‘ just normal’ – or as
existing in a cultural vacuum.
Both of these seem dangerous
in their own way.
But I don’t think any of this
should pose a dilemma for your
child. South Asians – particu-
larly Muslims and those living
in deprived neighbourhoods
– experience structural and
interpersonal racism in Britain.
And yes, unthinking forms of
‘cultural appropriation’ can
rub salt in the wound. Think
of, say, a restaurant owner
who profits off the cuisine of
a marginalized people while
exploiting staff of the same
ethnicity, or white Americans
dressing up in indigenous-
style headdresses at Hallow-
een. But, generally speaking,
the Indian subcontinent’s cul-
tures are not seen as alien in
the British Isles anymore, as
they once were by hostile
Brits – that’s a testament to the
success of anti-racist endeav-
ours. It also means that no-one
is likely to raise an eyebrow at
a white child in a sari.
But the key point here is
that she was given the dress
by your friend. That means
it was the result of a genuine
relationship between equals.
It wasn’t chosen randomly
based on its perceived exotic
value but was the result of an
exchange across boundaries –
which is the oxygen that keeps
culture alive. This, by the way,
is why I don’t have a lot of
truck with cultural appropria-
tion, a charge that is levelled
too readily: without the appro-
ILLUSTRATION: EMMA PEER
priate misuse of ‘foreign’ cul-
tures, much music, literature
and art would grind to a halt.
I would recommend making
sure that, together, you do
some research into the sari
before she goes to school; and
make sure that she’s ready to
learn from any south Asian
classmates who come wearing
saris too.
Recent trends in British
politics, noticeably the govern-
ment’s draconian anti-refugee
policies, remind us of the need
to robustly defend humanity
in all its forms. But we should
also be on guard against the
limits of multicultural dis-
course – when done wrongly, it
can dehumanize. We shouldn’t
use culture to reduce people
to simple categories but to
enlarge them; to grasp the
richness, complexity and unity
that exists across the word that
we all call home. O
1 ‘Revealed: the towns at risk from far-
right extremism’, The Guardian,
31 October 2021, nin.tl/Luton
SEND YOUR DILEMMAS TO
ADVICE @NEWINT.ORG
81
 WHAT IF…
WE TOOK DEGROWTH SERIOUSLY?
Ditching planet-popping expansion for justice is a vision worth getting behind,
says Dinyar Godrej.
Continual cumulative growth is the
central hegemonic pillar of main-
stream economics. Growth – an
accelerating frenzy of material pro-
duction and economic activities – is
seen as the only guarantor of secu-
rity and abundance for all. It actu-
ally achieves the reverse.
Capitalism’s organizing prin-
ciple is put with elegant simplic-
ity by economic anthropologist
Jason Hickel thus: ‘Take more than
you give back.’ Growth is all about
this accumulation, the creation of
massive surplus by devaluing the
material resources of our planet
and the labour of the very many
– for it to be captured by the very
few. Today the richest one per cent
grabs nearly a quarter of all income
and owns half of all wealth.
The growth dogma is also an
ecological disaster – and eventu-
ally a physical impossibility. We are
overshooting ecological limits year on
year currently at nearly twice the level of
sustainable material extraction.
But the alternative – degrowth – is
considered the kiss of death at the polls
by politicians Right and Left. It has been
portrayed as bringing the horrors of
continual recession, austerity and job-
lessness. But, if we took it seriously, we
would have a world to win. Degrowth
means reorienting our world to live
within ecological limits. The starting
point is to view the natural world as
essential rather than an ‘other’ to be col-
onized and plundered.
Next, we would need to rebalance the
use of ecological space and resources.
Poorer nations, where inhabitants reach
just a quarter of their annual per capita
material boundary, would be given space
to expand and develop. Those in high-
income nations – who exceed their per
ANDY CARTER
capita share by nearly four times – would
need to shift to a culture of sharing rather
than acquisition.
82
The focus, across the world, would
need to shift back from increasing private
ownership and accumulation, which only
serves the few, to a return to ‘commoning’
via initiatives such as: a guaranteed basic
income, social housing, public services,
public spaces, public resources that would
be shared and knit communities together.
Neighbourhoods could share the things
not everyone needs to own, easing the
atomization in today’s late capitalist set-up,
which spurs neurotic overconsumption.
Enacted degrowth policy would end
extreme private wealth, and politicians
would have to tackle what they usually
shy away from – fair distribution.
In material terms we would seek
to eliminate food waste. Saving just a
quarter of all food lost or wasted would
be enough to feed all the world’s under-
nourished people. Appliances would have
to be built to last – imagine a smartphone
for life! – and be repairable.
Ecologically destructive industries would
be scaled down, while planet-friendly
activities like public healthcare
and regenerative agriculture would
be scaled up.
Governments would ditch GDP,
which includes all kinds of damag-
ing economic activity, as a measure
of human progress and focus
on justice and welfare instead.
The economy would be directed
towards social objectives rather
than insane capital accumulation.
The government-corporate love-in
would end.
The withering of consumer
society would be accompanied by
a realization that current levels of
overproduction of material things
just aren’t necessary. Work would
be shared out in terms of what’s
required, not to create profits for
the few. Care work would be rec-
ognized as essential to the social
economy and appropriately com-
pensated. Leisure time would
increase, which would build bonds of
family and community.
The fair-shares worldview would
also change economic relations between
nations, dismantling the current system
of continuing economic colonization
by the rich West through unfair trade
arrangements that devalue the labour
and resources of poorer nations.
Capitalism pursues growth relent-
lessly, because it is premised on scarcity,
there never being enough for everyone.
Degrowth paradoxically offers a vision of
abundance and justice for all, if we learn
to live modestly, and would lead to our
flourishing in a world where everyone’s
needs were met and we regain a deep
connection with the natural world.
How to get past the ‘it will never
happen’ stage? It’s time to start talking and
demystify degrowth, building up public
awareness. Surveys routinely show that
people are fed up with capitalism and
anxious about ecological issues. It’s time
we said: ‘There are answers.’ O
NEW INTERNATIONALIST
 CLIMATE
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