Straight Outta Tottenham: Anger, Dignity and Austerity

"To be wholly overlooked and to know it are intolerable” ~John Adams

A clear thread is woven through the fabric of the many different, and often differently expressed, social upheavals that we have been experiencing throughout the year, and that thread is the challenge of global neoliberalism to dignity. Perhaps indeed some late 21st century Barbara Tuchman will tell the story of how 2011 was 1848 or 1937. What’s important now is that we understand how our systems—social, cultural, economic and political—are failing us on a large scale and what needs to be done to begin transforming them.

• London (unemployed youth riots)

•Ohio (union bargaining rights)

• Chile (student demonstrations over access to education)

• Wisconsin (union bargaining rights)

• The U.S. Tea Party (shrinking the welfare state)

• Israel (affordable housing—or as my colleague Aziz Abu Sarah memorably put it, “In Israel, the Rent Is Too Damn High”)

• The Arab Spring/Revolutions

But this goes even further back. Remember those uprisings in Paris a few years ago? Or the spate of anti-immigrant violence in Australia? How about pre-revolution food-price riots in Cairo? What about even the “Battle in Seattle” when the WTO was in town?

Why do I suggest that such different protests as the above all share a common impulse? Without ignoring local specifics, I see current the unrest as an extension of a larger trend that may have been developing throughout the 21st century so far as economic globalization and democracy expand and contract in response to what I believe are tectonic shifts of the global socio-political landscape. A root-bottom driver of the above is the relationship between entrenched neo-liberalism worldwide—which has accelerated to austerity as after-shocks of the Great Recession continue—and social dignity.

Dignity is what allows people to have faith in the social contract. So even if someone else has more materially, a young man or woman can still feel that

1. Others perceive him or her to be a part of society

2. Her role in society has some sort of meaning for her

3. She can have some sort of control over her future, especially as it relates to being able to provide for basic survival

Some excellent research has been done about the socio-political negotiation of social contracts and a community or nation’s security (see for example Beverly Crawford’s work on the “myth of ethnic conflict”). Essentially this is the agreement, sometimes spoken or written, sometimes not, that underlies how a society’s resources are divided up and what will constitute the CONSTRUCTED concept of legitimacy in a society—who gets to hold power, how and why. What we’re seeing in each of the cases above, I would argue, is a demand for renegotiating the social contract.

To my mind this implies the need for a global social contract. What rights can indeed a citizen demand? To what is he entitled? What does a citizen of Country X “look like” and/or believe? These are fundamental underlying questions being struggled over. The more interconnected our economies become, and the more migration continues throughout the 21st century, the truer this will be.

As I’ve written in my book on indigenous communities and austerity in Paraguay (Land and Dignity in Paraguay), when you take away someone’s ability to control their future, you take away their dignity. More than a set of mere economic policy prescriptions, neoliberalism is also a set of social norms and assumptions about human nature. This is where austerity, and Ha Joon Chang’s concept of “kicking away the ladder”, comes into play. The idea is that as one group climbs up the socio-economic ladder, benefitting from public spending on infrastructure, health, education, research/development and so on, they then begin to call for those supports to be chipped away.

I don’t think high rates of unemployment alone would have resulted in the riots we’re seeing in the UK. As a number of interviews with some of the rioters and protestors have shown, the ideas of power and economic injustices have been resonant. As part of austerity, youth services in Tottenham were cut by 75%! Don’t forget that historic Tunisian man who immolated himself in front of a municipal building after the confiscation of his vendor’s cart. It’s not just being unemployed—it’s being invisible!

An under-appreciated movie, “Dirty Pretty Things”, has a scene which captures the importance of “mere” visibility as a first step towards dignity. Several immigrants from various places encounter one another in some of London’s seedier sections. A few grisly scenes suggest that they have gotten caught up in the black market of organ smuggling. Having discovered it, they are soon blackmailed and threatened with deportation. Toward the end of the movie, a security man asks the Nigerian immigrant, “How come I haven’t seen you?” The immigrant replies, “We are the people you don’t see”. In all of the above cases, whatever distinct and valid differences they might also have from one another, the protestors are demanding to be accounted for—to be seen!—in the social contract.

Youth Development Is Security: Cairo Edition

Youth development, as I’ve developed a habit of saying, is security. As we have all watched unrest, riots and protests throughout Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Jordon, and previously in Iran, I continue to believe this truth.

Numerous analysts have noted how young “the Arab world” (we’ll set aside the fuzziness of that term for now) is. Stanford reports that 37% of Tunisia’s population is young (defined as 15-29). The median age in Yemen, according to the CIA Factbook, is 17. A full 50% of the country is of “working age”—25- 64. For context, the literacy rate in this country, in which the US has been using predator drones, is 50%. Nearby in Egypt, where tanks have been rolling onto the streets as I type, the median age is 24! 63% of the population are between 15-64. (It’s worth noting that Egypt’s literacy rate, at 71%, is significantly higher, which will matter greatly for Egypt’s future.) All of these countries grapple with high unemployment which may well be connected to the global financial crisis (at least in Egypt).

(Click here to watch Frontline’s Egypt: Middle East, Inc. which features a youth development effort.)

I rehearse this data, of course, because it so powerfully underlines an insight that I think is key to understanding the urgency of peace education, which again is precisely that “youth development is security”. Elsewhere I’ve written that I think there is great potential in peace education to “inoculate” young people against extremist views, whether it might be the mercenary violence of an MS13 or the more ideologically-driven terrorism of Al-Qaeda. So what then should we as peace educators be doing now? How can US educators help American students to understand what is unfolding? And how can teachers and schools in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and elsewhere, equip their students for a rapidly changing future in an increasingly armed and global world?

US educators might begin by opening discussions with their high school students (who are almost certain to be excited to begin driving) about where our oil comes from and the role it has played in shaping our foreign policy. The might also note that, as numerous media outlets have reported, the tear-gas cannons fired in Cairo at the protestors were made in the USA. Do today’s students feel this is right? What about the military aid we’ve given to Mubarak? This is also an exquisitely teachable moment regarding civil liberties and the rights to assemble, to peacefully protest and to petition one’s government, which every human being should have.

I won’t presume to explain to teachers or educational leaders in the Arab world what to do with this teachable moment. But there is some general wisdom from some of the founders of peace education, such as Freire and Montessori, that may be of use here. One insight is that schools too often are instruments of the state. Naturally this is even more the case when regimes are repressive and so use schools as instruments of repression. I would imagine some educators in these schools observe this daily. This use of schools as mechanisms of autocracy can often occur, for example, through plain censorship of what’s taught to encouraging one-sided views of history, lionizing accepted leaders, demonizing the opposition or (more subtly but crucially) shaping curriculum that encourages rote memorization, discourages critical and creative thinking and fosters individualism over community and collaboration. If democracy, or even “mere” good governance in any society is to be fostered or maintained, such an oppressive approach to education must be peacefully revolutionized.

Youth Development Is Security

During a class discussion on The Freedom Writers with my students at the Juvenile Detention Home School one afternoon, I asked my students why they thought kids joined gangs. Time and time again, from students who had not met one another, the same answer came.

Family.

Students shared in class debate, and in the privacy of their journals, that at the most basic level, gangs are a replacement for family.

Identity needs, such as esteem and relationship, are not negotiable, as we know from John Burton. If our students cannot get their need to belong, to feel safe, and be loved met by family or another group, the appeal of a gang (or similar group) can be overwhelming. Area gang task forces report that MS-13 and other gangs are recruiting not just at middle schools any longer, but increasingly at elementary schools.

Nor is this dynamic limited to the United States. States which have nearly failed have struggled with civil wars and ethnic violence. Sierra Leone is one example; combatants in this war were as young as eight! Ismael Beah, in one particularly harrowing scene from his memoir A Long Way Gone, describes two of his fellow soldiers who had to drag their AK-47s because the weapons were bigger than they were! We can see the same dynamic in the history of Liberia.

As Nick Kristof wrote in a fantastic op-ed today, fundamentalist madrassas are too often the only game in town for young people (let’s say 10-24) to imagine for themselves a meaningful future. Writes Kristof, “I can’t tell you how frustrating it is on visits to rural Pakistan to see fundamentalist Wahabi-funded madrassas as the only game in town. They offer free meals, and the best students are given further scholarships to study abroad at fundamentalist institutions so that they come back as respected ‘scholars.’ We don’t even compete. Medieval misogynist fundamentalists display greater faith in the power of education than Americans do.”

Conflict prevention necessitates that basic human needs are met. This requires the coordination of a number of practitioners who perhaps do not immediately view themselves as partners: those responsible for security and those responsible for education. As many students remind me daily, some feel impelled to join a gang or otherwise engage in violence because they feel they’re not safe otherwise. One young man from Washington, DC, shared his story with me. He told his father one night that he did not feel safe walking to school. His father told him to “man up”, so the boy bought a gun. He was arrested and served his time; months after his release, he shot and killed another young person. My latest understanding is that he will be tried as an adult. Had this young man’s security needs been met, this conflict could almost certainly have been avoided.

This student’s story, Ismael Beah’s and the students of whom Kristof writes, as well as the countless students who have come through my “juvie hall” classroom with tattoos from MS-13 or the Bloods, speak to an urgent need for peace education in every classroom globally. This can’t happen until we act on the clear truth that youth development is security.