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.

Towards a Mindful Foreign Policy?

First, a disclaimer. I’m no expert on mindfulness or Zen. I’m (slowly) learning to meditate and, as a peace educator, have been considering some of the connections between inner peace and social, political (dare I even say economic?) peace. Our talk during meditation class recently was focused on “paying attention to your intentions”. Of course this is a lifelong personal journey, but does the idea have relevance for nations as well? Can a country be mindful? If so, will international politics be more peaceful?


On one hand, I am frankly skeptical. The “causes” of war are numerous and complex, rooted in inadequate bureaucracies, autocratic regimes, resource depletion, patriarchy, economic markets, and what’s been called the “heavy hand of history”. In that “heavy hand of history” is there a possible connection between mindfulness and preventing war?

It is possible. What if not just political leaders but a nation’s citizenry “paid attention to their intentions”? As I’ve been writing here and elsewhere, I think a key outcome of peace education, especially any peace education that wants to engage or claims to be inspired by, critical theory must help students be able to deconstruct the causes of war. Part of this means being able to identify—to articulate!—the national narratives that tell the story of who we think we are as Americans (Brits, Irish, Iranians, Mexicans…). How do we explain what we stand for? How do we talk about our role in the world? And does that then lead us to war or peace?

I raise these questions of course because they have everything to do with how we understand—or misunderstand—our intentions in choosing war. Does an unexamined (or even unconscious) assumption about the goodness, the righteousness, of our national intentions lead us naively into conflicts we don’t understand? Surely a more rigorous examination—a more mindful one, you might say—of our interests and intentions in armed interventions is urgent, given that we have in the past decade ended up in at least two wars most Americans do not want (Iraq and Afghanistan).

Peace education, I think, can make at least two contributions to this. One, the systems thinking inherent in peace education can introduce students to thinking critically about the connection between interpersonal systems, communities, nations and the world system. Perhaps such students-as-citizens will be more willing, able and empowered to ask difficult questions about why a particular war is really necessary. Secondly, peace education, when it is effective, engenders in students a sense of themselves as part of a whole. Such a citizen is probably more likely to reject the view (a dangerous one in my opinion) that we can sensibly talk about U.S. national security separately from global, human security. That’s no longer possible in the hyper-connected, interdependent 21st century.

Honestly I can’t say that I’m sold on my own premise here. Again, I’m no expert but mindfulness seems to be such a personal, individual experience that I wonder if that can translate to the socio-national level. Yet clearly groups can act out aggressions, impulses and unconscious “scripts” as individuals do. I have more questions than answers but it sure seemed a question worth asking.

You Might Already Be Teaching Peace If....

If you've taught K-12, you've been there. A new mandate to plan for. A new test to scantron. Another inservice that may or may not be led by someone who has taught K-12 in the past decade. (Those who run these teacher trainings who have not taught run the risk of getting eaten alive.)

And they want us to "teach peace" too? They want us to seriously be responsible for the moral, social development of students we see 45 minutes a day on a good week? A week without fights, assemblies, tornado drills, fire drills, bomb scares, parent conferences, special ed conferences, state tests to proctor, open houses....

Sometimes, because of the reality I note above, it's almost impossible for teachers today to imagine adding one more thing to that list. So in that spirit, I say take heart! For exhausted, besieged teachers everywhere who would love to "teach peace" if there were only five spare seconds in the day, did you know you are probably already doing it?

It's closer than you think!

You might already be teaching peace if….

1.If you read works like To Kill a Mockingbird and 12 Angry Men with your students because you want them to understand the seeds of hate and prejudice.

2.If you read works like Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 so they know how important it is to think for themselves.

3.If your students know the words “doublethink” and/or “scapegoat”.

4.If you’ve ever told a kid that “it gets better”.

5.If you’ve encouraged a kid to power off and reconnect with nature.

6.If you’ve called a parent to tell her how great her kid is.

7.If you’ve invited a kid to write or speak about struggles s/he’s facing.

8.If you’ve taken a group overseas so they understand other kids better.

9.If you’ve involved kids in making the rules of the classroom.

10.If you’ve formed a partnership with a community organization.

If you're already doing those things or many more, you may already be teaching peace! You're already "being the change".

Got other suggestions of things teachers are already doing to "teach peace"? I invite you to leave them in the comments.

On the Doug Noll Show!

Many thanks to Doug for a fun and important conversation! We had a great talk about Egypt, global citizenship, power and hierarchy in schools and more. Enjoy!

Here's the link!

Book Talk: Hedge's War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

Sometimes you come across a book that really matters. I’d like to thank Chris Hedges for writing one of those books, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. Hardly new anymore, but perhaps more timely than ever.

Hedge’s thesis here is that there is in human nature a void, a need for meaning and purpose. This need can be, and too often is, filled by what he frankly describes as the excitement and illusory heroism of war—“war usually starts with a collective euphoria”. His work, I think, helps us link the personal with the political, the micro with the macro. In the natural human longing to matter, the lure of war can be irresistible and here is the power of war lords and ethnic cleansers. Especially in the chaos of major political or economic upheaval, many people experience themselves as powerless and seek war as a way to feel secure or powerful. This is possible because, Hedges argues, of the “collective amnesia” which national myths “ignite” in a society during a conflict.

This amnesia is facilitated, sometimes even engineered, by State destruction of both its own culture (which of course includes human, tolerant and free values in some aspect) and that of the enemy. This is the first step of the dehumanization of the enemy which HAS to precede the destruction of the enemy. Otherwise the safeguards and civilized behaviors that make society work cannot be overcome. This is why such wide spread abuse, to include torture and rape, even perpetrated by “peace keepers”, is so common. Once the mores of civilization are degraded, what’s unleashed is nearly impossible to control. Hedges notes, for example, that porn is sometimes used as a way to begin stripping away social taboos and/or to “divert a society that was collapsing”, as in former Yugoslavia. Once this dynamic is in motion, the worst aspects of human nature are exposed, rendering us nearly incapable of talking about what happened to understand it or heal.

Belying the notion that “ancient ethnic hatreds” are natural, Hedges documents the labor that must go into deconstructing and reconstructing national/ethno-national identities. He describes destruction of old monuments (for example) which might contradict the new desired state narrative, co-opting of art and culture, targeting of artists and intellectuals who do not “read from the script”, targeting of anyone else who does not “read from the script”, rewriting of school curriculum, forced migration, mandated apartment swaps to ensure ethnic cleansing, and years of radio and TV broadcasts deploying state propaganda to foment ethnic hatred. (I’m especially struck that it apparently took Milosevic four years of propaganda to finally foment the violence he needed to accomplish ethnic cleansing.) This selective, rewriting of history, as well as direct propaganda, helps to heighten the “narcissism of small differences” (32) that Freud spoke of. The myth, usually but not always nationalist, masks the lies and contradictions that would probably in peace time be obvious to most citizens. Writes Hedges, “War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially critical thought” (10).

He notes that language itself is “drafted” into the Total War effort, in a very Orwellian sense (34). War becomes peace. Language becomes reduced to a national (or religious or ethnic) script—the “reduction of language to code” (72); if you are not reading from that script, you are a dangerous dissident. Wars, he writes, “feed off martyrs”, whose memory “shuts all arguments for compromise or tolerance…It is the dead who rule. They speak from beyond the grave urging a nation onward to revenge” (94).

I would also observe that Hedges’ work helps us connect, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the humanities with the social and political sciences. He reminds us that the realm of myth, the emotional and super-rational, are as important to understanding human behavior as economic data or public opinion surveys. Men (and it is usually, though not always, men) who fight war do so for reasons they at least tell themselves are eternal. This is why the destruction of real art and culture are so important to war-making; the humanities do indeed humanize.

More than anything else, he argues, as one who has observed war after war firsthand that
1. Wars are fought based on illusion and the actual experience is horrific in a manner only comprehended by those who have experienced it. The experience of war, he argues, exposes the lie of what especially soldiers were told it would be.
2. War is fought essentially based on myths and lies that many willingly believe.
3. Secretly and often with guilt, some who have experienced or participated in war long for the intensity it offered. (See The Hurt Locker.)
4. Nearly every group in history involved in perpetuating violence has believed itself to be a victim, in fact THE victim, and this plants the seeds of what I call “war thinking”—that we are not just good but Goodness and they are not just bad but Evil. This is what makes patriotism “a thinly veiled form of collective self-worship” (10). Hence the enemy’s destruction is holy. As Hedges notes, echoing others, this “makes communication impossible” (69). I would extend this to add that such communication is, of course, central to ending, as well as mitigating and preventing, wars. Violence itself becomes the language through which societies communicate (ala McNamara).
5. He emphasizes the role of fear, guilt (since at heart and soul we know we’re buying lies, hence the extreme defensiveness) and extension of COMPLICITY to all citizens involved. This extension of complicity is a key social mechanism in perpetuating the war and its underlying myth since the shared complicity keeps everyone in guilty silence.
6. He also emphasizes the role of industrial and post-industrial technology in war which makes mass killing so much easier, less personal, more efficient; “men in modern warfare are in service to technology.” Of course this makes understanding war, and how to prevent it, more urgent than ever.

A Phenomenological Reflection on Ethnic Conflict

Editor's Note: It is my pleasure to publish this important and honest reflection from one of my Qualitative Methods students. The personal is the professional.


By: Safeer Tariq Bhatti

Growing up in America, one of the biggest difficulties I had was trying to be like the population I embraced every day. But, exclusion and the definition that I was not one of them was paramount. On the school bus, there was not segregation against black and white, but segregation against difference. My difference was my normalcy in many things, my difference in color, my simple clothing, my simple English and my simple habits. I wanted to be the best simply, but I was not the best in many things. I never knew what challenge was until I received it-until given the opportunity to be better than those who made me an outcast in every way possible. Once I achieved beyond the norm, my acceptance gained prominence.

Throughout my experiences, I could not understand why my ethnicity- why ME, was not accepted here in America. I thought going to my birth place, to a place that looks like me, acts like me and feels like me would accept, but they did not too. I had no identity. My identity was disputed. My territory was disputed. One day, when I was very young, I went to the Beach and I was sitting in the water and the sun gazed on our brown backs. In the water, they were many people that all looked like me. But, as I got closer, everyone had their own groups. Each group was speaking their own language and their own culture. This culture and that language were all different. People prided on their languages and their cultures. As you got closer to each group, each group would say that they are better than anyone- better than all the groups. One nation was so different. They were all Pakistani, but they all said we were different from each other. They all said we are better from each other. Why?

Why were they different in a country which makes them not? Why I was still not accepted? There is exclusivity in a homogeneous population and this exclusivity causes conflict.

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.