Author Archives: B Merritt

Putin needs to show more restraint than hero to avoid a new Crimean war

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This post was written by Professor Orlando Figes of Birkbeck’s Department of History, Classics and Archaeology. He is the author of Crimea: The Last Crusade (Penguin). This article originally appeared on The Guardian on 28 February 2014.Crimea: The Last Crusade, by Orlando FigesThe signs are ominous: Crimea’s parliament has been stormed by pro-Russian gunmen; its airports seized by soldiers in Russian uniforms; and Russian military trucks and helicopters are on the move. It looks like we are heading for a new Crimean war.Its course is predictable. Russia‘s forces, or – more likely – their Crimean proxies, would carry out a coup to defend the interests of the Russian-speaking majority in the peninsula and hold a referendum to secure autonomy from Ukraine.

Perhaps Crimea would rejoin Russia, despite the objections of the Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians. The pro-Russian movement might then spread into south-east Ukraine, whose industries are heavily dependent on Russia. Ukraine loses, Russia wins.

Crimea was bound to be the focus of the Russian backlash against the Ukrainian revolution. The Black Sea peninsula is the only part of Ukraine with a clear Russian majority. For more than 20 years, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, its rule by Kiev has been a major source of Russian resentment – inside and outside Crimea – and a major thorn in Ukraine’s relations with Russia.

The Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation – by which Russia rents its naval base at Sevastopol from the Ukrainian government – is so far-reaching in the rights it gives the Russians to exercise their military powers that it is seen by many in Ukraine to undermine the country’s independence. In 2008 the Ukrainians said they would not renew the lease when it expired in 2017. But they buckled under the pressure of a gas-price hike and, in 2010, extended the Russian navy’s lease until 2042. What will happen to it now is anybody’s guess.

From the Russian point of view, it is all the more annoying that Crimea was part of Russia until 1954. Exactly 60 years ago, on 27 February 1954, it was casually gifted to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev (after only 15 minutes of discussion in the Supreme Soviet Presidium), supposedly to mark the 300th anniversary of the 1654 treaty unifying Ukraine with Russia.

In those days of the “fraternity of peoples” in the USSR there were no real borders between the Soviet republics, whose territories were drawn up by largely artificial and even arbitrary means.

But the Soviet collapse brought real national feelings back. Russians in Ukraine felt they had been orphaned by the breaking of their ties to Moscow; they latched on to Crimea as a symbol of their nationalist resentments.

Crimea is vitally important to the Russians. According to medieval chronicles, it was in Khersonesos – the ancient Greek colonial city on the south-western coast of Crimea, just outside Sevastopol – that Vladimir, the Grand Prince of Kiev, was baptised in 988, thereby bringing Christianity to Kievan Rus’, the kingdom from which Russia derives its religious and national identity.

Ruled by the Turks and Tatar tribes for five hundred years, Crimea was annexed by the Russians in 1783. It was the fault line separating Russia from the Muslim world, the religious division on which the Russian empire grew.

Catherine the Great liked to call the peninsula by its Greek name, Taurida, in preference to Crimea (Krym), its Tatar name. She thought that it connected Russia to the Hellenic civilisation of Byzantium. She gave land to Russia’s nobles to build magnificent palaces along the mountainous southern coast, a coastline to rival the Amalfi in beauty; their classical buildings, Mediterranean gardens and vineyards were supposed to be the bearers of a new Christian civilisation in this previously heathen land.

The Tatar population was gradually forced out and replaced by Russian settlers and other Eastern Christians: Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians.

Ancient Tatar towns such as Bakhchiserai were downgraded, while new towns like Sevastopol were built entirely in the neoclassical style. Russian churches replaced mosques. And there was an intense focus on the discovery of ancient Christian archaeological remains, Byzantine ruins, ascetic cave-churches and monasteries, to make a claims for Crimea as a sacred site, the cradle of Russian Christianity.

In the 19th century, the Black Sea fleet was the key to Russia’s imperial might. From Sevastopol it bullied the Ottomans into submission to Russia – a policy that led to the Crimean war after Tsar Nicholas I overplayed his hand in defence of the sultan’s Orthodox subjects and the British and their French allies sent their troops to Crimea to destroy his naval base.

For 11 months, the Russian sailors held out in the siege of Sevastopol – a struggle immortalised by Leo Tolstoy’s Sebastopol Sketches – before finally abandoning the town to the vastly superior allied forces. Their heroic sacrifice became a powerful emotive symbol of Russian defiance in the nationalist imagination.

The Russian character of Sevastopol is still defined by this siege mentality.

Memories of the Crimean war continue to stir profound feelings of Russian pride and resentment towards the west. Although it ended in defeat, the war has always been presented by the Russians as a moral victory. Nicholas I is one of Putin’s heroes because he fought for Russia’s interests against all the Great Powers. His portrait hangs in the antechamber of the presidential office in the Kremlin.

If a new Crimean war is to be avoided, Putin must show more restraint than his Tsarist hero. Nationalist emotions must be calmed. There are political remedies for the deep divisions in Ukraine. If peace can hold until the elections on 25 May, a new Ukrainian government might do well to consider options for the country’s federalisation to grant Crimea more autonomy.

But with deposed president Viktor Yanukovych now saying that the elections are “unlawful” there is much uncertainty and, if he speaks with Russia’s backing, little hope that those divisions can be peacefully resolved.

Latin America is being transformed by a vision of post-human rights

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This post was contributed by Dr Oscar Guardiola-Rivera of Birkbeck’s School of Law. It originally appeared on The Guardian.

In Latin America, as elsewhere, progressive governments of the centre and left struggle with a seemingly intractable dilemma: should the country exploit its natural resources to the fullest, no matter what the consequences – or consider ethical questions such as the wellbeing of the natural environment and future generations?

Countries such as Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil hope to benefit from the commodity boom in global markets, fuelled by demand in China and elsewhere. At the same time their constitutions, as well as the manifestos of progressive political parties, pledge allegiance to a whole new variety of non- and post-human rights – rights of nature, declarations of inter-generational justice, and the recognition of Amerindian cultures.

These cultures are being celebrated in Beyond El Dorado, an exhibition at the British Museum in London. It includes hundreds of gold objects excavated in the early 20th century; and ceramics and stone necklaces from the Museo del Oro in Bogotá – which has one of the best collections of pre-Hispanic gold in the world – and the British Museum’s unique collections.

The British public has responded en masse to the profound spiritual and aesthetic message expressed by the gold objects displayed in the museum. But now it is time to consider the ethical and political implications of that message: not as a relic of the distant past, but because it may contain some of the answers we desperately seek to the most relevant questions of our time. A discussion organised by the Guardian and the British Museum next month aims to do just that with the help of a distinguished panel.

These big questions – climate change, food security, equality – are already being discussed in Latin America thanks to the social movements that are helping to remould politics and political discourse. In these countries both the electoral survival of progressive parties and the continuity of crucial processes of reconciliation and democratisation depend on the support of increasingly active social movements. These often include rural as well as urban campaigners, concerned about the social and environmental devastation caused by global market forces.

In this respect, social movements in the Americas display an attitude that cannot be dismissed simply as backwards or anti-business. They demonstrate a legitimate critical attitude towards the contradictions inherent in processes of globalisation. And rather than withdrawing into some fantasy zone, these movements seek to engage actively with the state and transform the relationship between the state and the people from within.

The concept that explains this interdependence between social movements and progressive parties in government goes by the name of “dual power“: the underpinning of vertical state-citizen relations by horizontal social movements, ready to criticise the decisions of the parties they elect on the basis of a commitment to a progressive agenda. This is how the protests that rocked the politics of countries such as Colombia, Brazil, Chile and Bolivia last year must be understood: as manifestations of dual power, and expressions of the terms of a new social contract – one that includes nature not only as a reservoir of resources but as an agent of politics and of the wellbeing of society.

As far as these movements are concerned, democracy and ethical politics go hand in hand. They discuss the big questions of our time – climate change, food security, the role of commons, the rights of nature, equality – in a political arena that until recently appeared to offer no alternative to the “one size fits all” view of globalisation and the market.

Crucially, in most Latin American countries such dogmatic views were imposed by sheer force, either military – as in Chile, Brazil, Argentina or Bolivia –or paramilitary, as in Colombia. To most Colombians it is now clear – a matter of indisputable record – that the paramilitary violence that engulfed the country with peculiar intensity during the last decade and a half, with the leading intervention of the United States, was part and parcel of an economic project rather than solely a counter-insurgency exercise.

The model still in place depends on the unbridled extraction of natural resources from parts of the country that have traditionally sustained peasant, indigenous and Afro-Colombian ways of life, and is the result of such violence. Because of this, as far as the social movements are concerned, any peace process worthy of the name must also consider the serious ethical questions posited by climate change science, food security and so on.

According to the information provided by climate science, as well as from anthropology and the humanities, it is no longer possible to keep human history separate from the history of the planet. We have become geological agents, capable of affecting and even destroying nature as a whole. We do this through the very processes that we considered to be at the heart of freedom in the 20th century – chief among them free trade. What we need now is a new politics, not only a politics of freedom, but one of post-human rights and cosmopolitics.

Teaching American History in Michael Gove’s Britain

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This post was contributed by Dr Adam Shapiro, Lecturer in Intellectual and Cultural History in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology. Dr Shapiro also has his own blog: Trying Biology.

The controversy started by Education Secretary Michael Gove about how to teach history is likely to be a reference point among British historians (or historians based in Britain) for quite some time.

As a lecturer of American history in the UK, I asked my class for their reaction to Gove’s column, which focused mainly on the historical causes of the First World War and the large number of events commemorating its centenary this year. Several points came up:

Moralized Histories

With my current cohort we haven’t yet reached the First World War from an American perspective, but it is clear that the US perspective on the War would look very different to the British one. While William Jennings Bryan, the US Secretary of State from 1913-15, would have had no problem agreeing that at the outbreak of World War One Germany had “the ruthless social Darwinism of the German elites, the pitiless approach they took to occupation, their aggressively expansionist war aims and their scorn for the international order,” (as Gove describes them) he nonetheless disagreed sharply that these elements “all made resistance more than justified.” Indeed, Bryan placed the blame for war not solely on the German governing elite, but in governments that were too supportive of promoting the industries that found war to be profitable. Decades before we saw Eisenhower’s warning of a military-industrial complex, its precursors can be seen in the conjunction of Bryan’s pacifism and economic populism. But perhaps for Gove, Bryan is another leftist who simply refused to acknowledge the existence of evil.

In class, this led to a discussion of what I might call a Manichean approach to diplomatic and military history.  People don’t tend to call their enemies by names such as “the Evil Empire” with the caveat that their own force is only slightly less evil. That kind of rhetoric is designed to make a clear moral distinction. In our discussion of the US civil war, we discussed whether the victory of the North could be expressed in moral terms: that the North won because its cause (against slavery) was morally superior to that of the South. We considered whether this explanation served better than a claim that the North had military or economic superiority, or whether the South was beset by subversion within its ranks.

We turned to the account of the war written by Confederate General Jubal Early. Early ridiculed the claims that the cause of the war was slavery, pointing out that the North had profited by it almost as much as the South. Slavery was “used as a catch-word to arouse the passions of a fanatical mob,” Early wrote in his memoir.

Early’s narrative shows the Southern fight for independence as just and moral, and that the Northern leaders invoked slavery to distract from their own desire for economic exploitation of the South through conquest. The North won not through moral right, nor through military skill, but through sheer force of numbers. The story Early gives is one in which the South suffers a defeat, a punishment, almost in religious terms as a test of faith.

As an experiment, I asked several friends and colleagues about a passage from Early, while withholding its context

“the people of the United States will find that, under the pretense of ‘saving the life of the nation, and upholding the old flag,’ they have surrendered their own liberties into the hands of that worst of all tyrants, a body of senseless fanatics.”

Out of context, people thought that it was a liberal critique of the Patriot Act or the NSA. This led to the question as to whether or not ‘fanatic’ was simply a term that anyone could invoke at any time, to demonize their opponents. At which point, referring to opponents as fanatics says more about the person using that rhetoric than it does about the opponents themselves.

Morality and Individual Agency

So did it matter whether Jubal Early, or a soldier killed in Pickett’s Charge thought that their actions were morally just and in opposition to unjust tyrants? Did it matter for the British Soldier going over the top in the Somme? It matters in a personal sense—it matters to them, and to the people who knew them. We can recognize the moral behaviours of individuals, where the evidence permits, but does doing so explain anything about the outcomes of the war? The importance of the moral character of soldiers in the outcome of war is a question as old as Thucydides, but it does tend to suggest that history is a composition of individuals acting as personal moral agents and that there are no social facts that constrain, influence, or reward individual behaviours. It might be that the soldier in the Somme was conscious of the moral virtue of his action, or he may have felt trapped in a situation he could not control. A lack of emphasis by historians of the heroism of these individuals does not diminish their sacrifice or their heroism; it recognizes that there were other causes at work than simply individual moral actions. That despite the moral virtue of some individuals, they lost battles, or despite the moral depravity of their opponents, they won. At such a point, we need something else to explain historical cause and effect.

And this is where the issue becomes practically important, because if it’s the case that individual moral virtue is insufficient to be universally rewarded, then that has an impact on political ideologies that emphasize purely individualistic approaches to the solving of problems in society. If crime must be addressed solely by punishing criminals and never looking at the social systems that perpetuate criminality. If poverty and unemployment are seen solely as referenda on the moral heroism of the poor and unemployed (or the wealthy and employed) then they cannot be treated by social interventions.

History and Ideology

If history explains how causes and effects work in human behaviour, then it offers us guidelines by which we can assess personal and political action. Students generally agreed that it was an error to see the point of history as validating ideology – the point of history is not to compel all facts to fit into a grand narrative of class struggle, or a battle between forces of good and evil waged by heroes and villains, it ought to be a discussion of the balance of causes pulling at different levels. While Gove may have a point that some historians are committed to an ideology, replacing it with a different ideology seemed a poor fix.

Ideology and School History

What struck me as odd was the fact that so many people regarded the politicization of the history curriculum as something new. And yet my students were aware that it had been a longstanding issue in American education. Perhaps this was because there’s no single unitary curriculum under national control in the United States, but my class had looked at examples of US and Canadian politicians citing interpretations of history to support differing interpretations of the same event. For some, it was easy to recognize differences in political ideology lurking behind Columbus Day proclamations issued by Presidents Bush and Obama.

We also raised a question for later: how can we remain historically detached when discussing the history of the history wars?

E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class and the Future of History from Below

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This post was contributed by Dr Brodie Waddell, Lecturer in Early Modern History in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology. A previous version was published in The Future of History from Below Online Symposium.

Half a century ago, E.P. Thompson published The Making of the English Working Class. Words like ‘pioneering’ and ‘pivotal’ are overused today, but this was truly a book with no equal in its field. In it, we see the arrival of the Industrial Revolution and struggle for political rights that defined the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Of course these stories had already been told many times before, but Thompson cut a new path by reconstructing these events from the perspective of the working people who experienced them first-hand.

He set out his agenda very clearly in the preface:

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.

This phrase, and the 900-page ‘biography of the English working class’ that followed it, inspired an exuberant outpouring of historical research and writing that has made us all richer. Hundreds of historians, both professional and amateur, have followed Thompson in seeking to tell the stories of the innumerable men and women who had long been ignored by traditional histories of kings and battles.

However, the anniversary of this publication also calls for reflection. Thompson’s book may have launched ‘history from below’, but is it still relevant today? And does it have future?

A group of almost fifty historians – both young scholars and eminent professions – gathered at a recent pair of workshops that Mark Hailwood and I organised to answer these questions. We published some of the contributions as an online public symposium and I think it is fair to say that level of interests that it sparked suggests that ‘history from below’ does indeed have a potentially bright future.

I will be talking about this in more detail at an upcoming event at the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities on January 24th, alongside two very esteemed scholars: Prof. Jane Humphries (Oxford) and Prof. Sander Gilman (Emory). However, here I’d like to briefly highlight the issues that I think are most important to those who aren’t professional historians.

If we want the practice of history from below to have a meaningful future, we need to continue to push for more a democratic history. For example, access to higher education in Britain and North America expanded dramatically through much of the twentieth century, but the recent spike in tuition fees in England and the long-term rise in the US has made university much less affordable for students from working-class families. Worse still, this has hit part-time students especially hard, leading to a 40% fall in part-time applications since 2010 in the UK. We must face this challenge head-on.

We need more people writing history, more people studying history, and more people reading history. We need, in other words, more people doing history. Fortunately, more democratic ways of doing history are not difficult to find. There are already vast numbers of people building histories ‘from below’, but most academics tend not to pay much attention to them.

One promising route forward is local history.  The field of local history is huge and healthy. Practically every town and village in the country has some sort of local history society, ranging from the unapologically antiquarian to the Bristol Radical History Group, which claims the support of ‘a much wider network of footballers, artists, techies, drunks, rioters, publicans, ranters, ravers, academics, Cancan dancers, anarchists, stoners and other ne’r do wells’. It is often these groups that fight to protect and promote important local historical sites which, because they aren’t pretty country houses, might otherwise be forgotten or destroyed. Local history, then, is an opportunity for academics, students and amateurs to work together to do history from below in a way that will be relevant far beyond the university.

Family history is another rapidly growing field. Lecturers may chuckle, but proponents of ‘history from below’ should embrace it. After all, most genealogists are unlikely to find many famous politicians or generals in their family trees. Instead, they will probably find themselves investigating the lives of factory workers, sailors, criminals, paupers, housewives and maybe even ‘poor stockingers’. So, family history, with its millions of practitioners, wealth of resources, and thoroughly democratic focus on the ‘common people’ of the past, will be another fruitful field to cultivate the future of history from below.

Finally, we need accessible education. The pioneers of ‘history from below’ spent much of their time teaching students who would have otherwise missed out on a traditional university education: E.P. Thompson wrote The Making of the English Working Class whilst working for the Workers’ Educational Association in Yorkshire’s industrial towns; Eric Hobsbawm spent his entire academic career teaching evening classes at Birkbeck; Raphael Samuel founded the History Workshop movement amongst the trade unionists of Ruskin College. Happily, these institutions are still carrying on this work. I feel privileged to work at a place like Birkbeck, founded in 1823 as the London Mechanics’ Institute, and still offering evening classes to students with other work or family commitments. Despite the dangerous impact of the fee increases mentioned above, I believe that these long-established institutions – alongside others such as the Open University – will be a key part of the future of this approach to history. Moreover, open-access publishing and the explosion in history blogging is dramatically expanding the reach of research, allowing practically anyone to benefit from the scholarly work that previously would have been available to only a tiny minority.

This suggests that the future of history from below is all around us. It is going on today in meetings of village historical societies, in family history workshops, and in the comments sections of amateur history blogs. What they have in common is their role in empowering people who wouldn’t normally have a voice in history to learn and think and speak about the past. In short, they are all part of a more democratic way of doing history, the very essence of history from below.

Beat ‘Blue Monday’ – tips for improving your happiness

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This post was contributed by Dr Amy Harrison, PhD, DClinPsy. Dr Harrison is a Clinical Psychologist and teaches Positive Psychology as an Associate Lecturer. Her clinical work focuses on helping young people with eating disorders and her research focuses on how people manage emotions and experience pleasure from social interaction. 

‘Blue Monday’ – the third Monday in January (today) – has been reported as one of the grimmest days of the year. Although there may be no hard science behind this assertion, it’s easy to understand why it’s developed this reputation. The merriment of Christmas has long since faded but the mountains of credit card debt remain as we struggle through to payday; New Year Resolutions have fallen by the wayside; and the next Bank Holiday feels an aeon away.

However, there are ways that you can tackle these ‘blue’ feelings.

It’s important to remember that it’s not what happens to you, but what you make of it that is important. Research from the field of positive psychology, which aims to understand the science of happiness and wellbeing, suggests that there are things we can all do to manage the daily grind with greater ease.

My tips include:

  1. Make an effort to look out for positive things during the day – we can train ourselves to notice more of the good stuff, no matter how small.
  2. Do something for others – give up your seat on the train, feed a parking meter or smile at a stranger. You’ll be surprised at how warm this makes you feel.
  3. Count your blessings – write about something you’re grateful for, or thank someone for helping you.
  4. Look at a picture of your favourite person, experience or animal – research has shown that this can significantly improve your mood.

Many people might be surprised to hear that these small actions can have such a positive impact on mood. However, it’s worth a go – one thing that can be guaranteed is that if you don’t try anything different, things will stay the same.

Women on screen aren’t allowed to grow old erotically

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Professor Lynne SegalThis post was contributed by Lynne Segal, Anniversary Professor of Psychology & Gender Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies. It was originally published on The Guardian’s Comment is Free.

Diane Keaton recalled her mother’s advice – “don’t grow old” – as useless, however pertinent for Keaton’s chosen career as an actress. It’s a truism that interesting roles for older actresses are hard to come by. While signs of physical ageing are routinely played down in leading male actors, who regularly take roles as still vigorous and desirable characters (whether heroes or villains), the opposite applies to older actresses, if they are allowed to appear on screen at all.

Are things changing? It was Keaton herself who seemed to herald a shift when she played in the popular 2003 film about love in later life, Something’s Gotta Give. At the time she expressed astonishment at being offered the role of romantic heroine, at 58, despite being partnered by Jack Nicholson, already a decade older. Yet, in Hollywood, the films that portray older women as desirable remain sparse, with Meryl Streep one of the precious few still allowed to play a romantic lead. Meanwhile, when not excluded, one of the notable ways that older actresses make it on to the screen is playing a character with dementia: Judi Dench in Iris (2001), Julie Christie in Away From Her (2006), Streep in The Iron Lady (2011), Emmanuelle Riva in Amour (2012).

However, if cinema remains grim and forbidding territory for older actresses, television is finally starting to offer them more. To be sure, the majority of shows remain youth obsessed, and older women – with The Golden Girls a striking exception – remain perceived as beyond playfulness and sexual passion.

Still, with a third of our population over 50, and 10 million over 65 – and half of them women – the media has had to give a little. Now along comes the second series of the BBC’s Last Tango in Halifax, with its portrait of the late-life romance of two septuagenarians, Celia and Alan. The channel is planning something similar for next year with Grey Mates, involving a friendship network of pensioners, starring Alison Steadman, Stephanie Beacham and Russ Abbot – all in their mid-60s.

Noting the success of Last Tango, I have been pondering what it tells us about attitudes to bodies, old and young. Celia and Alan may be in the throes of romance, but we typically see them, particularly Celia, in her overcoat. The dynamics of their romance are mostly played out in the kitchen or the countryside, with warm smiles and hugs. There is no reference to their sexual concerns, and the bedroom stays off limits. This is all the more striking because their adult children’s affairs mean there is a continuous focus on sex.

Last Tango upholds one of the last taboos around sex, ageing and the body. Intentionally or not, it suggests that though in love, these oldies are past sexual concerns. Yet our culture has little problem presenting older men’s sexual desire. Nor do older men refrain from eagerly proclaiming this, whether in empirical surveys or in their own words. Much of the most esteemed writing by men mourns not the passing of sexual passion, but possible difficulties in its performance. Whether in the work of Ireland’s illustrious poet WB Yeats or America’s celebrated novelist Philip Roth, older men’s chief fear could be summed up as that of a creature sick with desire, but fastened to a dying animal – the threat of penile failure.

Older women’s erotic life, however, is barely registered, save in certain genres of pornography. In the wake of Germaine Greer or agony auntsIrma Kurtz and Virginia Ironside, the most influential women’s voices tackling old age tend to suggest they are contentedly post-sexual, “free at last” from erotic passion.

Given the complexities of desire, I am sceptical about this apparent gender contrast. I see the media’s endless production of eroticised, young female flesh as feeding a sense of shame attached to older women’s bodies. Any eroticisation of our aged female bodies remains taboo and this is one reason older women, in huge numbers (70% of us over-65s) live alone. Tackling our sexual yearnings, or registering our bodies with anything other than disgust, would indeed be radical. I wait to see it.

Trenton Oldfield’s win is a defeat for Theresa May’s deportation policy

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Nadine-El-EnanyThis post was contributed by Dr Nadine El-Enany, a lecturer in Birkbeck’s School of Law. It was originally published on The Guardian’s Comment is Free.

On Monday 9 December, Trenton Oldfield won his appeal against Theresa May’s decision to deport him to Australia after he carried out a direct action protest against elitism at the Oxford Cambridge boat race in 2012. The home secretary had deemed Oldfield’s presence in the UK to be “undesirable” and “not conducive to the public good” after he was convicted of causing a public nuisance when he swam into the Thames and disrupted the boat race last year. Oldfield’s win is not only a victory for the right to protest, but a serious defeat for May’s deportation policy.

May had delivered a tub-thumping speech to Tory party members at their September conference in which she promised to “deport foreign criminals first, then hear their appeals”. In spite of this, at yesterday’s tribunal the Home Office’s legal representative did not seem to be trying very hard to win the case. He asked few questions of Oldfield and his wife, Deepa Naik, and chose not to quiz the witnesses at all. He presented little evidence, basing his entire case on the fact that Oldfield had carried out a direct action protest. It seemed the Home Office expected to lose. Was this a U-turn in disguise?

May should never have taken the decision to deport Oldfield. In cases of foreigners who serve sentences of less than 12 months, the home secretary has the discretion to order deportation if she considers it to be “in the public interest”. Oldfield’s crime was to carry out a peaceful direct action protest in the name of equality. At his tribunal hearing, he spoke of how he had not expected to have been dealt with so harshly by the state. Britain, he believed, was a “mature democracy”, which this year commemorated 100 years since Emily Davison staged her final protest calling for women’s suffrage at the Epsom Derby, where she was trampled by King George V’s horse. But the historical tradition that May seems to be following is a quite different one: Britain’s shameful history of deporting political activists to Australia – the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834, the Chartists in 1842 and the Fenians in 1868, to name but a few.

The state’s reaction to Oldfield’s protest is one of a long list of the coalition government’s repressive responses to dissent. Recall the police brutality and criminalisation with which students were met when they resisted the tripling of student fees three years ago; scenes which were replayed on campuses last week when students staged “cops off campus” protests following the violent eviction of a student occupation calling for an end to the marketisation of education.

Oldfield and his wife have lived through months of anxiety, facing the possibility that their family, including their five-month-old daughter, could be separated from each other. This anguish is felt by thousands of migrants forcibly removed from Britain every year. Addressing the press following his victory, Oldfield called for attention to be focused on all the other migrants “going through the same process”. Most deportees do not have the cultural capital and support network from which he, as a white middle class man, has benefitted.

Consider the case of Luqman Onikosi, an anti-racist activist who suffers from hepatitis B and is under threat of deportation to Nigeria, where he will be unable to access treatment. Or Isa Muaza, for whom May ordered an “end of life” plan be drawn up after he went on hunger strike for 100 days in protest at his deportation to Nigeria. Despite being so ill that he had to be carried out of Harmondsworth immigration removal centre in order to be deported, May refused to back down. As a result of his protest, Muaza’s case has attracted the support of MPs, the public and celebrities. The home secretary no doubt fears that other migrants in seemingly powerless positions will be similarly inspired to resist deportation through protest.

In carrying out his protest against elitism, Oldfield focused on a symbolic site: the Oxford-Cambridge boat race. In winning his appeal, he succeeded in disrupting something weightier and more sinister: the attempt by May – herself an Oxford alumnus – to use his case to send a message of deterrence to migrants who might consider engaging in political protest.

Chile election: young Chileans have voted for a radical change of direction

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This post was contributed by Dr Oscar Guardiola-Rivera of Birkbeck’s School of Law. It originally appeared on The Guardian.

Sunday’s elections in Chile will prove significant, regionally and globally. The centre-left candidate, Michelle Bachelet won nearly twice as many votes as her closest rival, Evelyn Matthei, of the governing rightwing Alliance for Chile. Bachelet, Chile’s president from 2006 to 2010, will have to go through a second-round runoff in December but is expected to win. Meanwhile, a new generation of student leaders – most notably, 25-year-old Camila Vallejo, who helped lead Chile’s student uprising in 2011 – has been elected to Congress as part of Bachelet’s coalition. It is this younger generation that is set to radically transform the direction of the country. In doing so, they’re breaking apart the dominant myths concerning the relation between politics and economics in the region – and in the world at large.

At the national level, the rightwing government of Sebastián Piñera is struggling to understand how, after four years of high growth, fiscal discipline and low inflation – which many would argue are the very measures of success – Chileans failed to award his party another term in office. Some commentators are already beating their chests at the apparent scandal of “irresponsible” Chileans voting the wrong way. Others argue that the conservatives “couldn’t transform a successful government into political success”.

The right’s resounding defeat, however, isn’t simply a case of its inability to tap into middle-class frustration. For some time now, many Chileans have been rejecting the very economic model that Piñera, Matthei and their supporters around the world continue to praise: that there may be change – a transition to democracy, the implementation of human rights, and so on – but only insofar as the “model” stays as it was before.

The “model” is what Chileans call both the economic and paternalistic establishment that emerged under Pinochet’s dictatorship and the myth that underpins it – that nothing can change. The myth is based on the terror and violence following the violent overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973, and the attempt to erase history and hope from minds and hearts.

Chileans, especially the young, have realised this. They have blown apart the message of good cheer, that if the economy is well, all is well. Their reasoning is clear: the economic model produces wealth for the benefit of the few and widespread unhappiness. In Chile, the wealthiest 5% earn 257 times more than the poorest 5%. Higher education is private and expensive. Parents are left with huge debts, and their children face impossible odds to start a family or envisage a hopeful future.

The Chilean youth have an agenda: free higher education and replacing the Pinochet-era constitution through a self-appointed popular assembly. Some also want renationalisation. However, the rebellion that exploded in Santiago in 2011 is not simply against this or that policy. This is a rebellion against historical compulsion – the idea that no matter what you do, nothing changes.

Vallejo has warned that this will not be a repeat of the same compromise-prone Concertación government, which won every election from the end of military rule in 1990 until Piñera came to power in 2010. A considerable percentage of voters responded to the students’ call for a constitutional assembly. As the new generation of politicians is swept to power, the next step towards reform is given radical legitimacy.

For the region this means that just as the first wave of leftism may be reaching an impasse in Argentina and Venezuela, a second, more profound one is beginning in unexpected parts of Latin America: conservative Chile, ultra-conservative Colombia and moderate Brazil. For the world, this spells the end of the dogma that the economy determines people’s consent rather than the other way around. It is the time of the people once again.

Commonwealth hamstrung to fight abuse in Sri Lanka

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This post was contributed by Frederick Cowell, a lecturer and researcher in international law in Birkbeck’s School of Law. This article first appeared on The Conversation.

The list of crimes alleged to have been perpetrated by brothers Mahinda and Gotabhaya Rajapaksa – respectively the president and defence minister of Sri Lanka – are truly horrifying. During the last few months of the civil war in 2009, the Sri Lankan army was alleged to have deliberately shelled civilian areas and since the ceasefire, as the Sri Lanka justice campaign has detailed, there have been numerous extrajudicial killings and incidents of torture.

Rather than being treated as international pariahs, though, the Rajapaskas are hosting the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting this week, attended by representatives of more than 40 governments from around the world.

Since 1965 the Commonwealth has been an independent intergovernmental organisation, with its own headquarters and secretariat. From 1971 it took a leading role in facilitating negotiations over ending white minority rule in Southern Africa.

Sincere commitments at the organisational level, however, did little to affect the Commonwealth’s membership. Military regimes and dictatorships were prominent members of the Commonwealth throughout the 1980s. When the Commonwealth broadened its focus to the protection of human rights with the passage of the 1991 Harare Declaration, committing Commonwealth member states to the protection of “fundamental human rights” and democracy, it was clear a more robust enforcement mechanism was needed if the declaration was to have any meaningful effect.

Suspension is easy

Article 3 of the 1995 Millbrook Action Programme allows states to be suspended from the organisation when they were clearly “in violation” of the Harare Principles, “particularly in the event of an unconstitutional overthrow of a democratically elected government”. This was the first instrument of its kind and was a radical move. At the time the UN Human Rights Commission didn’t even have an instrument for suspending serial human rights abusers or illegal governments.

In 1995 Nigeria became the first country to be suspended from the Commonwealth after General Abache’s regime rejected the results of the 1993 elections and went onto commit series of human rights abuses including the execution of activist Ken Saro Wiwa. This was followed by the suspension of Pakistan in 1999 and Fiji in 2000, both following military coups.

The Millbrook action programme also allowed the appointment of ad-hoc groups of high level officials. Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonwealth in 2002 after a troika of officials, including then Australian prime minister John Howard, concluded Robert Mugabe’s re-election that year had been “marred by a high level of politically motivated violence”. This led to Zimbabwe withdrawing from the organisation a year later. The most recent suspension was Fiji in 2009 after the government refused to accept a domestic court ruling that a 2006 coup was illegal.

Human rights play second fiddle

The focus of the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (CMAG), the decision making body of the Commonwealth, has been largely on the overthrow of democratically elected governments. This has led to the relative relegation of the protection of human rights, effectively turning Article 3 into an anti-coup instrument. And even as an anti-coup instrument, it has been applied inconsistently. When Maumoon Abdul Gayoom took power unconstitutionally in the Maldives in February 2012, CMAG issued a statement urging the government to hold fresh elections, but little action has been taken since.

It is also increasingly unclear what suspension is actually for. Fiji has been suspended for nearly four years, during which time it has made scant progress towards returning to constitutional government. Fiji’s government has covered the shortfall in development aid it suffered by receiving aid from China.

Anti-coup instruments have been adopted in several other international and regional organisations including the African Union. The problem is that they can easily become mechanisms that protect governments rather than human rights.

An anti-coup mechanism is also a barrier to gaining international recognition for a new government that comes to power through a coup. This can help deter future coups, which benefits exiting governments. This is why the Millbrook Action plan has received so much support from Commonwealth members. Commonwealth states have resisted attempts to create an independent Commonwealth Human Rights Commissioner, meaning that the decision to suspend states still rests with diplomats from member states.

The situation in Sri Lanka has split opinion among Commonwealth governments about the best way to respond to the human rights abuses taking place in Sri Lanka. Until a strong independent mechanism is brought in to assess suspension, Sri Lanka will remain a Commonwealth member, despite the atrocities that occur on its soil.

Torture prevention in Uzbekistan: my return visit

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This post was contributed by Professor Bill Bowring of Birkbeck’s School of Law. 

In March 2012 I travelled to Uzbekistan for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to lecture to practising defence advocates on torture prevention. In October 2013 I was invited back, and in this blog I explain Uzbekistan’s global significance, its paradoxical engagement with United Nations treaties and mechanisms, and my own activities.

This was not my first visit to this Central Asian country of some 28.5 million people. It is about the size of California, which has a population of 38 million. I have visited several times from the 1990s, carrying out human rights training.

The population of the capital, Tashkent, is nearly 2.5 million, the largest in the region, and more than twice the size of Britain’s second city, Birmingham. Having been largely destroyed by an earthquake in 1966, it is a modern city. Tashkent has been named the “cultural capital of the Islamic world”, and has the earliest written Qur’an, as well as a beautifully decorated three line metro system, and since 2012 a high speed train line to Samarkand. Tourists know Uzbekistan for the Silk Road, and for the gorgeous historical cities of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva. But Tashkent is the business, industrial and educational powerhouse.

Uzbekistan is a very serious and ambitious regional power. It has the largest population of the Central Asian states, double the population its nearest rival, Kazakhstan. There are substantial Uzbek minorities in its neighbours: 3% in Kazakhstan, 5% in Turkmenistan, 14% in Kyrgyzstan, and 15.5% in Tajikistan. In Afghanistan, General Abdul Rashid Dostum leads the Uzbek minority, about 10% of the Afghan population; and the most effective military force in the country, never defeated by the mujahedin or the Taliban. Uzbekistan sees itself as the regional leader. Uzbek is a Turkic language and there is substantial Turkish investment and involvement. I stayed in a hotel which is part of a Turkish chain, though I was able to enjoy some delicious traditional plov, rice with lamb, herbs and spices, in an enormous House of Plov.

As The Guardian reported on 9 October, British universities are, controversially, moving in. Westminster has set up a campus in Uzbekistan and at least five others, Cambridge, Bath, East Anglia, the London College of Fashion and London Metropolitan University, have partnerships with colleges in Uzbekistan.

That Uzbekistan is an authoritarian state is beyond question. 75 year old President Islam Karimov has been in power since 1989 when he became First Secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party. He has been elected President three times by overwhelming majorities in elections which have been condemned as unfree and unfair.

According to the United States State Department’s Country Report for 2012 on human rights practices in 2012: “The most significant human rights problems included: torture and abuse of detainees…; denial of due process and fair trial; restrictions on religious freedom; … incommunicado and prolonged detention; harsh prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; restrictions on freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association; on civil society activity;  and on freedom of movement; violence against women; and forced labor in cotton harvesting… human rights activists, journalists, and others who criticized the government [suffered] harassment, arbitrary arrest, and politically motivated prosecution and detention.”

That is, egregious violations of human rights, carried out by a strongly centralised regime, under a president for life, in which rights are subordinated to development.

Yet Uzbekistan participates energetically in UN human rights mechanisms. In 1994, after the collapse in 1991 of the USSR, Uzbekistan acceded to the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child, and in 1995 to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and – the Convention Against Torture (CAT).

In 2006 the UN created the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism, in which the human rights records of all 193 UN Member States are reviewed by the UN’s Human Rights Council. On 24 April 2013 the Council considered Uzbekistan’s second report – the first was in 2008 – and over one hundred recommendations were made by member states.

And on 30 October 2013, immediately after my visit, Uzbekistan defended in Geneva, in a public hearing which may be seen on You Tube, its Fourth Periodic Report to the UN Committee Against Torture. Its representative, Professor Akmal Saidov, Chairman of the National Human Rights Centre of Uzbekistan (NHRC), described this as a “fiery dialogue”.

Indeed, it was Professor Saidov and his Centre who invited me this time, and the British Embassy in Tashkent which paid for my visit. I had four engagements in my three days in Tashkent – with a ten hour journey via Istanbul overnight each way. It was made very clear that I was not representing the UK or the Foreign Office, but was in Uzbekistan as an independent expert.

On 24 and 25 October I attended an international conference organized by the NHRC with Uzbek and foreign experts to discuss human rights in Uzbekistan and international best practice. I gave a presentation on UK legislation and institutions for the protection of human rights. I also participated in a meeting between the NHRC and various UN agencies on the implementation of recommendations following Uzbekistan’s recent UPR report to the UN Human Rights Council.

I also spoke, on the morning of 25 October, to a large audience at the Training Centre for Lawyers. I gave a lecture on the British judicial system and the training of legal professionals in the UK, to future judges, practising lawyers, government officials and academics. There was tremendous interest and many questions.

On 26 October I visited the Uzbek Human Rights Ombudsman, Mrs Rashidova together with the British Ambassador, George Edgar, and Professor Saidov. I gave a presentation on the UK experience since 2009 in establishing a National Preventive Mechanism (NPM) under the CAT. Uzbek officials and legal experts discussed the establishment of an Uzbek NPM and Uzbekistan’s implementation of the CAT in the context of the hearing in Geneva on 30 October.

That evening I attended the inaugural event of the British Alumni Network, with over 40 graduates of Master’s degrees in the UK, many supported by Chevening and other scholarships.

Was my visit simply an opportunity for attempted window-dressing by Uzbekistan?  I argue that Uzbekistan’s engagement with international human rights, the enormous effort put into writing reports and defending them in Geneva, and the internet publicity which does not go unnoticed by Uzbek civil society, do indeed bear fruit. As Professor Saidov emphasised in Geneva, Uzbekistan has recently abolished the death penalty, reduced its prison incarceration rate to the level of the UK, and begun to introduce habeas corpus.

But most importantly, Uzbeks become ever more conscious of the yawning gap between their country’s proclaimed compliance with international standards, and its actual practice. I think I have made a very small but significant contribution to this process.