On FA Cup final day, homophobia is still a problem for English football

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This post was written by Dr Andy Harvey – a Researcher at the Birkbeck Sport Business Centre. His PhD thesis was on the history of homophobia in sport. A monograph derived from his thesis, Boys will be boys? An interdisciplinary study of male sexuality and homophobia in football fiction, is due to be published by Fisher Imprints in 2015.

Dr Andy Harvey is a Researcher at the Birkbeck Sports Business Centre

Dr Andy Harvey is a Researcher at the Birkbeck Sports Business Centre

As millions of people across the globe switch on their televisions to watch the FA Cup final on Saturday 17 May, the match happens to coincide with the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHOT) that is marked on 17 May every year. Celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, IDAHOT is a worldwide campaign that aims to bring attention to the problem of homophobia and transphobia that persists across the world.

No British sport has been associated with homophobic attitudes as much as football. A recent Channel 4 Dispatches programme, Undercover: Hate on the Terraces, broadcast on 3 March 2014, reinforced the idea that English football remains a potent site of discriminatory chanting by significant numbers of fans. The documentary showed how such chanting was often carried out in full view and earshot of stewards and police with little action taken by them or the football authorities. The programme confirmed a 2013 study by the Gay Football Supporters Network (GFSN) that showed how Brighton fans were the target of regular and persistent homophobic abuse from opposition supporters. The perpetrators of abuse have not been confined to fans: in April 2014 former Blackburn Rovers player, Colin Kazim-Richards, was found guilty of making an “utterly disgusting” homophobic gesture at Brighton and Hove Albion fans.

From the playing side of the professional game, it is now commonplace to mention that no professional footballer has ‘come out’ as gay while still playing in the English game. The fate of Justin Fashanu, who committed suicide after declaring his homosexuality in 1990 to a barrage of homophobia from the media, has acted as a warning to other gay professionals not to follow in his footsteps. In February 2013 the former Leeds United player, Robbie Rogers, ‘came out’ as gay in the same breath as announcing his retirement from professional football because he could not conceive of continuing to play due to the homophobic atmosphere of the dressing room and terraces. Earlier this year former German international and Premier League star, Thomas Hitzlsperger, announced he was gay after he had retired from the game, although the positive public reception he received stands in stark contrast to Fashanu’s experience.

A famous victim of football’s inability to accept sexual diversity was Chelsea and England defender, Graeme Le Saux, who, although known to be heterosexual, became the target of homophobic abuse during his playing career in the 1990s. Le Saux’s case graphically illustrates one of the little-mentioned aspects of homophobic behaviours: the vast bulk of homophobic abuse is aimed at straight men. No-one actually believes that Brighton fans are gay (although, as with any other club, some of them may be), or that a player who falls down rather easily is ‘a poof’. Opposing fans sing ‘does your boyfriend know you’re here?’ in order to call into question the gender credentials of the opposition supporters as a means of reinforcing their own ideas of a masculine heterosexuality. In other words, homophobic ‘banter’, whether perpetrated on the terraces or in the dressing room, acts as a mechanism for policing straight men’s sexuality.

In contrast to racist abuse where no-one would think of calling a white person by the ‘n’ word, homophobia relies on the assumption that being thought of as gay is a culturally demeaned identity that needs to be constantly repudiated at all times. The argument that homophobia is ‘like’ racism may be useful tactically to promote the importance of tackling homophobia. However, it is not the case that homophobia is ‘like’ racism since it works in very different ways.

The fact that straight men experience the negative consequences of homophobia should not in any way be taken to mean that gay men do not suffer from homophobia. The tragic consequence of the cultural regime that devalues gay lives is that homophobia is not confined to the football arena but is present in every city, town and community in the country. Homophobic attacks are a more violent means by which some men (it is usually, although not invariably, men who are the perpetrators) shore up their own narrow notions of their heterosexuality, or even attempt to deny their homosexuality. From personal testimony, I have had two acquaintances murdered in violent homophobic attacks and many LGB&T people still lead lives that are saturated in fear and anxiety due to their experience of persistent homophobia. This is what sets homophobic abuse apart from the other ‘banter’ of football: homophobia has disastrous impacts well beyond the football terraces.

Understanding that homophobia is steeped in the culturally demeaned status of sexual minorities is crucial if effective strategies to tackle it are to be developed. To do so successfully will mean challenging the notion that football is a ‘man’s game’ with all the gendered and cultural freight that is loaded on to that term. The work that the FA has commenced in opening up participation in the game will be crucial in this endeavour. Despite worrying levels of discrimination that still persist in Britain, there is evidence that, in some places, homophobic attitudes may be receding: after all we now live in a country where there are openly gay Conservative members of the government. Football has the potential to make a significant contribution to the shift against homophobia. The task is to work on the cultural regime of football in order to end forever the idea some forms of masculinity are superior to others or that football can only be played by a certain type of ‘man’.

A longer, and fully referenced, version of this article can be found on the Birkbeck Sports Business Centre web site.

British universities need Black Studies

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This post was written by Dr William Ackhar, a lecturer in community and voluntary sector studies in Birkbeck’s Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies. It was originally published on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site.

In San Francisco in 1968 a group of primarily black students went on strike to demand that their college establish an academic programme that reflected their lives and experiences. Their demand was met, and San Francisco State College became the first in the US to have a department and degree programme in Black Studies.

Nearly half a century later, Black Studies, Africana Studies or African-American Studies, as they are now variously named in different institutions, are a coast-to- coast academic discipline. Their academic departments in Ivy League institutions such as Harvard, Yale and Columbia are home to internationally renowned scholars.

Built on the two foundational pillars of academic excellence and social responsibility, Black Studies in the United States has led to the emergence of more black professors, heads of department and university administrators. From small beginnings, it has emerged as a genuine success story of the 1960s Civil Rights struggle.

As someone who draws heavily on the work of African-American scholars to inform my own teaching and research, I can only look with envy at what has been achieved in the US and wonder why, after all this time, there are still no equivalent Black Studies degree programmes and academic departments here in the UK.

In the past, universities did not feel there was a demand, need or interest in the subject but this is no longer the case. Britain’s black population is approaching 3 million and its increasing significance nationally and internationally in politics, religion, economics, science and the arts more than justifies the need for an academic discipline dedicated to researching and teaching the black experience, to UK society and the wider world.

On 15 May, a group of black scholars will meet to set up a British Black Studies Association, which will call for Black Studies degree programmes to be established. There has been a growing sense of frustration and anger among black British academics over how our communities have been treated by the British university system.

Black students are being encouraged to enter higher education in ever increasing numbers, yet there are no courses or departments where we can learn about ourselves, there is very little likelihood of being taught by a black professor, and according to the latest data there is no chance of seeing a black person leading and shaping the strategic direction of the university.

No wonder many black students, according to the National Union of Students, have a demoralising experience in higher education and on average are leaving university with poorer results than white counterparts who entered with equal A-level grades.

Black Studies – a social science covering subjects such as history, politics, religion, the arts, economics, geography and psychology – is needed to counter the damaging and corrosive idea that black culture is somehow anti-intellectual and that black people are not capable of contributing meaningfully to the intellectual life of this country. For example, it could include study of the Notting Hill carnival, building insight into its historical significance and connections to the Caribbean, South America and Africa, the complex religious symbolism that underpins it, its economic, geographical and cultural impact, and its role in establishing London as a global city.

Gender Studies has played an important role in shifting cultural attitudes and public policy towards women. The study of the black experience could be transformative for schools, police forces, mental health services and other arenas of public life that still have issues with black people. In education, a Black Studies perspective could be instrumental in tackling the underachievement of African-Caribbean boys.

By seeing their intellectuals, scientists, artists, technicians, being discussed, analysed and eulogised in schools and universities, the relationship between the black community and the authorities would change from that of “problem” to one of being productive contributors to society, resulting in engagement and achievement rather than continuing disengagement and underachievement.

This enhanced status of black life in Britain would ultimately result in more black teachers, intellectuals, and professionals being seen and heard in public life. And that is something many communities and public institutions in Britain need as a matter of urgency.

Our favourite diarists

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Ahead of the Arts Week event ‘Stranger than Fiction‘ about London Diarists on Wednesday 21 May, Birkbeck academics share who their favourite diarists are, and why. Please use the comments section to tell us about your favourite diarists.

Book M
Sue Wiseman, Professor of Seventeenth-Century Literature

Austin Street signMy favourite London diarist is Katherine Austen. Next time you go to Shoreditch consider stopping for a moment at Austin Street, next to St.Leonard’s church. You will be where much of Austen’s diary-notebook, ‘Book M’, was written in the second half of the seventeenth century.

Some of London’s most celebrated diarists, such as Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, were writing during the Restoration, when Austen was writing hers. Like Pepys, Austen was a successful and enterprising Londoner, but her voice and concerns add a new dimension to our understanding of Restoration scribbling. Austen had a substantial house in Shoreditch, an area that mixed poor houses, orchard and newly enclosed land. She notes her accounts in ‘Book M’ and is clearly prosperous, but she is pious and almost superstitious too. However, she also had strong views, railing against the ‘abominable rudeness’ of ‘Mr. C’ (he owed her money) and complaining that sending her son to university simply meant that he learned ‘ill-breeding and unaccomplishments’ at his Oxford College. As a young, rich, widow she worried about whether or not to marry again. ‘The world may think I tread upon Roses’, she wrote, but ‘they know not’.

I came across Austen’s ‘Book M’ in the manuscripts room at the British Library. Intrigued by the ‘M’ I ordered it up. My attention was immediately caught by a prose passage concerning ‘a Fall off a Tree where I was sitting in contentment’. The description of the fall was followed by a poem in which she claims that spirits, ‘the crew of Beelzebub’, were responsible for the accident. (You can read the passage and poem here.) Why had Katherine Austen gone from Shoreditch to Essex? Did most seventeenth-century women climb trees for fun? What made her think that the tree was inhabited by ‘revolted spirits’? Was it? I wanted to know and read on slowly, stumbling over her handwriting.

Tillingham_small

Churchyard at Tillingham

By the end of the day I knew that she had fled to Essex to avoid the plague. She comments that plague ‘is not yet’ in ‘my house’, but it is a race against time. She notes ‘Aug 28th 1665: on going to Essex … the day before I went there . . .was dead that week 7400.’ Soon after this the scene of the diary shifts to the village of Tillingham, Essex. She does not record what she thought and saw as she left the safety of her house to travel East through the poor, plague-racked eastern suburbs to ford the Lea and escape. But it may be that the plague travelled silently with her. For a mysterious physician and suitor that she took with her on her journey died while she was there and is buried in Tillingham churchyard (see here for a walk in Tillingham). Austen survived to return to London and pursue her many plans.

I left the Manuscripts Room that day excited but sad. How could this fascinating writer ever get the readers she deserved? Luckily it turned out that several other people had been at work and now there are two editions of ‘Book M’, one for easier reading and the other for scholarly detail.  Maybe someone will find books ‘A’ to ‘L’. I hope so.

Diary at the Centre of the Earth
Dennis Duncan, Lecturer in Modern Literature and Culture

My favourite London diarist is still writing today. In fact they’re a current undergraduate at Birkbeck. Actually, it’s one of my personal supervisees. This feels like an awkward confession. I have never discussed with him the fact that I read his diary. It always seems like an inappropriate digression in the context of the supervision session, like a psychoanalyst asking a novelist patient to sign their book. But let it be known henceforth that I have long been an admirer of Dickon Edwards’s online Diary at the Centre of the Earth.

Edwards describes his diary as ‘sporadic and slightly celebrated’, although there is characteristic modesty in both these descriptions. The Diary at the Centre of the Earth has been maintained since 1997, making it one of the longest-running internet diaries around, and it’s more than a little celebrated (indeed it contributes a fair few entries to Elborough’s London Year). Edwards’s delicate prose elegantly captures the life of a twenty-first-century flâneur, partaking of, and sometimes contributing to, the cultural life of the capital. It has its dandyish moments – Edwards is quite at home with the Soho in-crowd, and his writing has the precision of the Wildean bon mot. Yet for the most part this precision is gentle rather than ostentatious. Diary at the Centre of the Earth describes an attempt to experience London, in its brash, brand-conscious, contemporary configuration, through the aesthetic sensibilities of an earlier age. Its sentences are shot through with a wistfulness at the difficulty of maintaining the illusion.

There is, of course, another more specific pleasure in reading this diary, which comes about when Edwards describes his studies at Birkbeck – a subject he addresses frequently. Here, for me, is the thrill of an intimate association with the narrative – places I inhabit every day, courses I’ve taught, texts I know inside out – caught in the diarist’s lens, assigned a place alongside other, more decadent staples of Edwards’s unfolding life story.

The cat is out of the bag now. Perhaps next time we meet for supervision we’ll make small talk about the parties and private views Edwards has attended most recently. But I think I’d prefer it if we don’t; I’d prefer simply to admire the diary from a distance, to glimpse Edwards’s life – at least his life beyond the purview of a personal supervisor – only through the careful charm of his prose.

The Brixton Diaries
Joe Brooker, Reader in Modern Literature 

The Colour of MemoryGeoff Dyer’s first novel, The Colour of Memory (1989), began life as ‘The Brixton Diaries’. In 1986 Dyer was commissioned by the New Statesman to write about life as he and his friends were experiencing it in South London. In a note to the revised edition of his novel (2012), Dyer recalls that it was hoped that the diary would have ‘an interest that was more than local and personal’. But what had been a factual writing commission subtly became a fictional writing project: ‘Gradually I saw a way of using and shaping the material in a slightly different way, in a form that would deploy it to better, more personal ends (I invented a sister for myself, or for my narrator, rather) and, hopefully, more lasting effect’.

The Brixton Diaries had recorded facts from his real life, whereas the novel takes liberties: introducing invented characters, but also clouding the Dyeresque narrator himself in fiction and leaving him nameless and unidentifiable with the author. In a late twist, it appears that the entire narrative is to be taken as written by a character who has appeared in the third person throughout it. The move renders the novel a teasing paradox, a metafictional circle in the key of Calvino or Borges. But we note that Dyer, in retrospect, presents the shift from diary to novel as a move to a more personal mode of writing. It seems that the Brixton Diaries sought public resonance, as reportage from a riot-scarred area of London during Margaret Thatcher’s third term of office; whereas their metamorphosis into fiction somehow allowed Dyer to write a more truly subjective account of the times.

In any case, The Colour of Memory’s roots in diary are unmistakable. The novel recounts the events of a year in Brixton, around 1986-7, essentially in chronological order. It is divided into sixty chapters which count down from 060 to 000. This device lends the book an obscure suspense, but as Dyer admits, suspenseful narrative was not his forte nor his aim: ‘The book did not start out as a novel (and, for anyone expecting a plot, never adequately became one)’. Each small vignette – involving the theft of the narrator’s car, a party, or a trip to Brixton market – could just about claim to include narrative, and certain tendencies grow through the book, notably the fear of crime which culminates in a mugging. But by most standards, The Colour of Memory is distinguished by the absence of narrative, or at any rate of any plot that soars beyond the plausible. The novel’s fascination is with the texture of life, unmomentous yet constant.

This fascination sometimes takes the idiom of photography: the book declares itself to be ‘like an album of snaps’, in which ‘what happens accidentally, unintentionally, at the edges or in the margins of pictures – the apparently irrelevant detail – lends the photograph its special meaning’. Dyer’s book was thus a rarity: an English novel that not merely relayed but formally embodied the advanced continental ideas of the time, in this case those of Roland Barthes’ late work on photography Camera Lucida (1980). In its hospitality to contingency, it also stands as an ambiguous text, between the genres of personal journal and narrative fiction. The Colour of Memory invites us to think about the common ground occupied by the novel and the diary: that less public and celebrated genre that has so often nourished fiction.

(Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Literature will hold a day conference on the work of Geoff Dyer on 11 July 2014.)

Who can control the post-superpower capitalist world order?

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This post was written by Slavoj Žižek, Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. It was originally published on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site.

To know a society is not only to know its explicit rules. One must also know how to apply them: when to use them, when to violate them, when to turn down a choice that is offered, and when we are effectively obliged to do something but have to pretend we are doing it as a free choice. Consider the paradox, for instance, of offers-meant-to-be-refused. When I am invited to a restaurant by a rich uncle, we both know he will cover the bill, but I nonetheless have to lightly insist we share it – imagine my surprise if my uncle were simply to say: “OK, then, you pay it!”

There was a similar problem during the chaotic post-Soviet years of Yeltsin’s rule in Russia. Although the legal rules were known, and were largely the same as under the Soviet Union, the complex network of implicit, unwritten rules, which sustained the entire social edifice, disintegrated. In the Soviet Union, if you wanted better hospital treatment, say, or a new apartment, if you had a complaint against the authorities, were summoned to court or wanted your child to be accepted at a top school, you knew the implicit rules. You understood whom to address or bribe, and what you could or couldn’t do. After the collapse of Soviet power, one of the most frustrating aspects of daily life for ordinary people was that these unwritten rules became seriously blurred. People simply did not know how to react, how to relate to explicit legal regulations, what could be ignored, and where bribery worked. (One of the functions of organised crime was to provide a kind of ersatz legality. If you owned a small business and a customer owed you money, you turned to your mafia protector, who dealt with the problem, since the state legal system was inefficient.) The stabilisation of society under the Putin reign is largely because of the newly established transparency of these unwritten rules. Now, once again, people mostly understand the complex cobweb of social interactions.

In international politics, we have not yet reached this stage. Back in the 1990s, a silent pact regulated the relationship between the great western powers and Russia. Western states treated Russia as a great power on the condition that Russia didn’t act as one. But what if the person to whom the offer-to-be-rejected is made actually accepts it? What if Russia starts to act as a great power? A situation like this is properly catastrophic, threatening the entire existing fabric of relations – as happened five years ago in Georgia. Tired of only being treated as a superpower, Russia actually acted as one.

How did it come to this? The “American century” is over, and we have entered a period in which multiple centres of global capitalism have been forming. In the US, Europe, China and maybe Latin America, too, capitalist systems have developed with specific twists: the US stands for neoliberal capitalism, Europe for what remains of the welfare state, China for authoritarian capitalism, Latin America for populist capitalism. After the attempt by the US to impose itself as the sole superpower – the universal policeman – failed, there is now the need to establish the rules of interaction between these local centres as regards their conflicting interests.

This is why our times are potentially more dangerous than they may appear. During the cold war, the rules of international behaviour were clear, guaranteed by the Mad-ness – mutually assured destruction – of the superpowers. When the Soviet Union violated these unwritten rules by invading Afghanistan, it paid dearly for this infringement. The war in Afghanistan was the beginning of its end. Today, the old and new superpowers are testing each other, trying to impose their own version of global rules, experimenting with them through proxies – which are, of course, other, small nations and states.

Karl Popper once praised the scientific testing of hypotheses, saying that, in this way, we allow our hypotheses to die instead of us. In today’s testing, small nations get hurt and wounded instead of the big ones – first Georgia, now Ukraine. Although the official arguments are highly moral, revolving around human rights and freedoms, the nature of the game is clear. The events in Ukraine seem something like the crisis in Georgia, part two – the next stage of a geopolitical struggle for control in a nonregulated, multicentred world.

It is definitely time to teach the superpowers, old and new, some manners, but who will do it? Obviously, only a transnational entity can manage it – more than 200 years ago, Immanuel Kant saw the need for a transnational legal order grounded in the rise of the global society. In his project for perpetual peace, he wrote: “Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a law of world citizenship is no high-flown or exaggerated notion.”

This, however, brings us to what is arguably the “principal contradiction” of the new world order (if we may use this old Maoist term): the impossibility of creating a global political order that would correspond to the global capitalist economy.

What if, for structural reasons, and not only due to empirical limitations, there cannot be a worldwide democracy or a representative world government? What if the global market economy cannot be directly organised as a global liberal democracy with worldwide elections?

Today, in our era of globalisation, we are paying the price for this “principal contradiction.” In politics, age-old fixations, and particular, substantial ethnic, religious and cultural identities, have returned with a vengeance. Our predicament today is defined by this tension: the global free circulation of commodities is accompanied by growing separations in the social sphere. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the global market, new walls have begun emerging everywhere, separating peoples and their cultures. Perhaps the very survival of humanity depends on resolving this tension.

The Coach on the Couch

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This post was contributed by Dr Andreas Liefooghe, Reader in Organizational Psychology and Programme Director for the Postgraduate Certificate in Coaching, launched this week. 

The rise of executive and other forms of coaching is arguably one of the most significant changes in the work context so far this century. Prior to 2000, professional helping relationships were clearly linked to the tasks and operations of the organization, mainly in the guise of consultants. Care of the personal kind, when it happened, had a whiff of failure – no-one would admit to seeing a counselor, far less a psychotherapist or psychiatrist. So the idea that conversations in a specific professional relational context can help someone has finally shifted from Viennese couches to executive boardrooms.

Coach!

Of course, the name helps.  Coaching, derived from sport, has a much more macho feel than the more feeble counseling. Primarily, the focus is on ‘reaching your full potential’, ‘increasing your performance’, ‘finding solutions’. Coaching carries no stigma, unlike counseling with its progression from madness to neurosis to ordinary unhappiness.

Once the sole preserve of the executive classes, coaching has now been democratized and is accessible to most levels in organizations. The focus has shifted for coaches, too. Largely gone is the soul-searching about whether coaches deliver coaching or therapy. It has been replaced by angst about which accrediting professional body will legitimize their actions.

There is still, of course, the niggling doubt as to why coaching should be necessary in organizations. Is there not enough help already? Why does this helping relationship need to be outsourced, and in such numbers?

Helping others

We believe the answer to this might be found in social psychology. Rather glumly, experiments from the sixties and seventies provide evidence that when we would expect people to help, they actually don’t. The famous Good Samaritan experiment demonstrated that, ultimately, we see ourselves as more important than others, particularly when pressed for time. As Darley and Batson (1973) put it, morals are a luxury when the speed of life increases. In today’s fast-paced organizational cultures, helping others may not be efficient.

Instead of a more positive picture, Organizational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) research sets out why investing more time cultivating OCBs makes commercial sense. Also referred to as contextual performance, this field of study maps the extent to which altruism, civic virtue, sportsmanship, courtesy and conscientiousness are manifested at work. One important predictor of OCB is leadership – if there is a good relationship between the leadership and the employees, more examples of helping behaviours will be found, and higher performance levels (Motowidlo, 2011). And it is perhaps here that an executive coach can make a difference.

Coaching – a menace or a miracle?

Neither. Coaching can promote understanding, facilitate change, and develop potential, amongst others – but it would be wrong to claim it is a silver bullet to organizational helping and performance. Coaching is not a unified approach, and many different things manifest themselves under this moniker.

Edward Wray-Bliss (2013) writes of the deification/demonification of CEOs, and how they become the absolute Good and Evil. These attributions, while flawed, help organizational members make sense of a complex environment. Executive coaching in this context is no exception. Loh and Kay (2003) warned of the coaching menace, where coaching was seen as the silver bullet, and delivered by individuals with dubious credentials to people who didn’t need this macho sports-metaphor at the company’s expense. On the contrary, others see the miracle of executive coaching as further evidence of the well-deserved, god-like status, imbued with machismo, of the Glorious Leader. Indeed, in the late nineties one of the first CEOs I coached mentioned that I came third only to the private jet and his chauffeur…

The Post-Graduate Certificate in Coaching

Given that coaching is perhaps one of the most important organizational developments in the last decade, we decided it was important to spend more time reflecting on its impact. This one-year programme is designed for both established coaches who want more structure to their work, and to help those new to the field build a strong grounding. As you would expect from the Department, we emphasise rigorous academic theory and practice, combined with skills development and reflexive practice.

Today is happiness day, but could greater happiness be a permanent reality?

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David TrossThis post was contributed by David Tross, associate lecturer at Birkbeck. David is running a series of workshops on happiness and wellbeing as part of Birkbeck’s Pop-up University in Willesden Green, which is running until the end of May.

The 20 March is the UN International Day of Happiness, recognizing, it says, ‘the relevance of happiness and well-being as universal goals and aspirations in the lives of human beings around the world and the importance of their recognition in public policy objectives’. If you visit the UN’s observance day website, happy images include Ban Ki Moon dancing ‘gangnam style’ with puffy South Korean popster Psy, though paradoxically its text also recommends marking the occasion ‘in an appropriate manner, including through education and public awareness-raising activities.’ If this doesn’t sound particularly joyful, the UK organisation Action for happiness suggests a range of everyday activities to increase your happiness and those around you. If hugging strangers on the street sounds more dangerous than life-enhancing, then other ideas, including mindfulness meditation and keeping gratitude journals, are in keeping with older, eastern and western philosophical notions of how to live a good life.

What’s new is the shift in the claims made about the efficacy of these methods, with many contemporary scholars hailing happiness as a ‘new science’ on the basis of developments in measuring happiness that can be applied not just to individuals but to whole countries. The latest World Happiness Report, taking measures of self-reported life satisfaction and mood data from 156 countries, has proclaimed Denmark as the happiest country in the world, with fellow Scandinavian countries following close behind. (The UK is in 22nd place). Forget the bleakness and bad weather of popular scandi-noir TV shows, the research suggests. Denmark’s secret? Social equality, socialising across social classes, generous childcare policies, realistic personal expectations and a cozy spirit of togetherness the Danes call ‘hygge’ ( the closest translation might be the Irish ‘craic’). Although the scientific validity of these measures have been questioned, particularly  in terms  of cross-country comparisons, the findings are supported by claims brought to the public’s attention in 2008 with the publication of The Spirit Level, that the most unequal countries perform worst across a range of wellbeing indicators including trust, mental health, drug addiction, obesity and literacy.

This is the happiness paradox in action: after basic needs have been met, increased wealth has not produced greater happiness in rich countries, the gains made in life expectancy and income cancelled out by the personal and social stresses of a competitive, materialistic society. If happiness and wellbeing provides an alternative measure of social progress to economic growth then surely we should be encouraged by the enthusiasm of politicians, with David Cameron’s commissioning of an ONS-led UK happiness index the latest in a series of government-backed initiatives in France, Canada and the original happiness pioneers, the tiny nation of Bhutan. But some are suspicious. Government-backed happiness is the dystopian vision of Huxley’s Brave New World, where everybody feels good and nobody is free. And if the number of people relying on food banks to survive has tripled over the last year, why are we wasting our time on happiness when there are more pressing concerns? As the philosopher Julian Baggini has noted, ‘If you look at the countries that do best in surveys of wellbeing, they haven’t got there by having these indices. They’ve got there by agreeing what priorities should be”.

Such concerns are understandable in the context of recent ONS data suggesting the UK has become happier from 2012 to 2013; instead of an antidote, happiness measures could be used to legitimise austerity economics and increasing inequality.

The British economist Richard Layard declares that ‘happiness must be the business of government’. yet his policy recommendations, including spending to alleviate unemployment and poverty, sound almost socialist. Could it be that the happiness agenda could be a way of sneaking the politically taboo concepts of social justice and greater income equality in through the back door? Should you eliminate poverty because it makes people (including the rich) unhappy, or because it is the right thing to do? The answer might be to create the wider social and economic conditions conducive to individual fulfilment and not micro-manage the personal paths. But paradoxically, happiness is serious. Scroll along from the dancing UN secretary general on the UN website and you get a caption celebrating ten years of peace in Liberia. No disrespect to Psy, but that’s the kind of happiness many more would get behind.

Flight MH370’s disappearance does not demand a xenophobic response

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This post was contributed by Dr Nadine El-Enany, a lecturer in Birkbeck’s School of Law. It originally appeared on The Guardian.

We now know that the two men travelling on stolen passports on board the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 are thought to be Iranian asylum seekers en route to Europe. This has exposed as unwarranted the alarmist response to the discovery that passengers with falsified or stolen passports were on the flight. For the poorest people living in the global south, often from war-torn countries or repressive regimes, obtaining a falsified or stolen document is often the only way out.

And yet the mundane, everyday phenomenon of falsified travel documentation rapidly attracted a disproportionate degree of attention. The suspicion was quickly aired in the media, spurred on by officials, that those passengers holding falsified passports might have terrorist connections. And this has come hard on the heels of the story of the easyJet flight grounded when schoolchildren panicked after seeing a fellow passenger writing in a script they believed to be Arabic. All this is symptomatic of a moral panic that is presenting the “Islamic radical” and the “illegal immigrant” as the folk devils of our age.

In fact, it was always unlikely that either of these passengers were terrorists. Much more likely is that these were desperate individuals trying to better their lives.

The facilitation of terrorist activity by the market in falsified travel documentation is rare. The real story is the ordinariness and everyday necessity of this market due to strict immigration and border controls. Common EU visa rules are applicable to nationals of 128 countries, including the majority of African and Asian countries and significant parts of Central America. Many of these are refugee-producing countries.

Further, EU countries require a special airport transit visa for nationals from countries producing high numbers of asylum seekers, including Iran. The reality for most refugees fleeing to Europe in search of safety is a life-threatening journey by sea or stowing away in transport containers. In 2011, at least 1,500 people perished attempting to cross the Mediterranean alone. Only a tiny minority of irregular migrants can afford the cost of a forged passport and flight ticket, the extortionate cost of these – about $1,000 for a European passport – is indicative of the desperation of those willing to pay.

Due to EU carrier sanctions it is almost impossible for migrants – whatever their motivation for moving, whether economic or in search of safety from war or persecution – to enter the EU in a regular manner. Carrier sanction regimes entail fining airlines and other transportation companies for bringing individuals into the EU who do not have the required documentation. Transporters are fined and designated as responsible for returning or paying the cost of detaining such persons. It is these border control regimes that should be subjected to scrutiny, rather than the phenomenon they create: “illegal immigration” facilitated through falsified documentation. Carrier sanctions together with visa regimes force some migrants into a situation where they have to obtain forged or stolen documentation in order to be able to travel.

In the wake of the disappearance of flight MH370, Interpol’s secretary general called for stricter security measures at borders. This, he says, would ward off speculation of terrorism in the event of flight tragedies. But shouldn’t common sense and decency be sufficient to deter such speculation? Even more stringent security measures will mean that asylum seekers will be unable to flee their countries. It is due to the absence of legal migration routes that many asylum seekers are forced to travel irregularly. A xenophobic response to the tragic disappearance of flight MH370 even before the facts are known is reckless and unseemly.

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.

After the flood: finding ways to insure the uninsurable without breaking the bank

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This post was contributed by Dr Diane Horn of Birkbeck’s Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies. It originally appeared on The Conversation.

More wet and windy weather arrives week after week, with the inundated areas of the south and southwest of Britain still at the mercy of the elements. Even while politicians begin the blame game, we should look further ahead to when the floodwaters recede, the clean-up begins – and talk turns to who will pay.

In most countries, the government plays a role in covering flood losses. The UK is unusual because the government does not award compensation directly to individuals. Money is provided to local authorities through the Bellwin Scheme to reimburse the costs of emergency measures taken to safeguard life or property. But this is only intended to cover uninsurable risk.

Damage to private property is considered insurable and is not covered, which means compensation is drawn from the insurance industry, or charitable aid. The Prince’s Countryside Fund and the Duke of Westminster were among the first to make donations to help the flood victims, donating £50,000 each. As the floods continue, other businesses have pledged support. The government has also announced new measures, including a£5,000 grant to households and businesses to pay for repairs which improve a property’s ability to withstand future flooding. But most of those with property underwater will have to rely on insurance.

Unchartered waters

Big changes have swept through Britain’s flood insurance landscape. Until last July, flood insurance cover was available to households and small businesses as a standard feature of buildings and contents insurance under the Statement of Principles. Under this agreement, members of the Association of British Insurers (ABI) agreed to cover properties at risk of flooding in return for government commitment to manage flood risk.

Following extensive negotiations a new flood insurance scheme,Flood Re, was announced last June. This establishes a stand-alone, industry-run, not-for-profit insurance fund due to begin in 2015. Flood Re will provide cover for about 500,000 properties deemed at risk by the Environment Agency that might otherwise be uninsurable, or whose premiums are unaffordable. But the limitations of the Flood Re scheme need to be recognised.

While ABI members will continue to meet their commitments to existing customers, there’s no guarantee prices won’t rise between now and the implementation of Flood Re. In fact stories are already emerging about dramatic premium hikes, and the expectation is that these will rise further.

Policy recommendations

The government needs to take responsibility in the event of a catastrophic flood, but Flood Re’s liability will be capped at an expected limit of about £2.5 billion per year, equivalent to a 1:200 year flood loss scenario. As to who will bear the costs beyond this, the government has made no commitment. But this is a question that needs an answer. PricewaterhouseCoopers have estimated the insurance losses for December and January at £630 million, and while it’s too early to count the costs of the current floods, insurance industry forecasts suggest losses could reach £1 billion if the rains continue.

What is also needed from the government and insurers are incentives to reduce flood risk. Planning controls need to restrict development in flood risk areas, set higher standards for buildings on floodplains, and require that the best techniques to improve resilience against flooding are used when rebuilding and refitting after flood damage. As we argued in a paper published inNature Climate Change, using the flood insurance market to drive better adaptation to flood risk and the effects of climate change needs to be part of a wider strategy that includes land-use planning, building regulations and water management.

The Flood Re scheme needs to be clear whose insurance it will subsidise, and the effects on those not insured under the scheme. In fact many properties at risk will be excluded from the scheme. When Flood Re was first proposed, three categories of property owners were excluded from participation: small businesses, properties built after 1 January 2009, and properties in the highest council tax band.

It has since emerged that Flood Re will exclude many more properties than originally thought, with any policy classed as “non-domestic” unable to participate in the scheme, regardless of the risk. This will include housing association and council properties, many leasehold or private rented sector properties where homes are not insured individually, and properties which are both a residence and a business.

As it is, Flood Re does not reduce flood loss, but only spreads the risk, and therefore the costs, by protecting some policyholders at the expense of others. High-risk properties will be subsidised for decades by payments from low-risk households, with the financial risk still covered by the insurance industry, and government carrying no liability. Policyholders are unlikely to accept this situation without protest, and here the US experience may prove instructive.

Lessons from the US

In the US, flood coverage is excluded from property policies provided by private insurers, and is only available through theNational Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), with the federal government acting as insurer of last resort. Following massive payments for flood claims related to Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, the NFIP is approximately US$26 billion in debt. This led to legislation to reform the program, phasing out subsidies over five years, and increasing the annual rate until premiums reflect the true risk.

But as rates rose and homeowners faced huge bills, sometimeshikes of 600-1000%, they pressured congress to delay these rate hikes. Republicans and Democrats found common cause for once, with the proposal sailing through the normally divided senate in a matter of weeks. Less than two years after the flood insurance reform legislation was passed, the senate voted to delay premium increases for up to four years while the Federal Emergency Management Agency drafts a plan to make flood insurance premiums more affordable and re-evaluates the accuracy of its Flood Insurance Rate Maps.

Flood insurance reform efforts in the US have shown the political implications of angry voters. With flooding in some parts of Britain about to enter a third month and costs spiralling, it is something the UK government is also learning the hard way, with Flood Re facing its first test before it even has come into operation.

The Conversation

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.