Can we trust the Natives? Researchers, Indigenous Peoples and Scholarly Authority

There is renewed debate over interpretation and authority in constructing histories of indigenous peoples. Some historians such as David Silverman have critiqued sustained collaborative approaches with indigenous communities in writing their history. They contend that such approaches undermine scholarly objectivity and amount to a cession of scholarly authority over interpretation. Silverman's skepticism of community engaged histories of indigenous and native people is evident in his scathing review of two award-winning books on Native-American history in a recent issue of the American Historical Review. (AHR Exchange: Historians and Native American and Indigenous Studies” in The American Historical Review vol. 125, issue 2, April 2020). 

In this commentary, I reflect on this new assault on community-engaged approaches to indigenous history.

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In her ground-breaking book, Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples, Linda Tuhiwai Smith wrote:

From the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the term 'research' is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, 'research', is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world's vocabulary. When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful. It is so powerful that indigenous people even write poetry about research. The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world's colonized peoples.

Smith’s observations, made in the context of the colonial histories of indigenous peoples in Australia, applies perfectly to colonial African history.

Responding to calls to teach African history from indigenous perspectives in 1963, Hugh Trevor Roper, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University famously stated: “Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But, at present there is none: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness...” Roper was reaffirming for a 1960s European audience, a longstanding assumption about the supremacy of Western positivist notions of history and scholarly objectivity. It was a view of history that had little or no place for indigenous voices or perspectives.

Two centuries earlier, the German Historian Leopold von Ranke, credited as the "founder of modern source-based history," argued that the job of the historian is to “objectively” document facts, not offer subjective interpretation of these facts. 

Yet, these European historians, purveyors of “accurate history” and “scholarly objectivity” were themselves deeply invested in the "identity politics” of their time. Roper's magnus opus, "The Rise of Christian Europe" was a grand narrative of the triumph of Western Europe over other civilizations. Ranke was a German nationalist and protestant conservative historian, who wrote only monarchist and political history. In David Silverman’s recent review of Lisa Brooks’s and Christine De Lucia’s books in the American Historical Review, I hear modern-day echoes of Roper and Ranke. 

Criticism of “ethnohistorians” who do indigenous history through community-engaged research, rests on the assumption that they are straying from a sacrosanct path of scholarly detachment and objectivity. Critics like Silverman insist that research methods used to study predominantly oral indigenous societies, must conform to dominant standards of Western empiricism and positivist epistemology. 

My response is to question the intellectual validity of this claim to universal “objectivity.” I assert indigenous African ontologies and epistemologies as legitimate ways of knowing. I frame indigenous epistemologies as a counter to hegemonic Eurocentric positivist ways of knowing that have been cast as universal, objective, and immutable. 

Critics like Silverman dismiss the works of scholars who do community-engaged native studies as “beholden to identity politics” and their works as “contaminated with politics.” But isn’t all scholarship linked to individual and collective identities? Is any scholarly endeavor truly impervious to the politics of identity? 

Critics of community-engaged ethnohistory call for the “application of the same critical eye, in the same transparent fashion, to tribal knowledge as to manuscript evidence.” What these critics fail to consider is the possibility that what constitutes “critical eye" methodology when dealing with living and breathing oral tradition in tribal contexts might be different from "critical eye” methodology applicable to dead and cold archival manuscripts.

With Silverman and his likes, I suspect that the concern is not so much with collaborative research but with a certain kind of collaborative research - one that privileges long marginalized voices and perspectives which they find unfamiliar or uncomfortable. After all, historians have always “collaborated” with their sources – with archivists through the archives they produce, with long dead state officials through the manuscripts they left behind, and with statisticians through the selective data they compile. 

Silverman concludes: "... the epistemological quandary is that historians and Native communities sometimes have different standards of proof and truth." I would frame it slightly differently: "...the epistemological quandary is that historians fixated on Western positivist intellectual traditions and Native communities have different notions of proof and truth."

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My research focuses on the indigenous African notions of human rights within the context of global debates about universal human rights. This relates to indigenous notions of law, ethics, and human dignity.

Much of this debate has centred on the place of African history within the broader history of the global human rights movement. The contemporary meanings of human rights have come to be closely associated with universalism and internationalism. This conception of human rights follows from the notion that human nature is universal and entails an ontological superiority to the individual.  This concept of human rights conveys an intrinsic entitlement to autonomy and equality that all individuals can demand from the state, and which are (or ought to be) institutionally protected by the state. The universal character of modern human rights makes it essential to interpret  ethnohistories from global comparative perspectives.

Constructing human rights histories from indigenous African perspective had centered on arguments for an African concept of human rights founded on communitarian values and distinct from dominant “Western” human rights traditions that are premised on atomized individualism. These Western notions of rights have been the dominant influence in the development of international human rights from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

In my work, I seek to center indigenous African notions of human rights and human dignity within the discourse of universal human rights. The notion of an African concept of human rights is linked to long standing philosophical debates about African conceptions of human nature. At the heart of this debate is the claim that indigenous communal African conceptions of human nature stands in contrast to Western liberal conceptions which foreground humans as an autonomous individual defined by their intrinsic worth. In this view, the African conception of human nature, individual identity is said to be grounded in social interaction and community life.

African ethnohistories underscore the centrality of the relationship between notions of human dignity, individual rights and communal obligations. Some of these interpretations of indigenous moral thought is a humanistic outlook that sees human dignity and honor as fundamental to individual and collective wellbeing. But these interpretations suggest that the communitarian outlook of indigenous African social system did not necessarily imply the absence or rejection of individual rights. If anything, the dynamic between individual rights and communal obligations is more complicated than is often presented.

The main challenge of centering indigenous notions of human rights is that some human rights scholars’ critique arguments for indigenous African conceptions of human rights as arguments for cultural relativism that undermine universal human rights. They claim that arguments for cultural relativism are often used as excuses by authoritarian governments to violate the rights of citizens. Universal human rights guarantees against such abuses.

In my interventions in these debates, I do not seek to repudiate universal human rights but to frame universal human rights in terms of indigenous humanism. This concept of human rights transcends formal legalism. It is based on indigenous humanist values centered mainly on conceptions of personhood, notions of human dignity and honor, and the value of community.

An indigenous perspective to human rights posits that human dignity can be construed as universal but can also be construed as socially specific and culturally contingent. While many societies set minimum standards of respect for the life and basic liberties of social outsiders, the “humanity” of each individual is ultimately contingent on the social and political belonging.

This position is not simply a cultural relativist challenge to universal human rights. Rather, it is a questioning of what constitutes the “universal” in the context of universal human rights. I argue that the “universal” is not an abstraction. The “universal” is ontologically meaningless if not the aggregate of constituent “locals.” Indigenous African notions of human rights and ways of knowing ought to be integral to what constitutes universal human rights. Without these indigenous notions, what is claimed as universal human rights cannot be truly universal.

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What does it mean to write authoritatively about Indigenous pasts while being attentive to historical justice?

To write authoritatively about the indigenous past is to insist on the validity of indigenous ways of knowing and indigenous knowledge production processes. We cannot do so effectively without confronting critics who question counterhegemonic approaches.

When “ethnohistorians” who attend to native perspectives are accused of shoddy and uncritical scholarship or of "cherry picking” evidence we should ask the critics: Which history isn’t cherry-picked? Historical evidence has and continues to be cherry picked to devastating effects for indigenous people. 

 When critics like Silverman accuse ethnohistorians of not being critical enough of their tribal sources and question the presentism and reliability of native sources, we should ask: Have the same questions been asked of the "manuscripts" fetishized in colonial and settler archives? How do we counteract centuries of erasure of native voices, and the gaping silences and distortions of colonial and settler archives without privileging these native voices?  

 Community-engaged ethnohistories are not beyond criticism, however. Within these fields, there are longstanding and vibrant debates about evidence, interpretations, and arguments. In African history, for example, we talk frequently about the perils of swinging the post-colonial pendulum too far in ways that might re-create the same colonial distortions that we challenge. With critics like of Silverman, however, we have fundamental epistemological differences over what constitutes the "objective" centre of that pendulum.

Can we trust the Natives? Researchers, Indigenous Peoples and Scholarly Authority

10/18/2020 12:44:00 AM history, reflections

Human Rights, Nation-States and the Persistence of Oppressive Privilege in a Divided World

Human Rights, Nation-States and the Persistence of Oppressive Privilege - A commentary on Eric D. Weitz,A world divided: The global struggle for human rights in the age of nation-states, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019). 

Eric Weitz's book A World Divided offers a compelling history of the global struggle for human rights in the age of nation-states. Eric Weitz presents insightful stories of travelers, scholars, activists and statesmen who fashioned empires into nation-states from the late eighteenth century to the present period. These are stories of rights ideas and struggles at defining moments in nation-state foundings and formations. Overall, it is a narrative of the paradox of human rights, celebrating its triumphs and critiquing its failures. 

My commentary focuses on two themes that emerge from the book. The first is the question of human rights ontology; not necessarily the definition of human rights, but the varied contextual meanings of human rights and the relationships between them. I am interested in how Weitz deploys human rights as an analytical lens for his historical reconstructions. 

Like the concept of globalization, the notion of “human rights” provides historians with fresh analytic lens for creative reinterpretations of the past. With this new lens, familiar stories of human struggles, political crises and social upheavals can be re-told in ways that further illuminate our understanding of these histories. 

The doctrine of human rights has become the dominant language for public good in our world. It has become the language of choice for making and contesting entitlement claims, spawning a global human rights revolution – a revolution of norms and values that has redefined our understanding of ethics and justice.  So, the question inevitably arises: given the discursive power of human rights today, how much of the history that we see through human rights lens is an illumination of the past as it was, and how much of that history is a projection from the lens itself? 

The second theme of my commentary is the persistence of oppressive privilege. Like all histories, A Divided World is a narrative of changes and continuities – changes in the expansion of citizenship rights in emergent nations-states, and continuities of systems of oppression and exclusion. In between the lines of Weitz’s narrative of human rights struggles, we can also find histories of oppressive privileges of all sorts – white privilege, Christian privilege, ethno-cultural privilege, intellectual and epistemological privilege, and perhaps, the most enduring of all, male privilege. 

If the grand narrative of A World Divided is the complicated and paradoxical history of human rights, its sub-narrative is the equally complicated history of the persistence of oppressive privilege. Oppressive privilege has shaped the history human rights over the past two centuries. To fully appreciate Weitz’s grand human rights narrative, therefore, we must pay attention to the sub-narrative of oppressive privilege. 

The Ontology of Human Rights

The historical ontology of human rights - understood broadly as the interconnected socio-political processes by which human rights ideas have emerged - is evident throughout A Divided World.   The compelling cases in the book show the contradictions and partiality of human rights advances when built around national citizenship. 

Exclusion and inclusion, rights protection and violations, Weitz argues, have defined the emergence of the nation-state. “The contradictions are blatant and cannot be easily recovered resolved or wished away… They are irresolvable and an intrinsic part of the human rights system based on nation-state citizenship.”  

While historical reinterpretation using human rights lens can illuminate our understanding of the past, there is always the risk of overexposure. Here, photography offers a useful metaphor. In the hands of the historian, the human rights lens is most effective when it is neither underexposed nor overexposed. When underexposed, the story is deficient because the complex histories of rights ideas and struggles are insufficiently illuminated. 

Too little of the “light” that human rights have reflected on human events is recorded. When overexposed, however, the narrative becomes distorted. Too much of today’s human rights sensibilities is projected into interpretations of historical ideas and events. As in photography, therefore, effectively deploying the human rights lens for historical reconstruction requires the correct amount of exposure. 

Historians are often reminded to avoid foisting their own problem definitions on the people and societies they study. Historians should leave open the possibility that the historical actors they write about might have considered themselves part of a different drama than the one the historian imagines. 

In the context of A Word Divided, this raises a crucial question: Did eighteenth century Western travelers, who explicitly excluded Indians and Blacks from rights bearing citizenship, think of human rights in ways even remotely resembling contemporary conceptions of human rights? Weitz clarifies that the historical actors he writes about had a partial understanding of human rights, one that availed only certain categories of people defined by race, religion, ethnicity, gender and other identity markers. 

Weitz largely succeeds in the delicate task of reinterpreting familiar histories of nation-state formation through human rights lens in ways that appear “correctly exposed” – neither underexposed nor overexposed. However, he does not tell us what type of human rights lens he has used. Although he argues that the nation-state and human rights have played a central role in the making of our global world, he does not offer a definitive answer to the question of the meaning of human rights.  

Rather, he takes “an open ended, capacious, and practical approach to the disputes regarding the philosophy and history of human rights.”  Anticipating critics, Weitz states that some will dispute that the cases he recounts have anything to do with human rights. “They would say that these examples and thousands of others we could summon are too fragmentary and episodic to constitute a full blown program of human rights.”  

Even though he concedes that we need some distinctions, he rejects this argument, opting for a more fluid understanding of human rights.  On this, I agree with Weitz. The essentialist definitions of human rights preferred by those who see human rights as a uniquely twentieth century phenomenon disconnected from earlier notions of rights, limits our understanding of how rights ideas and struggles have shaped our world. A less rigid notion of human rights allows for better understanding of the deep and complex history and politics of human rights.

Still, the debate about human rights ontology remains integral to histories of human rights. Making histories of pre-twentieth century human rights struggles intelligible to twenty-first century audiences demands some definitional parameters. Weitz acknowledges that as the circle of rights bearing citizens has expanded, so has the meaning of these rights. Therefore, in order to fully understand the historical development of human rights, we first “need to see just how radical a break is our own modern world from the preceding millennia marked by empires; small, regional forms of governance; and tribes and clans - all of them built systems of inequality and non-recognition at least in terms of rights of other individuals.”  

Indeed, only since 1945 has the emergence of international human rights offered in model of universal rights beyond the nation-states. While we might debate whether this late model of universal human rights constitutes the defining essence of human rights, most commentators agree that it provides the ontological reference point for our understanding of human rights. 

The universalist human rights model that emerged in the aftermath World War II, and in the context of the United Nations, was a response to the limitations of nation-state-based citizenship rights. The holocaust and other war-time atrocities showed that states could not be trusted to protect the rights of citizens and subjects. The adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights marked the international recognition of certain fundamental and inalienable rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled simply by virtue of their humanity, and not because they are citizens of the nations. 

The hope was that universal human rights would be the antidote to the partiality and contradictions of nation-state-based citizenship rights regimes. This promise has, of course, not been fully materialized. However, it provides a powerful reference point for understanding histories of rights struggles in the era of empires and emergent nations states. 

Oppressive Privilege

Scholars have long drawn attention to the inequities and injustices wrought on societies by systems of oppressive privilege. In his influential 1891 land reform treatise titled The Birthright of Man, the Scottish classicist William Ogilvie described “landlordism” and aristocratic land monopolies as a “most oppressive privilege, by the operation of which the happiness of mankind has been for ages invaded and restrained, more than by all the tyrannies of kings, the imposture of priests, and the chicane of lawyers, taken together...” A few men, he lamented, “were permitted to engross a most oppressive privilege - the exclusive rights to the immovable value of soil.” 

Later political theorist have shown how the preservation of oppressive privilege in the face of popular pressure for egalitarian measures, provides the principal motivation for the separation between the public political realms with citizenship rights and a private non-political one with limited rights protection.  

If citizenship rights in the eighteenth and nineteenth century contexts that Weitz discusses were so restrictive and premised on the exclusion and subordination of others, do they really fit within the ontology of human rights? True, rights may bestow privileges, but oppressive privileges (embodied, ascribed or acquired), reinforced by power, is the very antithesis of human rights. 

Oppressive privilege bestows benefits, immunities or exemptions on persons or restricted group of persons, to the exclusion of others, and at the expense of the rights of others. As Weitz notes, the establishment and expansion of human rights have never been pure and straight. The paradoxes of human rights manifest in the patterns of inclusions and exclusions that accompanied nation-states and the establishment citizenship-based rights regimes.  

Human rights are typically framed as claims against the authorial power of states; yet human rights have historically been mediated by hierarchies of power and privilege. A Divided World offers many examples of this. In his discussion of Indian removals in America, Weitz notes that the vision of the nation-state as the preserve of one race meant that Euro-American whites would be able to enjoy the full complement of rights available at the time, while indigenous people will be pushed to the margins.  

White privilege was founded on what Weitz describes as the “racial international” - a racialized way of thinking about human diversity that transcended national borders. Nineteenth century Western statesmen and writers drew on Darwin’s ideas on biological evolution and the “survival of the fittest” to promote an agenda of scientific racism that affirmed the embodied privileges of some, with devastating consequences for others. The nation-state, defined in racial terms, would mark the “the most exclusionary and potentially deadly form of categorizing populations” as Weitz shows in the cases of United States, Brazil, Namibia, and Rwanda and Burundi.  

Discourses and practices of citizenship rights in these historical contexts also then become discourses and practices of privilege - white privilege, Christian privilege, varied forms of ethno-cultural privileges, ethnic privilege, religious privilege, male privilege and elite privilege. 

To understand the paradoxes of human rights, we must first understand the ways in which oppressive privilege determined patterns of rights inclusion and exclusion. For example, the persistence of embodied privilege partly explains why nineteenth century British liberal reformists could condemn the contemptuous way English imperialists treated the Indians while at the same time advancing arguments of Indian intellectual and cultural inferiority that sustained such contemptuous treatment.   

In the increasingly cosmopolitan world of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Western military, technological and governmental superiority came with immense power and privileges for those within the circle of a particular race, religion, culture and ideology. This would shape the pace and patterns of rights inclusion and exclusion in the era of declining empires and emergent nation-states. Privileged ideas about the hierarchy of races, cultures and civilizations influenced the organization of states and determined who could be entitled to right-bearing citizenship, when and how.

Weitz provides an insightful example of the power of this kind of privilege in the writings of Lord Byron and the English Philhellenes who supported the Greek revolution against Ottoman rule. The Philhellenes justified the exclusion of Muslims from the Greek state on grounds of what they saw as Greek subjection under Ottoman “barbarity.” Byron called on the Great Powers to rescue the Greeks from bondage and destruction while ignoring the atrocities committed by Greeks against Muslims. 

For all their humanitarian sensibilities, Byron and other Philhellenes “could not surmount the political contradictions of their positions.” They were in love with Greece, and it was a Greek state that they wanted, one in which other populations, most notably Muslims and Jews, would be rendered invisible.  

Why couldn’t Bryon and other Philhellenes of his time surmount the political contradictions of their positions? Partly, I would argue, because of the persistence of oppressive privilege – in this case, ethno-religious privilege. Philhellenes like Bryon campaigned for the Greek cause by arousing European consciences; but they also invoked the specter of the loss of Christian dominance and privilege. 

Could Europeans stand by and allow fellow Christians to be subdued? In Russia, pan-Slavists and an emergent public sphere exercised similar pressure on the tsarist government to aid fellow Orthodox Christians.  This was as much a cause to uphold Christian ascendancy and privileges as it was a cause for liberty. The Greek revolt would ultimately succeed only with European help, rendered in the name of Christian liberties. 

It did not matter that the rights claimed by Greek nationalists were limited to men who adhered to the Greek Orthodox religion. However, as Weitz notes, these rights were not static. Especially after 1945, they broadened significantly and expanded progressively. But to understand the pace and patterns of rights expansion and contraction, we must pay attention to the tenacity of oppressive privilege.

The persistence of oppressive privilege also explains the paradox of human rights in the case of Indian removals in the United States. Once indigenous nations were defeated, and Minnesota and the Dakotas were incorporated as federal states, US politicians contemplated the legal and political status of Indians. Did the Fourteenth amendment equal protection clause apply to these newly subjugated people? Were Indians to be accorded citizen rights as individuals or as collectives?  The court decisions that addressed these questions struggled with balancing the liberal promise of citizenship rights with entrenched white privilege. 

As Weitz shows, these court decisions affirmed Indian collective land rights but only to the extent that they did not impinge on the embodied, ascribed and acquired privileges of white settler population. Indians, the courts held, had rights of occupancy, not of absolute title. So long as they haunted, fished and farmed on areas clearly delineated theirs following conquest, and so long as they had not ceded land to whites through treaties, Indians possessed their land. But the absolute ultimate title lay with the “discoverer,” the Europeans and their descendants who had come from distant shores.  

In effect, the extent of Indian rights was contingent on what white privilege would accommodate. As Weitz notes, the Euro-Americans who settled in Minnesota quickly “assumed all the rights, privileges, and protections that the American nation-state had to offer. If newly arrived from Europe, they only had to declare their intent to become citizens and they could vote, speak out, and find redress in the courts.”  

The devastating power of oppressive privilege to subjugate and disenfranchise is perhaps most evident in the case of Brazil. Nineteenth century Brazilian statesmen who lauded the mixing of races, did so only because they believed it would eventually whiten the entire population and lead to the elimination of blacks as a group. 

The extinction of the black race in Brazil was the primary motivation for seemingly liberal attitudes toward miscegenation. Even though Brazilian racists did not believe that race mixing led to the degeneration of the race, (unlike most European and North American intellectual racists of their day), they shared a common goal of maintaining white ascendency and privilege – one group, by segregation, the other by strategic dilution. In all cases, the belief in black inferiority, strengthened by so-called racial science, furthered the ideology of white supremacy and its associated privileges.

Conclusion

The stories that Weitz tells in A World Divided are as much about the tenacity of oppressive privilege as there about human rights and the foundings of nation-states. The logic of the nation-state that emerges and prevailed after World War I was founded on expansions and constrictions of citizenship rights in patterns mediated by oppressive privilege. 

As Weitz concludes from his cases, “The nation-state granted Orthodox Christians in Greece, Euro-Americans in the United States, light skinned males in Brazil the privileges and responsibilities that came with rights. They possessed the benefits of full citizenship, including security of property and persons and the ability to participate politically, that human rights offer. For those who did not fit determinant category, it was a different matter, even more so with the rise of the explicit category of minority.”  

To be sure, since the mid-twentieth century the circle of human rights has extended beyond propertied white men, as was largely the case in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Universal human rights now specifically encompass several previously excluded groups – children, persons with disability, asylum seekers, indigenous people, stateless persons, and more broadly, women. 

However, as we see in the global rise of xenophobic populism, exclusionary nationalism, growing economic inequalities, and the proliferation of toxic forms of digital communication that reinforce prejudice, oppressive privilege continues to constrain human rights. Contemporary debates about the prioritisation of human rights centre on questions of power and privilege. Why have certain human rights agendas gained prominence and visibility over others despite the rhetoric of the indivisibility of human rights? 

Even the dominant generations of human rights ordering where first generation individual-centred civil and political rights precede second generation economic and social, and third generation collective solidarity rights, are steeped in histories of power and oppressive privilege. Power and privilege continue to mediate human rights doctrine, raising fundamental questions about its normative objectivity. 

This partly explains why the bulk of the cases before the International Criminal Court (ICC) have originated in weak African states and why, as Weitz opines, it is unlikely that any of the Great Powers will ever be hauled before the court for human rights violations.  Thus, as in the eighteenth century, the reach of the ICC is contingent on what Great Power privileges will allow.

A World Divided captures the contradictions of human rights and the processes of inclusion and exclusion as the circle of human rights expanded with the emergence of nation-state settings. However, explaining these contradictions remains an ongoing task. We need to better understand how historical and contemporary systems of oppressive privilege engender the many paradoxes of human rights so vividly captured in this book.

(This commentary first appeared as a book review in the Journal of Genocide Research)

Human Rights, Nation-States and the Persistence of Oppressive Privilege in a Divided World

9/06/2020 05:57:00 PM history, human rights, world

"Dad, what did you do for racial justice?"

Years from now, kids will ask their parents, "Dad, what side were you on during the great protest for racial justice of 2020?" Can you look them in the eye and say "On the side of justice," or will it be "I took no position"?

"Dad, what did you do for racial justice?"

5/31/2020 01:19:00 PM human rights, reflections, world

After Pandemic: Imagining a post-Covid-19 World

Amidst the current COVID-19 pandemic, I asked my friend, colleague and the most versatile historian I know, Dr. John Weaver, to reflect on what we can learn from history about the aftermath of the current pandemic. Here’s his insightful take.

After Pandemic: Imagining a post-Covid-19 World

John Weaver

As a way of thinking about a Plan B, I’d begin with an unremittingly pessimistic assessment of what could happen after the pandemic passes.  After other pandemics and plagues, there were swift economic recoveries because individual and government debt loads were small or there were even savings and state surpluses.  Neither is the case now.

The effects of the quantitative easing from 2008 are still evident in the form government debts (fiscal imbalance) and now governments in charge of major economies are shooting the works to cushion full the socio-economic impact of social distancing.  Admirable actions, though I’ve heard officials admit that they have no idea where this will lead.  They are not proceeding with targeted expenditures on infrastructure but channelling to support employees and employees.  This all seem sensible or at least the best policy choice when there are no good choices.

For historical precedents, which are probably a worse source of informing current policy than digging deeply into how the world economy currently functions (correcting yesterday’s problems in a dynamic environment is unwise), maybe the best flawed model we have is post-WWI.  In terms of debt and potential for trade imbalances, the situations seem similar.

Central banks then did not fully fund their governments’ debts (except for the UK which financed the war with bonds and taxes).  Most belligerents printed money, leading to post-war inflation.  Currently, central banks in some major economies are desperately trying to find assets to enable liquidity and to avoid merely printing money without something to show for it: they are buying government debt (bonds) and likely will soon accept corporate assets (maybe are already). 

Not only do they have to do this to fund the new government spending programmes , but my reading of some news suggests that a few overseas commercial banks have their backs to the wall and need injections of funds from the lenders of last resort (central banks).  They have their backs to the wall because employers and general populace are tapping into lines of credit and savings rates are low.   The banks are running out of capital.  Commercial banks are squeezed and where they are already weak, they may fall over.  Canada’s system is more robust.  Let’s hope so.

After WWI, the crises rippled on and on from one emergency and international Band-Aid to another; many remedies were quite creative.  We might experience some of the 1920s troubles: inflation, especially in assets, and trade protectionism.  The hidden inflation is what we have had since 2008: housing and stocks rising as ‘money’ seeks safe havens.  But unlike the 1920s, there are deflationary pressures now as well  Commodity prices will tumble (oil already) and countries with over-valued fixed exchange rates will not be able to defend their currency and will have to devalue deeply in order to compete in export markets.

Some countries may try rationing imports to reduce the damage to their balance of payments.  Whatever route is taken, a deflationary cycle will spiral downward.  Instead of a decade-long 1920s style period of crisis ours will come on fast and go through a series of emergencies almost concurrently, and they will be asymmetrical in terms of countries and regions.  The daily news will be packed with bank failures, governments defaulting on their debts (with pension fund consequences), and governments lacking residual fiscal firepower.

Taxes will have to be increased and social justice will properly require wealth taxes; however, this additional tax-take will not make up for the loss of revenue from an economic slow down or even marking time.  Widespread national defaults are probably out of the question.  Therefore, combined with tax increases, there will be expenditure cuts, probably more fully reflected in personnel and wages than in direct expenditure programmes.

I won’t go into what my suicide research would imply, except to say I would have little faith in prevention initiatives apart from our own individual care for others. 

Plan B?  No one policy answer.  Muddle on.  Keep the memory alive so that several decades from now, things might be refashioned.  On the health front, reform may have been achieved by then.  But the economic inter-dependency asymmetries and wasted resources through conflict will not have been. History is poor guide to policy, but perhaps not to attitude.       

After Pandemic: Imagining a post-Covid-19 World

4/03/2020 02:36:00 PM history, reflections, world

Is Democracy in Crisis?

A panel of scholars discuss the crisis of democratic politics, the possibilities of democratic innovations and the future of politics

• Leonardo Avritzer, Professor of Political Science at Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
• Selen Ercan, Associate Professor of Politics, Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra, Australia
• Archon Fung, Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government, Harvard University, USA
• Bonny Ibhawoh, Professor of History, and Centre for Peace Studies, McMaster University, Canada
• Melissa Williams, Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto, Canada
• Moderator: Professor John Gaventa, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK

Is Democracy in Crisis?

6/14/2019 11:22:00 AM human rights, politics, world

Do truth and reconciliation commissions heal divided nations?

My op-ed in the National Post on Truth Commissions as mechanisms for addressing historical injustices, bringing justice to victims of human rights abuses, and reconciling divided nations. 

National Post
The Conversation 

As long as unresolved historic injustices continue to fester in the world, there will be a demand for truth commissions.

Unfortunately, there is no end to the need.

The goal of a truth commission — in some forms also called a truth and reconciliation commission, as it is in Canada — is to hold public hearings to establish the scale and impact of a past injustice, typically involving wide-scale human rights abuses, and make it part of the permanent, unassailable public record. Truth commissions also officially recognize victims and perpetrators in an effort to move beyond the painful past.

Over the past three decades, more than 40 countries have, like Canada, established truth commissions, including Chile, Ecuador, Ghana, Guatemala, Kenya, Liberia, Morocco, Philippines, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa and South Korea. The hope has been that restorative justice would provide greater healing than the retributive justice modelled most memorably by the Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War.

There has been a range in the effectiveness of commissions designed to resolve injustices in African and Latin American countries, typically held as those countries made transitions from civil war, colonialism or authoritarian rule.

Most recently, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission addressed historic injustices perpetrated against Canada’s Indigenous peoples through forced assimilation and other 

Its effectiveness is still being measured, with a list of 94 calls to action waiting to be fully implemented. But Canada’s experience appears to have been at least productive enough to inspire Australia and New Zealand  to come to terms with their own treatment of Indigenous peoples by exploring similar processes.

Although both countries have a long history to trying to reconcile with native peoples, recent discussions have leaned toward a Canadian-style TRC model.

South Africa set the standard

There had been other truth commissions in the 1980s and early 1990s, including Chilé’s post-Pinochet reckoning.

But the most recognizable standard became South Africa’s, when President Nelson Mandela mandated a painful and necessary Truth and Reconciliation Commission to resolve the scornful legacy of apartheid, the racist and repressive policy that had driven the African National Congress, including Mandela, to fight for reform. Their efforts resulted in widespread violence and Mandela’s own 27-year imprisonment.

Through South Africa’s publicly televised TRC proceedings, white perpetrators were required to come face-to-face with the Black families they had victimized physically, socially and economically.

There were critics, to be sure, on both sides. Some called it the “Kleenex Commission” for the emotional hearings they saw as going easy on some perpetrators who were granted amnesty after demonstrating public contrition.

Others felt it fell short of its promise — benefiting the new government by legitimizing Mandela’s ANC and letting perpetrators off the hook by allowing so many go without punishment, and failing victims who never saw adequate compensation or true justice.

Saving humanity from ‘hell’

Dag Hammarskjöld, the secretary general of the United Nations through most of the 1950s who faced criticism about the limitations of the UN, once said the UN was “not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.”

Similarly, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not designed to take South Africa to some idyllic utopia. After a century of colonialism and apartheid, that would not have been realistic. It was designed to save South Africa, then a nuclear power, from an implosion — one that many feared would trigger a wider international war.

To the extent that the commission saved South Africa from hell, I think it was successful. Is it a low benchmark? Perhaps, but it did its work.

Since then, other truth commissions, whether they have included reconciliation or reparation mandates, have generated varying results.

Some have been used cynically as tools for governments to legitimize themselves by pretending they have dealt with painful history when they have only kicked the can down the road.

In Liberia, where I worked with a team of researchers last summer, the records of that country’s truth and reconciliation commission are not even readily available to the public. That secrecy robs Liberia of what should be the most essential benefit of confronting past injustices: permanent, public memorialization that inoculates the future against the mistakes of the past.

U.S. needs truth commission

On balance, the truth commission stands as an important tool that can and should be used around the world.

It’s painfully apparent that the United States needs a national truth commission of some kind to address hundreds of years of injustice suffered by Black Americans. There, centuries of enslavement, state-sponsored racism, denial of civil rights and ongoing economic and social disparity have yet to be addressed.

Like many, I don’t hold out hope that a U.S. commission will be established any time soon – especially not under the current administration. But I do think one is inevitable at some point, better sooner than later.

Wherever there is an ugly, unresolved injustice pulling at the fabric of a society, there is an opportunity to haul it out in public and deal with it through a truth commission.

Still, there is not yet any central body or facility that researchers, political leaders or other advocates can turn to for guidance, information and evidence. Such an entity would help them understand and compare how past commissions have worked — or failed to work — and create better outcomes for future commissions.

As the movement to expose, understand and resolve historical injustices grows, it would seem that Canada, a stable democracy with its own sorrowed history and its interest in global human rights, would make an excellent place to establish such a centre.

Do truth and reconciliation commissions heal divided nations?

1/29/2019 12:24:00 AM war and peace, world

“WILL THERE EVER BE PERMANENT PEACE AND EQUALITY IN THE WORLD?”

http://alumni.mcmaster.ca/s/1439/17/interior.aspx?sid=1439&gid=1&pgid=7514  “WILL THERE EVER BE PERMANENT PEACE AND EQUALITY IN THE WORLD?”

A frequently asked question: “WILL THERE EVER BE PERMANENT PEACE AND EQUALITY IN THE WORLD?” Yes, I think there can be “more” world peace. The emphasis is of course on “more” because peace is never absolute. Conflict is a part of human life and human nature. The realistic goal is to be able to transform conflict situations peacefully and build cultures of peace that will reduce the scale and frequency of human conflicts. In Peace Studies, we talk about levels of global peacefulness and “peacelessness.” The Institute for Economics and Peace, a policy think-tank, issues an annual Global Peace Index (GPI) that uses a variety of indicators to score and rank peacefulness in 162 countries around the world. In its latest report, the Institute stated that while the overall number of wars being waged around the world is declining, the world has become much less peaceful. Although overall conflicts between nations are becoming less frequent, global peacefulness has been falling for the past seven years. Over 500 million people currently live in countries at risk for further declines in peacefulness in the short-term. So, how can wars and peace decline at the same time? How can we have fewer wars, yet less peace? This is because large-scale armed conflicts are longer the preserve of national armies and sovereign powers. Non-state actors increasing have the capacity to engage in armed conflict thereby reducing overall peacefulness around the world. This takes the forms of domestic terrorism, insurgencies, rebellions, revolts and uprisings. We have fewer wars and less peace today because conflict has become democratized. Democratic civic action and peace advocacy can also be the antidote. With fewer wars, we can have more world peace. But this requires concerted citizen action to put pressure on governments to avoid wars, and to build cultures of peace and tolerance within our respective communities. The civil rights movement of the 1960s, the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1970s and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s and ‘90s, provide the clearest examples of the power of ordinary citizens to bring about a more just and peaceful world.

This week’s answer is provided by Dr. Bonny Ibhawoh, the director of McMaster’s Centre for Peace Studies. Dr. Ibhawoh’s research focuses on global human rights, peace and conflict studies and legal and imperial history. He is currently studying global truth and reconciliation commissions.

“WILL THERE EVER BE PERMANENT PEACE AND EQUALITY IN THE WORLD?”

1/20/2019 12:07:00 AM war and peace, world

"A Silent Monument to Slavery": The Ivory Tower confronts its Past

Like their US counterparts, Canadian universities are coming to terms with unsettling parts of their histories. In recent weeks two of the country’s oldest universities - Dalhousie University and the University of King’s College - both in Nova Scotia, have announced scholarly inquiries into their institutional links with slavery. 

Slavery existed in the East Coast province until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1834 which abolished slavery throughout the British Empire, including Canada, then British North America.

Dalhousie University’s panel will research the controversial views and actions of its founder, George Ramsay, the 9th Earl of Dalhousie, on race, racism and slavery. Lord Dalhousie reportedly described black refugees who fled the United States during and following the War of 1812 as “slaves by habitat and education.” He also made efforts to have them removed from Nova Scotia. 

The president of the University of King’s College states that the task of his university’s panel is to examine the institution’s past in an open and honest way in order to make the school as welcoming as it can to people of diverse communities, including those from the local African-Nova Scotian community.

These inquiries follow similar developments in U.S. universities such as Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Harvard and the University of Virginia that have acknowledged and addressed their institutional links with slavery. In his book, Ebony and Ivy, historian Craig Wilder shows how slavery benefited universities financially and through the labor of those enslaved. 

Slavery also influenced the intellectual development of universities, shaping pedagogy and curriculum over a century. The American campus, Wilder argues, “stood as a silent monument to slavery.”

Until recently, these hard questions have not been asked of Canadian universities. As an African-Canadian historian who teaches slavery in a Canadian university, I have found this silence unsettling from both personal and professional standpoints. However, as someone with ties to both Dalhousie University and King’s University, I’m pleased that these institutions have taken the first step in what I hope will be a trend among other Canadian universities historically linked with slavery.

In the era of truth and reconciliation, Canadian universities must strive to create spaces for conversations about their historical connections with institutional racism and the institution of slavery. The quest for diverse, inclusive, and welcoming campuses should begin with open discussions about the historical role of universities in profiting from, and sustaining systems of oppression of indigenous people, African-Canadians and other minorities.

Although, universities have been silent on these issues, histories of exclusion resonate deeply within minority communities. As a graduate student at Dalhousie University in the late 1990s, I took many of my classes in the Henry Hicks Building, an imposing masterpiece of Victorian stone architecture with an iconic clock tower. 

As I walked through its grand halls, I often wondered what Lord Dalhousie who invested his treasure to establish the University would have thought of my place at the institution. I also often wondered how much of the treasure that went into building the university came from unacknowledged slave labor.

I have fond memories of my tenure as Residence Don of Cochran Bay at the University of King’s College. It was not a very diverse community, but I found it warm and friendly. I enjoyed living among and superintending over a cohort of boisterous teenagers. As was the university’s Oxbridge tradition, we had formal meals at the common dining room in academic gowns where grace was said in Latin. 

But even then, as a newcomer to Canada, I wondered why African-Nova Scotians, whose ancestry in the community date back to 1605, were not more represented in that beautiful campus. I also wondered why indigenous and African-Nova Scotian faces were not at all represented in the many portraits of former university chancellors, presidents, and distinguished professors that lined the hallowed halls of the university.

The initiatives by both Dalhousie University and the University of King’s College might help begin the conversation that provides answers to these questions. A first step would be acknowledging that some institutions of learning in Canada and the institution of slavery share an interconnected history. 

These will be difficult conversations sometimes, leading to equally difficult decisions. Some feathers may be ruffled in the process. In the U.S., the debate has led to calls to take down statues of slave-owning and slave-trading university founders, erect memorials to enslaved persons, rename building, and redesign university insignia. But it is a conversation that we must have in our universities and beyond, if the goal of building inclusive campuses that are welcoming to all is to be achieved.

"A Silent Monument to Slavery": The Ivory Tower confronts its Past

4/24/2018 01:27:00 PM education, slavery

Zera Yacob's Hatata. African Precursor to Enlightenment Liberalism

There has been resurgent interest in the seventeenth century Ethiopian philosopher and thinker, Zera Yacob (also identified as Zara Yacob).

Africanists historians and philosophers have long seen Yacob as the pioneer humanist thinker that he was, a precursor to Enlightenment liberal thought. Beyond Africanist scholars however, Yacob’s legacy has largely been obscured, even ignored, partly because of the relative neglect of African epistemic traditions in the Western academy.

But all that now seem to the changing as more non-Africanists re-discover Yacob. In a recent article in Aeon (A digital magazine dedicated to "provocative thinking"), the Norwegian historian Dag Herbjørnsru introduced Yacob to a new audience, placing Yacob firmly in the pantheon of Enlightenment thinkers.

Herbjørnsru argues that liberal Enlightenment ideas may not, as we have been schooled to believe, begin with René Descartes’s Discourse on the Method (1637) or the works of John Locke, Isaac Newton, David Hume, Voltaire and Kant. What if, Herbjørnsru asks, the Enlightenment can be found in places and thinkers that we often overlook such as in the treatises of Zera Yacob?

He states: “Many of the highest ideals of the later European Enlightenment had been conceived and summarized by Yacob long before they emerged in Enlightenment Europe. Yacob shows a much more agnostic, secular and enquiring method" than many later Enlightenment thinkers. By comparing Yacob’s treatises with those of Descartes and Kant, Herbjørnsru concludes that Yacob's ideas more enlightened than his Enlightenment peers on questions of religion, slavery and the status of women.

Herbjørnsru’s article has triggered a vibrant debate over whether Yacob rightly belongs to the Enlightenment pantheon. The main critique is that while Yacob’s thoughts might have been exceptionally liberal for his time, they did not coalesce into a social and political movement as they did with the Enlightenment. Others however, question the wisdom of trying to fit this African thinker into the mold of European philosophers. Yacob, they insist, should be treated on his own terms. If anything, he fits more with a longstanding tradition of African oral and textual humanistic thought. 

While these questions are unlikely to find definitive answers, I am pleased to see the debate happening at all. Given his ground-breaking liberal ideas, Yacob has been in the shadows for too long. Sure, there have been some important studies of this work, but these have never really engaged non-specialist audiences. The current debate promises to put Yacob’s work in the intellectual spotlight where it rightly belongs.

As a historian of human rights, I have long been puzzled by the complete absence of Yacob’s thought in the many "global" histories of human rights that have been written. Discussions of the philosophical antecedents of modem human rights often begin and end with European Enlightenment liberalism. This is why in my book Human Rights in Africa, I place Yacob's Hatata alongside Thomas Pain's "Rights of Man," Rousseau’s "Social Contract and Descartes’ Discourses in my discussion of the ideas that have shaped the modern human rights movement.

My excerpts on Zera Yacob:

“Ethiopian philosopher and theologian Zera Yacob, who is most renowned for his critique of divine law and theory on natural law. In Hatata (Discourse), his polemical treatise on rationalism and Christian theology, he asserted that human action should be judged essentially on whether it advances or degrades overall societal harmony. Yacob’s ethics placed emphasis on human dignity, tolerance, non-violence and mutual responsibility. Two central themes in his work are the sanctity of life and individual freedom. 

The first assertion in the Hatata is that man is created a free being and “endowed with the power of reason and the light of intelligence.” In the Hatata, freedom is defined in relation to individual choice and initiative. Human freedom, like human intelligence, is a gift from God to “man” so that, through good choices, he may fulfill his destiny.

Yacob’s ethics in the Hatata also includes an affirmation of the communitarian duty of each person toward those individuals within the societies in which they live. Although he drew on an eclectic mix of Christian, Muslim and indigenous thought, Yacob’s ethics rejected many established Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions of his time as oppressive and discriminatory. 

His point of departure was rationalism. Man is a creature of God, but he was created to be free and intelligent. On this ground, one Zera Yacob scholar has argued that Yacob’s critique of discrimination against women marked, in the context of seventeenth century Ethiopia, a radical defense of “human rights, equality and freedom.”

Yacob also proffered a moral condemnation of the slave trade because, according to him, it was against God’s will. He wrote: “It is stated in the text that buying and selling human beings like an animal is right . . . this law does not come from the Creator of human beings, who created us equal as brothers, so that we call our creator our Father.”36 For proponents of African human rights values, the humanist ideas in these theological and philosophical writings provide the normative foundations for a conception of human rights founded in African history and culture."

The rediscovery of Zera Yacob is long overdue.

Zera Yacob's Hatata. African Precursor to Enlightenment Liberalism

12/23/2017 03:41:00 PM africa, history

Rethinking Human Rights in Africa

Discussions of human rights in Africa are often reduced to simplistic narratives of ruthless violators and benevolent activists. In my new book, Human Rights in Africa (Cambridge University Press) I attempt to go beyond this staid trope.  

This is an account of indigenous African rights traditions embodied in the wisdom of elders and sages; of humanitarians and abolitionists who marshaled arguments about natural rights and human dignity in the cause of antislavery; of the conflictual encounters between natives and colonists in the age of Empire and the “civilizing mission”; of nationalists and anti-colonialists who deployed an emergent lexicon of universal human rights to legitimize long-standing struggles for self-determination; and of dictators and dissidents locked in struggles over power in the era of independence and constitutional rights.

In writing this book, my aim was to tell a story of human rights in Africa that engages key scholarly debates while also appealing to a general audience. This is because the subject of human rights is too important to be left to experts and specialists. Human rights discourses, laws, policies and practices affect the everyday lives of millions of ordinary people in Africa and around the world. I believe it is important to engage the broadest audience possible in conversations about human rights.

In these uncertain times, my hope is that this volume moves forward the conversation on how we can reaffirm human dignity in our societies and actualize human rights ideals in Africa and our world.

Bonny Ibhawoh, Human Rights in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2018)

Bonny Ibhawoh, Human Rights in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2018) [Amazon.com]

Early Reviews

“In Human Rights in Africa, Professor Ibhawoh weaves, in his usual incisive and sharp-witted way, an aptly and appropriately complex and sophisticated story about the long career of human rights thought and action on the African continent. Shorn of the de-historicization, linear progressivism, facile accounting, and de-politicization that has all too often marred human rights scholarship and action in regard to the continent, Human Rights in Africa succeeds vastly in its stated goal of broadly analyzing the development of human rights as idea, discourse and struggle in Africa. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in gaining a thorough understanding of the deep complexity of Africa’s relationship to human rights ideas and practices.”
– Obiora Chinedu Okafor, Professor & York Research Chair in
International and Transnational Legal Studies, York University


“Highly readable, versatile, subtle, nuanced and authoritative, this book gives the subject of human rights an outstanding treatment, superseding most of the current literature on the subject. Its coverage is both balanced and sweeping, moving at a fast pace from the past to the present without losing focus and proportionality. Students will find it a stunning achievement, and scholars will see merit in moving forward so many arguments that the fresh insights open up.”
– Toyin Falola, University Distinguished Teaching Professor and the Frances and Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities,
The University of Texas at Austin

“How can human rights be universal if they originate in one place or are applied to only one sector of humanity? This and related questions have occupied scholars of rights in and outside of Africa for generations. Bonny Ibhawoh’s exciting new work sweeps past this redundancy by delving deeply into rights-based rhetoric, argument, and mobilization by Africans transnationally and transregionally. Ibhawoh connects rights visionaries of the African and diasporic past to the political challenges of the present in provocative and innovative ways and has written a highly readable and teachable book.”
– Benjamin N. Lawrance, Director of INGS, Hon. Barber B. Conable, Jr. Endowed Chair of International Studies, Professor of History and Anthropology, Rochester Institute of Technology

Rethinking Human Rights in Africa

12/09/2017 02:56:00 PM africa, history, human rights