Ali Smith’s Gliff is set “once upon a time, not very far from now”. It is a kind of fairytale of the future in which two children, Briar and Rose, navigate a world which seems increasingly baffling and hostile.
Gliff is the first of a planned pair of novels – the second to be called Glyph. Although the two words sound identical, their meanings are quite different. The Scottish word “gliff” means a shock, fright or sudden glimpse. A “glyph”, meanwhile, is a written character or symbol. There’s similarly insistent wordplay in Gliff. It reflects its preoccupation with how meaning is created – and destroyed.
Smith’s latest novel shares many of the same concerns as her recent Seasonal Quartet (2016-2020): the effects of climate change, the plight of refugees, the growth of intolerance and authoritarianism. But Gliff is set in a dystopian Britain where all these problems have intensified in frightening ways. Smith therefore follows in the footsteps of a growing number of literary novelists who have turned to science fiction in recent years, as boundaries between genres become less rigid.
Some of the predictions – extreme surveillance, blistering summers, widespread penal servitude – are familiar science fiction themes. But other elements of Gliff are more surreal and fantastical. A particularly strange plot element is the use of a device called the “supera bounder”, a clunky machine which “looked like an invention made by an amateur for a joke”. This is used to spray red paint around houses, people, vehicles and animals which are targeted for removal or destruction.
When Briar and Rose find a red paint circle around first their house, then their campervan, they are forced into hiding. They lurk on the margins of society, hoping they can escape being packed off to a “reeducation centre”.
Exploring marginalisation
The sinister red paint circles are an effective symbol for the more subtle ways in which societies exclude or marginalise “undesirables” of various types. The device fits in with a long tradition of science fiction writers offering the reader a distorted reflection of the ways in which inequality and prejudice operate in society. The invisible barriers which separate rich from poor, for example, are often reimagined as literal walls or fences.
Smith gives a horrifying vision of a future world of work in which unprotected or unwanted children are forced to scavenge metal from waste in dangerous conditions and adult workers are ruthlessly surveilled, punished, fined and controlled.
One reason this is so shocking is because the novel is set solely in Britain. Under globalisation, we are already dependent on goods produced under similar conditions – but in countries which are safely remote from us. Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy can be read as a similar parable of globalisation.
Gliff can be compared with other recent works of speculative fiction which combine dystopian themes with more surreal or fantastical elements. Rumaan Alam’s acclaimed Leave the World Behind (2020), for example, uses a mysterious, undefined national emergency as the springboard for reflections on racism, over-reliance on technology, and climate change. But it also draws on fairytale motifs.
Separated from their parents, Briar and Rose resemble a science fictional Hansel and Gretel. Towards the end of the novel – through both its themes and landscapes – there are also echoes of Alan Garner’s powerful children’s fantasies. And Gliff the horse is invested with an almost mythical charge, harking back to Smith’s earlier use of magical tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in her novel Girl Meets Boy (2007).
Gliff demonstrates Ali Smith’s characteristic strengths as a novelist. The narrative is accessible and engaging, yet at the same time complex and subtle. Many puzzles are set for the reader – only some are resolved.
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Sarah Annes Brown does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Gardens in New York City on Sunday, October 27 was called a “carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism” by the New York Times. The event, which came just over a week before the election, was a hostile and partisan affair. Trump doubled down on his assertion that one of America’s gravest threats is from “the enemy within”.
Trump’s rhetoric is a manifestation of the increasingly polarised nature of US politics, whereby hostility from one group towards their perceived enemies is amplified across social media platforms. Yet Trump’s comment about an insidious “threat” hints at a darker undercurrent of division, with the threat of violence.
A June 2024 poll by the University of Chicago suggested that there was more support for violence against Trump than in his favour – 10% of respondents agreed that “the use of force is justified to prevent Trump becoming president”, compared to 6.9% who believed violence was justified “to restore Trump to the presidency”. Two months earlier, a Marist poll revealed that 47% of Americans believed that another civil war was likely in their lifetime.
As a report from Chatham House recently observed, the US is more divided “along ideological and political lines than at any time since the 1850s”. And according to another report from UK-based think tank, the Foreign Policy Centre, Americans have “increasingly grown to hate supporters of the other party, viewing their capture of political power as not merely unfortunate but illegitimate”.
Americans have regularly articulated a preference for living among people who share their political outlook. And they have expressed a stronger aversion to dating, living, working or socialising with supporters of another party. These views point to a state suffering the ills of sectarianism.
Those who have observed sectarianism around the world know all too well the chaos that such divisions can wreak. In the Middle East, for example, politically charged religious difference has had a devastating impact on political, economic and social life. Hundreds of thousands have been killed and millions displaced from their homes across Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Libya because of violence along sect-based lines.
The US may be a long way from these scenarios, but there are some early warning signs. Competing forms of what American social theorist Irving Howe calls “epistemological authoritarianism” – or a sense of certainty that is zero-sum and rejects those of the other – can be easily seen across America’s political landscape.
Protests and counter-protests have played out both on the streets and online over abortion, gun laws and LGBTQ+ rights, as well as on university campuses over the war in Gaza. Elite entrepreneurs with political capital have also positioned themselves on opposite sides of sensitive issues to cultivate support.
Take, for example, Donald Trump’s false allegations that Democratic states executed babies after birth, or that migrants in Springfield, Ohio, have been eating pets. Such comments quickly spread across social media, regardless of their veracity. For Trump’s followers, truth matters less than the ability to justify their position on a particular issue. The stance taken by political communities is increasingly polemic and predictable.
Such dynamics are, of course, also shaped by local contexts. But the growing politicisation of social identities in recent years, and the increasing political importance of social issues, has created a landscape where difference is broadly antagonistic.
In this situation, grievance becomes a means of reinforcing in-group cohesion and disdain for the other. In such a landscape, society becomes divided into mutually distrustful camps set apart by a form of emotional polarisation that takes on political meaning.
It is the emotional dimension that is key here, as this is the foundation upon which political and social enmity is built. Supreme Court decisions, for example, relating to emotionally charged issues such as abortion, have strong mobilising potential on both left and right.
Entrenched differences
Elections often exacerbate uncertainty and division, as the 2020 US presidential election and its fallout demonstrate. According to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (Acled), a research group that analyses occurrences of political violence around the world, demonstrations and far-right activity peaked around the 2020 election. This reached a crescendo with the events of January 6 2021 when Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol building.
Far-right activity has dropped during Biden’s administration. But a number of far-right groups have recently become active in the run-up to the election. Meanwhile, divisions over abortion, LGBTQ+ mobilisation, and the war in Gaza have contributed to a precarious environment.
Indeed, a vast majority do not think that next week’s election will solve the issues that America faces. In a recent poll, 70% of respondents believe that things in the US are going “in the wrong direction” – a view shared more by Republican respondents (94%) than Democrat respondents (41%). And 19% of Republicans think that if Trump loses the election, he should declare the results invalid and do whatever it takes to assume office.
Pro-Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in Washington DC on January 6 2021. lev radin / Shutterstock
The schisms across the US are real and the pieces are not easily put back together. Narratives of division will continue to spread as election fever increases, further deepening the rifts in American society. And sectarianism will become the broad frame through which political and social life is viewed.
This need not necessarily become violent. But it can easily become entrenched. The increasingly hostile exclusion of “the other” in all its forms, along with a growing willingness to breach established norms and rules, requires a step back from the brink before it is too late.
Simon Mabon receives funding from Carnegie Corporation of New York. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lisa Shitomi-Jones, Research Assistant & PhD Candidate at the Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics, Cardiff University
Women going through perimenopause – the transition period surrounding the menopause – are more than twice as likely to develop bipolar disorder for the first time according to our research. Our study is the first to investigate the link between perimenopause and the onset of severe psychiatric conditions.
Many people think of menopause as a single event that happens around a woman’s early 50s, the average age for her last period. But it’s a gradual process that typically occurs between the ages of 45 and 55.
Perimenopause is the phase leading up to and following menopause, during which hormonal changes affect the menstrual cycle. This stage differs from person to person and can last several years. Symptoms may include hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings and irregular periods.
While physical symptoms are common, the potential effect of perimenopause on mental health – including mood changes and severe psychiatric disorders – is less understood and has been under-researched.
We were inspired to conduct our research by the patients at Professor Di Florio’s mental health clinic. It offers a free clinical service providing second opinions for people experiencing severe psychiatric disorders associated with reproductive events.
Many of the women in the clinic had never experienced severe mental health problems before menopause. But something seemed to shift during perimenopause. Suddenly many found themselves grappling with these conditions. However, upon reviewing the research, it appeared that the experiences of these women were not documented or explored in scientific literature.
To address this research gap and find answers, we conducted research using a large database called UK Biobank. This is a resource which gives approved researchers secure access to anonymous medical and genetic data from half a million volunteers. It aims to improve our understanding of how to prevent, diagnose and treat many serious conditions.
Using the data, we investigated how many participants had new onsets of psychiatric conditions during the perimenopause. We then compared this to the number of new onsets during the late reproductive stage, which are the years before the perimenopause.
The data we examined came from 128,294 women in the UK. We wanted to explore how the years around the final menstrual period may trigger serious mental health issues, including bipolar and major depressive disorders. We discovered a 112% increase in new cases of bipolar disorder. We also found a 30% rise in major depressive conditions during this time, compared to earlier stages of the late reproductive period.
Our study was the first of its kind to investigate first onsets of bipolar disorder during the perimenopause. It validates the experiences of women who were previously essentially invisible in the world of research.
Although some hypotheses exist as to why perimenopause and hormones may play a role in psychiatric disorders, much more research is required to better understand why this affects some people but not others. Researchers also need to uncover the best treatment options for these women.
We hope that our research paves the way for more research on women’s mental health at perimenopause, as well as further investigations into the underlying biological mechanisms.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
L-R: Miriam Frankel, Priya Atwal, Alice Hunt.CC BY
The Conversation UK, Curtis Brown and Faber are pleased to announce our three judges for The Conversation Prize for writers: Miriam Frankel, senior science editor at The Conversation UK, Priya Atwal, historian, broadcaster and community history fellow at the University of Oxford, and Alice Hunt, professor of early modern literature and history at the University of Southampton.
Our competition is looking for the best longform article and nonfiction book idea aimed at a general audience from our community of academics. For your chance to win £1,000, publication on The Conversation Insights and mentorship from a literary agent and book publisher then enter your 2,000-word story and book idea.
About our judges
Miriam Frankel.
Miriam Frankel is senior science editor at The Conversation UK. She is co-author of Are You Thinking Clearly? 29 Reasons You Aren’t and What To Do About It, a book investigating the many factors that influence and manipulate the way we think, from genetics, biology, bias and personality to time perception, culture, language, advertising and technology. Miriam also writes on a freelance basis for a number of publications including New Scientist, The Observer, BBC Future and BBC Science Focus magazine.
Priya Atwal is a historian of monarchy, empire and cultural politics in Britain and South Asia. Her first book, Royals and Rebels: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire, was published in 2020 and was one of BBC History Magazine’s Best Books of the Year. Priya is an active champion for public history and community empowerment in historical research. She is currently building a new Community History Hub at the University of Oxford, and regularly consults on a wide range of creative historical projects, from working on Netflix’s Bridgerton, to supporting the development of inclusive history curricula for UK state schools.
Alice Hunt.
Alice Hunt is professor of early modern literature and history at the University of Southampton. She was awarded a Leverhulme Trust fellowship to research her first trade book, Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649-1660, which was published by Faber in 2024. Alice is also the author of The Drama of Coronation and has previously written about the Tudors and James I.
How to Enter
Submissions are open to academics employed or affiliated to a university or approved research institution (IRO) in the UK, Europe or Commonwealth, including PhD candidates under supervision by an academic. Submissions should be in the following areas: History, Arts + Culture, Business + Economy, Education, Environment, Health, Politics + Society, Science + Technology or World.
To enter, please email your 2,000-word article, plus the following information, to uk-prize@theconversation.com:
Name
Institution
Country
Email
Telephone no.
Your book idea [max 350 words]
Please provide a brief summary of a trade nonfiction book idea based on your article. Tell us why this topic deserves a deeper dive and why it would appeal to an audience of non-academic readers.
About you [max 100 words]
Tell us a little about you – your current academic role or affiliation, your area of expertise and any relevant research to your book idea. Why would you be the right author for this book?
Please disclose any conflicts of interest that should be mentioned in relation to your article or book idea.
Oxygen, the molecule that supports intelligent life as we know it, is largely made by plants. Whether underwater or on land, they do this by photosynthesising carbon dioxide. However, a recent study demonstrates that oxygen may be produced without the need for life at depths where light cannot reach.
The authors of a recent publication in Nature Geoscience were collecting samples from deep ocean sediments to determine the rate of oxygen consumption at the seafloor through things like organisms or sediments that can react with oxygen. But in several of their experiments, they actually found oxygen was increasing as opposed to decreasing as they would have expected. This left them questioning how this oxygen was being produced.
They found that this “dark” oxygen production at the seafloor seems to only happen in the presence of mineral concentrates called polymetallic nodules and deposits of metals called metalliferous sediments. The authors think the nodules have the right mixture of metals and are densely packed enough for an electrical current to pass through for electrolysis, creating enough energy to separate the hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O) from water (H₂O).
The authors also suggested that the amount of oxygen created may fluctuate depending on the number and mixture of nodules on the ocean floor.
This research team was trying to understand the implications of mining metals from the deep-sea floor such as lithium, cobalt or copper, funded by an extractions company in an effort to ensure deep sea mining leads to a net benefit to humanity and the Earth system. Lithium and cobalt are used, for example, to make rechargeable batteries for mobile phones, laptops and electric vehicles. Copper is vital for electrical wiring in devices like TVs and radios and for roofing and plumbing.
The investigation was focused on the Clarion-Clipperton zone of the Pacific Ocean, a vast plain between Hawaii and Mexico where millions of tons of these metals have been found. However, scientists believe mining on this scale is potentially unpredictable and can destroy habitats vital to ocean ecosystems. Deep-sea mining can also introduce harmful sediment plumes to fragile ecosystems leading to a growing number of countries calling for a moratorium.
Dark oxygen for life
The implications for this finding may also play a role in life elsewhere.
Oxygen is essential to complex life as we know it. Complex life has evolved and expanded alongside photosynthesisers, which actually produce oxygen as a waste product. Yet this oxygen allows organisms’ metabolisms to be much more efficient than without it.
Without photosynthetic bacteria, the reliance that Earth’s life has on oxygen may well have never happened, in addition to the evolutionary pathway to biodiversity as we know it. But this study shows that rich-nodules on the seafloor may have provided an additional source of oxygen to the biosphere – the zone of life on Earth encompassing all living organisms.
We can’t understand how these nodules may have affected evolution until we understand more about how they formed deeper in time. At the moment, all we really know it that we these nodules would have needed oxygen themselves to form.
Studies like this show how much the origin of life on Earth is still a mystery.
Lewis Alcott does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The Little Ice Age is a period from around 1300 to 1850, when global temperatures dropped significantly. While the exact cause of this phenonemon is unknown, theories range from volcanic eruptions to European colonization of the Americas.
Our research into England’s Little Ice Age during the 16th and 17th centuries has unearthed more than 1,800 unique pieces of weather observations, hidden in documents like diaries and letters. Local and national chronicles embedded reports of extreme weather among accounts of war and monarchs. Extreme weather pamphlets publicized tragic effects of earthquakes, floods and storms, much like our media today.
Our team has created an open access database called the Weather Extremes in England’s Little Ice Age 1500-1700. This database visually maps both extreme and temperate weather in the age of Shakespeare and can help to advance modern climate science.
More fundamentally, these experiential accounts provide a fascinating window into a world not too different from our own. While the causes of the climate change of today are well known, and likely different from that of the Little Ice Age, the experiences of living through both events are at times eerily similar. Understanding these past experiences can help us to better understand our present day and to develop more robust policies in the here and now.
Frost fairs on the River Thames have become a familiar cultural reference point for England’s Little Ice Age. Our data shows that the river froze over a mere four times in the 16th century — in 1516, 1537, 1564 and 1590 — and there were only intermittent observations of unusual cold or snow.
The 17th century was markedly different. Reports of cold came thick and fast, with the exception of a few years between 1620 and 1643.
Title page from The Great Frost: ‘Cold doings in London, except it be at the lotterie. With newes out of the country. A familiar talk betwene a country-man and a citizen touching this terrible frost and the great lotterie, and the effects of them.’ Printed at London: For Henry Gosson, 1608. Attributed to Thomas Dekker. (Houghton Library, Harvard University)
This was the century of frost fairs on the Thames. With the first 17th century fair in 1608, these events were celebrated by English playwright Thomas Dekker in his pamphlet The Great Frost.
Drinking, barbering and games were on display as London’s citizens marvelled at the novelty of entertainment on the ice. The freezes were frequent enough to become an institution.
By the winter of 1683-1684, the frost fair had become a city within a city, expanding across the ice with avenues of booths, bear and bull-baiting rings and boats-turned-chariots pulled by enterprising watermen across the now solid river.
But these iconic events were just one aspect of Little Ice Age weather in England.
Storms and floods
In the 16th century, severe rain storms were far more common than cold snaps.
On Oct. 5, 1570, “a terrible tempest of wind and raine” caused flooding from Lincolnshire to London as rivers overflowed their banks, drowning towns, fields, crops and cattle. Storm surges inundated the coastline.
Four years later, towns from Newport to St. Ives suffered “raging floods,” and a “giant sea fish” (whale) washed up in the Thames from a massive surge up river. In May 1594, “soddane showres of haile [and] raine” destroyed houses, iron mills, crops and cattle in Sussex and Surrey. September of that year saw another deluge, with bridges taken down in Cambridge and Ware.
This all changed in the 17th century, following the Great Flood that struck Bristol and surrounding areas in 1607. Extreme cold spells then became more frequent, and major storm events were less common. The winter of 1612-1613 saw a number of violent storms recorded in the pamphlet Wonders of this Windie Winter, with livestock lost from Newcastle to Dover and bodies from shipwrecks washing aground in the Thames.
In the next 40 years, though, only the years of 1626 and 1637 contain reports of significant storm events causing loss of life or livestock. Instead of extreme storms, this century was marked more by regular but moderate rainfall, consistent with colder, wetter conditions normally associated with the Little Ice Age.
Fire and heat
If colder, wetter weather was a new normal for 17th century Britons, the hot, dry spring of 1666 caught Londoners unprepared. The Great Fire of London was one of the worst disasters of the age, and diarist John Evelyn recounts that “the heate … had even ignited the aire,” a comment reminiscent of descriptions of wildfire spread today.
Yet periods of extreme heat were surprisingly frequent during the previous century, especially in the England that Shakespeare knew. More than a dozen droughts were recorded across England in the 16th century, usually broken by extreme storms or floods. It never rained, it seems, but it poured. The Thames dried up completely in 1592.
As Thomas Short wrote in his Chronological History of English Weather, “an excessive drought, great death of cattle from want of water; springs and brooks were dried up; horsemen could ride the Thames.” Locals went into the mud to retrieve items long lost to the river.
Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon was nearly destroyed by fire twice, in 1594 and 1595, due to severe drought and heat. The warning signs were there for Londoners to beware of hot spells in the next century, but frost fairs and wet weather may have bred complacency.
Lessons for today
The Weather Extremes in England’s Little Ice Age 1500-1700 database is revealing a picture of the world of Shakespeare and early modern England that upends a simplified picture of the Little Ice Age. More than just a world of frosts and freezes, the English Little Ice Age could be known as well as an age of fire and rain.
The documents in our database are the reports of people who lived in a climatically changing world and saw its shifts firsthand. It shows how important weather crowd-sourcing can be, even centuries later. Contemporary projects like the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network, or the Northern Tornadoes Project, continue in the spirit of this work.
But our data could also provide insight into today’s extreme weather. Historical flooding patterns might provide reference points to better manage and understand the unstable weather experienced in the British Isles today.
Madeline Bassnett has received funding from SSHRC for the Weather Extremes in England’s Little Ice Age 1500-1700 project.
Laurie Johnson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ended his independent presidential run in August 2024 and endorsed Republican Donald Trump, it might have seemed a surprising turn of events.
Kennedy began his presidential run as a Democrat and is the scion of a Democratic dynasty. Nephew to former President John F. Kennedy and the son of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Kennedy spent most of his career as a lawyer representing environmental groups that sued polluting corporations and municipalities.
Based on my research, I find that Kennedy uses a populist style of speech that matches the rhetoric of today’s online alternative media, also known as the “alternative influence network.”
If populism cuts across the ideological spectrum, so does the alternative media.
This network of politically diverse independent podcasters, YouTube hosts and other creators connects with young, politically disaffected audiences by mixing politics with comedy and pop culture, and presenting themselves as embattled defenders of free thinking – in opposition to mainstream media and mainstream parties.
These shows hosted Kennedy frequently throughout his presidential run in 2023 and 2024.
Kennedy finds his audience
I analyzed a set of Kennedy’s appearances for this story. Both Kennedy and alternative media hosts claim to care about “the real issues” facing Americans such as war, corporate and political malfeasance and economic troubles. They condemn the “mainstream” for promoting frivolous “culture war” topics related to race and identity politics.
Kennedy and the alternative media hosts also combine left and right arguments in a typically populist way. They claim that corporations control the government and that liberals and corporations censor free speech.
For example, on a May 2024, episode of “Stay Free with Russell Brand,” Brand asserted that corrupt institutions are backed by the “deep state.” He asked Kennedy how he would fight these powerful interests.
“The major agencies of government have all been captured by the industries they’re supposed to regulate and act as sock puppets serving the mercantile interests of these big corporations,” responded Kennedy. “I have a particular ability to unravel that because I’ve litigated against so many of these agencies.”
My research found that Kennedy often bonded with his alternative media hosts over his perception that liberal media sources – allegedly controlled by the Democratic National Committee or the CIA – were censoring his campaign.
In a June 2023 episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Rogan explained that he no longer identifies as a liberal because of the “orthodoxy it preaches” around issues like vaccines. He then cited YouTube’s removal of some of Kennedy’s vaccine-related videos for violating its COVID-19 misinformation policy.
Kennedy had just spent 90 minutes outlining his journey toward vaccine skepticism, which started with meeting a mother who believed vaccines caused her son’s autism.
“If a woman tells you something about her child, you should listen,” he said.
Kennedy also described being convinced by a set of studies that public health officials had ignored.
“Trust the experts is not a function of science, it’s a function of religion,” he said. “I’ve been litigating 40 years; there’s experts on both sides.”
Afterward, he thanked Rogan for maintaining “this little island of free speech in a desert of suppression and of critical thinking.”
“The DNC-allied mainstream media networks maintained a near-perfect embargo on interviews with me,” Kennedy said.
Speaking directly to the reporters in the room, he added, “Your institutions and media made themselves government mouthpieces and stenographers for the organs of power.”
Alternative media hosts tap into this desire, helping to push some disaffected listeners down the same left-to-right pipeline that landed Kennedy in Trump’s orbit.
Until recently, Democrats have largely embraced traditional media. During the first months of her 2024 presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” ABC’s “The View” and MSNBC’s “Stephanie Ruhle.”
“Step outside the culture war!” he tweeted in July 2024. “Step outside the politics of hating the other side!”
Rachel Meade does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Garret Martin, Senior Professorial Lecturer, Co-Director Transatlantic Policy Center, American University School of International Service
But the upcoming presidential election may be somewhat of an outlier. In a September 2024 poll, foreign policy actually ranks quite high in voters’ concerns – with more Democrats and Republicans combined saying it was “very important” to their vote than, say, immigration and abortion.
As such, understanding where Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic rival Kamala Harris stand on the significant international issues of the day is important. And we can do so by looking at the records of their respective administrations in the three regions they prioritized: the Indo-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.
Donald Trump: Disrupter-in-chief
In his 2017 inaugural address, Trump painted a dark picture of the U.S. In his telling, his country was being taken advantage of by other nations, especially in trade and security, while neglecting domestic challenges.
To disrupt this, Trump promised an “America First” approach to guide his administration.
And in practice, his foreign policy certainly proved disruptive. He showed a clear willingness to buck traditions and undid some of former President Barack Obama’s signature policies, such as the Iran nuclear deal, which exchanged sanctions relief for restrictions on Tehran’s domestic nuclear program, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.
In so doing, he ruffled the feathers of allies and foes alike.
While NATO did make inroads in bolstering its Eastern flank in that period, the alliance was primarily defined by internal turmoil and limited cohesion during Trump’s time in office. U.S. relations with the European Union hardly fared better. In 2018, the U.S. imposed steel and aluminum tariffs on the European Union, citing national security concerns.
Trump also broke with previous U.S. presidents in his administration’s Asia policy. One of his first moves in 2017 was to abandon the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal negotiated by Obama. Trump’s late 2017 national security strategy also announced a major shift toward China, labeling it as a “strategic competitor” – implying a greater emphasis on containing China as opposed to cooperating with it.
This hawkish turn played out especially in the field of trade. Trump’s administration imposed four rounds of tariffs in 2018-19, affecting US$360 billion of Chinese goods. Beijing, of course, responded with tariffs of its own. The two countries did sign a so-called phase-one deal in January 2020 that sought to lower the stakes of this trade war. But the COVID-19 pandemic nullified any chance of success, and relations soured further with each Trump utterance of the pandemic being a “Chinese virus.”
Although not taking a driving role in foreign policy, Harris has been part of an administration that has committed the U.S. to repairing alliances and engaging with the world.
Moreover, it cultivated different diplomatic platforms in the Indo-Pacific to act as a counterweight to China. This included the cultivation of the Quad dialogue with Australia, India and Japan, and the AUKUS deal with Australia and the U.K., both of which attempted to further the Biden administration’s strategy of containing China’s influence by enlisting regional allies. Finally, the Biden administration did maintain some channels of communication with China at the highest level as well, with Biden meeting Xi Jinping twice during his presidency.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy walks alongside Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House compound on Sept. 26, 2024. Tom Brenner/Getty Images
People who are convicted of felonies might think they can’t vote.
Even in California, where they do have the right to vote, people convicted of felonies cite cases in Florida and Texas where people with felonies who have completed their sentences have been arrested and sentenced to prison for trying to vote illegally.
It’s almost an article of faith that a person loses their right to vote once they have been convicted.
The reforms reflect the growing recognition by some politicians that felony disenfranchisement laws often excluded people from voting long after they served their sentences. Rooted in historical racism that restricted access to the ballot box, these laws are at odds with the idea that punishment should end after someone completes their sentence.
But with these reforms comes a new challenge – ensuring that people who have the right to vote are aware that they can.
Different states, different laws
A popular assumption among the general public, and even among those convicted of felonies, is that they can’t vote for life.
During our research, we conducted interviews and focus groups with 137 people, as well as text message conversations with over 1,800 people across five states (California, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas). Delia, a 40-year-old Hispanic woman in Texas, explained: “It’s very confusing on purpose. The majority of people that I know, who get booked in and are going to jail, one of the biggest things is, you can’t ever vote again. Right. And so, that’s what I believed.”
Laws on felony disenfranchisement vary by state]. In some instances, people with convictions can still vote while they are serving time in Maine, Vermont and Washington, D.C.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced on Oct. 18, 2022, that the state’s new Office of Election Crimes and Security was in the process of arresting 20 individuals for voter fraud. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, those convicted of felonies have their rights automatically restored in 23 states when released from prison. But in 10 other states, those convicted of certain felonies can lose rights indefinitely or require a governor’s pardon for voting rights to be restored.
Making matters even more confusing is that state laws make different distinctions on who can and cannot vote. In some cases, the distinctions are based on whether the conviction was a felony or misdemeanor.
Other states distinguish between the timing of the end of imprisonment, parole or probation – and whether all fines and fees have been paid.
The Florida eligibility question
In 2018, for example, Florida voters approved a ballot initiative that “restores the voting rights of Floridians with felony convictions after they complete all terms of their sentence including parole or probation.”
Known as Amendment 4, the measure excluded people who committed murder or a felony sex offense.
But before the measure went into effect, a legal dispute arose over the definition of what it meant to complete a sentence. In 2019, Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed a law that required payment of outstanding fees and fines before a person convicted of a felony conviction could regain their voting rights.
Though the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the constitutionality of the law in court, a federal appellate court backed the Republican lawmakers.
Over the past nearly 30 years, many states have moved to make it easier for those convicted of felonies to regain their voting rights, starting in 1997 in Texas, where lawmakers eliminated a two-year waiting period before a person convicted of a felony regained their right to vote.
As a result, the number of people with felonies who had lost their right to vote dropped from a high of 6.1 million in 2016 to an estimated 4 million in this election, according to the Sentencing Project. During the U.S. presidential election in 2020, that number was 5.2 million.
So far in 2024 alone, officials in three states have tinkered with their laws on voter eligibility requirements for people convicted of felonies.
In Virginia, lawmakers approved on April 5 a new law that allows registered voters who are imprisoned while awaiting trial or have been convicted of a misdemeanor to vote by absentee ballot.
A month later, in May, Oklahoma lawmakers clarified their existing laws by passing a measure that allows people convicted of felonies to vote under certain conditions, such as receiving a pardon or a reduction of their felony conviction to a lesser misdemeanor.
Though passed by state lawmakers in April 2024, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled on Oct. 16 that the new law could take effect. The law eliminates the two-year waiting period following the completion of a prison sentence before voting rights could be restored.
Increasing voter turnout
Numerous studies of those with felony convictions have shown that they believe the voting process is unclear and confusing.
In our study of voting behavior of people with convictions, we interviewed Raymond, a 49-year-old Black man in Michigan. When asked about the process of registering to vote, he told us: “I ain’t going to say scary, but it was unfamiliar. It can be overwhelming for people who don’t want to do it. You don’t know where to go, you don’t know who to really vote for.”
To get the word out to newly eligible voters, community organizations across the U.S. have launched grassroots operations to inform people with convictions of their voting rights and help guide them through the registration process.
As part of that effort, community organizations such as Alliance for Safety and Justice and TimeDone are working with academic researchers to further understand how different methods of outreach can increase voter turnout among people with felony convictions.
With many people newly eligible to vote in their first presidential election this year, I believe providing them with accurate information about voting and their state’s felony voting laws is critical to ensuring that the idea of a second chance includes the right to vote.
Naomi F. Sugie receives funding from the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Council on Library and Information Resources, Orange County, Alliance for Safety and Justice, Crankstart, and Public Agenda.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly denounced immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally and the danger he says that poor immigrants of color pose for the U.S. – often using hateful language to make his point.
In early October 2024, Trump took his comments a step further when he questioned immigrants’ faulty genes, saying without support that “Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they are now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
It was far from the first time Trump has invoked eugenics – a false, racist theory that some people, and even some races, are genetically superior to others.
In 1988, for example, Trump told Oprah Winfrey during an interview: “You have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.”
“I always said that winning is somewhat, maybe, innate. Maybe it’s just something you have; you have the winning gene. Frankly it would be wonderful if you could develop it, but I’m not so sure you can. You know, I’m proud to have that German blood, there’s no question about it. Great stuff.”
The Nazis are indeed the most infamous believers of the false idea that white, blue-eyed, blonde-haired people were superior to others – and that the human population should be selectively managed to breed white people.
But the Nazis didn’t originate these ideas. In fact, the Nazis were so impressed with many American eugenic ideas that they incorporated them into their racist, antisemitic laws.
Root of eugenics
The British scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of the evolutionist Charles Darwin, first developed the theory of eugenics in the 1860s, and it gained a foothold in the U.S. and Britain around this time.
By the dawn of the early 1900s, much of the American eugenics scholarship looked down on American immigrants from any place other than Scandinavia, thus coining the term “Nordicism.”
In the late 19th and early 20th century, immigration to the U.S. was at its peak. In 1890, 14.8% of people living in the U.S. were immigrants. Many people felt concerned about immigration in the U.S., and there were many prominent eugenicists in America. Two of the most famous were Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.
Both were avowed white supremacists who advocated for scientific racism. They wrote popular and widely read books that helped shape American and German law in the 1920s and 1930s.
Grant, Stoddard and other theorists in the U.S. embraced eugenics as a way to justify racial segregation, restrict immigration, enforce sterilization and uphold other systemic inequalities.
Stoddard attacked the United States’ immigration policies in his 1920 book, “The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy.” He wrote: “If the present drift is not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed. … We now know that men are not, and never will be equal. We now know that environment and education can only develop what heredity brings.”
Another prominent eugenicist was Harry H. Laughlin, an educator and superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, a now-defunct research group that gathered biological and social information about the American population.
Laughlin wrote an influential 1922 book, “Eugenical Sterilization in the United States,” which included a chapter on model sterilization laws. The Third Reich used his book and laws as a template when implementing them in Germany during the height of the Nazi period.
Laughlin also regularly testified before U.S. Congress, with this 1922 testimony representative of his message to lawmakers: “Immigration is essentially and fundamentally a racial and biological problem. There are many factors to consider, but, from the standpoint of the future, immigration is primarily a long time national investment in human family stocks.”
Eugenicists, including Laughlin, have long been specifically preoccupied with Norwegian genetics – believing that America is under attack when immigration occurs from non-Nordic countries.
In 1924, Congress approved the Immigration Act, which severely limited immigration to the U.S., established quotas for immigrants based on nationality and barred immigrants from Asia.
It was only following the end of World War II and the Holocaust that eugenics fell out of favor and lost its prominence in American thinking.
Trump’s recycling of history
Fears over foreign immigrants weakening the U.S. were popular a century ago, and Trump and many of his followers still embrace them today.
Trump has also promoted eugenicists’ obsession with Scandinavia and the superiority of white people.
In 2018, Trump spoke about immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa, saying “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”
In the same meeting, Trump also reportedly suggested that the U.S. should instead draw in more people from countries like Norway.
In April 2024, Trump again embraced this idea of Scandinavian superiority, saying that he wants immigrants from “Nice countries. You know, like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”
A dangerous flash to the past
A person running for president in 1924 would seem more likely than a candidate in 2024 to espouse this now-discredited point of view.
The idea of America First, at the time, denoted American nationalism and exceptionalism – but also was linked to anti-immigration and fascist movements.
When Coolidge signed the heavily restrictive 1924 Immigration Act into law he stated, “America must remain American.”
One hundred years later, Trump calls to mind an America First mentality, including when he regularly reads the lyrics to a song called “The Snake” during his rallies as a way to explain the dangers of welcoming immigrants into the U.S. The civil rights activist Oscar Brown wrote this poem in 1963, and his family has said that Trump misinterprets the song’s words.
‘I saved you,’ cried that woman.
‘And you’ve bit me even, why’
‘You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die.’
‘Oh shut up, silly woman,’ said the reptile with a grin,
‘You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.’
I have written a book on this and I used many of my citations in Chapter 4 to help develop this piece though I reworded or reframed it.
Cannabis legalization is on the ballot again this November.
Voters in Florida, North Dakota and South Dakota will decide whether to allow adults 21 and up in their states to use cannabis recreationally.
Voters in Nebraska will decide whether to allow medical access under a doctor’s care.
Voters in Arkansas will see a question about medical access on their ballot, but the state supreme court ruled that the votes can’t be counted because the name and title of the measure were “misleading.”
The results of these ballot measures obviously matter to residents of each state, but they also will be telling for the future of the cannabis legalization movement. That’s because these states are all so-called red states where Republicans dominate state politics. They are part of the legalization movement’s biggest obstacle – what I call the “red wall.”
Cannabis legalization hasn’t always been so partisan.
In fact, bipartisanship has been key to the success of the contemporary legalization movement, which began in the 1990s.
How do I know? Because I’ve been told as much by the people who made it happen.
Since 2014, I’ve been researching cannabis legalization in the U.S.. I’ve been trying to understand the contemporary legalization movement’s success and what it means for the future of U.S. drug policy. As an anthropologist, my process is to go where the action is and talk to people with lived experience.
And so I’ve been talking to people in Colorado. In 2012, it became one of the first two states to legalize recreational use of cannabis, also called “adult use.”
Today, 48 states and Washington D.C. have approved cannabis for some kind of medical use, although 10 of those states have legalized only the limited use of oils containing low levels of THC, the active compound in cannabis. Adult use for anyone 21 and older is now allowed in 24 states and Washington.
This is a dramatic change that is undoing decades of prohibition.
Any political movement takes thousands of people to be successful, but it also takes leaders. In Colorado, attorney Brian Vicente and activist Mason Tvert played a pivotal role. With support from the Marijuana Policy Project, they spent most of the 2000s building the movement that made recreational legalization possible in Colorado.
When I asked Vicente and Tvert how they made it happen, they emphasized the same thing: To be effective, they had to build a new kind of coalition. They had to appeal to people who had no personal interest in consuming cannabis.
In Colorado, they made the case that marijuana should be regulated like alcohol, with tax money going to schools. The fact that Colorado allowed ballot initiatives was also key. It let activists take the issue directly to voters, bypassing opposition from the governor and other elected officials.
The strategy worked.
Liberals liked the social justice arguments. Conservatives liked that it enhanced individual liberty. And a broad cross section of voters liked that it would generate tax revenue and let the criminal justice system focus on more serious threats to public safety.
These voters made for a powerful coalition. And for years, such coalitions helped legalization measures pass in blue states like Oregon and California, and in red states like Alaska and Montana.
Hitting the red wall
But since 2020, legalization has become more partisan.
Of the 26 states where cannabis remains illegal for adult use, 20 are red states with a Republican trifecta, meaning that Republicans control both chambers of the state legislature and the governor’s office.
Another four – Kansas, Wisconsin, Kentucky and North Carolina – have Republican-controlled state legislatures and Democratic governors.
Pennsylvania is the only state in the nation where legislative control is split. Medical cannabis was legalized there in 2016, but recreational use is not allowed.
And Hawaii is the lone blue state that has yet to legalize recreational cannabis. A slimmer majority of voters support it than in other blue states, and there are unique concerns such as the potential impact on the tourist economy.
All told, 92% of the states where adult use is still illegal are dominated – if not completely controlled – by Republicans who are much less likely to support legalization than either Democrats or independents. This is true of both elected leaders and rank-and-file party members.
What’s more, 16 of the 26 states that have not legalized adult use cannabis don’t have a ballot initiative process, so supporters can’t take the issue directly to voters. The states with measures on the ballot this November are part of the minority that do.
Voters in states without ballot initiatives have no choice but to wait on their state legislatures to act. But most Republican-controlled legislatures have shown little interest in the issue, even when the majority of voters in the state support it – like in Iowa.
Voters in conservative North Dakota have also rejected adult use legalization twice before, which makes success this year unlikely. On the other hand, it has more support from Republican state legislators than in other states, and more voters are undecided on the issue.
And even if it survives legal challenge, that does not mean recreational legalization is around the corner. The most recent polling of Nebraskans shows lower support for recreational use than medical use, particularly among Republicans.
Second, it has divided party leaders, with the state’s two highest-profile Republicans, Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis, taking different positions on the issue. Trump says he’s voting yes, while DeSantis is a strong no.
And third, it has drawn the ire of some legalization supporters for potentially giving disproportionate control of the market to a small group of large cannabis companies. The concern is that the amendment as written does not require the state to increase the number of licensed businesses. Only already-licensed businesses would be guaranteed the opportunity to expand into the recreational cannabis market.
Ironically, DeSantis’ No campaign has put concerns about corporate control at the center of its own messaging, creating a potential coalition between people who oppose adult use legalization under any circumstances and those who oppose it when there’s too much corporate control.
Fancy, high-quality products such as Rolex watches and Red Wing boots often cost more to make but last longer. This is a principle that manufacturers and customers are familiar with. But while this also applies to biology, scientists rarely discuss it.
Researchers have known for decades that the faster an animal grows, the shorter its lifespan, at least among mammals. This holds across species of different sizes. Ecophysiologists like me have been studying the trade-offs between allocating energy for growth or for maintenance, and how those trade-offs affect aging and lifespan.
One explanation is that since animals have a limited amount of energy available, investing more energy in growth will reduce the energy they have left to maintain their health, therefore leading to faster aging.
Another explanation is based on the observation that metabolism – all the physical and chemical processes that convert or use energy – fuels growth. Some researchers have suggested that fast growth is associated with high metabolism, in turn causing stress that speeds up aging.
However, these two explanations may not capture the whole picture of the trade-off between growth and longevity. For example, certain species allocate a larger fraction of their energy to maintenance but don’t have better resistance to stress than species that allocate less energy to those processes. This finding indicates that the amount of energy allocated to maintenance may not be the only thing that determines its quality.
Meanwhile, I found that this negative association still strongly holds even after accounting for metabolic rate. That means the higher metabolism associated with faster growth cannot completely explain faster aging. There had to be other missing links to consider.
What have scientists overlooked? My recently published research suggests that the energy cost it takes to make biological materials, or the biosynthetic cost, also affects lifespan.
It costs energy to make biological materials, or biomass, such as assembling individual amino acids into whole proteins. It also costs energy to check newly synthesized materials for errors, break down and rebuild materials with errors, and transport finished materials to where they need to be.
To measure the energy investment in building biomass across species, I derived a mathematical relationship between biosynthetic cost and rates of growth and metabolism. I based my equation on the first principle of energy conservation, which states that energy is neither created nor destroyed, and data on the growth and metabolism rates of different mammals routinely measured by other researchers in the field.
While researchers previously believed that the cost of synthesizing new biomass was the same across species, my analysis of data from 139 different animals found that there is a great difference in biosynthetic cost between species. For example, a naked mole rat has a biosynthetic cost that is over three times as that of a mouse with the same body mass. While the naked mole rat has a lifespan of 30 years, the mouse’s lifespan is only two to three years.
My findings suggest that some species spend more energy than others to make one unit of biomass. This is perhaps partially due to living in a more dangerous environment. Animals that grow faster are more likely to reach reproductive maturity than animals that grow more slowly, but the price to pay is low-quality biomaterials.
Biosynthetic cost and aging
If everything else is kept the same, the more expensive growth is, the lower the growth rate will be. But how does this energy cost contribute to the aging process?
I used what I call a cost-quality hypothesis to answer this question. At the cellular level, biosynthetic cost is in part determined by the cell’s tolerance for errors in making materials. Take proteins as an example. Research has repeatedly suggested that protein homeostasis – the collective processes that maintain protein level, structure and function – plays a key role in the aging process. In simple terms, the accumulation of proteins with errors leads to aging.
Protein synthesis and folding is imperfect. Researchers have estimated that 20% to 30% of new proteins are rapidly degraded after they’re made due to errors. Different species have different degrees of error tolerance and protein quality control. For example, the mouse proteome has two- to tenfold higher levels of proteins with incorrect amino acids relative to the proteome of naked mole rats.
Let’s consider two species, where one is picky about protein errors and the other not so much. The picky species will break down and remake a protein when it finds an error, constantly using protein quality control mechanisms to proofread, quickly unfold and refold, degrade or resynthesize proteins. Not only do these processes cost energy, they also slow down an animal’s overall biomass growth rate. A pickier species would spend more energy for a unit of net new biomass synthesized than a species with high tolerance, growing more slowly overall.
On the other hand, a species with higher tolerance to errors would have a lower biosynthetic cost because it would just incorporate the faulty protein into their new biomass. Because this species can function with faulty proteins, it is more resistant to stress and therefore lives longer.
An animal’s ability to maintain homeostasis not only depends on the amount of energy it allocates to maintenance but also on the quality of the tissue it produces. And the quality of that tissue is at least partially due to the energy it invests in making biomass.
In other words, fancy stuff costs more to make but lasts longer.
My hope is that these results could be used as a framework to investigate how differences in a person’s development and growth rate affect their health, risk for aging-related diseases and lifespan. It also opens a door to a new research area: Could we manipulate the mechanisms that determine the energetic cost of biosynthesis and slow aging?
Chen Hou does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
From their caramel centers to chocolatey coatings, several widely used candy-making processes go into the production of a single Snickers bar. NurPhoto / Contributor via Getty Images
It’s Halloween. You’ve just finished trick-or-treating and it’s time to assess the haul. You likely have a favorite, whether it’s chocolate bars, peanut butter cups, those gummy clusters with Nerds on them or something else.
For some people, including me, one piece stands out – the Snickers bar, especially if it’s full-size. The combination of nougat, caramel and peanuts coated in milk chocolate makes Snickers a popular candy treat.
As a food engineer studying candy and ice cream at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I now look at candy in a whole different way than I did as a kid. Back then, it was all about shoveling it in as fast as I could.
Now, as a scientist who has made a career studying and writing booksabout confections, I have a very different take on candy. I have no trouble sacrificing a piece for the microscope or the texture analyzer to better understand how all the components add up. I don’t work for, own stock in, or receive funding from Mars Wrigley, the company that makes Snickers bars. But in my work, I do study the different components that make up lots of popular candy bars. Snickers has many of the most common elements you’ll find in your Halloween candy.
Let’s look at the elements of a Snickers bar as an example of candy science. As with almost everything, once you get into it, each component is more complex than you might think.
Let’s start with the nougat. The nougat in a Snickers bar is a slightly aerated candy with small sugar crystals distributed throughout.
One of the ingredients in the nougat is egg white, a protein that helps stabilize the air bubbles that provide a light texture. Often, nougats like this are made by whipping sugar and egg whites together. The egg whites coat the air bubbles created during whipping, which gives the nougat its aerated texture.
A boiled sugar syrup is then slowly mixed into the egg white sugar mixture, after which a melted fat is added. Since fat can cause air bubbles to collapse, this step has to be done last and very carefully.
The final ingredient added before cooling is powdered sugar to provide seeds for the sugar crystallization in the batch. The presence of small sugar crystals makes the nougat “short” – pull it apart between your fingers and it breaks cleanly with no stretch.
Chewy caramel
On top of the nougat layer is a band of chewy caramel. The chewiness of the caramel contrasts the nougat’s light, airy texture, which provides contrast to each bite.
Caramel stands out from other candies as it contains a dairy ingredient, such as cream or evaporated milk. During cooking, the milk proteins react with some of the sugars in a complex series of reactions called Maillard browning, which imparts the brown color and caramelly flavor.
Maillard browning starts with proteins and certain sugars. The end products of these reactions include melanoidins, which are brown coloring compounds, and a variety of flavors. The specific flavor molecules depend on the starting materials and the conditions, such as temperature and water content.
Commercial caramel, like that in the Snickers bar, is cooked up to about 240-245 degrees Fahrenheit (115-118 degrees Celsius), to control the water content. Cook to too high a temperature and the caramel gets too hard, but if the cook temperature is too low, the caramel will flow right off the nougat. In a Snickers bar, the caramel needs to be slightly chewy so the peanuts stick to it.
Chocolate coating
To make chocolate, raw cocoa beans are harvested from cacao pods and then fermented for several days. After the fermented beans are dried, they are roasted to develop the chocolate flavor. As in caramel, the Maillard browning reaction is an important contributor to the flavor of chocolate.
The milk chocolate coating on the Snickers bar happens through a process called enrobing. The naked bar, arranged on a wire mesh conveyor, passes through a curtain of tempered liquid chocolate, covering all sides with a thin layer. Tempering the chocolate coating makes it glossy and gives it a well-defined snap.
The enrobing process in action.
The flow of the tempered chocolate needs to be controlled precisely to give a coating of the desired thickness without leading to tails at the bottom of the candy bar.
The Snickers bar
When done right, the result is a delicious Snickers bar, a popular Halloween – or anytime – candy.
With about 15 million bars made each day, getting every detail just right requires a lot of scientific understanding and engineering precision.
Richard Hartel has previously consulted for Mars Wrigley, but not in the past decade, and does not receive funding from them nor own shares in their company.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Nicholas R. Micinski, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, University of Maine
The Israeli parliament’s vote on Oct. 28, 2024, to ban the United Nations agency that provides relief for Palestinian refugees is likely to affect millions of people – it also fits a pattern.
Aid for refugees, particularly Palestinian refugees, has long been politicized, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, or UNRWA, has been targeted throughout its 75-year history.
The vote by the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, to ban the UNRWA goes a step further. It will, when it comes into effect, prevent the UNRWA from operating in Israel and will severely affect its ability to serve refugees in any of the occupied territories that Israel controls, including Gaza. This could have devastating consequences for livelihoods, health, the distribution of food aid and schooling for Palestinians. It would also damage the polio vaccination campaign that the UNRWA and its partner organizations have been carrying out in Gaza since September. Finally, the bill bans communication between Israeli officials and the UNRWA, which would end efforts by the agency to coordinate the movements of aid workers to prevent unintentional targeting by the Israel Defense Forces.
Refugee aid, and humanitarian aid more generally, is theoretically meant to be neutral and impartial. But as experts in migrationandinternational relations, we know funding is often used as a foreign policy tool, whereby allies are rewarded and enemies punished. In this context, we believe Israel’s banning of the UNRWA fits a wider pattern of the politicization of aid to refugees, particularly Palestinian refugees.
What is the UNRWA?
The UNRWA, short for United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, was established two years after about 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes during the months leading up to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent Arab-Israeli war.
Prior to the UNRWA’s creation, international and local organizations, many of them religious, provided services to displaced Palestinians. But after surveying the extreme poverty and dire situation pervasive across refugee camps, the U.N. General Assembly, including all Arab states and Israel, voted to create the UNRWA in 1949.
Since that time, the UNRWA has been the primary aid organization providing food, medical care, schooling and, in some cases, housing for the 6 million Palestinians living across its five fields: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, as well as the areas that make up the occupied Palestinian territories: the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The mass displacement of Palestinians – known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe” – occurred prior to the 1951 Refugee Convention, which defined refugees as anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution owing to “events occurring in Europe before 1 January 1951.” Despite a 1967 protocol extending the definition worldwide, Palestinians are still excluded from the primary international system protecting refugees.
While the UNRWA is responsible for providing services to Palestinian refugees, the United Nations also created the U.N. Conciliation Commission for Palestine in 1948 to seek a long-term political solution and “to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation.”
As a result, UNRWA does not have a mandate to push for the traditional durable solutions available in other refugee situations. As it happened, the conciliation commission was active only for a few years and has since been sidelined in favor of the U.S.-brokered peace processes.
Is the UNRWA political?
The UNRWA has been subject to political headwinds since its inception and especially during periods of heightened tension between Palestinians and Israelis.
While it is a U.N. organization and thus ostensibly apolitical, it has frequently been criticized by Palestinians, Israelis as well as donor countries, including the United States, for acting politically.
The UNRWA performs statelike functions across its five fields, including education, health and infrastructure, but it is restricted in its mandate from performing political or security activities.
Initial Palestinian objections to the UNRWA stemmed from the organization’s early focus on economic integration of refugees into host states.
Although the UNRWA officially adhered to the U.N. General Assembly’s Resolution 194 that called for the return of Palestine refugees to their homes, U.N., U.K. and U.S. officials searched for means by which to resettle and integrate Palestinians into host states, viewing this as the favorable political solution to the Palestinian refugee situation and the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this sense, Palestinians perceived the UNRWA to be both highly political and actively working against their interests.
In later decades, the UNRWA switched its primary focus from jobs to education at the urging of Palestinian refugees. But the UNRWA’s education materials were viewed by Israel as further feeding Palestinian militancy, and the Israeli government insisted on checking and approving all materials in Gaza and the West Bank, which it has occupied since 1967.
A protester is removed by members of the U.S. Capitol Police during a House hearing on Jan. 30, 2024. Alex Wong/Getty Images
While Israel has long been suspicious of the UNRWA’s role in refugee camps and in providing education, the organization’s operation, which is internationally funded, also saves Israel millions of dollars each year in services it would be obliged to deliver as the occupying power.
Since the 1960s, the U.S. – the UNRWA’s primary donor – and other Western countries have repeatedly expressed their desire to use aid to prevent radicalization among refugees.
In response to the increased presence of armed opposition groups, the U.S. attached a provision to its UNRWA aid in 1970, requiring that the “UNRWA take all possible measures to assure that no part of the United States contribution shall be used to furnish assistance to any refugee who is receiving military training as a member of the so-called Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) or any other guerrilla-type organization.”
The UNRWA adheres to this requirement, even publishing an annual list of its employees so that host governments can vet them, but it also employs 30,000 individuals, the vast majority of whom are Palestinian.
Questions over links of the UNRWA to any militancy has led to the rise of Israeli and international watch groups that document the social media activity of the organization’s large Palestinian staff.
In 2018, the Trump administration paused its US$60 million contribution to the UNRWA. Trump claimed the pause would create political pressure for Palestinians to negotiate. President Joe Biden restarted U.S. contributions to the UNRWA in 2021.
While other major donors restored funding to the UNRWA after the conclusion of the investigation in April, the U.S. has yet to do so.
‘An unmitigated disaster’
Israel’s ban of the UNRWA will leave already starving Palestinians without a lifeline. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said banning the UNRWA “would be a catastrophe in what is already an unmitigated disaster.” The foreign ministers of Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea and the U.K. issued a joint statement arguing that the ban would have “devastating consequences on an already critical and rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation, particularly in northern Gaza.”
Reports have emerged of Israeli plans for private security contractors to take over aid distribution in Gaza through dystopian “gated communities,” which would in effect be internment camps. This would be a troubling move. In contrast to the UNRWA, private contractors have little experience delivering aid and are not dedicated to the humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality or independence.
However, the Knesset’s explicit ban could, inadvertently, force the United States to suspend weapons transfers to Israel. U.S. law requires that it stop weapons transfers to any country that obstructs the delivery of U.S. humanitarian aid. And the U.S. pause on funding for the UNRWA was only meant to be temporary.
The UNRWA is the main conduit for assistance into Gaza, and the Knesset’s ban makes explicit that the Israeli government is preventing aid delivery, making it harder for Washington to ignore. Before the bill passed, U.S. State Department Spokesperson Matt Miller warned that “passage of the legislation could have implications under U.S. law and U.S. policy.”
At the same time, two U.S. government agencies previously alerted the Biden administration that Israel was obstructing aid into Gaza, yet weapons transfers have continued unabated.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Lisa Bitel, Dean’s Professor of Religion & Professor of History, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
The Celtic festival of Samhain celebrates a time of year when the division between Earth and the otherworld collapses, allowing spirits to pass through.Matt Cardy/Getty Images
The Irish often get credit – or blame – for the bonfires, pranksters, witches, jack-o’-lanterns and beggars who wander from house to house, threatening tricks and soliciting treats.
The first professional 19th-century folklorists were the ones who created a through line from Samhain to Halloween. Oxford University’s John Rhys and James Frazer of the University of Cambridge were keen to find the origins of their national cultures.
They observed lingering customs in rural areas of Britain and Ireland and searched medieval texts for evidence that these practices and beliefs had ancient pagan roots. They mixed stories of magic and paganism with harvest festivals and whispers of human sacrifice, and you can still find echoes of their outdated theories on websites.
But the Halloween we celebrate today has more to do with the English, a ninth-century pope and America’s obsession with consumerism.
A changing of the seasons
For two millennia, Samhain, the night of Oct. 31, has marked the turn from summer to winter on the Irish calendar. It was one of four seasonal signposts in agricultural and pastoral societies.
After Samhain, people brought the animals inside as refuge from the long, cold nights of winter. Imbolc, which is on Feb. 1, marked the beginning of the lambing season, followed by spring planting. Beltaine signaled the start of mating season for humans and beasts alike on May 1, and Lughnasadh kicked off the harvest on Aug. 1.
But whatever the ancient Irish did on Oct. 31 is lost to scholars because there’s almost no evidence of their pagan traditions except legends written by churchmen around 800 A.D., about 400 years after the Irish started turning Christian. Although they wrote about the adventures of their ancestors, churchmen could only imagine the pagan ways that had disappeared.
These stories about the pagan past told of Irish kings holding annual weeklong feasts, markets and games at Samhain. The day ended early in northwestern Europe, before 5 p.m., and winter nights were long. After sundown, people went inside to eat, drink and listen to storytellers.
The stories did not link Samhain with death and horror. But they did treat Samhain as a night of magic, when the otherworld – what, in Irish, was known as the “sí” – opened its portals to mortals. One tale, “The Adventure of Nera,” warned that if you went out on Samhain Eve, you might meet dead men or warriors from the sí, or you might unknowingly wander into the otherworld.
When Nera went out on a dare, he met a thirsty corpse in search of drink and unwittingly followed warriors through a portal into the otherworld. But instead of ghosts and terror, Nera found love. He ended up marrying a “ban sídh” – pronounced “BAN-shee” – an otherworldly woman. But here’s the medieval twist to the tale: He lived happily ever after in this otherworld with his family and farm.
The Irish otherworld was no hell, either. In medieval tales, it is a sunny place in perpetual spring. Everyone who lives there is beautiful, powerful, immortal and blond. They have good teeth. The rivers flow with mead and wine, and food appears on command. No sexual act is a sin. The houses sparkle with gems and precious metals. Even the horses are perfect.
Clampdown on pagan customs
The link between Oct. 31, ghosts and devils was really the pope’s fault.
In 834, Pope Gregory IV decreed Nov. 1 the day for celebrating all Christian saints. In English, the feast day became All Hallows Day. The night before – Oct. 31 – became known as All Hallows Eve.
Some modern interpretations insist that Pope Gregory created All Hallows Day to quell pagan celebrations of Samhain. But Gregory knew nothing of ancient Irish seasonal holidays. In reality, he probably did it because everyone celebrated All Saints on different days and, like other Popes, Gregory sought to consolidate and control the liturgical calendar.
In the later Middle Ages, All Hallows Eve emerged as a popular celebration of the saints. People went to church and prayed to the saints for favors and blessings. Afterward, they went home to feast. Then, on Nov. 2, they celebrated All Souls’ Day by praying for the souls of their lost loved ones, hoping that prayers would help their dead relatives out of purgatory and into heaven.
But in the 16th century, the Protestant rulers of Britain and Ireland quashed saints’ feast days, because praying to saints seemed idolatrous. Protestant ministers did their best to eliminate popular customs of the early November holidays, such as candle-lit processions and harvest bonfires.
In the minds of ministers, these customs smacked of heathenism.
A mishmash of traditions
Our Halloween of costumed beggars and leering jack-o’-lanterns descends from this mess of traditions, storytelling and antiquarianism.
Jack-o’-lanterns are neither ancient nor Irish. One of the earliest references is an 18th-century account of an eponymous Jack, who tricked the devil one too many times and was condemned to wander the world forever.
Supposedly, Jack, or whatever the hero was called, carved a turnip and stuck a candle in it as his lantern. But the custom of carving turnips in early November probably originated in England with celebrations of All Saints’ Day and another holiday, Guy Fawkes Day on Nov. 5, with its bonfires and fireworks, and it spread from there.
As for ancient bonfires, the Irish and Britons built them to celebrate Beltaine, but not Samhain – at least, not according to the medieval tales.
In 19th-century Ireland, All Hallows Eve was a time for communal suppers, games like bobbing for apples and celebrating the magic of courtship. For instance, girls tried to peel apples in one long peel; then they examined the peels to see what letters they resembled – the initials of their future husbands’ names. Boys crept out of the gathering, despite warnings, to make mischief, taking off farm gates or stealing cabbages and hurling them at the neighbors’ doors.
Halloween with an American sheen
Across the Atlantic, these customs first appeared in the mid-19th century, when the Irish, English and many other immigrant groups brought their holidays to the U.S.
In medieval Scotland, “guisers” were people who dressed in disguise and begged for “soul cakes” on All Souls Day. These guisers probably became the costumed children who threatened – and sometimes perpetrated – mischief unless given treats. Meanwhile, carved turnips became jack-o’-lanterns, since pumpkins were plentiful in North America – and easier to carve.
Like Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Easter, Halloween eventually became a feast of consumerism. Companies mass-produced costumes, paper decorations and packaged candy. People in Britain and Ireland blamed the Americans for the spread of modern Halloween and its customs. British schools even tried to quash the holiday in the 1990s because of its disorderly and demonic connotations.
The only real remnant of Samhain in Halloween is the date. Nowadays, no one expects to stumble into a romance in the sí. Only those drawn to the ancient Celtic past sense the numinous opening of the otherworld at Samhain.
But who’s to say which reality prevails when the portals swing open in the dark of Oct. 31?
Lisa Bitel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Afraid of partisan rancor, nonprofits are biting their tongues, with divisive politics hindering public policy engagement by social service organizations. This is one of our findings in a new study we conducted on behalf of Independent Sector – a coalition of nonprofits, foundations and corporate giving programs.
Although the law bars charitable nonprofits from endorsing political candidates, charities are allowed to engage in at least some advocacy, lobbying and public affairs work tied to issues that are relevant to their own work. For example, a food pantry can hold an event about food insecurity in its neighborhood. Or the executive director of a homeless shelter can lobby elected officials about proposed zoning changes that would interfere with a planned expansion.
Nonprofit advocacy involves attempts to influence government policy. This may include some lobbying, along with information-sharing activities, such as sponsoring events to raise public awareness of an issue, conducting research, or educating the public about policies that affect an organization.
We, scholars who researchnonprofits, spoke with a diverse sample of nonprofit leaders to learn about their organizations’ policy engagement.
Some of the 40 executive directors of social service nonprofits across the nation whom we interviewed had engaged in advocacy, and others had not. The groups were of different sizes and were founded at different times. They were located in red, blue and purple states.
Our team set out to identify some of the causes of a decline in nonprofit advocacy through these interviews.
A few of these nonprofit leaders indicated that they lack expertise or don’t fully understand the restrictions they face regarding advocacy. We also heard many of these executives express concerns about partisanship and political polarization.
As this growing divisiveness has permeated even the most local aspects of American life, many food pantries, homeless shelters and other social service nonprofits are hesitating to take policy positions that may appear partisan to members of their local communities or donors.
When addressing a social media post about Israel and Palestine that had been misconstrued and sparked controversy, the leader of a legal services nonprofit remarked: “The more polarized we are as Americans, the harder it becomes for us to have an open conversation.”
Other nonprofits feared the consequences of any kind of engagement regarding policy questions.
“Nonprofits sometimes are afraid to engage with government officials,” a food security nonprofit leader said, because that advocacy might lead to “some form of retaliation” by the authorities.
Another concern they expressed: Advocacy might alienate donors who disagree with the nonprofit leaders’ stances.
“It’s like there’s no middle ground anymore,” said the executive director of an emergency housing center. Others discussed how polarization has led to more divisions in board rooms and the loss of donors. That makes it harder for these organizations to decide to take a public stand on many issues.
Why it matters
This study followed up on an earlier stage of our research, which showed that nonprofit advocacy and lobbying had declined over the past two decades.
We find this trend especially concerning because charitable nonprofits often serve as a voice for many people who don’t have one in American society.
As a result, when nonprofits fail to engage in the policy process, those voices go unheard, and their needs may become more likely to go unmet. One reason for this is that the people with direct expertise aren’t weighing in on policies that could reduce the need for those services in the first place.
“The loudest voices are the ones that get heard,” as one nonprofit leader put it. The “people we support don’t have a voice.”
What still isn’t known
We don’t know how polarization might affect longer-term engagement by the nonprofit sector.
Indeed, some of these organizations have stepped up their advocacy efforts over the past five years, and some took strategic steps to buffer their organizations from resistance to policy engagement, such as by replacing board members who were opposed to taking policy stances that represented their clients’ interests.
Future research is needed to understand these dynamics more fully and how nonprofits respond to prolonged contentious political discourse.
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
Heather MacIndoe receives funding from Independent Sector and is a current Visiting Scholar with them.
Lewis Faulk previously received funding from Independent Sector, where he is also a former visiting scholar.
Mirae Kim previously received funding from Independent Sector. She is affiliated with the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) as a non-paid board member.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Vivek Astvansh, Associate Professor of Quantitative Marketing and Analytics, McGill University
Hoping to win over customers, businesses from Amazon to Zoom have taken to touting their good deeds in corporate social responsibility reports.
CSR reports let companies spotlight what they’ve done for workers, consumers, communities and the environment – essentially all their goals beyond simply making a profit. Research shows that CSR statements are linked to rising sales.
As a marketing professor, I thought that raised an interesting question: When companies find success with CSR disclosures, are they bringing in new customers – or are their extra sales coming from their existing base alone?
In a recent study of several hundred Chinese companies, a colleague and I put the question to the test. We found that a CSR disclosure lowers a business’s dependence on current customers by 2.1%.
That’s welcome news for businesses. It means those additional sales are coming from new customers, who are indeed impressed by the company’s CSR efforts.
But the findings weren’t all positive.
To sell more products, companies generally need to buy more supplies. So a logical follow-up question is: Does a company’s CSR disclosure lead it to source purchases from new suppliers?
In fact, we found the opposite. Companies that released CSR disclosures seemed to scare away new suppliers. This is probably because suppliers often bear the costs when a company chooses to prioritize social responsibility.
Becoming dependent on suppliers comes at a cost to businesses. When suppliers know a company depends on them, they tend to demand payment in cash rather than credit. That can hurt a company, because it now has less cash for investments.
So while CSR reports impress customers, they appear to antagonize suppliers – and that comes at a price.
Why it matters
Prior research has shown that CSR disclosures can boost sales, but it’s long been unclear whether these additional sales are sourced from old customers or newly acquired ones. Our work brings clarity that businesses can use in making decisions.
The findings are also of interest to lawmakers, regulators and corporate responsibility advocates who are debating making CSR reports mandatory.
The U.S. doesn’t require businesses to release CSR reports, but some countries do. One is China, which in 2008 mandated that all public companies submit annual CSR reports starting in 2009. This created the conditions for the nearly natural experiment we conducted.
Interestingly, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has reportedly considered making some form of corporate social responsibility reporting mandatory. In the absence of requirements, many American corporations will continue to voluntarily report their CSR.
In other words, the need for empirical evidence on the cost and benefits of CSR disclosure is greater than ever.
First, I’m using a company’s public disclosures to measure its environmental risks and the activities it has undertaken to mitigate them. Second, I am researching how CEO incentives shape a company’s environmental disclosure, activities and spending – or the lack thereof.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
Vivek Astvansh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Shannon Van Zandt, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University
Two people survey their beachfront home and business, which was destroyed in Hurricane Milton, on Manasota Key, Fla., Oct. 13, 2024.AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell
In a pattern all too familiar to people affected by disasters, hurricanes Helene and Milton have disappeared from the headlines, just a few weeks after these disasters ravaged the Southeast. Although reporters have moved on, recovery is just beginning for people who were displaced.
Staffers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency have been on the ground since before Helene and Milton hit, positioned to help as soon as the storms passed, along with state and local responders. But many people aren’t clear about how FEMA helps or what its responsibilities are.
This FEMA video explains how to initiate claims after federally declared disasters.
Quick cash grants, then funding for repairs
FEMA works year-round helping communities prepare for disasters and training emergency management personnel to respond to these events. In the wake of declared federal disasters, it offers its Public Assistance and Individuals and Households programs.
Public Assistance Program funds are available to state and local governments and some nonprofits to help pay for things like removing debris, preventing further damage and restoring public infrastructure. Support from the Individuals and Households Program may include funds for temporary housing and for repairing or replacing primary residences, as well as provision of temporary housing units for people displaced from their homes.
FEMA launched a new form of flexible aid in March 2024 that provides quick cash payments of $750 per household for immediate needs, such as food, water, gasoline and emergency shelter. Contrary to rumors that have circulated in the wake of Helene, these payments are just a start, not the maximum support that FEMA offers.
Applicants have to file claims to receive further aid. These requests go through extensive review, such as inspections of home damage. FEMA then decides how much aid to provide, if any.
The agency will fund repairs intended to make the home safe to live in, but this work may not be enough to return the home to its pre-disaster state. Currently, the maximum FEMA aid for housing assistance is $42,500, plus an additional $42,500 for other disaster-related needs. For many, these amounts will be insufficient.
FEMA officials say the agency has enough funding to handle immediate response and recovery from both Helene and Milton. However,
until damage from both storms has been fully assessed, it is hard to know whether FEMA will need supplemental funds from Congress to support long-term recovery.
Insurance plays a key role
FEMA’s programs are intended to help with temporary housing and other needs that aren’t covered by insurance. Homeowners are expected to protect themselves against losing their dwellings by insuring their homes.
In places that are vulnerable to these hazards, homeowners may have to seek separate coverage, either from private insurers or government-backed lenders of last resort. Households that don’t purchase special coverage, either because it costs too much or they don’t think they need it, will struggle to recover.
According to FEMA, only 4% of U.S. homeowners have flood insurance, while 99% of U.S. counties have experienced flooding since 1996.
Other federal funding sources
Another federal funding source for housing repair and replacement and other personal property losses is the Small Business Administration. But, unlike FEMA grants that don’t need to be repaid, the SBA only offers low-interest loans.
The main source of funding for long-term housing recovery is the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant – Disaster Recovery grants. These funds must be approved by Congress following a disaster, so it can take months or years for funds to reach communities.
Awarding this money as block grants gives state and local governments more flexibility to meet the needs of affected communities. However, it also makes it easier to allocate the funds in ways that don’t address the housing needs of the people they are intended to help.
In recent years, we have seen many cases in which state or local officials have spent these funds inappropriately. For example, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour redirected most of his state’s HUD funds to economic development projects, including expanding the port of Gulfport, rather than rebuilding housing for storm survivors.
Fighting to direct funds to those who need them most often requires legal action, extending the wait for hard-hit communities that need it.
Renters have few options
Disaster recovery programs often overlook renters, even though in many areas up to half of residents may rent their homes. Renters have little control over whether their homes are rebuilt at all, much less whether they will be allowed to return to them.
Even after recent updates to its rules, FEMA still struggles to adequately meet the needs of the most vulnerable groups in society. This includes low-income and minority households, people with disabilities and those who are undocumented.
Poor households often live in homes that are in bad shape or that have gone through previous disasters without repair. In such cases, it can be hard for FEMA inspectors to determine how much damage was caused by the current disaster, which in turn can lead to claims being denied.
In response, FEMA created new rules in 2023 for demonstrating ownership. For example, FEMA has modified and expanded the types of documentation needed to prove ownership. The agency has also changed eligibility and assistance rules to make it easier to qualify for assistance.
Recent research suggests that, at least on the whole, FEMA’s Individual Assistance Program is not likely to underserve poor households. Nonetheless, as people across the Southeast take stock of losses from this year’s hurricanes, we believe it will be important to pay special attention to under-resourced households, whose needs may not be adequately addressed by federal programs.
Shannon Van Zandt receives funding from the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development and the National Institutes for Standards & Technology. She is a board member of Texas Housers, a non-profit that advocates for housing for low-income Texans.
Walter Gillis Peacock research has been funded by a number of agencies including the National Institute for Standards and Technology, the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Across the UK, how children are identified with special educational needs, and how they are then supported, differs according to where they live. There are broad similarities in the approaches in Wales, England and Northern Ireland. But in Scotland things are done differently.
Northern Ireland, Wales and England define children with learning needs as those who have significantly greater difficulty in learning than their peers.
Scotland takes a more distinctive approach, using the term “Additional Support Needs” (ASN). A child or young person has ASN if they are unable, without the provision of additional support, to benefit from the school education provided.
This much broader definition means that there is a wide range of reasons a learner could have ASN. These could be permanent or temporary in nature: they could be, for instance, experiencing family bereavement or bullying. Unsurprisingly, Scotland’s broader definition has meant that it has a significant proportion of learners identified with ASN – 37% in 2023.
Across a wide range of policy documentation, inclusive education in Scotland is understood broadly to encompass an extensive range of issues, such as addressing discrimination more widely – not just related to disability.
This is underpinned by a presumption of mainstreaming in Scottish law. This is the assumption that, with the exception of specific circumstances, children identified with additional support needs will be educated in mainstream schools.
Making inclusivity work
There is a broad consensus from parents, children, teachers, politicians and others that the Scottish approach to inclusive education is the correct way forward. However, there is significant divergence between policy intent and practice.
An independent 2020 review investigated how provision for additional support needs worked in practice – and found many failures.
The review showed that the needs of children and young people for additional support were not being met adequately. There were disconnects between the system’s intentions and what children and young people were actually experiencing.
The report established that not all children, young people and those who support them flourish or are equally valued within the education system. Their voices are not being heard by those who have the power to make a difference. Service providers and senior leaders in schools experience significant challenges in being able to meet needs, but this is not recognised sufficiently at a higher level.
A subsequent inquiry, concluded in 2024, found many reasons for this divergence between policy and practice. These included a lack of resources, the need for ongoing professional training for school staff and issues with school culture.
The inquiry heard that resourcing for Additional Support for Learning had decreased over time. It found that many recently built schools had not been designed to be accessible to all. It heard about the need for school leaders to have training which has equity, inclusion and social justice at its heart to effect the necessary cultural change.
Learning from practice
Across the UK and in Ireland, an issue of concern is the lack of a clear definition of what inclusive education means and entails and how it should be implemented in practice. This is reflected in the current crisis in the growing demand for specialist provision.
A recent review of special educational needs education in England by the National Audit Office has pointed out that mainstream schooling needs to be much more inclusive, that schools are not incentivised to prioritise it, and that the Department of Education should “develop a vision and long-term plan for inclusivity across mainstream education”.
In Scotland, in contrast to the other nations, greater attention has been devoted to coming to a shared understanding of what an inclusive education system constitutes. This is reflected within the National Framework for Inclusion, the third edition of which was published in 2022. This framework underpins the professional standards for teachers and informs policy more generally.
The Framework, produced under the auspices of the Scottish Universities Inclusion Group and influenced by the work of inclusive education expert Lani Florian and colleagues on inclusive pedagogy, offers a series of reflective questions to promote inclusive practice. This is indicative of a more consensual and collaborative approach towards educational policy making in general. But it is clear that more work needs to be done to make this understanding of inclusivity a widespread reality in schools.
The differences in policy approaches to additional support and learning needs mean that the profile of a child identified with special educational needs will vary depending on which country they live in. Furthermore, the variations in the education systems themselves will affect the child’s placement and the support they may receive.
Collaborative cross-nation work is essential to gain a stronger understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to meeting the additional learning needs of children and young people.
Carmel Conn has received funding from Welsh Government.
Brahm Norwich and Joan Mowat do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
After months of relentless gang violence, thousands of killings, and the unseating of a government, Haiti is faced with another heartbreaking issue which seems likely to prolong the Caribbean island nation’s woes for another generation. Testimonies collected by Amnesty International have uncovered how Haiti’s armed gangs are enlisting hundreds of children.
Ana Piquer, Americas director at Amnesty International, says: “We have documented heartbreaking stories of children forced to work for gangs: from running deliveries to gathering information and performing domestic tasks under threats of violence.”
Boys as young as six are being forced to work as lookouts, made to build street barriers, trained to use machine guns, and are being ordered to participate in kidnappings and other acts of violence. Girls in the possession of gangs are subjected to rape and other forms of sexual violence by older male gang members, according to Piquer.
Haiti’s 200 or so armed gangs currently control around 90% of the capital city, Port-au-Prince, and large parts of the country are ungovernable. The collapse in law and order has allowed gang leaders such as Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier to commit terrible atrocities largely unchallenged.
The involvement of children in Haiti’s gangs is not exactly new. According to Unicef, between 30% and 50% of children in Haiti are involved with armed groups in some capacity. There are several socioeconomic explanations for this.
Haiti was once the wealthiest European colony in the Americas – and staged the only ever successful slave rebellion against its French colonial masters before declaring independence in 1804. But modern Haiti is a failed state where more than half of the population now live below the World Bank’s poverty line.
According to figures published by the International Fund for Agricultural Development, Haiti has the highest prevalence of food insecurity in Latin America and the Caribbean. One-third of the population goes hungry every day.
Impoverishment and grinding poverty has made the population desperate. With limited options for survival, many children in Haiti are drawn into criminal groups. At times, the promise of a single meal can be enough to attract a child to join a gang.
That said, the breakdown of order throughout the country has undoubtedly encouraged the gangs to increase their recruitment of children. As with most conflict zones, once indoctrinated, child soldiers make for cheap and deadly combatants.
There is also one other specific social factor that contributes to some parents turning a blind eye to their children joining the gangs. The prevalence of child recruitment by gangs can be linked to a Haitian socioeconomic practice called restaveks.
A restavek, which is Creole for “to stay with”, is a child who is given away by impoverished parents with the unwritten understanding that they will be fed, looked after and will not die of hunger. It has become a form of modern-day slavery.
The End Slavery Now project has found that “more than 300,000 children are victims of domestic slavery” in Haiti today. Many of these children regularly undergo forms of physical and sexual violence.
A set pattern
Child sex slavery and sexual abuse are familiar occurrences in societies torn by civil war. It is more likely to take place in settings where the process of governance is weak or non-existent. This situation facilitates conditions of criminal impunity, leading various actors involved in conflict to sexually exploit children.
There is an established pattern of predatory child sexual slavery in Haiti. Following the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010 and the ensuing cholera epidemic, some members of the UN peacekeeping force stationed in the country were found to have been running a child sex racket.
In 2017, an investigation by the Associated Press revealed at least 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers were involved. It has been documented that girls as young as 11 were sexually abused and impregnated by the peacekeepers, and then subsequently abandoned to raise their children alone. Impoverished and starving Haitian children fell victim to this racket in exchange for scraps of the peacekeepers’ leftover food.
According to its own admission, the UN peacekeeping force was responsible for “transactional sex” during its operations in the country.
In 2019, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, branded violence against children as a “silent emergency” of our time. Unfortunately, not much is being done to address this challenge, despite the urgency of Guterres’ statement.
There are many existential challenges facing Haiti. Some of them are homegrown, such as the prevalence of gangs and their terror techniques.
But, as it is located on a geological fault line in a region susceptible to severe storms, Haiti is particularly prone to natural disasters. A devastating earthquake in 2010 and a cholera epidemic in 2016 debilitated the country, and the knock-on effects will last decades.
To make matters worse, Haiti also suffers from a compassion deficit. A lack of real engagement from the international community has contributed to the erosion of the Haitian civil society and left the population at the mercy of gang violence.
Even the Kenyan-led policing mission tasked with restoring order is suffering from inadequate funding and equipment, which has affected its operational capacity. Only around US$400 million (£308 million) of the US$600 million that was originally pledged for the mission has materialised, with the US shouldering a disproportionate financial burden.
Preoccupied with more high-profile conflicts elsewhere, the international community appears to have little interest in the horrors that are unfolding under the tropical sun in the faraway Caribbean.
Amalendu Misra is a recipient of British Academy and Nuffield Foundation fellowships.
Medieval people have a reputation for being superstitious – and many of the supernatural phenomena found in the pages of medieval chronicles, miracle stories and romances are still alive in modern culture. Think ghosts, werewolves, demons, vampires, fairies and witches. But while (almost all) people today regard these beings as entirely fictional, many medieval people believed in them.
Christian theologians accepted the existence of the supernatural, categorising such beings broadly as “fallen angels” who viewed humanity as a battleground in their ongoing conflict with God. Their enormous power meant they could even appear as deities, including the pagan gods and goddesses – they were seen to take on a monstrous appearance mainly when claiming the souls of the damned or being defeated by a Christian leader.
The smaller and less powerful supernatural creatures known in Old and Middle English as “elves”, however, were seen to have less straightforward explanations.
Elves, fairies and sirens
Medieval elves were not usually as powerful as the glamorous beings envisioned centuries later by J.R.R. Tolkien. They merged with demons in some accounts and with fairies in others.
For the 13th-century English priest Layamon, it was elves (alven) who gave King Arthur magical gifts and who, in the form of beautiful women, carried him away to the mythical island of Avalun to heal. However, Layamon was careful to say that this was the belief of “the Britons” (Celtic people), which he was simply recording.
Fairies first appeared in French-language accounts and quickly blended with other categories of supernatural being. They were apparently more human in appearance than elves, though wings were added later.
They formed one category of the large group of tempting, supernatural female creatures who lured human men into dangerous relationships. Perhaps most famous is the fairy Melusine, who was strongly linked to water.
Melusine was half-human, half-serpent and was both beautiful and powerful. She brought prosperity and numerous sons to her human husband, but forbade him to see her at a specified time (Saturdays). When he broke his promise, Melusine’s true form was revealed, and she left forever.
It is unclear whether the chroniclers and readers who enjoyed such stories entirely believed them, but it seems likely that fairies were considered more real in the middle ages than now.
Medieval abductions and miracles
For medieval people, elves, fairies and sirens inhabited the ambiguous territory between fact and fiction. The same may be said of mysterious beings who abducted unsuspecting humans, often women, and carried them off to strange and frightening regions. Those who allegedly reported these experiences believed them to be real, although they were condemned as demonic illusions by moralists.
Being taken high above the Earth is a recurring theme in medieval writing, including tales of witches deliberately flying on the backs of animals. These abduction tales could be compared to modern accounts of alien abductions.
While tales of abduction by fairies were sometimes dismissed as delusions, stories of saints’ miracles and natural marvels were usually accepted as true. It might be tempting to compare the powers of miracle-working saints with those of modern superheroes – but miracles were considered overt demonstrations of the power of God, whereas superheroes tend to result from scientific or technological extremes.
A particularly sensational example was recorded in the Life of St Modwenna (an early Irish princess and abbess), written by the abbot Geoffrey of Burton circa 1120-1150. In his account, two tenants of Burton Abbey stirred up a violent feud between the abbot and Count Roger the Poitevin. The troublemakers died suddenly and were buried in haste, but apparently reappeared at sunset carrying their own coffins, before transforming into terrifying animals.
These revenants (spirits or animated corpses) reportedly brought death to the village – only three people were left alive. When the graves of the runaways were opened, they were found to be bloodstained but intact. A formal apology to the abbey and the saint was followed by ritual dismembering of these corpses and burning of their hearts. This apparently led to the expulsion of an evil spirit and the recovery of the surviving peasants.
Natural marvels
“Natural marvels” were medieval phenomena which were accepted as parts of God’s creation, but could not be scientifically explained. Many of the creatures found in bestiaries (medieval encyclopedias of animals both real and mythological) fitted here, such as dragons, unicorns and basilisks.
Dragons and unicorns remain popular fantasy characters today, but basilisks are less well known – although a giant one once proved a fearsome opponent for Harry Potter. Basilisks were said to be so poisonous that their scent, their fiery breath and even their gaze could kill. They were attested not only by bestiaries but by the Roman philosopher and botanist Pliny in his book Natural History (circa AD77). They were found in the province of Cyrene, in modern Libya.
A basilisk depicted in a bestiary (circa 1200-1225). British Library
Similarly, different regions of the Earth were characterised by natural marvels recorded in works such as priest and historian Gerald of Wales’s book, The History and Topography of Ireland (1185-88).
Gerald noted that some readers would find his stories “impossible or ridiculous”, but testified to their accuracy. They included strange islands where no female creature could survive and nobody could die a natural death, as well as strange creatures and humans forced to transform periodically into wolves by the power of St Natalis (an Irish monk and saint).
Medieval people believed in a wide array of supernatural beings. While today we mostly see them as the stuff of nightmarish fiction, our enthusiasm for this diversity hasn’t waned – just look at the breadth of supernatural costumes on display every Halloween.
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Anne Lawrence-Mathers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dalia Alazzeh, Lecturer in Accounting and Finance, University of the West of Scotland
The Palestinian economy has been devastated beyond recognition. Israel’s intense military operations in Gaza have led to unprecedented destruction, wiping out much of the enclave’s essential infrastructure, private property and agricultural resources.
Meanwhile, the occupied West Bank is also under severe strain. Similar patterns of destruction, alongside rising settler violence, land confiscations and expanding settlements, have left its economy buckling under the pressure of mounting public debt, unemployment and poverty.
Gaza’s economy was being suffocated even before the war. A blockade imposed by Israel in 2007 has severely restricted the import and export of goods, while fishermen were limited to a six-mile zone, crippling their ability to earn a livelihood.
The blockade caused Gaza’s GDP per capita (a measure of the wealth of a country) to shrink by 27% between 2006 and 2022, with unemployment rising to 45.3%. This gave rise to a situation where 80% of the population depended on international aid.
In addition to the economic blockade, Gaza suffered massive physical destruction due to Israeli military operations in 2008–2009, 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2022. Yet the cumulative effects of 16 years of blockade and military attacks are minor compared to the sheer destruction caused by the current war.
A report by the UN’s trade and development wing (Unctad) has revealed that in the space of just eight months, between October 2023 and May 2024, Gaza’s GDP per capita was fell by more than half. The economic situation now is almost certainly worse.
According to the report, which was released in September 2024, Gaza’s GDP dropped by 81% in the final quarter of 2023 alone. The report concluded that the war had left Gaza’s economy in “utter ruin”, warning that even if there was an immediate ceasefire and the 2007–2022 growth trend of 0.4% returns, it will take 350 years just to restore the GDP levels of 2022.
The only sectors still functioning are health and humanitarian services. All other industries, including agriculture, are at a near standstill. The destruction of between 80% and 96% of agricultural assets has led to rampant food insecurity.
The scale of destruction in Gaza is unprecedented in modern times and is happening under the world’s gaze. From October 2023 to January 2024 alone, the total cost of damage reached approximately US$18.5 billion (£14.2 billion) – equivalent to seven times Gaza’s GDP in 2022.
A separate report by the UN Development Programme, which was published in May, predicts that it will take more than 80 years to rebuild just Gaza’s housing stock if it repeats the rate of restructuring seen after Israeli military operations in 2014 and 2021. Merely clearing the debris could take up to 14 years.
The war has displaced almost all of Gaza’s population, and has thrown people into dire poverty. Unemployment surged to 80%, leaving most households without any source of income. And prices of basic commodities have increased by 250%, which is contributing to famine across the Strip.
The economic crisis has also extended to the West Bank, where GDP has fallen sharply. Military checkpoints, cement blocks and iron gates at the entrances to Palestinian towns and cities, as well as the denial of work permits for Palestinians in Israeli settlements, have resulted in more than 300,000 job losses since the start of the war.
The Unctad report reveals that the rate of unemployment in the West Bank has tripled to 32% since the start of the conflict, with labour income losses amounting to US$25.5 million. Poverty is rising rapidly.
Israeli forces have also continued to confiscate Palestinian homes and land. Over the past year alone, 24,000 acres of land in the West Bank have been seized, and over 2,000 Palestinians have been displaced.
This devastation has been exacerbated by Israel’s decision to withhold the tax revenue it collects for the Palestinian Authority, which typically accounts for between 60% and 65% of the Palestinian public budget, as well as a significant decline in international aid. Aid to Palestine has dropped drastically over the past decade or so, falling from the equivalent of US$2 billion in 2008 to just US$358 million by 2023.
The Palestinian Authority is facing a massive budget deficit, which is projected to increase by 172% in 2024 compared to the previous year. This financial strain has crippled the Palestinian government’s ability to provide essential services, pay salaries and meet the needs of a population battered by war, displacement and severe poverty.
The road to recovery
For the Palestinian economy to have any chance at recovery, several immediate steps are necessary.
First, international aid should flow into Gaza uninterrupted, and pressure must be applied to ensure that humanitarian aid – particularly food aid – reaches those in need. Data analysis by organisations working in Gaza suggests that Israel is currently blocking 83% of food aid from reaching Gaza.
Second, the destruction of homes, schools and infrastructure must cease. However, this seems improbable as Israel continues to pursue its military goal of destroying Hamas – an objective most analysts believe to be unachievable.
And third, the economic restrictions imposed on Gaza and the West Bank must be lifted. Sustainable development – and any prospect for recovery – cannot be achieved without granting the Palestinian people the right to self-determination and sovereignty over their resources.
This would require new peace agreements, an outcome that appears unlikely at present. But without these crucial interventions, the Palestinian economy will be completely devastated and the humanitarian crisis will worsen, making any future recovery within the lifetime of anyone currently living in Gaza virtually impossible to imagine.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
And yet, it is precisely because it is written in English, that climate science is largely inaccessible to the majority of people globally.
To explain this apparent contradiction, we need to look at some numbers. Nearly 90% of scientific publications globally are in English. This is a staggering dominance of just one language. But English, often called a global language, is only spoken by a minority of the world’s population.
How do we know that most people in the world don’t speak English? English the main language of society in only a handful of countries: the UK, Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The population of these countries, combined, amounts to about 400 million – a very small percentage of the world’s population.
In many other former British colonies, such as India, Nigeria or Malaysia, English exists alongside other languages. In these contexts English tends to be an elite language, used mostly by urban, middle-class, well-educated people. Elsewhere, English functions as a lingua franca, used mostly in transnational communication.
Given these diverse scenarios, it is extremely difficult to estimate the number of speakers of English with any precision. About 20 years ago, linguist David Crystal suggested that the number may be somewhere between 1 and 2 billion. Even if we take the upper limit of that extremely large range, we’re talking about only one quarter of the world’s population. This means that three out of four people in the world do not speak English.
That means at least three quarters of the world’s population do not speak the language in which the science about climate change is disseminated globally. At the same time, languages other than English are marginalised and struggle to find space in the global communication of science.
So this linguistic inequality creates an imbalance in the distribution of scientific knowledge about climate change. But it also reinforces two other types of existing inequality.
One has to do with the production of scientific knowledge in general, which is disproportionately emanating from the two main Anglophone countries: the US and the UK. Out of the top 100 scientific journals for impact and prestige, 91 are based in these two countries.
Out of 100 top scientific journals, 91 are published in the UK and the US. Sergei25/Shutterstock
The other form of inequality has to do with social injustice. Scientific literature is almost exclusively written in English. But this language is virtually unknown by most people, especially in developing countries. And so, societies who suffer more from climate change are precisely those where access to scientific literature about it is severely limited.
What is the solution? Unesco’s Open Science initiative, is attempting to tackle the problem. It aims to “make scientific research from all fields accessible to everyone for the benefits of scientists and society as a whole”. One of its objectives is to “ensure that scientific collaborations transcend the boundaries of geography, language and resources”.
Breaking language barriers
Achieving the objectives set by Open Science is no easy task. One approach is to break the barrier of English monolingualism by promoting multilingualism.
On the one hand, opportunities must be created for scientists from around the world to communicate their research and their scholarship in languages other than English.
On the other, the great technological advancement made in machine translation, especially with the advent of AI, should be put to use in order to ensure that content is available in languages other than English. This is precisely the goal of Climate Cardinals, a non-profit organisation whose mission is to “make the climate movement more accessible to those who don’t speak English” by translating information into more than 100 languages.
These kinds of concrete efforts offer hope for climate literacy and, consequently, for action to lessen the impact of climate change.
Mario Saraceni does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lucie Nield, Senior Lecturer in Nutrition and Dietetics, Sheffield Hallam University
Weight-loss injectables don’t address the many core reasons for why weight gain and unemployment occur in the first place.oleschwander/ Shutterstock
Prime Minister Keir Starmer and health secretary Wes Streeting have recently discussed plans to trial weight-loss injections for around 250,000 people with obesity who are unemployed in a bid to get them back into work, ease pressure on the NHS and boost the economy.
Obesity is estimated to cost UK society around £35 billion annually. This is due to lower productivity and higher NHS treatment costs.
Around 26% of the English adult population (approximately 15 million) are considered obese. However, it’s not known what proportion of unemployed people are obese.
While weight-loss injections have proven to be very effective in helping people who are obese to lose weight and lower their risk of certain chronic diseases, there are many reasons why these drugs alone won’t help tackle obesity and unemployment rates in the UK.
1. Lack of capacity
The majority of UK people who are obese are likely to meet the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s eligibility criteria for weight-loss injections.
But prescribing these drugs is just one part of the equation. Eligible patients will require support from specialist services who provide guidance in making the appropriate lifestyle changes (such as to their diet) to successfully lose weight while on these drugs. This is crucial, as all of the weight-loss injection trials to date have involved a behaviour change component. This may potentially be key to the successful weight losses observed in these studies.
However, current demand for weight-loss services is already outstripping capacity. Nearly half of eligible patients in England are unable to get an appointment with a specialist team. Weight-loss injections can only be prescribed through such services currently. If the government is to roll out the proposed programme, they will need to rethink the way weight-loss services are delivered so all eligible patients can access support.
2. Won’t work for everyone
Weight-loss jabs don’t necessarily work for everyone. One study found that 9-15% of participants who took the drug tirzepatide (Mounjaro) did not lose clinically significant amounts of weight.
Weight-loss jabs may also cause intolerable side-effects for some. Trials have shown between 4-8% of participants couldn’t tolerate the side-effects, causing them to drop out of the study. Constipation, diarrhoea and nausea are some of the most commonly reported.
People with certain health conditions may be unable to use weight-loss injections – such as those with inflammatory bowel disease and pancreatitis. In such cases, weight-loss jabs may worsen symptoms or interact with the prescription drugs used to manage these conditions, increasing risk of harm.
Additionally, some people may not want to take an injection – whether that’s simply due to personal preference or even fear of needles.
3. Obesity is a complex issue
There are many complex factors that contribute to weight gain – such as opportunities for physical activity, access to healthy foods and levels of deprivation in a community. Prescribing weight-loss jabs to help people lose weight may not be effective long-term if the rest of these factors are not also addressed.
A more effective way of seeing significant, sustainable reductions in obesity levels across a population is by using a “whole systems approach”. This would address to the multiple environmental, social and economic factors that contribute to obesity.
Where whole systems approaches have been embedded in healthcare design and delivery, they have led to improvements in services and patient outcomes – including obesity-related metrics (such as patients making healthier food choices and being more active).
However, one limitation to whole systems approaches is challenges in measuring impact. This can reduce political will to implement these approaches.
4. Obesity stigma
Obesity stigma in the workplace is a huge barrier to satisfactory employment and leads to poor wellbeing and burnout.
Obesity stigma in the workplace perpetuates harmful weight-based stereotypes that overweight and obese people are lazy, unsuccessful, unintelligent and lack willpower. As a result, people with obesity are more likely to be in insecure and lower-paid jobs than those who may be considered of a healthy weight.
It’s also well-evidenced that regular exposure to stigmatising, isolating and degrading prejudices has long-term consequences on physical and mental health – and may lead to problems such as binge eating and depression.This can lead to a loss of productivity, absenteeism and loneliness.
Prescribing weight-loss jabs to help a person lose weight doesn’t address the core reasons for why they may have been absent from work or unemployed in the first place. Nor does it help to address the mental health struggles they may still harbour as a result of discrimination they might have experienced.
Current prescribing restrictions also limit some injections to a maximum of 24 months (although further trials are ongoing). This means that even if a person has successfully lost weight, they may regain that weight again when they stop using the drug. This could mean any health problems they experienced prior to losing weight (and which may have prevented them from being in employment) could reemerge.
There are better ways of getting people back into work than prescribing weight-loss jabs. Flexible working approaches, for instance, may make it easier for someone who is unemployed due to caring responsibilities or health problems to transition back into employment. Supportive policies and workplace wellbeing programmes may be a more cost-effective way of helping people to overcome barriers, improve their health and transition back into work.
Lucie Nield has received funding from The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) for evaluation of children’s weight management services.
Lucie Nield sits on the Board of Trustees for Darnall Wellbeing (a local community service organisation).
Recent research on animal sleep behaviour has revealed that sleep is influenced by the animals around them. Olive baboons, for instance, sleep less as group sizes increase, while mice can synchronise their rapid eye movement (REM) cycles.
In western society, many people expect to sleep alone, if not with a romantic partner. But as with other group-living animals, human co-sleeping is common, despite some cultural and age-related variation. And in many cultures, bedsharing with a relative is considered typical.
Apart from western countries, caregiver-infant co-sleeping is common, with rates as high as 60-100% in parts of South America, Asia and Africa.
Despite its prevalence, infant co-sleeping is controversial. Some western perspectives, that value self-reliance, argue that sleeping alone promotes self-soothing when the baby wakes in the night. But evolutionary scientists argue that co-sleeping has been important to help keep infants warm and safe throughout human existence.
Many cultures do not expect babies to self-soothe when they wake in the night and see night wakings as a normal part of breastfeeding and development.
Concerns about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (Sids) have often led paediatricians to discourage bed-sharing. However, when studies control for other Sids risk factors including unsafe sleeping surfaces, Sids risk does not seem to differ statistically between co-sleeping and solitary sleeping infants.
Researchers don’t yet know whether co-sleeping causes differences in sleep or, whether co-sleeping happens because of these differences. However, experiments in the 1990s suggested that co-sleeping can encourage more sustained and frequent bouts of breastfeeding. Using sensors to measure brain activity, this research also suggested that infants’ and caregivers’ sleep may be lighter during co-sleeping. But researchers speculated that this lighter sleep may actually help protect against Sids by providing infants more opportunities to rouse from sleep and develop better control over their respiratory system.
Childhood co-sleeping past infancy is also fairly common according to worldwide surveys. A 2010 survey of over 7,000 UK families found 6% of children were constant bedsharers up to at least four years old.
Some families adopt co-sleeping in response to their child having trouble sleeping. But child-parent bedsharing in many countries, including some western countries like Sweden where children often co-sleep with parents until school age, is viewed culturally as part of a nurturing environment.
It’s normal for children to bedshare in many parts of the world. Yuri A/ Shutterstock
It is also common for siblings to share a room or even a bed. A 2021 US study found that over 36% of young children aged three to five years bedshared in some form overnight, whether with caregivers, siblings, pets or some combination. Co-sleeping decreases but is still present among older children, with up to 13.8% of co-sleeping parents in Australia, the UK and other countries reporting that their child was between five and 12 years old when they engaged in co-sleeping.
Two recent US studies using wrist-worn actigraphs (motion sensors) to track sleep indicated that kids who bedshare may have shorter sleep durations than children who sleep alone. But this shorter sleep duration is not explained by greater disruption during sleep. Instead, bedsharing children may lose sleep by going to bed later than solitary sleepers.
The benefits and downsides of co-sleeping may also differ in children with conditions such as autism spectrum disorder, mental health disorders and chronic illnesses. These children may experience heightened anxiety, sensory sensitivities and physical discomfort that make falling and staying asleep difficult. For them, co-sleeping can provide reassurance.
Adults sharing beds
According to a 2018 survey from the US National Sleep Foundation, 80-89% of adults who live with their significant other share a bed with them. Adult bedsharing has shifted over time from pre-industrial communal arrangements, including whole families and other household guests, to solo sleeping in response to hygiene concerns as germ theory became accepted.
Bedsharing couples also often get into sync with each other’s sleep stages, which can enhance that feeling of intimacy. However, it’s not all rosy. Some studies indicate that females in heterosexual relationships may struggle more with sleep quality when bedsharing, as they can be more easily disturbed by their male partner’s movements. Also, bedsharers can have less deep sleep than when sleeping alone, even though they feel like their sleep is better together.
Many questions about co-sleeping remain unanswered. For instance, we don’t fully understand the developmental effects of co-sleeping on children, or the benefits of co-sleeping for adults beyond female-male romantic partners. But, some work suggests that co-sleeping can comfort us, similar to other forms of social contact, and help to enhance physical synchrony between parents and children.
Co-sleeping doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all answer. But remember that western norms aren’t necessarily the ones we have evolved with. So consider factors such as sleep disorders, health and age in your decision to co-sleep, rather than what everyone else is doing.
Gina Mason receives funding from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine Foundation (grant #334-BS-24). The views expressed herein are her own, and do not represent the official views of the Academy or any other professional organization with which she is affiliated.
Goffredina Spanò does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Lisa Bitel, Dean’s Professor of Religion & Professor of History, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
The Celtic festival of Samhain celebrates a time of year when the division between Earth and the otherworld collapses, allowing spirits to pass through.Matt Cardy/Getty Images
The Irish often get credit – or blame – for the bonfires, pranksters, witches, jack-o’-lanterns and beggars who wander from house to house, threatening tricks and soliciting treats.
The first professional 19th-century folklorists were the ones who created a through line from Samhain to Halloween. Oxford University’s John Rhys and James Frazer of the University of Cambridge were keen to find the origins of their national cultures.
They observed lingering customs in rural areas of Britain and Ireland and searched medieval texts for evidence that these practices and beliefs had ancient pagan roots. They mixed stories of magic and paganism with harvest festivals and whispers of human sacrifice, and you can still find echoes of their outdated theories on websites.
But the Halloween we celebrate today has more to do with the English, a ninth-century pope and America’s obsession with consumerism.
A changing of the seasons
For two millennia, Samhain, the night of Oct. 31, has marked the turn from summer to winter on the Irish calendar. It was one of four seasonal signposts in agricultural and pastoral societies.
After Samhain, people brought the animals inside as refuge from the long, cold nights of winter. Imbolc, which is on Feb. 1, marked the beginning of the lambing season, followed by spring planting. Beltaine signaled the start of mating season for humans and beasts alike on May 1, and Lughnasadh kicked off the harvest on Aug. 1.
But whatever the ancient Irish did on Oct. 31 is lost to scholars because there’s almost no evidence of their pagan traditions except legends written by churchmen around 800 A.D., about 400 years after the Irish started turning Christian. Although they wrote about the adventures of their ancestors, churchmen could only imagine the pagan ways that had disappeared.
These stories about the pagan past told of Irish kings holding annual weeklong feasts, markets and games at Samhain. The day ended early in northwestern Europe, before 5 p.m., and winter nights were long. After sundown, people went inside to eat, drink and listen to storytellers.
The stories did not link Samhain with death and horror. But they did treat Samhain as a night of magic, when the otherworld – what, in Irish, was known as the “sí” – opened its portals to mortals. One tale, “The Adventure of Nera,” warned that if you went out on Samhain Eve, you might meet dead men or warriors from the sí, or you might unknowingly wander into the otherworld.
When Nera went out on a dare, he met a thirsty corpse in search of drink and unwittingly followed warriors through a portal into the otherworld. But instead of ghosts and terror, Nera found love. He ended up marrying a “ban sídh” – pronounced “BAN-shee” – an otherworldly woman. But here’s the medieval twist to the tale: He lived happily ever after in this otherworld with his family and farm.
The Irish otherworld was no hell, either. In medieval tales, it is a sunny place in perpetual spring. Everyone who lives there is beautiful, powerful, immortal and blond. They have good teeth. The rivers flow with mead and wine, and food appears on command. No sexual act is a sin. The houses sparkle with gems and precious metals. Even the horses are perfect.
Clampdown on pagan customs
The link between Oct. 31, ghosts and devils was really the pope’s fault.
In 834, Pope Gregory IV decreed Nov. 1 the day for celebrating all Christian saints. In English, the feast day became All Hallows Day. The night before – Oct. 31 – became known as All Hallows Eve.
Some modern interpretations insist that Pope Gregory created All Hallows Day to quell pagan celebrations of Samhain. But Gregory knew nothing of ancient Irish seasonal holidays. In reality, he probably did it because everyone celebrated All Saints on different days and, like other Popes, Gregory sought to consolidate and control the liturgical calendar.
In the later Middle Ages, All Hallows Eve emerged as a popular celebration of the saints. People went to church and prayed to the saints for favors and blessings. Afterward, they went home to feast. Then, on Nov. 2, they celebrated All Souls’ Day by praying for the souls of their lost loved ones, hoping that prayers would help their dead relatives out of purgatory and into heaven.
But in the 16th century, the Protestant rulers of Britain and Ireland quashed saints’ feast days, because praying to saints seemed idolatrous. Protestant ministers did their best to eliminate popular customs of the early November holidays, such as candle-lit processions and harvest bonfires.
In the minds of ministers, these customs smacked of heathenism.
A mishmash of traditions
Our Halloween of costumed beggars and leering jack-o’-lanterns descends from this mess of traditions, storytelling and antiquarianism.
Jack-o’-lanterns are neither ancient nor Irish. One of the earliest references is an 18th-century account of an eponymous Jack, who tricked the devil one too many times and was condemned to wander the world forever.
Supposedly, Jack, or whatever the hero was called, carved a turnip and stuck a candle in it as his lantern. But the custom of carving turnips in early November probably originated in England with celebrations of All Saints’ Day and another holiday, Guy Fawkes Day on Nov. 5, with its bonfires and fireworks, and it spread from there.
As for ancient bonfires, the Irish and Britons built them to celebrate Beltaine, but not Samhain – at least, not according to the medieval tales.
In 19th-century Ireland, All Hallows Eve was a time for communal suppers, games like bobbing for apples and celebrating the magic of courtship. For instance, girls tried to peel apples in one long peel; then they examined the peels to see what letters they resembled – the initials of their future husbands’ names. Boys crept out of the gathering, despite warnings, to make mischief, taking off farm gates or stealing cabbages and hurling them at the neighbors’ doors.
Halloween with an American sheen
Across the Atlantic, these customs first appeared in the mid-19th century, when the Irish, English and many other immigrant groups brought their holidays to the U.S.
In medieval Scotland, “guisers” were people who dressed in disguise and begged for “soul cakes” on All Souls Day. These guisers probably became the costumed children who threatened – and sometimes perpetrated – mischief unless given treats. Meanwhile, carved turnips became jack-o’-lanterns, since pumpkins were plentiful in North America – and easier to carve.
Like Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Easter, Halloween eventually became a feast of consumerism. Companies mass-produced costumes, paper decorations and packaged candy. People in Britain and Ireland blamed the Americans for the spread of modern Halloween and its customs. British schools even tried to quash the holiday in the 1990s because of its disorderly and demonic connotations.
The only real remnant of Samhain in Halloween is the date. Nowadays, no one expects to stumble into a romance in the sí. Only those drawn to the ancient Celtic past sense the numinous opening of the otherworld at Samhain.
But who’s to say which reality prevails when the portals swing open in the dark of Oct. 31?
Lisa Bitel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The world is witnessing the consequences of climate change: long-lasting changes in temperature and rainfall, and more intense and frequent extreme weather events such as heat waves, hurricanes, typhoons, flooding and drought. All make it harder for families and communities to meet their care needs.
Climate change affects care systems in various ways. First, sudden illnesses and unexpected disabilities heighten the need for care. Second, it reduces access to important inputs for care such as water, food and safe shelter. Third, it can damage physical and social care infrastructures.
It can also lead to breakdowns of traditional units of caregiving such as households and communities. And it creates new situations of need with the increase in displaced person settlements and refugee camps.
Climate change creates sudden spikes in the demand for care, and serious challenges to meeting the growing need for care. All this has immediate and long lasting effects on human well-being.
The size of the current unmet care needs throughout the world is substantial. In childcare alone, about 23% of children worldwide – nearly 350 million – need childcare but do not have it. Families in low- and lower-middle-income countries are the most in need.
Similarly, as the world’s population ages rapidly, only a small proportion of the elderly who need assistance are able to use formal care (in an institution or paid homecare). Most are cared for by family members or other unpaid caregivers. Much of this unpaid care and formal care work is provided by women and girls.
Hundreds of millions of people around the world struggle to get healthcare. Expansion of access to essential health services has slowed compared to pre-2015 . And healthcare costs still create financial hardship.
Without comprehensive public and global support for care provision and the integration of care in the climate agenda, unmet care needs will only grow and inequalities will widen.
Impact
Climate change interacts with human health in complex ways. Its impact is highly uneven across populations. It depends on geographical region, income, education, gender roles, social norms, level of development, and the institutional capacity and accessibility of health systems.
Africa is also the region most affected by droughts in 2013-22, with 64% of its land area affected by at least one month of extreme drought per year on average. It was followed by Oceania (55% of its land area) and South and Central America (53%).
Scientific evidence also points to increases in health inequalities caused by climate change. The health effects of climate change are not uniformly felt by different population groups.
There is also evidence of the disproportionate effect of climate change on the health of people living in poverty and those who belong to disadvantaged groups.
Women of lower social and economic status and with less education are more vulnerable to heat stress compared to women in wealthier households and with higher education or social status. They are exposed to pollution in the absence of clean cooking fuel, and to extreme heat as they walk to gather water and fuel, or do other work outdoors.
Lack of access to healthcare services and the means to pay for medicines make it difficult for women and men in low-income households to recover from illness, heat strokes, and air pollution-related ailments.
These adverse impacts increase the demand for caregiving and the care workload. Climate-induced health problems force family and community caregivers, particularly women, to spend more time looking after the sick and disabled, particularly frail elderly people and children.
Effect on food and water
Climate change threatens the availability of food, clean water and safe shelter. It erodes households’ and communities’ care capacity and hence societies’ ability to thrive.
The threat of chronic shortage of safe drinking water has also risen. Water scarcity is an area where structural inequalities and gender disparities are laid bare.
Care for the sick and disabled, the young and the elderly is compromised when water is scarce.
Effects on providing care
Extreme weather events disrupt physical care infrastructures. It may be hard to reach hospitals, clinics, daycare centres, nursery schools and nursing homes. Some facilities may be damaged and have to close.
Another type of care system that can break down is family networks and support provided by friends and neighbours. These informal care sharing arrangements are illustrated in a study of the three large informal settlements in Nairobi.
About half (50.5%) of the sampled households reported having had a sick member in the two weeks before the survey. The majority relied on close friends and family members living nearby for care and support.
Studies have shown that climate change eventually leads to livelihood loss and resource scarcity, which can weaken social cohesion and local safety nets in affected communities.
Heightened risks and uncertainty and imminent changes in socio-economic and political conditions can also compel individuals or entire households to migrate. Migration is caused by a host of factors, but it has increasingly been a climate-related response.
The World Bank’s Groundswell Report released in 2018, for example, projected that climate change could force 216 million people to move within their countries by 2050 to avoid the slow-onset impacts of climate change.
A possible consequence of migration is the withdrawal of care support provided by the migrating extended kin, neighbours or friends, increasing the caregiving load of people left behind.
In the case of forced displacements, the traditional social networks existing in communities are disrupted entirely.
What’s needed
There are compelling reasons to believe that meeting care needs can also help mitigate the effects of climate change. And actions to meet carbon-zero goals, prevent biodiversity loss and regenerate ecosystems can reduce the care work burden that falls heavily on families, communities and women.
This article is part of a series of articles initiated through a project led by the Southern Centre for Inequality studies, in collaboration with the International Development Research Centre and a group of feminist economists and climate scientists across the world.
Maria S. Floro does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Anthoni van Nieuwkerk, Professor of International and Diplomacy Studies, Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Affairs, University of South Africa
The last two summits of Brics countries have raised questions about the coalition’s identity and purpose. This began to come into focus at the summit hosted by South Africa in 2023, and more acutely at the recent 2024 summit in Kazan, Russia.
At both events the alliance undertook to expand its membership. In 2023, the first five Brics members – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – invited Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to join. All bar Saudi Arabia have now done so. The 2024 summit pledged to admit 13 more, perhaps as associates or “partner countries”.
On paper, the nine-member Brics+ strikes a powerful pose. It has a combined population of about 3.5 billion, or 45% of the world’s people. Combined, its economies are worth more than US$28.5 trillion – about 28% of the global economy. With Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE as members, Brics+ produces about 44% of the world’s crude oil.
Based on my research and policy advice to African foreign policy decision-makers, I would argue that there are three possible interpretations of the purpose of Brics+.
A club of self-interested members – a kind of global south cooperative. What I’d label as a self-help organisation.
A reforming bloc with a more ambitious goal of improving the workings of the current global order.
A disrupter, preparing to replace the western-dominated liberal world order.
Analysing the commitments that were made at the meeting in Russia, I would argue that Brics+ sees itself more as a self-interested reformer. It represents the thinking among global south leaders about the nature of global order, and the possibilities of shaping a new order. This, as the world moves away from the financially dominant, yet declining western order (in terms of moral influence) led by the US. The move is to a multipolar order in which the east plays a leading role.
However, the ability of Brics+ to exploit such possibilities is constrained by its make-up and internal inconsistencies. These include a contested identity, incongruous values and lack of resources to convert political commitments into actionable plans.
Summit outcomes
The trend towards closer trade and financial cooperation and coordination stands out as a major achievement of the Kazan summit. Other achievements pertain to global governance and counter-terrorism.
When it comes to trade and finance, the final communiqué said the following had been agreed:
adoption of local currencies in trade and financial transactions. The Kazan Declaration notes the benefits of faster, low cost, more efficient, transparent, safe and inclusive cross-border payment instruments. The guiding principle would be minimal trade barriers and non-discriminatory access.
establishment of a cross-border payment system. The declaration encourages correspondent banking networks within Brics, and enabling settlements in local currencies in line with the Brics Cross-Border Payments Initiative. This is voluntary and nonbinding and is to be discussed further.
creation of an enhanced roles for the New Development Bank, such as promoting infrastructure and sustainable development.
a proposed Brics Grain Exchange, to improve food security through enhanced trade in agricultural commodities.
All nine Brics+ countries committed themselves to the principles of the UN Charter – peace and security, human rights, the rule of law, and development – primarily as a response to the western unilateral sanctions.
The summit emphasised that dialogue and diplomacy should prevail over conflict in, among other places, the Middle East, Sudan, Haiti and Afghanistan.
Faultlines and tensions
Despite the positive tone of the Kazan declaration, there are serious structural fault lines and tensions inherent in the architecture and behaviour of Brics+. These might limit its ambitions to be a meaningful change agent.
The members don’t even agree on the definition of Brics+. President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa calls it a platform. Others talk of a group (Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi) or a family (Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jianan).
So what could it be?
Brics+ is state-driven – with civil society on the margins. It reminds one of the African Union, which pays lip service to citizens’ engagement in decision-making.
But it would need to cohere around shared values. What would they be?
Critics point out that Brics+ consists of democracies (South Africa, Brazil, India), a theocracy (Iran), monarchies (UAE, Saudi Arabia) and authoritarian dictatorships (China, Russia). For South Africa this creates a domestic headache. At the Kazan summit, its president declared Russia a friend and ally. At home, its coalition partner in the government of national unity, the Democratic Alliance, declared Ukraine as a friend and ally.
There are also marked differences over issues such as the reform of the United Nations. For example, at the recent UN Summit of the Future the consensus was for reform of the UN security council. But will China and Russia, as permanent security council members, agree to more seats, with veto rights, on the council?
As for violent conflict, humanitarian crises, corruption and crime, there is little from the Kazan summit that suggests agreement around action.
Unity of purpose
What about shared interests? A number of Brics+ members and the partner countries maintain close trade ties with the west, which regards Russia and Iran as enemies and China as a global threat.
Some, such as India and South Africa, use the foreign policy notions of strategic ambiguity or active non-alignment to mask the reality of trading with east, west, north and south.
The harsh truth of international relations is there are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests. The Brics+ alliance will most likely cohere as a global south co-operative, with an innovative self-help agenda, but be reluctant to overturn the current global order from which it desires to benefit more equitably.
Trade-offs and compromises might be necessary to ensure “unity of purpose”. It’s not clear that this loose alliance is close to being able to achieve that.
Anthoni van Nieuwkerk does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, the world’s longest reigning female political leader, fled Bangladesh on 5 August 2024 for the safety of India. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of protesters descended on Bangladesh’s capital city, Dhaka. The crowds ransacked her official residence, occupied the nation’s parliament and burnt down her family home.
Hasina, who had ruled the country for more than 20 years in total, had been widely accused of turning autocratic and clamping down severely on any opposition to her rule.
For many, the Bangladesh revolution offers hope in the context of growing global authoritarianism. It illustrates the power of the youth to confront entrenched leaders, and the fragility of authoritarianism. It also highlights a striking feature of contemporary global politics: how central capital cities are to the political life of nations.
In our new book, Controlling the Capital: Political Dominance in the Urbanizing World, a diverse range of scholars argue that capital cities are crucial political sites. They’re where governing elites seek to assert and maintain political control, and they are also stages for political contestation.
The book is focused on sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the two fastest-urbanising regions of the world.
Authors explore the strategies and tactics used by ruling elites to politically dominate their capital cities in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The authors also consider how urban populations have engaged with these efforts. People may resist authority, but they can also cooperate with it in ways that benefit themselves – which sometimes reinforces or supports authoritarian control.
This is increasingly important in the context of two contemporary trends. First, authoritarianism is growing globally. Just 10 years ago under half of the world’s population lived under authoritarian rule; now the figure is at 71%. The second trend is the ongoing rapid urbanisation of the world’s population, with the majority of us globally now living in urban areas.
Urban unrest
Over the past year we’ve seen how capital cities are spaces for contestation.
Some pro-democracy movements draw from their own histories of struggle and the paths that have been carved by those before them. The template of Bangladesh’s 2024 revolution is ingrained in politics from the ways in which liberation was fought and how later struggles against authoritarian rule were won. The capital city has also been crucial, and students at Dhaka University were key mobilisers in such movements.
In other contexts, the link between political resistance and urban areas is a relatively new and surprising route to political change. One example is “the struggle” seen in Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo and the unseating of the Rajapaksa family, who were perceived as increasingly authoritarian rulers of the country. The Colombo chapter in this volume highlights how such protests emerged in a context where urban unrest had rarely threatened those in power before.
Even where anti-authoritarian protests have proved futile time and again, urban populations rarely remain quiet.
In Kampala, Uganda, demonstrations prior to the 2021 elections resulted in a horrifying government crackdown. Inspired by events in neighbouring Kenya, protesters took to the streets once more in July 2024 to demonstrate against corruption.
The protests that erupted in Nairobi from late June 2024 against tax rises engulfed the capital city. They continued for some time, fuelled by the brutal police response. Similarly, Nigeria’s 2020 #EndSARS protests against police brutality created a powerful movement in cities such as Abuja and Lagos which shook government, and resonated across much of the continent.
In an age of social media, learning and mimicry across national borders is increasingly common. One of the defining images of Kenya’s 2024 urban uprising was of a group of men with their arms raised and crossed at the wrists – a gesture of anti-authoritarian protest that gained particular resonance several years back during neighbouring Ethiopia’s own uprising.
As urban protest seems set to continue and spread – often taking intentionally similar forms – techniques of urban authoritarian control are more varied and complex.
Strategies to dominate and control city populations can be dramatic and repressive – such as the brute force of police violence – and they can also be subtle, deeply ingrained, and sometimes difficult to discern.
Authoritarian tactics
Our book argues that authoritarian leaders are increasingly aware of the power of the urban masses. As a result, they are using a range of subtle, and not-so-subtle, tactics to entrench their domination in capital cities.
The first are policies and favours that actively build support among urban groups. These can range from inclusion in political parties to investments in social provisions or infrastructure to win support. The book’s chapter on Addis Ababa shows how the latter were particularly striking under the previous governing regime in Ethiopia.
The second are repressive interventions that aim to crush opposition. These are also diverse, and include violent crackdowns, but also surveillance and intimidation.
In practice, the two types of interventions often overlap. The line also blurs through various forms of manipulation. For instance, misinformation or the delivery of goods in exchange for performances of political loyalty, underpinned by implicit threats of coercion.
We also highlight the significance of urban geography.
Ruling elites often seek to divide city populations (for example inner-city dwellers versus the peripheries). This is evident in our book’s chapter on Colombo, Sri Lanka. The Rajapaksas tried to consolidate power by appealing to the new middle class suburbanites through “beautification” projects. But these displaced and excluded the inner-city poor.
Chapters on Harare and Kampala also show how particular peripheral areas have become central to efforts to build an urban support base by Zanu-PF and the National Resistance Movement. This often plays out through the informal parcelling out of land to supporters.
Contesting autocratic rule
Concerns about authoritarian politics are at an all-time high.
The above Google Ngram highlights the perilous rise in the use of the term “autocratization” in published work over the past decade.
Meanwhile, the contestation of autocratic rule will continue to erupt in cities, especially in rapidly urbanising parts of the world. In this context, the need to understand how autocracy and urbanisation collide could hardly be more important.
If pro-democracy forces are to have any hope of prevailing against efforts by authoritarian ruling elites to entrench their position, there is a crucial need to better understand their urban strategies and tactics.
David Jackman received funding from the Leverhulme Trust.
Tom Goodfellow is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, which funded part of the research on which this book is based.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By James Horncastle, Assistant Professor and Edward and Emily McWhinney Professor in International Relations, Simon Fraser University
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently accused North Korea of plans to send 10,000 soldiers to fight for Russia in Ukraine. South Korean intelligence later gave credence to Zelenskyy’s assertion, as the country’s legislators noted that North Korea has already dispatched 3,000 soldiers to Russia.
North Korea lending a helping hand to Russia is nothing new. The country has already provided Russia with significant munitions to supplement its depleted reserves. North Korean soldiers, in fact, are likely already fighting in the conflict.
North Korea’s alleged decision to send additional soldiers to fight demonstrates the inadequacy of the West’s actions. Wavering western commitment to Ukraine has not only made the situation in Ukraine worse, it’s compromised global security too.
Each side in the Russia-Ukraine conflict is seeking any and all assistance from its allies. In Russia’s case, western efforts to make Russian President Vladimir Putin a pariah caused him to turn to another pariah in the international order: North Korea.
Russian-North Korean diplomatic relations are longstanding. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin initially favoured relations with South Korea over its northern counterpart. But since Putin assumed power in 2000, Russia has strengthened its ties with North Korea, albeit with a few notable exceptions.
Russia has always been the dominant partner in the relationship. North Korea, however, has leveraged Russia’s diplomatic isolation for its own benefit. This explains why it’s providing soldiers to Russia on a scale that helps address the most immediate Russian concern: lessening the burden on its population.
Russia has employed mass mobilization in the conflict, but it has sought to push this burden onto the ethnic minorities and rural population of the country.
The protracted nature of the conflict, however, means that it’s increasingly difficult for Russia to disproportionately mobilize these elements. The more Putin’s government relies on ethnic Russians from the larger cities of the country, the more it puts his position under strain. Ten thousand North Korean soldiers will help alleviate this issue in the short term.
Despite North Korea’s diplomatic connections with Russia, it remains one of the world’s most isolated countries.
North Korea’s closest relationship is with China, which is both a blessing and a curse — a blessing because China, for its own reasons, frequently provides diplomatic cover for North Korean actions; a curse because it puts North Korea at risk of becoming dependent on China, even though their objectives do not often align.
North Korea’s deepening alliance with Russia is reminiscent of its strategy during the Cold War, when it maintained strong relations with both the Soviet Union and China to prevent itself from being subsumed by either.
North Korea will also receive substantive benefits from its alliance with Russia. An endemic problem for North Korea is food shortages. During the 1990s, as many as three million people died from starvation.
North Korean participation in the Russia-Ukraine war also gives the country opportunities to access Russian military training. While western analysts have criticized Russia’s military performance in terms of training and doctrine, it still represents a substantial upgrade for North Korea. Furthermore, there is no substitute for the live experience North Korean soldiers will amass on the battlefield.
Perhaps more worrisome is potential Russian aid for North Korea’s missile program. As one of the world’s nuclear powers, North Korea has lagged in its ability to deploy nuclear weapons, with its ballistic missile tests frequently ending in malfunctions, disasters or both.
Given the pressure that North Korea has been able to exert with its missile tests alone in recent years, any improvement in its capabilities has the potential to destabilize the Asia-Pacific region.
Global consequences for western inaction
Russia’s need for North Korean support will undoubtedly improve North Korea’s military technology, as well as provide its army with valuable military experience.
North Korea has in the past — and will likely in the future — stoke instability in the Asia-Pacific region. The gains North Korea has made from its partnership with Russia will only increase its ability to pose a threat in the region.
Western states, in so doing, not only put Ukraine in a disadvantageous position, but weakened their own security as well.
James Horncastle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
