Newsletter: Week 6, 2023
All Afghan women and girls to have asylum claims granted by Denmark and Sweden, Australia's forthcoming female-focused development program, and a darkly compelling series on Mormonism.
All Afghan Women And Girls Are Eligible Refugees
Last week Denmark followed Sweden’s lead in declaring that all women and girls from Afghanistan would automatically have their asylum claims granted solely based on their sex. In doing so both Stockholm and Copenhagen have designated the Taliban regime as one that is actively and intentionally violating the human rights of all Afghan women and girls.
It is clear that this is a standard that should be adopted by all countries capable of accepting refugees. Since its takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban have barred girls from secondary school and women from universities, prevented women from working in most jobs, and imposed heavy restrictions on their dress and movements. It is a regime that has hatred and strict control of women as its core guiding principle.
In recognising exactly who the Taliban are, it is worth considering the opposite – what would a state look like that actively and intentionally prioritised the safety, well-being, freedom and flourishing of women and girls? No country can claim these are their guiding principles. To do so would require a wholesale confrontation of men’s attitudes and psychologies that our societies are unwilling to engage in.
So Denmark And Sweden will allow Afghan women and girls who can make it to these countries to be safer and afforded greater opportunities and this is a great positive. However, these countries themselves – and others like them – are still yet to provide women and girls safety as an absolute and flourishing without caveats. The low bar set by Afghanistan shouldn’t be the one we are trying to clear.
Australia’s Female-Centric Development Assistance
There is not just a moral case for states to reorientate themselves towards prioritising the safety, well-being and flourishing of women and girls. Development economics has long understood that the advancements of societies overall are heavily tied to the advancement of women. Investing in women and girls produces disproportionately positive results for a country’s overall health and prosperity.
This week, Australia’s minister for foreign affairs, Penny Wong, delivered a speech at the International Women’s Day Parliamentary Breakfast highlighting that unfortunately, globally gender equality has receded to 2016 levels. This is an acknowledgement that progress isn’t linear and requires vigilance.
Wong announced that Australia will soon release a new international development strategy that will make gender equality a priority, with Australia’s particular development focus on the Pacific and Southeast Asia. Prioritising women and girls has been part of Australia’s development assistance program for several years, and while previous foreign ministers Marise Payne and Julie Bishop were undoubtedly committed to these issues, they sat within a cabinet that was less committed and sympathetic. Wong made note in her speech that Australia now has a prime minister “who respects women, and listens to women.” A not too subtle reference to Australia’s previous PM.
There is one issue that should be acknowledge with prioritising women and girls in development assistance, and this something I have previously written about for The Diplomat:
There is a growing body of disheartening evidence — from Bangladesh, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, India, and Rwanda, just to name a few — that has found that greater female empowerment and agency leads many men to become antagonistic and violent toward their female partners. There is a clear male backlash to the economic, social, and political gains that women are making.
For Australia’s new development assistance program to be successful it will also need to devise strategies that counteract male resentment. To help men understand that female advancement doesn’t come at men’s expense, and to not feel threatened by the success of the women in their societies.
Under The Banner Of Heaven
I recently finished watching the Under The Banner Of Heaven, a mini-series based on the non-fiction book by Jon Krakauer about the murder of a mother and child in a Mormon community in Utah in the 1980s.
The series bluntly confronts how the security of close-knit groups can also be highly oppressive, with an incessant pressure to conform, and the ability for power to be heavily manipulative and abusive. The series also highlights the intoxication of religious sentiment, and the way that “God’s word” can be used to justify appalling acts of violence.
The show seeks to understand the core of Mormonism, its history as homegrown American religion, with specific and insular ways of being, and in particular being tied to the violence of American expansionism across from the east coast. This is a violence that it is argued is within the DNA of the religion itself.
Given the nature of Mormons as a distinct subculture – or even a nation themselves – they make for fascinating subject matter. This series is darker than Big Love – the drama serious about a polygamist family in Salt Lake City – but it is a highly compelling viewing.
Personal Update
Just a quick note to update readers on the state of this Substack.
At the start of the year I indicated that I would seek to write profiles on researchers whose work I found compelling each fortnight. This looks to have been a bit ambitious. Due to difficulties to coordinating interviews due to people’s work schedules and the time difference to Melbourne, there have been some delays. However, is still a feature I am keen to pursue, but profiles may be more sporadic.
Also sporadic will be the larger essays I wish to publish. I have a few in the works, but the freedom of no strict word limits has encouraged me to be more expansive with these subject matters. And with other work commitments during the week this means they are progressing slowly. But will hopefully be interesting reads when finally complete!
Thanks again for your interest in my work.
This Week’s Reading, Listening, and Watching
China’s Residential Schools Separate a Million Tibetan Children From Their Families, U.N. Says
Charlie Campbell - Time Magazine
“An accelerating assimilation campaign waged by the ruling Chinese Communist Party is threatening to utterly erase Tibet’s unique way of life. The latest salvo was revealed Monday, when three U.N. experts warned that roughly 1 million Tibetan children have been separated from their families and forcibly placed into Chinese state-run boarding schools, as part of efforts to absorb them “culturally, religiously and linguistically” into the dominant Han Chinese culture.
The scheme involves placing children from rural communities into residential schools, where lessons are conducted solely in Mandarin Chinese with scant reference to Tibetan history, religion, and certainly not exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama. The result is that many children forget their native tongue and struggle to communicate with their parents when they return home, which is typically just for a week or two each year. While the proportion of Chinese students at boarding schools is around 20% nationwide, the U.N. experts believe the vast majority of Tibetan children are in large residential schools following the systematic shuttering of rural classrooms.”
The Many “One Chinas”: Multiple Approaches To Taiwan And China
Chong Ja Ian – Carnegie Endowment For International Peace
“Contestation over the wording, interpretation, and application of “one China” positions is unlikely to abate—this despite its roots as a phrase that permitted governments to agree to disagree. The term has become tied to the CCP and PRC’s conceptions of self, including their domestic and international standing. These positions place in contention Taiwan’s political status, the will of its people, and the multiple ways Taiwan intersects with the different interests and concerns of other states and international actors. They include the U.S. and PRC strategic positions in Asia and beyond, as well as relations various states have with the two major powers and Taiwan. Growing differences over “one China” underscore the pressure mounting on once mutually convenient expediencies as the world evolves from the historical contexts of their inception. Awareness and understanding of the nuances and implications associated with various permutations of “one China” may be more crucial than ever before.”
Why China Is Losing The Chip War (video)
Vox
“In October 2022, the Biden administration placed a large-scale ban on the sale of advanced semiconductor chips to China. They also implemented a series of other rules that prevents China from making these chips on their own. These chips are used in everyday technology, like our mobile phones and computers. They’re also crucial to military and intelligence systems, which is one of the main reasons they're at the centre of a feud between the United States and China.
Microchips were first invented in the US in the 1950s, after which their use rapidly expanded worldwide. Since then, the supply chain for these chips has grown and spread to include countries in Europe and Asia. And while some countries have caught up to the US's edge in making these advanced chips, China still falls far behind despite multiple attempts to gain an advantage.”
My Chinese Generation Is Losing the Ability To Express Itself
Mengyin Lin - New York Times
“The Communist Party’s monopoly on all channels of expression has helped prevent the development of any resistance language in Mandarin, especially since 1989, when the brutal military suppression of the Tiananmen Square student movement demonstrated what happens to those who speak out. If language shapes the way we think, and most people think only in their own language, how can China’s youth conjure up an effective and lasting resistance movement with words that they don’t have?
The problem isn’t the Chinese language itself. “Freedom,” “rights,” “democracy” — these exist in Mandarin, as they do in nearly every language. They are universal values. Both the May Fourth Movement in 1919 — a student-led uprising against Western colonial encroachment on China and the incompetence of Chinese leaders — and the student movement in 1989 weaponised Mandarin in both long-form writing and short slogans. But decades of censorship and fear of violating it have made Chinese people scared to even think with such words, let alone speak or write with them.”
Shivshanker Menon - Foreign Affairs
“In many parts of the world, the most crucial issues of 2022 had little to do with the war in Ukraine. Emerging from the havoc of the pandemic and confronted by far-reaching challenges ranging from debt crises to a slowing world economy to climate change, many developing countries have been alienated by what they view as the self-absorption of the West and of China and Russia. For them, the war in Ukraine is about the future of Europe, not the future of the world order, and the war has become a distraction from the more pressing global issues of our time.
Yet despite this disillusionment, a coherent third way, a clear alternative to current great-power rivalry, has yet to emerge. Instead, these countries have sought to work with present realities, respecting Western sanctions on Russia, for instance, in an international system that no longer inspires much faith in its relevance to their security and economic concerns. In this sense, for many parts of the globe, a year of war in Ukraine has done less to redefine the world order than to set it further adrift, raising new questions about how urgent transnational challenges can be met.”
Japan’s Long-Awaited Return To Geopolitics
Jeffery W. Hornung – Foreign Policy
“The motivation for Japan’s historic shift is twofold. The first is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine suggests not only naked aggression is still possible in today’s globalised and integrated world but also that survival against a much larger neighbour depends on being well defended. The second, of course, is China’s approach to regional relations, which relies on bullying, provocation, coercion, and disrespect for international law, such as in the South and East China Seas. Japan has endured this behaviour for years and finally appears to be fed up. When actions by Russia and China are viewed together, Japanese leaders and the country’s public are increasingly seeing conflict as an ever-present risk. As Kishida has said, “Ukraine may be the East Asia of tomorrow.”
Noah Smith – Noahpinion
“Why is India the most important development story on Earth? Two reasons. First of all, sheer size; as of this year, India is the world’s most populous country, overtaking a now-shrinking China. And its population dwarfs that of every development success story I’ve written about in this series so far, combined.
Together, India’s massive size and low income levels mean that it has far more poor people than any other country on the planet. This is true if you look at extreme poverty (people living on less than $2 a day), and it’s even more true if you look at the number of people living on less than $3.65 a day.
Remember that the primary task of economic development is to bring people out of poverty. So if you could pick one country to industrialise in order to do the most good for humanity, it would be India. And the experience of China — the only country comparable to India in size — is very encouraging here. China’s industrialisation over the four decades starting in 1979 brought about the largest and most dramatic poverty reduction in the history of the human race; if that feat could be repeated in India, it would be absolutely incredible. When Malaysia or the Dominican Republic reaches upper middle income status, it’s a good thing and a useful success story; if India did the same, it would shake the world.”
Adani Scam Tests The Credibility Of India’s Institutions
Mohamed Zeeshan - The Diplomat
“As far as foreign investors are concerned, however, whether there really is a neocolonial Western assault on a proud, rising India is beside the point. The very fact that both the government and India’s foremost industrialist believe that this is a credible defence raises questions over whether India’s state institutions will objectively investigate Hindenburg’s claims — or even other allegations against similarly influential corporations in the future.
As columnist Andy Mukherjee summed up in Bloomberg, “To project oneself as the flagbearer of a proud, self-reliant India is increasingly seen as a ticket to avoiding scrutiny by the media, regulators or environmental groups, all of whom can be denounced for not being on board with the chauvinistic chest-thumping.”
Jason Bordoff & Meghan L. O’Sullivan
“Proponents of clean energy hope (and sometimes promise) that in addition to mitigating climate change, the energy transition will help make tensions over energy resources a thing of the past. It is true that clean energy will transform geopolitics—just not necessarily in the ways many of its champions expect. The transition will reconfigure many elements of international politics that have shaped the global system since at least World War II, significantly affecting the sources of national power, the process of globalisation, relations among the great powers, and the ongoing economic convergence of developed countries and developing ones. The process will be messy at best. And far from fostering comity and cooperation, it will likely produce new forms of competition and confrontation long before a new, more copacetic geopolitics takes shape.”
Canada’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, With Jonathan Berkshire Miller (Audio)
The President’s Inbox – Council On Foreign Relations
Jonathan Berkshire Miller, senior fellow and director of foreign affairs, national defence, and national security at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, sits down with James M. Lindsay to discuss Canada’s first Indo-Pacific strategy and the implications for its allies.
Originalism Is Going To Get Women Killed
Madiba Dennie - The Atlantic
“The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals demonstrated as much when it relied on originalism in United States v. Rahimi, a case about a law restricting the gun rights of domestic-violence offenders, last week. The central legal issue in Rahimi was not whether protecting women and children from gun violence is good; the court conceded that it is. Rather, the question before the court was whether protecting women and children from gun violence is constitutional. And the court concluded that it is not.
A three-judge panel unanimously ruled that the Second Amendment was violated by a federal statute that made possessing a gun unlawful for a person who is subject to a restraining order in protection of an intimate partner or child. Its explanation for this dangerous ruling was a straightforward application of originalism. The Founders mentioned a right to keep and bear arms in the Constitution. They did not, however, mention women, who are disproportionately victimised by domestic violence. And although today’s lawmakers may care about women’s rights, they cannot deviate from the Founders’ wishes without a formal constitutional amendment. This will almost assuredly have very real, potentially fatal consequences for women in America: The presence of a gun in a domestic-violence situation increases the risk of femicide by more than 1,000 percent. Originalism is going to get women killed.”
After Germany’s Fall, Which Is The Paragon Nation?
Janan Ganesh - Financial Times
“As far as I can make out, the criteria for paragon nation are as follows. It can’t have nuclear weapons or a permanent seat on the Security Council. (A paragon must embody liberal democracy. To get its hands dirty defending it is below-stairs.) It can’t have had lots of extra-European colonies. (You can’t praise a nation and cancel it all at once.) It can’t be restrictive on immigration. (Otherwise Japan would be in with a shout.)
Which leaves us with, what? Australia? It seems to balance the market and the state in a sensible way. Though liberal Brits sometimes suspect it of unreconstructed attitudes on race, I feel more invisible there than in most of continental Europe. Its politicians are rancorous but, in the end, conscientious.
But no. The paragon can’t be English-speaking. Too familiar. There is no snob value in hailing a nation unless it confers on one a veneer of worldliness and urbanity. On that score, New Zealand, Canada and other Anglophones are also out.”
Alastair Campbell And Rory Stewart’s Unlikely Bromance
Decca Aitkenhead - The Times
Although Australia drifts further away from the United Kingdom by the day, I still listen to The Rest is Politics podcast each week. I lived for several years in London in my early-20s, it was where I developed a political consciousness, and the UK press is still where I habitually turn to for information. I instinctively think that the thrust and parry of Westminster is far more interesting than that of Canberra. And, if I can be frank, the UK has far more commentators capable of explaining both the UK and the world in an interesting and compelling manner than Australia does. This podcast being a prime example.
This Week’s Playlist Is Themed: Security (or lack thereof)