Week 24: Institutional Betrayal
The failings of the Hague Convention, and having a holistic understanding of what constitutes peace.
This week I had an essay published concerning a Hague Convention case by an organisation called Movement of Mothers. Since I started writing about family courts over the past few years I have come to know an extraordinary network of women who have been working tirelessly to improve the systems that should protect children from violence, but often brutally fail to do so. These women are absolute heroes and it is an honour to know them.
For those that don’t know, the Hague Convention was established in the early-1980s as the international framework to prevent child abduction. Its intent was good, but it failed to understand how the convention would actually be implemented. Currently around three quarters of Hague Convention cases are mothers and children fleeing domestic violence. The convention is routinely used to seize children from their mothers and transport them back to their abusive fathers.
One of the key questions I ask in the piece is - are women and children allowed to leave abusive environments? Those who have no experience of domestic violence and the law around it may consider this a ridiculous question, but far too often the answer is no. Women have a lack of freedom over their own lives that men cannot comprehend.
This is an issue worthy of being addressed on its own merits, but is also important to understand the wider context. The psychological drivers of violence are very similar whether on an individual or state level. There is no solution to international conflict without understanding men’s lust for violence and control, and understanding the legal structures that protect – or reward – this behaviour. I made these arguments in an essay after Russia’s escalation of its invasion of Ukraine last year titled Our Reckoning With Machismo.
This past week I have come onboard as a permanent staff member at Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy, and Defence Dialogue, after contracting as an editor for them over the past year and a half. We have just published a new report titled What Does it Look Like for Australia to be a Strategic Partner On Women, Peace and Security with the Pacific. The Women, Peace and Security agenda understands these connections between individual human insecurity and social and state-level insecurity. This includes not just importance of enhancing women’s security (or diminishing men’s violence), but the importance of women’s leadership across all facets of society as central to peace and human flourishing.
Over the next few weeks we will be turning this report into some public-facing articles in the Australian and international press. I will be sure to share them here.
On a related noted, this week the United Nations Development Programme released its new Gender Social Norms Index that revealed that “close to 9 out of 10 men and women hold fundamental biases against women. Nearly half the world’s people believe that men make better political leaders than women do, and two of five people believe that men make better business executives than women do.”
Disheartening and exhausting.
This Week’s Reading:
Grant Wyeth - Movement of Mothers
“There is an instinctive connection that children have with their mothers, a dependence on them in their early years, which makes any violence or abuse committed against a mother a direct threat to the most basic and essential needs of a child. In a broader social sense, domestic violence also exposes children to warped ideas of power relations, polluting their understanding of what relationships should be. To believe that domestic violence is just isolated incidents between partners is a failure of duty by judges to understand what actually constitutes child welfare.
The proposed solution of simply separating Saada from Golan as a way to secure Bradley’s safety was not a solution with his best interests in mind. It not only played into the notion that women are the cause of men’s violence, but it overlooked that children exposed to violence carry this abuse with them — how traumatic it can be to continue to see the man who has created the chaos and insecurity in their lives. The “grave risk” to Bradley’s life was not the relationship between Saada and Golan, the risk is Saada himself.”
Grant Wyeth - International Blue
“Faced with such a rapidly changing world, those who most need a keen sense of order descend into an emotional turbulence which projects outwards into their political behaviour. Through this, Trump and Johnson can be seen as avatars for these people’s own internal disorder. Their chaotic personalities provide a public expression of what those attracted to them feel. There’s an emotional kinship that has forged a deep bond of trust. Even if through their personalities these political figures only create more disorder in their societies.
The cliché may be that all politics is local, but a more accurate phrase might be that all politics is psychological. Even those of us who may consider ourselves well-read, rational actors, who may spend time in deep contemplation of the pros and cons of specific policies are still slaves to our impulses. And how we choose to engage with politics is still driven from deep within the murk of our animal spirits and inscrutable id. We may just be better at pretending otherwise.”
Has China Overplayed Its Hand In The Pacific?
Grant Wyeth - The Diplomat
“Pacific Island countries highly value their sovereignty and are deeply committed to an international system that protects state sovereignty, regardless of the size of each state. A world without such rules and restraints on the actions of larger and more powerful states is one where these small nations would have limited ability to protect not only their independence, but also their cultures and ways of life. The value of these cultures is often something more powerful states either overlook at best, or actively seek to trample at worst.
While such rules and restraints are fundamental necessities for Pacific Island countries, they go against the nature of authoritarian psychology, which cannot recognise the agency of others, and struggles to comprehend ideas like reciprocity and persuasion. As an ethnic nationalist party, with Confucian cultural values, an unassailable leader, and an entitled pride in its status as a superpower, the CCP has a hierarchical worldview at its core. It is unavoidable that it would see Pacific Islanders as subordinates, rather than partners. “
What Does the West Really Know About Xi’s China?
Odd Arne Westad – Foreign Affairs
“What do analysts in the West know about the making of China’s foreign policy under President Xi Jinping? They know that in China, as in all major countries, foreign policy is first and foremost a reflection of domestic priorities. Xi has spent his time in office attempting to destroy all internal bases of power except his own. He wants to centralise authority around the leadership of the CCP and wipe out party factions, provincial groups, and business tycoons who could stand in his way. Xi believes that he needs such powers for several interrelated reasons. He believes in authoritarian rule and is convinced that it is a superior form of government to democracy. He concluded, early in his tenure, that his predecessors had been weak and that their weakness had given rise to domestic chaos and corruption, as well as to an unwillingness to stand up for China’s interests abroad. And he sees China under his rule as having entered a triumphant new era, the successes of which have so alarmed the West, and the United States in particular, that these countries, who are by nature inimical to China, will do anything to prevent China’s continued rise.
The United States has given CCP leaders many reasons to fear U.S. power and distrust U.S. intentions. But it is unlikely that such actions, however ill advised, have made Xi an authoritarian set on profoundly changing his country’s development path. Xi surveyed China’s road through the reform era since the 1970s and saw much that he did not like, especially the economic, geographic, and institutional dispersal of power. He did not, of course, deplore China’s remarkable economic growth, but he wanted that growth to serve a purpose beyond merely making some people rich. Xi’s aim for the past decade has been the promulgation of such a purpose, which he believes lies in recentralisation, the consolidation of party power, and confrontation with the United States. All of his key initiatives, such as Belt and Road, the China Dream, and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, have been made to serve this aim.”
Modi Can’t Look Away From Manipur
Sushant Singh - Foreign Policy
“If a full-fledged insurgency returns to Manipur, with a cascading effect on the neighbouring states of Mizoram, Nagaland, and Assam, the Indian Army will have to substantially increase its deployment there. This would negatively affect the army’s capabilities against China along the border in the state of Arunachal Pradesh, where the People’s Liberation Army has increased its own deployment since 2021.The longer the Indian Army is committed to pacifying Manipur, the more vulnerable India looks on its border. There is already a vast disparity in border infrastructure between India and China; any further reduction in Indian forces will open New Delhi to increased pressure from Beijing.
In 2015, Modi announced the “Act East” policy, focused on connecting India’s northeast region with nearby Southeast Asia through trade, culture, people-to-people contacts, and physical infrastructure. Infrastructure progress has been patchy, with some of the delayed projects seeing a forward movement only in recent months. If the violence in Manipur spills beyond the state’s borders, it will further hamper the Act East policy; although indirectly, the policy dovetails with the Indo-Pacific strategy pursued by the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (known as the Quad), which also stands the risk of being undermined if these connectivity projects stall.”
Ross Douthat – New York Times
“Then there is Berlusconi, a very different kind of he-rebel. For the Italian prime minister, modern society’s taming of masculinity allowed him to offer machismo as a form of burlesque, an entertainment, rebellion with a wink, a leer, and a snigger rather than the Unabomber’s alienated rage. In his shtick the danger of male violence was reduced to the milder threat of male misbehavior, and in his political career you could see how the bad boy politician can thrive in a feminized context — by being just shocking enough to stand out from the crowd, just different enough to draw the discontented to his banner, but always reassuringly performative and cheesy, a bunga-bunga man rather than a killer.
It’s not surprising that other populist leaders have offered this same kind of masculine burlesque — Donald Trump, of course, but also Boris Johnson with his shambolic naughtiness. It’s also not surprising that for both Berlusconi’s Italy and Johnson’s Britain, the policy results feel like a dead end: If our therapeutic age tends toward a certain kind of stagnation, electing men who make a spectacle of their virility isn’t any kind of magic ticket back to dynamism.”
To Save Their Own Skins, Trump and Johnson are Destroying Something Precious: Our Faith in the Law
Jonathan Freedland – The Guardian
“But the damage is great all the same. For both Trump and Johnson are, like Berlusconi in his pomp, tearing away at something precious. It might sound hyperbolic, yet it is not only democracy but civilisation itself that rests on our acceptance of the rule of law. In some ways, it requires a suspension of disbelief: assisted by the rituals, costume and ceremonies of the courtroom, we construct “the law” as somehow above the mere whim or bias of this or that individual. We accept it instead as a system that transcends us and to which we are all subject. It is the only way we can get along, the only way we can live ordered lives. The alternative is brutal violence and competition: the law of the jungle.
When Trump brands every federal investigator a personal agent of Joe Biden, every judge a partisan hack doing the bidding of the politicians who appointed them, he takes a knife to that conception of the law – one that is necessary for society to function. Johnson has similarly slashed away at public trust in parliament – the same Johnson who seven years ago this week urged Britons to commit an act of national self-harm in the name of a sacred parliamentary sovereignty that was, he claimed, spuriously, imperilled by Brussels.
They do it so casually, trashing the institutions on which we all depend, destroying the trust without which society cannot exist. They do it to get themselves through a news cycle, to keep alive the hope that, once more, they might wear the crown that they tarnished so badly. For them, it’s just a tactic, a move from a playbook. But for us, the consequences are lasting. Even out of office, these men have taken a collective reservoir of trust built up over many centuries – and filled it with poison.”