The University of Konstanz in southwestern Germany has put together a really wonderful tool, the Database of Constitutions of Sub-Saharan Africa. Using it, you can glance through constitutions, amendments, and various constitutional documents for most of sub-Saharan Africa, using web sources and pdfs. It’s a work in progress, but it already has a sizable number of founding documents included. If you’re interested in constitutional law or politics in Africa, it’s a great resource to bookmark.
Author Archives: scott
Weekend Reading
- Dude, Where’s the Race in Your Class Analysis of Higher Education?
- Humanities Scholarship is Incredibly Relevant, and That Makes People Sad.
- Rhetoric and Composition: Academic Capitalism and Cheap Teachers.
- The New Main Street Consensus.
- Understanding the Suicidal War in South Sudan.
- How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood.
- Alas, Poor Shakespeare:
Mac Donald chides the literary disciplines for losing “timelessness” in favor of contemporary critique. Timelessness? Anyone who has taught Dante’s Inferno (as I just did to my freshmen) knows that every canto contains some now-opaque reference to Dante’s personal enemies, or Pope Boniface VIII, or that timeless political party the Guelphs.
In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (which I also just taught to my freshmen), much of theWife of Bath’s Prologue is devoted to rousing debate about Jovinian, whose views on marriage got him excommunicated from the Church in that timeless year that everyone remembers: 393. And do you know what play was written largely to placate his audience’s new fascination with all things Scottish? Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Because listen. No literature, if it’s any good, is timeless. Ever. It is of its time—and, in order for students to be at all interested in reading it, it is of ours as well. That does not make it “timeless.” That makes it nuanced.
- On Marijuana Legalization and Terrorism.
- Millionaires Run Our Government.
- Sweet God, Starfish Have Eyes.
- The Female Face of Poverty.
- On the Use of Temps in Manufacturing.
- The American Studies Association Goes to Politics.
- Trickle-Down Gentrification:
The fallacy of trickle-down gentrification also highlights the complications of the term “affordable,” used to describe housing priced below market rates. Affordable housing, often built by community development corporations like the one I work at, has largely supplanted government-funded public housing since the 1970s. Many units are paid for by Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC), while some are covered by project-based Section 8 vouchers and other subsidies. But while public housing is home to people with incomes below 30 percent of the median, LIHTC units typically use 30 percent of median income as a floor. This means that while affordable housing is affordable to certain low- and moderate-income people, and plays an important role in allowing those people to remain in gentrifying cities, it is often unaffordable to the working poor.
If affordable housing is only sometimes affordable, and public housing construction has stalled, then how will luxury condo development keep cities affordable for poor and working-class people? It won’t, of course. But the idea that the crisis can be solved by letting the free market build penthouses masks the need for government intervention through massive construction of new housing.
- How London Was Redesigned to Survive WWII Blackouts.
- Everything is a Target: An Interview with Peter Galison.
- The Postmodernity of Big Data.
- What It Means to Be a Public Intellectual.
- What Can Blind People Tell Us About Race?
- On Fashion’s Appropriation of Urban Culture.
- Free is Not For Nothing:
If you’ve never experienced it, “free” just seems like a lower number on a slider that has “half-price” in the middle. But free is not a number.
If you paid for your education, you’re likely to understand education in transactional terms. In straightforward economic terms, it means that if you charge some money, you can have some stuff. With more money comes more stuff, higher quality stuff.
But “free” is something different than “less.” And free is not less than cheap. It’s something else entirely.
On Sensitization and Safe Reporting Sites in LRA-Affected Regions
A few days ago, I tweeted a flurry of late-night thoughts on sensitization in LRA-affected areas that I’d like to flesh out further here. I should start by stating that, while the topic struck me with great interest while I was in the Congo this summer, I didn’t really get to do in-depth research on it, so this is really just brainstorming, or maybe a call for further research.
My research in Uganda and Congo centers around the use of radio. One such use is that of defection messaging: FM radio stations broadcast messages that encourage LRA rebels to surrender. These radio messages are accompanied by leaflets dropped via airplane and messages played over loudspeaker on helicopters. They are also accompanied by sensitization in LRA-affected communities.
When encouraging rebels to surrender, humanitarians/militaries/civil society actors also have to ensure that surrenders can happen successfully. This means sensitization: making sure that communities know that some LRA will (hopefully) try to surrender, that they will help facilitate that (by directing rebels to reception centers, not attacking rebels trying to surrender, etc.), and that people understand why facilitating surrenders is important.
But LRA fighters who surrender are not brought to justice. Acholi traditional leaders and civil society organizations have long-pushed for forgiveness and amnesty as a way to end the war. They pressured the Ugandan government into passing an amnesty law in 2000, and have worked closely with organizations in DRC and CAR to promote forgiveness for the LRA. This is largely because so many members of the LRA were forcibly conscripted, and are therefore both victims and perpetrators.
That’s where my research leaves off, and where another gap in the literature appears.
A potential starting question is, how effective are these sensitization programs? But this misses that gauging effectiveness in terms of compliance/acceptance might miss the dynamics of the sensitization process in the first place. Another question might be, how do Congolese understand and interpret the message these programs put forward? More fundamentally – what do these programs mean for the victims of the conflict?
It’s a lot to ask a victim of conflict to forgive his or her attacker, even if the perpetrator suffers too. When I was in the Congo, I talked to some people about this, and it was hard to get any real answers. On a long bus ride through Garamba, several people told me they would be willing to forgive the LRA if it meant the war would end. Some others suggested that the LRA should face some kind of justice, even if it wasn’t jail (maybe an acknowledgement of abuses, form of payment, etc.)
One example gets at why it’s so difficult to tease out the answers: one informant told me that he absolutely supported amnesty, citing an end to the suffering as well as Christian tenets of forgiveness. Later, my research assistant, who has known the informant for a long time, said that he thought he was lying to me. He had heard the informant talk about killing the next LRA that came through the town, about making the LRA pay for what they’ve done to the people.
It was tough to determine whether my informant had changed his mind or changed his story. Was he lying to me? And if he was, why? Did he think this was what I wanted to hear? Did he think that I was affiliated with groups performing these programs? Did he think he would get something out of it? I don’t know, but exploring this interaction – and others like it – is something I’ll be working on over the course of the next couple of months.
* * *
Many of the sensitization programs are implemented by Invisible Children and its partner organizations (a number of local NGOs and religious organizations have worked with IC in the region). There is definitely some Acholi influence at play as well, in addition to pressure from militaries to establish safe reporting sites to which rebels can go to surrender. These groups carry some weight in these communities, as they are actively working on ending the rebel group that preys on these people. This raises the question of how who says the message can change how the message is perceived.
The topic of safe reporting sites is particularly worth exploring. These communities have been asked to serve as a reception point for LRA who want to defect (blue diamonds on the map below). This does two things first and foremost: it allows the community to play a part in the effort to stop the LRA, and it makes the community a potential target to LRA retaliation. The LRA has a long history of retaliating against civilians for collaboration (real or perceived) with the government (see Branch). It’s a tough position: radio messages identify which communities defecting rebels should go to, helping facilitate surrenders, but they also make it clear which communities are collaborating with counter-LRA forces and should therefore be targeted should the LRA retaliate.
Again, the role of the organizations promoting these sites is important. Given their central position to counter-LRA activities, Invisible Children, the Ugandan military, and U.S. military are primary actors in supporting, implementing, and protecting reporting site communities. They also have a lot of leverage in some of these towns, as they provide either protection or development programs. So, when communities decide to participate, it is difficult to gauge just how supportive these communities are. Do they want to participate? Were they pressured into accepting reporting sites? Or were they simply convinced by the argument for participation?
In a report from Discover the Journey [pdf], a short passage is telling:
Each community said they would be willing to allow their community to become an intentional defection point. Of the research locations, all except Duru, DRC, have received previous sensitization around the defection/safe reporting site principles. (29)
The report takes this as affirmation that the sensitization programs are working. People are being convinced that this is the right way to go. And it very well might be – as I mentioned, not only will defection messaging help shrink the size and fighting capacity of the LRA, but these types of programs allow the local communities to be involved directly in the process. They could be given agency in being a part of the effort to stop the violence.
But they could also be denied agency if they feel pressured to agree. If a community is approached by the military or aid groups to participate – will they say no? Might it be implied that, by saying no to reporting sites, they say no to protection, aid, and rehabilitation? And if that’s the case – is that right or wrong? If it’s for the greater good (ending the LRA, supporting infrastructure, ensuring protection), maybe it’s worth it.
Again, these exploratory questions are based on a very, very small experience in working with these communities. Has anybody studied the defection sites in South Sudan or Central African Republic? Or has anybody worked on sensitization/implementation and want to shed some light on the process? I’d be curious to hear more about how these programs are working, how they were implemented, and local opinion on the matter.
2013
In the spirit of year-end posts, I’d like to put this year at Backslash Scott in perspective. But I’ll begin with a heartfelt thanks to everyone who still comes here to read random things that I write – you’ve made it a great year for me by caring enough to read what I have to say, for exchanging opinions and ideas in comments (and through other social media), and for being pretty a pretty swell group of folks.
It’s been a pretty good year for the Backslash blog. We started off with a bang when I shopped David Brooks’ class at Yale. Other popular posts from this year included a look at early 20th Century slang, a rant against Teach For America, and a reading of justice in The Hunger Games. I take it you all are really into casual, justice-focused education.
This summer I also traveled to Uganda and D.R. Congo for some fieldwork. While I was there I wrote some notes about my work. This was also the first year I’ve written outside of this blog, which is pretty exciting thing for me to do. In 2013, I was very happy to have my writing appear in Guernica and African Arguments, among others.
As we move into 2014, I hope to have more to say, and I’m thankful that you’ll be here to read. Looking forwards, I’ll be doing lots of thesis-writing and will be working through a formidable semester of coursework. I’ll also be graduating in the spring – and hopefully starting at a new school in the fall. And, through all of that, I will blog.
Shameless Self-Promotion: At the Fair Observer
I was recently tasked with writing about the Justine Sacco issue, what it says about our perception of Africa, and any lessons learned from the debacle. I tried to stick to the prompt, but went instead towards what people thought about when the hubbub occurred, and what they should have thought about:
AIDS does discriminate by race. It does this because our societies allow it to. Sacco’s joke is a joke precisely because it is true: being white means she probably will not get AIDS. The prevalence of HIV/AIDS for blacks in South Africa was 13.6% in 2008. For whites it was 0.3%. While the conversation rightly lambasted Sacco for a stupid, awful joke – the discussion should also turn to why the AIDS crisis has unfolded the way that it has.
South African history, like much of African history, is fraught with racism that resulted in real damage to black lives and livelihoods. South Africa’s AIDS epidemic exists partially because of what colonialism and apartheid did to South African livelihoods — that much is clear.
Read the rest at Fair Observer.
Weekend Reading
Ahoy, dear readers! Behold: the last weekend reading of 2013. Sally forth and whatnot:
- Exhuming Equality: The Forensics of Human Rights.
- Bell-Ringers: The Salvation Army’s Lowest-Paid, Much-Needed Employees.
- On South Sudan.
- The Brave New World of Academic Censorship.
- Race, Religion, and Rounding Up Africans in Israel.
- The Disconcerting Popularity of Justice Populaire in the Congo.
- Beyoncé’s New Album Should Silence Her Feminist Critics:
It’s clear that like a lot of black American women, the mainstream middle class white feminist narratives with which we are so familiar aren’t necessarily compatible with Beyoncé’s view of herself. This album makes it clear that her feminism isn’t academic; isn’t about waves, or labels. It simply is a part of her as much as anything else in her life. She’s pro-woman without being anti-man, and she wants the world to know that you can be feminist on a personal level without sacrificing emotions, friendships or fun. Is it a message that will appeal to everyone? No. But then, no one expects any other feminist message to be unilaterally accepted, do they?
- Time to Bring Eritrea In From the Cold.
- Why is Canada Naming Its Ships After U.S. Defeats?
- Edward Snowden, American Nationalist.
- Corporate Media’s Rapist Problem.
- The ICC in the CAR: The Death of Deterrence?
- How We Define Racism and Why.
- Teaching While Black and Blue:
I told the students that the staff needs to deal with the fact that this newsroom, and the newspaper in general, has historically been a space where white male experience has been centralized and validated, mostly to the exclusion of all others. I told them that the readership will continue to flag in a school that is more than half students of color, if the editorial staff continues to not represent their interests. In short, they don’t see themselves in the paper because they are not in the paper.
[…]
Later that night, I received an email, full of roiling, angry emotion, from a White male editor. He said that my words had angered him, that it wasn’t my place to say them, being a faculty member in the student newsroom. He said that my comments were racist and hateful, that they were akin to a white man standing up and saying that all Black women were irrational, and that my understanding of race was facile if I thought that white people was actually a tenable category to use. He said that I would not be welcome in the newsroom in the future, if I offered up a similar diatribe, and that what I had engaged in was racial harassment.
- More Than a Decade After 9/11, a Bull Market for Barriers and Checkpoints.
- Portland Teachers Prepare to Draw the Line.
- The Salt Wars of the U.S. Civil War.
- Subaltern Speak.
- Drill Down, on Oil in Africa.
- Charity is not a Substitute for Justice.
South Sudan Descends into Crisis
Things have rapidly deteriorated in parts of South Sudan since political infighting between President Salva Kiir and ex-Vice President Riek Machar left Juba locked down on December 15th. A country that was described as “teetering on the brink” a week ago now looks like all-out civil war.
While this is a political crisis first and foremost, it is playing out along ethnic lines, and to very frightening effect. Human Rights Watch has reported that both soldiers and rebels have been seen executing people based on their ethnicity (Dinka or Nuer). Daniel Howden describes what can only be labeled a massacre in Juba (and several others like it) at The Guardian. The most horrifying example of what’s now happening there:
A week ago, Simon K, a 20-year-old student living in the capital of South Sudan, was arrested by men in military uniforms. He was asked a question that has taken on deadly importance in the world’s newest country in the past seven days: incholdi – “What is your name?” in Dinka, the language of the country’s president and its largest ethnic group.
Those who, like Simon, were unable to answer, risked being identified as Nuer, the ethnic group of the former vice-president now leading the armed opposition and facing the brunt of what insiders are describing as the world’s newest civil war.
Simon K was taken to a police station in the Gudele market district of Juba, where he was marched past several dead bodies and locked in a room with other young men, all Nuer. “We counted ourselves and found we were 252,” he told the Guardian. “Then they put guns in through the windows and started to shoot us.”
The massacre continued for two days with soldiers returning at intervals to shoot again if they saw any sign of life. Simon was one of 12 men to survive the assault by covering themselves in the bodies of the dead and dying.
Outside of Juba, the reverse is happening. Armed groups have taken much of Jonglei and Unity states, including Bor and Bentiu, their respective capitols. The UN humanitarian coordinator said that he saw “people who were being lined up and executed in a summary fashion” in Bor. Tens of thousands have sought refuge at UN compounds, and expatriates from many countries have already been evacuated.
As we hold our breath and hope that calm can be restored, talks can be mediated, and people can safely return home, I’ll try to keep you updated. In the meantime, a good primer is Radio Tamazuj’s nine questions about the South Sudan crisis and Think Africa Press’ edition of experts weekly focusing on the crisis. If you’re feeling like historicizing, this HRW dispatch on ethnic tension from earlier this year and this FP piece on how South Sudan faced setbacks from the beginning. If you’re on Twitter, Lesley Warner has compiled a long list of South Sudanese Twitter handles you can follow to get news, and the bottom of this post also has some expats that were (might still be) tweeting from Juba.
Update: Colum Lynch just wrote a good piece outlining how things have devolved.
Building Offices and Homes for the Rich in NYC
When you look at the SkyscraperPage.com diagram of skyscrapers in New York City, you might be impressed with how high so many of them are. You might also notice that most of the tallest buildings in the city (and in the country) are proposed, under construction, or new. Three were built in the 1930s, two were just built in the late-2000s, everything else is in progress. In other words, there’s a boom in skyscraper construction like New York has never seen.
Skyscrapers in NYC, by height
You might also notice that, of those seventeen contemporary structures, nine are office-only, five are mixed use, and only two are residential. These new, expensive buildings are to be places where money is made – by those who already have money.
But even the residential properties being built in New York aren’t the types of homes that you and I think of – they’re homes for the elite. One57, a construction project on the edge of Central Park, will house duplex apartments at $90 million each. 432 Park, soon to be the tallest residential building in New York, includes a lower floor studio apartment – to house staff like maids or butlers – to the tune of $1.59 million. And what types of people are buying these places?
[A] transnational nouveau riche looking for a second (or third or fourth) home. Having made fortunes in nations less regulated economically and less stable politically than the USA, these buyers want a safe investment as much as, or more than, shelter. And they don’t want to pay New York resident income taxes.
[…]
One57 says that more than half of ts buyers come from outside the USA, including 15% from China. A Chinese couple bought a small, $6.5 million apartment for their daughter to use when she’s in college — around 2030.
You know who isn’t buying these apartments? People who can’t, because they can’t afford to stay in their own city. People have been talking for a while about how the biggest cities are pricing out even the upper-middle class, leaving room for only the elite. These cities have been turned into “vast gated citadels where the elite reproduces itself.”
Indeed, some people in New York can work two jobs and still be homeless. And, while high-rise office tower construction is rapidly increasing, and rents along with them, so is homelessness. The number of people in the city’s homeless shelters hit a record 64,000 in January. That was nearly a year ago, and it was a 13% increase from 2012 – the future isn’t bright either. In September the number of children in homeless shelters past 22,000 – children like Dasani, who was recently highlighted in a much-talked-about NYT piece.
And sometimes, when new building developments do offer homes to those who who don’t have millions of dollars, they do it like this:
Manhattan developer Extell is seeking millions in air rights and tax breaks for building 55 low-income units at 40 Riverside Boulevard, but the company is sequestering the cash-poor tenants who make the lucrative incentives possible.
Five floors of affordable housing will face away from the Hudson River and have a separate entrance, elevator and maintenance company, while 219 market-rate condominiums will overlook the waterfront.
That building, which relegates the poor to a separate entrance, saved the development company $21.5 million in tax breaks – taxes that could potentially go into relief for far more than 55 families.
This is what the world’s richest cities are doing: building new houses and offices for the elite to use part-time, while homeless shelters are overrun and those lucky enough to not be homeless either move out of the city center or turn to low-income housing.
Weekend Reading
- Compulsory Monogamy in The Hunger Games.
- Why Love Actually is Horrible.
- Dare to Get the Federal Government Off Weed.
- The Layers of Unemployment Remain Hidden.
- The Cruelty of Papillon is a Reality in U.S. Prisons.
- Almost Human: The Surreal, Cyborg Future of American Telemarketing.
- When “Life Hacking” is Really Just White Privilege:
Altucher — whose Wikipedia page contains the phrase “ran a fund of hedge funds” — recounts the tale of taking his daughter out for a fashion show and some ping-pong. When he is not on the list at the fashion show (a friend had promised to add him), he manipulates his way in. When the ping-pong venue is closed due to a private event, he manipulates his way in and plays ping-pong at someone else’s party.
He believes his fun evening provides a lesson for us all: “Don’t break the laws. Don’t kill people. Don’t steal. But most other rules can be bent.”
James Altucher thinks he has written an article about “getting everything you want.” He has actually written an article about white privilege. (And probably class privilege, and male privilege, and maybe some others.)
- Strange Frontiers, on the Impacts of the U.S.-Mexico Border.
- Putting Homelessness in a Different Light.
- Expensive Cities are Killing Creativity.
- The Nation on BDS in the Academy.
- Burma’s Senseless Census.
- On Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn.
- “Uh oh, here comes trouble,” An Oral History of Anchorman‘s Battle Scene.
- Making Hollywood Less Sexist:
The basics are that for every one female-speaking character in family-rated films (G, PG and PG-13), there are roughly three male characters; that crowd and group scenes in these films — live-action and animated — contain only 17 percent female characters; and that the ratio of male-female characters has been exactly the same since 1946. Throw in the hypersexualization of many of the female characters that are there, even in G-rated movies, and their lack of occupations and aspirations and you get the picture.
It wasn’t the lack of female lead characters that first struck me about family films. We all know that’s been the case for ages, and we love when movies like The Hunger Games: Catching Fireand Frozen hit it big. It was the dearth of female characters in the worlds of the stories — the fact that the fictitious villages and jungles and kingdoms and interplanetary civilizations were nearly bereft of female population — that hit me over the head. This being the case, we are in effect enculturating kids from the very beginning to see women and girls as not taking up half of the space. Couldn’t it be that the percentage of women in leadership positions in many areas of society — Congress, law partners, Fortune 500 board members, military officers, tenured professors and many more — stall out at around 17 percent because that’s the ratio we’ve come to see as the norm?
- In Michigan, Women Are Always Pre-Pregnant.
- On Meghan Murphy, Internet Ethics, and the Morality of Quoting.
- MOOCs, Mechanization, and the Modern Professor.
- Boxed In: How a Criminal Record Keeps You Unemployed for Life.
- Very Serious Populists, on Voting and Reddit.
- Sometimes the Real Santa is a Tan Woman.
Africa’s Countries
Over at Africa is a Country (very appropriate, I know), Laura J. Mitchell linked to an interactive study map of Africa that she created, saying that:
As Africanists, our stock-in-trade includes pushing back. As teachers, scholars, and commentators we poke and prod at constructed geographies, charting unities across previously demarcated sub-regions and identifying particularities in eco-zones or communities that are conventionally grouped with larger nations. In a post-modern landscape, geography is admittedly malleable. But that does not make it optional. I may be hopelessly old-school to say so: but to make sense of a place, you still have to find it on a map.”
The map, which can be found here, is a pretty straight-forward geography study tool. You can hover over each country in study mode to learn which is which, and you can test yourself by dragging country names over the geographic location.
Whether you’re a student trying to learn about Africa’s many states or just a curious geography nerd, it’s worth a look.
(Shameful admission: I still mix up the western coast of West Africa.)
Scott Ross 