March For Our Lives (Again)

The recent uptick in mass shootings in America has made me as angry and disgusted and numb and frustrated as it always does. I struggle to write about it because 1) so much academic research on the U.S. gun debate tries to be “neutral” and I cannot be neutral on this topic at all, and 2) because when I see the arguments put forward by the “other side,” I lose all hope of change ever happening. There’s no reasoning with them–they don’t care about the facts and they clearly value gun rights over the right of children not to get shot in school. They made that decision in 2012, and after every shooting since Sandy Hook, they’ve just doubled down.

I started my research on the U.S. gun debate after the Parkland shooting, so I’ve read a lot of analyses about the March For Our Lives movement, their 2018 march on Washington, and the incredible organising and lobbying work of the Parkland survivors and victims’ families.

Today, they marched again. Some 450 rallies were organised around the US, and tens of thousands showed up in Washington, D.C.

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A post shared by March For Our Lives (@marchforourlives)

I wish they didn’t have to keep doing it, but I’m so proud of them and inspired by them for their continued fight against gun violence.

As I’ve written before, these mass shootings and the cult of the Second Amendment are America’s Embarrassment. The U.S. looks crazy to the rest of the world. When Trump or George W. Bush were in charge, the lack of progress on gun control was understandable. But under Obama after Sandy Hook in 2012? Now, with Biden and a Democratic-majority (in theory) Congress? Biden tweeted his support for the March For Our Lives demonstration today, and asked Congress to do something–but surely there must be more that he can do? Why is the President considered so powerful if they can’t even keep the American people safe from gun violence at elementary schools, churches, supermarkets, etc.?

These refugees, not those refugees

(Disclaimer: This is not my post to write. I’m white and privileged, I’m not an authority on race or refugees. But that never stops other people from sharing their views, so I should speak up…I’m an authority on media, and this is a media bias issue)

I haven’t said anything about Ukraine on the blog because there’s so much to say that it’s hard to know where to start. I’m also reluctant to say anything because the sheer amount of attention that it’s been getting is also upsetting, in and of itself.

The other day I heard on the radio that the UK Government was paying people who would take in Ukrainian refugees, and that there’s been an unprecedented amount of support for them, with people offering to open up their homes. On the one hand, this is absolutely lovely and right and good, and I don’t want to detract from what is a wonderful humanitarian effort. On the other hand, why is this unprecedented? Why haven’t other groups of refugees received this much attention and support? Why didn’t the UK Government pay people to take in Afghans or Syrians?

Why do these refugees get an unprecedented outpouring of love and those refugees don’t?

One of my favourite writers/thinkers/people, Ijeoma Oluo talked about this at the start of the Ukraine invasion. Of course it’s right that people are upset about Ukraine and want to help the Ukrainians–but where is this empathy and love and support for refugees outside of Europe?

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A post shared by Ijeoma Oluo (@ijeomaoluo)

Trevor Noah also confronted some of these ideas on The Daily Show.

In this piece in the Independent, Nadine White does a brilliant job of discussing the racial bias in media coverage of the Ukraine crisis. She cites many examples of journalists commenting on how shocking it is to see this happen in Europe, how they “look like us”.

Peter Dobbie on Al Jazeera English was quoted as saying “What’s compelling is looking at them, the way they are dressed. These are prosperous, middle-class people. These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from the Middle East […] or North Africa. They look like any European family that you’d live next door to.”

“On Friday, Sky News broadcast a clip of people making Molotov cocktails – effectively bombs – explaining in intricate detail how to make these devices as effective as possible. Can you imagine if these were Syrians or Palestinians? They’d quickly be branded as terrorists.”

Nadine White, 28 February 2022, The Independent

What are we supposed to do with this information?

-Hold people accountable when they make comments about these refugees being “like us” (because all refugees are like us, actually)

-Urge your political leaders to support all refugees and to aim for peaceful, diplomatic methods of conflict resolution

-Donate money to organisations that help on a global scale (IRC, Unicef, Doctors Without Borders, etc.)

The Capitol Riots: 6 months on

This morning I watched the New York Times report on the January 6th riot. It’s very hard to watch, but everybody who was patriotically barbecuing and watching fireworks last Sunday for Independence Day should watch it and take a moment to reflect on the state of the union.

Rewatching the events of that day, brought together so seamlessly in this report, I felt that same sense of shock and horror. It was surreal. If I didn’t know that it had actually happened, I wouldn’t think it was possible for people to breach the Capitol building. I’ve never been inside it, but I’ve been through security at the National Archives–it was airport-level scrutiny, with armed guards, metal detectors, and x-ray machines. A normal, law-abiding, sensible person would not think to try to breach it or attack it or “take it back”.

I was struck by the way they chanted “treason” while they were, in my eyes, committing treason. It reminded me of the classic discourse analysis example, one man’s “terrorist” is another man’s “freedom fighter.” In their eyes, they were there to fight the “treason” of a “stolen” election–a great injustice had taken place, and they (somehow?) thought they would stop it by taking over the Capitol building. It’s so hard to be empathetic and see January 6th from their perspective, because their perspective is counterfactual. How can you have a dialogue with them?

Looking at the sea of angry white faces waving Confederate flags, I was also reminded of the Civil Rights era and the aggressive crowds protesting school integration. So little has changed since then.

Crowd that attacked a Freedom Riders bus in Alabama on May 14, 1961

This anger and hatred didn’t go away with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. It didn’t go away when we elected a Black President. We see it in the counter-protests that meet Black Lives Matter demonstrations. We see it in daily miscarriages of justice, in persistent inequalities, in casual racism and overt racism.

Investigating what happened on January 6th is about more than Trump. He’s a symptom of a larger problem. It’s about a whole system that made these people feel they were the ones who had been wronged, that they were fighting “treason” (rather than committing it), and that they had the right (and even the duty) to breach the Capitol and stop the Constitutionally-mandated process of certifying an election that their own party’s officials had declared was secure, free, and fair.

I’m sure in the Civil Rights era it felt like American was hopelessly divided and there was no way forward, just as it does now. Things have improved in the past 60 years, even if we still have a long way to go.

The Last Three (Make that Six…) Feet

This pandemic has brought into question one of the basic tenets of public diplomacy–Murrow’s ‘Last Three Feet’ of international messaging. The ‘personal touch’ of a Cultural Affairs Officer or a citizen diplomat communicating with locals overseas face-to-face was the whole point of public diplomacy. Bringing people together, sharing ideas and experiences, learning through immersion–how can that happen at a distance? In this new global context of travel restrictions, what does public diplomacy look like? What is its raison d’être?

The USC CPD Blog has had some really interesting pieces over the past couple of months, and when I get a chance, I hope to read them all & reflect on them here. In the meantime, here are some of my preliminary thoughts on PD in the post-Covid-19-era:

1. Moving (even further) online

Firstly, I think we’re going to see public diplomacy activities shift online, even more than they already have, with things like virtual exhibits and galleries, and webcasts of lectures, and distance learning versions of educational exchange.

This has tremendous opportunities for expanding the reach of public diplomacy efforts. Where an art exhibition might only reach a few hundred visitors in person, making it available on the web and sharing it on social media platforms could increase its reach dramatically. It also has significant cost-savings and environmental advantages, when compared with the expense and pollution of international air travel.

Craig Hayden’s 2016 chapter “Technology Platforms for Public Diplomacy: Affordances for Education” considered the potential applications of MOOCs (massive open online courses). It highlighted some of the ways technology can enhance PD practices, and raises interesting points for consideration as our reliance on technology increases. The US State Department’s MOOC Camp is discussed as a largely successful endeavour, and it offers a model which could be built upon in the future.

One caveat to techno-optimistic thinking, however, is that while the internet offers more potential for increased audience size and interactivity, it also suffers from attention scarcity–there is too much content and audiences are fragmented. It is difficult to be heard on the internet, especially by the general public (who are unlikely to do a google search for virtual cultural exhibitions). Also, it is always important to bear in mind that the internet is not universally accessible–just 59% of the world’s population are active internet users (Statista), and although internet penetration rates have increased significantly over the past decade, there are still dozens of countries where less than a quarter of the population are online (Wikipedia). A shift towards online public diplomacy can mean ignoring parts of the world that are significant public diplomacy targets for the West.

2) Uniting publics over shared problems

Pandemics have a strange way of bringing people together. Although we’re all going through it separately, this is a common experience that we’re all sharing. Some people are isolating more comfortably than others, of course, and key workers never stopped going out into the world, but for many millions of people, this has meant staying home and limiting contact with others–a weird time that we’re all processing together.

Pandemics are shared problems that demand shared solutions. We have to cooperate on a global scale to resolve the pandemic, whether it’s collaborating in medical research to create a vaccine or coordinating resources like PPE. A vivid illustration of crisis-induced cooperation is the fact that wars have stopped–apparently they weren’t essential after all.

Public diplomacy can play a role in addressing issues that transcend borders. Initiatives like Fulbright NEXUS were aimed at bringing scholars and professionals together to work on shared problems, such as public health, climate change, and food and water security. The program has been on hiatus since 2016, according to the 2019 USACPD Annual Report, but recent events may inspire a reboot.

Work cited:

Hayden, C. (2016) Technology Platforms for Public Diplomacy: Affordances for Education, In: Mathews-Aydinli, J., Ed. International Education Exchanges and Intercultural Understanding, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Humanizing UK-EU relations in the face of Brexit

Yesterday the UK government announced plans to prorogue (suspend) Parliament in the run up to the 31 October Brexit leaving date. The Prime Minister claims the timing decision was about making progress in other policy areas (fighting crime, funding the NHS & education, etc.) but that doesn’t fit with what he’s said in the past. During the recent leadership contest, he considered using it as a means to get Brexit through:

At Conservative hustings in Bournemouth on 27 June

Overnight, there’s been a huge backlash from politicians of all parties and members of the public. House of Commons Speaker John Bercow said, “However it is dressed up, it is blindingly obvious that the purpose of prorogation now would be to stop parliament debating Brexit and performing its duty in shaping a course for the country.” A petition started just yesterday evening has already gathered 1.3 million signatures, and counting–far surpassing the 100,000 signature threshold needed to get the petition debated in Parliament.

Brexit has been 3 years of crazy so far, and I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I know one thing–on a human level, the people of the UK and the people of the rest of the EU are fine with each other. Even the most ardent Brexiteers actually love Europe. They drink champagne and vacation in Italy and Spain, they love the German Christmas markets and shop at Ikea. They drive Audis, BMWs, Volvos, Fiats, Renaults, Citroens, Peugeots, Dacias, Skodas, etc. They eat huge amounts of food imported from the continent–the UK imports nearly 40% of its food, and 79% of that comes from the EU. At grammar school, they learn European languages like French, Spanish, Italian, German–they’re not learning Chinese or Arabic (although Brits are well-below the EU average when it comes to languages: only 38% of Brits speak at least one foreign language, versus an EU average of 56%).

At the end of the day, Britain and the EU are neighbours and friends, colleagues and family members. They were before Britain joined the EU, and they will still be if/when Britain leaves the EU.

11 November 1940

“11 November 1940–in front of the Tomb of the Unknown soldier, the students of France demonstrated en masse, the first to resist the occupier.”

On my last trip to Paris, I noticed this plaque near the Charles De Gaulle Etoile metro entrance on the Champs Elysees. It commemorates the first demonstration against Nazi occupation, a small student protest held on Armistice Day at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe. The Chemins de Memoire website has a very good official account of the event, as well as this photo:

“Demonstration of 11 November 1940. Students from the Institut agronomique prepare to march long the Champs Élysées to lay flowers on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Source: Museum of National Resistance – Champigny-sur-Marne”

When I saw it, I loved the fact that students were the first to speak out against the occupation, the first to organise and demonstrate. It’s always been students–in Berkeley, in Prague, in Tiananmen Square–and now it’s students in Washington, D.C. at the March For Our Lives.

Last week I presented my research on post-Parkland gun debate rhetoric at the Political Studies Association’s Media and Politics Group annual conference, and another mass shooting happened. My slides, which I’d recently updated to include the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue shooting, were now already out of date.

You can’t keep up with the mass shootings in America. When I first considered doing research on the gun debate, it was after Las Vegas. That was only a year ago, and there have been so many mass shootings since.

But–and this is where my French resistance example comes in–I do have some hope after reading about the Parkland survivors, their #NeverAgain campaign and the March For Our Lives. They haven’t stopped speaking out. They’ve sustained an active social media presence on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, with 300k-400k followers on each platform. They campaigned for gun control candidates (i.e. recipients of F grades from the NRA) during the midterm election.

Students were the first to stand up to the Nazis on this day in 1940, and they’re standing up to the NRA today. Stand with them on the right side of history.

Depressing (but necessary) research

After I did my Master’s dissertation on the London 7/7 bombings, I thought I’d pursue a more cheerful subject with exchange diplomacy. Doing content analysis of the press coverage of the bombings was very depressing–I spent the summer coding 826 articles about the attack, and although I found the literature on the media and terrorism fascinating, it’s not very fun.

So I spent the next few years looking at exchanges and reading uplifting anecdotes about scholars who had a brilliant time overseas on their Fulbright grants. I interviewed enthusiastic participants and program administrators who praised it to the hilt and were happy to talk about it to anybody who would listen. I looked through archive boxes full of thank you letters to Senator Fulbright and read about the range of transformational and positive experiences they’d had. Even the most cynical and critical scholar would be persuaded that there must be something to exchange diplomacy after all of that.

But terrorism still exists. Violence is still a pressing issue, and I’m still drawn to researching things that matter to me–right now, it’s gun violence in America.

A few months ago, I started a new project to look at (what I assumed would be) the shifting rhetoric around guns in America in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting. I’m presenting my work-in-progress at a conference on Thursday, and I have to admit that it’s way more depressing than my master’s research was. This morning I was reading up on Sandy Hook for some background and context, and reading the accounts of 6-year old survivors is absolutely heartbreaking. I sat in my office and cried while reading–this is just beyond imagination. And America/Congress/NRA/politicians, etc. are letting it happen over and over, without changing a damn thing.

In the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, I thought something had changed. The March For Our Lives movement, led by Marjory Stoneman Douglas students who survived the shooting, looked like something new, something we hadn’t seen before–a real stand against gun violence, with media coverage and support from (some) public officials.

But has anything changed? I decided to look at legislators’ Twitter feeds over the month following the shooting–all US Senators and Representatives’ verified accounts from 14 February to 15 March, the day after the national school walkout. I’m still coding tweets, but so far, I’m seeing:

• Cliche “thoughts and prayers” from Congress members of both parties
• Republicans saying we should heighten school security, arm the teachers and address mental health
• Democrats criticising Congressional inaction (despite the fact they’re also members of Congress), arguing against arming teachers, and praising student activists
• Most of the tweets (from both parties) are NOT about guns at all. They’re about tax reform, immigration, Billy Graham’s death and Dodd-Frank banking regulations.

This project is also why I’m particularly interested in the election today. It’s the big test–will voters re-elect politicians who said nothing, who did nothing in the aftermath of the shooting? Will they punish them by voting for change? I’m curious to see what’s going to happen, and I’m very happy for the Parkland survivors who are now 18 and able to vote for the first time.

Election Day

Overlapping deadlines and teaching have kept me away from the blog recently, but I couldn’t let today go by without writing about the election.

It’s always a strange experience to watch the election from overseas–I’ve been here for 3 Presidential elections and today makes my third midterm. Despite having been through so many elections over here, it’s still surprising how much news coverage is devoted to US politics in the UK. It’s on the BBC every day. The BBC Facebook page cover photo features Emma Gonzalez, Gloria Allred at a #MeToo demonstration, and Trump.

In 2010 I got a taste of comparative grassroots politics first-hand–I interned and canvassed for my local MP in Leeds during the UK general election, then canvassed in the summer for my senator and representative in Washington state ahead of the US midterm. People typically don’t care as much about midterms as they do for Presidential elections–turnout is always much lower, and it was particularly skewed towards older, conservative voters in 2010. Samantha Bee did a fantastic piece on it during the primaries in 2016:

This piece highlights the problem of voter apathy–the feeling disconnected and unengaged, of thinking that voting doesn’t matter, that it doesn’t make a difference.

It’s also well established that certain demographics are far less likely to vote than others, and they track closely with class status. Jonathan Nagler, the director of New York University’s Politics Data Center, told the New York Times last month that more than 80 percent of college-educated Americans turn out to vote, compared with about 40 percent of Americans who do not hold high school degrees.

“There is a class skew that is fundamental and very worrying,” Alexander Keyssar, a Harvard historian and social policy expert, said in the same article. “Parts of society remain tuned out and don’t feel like active citizens. There is this sense of disengagement and powerlessness.”

It’s something my students discussed last week in a seminar on the public sphere. Nancy Fraser‘s critique of Habermas pointed out that some voices don’t get included–when the public sphere is dominated by college-educated, middle class, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, male, WASP voices, it’s to the exclusion of other voices–the working class, LGBTQ+, women, people of colour, disabled, immigrant, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, atheist, etc.

Obviously I have certain causes and candidates that I want to win tonight, but my biggest hope, as with every election, is that people VOTE. I don’t want to see a repeat of this map, created by Philip Kearney. Just look at Arizona and West Virginia…Shocking. And the US goes around the world preaching about democracy…

It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens tonight!

 

The symbolic power of the Nobel Peace Prize

Last Friday,  Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad were announced as this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipients.

Before the announcement, there had been speculation that Trump and/or Kim Jong Un and/or Moon Jae-In could win it for their efforts to end the decades-long conflict on the Korean Peninsula. Republican lawmakers wrote to the Nobel committee to nominate Trump, and Moon Jae-In suggested Trump should win it last April. I’m so relieved they didn’t go there. There are so many reasons why Trump shouldn’t be a Nobel laureate–and many of them are highlighted in the laureates who were chosen.

The Nobel committee chose to honor people who campaign against sexual violence, specifically the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. Mukwege is a doctor who helps victims, and Murad is a survivor who has spoken out for other victims. Their stories are inspiring and heartbreaking, and they absolutely deserve to be better known–their causes deserve this kind of recognition and publicity.

Looking over a list a previous Nobel Peace Prize laureates, you can see the symbolic power of the prize–how it designates what issues matter, which voices ought to be heard and better known, who we should be paying attention to.

Sometimes it’s very specific, focusing on one country at one specific point in time, such as the 2015 award to the National Dialogue Quartet “for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011.” Sometimes it coincides with an anniversary, like the 2012 award to the European Union on its 60th anniversary.

Sometimes, it’s a thinly veiled political statement. We saw that in 2009, when it was awarded to Barack Obama “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”. At the time, he hadn’t done anything yet–he was a lawyer and community organizer, a law professor, a State Senator and a junior U.S. Senator, and had only been President for 8 months when he was awarded the Nobel Prize. He wrote a couple of brilliant bestselling books, made some fantastic speeches, but in terms of actually taking action beyond words, the award was really premature. The main justification seemed to be that he was an inspiring figure who promoted peace and international cooperation. As much as I loved him, I’ll admit that Obama wasn’t an obvious choice. It was clearly political.

In the same way, the decision to highlight campaigners who fight sexual violence is the Nobel Committee’s way of saying #BelieveWomen. It’s a decision not to celebrate a work-in-progress peace agreement between North and South Korea, but rather to honor the achievements of a doctor who’s devoted his career to helping victims of sexual violence, and to honor a woman who has overcome human trafficking and sexual violence, not just surviving it but speaking out for others affected by it. Instead of honoring a politician who’s been accused of sexual violence (and who’s actually bragged about it in a recording we all heard before the 2016 election), the Nobel Committee chose to honor the victims and those who help them.

Vive la resistance!

 

What the Kavanaugh hearings look like from afar

I’ve been following the confirmation hearings closely this week. As I follow a lot of American journalists & politicians on social media, it’s not surprising that the hearings are the top story everyone seems to be talking about.

What is surprising is the fact that it’s also been a huge news story here. The TV in the foyer of my department always shows BBC News, and I keep seeing live coverage of the hearings when I go to and from my office. Last night I was at an event with a mixed international group of friends (Brazil, Bulgaria, UK, Netherlands, Italy, Chile, etc.) and I spoke with some of the other women about the hearings, and about sexual harassment & sexual assault more generally. Everybody’s watching, and I don’t think Americans are really aware of that.

This morning I saw an article in The New York Times with that very title–a quotation from a reader in Belgium, “I don’t think people in the US know how closely we’re watching this”. My favorite comment came from a New Zealander:

“I have visited America more times than I can count and always loved the country, and most of the people I met were friendly, welcoming and open. I watch in despair as America slides back into the Dark Ages and loses its reputation on the international stage. It is really very sad seeing America implode.”

It feels like the stakes are very high now, in the age of Trump and #metoo. During the 2016 campaign, Trump faced many accusations of sexual assault (there’s even a Wikipedia entry to keep track of them all), and even a recording of him boasting about sexual assault released before the election–and still, 62 million people voted for him.

The #metoo movement has shifted the way (most) media talk about sexual assault, and it’s shaping the way a lot of people think about their own experiences, and those of people they know and love, friends and family members–because when half of the people on your social media feed are sharing #metoo stories, you realize how common sexual harassment and sexual assault really are.

We recently watched Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma again, for the first time in many years. As a child, I loved it–my favorite character was Ado Annie and I used to sing “I’m just a girl who can’t say no” without really understanding what the lyrics meant. I just thought they were funny, because my family always laughed when I sang it!

Watching it now, in the context of #metoo, I found it much scarier and more disturbing than I ever did as a child. When Laurey is sitting in that wagon with Jud Fry, you can feel how nervous she is. The tension is palpable. She’s thinking, “what have I gotten myself into?” and blaming herself because she told Jud she would go to the party with him (before she caught him peeping into her bedroom–another horrible scene). If anything happens (and it did, of course), she only has herself to blame because she put herself in the situation. That’s the story that victims tell themselves, and that’s why victims don’t tell anybody about their assault, for months, years or even for the rest of their lives.

Christine Blasey Ford didn’t tell anybody because she was afraid of getting in trouble for being at that party, where no parents were around, for having a beer at age 15, for putting herself in that situation.

When she realized Trump expected her to have sex with him, Stormy Daniels reportedly thought she deserved it for putting herself in that situation:

“I was like, ‘Ugh, here we go.’ And I just felt like maybe… I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone’s room alone and I just heard the voice in my head, ‘well, you put yourself in a bad situation and bad things happen, so you deserve this.’”

 

In Oklahoma, Laurey escapes from Jud and finds help at the party–her aunt desperately tries to keep the bidding going when Jud stubbornly outbids everyone else for Laurey’s picnic basket, and Curly, the man she actually loves, sacrifices everything he owns to be the highest bidder. When a grateful Laurey tells Curly about Jud’s attack, he believes her.

He doesn’t say, “Well, you did choose to ride alone with him in his wagon,” or ask “What were you wearing? You were dressed up for a party–don’t you think that you were asking for it?”

Instead, Curly asks Laurey to marry him. He wants to protect her from Jud and prevent anything like that ever happening again (male guardianship is thus presented as the only way to prevent sexual harassment and assault, but putting the patriarchy aside…it’s a nice moment).

The #metoo movement is about honoring survivors’ stories. The new hashtag going around, #BelieveWomen, captures this idea perfectly. Rather than doubting and questioning their accounts, or accusing them of complicity (by wardrobe or drinking or “putting themselves in a bad situation”), it asks us to trust that they are fully capable of accurately interpreting events. They know what happened, and if it’s explained away as “horseplay”, “banter”, “Boys will be boys”, then the terrible acts committed against them are just being reinforced over and over again. The perpetrators are being protected and honored every time we choose not to believe victims’ stories–and there’s no greater honor than a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the most powerful nation on earth.