Oxford University Press's Blog, page 293

Labour unions and solidarity in times of precarity

Labour unions have traditionally been at the forefront of the struggle to improve job security, pay, and working conditions. The widely observed growth in precarious work in recent decades is a result of union weakness, as they are increasingly likely to lose these battles. Many, including scholars in the influential dual labour market school of thought in Comparative Political Economy, have argued that unions often promote the job security of their ‘insider’ core members at the expense of more precarious ‘outsiders.’ It cannot be denied that unions sometimes accede to employer demands to shift jobs to non-standard, insecure contracts and deregulate labour markets, or neglect the interests of precarious workers. However, these exclusive strategies are often developed under the frame of competitive collective bargaining and are rarely sustainable in the long term. Where core workers do not show solidarity with vulnerable workers, they often undermine their own bargaining power through allowing lower-cost competition to expand. On the other hand, ensuring equal treatment for all workers, particularly those in unstable work, is essential to the long-term viability of the labour movement.

Labour unions increasingly seek to regulate precarious work and represent precarious workers, both to protect their members’ working conditions and to pursue broader commitments to equity and social justice. They succeed in these objectives when they can mobilize power resources derived from inclusive institutions and inclusive forms of worker solidarity. These factors are complementary: inclusive institutions make it easier for unions to organize and represent diverse groups of workers, while unions rely on inclusive solidarity to mobilize the broad forms of collective action necessary to sustain or rebuild encompassing institutions. In this sense, employment precarity is both an outcome of and a central contributing factor to a mutually reinforcing feedback relationship between labour market, welfare state, and collective bargaining institutions; worker identity and identification; and employer and union strategies.

Most crucially, grounding labour power in inclusive solidarity depends on two factors: first, building or sustaining coordinated bargaining within the labour movement; and second, coalition building across unions and among organizations representing workers and their communities.

Growing popular support for far-right populist parties and candidates in Europe and the US demonstrates the growing hold that exclusive forms of solidarity, based on more narrow forms of worker identity and identification, have on workers in the Global North. One explanation traces these trends to economic insecurity among workers experiencing stagnant or declining pay, working conditions, and job security. This insecurity encourages a backlash against the elite institutions and individuals promoting trade liberalization, as well as against groups of precarious ‘outsiders’ viewed as competitors for increasingly scarce jobs. Labour unions can combat these divisive politics, by building inclusive forms of collective action that incorporate migrants, minorities, and other labour market outsiders most at risk of experiencing precarity and exploitation at work.

However, this requires increasingly creative collective action that both looks upwards to closing gaps in welfare state, labour market, and collective bargaining institutions, and looks inwards to building inclusive solidarity across the workforce and within the labour movement.

Featured image credit: Rail trafffic train by geralt. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Open access: reflections on change

Sally Rumsey shares her reflections on the changing open access environment and experiences from the University of Oxford.

Cast your mind back 15 years to the earlier days of open access. In 2002 the University of Oxford contributed to the SHERPA project, with a collaborative pilot between the then OULS (Oxford University Library Services) and OUP. In 2006 we set up a new institutional repository service that launched very quietly in early 2007. With support from what is now the Bodleian Libraries, we were operating on a shoestring (like many institutions), and referring to the relatively new funder policies to try to engender interest and compliance across disciplines and amongst academics.  Some disciplines were motoring with respect to OA – most notably high-energy physics and economics in repositories; OA publication in life sciences journals was growing. Others ranged from lukewarm to completely uninterested.

A change to University regulations was agreed in 2007 that digital copies of research theses should be deposited into the repository as a condition of award, which was a major breakthrough. In 2009 the Libraries set up a research data repository in parallel to the publications repository, and during that period we participated in a number of Jisc-funded repository related projects. These projects helped build knowledge and sections of our repository service. However, up until 2015 we were lucky to be receiving 100 deposits of copies of scholarly publications per month.

Here we are in 2017 upgrading our 10-year-old repository to a system that is robust and fit for 21st century research dissemination. Most notably, the repository service has mushroomed into a central university service currently receiving around 1,100 – 1,200 deposits of copies of research publications per month. That is about 1,000 percent increase in deposits. Coupled with this our Electronic Resources staff are managing a growing APC processing service, and our subject librarians, led by our OA Librarian, are staffing our well-used OA enquiry line. Academics and research administrators participating in University committees are using terminology such as ‘green,’ ‘gold,’ ‘CC-BY’ and SHERPA-Romeo: complete gobbledygook to such folk not that long ago. The culture change that we in libraries were struggling to promote, appears to be happening.

There remain some areas of confusion and mistrust of OA, but I detect a definite sense of acceptance of and shift to ‘open.’

The most obvious cause of change in the UK has been the policies (and their policing) of Wellcome Trust/COAF, RCUK, and HEFCE for the forthcoming REF2021.  Although these have been the main catalysts, I detect a more subtle culture change that is happening at the grass roots i.e. by the researchers themselves. To disseminate your research in the past, it was necessary to follow the standard traditional publishing route – publish in a respectable journal and those people who have paid can read your paper – plus you can post a few copies to your mates. Today, in order to get your research noticed and ‘out there,’ there are many more options available. The ‘standard’ route is being enhanced, and many researchers don’t want to be confined to a single model, or to limited sharing of their work.

Many are taking advantage of the diversity that the internet offers: how research findings are presented and distributed, such as articles with integrated data, open commentary to published findings, new models of peer review and comments, registered reports, and rapid publication. Add to this the immediacy of promotion by social media, academic networks, and altmetrics scores that can give rapid indication of one type of impact. In some disciplines, particularly the sciences, authors are becoming frustrated with continuing barriers to access and re-use as they habitually adopt a more open stance. There remain some areas of confusion and mistrust of OA, but I detect a definite sense of acceptance of and shift to ‘open.’

The University of Oxford’s response to the HEFCE REF2021 OA policy was to implement its ‘Act on Acceptance’ (AoA) initiative, whereby academics and researchers deposit the accepted manuscript into the University repository within three months of acceptance for publication. Although this has been a significant driver for OA, the awareness and take-up of ‘open’ for publications in its broadest sense by academics, is helping to support AoA. The one now complements the other. The repository and what it offers – secure local copies, extra visibility and discovery, links to published versions, and a shop-window of Oxford research – is now an accepted central University service.

The libraries have set up technical and ‘soft’ services to support open approaches to research dissemination. However, continued training, communications and guidance is necessary to ensure authors know what they need to do, what they are entitled to do, and how to overcome hurdles to what they want to do, to be open. Our systems are working, but would benefit from further development. We would like to increase efficiency and accuracy by employing more unique identifiers, for example ORCIDs for all authors and DOIs for accepted manuscripts. Increased automation is a goal – but it is largely dependent on external parties such as publishers, funders, and other services (eg Jisc services) also implementing such identifiers in a standardized way. We continue to work with these external parties to describe to them our requirements – our own requirements have to be driven by our academics and the strategic and administrative needs of the University. We realize that our services are in ‘permanent beta’ with the need to adapt to rapidly changing requirements.

In my opinion, we are observing a fundamental shift from a scenario where ‘open scholarship’ comprised a number of OA enthusiasts + others who adopted OA for compliance (because they had to), to one where the majority of researchers choose to take advantage of many facets of open scholarship.

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1917: A reading list

In order to fully understand key moments in history, it is important to review the culture that created them. As 2017 draws to a close, we have compiled a reading list to re-examine history from a century onward.

What was going on in the world at large? Fred Astaire was still dancing with his older sister, Adele. A young black man named Alain Locke from Philadelphia was discovering and encouraging fellow African American artists. Virginia and Leonard Woolf received the printing press with which they would found Hogarth Press. Poets like Siegfried Sassoon were writing anti-war verse while serving in the trenches of World War One. Transport yourself to a truly world-changing year in our shared history — 1917 — with any of the following titles.

The Russian Revolution

1917: War, Peace, and Revolution by David Stevenson

1917 was a year of calamitous events, and one of pivotal importance in the development of the First World War. In 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution, leading historian of World War I David Stevenson examines this crucial year in context and illuminates the century that followed. He shows how, in this one year, the war was transformed, but also what drove the conflict onward and how it continued to escalate.

Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914 – 1921 by Laura Engelstein

Russia in Flames offers a compelling narrative of heroic effort and brutal disappointment, revealing that what happened during these seven years was both a landmark in the emancipation of Russia from past oppression and a world-shattering disaster. As regimes fall and rise, as civil wars erupt, as state violence targets civilian populations, it is a story that remains profoundly and enduringly relevant.

Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution by Elizabeth McGuire

Red at Heart brings to life a cast of transnational characters who connected the two great communist revolutions in human terms. Weaving personal stories and cultural interactions into political history, McGuire movingly shows that the Sino-Soviet relationship was not a brotherhood or a friendship, but rather played out in phases like many lifelong love affairs. A century after 1917, this book offers a novel story about Chinese communism, the Russian Revolution’s most geopolitically significant legacy.

World War One

The Path to War: How the First World War Created Modern America by Michael S. Neiberg

Examining the social, political, and financial forces at work as well as the role of public opinion and popular culture, The Path to War offers both a compelling narrative and the inescapable conclusion that World War One was no parenthetical exception in the American story, but a moment of national self-determination.

Wounded: A New History of the Western Front in World War I  by Emily Mayhew

In Wounded, Emily Mayhew tells the history of the Western Front from a new perspective: the medical network that arose seemingly overnight to help sick and injured soldiers. These men and women pulled injured troops from the hellscape of trench, shell crater, and no man’s land, transported them to the rear, and treated them for everything from foot rot to poison gas, from venereal disease to traumatic amputation from exploding shells.

Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology Edited by Tim Kendall

The First World War produced an extraordinary flowering of poetic talent, from British poets whose words commemorate the conflict as enduringly as monuments in stone. Their poems have come to express the feelings of a nation about the horrors and aftermath of war.

Arts and culture of 1917

Balanchine & the Lost Muse: Revolution & the Making of a Choreographer by Elizabeth Kendall


Tracing the lives and friendship of these two dancers from years just before the 1917 Russian Revolution to Balanchine’s escape from Russia in 1924, Elizabeth Kendall’s Balanchine & the Lost Muse sheds new light on a crucial flash point in the history of ballet. Drawing upon extensive archival research, Kendall weaves a fascinating tale about this decisive period in the life of the man who would become the most influential choreographer in modern ballet.

The Astaires: Fred & Adele by Kathleen Riley

In this book, the first comprehensive study of their theatrical career together, Kathleen Riley traces the Astaires’ rise to fame from humble midwestern origins and early days as child performers on small-time vaudeville stages (where Fred, fatefully, first donned top hat and tails) to their 1917 debut on Broadway to star billings on both sides of the Atlantic.

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart

In The New Negro, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar and earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University. Locke also received a cosmopolitan, aesthetic education through his travels in continental Europe, and yet, he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America and his promotion of the literary and artistic work of African Americans as the quintessential creations of American modernism.

Literature of 1917

Summer by Edith Wharton

Published in 1917, Summer is often called the warm weather companion to Ethan Frome. They share many similarities but Wharton thought better of Summer than her earlier novel. The novel details the sexual awakening of its protagonist, Charity Royall, and her cruel treatment by the father of her child.

The Wild Swans at Coole by WB Yeats

First published in 1917, The Wild Swans at Coole was republished over two years later with an additional 17 poems which is the edition most widely acknowledged. The middle years of Yeats’ career found the poet grappling with Irish nationalism and with the creation of an Irish aesthetic.

The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction by Virginia Woolf

When Leonard and Virginia first began Hogarth Press in 1917, the first book they printed was Two Stories. It contained a story by Leonard and a story by Virginia. That story by Virginia was The Mark on the Wall. She said of writing it, “’I shall never forget the day I wrote The Mark on the Wall – all in a flash, as if flying, after being kept stone breaking for months.”

Featured image credit: “time-alarm-clock-alarm-clock” by Monoar Rahman. CC0 via Pexels.

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Illustrating Streptococcus pneumoniae

According to the WHO, Streptococcus pneumoniae (also known as pneumococcus) is the fourth most frequent microbial cause of fatal infection. These bacteria commonly colonize the upper respiratory tract and are the most common cause of bacterial pneumonia and meningitis. Although much is known about pneumococcal biology and the diseases it causes, there are still many questions about the molecular biology and cellular processes of the bacterium.

To further explore pneumococcus at a microscopic level, former PhD student Ditte Høyer Engholm uses an unconventional method – watercolour – to visualise this troublesome bacterium. We caught up with Ditte recently, who kindly shared with us the process and motives behind these scientific illustrations.

Why did you choose to use the pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae ?

If you, like I, have ever watched one of your kids shake with febrile convulsion while their eyes take on a faraway look due to a sudden case of pneumonia, you’d agree that nobody should ever have to experience this. I was once home alone with my two small kids, when my oldest suddenly woke up soaked in sweat and started shaking. Luckily the doctors at the emergency room quickly diagnosed her with bacterial pneumonia and prescribed her antibiotics, which killed the bacteria.

Pneumonia is rather common in kids and the bacterial kind is mostly caused by the bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae, also known as the pneumococcus. According to the World Health Organization, more than one million kids under the age of five die from pneumonia each year and it is believed that simple precautions including appropriate use of antibiotics and increased hygiene can prevent most cases. Although most of these cases happen in developing countries, you shouldn’t think that pneumococcal infections aren’t dangerous in the western world. One of my supervisors, who was happy, healthy, and unknowingly living without a spleen suffered from a very severe pneumococcal infection which was almost fatal. If my PhD project can help increase awareness of precautions and treatments I’d be very happy – also if my illustrations can help communicate some of the fantastic pneumococcal research in a new way.

Overview of the pneumococcal visualization by Ditte Høyer Engholm and used with permission. Upper image. Whole-cell digital illustration of the pneumococcus. Lower eight images. Watercolor paintings of the cellular sections indicated in the upper image with key molecules highlighted in light purple. 1. Protein synthesis. 2. Carbohydrate metabolism. 3. Cell wall synthesis. 4. Cell division. 5. Teichoic acid synthesis. 6. Virulence. 7. Transformation. 8. Pilus synthesis.

Why do you think these kinds of visual representations are important?

Scientists are now increasingly becoming aware of the advantage of communicating research in untraditional ways. When I started my project in 2015, I didn’t know anything about the pneumococcus. It was a treasure hunt for knowledge in a vast sea of information. All the little important pieces of information I found, I used to create a coherent whole visualization of the bacterium. The data generated in laboratories all over the world provide important information about the biological functions or implication of the pneumococcus. However, I found it very difficult to comprehend all of this when I was all new in the field. I hope that my visualisations will help others by providing a visual entrance for learning more about the pneumococcus, stimulate them to ask questions to the experts within the field. Much of the information that I used to create the visualisations is not available in a format like this and I hope that it might even inspire experts to ask new questions too.

How did you get started with these illustrations?

The illustration style that I’ve used is not something I’ve come up with. I’ve learnt from the master himself – David Goodsell. David is well-known for his illustrations of cellular landscapes and his work at the RCSB Protein Data Bank, and he’s been a wonderful mentor. My supervisor invited him to come visit us in Aarhus, and I did my first watercolour painting (ever) under his supervision in April 2015. As a PhD student, I was really lucky to have a whole team of supervisors and helpers with diverse backgrounds ranging from molecular biology, crystallography, science visualization, and pneumococcal biology. In addition to this, I’ve asked many different experts about all sorts of stuff that I needed to discuss to complete my illustrations. Everybody that I’ve talked to has been very interested in sharing their knowledge and guiding me in the right direction. So, after my first introduction to watercolour paintings from David, I simply dug through the literature and tried to understand the bacterium enough to be able to draw it.

How long does it take you to create these images, and what is the process behind them?

I spent two years making the pneumococcal visualizations. Most of this time was spent reading the literature and collecting information. I’d say that this treasure hunt was 80% of that time if it includes generating and drawing models for the illustrated proteins. When all the information was gathered, I wrote short reviews that I tried to illustrate in a step-by-step manner. When the narrative in the review was in place, all the proteins drawn and I had selected the colour-scheme, each of the paintings was fairly quick. I used about one day to draw the composition of the foreground of a small painting, and three days for one of the two big ones. The painting itself took two days for the small ones and a week for the big ones including the manual outlining of all components. The digital illustration took me a month to create and then a couple of weeks for the video. We have a method article in the pipeline that should be able to clearly outline how the visualizations were created.

Do you have plans for how to use your combined artistic skills and microbial knowledge in the future?

No, not at the moment but I’d be happy to get suggestions! I’m considering applying for funding for a postdoc in research-based science communication. I really liked the challenge of trying to understand something completely new and finding ways to communicate it to peers but also a broader audience. In addition to my paintings and the digital illustration, I’ve also worked with cartoons and they’ve received very positive feedback from a broader audience whenever I’ve had a chance to show them. At the moment, everything is rather open for me job-wise, but I’d definitely like to stay connected to the natural sciences somehow.

If I were to do a similar project again, I think an ideal set-up would be to have an even closer interaction with the experimental scientists. If it was possible, I’d prefer to have weekly or bi-weekly meetings with a board of scientists to discuss questions and the way that the visualizations were progressing. I believe that this would also be both useful and interesting for the involved scientists.

Featured image credit: Painting by WerbeFabrik. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

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10 great writers from China’s long literary history

China and its long history goes hand in hand with its rich literary tradition. The Zhou dynasty (1030-221 BC) saw some of the earliest forms of literature, and it was during this time that the writings of Confucius and Lao Tzu were penned, from which the philosophies of Confucianism and Taoism arose. Prose poetry flourished under the Han dynasty (202 BC-AD 220), and the Tang dynasty of the seventh- through tenth-centuries marked the golden age of Chinese literature. The novel arose during the Song dynasty (960-1279), and the following centuries saw the publication of the “four great classical novels.” The twentieth century brought about the rapid modernization of China and its literature, though censorship during the Cultural Revolution and under communist rule has threatened to halt this transformation.

The names Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Sun Tzu are well-known around the world, but many of China’s poets, philosophers, and novelists remain hidden gems to outsiders. Take a look at the list below and discover 10 of China’s greatest writers, from the end of the Zhou dynasty to the twentieth century.

1. Qu Yuan (339-278 BC) was a statesman and poet during the Warring States period. He has been attributed to the first seven poems of the Chu ci (Songs of Chu). He served under King Huai but was banished after composing the poem “Li Sao” (Encountering Sorrow), which attacked the court for failing to listen to his advice. He committed suicide by throwing himself in a river.

2. Wang Wei (701-761) was a painter, musician, poet, and devout Buddhist. He composed “landscape poems” while roaming the lands near the Wang River, exchanging verses with his friend Pei Di. A Zen Master taught him the doctrine of dunwu (instantaneous enlightenment), and Wei’s later poetry reflects his devotion. He was referred to as Shi fo, or the Buddha of Poetry. The poet Su Shi said of his works: “There is painting in his poetry, and poetry in his painting.”

Pages from 1645 version of “Li Sao” by White whirlwind. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

3. Shi Nai’en (1296-1372) was the author of the first of the “four great classical novels,” though some historians believe his mentor Luo Guanzhong played a role its writing. Not much is known about Shi, but the work attributed to him, Shuihu zhuan (Water Margin), about a rebellious leader of outlaws, has been equally banned and celebrated over hundreds of years. Water Margin was written in popular vernacular and expanded on its characters in contrast to the historical writings of the time, advancing the art of the novel.

4. Luo Guanzhong (1330-1400) was a prolific writer who has had many anonymous works attributed to him over the years. Historians agree that the second of the “four great classical novels,” Sanguo yani (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), was written by Luo. Over 750,000 Chinese characters long, the novel told the story of three kingdoms over the course of a century. It was based on a historical account and contained historical figures, but also incorporated folk stories and plots from popular dramas of the time.

5. Not much is known about Wu Cheng’en (c. 1500-1582), the author to whom the third of the “four great classical novels,” Xi you ji (Journey to the West), is attributed. Loosely based on the historical account of the Buddhist monk, Xuanzang, the novel humorously followed a group of pilgrims on a journey to India and back. The novel contained religious themes, witty dialogue, and elegant poems, as well as critical commentary on contemporary Ming-era China.

6. The Laughing Scholar of Lanling was the pseudonym of the unknown author of the controversial novel Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase). It has been frequently banned for its pornographic nature since its publication around 1610. American translator David Todd Roy suspected poet Xu Wei (1521-1593) to be its author. Wei was famous for his painting and calligraphy, and he was an early proponent of women’s rights, writing a popular play on the legend of Mulan; however, he was also imprisoned for the murder of his second wife.

Eileen Chang (September 30, 1920 – September 8, 1995) was a Chinese (Republic of China) writer. Photo was taken in 1954 in Hong Kong, by北角英皇道兰心照相馆. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

7. Cao Xueqin (1715-1763/64) was the author of the fourth of the “four great classical novels,” Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber), which told the story of an aristocratic family and its downfall. The novel was written in vernacular and published in two editions: the 80-chapter version reportedly based on Cao’s life, and the 120-chapter “Cheng edition,” published posthumously in 1791 and believed to have been enhanced by the scholar Gao E. Cao’s novel is so important to Chinese literature that an entire field of study called hongxue (redology) arose in the 1920s.

8. Lu Xun (1881-1936) studied medicine in Japan as a young man but ultimately concluded that he was better served as a writer. In 1918, he published his first short story, A Madman’s Diary, the first colloquial story in modern Chinese literature. His writings comprised many genres, from fiction to zawen (satire) to a historical account of Chinese fiction. Mao Zedong called Lu “the standard-bearer” of the new Chinese culture that arose after the May Fourth Movement.

9. Ba Jin (1904-2005), born Li Yaotang, began his career as a poet but achieved fame as a novelist. His most famous novel was Jia (The Family); in addition to these novels, he also translated Russian, British, German, and Italian works. Ba Jin’s most famous later work was Suixiang lu (Random Thoughts), a painful reflection on the Cultural Revolution in which he was persecuted as a “counter-revolutionary.”

10. Zhang Ailing (or Eileen Chang) (1920-1995) was a student during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II. She returned to her home in Shanghai and supported herself by publishing short stories and novels about the plight of women in difficult romantic relationships. She wrote the anti-communist novel Rice Sprout Song in 1952 and moved to the United States three years later, where she wrote novels and screenplays. In 2007, Ang Lee directed a movie adaptation of her novel Lust, Caution.

Featured image credit: Romance of the Three Kingdoms mural at the Long Corridor by Shizhao. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons .

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The Oxford Place of the Year 2017 is…

Puerto Rico

Our polls have officially closed and the results are in: our Place of the Year for 2017 is Puerto Rico. Although it was a tight race between Catalonia and Puerto Rico in both the long- and shortlist polling, the events that have occurred in this Caribbean Island in the past year have truly resonated with our followers who partook in voting.

Puerto Rico has been in recession since 2006 due to a spiraling cycle of public debt – much of it stemming from public corporations such as the government development bank, the transportation authority, the electrical power authority, and the water and sewage authority. However, earlier this year, the island came into the global spotlight when they declared a form of bankruptcy in May. Because Puerto Rico is a Commonwealth of the United States, it was not allowed to formally declare bankruptcy, thus shedding light on the Commonwealth’s political relationship with the United States.

San Juan – Old San Juan from Air (Postcard) by Roger W. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

Then in September of this year, Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico and brought about horrific destruction. With the crippled hospitals, lack of safe drinking water, closed roads, and electrical outages island-wide, thousands of Puerto Ricans who were able to leave did just that. Response by the White House was met with great criticism for being too slow and insufficient in terms of relief funding. Two months later, much has improved but it will still be a while before Puerto Rico is back to its pre-hurricane status. Power on the island is still not completely restored, and hundreds of survivors remain in shelters across Puerto Rico.

Hurricane Maria Makes Landfall in Puerto Rico by NOAA Satellites. Public domain via Flickr.

Between the financial and humanitarian crises facing Puerto Ricans, it has not been an easy year for this Commonwealth. It’s also unclear how the rest of the year will play out in regards to additional hurricane relief. What is sure is that debates will continue between Puerto Rico and the White House regarding debt relief, further hurricane assistance, and whether Puerto Rico should remain in the United States as a territory or a state – or become an independent country altogether.

Read up on our Place of the Year archive, and remember to check back for more posts about Puerto Rico and the other POTY contenders. Let us know what you think of this year’s Place of the Year in the comments below, or use #POTY2017 on social media.

Featured image credit: Puerto Rico by Birga. CC0 Public domain via Pixabay.

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What the House-Senate Conference Committee should do about the Johnson Amendment

The Johnson Amendment is the part of Internal Revenue Code Section 501(c)(3) which bans tax-exempt institutions from participating in political campaigns. The US House of Representatives has passed H.R.1, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, to revise the Code. Section 5201 of H.R. 1 would modify the Johnson Amendment. In contrast, the tax bill pending in the US Senate does not address the Johnson Amendment.

H.R. 1 gets three things right and wrong about the Johnson Amendment. The Conference Committee charged with reconciling the House and Senate tax bills should craft a true safe harbor from the Johnson Amendment limited to internal church communications. This safe harbor should protect internal church communications from government interference while keeping intact Section 501(c)(3)’s general prohibitions on the use of tax-exempt institutions (including churches) for political campaigning and legislative advocacy.

The first thing H.R. 1 gets right about the Johnson Amendment is that section 5201 of H.R. 1 would protect from the Johnson Amendment the statements of religious organizations. H.R. 1, if enacted into law, would thereby abate the untoward governmental intrusion the Johnson Amendment causes into the internal communications of churches, synagogues, mosques, and other sectarian congregations.

Section 5201 has been criticized by many organizations, with which I often agree, including the Anti-Defamation League and B’nai B’rith International. I suspect that these critics do not appreciate the extent to which the Johnson Amendment interjects the IRS into the internal deliberations of churches, synagogues, mosques, and other religious congregations.

In Revenue Ruling 2007-41, the IRS held that the “issue advocacy” of a tax-exempt group may “function […] as political campaign intervention” and thus cost the group its tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(3). Thus, for example, a minister who from their pulpit supports or opposes DACA, BDS, the Confederate flag, or same-sex marriage thereby jeopardizes their church’s tax-exempt status under Code Section 501(c)(3) if that advocacy is deemed by the IRS to pertain to “a prominent issue” in a contemporary political campaign.

Such governmental interference with the internal communications of religious congregations is troubling as a matter of free expression and religious liberty. The drafters of H.R. 1 correctly decided to restrict the church-state entanglement the Johnson Amendment causes by requiring the IRS to monitor and evaluate the internal conversations of religious congregations.

The House-Senate Conference Committee should amend Code Section 501(c)(3) to create a true safe harbor for internal church communications which do not cause more than de minimis additional costs.

The second thing H.R. 1 gets right about the Johnson Amendment is the course H.R. 1 doesn’t take. H.R. 1 eschews the more radical alternative articulated by President Trump and others who would abolish the Johnson Amendment altogether. While free speech within religious congregations should be protected from government interference, tax-exempt entities should not be used to funnel tax-deductible contributions to political campaigns. While it protects the statements of tax-exempt organizations, Section 5201 of H.R. 1 properly leaves intact the Johnson Amendment’s general ban on political campaigning by tax-exempt institutions including churches.

Third, Section 5201 only provides protection from the Johnson Amendment if no “more than de minimis incremental expenses” are incurred in making a statement. The protection of Section 5201 would be lost if, for example, a church, synagogue or mosque purchases television time to broadcast a sermon or reproduces the sermon in a newspaper ad. This limitation on incremental expenses provides additional assurance that churches and other tax-exempt entities will not be used to channel tax-deductible contributions to political campaigns.

To summarize , if enacted into the Internal Revenue Code, Section 5201 of H.R. 1 would protect the ability of a minister, rabbi, or imam to speak from a congregation’s pulpit without jeopardizing the congregation’s tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(3) as political campaigning. This amendment of the Code would affirm free expression and religious liberty while retaining the general ban on political campaigning by religious and secular tax-exempt entities.

The first thing H.R. 1 gets wrong about the Johnson Amendment is the original version of Section 5201 of H.R. 1 would have only protected the internal communications of churches and church conventions. Unfortunately, H.R. 1, as passed by the House, extended this protection to all secular and sectarian tax-exempt institutions. The problem which requires a solution is the Johnson Amendment’s interference with religious congregations’ internal discussions of issues of public import.

Second, Section 5201, if enacted into the Code, would not protect church communications from Section 501(c)(3)’s prohibition against “influence(ing) legislation.” Under current law, if a minister in their  sermons supports or opposes particular legislative proposals, they  jeopardizes their congregation’s tax-exempt status if these comments are deemed by the IRS to be “substantial.” Section 5201 does not address this statutory impediment to religious expression.

Finally, Section 5201 of H.R. 1, if enacted into law, would require the IRS to determine if a particular statement merits protection from the Johnson Amendment, because the statement is made “in the ordinary course of the (church’s) regular and customary activities” furthering the church’s religious purposes. This statutory language unacceptably entangles church and state by mandating the IRS to monitor churches to determine their “regular and customary activities” and to assess which activities further the churches’ religious purposes.

In sum, while Section 5201 would reduce one aspect of the church-state enforcement entanglement stemming from the Johnson Amendment, Section 5201 as passed by the House would still entangle church and state unacceptably. Section 5201 of H.R.1 would require the IRS to survey and evaluate internal church communications to enforce Section 501(c)(3)’s prohibition on substantial legislative advocacy and to determine if such communications are made “in the ordinary course of the (church’s) regular and customary activities.”

In light of the foregoing, the House-Senate Conference Committee should amend Code Section 501(c)(3) to create a true safe harbor for internal church communications which do not cause more than de minimis additional costs. This safe harbor should be limited to churches and other religious congregations and should protect their internal discussions from characterization as either political campaigning or as substantial legislative advocacy. This amendment of Section 501(c)(3) should be a true safe harbor and should not authorize or require IRS inquiry into churches’ “regular and customary activities.”

A true safe harbor along these lines would provide a balanced approach, continuing the Johnson Amendment’s ban on the use of churches and other tax-exempt entities to channel funds to political campaigns while protecting internal church communications from untoward church-state entanglement.

Featured image credit: The western front of the United States Capitol by Architect of the Capitol. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

 

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The legacies of the “Russian” Revolution(s): World War II

This year marks the centenary of the Russian Revolution. This event has often been reduced to the urban upheaval that gripped Petrograd (St Petersburg) throughout 1917 and which culminated in the Bolsheviks taking power in October. The Soviet Union traced its legitimacy back to this event, and many other aspiring revolutionaries were inspired by it too—some still are to this day. The twentieth century cannot be understood without reference to Petrograd’s Red October because of the twin legacies of Bolshevik October: the foundation of the first socialist state, and the inspiration it provided for other would-be revolutionaries all over the world.

The legacies of the revolution, however, extend beyond October. Historians have begun to embed 1917 into the longer period of war, revolution, and civil war of 1914-23; shifting their attention from the events in Petrograd to what happened in the vastness of the Russian empire. What they have discovered is that the revolution was not a singular moment, but a process involving the breakdown of the Romanov Empire and its violent reconstitution as the Soviet Union. As I have previously argued the Revolution is essential for understanding the current shape of Eurasia; the breakdown of the Soviet Union into fifteen successor states in 1991 was intimately linked with this period of imperial breakdown and the mode of the empire’s reconstruction.

Finally, the legacies of the Russian revolution included the Soviet experience of World War II. To many participants this conflict seemed like a continuation of what had happened in 1914-23. With one major exception (Galicia), the countries the Soviets annexed behind the curtain of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 were former Romanov possessions that had avoided reincorporation into the Red Empire. These include the eastern parts of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Even Finland, which escaped annexation but had to fight for its independence in the Winter War of 1939-40, was an old Tsarist domain which had gained independence in the wake of the revolution. From the Soviet perspective, then, the annexations of 1939-40 were completing the process of re-gathering Romanov lands under the red flag, a process which had begun in 1919 but had been aborted in the west after the disaster of the Bolshevik-Polish War of 1920-21.

Stalin’s enemies also remembered this past. Historians have persistently stressed that the German attack on the Soviet Union in WWII was insane — a campaign against a huge country with poor roads, bad weather, and far superior resources. From the very start, the Soviets had more guns, more planes, more tanks, more men, and more horses; they had space to retreat to rob the German war machine of its tactical superiority, and they had the industrial might to out-produce Germany in a war of attrition. However, the Nazis ignored these facts; the Great Terror and the Finnish War were enough to prove to them that the Soviets were weak militarily. Their miscalculation was also due to their WWI memory of 1914-1918 when the Germans had actually won due to the breakdown of the Russian state and the withering away of its army. Keen students of history, many German military men believed they could reproduce this victory and watch the entire rotten structure tumble down.

Hk1 #293 at Finlyandsky Rail Terminal, St. Petersburg, Russia. © by James G. Howes, 1998 via Wikimedia Commons.

They did not appreciate that the Soviets, too, continued to remember this history and had prepared against its repeat. Stalin’s revolution from above of 1928-32 and his Great Terror of 1937-38 were brutal ways to deal with the trauma of imperial breakdown. The peasants were forced into collective farms to keep them from withholding grain from the cities, as they had done in World War I. Industry had to be developed at an accelerated pace to catch up with the capitalist countries and not face the situation of relative backwardness of 1914. Enemies within, real and imagined, were incarcerated, deported, or shot in order to prevent a repeat of the spectacle of mutiny and uprising. What the Germans faced in 1941, then, was no rotten structure, but a ruthless warfare state ruled by hard-headed authoritarians who would do whatever was necessary to win this war. There was no organized opposition that could rise; the majority of the population was preoccupied with survival; and there was an organized core of highly dedicated fighters for Soviet socialism who would lead the country to victory. The Germans, prepared to fight the previous war, soon learned what mistakes they had made.

Meanwhile, ordinary Soviets also remembered war and revolution. Few believed the horror stories of Soviet propaganda. They had seen these Germans before, during their occupation of Ukraine in 1918, and they knew Soviet media rarely told the truth. Many remembered the German occupiers as harsh task-masters but no worse than the Soviets. Most tragically, even Jews sometimes reasoned thus when deciding against the unpredictable life of the refugee. These were the wrong lessons to learn, but they did not seem unreasonable in 1941. Occupiers come and go; you cannot predict who will win; hunker down and look after your family; maybe you shall survive.

Those Soviets who went further and collaborated with the Germans also had the events surrounding the Russian Revolution on their mind. Men like Andrey Vlasov or Stepan Bandera did not think of themselves as traitors to their fatherland or as collaborators with the enemy. Instead, they understood what they were doing as a temporary, tactical alliance in order to free the fatherland from the Bolsheviks — a continuation of the Civil War after the Russian Revolution. Then, after all, cooperation with Germany was widespread. The Germans brought Bolshevik leaders in a sealed train to Petrograd, so they could start a revolution; they trained Finnish soldiers who returned home to win their own civil war against “the Reds”; they threw the victorious Bolshevik troops out of Ukraine, after the newly independent state had signed a separate peace; the list could go on. Why not use the Germans in a temporary alliance again? They had left the last time around; they would leave again. The local winners meanwhile would take the spoils, as they had before. That such lessons of history were poor, catastrophic guides to action in the new context was another matter altogether: that they were part of the calculation of actors at the time is beyond doubt. The ghosts of the Russian Revolution went to war again two decades later.

Featured image credit: Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), July 4, 1917. Street demonstration on Nevsky Prospekt just after troops of the Provisional Government have opened fire with machine guns. Photo by Viktor Bulla. Public Domain via  Wikimedia Commons .

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How much do you know about cheetahs? [Quiz]

Today, 4 December, is International Cheetah Day! Cheetahs are easily distinguished from other cats due to their distinctive black “tear stain” markings that create two lines from eye to mouth, their black spots on tawny fur, and black rings at the end of their long tails. Cheetahs also stand apart from other large cats due to their loose and rangy frame, small head, high‐set eyes, and slightly flattened ears.

Cheetahs are one of the fastest animals on the planet. Known for their high speeds and ability to chase down fast prey, cheetahs first stalk prey using a concealed approach, followed by a full sprint starting from about 30m (33yd) away. An average chase will last between 20–60 seconds, and covers a distance of 170m (183yd). Due to stamina restrictions, cheetahs cannot continue a chase for more than about 500m (550yd), which is why hunts tend to fail if there is a large initial starting gap between cheetah and prey. About 50% of cheetah chases result in a successful capture of their prey.

Due to their depleting population, cheetah conservation has received considerable attention in the past 10 years through a number of workshops held in various regions of Africa and also in Iran. A global conservation strategy for the cheetah in Africa has been developed, which has resulted in the publication of a number of regional conservation strategies for southern, eastern, North, West, and Central Africa, as well as national action plans for several countries; however cheetah conservation still has a long way to go.

In honor of International Cheetah Day and the ongoing cheetah conservation efforts, we’ve put together a quiz to let you test your cheetah knowledge. Take the quiz below, and find out how much you actually know about these fast felines!

Featured image credit: Cheetahs Two Together by skeeze. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Towards a study of the role of law in the Arab Spring

The Arab Spring has been the subject of a growing body of scholarship. Much of this commentary has hitherto related to political and economic analysis of the events that took place in many Arab countries since December 2010. Nevertheless, the role of law remains understudied. There are several inter-related temporal, empirical, and theoretical difficulties that impede a proper analysis of the role of law in the Arab Spring. It is vital to overcome these limitations in order to take the role of law seriously.

Temporally, it is problematic to assess the meaning and significance of legal developments in reference to a short period of time. For instance, the assessment of legislative acts cannot be separated from questions about their enforceability, their judicial interpretation, and their (intended or unintended) consequences. Additionally, a focus on specific developments may miss the fact that they may be superseded shortly after by later developments. These issues point towards the need to locate events in wider processes in order to fully grasp their significance and meaning. It also suggests that one needs to complement the analysis of symptoms with root causes.

Empirically, the limited access to primary sources and legal materials may reduce the role of the “legal system” to a limited number of highly visible legal texts or landmark judicial rulings. In some cases, the focus is exclusively on the outcome of the rulings and not on the legal reasoning involved. The more primary sources are consulted, the richer one’s understanding of the role of law.

These difficulties may be rooted in deeper theoretical issues that relate to the study of law. First, is a formalist-textualist analysis of the role of law that separates law-in-the-books from law-in-action. This formalistic inquiry disregards judicial agency in developing the law. After all, the judges are not mechanically applying the law but are engaged in interpreting ambiguous standards, filling gaps, or reconciling inconsistent legal materials. In other words, judges are legislatures. This means that the legal resolution of social and political conflicts is not explicable merely by reference to the legal materials.

Additionally, one may be tempted to dismiss the role of law as a mere “reflection” of political and social developments; in other words, to reduce law to politics or society. The sense of politicized judiciary in Egypt, for example, may lend support to the initial impression that law equals politics. However, acknowledging the intertwinement between law and politics should not lead to collapsing law into politics. If one recognizes judicial agency in making the law, takes into consideration long-standing legal traditions, considers the corporate or professional identity of the judiciary, underscores the ways in which legal discourse shapes our consciousness and impacts practices and institutions, and highlights deep political fissures as the backdrop for judicial work—then one needs to acknowledge that the law is “relatively autonomous” from political and social interests. The practical questions become: what are the social and political conditions, how did they change over time, how does the law become a field for political struggle, and what did the judges do in a particular country. Social and political fissures are foregrounded in revolutionary moments and as such require scholars to move beyond theories that presuppose a coherent legal system. The analysis of law needs to foreground contradictions.

Protest on Tahir Square by Floris Van Cauwelaert. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Moreover, a reflective study of the role of law is undermined by the neglect of local context. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, international organizations dramatically increased their interest in the region. Like the international NGOs’ interest in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the communism, these organizations channelled funds to projects that sought to establish the “rule of law”, “transitional justice”, “institution building”, “judicial reform”, “constitution-making”, and the like. The difficulty with these projects and the reporting or commentary associated with them is their reliance on a “one-size-fits-all” approach that does not appreciate the differences amongst Arab countries, and in many cases has been consistent with hegemonic neo-liberal understandings of the international order. This approach allows little room for an endogenous evolution of legal systems and may lead to unintended consequences given the imposition of de-contextualised legal templates. Moreover, as these efforts are aimed at “public law”, they neglect the social background conditions in which public arrangements operate.

The nuanced study of the role of law is further undermined by particular instances of empirical legal studies. A sociological analysis of the role of law would certainly benefit from a carefully-designed empirical inquiry. Yet, there is a risk of reductionism if empiricism does not inquire about its “data” and presuppositions. It would provide neither jurisprudential nor sociological or historical depth.

Finally, a reflective analysis of the role of law needs to set aside the “confirmation bias”. One example of this is the mechanical application of pre-existing theory to concrete case studies. Thus, reality does not contribute to the development of theory. Rather, in this unidirectional movement from theory to reality, the theorist merely applies a ready-made toolkit to the Arab Spring without sufficient inquiry into the case studies and whether the Arab Spring provides a room for questioning these theories. Long-standing, binary distinctions in legal and political theory would need to be revisited because filtering reality through these distinctions merely simplifies it to make it “fit” the theory. In particular, constitutional and legal experiences outside the European and North American orbit have long been discounted or made exotic by the deployment of a variety of distinctions that tend to exaggerate the differences between western, liberal constitutions and other constitutions. Additionally, these abstract distinctions do not illuminate the actual workings of legal and constitutional orders.

To conclude, overcoming these limitations would enable scholars to take the role of law in the Arab Spring seriously. It will also enable them to take the Arab Spring itself seriously as a contributor to the global study of legal and constitutional theory rather than short-lived academic fashion.

Featured image credit: “Protesters raise their hands with the four finger sign representing Rabaa during a march in Maadi, Cairo, on the six month anniversary of the violent crackdown against supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi, Feb. 14, 2014.” (Hamada Elrasam/VOA). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 

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