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The history behind Ukraine’s 2016 Eurovision song

Most entries to the Eurovision song contest are frothy pop tunes, but this year’s contribution from Ukraine addresses Stalin’s deportation of the entire Tatar population of Crimea in May 1944. It may seem an odd choice, but is actually very timely if we dig a little into the history of mass repression and inter-ethnic tensions in the region.

Almost a quarter of a million Tatars, an ethnically Turkic people indigenous to the Crimea, were moved en masse to Soviet Central Asia as a collective punishment for perceived collaboration with the Nazis. Between a third and a half of them died on the journey or in the “special settlements” of the Gulag that became their home. The death rate, combined with the aim of the regime to blend the Tatars into the Muslim, Turkic peoples of Central Asia, has led some to call the episode an attempted genocide, including the Ukrainian parliament in 2015.

The deportation was one of many examples of the mass repression of ethnic minorities in the history of Soviet Russia – which by no means limited mass repression to ethnic minorities.

Stalin and much of the Soviet leadership were peculiarly sensitive to the threat various groups presented to the Bolshevik Revolution in the years after 1917. In the years they spent planning and preparing for the seizure of power, they sought to understand why previous global revolutions (in 1789, 1848, 1871, 1905) had failed. They commonly drew the conclusion that previous generations of revolutionaries had failed adequately to anticipate the energy and violence with which the establishment (the “bourgeoisie”) would react.

The Soviet leadership’s own experience in the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917 served to reinforce this view. Between the late spring of 1918 and the end of 1921 they had to overcome the combined forces of the old imperial army (the “Whites”) and foreign armed forces from Germany, Britain, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Japan among others. It was an exceptionally violent struggle, and the Bolsheviks tended to credit the prosecution of a ruthless “Red” terror for their victory.

While there were no immediate threats to Revolution in the 1920s, the political police were instructed to look for evidence of counter-revolutionary conspiracy at home and abroad, and were given powers that predisposed them to exaggerate the threats they did find. Non-Russian ethnicities were not initially high on the list of threats – although this was not because they were seen as being sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, which they weren’t.

The new regime had a hard time drawing many of the republics on the Russian periphery into the Soviet “Union.” Initially in the 1920s the Bolsheviks actively courted the non-Russians with promises of “freedom” from policies of forced assimilation characteristic of the Russian Imperial regime. Joseph Stalin was Lenin’s commissar of nationalities, and together the two developed a nationalities policy that encouraged the flourishing of national and ethnic cultures, as long as they remained “socialist in content.”

But it was not long before Stalin became concerned that this conciliatory nationalities policy was encouraging separate identities that would present a challenge to central power. By the mid-1930s, the threat of war deepened with the rise of the virulently anti-communist Nazi regime in Germany and the militarists in Japan. After the assassination of Politburo member Sergei Kirov in December 1934, the regime became hyper-sensitive to potential “counter-revolutionary” threats.

Between 1936 and 1938, the regime lashed out, murdering three quarters of a million people it considered real or potential enemies of the regime. Many of the victims were non-Russians, and many national groups, including Poles, Germans and Koreans, were targeted because their loyalty as nations to the USSR was held in doubt. During and after World War II, the regime deported over 3 million members of non-Russian ethnic groups suspected of collaboration with the Nazis. The 240,000 Crimean Tatars shared their horrendous fate with many other victims.

The deportation was one of many examples of the mass repression of ethnic minorities in the history of Soviet Russia

After the Nazi army took over the Crimean peninsula in October 1941, it’s true that there were many detachments of Crimean Tatar soldiers recruited to the Wehrmacht – perhaps as many as 20,000 soldiers – but they could legitimately claim that they had little choice but to accept the Germans’ “offer.” The probability is that some fought because they wanted to defeat the Soviet regime, some fought because joining the Wehrmacht was a way to ensure a steady diet when food was scarce, and others were afraid of reprisals.

Stalin died in 1953, and his successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced many of Stalin’s crimes, including the deportations. The charges of collaboration against the Tatars were formally dropped in 1967, but in contrast to some of the other persecuted national groups, they were not allowed to return home until the late 1980s. Hundreds of thousands did then return to the Crimea, but their villages and property had long since been redistributed, such that most had to rebuild their lives from scratch often on land where they were little more than squatters.

They are still seeking recognition for their plight, and some form of compensation, from Russian, Ukrainian, and European authorities. The challenge of coming to some sort of solution has, however, been exacerbated by the poverty, political instability, ethnic tensions, and corruption endemic in the region. The annexation of Crimea by the Russian government in 2014 added another layer of complication. Many of the historically persecuted ethnic minorities of the former Soviet Union – including many Ukrainians – blame the “Russians” for their plight, rather than Stalin and subsequent Soviet and post-Soviet elites.

For that reason, the Ukrainian Eurovision entry makes sense. This is not because the Crimean Tatars are ethnically Ukrainian (which they are not as they are Turkic), but because with the Tatars, many ethnic Ukrainians share a sense of grievance with “the Russians” about the annexation of Crimea, the war on their frontier with Russia, and a longer history of perceived persecution on ethnic lines.

Headline image cerdit: Monument of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars which starts the 18 of May 1944 by Lystopad. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation.

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Composer Richard Causton in 10 questions

Richard Causton’s studies took him from the University of York via the Royal College of Music and the Scuola Civica in Milan, to King’s College, Cambridge where he is Lecturer in Composition. In addition to composition, Causton writes and lectures on Italian contemporary music and regularly broadcasts for Italian radio. In our occasional series, in which we ask Oxford composers questions based around their musical likes and dislikes, influences, and challenges, we spoke with Richard Causton about his writing, new music, and his desert island playlist.

Photo credit: Katie Vandyck

Which of your pieces are you most proud of and/or holds the most significance for you?

That’s quite a tricky question but probably the piece that holds the most significance is Millennium Scenes, an orchestral piece I wrote in 1998-99. It was a rite of passage — extremely difficult to compose — and it pushed me way outside my comfort zone. Writing it certainly changed me, and it made my whole experience of music quite different.

Which composer were you most influenced by and which of their pieces has had the most impact on you?

May I name two composers instead of one? If so, they would be Stravinsky and Messiaen. The Rite of Spring and Turangalîla have both been enormous experiences for me and they are no less fascinating as the years pass. Another very important piece for me has been Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony: it sets up an extraordinarily powerful dramatic scenario within the structure and offers a new way of thinking about musical character and form.

Can you describe the first piece of music you ever wrote?

It was a little piece in triple time which I mistakenly thought of as a march. I scored it for flute, cello, clarinet and piano and made my sisters and my mum attempt to play it with me. It was not a great success. I must have been about eight years old.

If you could have been present at the premiere of any one work (other than your own) which would it be?

I’d love to have been present at one of Berio’s works of the 1960s: Passaggio for example, or his Sinfonia. In Passaggio, he sets up little groups planted in the audience who start to heckle at various points in the piece. Suddenly you don’t know who’s a performer and who’s audience and you feel right in the middle of it all — it’s an electrifying coup-de-theatre and really shakes things up.

A page of Richard Causton’s manuscript of his orchestral work, Millennium Scenes

What piece of music have you discovered lately?

A piece for large orchestra by Reinbert de Leeuw called Der nächtliche Wanderer. It’s a real epic — an orchestral piece in a continuous movement lasting around 40 minutes. I was intrigued by his starting such a piece with the sound of a dog barking, but it works extremely well.

Is there an instrument you wish you had learnt to play and do you have a favourite work for that instrument?

To be able to play any instrument well would be great. But I think it would be wonderful to be able to play the Bach Cello Suites.

Is there a piece of music you wish you had written?

With a really great piece, it becomes an affair of the heart while you’re listening to it. I might wish I’d written the piece as I listen to (say) a Beethoven symphony – the music is so involving and persuasive. I think that’s probably how I started to write music in the first place, but in reality it’s absurd to wish you’d written someone else’s piece: it’s like wishing you were another person. So in starting to create a new piece of my own, I really need to start by closing the door of the room I’m working in and leaving Beethoven and all the others outside.

Have the challenges you face as a composer changed over the course of your career?

When I was younger, it felt as if I had all the time in the world but now I’m a little older, I never feel I have enough!

What would be your desert island playlist?

I’d probably take Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Messiaen’s Turangalîla, and Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony (provided it could be Paavo Berglund’s recording with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra from 1975).

How has your music changed throughout your career?

I’d like to think it’s become tighter and technically more rigorous. I’ve gradually learned how to approach structuring longer pieces. But on a poetic, expressive level the basics have probably remained much the same.

Music highlighted by Richard Causton:

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“It takes nine tailors to make a man” and other wonders on Cloud Nine

The proverb in the title of this post rarely, if ever, occurs in modern literature and may even have been forgotten but for the title of Dorothy Sayers’ novel. However, at one time it was well-known, and extensive literature is devoted to it. The publications appeared not only in the indispensable Notes and Queries, American Notes and Queries, and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine but also in such great newspapers and periodicals as The British Apollo and Churchman’s Shilling Magazine, to say nothing of Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom. Predictably, the source of the proverb has not been discovered. In my fairly recent essay on the custom of hanging out the broom, I wrote that those who try to find the origin of idioms straddle the line between folklore in the broadest sense of the word (that is, including customs) and etymology. The story of nine tailors, besides being “global,” also poses an “interdisciplinary” challenge, a circumstance that should warm the cockles of every modern scholar’s heart.

Dressed up to the nines.

Apart from the fact that the saying sounds like pure nonsense, we immediately observe that it refers to nine, a numeral whose occurrence is too frequent to inspire confidence: compare the whole nine yards, dressed up to the nines, nine days’ wonder, to look nine ways “to squint,” and so forth. Nine seems to be a vague synonym for many, and in this respect it shares common ground with seven. Other than that, a search for the origin of a proverbial saying is in many respects similar to the process familiar to a student of word etymology. First, the important question arises: native or borrowed? In France (at least in Brittany), they at one time believed that il faut neuf tailleurs pour faire un homme (a word for word equivalent of the English phrase), while the Germans teach (or taught) that tailors are such insignificant creatures that ninety-nine of them weigh only one pound, while weighing even less would do them nothing but good (“Neun und neunzig Schneider gehen auf ein Pfund, / Wiegen sie noch weniger, so sind sie gesund”). Elsewhere in Germany, it is said that twelve button-makers (Knöpfmacher) or twelve tailors make a man. We are dealing with a migratory phrase that may reflect the poverty of itinerant tailors (see also my post “Praising a cat to sell a horse”: it mentions the idiom to whip the cat in connection with tailors wandering from house to house and thus scraping for their livelihood). Second, the most popular explanation of the English phrase, the one that suggested to Sayers her title, becomes quite suspicious—unless we assume that the idiom originated in England, fell victim to folk etymology at home, and spread in its later form to the continent.

This most popular explanation takes its cue from the theme “For whom the bell tolls?” and resolves itself into the following. In some places in England the bell tolled nine times for a deceased man, six times for a woman, and three times for a child. Thus, nine tolls made, as it were, a dead man. The rest depends on the flight of a rather wild imagination. The strokes told, or counted, at the end of a knell were allegedly called tellers, because people mistook tolled for told. Tellers in turn were “corrupted” into tailors from their sounding at the end, or “tail,” of the knell. This is then how a tailor became the ninth part of a man. Surprisingly, this etymology has been repeated even by some people who should have known better.

Since nine tailors make a man appeared in print in William Hickes’s Grammatical Drollery (1682), by the last quarter of the seventeenth century the phrase had become sufficiently popular to be recognized in a poem. Many English idioms surfaced around that time, when slang and popular sayings flooded chapbooks, pamphlets, and even more dignified sources. The poem in Grammatical Drollery contained such lines:

“There is a proverb which has been of old,


And many men have likewise been so bold,


To the discredit of the Taylor’s Trade,


Nine Taylors go to make up a man, they said.


But for their credit I’ll unriddle it t’ye:


A draper once fell into povertie,


Nine Tayors joyn’d their purses together then,


To set him up, and make him a man again.”

The story about nine tailors rescuing a beggar circulated in several versions. One refers to an event that allegedly happened in 1742. Since Hickes’s book is much older, this date cannot be taken seriously, but the plot is more or less the same everywhere in England. Hickes, it will be remembered, mentioned a draper who “who fell into povertie.” According to another legend, an orphan boy applied for alms at a fashionable tailor’s shop in London, in which nine journeymen were employed. The men took pity on the youngster and contributed nine shillings for his relief. With this capital he bought fruit, retailed it at a profit, and, as time went on, became a rich man. He bought a carriage and painted the motto on the panel: “Nine tailors made me a man,” a motto reminiscent of “Seven at one blow.”

Black pudding: a dangerous weapon.

This tale, which looks like pure fiction, presents tailors in a favorable light. Another tale denigrates them. The version printed in 1726 tells that once there were eight (!) “slender” tailors who finished some work, received the remuneration they expected, and were on their way home. An evil female servant attacked the group. To frighten the men, she took “a very terrible black-pudding,” which the attacked tailors mistook for a dangerous weapon. Not only did the malevolent servant get all the money; she also belabored the tailors with a cudgel.

“Thus, eight not being able to deal with one woman, by consequence could not make a man, on which account a ninth is added. ‘Tis the opinion of our curious virtuosos, that this want of courage ariseth from their immoderate eating of cucumbers, which too much refrigerates their blood. However, to their eternal honour be it spoke, they have been often known to encounter a sort of cannibals, to whose assaults they are often subject, not fictitious, but real man-eaters, and that with a lance but two inches long; nay, and although they go arm’d no further than their middle-fingers.”

Silly jokes of this type are many. But not a single one has been “perpetrated” by the gentlemen of that profession, for, as Charles Lamb exclaimed: “How extremely rare is a noisy tailor! A mirthful and obstreperous tailor!” (“On the Melancholy of Tailors”). By contrast, witticisms ridiculing dishonest, stupid, and pusillanimous tailors are countless. Queen Elizabeth is reported to have begun her reply to a petition by eighteen tailors with the words: “Gentlemen both.” The same response has been ascribed to another person. Whoever addressed eighteen tailors as gentlemen both must have had our proverb in mind. Carlyle also knew and alluded to it in his Sartor Resartus but offered no explanation of its origin.

Even one tailor is more than a match for a giant.

It seems that a tale featuring the adventures of tailors (not necessarily nine) was current in seventeenth-century, or earlier, Europe (compare again the Grimms’ “The Brave Little Tailor”). The proverb might have been coined as the corollary to it. The versions known to us are echoes of the popular tradition that gave birth to the Early Modern plot. Its center of dissemination is beyond recovery. The number nine is arbitrary, and the sentiment expressed in the proverb has little to recommend it, unless we agree with some interpreters who insist that nine tailors are needed to make a good suit of clothes, but there is no evidence to confirm this statement.

Image credits: (1) Sarcophagus known as the “Muses Sarcophagus”, representing the nine Muses and their attributes. Marble, first half of the 2nd century AD, found by the Via Ostiense. Louvre Museum. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Whole Black Pudding. (c) Difydave via iStock. (3) The Brave Little Tailor. Illustration by H.J. Ford from the 1889 edition of ‘The Blue Fairy Book’ edited by Andrew Lang. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Unnatural disasters and environmental injustice

The recent tragedy involving toxic, lead-laced tap water in Flint, Michigan highlights the growing gulf between rich and poor, and majority and minority communities. In an ill-fated measure to save costs for the struggling city of Flint, officials stopped using Detroit’s water supply system and switched to the Flint River. Although residents complained about the water’s foul taste, odor, and color, officials assured them that the water was safe to drink. Later, it became clear that the polluted, corrosive river water leached lead from the city’s water pipes, so that the water coming out of the residents’ taps contained high levels of lead—a powerful neurotoxin for which there is no safe level of exposure. Children are particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning, which causes severe learning disabilities and irreversible neurological damage.

Although many factors undoubtedly contributed to the tragedy, critics quickly drew a connection between the mismanagement of Flint’s water supply and the fact that a majority of Flint’s population is black and about 40% live below the poverty line. Filmmaker and activist Michael Moore, a native son of Flint, characterized the catastrophe as the Governor’s “economic and racial experiment,” arguing that “the water crisis in Flint never would have been visited upon the residents of Bloomfield Hills or Grosse Pointe”—two affluent areas of metro Detroit.

Regrettably, the Flint crisis is not a new story. People of color and the poor have long suffered disproportionately from environmental tragedies such as tainted drinking water, mercury-laden fish, and displacement by flooding.

People of color and the poor have long suffered disproportionately from environmental tragedies such as tainted drinking water, mercury-laden fish, and displacement by flooding.

Flint is part of the larger story of environmental injustice—a story that highlights the linkages between race, class, and vulnerability to toxins and other kinds of environmental harm.  Hurricane Katrina gave us another chapter to this story. Floods and other so-called “natural disasters” are sometimes seen as social equalizers, but in fact they often have disproportionate impacts on the powerless. People of color, the poor, and the elderly tend to live in less desirable, high risk neighborhoods and so they often feel the effects of storms and floods most heavily. As Loyola Professor Robert Verchick observed:

In New Orleans proper, the damaged areas were 75 percent African-American, while undamaged areas were 46.2 percent African-American. Thus two of the most devastated areas—New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward—were almost all of color (mostly African-American) and were notoriously prone to floods and storms. Such housing patterns occurred not by chance, but rather followed formal and informal segregation efforts, as well as traditional market forces. As any native Orleanian will tell you, “Water flows away from money.”

Only by recognizing the recurring linkages between race, class, and vulnerability can we find ways to remedy the disproportionate impacts of what are, in effect, unnatural disasters caused by a confluence of natural forces and human choices.  The need to scrutinize our nation’s aging infrastructure and our disaster-related policies has never been greater, given the likelihood of ever more extreme weather events caused by climate change.

Featured image: ‘Turbid rain water runoff’ by Larry D. Moore. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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International Studies Association’s 57th annual convention re-cap

Last month, we were thrilled to see so many of you at ISA’s 57th Annual Convention in Atlanta, Georgia. Being able to communicate with so many International Studies Association members from all different fields and backgrounds is an opportunity our OUP Staff looks forward to every year. We would like to thank everyone who stopped by our booth, and specifically, all of our authors who made the trip to represent themselves and their books with pride.

Award Winners

OUP would like to highlight two of our published works that were honored with ISA Award recognition.

Lauren B. Wilcox’ Bodies of Violence, an unprecedented study of the biopower to the conception of violence in International Relations, has been awarded the 2016 ISA Theory Section Book Award.

 

Ayten Gündogdu’s Rightlessness in an Age of Rights, a critical inquiry of human rights for the purpose of understanding contemporary problems of migrants, was recognized as a Runner-Up for the 2016 ISA Theory Section Book Award.

 

ISA 2016 Top Sellers

Our booth was bustling with conversation and engagement throughout the conference. As a part of our conference presence, OUP offered hundreds of titles for sale at discounted prices which we hope everyone was able to take full advantage of. Without further adieu, we’d like to reveal the conferences Top Sellers!

Taliaferro, Lobell, & Rispman’s Neoclassical Realist Theory of International Politics
Diehl, Balas, & Goertz’ The Puzzle of Peace
Cynthia Weber’s Queer International Relations
Risse & Borzel’s Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism
David Kilcullen’s Blood Year
Colin Dueck’s Obama Doctrine
Leif Wenar’s Blood Oil
Rajan Menon’s The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention

 

Conference Slideshow

Our marketers who attended the meeting would also like to take this opportunity to share some of their “snapshots” of authors who visited our booth!

Miriam J. Anderson with her book Windows of Opportunity

Image Credit: Anne Rusinak.

Authors Annie Bird and Zachary Kaufman exchange copies

Image Credit: Anne Rusinak.

Ruti Teitel poses with her book Globalizing Transitional Justice

Image Credit: Anne Rusinak.

Annie Bird and her book US Foreign Policy on Transitional Justice

Image Credit: Anne Rusinak.

Authors Annie Bird, Ruti G. Teitel, and Zachary Kaufman pose with their latest releases

Image Credit: Anne Rusinak.

Cynthia Weber and her latest title Queer International Relations

Image Credit: Anne Rusinak.

Author Zachary D. Kaufman and his book United States Law and Policy on Transitional Justice

Image Credit: Anne Rusinak.

Author Clint Peinhardt and his book Transnational Cooperation

Image Credit: Anne Rusinak.

Ruti Teitel and her book Humanity's Law

Image Credit: Anne Rusinak.

OUP Author Cynthia Weber and OUP Editor Angela Chnapko share a laugh at the OUP Booth

Image Credit: Anne Rusinak.

Stop by at the next conference!

Featured Image: “Atlanta Skyline – enilykS atnaltA” by Joiseyshowaa CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr

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Beyond “methodological nationalism” in global security studies

A version of this article originally appeared on the Political Violence @ a Glance blog.

Last month’s news of terrorist attacks in Lahore and Brussels followed only days after similar news from Istanbul. And before that Ankara, Jakarta, and Paris. The list goes on. Attacks on cities around the world are part of the new reality of global insecurity that transcends state and national borders. In addition to the terrible human devastation and fear caused by each incident, they are also examples of how traditional models of “national” security are not sufficient for understanding contemporary patterns of political violence.

Methodological nationalism is a critique developed by sociologist Andreas Wimmer and anthropologist Nina Glick-Schiller. Although the national state seems to be a “natural” unit, this is partly the result of how the social sciences have treated it. When “security” is assumed to be about how states respond to threats of violence from other states, scholars miss the multiple ways in which political violence is used by non-state actors, but also by states against segments their own populations. For example, in the United States, a national security frame post-9/11 allowed for the militarization of the police across the country in ways that turned military force against unarmed civilians. Similar national security frames allow for deaths of migrants around the world to be ignored as a pressing global security issue—because policy-makers perceive no direct threat to the state. Even many of our datasets on violent conflict such as Correlates of War (COW) rely on this assumption. Uncritical acceptance of methodological nationalism can shape scholars’ normative orientation. Indeed, there are arguably few fields of study in which scholars are as identified with their own state’s interests as in security studies—especially the most vocal of those advocating policy-relevance.

This doesn’t mean that we should throw out the state or refrain from trying to affect policy. But we should pay greater attention to thinking about other spaces in which security might be important. Globalization has in many ways increased the power of states through technological tools like global surveillance and remote control warfare. But globalization also highlights the importance of non-national spaces such as cities, the high seas, cyberspace and various “holding areas” such as refugee camps, detention centers and prisons. The field could benefit from a “spatial turn” by using a “non-national” frame to look at cities, cyberspace, and even the globe itself.

Cities, for example, are important symbols and sites of power in the global economy—many of them contain populations and resources greater than those of some states. They act as nodes that connect transnational networks of capital, culture and politics, as well as functioning as global media hubs. Remarkably, as H. V. Savitch highlights, three out of four incidents labeled as “terrorism” in the past four decades have occurred in cities, with a total of 12,000 incidents altogether. The range of cities that have been targeted—from New York to Abuja, Jakarta to Paris to Istanbul—is an indication that security scholars should be paying attention to cities themselves as entities in world affairs, rather than analyzing such attacks through the lens of “national security.” A national security frame views each incident as an attack against a particular state that only happens to take place within a city. A “spatial turn” instead focuses attention more broadly on cities as new spaces in the changing landscape of global security.

Cities are increasingly significant because new information and communications technology (ICT) allows us to know what is happening around the world in an instant. New ICT however also creates virtual political spaces that transcend national borders—the world of cyberspace. Cyberspace can function as a non-national space where actors fight it out (think here of the hacker group Anonymous issuing threats to everyone from ISIS to Donald Trump). Perhaps more significant, however, is cyberspace’s effect on how we construct narratives of “us” vs. “them.” De-humanizing groups of people is one of the easiest ways to justify violence, and in the past states and other actors could get away with this by tightly controlling public narratives. While actors still employ de-humanizing language to try to justify political violence, this practice is something that can now be challenged and contested on-line through the use of counter-narratives.

We could also be thinking about how increased connectivity means that the most important space for understanding security is actually the globe itself—as a single, integrated space. Violent conflicts in “peripheral” regions of the global economy have consequences in major global cities—what happens in Syria affects what happens in Paris. These connections are missed when we approach the study of political violence as simply about events that happen “over there.” At the same time, suggestions that building walls will keep violence at bay misunderstands how deeply connected we all are now due to globalization—it is not possible to turn back time or technology, and simply reinforcing borders is a retrograde “methodological nationalist” response to complex problems that are essentially global in nature.

How we think about security shapes policy and action. Scholarly analysis might aim to be more self-conscious of this. The rise of global security challenges us to move beyond the methodological nationalist lens that has dominated traditional security studies. A “spatial turn” allows us to see more clearly where security takes place—not just, or even primarily, between states. It directs our attention to the non-national spaces of global security. Cities, cyberspace and our planet itself are just three such spaces; we should look at these and others so as to ensure policy responses that fit the problem.

Image credit: Police-anti-terrorist-team by arunasbiz1961, CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay. 

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Possible genetic pathway to melanoma

Genetic mutations that result in melanoma have been cataloged over the years. The missing piece has been an understanding of the order of their occurrence and how they move from a benign lesion to one that is cancerous. An article by Boris C. Bastian, MD, PhD, Gerson and Barbara Bass Bakar Distinguished Professor of Cancer Research at the University of California, San Francisco; Hunter Shane, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the university; and others hopes to help answer some of those questions.

“Over last 20 years, we have shown that there are distinct types of melanoma,” Bastian said. “These differ in cell of origin, mutational processes that alter the cells, and types of mutations that occur.”

Researchers have made substantial advances in finding the genetic alterations that lead to advanced disease. However, the order in which the lesions evolve these mutations wasn’t clear.

“There are a series of pathogenic or driver mutations in fully involved lesions,” Bastian said. “We set out in this study to look at changes in melanomas where at least some of the noncancerous precursor lesion was still identifiable.”

A total of 37 formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded melanocytic neoplasms were retrieved from the archives of hospitals in San Francisco, London, and Zurich. Overall, 150 distinct areas were prepared for genetic sequencing.

Each area was assessed microscopically by eight dermatopathologists and categorized as benign, intermediate but probably benign, intermediate but probably malignant, or malignant according to how far the pathologists judged the areas had progressed toward malignancy.

Closer to Malignant, More Mutations Seen

All those lesions unanimously deemed benign had only a single mutation, BRAF V600E, a common, well-established mutation in melanoma. This single genetic alteration appears to be all that is needed to form a common mole.

Pathologists also agreed at the malignant end of the spectrum where melanomas tended to show multiple mutations such as mutation of TERT and loss of CDK2NA. They also saw mutations of PTEN or TP53 in more advanced primary melanomas.

“One of the unexpected findings was there clearly were lesions that are genetically intermediate between clearly benign and clearly malignant,” Bastian said. “These genetically intermediate lesions happe­ned to also be those in which there was significant disagreement among the pathologists and which were placed between the benign and malignant categories by the consensus vote of the pathologists. Those were the lesions that without exception had multiple mutations.”

He further noted that controversy has persisted for decades about whether an intermediate stage lies between clearly benign and clearly malignant as a melanoma forms from a precursor lesion.

Distinct Genetic/Biologic Stages

“What we show for the first time is that there is a genetically and biologically distinct intermediate phase,” Bastian continued. “This is the first wave of new investigation looking at these intermediate lesions that may allow us to refine our clinical and histopathological criteria into a much more detailed risk assessment.”

Multiple evolutionary trajectories exist that start differently and lead to several types of melanoma. Those results confirm earlier observations suggesting melanoma has subtypes.

Strong UV Signature

The findings also point to a very strong UV signature in the genetic mutations. It is the first time that UV radiation has been shown to be the major pathogenic mechanism transforming benign lesions into melanomas by creating the mutations required for full transformation.

“The intermediate lesions tended to have significantly more mutations [than] the precursors,” Bastian said. “The increased numbers had a very strong UV signature telling us that this is what was transforming precursor in full-blown melanoma. We were stunned by the five- to sevenfold increase in the number of these mutations when compared to the precursor lesions.”

These results give people another reason to stay away from sources of UV radiation. He thinks that avoiding UV radiation could prevent existing moles from progressing to malignancy. Avoiding UV essentially gives the person another chance to stop the progression.

“We haven’t told anybody to keep their moles out of the sun,” Bastian said. “We can infer clearly that the pathogenic variable in turning lesions into cancer is UV radiation. By reducing exposure of your moles, you are likely to also be decreasing the possibility of transformation into melanoma.”

Changes in Diagnosis/Treatment

Some early indicators might exist of possible changes in how we diagnose and possibly even treatment melanoma.

“We can take this information, after other studies have confirmed it, and possibly look for specific mutations in a suspicious lesion,” Bastian said. “Current diagnosis is done through a microscope and doesn’t produce highly repeatable verdicts for a subset of lesions. It is likely that an assay could be developed based on genetic alterations that could place individual lesions on that trajectory from clearly benign to clearly malignant based on objective criteria.”

What is not yet clear is whether this is a stepwise movement or if it is possible to skip the intermediate level. He points to families prone to develop melanoma over multiple generations.

“They inherit a nonfunctional copy of one of the genes that usually gets mutated later and then random mutation leads to BRAF mutation as the second change,” Bastian said. “Whether this reversal of order could allow them to ‘skip’ one of these intermediate stages and form a melanoma without an apparent precursor is an intriguing proposition. We really don’t address the possibility in our research, and any ability to do so still needs to be determined.”

Lawrence Mark, MD, PhD, associate professor of dermatology at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, said he thinks that the article is interesting and important because it gives an early scientific indication validating what both clinical experience and intuition have been telling physicians about the development and progression of melanomas.

“We have hypothesized that melanoma arises through a chain of mutations leading to more and more deranged cellular activity to the point it could no longer control itself,” Mark said. “This study provides support for something we thought was true. When you start thinking about things in the right manner, you can start looking for things that might stop the pathway toward melanoma.”

Asad Umar, DVM, PhD, chief of the Gastrointestinal and Other Cancers Research Group at the National Cancer Institute, said that the importance of this study is that it is similar to other recent articles that examined the genomic landscape of cancers from other organs also showing a similar pattern. The article “does give us an early indication of a possible sequence for turning benign lesions into melanoma,” Umar said. “Right now the major takeaway, if these results can be replicated, is establishing genomic risk factors that can be added to other risk factors in deciding who should be [monitored] more closely.”

Direct Effects a Long Way Off

Although he does acknowledge the value of the additional information, he said he thinks that direct effects on either diagnosis or treatment are not likely soon. For example, translating this into a screening test is probably a long way off, if it is even feasible.

“The problem is quite difficult if you think about it,” Umar said. “If only 5% of lesions go on to progress to cancer, you have to sequence 100 lesions to just find five to follow and which ones are the meaningful ones? Even if you could find the 5% that might become cancerous you would have to follow them for a long time as benign moles don’t progress to cancer overnight.”

Some BRAF-inhibitor medications have shown some promise, but they are still early in development. However, nothing in this particular study offers guidance for a treatment anytime soon.

Concerns About Design

Umar has some concerns about the design of the study and how that might affect its influence.

“It is a strange design in my opinion and that is a limitation to be considered,” he said. “They looked at slides for both cancers and pre-cancers that they already knew had cancer, which limited their sets to just those regions that they targeted. It is a problem in that it doesn’t give you an unbiased opinion.”

That issue limits the sample size and it won’t apply to everyone. He said a larger sample set with unbiased samples could yield a better picture of other possible cancer-driving mutations.

“If you move outside the area of the lesion itself, you start to see mutations indicating a path but [that] doesn’t mean that is the only path,” Umar said. “We can’t be sure until we look at other possible pathways to the same point. There are usually multiple genomics paths in cancer.”

Adding a Piece of the Puzzle

But in the end, the results do help in understanding, at the very least, a piece of the genomic puzzle in melanoma.

“Our study sheds light on some long-existing murky areas and provides additional clarity in others,” Bastian said. “Hopefully this will motivate others to revisit the problem to identify and develop better criteria for diagnosis and recognition of intermediate lesions and a better understanding of what actually constitutes a melanoma.”

A version of this article originally appeared in the Journal of the Nation Cancer Institute.

Featured image credit: 28 F w/ in-transit met (melanoma) by Niels Olson. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Study Bible sampler

Study Bibles have been around almost as long as Bibles have been printed in English. While Christianity has long been considered a “religion of the book” (a phrase that not everybody likes), the Bible isn’t easy to understand. It’s so complex that the first universities (which emerged from monastic and cathedral schools) regularly taught Bible classes. With the Reformation and the Protestant focus on “the Bible alone” (sola scriptura is the fancy term for it), laity were encouraged to read the Bible. Problem was, by then the Bible was nearly a millennium-and-a-half old and difficult to understand.

Study Bibles arose out of the recognition that, even with a Bible in your own language, comprehension of that Bible couldn’t be taken for granted. Most readers had never been to the Holy Land. Places and customs that appear without explanation in the Bible were obscure. More than just the original languages hampered the modern reader. The solution was to offer Bibles with additional material.

The King James Bible, originally, had very little in the way of study helps. This was intentional. The Church of England had problems with some of the apparatus that appeared in earlier English Bibles. Today, King James Study Bibles are very popular among some Christian readers. In fact, a large portion of all Bibles purchased every year are Study Bibles.

It’s natural to wonder why, if Study Bibles are so useful, they didn’t appear earlier in history. If they’re so good to have, why weren’t they available in the beginning?

Individual reading of the Bible by the laity hasn’t always been possible, or even encouraged, among Christians. Literacy rates, while difficult to measure, were likely not high in the early years of the movement. Not only that, but the actual “final form” of the Bible wasn’t settled in even a basic way until about the fourth century CE. Nobody thought to write down how decisions were made about the final cut of the Bible, but a rough consensus emerged around this time. It was also the period of the early church gatherings to deal with troubling differences of opinion. The Ecumenical Councils, beginning with the First Council of Nicea, were concerned with unified church doctrine. Even the learned didn’t always agree on how to interpret the Bible.

Bible reading among the laity, when it became feasible, was not always desirable. As the Reformation itself demonstrates, different readers form different interpretations. Protestants, with their confidence in sola scriptura, encouraged believers to read the Bible for themselves. Looking at the number of Protestant denominations that have emerged (and continue to emerge), it’s clear that opinions on the Bible still differ widely. Five centuries after the Reformation, most people still find the Bible hard to understand.

The result has been the florescence of Study Bibles. Here’s a list of six fun tidbits about Study Bibles:

1. The Geneva Bible, an early English translation half-a-century older than the King James, was a Study Bible. It contained introductions to each book of the Bible, cross-references, maps, illustrations, tables, and indices. The Bible of the early English colonists to America was the Geneva Bible.

2. Catholic Bibles, from the Douay–Rheims translation on, have generally been Study Bibles. The Douay-Rheims Bible had extensive marginal notes. The tradition continued into the Jerusalem Bible, and then the New American Bible, where introductions and notes (respectively) precede and follow the biblical text.

3. The Scofield Reference Bible of 1909 was likely the most influential Study Bible in American history. The Scofield has introduced the dispensationalist outlook to generations of conservative Christians. If you’ve heard of the Rapture, you’ve met a form of dispensationalism.

4. Study Bibles are available for many faiths. Study Bibles are produced for Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics, and Jewish readers. Many Study Bibles are non-denominational, or interdenominational, intended for use by both religious and secular readers.

5. Study Bibles are also called “Reference Bibles” and “Annotated Bibles.” What marks a Bible as a “Study Bible” is extra material to help the reader understand the biblical text. Every major Bible publishing house offers at least one form of Study Bible.

6. Study Bibles have inspired study editions of other religious texts. Two study editions of the Qur’an have recently appeared and this points to a growing interest in annotated editions of other holy books. As long as there are sacred texts, help understanding them will remain welcome.

Featured image credit: Bible by condesign. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Prostitution: The world’s oldest public policy issue

Ever since the first arrangements were made for the exchange of some form of money for some form of sex, buying (or selling) sex has raised thorny issues for society’s rulers and governments. The Israelites condemned it, believing it would encourage men to seek sex outside marriage (Proverbs 23:27–28). Throughout much of European history, the profession was legal and often a source of tax revenue. The ancient Greeks and Roman used prostitution as a cash cow. It was unregulated in Britain until the Reformation, when it was criminalized. The question of how best to regulate prostitution is still with us, as evidenced by the plethora of policies across the world, from laissez-faire to outright prohibition. The Economist magazine thought the issue important enough to devote a cover to its own free trade position on prostitution (9–11 August 2014).

Modern economics is usually kind to market exchange, giving freely contracting individuals the benefit of the doubt rather than seeking to restrict them. Exceptions are made for market failure, that is, occasions where exchanges between individuals make society worse off. Two major failures relevant to the market for prostitution are externalities —where persons outside the exchange are negatively affected — and asymmetric information — where one party in an exchange has better information about the product or service than the other party. These types of failures create a role for government to regulate exchanges in some way. Secondhand smoke, for example, can be handled with a cigarette tax equal to the negative effects on nonsmokers, whereas asymmetric information can be handled with truth in labeling laws.

The failure often arises, however, not from the market, but from regulation. Violence against prostitutes from customers or bosses, for example, is a serious reality. Can you imagine a situation in which you, working at a fast food restaurant, are assaulted by a manager who doesn’t like the way you’re flipping burgers? Probably not. Then why is it a regular experience for prostitutes? Simply put, flipping burgers is legal and prostitution is not. Such situations are called government failures, that is, negative outcomes arising from unintended consequences of public policies.

The question of how best to regulate prostitution is still with us.

The regulatory tool kit for the sex trade is much older than is commonly thought. In 1724, the rogue social philosopher Bernard Mandeville wrote A Modest Defense of Publick Stews (brothels), analyzing the post-Reformation prostitution market in England with the steely detachment of the best modern economists. He laid out the costs and benefits, located the failures of market and government, and designed a policy to counter both. Mandeville split society into female prostitutes, men, and women who are not prostitutes (chiefly virgins and married women). For Mandeville, the “only End of all Law and Government” was to attempt to increase “the Welfare and Happiness of the Community,” and prohibition was harming everyone. Mandeville’s concerns arising from prohibition included the spread of syphilis (French Pox), the increased pressure on women to become sexually active outside of wedlock, the low level of health and safety of prostitutes, and the general commercial and physical health of the nation.

In view of all these concerns — much of them resulting from badly constructed policy — something had to be done to improve market outcomes “in such sort as may best prevent these Mischiefs.” Mandeville’s answer was the establishment of legal and well-regulated brothels. The brothels were to be clean and safe for the prostitutes; the prostitutes were to be checked regularly for sexually transmitted diseases and, if found infected, “sent to the Infirmary, and cured at the Publick Charge.” Moreover, a fund was to be set up to care for and educate the children of prostitutes along with a pension plan for the prostitutes — all to be paid for by a tax set large enough to cover the external costs arising from prostitution.

Broadly speaking, Mandeville believed that a well-designed policy of legal prostitution would have three benefits; decreased sexually transmitted diseases, decreased instances of sexual exploitation of women who were not prostitutes, and improvements in the health and safety of prostitutes.

Each of these issues has been the subject of academic study through the use of questionnaires of prostitutes in legal brothels, theoretical modeling and simulation, and empirical work based on a famous natural experiment arising from an unexpected court ruling in Rhode Island. A similar story arises each time. Legal prostitution is associated with decreased disease incidence, decreased sexual violence against women, and increased health and safety for prostitutes. For example, the Rhode Island experiment resulted in a 31% decrease in reported rape offenses and a 39% decrease in cases of gonorrhea in women, while legal prostitution in Nevada has resulted in zero cases of positive HIV tests among prostitutes in mandatory weekly exams and few concerns with violence against prostitutes.

Maybe it is time to give Mandeville another hearing.

Featured image credit: Red Lights by Marco Bellucci. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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Florence Foster Jenkins: a user’s guide to aging the female voice

In a brief scene in the 1931 Warner Bros. horror film, Svengali, an aging heiress takes voice lessons, falls in love with her teacher, and upon finding her love unrequited and her voice uninspired, throws herself in the river. That the film hastily banishes her for these infractions isn’t much of a surprise, for we don’t tend to remember bad voices, nor do we dwell on older women who would dare possess them. In fact, were it up to Hollywood, we’d hardly dwell on older women at all. Unlike her male peers who continue to be paid handsomely well into their 50s, when an actress reaches the age of 34, her salary drops precipitously. Assuming she can even find her way to the screen, of course, for as popular male stars inevitably grow older, their on-screen love interests typically do not. It would seem that Hollywood follows the bleak mantra implicit in Sunset Boulevard: to see an aging actress is unpleasant, to love one is perverse. But what does it mean to hear an older woman sing or speak on screen? Does Hollywood’s ageism apply to perceptions about the female voice?

Florence Foster Jenkins, a new movie starring Meryl Streep with a planned release date later this spring, may provide an answer. Directed by Stephen Frears (who made The Queen with Helen Mirren and Philomena with Judi Dench), the film is based on a true story of a surprising musical career. Born to a wealthy Pennsylvania family, Florence Foster Jenkins left home against the wishes of her parents to marry and become a singer, a dream that cost her everything when her husband abandoned her, leaving her with syphilis and an inability to fully support herself. Undeterred, however, Jenkins taught the piano until she inherited a great deal of money in her 40s and began singing lessons in earnest. By all accounts, no matter how hard she worked Jenkins remained very bad at her craft. And that would be the end of the story, were it not for Jenkins’ refusal to succumb to the fate of Svengali’s heiress or Hollywood’s female romantic leads. Rather than cave to criticism of her efforts, Jenkins persisted, until eventually, in 1944, at the age of 76, she gave a performance at Carnegie Hall that was uproarious, ridiculous, and sold-out in a mere two hours.

It would be easy to dismiss Florence Foster Jenkins as delusional, but history can’t seem to dismiss her at all. Her recordings still sell, her life story has become a successful play, and now, one of the greatest actresses of our time will play her on screen. When people write about Jenkins’ oddities, and there were many, they tend to discuss the curious concurrence of her inability to sing and her confidence that she had every right to do so. They ask, “Didn’t she realize everyone was laughing at her?” That she seems not to have cared produces a collective shudder of sympathetic embarrassment. However, rarely does someone point to her age at the peak of her fame, which is remarkable, for the list of singers giving a public debut in their mid-70s must be incredibly short. I wonder if our horror at Jenkins’ determination is a substitute for a more frightening question: “Wouldn’t we laugh at any older woman who dares to speak without being asked?”

A theorist of voices, Michel Chion writes, “Only a woman’s voice can invade and transcend space… No need for a curtain. The curtain drop is a masculine artifice.” Yet the world is full of curtains. Curtains define the stages on which women play roles written by patriarchy. They determine which women are seen and which remain invisible. And on most of us, they close before we’re ready. The voice, however, poses a challenge to the regulation of women’s bodies. A woman’s voice isn’t bound to space or character; it’s an idea that demands action. Beautiful female voices lure us to death, as with the sirens of Odysseus, or call us to life, as with the mother’s voice heard in the womb. Voices that aren’t beautiful expose the flaws in the logic of how we characterize women. They insist that a woman can be something other than a seductress or a mother.

We might be tempted to point to Meryl Streep to refute claims about the limited representation of older women in Hollywood. Since reaching the age of 60, she has played Margaret Thatcher, a fairy tale witch, a failed rock star, and a British suffragette. Indeed, there seems to be an incredible mismatch between Meryl Streep, who has more Oscar nominations than any other actress in film history, and Florence Foster Jenkins, who performed so badly that one review of her Carnegie Hall concert declared she could sing “everything but notes.” Although she sings from time to time in her earlier films, it’s only in the past decade that Streep has ventured wholeheartedly into musicals, a career shift that has been received mostly with acclaim. In making that same leap toward a musical future, however, Jenkins was seen as an affront to a number of artistic and social standards—that women ought to fade quietly out of view, that people who sing should have a particular kind of training, that youth is more valuable than passion. Yet are these women really so different? Meryl Streep has remarked that she wants to portray women who assert: “I’m not what I look like.” With enormous angel’s wings strapped to her back and a crown of pearls atop her head, Florence Foster Jenkins certainly didn’t look like a “respectable” American socialite. She didn’t sound like one either. And that’s the point. There may be only room enough in Hollywood for one Meryl Streep, but any of us could be Florence Foster Jenkins. By using her voice in a way that she loved, Florence Foster Jenkins tore down curtains. I hope she inspires the rest of us to do the same.

Featured image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

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