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Election 2015: ‘Don’t vote, it just encourages the b**tards’

By Matthew Flinders

Without a whistle or a bang from a starter’s gun, the 2015 general election campaign is now well under way. Labour’s proposed freeze on energy prices marks a first tentative attempt to seize the pre-election agenda, while the Chancellor’s autumn statement next month looks set to respond by including measures aimed at cutting the cost of living.

Although Russell Brand’s recent interview with Jeremy Paxman is unlikely to be remembered as a ‘classic’ political interview that redefined a debate, or shaped a career, it did draw attention to the fact that the British public is becoming increasingly disengaged with politics. The 2013 ‘British Social Attitudes Survey’ revealed that only a small majority of the public now turns out to vote, and fewer than ever before identify with a political party. The United Kingdom is by no means unique in terms of the relationship between the governors and the governed. A quick glance at the titles of recent books on this topic – Why We Hate Politics (Colin Hay), The Life and Death of Democracy (John Keane), Don’t vote, it just encourages the b**tards (P.J. O’Rourke) — reflects the fact that ‘disaffected democrats’ appear to exist in every part of the world. But what is to be done?

There are, as Bernard Crick emphasised in his classic In Defence of Politics (1962), no simple answers to complex questions. Yet, in the intervening half-century since Crick’s classic book was published, public attitudes to political institutions, political processes, and politicians have become increasingly negative. Today three-quarters of the public feel the political system is not working for them, younger people are less likely to identify with a political party, less likely to believe it a civic duty to vote, and are less likely to have engaged in any conventional political activities. Recent research suggests that only 12% of those aged 18-25 will definitely vote in 2015. The other 88% are seemingly unsure whether it is worth voting at all.

In this context Russell Brand’s arguments appear slightly more sophisticated than some of his critics might have appreciated. The comedian’s position was not that people should not vote but that it was rational for people not to express their democratic right when there was no real choice between the main parties. To do otherwise was simply to participate in a sham that actually gnawed away at the health of democratic politics. The problem with this argument is that it polarises the debate around a set of rather crude options: ‘Vote!’ versus ‘Don’t Vote’, the ‘engaged’ versus ‘the disengaged’, ‘politicians’ versus ‘comedians’. Ok, so I made the last bit up but you know what I mean.

Surely the real question is how to make voting matter? For some people this might involve the reform of the electoral system, or compulsory voting, and these ideas merit consideration (although in Australia, where voting is compulsory, levels of public trust in politics make the United Kingdom look positively healthy). However, a simpler and more effective reform would be the addition of a ‘None of the Above’ option on all ballot papers. In this way citizens could make a formal and recognised contribution to the electoral results without having to demonstrate their frustration through spoiling their ballot paper or simply not bothering to vote. The danger is that the ‘None of the Above’ option might actually win quite a few elections!

A more radical option involves the introduction of time limits for MPs. Let us say – for the sake of argument – a maximum of two or three terms after which the individual would have to leave Parliament and serve the same period ‘in the real world’ before being eligible to stand for re-election. Introducing a term-limit would at least end the current system – the political equivalent of ‘bed blocking’ – by shaking-up the notion of ‘safe seats’. It would give more chances to more people, and would offer a balance between stability and fresh thinking. It would also make voting a far more significant political act. Although I am no ‘Mystic Meg’ my guess is that our current MPs will hate this idea. Protestations and all manner of reasons not to open-up a debate on this matter will inevitably pour forth but my interest lies not with the current generation of politicians but with the future.

An even more radical option involves engaging with the public to solve the pressing political issues. Take reform of the House of Lords for example. How many public consultations, Royal Commissions, and parliamentary inquiries can one issue consume before someone admits that a more radical approach is needed? This might involve the creation of a Citizens’ Assembly on the Second Chamber modelled on British Columbia’s Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. A broad selection of members of the public drawn from all across the United Kingdom and in a way that broadly reflects society at large (let us say 200 people) would become members of the Assembly. Once selected, the Assembly would work through three main phases. In the first educational phase, all the members would be brought together for a number of lectures and seminars about the role of second chambers and their composition. In the second stage, the focus would be on community engagement as the Assembly Members went back to their localities to organise and lead a number of community discussion groups, with the aim being to gauge the views of the public at large. The final stage focuses on decisions. After debating the various options on the basis of an informed understanding of the topic, and presenting a cross section of views drawn from their community engagement, the Assembly must come to a final recommendation to offer the public.

The campaign could start right here, right now with this blog: the Campaign for a Citizen’s Assembly on Lords Reform. For the canny politician with fixed-elections in mind, this idea has the twin attraction of making them appear a dynamic democrat while also kicking the issue of Lords Reform into the long grass for the length of the 2015-2020 Parliament. Establish the Citizens’ Assembly in 2015 (or 2016 by the time the post-election dust has settled), with the requirement to announce its final recommendation by the end of 2018, add a year to ensure a thorough public information campaign, and then a public referendum on the Assembly’s recommendation can be held in conjunction with the May 2020 General Election. Perfect.

I can already hear the naysayers denying the public’s capacity to deal with such complex issues, or denying that an Assembly could ever come to a clear single recommendation, but international experience leads me to a different conclusion.

Professor Matthew Flinders is Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield. His next project for the BBC – ‘When Politics and Comedy Collides’ – will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 21 December 2013. Author of Defending Politics (2012), you can follow Matthew Flinders on Twitter @PoliticalSpike and read more of his articles on the OUPblog.

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Image credit: House of Lords Microcosm edit, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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Lost writings of Latin literature

By Peter Knox and J.C. McKeown

Once upon a time, the Greek city of Cyrene on the coast of Libya grew prosperous through the export of silphium, a plant much used in cookery and medicine. But then the farmers learned that there was more money to be made through rearing goats. Overgrazing ruined silphium’s habitat quickly and completely, and the last sorry stalk was presented to the emperor Nero in the middle of the first century AD. In Apicius’s recipe book, the Art of Cookery, silphium is one of the ingredients in stuffed sow’s belly. Modern cookbooks that replicate Apicius tacitly omit silphium from the recipe for this dish. Unless silphium still lingers on in some remote Libyan oasis, we can never know what stuffed sow’s belly should really taste like.

It’s much the same with reading Latin literature. The Aeneid is one of the greatest poems ever written, but how much more we would be able to admire its detailed perfection if we only had Ennius’s Annals, which Virgil is known to have imitated and adapted throughout. The loss of a vital ingredient is felt even more intensely with love elegy. Much of our enjoyment of Ovid’s account of his frustration when he is locked out by his mistress is derived from seeing how he varies the accounts of the same scenario given by Propertius and Tibullus. It is depressing to know the almost total loss of their chief model, the four books of Amores by Cornelius Gallus, the founder of the elegiac genre.

No doubt the Roman world produced many literary masterpieces of which we are completely unaware. Even a bare and highly selective catalog of those known to be lost makes for very solemn reading. No doubt other readers would include here other sadly lost works, for de gustibus non disputandum est:

A full copy of the fifth-century BC law code, the Twelve Tables, which would vastly improve our knowledge of the origins and development of the legal system, one of Rome’s greatest legacies to the world.
Livius Andronicus’s translation of the Odyssey, which is traditionally regarded as the earliest Roman poetic text. It is also the earliest literary text in any culture known to have been translated from another language.
The emperor Claudius’s histories of Carthage and of the Etruscans, important peoples about whom we learn so little elsewhere.
The dictator Sulla’s memoirs and Asinius Pollio’s histories would broaden our perception of the last years of the Republic. As things are, seventy-five percent of what survives in Latin from Cicero’s lifetime was written by Cicero himself.
The speeches by Hortenius in defence of Gaius Verres, whom Cicero’s prosecution destroyed in 70 BC. There are no extant speeches, forensic or otherwise, by anyone but Cicero till AD 100.
The speech in 42 BC by Hortensius’s daughter, Hortensia, in which she pleaded successfully with the Triumvirs for amendments to the war tax imposed on wealthy women.
Mark Antony’s speech on his drunkenness.

Mark Antony. Not drunk.

Varro’s Antiquities of Human and Divine Affairs, a vast store of information about Roman civilization, both religious and secular.
Ovid’s single tragedy, the Medea, perhaps his only important work that has not survived. This is a particularly poignant loss, given that Quintilian, who had a generally rather low opinion of Ovid, declares that the Medea shows what he was capable of when he applied himself properly. If Ovid ever did write a poem in Getic in praise of the imperial family, that would also be worth having for its linguistic, if perhaps not its literary, interest.
The histories of Cremutius Cordus, which were burned by order of the senate when he was forced to commit suicide in AD 25, and the memoirs of Agrippina the Younger. They would go some way to filling the conspicuous absence of contemporary records of the early empire.
The handbook on throwing javelins from horseback, written by Pliny the Elder on the wild German frontier. It would solve his image problem, given that he tends to be thought of nowadays as a bumbling professorial type who doesn’t know enough to come in from the ash that was raining down from Vesuvius.
The biographies of the emperors, probably Hadrian to Elagabalus, by the mysterious Marius Maximus, a missing link between Suetonius and the bizarre imaginings preserved in the Historia Augusta.

Most classical texts that have come down to us have done so because they deserve to survive: the labor of transcribing them was considered worthwhile. But there are quite a few works known to be lost that have a certain fascination even if their literary merits were perhaps not great:

As Catullus predicted, Volusius’s cacata carta (“shitty sheet”) has not survived, but it would have been good if we could have made up our own minds about him. We’d at least make up for quality with quantity.
Tacitus said that Caesar and Brutus were luckier than Cicero, because not so many people knew they had written poetry. Even so, poetry composed by the great and the good has a special appeal: if only Augustus’s Ajax hadn’t fallen on his sponge.
Valerius Maximus can find only three women to include in his catalogue of “women whom nature and decency could not restrain from public speaking”. One was Hortensia (see above), but what are we to make of Afrania, a senator’s wife who always chose to speak in court on her own behalf? Her speeches, characterized by Valerius as “weird barkings,” could not fail to alter our perspective on Roman society.

Is it easier to resign oneself to the fair certainty that none of these lost works of Latin literature will ever be recovered, or to cope with the tantalizingly random reemergence of so much Greek literature? Scholars who work on Roman elegy or the early empire are not holding back in anticipation of the discovery of a complete text of Gallus or of Cremutius Cordus, but who can say what lost treasures of Greek literature are about to turn up on Athos or at Oxyrhynchus? We are all waiting for Sappho. Greek literature without her is like Hamlet without the princess of Denmark.

Peter E. Knox is Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. J.C. McKeown is Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Together, they are the editors of The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature.

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Image credit: L’entrée de Marc-Antoine à Ephèse by Charles-Joseph Natoire, 1741. Dépôt du Musée du Louvre. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Syria and the social netwar 2011-2013

Syria is Oxford University Press’s Place of the Year, and to call attention to the sociopolitical turmoil in the country, we present a brief excerpt from Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla by David Kilcullen. This is a powerful study of the important role technology, particularly social media, plays in the war zone in Syria.

As mentioned earlier, the war in Syria is going on as I write, and its outcome—after two years of fighting, a million refugees crowded into squalid camps in neighboring countries, millions of displaced persons within Syria, and eighty thousand killed and counting—remains in doubt. Syria represents a huge escalation in violence, scale, and scope over previous uprisings in the Arab Awakening, as far beyond the conflict in Libya as Libya was beyond the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. To do justice to the Syrian uprising would require a full-length study, and I don’t propose to discuss it in detail here—only to highlight aspects that are directly relevant to our examination of future conflict environments.

The Syrian war began, like the other uprisings, as a series of peaceful protests. These first broke out in the southern city of Daraa on March 15, 2011, a few days before NATO began its intervention in Libya. Daraa was experiencing significant stress: decades of neglect and mismanaged resources contributed to an unprecedented and severe drought, and there had been am influx of population into the city’s outlying districts over the past few months. Syria has lost half its available water supply over the past decade, in part because of mismanagement and urban growth, in part because of changing weather and rainfall patterns. As a result, water is rationed in all of Syria’s cities, the water system in most towns is operating right at the limit of its capacity, and disturbances in water supply can have immediate destabilizing effects. As noted in Chapter 1 , water supply is one of the most challenging aspects of urban governance, and the influx of a large number of displaced people, seeking water, into a city already rationing its water supply represents one of the most severe possible stresses on a city’s metabolism. In Syria’s case, this was an added burden on top of the demands of roughly 1.5 million Iraqi refugees, many of whom moved to the Sayyida Zeinab neighborhood south of Damascus as the Iraq war worsened after 2004. “Although political repression may have fueled a steady undercurrent of dissent over the last few decades, the regime’s failure to put in place economic measures to alleviate the effects of drought was a critical driver in propelling such massive mobilizations of dissent . . . Syrian cities [served] as junctures where the grievances of displaced rural migrants and disenfranchised urban residents meet and come to question the very nature and distribution of power.”

The immediate trigger for the protests was the arrest and beating of three teenage boys, inspired by protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere, who tagged a building with anti-regime graffiti. Several hundred people rallied to demand the boys’ release, and the protests turned violent aft er security forces fired on the crowd. Riot police killed more than four hundred protestors, particularly targeting mourners at protestors’ funerals, in the first three months of clashes in Daraa alone. They attempted to seal off Daraa from the outside world, but as in the other uprisings, thousands of demonstrators across the country subsequently took to the streets, and the demonstrations quickly spread to towns across Syria in March and April 2011. Activists used cellphones and social media to connect with each other and with international supporters, and human networks linked urban dwellers in Damascus and Aleppo (Syria’s two largest cities) to people in rural areas experiencing unrest. By early May, hundreds had been killed or detained in massive riots, and the army had deployed tanks and thousands of troops in Homs and Daraa to suppress what was now morphing into an armed uprising.

Pro-regime militias, known in Syria as shabiha , “ghosts,” committed massacres in several towns, and secret police arrested (and in many cases tortured, killed, or “disappeared”) dissidents across the country as the conflict escalated in May and June. 145 The shabiha , in a pattern that mirrors the other examples we have explored, were drawn largely from gangs of marginalized street youth, criminal networks, and organized thugs who operated in poor, marginalized “garrison districts” in Syrian cities and often had close patron-client relationships with regime officials. As the uprising escalated, the shabiha became a key irregular auxiliary force, which the regime regularly employed in order to intimidate the population.

Kafranbel Local Council, Syria. Photo via Caerus Associates network. Used with permission.

Learning from the experience of the Egyptian and Libyan regimes, the Syrian government under President Bashar al-Assad quickly offered a series of compromises and concessions, but none of these offers to relax regime restrictions and introduce limited democratic freedoms was enough to appease the protestors. Assad initially left the Internet and phone networks up and quickly mobilized an Iranian-supported Electronic Army to harass activists, hack opposition websites, and undermine anti-regime cohesion by spreading confusing messages. More sophisticated than the government in Egypt, the Syrian regime had created an extremely effective system of wiretapping, cellphone interception, and Internet surveillance, and so the security forces’ instinct at first was to allow unrestricted use of these tools as a way of gathering information on the protestors. When protestors began using cellphones to post updates on Twitter, however, and using cellphone cameras to gather and broadcast images of regime brutality, this caught the security services by surprise, forcing a rethink.

Over the preceding decade, there’d been an explosion in digital connectivity and information access in Syria. Hafez al-Assad, Syria’s dictator from 1971 until his death in 2000, had enforced extremely tight restrictions on information and connectivity—allowing no international media, satellite television, cellphones, or Internet access whatsoever. However, his son and successor, Bashar al-Assad, was something of a computer geek, taking an active role as the head of the Syrian Computer Society after his brother Basel died in 1994. On his accession as president in 2000, Bashar al-Assad initially made efforts to modernize Syria, tolerating a limited amount of political dissent during a short-lived period known as the Damascus Spring, and opening up electronic connectivity to ordinary Syrians, to include satellite and cable television, cellphone networks, and open Internet access.

Despite occasional crackdowns—the regime banned YouTube, for example, in April 2007 after the site uploaded a clip of President Assad’s wife, Asma, with her underwear exposed in a gust of wind—Syrians generally had excellent access to digital connectivity, and Internet penetration and cellphone usage rates in Syria were vastly higher than in any other country affected by the Arab Awakening. According to World Bank data, between 2002 and 2012, Syrian cellphone usage rates “shot up by 2,347 percent (by contrast, they increased by 83 percent in the US during the same time period). This was almost double that of similarly repressive environments in Egypt and Tunisia at the time. What is perhaps even more incredible is Syria’s Internet penetration growth rates, which shot up by 883 percent, greater than Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia (for comparison, Internet penetration only increased by 27 percent in the US during the same time period).”

But by June 4, 2011, the regime was forced to suspend Internet access in an attempt to stanch the flow of damaging images and video clips documenting regime brutality, which were being posted on the Internet and broadcast on satellite television. Another reason for the ban on land based Internet may have been that this enabled the regime’s security services to detect who was still using satellite-based Internet in the country, and thus to locate and target dissidents and guerrilla groups. As in the other uprisings, when the regime banned the Internet, Syrians improvised mesh networks, smuggled videos out to Lebanon to be uploaded there, and jury-rigged their own satellite uplinks (a traditional pastime—under Hafez al-Assad’s ban, the Syrian army had run a lucrative side business in black market sales of satellite dishes so that people could access banned satellite television channels). At the same time, international activists (including Anonymous, once again, with #OpSyria) and a network of diaspora supporters and social media networks stepped into the breach.

By July, cities across the country—including Damascus, Aleppo, Daraa, Idlib, Homs, and Hama, together representing almost 40 percent of Syria’s population of just under 21 million—were experiencing violent unrest. Protestors were arming themselves, guerrilla groups were forming, and the regime had lost control of many outlying towns and cities. As in conflict in Libya, a civilian democracy movement was emerging in parallel with a diverse armed resistance that included jihadist groups, secular nationalists, ethnic separatists, military defectors, and tribal groups. On the ground in Syria, leaders of armed groups rapidly marginalized and overshadowed the unarmed pro-democracy movement as the violence spread, emphasizing the importance (which we noted in the last chapter) of coercive means as the underlying enabler for competitive control over populations: armed groups could always outcompete unarmed groups at the coercive end of the spectrum of control, and thus rapidly became dominant on the ground.

At the same time, liberated areas formed district and neighborhood councils to administer their areas and provide essential services once the regime had withdrawn. Relations between the armed resistance and these local administrative councils were oft en complex and fractious, with armed groups trying to co-opt or intimidate the councils, and civilians trying to manipulate armed groups to further their own interests and minimize risk. The situation stabilized somewhat after September 25, when military defectors (many of whom were Sunni officers of the Syrian army) formally announced an armed insurrection against the regime and formed the Free Syrian Army. A week later, on October 2, civilian opposition groups formed the Syrian National Council, similar to Libya’s National Transition Council, and sought to impose order on a chaotic set of military and political actors opposing the regime. In this effort, the rebel movement was (consciously or unconsciously) acting to create the kind of wide-spectrum competitive control system that we discussed in Chapter 3 , adding persuasive and administrative capabilities to their existing coercive capabilities in order to give them more resiliency and a stronger capacity to control territory and population.

David Kilcullen is the author of the highly acclaimed Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla, The Accidental Guerrilla and Counterinsurgency. A former soldier and diplomat, he served as a senior advisor to both General David H. Petraeus and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In recent years he has focused on fieldwork to support aid agencies, non-government organizations and local communities in conflict and disaster-affected regions, and on developing new ways to think about complex conflicts in highly networked urban environments.Read his previous blog posts.

The Oxford Atlas Place of the Year 2013 is Syria. The Oxford Atlas Place of the Year is a location — from street corners to planets — around the globe (and beyond) which has attracted a great deal of interest during the year to date and judged to reflect the important discoveries, conflicts, challenges, and successes of that particular year. Learn more about Place of the Year on the OUPblog.

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Who’s Who in 2014 [infographics]

December sees the annual update of Who’s Who, the essential directory of the noteworthy and influential in all walks of life, in the United Kingdom and worldwide. This year, over 1,000 new lives have been added to the resource. Who’s made it in in 2014? From actors to authors, and presenters to politicians, discover the entries of a vast selection of past and present influential figures, written by the individual themselves.

Explore the breakdown of new lives entering Who’s Who by name, birth year, secondary school, university, and work location, including Thomas Hooper, Oxford University graduate and director of Les Miserables (2012), author Malorie Blackman, who was born in 1962, and comedian Andy Parsons, just one of the 25 notable ‘Andrews’!

The majority of new entrants this year are from the Greater London area, but many interesting figures have been drawn from other places: Miranda Hart, a Devonshire-born actress, comedienne and writer, for example.

Using the Job Sectors and Gender gateway is a quick and easy way to establish the breakdown of occupations and professions of the 2014 Who’s Who entrants. Figures such as Mark Carney, the new Governor of the Bank of England, are among the large Government, Public Administration, and Politics sector. Crossing over to the world of sport, retired Rugby Union football player and cricketer Alastair Hignell and gold medal-winning athlete Dame Sarah Storey are included.

Who’s Who is the essential directory of the noteworthy and influential in every area of public life, published worldwide, and written by the entrants themselves. Who’s Who 2014 includes autobiographical information on over 34,000 influential people from all walks of life. You can browse by people, education, and even recreation. The 166th edition includes a foreword by the Chairman of Imperial War Museums, Sir Francis Richards. For free lives of the day, follow Who’s Who on Twitter @ukwhoswho. You can gain full access to Who’s Who via subscription.

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A day in Eyeth

To commemorate International Day of Persons with Disabilities, we are pleased to share this post from Jeannette Jones about her experiences with music in Deaf culture.

By Jeannette D. Jones

There’s a legendary world in Deaf culture lore. It’s like Earth but it’s for people of the eye, so they call it Eyeth (get it? EARth, EYEth). In this world, people listen with their eyes with the comfort of being typical, just the way life is, unlike the existence of a Deaf person on Earth, heavily mediated through hearing devices, pads of paper, interpreters, lip reading, and gestures.

I got a small peek into what Eyeth might look like a year and a half ago, when I attended the biennial National Association of the Deaf (NAD) meeting on a sweltering weekend in July in Louisville, KY. When I got there, DeaFestival, a day of arts and fun, was just launching. My goal was to catch as much music and time with musicians as possible, especially with the Deaf rock band Beethoven’s Nightmare. And my job for the day was “listening” (LISTEN-EYES in American Sign Language).

Beethoven’s Nightmare via facebook.com/BeethovensNightmare.

When I stepped across the crosswalk of the streets bordering the convention center, I crossed the threshold into a Deaf world. Everyone around me was signing. Every restaurant in the vicinity had a pad of paper on its counter, a few adventuresome servers had learned some signs. I have been in Deaf environments before, for example at the local Deaf school. But this was different, it was like a small town with adults conducting business in ASL.

A break in the afternoon allowed me to approach the drummer of the band, “Let’s talk.” He says “Ok.” And I’m whisked into a conversation about music with total strangers. A woman about my age said she’s never liked music, she never understood it, and it wasn’t fun to try to lip-read bands. Her friend said, “Oh, you need to learn how to feel it. I love music! It’s like a drug!” She’s open to being convinced. All afternoon I followed the drummer, Bob Hiltermann, around the vendor booths of the NAD meeting, talking to people about music. Another woman was “forced” to take music classes in her mainstream education. Many Deaf people haven’t had opportunities to experience music so it is nothing; others love it and over and over again I heard, “Once you connect what you’re feeling with what’s going on on-stage, it’s amazing!”

I turned to the bass player of Beethoven’s Nightmare, Ed Chevy, “Let’s talk.” We sit down. It is 104 degrees under the tent. He tells me again how much they want to reach out to their Deaf culture with music. Chevy explains that in Deaf culture there is a rich tradition of story-telling and mime, but not so much a musical culture. Beethoven’s Nightmare wants to change that, opening the door of possibility of a musical experience, but first they have to disassociate the notion that this experience is going to be LISTEN-EARS like it is for a hearing person. For them their Deaf musical experience is feeling the beat along with sign language and movement.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Later as evening fell, everyone gathered under the tent for the music. The young Deaf rapper, Sean Forbes, came out waving his arms, getting the crowd excited. Deaf teens and college-aged kids flocked around the stage, screaming and cheering, enthusiastically waving their hands and pounding the air with the beat. He raps in American Sign Language, performing vocals in English over his signs. Forbes’s songs are suffused with his experience as a Deaf person. Creating a bridge between the Deaf and hearing worlds is a driving motivation in his work. He is an inspiration for American Deaf youth, who sport his fan T-shirts that say “I’m Deaf!” in the bold letters from one his songs. In Forbes, Deaf youth see an artistic world that does not exclude them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

While waiting for Beethoven’s Nightmare to get situated for their set, the emcee called for people to come up to the stage to share their memories of being at Gallaudet University, the only Deaf liberal arts college in the world, with the members of the band: “You know we Deaf folks share our stories to preserve our history and preserve our culture, and this is a way of documenting our past.” One woman excitedly came to the stage, and recounted her memory: “I was there in 1977. I knew Ed…they were there for my freshman, sophomore, junior years. They were the best! So great!” Another couple sitting near me also shared about their time at Gallaudet with the band members, telling of how the band played often on Friday nights, for their fellow Deaf students who danced along. Hiltermann distinguishes their group as the only Deaf rock band, describing what they do as “rock and roll infused with American Sign Language.” With this statement Hiltermann is calling on us to consider that ASL is part of the music—not just a text that stands alone, nor a translation of preexisting English lyrics. In their performance, a vocalist sings in English, while signers on stage perform the song in ASL.

Thinking about my day in Eyeth, I am challenged, as a hearing person, to reevaluate how I experience music. I feel the bass pounding deep in my core. I see the music, the lyrics, moving my hands with the beat, performing signs with the chorus along with the rest of the audience. My intersection with a Deaf experience of music has made visible certain multi-sensory aspects of my own hearing as a hearing person that often go unmentioned, and I believe that the binary of the categories of Deaf and hearing becomes are blurred, as we begin to understand the broad spectrum on which musical experiences can lie, somewhere between the ears, the eyes, and the body.

Jeannette D. Jones is a doctoral student in historical musicology at Boston University. Her essay, “Imagined Hearing: Music-making in Deaf Culture” will appear in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies. She has also blogged at the new blog, Music and Disability at the AMS and SMT, the official blog of Music and Disability Studies at the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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Q&A with T.V. Paul on the 25th anniversary of Benazir Bhutto’s election

Twenty-five years ago today, Benazir Bhutto became the first female Prime Minister of Pakistan and the first female head of government in a Muslim country. T.V. Paul, author of The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World, joins us to discuss her legacy, the role of women in Pakistani politics today, and the changing shape of political parties in Pakistan.

Benazir Bhutto was Pakistan’s first and, so far, only female Prime Minister of Pakistan. What has changed for women in Pakistani politics since then?

Women’s role in Pakistan’s social and political life still remains secondary. Benazir Bhutto was elected prime minister largely because she was the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and the best known figure for the Pakistan People’s Party in 1988. In South Asia almost all women leaders emerged due to their close family links. In the May 2013 elections for the 272 elected members in the National Assembly, as many 150 women candidates contested, but only 6 won. However, an additional 60 seats are reserved for women. In the provincial elections 313 women contested and 10 won.

Bhutto and her successors introduced very little meaningful legislation to support women, barring the reservation of some seats in parliament. She promised to remove the Hudood ordinance of the Zia-ul-Haq regime, which undercut women’s rights considerably, but was not successful. In fact, a precipitous decline has occurred in the area of women’s education as the state is unable to control Taliban engineered opposition to girls’ education in many parts of Pakistan where they retain de facto control. The October 2012 shooting of young activist Malala Yousafzai has brought this issue to international attention more forcefully, but it is yet to be seen how Pakistan tackles the problem, especially in the context of the ongoing struggle with the Taliban and other sectarian forces.

Benazir Bhutto, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, speaks to the press upon her arrival for a state visit at Andrews Air Force Base, May 6, 1989. Image by SRA Gerald B. Johnson, United States Department of Defense. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

What was Bhutto’s legacy? What were her key political successes or failures?

Bhutto’s legacy is a mixed one. On the one hand, she proved that a woman can be prime minister of an orthodox Muslim country and she showed much courage in the face of adversity, especially in the context of the assassination of her father and two brothers, the long jail terms and house arrests of her and her husband, and constant challenges from the army, mullahs, and other political parties. On the other hand, her policies were driven by a hard realpolitik agenda and they proved to be hurtful to Pakistan in the long run. Three areas in which Bhutto’s policies did harm to Pakistan were:

Bhutto’s strong support of the Taliban in Afghanistan, by appointing a pro-Taliban Pashtun leader as minister of the interior and thereby ensuring Taliban’s success in the civil war, the consequences of which are still haunting Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the world.
Her allowing and supporting the A.Q. Khan network in spreading nuclear materials to North Korea, Iran, and Libya during the 1990s. In an interview she confessed carrying CDs of nuclear designs to Pyongyang, which she denied later.
She increased Pakistan’s support to militant groups fighting against India in Kashmir. These same groups now have become a challenge to Pakistan’s internal peace and act as spoilers in any rapprochement with India.

On the positive side, it must be noted that she refused to approve a limited military action in Kashmir similar to the Kargil operation in 1999 as proposed by Pervez Musharraf, a lieutenant general during her period. She had great difficulty managing relations with the military and presidents (who were trying to gain power from the elected government). It may well be that she pursued hard realpolitik external policies to placate the military and prove her mettle as a tough leader in a male-dominated country.

What role does Bhutto’s party, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), play in Pakistan today?

Bhutto’s assassination in December 2007 generated a considerable wave of sympathy for the PPP, and subsequent electoral victory in February 2008, which led to a coalition government spearheaded by her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, as president. It also led to the appointment of two prime ministers during the period. Zardari completed his six year term, but in the May 2013 elections the PPP lost its majority to Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (N). It came second in the number of seats, although the second position in terms of popular votes went to cricket-star-turned-politician Imran Kahn’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. Only in the province of Sindh did the PPP maintain a respectable position. President Zardari and his son, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, the chairman of PPP, stayed away from the electoral campaign fearing militant attacks.

The Zardari government could take credit for getting rid of the military rule and staying in office full term, as well as for the addition of the 18th constitutional amendment which made Pakistan a parliamentary democracy by transferring presidential powers to the prime minister and the cabinet, improving the freedom of the press, occasional consensus based legislations, as well as some economic support to poor families. The party lost largely due to the disenchantment of the electorate with the deteriorating law and order situation, a crumbling economy, especially high unemployment, and the deepening crisis in electricity supply among other things. Zardari’s pro-US position, especially in allowing drone attacks on the Taliban, which sometimes claimed innocent civilians as victims, also hurt the PPP’s position.

How does the current ruling party, Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), differ from the PPP?

Nawaz Sharif’s party won the largest number of seats from the Punjab, the bastion of Pakistan’s political and economic power. The differences are that the PPP is left of the center, with a proclaimed social democratic ideology, while PML(N) is center-right with a more conservative approach. Sharif’s support base comes largely from landed aristocracy and small and medium businesses in the Punjab, while the PPP has a more working class and peasant support base from the Sindh and southern Punjab. The lack of a strong leader like Benazir Bhutto probably was a reason for the disconnect PPP faced from the electorate. Anti-incumbency sentiment also worked against the PPP. If properly organized and contested, the PPP could come back to power in the future in a coalition arrangement given that Nawaz Sharif has not been able to solve any of the problems he inherited from the PPP government. In the current Pakistani political order, no single party is likely to gain majority status.

T.V. Paul is James McGill Professor of International Relations at McGill University, Montreal, and a leading scholar of international security, regional security, and South Asia. His most recent book is The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World. He has also published 15 other books and over 55 journal articles and book chapters and has lectured at research institutions internationally. He is the editor of the book series: South Asia in World Affairs and was the founding director of the McGill/University of Montreal Center for International Peace and Security Studies (CIPSS). During 2013-14 Paul served as vice-president of the International Studies Association (ISA).

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                Related StoriesAn interview with Mohsin HamidThe Hobby Lobby problem and the HSA/HRA solutionThe Oxford Atlas Place of the Year 2013 is… 

The Hobby Lobby problem and the HSA/HRA solution

By Edward Zelinsky

Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Mardel, Inc. are owned by the Green family. The Greens oppose on religious grounds “morning after” forms of contraception. Hobby Lobby, Mardel, and the Greens have sued, claiming that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) precludes the federal mandate which requires the Hobby Lobby and Mardel employee health plans to provide such contraception coverage to Hobby Lobby and Mardel employees. In Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. v. Sebelius, the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit held that Hobby Lobby and Mardel had demonstrated the likelihood of prevailing on their RFRA claim against the contraception mandate and had proven irreparable harm. Both sides in Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. have asked the US Supreme Court to review the Tenth Circuit’s decision in that case.

Suits like the Hobby Lobby litigation are proliferating, no doubt with an eye toward such review by the US Supreme Court. In contrast to the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit which ruled for Hobby Lobby and Mardel, other US Courts of Appeal have rejected claims similar to Hobby Lobby’s religious objections to the contraceptive mandate.

As this litigation has proceeded through the courts, the Departments of Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services have promulgated regulations exempting non-profit religious employers from the contraceptive mandate as long as contraception is made available to such employers’ employees through third-party administrators or health insurers. Critics have chastised these regulations, both because they ignore the religious concerns of for-profit employers like Hobby Lobby and Mardel and because these regulations require religious employers to participate in the provision of contraception to which they object.

This entire controversy is unnecessary. The tax law contains devices for reconciling the religious concerns of employers like Hobby Lobby with the policy of expanding medical coverage: health savings accounts (HSAs) and health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs). The current regulatory exemption from the contraception mandate should be amended to include for-profit employers and to exempt from the federal contraception mandate employers (both non-profit and profit-making) who maintain HSAs or HRAs for their respective employees. Compromise along these lines would respect the genuinely-held views of religious minorities while implementing the federal policy of broadening access to health care.

An HSA/HRA compromise would eliminate the complicity of religious employers in the provision of contraception methods to which they object while enabling such employers’ employees to obtain on a pre-tax basis any medicines or devices such employees want, including contraception to which their employers object. Employers’ payments into their employees’ HSAs and HRAs would be the equivalent of the cash wages paid to such employees, wages which the employees are free to spend as they choose.

Suppose that the Greens (and others with similar religious concerns) object that funding HSAs or HRAs still makes them complicit in the provision of forms of contraception to which they object. The first rejoinder is that HSAs or HRAs would be established for all employees and could be used for any medical expenditure. Thus, when the employer puts money into each employee’s HSA or HRA, there is no link between that money and any particular form of medical outlay. While one employee may use his HSA or HRA funds to purchase new glasses, another employee may use her funds to buy birth control. These alternative purchases would represent each employee’s own decision.

The second rejoinder is that HSA and HRA funds are comparable to employees’ wages and, like wages, are the employees’ money to spend as the employees want. Just as we are committed to the value of religious freedom, we are also committed to the value of personal autonomy. An employer is not permitted to withhold the wages earned by an employee because the employee spends those wages in ways to which the employer objects. Religious employers, like Hobby Lobby or Mardel, cannot refuse to pay an employee’s salary because they fear that she will use some of those proceeds to buy a form of contraception to which they object. Employer-provided HSA and HRA funds are, for these purposes, comparable to wages, falling on the employee autonomy side of the line demarcating an employer’s religious rights from the employee’s control of his own funds.

The contraception mandate is a policy about which reasonable people sincerely disagree. A society committed to genuine diversity should accommodate the genuinely diverse views of religious minorities. An HSA/HRA-based exemption from the contraception mandate would be such an accommodation.

Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His monthly column appears on the OUPblog.

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Image credit: closeup image of the patient paying to the doctor. © lanych via iStockphoto.

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                Related StoriesUS Supreme Court weighs in on BG Group v. ArgentinaThe Oxford Atlas Place of the Year 2013 is…Enforced disappearance: time to open up the exclusive club? 

The Oxford Atlas Place of the Year 2013 is…

Syria

Despite a strong field of contenders for the Oxford Atlas Place of the Year 2013, Syria emerged as the clear winner, owing to its central role in global events this year.

Sayyidah Zaynab Mosque, located in the outskirts of Damascus, Syria. Photo by Argooya. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Syria has been embroiled in a catastrophic civil war for more than two years. Originating with peaceful protests during 2011’s Arab Spring, the rebellion turned violent when the government of President Bashar Al-Assad began to suppress the uprising using force. The worsening conflict put Syria on the Place of the Year (POTY) shortlist in 2012, when it was edged out by Mars, but this year the crisis expanded into a global flashpoint when the use of chemical weapons against civilians triggered a standoff between Russia, which is Assad’s close ally, and the United States.

Wreckage from fighting in Azaz, Syria. Voice of America News: Scott Bobb reports from Azaz, Syria. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

This year, your votes and our panel of experts and geographers agreed that Syria would beat out a packed shortlist – Greenland’s Grand Canyon, The NSA Data Center, Rio De Janeiro, and Tahrir Square, Egypt – to become Place of the Year for 2013. As Marshall University geographer Joshua Hagen wrote when making the case for Syria,

Syria is an excellent candidate for Place of the Year, because in a deeply visceral and tragic way, it continues to illustrate several basic characteristics of our early twenty-first century world: an increasingly multipolar international system, societies assuming a more inward focus in response to a global economic downturn, and the persistence of ethno-nationalist antagonisms often simmering beneath the veneer of nation-state sovereignty.

All this week, OUPblog will feature in-depth takes on Syria. You can check on the Place of the Year archive for the latest. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Oxford’s Atlas of the World — the only world atlas updated annually, guaranteeing that users will find the most current geographic information — is the most authoritative resource on the market. The milestone Twentieth Edition is full of crisp, clear cartography of urban areas and virtually uninhabited landscapes around the globe, maps of cities and regions at carefully selected scales that give a striking view of the Earth’s surface, and the most up-to-date census information. The acclaimed resource is not only the best-selling volume of its size and price, but also the benchmark by which all other atlases are measured.

The Oxford Atlas Place of the Year 2013 is Syria. The Oxford Atlas Place of the Year is a location — from street corners to planets — around the globe (and beyond) which has attracted a great deal of interest during the year to date and judged to reflect the important discoveries, conflicts, challenges, and successes of that particular year. Learn more about Place of the Year on the OUPblog.

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US Supreme Court weighs in on BG Group v. Argentina

By Frédéric G. Sourgens

On Monday, 2 December 2013, the US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a significant appeal for investor-state arbitration conducted in the United States. Last year, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit set aside an award rendered by a United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) tribunal seated in Washington, DC and constituted pursuant to the United Kingdom-Argentina bilateral investment treaty (BIT) in BG Group PLC v Republic of Argentina. The arbitral tribunal in December 2007 awarded BG Group in excess of $185 million in damages.

The key question addressed by the DC Circuit decision was whether the BG tribunal had jurisdiction to proceed with the case. The United Kingdom-Argentina BIT required investors to submit disputes to local courts in the host state for a period of eighteen months. BG Group had not in fact so submitted its dispute with Argentina to the Argentine courts. The BG arbitral tribunal concluded that Argentina hindered or prevented recourse to its domestic courts. In light of this conduct, the BG arbitral tribunal concluded that interpretation of the 18 month submission requirement as an absolute impediment to arbitration would be absurd and unreasonable and exercised jurisdiction over the dispute.

The DC Circuit followed US arbitral jurisprudence that an arbitrator may only resolve a challenge to the “arbitrability” of a dispute if it is established by clear and unmistakable evidence that this threshold question was itself submitted to arbitration – ie. one cannot question whether a dispute may be submitted to arbitration unless the dispute parameters were themselves submitted to arbitration. In commercial arbitrations, parties typically provide this evidence by means of incorporating arbitration rules granting competence to arbitral tribunals to decide upon their own jurisdiction in their consent to arbitration. Barring such clear submission of this question to the arbitrator, the issue would have to be resolved by the competent court of general jurisdiction.

The Supreme Court of the United States in 2007. Photo by Kjetil Ree. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

The DC Circuit did not find such clear and unmistakable evidence in the BIT despite the BIT’s incorporation of the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules. Submission to local courts, the DC Circuit concluded, operated as a condition precedent to Argentina’s obligation to submit disputes to arbitration. Any reference in the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules to the competence of the arbitrators to decide upon their own jurisdiction was irrelevant to the question at bar. Consequently, the DC Circuit ruled that “BG Group was required to commence a lawsuit in Argentina’s courts and wait eighteen months before filing for arbitration pursuant to Article 8(3) if the dispute remained” and vacated the award.

The DC Circuit’s decision sets up a dangerous clash between the public international law of arbitration and the Federal Arbitration Act. Arbitrations governed by international law expressly require the arbitrators to determine their own competence. Arbitrators in fact would manifestly exceed their powers should they refuse to resolve jurisdictional questions submitted to them.

This facial difference between the US Federal Arbitration Act and international law has a simple structural reason. In cases governed by the Act, the consent to arbitration displaces courts of general jurisdiction. These courts remain able and available to resolve all questions not submitted to arbitration.

In public international law cases, there are no such courts of general jurisdiction. There is no forum that could resolve arbitrability questions—other than perhaps the objecting state itself. If the question of arbitrability was a matter to be decided by the respondent state however, it would be practically impossible to submit international legal disputes to arbitration by means of an advance consent.

Luckily, the clash between the Federal Arbitration Act as interpreted by the DC Circuit and international law can be resolved in light of US arbitration jurisprudence for two reasons. First, the US Supreme Court as a matter of definition limits the role of courts to decide the gateway matter of “arbitrability” to “narrow circumstance[s] where contracting parties would have expected a court to have decided [that] gateway matter.” Given that there are no courts of general jurisdiction in international law, it is precisely not the case that a party could have expected the construction of a potential condition to a host state’s treaty obligation to arbitrate certain disputes to be decided by a court. The DC Circuit therefore erred in its classification of the question as pertaining to “arbitrability” as that term has been defined in US jurisprudence.

Second, the DC Circuit erred when it looked principally to the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules to determine whether the parties intended to submit the arbitrability question to the arbitral tribunal. Rather, the issue is laid to rest by the nature of the arbitration clause itself: it is a public international law obligation of the Argentine government. As such, the applicable law of the consent to arbitration is international law. As a matter of public international law, the power of the arbitral tribunal to construe the jurisdictional instrument in its entirety is clear and unmistakable.

Consequently, there is every hope that the US Supreme Court will reconcile US jurisprudence on the review of BIT awards with public international law. Doing so will strengthen the role of the United States as a forum for the resolution of similar disputes in the future. It also will avoid an absurd result born from a failure to understand the different functions of commercial arbitration and investor-state arbitration in which the United States is a significant player.

Frédéric G. Sourgens is an Associate Professor of Law at Washburn University School of Law. He is a contributor to Investment Claims, an online law resource from Oxford University Press. For a full discussion of this topic, see By Equal Contest of Arms: Jurisdictional Proof in Investor-State Arbitrations, 38 N.C. J. INT’L L. & COM. REG. 875 (2013)

Investment Claims is a regularly updated collection of materials and analysis used for research in international investment law and arbitration. Described as an invaluable resource by its users, Investment Claims contains fully searchable arbitration awards and decisions, bilateral investment treaties, multilateral treaties, journal articles, monographs, arbitration laws, and much more, all linked and cross-referenced via the Oxford Law Citator.

Oxford University Press is a leading publisher in international law, including the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, latest titles from thought leaders in the field, and a wide range of law journals and online products. We publish original works across key areas of study, from humanitarian to international economic to environmental law, developing outstanding resources to support students, scholars, and practitioners worldwide. For the latest news, commentary, and insights follow the International Law team on Twitter @OUPIntLaw.

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                Related StoriesEnforced disappearance: time to open up the exclusive club?Transitional justice and international criminal justice: a fraught relationship?An interview with Mohsin Hamid 

Enforced disappearance: time to open up the exclusive club?

By Irena Giorgou

For over five decades, enforced disappearance has been the symbol of state terror and the absence of justice. Pursuant to this heinous practice, people are arrested or kidnapped, detained in secret, and subsequently ‘disappear’. All traces of the victims are deliberately wiped out: no record, no information, no body. Relatives, and the society as a whole, bear the psychological and material consequences of uncertainty over their fate, with the perpetrators enjoying eternal impunity.

Enforced disappearance is much more than a ‘common’ kidnapping, and the difference goes way beyond the absence of ransom. What principally distinguishes it from similar crimes is the fact that the state is involved in its planning and execution. As a typical ‘crime of state’, enforced disappearance can only be committed by state officials, or with their authorization, support, or acquiescence.

State involvement is reflected as a contextual element in the traditional definition of enforced disappearance. However, recent trends in practice are increasingly calling the ‘crime of state’ label into question.

While the classic model of a state apparatus operated by authoritarian regimes in order to commit disappearances of political opponents is still in function in many parts of the world, actors not linked to the state are increasingly applying the same pattern for their own political, military, or merely criminal, purposes. From the drug cartels of Colombia and Mexico to the array of armed groups in the DRC and the plantations of Honduras, acts very similar to enforced disappearance are being perpetrated, albeit detached from the state, with the latter often either unable or unwilling to prevent them or deliver justice.

Law must reflect the reality if it is to fulfil its role. The emergence of new patterns brought to light the existence of a legal gap, and sparked the debate on whether time has come for the definition of enforced disappearance to be opened up to private individuals. Since the complexity of the crime practically rules out the possibility of an isolated perpetrator, the above question refers basically to non-state armed groups, and is termed as follows: should ‘disappearances’ committed without the involvement of the state be considered as enforced disappearance, and why?

Aware of the recent developments in practice, the drafters of the ICC Statute attempted to broaden the definition of enforced disappearance, so as to cover at least some of the emerging patterns. As a result, the Rome Statute provides that enforced disappearance may constitute a crime against humanity when committed by or with the authorization, support or acquiescence of a state or a political organization.

While the initiative to bring the law closer to the new realities on the ground ought in principle to be praised, the complexity of the phenomenon requires more than a simplistic answer. Enforced disappearance is intrinsically related to the state in terms of objectives, consequences, and constitutive elements, and diluting this link would require a complete reformulation of the definition. The codification of enforced disappearance as a distinct crime serves to emphasize state rather than individual responsibility. At the same time, similar acts can in most cases be effectively addressed under the existing legal framework. A ‘privatization’ of enforced disappearance would remove the stigma from the states onto non-state actors, while achieving a limited added value.

In this context, the new actor of ‘political organization’ in the Rome Statute is a compromise solution, which moves enforced disappearance away from the state, albeit without privatizing it. While different to the state, a political organization is nevertheless by definition not a private entity. However, and precisely for this reason, the new element seems at odds with the contextual element of a state or organizational policy, which is a requirement of every crime against humanity.

The ICC Pre-Trial Chamber, when dealing with the situation in Kenya, interpreted the element of ‘organizational policy’ as referring to both state-like and private organizations, and thus accepted that crimes against humanity may be committed on the basis of the policy of a purely criminal group. While this interpretation would undoubtedly cover most of the cases left out by the traditional definition of enforced disappearance, the much stricter ‘political’ qualifier would undo this effect. In practical terms: a drug cartel is not a political organization, and ‘disappearances’ perpetrated by such groups cannot constitute enforced disappearance unless committed with the involvement of a political organization. Only a small part of the new patterns is thus captured.

The Kenya interpretation of ‘organizational policy’ deprives the ‘political organization’ element of any sense. This paradox shows that, in order to achieve consistency between the chapeau and the definition of enforced disappearance, the element of ‘organizational policy’ should be taken to refer to state-like organizations only.

This limited ‘de-statalization’ of enforced disappearance, while logically consistent, is a poor solution to the existing legal gap. Rather, the answer should be searched in the notion of acquiescence. Unwillingness of the state to prevent or repress ‘disappearances’ committed by groups not linked to it will usually amount to acquiescence, and the acts in question will thus qualify as enforced disappearance. Nevertheless, when the state is unable to deal with them due to lack of authority or control, the legal gap remains.

Stretching the definition of enforced disappearance away from the state is not the most effective answer to the new developments in practice. And even if warranted, it would take much more than the acceptance of ‘political organizations’ to open up what has been a traditionally exclusive club to the public.

Irena Giorgou is a PhD candidate at the University of Geneva and a research assistant in the unit for relations with arms carriers of the International Committee of the Red Cross. She is a member of the Athens Bar, and specializes in international criminal law and disarmament affairs. She is the author of “State Involvement in the Perpetration of Enforced Disappearance and the Rome Statute” (available to read for free for a limited time) in the Journal of International Criminal Justice.

The Journal of International Criminal Justice aims to promote a profound collective reflection on the new problems facing international law. Established by a group of distinguished criminal lawyers and international lawyers, the journal addresses the major problems of justice from the angle of law, jurisprudence, criminology, penal philosophy, and the history of international judicial institutions.

Oxford University Press is a leading publisher in international law, including the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, latest titles from thought leaders in the field, and a wide range of law journals and online products. We publish original works across key areas of study, from humanitarian to international economic to environmental law, developing outstanding resources to support students, scholars, and practitioners worldwide. For the latest news, commentary, and insights follow the International Law team on Twitter @OUPIntLaw.

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Image credit: Buenos Aires, Argentina, December 8th, 2011: Each Thursday Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo meet in front of the Casa Rosada for their lost children, who were abducted by agents of the Argentine government during the years known as the Dirty War from 1976 to 1983. The Mothers used to wear white head scarves, to symbolize the blankets of their lost children. © Lya_Cattel via iStockphoto.

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