EXPeditions

Peter Pomerantsev - Democracy and the politics of identity

Peter Pomerantsev, Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics, explores how democracy might face the information crisis.
About Peter Pomerantsev
"I’m a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs of the London School of Economics and at the University of Johns Hopkins.
I research disinformation, hate speech and polarisation to try to work out what we can do about it."
The media “problem”
I always get confused when I look for a word that describes the scale of the issue that we’re talking about. I suppose you could just reduce this to a question about election rules or media; often, this is just talked about as a media problem. That’s not the right way to look at it. The internet is not a media space or even an information space. It’s just society. It’s everything. It’s where our schooling is and our relationships are. It’s not an information space issue that can be thought about purely in one government department. This is not just an issue for one ministry, like the often overlooked Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport in Britain. This is not just a culture, media and sport problem while the economy and healthcare and everything else ignores it. This is everything. This is how we organise ourselves. This is how we relate to ourselves as a society. So, the issues that have to be addressed are … everything.
Key Points
• The information, or misinformation, crisis cannot be dealt with from a media standpoint alone.• The information crisis has permeated all aspects of society. This threat to democracy has to be addressed in all of our institutions, systematically.• Individuals turn to smaller, tribal microcosms and close themselves off to deliberative conversation with others.• Fortunately, it is still possible to find commonalities between groups that seem diametrically opposed.

Eva Illouz - Democracy in danger: how emotions affect grievances and politics

One of the chief assumptions of liberalism, at least a certain strand of liberalism and democratic theory, is the hope that the public sphere would be governed by reason: specifically, deliberative reason.
About Eva Illouz
"I’m a sociologist and I teach in Paris at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences.
My work is about the sociology of emotions, the sociology of capitalism, the sociology of consumer culture and the interface between all of these. I’m the author of 13 books, and perhaps most recently The End of Love."
Do emotions belong in politics?
One of the chief assumptions of liberalism, at least a certain strand of liberalism and democratic theory, is the hope that the public sphere would be governed by reason: specifically, deliberative reason. The fact that citizens can each express what they think would generate the process in which, through argument and disagreement, they would discover the truth together.
This assumption is very old in our philosophy. Plato did not have much respect for the leader or the educator who used emotions to reason. The use of emotions in the political sphere and the public sphere has always been deemed counter-democratic. Machiavelli, when advising the prince on how to control his subjects, put fear at the centre of his mode of governance. He suggested that the best way would be to invoke fear and love in his subjects.
But if you had to choose, you should choose fear over love because through fear, you can at least have social order. We have come to view this kind of advice as being antithetical with a democratic way of conducting our political affairs. That is a mistake. Emotions are never far from politics; in fact, they are always built within politics.
Key Points
• The use of emotions in politics is considered counter-democratic, but emotions are built into politics.• Minorities are increasingly giving voice to long-held grievances.• A rhetoric has emerged in which the majority feels oppressed by the minority.• Mutual grievances have led to the extreme polarisation of politics.

Samuel Moyn - What human rights missed: the larger agenda

Samuel Moyn, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, looks at the triumph (or failure) of human rights.
About Samuel Moyn
"I am Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University.
I’m a historian of morality; at least, that’s how I think of myself. I’ve studied where ideas about morality come from and the philosophers who’ve propounded them. For the past decade or so, I’ve been interested in movements that try to make the world a better place: things like the human rights movement or the mobilisation to make war less cruel."
Selective rights
Human rights became triumphant around the end of the Cold War. As a new language of idealism and politics, they are selective. Like all things human, they prioritise certain things over others. Namely, the whole idea of human rights is that there are sacrosanct entitlements: free speech, integrity of the body, maybe some notion of sufficient provision, like enough housing or health, that every human deserves. However, what we’ve seen is that certain other priorities can get lost when human rights achieve the prominence they have in our world.
Key Points
• Human rights become sacrosanct entitlements but do not alleviate inequality.• International human rights movements and law create stigma in the international system.• We should reclaim human rights as part of local politics and in relation to a larger agenda.

Hannah Dawson - How violence became quintessential to the idea of the Modern State

A core idea in political philosophy since at least the 17th century, if not since antiquity, is that violence is quintessential to the definition of politics and to the State.
About Hannah Dawson
"I teach the History of Ideas at King's College London.
I work on early modern philosophy, especially moral and political thought, and also the history of feminism."
Using the threat of force to maintain order
A core idea in political philosophy since at least the 17th century, if not since antiquity, is that violence is quintessential to the definition of politics and to the State. The basic idea is that the State needs the threat of force in order to coerce people into maintaining order. People only behave well, the thought is, if they’re frightened of what will happen if they follow their impulses and, for example, murder someone they don’t like.
A key figure here is the English 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes. He made a statement that remains very powerful to this day. Hobbes was writing in the middle of the 17th century in response to the English Civil War, and against this backdrop of revolution and war, he wrote his classic masterpiece Leviathan in order to show just how awful it was when you didn’t have the violent apparatus of the State to keep you safe. He thought that without the violent apparatus of the modern State, human beings would be in a condition of war. That’s his famous thought: the condition of nature is a condition of war.
Key Points
• In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes argued that the natural condition of people is war, which is why an all-powerful State with the threat of force was needed to maintain order.• In the 20th century, Hannah Arendt argued that violence only leads to more violence and doesn’t allow for political dissent.• Abolition theorists argue that the criminal justice system not only fails to keep us safe but also harms the citizens it should protect.

David Runciman - Modern democracy and what we mean by it

David Runciman, Professor of Politics at Cambridge University, explores the idea of what we call democracy.
About David Runciman
"I’m a Professor of Politics at Cambridge University and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. I explore the history of politics and political ideas, and democracy.
My interest is in the history of politics and political ideas and particularly, democracy. Where does it comes from? How different is our democracy from democracy in the past? What might it become in the future? In parallel to my research, writing and teaching work, I hosted a weekly podcast called Talking Politics with 300 episodes between 2016 and 2022."
What we call democracy is a recent phenomenon
The idea of democracy is thousands of years old, and most people have a sense of that. Because they believe that it’s the oldest idea, they believe it must be the basis of our own politics. But the notion that what we call democracy goes back thousands of years is wrong. The thing that we call democracy is a much more recent phenomenon. It’s been around for a hundred years or less. 
Key Points
• The political system we broadly refer to as “democracy” is a “representative democracy”. It is much younger than we imagine.• Ancient and modern democracy share an idea of political equality. But while ancient democracy was much more participatory, modern democracy is more inclusive.• We hang onto the version of democracy from the past 50 years through fear that our societies will collapse into fascism or authoritarianism. But there are many other ways of doing democracy.

Patrick Weil - The right of asylum

Patrick Weil, Professor at Yale Law School and Senior Research Fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, discusses migration.
About Patrick Weil
"I’m a Research Professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne and a visiting scholar in law at Yale Law School.
In my work I have often explored the issues of citizenship and immigration laws and policies."
The right to exit, not to enter
Nationality is the right to claim a place in the world where you can have your home, where even if you have lived abroad for 30 years, you can come back in case of a big crisis. It’s a place where the State owes you protection and gives you rights based on your nationality. Among the rights that have been proclaimed in 1948 by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the right to exit your country – but the right to exit your country doesn’t mean the right to enter another one. It is in this loophole that we must consider the question of refugees and immigrants.
Is there a right to enter a country where you are a foreigner? Since the Second World War, many countries have developed, often through court rulings, rights that are proclaimed by the government. For example, if you marry a foreigner, often it is decreed by the State that you can bring your spouse to your country. So that is one category of foreigners that have the right to move abroad, to live with the spouse who has the nationality of the country of entry. When an immigrant has been legally admitted into a country, has a right of residence, often the court also guarantees, under certain conditions of housing and resources, the right for his or her family to immigrate and join the person. So, there is a right to a family life that is recognised, for example, under the European Commission of Human Rights.
Key Points
• The Geneva Convention recognises the right to apply for asylum but not the right to be admitted into another territory.• People migrate due to a lack of opportunities, lack of rights, global warming and war, among other reasons.• Dialogue is key to convincing people to accept migrants.

Patrick Weil - The status of citizens and the right to nationality

Patrick Weil, Professor at Yale Law School and Senior Research Fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, explores citizenship.
About Patrick Weil
"I’m a Research Professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne and a visiting scholar in law at Yale Law School.
In my work I have often explored the issues of citizenship and immigration laws and policies."
Citizenship and the World Wars
The new citizen of today was created in reaction to the two World Wars of the 20th century and their context. In the First World War, the French and the British Empires, which had tolerated dual nationality, had to face the fact that some of their citizens were German and British or German and French, and would fight for the enemy. So they created a provision in their law for the denaturalisation, or the deprivation of citizenship, of these dual citizens who had broken their allegiance to the French or the British Empire. In 1906, the United States had already created a provision for denaturalisation, not for the same reason but to face the corruption that existed in the federal system of British citizenship in the United States. The three main democracies had thus instituted in their law the mechanism of denaturalisation.
Very soon, dictatorships created a massification of the same provision. In a democratic system, you could be denaturalised but only through an individual process and only a court could decide. With the emergence of the Soviet Union and then the Nazi regime, massive denationalisation of what the regime considered enemy citizens or racial enemy citizens was carried out. The same thing occurred in Turkey. Suddenly, the world was faced with hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people who had become stateless.
Key Points
• Denaturalisation laws emerged in democracies and dictatorships in the context of the World Wars.• Having a nationality has become the basis for all other human rights.• The UNHCR offers protected status to refugees and stateless people.• Identification documents offer evidence of our legal identity and rights.

Homi K. Bhabha - 70 million refugees and the ethical core of citizenship

There are over 70 million displaced people in the world today, and the number is growing. This is roughly the size of the population of the 21st largest country in the world.
About Homi K. Bhabha
"I’m the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. I work on questions of race and representation.
I work on the politics of affiliation, the literature and culture of groups who are minorities, the ethics of refugees. The questions of dignity in art, culture and politics are very important for me. My work as a whole is aimed towards understanding the present moment because the past refuses to die and the future refuses to wait to be born."
Who is a citizen today?
There are over 70 million displaced people in the world today, and the number is growing. On present reckoning, it will grow much more strongly in time to come with climate change issues, civil wars and external incursions into various countries.
Over 70 million people today are displaced. This is roughly the size of the population of the 21st largest country in the world. I think it’s larger than Great Britain. Over 70 million displaced people, for me, are people who don’t have a nation, but they are people of a country that is entirely germane to the current situation that we are in. These 70 million people also represent the long history of the production of minorities, displaced people, with every turn in the large historical frame.
Now, if there are 70 million displaced people in the world today, every citizen has to recognise that she or he has a shadow – and that shadow is a displaced person. It could also be an undocumented person. It could be the person who comes and works in your garden or works on your house in America, who is undocumented and yet part of your own social fabric and allows you, supports you, to be a citizen.
Key Points
• There are over 70 million displaced people in the world today.• The status of refugees, migrants and displaced people is a problem at the ethical core of the concept of citizenship.• By actively seeking citizenship, non-citizens inspire us to expand our notions of human rights and citizenship.

Homi K. Bhabha - The state of unpreparedness

I started thinking about the term “unprepared” because it’s a term that is not often reflected upon yet is popularly used in the public discourse.
About Homi K. Bhabha
"I’m the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. I work on questions of race and representation.
I work on the politics of affiliation, the literature and culture of groups who are minorities, the ethics of refugees. The questions of dignity in art, culture and politics are very important for me. My work as a whole is aimed towards understanding the present moment because the past refuses to die and the future refuses to wait to be born."
Why study unpreparedness?
I started thinking about the term “unprepared” because it’s a term that is not often reflected upon yet is popularly used in the public discourse. We were unprepared for 9/11, and 9/11 has become a turning point for work on risk assessment and risk studies and being unprepared. We were unprepared for Trump’s victory, for it being so massive. We were unprepared for a number of things, including things that are forgotten.
One of the greatest moments of industrial havoc was in Bhopal in 1984, when the citizens and the population of Bhopal went to sleep and they got up, having been woken by the nightmare of the Union Carbide explosion. From one moment to the next, people had died. People had lost their eyesight. They were completely unprepared.
These moments of unpreparedness really need to be studied, which is why I’m beginning to work on this term, the “unprepared”, as opposed to risk assessment. Risk assessment very often assumes that you know what the whole set of correlations of a possible risk might be. From a position of modelling and statistics, you make a risk assessment. The “unprepared” is to be shocked, to be sudden, to experience a moment and not know how it’s going to go.
Key Points
• There are two kinds of unpreparedness: anxiety-induced unpreparedness and deliberate, political unpreparedness, which enables governments to do as they wish.• Black Lives Matter protesters exemplify an emergent community against ethno-populist-nationalist majoritarianism.• Protesters worldwide have translated Black Lives Matter into their own situation – an example of the “translation of globalisation”.

Homi K. Bhabha - The limits of global freedom: where is home in today's world?

To feel at home in today’s world is a very big demand because the sense of homelessness has always been a place of feeling at home and not feeling at home.
About Homi K. Bhabha"I’m the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. I work on questions of race and representation.
I work on the politics of affiliation, the literature and culture of groups who are minorities, the ethics of refugees. The questions of dignity in art, culture and politics are very important for me. My work as a whole is aimed towards understanding the present moment because the past refuses to die and the future refuses to wait to be born."
Why it’s hard to feel at home
To feel at home in today’s world is a very big demand because the sense of homelessness, looked at from a long period of historical reflection including our present moment, has always been a place of feeling at home and not feeling at home. Arendt, Freud, Heidegger – in all these cases, you feel both placed and displaced at the same time. It’s very difficult to think of a period where you feel at home because of these larger contradictions.
When you ask me to think about this question in relation to these large categories of globalisation, colonialism or anti-colonialism, I begin to think about the limits of this kind of nominalism. That’s how we get contained in a particular history. But these are very limited issues, partly because the question of periods and ages where historians feel at home – people are made to think that they were at home – are very complicated. It seems that transition is a much better discursive or analytic time frame than thinking of ages and periods which are all neatly labelled, and thinking we knew what the world was like.
Key Points
• The emergence of ethnonationalist groups today makes it difficult to feel at home and not feel displaced at the same time.• New national territories and announcements of progress produce displaced people, such as migrants and minorities.• Dignity is part of what you do, not who you are.