A window of opportunity opens in the international climate talks

Since the collapse of the 2009 Copenhagen conference, much of what has gone on at the negotiating sessions of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has slipped off the radar of both public and political attention. But a new chapter in the international climate change negotiations begins this year – and could be a unique moment in efforts to craft international agreement on how the world will collectively attempt to slow global climate change.

This week, the Durban Platform working group (ADP) is convening in Bonn, Germany, for the first of three meetings in 2013, moving in earnest towards its 2015 deadline to agree a new international treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol and enter into force in 2020. But while the ADP negotiating process had been launched at the 2011 Durban conference, its progress last year was dogged by deep conflict over how to organise its work, partly in view of substantively similar issues being discussed in parallel negotiating processes, and thus resulting in disagreement over the right procedural ‘home’ for substantive discussions.

Two other sets of processes – on the fate of the Kyoto Protocol’s second commitment period, and on ‘Long-term Cooperative Action’ (LCA) – were brought to a conclusion at last year’s Doha conference and streamlined into existing institutions and bodies. Thus, now free of the procedural morass that characterised UNFCCC negotiations in 2012, the ADP process that unfolds over the next three years represent what may be seen as a contingent moment in the history of the UN climate negotiating process, where fundamental questions over the design and scope of an international agreement are up for grabs in a way and manner perhaps unseen since the beginning of the initial intergovernmental negotiations at the end of the 1980s.

The 2013 UNFCCC meeting on the ADP in Bonn, Germany. Credit; UNFCCC/flickr

Around the rooms and corridors of the climate negotiations, an oft-heard phrase is that ‘context shapes content’, a reference to the way in which previous decisions and agreement carefully sets the boundaries of what can be agreed substantively at any given session. In 2013, with the Kyoto and LCA negotiating tracks no longer defining the main focus for negotiations, the context for the ADP is dramatically different than it was a year ago, free to stretch its legs and begin to chart a way forward without being accused of prejudging decisions taking place in the other negotiating tracks.

This is, therefore, a tremendously febrile moment, fertile for new ideas and approaches that have been buzzing around the past few years from think tanks, NGOs and academia, to finally make it into the substance of a new intergovernmental agreement. It is a moment that can be a profoundly creative one, with a bit more space to explore and imagine different ways of proceeding. And it is, most importantly, a unique moment, one where the procedural constraints that so tightly structure the negotiating process have been momentarily relaxed. Both previous ‘big bang’ moments for the UNFCCC process – Kyoto in 1997, and Copenhagen in 2009 – were directed by negotiating mandates that had relatively clear parameters, even if these were contested by some. Agreement on the Kyoto Protocol had been guided by the 1995 Berlin Mandate that limited binding emission reductions to developed countries; and the attempt at a new agreement in Copenhagen had a full-blown agenda specified in the 2007 Bali Action Plan.By contrast, the ADP mandate is relatively non-prescriptive, simply setting out a goal for a legal instrument to be agreed by 2015 and an interim process to raise mitigation ambition in advance of this legal instrument coming into force in 2020.

The co-chairs of the ADP process, for their part, recognise that the carefully-crafted ambiguity of their mandates provide an opportunity for negotiators to reflect on the very purpose of an international agreement, and not just its content and form. Questions that they have asked negotiators to address in forthcoming discussions are strikingly open-ended: “How would the agreement be designed to ensure durability and flexibility to respond to changes in national circumstances and evolving scientific knowledge over time?”; “How will the principles of the Convention be applied in the new agreement?”; and “Are new arrangements needed in the 2015 agreement to ensure transparency of action and support and, if so, which?”

These, and the other questions that the co-chairs have framed for discussion, are remarkable because they address deeply the core normative issues of the negotiations that have simmered away in recent years but which have been perennially dodged rather than confronted: How should the benefits and burdens of climate action be distributed in a diverse world? In effect, they almost resemble an effort to design the new agreement beginning with a blank sheet of paper, loosened from the norms that have guided the past two decades of the climate negotiations.

As the ADP talks proceed, the institutional machinery of the UNFCCC process rumbles on as the new institutions established in the past two years, especially the Green Climate Fund, find their footing and begin the work of implementing their mandates. And wider developments, most recently the crisis that the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme finds itself in and the collapse of the carbon price, obviously condition the demands and flexibility that governments come to the UNFCCC negotiating table with. Nonetheless, at this particular negotiating venue, we are now entering a moment where there is at least the space for far more creativity and innovation than what the memory of recent disappointments might suggest.

In the years since Copenhagen, those inside and outside the political drama of what goes on at the UNFCCC process have come to recognise the multilevel, multilayered nature of global climate action, where an intergovernmental treaty is just one, and perhaps not even the most central, element. But some kind of binding international agreement still remains the political lodestar for many, and the ADP’s 2015 deadline is now the date that looms on the horizon. Many have bemoaned the glacial, circular and halting pace of progress in the UN climate negotiations. The next three years – in a negotiating context wholly distinct from previous ones – may present a unique opportunity to break that mould.

Originally posted at Politics in Spires on 2 May 2013

Nationality, territoriality and the College of Cardinals

With papabile punditry in full swing, and will only intensify until the white smoke appears, one element of the criteria that emerges in commentary and discussion is striking: the emphasis on the geographic background of any prospective candidate as one of the more important considerations.

One of the common features of John Allen’s papabile-of-the-day rundown has been the geographical and linguistic profile of any prospective candidate: do they come from the Church ‘outside the West’? If so, where – Latin America, Africa, Asia? Musings about an ‘African’ pope have been frequent, as have those simply contemplating a non-European figure. Do they speak Italian (in order to be able to manage the Curia)? Or what part of the Francophone, Hispanophone, Lusophone or Anglophone worlds can they relate to?

Does this matter? Should this matter? In some ways this discussion speaks to a notion that geographic background provides some kind of representative function; a non-Western cardinal becoming pope would supposedly symbolise the ‘growth’ areas of the world for the Church (although not without its own challenges) and its universality as opposed to Christianity still having some vestige of Western-ness. Certainly ‘national pride’ has been evoked by the notion of Benedict XVI as a German pope, or John Paul II as a Polish one, appealing to national affiliations as a basis of collective identity – ‘one of us’, whether among the cardinal-electors or congregations at home. But a contrast is provided by Sr. Gemma Simmonds CJ, writing for Thinking Faith:

 ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to have an African pope!’ exclaimed one cheery pundit on the radio. As if someone’s race could possibly be in and of itself a qualification for the post. This sort of tokenism gets us nowhere. It certainly might be the case that a background of challenging pastoral service could well equip a pope for tomorrow, but someone’s nationality is no guarantee of that.”

A more prosaic importance of nationality, however, may lie in how the cardinal-electors arrive at their choices, the Holy Spirit notwithstanding. There is a striking passage from journalist Austen Ivereigh’s recent Tablet article on the 2005 conclave:

“I remember seeing clutches of developing-world cardinals wandering around Rome as dazed as first-time tourists; one African asked me, when he knew I worked for the English cardinal, “where are these dinners they are talking about?” Many hardly knew each other, had poor Italian and little know­ledge of Rome, and had little sense of whom to vote for…” (emphasis added)

Like all kinds of choices, the process question here is about how the cardinals will be making (or more appropriately, discerning) their decisions under conditions of uncertainty – in this setting, uncertainty about the qualities of their fellow cardinals, uncertainty about their background, and at a fundamental level, simply who each other is. A class of 120-odd electors provides a finite pool of possibilities, but is still a fairly big pool to filter through. It is here I would suggest that nationality and linguistic backgrounds possibly come into the fray as a firsthand guide to whom the electors are likely to first turn to consider the possibilities – other electors from the same national or regional background, and who share a language. Geographic affinity may matter, for the simple reason that they are more likely to have encountered each other in regional conferences and meetings; and similarly  language for little other than practical reasons of being able to actually exchange ideas and understand each other. Particularly for those electors who have little experience of Rome, these are likely to be the initial, if not main, channels of influence and persuasion that lead towards writing a particular name on the ballot.

This isn’t the same as suggesting that there is much to the notion of voting ‘blocs’ or associations along geographic and/or national lines – a background of more intensive interaction among electors in national or regional circumstances may simply mean that they come to realise who they don’t particularly like! Thus while Italian, American, or German cardinals may form substantial constituencies of electors, whether they vote in homogeneous terms is something I would be reluctant to assume.

And at the same time, the prior knowledge that national ties facilitate may be weaker at this conclave than at the previous one illustrated by Ivereigh’s anecdote quoted above. One bit of recent commentary (which I haven’t succeeded in tracking down again) noted that Benedict XVI, in a way, had sought to prepare the cardinals for this moment by convening assemblies of them at least once in each of the past few years; John Paul II on the other hand, only had a few meetings of the entire body of cardinals over his 26-year pontificate. That a number of them also had attended the 2005 conclave also means that this prior experience of the conclave process will have helped them prepare better for this time around, rather than being newcomers to the process.

Finally, in a possibly tangential way, these two elements discussed here that parse the relationship between nationality and the conclave process point to a larger tension between the Church as universal institution and its practical manifestations in different socio-cultural-economic contexts spread throughout the world. Is the hope that the electors, most of them as leaders and administrators and all its diverse circumstances around the world, coming together, produce a result that is greater than the sum of its parts? Or is it that the electors should be trying to stand outside of their immediate context to consider the prospect of a candidate who might not play very well ‘back home’ but be good for the wider Church? The universal Church is at the same time also temporally- and territorially-situated, and it is this tension that the cardinal-electors – and indeed all of us, praying for them – will be grappling with in the coming days and weeks.

Easier to kill than to capture

One of the starker figures to emerge from a new report on US drone strikes in Pakistan is that in the three-and-a-half years of the Obama administration, 292 strikes have been carried out – compared to 45 during over the entire span of the Bush administration. It speaks of the Obama administration’s dramatic turn to drones to conduct its version of the ‘war against terror’ in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen – but it also speaks, in a deeply unsettling way, about its preference to kill rather than detain and capture. In other words, the US’ current solution to dealing with suspected al-Qaeda militants seems to be not to capture, and then question, interrogate, or imprison – but to kill them outright.

A recent discussion at Political Violence At A Glance highlights the legal complexities of dealing with detainees that have raised the political costs of capture-and-question as opposed to death-by-drone. As a result, as Micah Zenko points out, the US’ professed preference to capture suspected terrorists rings pretty hollow:

“According to Daniel Klaidman in his book, Kill or Capture, “The inability to detain terror suspects was creating perverse incentives that favored killing or releasing suspected terrorists over capturing them.” And in the words of an anonymous “top counterterrorism adviser”: “We never talked about this openly, but it was always a back-of-the-mind thing for us.… Anyone who says it wasn’t is not being straight.”

“This reality was recently echoed by Sen. Lindsey Graham, who serves on the Armed Services and Judiciary committees: “We lack, as a nation, a place to put terrorists if we catch them.… I can tell you that the operators are in a bad spot out there. They know that if they capture a guy, it creates a nightmare. And it’s just easier to kill ‘em.” This perverse incentive remains in place today and largely explains why around 3,000 suspected terrorists and militants have been killed by drone strikes under Obama and only a handful have been captured.”

Somehow, it has come to this: that drones strikes are simply easier than capture and detention. No more worries about the legal niceties, ‘extraordinary rendition’, torture, or Guantanamo Bay.

Similarly, for whatever the horrors of the Bush administration’s cavalier approach to suspected terrorists and the humiliations endured by detainees, at least they weren’t dead at the end of it.

The inhumanity of this preference to kill, rather than capture, is intensified given the rather relaxed approach adopted by the Obama administration to establishing who a legitimate target is, as the report points out. Firstly, a ‘militant’ is defined by the US as “being a male of military age in an area where “militant” organizations are believed to operate”. Secondly, Obama-era drone strikes have been marked by a turn to ‘pattern of life’ attacks (and not just going after high-profile individuals, as I wrote about last year). Attacks seem to be justified based on whether a proposed target fits a particular profile without much regard for individual specifics: ”According to US authorities, these strikes target “groups of men who bear certain signatures, or defining characteristics associated with terrorist activity, but whose identities aren’t known.” Just what those “defining characteristics” are has never been made public.”

As a pair of legal scholars write, “expanded notions of legitimate target…introduce greater flexibility with regard to collateral damage – both in terms of who constitutes collateral damage and how much collateral damage is justified in the course of targeting a particular threat.” No wonder the US can claim that civilian casualties are virtually nonexistent.

This rather expansive method of identifying legitimate targets seems to be little less than being charged guilty by association. When the likely consequence of being on the receiving end of a drone-launched missile is death, what is on display is effectively an indiscriminate disregard for human life.

Drawing the ‘real’ map of the world

The Guardian – The separatist map of Africa

‘The government in the distant capital doesn’t care about us. We’d be better off ruling ourselves’. This refrain continues to echo the world over as secessionist groups press for autonomy and independence from existing states. The grievance is often historical, but in the here and now, also has much to do with the quality of governance. A better life, secessionist groups argue, comes when we rule ourselves.

The Guardian has a recent interactive graphic that redraws the map of Africa to realise the dreams of all the continent’s secessionist movements - from unmaking modern Libya back into east and west, to the various de facto bits of what was once Somalia. This sort of exercise – accompanying a piece on the Mombasa Republican Council, which calls for the separation of the Mombasa region from the rest of Kenya – often alludes to the artificial character of much of African state creation, inheriting colonial boundaries and having to cope with the multi-ethnic animosities of this new creature. Underneath and criss-crossing these straight lines, the common conception goes, lies the ‘real’ political communities on which more robust states should be built.

But perhaps artificialness is what one makes of it. For as much as some of these separatist groups hark back to a pre-colonial political entity, demarcating these is never straightforward (where did that earlier entity come from, anyway?) and building what we call the modern nation-state is a process that unfolds over time and subject to political compromises. ‘Who is part of the nation’ is little more than an idea, the result of a process of constructing a social group that may be more or less stable at different points in time, but can never be static or fixed.

And this is as true for Africa as it is for the ‘old’ Western world where the nation-state as the political unit that marks modernity came into being. A million-strong march in Barcelona to mark the 300th anniversary of the siege of Barcelona has provided a reminder of the continuing political resonance of the cause of Catalonian independence; a referendum on Scottish independence is due sometime in 2014. The same logic is at play: ‘we’re better off alone, as we once were before’. Ongoing events, in this sense, challenge just how ‘real’ either of these states are: are Spain or Great Britain any more real states than Libya or Somalia? It probably didn’t seem like it in the early days of a united Britain and united Spain, and resolving the question of unity or separation has often come through violence and civil war.

Catalonia’s independence rally – 12 September 2012. Credit: BBC and AP

Happy birthday to the Montreal Protocol!

The Montreal Protocol marks its 25th anniversary. Credit: UNEP

Happy 25th birthday to the “perhaps the single most successful environmental agreement to date”! On 16 September 1987, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer was signed, and rapidly became the symbol of what global cooperation on environmental issues could achieve. But as symbols come to represent particular possibilities and narratives in world politics, they also legitimate and justify these, and the Montreal Protocol is no exception. Success on addressing ozone depletion has been seen to hold lessons – then and now – for art and craft of global environmental politics, with climate change being one of the best examples of this.

In a post to mark this anniversary, I reflect on some of these longer legacies and lessons of the Montreal model for the conduct and history of international climate politics, which has unfolded in the shadow of Montreal’s success – for better or worse. The two paragraphs are below, and you can find the full version at either the Politics in Spires or Responding to Climate Change sites:

“In June, the international environmental community gathered at the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development set for hard-fought negotiations on sustainable development. This occurred with the backdrop of decades of questionable progress on global environmental issues like deforestation, biodiversity and climate change.

“Old hands lamented the missed opportunities and false dawns in the years since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Rio+20 needed to be a turning point — seen as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to find a new paradigm for sustainable development and kickstart a transition towards ‘green growth’. But while Rio+20 marked the marquee environmental summit of 2012, another much quieter – and perhaps more significant – anniversary takes place in a few days’ time, one that does much to tell us about the environmental malaise that we find ourselves in.”

Find the full post at either Politics in Spires or Responding to Climate Change.

The receding final frontier of outer space

One small step for man…and mankind’s last step? Neil Armstrong’s death has prompted much navel-gazing at what has become of the space age that the mission to the Moon was supposed to herald, when in the decades since, human exploration has largely ceased, venturing no further than the International Space Station. The US space shuttle program is over, as is its funding for the Constellation Program that was supposed to reopen the door to human spaceflight; the only manned spacecraft at the moment are the Russian Soyuz modules, the only way of getting astronauts to the ISS and back.

In a way, there is a certain aptness about Armstrong’s death, coming in the same year as a new space age has been foreshadowed once again, this time surrounding the prospects for private space flight – built and operated by private companies, not by governments. The success of the SpaceX Dragon’s visit to the ISS in May is “a demonstration of the idea that a small private firm can do something that has, until now, been the preserve of nation-states”, writes the Economist. Nearly a decade after SpaceShipOne won the X-Prize competition by going 100km up for private spaceflight (and now, as Virgin Galactic, aims to make a business out of such suborbital trips), the momentum and energy now seems to be firmly with private firms, whether it be for space tourism or as ‘space trucks’. Chinese plans to send a man to the Moon (triggering this academic piece about Chinese conquest of the Moon), or India’s own burgeoning space program, by contrast, are signs of their worldly ambitions here on Earth – but hardly constitute boldly going where no-one has gone before, or exploring strange new worlds (see Star Trek: The Next Generation opening credits below).

This is, on one hand, the privatisation of space missions – the SpaceX goal is to nab a $1.6bn contract from NASA to deliver cargo to the ISS, as NASA seeks to subcontract out ISS deliveries. And only with the backing of wealthy private individuals can the barriers to entry be overcome by would-be spacefirms – SpaceX is bankrolled by a billionaire, as is Virgin Galactic by Richard Branson. Armstrong himself didn’t seem to be terribly keen on private space missions, although fiction envisions future worlds where private corporations are common across the cosmos, from the excellent 2009 film Moon to the Trade Federation of the Star Wars universe.

And yet will mankind get beyond near-Earth orbit, inner space as opposed to outer space? Last year the Economist wrote of geostationary orbit, where an object orbits in time with the Earth’s rotation, as marking the limits of human activity in space. The transformations brought by the Space Age have been those confined to 0 to 36,000km up, forested by a ring of satellites that bring us GPS, deforestation estimates, and troop movements. The visions of starfleets and space cadets is all but over:

“The future, then, looks bounded by that new outer limit of planet Earth, the geostationary orbit. Within it, the buzz of activity will continue to grow and fill the vacuum. This part of space will be tamed by humanity, as the species has tamed so many wildernesses in the past. Outside it, though, the vacuum will remain empty. There may be occasional forays, just as men sometimes leave their huddled research bases in Antarctica to scuttle briefly across the ice cap before returning, for warmth, food and company, to base. But humanity’s dreams of a future beyond that final frontier have, largely, faded.”

In 2010, Armstrong spoke of a deeper quest to explore the unexplored, on the Moon and beyond: “”Some question why Americans should return to the moon. After all,’ they say, ‘we have already been there.’ I find that mystifying. It would be as if 16th-century monarchs proclaimed that ‘we need not go to the New World, we have already been there.’…Americans have visited and examined six locations on Luna, varying in size from a suburban lot to a small township. That leaves more than 14m square miles yet to explore.”

But, for both governments and the private sector, it seems, perhaps only when it becomes profitable to do so.

Putting the ‘China’ back into the South China Sea?

A few fishing boats and navy gunboats go eyeball-to-eyeball around a few rocky islands; fiery words exchanged about the defense of national sovereignty – plus ca change in the South China Sea? The overlapping territorial claims between China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei (i.e. just about everyone in the region…have I missed anyone out?) over the various island groups in the area have intensified in recent months, including a public bust-up at this year’s ASEAN summit.

Territorial claims in the South China Sea – The Economist, 6 August 2012

At centre stage of whether tension might degenerate into armed conflict (‘going hot’) is disagreement and uncertainty over what China’s goals over the islands are, especially among its Southeast Asian neighbours. In its regional neighbourhood, disputes over the Spratlys provide the counterpoint to China’s efforts at reassuring its neighbours of its peaceful intentions. Accordingly, the US interest in the region (defined by Hilary Clinton as a US ‘national interest’) is not unwelcome by China’s neighbours, happy to hedge their bets and retain a little bit of a pushback option.

And for all the natural resources that might lie under the South China Sea, China’s ambitions are at least guided too by reclaiming that area identified as being centrally ‘Chinese’. The Spratlys are perhaps not Taiwan or Tibet, and lack the uncompromising centrality to Chinese nationalism of the latter. But they nonetheless fall within the realm of being part of ‘historic’ China – the Chinese point to post-World War II maps that include the Spratlys and Paracels as a basis for justifying their claims (over 1,000km from the Chinese mainland), unlike other claimants, who justify their claims based on the terms of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and conventional ways of demarcating exclusive economic zones (EEZs). Claims rooted in historical identity (rather than a matter of international law) are, by their nature, not terribly susceptible to negotiation, and The Economist puts it that “China’s neighbours have reason to worry China sees their sea as its lake.”

Claiming its lake, however, is fraught with considerable danger for China, because of the larger normative shifts over the past century that have rendered violent conflict an unacceptable means of resolving territorial disputes. Using its coercive muscle would simply trigger balancing reactions among its neighbours (and it is far from clear that the benefits of territorial control would outweigh the costs – see Taylor Fravel) that it has long sought to avoid. And in dividing ASEAN members at its summit, it will have simply pushed some closer towards the US.

But China hopes that it is playing the long game and has time on its side. As its relative strength continues to increase vis-a-vis those of its neighbours, it waits for the day when, perhaps, its assertive efforts will go unchallenged. The South China Sea may one day be truly ‘Chinese’ again, satisfying its nationalist ambitions – but the trouble may be whether this comes at the cost of regional amity.

The real winner of the Olympics: nationalism

In the warm afterglow of the 2012 London Games, one of the recurring themes has seemed to be how humanity can come together despite our myriad differences to celebrate human athleticism and sporting prowess. True, but at the same time the very conduct of the Games has provided a reminder of one key difference: competing nationalities, where the geography of the Olympics takes our established political maps for granted.

The relative importance of the medal tables, and the flag-draping and waving by both competitors and spectators inescapably make the Olympic games a celebration of allegiances and loyalties on a national level. One’s passport and citizenship determines the in-group that we identify ourselves with in a straightforward manner – who should I support? Who do I want to win? And ultimately, who is the ‘we’? The tremendous success of nationality as a marker of identity is reflected most powerfully in the cheers and support whenever ‘our’ man or woman is competing – support for a particular athlete just because he or she comes from the same country that one is a citizen of, even if we know next to nothing about that athlete, let alone that sport. Stephen Walt puts this nicely when he writes that:

“Every Olympic year I ask my students who they rooted for, and whether they got a subtle thrill when one of their countrymen won. Are they disappointed when one of their fellow nationals loses out? Of course, the vast majority of students admit that they tend to do just that, and I’ll confess to similar instincts myself.

“But the next question I ask them is “Why? Why do you care? Is it because you know the actual people involved?” Of course not. I don’t root for Ryan Lochte of the United States over Yannick Agnel of France because I know them both personally, and I happen to like Lochte more, or because my personal knowledge of the two tells me that Lochte is more deserving in some larger sense (i.e., he works harder, has overcome more obstacles, etc.). I have no idea, yet for some silly reason I get a certain pleasure when some American I’ve never even met does well. This tendency is even more true about team events: I really have no way of knowing if the American team is nicer, smarter, more ethical, etc., than any of their foreign rivals. Yet I find myself cheering for a bunch of strangers who for all I know might be mostly jerks.”

Occasionally, spectator appreciation for sublime individual performances and special talents do transcend national differences, such as Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps for their sheer achievements. But the norm is to cheer for TeamGB if you’re British, TeamUSA if you’re American, and Team-insert-your-country-here – nationalism exemplified. The Olympics have been terrific for national cohesion, as the litany of ‘proud to be British’ commentary illustrates, with ethnic, religious or class differences fading away especially when one has a medal around the neck. But the corollary is also to increase the sense of difference with who ‘we’ are not – for if ‘we’ are British or Malaysian, then we are certainly not French or German (for the former), or Singaporean (for the latter). National affiliations, in sports as in other areas of life, draw a line that defines and categorises who is ‘inside’ the community, and who is ‘outside’, who are ‘citizens’ and who are ‘strangers’.

Two weeks ago, the opening ceremony provided a quick glimpse of just how ingrained nationalism is in the Olympic ethos – with the appearance during the parade of athletes of a small team walking behind the Olympic flag as Independent Olympic Athletes. It was notable not just for their dance routine  (see video from the parade here), but perhaps also because it raised just a little question about the parochialism of nationalism that runs throughout the Games: why don’t we see more athletes competing under this flag?  That these group of athletes are an exception, rather than rule, is a reminder that Olympic participation is organised through national Olympic committees. This structure caps on the number of athletes a country can send to participate in a given sport, and the absence of a NOC prevents participation, leaving a South Sudanese marathon runner, and athletes from the Dutch Antilles to compete under the Olympic flag. At the next games, if South Sudan has established a NOC, there’ll be no such provision.

The ‘Independent Olympic Athletes’ at the London 2012 athletes’ parade (credit: SportsGrid)

The organisation of Olympic participation based on our existing political boundaries means that the politics can never be separated fully from the sports. That the competition at the top of the medal table between the US and China is viewed through the lens of their larger political rivalry (among other things, the ‘China’s rise’ and victimhood narratives), and attempts are made to assemble ‘alternative’ medal tables weighted by population or GDP only underline the point that (especially as a mass spectator event) the larger triumph of the Olympics lies in reinforcing identities based on national allegiances and loyalty claims. The spectacle of the Olympics transcend human differences, yes – in every way but one.

Does Christianity have a problem with Arab democracy?

In everything that has gone in over the past 18 months across the Middle East, the role of Christians has seemed either as absent or as victims of sectarian violence. To this UK-based armchair reader, the pressures for democratic change have seemed largely to not involve the Christian minorities, who have come to be associated more with the Arab spring turning into a ‘Christian winter’ of persecution: “What is striking about the tensions of recent months, however, is how old sectarian notes are sounding amidst the new symphony of freedom”, writes one commentator.

Against the instances of local churches being at the forefront of democratic change – most notably in the 1980s in Poland and the Philippines – what explains their relative inaction and silence? As minority groups in Muslim-majority countries, the positions staked out by the Christian churches in the Middle East seemed to have been a tradeoff of support and acquiescence with the regime in exchange for noninterference in church affairs, and an assurance of survival. A particularly timely recent paper by Fiona McCullum, published in Third World Quarterly (academic paywall), offers a broader way to understand these dynamics between the Christian churches, secular authoritarianism, and an Islamist opposition, as a form of ‘security guarantee’. Her conclusion, comparatively drawn from Egypt, Jordan and Syria:

“As long as the state is perceived as promoting tolerant policies towards the Christian communities, recognising their contribution to society and not condoning rhetorical or physical attacks against their presence, the churches are willing to accept limitations on societal freedom. The belief that Christians would be vulnerable to any regime change in the region, whether achieved through violent revolution or peaceful democratisation, has been an underlying factor in institutional backing of the status quo…In light of the challenge to the authoritarian model which has erupted throughout the region in 2011, church hierarchy support for the regimes reflects this assumption that the authoritarian status quo as preferable to democratic uncertainties.”

Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t? Is it – or will it continue to be – indeed a dilemma between organisational survival and an assertive proclamation of Christianity’s prophetic mission? A common theme in the obituaries of Coptic Pope Shenouda III when he died in March lay in how he had positioned the Coptic Church vis-a-vis the Mubarak regime, as the New York Times reflected:

“For most of his four decades as patriarch, Pope Shenouda managed a delicate balancing act, strongly supporting Mr. Mubarak in exchange for recognition of his role as the government’s primary interlocutor with the Copts. His close relationship with Mr. Mubarak followed a confrontation with his predecessor, President Anwar el-Sadat, who put Shenouda under house arrest to curb his vigorous advocacy for Coptic rights.

In choosing to support Mr. Mubarak, the pope was given a freer hand to strengthen the church without the state’s interference…The deep change that Pope Shenouda imposed on the post [of Pope] was how wise he was in dealing with explosive cases concerning Christian-Muslim sectarian fights — how wise he was in dealing with the state and the administration.”

As a result, have and are the Christian minorities in the Middle East finding themselves on the wrong side of history? And what if that history is pointing towards the Muslim Brotherhood? The tricky and uncertain challenge for Christians, as the NCR’s excellent John Allen puts it, lies in helping a transition from secular autocracy to secular democracy, that “democracy, the rule of law, and distinguishing religion from politics amount to a survival strategy. As one Arab Catholic recently put it, “In the Middle East, we don’t need liberation theology. We need liberation from theology.”

After the monarchy: keeping political power in the family

The River Thames with St. Paul’s Cathedral on Lord Mayor’s Day – Canaletto, c.1746

Does hereditary rule ‘make sense’ in the 21st century? Images from Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee celebrations harked back to Canaletto’s famous painting of a Thames river pageant. While the pomp might still be there, three centuries apart, being a monarch is a far lonelier time. At a lunch hosted by the queen, there were no cousin kaisers or tsars to invite, just a rather odd and eclectic collection of Gulf sultans, the Japanese emperor and European queens of a similar generation, all invited by the virtue of being born into the right family.

The royal barge Gloriana at the head of the Diamond Jubilee river pageant – Andy Rain/EPA

But a world away from a family clustered on a processional river barge, hereditary-type political rule retains a certain durability. Hereditary succession is commonly associated with the out-and-out non-monarchical autocracies: the Kims of North Korea, the Assads of Syria, and up to recently the Gaddafis of Libya and Mubaraks of Egypt. But in between, in many of the countries that Freedom House might classify as being ‘partly free’, patterns of de facto dynastic rule still seem strikingly prevalent.

In the Philippines, the current president is the son of a former president (the Aquinos), having replaced a daughter of a former president (the Macapagals); the current president of Pakistan is the widow of a former prime minister, herself the daughter of a former prime minister and president (the Bhuttos); the president of Argentina is the widow of a former president (the Kirchners); on a short visit I made to India earlier in the year, TV coverage of upcoming regional polls were plastered with questions about the Gandhis; for over two decades the Bushes and Clintons have held high political office in the United States; the list goes on and on (Wikipedia has a handy little directory of political families here).

When Yingluck Shinawatra became Thailand’s prime minister last year, widely seen as a mark of her brother and former prime minister’s (Thaksin Shinawatra) popularity, a good longform Guardian piece searched for explanations for a specifically female succession in dynastic families: Women appear “when the men have already left the stage: often murdered by opponents, or otherwise incapacitated. Frequently, there is no male alternative – perhaps because sons are too young; perhaps because others are not up to the task”, or alternatively, that “The depiction of female leaders as innocents reflects enduring stereotypes about women in politics, but it can also be exploited by them. They can embody the promise of change and represent moral purity in comparison to their opponents.”

I don’t have any firm answers to the likelihood of when females might be more likely to gain power, but the larger question to me, still seems to be trying to explain the dynastic politics of modern-day democracies. (I don’t have any answers to this either). Somewhere in the mix are probably the cult-ness of personality, the strength of the party and governing machinery, and the advantages of a recognizable family ‘brand’ name. Nonetheless, it seems, beyond the world of monarchies, crowns and royal honorifics, hereditary political power is still going strong.