Category Archives: Ethnic Politics

Affirmative action in Brazil: the challenges of racial classification

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It’s old news that Brazil is enacting social quotas – both socioeconomic and racial – for public higher education. In my earlier post, I detailed the impact this sort of policy could have on the quality of higher education.  However, before I had the chance to write a follow-up to that post, a new piece of legislation began being drafted to introduce affirmative action to the civil service.

This is not the first policy of its kind in Brazil. Yet, it is too soon to discuss the implications and effects of this law. Regardless of the final shape the bill takes, any affirmative action will have to grapple with the basic issue of identification of the beneficiaries.

In Brazil, racial classification has always been a contentious topic. For many decades, the government refused to even collect racial information, arguing that race was not a salient issue on this side of the Americas.  However, even if one agrees that there is racial discrimination in Brazil, and that part of the country’s huge inequality hinges upon race and not only class and education, the issue of racial classification is not something to be quickly dismissed. A recent New York Times  forum, for instance, shows very different perspectives.

On the one hand, Peter Fry, a leading anthropologist, argues: “[…], unlike the U.S., the majority of Brazilians do not classify themselves neatly into blacks and whites. In Brazil, therefore, eligibility for racial quotas is always a problem.”

On the other hand, Antonio Sergio Guimarães, a leading sociologist fights back:

Perhaps the biggest challenge in Brazil is the temptation to introduce a systematic verification of self-declared color or race to prevent fraud in affirmative action programs. Race and color are social constructs. It is impossible to define their borders scientifically. Passing is something inherent to this kind of classification. It can be motivated by selfish economic protection or by political altruistic reasons. The fear of fraud must be restrained to give a chance to these programs to flourish.

Ultimately, these scholars seem to be discussing an empirical and methodological issue of racial classification with wide implications for redistribution. Despite the known complexities of racial classification, much analysis relies on a single self-classification based on fixed, mutually exclusive, choices.

Bailey, Loveman and Muniz (2012) present an interesting analysis of Brazil’s racial make-up and racial inequality, taking different racial classification schemes into consideration:

They demonstrate that very different pictures of Brazil’s racial make-up are created depending on which scheme is followed. Comparing the most extreme cases, Brazil could be either 70.4% or 40.7% White. Beneficiaries of affirmative action could either comprise 29.6% or 59.3% of the population. These are hugely different percentages.

Furthermore, these different measurements are not necessarily robust.  Even if more than one measure is used, there is still a lot of incongruence.

In their paper, they go on to convincingly show that different measures also imply different mappings of income inequality between those groups. Their findings do not necessarily challenge the finding that Blacks are, on average, worse off than Whites, but they do bring more precise, rigorous, and contextual evidence to support that claim. In any case, these findings do not mean that race should be disregarded and that it does not influence social interactions in Brazil. They argue that these different measures provide more evidence that race is a multi-dimensional social construct and should be analyzed as such – there is no “true race” to be measured.

But, what do these findings tell us when discussing redistributive policies based on race? Do these inconsistencies hinder any systematic implementation of affirmative action? Or are inconsistencies (and, to some extent, fraud) a “lesser-evil”, with affirmative action a good idea despite these issues? The recent policies seem to have embraced affirmative action despite these problematic measurement issues. The consequences of these choices are still to be fully understood.

At the Frontline of the Battle for Syria

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Earlier this week PBS’s Frontline aired a powerful new documentary on Syria that lets viewers see the ongoing fighting up close and through the eyes of the rebels, the regime, and those trapped in the middle. It does a fantastic job of integrating the micro-level dynamics of the violence on the ground with the macro-level political forces operating in the country more broadly.

The Battle for Syria is gripping footage and courageous journalism. In the first of two segments, freelance cameraman Jeremiah Bailey Hoover joins The Guardian’s Ghaith Abdul-Ahad as the two use smuggling routes to slip inside the country from across the Turkish border. They journey to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, and meet a squad of rebel fighters engaged in street-to-street warfare against the tanks, snipers and air force of the regime.

The battle line cuts through the heart of Aleppo. Graves are dug in local gardens, waiting to receive the still-warm dead. The rebels retreat and advance. They kill a sniper and retrieve bodies lying in the street. They receive a defector and capture a spy who betrayed himself by mistakenly praising Assad at the rebel checkpoint. With the front line moving by the hour and death in the air, it’s not clear who controls the neighborhood.

The streets are typically deserted but civilians pop up here and there. In a telling scene, a man approaches the front with an absurd level of nonchalance as he walks hand-in-hand with his young children, ignoring the rebel’s entreaties to stay back, telling them that the regime snipers will not shoot as they walk on by. Another man shouts angrily at the rebels, cursing them for inviting the Government’s artillery and air power to bombard the neighborhood without discrimination.

Just as The Battle for Syria lays bare the micro-level uncertainties that prevail on the frontlines among civilians betwixt and between the two combatants, the film’s second segment recounts the macro-level narrative of how the fighting resulted from a series of increasingly polarizing events beginning with a few kids from the town of Daraa, who had the balls to spray-paint anti-Assad graffiti on the walls of their school.

The film traces how the torture subsequently suffered by the boys at the hands of the regime was recorded and shown on YouTube, quickly becoming a focal point for people to organize collectively and express their outrage. Although their demands were limited and relatively inchoate, the regime responded with a brutal crack-down. Even so, the examples of successful revolts in Tunisia and Egypt emboldened the people and the protests gained momentum and the repression of the regime only served to empower those willing to use violence to meet the violence.

How is it that such a small spark could light this kind of fire and how does it relate to the broader structural forces that drive political instability in some countries but not others?

Timur Kuran has suggested one way to think about how broad structuralist forces interact with the individual determinants of opposition. In a famous analysis of the fall of the Iron Curtain, Kuran distinguished between an individual’s private and public preferences. Citizens living under authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe were often afraid of expressing their true desires—i.e., opposition— publicly for fear of punishment. Instead, they behaved as though they supported communism in a form of “preference falsification,” cloaking such private truths with public lies.

Individual support or opposition to a political regime is not uniformly distributed throughout society. In Syria, for example, Sunni Islamists have a long history of resentment against the Assad regime and are die-hard opponents; others like the Alawite minority are die-hard supporters, many of whom fear for their lives were Assad to fall from power. Most people, however, are somewhere in between.

Kuran’s second point is that the mere sight of people collectively engaging in public defiance can inspire those on the sidelines to take part. He suggests that the die-hard opponents who mobilize early in protest can lower the threshold of others who, though privately sympathetic, would otherwise remain on the sidelines out of fear or social pressure. The participation of these individuals, in turn, add to the size of the protest movement and make it even easier for even more reluctant yet privately dissatisfied individuals to join in. This process is further accelerated if dramatic events like the torture of children can serve as focal points to channel public dissatisfaction. Subsequent repression by the regime that results in additional casualties can raise grievances and lower thresholds even further. Such a cascading effect helps explain how seemingly minor incidents can have major repercussions. Though apparently unpredictable in advance, they seem obvious in hindsight.

Preference falsification helps us see why authoritarian regimes seems so stable until the eve of their disintegration. In Eastern Europe, when citizens realized that there were thousands of others who were just like them, the regimes collapsed remarkably swiftly. This, according to Kuran, is why seemingly strong dictatorships are actually highly vulnerable to the public expression of political opposition. Indeed, as Lisa Wedeen has shown, fears of public unrest drove a remarkable effort by Bashar’s father, Hafez, to build a cult of personality. That pretty much everyone privately knew this cult was ridiculous missed the point: ensuring the mere semblance of outward support was enough to keep citizens engaging in docile preference falsification and unaware of the true scale of discontent.

In a cruel irony, The Battle for Syria recounts Bashar’s elderly mother, Anisa, chiding her son for lacking the firm hand of his father.

Dommage for Catalonia: Identity and Economic Crisis

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Since the beginning of the Euro crisis, there has been a substantial amount of analysis, and more than a bit of hand-wringing, over the (arguably counterproductive) resurgence of nationalism among the European Union’s constituent states. Nicholas Sambanis’s New York Times op-ed from a few weeks ago is representative: he suggests that the crisis has refocused the European populace on their parochial national identities at the expense of their (potentially) continental one, and that such socio-psychological (re)orientation is preventing concerted action to solve the problem:

As Europe’s status declines, the already shaky European identity will weaken further and the citizens of the richer European nations will be more likely to identify nationally — as Germans or French — rather than as Europeans. This will increase their reluctance to use their taxes for bailouts of the ethnically different Southern Europeans, especially the culturally distant Greeks; and it will diminish any prospect of fiscal integration that could help save the euro.
The result is a vicious circle: as ethnic identities return, ethnic differences become more pronounced, and all sides fall back on stereotypes and the stigmatization of the adversary through language or actions intended to dehumanize, thereby justifying hostile actions. This is a common pattern in ethnic conflicts around the world, and it is also evident in Europe today.

Indeed, the economic malaise plaguing Europe provides some interesting evidence for the interaction between crises, insecurity, institutions, elite behavior, and political identity. It has certainly provided a clarifying moment for those who argue that European identity is sufficiently well-developed to have coherent political meaning. The importance of identity is difficult to observe when peoples’ various subject positions (religion, regional identity, nationality, etc.) coexist in harmony. It is when identities are brought into conflict—via social unrest, economic crisis, political competition or war—that they become the most salient. Events of recent years have not boded well for the European project, and have arguably reaffirmed the primacy of the nation-state as the locus of mass political allegiance.

Recent days have added another wrinkle to this narrative. Underreported in the American press, September 11th saw a colossal Catalan nationalist rally in Barcelona. Local police reported 1.5 million attendees. To put this into perspective, that’s nearly as many people as live in the city, and more than 20 percent of the total population of Catalonia. September 11th is Catalonia’s “national day,” commemorating the 1714 Siege of Barcelona that, according to the relevant national mythos, marked the end of Catalan independence. The holiday often draws a decent-sized crowd. This week’s demonstration, though, was orders of magnitude larger than usual. Reports indicate that protesters expressed grievances over their homeland’s disproportionate tax burden within the Spanish state, itself cash-strapped as it struggles with a balance-of-payments crisis originating in Brussels and Berlin.

There are a few points to be made here. The first is to reiterate that for European elites who profess such dedication to their continent-wide project of neoliberal cosmopolitan governance, austerity policies have been highly counterproductive. By requiring Europe’s periphery to deflate its way to renewed growth, Brussels (read: Berlin) is imposing scarcity and economic misery on the very populations it seeks to bind into a unified community of fate. Competition for a shrinking resource base is a poor breeding ground for mutual identification and positive fellow-feeling, yet rather than play savior by easing the damage done to places like Catalonia by international capital markets, institutional Europe has only exacerbated their ill effects.

The second is to note that the last few years provide a measure of support for the account of modern nationalism advanced by Karl Polanyi more than a half-century ago. For Polanyi, the overly-intensive identification with volk and fatherland that plagued midcentury Europe had roots in the collapse of the nineteenth century economic order and the incapacity of extant institutions to assert control over the fates of their societies. The renewed intensity of Catalan nationalism suggests that it continues to function as a kind of psycho-social defense mechanism through which people search for communities of fate with the capacity to control their own destinies. Madrid lies at the mercy of international creditors and lacks the institutional capability to address Spanish problems with any kind of decisiveness. In some ways it’s not surprising that the citizens of Catalonia search for other notions of community with the potential to do better.

Affirmative Action in Brazil: The Country of Racial Inequality Battles the Country of Racial Democracy

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On August 29th, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil signed into law a policy that would require public federal universities to reserve at least half of their admission spots for students who had attended public high schools. The law also dictates that there should be quotas based on the racial composition of the state in which the university is located; that is, the number of students admitted should mirror the racial composition of the state.

This law has generated a lot of debate, with the introduction of the racial quota proving particularly controversial. While the debate isn’t new, this latest development marks a major milestone. Last April, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of racial quotes at University of Brasília (UnB), finally burying the much-used argument that racial quotas were unconstitutional, in turn paving the way for this law.

Most students in public federal universities, which are usually of better quality than private universities, come from private elementary and high schools. In four years, Brazilian federal universities will be very different in terms of the demographics of their students, particularly in comparison to the situation prior to 2003, before the first experiment with affirmative action and the expansion of federal universities through a policy of restructuring of higher public education (REUNI).

Now that the social quotas have been enacted by law, universities have four years to adapt to the changes. The effect of the law will certainly vary depending on the field of study – medicine, law and engineering are usually more competitive than other undergraduate majors. But what can we generally expect as a result of this development? In particular, will quotas “lower the quality” of teaching and research in public universities?

There are as many ways to answer this question as there are ways to measure the “quality” of schools and students. Based on the experience of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBa), Antonio Sergio Guimarães et al. collected data and provided analysis on three measures: absolute performance, relative performance, and dropout rates (if you’re interested, there are many others that you can find mentioned here).

Absolute performance is a standardized measure based on coursework grades. Relative performance assesses the development of the students: do students improve their relative positions from entrance admission scores to coursework scores? In other words, are students climbing up the “educational ladder” while in college, are the entrance positions relatively stable over time, or are students’ performances exacerbating the entrance score differences?

Based on these measures, Guimarães et al. compare three types of students: non-beneficiaries (students that did not fill quotas requirements), non-effective beneficiaries (students that, even though they fulfilled the quota requirements, would have been admitted without quotas), and effective beneficiaries (students that were admitted because of the quotas).

They show that, as expected, effective beneficiaries indeed are in much worse socioeconomic positions than the other types of students. Also, effective beneficiaries have, on average, worse absolute performance, as the graph below shows (vertical axis gives the absolute performance, blue and green ticks present the estimate for non-beneficiaries and non-effective beneficiaries, and yellow ticks are for effective beneficiaries):

In terms of relative performance, the authors find that effective beneficiaries perform, on average, similar to other types of students. And, based on a few measures of relative performance, they clearly outperform both the non-beneficiaries and the non-effective beneficiaries.

This point deserves greater attention. It could be argued that effective beneficiaries outperform other students in terms of relative performance because they have more room for improvement given their lower entrance exam scores. The authors acknowledge this point and, based on a series of analyses, attempt to measure the degree to which effective beneficiaries were able to rise to the challenge and keep up with other types of students, accounting for this initial improvement. Their analysis shows that 50% of effective beneficiaries, on average, improved their performance in college (compared to the entrance scores) and rose to the same level as other types of students. In low demand majors, this percentage is as high as 75% and in high demand majors, the percentage is about 40%.

Furthermore, even though it takes longer for effective beneficiaries to graduate (many of them have to work while attending school), they dropout at lower rates than other types of students. This is demonstrated in the graph below (colors are the same as above, blue for non-beneficiaries, green for non-effective beneficiaries, and yellow for effective beneficiaries):

The answer, then, to the fear that social and racial quotas will lower the “quality” of public universities is a cautious “no”. There are many threats to the future of public higher education in Brazil, but, based on the pieces of evidence we have, social quotas do not seem to be a particularly threatening one.

Biting Off More Than You Can Chew: Turkey, Syria and the PKK

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As the conflict in Syria worsens, an increasing number of Syrians have been heading to Turkey. The UN Refugee Agency warned on Tuesday that the number of refugees in Turkey could increase up to 200,000. Currently, around 80,000 Syrians are already registered in Turkey across nine refugee camps, with Turkey building facilities for six more camps in order to increase their capacity to accommodate refugees. This burgeoning refugee crisis is stoking tensions in Turkey, both on a local as well as a national level.

At the local level, observers have noted increased tensions in the Hatay district of Turkey, where about a million Alawis reside (Alawis are ethnically Arab and are related to the Alawi-dominated Syrian state). While some have cautioned that this in no way means that the Alawis in Turkey are directly supporting the Assad regime in Syria, the conflict has nonetheless turned their presence into a sensitive subject. As evidence, some Turkish media outlets have commented that Syrians in Turkey are being given priority over Turks in public hospitals in the district and are putting a strain on various other public services as well.

At the national level, the refugee crisis has highlighted the increasing inability of the government to deal with the Kurdish “issue.” Aliza Marcus argues in The National Interest that “the real fear isn’t that Syria will be divided. It’s that Kurds are uniting.” About a third of the PKK members are drawn from Kurds residing in Syria and organizational links are said to exist between the PKK in Turkey and the Democratic Union Party (PYD), an offshoot of the  PKK in Syria. These ties date back to the early 1980s, from when Abdullah Öcalan, the founding member of the PKK, built up the organization from Damascus once he was forced to flee Turkey.

Intensifying PKK attacks started this July when the PKK took over a large amount of territory in the town of Şemdinli, a district in southeastern Turkey bordering Northern Iraq. Şemdinli then witnessed a two-week showdown between Turkish military and the PKK, with the Turkish government claiming that it killed 150 PKK terrorists in the two weeks. On August 13th, the PKK kidnapped Hüseyin Aygün, a deputy for Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP). Its most recent public attack (allegedly) was in Gaziantep, a city 30 miles from the Syrian border, where a car bomb killed 9 civilians while injuring 70 others.

The Turkish government’s problems extend beyond the worsening situation in Syria and the refugee problem, however.  Last year, it had tried to strike an agreement with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Northern Iraq to import a large amount of oil and natural gas, in exchange for exporting refined petroleum products to the region . While on the face of it, the deal increases the country’s energy and economic security, it was also seen as fulfilling certain strategic goals. Gonul Tol writing in The National Interest argues:

From the Turkish perspective, closer ties to the KRG serve Turkey’s strategic interests in Syria. Turkey would like to use the clout of Barzani (the current President of Iraqi Kurdistan) with the Syrian Kurds to sideline the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the PKK offshoot in Syria, and to gain some influence with the Syrian Kurds in a post-Assad scenario.

However, in April of this year, the Iraqi government declared that the export of oil to Turkey was illegitimate and that the oil and natural gas reserves were the property of all Iraqis and should therefore be federally managed, instead of by the KRG alone. In May, Iraq awarded Pakistan Petroleum the right to explore for gas, officially snubbing Turkey, who is also harboring Iraq’s fugitive former Vice-President.

So what do all these events mean for Ankara? In terms of posing a threat to Turkey, the number of Kurds in Syria are too dispersed and fragmented as compared to their kin in Iraq and Turkey. The issue is most salient nationally as it highlights the inability of the ruling AKP to deal with the issue. Writing in the Hurriyet Daily News, analyst Semih Idiz laments:

What makes it sadder is that the situation in terms of Kurdish cultural rights is much better than it was a decade ago, and the government has the strongest mandate from the electorate any government has had over the past four to five decades. Given this situation, the government was in a position to take bold steps aimed at solving the Kurdish problem.

Instead of moving in that direction, however, it has moved in the traditional direction of considering the Kurdish problem as one that is not political in nature but a simple question of security and terrorism……The prospects for solving the Kurdish problem soon, therefore, do not appear good, which unfortunately points to more bloodshed and increased ethnic estrangement.

Peeking Through Syria’s Fog of War

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With recent high-profile blows to the Syrian regime headed by Bashar al-Assad and his allies — including last month’s bombing in Damascus that killed and wounded a number of key regime figures, the metastasis of the conflict into Aleppo and Damascus (both of which were largely quiescent previously, while other parts of the country were being ravaged by the war), and continuing defections, including the  prime minister’s escape to Turkey earlier this month — the rebels appear to be gaining significant ground. But is this an accurate assessment, and what can we expect moving forward?

In trying to understand the dynamics of the conflict in Syria, as well as its possible trajectories, the initial step must be to nail down exactly what we’re looking at. In this effort, disaggregation is one of the strongest potential tools at our disposal. Media coverage of Syria and other conflict situations often suffers from a lamentable tendency to lump all different sorts of civil wars together, a habit that hinders understanding of the conflict dynamics in specific cases. But there is actually more than one sort of civil war — and determining which category Syria falls into is essential to generating a more thorough understanding of the conflict.

In a 2010 article, political scientists Stathis Kalyvas and Laia Balcells show that,

insurgency (“guerrilla” or “irregular war”) is neither the only technology available to rebels nor is it as time invariant as assumed. In addition to irregular warfare, [they] identify two overlooked technologies of rebellion: conventional warfare and symmetric non-conventional (SNC) warfare.  (Kalyvas et al. 2010, 415)

These technologies of rebellion take into account variation on both the challenger and incumbent sides, and each type is characterized by a unique constellation of joint capabilities — as well as distinctive internal wartime dynamics.

The focus on technologies of rebellion has several advantages. It allows the study of civil wars as an evolving and dynamic historical phenomenon rather than one that remains constant over time. We show that the relative balance of power between contending forces determines the war-fighting strategies of the respective sides. We also indicate that the three technologies of rebellion reflect distinct military, social, and political dynamics, and affect differentially the strategic logic of conflicts, including their tactics, ideology, recruitment practices, and relations with the civilian population, among others…

Conventional civil war takes place when the military technologies of states and rebels are matched at a high level; irregular civil war emerges when the military technologies of the rebels lag vis-à-vis those of the state; and SNC war is observed when the military technologies of states and rebels are matched at a low level. (Kalyvas et al. 2010;  415, 418)

It seems clear that the Syrian conflict up till now fits into the irregular war category. Rebels remain lightly armed compared to the regime, which still has yet to unleash the full force of its military capabilities in its brutal campaign against its own people, including many noncombatants. (There was some very limited use of heavy weapons by the insurgents in Aleppo earlier this month, but for the most part they fit the profile of lightly-armed fighters).

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Drone Strikes and Anti-Americanism

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To what extent do drone strikes cause anti-Americanism and an increase in militancy? In a recent Op-Ed in The New York Times, writer and activist Ibrahim Mothana strongly condemns the use of drone attacks in Yemen by the Obama Administration. He unequivocally suggests a causal relationship between their increased use and growing anger towards the United States, stating

Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants; they are not driven by ideology but rather by a sense of revenge and despair. . . . . Indeed, the drone program is leading to the Talibanization of vast tribal areas and the radicalization of people who could otherwise be America’s allies in the fight against terrorism in Yemen.

Mothana begins his article with a jarring quote from a Yemeni lawyer: “Dear Obama, when a US drone missile kills a child in Yemen, the father will go to war with you, guaranteed. Nothing to do with al-Qaeda.”

Substitute Yemen for Pakistan and the words would still ring true for many. The use of drone attacks in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on the border of Afghanistan is a huge point of contention and controversy in Pakistan. The majority of the country appears to be vehemently opposed to their use, with protests and rallies against drone strikes common. Opposition is both based on the illegality of the strikes – both from an international human rights law perspective and their violation of the country’s sovereignty – as well as the suggestion that a very large number of civilians are killed in the process (statistics, when available, are largely contested). As the recent New York Times article made apparent, the definition of “combatant” is itself frighteningly broad:

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

And, as David Ignatius makes clear in his latest piece, drone strikes are a huge hurdle in successful bilateral relations between the U.S. and Pakistan. The situation, and public sentiment, is further complicated by evidence presented (in part through Wikileaks) that the Pakistan government has given tacit approval to the continuation of these strikes. The National Assembly’s recent resolution stalling resumption of Pak-US talks on the question of drones thus rings hallow.

However, in my conversations with some people from the tribal areas (certainly not representative of the population, as a clear selection bias exists), the counter-argument arises that, contrary to popular opinion, drone strikes are the lesser of other evils (with the bigger evils being allowing militants to roam free, as well as military operations carried out by the Pakistan army). Many of these individuals argue that drone strikes are in fact effective and create less damage than the more invasive military operations. They state that it is individuals living outside of the tribal areas, where drone strikes do not occur, who are most opposed to their use.

To be honest, I am having a hard time reconciling these anecdotes with the harrowing accounts featured in the media. In their piece for The Independent from March of this year, Andrew Buncombe and Issam Ahmed profiled FATA residents who had lost loved ones as a result of drone strikes:

Imran Khan Wazir, a day labourer, said his father, Malik Ismail, was also killed at the jirga. He said he was in the market in Miran Shah, the main town in North Waziristan, when he learned the news. “It’s been a huge loss. I’m the only brother, and now I have the responsibility of looking after the family,” he said. “America – stop these attacks. These are wicked acts. Many innocents are dying. Our jirga was innocent.”

Polling data from The New America Foundation indicates that more than three-quarters of FATA residents oppose drone strikes. Meanwhile, other surveys, such as those carried out by the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy, have found that less than half of those living in FATA (compared with a far greater number in the rest of Pakistan) felt anti-American sentiment had increased as a result of the drones, which they perceived as damaging to militant organizations. Further research is no doubt needed on the precise mechanism by which drone strikes lead to anti-Americanism and in turn to militancy, particularly in the regions directly affected by the strikes. Given the precarious security situation, clearly this is no easy task.

In discussing the factors that drive anti-Americanism in Muslim countries, arguments swing between those who cite Huntington’s “Clash of Civilization” theory which posits that fundamental differences between social norms and values are to blame, and others who place the blame squarely on U.S. policies.

In a recent research paper entitled “How Deeply Held Are Anti-American Attitudes Among Pakistani Youth?”, Adeline Delavande and Basit Zafar carry out a survey experiment in Pakistan to explore the impact of information on attitudes towards the U.S. They find that “(i) public opinions are not purely a cultural phenomenon, and are malleable, and (ii) the tendency of respondents to ignore information not aligned with their priors can be overcome.” The authors survey young, urban Pakistanis, and expose them to fact-based statements describing the U.S. in either a positive or negative light. They find that many respondents revised their attitudes up when provided positive information, and down for negative. However, the majority (57%) of respondents affiliated with conservative educational institutions did not revise their attitude, suggesting that an individual’s prior beliefs may not be overcome by increased information.

In a country where conspiracy theories are incredibly common (and often proven true) and where information and facts are always disputed, this high percentage is not surprising. In fact, it is the “information” itself that is suspect; there is little that people here view as objective fact.

Lisa Blaydes and Drew A. Linzer indirectly address this issue in their convincing work on elite competition and anti-Americanism in Muslim countries. Since this paper has already been effectively reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and The Monkey Cage, I won’t go into too much detail here. Still, it’s worth re-reading their following conclusion:

Muslim anti-Americanism is predominantly a domestic, elite-led phenomenon that intensifies when there is greater competition between Islamist and secular-nationalist political factions within a country….. Intense competition between political elites along Islamist-secular lines provides these incentives, making it advantageous for elites to foment anti-American sentiment for their own political gain.

This struggle over competing narratives finds clear support in Pakistan, and nowhere is it more apparent than in debates and discussion over the use of drone strikes in the country.

Questioning Democracy: A Look at India 10 Years After The Gujarat Riots

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Is Narendra Modi, the man who was responsible for India’s worst riots since independence, going to become one of the main candidates for the 2014 elections? Ten years after the deadly communal riots broke out in Gujarat, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, with Narendra Modi as Chief Minister, continues strong, having won the past two state elections with over two-thirds majority. This raises two sets of puzzling questions: Why do voters continue to view Modi in a positive light, despite the knowledge that he colluded with state police to assume a passive role during the course of the riots? And how has the nature of party politics in India allowed such deficiencies in the democratic process to persist?

Sworn in as Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2001, Modi watched as a carnage was committed in broad daylight by Hindu mobs. Mobilized by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a volunteer-based Hindu nationalist organization, a large number of Hindu mobs attacked and looted Muslim homes.  The precipitating event for these bloody massacres was said to be an attack by radical Islamists on a train containing VHP activists.

A 2011 report attested that two ministers sat in the police controls, remaining deliberately oblivious to the riots raging outside. Much earlier in 2003, a senior police officer and minister were murdered for having said that the police was instructed by Modi not to intervene.  This is not the only blot on Modi’s record as Chief Minister. Gujarat has also become infamous for its extrajudicial killings, commonly referred to as ‘staged encounters’, where the security forces in the state target ‘terror suspects’ even when they do not have a criminal record.

Despite this, in a poll conduced by India Today, one of India’s leading magazines, in February 2012, 24% voted that they wanted Narendra Modi as the next Prime Minister of India, with Rahul Gandhi, his nearest rival, getting 17% of the votes. This number is astonishing given that, in another online poll, Modi received the highest number of ‘no’ votes on The Times’  100 most influential people, making him the most disliked person on the list. How has Modi managed to gain such popularity despite the obvious doubts cast about him when he presided over the carnage in 2002? Much of his popularity seems rooted in economic performance. In 2008, the Tata Group, one of India’s biggest industrial giants came to Gujarat. This marked a turning point as it gave a positive signal to investors. Soon after, Ford and Peugeot also followed. This carefully crafted image of a state open to FDI, which focuses on improving the welfare of its citizens via economic growth, has its fair share of supporters.

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