By Laura Zuber

It is the 13^th of April 2021 and the the call for writing a blog article on ‘Reimagining Communities’ for this year’s Security Studies conference reaches me in a vulnerable moment in my research process: six months into the PhD, I made the decision to change topic. Roughly, my original plan consisted of comparing the UK’s crisis management during Covid-19 and the Second World War. Naturally, the question I would receive from many a person coming across my research would be: “Why these two?” Concretely, “What is your understanding of crisis that made you come up with comparing these two completely different phenomena?” The truth is, although I was mostly able to provide a satisfactory answer to those asking, I had to quietly confess that I was not able to provide a satisfactory answer to myself, to the point that the molehill became a mountain that blocked from my sight the further path of the project. 

A thought-provoking question. What do I mean by ‘crisis’? What does ‘crisis’ mean in general? This question came accompanied by a latent sense of shame, given that the word was prominently featured in my project title. Adding to this feeling, I did what most of us on the privileged side of the digital divide do in moments of fundamental ontological questionings of the world around us: I googled. Eventually, after hours of research, browsing through academic and various other sources, I still did not exactly know what, when and how a ‘crisis’ is, but I knew one thing: that it is tricky to figure out for others, too. 

Thereby, we encounter this notion in every other news article, attached to words such as health, climate, migration, food, housing, or the economy. Does the meaning of ‘crisis’ impose itself so naturally? “That, now that one is a sound crisis! No no, that one, not the other, the other one is just a huge problem.” Or is its inflationary use rather a matter of quantity than quality? “Hah, we simply have too many of them, there you go, Ma’am, catch!”

Even though the latter might be sadly true, I would like to reflect on the first aspect, specifically on the political implications of using this notion unquestioningly. My aim is not to advocate for a narrow definition of the word – on the contrary. Rather, I would like to invite the reader to a broader reflection on the dangers and potentials of handling a remarkably adaptable and ontologically hollow notion such as ‘crisis’; an excercise that might prove useful for the next time we stumble across this little word in the newspaper. 

To do this, I need to offer an outline of a much lesser known crisis phenomenon: Coming from feminist theory, my current research explores what is known, whithin feminist scholarship, as the crisis of reproduction. (Yes, that suspicious word again!) That is the increasing difficulty to engage in physical, mental, and emotional life-making and -sustaining activities within the microcosm of the everydays; from cooking, eating, sleeping, accessing potable water, to teaching, and giving and receiving care and love – activities that sustain ourselves and the extended community and kinship ties around us. According to Marxist and socialist feminists, the ultimate goal of these reproductive activities is to renew, day-to-day and generationally, the labour power we need to sell on the market to gain access to the finacial means to – again – reproduce ourselves and the capitalist modality. Life-making for profit-making. If this is part of the deal, why is the reproductive sphere in crisis, then? Ought it not be the most secure of all? 

Seen through a critical lens, capitalism, especially in its neoliberalised form, reveals itself as a cosmology, a value-system that acts with a parasitic, that is an expansive and extractive relationality on those within its reach, with the goal of infinite accumulation of profit. This extractive relationality furthermore has an explicitely colonial and heteronormative patriarchal quality, which shines light on why the global reproductive sphere is disproportionally made up by precarious Women and people of Colour – as opposed to the primary beneficiaries of this system. In order to sustain itself, capitalism then needs to extract more and more – theoretically infinitely more – from human (and other-than-human) regenerative life-forces that are by nature finite. Capitalism’s progressive eating itself through finite life-forces – unevenly across lines of inequality – is increasingly palpable even in Western heteronormative societies. And suddenly, the crisis of reproduction is everywhere and nowehere. 

The crisis of reproduction is everywhere, because it hides at the core of many of the crises we read and hear about in many a news article, talk and conference: the crises of climate, migration, debt, food or housing, not to speak of the manifold struggles brought about by the pandemic. The crisis of reproduction is seen nowhere, because the reproductive sphere and its racialised, gendered and precarious demography is produced as invisible. Because acknowledging the global reproductive crisis would mean declaring a (‘a’ – not ‘in’) crisis the current political-economic order, including the very colonial and heteronormative patriarchal relationships it is built upon and that permeate and uphold the insititutional grid of society. It would mean declaring a crisis competitive, hierarchical and cumulative systems of power and the way we organise life in them. It would mean for society to enter into a state of ontological insecurity.  

Turns out, the question what is deemed to be a crisis is not a trivial one. The way this word is filled with meaning has a strategic function for the ontological security of societal and global structures protecting capitalist – including colonial and patriarchal – modalities. It is also of utmost importance for the livelihood of everyone living in and with them day-by-day. The question what a crisis is and the dominant value-system in which this question is subsequently interpreted have concrete political implications as to which life-threatening situations will be problematised or normalised, and thus whose lives will be protected or sacrificed. Moreover, the question of who is ontologically constructed as being, and the subsequent affirmation of who is valued in the dominant value-system, will have concrete political implications as to when a situation is declared or taken seriously as a crisis; depending on whose lives are in danger.

“But during the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a revaluation of (white and Western) women’s reproductive activities, how does that fit in?”, some might wonder. While we cannot know with certainty what this revaluation might bring, feminist scholar Smriti Rao offers a rather disheartening outlook:

The terrible pandemic sweeping the globe caused capitalist accumulation to be temporarily suspended in order to address the threat to the production and maintenance of life posed by the virus. One could sense the impatience generated by this unprecedented move in an economic system that is designed to reverse that order of priorities. The suspension did not last long, precisely because of how poorly it fits our current political economy. From a feminist political economy perspective, this is a further reminder of the fundamental contradiction between a capitalist system that prioritizes profits, and a feminist ethic that prioritizes life-making or social reproduction. (Rao, 2021, p.18)

With this background, what should we reimagine communities for, given that they are the primary site of reproduction, whose struggle seems to be a lost case? To try to reproduce our labour-power better, until the ‘dragon’, as Audre Lorde named it, eventually devours itself and us? 

If the community in capitalist societies is, as Silvia Federici explains, essentially an assembly line that (re)produces workers and labour-power, then reimagining communities would mean: reimagining communities that produce something beyond that. The world we live in is materialised cosmology – it is nothing but materialised cosmology. Before we feed any Lorde’ian dragon with our labour power, we must feed that dragon with our collective belief  in it. Collective belief is the true source of ontological security. 

The micro-level of community, then, is the primordial site where the conditions of possibility for the world we live in – in all its ontological, structural and cultural facets – is produced. This is what ‘reproductive activities’ ultimately are about: they are world-making activities that set the stage for any cosmology to materially unfold.  Understanding the community as a site of world-creation shines light on why capital accumulation happens through a regime “in which all life forms are severed from the interdependence that nurtures life-making” (Hennessy, 2020, p. 5): severed, dismembered and alienated (or simply absent) communities cannot realise their full life-making, meaning world-making potential beyond the mere reproduction of labour power. The ontological threat is minimised. The community is stripped from its creative power that is free to be transfered to privileged political, economic and financial elites sitting on top of often violent hierarchies. These then appear as the only legitimate agents to endow such crucial notions as ‘crisis’ with meaning. Can we reimagine communities that are able to realise their full hidden potential? 

An investigation into the etymology of the word ‘solidarity’ reveals that the french word solidarité designates a community of mutual responsibility, and itself stems from the words solidaire, meaning ‘interdependent’ and solide, meaning ‘solid’. Can solidarity be the key to restore solid and interdependent community ties? If yes, solidarity and interdependence need to be based on a sense of mutual responsibility – not on coercive or exploitative relationships. As decolonial philosopher Enrique Dussel tells us, respect and responsibility for the Other is a precondition for reimagining and remaking: “it is an almost metaphysical activity. […] It is the metaphysical anteriority of the new or future order. It is anteriority to ontological openness to the world; it makes it possible; it is its real a priori” (1985, p. 60, italics in original). Solidarity, interdependence and mutual responsibility are reflections of each other. Reimagining communities as sites of rooted and actualised solidarity is the precondition for them to engage in the task that is theirs only: to reimagine a world – or worlds – we want to live in. Perhaps it is due to the crisis of reproduction that images of these worlds-that-could-be are haunting so many of us. I see the call for reimagining communities as the call for cultivating solid ‘haunting grounds’ for them. 

And here I am asking you, the reader of these lines: How do you feel? If everything and nothing can be a crisis, then what do you think is one? When did you have your last chat on ‘God and the world’, your pain, hopes and anger within a safe and nurturing community setting? Where do you wish for more of these settings, maybe in institutional and work contexts where ‘they do not belong’? Why don’t they belong? What could be done to challenge that? You don’t have time and energy for that? Why, where do they go? What is making you sick? What could be done to challenge that?

Reimagining communities is a security issue. In a crisis-ridden and self-devouring world, the community offers security of the most meaningful kind. Especially Indigenous, Black and postcolonial knowledges speak of this reality. 

For my part, I wish that one day, when we are haunted by fundamental ontological questionings of the world around us, instead of turning to google, we can turn to healthy, thriving, nurturing and sustainable communities for the knowledge and strenght to provide ourselves with aswers. And in case I should be  deemed mad for harbouring such heretic thoughts, I leave here the words of Black domestic servant Hanna Nelson: “I have grown to womanhood in a world where the saner you are, the madder you are made to appear.”

Laura Zuber (she/her) is a doctoral researcher at the War Studies Department of King’s College London. Her thesis explores the interrelation between the neoliberal crisis philosophy and the global crisis of reproduction. She furthermore researches into alternative philosophies and approaches to the governance of the reproductive sphere and its crises coming from social justice collectives. 

This blog entry excerpts ideas and phrases from an unpublished doctoral thesis; please do reach out to the author via laura.zuber@kcl.ac.uk if you wish to reproduce or cite.

Bibliography

Beier, F. (2018). Marxist Perspectives on the Global Enclosures of Social Reproduction. TripleC, 16(2), 546–561.

Bhattacharya, T. (2017). What is Social Reproduction Theory? Retrieved May 03, 2021 from http://www.tithibhattacharya.net/social-reproduction-theory

Bhattacharya, T., & Vogel, L. (eds.) (2017). Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press.

Dussel, E. D. (1985). Philosophy of Liberation. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books.

Federici, S., & Jones, C. (2020). Silvia Federici and Campbell Jones: Counterplanning in the Crisis of Social Reproduction. South Atlantic Quarterly, 199(1), 153–165.

Fraser, N. (2014). Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism. New Left Review, (86), 55–72.

Fraser, N. (2016). Contradictions of Capital and Care. New Left Review, (100), 99–117.

Grosfoguel, R. (2014). Epistemic Racism/Sexism, Westernized Universities and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century. Tabula Rasa, 19, 31–58.

Gunn Allen, P. (1986). Who is Your Mother? Red Roots of White Feminism. Retrieved February 17, 2021 from https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/allenredrootsofwhitefeminism.html

Harman, S. (2021). Threat not Solution: Gender, Global Health Security and Covid-19. International Affairs, 00(0), 1–23.

Hennessy, R. (2020). Toward an Ecology of Life-making: The Re-membering of Meridel Le Sueur. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature And Culture, 22(2).

hooks, b. (1984). Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. Boston, MA: South End Press.

Lorde, A. (2007). Sister outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, Calif.: Crossing Press.

Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a Decolonial Feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 742–759.

Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 240–270.

Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso.

Online Etymology Dictionary. Solidarity. Retrieved May 03, 2021 from https://www.etymonline.com/word/solidarity

Rao, S. (2021). Beyond the Coronavirus: Understanding Crises of Social Reproduction. Global Labour Journal, 12(1).

Sauer, B., & Wöhl, S. (2011). Feminist Perspectives on the Internationalization of the State. Antipode, 43(1), 108–128.

For the quote by Hanna Nelson see Nakano Glenn, E. (1992). From Servitude to Service Work. Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor. Signs, 18(1), 1–43.

by Jan Camenzind Broomby

For the purposes of my King’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship I assisted both Professor Claudia Aradau (KCL War Studies) and Professor Tobias Blanke (KCL Digital Humanities) in their research on intelligence and oversight in the UK parliamentary archives, with a focus on how questions of accountability and scrutiny have been raised in regard to the British intelligence activities. I was primarily tasked with cleaning the data that had been compiled thus far and conducting archival research to ensure that said data was relevant and correct. This involved harmonising the names of entities (the data that had been collected previously) under new names, discarding irrelevant entities, adding latitudes/longitudes for entities that referred to locations, and Wikipedia articles for entities that referred to events. This blog will discuss the methodology I adopted during my work and for the sake of clarity I have split this into several segments, each of which outlines a challenge that I encountered, and a solution I developed thereto. 

How to begin?

I began by working on cleaning the data in the smallest Excel file that had been sent to me. This ensured that any mistakes I might make would be contained to a smaller, more manageable Excel file and would thus be easier to rectify. It also ensured that the task appeared less daunting and enabled me to get to grips with what I was doing without being overwhelmed. From the sheer size of the data that I was dealing with, I knew that I would have to automate a portion of the work in order to ensure that I was able to work as efficiently as possible. I therefore began looking into the different Excel commands that might be of benefit to me and discovered that the IFS command could be used to automatically fill cells with the harmonised names that I had chosen. Using this command, I set about populating the ‘Harmonised’ column with the harmonised names for each entity. Having done this I wrote another IFS command that filled another column with relevant Wikipedia articles depending on the harmonised name that the article was to refer to. Given the small size of this document I was able to write an IFS command that included all unique entities. This sped the progress of work up considerably.

World War or Wars?

One issue I stumbled across early on was the decision of how to harmonise certain entities. This problem was particularly prevalent when I came across several entities that referred generally to ‘World Wars’. Unsure of what to do, I emailed my supervisors and was advised that I could either harmonise this entity under a ‘World Wars’ name or create two separate rows for both World War I & II. Having realised that there was no Wikipedia article for ‘World Wars’, and that whenever a speech referenced ‘World Wars’, they also referred to World War I & II separately, I decided I would create new entries for both World War I & II whenever I came across the entity ‘World Wars’. I adopted the same solution for any other such issues I encountered, searching first to see whether a relevant Wikipedia article could be found, and secondly determining whether the entity could be split into smaller sub-events.

Automating Efficiently?

Having finished the file that focused on events, I moved onto the file that dealt with locations. I noted that this file was far larger and would therefore require more automation to finish. I gave a cursory glance to the whole dataset and noted down which entities seemed to be cropping up the most. I took this list and, using the IFS command, automated the harmonisation of these entities. While this was a step in the right direction, I nevertheless noticed that there were several entities that came up frequently that I had failed to make note of when I first looked through the document, these therefore had to be harmonised manually which took longer than it otherwise might have done. 

Constituency or location?

The next issue I ran into was that a large portion of the locations that were included as entities were actually references to members of Parliament (who are often referred to by their constituency, rather than their names). These were unwanted as they generally did not refer to relevant locations, however the difficulty was that I could not be sure whether or not to discard the entity without checking each one within the Hansard archive.

I noticed also that the algorithm, when making reference to an MP, would often include their City, followed by one of the four cardinal compass directions (North, East, South, or West). The honourable member for Sunderland, South was, for example, often represented on the Excel sheet with one ‘Sunderland’ entity, and one ‘South’ entity following it. Given that there was a low chance that the South of Sunderland would be relevant to a GCHQ debate, and given that people colloquially tend to refer to areas with the compass direction first (one might say ‘the South of Sunderland’), rather than afterwards (one would not say ‘Sunderland, South’), I could thus remove pairs of entities that I knew followed this pattern of town, cardinal direction. 

To read or not to read? 

I then set about manually cleaning the remaining data but happened upon a further problem. When I went to check the Hansard archives to determine what was being referred to in the entities, I was often confronted with hundreds of different mentions of the entity. The entity might for example be listed as ‘West’ but upon searching within the Hansard archive I would find that ‘West’ had been referred to in the context of West Berlin, West Germany, The West, West Wales etc. and I could never be sure which of these ‘West’s was the one that should be recorded. The issue was that I had been checking the whole Hansard archive of each date, which meant that far more irrelevant results showed up.

I emailed my supervisors and they explained that the programme that had been used to extract entities from the Hansard archive material had only looked for locations, events and organisations in speeches that mentioned GCHQ, as well as 2/3 speeches before and after. This meant that I did not have to look through the entire Hansard archive. My supervisors also sent me a new filed named ‘gchq_speeches’. This massively sped up the process of manually checking entities as it allowed me to search within the gchq_speeches file, rather than searching on the Hansard archives website.

Final Automation:

I finally moved on to the second location file. This was much larger than the two files I had been working on so far. It thus required more automation to ensure that I could get the work done on time. I knew that it made sense to automate the harmonisation of entities that appeared most frequently, but I had yet to figure out how I could determine which entities appeared the most. While I could have used Excel’s COUNTIF function, this would have involved me manually inputting each unique entity to see how many times it appeared and would thus not have saved me as much time. 

I decided instead to use an online word occurrence tool. I quickly realised, however, that this tool counted each word separately. This caused an issue as many of the entities in my Excel file contained multiple words within one cell. I therefore found a different tool that would allow me to remove the spaces between the words in each cell. I could then take the output from the space removal tool and input that to the word frequency tool, which generated a list of the entities that most frequently came up in the file. 

This list of the most frequent words allowed me to automate the harmonisation of entities using the IFS command in Excel more efficiently than I had been doing before. I still, however, was limited by the fact that Excel only allows 125 tests within one excel command in a cell. This meant that I was only able to automate the first 125 unique entities. However, this was by far the most efficient way of cleaning the data, and it enabled me to sort through over 5,000 data points considerably faster than I otherwise would have done.

Conclusion:

As is evident from this piece it took me several iterations and adaptions to reach a point where I was satisfied with my workflow. However, having finished my undergraduate fellowship, I am aware that there are still numerous areas that could still be improved upon. I suppose that there are several things I have learned from this experience. It has borne testament to the value of trial and error, persistence, and to the fact that, as my supervisor Professor Blanke pointed out to me, ‘most knowledge is serendipitous in its origins to a degree’. Challenges should thus not be seen as an immovable obstacle, but as an opportunity to learn, and adapting and overcoming these challenges is an important part of learning and of the research process. 

This article was written as part of the King’s Undergraduate Research fellowship held in the context of the GUARDINT project, which is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council.

By Alvina Hoffmann

What kinds of transnational or global strategies can local activists mobilise for themselves to generate international attention and solidarity? This is a central question for many Crimean activists as they face criminalisation and incarceration of Crimean Tatar men in Crimea since its annexation by Russia on 18 March 2014. Based on the ongoing military court trials of Crimean Tatar men and how as a response women have emerged as central activist voices, I propose to explore three different but closely linked global struggles in which Crimean Tatars are implicated: the global history of indigenous peoples’ rights which was already mobilised by Crimean Tatar political leaders long before the annexation of Crimea; the global politics of extremism legislation as part of counter-terrorism efforts which has been employed arbitrarily and overly harshly to criminalise and defame activists; and a reading of the on-going trials of Crimean Tatars as part of global practices of incarceration.

© Alina Smutko

Mass Arrests Transforming the Social Fabric of Crimean Tatar Communities

Since Russia annexed Crimea over six years ago, the social fabric of the local Crimean Tatar communities has been profoundly changed. To this date, over 60 Crimean Tatar men have been arrested in 10 groups in various cities around Crimea, the latest of which was in March 2020 (see here for a graphic and list with pictures of arrested men, including additional individual cases). All these men have either already received or are anticipating very long and harsh prison sentences – 10, 15, or 20 years in a penal colony in mainland Russia – on the basis of terrorism charges, created through an overly harsh and arbitrary application of Russian extremism legislation. The men are said to belong to the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir which is deemed a terrorist organisation in Russia but legal in Ukraine of which Crimea was an autonomous region before its annexation. With so many
imprisoned men, fathers, husbands, and brothers, Crimean Tatar mothers are turned into single mothers and left to raise their numerous children by themselves. However, activist Mumine Saliyeva – whose husband is also facing terrorism charges – created a project entitled ‘Crimean Childhood’, supporting mothers like herself and now nearly 200 children growing up without their fathers (see here for an interview with her). What stood out when interviewing local activists is the great number of primarily female activists who have been taking centre stage in Crimea’s activist and dissident circles.

The trials take place in a military court in Rostov-on-Don, like all terrorism-related charges in Russia. Rostov-on-Don is around 700 km away from Crimea in the Russian oblast of Rostov, which the activists and affected wives who graciously found time to talk to me all highlighted as an impediment for on-site support and mobilisation. Nonetheless, this is an obstacle which won’t stop them from travelling there by bus, embarking on long journeys to show solidarity and be present for their community. Trials in Rostov are open to public audiences but closed in Crimea where they are treated as state secrets, showing how
different, often arbitrary rules apply in Crimea compared to mainland Russia. However, as one of the leading activist voices Lutfiye Zudiyeva notes, it is much easier to mobilise a great number of people in front of the courts in Crimea than Rostov. Nonetheless, still 90 to 100 Crimean Tatars travel to Rostov whenever trials take place there.

In light of this, Lutfiye Zudiyeva recalled a fascinating story. During one hearing, many Crimean Tatar supporters had travelled to Rostov but were not allowed into the small court rooms. Being left outside on the corridor, they noted that in the neighbouring court room, men from Ingushetia, a Russian oblast in the Caucasus, were tried on the same charges with close to no audience. Being moved by a shared Muslim religious identity, the Crimean Tatars sat down in the audience and supported the Ingushetian men on trial. According to the activist, this left a deep impression with the Ingushetian community, noting that other people can build on this example of solidarity and self-organisation.

© Alina Smutko

Local Activism and Global Patterns: Making Connections

In the remainder of this post, I want to generalise from this account and identify three different and interlinked global processes through which the Crimean Tatar struggles can be understood. The first is the global history of Indigenous peoples’ struggling for their rights. The Crimean Tatars have long before the annexation pursued this strategy in relation to the Ukrainian state. Crimean Tatars identify themselves as Crimea’s Indigenous people and share common memories of the first annexation of Crimea by Russia in 1783. Previously, Crimea was ruled by Crimean Tatar rulers who established the Crimean Khanate from 1475 onwards  which was under Ottoman tutelage (see hereand here for more in-depth historical studies). Another central and dramatic event was the deportation of Crimean Tatars to Central Asia under Stalin in 1944, for their ‘ostensible collaboration with German and Romanian forces during’ World War II (see Greta Uehling). The most recent annexation, then, becomes part of this broader history and memory passed on to generations. Their Muslim religious identity, customs and language are shared practices and allow people to self-identify as Crimean Tatar.

© Alina Smutko

The Crimean Tatars were given a special political representative organ, the Mejlis, by the Ukrainian state, but no special rights were enshrined in the constitution. When the UN passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, Ukraine abstained from signing it despite encouragements from the Crimean Tatars. Finally, a few months after the annexation in 2014, the Ukrainian state signed the Declaration and is leveraging the Crimean Tatar’s minority and Indigenous rights in international courts, for example in the most recent ICJ ruling in which Ukraine refers to Crimean Tatars as the Indigenous people of Crimea.

Second, the legal machine that continues to criminalise and incarcerate Crimean Tatars, and other vocal dissent voices, is part of a broader global practice that states mobilise in their counter-terrorism policies. A 2020 report by Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, UN Special Rapporteur on protecting human rights while countering terrorism, analyses widespread uses of anti-extremism policies, in particular in contexts which lack a human rights-based approach to these questions. T These policies are problematic as they lack a precise legal definition of extremism, potentially leading to mass violations of human rights in many contexts. The report traces how ‘violent extremism’ entered into international policy agendas on counter-terrorism in the mid-2000s, underlining governmental approaches to combat terrorism by using hard military power as well as other ‘soft power’ approaches. At the UN level, the language of extremism entered in 2010 in a Security Council resolution. In a field visit to Kazakhstan, Special Rapporteur Ní Aoláin encountered similar questions of extremism legislation used, and potentially abused, to counter terrorism. Crimean Tatars, then, become part of a broader global politics of extremism legislation used to criminalise, defame and incarcerate activists and other local dissidents.

Finally, inspired by Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s ground-breaking work on the massive expansion of the prison system and incarceration rates in California since 1982 despite a falling criminality rate, I want to conclude this post by reflecting on the group arrests of Crimean Tatars in light of global practices of incarceration. The choice of incarceration itself as a means to ‘punish’ dissidents is not surprising given the context. But relative numbers reveal just how wide-ranging the practice of incarceration as a solution to social problems is in Russia. While noting a downward trend in its prison population, falling by 45% since 2000, in 2018 Russia recorded a prison population of 402 per 100,000 people, the fifth most of any state after Rwanda (464), Thailand (526), El Salvador (604) and the United States (655). Many factors need to be considered when analysing incarceration practices and the vast system that upholds this machine. This ranges from lengths of sentences, lengthy pre-trial detention in which people are held over long periods of time – some Crimean Tatars for example are held over several years before their official court hearings begin – and the legal system itself and by whom it is enforced. As a few interviewees noted, many judges and other civil servants retained their posts in Crimea even after the annexation and now need to deal with, enforce and interpret a completely new legal system they were not trained in. Crime legislation has profound effects through the ways in which it governs, classifies and divides society. Finally, geography itself matters, as already pointed out above in interviews with activists. Once sentenced, the prisons could be similarly far away from Crimea, on the margins of society, putting serious constraints on visits and continuous social integration of criminalised groups.

Questions of solidarity and care for communities are of vital importance to the Crimean Tatars, as shown by their grassroots mobilisation and activism. They allow us to see connections and links with other struggles which would remain obscured in geopolitical or foreign policy accounts in which Crimea is merely an object of great power interest.

© Alina Smutko

Alvina Hoffmann is a PhD candidate in International Relations in the department of War Studies, King’s College London, funded by LISS DTP. Her research examines rights claims from the perspective of those who claim to speak with authority on behalf of social groups or a cause. She is a research assistant for the ERC funded project Security Flows and previously worked at Millennium: Journal of International Studies as the review article editor, social media officer and member of the editorial board.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Alina Smutko for her beautiful photographs from Crimea, Lutfiye Zudiyeva from Crimean Solidarity and Mumine Saliyeva from Crimean Childhood, two brave, generous and tireless activist voices, and Alyona Savchuk who generously connected me to local voices. Thanks also to Kerry Goettlich, Andy Li and Alireza Shams-Lahijani for great comments.

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Greta Lynn Uehling (2004) Beyond Memory: The Crimean Tatars‘ Deportation and Return. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

UN General Assembly (2007) United Nations Declaration on the Rights of INdigenous Peoples: resolution/adopted by the General Assembly, 2 October 2007, A/RES/61/295, accessed 21 May 2020 at https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf

Application of the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism and of the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (Ukraine v. Russian Federation) (2019) I.C.J., accessed 21 May 2020 at https://www.icj-cij.org/files/case-related/166/166-20191108-JUD-01-00-EN.pdf

HRC report on the human rights impact of policies and practices aimed at preventing and countering violent extremism – Fionnuala Ní Aoláin – (2020) accessed 21 May 2020 at: https://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?si=A/HRC/43/46

Visit to Kazakhstan – Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism (2020) accessed 21 May 2020 at https://undocs.org/en/A/HRC/43/46/Add.1

Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.

World Prison Population List, 12^th edition, Roy Walmsley (2018) accessed 21 May 2020 at: https://www.prisonstudies.org/sites/default/files/resources/downloads/wppl_12.pdf

Jenna M. Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge (2012) Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis. Athens & London: The University of Georgia Press.

By Leonie Ansems de Vries

I am very happy to introduce this short blog series on The Ethics of Solidarity, Community and Care, which is part of the International Relations and Ethics theme contribution to the School of Security Studies Virtual Research Conference on Global Shocks. In addition to the blog series, IR and Ethics theme members have contributed to a short video in which they reflect on what the ethics of solidarity, community and care means to them and how it features in their research. The video will be shown as part of an interactive panel discussion on the same theme.

Global shocks such as the Covid-19 pandemic highlight the structural social, political, and economic inequalities that put some people more at risk than others, raising important ethical questions. Yet, we have also seen the emergence and renewal of communities of solidarity and care, locally as well as transnationally.

This blog series comprises three thoughtful and thought-provoking contributions on these broader themes of violence, inequality, solidarity, and care, by Hannah Goozee, Alvina Hoffmann and Lucy Thomas respectively. Indeed, one of the things that struck me when I first read the pieces is that all three approach the ethics of solidarity, community and care by addressing questions of violence and exploitation – political, economic, historical, social, personal, structural and epistemic. Moreover, all three pieces weave together the local with the global, the present with the historical, and the personal with the structural and the planetary.

This focus on personal experiences, local and global struggles and practices and structures of violence and exploitation might seem surprising for a set of reflections on community, solidarity, and care. In turn, the focus on these themes might be unusual for a Security Studies conference. Yet, grounded in critical and self-reflexive approaches, the three pieces show that these issues are closely connected; that questions of community, solidarity and care are highly contested and imbued with relations of power and structures of violence. Shifting away from the presumption of institutionalised units such as the state as the starting point for thinking about community and solidarity – as is so often the case in Security Studies and International Relations scholarship – they bring to the fore more marginalised voices and communities, as well as more personal reflections on knowledge production in academia. In addition, the contributions show the importance of taking seriously intersectional issues such as, but not limited to, gender, race, and class.

Rather than thinking about practices of solidarity and care within a realm that is pre-established, and/or implies a preconceived idea of who belongs, the focus is on struggles. This resonates with my own research, which seeks to dig deeper into practices and structures of power and violence whilst remaining attentive to the entanglements of struggles and practices of resistance and what these seek to contest (e.g. Ansems de Vries 2016; Ansems de Vries et al 2017). Communities of solidarity – and a sense of who I am/we are – come into being through struggle, rather than being pre-existent. Moreover, as Coleman and Rosenow (2016) note, an understanding of what the struggle is about emerges through struggle.

For me, the politics of struggle is not only a matter of looking for and listening to what has been silenced and a question of how we amplify the struggles of those who are marginalised; it is also about remaining reflexive of the impact of our interventions and positionalities (Ansems de Vries 2020a). Relatedly, an ethics of solidarity and care means being open to being cha(lle)nged in the process, and in ways that might be uncomfortable and/or unknown. This requires different ways of looking, and, importantly, of listening, as well as developing more affective approaches to knowing, as Goozee and Thomas also write in their contributions.

I will end with a brief overview of the three contributions. Firstly, in her piece, Bringing the personal (back) in (published Wednesday 3 June 2020), Hannah Goozee asks what happens if we, as researchers, listen to our emotions. In this very personal reflection of the felt experience of conducting ethnographic and archival research in South Africa, Goozee writes that research methods are not abstract but very much bound up with who she is as a feeling individual. Much of her time in South Africa was marked by fear and anxiety. She relates this personal reflections to broader epistemological biases in International Relations and the colonial extraction of knowledge. Rather than understanding her efforts to ignore her emotions during her research as a personal failure, she suggests, with reference to Laura Sjoberg (2019), that the realisation of the importance of emotions can also be seen as a political moment: it offers the opportunity to re-evaluate broader systems and values.

Alvina Hoffman’s contribution Solidarity in military courts: Crimean Tatars in global history, politics and practices (published on Thursday 4 June 2020) discusses the criminalisation of Crimean Tatar men after the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, linking local and global struggles and practices. She does so by asking how local activists seek to gain international attention and solidarity and by connecting these local practices to three global struggles in which Crimean Tatars are implicated: the global history of indigenous peoples’ rights; the global politics of extremism legislation as part of counter-terrorism efforts; and global practices of incarceration. The question of gender is also raised, as women become actively involved in activism as men are incarcerated.

Finally, Lucy Thomas, in her piece Writing the self, writing as care (published on Friday 5 June 2020), reflects on how writing differently and writing otherwise can be an act of care and resistance within wider contexts of violence. Her contribution also addresses the epistemic bias according to which academic writing is regarded as detached from the self. She shows how this cleansing of academic writing is deeply implicated in coloniality. The Enlightenment, the intellectual transformation of Europe during which dominant conceptions of ‘objective’ scientific ways of knowing became established, is inextricably bound up with the colonisation of Africa, America and Asia and the extraction of data from ‘the Other’. She concludes that, for those marginalised in the colonial present, ‘writing for and of oneself and writing for and of one another’s lives, struggles, and deaths, is a form of liberation and resistance.’

Leonie Ansems de Vries is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Chair of the Migration Research Group at King’s College London.

Bibliography

Ansems de Vries, Leoine (2016) ‘Politics of (in)visibility: Governance-resistance and the constitution of refugee subjectivities in Malaysia’, Review of International Studies 42 (5):876–94.

Ansems de Vries, Leonie (2020a) ‘movement – becoming – violence: two’, Arts Cabinet, available at https://www.artscabinet.org/index/movement-becoming-violence-two

Ansems de Vries, Leonie (2020b) ‘movement – becoming – violence: three’, Arts Cabinet, available at https://www.artscabinet.org/index/movement-becoming-violence-three

Ansems de Vries, Leonie, Lara Coleman, Doerthe Rosenow, Martina Tazzioli, Rolando Vázquez (2017) ‘Collective Discussion: Fracturing Politics (Or, How to Avoid the Tacit Reproduction of Modern/Colonial Ontologies in Critical Thought)’, International Political Sociology 11 (1):90–108.

Coleman, Lara Montesinos and Doerthe Rosenow (2016) ‘Security (Studies) and the Limits of Critique: Why We Should Think through Struggle’, Critical Studies on Security 4(2): 202-20.

Sjoberg, Laura (2019) ‘Failure and Critique in Critical Security Studies’, Security Dialogue 50 (1): 77–94.

Dear Fariba, Roland and Kylie

We wish to let you know that we held a meeting on the 17^th February 2020 in Bush house King’s College London and that we have created a branch of the Support Committee in London for the three of you.

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day we can’t stop thinking about you and your ordeal. At the meeting there were old friends of yours; academics who have read your books and articles; Doctoral and Master’s Students who are inspired by your examples of courage and lucidity about the situations you have described; previous detainees who have known what you are suffering now; were all gathered together to sign this postcard. We hope you will have an opportunity to read when you come home.

We, professors and scholars of King’s College London, Oxford, Birkbeck, Goldsmith, Cambridge and Queen Mary, are all asking for your immediate and unconditional release from prison.  Your detention is legally and ethically unjustifiable.  It poses a threat to all academics and to academic freedom in general. Iranian society values knowledge, it’s universities and academics, as do we. It is in that spirit that we are calling on the regime to implement your release with immediate effect. We will continue to mobilise both within our institutions and beyond in your support.

Signed by Vivienne Jabri, Mervyn Frost, Nick Michelsen, Didier Bigo, Susan Martin, Aggie Hirst, Pablo de Orellana, Claudia Aradau, Sarah Perret, Leonie Ansems de Vries, Emma Mc Cluskey, James McDougall, Ramon Sarro, Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, David Styan, Evelyn Ruppert, Christopher Clapham, Elspeth Guild, Engin Isin, Christine Cheng, Ziad Elmarsafy, Stacey Gutkowski, Alvina Hoffmann, Kerry Goettlich, Andrew Brown, and many other participants

UPDATE 5 March 2020

today Fariba Adelkhah and Roland Marchal have been condemned to 9 months of imprisonment. Click here for more updates. We do not forget them.

UPDATE 17 March 2020

“Is research getting more dangerous? Roland Marchal’s plight suggests so” in African Arguments. click here for article

UPDATE 20 MAY 2020

Fariba Adelkhah sentenced to prison in Iran, listen here on BBC

UPDATE 8 June 2020

Message from Professor Alain Dieckhoff, Director of CERI Sciences-Po Paris: here.

A one-day workshop examining the rise of nationalist ideas and movements around the globe in recent years. Drawing together scholars addressing nationalist ideas, events and movements of the last two decades through a variety of interdisciplinary theoretical and analytical perspectives and methods, this workshop seeks to establish a forward-looking research agenda for the study of contemporary nationalisms, and to disseminate it though an edited volume (under contract).

Saturday 29^th June 2018, KCL Research Centre in International Relations, King’s College London, UK. To submit to the workshop, please email an abstract and 5-line biography to reflectionsonnationalism2019@gmail.com by 15^th May.

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