Sociology and International Relations

Sociology is necessary to understand International Relations.  How much do you agree or disagree?  Give reasons for your answer.

                        Barry Gilheany ©

                       

In this essay I argue that insights from sociology, specifically from historical sociology, are essential to the understanding of International Relations.  There has been a surge  in academic interest in the application of sociology to International Relations (IR) due to the theoretical deficiencies within the latter discipline which have become apparent to many.  These relate particularly to its failure to predict the end of the Cold War which prompted much soul-searching within the discipline and the inability of contemporary International Relations generally to explain the causes of the shifting sands in global politics since 1989.  In my resume of the main corpus of IR theory, I explain that the essential reductionism of IR analysis and practice has necessitated a reorientation of IR towards more sociological accounts of transnational relations

Nye defines International Politics as politics in the absence of a common sovereign, politics among entities with no ruler above them.  Consequently international politics is often called anarchic in the sense that there is no higher government unlike domestic politics where the government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.  Since international politics is the realm of self-help lacking a Hobbesian sovereign or Leviathan, and some states are stronger than others, there is always the danger of them resorting to force (Nye Jr, 2005).

There are two main approaches to International Politics: the realist and liberal with realism being historically the dominant approach.  For realists the central problem of international politics is war in a world where life can be ‘nasty, brutish and short’, the central actors are states and the beginning and the end of the international system is the individual state in interaction with other states.  Liberals envisage a global society that functions alongside the states.  Trade crosses frontiers, people interact across borders and international institutions such as the United Nations perform some international governance functions (Nye Jr, 2005 p.5).

In the 1980s, “neorealist” scholars such as Kenneth Waltz and “neoliberals” such as Robert Keohane developed structural models of states as rational actors constrained by the international system.  The Waltzian version of neorealism is particularly problematic as Waltz claims that the international system is essentially unchanging in which political forms (units) compete with each other and that the domestic aspects or characters of states cannot affect the international realm because all states conform to the logic of competitive survival.  He pointedly rejects any role for sociological analysis in IR as such an approach would produce a picture of constant international change, as opposed to continuity (Hobson, 2002)

This emphasis on states and international systems and the concomitant relegation of domestic and human dimensions of decision-making was a major contributory actor to the failure of IR specialists to see the end of the Cold War coming (Gaddis, 1993).  In the post-Cold War world, international politics has been marked much more by change than continuity.  It went through ‘one of those deep mutations’ (Hobson 2002, p.15). It is because of this moment that historical sociology has a crucial role to play in the reassessment of the study of IR.

In promoting the volume Historical Sociology of International Relations as a ‘kind of historical sociology manifesto’ to be conveyed to the wider IR audience (Hobson, 2002 p.4) , Hobson  states that it provides new ways of explaining the emergence and  development of the modern international system in all its dimensions and refutes the ‘Westphalian’ moment of territorially demarcated sovereign states operating in permanent anarchy which has been valorized by IR realist scholars (Hobson 2002, pp.19-20).  It is time now to briefly survey sociological analyses of international politics.

Historical sociology has historicised social relations, not only those of the state but other aspects of social life: the family, economy, culture, power and social movements.  Marx, Weber and Durkheim were above all concerned with the impact of industrial modernity on those dimensions of social life.  Historicisation has also involved the study of international and transnational developments: empires, wars, geographical spaces and regions, and the relation of humanity to the environment (Halliday, 2002)

Closely entwined with historicisation is the analysis of the capacity of agency which IR realists have classically refuted and who have stressed the dangers of any attempt to improve the system.  Candidates for agency can be states, intergovernmental organisations, NGOs, Multinational Corporations, social movements, anti-system movements and individual leaders.  The challenge of analysing agency in IR is to identify where agency operates while recognising where structure may be the catalyst of change and conflict.  For example, to what extent can events in the former Yugoslavia be attributed to structural change – the collapse of communism and the rise of atavistic nationalism – and how much to the decisions of individual parties and how much to the decisions of the international community (Halliday, 2002 pp. 250-51).

IR also needs an account of the structural factors that produce revolutionary or anti-system movements such as communism, nationalism, feminism and religious fundamentalism and to locate them in their transnational context.   It must be stressed that study of such movements cannot be separated from the formulation and impact of ideas something which classical IR theory refused to do. Historical sociology has a key role in these intellectual tasks (Halliday, 2002 pp.252-53)

The crisis of confidence in the IR discipline in the wake of the end of the Cold War led to the emergence of the ‘constructivist’ school which took proper account of human consciousness and how lived experience  shapes each individual’s and country’s perception of the world (Roberts, 2008).  They draw upon different disciplines to examine the processes by which leaders, people and cultures develop their identities and learn new behaviour. For example they ask why now universally abhorred practices such as apartheid and slavery used to be acceptable.  Constructivists point out that concepts such as “nation” and “sovereignty” are socially constructed, not just “out there” as permanent reality (Nye Jr, 1995 pp.7-8).

Closely related to constructivist approaches is critical theory in IR which it is analysis of gender, class, ethnicity and religion (among other subjects) can provide necessary links between Historical Sociology and IR (Kennedy-Pipe C, 2000).  In particular, feminist theories of IR critique notions of power and what constituted the public  sphere during epochs like the Cold War, telling  stories of the skills of unpaid diplomatic wives as well as the prostitute servicing military bases and the low grade workers in Third World economies (Kennedy-Pipe C, 2000 p.753).

In conclusion, sociological insights provide a necessary antidote to an IR discipline that has been ossified in the reductionist and determinist paradigms around an unchanging international arena in which sovereign states compete as units in isolation from domestic factors and transnational actors.  The collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of the BRICS nations as potential axes of power and the convulsions that have spread through the Arab worlds, to name three contemporary global developments, provide excellent laboratories for international sociologists to generate the material that will revitalise IR for the 21^st century.

Bibliography

Gaddis, J., Winter 1992-93: International Relations and the End of the Cold War. International Security 17 (3), pp.5-58

Halliday, F. (2002) For an International Sociology in Hobden, S. and Hobson, J.M. (eds.) Historical Sociology of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Hobson, J.M. (2002) What’s at Stake in Bringing Sociology back into International Relations’? Transcending ‘Chromofetishbism’ and ‘Tempocrentism’ in International Relations in Hobden, S. and Hobson, J.M. (eds.) Historical Sociology of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Kennedy-Pipe, C., (2000) International History and International Relations Theory: A Dialogue beyond the Cold War. International Affairs, 76 (4), pp.741-754

Nye, J , Jr. (2005) Understanding International Conflicts.  An Introduction to Theory and History. Fifth Edition. Longman Classics in Political Science. London: Pearson

Roberts , A (2008) International Relations after the Cold War.  International Affairs 84(2), pp.335-350

Technology and Social Movements

                        Has technology benefited social movements?

Barry Gilheany ©

This essay examines Manuel Castells’ theory of the network society developed to explain the mobilisation of social movements in the Internet era and to assess the benefits that these movements are said to have accrued from technological innovation.  It focuses on the uprisings in the Arab Spring of late 2010 to early 2011 as possible examples of the validity of the network society template.  The paper engages with social movement theories particularly those that analyse the “Global Social Movements” (GSMs) that have emerged in the early 21^st century. It describes the developments in online technology that have occurred in the last two decades or so and their impacts on contemporary social movement activism.  It examines the prospects of success for networked cyberactivism as a new paradigm to seeing social change while looking at what those critics of the “utopian” potential virtual networks who still assert the primacy of class in social struggles and who caution about the capacity of states and corporations to colonise large parts of the online world.

It is important to remember that there has been so far no comprehensive academic theory of the “Global Social Movements” (GSMs) that have emerged in the late (20^th and early (21^st centuries.  It is also important to appreciate that the term “social movement” is often used to describe a diversity of related phenomena, including protest events and coalitions and that different schools of thought hold to different tenets of social movement theory.  However all schools of thought in this area agree on three principal characteristics: they are made up by networks of informal interactions between diverse actors, including individuals, organisations and groups; they are bound by shared beliefs and ties of solidarity that make their participants ascribe a common meaning to specific collective events and are involved in political and/or cultural conflicts that arise as a result of social change. The decentralised structure of social movements consist of the following characteristics: they are segmented, meaning that social movements consist of numerous smaller groups (or, in the language of networks, “nodes”) whose involvement may wax and wane while new members join and others leave to pursue new interests; they are polycentric, meaning that they have multiple centres and leaders whose influence tends to be temporary and they are integrated, meaning that these multiple segments and hubs connect to each other through interpersonal relationships between activists or through common identities and belief systems.  This SPIN model (comprising the acronym Segmented, Polycentric, INtegrated model) was devised in 1970 and seems appropriate to current social movements as well (Joyce, ed. 2012).

To focus on the employment by social movements of online tools for mobilisation, coordinating and community building can facilitate a wider and fuller analysis of the role of the Internet in collective action.  One of the first movements to have organised extensively through the Internet is the Global Justice Movement (GJM) (or the anti-globalisation movement as it is more widely and inaccurately known) which emerged in late 1999 when Internet access was becoming more widespread.  An umbrella movement of trade union activists, autonomist groups, radical left political parties and organisations concerned with human rights, environmentalism, poverty and debt relief, the GJM made its first global imprint at the “Battle of Seattle” in late 1999 when 50,000 demonstrators severely disrupted the meeting of the World Trade Organisation.  Demonstrations at almost every summit of transnational economic and political power organisations have followed in the subsequent decade or so including those organised at the London G20 summit in April 2009 (Joyce, ed, 2012: pp.102-103).

Independent media coverage of the WTO demonstrations in Seattle was provided by the digital Independent Media Centre, or Indymedia. Soon Indymedia centres were set up in other parts of the world. As loose organised networks of groups that post accessible campaigning and political information on websites they provide alternative news sources to the mainstream media (Roberts, 2014); in this way alternative media outlets such as Indymedia disrupt a dominant switch in an established power network.

Writing about the movements that emerged from such epoch-defining moments as the global financial collapse in 2008 which posed serious questions for the democratic legitimacy in many countries in Europe and the United States and the global food crisis which impacted particularly severely on the livelihood of most people in the Arab world, Castells (2012) identified the following common features:

They are networked in multiple forms.  As a network of networks, they can afford not to have an identifiable centre but can still ensure coordination and deliberation through multi-nodal interaction.  Therefore they do not require a formal leadership, a centralised command structure or a vertical organisation to feed down resources and information to subordinates.  Networking information technology provides the platform for the expanding network practice consonant with the changing shape of the movement.  Networking guards the movement from its enemies and from internal power struggles and bureaucratisation (Castells, 2012: pp.221-222).

While such movements usually start in cyberspace, they become a movement by occupying the urban space, whether through the occupation of public squares or the persistence of street demonstrations.  Castells describes the interaction between the space of flows on wireless communication networks and the space of symbolic arenas targeted by protest actions as “the space of autonomy” (Castells, 2012:p222).

They are local and global at the same time, they originate in specific contexts for their own reasons but then connect around the world finding inspiration for their own mobilisation by other experiences; sometimes calling for joint global demonstrations in a network of local spaces in simultaneous time.  They develop their own form of time between their daily lives in the occupied settlements and the unlimited potential and possibilities for new forms of life and community which emerge in their debates; an alternative time to that of the calibrated time of factory assembly worker and corporate chief executive.  These movements are viral ,following the logic of the Internet networks, are highly self-reflective, usually non-violent in principle and through their horizontal, multi-modal networks create a sense of togetherness which enables people to overcome fear and find hope (Castells, 2012: pp.222-25).

Castells’ analysis is based on his grounded theory of power that he puts forward in his earlier book Communication Power (2009)[1].He starts from the premise that power relations are constitutive of society because those who have power construct society’s institutions in accordance with their values and interests.  However, since societies comprise contradictions and conflicts, where there is power is there is counterpower; the capacity of social actors to challenge the power embedded in the institutions of society with the aim of claiming representation for their own values and interests.  State institutions cannot survive by coercion alone; the construction of meaning in people’s minds is a more lasting source of power.  That is why the fundamental power struggle is the battle for the construction of meaning in the minds of people (Castells, 2012: pp.4-5).

The rise of mass self-communication, the use of the Internet and wireless networks as platforms of digital communication, has provided the technological platform for the construction of the autonomy of the social actor, individual or collective, vis-a-viz the institutions of society.  It has done this through sending messages between multitudes of senders and receivers and connecting to seemingly endless networks that transmit digitised information around neighbourhoods or the world.  Mass self-communication is based on horizontal networks of interactive communication that governments and corporations find it difficult to control (Castells, 2012: pp.6-7).

Castells conceptualises society as a network society in which power is multidimensional and is organised around networks programmed in each domain of human activity according to the interests of dominant actors.  These networks of power are intermeshed among themselves.  Global financial networks are global multimedia networks are intimately linked to form a meta-network of extraordinary power.  Networks such as those in the realm of politics, cultural production and military/security and form ad hoc networks around specific projects.  These networks share a common interest in creating a political system that defines societal norms and rules and which is fundamentally responsive to their interests.  They connect with each other through the capacity to switch power; the capacity to connect two or more different networks in the process of making power for each one of them in their respective fields.  Power resides in the network society with the programmers who run the main networks on which people’s lives depend (government, parliament, finance, media and national security establishment etc.) and the switchers who operate the connections between different networks (media bosses introduced in the political class, political elites bailing out financial institutions and academic institutions financed by big business, etc.). (Castells, 2012: pp.7-9).

In Castells’ account, social movements exercise counterpower; the deliberate attempt to change power relationships.  This is done by reprogramming networks around alternative interests and values and disrupting the dominant switches.  Social movements have always produced new transformative values and goals in order to create new norms for social life.  Social movements exercise counterpower through establishing communicative autonomy in digital social networks such as the Internet, free from the control of those holding institutional power in the mass media and which enable largely unconstrained deliberation and coordination of action.  Social movements also build public space for deliberation through the occupation of sites of state power or financial institutions this public a hybrid space is thus created between the Internet social networks and the occupied public space, the occupation of Tahir Square in Cairo by anti-Mubarak protestors and the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York provide potent examples of this new public space. This networked space between the digital space and the urban space is crucially a space of autonomous communication enabling social movements to thrive and to connect to society at large beyond the corporate and state mass media power holders. (Castells, 2012: pp.7-9).

Castells uses the model of networked social movements to describe how they spread by contagion in a world networked by the wireless internet and marked by fast, viral diffusion of images and ideas.  To take two examples from the Arab Spring, the success of the Tunisian Revolution and the partial success of the Egyptian Revolution were made possible by people overcoming fear through togetherness built in the networks of cyberspace and in the communities of public space.

The spark of the revolt in Tunisia was the self-immolation in December 2010 of the market trader, Mohamed Bouazizi, in the town of Sidi Bouzid, in protest against the humiliation of repeated confiscation of his fruit and vegetable stand by the local police after his persistent refusal to pay a bribe.  This triggered coordinated and spontaneous demonstrations against the notoriously corrupt regime of President Ben Ali especially among the young among whom unemployment ran at 22 per cent for college graduates.  The protests eventually reached the capital Tunis.  Despite bloody police repression of the protests, the President and his family departed on the 14^th January 2011.  The protestors were not assuaged however and, outraged by the control of both politics and economics by the family of the second wife of Ben Ali, demanded free and fair elections under a new electoral law, freedom of the press, an end to corruption and jobs.  On 22^nd January 2011 protestors occupied the Place du Gouvernement in the heart of the Kasbah, the site of most government ministries.  Trade union rank and file and middle ranking cadres voiced their demands and launched a number of strikes which practically led to the country becoming out of control for the authorities. Opposition political parties were ignored by the activists and protestors generated their own ad hoc leaders, mostly in their twenties and thirties, at specific times and places.  Within the occupied public space, protestors erected tents and organised a standing forum which held animated deliberations which could last for days on end and which were relayed by video on the Internet.  Secularism, Islamism and nationalism co-existed in the movement and it developed its own soft surveillance network to enforce the rules around the protestors’ new found freedom of speech; this succeeded despite police violence and several evictions (and re-occupations).  There was a symbiotic relationship between mobile phone citizen journalists unloading images and information onto You Tube and Al-Jazeera (watched by forty percent of Tunisia’s urban dwellers).  Twitter played a major role in discussion of events and coordination of actions as demonstrators used the hashtag #sidibouzid to communicate, thus indexing the Tunisian revolution (Castells, 2012: pp.22-28).

Through this hybrid space of physical occupation of the Kasbah and online dissemination of words and images from the Revolution, the Tunisian protestors persisted throughout 2011 with their demands for full democratisation of the country until clean, open elections were held on 23^rd October leading to the moderate Islamist coalition of Ennahad becoming the leading political force in Tunisia.  Despite the challenges that Tunisia will face in the years ahead, the legacy of the sacrifice of Mohamed Bouazizi consists of a fairly democratic polity in place and a vibrant civil society, still occupying cyberspace and ready to re-enter the public space if necessary (Castells, 2012: pp.30-31).

The Tunisian Revolution proved to be the spark that ignited the revolution in Egypt.  It was preceded by political protests against rigged elections, women’s rights struggles and the bloody repression of striking workers at the textile mills of Malhalla-al-Kubra on 6^th April 2008.  Out of the latter event emerged the 6 April Youth Movement which created a Facebook group attracting 70,000 followers.  This movement conspired with many others online and offline to organise demonstrations which culminated in the set-piece occupation of Tahir Square on 25^th January 2011.  The network around the Facebook group “We are all Khaled Said” in memory of a young activist beaten to death by the police in June 2010 after distributing a video exposing police corruption was the most prominent of these groups.  The Egyptian Revolution was dramatized in the fashion of the Tunisian example, by a series of six self-immolations in protest against rising food prices that left many hungry.  A vlog posted on her Facebook page by a 6 April founder, Asmaa Mafhouz, announcing her intention to go to Tahir Square on 25^th January, National Police Day and imploring others to do so went viral after being uploaded to You Tube.  The call to action spread from cyberspace to the social networks of friends, families and associations of all kinds including supporter networks of Cairo’s two rival soccer teams.  Tens of thousands of people converged on the symbolic Tahir (Freedom) Square from all socially excluded groups, including the urban poor, religious minorities, women Islamists and secularists where they found a safe space to call for the end of the oppressive regime of President Hosni Mubarak.  |Attempts by police to suppress the demonstrators were met with determined resistance at the cost of hundreds of lives.  Similar events occurred in many other cities, including Alexandra, in solidarity with the Tahir Square protestors and eventually the regime collapsed (Castells, 2012: pp.53-56).

Although Egypt has not experienced the subsequent democratic successes that Tunisia has enjoyed; the same dynamics were at play.  Tunisia symbolised the hope for change.  Networks formed in cyberspace extended their reach to urban space, and the revolutionary community formed in public squares successfully resisted police repression, and connected with multimedia networks with the Egyptian people and globally.  Tahir was the switcher that linked together the multiple networks of counterpower in spite of their diversity (Castells, 2012: p.81).  The communal solidarity created in Tahir Square became a role model for the Occupy movements that sprang up around the world in the months ahead (Castells: 2012: p.59).

Castells paints a very positive picture of the Internet’s capacity to act as an agent of freedom and autonomy for social movements.  In his potted history of the Internet, he explains that it was deliberately designed as a decentred, computer communication network able to withstand control from any command centre.  Emerging from the culture of freedom prevalent in the university campuses of the 1970s, it was based on open source protocols from the start, the TCP/IP protocols developed by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn.  The creation of the World Wide Web, another open source programme, created by Tim Berners-Lee, made the Net user friendly on a large scale.  The really transformative development in the potential of the Internet came in the first decade of the 21^st century with the shift from individual and corporate interaction on the Internet( for example, the use of email) to the autonomous construction of social networks managed by their users.  This shift was enabled by improvements in broadband, and in social software and from a wide range of wireless communication systems feeding the Internet networks.  The most important activity on the Internet now goes through social networking sites (SNS) which have become open forums for most types of activities including socio-political activism.  Thus the Net enhances empowerment, sociability and autonomy (which Castells defines as the capacity of a social actor to become a subject through involvement in projects independently of societal institutions, according to the values and interests of the social actor).  He cites survey evidence from a 2010 study in Britain conducted by the sociologist Michael Wilmott showing particularly positive effects for people with lower income, fewer qualifications, for people in the developing world and for women[2].

Digital penetration has been particularly and crucially prevalent in the Arab world.  From 2009, both BBC Arabic TV(launched in March 2008) and BBC Persian TV (launched in January 2009) both drew on User Generated Content (UGC) streaming out of Arab countries, enabling them to cover events of the Arab Spring in real time.  New satellite channels like Al-Jazeera and digital technology in the shape of the Internet had helped to create an Arab digital public sphere which steadily grew in the 1990s and 2000s.  However relatively inexpensive new media products like iPhones and the relative ease and low costs involved in setting up social networking sites enabled new outlets for protestors to publicise the Arab Spring.  Facebook only became available in Arabic in 2009, and yet more than a quarter of the protestors in Egypt first heard of demonstrations taking place there on Facebook.  Some Arab readers posted their own opinions on the online comment boards of western newspapers to place the demonstrations in their proper context.  Citizen media outstripped the mainstream media in the reportage of the initial stages of the Egypt revolution in January 2011. For example, on 25^th January 2011, 76 % of all videos uploaded to the internet detailing the demonstrations came from citizens, while journalists produced only 24% (Roberts, 2014:pp.159-160).   Mobile phone penetration exceeded 100% in half of all Arab countries, with most others over the 50% mark and many in urban centres had some sort of access to social media (Castells, 2012: p.95).

Other commentators are not as sanguine about the emancipatory capacities of new media technology for social movement activism.  Jones cautions that Web 2.0 and social media represent a barrier to practical activity.  Instead they represent a shortcut into “slacktivism”, defined by the social media specialist, Evgeny Morozov, as “feel good online activism that has zero political or social impact”… “the ideal type of activism for a lazy generation”[3] (Jones, 2011).  He refutes the idea that the Internet is neutral space on which all sides as “hopelessly utopian” as technologies are developed in a social, political and economic context.  One has to pay an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to get online and ISPs have tremendous power in barring access to the Internet.  Capitalism is very adept at exploiting new avenues for capital accumulation and the absorption, for example, of Open source software (OSS) into the market as an essential source of profit shows that the online world is no exception. (Jones, 2011: p.8).  Furthermore, unstructured online decision making can unaccountable and exclusive; it may be appropriate for short scale direct actions organised, for example , by the anti-tax avoidance network UK Uncut but is not applicable to strikes or to long-term strategic thinking (Jones, 2011: p.9).

In the same vein, Roberts, in offering a balance to those perspectives that “overly” celebrate the social media in providing an important impetus for the Arab Spring, points out that corporate hegemony had been operating in the media infrastructure of many Arab countries for years.  For example the first two private satellite companies created to serve the Arab world were the Middle East Broadcasting Centre (MBC) in 1991 and, in 1993, the Arab Radio and Television (ART) had close links with the Saudi ruling family from the outset.  In turn they are plugged into other business networks proving that satellite channels in the Arab world are owned by the super-rich with support from political elites like their Western counterparts (Roberts, 2012: p.169).

In conclusion, while I accept that there have yet to be grand, overarching theories and narratives for Global Social Movements and the need for caution about the liberating potential of new media technology; Nicholas's  account of the Quantified Self from tool of  liberation to tool of  Taylorian scientific management of the white-collar workforce (2013) and Terranova’s analysis of the potentially exploitative nature of labour in the digital economy (Terrenova, 2000), serving as particularly cautionary tales, I largely concur with Castells’ account of the benefits of the Internet and social media for the flexible and polycentric protest movements that have swept our contemporary world.  It is to be hoped that they will bequeath a vibrant civic culture and hybridised activist space which can resist whatever centralising and controlling tendencies that may emerge in the Netscape of the future.

 Bibliography

Castells, M (2012). Networks of Outrage and Hope. Social Movements in the Internet Age Cambridge: Polity Press

Jones, J. (2011) “Social Media and Social Movements” International Socialism (130) pp.1-13

Kavada, A. “Activism Transforms Digital: The Social Movement Perspective” in Joyce, M. (2010) Digital Activism Decoded. The New Mechanics of Change pp.101-118 New York: IDEBATE Press

Roberts, J.M. (2014) New Media & Public Activism.  Neoliberalism, the state and radical protest in the public sphere. Bristol: Policy Press

Terranova, T. (2000) “Free Labour: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy” Social Text 63 (18, 2) pp.33-58

Nicholas   (2013) Frederick Taylor and the Quantified Self

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[1] Castells, M. (2009) Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press

[2] Wilmott analysed 35,000 individual answers between 2005 and 2007 from global data obtained from the World Values Survey of the University of Michigan.

[3] Morozov, Evgeny (20099) “The Brave New World of Slacktivism” Foreign Policy (19 May)

http://netefect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/05/19-the_brave_new_world_of_slacktivism

Welfare in Irish Society

Discuss the emergence of welfare within Irish society

                        Barry Gilheany ©

This essay analyses the development of the welfare state in the Republic of Ireland.  It looks at the piecemeal development of welfare policies in the Republic and at the main actors within the Irish welfare ‘field’ conceptualised by Pierre Bourdieu.  It is argued that the exceptionalism of the Irish welfare system is best understood by reference to Bourdieu’s model.

Until the middle of the 19^th century no state income maintenance existed in Ireland.  .  The concept of outdoor relief was introduced to Ireland for the first time under the Poor Relief (Ireland) Act 1847 which tried to deal with the hordes of desperate landless labourers seeking to enter workhouses as a result of the Great Famine (Rehill and Mills, 2005).

After independence in 1922, Ireland did not adopt the Beveridge model of the welfare state introduced in the UK and during the early years of the UK welfare state the paucity of income maintenance provision in Ireland in contrast to the generous UK provisions was often commented upon.  Arguable this situation has been reversed since the 1990s as many mainstream schemes in Ireland are now more generous than their UK analogues (Rehill and Mills, pp.9-10).

The following are distinctive features of the Irish income maintenance system: it is contingency-based as entitlements depend on the contingency experienced by a claimant (e.g. unemployment, old age, illness) with the exception of the needs based Supplementary Welfare Allowance Scheme; payments based on contributions to the Social Insurance Fund by both employers and employees; means-tested social assistance payments for a variety of schemes; payments in kind e.g. Cheap Footwear Scheme and free electricity and virtually all schemes are entitlement based with the exception of the Supplementary Welfare Allowance which has large areas of discretion (Rehill and Mills, pp.11-13).

Welfare policy proceeded in a largely inconsistent and ad hoc fashion in Ireland.  For example the report of the Commission on Social Welfare in 1986 found that there were 36 different child dependent rates in the system.  It recommended a standard basic rate of payment be made to all recipients and concluded that although social welfare payments were an important part of the redistributive process, they could not be considered in isolation from the tax system that finances them (Rehill and Mills, p.15).

More recent initiatives[1] have sought to address unemployment and poverty traps through back-to-work schemes which allow participants to retain most of their benefits and have proposed the benchmarking and indexation of social welfare payments to improvements in the general standard of living and individualization of welfare payments whereby each partner would receive their own payment rather than on being a dependent (usually on a male breadwinner) (Rehill and Mills, pp.20-28).

The significance of the Irish welfare system, as a case in comparative studies, rests mainly in its counterpoint value.  The old version of Ireland as a semiperipheral country is outdated as its welfare system has moved closer to that of Northern European countries.  Peillon defines it as ‘a case study of the welfare mix: of the way the state, market mechanism, voluntary organisations and the informal sector are combined. The Irish social security system is one of the most centralized in Europe, along with a loose welfare mix in the provision of many social services: the state pays the costs of such services such as education and health but enjoys very little control over the way that services are delivered (Peillon, 2001).

 Peillon uses the concept of welfare field, loosely derived from the work of Pierre Bourdieu[2] to fit welfare institutions within Irish society and to account for their internal logic.  For Bourdieu a field refers to a particular domain of activity or structures of domination in which a struggle takes place.  The issue at the core of the struggle relates, within each field, to the generation and distribution of a type of resource which Bourdieu calls capital (Peillon, p.25). The structure of a field corresponds to the distribution of capital whose possession enhances the chances of appropriating the capital that forms the stake in the field (Peillon, p.30).

The welfare system is not solely a direct relationship between administrative agencies and clients.  It forms a mix of not only the state but also market mechanisms and many agencies within the civil society.  The welfare field thus extends beyond the bureaucratic field, with which it nevertheless overlaps (Peillon, p.28).  Within the welfare field, welfare recipients’ position is defined by the distribution of the existing capital and by access to the capital that social agents may seek to accumulate.  However lack of capital turns them into passive objects of welfare and the experience of such powerlessness may cause a habitus, a matrix that routinely generates the practice of welfare clients (Peillon, p.33).

The welfare field is composed of many subfields of different policy areas (health, education, social security etc.) characterised by different structures, different habitus and possibly different stakes.  Within the same income maintenance scheme, some social policy programmes are based on contributory or insurance principles and others on means testing (Peillon, p.34).

Having sketched out the typical structure of the welfare field, three major actors in the Irish field are now examined – the state, Catholic Church and feminism

The state represents a central player in the Irish welfare field (Peillon, p.40) but the role it plays diverges sharply from that played by the state in other Western European welfare systems.  Historically Ireland has not relied on local authorities to deliver welfare benefits.  Most critically, the central state wields very close administrative control over the county councils ;( Peillon, p.42).  As the welfare system grew, it did not increase its reliance on local government.  The central government retained a close control over the various social insurance schemes.  However this centralised mode of state operation did not correspond to another major element of western welfare systems: their management. The state did not actually run social services but paid for them with control residing with selected private organisations, most notably the Catholic Church (Peillon, p.44).

For almost a century and a half after the Great Famine, it could be said with confidence that the Church exercised a moral monopoly[3] over Irish discourse and practice.  It controlled the delivery of much of Ireland’s education and health services and exercised coercive moral authority over individual behaviour especially in the areas of human sexuality and women’s reproductive rights.  More recently, it has successfully presented itself as a voice for the poor and socially excluded.  In Bourdieu’s framework, the Church generates and control religious capital.  The acquisition of social capital (being well known and connected) depended greatly on the ownership of religious capital.  Catholic habitus or social reproduction of Catholic power was generated by the institutional control of schools and hospitals, provision of personal social services and the policing of religious adherence through attendance at Mass.  The legitimacy of the institutional Church has probably, of course, been terminally undermined by revelations of the extent of physical and sexual abuse of children perpetrated by clerics and, relatedly, an almost exponential decline in vocations.

Welfare issues have been central in women’s movement activity and its focus on the familist ideological construction of the Irish welfare system with its division of family labour between the breadwinner husband and the caregiver wife.  These gendered roles were formally written into the 1937 Constitution which proclaimed that the state is meant to ensure that mothers are not obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home[4].  The Irish women’s movement originally mobilised in the early 1970s around five demands: equal pay, equality before the law, equal education, legalisation of contraception and justice for deserted wives, unmarried mothers and widows[5].  In the following three decades women’s activism was centred in the main on reproductive issues; around the availability of birth control devices and the constitutional prohibition on abortion.  Elements within the feminist movement veered towards self-help and single-issue groups such as Women’s Aid, Rape Crisis Centre, Cherish (for single mothers) and Well Women Centre.    Out of these initiatives developed a shadow welfare system whereby women’s groups identified services not delivered by the state and simply assumed responsibility for them.  They then turned to the state to secure funding in the form of discretionary subsidies from ministerial departments. But tension persisted between the need for state funding and the desire of these groups to retain their ethos over service provision.

However the main gains for women’s financial welfare came from outside Ireland principally the EU Directive in 1978 on the equal treatment of men and women in matters of social security[6].  Prior to its implementation married women received lower rates of social welfare payments and were mostly excluded from claiming unemployment assistance (Rehill and Mills, p.11).  It took the Irish government fifteen years in total to fully implement this directive.

Thus in the welfare field, the feminist movement relied, like trade unions, on its power (political) capital which it deployed to maximise economic capital, by securing state funding of women’s agencies, by recasting the way in which benefits are distributed and gaining more generous benefits.  The limited power (control) capital in the form of the control that women’s agencies exercise over the delivery of some services represents another resource for them (Peillon, p.96).

This essay has shown that the Irish welfare system produces its own sets of clientele around the access to, and the level of, welfare benefits and services.  Income maintenance programmes remain highly centralised.  But a great deal of autonomy is permitted to a spectrum of voluntary agencies (religious and women’s groups are cases in point) in the running of education and health services, but not to local authorities.  Bourdieu’s concept of welfare fields is a good explanatory tool for the exceptionalism of Irish welfare services.

Bibliography

Peillon, M., 2001 Welfare in Ireland.  Actors, Resources, and Strategies, Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers

. Rehill, P. and Mills, F. Income Maintenance pp.7-29) in Quin, S., Kennedy, P., Matthews, A. and Kiely, G (2005) Contemporary Irish Social Policy Second Edition

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[1] Report of the Expert Working Group on the Integration of the Tax and Social Welfare Systems in 1996; Social Welfare Benchmarking and Indexation Working Group established in 2000 and Building and Inclusive Society: National Anti-Poverty/Social Inclusion published in February 2002 which set out an Action Plan for 2002-2007 (Department of the Taoiseach, 2002).

[2] Bourdieu, P (1990) In other words.  Essays towards a reflexive sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press; (1993) Sociology in Question. London: Sage; (1996) The rules of art. Genesis and structure of the literary field. Cambridge: Polity Press

[3] Inglis, T. (1998) Moral Monopoly Dublin: University College Dublin Press

[4] Conroy Jackson, P. (1993); “Managing the mothers: The case of Ireland.” In Lewis, J (ed.) Women and social policies in Europe.  Work, family and the state (72-92). Aldershot: Edward Elgar

[5] Mahon, E. (1987) “Women’s rights and Catholicism in Ireland.” New Left Review 166: 53-77 p.63

[6] Council Directive 19.12.1978, 79/7/EC)

Women's Rights in the Middle East

How have women’s rights in the Middle East advanced, how are women doing in terms of human rights and legal rights? What can be done to advance the progress of women’s rights in this region?

                                                Barry Gilheany

This paper describes the current state of play regarding women’s rights in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) Region.  It assesses the advances that have been made and examines factors affecting the progress of women’s emancipation in the Region.  In doing this it looks at state formation and the influence of Islam in the MENA Region as it has affected women’s rights.  It posits a way forward for women’s rights in the Region in the embrace by women’s movements of new social media technology in the context of recent events such as The Arab Spring.

It is fair to state that across the MENA Region the majority of women are still, despite recent engagement in the public sphere, treated as second-class citizens.  Grinding poverty, illiteracy and social and legal discrimination still represent substantial obstacles to the full emancipation of women (World Bank, 2013).  The following are examples of the discriminations faced by women in the personal sphere.

 In several MENA countries the legal minimum age of marriage is lower than that for boys.  For example it is 15 in both Bahrain and Kuwait and in Iran it is 13.  In Saudi Arabia and Yemen a legal age of marriage for girls does not exist. Measures to protect women from domestic violence remain poorly implemented in Egypt and Morocco  In many MENA countries including Iran and Syria, citizenship laws prevent access to property, welfare and employment opportunities for  women married to foreign men (World Bank, 2013 p.16). In Jordan, despite the fact that 50 female judges currently preside in the country’s court system, there is seemingly negligible enforcement of the penal code regarding domestic violence, rape, honour killing and female genital mutilation (Basch-Harod, 2011).

It should be emphasised that the majority of MENA countries offer constitutional guarantees of gender equality and non-discrimination but these are often undermined by conflicting and discriminatory laws as described above.  But mention should also be made of recent successful challenges to such laws by women’s groups.  For example, in 2005 the Kuwaiti Constitutional Court overturned that country’s 1962 Passport Law requiring a husband’s signature to his wife’s passport application.  The comprehensive family law reform in Morocco in 2004 striking down, among other things, discriminatory sections of the 1957 family code regarding polygamy and guardianship followed decades of campaigning by women’s groups.  (World Bank, 2013 p.17).

During the last decade also, progress has been made across the Region in the extension of women’s suffrage and in their right to run for public office. In Kuwait, women acquired full political rights in 2005.  Electoral quotas have been introduced for women in parliamentary and municipal elections and the governing bodies of all major political parties in Iraq, Jordan and the Palestinian Territories. In Tunisia, women now occupy a quarter of seats in the new Constituent Assembly. Saudi Arabia has granted women the right to vote and run for office (World Bank, 2013 pp.9-10).

Notwithstanding these recent gains, the patriarchal nature of these laws have severely impacted on the women’s participation in the public sphere, measured principally by the representation of women in legislative bodies and labour forces.  Across the Region, women hold approximately 7 per cent of parliamentary seats (World Bank, 2013 p.9).  Only 25.2 percent of women aged 15 or over participate in the labour force.   This is despite the progress made in gender specific development outcomes since 1970 – female literacy, primary and secondary school enrolment rates, maternal and infant mortality and, in the last decade, decline in fertility rates (World Bank, 2013 pp.5-7).

It is often taken as a given that the inferior status of women in MENA countries is related to the ubiquity of Islam in the Region. However Islam is not uniquely patriarchal compared to other religions nor is it monolithic.  The application of Islamic law in the Region varies from the ultra-conservative religiosity prevalent in Saudi Arabia to the secular state in Tunisia.  A potential ideological tool for the advancement of women’s rights in the MENA Region and other Muslim majority parts of the worlds is Islamic feminism. Theorists such as Omaima Abou-Bak of Morocco and Zaynab Radwan of Egypt are deconstructing the male interpretations of the Koranic texts that have caused so much gender inequality in Muslim societies and are working on issues relating to divorce, inheritance, court testimonies and adoption.  In mapping this way forward, Hatem takes issue with iconic Arab feminists such as the Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi who have described Islamic forms of dress such as the hijab as a barrier to reason.  Hatem argues that this internalised Orientalist view of the wearing of the hijab as a marker of the passivity of Muslim women ignores the empirical evidence that women who wear the hijab share the educational and career aspirations of secular Arab/Muslim women and their aspirations for marriage and family (Hatem in Makdisi, J et al , 2014).

Feminist writers from the MENA region (Hatem, 2014 pp.5-13; Moghadam, 1993) point to Arab state formation as the primary causal factor in the uneven advancement of women’s rights there. In the post-colonial era a ‘silent bargain’ was made in many Arab states between authoritarian regimes and upper-and middle-class women whereby these classes of women were provided with expanded rights to education and public work and were recruited as ‘femocrats’ (feminist bureaucrats) within governmental structures.  In turn Arab feminists supported these regimes which enhanced their standing as socially progressive states.  This process was especially apparent in Tunisia, Egypt, Ba’athist Iraq and Syria, Algeria and Libya (Hatem, 2014 p.12)

As the beneficiaries of these informal pacts, middle and upper class women tended to remain silent regarding the needs of working-class women.  A case in point was the criticism made, in the wake of the overthrow of her husband in Egypt in early 2011, by former employees of the National Council of Women (NCW), a body dominated by Suzanne Mubarak for three decades, that it had failed to address core socio-economic issues such as sexual harassment, equal pay and proportional representation in government (Basch-Harod, 2011 p.119).

It is in the light of these limitations of ‘state feminism’ that the participation of women’s rights activists in the various pro-democracy movements generated by the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings of 2011-12 is so critical to the advance of women’s agendas in the Middle East.  Two features of the Arab Spring (and the earlier Green protests in Iran in 2009) are especially important: (a) the presence of new information media including mobile phones and satellite broadcasts as a means of bypassing state control of the traditional news outlets (print media, TV and radio) and (b) the intertwining of women’s movements with broader social movements for social change (Gheygtanchi and Moghadam, 2014). For example, by uploading video clips to YouTube of state brutality against activists in Iran in 2009 women’s rights activists were able to change the nature of the news in the wake of the expulsion of foreign reporters after the first week of the Green Protests against the conduct of the Presidential election that year.  This use of cyberspace appears to have created the phenomenon of “accidental” feminism whereby women go online to connect with peers and then encounter social issues discussed widely on social networking sites.  A case in point is the case of Amina Filial, a young woman in Morocco who committed suicide following an abusive marriage to her rapist and which provoked many Moroccans to protest about the injustices suffered by such poor women (Gheygtanchi and Moghadam, 2014 p.37)

In these ways, cyberspace has created an opportunity structure for women activists within and across borders.  It facilitates an anonymity that enables the promotions of women’s rights issues across domestic and international social space.  Women’s access to the new media technology in MENA and their contributions to the virtual public sphere that has emerged as a result may help to transform attitudes towards women’s rights. I would argue that it is vital for women’s rights activists to tie their claims wider social and political demands for democratisation in MENA  as they have done in, for example, in the campaigns against sexual harassment and post-revolutionary exclusion of women in Egypt and in Tunisian feminists’ insistence on maintaining a presence in governance (Gheygtanchi and Moghadam, 2014 p.18).

This essay has briefly surveyed the state of women’s rights in the polities and legal systems across the countries of the MENA Region.  It has connected the unevenness of progress in this area to gendered legal codes in many MENA countries and to the nationalisation of women’s agendas by authoritarian Arab states.  It has identified route maps for women’s rights activists through transnational cyberactivism; connection to wider emancipatory struggles in the Region and through progressive interpretations of Islam. Despite with the recent chilling of the Arab Spring, the genie is certainly out of the bottle as regards women’s rights activism in the Middle East and will not be put back in again.

Bibliography:

World Bank, 2013 Opening Doors. Gender Equality and Development in the Middle East and North Africa MENA Development Report Washington DC, World Bank.

Moghadam, V, 1993 Modernising Women. Gender & Social Change in the Middle East. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Hatem, M, What Do Women Want? A Critical Mapping of Future Directions for Arab Feminisms pp.3-18 in Makdisi, J, Bayoumi, N. and Sidawi, R.,(Eds)  2014 Arab Feminism. Gender and Equality in the Middle East London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.

Gheytanchi, E. and Moghadam, V. (2014) Women, Social Protests, and the New Media Activism in the Middle East and North Africa. International Review of Modern Sociology 40(1), pp. 1-26

Basch-Harod, H. (2011) Women of the Middle East.  The Jihad Within. Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture. 17 (3/4) pp. 116-121