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3952. A large amount of noise and smoke
- Author:
- Jonathan Spyer
- Publication Date:
- 01-2021
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS)
- Abstract:
- Iran’s attacks against the US in Iraq accomplished what was intended
- Topic:
- Military Strategy, Conflict, Strategic Stability, and Strategic Interests
- Political Geography:
- Iran, Middle East, North America, and United States of America
3953. How does exposure to conflict events shape social trust? A spatiotemporal approach
- Author:
- Jacob S. Lewis and Sedef A. Topal
- Publication Date:
- 10-2021
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Afrobarometer
- Abstract:
- This article examines how proximate exposure to violent conflict events affects levels of social trust. We argue that since exposure to conflict heightens perceptions of threat, individuals who were proximately exposed to conflict events should exhibit lower levels of generalized and out-group social trust than individuals not subject to such exposure. We also argue that individuals subject to exposure to conflict should show higher levels of in-group social trust due to existential concerns that increase their desire to find security within their group. Using geocoded survey data from more than 25,000 respondents in 16 African countries surveyed in 2005 and from the Armed Conflict Location Event Database, we draw spatiotemporal buffers around each respondent. We find that exposure to violent conflict events reduces all forms of social trust across all models. Such findings run counter to arguments suggesting that proximate exposure to violent conflict increases in-group social trust.
- Topic:
- Civil Society, Conflict, Social Order, and Trust
- Political Geography:
- Africa
3954. Green Hydrogen in a Circular Carbon Economy: Opportunities and Limits
- Author:
- Zhiyuan Fan, Emeka Richard Ochu, Sarah Braverman, Yushan Lou, Griffin Smith, Amar Bhardwaj, Jack Brouwder, Colin McCormick, and Julio Friedmann
- Publication Date:
- 08-2021
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP), Columbia University
- Abstract:
- As global warming mitigation and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reduction become increasingly urgent to counter climate change, many nations have announced net-zero emission targets as a commitment to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Low-carbon hydrogen has received renewed attention under these decarbonization frameworks as a potential low-carbon fuel and feedstock, especially for hard-to-abate sectors such as heavy-duty transportation (trucks, shipping) and heavy industries (e.g., steel, chemicals). Green hydrogen in particular, defined as hydrogen produced from water electrolysis with zero-carbon electricity, could have significant potential in helping countries transition their economies to meet climate goals. Today, green hydrogen production faces enormous challenges, including its cost and economics, infrastructure limitations, and potential increases in CO2 emissions (e.g., if produced with uncontrolled fossil power generation, which would be hydrogen but would not be green). This report, part of the Carbon Management Research Initiative at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, examines green hydrogen production and applications to understand the core challenges to its expansion at scale and the near-term opportunity to enable deployment. An analysis using Monte Carlo simulations with a varying range of assumptions, including both temporal (i.e., today versus the future) and geographical (e.g., the US, the EU, China, India, Japan) factors, anticipates emissions intensity and costs of producing green hydrogen. The authors evaluate these production costs for different scenarios as well as associated infrastructure requirements and highlight near-term market opportunities and policies to motivate development of the green hydrogen industry.
- Topic:
- Climate Change, Energy Policy, Green Technology, and Carbon Emissions
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
3955. Risen from the Ruins: The Economic History of Socialism in the German Democratic Republic
- Author:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Publication Date:
- 04-2021
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Abstract:
- The German Democratic Republic (DDR) was a socialist state founded in 1949 as a democratic, antifascist reaction to the Second World War. It redistributed land, socialised the means of production, and collectivised the agricultural system. This socialist state established an egalitarian education, healthcare, and social system, and guaranteed equal rights between men and women. It cultivated friendly and close-knit economic relationships with other socialist states and supported countries fighting for their independence in Latin America, Asia, and Africa by showing international solidarity. The establishment of a just society based on the principles of equality was the DDR’s declared objective. With public ownership of the means of production as its foundation, the country developed into a powerful and efficient industrial state that used its economic profit for the benefit of its citizens and guaranteed them a life of social security. Ultimately, the DDR was extremely successful in realising its main socio-political goal: the satisfaction of the growing material and cultural needs of its people. But why bother re-examining the DDR’s achievements, principles, and structures thirty years after its downfall? What can we learn from the DDR’s alternative economic practices in today’s world, where the triumph of capitalism has exacerbated the problems of inequality and poverty and has resulted in more frequent crises? What did socialist democracy really look like? What contradictions arose from the everyday application of a planned economy? What lessons can we draw from the DDR’s ultimate failure? With this series Studies on the DDR, the Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR (International Research Centre DDR) together with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research seek to encourage a new engagement with the history and principles of the DDR. It is our goal to re-evaluate the legacy and experiences of this socialist state. For this reason, we use the German acronym DDR, or Deutsche Demokratische Republik, (English: GDR) specifically because it often represents a positive point of reference in many parts of the world and especially for countries in the Global South. This educational series on the socialist agenda and realities of the DDR explores aspects of everyday life, provides facts about the country’s social achievements, and examines the political and economic foundations of this socialist state. By reflecting on the lived experiences of daily life, which are generally left out of the dominant narrative due to the crushing victory of capitalism and the dominance of the market economy, we hope to make a useful contribution to the debate currently taking place within progressive movements. After all, millions of people around the world are still fighting for advancements that were once a given in this socialist system but were lost with its downfall. This first publication in Studies on the DDR will briefly outline the formation of the DDR and its economic circumstances from the country’s inception to its end. In order to fully understand the specific DDR brand of socialism, we must highlight the historical conditions from which it emerged. The DDR was born in times of crisis in the aftermath of a devastating war as Germany – the instigator of the Second World War – was divided in two. It is imperative that we examine the DDR in its relationship to West Germany, which it opposed in the ensuing Cold War between the communist and capitalist systems. In 1990, after the reunification of Germany, the DDR economy was dismantled. It was treated as a shock therapy prototype for the austerity measures that were soon imposed on other countries – and not just the former socialist states. At the same time, the DDR was politically, judicially, and morally delegitimised. The publications in this series are a rejection of the narrative propagated by enemies of socialism, both new and old, that the downfall of the DDR proves the inevitable failure of socialist policy and economy. By depicting the realities of life in the DDR and by affirming the experiences of DDR citizens, we hope to remind the reader that alternatives to capitalism did and do exist.
- Topic:
- Economics, Governance, State Building, Socialism, and Political Crisis
- Political Geography:
- Europe, Germany, and East Germany
3956. Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China
- Author:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Publication Date:
- 07-2021
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Abstract:
- Grandmother Peng Lanhua lives in a two-hundred-year-old rickety wooden house in a remote village of Guizhou Province. Born in 1935, she grew up in a China that was under Japanese occupation and entered adolescence during the Chinese Revolution. Peng is one of the few people in her community who did not want to relocate as part of the government’s poverty alleviation programme when the government designated her house unsafe to live in. Since 2013, eighty-six other households whose houses were deemed too dangerous or for whom jobs could not be generated locally were moved to a newly built community an hour’s drive away. But Peng has her reasons for not moving. She is eighty-six years-old and lives with Alzheimer’s disease. In addition to low-income insurance and a modest pension, she receives supplemental income from a new grapefruit company that leased her family’s land. The company, whose dividends are distributed to villagers like Peng as part of the national anti-poverty efforts, was established to develop the local agricultural industry. Peng’s daughter and son-in-law live next door in a two-storey house they built with government subsidies. Her children are employed. In other words, her basic needs are cared for, and relocation is voluntary. ‘We can’t force anyone to move, but we still have to provide the “three guarantees and two assurances”’, says Liu Yuanxue, the Party cadre sent to live in the village to see that every household emerges from extreme poverty. He is referring to the government poverty alleviation programme’s guarantee of safe housing, health care, and education, as well as being fed and clothed. Liu visits Peng on a monthly basis, as he does with all the households in the village. Through these visits, he comes to know the details of each person’s life. ‘The floor is too messy’, Liu says, jokingly reprimanding Peng’s daughter-in-law as he enters the large wooden house. She is also a member of the Communist Party of China. On the wall, a poster of Chairman Mao and, next to him, President Xi Jinping, pay homage to two of China’s socialist leaders who bookend the course of Peng’s life. Below their portraits sit a weathered table and a dusty terracotta water jug, an internet router flashing green beside them. A string of ethernet cables and wires stretch to different corners of the house (each house gets free internet and CCTV satellite television for three years before a subsidised rate sets in). There are energy-saving lightbulbs in each room and a satellite dish installed next to Peng’s hanging laundry. An extension of the house was built with a toilet and shower equipped with solar-heated running water, the mud floor poured over with concrete. As Lenin said, ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country’. Strengthening the Party in the countryside and meeting the concrete needs of the people have been pillars in China’s fight against poverty. Liu’s visit to Peng’s house is just one everyday scene in that process. The fact that Peng has lived in this house for half a century is also a product of the Revolution; in the 1970s, during the Cultural Revolution, the house was confiscated from a rich landlord and redistributed to three poor peasant families, including Peng’s. That cadres like Liu visit her on a monthly basis, that her house has been made safe to live in through the recent renovations, and that there is internet to connect the poorest of rural villages with the world is a continuation of this revolutionary history. After all, ensuring that the country’s workers and peasants like Peng get housed, fed, clothed, and cared for is part of China’s long struggle against poverty and a fundamental stage in constructing a socialist society.
- Topic:
- Poverty, Governance, Inequality, and Socialism
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia
3957. New Clothes, Old Threads: The Dangerous Right-Wing Offensive in Latin America
- Author:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Publication Date:
- 12-2021
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Abstract:
- In Latin America, the adoption of the neo-reactionary and alternative right projects of the Global North appears to be a launching pad from which to modify the cognitive maps of the people and to shift political and discursive positions and public agendas to the right. This dossier analyses the right-wing developments in Latin America, identifying how they operate and with what discourses, what social base they mobilise, and their continuities of and ruptures with the history of the right wing in the continent.
- Topic:
- Politics, Far Right, and Mobilization
- Political Geography:
- South America, Latin America, and North America
3958. Big Tech and the Current Challenges Facing the Class Struggle
- Author:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Publication Date:
- 11-2021
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Abstract:
- The fact that the largest companies are in the field of information technologies raises a concern about the use of data for repression, control, and surveillance. This dossier seeks to understand the dynamic of contemporary capitalism and technological transformations and their social impact on class struggle, sparking a debate about the role of digital data and technology companies.
- Topic:
- Science and Technology, Class, and Digitalization
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
3959. Indian Women on an Arduous Road to Equality
- Author:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Publication Date:
- 10-2021
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Abstract:
- Despite the constraints that their socioeconomic conditions impose on them time and again, Indian women have found their collective voice to fight for their rights. A vibrant women’s movement in various parts of India has fought against the apathy of the state towards the condition of women, attaining big and small victories in asserting the constitutional rights of women as citizens and workers.
- Topic:
- Gender Issues, Women, Feminism, Social Order, Socioeconomics, and Mobilization
- Political Geography:
- India and Asia
3960. Black Community Programmes: The Practical Manifestation of Black Consciousness Philosophy
- Author:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Publication Date:
- 09-2021
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Abstract:
- This dossier focuses on the Black Community Programmes, a series of projects initiated in 1972 that served as the practical implementation of the Black Consciousness philosophy to give Black people the power to become self-reliant. In practice, these programmes included the foundation of publications and research, health centres, factories to employ the economically marginalised, and a trust fund to provide basic necessities for ex-prisoners as well as grants for yet other projects.
- Topic:
- Race, Philosophy, Black Politics, and Consciousness
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus