The Journal of Transdisciplinary Peace Praxis (JTPP) is a peer-reviewed, biannual, subscription-based, scholarly journal of contemplative cutting edge research and practice on subjects related to human social flourishing and peace.

Editor: Dr Jeremy A Rinker

Associate Editor: Nilanjan Dutta

Publisher: Abhijit Mazumder

ADVISORY BOARD

Dr Amii Omara-Otunnu • Dr Ashwani Kumar • Dr Bandana Purkayastha

Dr Jacint Jordana • Dr John Doyle • Dr Lenin Raghuvanshi • Ms Michelle Ndiaye

Dr Rahul Mukherji • Dr Shankari Sundararaman • Dr Vandana Shiva

JTPP (https://jtpp.uk), bringing together peace practitioners and academics, fills an important transdisciplinary gap that exists in current academic literature.

JTPP endeavours to support scholarship that highlights

- the human potential for transformation,

- a holistic and collaborative approach to complex systems,

- the transdisciplinary nature of solutions to wicked social problems, and

- a shared sense of purpose in human transnational activism for positive change.

JTPP thus provides a dynamic forum for sharing information and experiences primarily catering to academics, and activists particularly in the disciplines of Peace and Conflict Studies, Political Science, International Relations, Human Rights, History, as well as professionals, policymakers, organisations, institutions and individuals who nurture a firm belief in peace and human rights.

JTPP invites SUBMISSIONS from academics, scholar-practitioners, and social activists. Please see: Author’s Corner (https://jtpp.uk/authors-corner/) for Submission Guidelines.

JTPP follows the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

For SUBSCRIPTION, please see: https://jtpp.uk/subscription-plan/

Published by Frontpage Publications Limited (https://frontpagepublications.com), Level 2, 13 John Prince’s Street, London W1G 0JR, in both print and online versions, in February 2022.

In association with Peace and Justice Studies Association (https://www.peacejusticestudies.org).

ASSOCIATES at: Delhi, Honolulu, Istanbul, Kampala, Kolkata, London, Madrid, Norwalk

Vol. 4

February 2022

No. 1

Contents

Our Contributors

Editor’s Welcome and Introduction

JEREMY A RINKER

COVID-19 and Dreams of a Radical Re-visioning of Global Health Engagement

JAMES R WALKER

Black is Beautiful and, also Traumatising: A Story of Everyday Trauma in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child

G MICHELLE COLLINS-SIBLEY

Healing of the Divided Brain in a Divided World: Two Pandemics to Integrate

JUNE GORMAN

The Question of Caste in the Time of Pandemic

SANTI SARKAR

Do Insurance-based Health Policies Benefit the Poor? The Indian Experience

SALONI & SUSHIL KUMAR

In Dialogue with a Public Intellectual: An Interview with DR RANABIR SAMADDAR by Dr SIBAJI PRATIM BASU

Kaleidoscope

NILANJAN DUTTA

Book Reviews

REKHA DATTA, TIMOTHY KAUER & CORINNE GUNTER

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Our Contributors

COLLINS-SIBLEY, MICHELLE G, PhD, is Professor of English and Director, Africana Studies, University of Mount Union, USA; her recent publications include ‘If These are Our Values then What is Our Practice: Black Lives Matter and an American Apocalypse’, Groarke & Welty (eds.), ‘Peace and Justice Studies: Critical Pedagogy’, (Routledge, 2019); ‘You Can’t Really Change the Heart without Telling a Story: Poetry as Peacebuilding’, Johnson (ed.), ‘Humanities Perspectives in Peace Education: Re-Engaging the Heart of Peace Studies’ (IAP, forthcoming). Michelle serves on the board of Peace & Justice Studies Association (PJSA) and the Ashland Center for Nonviolence steering committee.

(email: sibleymg@mountunion.edu)

DATTA, REKHA, PhD, is Professor of Political Science and Freed Endowed Chair in Social Sciences at Monmouth University, USA. She also served as Interim Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs. An alumna of Presidency College, and the University of Calcutta, India, Datta received her PhD from the University of Connecticut, USA. Specialising in foreign policy, human security, gender and development, and South Asian politics, Datta has authored and co-edited five scholarly books and her work has appeared in scholarly journals and the print media.

(email: rdatta@monmouth.edu)

DUTTA, NILANJAN, Associate Editor, ‘Journal of Transdisciplinary Peace Praxis’, is better known as an activist being involved in various social movements, particularly the civil liberties, environmental, anti-nuclear and peace movements. Having researched on various allied topics with fellowships from the SOAS, University of London, SARAI-CSDS and Calcutta Research Group, Nilanjan has authored, co-authored and edited a number of books on related subjects and made a few documentary films as well. His forthcoming publication is ‘Civil Liberties Movement in India’.

(email: nilanjan123123@rediffmail.com)

GORMAN, JUNE is a 35+ year educator and former alternative middle school director, co-founder of the Transformative Education Forum (TEF-Global), Board Project Director of Outreach for the International Model United Nations Association (IMUNA) and serves as a member of the UN Education Caucus and UN Commons Cluster. Currently, she teaches in CA schools and is a Learning Research Associate with the Schumacher Institute (UK), advocating international sustainability education models incorporating new neuroscience and full brain education. Gorman’s greatest honour is still to be called, ‘just a teacher’.

(email: june_gorman@sbcglobal.net)

GUNTER, CORINNE is a minister and the founder of Rise Up Woman International, a non-profit that empowers women and girls. She has 25+ years of experience in leadership development, volunteer empowerment, and organisational change in the United States and East Africa. Her work includes personal formation, trauma awareness and recovery, theology, conflict transformation, and economic empowerment. Corinne holds a Bachelor of Arts in Business Management and Marketing, a Graduate Certificate in Conflict Transformation. She is finishing a Master of Arts in Transformational Leadership from the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (Eastern Mennonite University, USA).

(email: corinne.gunter@emu.edu)

KAUER, TIMOTHY is an aspiring academic scholar. He has recently completed his Master’s degree at California State University Sacramento, USA in Criminal Justice, and plans to join PhD programme in the fall of 2022.

(email: tkauer4@gmail.com)

KUMAR, SUSHIL, a PhD in Sociology, contributes in the field of Corporate Social Responsibility since 2005 in India. He has worked with international organisations viz. University of Gothenburg, Sweden DFID, Enterplan, Impactt Limited (London), World Bank, Rockefeller Philanthropy Associates (USA), BFA (USA), Norwegian Research Council & Overseas Development Group, ODI-London, IDPM-Manchester etc. He delivered the inaugural lecture at the Neubauer Collegium, Chicago in November 2016.

(email: susheel.chaturvedy@gmail.com)

RINKER, JEREMY A, PhD, the Editor of the ‘Journal of Transdisciplinary Peace Praxis’, is Associate Professor & Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of Peace & Conflict Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA where his research interests revolve around the centrality of justice discourse, trauma awareness, and collective resilience in movements aimed at transforming social conflict, historical injustices, and structural violence. His publications include ‘Identity, Rights, and Awareness: Anticaste Activism in India and the Awakening of Justice through Discursive Practices’ (Lexington, USA, 2018), ‘Realizing Nonviolent Resilience: Neoliberalism, Societal Trauma, and Marginalized Voice’ (with Jerry T Lawler, Peter Lang, 2020).

(email: jr@jtpp.uk / jarinker@uncg.edu)

SALONI, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at K D G D College, University of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India. ‘Gender Issues’ and ‘Lived Religion’, particularly in India, have been her focus area in the field of academics and social science research. At present Saloni is writing a book on Varanasi covering ‘Religious Myths and Religiosity: A Case of Hindu Women in Varanasi’.

(email: tiwarisaloni8@gmail.com)

SARKAR, SANTI, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, Directorate of Distance Education, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, West Bengal, India. He obtained his PhD degree from the same university. His academic interest focuses on Political Theory, Western Political Philosophy, Indian Politics, Forced Migration, Dalit, and Tribal Studies. Santi is a member of Calcutta Research Group, India.

(email: santisarkar35@gmail.com)

WALKER, JAMES R, a PhD from the State University of New York, initiated his career with teaching philosophy at the university level. In 2011 James, also an ADN, stepped away from academia to become a nurse and co-founded and directed an international NGO working to support community-based health care initiatives in Northern Uganda. In 2021, James returned to academia as a full time faculty in Philosophy and Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies at DePaul University, USA where his academic interest focuses through the lenses of critical race theory, decoloniality studies, the Black Radical Tradition, and Black Feminisms.

(email: james.walker@depaul.edu)

Disclaimer

While the information contained in this journal is believed to be true and accurate at the time of publication, neither the authors, editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors and/or omissions that may have been inadvertently made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the materials contained in this journal.

Editor’s Welcome and Introduction

Coronavirus (COVID-19) has shifted the world’s sense of perception, preservation, and overall frame of reference. This decoupling and decentring have been all-invasive across all human endeavours and institutions. Simple welcomes no longer seem to articulate where we have been since our last issue as many people feel perpetually adrift in unsettling conversations about uncertain futures. We are all sufferers of long-COVID-19 and the opaque feeling of the ineffable continues to berate our collective ability to adequately respond to the many protracted challenges our world faces. Still, we soldier on. We pick ourselves up and continue to work for more just and equal relations, despite our collective struggles. While COVID-19 has changed us, it has not stopped our passion to share and build transdisciplinary peace praxis!

In this inspiring Seventh Issue (Vol. 4, No. 1) of the Journal of Transdisciplinary Peace Praxis (JTPP) much of this global shift and uncertainty is documented and discussed. Our personal health and wellness have been tested in much the same way that our institutions of health have been challenged to the point of breaking. As stated in our July 2021 ‘Call for Papers’, this issue cannot be the answer to all these challenges, but it can provide global perspective and hope in the newly unmasked interconnections between us all.

In welcoming you to this issue, I hope these articles and critical reviews can shed some light on the important role that peacemakers and peacebuilders can play in creating health equity for a more just world. Health equity is human equity and impacts all facets of our collective lives. Without health and wellness there is nothing, no hope.

Issue Seven of the JTPP marks the start of our fourth year of publication. We believe that 2022 portends good things, but the new life of a new year also requires our dedicated attention and vigilance. Never in human history has the world been so unequal. In its January 2021 report entitled ‘The Inequity Virus’ Oxfam International reports:

Worldwide billionaire’s wealth increased by a staggering $3.9 trillion between 18 March and 31 December 2020. Their total wealth now stands at $11.95 trillion, which is equivalent to what G20 governments have spent in response to the pandemic.[1]

This global rise in inequity has been near universal and marks the first time in human recorded history that we have seen such a quick and drastic shift in global disparities. The virus has exposed and exacerbated global inequalities and widened the gap between rich and poor. The fissures and cracks are increasingly obvious. Political polarisation, economic/supply chain shortages, and xenophobic ideologies and hate crimes are on the rise worldwide and represent pernicious roadblocks to peace and human flourishing. The signs are clear, we need clear-eyed analysis and citizen action to effect change. Theory informed practice and practice informed theory (aka praxis) require that we relentlessly soldier on, but we do so with a reflective eye towards our own social agency. And so here we remain to welcome you back!

We at the JTPP, promise to continue to bring you cutting edge research and practice aimed at empowering the understanding of how to create a more just world. With the state of global health in crisis and the collective feeling of disequilibrium wrought by the global COVID-19 pandemic, now more than ever we need transdisciplinary collaboration in peace theory-building and intervention practice. As editor of the JTPP, I wish our readers an effective and fulfilling 2022 and request that you remain optimistic and engaged in the current state of perpetual global scepticism and polarisation. Our name could just as easily be the journal of transdisciplinary perseverance practice! Do not lose hope, we are on the right side of history and polarities eventually find their centre. This Seventh Issue is an invitation to think of our global health context as a critical grounding for peace and change; a polarity to manage (Johnson, 1996) the crisis all around us.

From the editor’s vantage point, the critical pieces in this Seventh Issue of the JTPP challenge us to engage with global public health as an important foundation of peace and human flourishing. These articles exemplify the critical questioning we envisioned when we began this venture almost four years ago. Each article addresses important choke points that the global coronavirus pandemic exposed in our health and social infrastructures.

The first article in this Seventh Issue, entitled ‘COVID-19 and Dreams of a Radical Re-visioning of Global Health Engagement’ sets an indignant tone in asking how racial strife in the United States connects to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In this first critique, James R Walker writes critically and sceptically of the Western sense of development ‘progress’. He cogently states:

. . . what has been herein exposed is the misguided conception of progress that lies at the very core of initiatives and efforts to deal with global health inequity . . . we may wonder, when the white Western powers-that-be insist that such ‘progress’ is occurring—even though it may, here and there, backslide—for whom and from whom is this ‘progress’ being made? (pp.16-17)

A fitting opening salvo to this issue, the connections between the pandemic and racial trauma are deepened and expanded in the second article by G Michelle Collins-Sibley. In ‘Black is Beautiful and, also Traumatising: A Story of Everyday Trauma in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child’, Collins-Sibley applies Resmaa Menachem’s idea of a ‘soul wound––intergenerational Black Body Trauma—Nathalie Etoke’s melancholia Africana—the production of a self or subject born of loss in the context of the African Diaspora’ (p.29) to critically analyse the last of Toni Morrison’s many novels. Collins-Sibley’s integration of critical theory and literary criticism provides a unique vista on our collective interdependence through traumatic narrative.

The third essay in this issue takes a deeper dive into the trauma and healing powers of the brain. ‘Healing of the Divided Brain in a Divided World: Two Pandemics to Integrate’ by June Gorman provides an integration of the complex internal and external mechanisms necessary for maintaining both mental and physical health. The mental health effects of the pandemic are, in Gorman’s writing, inseparable from the neoliberal realities of our modern world. Arguing that COVID-19 ‘is a symptom of the increasing global physical health pandemics spread by this theory of progress’ (p.68), Gorman takes aim at the ascendant neoliberal norms and values that underpin this ‘emotionally and empathy-damaging dystopian worldview’ (p.68). Her focus on the concept of a divided brain provides an important and critically innovative take on the inequities exposed by the global pandemic.

The fourth piece in this issue, Santi Sarkar’s treatise entitled: ‘The Question of Caste in the Time of Pandemic’ takes us to the South Asian context and provides a nice cross-cultural case study resonant with themes in the earlier pieces in this issue. Rather than addressing the role of race, focused primarily on the North American context, the shift to India provides important global context for COVID’s dynamic effects on all manner of societies and cultures. Caste is not race, but there are important sociological insights we can gain from looking at them in tandem (see Wilkerson, 2020). Sarkar argues that the ‘lockdown has revealed the hierarchical structure of Indian society’ (p.75) and revealed the fact that exposure to the virus in India has been ‘neither random nor accidental (p.81). These insights, though well known to many Indians, need to be better understood by those outside the sub-continent. While race captures our imagination in the North American experience, caste does the same in the South Asian lifeworld.

‘Do Insurance-based Health Policies Benefit the Poor? The Indian Experience’, the article, authored by Saloni and Sushil Kumar, follows next and takes a deeper dive into the Indian healthcare system where the contributors argue that ‘medicalisation’ of the Indian Health Service has led to ‘poor performance of many of the health insurance schemes’ (p.105). This systemic analysis of an economically burgeoning Indian health sector, when coupled with the more granular look at caste in the previous article, allows one to see how the coronavirus has exacerbated social inequalities around the globe.

The final long-from manuscript in this Seventh Issue is an interview with Ranabir Samaddar, the Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies at the Calcutta Research Group. The interview, centring on the focus of our Sixth Issue, probes what it means to be a critical thinker and public intellectual. Professor Samaddar urges us to be sceptical of those who claim themselves public intellectuals and ‘to engage in intellectual work but to remain radical’ (p.119). In our polarised and inequitable world this will become increasingly more difficult, but if the experience of Coronavirus has taught us anything, it is that the public intellectual is needed now more than ever.

As usual, after these longer pieces, we present a Kaleidoscope section that engages with recent news as it impacts the overall themes in the issue. Curated by Nilanjan Dutta, Associate Editor, JTPP, these touchpoints to recent happenings keep us connected to real world peace practice.

Also included in this issue are three book reviews of recent works that span the themes of place and resistance to increased polarisation and injustice. Rekha Datta’s review of Home in the World: A Memoire by Amartya Sen (2021) provides a more personal accounting of the thoughts of India’s Nobel Laureate. The second book review by Timothy Kauer is of Selina Gallo-Cruz’s book Political Invisibility and Mobilization: Women against State Violence in Argentina, Yugoslavia, and Liberia (2021). Spanning three continents, this book provides a comparative analysis of three marginalised women’s movements and effective peaceful change in their local contexts. The third and final book review in this issue, written by Corinne Gunter, is an analysis of Eastern Mennonite University Professor David Brubaker’s When the Center Does Not Hold: Leading in an Age of Polarization (2019). This book provides a lens through which to understand the power of fear in polarised societies and explore the role of leaders in making change. All these reviews introduce our readers to unique and personal views of the complex work of peace praxis.

Once again, thank you for taking your limited time to read us! There is so much to distract us in our COVID-19 age. It is as if we are living a new era and stuck in a Coronavirus vortex. Yet, hope remains, and our hope is that this issue reignites readers’ peace passion and call to dedicated and sustained resistance. If nothing else this issue should provide a window into new understandings of the vast impacts of COVID-19 in the world’s health and social welfare. Again, I encourage you to share this issue with friends, colleagues, and fellow peace activists. Encourage them to subscribe to the JTPP and support our work. We welcome your feedback and continued support for our shared work.

With metta (loving kindness and compassion),

Jeremy A Rinker, PhD

Department of Peace and Conflict Studies

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA

Editor, Journal of Transdisciplinary Peace Praxis (JTP)P

E: jr@jtpp.uk / jarinker@uncg.edu

3 February 2022

NOTE

1 For more see: Oxfam, 2021, ‘The Inequality Virus: Bringing together a World Torn Apart by Coronavirus through a Fair, Just, and Sustainable Economy’, p.12, retrieved from https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621149/bp-the-inequality-virus-250121-en.pdf on 1 February 2022

REFERENCES

Johnson, Barry, Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems, Amherst, MA: HRD Press Inc, 1996

Oxfam, 2021, ‘The Inequality Virus: Bringing together a World Torn Apart by Coronavirus through a Fair, Just, and Sustainable Economy’, p.12, retrieved from https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621149/bp-the-inequality-virus-250121-en.pdf on 1 February 2022

Wilkerson, Isabelle, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, New York: Random House, 2020

COVID-19 and Dreams of a Radical Re-visioning of Global Health Engagement

James R Walker

ABSTRACT

In this paper the author calls for a radical re-visioning of our engagement with global health inequity. The current COVID-19 pandemic, and its catastrophic effects upon communities within the Global South, reveals the inadequate foundations of the current paradigm of global health engagement operative in the world. The author identifies how a problematic notion of ‘progress’, and the corresponding notion of ‘regress’, which presuppose a goal of ‘equality’ with the West are central to this inadequacy. This notion not only fails to address, but, moreover, obfuscates and augments, the true illnesses at the root of global health inequity. Drawing on the Black Radical Tradition, the author suggests that in place of this deeply problematic notion of progress, we must begin centring one that takes as its ultimate goal the deconstruction of the hegemonic power relations at the core of global health inequity.

KEYWORDS

Black Radicalism, Global Health, COVID-19 Pandemic

§ 1. REFLECTIONS

When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered, What will happen to all that beauty? For black people, though I am aware that some of us, black and white, do not know it yet, are very beautiful. And when I sat at Elijah’s table and watched the baby, the women, and the men, and we talked about God’s—or Allah’s—vengeance, I wondered, when that vengeance was achieved, What will happen to all that beauty then? I could also see that the intransigence and ignorance of the white world might make that vengeance inevitable—a vengeance that does not really depend on, and cannot really be executed by, any person or organization, and that cannot be prevented by any police force or army: historical vengeance, a cosmic vengeance, based on the law that we recognize when we say, ‘Whatever goes up must come down’. And here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfilment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time 1

Baldwin writes of ‘inevitable historical––or cosmic––vengeance’ to be enacted through ‘fire’––and here we are enduring this pandemic, which so often manifests itself upon the human body through fever––the body’s process of attempting to purge itself through an internal ‘fire’, of sorts. For Baldwin this vengeance is ‘based on’ the logics of domination that form the core of white supremacy, which lie at the very heart of Western modernity. His referencing ‘the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen’ is a telling––and, indeed, damning––metaphor, for a water wheel is a machine––a humanly constructed mechanism––for converting, or maybe better, stealing, the energy and force of flowing water and transferring it into other forms of power. Nor should the importance of his evoking the metaphor of water be lost upon us in this context. Whether it be Frederick Douglas, W E B Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Christina Sharpe, or so many others, the water, the sea, rivers, etc, are all powerful metaphors for the black struggle for liberation, or, even more so, the force of black souls striving upon shores ‘far from [our] native clime’. This theme is one that is so vividly captured for us in Vincent Harding’s powerful radical work, There is a River.2

Baldwin warns us of how the white Western logics of power and domination––racial, colonial, and to which we may add, patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, etc, etc,—through the continued processes of attempting to dam this forceful river and the transferring of its immense power into the colonial task of securing the interests of the white Western world, will bring its own downfall. Of course, we cannot forget, nor fail to acknowledge, the immense suffering these systems and logics of domination have had on millions upon millions of racialised, non-Western ‘others’––something that is true of the current COVID-19 pandemic as well. Yet, while keeping that in mind, what we see Baldwin here conjuring is none other than the spirit of Aimé Césaire’s ‘boomerang effect’ whereby even the oppressor will be brought down under the violence and oppression of his own system of domination and dehumanisation.3

How does the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic connect to these systems of domination that constitute the very foundation of the world that we inhabit? And once this comes more clearly into view, the truly important question we must then ask is how can we undam the force of the River? As Baldwin recognised sixty years ago, this may be the only chance we have, if it is not already far too late. Alas, I fear we are faltering in our duty, yet again. These are the themes that will be engaged with in this paper.

§2. EVIDENCE

I’m always appalled when some white person tells me that ‘progress is being made’. I always ask him, ‘Progress for whom and from whom?’ Progress for white people might be made, because I would say that since World War II they have learned a little how to get around, to get along with people of color. But I don’t think there’s been progress for the black people, there’s not been progress for the people of color around the Third World. And progress will not be measured for us by white people. We will have to tell you when progress is being made. You cannot tell us when progress is being made, because progress for us is getting you off our backs, and that’s the only progress we can see.

There have been a lot of changes but no progress.

Kwame Ture (aka, Stokely Carmichael), The Dialectics of Liberation^4

Every December, just in time for the holiday season, the World Health Organization publishes its World Malaria Report. According to the WHO, the purpose of this annual publication is to provide ‘in-depth information on the latest trends in malaria control and elimination at global, regional and country levels’.5 The report also ‘highlights progress towards global targets and describes opportunities and challenges for curbing and eliminating the disease’.6 ‘Progress.’ I will return to this theme below. This year’s edition, published on 6 December 2021, also includes an analysis of how the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has affected efforts to tackle malaria globally. Unsurprisingly, the effects have been significantly negative. According to the report, ‘There were an estimated 14 million more malaria cases and 47,000 more deaths in 2020 compared to 2019, due to disruptions to services during the pandemic’.7 Nonetheless, we are also reminded that ‘things could have been far worse’ and that we have ‘averted the worst case-scenario projected at the start of the pandemic’ that malaria deaths could, indeed, double because of the pandemic’.8 One may wonder by what standards—according to what goal—can we make such judgements? ‘Progress’, ‘regress’, ‘worst case scenario’? What is the measure of these notions that we so constantly find bandied about in the domains of international/global aid and development, or even domestically in relation to the inequities faced by marginalised communities?

These findings concerning malaria, a disease that has been rendered quite negligible in its effects to the population of the Global North despite once having been endemic to much of it, and yet which still kills hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of individuals in the Global South every year, are merely part and parcel of the significant, and indeed, disproportionate degree to which the COVID-19 pandemic has devastated communities in the Global South.9 As with most matters, the view of these issues is highly distorted from the relative privilege of the Western/Global North perspective and hides beneath the myth that Sub-Saharan Africa has somehow been, relatively speaking, spared the brunt of the disease, when compared to the nations of the Global North. Disease, death, and suffering, although documented and counted to the highest precision possible in privileged communities, simply speaking, and quite literally, don’t count in less privileged sectors of the globe. Indeed, the WHO recently concluded that infection rates of COVID-19 in Africa are at least seven-times higher than what has been reported, with only one out of every seven cases actually being detected, and that two-thirds of deaths from COVID-19 in Africa simply are not reported.10 It is no wonder that from positions of privilege in the global ‘community’, the picture appears to be far rosier than it is from the ground in Africa. In addition to the direct effects of the COVID-19 virus upon the bodies of individuals and communities in the Global South, we also must factor in the host of other associated and yet equally catastrophic effects it has upon them. For instance, the dramatic increases in poverty.11

Nonetheless, despite the undeniable devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic upon these communities, we cannot place responsibility for the brunt of these numbers upon this virus. Indeed, since 2015 malaria ‘progress’ had stalled, and even had begun to reverse itself in many regions of Sub-Saharan Africa.12 Rather, COVID-19 has merely exposed the tenuous foundations upon which all of that ‘progress’ had rested. Indeed, it may be more accurate to say, that what has been herein exposed is the misguided conception of progress that lies at the very core of initiatives and efforts to deal with global health inequity. In communities that I have worked within, it would be quite difficult to find this ‘progress’ that we are constantly being reminded has been happening. Again, to hark back to

Black is Beautiful and, also Traumatising: A Story of Everyday Trauma in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child

G Michelle Collins-Sibley

ABSTRACT

Recent explorations of intergenerational trauma have contributed to the re-conceptualisation of trauma as an ordinary, everyday phenomenon, particularly in the context of the black colonial and postcolonial condition. In the framework of Nathalie Etoke’s theorisation of melancholia Africana and Resmaa Menakem’s call for a somatic abolitionism, this paper explores Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child as a tale rendering visible the impact of everyday and intergenerational trauma in the body of her protagonist, Bride. Bride embodies the paradox of the black condition––melancholia Africana––with her tar black skin and wavy––not kinky––hair through a physical regression from woman to childhood; this marks the stages of her journey from abnegation to compassion and healing through resistance and redefinition. I will argue that Morrison’s novella brings the lens of trauma theory to peace praxis, exercising the social function of the storyteller to offer a model for reconciliation and peacebuilding through Bride’s journey.

KEYWORDS

Toni Morrison, God Help the Child, intergenerational trauma, black condition, melancholia Africana

‘No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found that you were black. That’s a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.’

Toni Morrison

‘History is not the past, it is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.’

James Baldwin

INTRODUCTION

Trauma is often conceptualised as a one-time event, a shock, sometimes physical, with long-term effects, so to speak of ‘everyday trauma’ evokes a paradox not unlike that expressed by Lena Waithe in her comment, when discussing her recent film Queen and Slim, that ‘being black is beautiful’ and, also, ‘traumatising’. Beauty and trauma yoked together: a paradoxical condition harkening back to W E B Du Bois’ notion of double consciousness as articulated in The Souls of Black Folk, ‘this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’ (Du Bois, 1903: 8 ). In this essay, I explore intersections of alienation/double-consciousness, colourism and gender, in Toni Morrison’s final novel, God Help the Child, in which she renders visible the impact of everyday trauma in the body of her protagonist whose own mother rejects her emotionally at birth because she ‘was so black she scared’ her (Morrison, 2015: 3). My understanding of trauma as addressed in the novel is informed by the theoretical frames of Resmaa Menachem’s soul wound––intergenerational Black Body Trauma––Nathalie Etoke’s melancholia Africana––the production of a self or subject born of loss in the context of the African Diaspora, something she explicitly associates with Du Bois’ double consciousness––and Toni Morrison’s assertion that literature, ‘[n]arrative has never been mere entertainment’ but rather ‘one of the principal ways in which we absorb knowledge’ (Morrison, 1994: 7). I will argue that in God Help the Child Morrison returns to and closes the narrative loop begun with The Bluest Eye. In her fictive engagement with the twin traumas of race and gender, Morrison’s fiction engages with Menakem’s somatic abolitionism by giving voice to the experiences––telling the stories––of those who suffer Etoke’s melancholia Africana.

SOUL WOUND, MELANCHOLIA AFRICANA

In My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, Resmaa Menakem re-conceptualises trauma not just as something that happens in the body but also ‘a spontaneous protective mechanism used by the body to stop or thwart further (or future) potential damage’. Rather than conceptualising it as flaw or weakness, or even an event, for him trauma is ‘the body’s protective response to an event––or a series of events––that it perceives as potentially dangerous’ (p.7). This soul wound may be understood in terms of ‘trauma ghosting’––a body’s recurrent or pervasive sense that danger is just around the corner––‘reflexive trauma response’––in which bodies recreate the trauma to complete the thwarted action or re-enact situations similar to those associated with the original trauma––and ‘traumatic retention(s)’––internalised strategies passed down over generations within a given group. Over time, Menakem explains, these reflexive trauma responses will begin to look like part of personality or personality defects while traumatic retentions come to be seen and understood as culture. The basic premise of his work is that in the United States of America ‘nearly all of us, regardless of our background or skin colour carry trauma in our bodies around the myth of race’. We are all bearers of soul wounds.

Menakem describes multiple ways in which soul wounding occurs, from family contexts in which one member abuses or mistreats another––very definitely applicable to Morrison’s novel––to unsafe or abusive systems, structures, institutions and/or cultural norms––no less applicable in the social history of the United States, as he makes clear––to our very genetic makeup. He references recent work in human genetics which suggests that trauma is passed on in our DNA expression, through the biochemistry of the human egg and sperm. Nathalie Etoke locates and describes melancholia Africana in like manner. She derives the term from original meanings of ‘melancholy’ as the production of a self or subject born of loss in the context of the African Diaspora. She further posits the emergence of a new kind of indigenous person, born of Euro-modernity. These new indigenous people––New World Africans––have been born into a temporal location that rejects them such that they exist, they belong, where they do not belong. This rejected belonging results in a secular theodicean judgement that reality is better off without them. They, not the societies into which they were transported and subsequently born, are the problem; they are a ‘stain to be removed’. Not only is reality better off without them, they should be removed from the present and ‘they do not belong to the future . . . they should not belong to the future’. Etoke’s melancholia Africana is W E B Du Bois’ ‘unasked question’: how does it feel to be a problem?

For Etoke melancholia Africana––the indispensable overcoming of the Black condition––proceeds through performance: the assertion of agency, of being and belonging now and in the future. She maintains that ‘to perform the self is an effort to produce what one is to become’. This performance is located in two primary modalities or genres: that of the Spirituals––Du Bois’ ‘sorrow songs’––understood as born of the suffering of non-belonging and prayers of redemption, and that of Jazz, understood as demanding improvisation, a quintessential performance of freedom informed by ubuntu rather than cogito. Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ countered by the Bantu concept, ‘I am because we are, we are because I am’. She adds to this the ‘spirit of for/giving’: the act of letting go as productive practice, one that mediates the tensions and failures of traditional ‘forgiveness’ in the diaspora as a bad faith practice, a gift of deferred responsibility demanded by the coloniser or enslaver of those without power to bestow fantasies of guilt-free theft (Etoke, 2019: xxii). Etoke’s articulation of the concept of ‘for/giving’ by contrast with conventional western notions of forgiving/forgiveness is critical to the application of melancholia Africana in my reading of Toni Morrison’s novel.

Nathalie Etoke identifies the phenomenon of witnessing as an aspect of melancholia Africana, the overcoming of the Black condition. Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child with its multiple narrative voices and perspectives evokes this notion of jazz performance as Etoke describes it, giving voice to those deemed ‘stains to be removed’.

Trauma theorists, like Resmaa Menakem, have documented the essential aspect of witness/witnessing in overcoming trauma while literary and narrative theorists attest to the power of literature(s) of witness, of a ‘radical’ literature of witness as literature that ‘potentially changes live by bearing witness to (not just observing) some situations demanding our collective attention, at first by raising our consciousness about what is going on’ (King, 2017). Nathalie Etoke identifies the phenomenon of witnessing as an aspect of melancholia Africana, the overcoming of the Black condition. Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child with its multiple narrative voices and perspectives evokes this notion of jazz performance as Etoke describes it, giving voice to those deemed ‘stains to be removed’. It as with so many of her works from The Bluest Eye (1970) to Beloved (1987), and Home (2012), works to bear witness to the everyday trauma of the Black experience in the diaspora. Morrison has often remarked that she purposefully leaves holes and gaps in her novels; so that readers can find a place to enter her work, commenting that ‘[j]azz always keeps you on the edge. There is no final chord . . . I want my books to be like that––because I want the feeling of something held in reserve and the sense that there is something more’ (McKay, 1993: 411). By pulling her readers into her work, Morrison engages them, us, in an act of witness. Bride––Lula Ann Bridewell, Ann Bridewell––as she re-names and thereby re-creates herself is a quintessential example of one who has been born into a temporal location that rejects her with that first rejection coming from her mother, Sweetness. Bride, I suggest, embodies melancholia Africana and Morrison’s treatment of her advocates’ story, specifically fairy tale, as mode of expression and remedy. Her fairy tale quest compels her to face her own buried truths, reconstruct her own history and find her own voice.

Healing of the Divided Brain in a Divided World: Two Pandemics to Integrate

June Gorman

ABSTRACT

In 2020, the world was hit with two deadly pandemics. The Coronavirus COVID-19 was the biological, scientific one—highly transmissible and extremely dangerous especially to immune-compromised groups particularly including the poor, the worldwide elderly and those with prior health conditions. The other, spreading across the world prior to 2020 but in new places never before considered rationally so vulnerable, was sociological, psychological and most of all, educational. In a complex, interdependent world we were suddenly exposed to an even more highly transmissible and ultimately ever more dangerous to informed democracy, neoliberal ‘thinking’ disease. One that spread and thrived on misinformation and exposed underlying weak educational immune systems even in, especially in, the ‘wealthiest’ of democratic nations. Despite top tier educational systems and high historical rates of population attendance in those systems, the US being the clearest example, people still seemed unable to vaccinate against growing provable lies, misstatements of facts and even completely alternative world-views built on emotional diseases of inequity, misogyny, racism and corrupting abuses of power. The result even in this ‘advanced democracy’ was dangerously divided realities manipulated to increase lower brain-stem confusion and stoke fear, rage and hate of the ‘other’. The social/psychological and emotional diseases that education systems not only refuse to address but indeed often exacerbate have become the far greater danger to the social responsibility that is necessary in a world struggling together for true equity, fairness and peace for all. That pedagogy is only available by developing understanding across both hemispheres of the human brain. It calls for a transformative, democratic education emotionally value-integrated with, rather than isolated from, the scientific and logical solutions that then can inform and address both types of the dangerous environmental, scientific and societal pandemics currently spreading worldwide.

KEYWORDS

Pandemic, advanced democracy, educational systems, emotional diseases, social responsibility, resilience

NEOLIBERALISM’S EDUCATION TAKEOVER

Cognitive Assessment Test Question

How does the arguably richest resourced, top educated developed country,1 the USA, with potentially the top National Public Health institutions and standards of medical Public Health Policy, including the highly touted and respected Center for Disease Control (CDC), end up as the undisputed leader of all other countries of the world, in actual total COVID-19 pandemic death toll ?

Fact

All during the first (2020) and second (2021) year of the deadly Coronavirus Pandemic, the USA remained ‘number 1’ at COVID-19 pandemic spread and corresponding death rate (much of it arguably preventable because of these same resources), and stands currently at 4% of the world’s population, while maintaining 25% of the world’s COVID-19 death.2

Or as Ed Yong of the Atlantic’s Pulitzer Prize Reporting on this, even early on in the US Pandemic asks,

How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom.3

How did this shocking dissonance of supposed rational ability, with the highest financial resources, elite public educational, medical and supposedly democratic social institutions built to prepare, prevent and most importantly protect society from a pandemic’s worst outcomes, enact such a demonstrably epic failure at doing exactly that?

How did this shocking dissonance of supposed rational ability, with the highest financial resources, elite public educational, medical and supposedly democratic social institutions built to prepare, prevent and most importantly protect society from a pandemic’s worst outcomes, enact such a demonstrably epic failure at doing exactly that? And most importantly how, with all the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) emphasis of a top education of scientific rational thinking, can this failure be rationally explained?

The answer to that is far more disturbing for modern society to face worldwide because it isn’t primarily only rationally explainable at its root, and worse it isn’t a ‘failure’ or bug in the system at all. It is actually the neoliberal economic-values reprogramming feature. It is a feature now encoded in all our mechanisms of information, imagery and dominant worldview and critically, reengineered education delivery systems in our modern developed globalising society.4

It isn’t a ‘failure’ or bug in the system at all. It is actually the neoliberal economic-values reprogramming feature.

Most concerning, in STEM-dominated standardised education systems, this exported neoliberal education for global development pushed hard against all the new neuroscience which explains the far more necessary full brain, complex problem-solving abilities most critical for human and planetary survival. The neuroscience proving to be more socially beneficial than the virally spread values of economic profiteering, because it argues instead for the healthy, fully ‘connected’ human brain, body and heart because they demonstrably work best when interconnected in the human social animal. It’s a microcosm of the most critical metaphor for all of humanity: the need to be humanely connected with all on the planet and the planet itself, in order to survive.

‘RESOLVING TO BE RESILIENT’ ABOUT THE PROFITS OF DESTRUCTION

Instead, as globalisation reinforced the far narrower profit over people-focused neoliberal economy models developed in the US and the UK in the decades before globalisation was put on technologically enhancing steroids, global environmental disasters and increasing wealth disparity became ever more glaring. The globe, the planet itself, was evidently suffering daily with more destructive effects on its people and other living beings. The neoliberal Think Tanks’ response, with billions invested by wealthy Conservatives and their foundations in the years between 1970s and 1990s was prepared for this outcome in stages:

(1) Selling to the public neoliberalism’s accelerated profiteering extraction and exploitation for the planet as the best ‘free market’ economic growth

(2) Externalising environmental costs and ‘unavoidable’ extinction for the rest of living species and planet destabilisation, and

(3) Implementing a subsequently necessary education of ‘resilience’ taught to humanity.

But resilience didn’t so much explain these evident rising disparities and the corresponding damages of this new crises-creating, crises profiting economic 5 model, or the lack of focus on any real attempt to solve them at their roots. It instead assumed, and reinforced by taught silence,6 its unspoken inevitability. It took the actual and evocative terms out of the language, replacing rape of the planet, and obscene wealth growing even faster than the rising waters this exploitation was provably causing, and argued for ‘adaptation’ as they denied any of these effects were human caused or even dramatically accelerated.

What had to be taught now, and the emotional sanitising of the necessary language and thus subverted outrage was facilitated by teaching, was resignation to the inevitable. It was our job, those of us educating to these new values hidden in these new ‘vocabulary’ tests, to change our understanding of our lives and educate to fit their increasingly obscene and increasingly short-term profit models, hidden in these definably Orwellian words.7 This, at the very same time evidential higher and higher environmental costs were ravaging our world and endangering even the very next generation. What we needed was argued, apparently besides evidential truth, was a totally new form of ‘resilience’. Apparently, one preparing us to accept the predictable and actually preventable human-made environmental physical and mental health blows for profit even if this path is potentially humanity extinguishing, while we learned to smile with brighter, whiter teeth.

But it was a values definition, not a scientific one. It was focused on denying human agency and therefore, the power to mitigate what was actually happening under the continued extractive, destructive, upward wealth redistribution economy, which if continued, was making it inevitable. Those were social human and values truths, not scientific ones. Science itself had already illuminated decades ago the results if we continued along Western dominated extractive economies, based on denying the destruction of nature and the planet that all science was based upon.

What we truly needed education for instead was the resilience necessary to fight for our lives in rejection of the resource and humanity depletion of our world. Resilience must go beyond just acceptance as our world and the large majority of those living in it but not profiting by it, careens with the indoctrination of selective-evidenced beliefs, reinforced by digitally managed imagery and driven by constant repetition of a dystopian inevitably that somehow just must be accepted? By that very underlying neoliberal definition and media-reinforced framing, it is indeed a virally spread contagion and ultimately, to humans, a fatal one. One that damages necessary full-brain understanding enhancing complex globally interconnected problem solving, and thus indeed becoming an inevitable dead end. Science itself has been telling and showing us that but science alone can’t answer why we continue increasing even speeding up off the cliff in front of us to the un-survivable bottom.

The Question of Caste in the Time of Pandemic

Santi Sarkar

ABSTRACT

As soon as the countries decided to implement the COVID-19 protocols, the term ‘social distancing’ overnight has become a buzzword and a novel universal norm to be abided by all. But when it comes to the Dalits (Untouchables in India), for them obeying social distancing norms is not strange at all. Because ‘pollution’ and ‘purity’ have always been central to the age-old Indian caste institutions. It is during this pandemic when the custom and the scientific norm imposed by the modern States converge. However, the categorical difference, practically not, is that while the former form of untouchability was legitimised by the fear of losing ‘caste purity’, the latter is being justified for saving lives.

In the present paper, the author wants to argue that the present lockdown has revealed the hierarchical structure of Indian society. Given the pervasiveness and obstinacy of the caste system, it is easy to surmise that some of the worst sufferers of the nationwide lockdown in India are the ‘untouchables’. The Dalit migrant labourers, both women and men, who are disproportionately confined to mostly menial and low-paying jobs became jobless once the economic activities were suspended.

Traversing a series of instances and understanding the responses of both the society and State, the present paper wants to throw light on the social segregation and economic distress of the lower castes that only get perpetuated during the lockdown in India (came into effect on 24 March 2020).

KEYWORDS

Dalits, pandemic, COVID-19, women, social distance

INTRODUCTION

In India, the caste system is so pervasive and obstinate that it is easy to understand that during the nationwide lockdown in India some of the worst sufferers are the ‘untouchables’. The Dalit migrant labourers are referred to as ‘migrant labourers’ by the policymakers, the courts, the media, and academics, all of which are dominated by the higher castes. However, this innocuous word obscures how intimately caste and class are connected, and how the lockdown has caused a mass trauma endured mostly by the tribals, Dalits, and backward castes. They are the impoverished mass that belongs to Bharat that keeps our farmlands, factories, and workshops going, toil on streets and building sites, provide service to the upper and middle classes’ houses, care for our children, and clean our city and sewage lines.

The Dalit migrant labourers are referred to as ‘migrant labourers’ by the policymakers, the courts, the media, and academics, all of which are dominated by the higher castes. However, this innocuous word obscures how intimately caste and class are connected, and how the lockdown has caused a mass trauma endured mostly by the tribals, Dalits, and backward castes.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CASTE IN INDIA

The caste system in India perhaps is the oldest and persistent social stratification in the world that sanctions professions along with hereditary lines and perpetuates status hierarchies that often culminated in restricting the freedom of the people belonging to the lower stratum or outside the realm of caste structure (Sindhuja, 2017). The Rigveda (1500 BC–1000 BC), the ancient religious scripture of Hindu religion distinguishes four social classes based on occupation which includes the Brahmanas (the priest class), Kshatriyas (the kings, administrators, and warriors), Vaishyas (traders, merchants, and landlords), and Shudras (labourers devoted to serving the other classes). The groups which belong to the outside of these four distinct classes are called Dalits and Tribals also known as ‘untouchables’ in the past.

After independence in 1947, this contentious term was, however, outlawed. Also, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) who became the Father of the Indian Nation after independence was not of the opinion to use it. Instead, in 1933 he coined a new term Harijan which means ‘Children of the God’ has its etymological roots in Sanskrit. But, the meaning of the Dalit word in Sanskrit is ‘oppressed or broken’. In fact, it was found in the colonial records of 1935 that the expression Dalit was in use to denote the socially repressed groups of the lower classes. The term was popularised by Baba Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) by calling himself a Dalit and sought to include all oppressed people irrespective of their caste into the definition of Dalits (Katuwal, 2008). In other words, the people who are outside the four folds of the Hindu varna system and thought of forming a fifth one referred to themselves as Panchama (Sagar & Bhargava, 2017). In both past and present, Dalits are not allowed to enter Hindu temples, public spaces (schools, common source of drinking water), and houses of the upper caste people. The logic behind this was that they were perceived as polluters and by restricting them the upper caste Hindus act as the custodian of sacred religious scriptures.

The Dalits are a varied but distinct cultural and social group in India who are treated unequally in everyday life due to their low rank in the Hindu social order. They epitomise India’s hierarchical caste structure at its most basic level as its worst victims. India has a long history of battle against caste discrimination. For nearly two millennia, Dalits have been traditionally barred from most aspects of social, cultural, religious, and economic life. Only during the colonial period (1757–1947) did changes begin to occur, as they did in the rest of society. Although castes have changed significantly in terms of their structure and operation, they have remained repressive for the vast majority of Dalits at the bottom. Though Hinduism is mostly associated with India, Dalits may be found in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar, as well as in the diaspora in the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Malaysia, Canada, South Africa, Caribbean (Teltumbe, 2020). Later, in order to implement the Government of India Act, 1935, the colonial rulers created a schedule in 1936 that listed all castes in Hindu society that were considered untouchable and gave it the administrative label ‘Scheduled Castes (SC)’, which has since been adopted by the post-colonial regime and is still in use today in the governmental sphere. Despite constitutional declarations prohibiting caste-based discrimination more than six decades ago, Dalits continue to face various forms of social exclusion and discrimination. Physical segregation is the most striking element of social exclusions. Even though most villages and towns have experienced expansion and regeneration thanks to governmental programmes like Indira Awas Yojana (IAY) and Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY), Dalits continue to reside in different neighbourhoods outside of villages in rural regions and specific locations in cities. They still lack access to basic public facilities like wells, tanks, and temples. They continue to have restricted access to capital assets such as agricultural land and non-land assets (and/or assets with poor productivity). As a result, they continue to be at the lowest socioeconomic stratum of society in terms of household income, education, and profession.

According to Ambedkar, Hindu society, like other cultures, was fundamentally a class structure in which individuals may change their class if they were qualified (Teltumbe, 2020). However, at some point in history, the priestly caste socially separated itself from the rest of society and formed a separate caste through a closed-door policy. The other varnas, which were governed by the rule of the social division of labour, developed subdivision as the class system’s social mobility increased. They, too, have lost the open-door nature of the class structure, as Ambedkar contended, and have become self-contained entities known as castes. According to Ambedkar, the reason behind the formation of caste was: ‘Some closed the door: Others found it closed against them.’ (Teltumbe, 2020).

Untouchability was outlawed in India under Article 17 of the Constitution, and its practice in any form was deemed illegal. In order to strengthen the constitutional provisions of Article 15 (Prohibition of Discrimination Based on Religion, Race, Caste, Sex, or Place of Birth) and Article 17, the Indian Parliament passed the Untouchability (Offenses) Act in 1955, which was later amended and retitled as the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955 in 1976.

Although in Independent India prejudicial practices based on caste and religion are illegal, the ground reality is, however, different. Reports of caste-based atrocities from the different villages across the country testify to this assertion (Khubchandani, Soni & Fahey, 2018). Nonetheless, the National Crime Records Bureau finds that in 2021 there is an increase of 9.4% in crime against Scheduled Caste (SC) persons (https://www.hindustantimes.com). The penetration of caste into the modern system can be observed in the public employment sector. One study suggests that among 1.2 million sanitation workers in India most belong to Dalit or de-notified tribes (https://scroll.in). The spill-over caste prejudice can be found in another case that although in 2013 the Government of India put a halt to the requirement of manual scavengers, in 2019 there are 54,000 active contractual scavenger workers are involved in cleaning sewers without protective gears, cleaning human excreta, etc. Unlike Dalits, historically the people from the upper castes have not engaged in menial jobs like these. Since the Dalits are considered untouchables, therefore, they are judged to be ‘incapable’ to undertake the duties of the upper castes (Kumar, 2014). It is for this reason that they are historically engaged in or forced to do the jobs like manual scavenging and sweeping. Their occupational and caste status also expose them to exclusion in the spheres of economic activities, area of residence, political participation, education, and so on. These factors are very instrumental in leading to their social stigma.

There are numerous descriptions of living as a Dalit in India today, including the marginalisation, brutality, and cruel behaviour that has been ingrained in Indian culture, preventing Dalits from moving around freely. Being a member of an oppressed group highlights the inequality that exists between Dalits and upper caste people, as well as how this may lead to prejudice and poverty on a broader scale.

To develop appropriate remedies to eliminate caste and social inequalities, a

Do Insurance-based Health Policies Benefit the Poor? The Indian Experience

Saloni & Sushil Kumar

ABSTRACT

The neoliberal economy has changed the shape and approach of health services the world over. In spite of well-meaning principles adopted in international fora such as the World Health Organization, wellness is no longer viewed as a fundamental basis of human development that the state is duty-bound to promote, but as a commodity which the consumers must buy according to their purchasing capacity. Of late, the health sector is more and more being linked with insurance sector and governments are becoming more than willing partners in this game. This paper analyses the resultant situation with particular reference to India, a developing country with a vast population and a huge economy, and suggests ways for making it more inclusive and pro-poor.

KEYWORDS

Health services, health insurance, medicalisation, Indian health sector, inclusive healthcare

There is no larger test for humanity than the crisis of global health. Solving it will require the full commitment of our hearts and minds. We need both. Without compassion, we would not do anything. Without science, we cannot do anything. So far, we have not applied all we have of either.1

INTRODUCTION

A society can flourish only with its healthier human resource that spend lesser time and financial resources on medical treatments and medicines. The healthcare services along with medical facilities, existing and perceived, are considered as integral parts of the modern societal life. Consistent, vital and futuristic institutional efforts can be seen at the national and global levels.

With the advent of the processes like modernisation and globalisation, the international community felt urges to focus on the issues like even economic development, gender equality, political cohesiveness, human rights, peace and cultural harmony, etc to make the global society better, progressive, inclusive and peaceful. Health is not only the most important and vital aspect of an individual’s life but healthier citizens of a country provide an effective platform of development in the form of productive human resources. Seeing this aspect of human life United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) also emphasised on the vitality of human health and included it in the process of determining Human Development Index of a country. It says that ‘the Human Development Index (HDI) is a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, being acknowledgeable and have a decent standard of living’.2 An agenda, in this context, was set internationally to make systematic and collaborative efforts to make the humankind gradually healthier in all the countries of the world irrespective of their developmental categories.

The World Bank classifies countries into four categories namely ‘Low-income economies’, ‘Lower-middle income economies’, ‘Upper-middle-income economies’ and ‘High-income economies’.3 However, income, as explained in this paper, cannot be seen as the single and the most important factor behind ‘good’ or ‘bad’ health of the people. On the contrary, it is an important factor along with various other non-economic factors affecting the health of individuals.

In order to gradually improve health conditions of people globally, a roadmap was prepared and strategies were discussed by many countries at Ottawa in 1986. The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion was adopted on 21 November 1986 to build up a strategic framework to implement the ‘Health for All’ principle. It says:

Health is a positive concept emphasizing social and personal resources, as well as physical capacities. Health promotion therefore, is not only the responsibility of the health sector, but goes beyond healthy lifestyles to wellbeing. Positive health thus has three linked dimensions––social, psychological and physical—which should all be included when measuring health.4

In this context, that is largely accepted and globally followed, the overall human health dimension appears as vital to human life that includes life expectancy at birth and life expectancy index in the wider realm of the public health.

Public health, the improvement of a population’s health through the organized means of society, has a long tradition. Public health has always depended on sufficient food, clean water and protection from disasters. Infectious diseases have been reduced through isolation, immunization and specific treatments; measures to combat chronic diseases have also been based on epidemiology.5

The World Health Organization’s Health for All campaign emphasises the broad scope of public health at national level and its Healthy Cities programme affirms the fundamental contribution of local organisations––municipal, professional and voluntary.6

As far as the contemporary world health situation is concerned, HDI is considered to be an important aspect. However, at the same time it is observed that various communities living at the peripheries of societies in the developing world are neither proportionately benefitted economically under the realm of the respective GDP growths nor have they been linked properly with emerging modern day health services and facilities available around them. Other than the poor performance of the health service providers there have been many socio-cultural and psychological factors preventing them to come into a wider umbrella of the institutional health service networks and subsequently to use available services to cure their health problems.

Such communities have been ignorant, for various reasons and under the impact of many factors, towards mental sicknesses and psychological problems. Instead of realising the ways to use the modern medical facilities and services they either rely on their own traditional ways to treat health problems or accept to live with their persisting health issues leading them gradually towards suffering and death. In such invisible but felt circumstances, it becomes a challenge for the health service institutions and service providers to bring them closer to the quality medical treatments with promptness, mainly at the initial stage of sickness. The low-income groups and communities living in slums in urban areas, poor habitats in the countryside including relatively larger proportions of the tribal population can be seen in this perspective. Looking at these it was announced long ago that ‘by the year 2000, all settings of social life and activity, such as the city, school, workplace, neighbourhood and home, should provide greater opportunities for promoting health’ 7 so the different sections of the world population can gain better health over a period of time through multi-institutional, multi-organisational and multi-dimensional efforts.

However, the overall progress in this direction has been fragmented, imbalanced and uneven so far. Rapid pace of medicalisation in the context of modern medicines in almost all the countries in the world has been one important factor behind this. The term ‘medicalisation’ commonly denotes the spread of the medical profession’s activities, such as their increasing involvement in the process of birth and dying.8 Instead of focusing on preventive measures, it has been promoting a business model of healthcare services and medical treatments in which the human health becomes secondary and a source of financial gains of the medical infrastructures. It has been creating space for relatively expensive system of diagnosis and treatment of particular diseases such as hypertension, blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, pregnancy related health problems and surgeries, etc. Moreover, with the fast growing health insurance sector, it has clubbed a number of healthcare services and medical treatments with health insurance provider companies, involving government as a major stakeholder. Emergence of various health insurance based social security schemes in India can be seen in this context. Two health insurance schemes, namely ‘Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana’ and ‘Ayushman Bharat Yojana’ have been two effective health insurance schemes for the poor people in India. These schemes are discussed in detail in forthcoming parts of this paper.

The term ‘medicalisation’ commonly denotes the spread of the medical profession’s activities, such as their increasing involvement in the process of birth and dying. Instead of focusing on preventive measures, it has been promoting a business model of healthcare services and medical treatments in which the human health becomes secondary and a source of financial gains of the medical infrastructures.

FAILURE OF THE INCLUSIVE APPROACH IN MODERN HEALTHCARE SERVICES: AN INDIAN PERSPECTIVE

The world by and large exists with a combination of societies which are different from each other in various ways. Many of these societies are still living with tribal, nomadic, pastoral, traditional, rural, urban and cosmopolitan ways of life and their respective value systems. The nature of the specific societies determines how the health issues of their members are tackled––through naturopathy, indigenous knowledge, alternative or modern medicines. India, in this context, appears as a society combined with multiple ways of human life and value systems that ponders between traditionality and modernity. It is important to highlight here that the Indian society, in its grand form, has multiple traditionalities and modernities. It means that different forms of tradtionalities and various versions of modernities walk together side by side, and it can be seen in almost all the aspects of life. One interesting example, that is much contrasting as well, can be cited here. The COVID-19 crisis has been fatal in India as well. The modern and ultra-modern medical tools and techniques are being used to identify the degree of the COVID-19 infections and for all the possible treatment of people

In Dialogue with a Public Intellectual An Interview with Dr Ranabir Samaddar by Dr Sibaji Pratim Basu

‘The prestige intellectuals enjoyed in the glorious days of liberalism is over, or soon will be over.’

Professor Ranabir Samaddar (RS), currently the Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies at Calcutta Research Group, India, belongs to the critical school of thinking and is considered as one of the foremost theorists in the field of forced migration studies. He has worked extensively on issues of forced migration, the theory and practices of dialogue, nationalism and post-colonial statehood in South Asia, and new regimes of technological restructuring and labour control. His much-acclaimed book, The Politics of Dialogue: Living Under the Geopolitical Histories of War and Peace (2004) was a culmination of his long work on justice, rights, and peace. Some other important writings include a two-volume account, The Materiality of Politics (2007) and The Emergence of the Political Subject (2009). He has co-authored a major work on New Town (a satellite township of Kolkata) and new forms of accumulation, Beyond Kolkata: Rajarhat and the Dystopia of Urban Imagination (2013). It takes forward urban studies in the context of post-colonial capitalism. Professor Samaddar is also a leading columnist in many newspapers, news journals and e-portals published from India and abroad.

Professor Sibaji Pratim Basu is (SPB) the Vice-Chancellor, Vidyasagar University, West Bengal, India. A regular contributor to academic journals/books as well as popular dailies, periodicals and news channels, Basu has also edited a number of books. His important publications include: The Poet & The Mahatma: Engagement with Nationalism & Internationalism (2009), edited volumes called, The Fleeing People of South Asia (2009) and Forced Migration & Media Mirrors (2014); Basu has also to his credit a co-edited volume, Politics in Hunger-Regime: Essays on the Right to Food in West Bengal (2011). A former secretary and treasurer of Calcutta Research Group, Basu’s academic interests centre round history of socialist thought; Indian political thought, popular movements, sustainable rights, forced migration and displacement, media studies and cultural politics.

SPB had a long conversation with RS on the emergence, role and importance of Public Intellectuals in the past and in recent times. The interview is being published in the Journal of Transdisciplinary Peace Praxis with editorial assistance from Dr Santi Sarkar.

Critical thinking must accept the temporality and provisional character of its own nature and its own world. The moment a particular style of thinking claims that it is the only style of inquiry and going to last forever, it will cease to be critical.

SPB: As a radical intellectual you have always emphasised the importance of critical thinking. For our readers, can you elaborate further what you mean by it?

RS: Well, the biggest challenge for critical thinking would be not to take it as something that has been settled once and for all. So, critical thinking must accept the temporality and provisional character of its own nature and its own world. The moment a particular style of thinking claims that it is the only style of inquiry and going to last forever, it will cease to be critical. In this context let us recall Marx, who said, ‘Thank God. I am not a Marxist!’

A theory that claims itself to be a theory immediately tends to stabilise itself. Moving to the margins not only requires acute investigation but also needs a particular way in which it can move away from the centre and move to the periphery and from there it can have a critical glance towards the centre.

I think the biggest challenge to critical thinking, in the present time, is when we find the term critical has become a fashion—more than a way of thinking and therefore, it loses its interrogative nature and forget to ask ‘why?’ which is one of the cardinal characteristics of a critical mind. The other preliminary reply to your question would be: does this way of thinking that claims to be ‘critical’ work in the margins? However, it does not mean that you have to situate yourself in the margins but the material with which you are working, the position you are taking, the concerns that you show, or the basis of your inquiry—does it have the margins of the time, history and society as the main stuff of thinking?

I would say three characteristics will mark critical thinking, namely, first, its provisionality and temporal nature; secondly, it should not reduce itself to a fashion but be a mode of thinking; and thirdly, if a theory wants to achieve criticality, then it must accomplish two tasks: (i) it must interrogate what is accepted as the ‘mainstream’ and (ii) moving to the margins. So, a theory that claims itself to be critical must be taken with suspicion. A theory that claims itself to be a theory immediately tends to stabilise itself. Moving to the margins not only requires acute investigation but also needs a particular way in which it can move away from the centre and move to the periphery and from there it can have a critical glance towards the centre. And so, on this basis we can say that critical thinking which is not transformative is not critical at all. Critical thinking that turns itself into the style of the time and is employed to earn respect and prestige of the society is not critical. We must ask, does it transform the society?

SPB: You have talked about the transformation of society. It was raised in The German Ideology by Marx and Engels that ‘The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production at its disposal’. Marx and Engels noted that ‘mental production’ was delegated to the ‘thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists . . . )’. Do you agree with this depiction of intellectuals, especially of ‘public intellectuals’?

The question of class, social basis, economic relations, and the particular vocation of the intellectual will take us to what Lenin, Mao and Gramsci all thought of, and at the same time I think through them we can interrogate the kind of demigod status that the public intellectuals achieved in India.

RS: It is a very important question, and I think Marx and Engels’ arguments about ideology in The German Ideology and elsewhere are very important. It is also very important to keep in mind that intellectuals represent class or classes. And they become one of the very important articulating organs of a particular class or classes.

(i) We should not be deceived by the status of the intellectuals. It is not that the intellectuals are the His Master’s Voice but at the same time, we must not take the intellectuals as the autonomous voice of society.

(ii) In this age, the word ‘public’ should be taken with caution. They are called public intellectuals because they work on public issues, articulate their ideas and disseminate them in public that affects the public. And, the public recognises them as intellectuals.

Kaleidoscope

Pandemic stress pushes up violence in US schools

Researchers are worried over the rising incidence of gun violence is American schools during the last one year. Those studying the phenomenon say it is related to increasing stress in the life of young people brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. The watchdog ‘Everytown for Gun Safety’ has counted as many as 141 campus shootings so far during the academic year 2021-22. The figure is higher than the peak at any point in the previous decade, it points out.

The reasons behind this calamity are several. The inequality and inadequacy of resources that had already existed before the pandemic have worsened amidst the COVID-19 situation, compounded by obvious health issues. Many of the children have been forced to live without the care and watch of their adult family members for long periods. The stress is apparent not only among the students but among the teachers as well. A National Education Association survey report says that half of the teachers now want to leave the profession or retire early, which forecasts further escalation of the campus crisis.

Read more at:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/tsunami-woes-us-school-shootings-spike-amid-pandemic-stress-2022-02-06/

Working class is the worst sufferer

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the US economy hard and the hardest-hit are the working class people. Many of them are out of employment and facing a precarious situation. Although some signs of recovery have been noticed in recent months, reports point out that the total number of jobs in the system still falls short of the February 2020 figure (before the virus outburst) by 2.9 million. Estimated against the growth in the country’s population, the actual gap should be 4.5 million. Even as the slump in job market indicates a downtrend in income for the working population, their helplessness is increased further as the state is rolling back the financial support and extra unemployment allowance which it offered during the peak period of the pandemic. They are also losing the benefits of child tax credits and rent moratoriums. All this is reflected by a decrease in consumer spending, which fell by 0.6% in December 2021, the first time since February 2020.

See more at:

https://robertreich.org/post/675282257789992960

Vaccine Pass law stirs up protests

Thousands of people protested in Paris and other cities in France on 16 January 2022 as the country’s parliament passed a law making it mandatory for citizens to carry a ‘vaccine pass’. The pass will be necessary for boarding all public transport including surface and air and entering all public places. Neither a negative COVID-19 test report nor the health pass introduced earlier will be considered valid under this new strict law unless one produces the pass indicating that the person is fully vaccinated. However, according to a health ministry release on the eve of the legislation, the fully vaccinated category still covers only 78% of the population. There is one concession though: children between 12 and 15 may continue to present a health pass instead of a vaccine pass.

Meanwhile, there were demonstrations in many other cities across Europe including Athens, Helsinki, London and Stockholm declaring opposition to stringent laws and restrictions in view of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Similar protests were witnessed in other continents, too. Marchers poured into the streets of the Bolivian Capital La Paz on 10 January 2022 resenting a government order requiring people to display their vaccination certificates. A copy of the order was burnt in front of the Ministry of Health by the protesters, who said they were not against vaccination but against coercive measures to make it mandatory.

See reports at:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/16/french-parliament-approves-vaccine-pass-law-to-tackle-covid

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/French-National-Assembly-Adopts-Vaccine-Pass-Law-20220117-0003.html?utm_source=planisys&utm_medium=NewsletterIngles&utm_campaign=NewsletterIngles&utm_content=18

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/vaccine-passport-protests-in-europe-draw-thousands-of-people/

https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/south-america/street-protests-in-bolivia-against-vaccination-pass-articleshow.html

For a study of the issue in a wider perspective, see the World Economic Forum feature, ‘Are COVID-19 vaccine mandates human rights violations?’ (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/are-covid-19-vaccine-mandates-a-human-rights-violation/)

Cuba defies Big Pharma to build vaccine solidarity

The tiny island nation has been under sanctions from its mighty neighbour, the United States, on trading of almost all essential items including food and medicines for six decades now. It has faced an acute shortage of even as simple an implement as injection syringes during the pandemic. And yet, Cuba has set an example before the world having developed its own vaccines of not one but five varieties. These vaccines are said to be more suitable for low-income countries than the ones marketed by the big multinational pharmaceutical companies. The reason: these are easy to manufacture and easy to store. They do not require freezing temperatures for remaining effective.

The Cuban Public Health Ministry had reported on 12 October 2021 that 58.1% of the country’s population had been fully vaccinated. The percentage of those who had received at least one dose of vaccine stood at 86.3%.

Cuba has already submitted the details about its vaccines to the World Health Organization and hopes to get a clearance in the current year. Meanwhile, it has already started sending teams to different countries from its famous Henry Reeve Brigade, which did a commendable work during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. So far, 57 of these teams have been engaged in battling the virus in 40 countries. These include Venezuela and Iran, which are also facing US embargos. Apart from sending doctors and volunteers, Cuba has made technology-transfer agreements with Argentina, Vietnam and Nicaragua and is negotiating similar contracts with more countries to facilitate local manufacture of the vaccines.

Read these reports at:

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/02/05/cuba-is-helping-vaccinate-the-world/

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2021/10/14/cuba-reaches-milestone-with-60-of-its-population-being-fully-vaccinated/

For a foreign visitor’s account of life in Cuba under US embargo, see

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/2/7/from-havana-with-love

Curated by Nilanjan Dutta

Book Reviews

Home in the World: A Memoir

By AMARTYA SEN

pp.480, Allen Lane

2021, HB/Audio Download

£25.00/16.00

Reviewed by

REKHA DATTA

A Philosopher-Economist’s Journey from the Cottage of the World to the Global Stage

‘. . . I have come to the gateway of the simple; I am now content to see things as they are. I have gained freedom myself; I shall allow freedom to others. In my work will be my salvation.’

— The Home and the World, Rabindranath Tagore (1916)

In Home in the World, a title inspired by Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World, Amartya Sen, a quintessential humanist economist, moral philosopher and social theorist, chronicles the first three decades of his life spanning his education and early teaching career. When asked where his home was, Sen once inferred that he has embraced as his home wherever his life and work took him. Born in 1933 in Santiniketan (Abode of Peace), a university town housing Tagore’s Visva Bharati (World University), Sen describes feeling at home there as well as in Dhaka (where his ancestral home was named Jagat Kutir, or the Cottage of the World), Mandalay in Burma, Calcutta, Cambridge, Boston, Delhi, and other places where he sojourned. Tagore, a close associate of the family, named him Amartya, meaning ‘immortal’ in Sanskrit and Bengali but also ‘unearthly’, which Sen would prefer.

In this memoir, Sen demonstrates his mastery in storytelling, interspersing musings with intellectual wit and humour. In five parts, he covers his formative years and the foundation of theories that would open new gateways in welfare economics, justice, inequality and social choice theory. It includes his pursuit of freedom through reason, philosophical conjectures and synthesis of intellectual traditions, and a symbiotic engagement of his life experiences that shape many of his normative economic theories. Nadine Gordimer once commented, the ‘rare synthesis of great intellect and total personal human involvement combine in Amartya Sen.’ Finally, Sen’s disarming humility and love for teaching are evident throughout the memoir.

In Rationality and Freedom (2004), Sen shows how reason and freedom were interrelated. Freedom gives humans the space to use their reason, and rationality allows them to assess their freedom of choice. Sen thus broadens the concept commonly used in economics that self-interest drives rationality. For Sen, almost in an Aristotelian sense, reason helps humans to go beyond self-interest and act for the public good. Reflecting on some of the later misgivings of Marxist philosophy, Sen laments how Marxism has come to signify absence of personal liberty whereas, as is evident in The German Ideology (1846, 1966), Marx and Engels advocate freedom of thought and action in an ideal society.

Through Sen’s memoir we learn that it was his early education in Santiniketan and Tagore’s philosophy of education to train the mind to combine freedom and reason that inspired his thought process. ‘If you have freedom, you will have reason to exercise it’ (p.42). Mirroring Tagore, Sen questions the shackles of colonialism, socioeconomic inequalities in pre and post-independence India, casteism, religious fanaticism and fragmentation, poverty, and also advocates for education and gender equality. He acknowledges how Tagore’s ideas of combining reason and freedom have served as guides through his life and work.

Attending Presidency College, Calcutta (now Kolkata), at 18 he self-diagnosed his oral cancer. The fascinating narrative begins with a light-hearted introduction to a friendship with hypochondria that saved his life. As he battled with a potentially fatal illness, he used reason to free his mind of fear, processing his cancer diagnosis by distinguishing two self-identities: patient and agent. The latter focused on the objective evaluation of his chances of recovery and treatment options. As he reflected on the work needed to be completed should the treatments fail, uppermost in his mind were cures to the problems of poverty and illiteracy in India.

Synthesis of intellectual traditions: Sen has an uncanny ability to seamlessly navigate and synthesise intellectual traditions in Sanskrit, Buddhism, Tagore’s universalism, justice, social contract, and moral and social theories. Among others, he finds parallels in the quests of Buddhism, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Tagore, and John Maynard Keynes to remove social inequity. ‘Tagore expressed horror at the treatment received by some parts of humanity, much as Smith had found the enslavement of people intolerable’ (p.407).

Total personal involvement: Sen, the social scientist, personalises a problem to carve out a research question, analyse it and offer a policy solution. His fascination with normative economics was cultivated by analysing many childhood experiences including rising food prices, and social inequalities that created poverty, illiteracy, and gender discrimination. On the steamer rides of his childhood along the Padma River, he would witness children waving at the passing boats and wonder: ‘why were they not in school?’ Since those early years, Sen developed a life-long commitment to promoting education, especially among underprivileged rural children. It should not come as a surprise that Sen established the Pratichi Trust for education with the funds from his 1998 Nobel Prize.

When Sen was about 10 years old, he encountered a man who had not eaten for about a month. In the 1943 Bengal that enjoyed sufficient food supply, the rural poor could not afford the high price of food, leading to mass starvation and death of 2-3 million people. Food deprivation in the face of plenty inspired Sen’s path-breaking ‘capabilities approach’.

Sen’s life-long interest in resolving the conundrum of gender inequality germinated in early childhood. Conversations with his maternal grandmother Kiranbala about how mothers died at childbirth due to lack of knowledge about antiseptics informed his work on maternal mortality and female infanticide. These early impressions shaped his work on the phenomenon now known as ‘missing women’ (1990). He also observed how cultural constraints, including the ‘psychology of modesty’, held back several of his female classmates in Santiniketan. Sen’s work includes suggestions for further research in this area for his followers.

Humility, wealth of knowledge, and teaching: To summarise Sen’s memoir and monumental contributions to the world of scholarship, policy, and humanistic inquiry, an ancient Sanskrit shloka seems appropriate.

Roughly translated it means that knowledge brings humility. From humility comes worthiness, which in turn creates wealth. This kind of wealth is the key to happiness.

Despite accomplishing high accolades as a world-class scholar and economic philosopher, Sen remains humble to the core. In Home in the World: A Memoir, he does not shy away from sharing that his Trinity College, Cambridge, admission was apparently the fortunate product of some students declining the invitation to attend. Referring to his collaboration with Mahbub ul Haq, the Pakistani economist who pioneered the concept of human development, and the UN Human Development Report, he describes himself as Haq’s lieutenant.

Argumentation is a form of learning for Sen, reminiscent of the Socratic dialogue, where discovery of truth, not winning, is the objective. The memoir reveals Sen’s reverence for his family, school friends, and colleagues, particularly his Cambridge mentors Piero Sraffa and Maurice Dobb. Despite some intellectual disagreement with Paul Samuelson on welfare economics, he considers substitute teaching for him in the early stages of his career as an honour.

The wealth of Sen’s knowledge rubs off in his love for teaching and students. When he started teaching in Delhi in 1963, he was ecstatic that his students, inspired by Adam Smith, empathised with marginalised people. Sen can hardly contain his pride when his former students receive recognition as world-class economists. His memoir ends with a hopeful note on his love for teaching. By embracing Smith and Tagore, his students have empathised with the plight of people who experience injustice around the world. At 88, Sen still enjoys teaching and transforming lives, preparing economists to reduce inequalities at home and the world.

REFERENCES

Marx, Karl & Frederick Engels et al, The German Ideology Parts I & III, New York: International Publishers, 5th Printing edition, 1966

Sen, Amartya, ‘More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing’ in The New York Review, 20 December 1990, retrieved from https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/12/20/more-than-100-million-women-are-missing/ on 15 January 2022

Sen, Amartya, Rationality and Freedom, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press; 1st edition, 2004

Political Invisibility and Mobilization:

Women against State Violence in Argentina, Yugoslavia, and Liberia

By SELINA GALLO-CRUZ

pp.178, Routledge

2021, HB/PB/eBook

£120/34.99/31.49

Reviewed by

TIMOTHY KAUER

Do you think you know history? Selina Gallo-Cruz’s book Political Invisibility and Mobilization: Women against State Violence in Argentina, Yugoslavia, and Liberia gives a different perspective. She analyses instances where women activist groups were able to mobilise and help bring an end to various state violence. Political Invisibility and Mobilization focuses on three case studies with different historical and socio-political contexts that led to comparable outcomes. Gallo-Cruz’s work is an analysis on the mobilisation of a marginalised populace working towards peace.

The book is broken down into five separate chapters. The first chapter overlays the theoretical basis for Gallo-Cruz’s analysis of these case studies; including the defining structure and methodology utilised throughout the book. The next three chapters focus on individual case studies. Chapter two’s case study is on the ‘Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’ organisation in Argentina. Next, chapter three, is centred around the Serbian chapter of the ‘Women in Black’ organisation. The fourth chapter is a study on the woman’s peace movement in Liberia. The final chapter is Gallo-Cruz’s analysis and conclusions from the three case studies.

Gallo-Cruz explores how these three groups were able to mobilise to the extent that they were able and how they were able to affect the peace process. The primary avenue for these groups’ effectiveness was the utilisation of their political invisibility, which allowed them a sort of freedom. The women in each country, for differing reasons, were a marginalised people and often not considered a threat to the groups instigating the violence. These three case studies showcase how women were able to utilise their non-threatening status to eventually affect change both locally and internationally. Gallo-Cruz argues that certain freedoms afforded by political invisibility allow marginalised populations to eventually garner the social power to work against state violence.

One of the book’s greatest strengths is the organisational structure for presenting information. Before reading the book, I did not have much familiarity with any of the situations that were presented. Each case study has historical, cultural, and socio-political context that is critical to understanding each movement. Gallo-Cruz, with thorough exploration of the settings in each case study, allows for an ease of understanding. Readers can follow how each movement first formed and developed during the conflict periods. The inclusion of a timeline near the beginning of the chapters further primes the readers for the major events of each group’s activism. Readers can follow the development process as each group worked to stop violent conflicts. Furthermore, readers can see how these groups were able to shift, sometimes internationally, and continue beyond the instances of state violence. Political Invisibility and Mobilization is not solely a historical recounting as Gallo-Cruz explores groups’ ability to resist violent regimes.

A potential area of weakness for the book is that there is little, if any, discussion around other groups that mobilised and resisted during the discussed conflicts. The comparison with other resistance groups could help build on some of Gallo-Cruz’s more salient points. The book focused on groups that had opportunities to mobilise. How did other groups also mobilise despite being a higher threat to the military regimes? This comparison between these groups could underscore how political invisibility can allow certain groups of people to resist violent regimes. Furthermore, a comparison showcases the potential difficulties and obstacles that politically invisible groups may avoid. Political invisibility can afford social mobilisation, yet understanding the full scope needs a basis for comparison.

Gallo-Cruz’s work is an important addition to the discussion of social mobilisation within violent political conflicts. Political Invisibility and Mobilization argues that people can utilise their non-threatening status to shield mobilisation against violent regimes. For example, the ‘Women in Black’ utilised their network to help people, including army deserters and conscientious objectors, even though women were not considered as a high threat to the regime. These groups were able to function in a way that afforded them potential in a place where they lacked power. This ability to affect change despite the lack of social power is predicated on the goal of these groups. Gallo-Cruz realises that these groups are not attempting to overthrow violent regimes but work with the regimes and populace for peace. The movements studied by Gallo-Cruz are successful examples that showcase the ability of marginalised populations can shift during a crisis. Furthermore, she explores how shifting allowed marginalised populations to build the socio-political power that helped bring peace from violent regimes.

Political Invisibility and Mobilization is an analysis of case studies on the ability to work despite lack of social power to resist violent regimes. Gallo-Cruz recognises that though marginalised, women were able to form groups that would eventually garner attention both locally and internationally, allowing the groups to help affect change. The focus on three longstanding case studies showcases that this type of mobilisation can occur amidst a variety of background circumstances and cultural realities. The detailed and structured work allows for nearly any reader to understand the development process for these organisations and their ability to help bring an end to the violence in their countries.

Political Invisibility and Mobilization is a well-crafted analysis for anyone looking to form a better understanding surrounding potential mobilisation of peace movements.

When the Center Does Not Hold: Leading in an Age of Polarization

By BRUBAKER, DAVID R, BRUBAKER, EVERETT N, YODER, CAROLYN E & HAASE, TERESA J

pp.154, Fortress Press

2019, PB/eBook

$16.99/8.01

Reviewed by

CORINNE GUNTER

The saying ‘birds of a feather flock together’ is represented in David R Brubaker’s new book, When the Center Does Not Hold: Leading in the Age of Polarization. Like-minded people congregate and distance themselves from those who think, believe, and behave differently. Such choices make humanity a complex phenomenon. David Brubaker invites Everett Brubaker, Carolyn Yoder, and Teresa Haase each to write a chapter as they collectively try to unfold this complexity. In the discourse of seven chapters, Brubaker and others attempt to broaden and deepen the readers’ understanding of the multiple factors contributing to persistence and pervasiveness of polarisation and provide leaders with interventions that can lead to a less divided society.

The book provides a lens for understanding and transforming polarised societies. Various factors exacerbate polarisation, including economic inequality, identity threats, racial inequality and racism, gender inequality and sexism, differing moral universes, global nationalism, balkanised media, political structure, social sorting, and leadership-driven polarisation. One of the most prevalent instigators of polarisation is divisive leaders in a fear-driven environment. ‘What seems most likely is that highly polarizing leaders are able to capitalise on the identity and economic threats that a significant portion of the population is experiencing. Threat is therefore the necessary precondition, and fear is the mechanism that polarizing leaders employ to seize power’ (p.23).

As a scholar of Organisational Studies, Brubaker combines theory and practice with more than three decades of work in conflict transformation and organisational change in this book. His varied field experiences and research provide depth and insight on polarisation and leadership. He combines multiple disciplines to understand better the complexity of polarisation and the role of leaders in pulling us back together. Although it feels bleak, Brubaker thinks it is possible to turn the tide and overcome the current level of polarisation. He outlines various prevention and intervention concepts that call for embracing paradox, building resilience, and enacting agents of reconnection. As the title suggests, leaders can address polarisation by replacing fear with hope. Brubaker uses the acronym (HOPE) as a signpost for engaging. The author states, ‘We need leaders who offer us not fear but hope. Hope requires that we: Humanise our opponents, Openly state our core beliefs, Pursue justice (particularly racial, gender, and economic justice), Engage difference’ (p.9).

Working against pervasive polarisation calls for sustained focus, counter-cultural tendencies, and resilience for those holding the centre. Binary thinking leads to comparison and labelling positions and people accordingly. One way to counteract binary thinking and create space for understanding and empathy to grow is to slow down the thought process. As people question their assumptions and suspend judgement, they become more open to dialogue and increase their capacity for collaboration.

The book invites the reader to thoughtfully process and consider a different way of being and engaging. It provides a cursory historical lens for the division in the United States and digs deeply into the embedded nature of polarisation in all levels of society. The author covers a lot of ground in his book. He identifies numerous contributing factors to polarisation and then explores a different way forward that challenges the desire for uniformity and instead calls for unity, celebrating diversity, and rebuilding civil society.

The book sheds some light on how trauma fuels polarisation. ‘Trauma polarizes. Then that very polarization can be traumatic as it creates rifts and severs friendships. Scratch beneath the surface of any conflict, division, or evil, and you often find unaddressed individual and/or group trauma’ (p.67). Unaddressed trauma impacts a person’s capacity to remain present and open to others, especially to those who hold different beliefs and opinions. In chapter four, Carolyn Yoder highlights some findings from STAR[1] (Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience). Briefly, she offers a practical approach to breaking cycles of violence and reducing division by restoring the body-brain connection. She contends that learning how to regulate is essential to activating empathy and engaging individuals at different places on the spectrum, leading to less division and polarisation.

From a leader’s standpoint, this book provided a basis for understanding polarisation and the various causal factors that perpetuate polarisation. For anyone beginning to think about their role and responsibility in advocating for a different way forward, this book provides a cursory look at the myriad of factors associated with polarisation. Although the authors offer a collection of thoughts and summarise the topic, anyone desiring a deeper dive into it would have to access other sources, if necessary. The book makes us acknowledge our own bias and judgements then choose to lean in and listen to differing opinions and ideas. Brubaker challenges readers to hold the centre and live and lead with HOPE.

Note

1 STAR was developed at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, Virginia, in 2002. See: www.emu.edu.cjp/star/