Is Syria’s Civil War A Result of Too Little ‘Bandwidth’ in Washington?

A commonly heard refrain about why the Obama administration has not done X or Y in [insert global troublespot name here] is that there is just not enough bandwidth. Richard Haass, discussing how Iraq distracted us from other more pressing priorities with Diane Rehm, said, “Presidents only have so much bandwidth.” 

The administration’s mouthpieces are also fond of the web 2.0 metaphors in discussing U.S. relations with the world. Benjamin Rhodes on Africa: “[There’s bandwidth in] the relationship for a lot of cooperation, even when we have difference, and even within the Syria issue, there’s that bandwidth. And that’s the message that the leaders wanted to send.” Even Obama himself has employed the notion of freeing up “national-security bandwidth.”

 

Huh? I understand that there are only so many hours in the day. Bandwidth is treated by its users as a finite and depletable resource, like political capital or canola oil, that should be used prudently. But part of me feels this “bandwidth” metaphor is a cop-out. When are presidents’ in-boxes ever empty? Juggling the breakup of the USSR, Tiananmen Square massacres, South Africa overturning apartheid, an invasion of Iraq, a follow-up no-fly zone in that country’s north, and an economy crumbling around him, George Bush Sr. still found time to send U.S. forces into Somalia to save lives in a place barely anybody at the time had heard of and which was of zero strategic interest.

All of which is to ask: Have scholars ever tried to code “bandwidth” in any systematic fashion? In other words, is it possible to examine the number of other pressing issues (e.g. immigration reform, healthcare, SARS outbreak, etc.) an administration is juggling at the same time? If there are more than, say, a dozen, that might cause the system to short-circuit and lead to paralysis. Do we intervene less overseas or lean more isolationist when bandwidth is low? Discuss.

What We’re Reading

• Corey Robin writes about the Hayek-Pinochet connection over at Crooked Timber. “Hayek came away from Chile convinced that an international propaganda campaign had been unfairly waged against the Pinochet regime (and made explicit comparison to the campaign being waged against South Africa’s apartheid regime).” Yikes.
• If life imitates art in Syria, we’re all screwed. An imagined (and amusing) CIA vetting of a Syrian rebel.
• Speaking of Syria… Reuters’ Oliver Holmes and (the very charming) Alexander Dziadosz have a number of excellent pieces from inside rebel-held territory, detailing a changing sectarian landscape, cooperation in service provision between the warring parties, Islamists’ upper hand compared to moderate fighters (plus, how they “govern with guile and guns“), and an interesting portrait of a jihadist in Syria whose “…accent and swagger are pure London.”
• As India is drafting rules for foreign universities to operate campuses in the country, we’d be curious to know who decided to insert this proviso: “They would not be allowed to offer any course that adversely affects the sovereignty and integrity of India or its friendly relations with other countries.”
• Poor William Dalyrmple is getting beaten up in the Indian blogosphere for his recent essay claiming, “The hostility between India and Pakistan lies at the heart of the current war in Afghanistan.
• Egypt’s low-boiling political dysfunction seems set to ratchet up in intensity. There has been scattered violence and heated rhetoric as supporters and opponents of President Mohamed Morsi have mobilized ahead of large protests against the president planned for June 30 — all with the military watching from the wings (not to mention its head making ominous remarks about intervention) . Eric Trager laid out a pessimistic (and plausible) assessment of the current situation on Monday that’s worth checking out, as is Sarah Carr’s (characteristically) funny and biting articulation of the conundrum facing democratically-inclined opponents of the president.
• New efforts to predict war using GDELT. Every paper using GDELT should have a long section entitled, “We are not data-mining or over-fitting and we can prove this to you.” This one doesn’t.
• The FBI had an informant in Wikileaks who was also the little-known Icelandic character from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
• Interesting analysis by Garman and Young. In a nutshell: shifting demands — due in part to Brazil’s recent economic success — drove millions to the streets. As you read it, listen to this 2001 tune that is back on radio stations all over Brazil.
• Tom Edsall reviews recent debates about how to best measure inequality, and what those measurements tell us. Shorter version: researchers need to go beyond the Gini coefficient.
• Jenna Krajeski explores how the headscarf has become a useful symbol both for the Gezi protesters and Erdoğan supporters alike. Unfortunately, these women in Turkey are often treated more as prizes to be won over by a particular side, rather than as complex individuals with nuanced views about politics and religion.
• Peter Bergen’s “Ultimate AfPak Reading List“.

Who is protesting in Brazil?

The current developments in Brazil have caught all by surprise. Yearly increases in bus fares, notoriously bad public transportation, inflation and slow economic growth (weirdly combined with low unemployment rates) have been looming for some time now. The Free Fare Movement (MPL) has been actively voicing its demands for better public transportation since at least 2006 and other similar organizations and movements have also been mobilizing for better public services. In this context, therefore, it would not be accurate to state that the “the Giant is awake” on the streets (“o Gigante acordou”). Yet, it would also be cynical to say that the current mobilization is not unprecedented – at least since redemocratization.

The nature of the unfolding events, affected by almost daily incidents and bipolar swings in public opinion and in an editorialized media, makes it hard for most of us to answer simple questions: Who are these protesters? What do they want? Social media outlets, in particular Facebook, have been primary sources of information for protesters over the past few weeks. However, social media also works to bias our opinions on the basis of our own personal experiences and social groups: after all, birds of a feather tend to flock together, as research on social network has shown (McPherson, et. al, 2001).  In summary, it has been difficult to see the forest for the trees.

On Sunday, June 23rd, Ibope, a well-know survey company in Brazil, released the first (to my knowledge) systematic collection of data on the characteristics of the protesters. This data is illuminating and, importantly, allows us to answer further questions: how different are these protesters from the “average” Brazilian? Are these protesters different than those individuals who usually engage in politics?

The plots below show a comparison of the demographic profile of protesters and the broader Brazilian population. Protesters are much younger, and, as expected, students are over-represented compared to the population. Also, those who mobilize are clearly better off compared to the rest of the population: the discrepancies between income and education distributions of the protesters and the population are remarkable. For instance, about 10% of the population has a higher education degree, whereas about 43% of the protesters have at least a college degree.

These differences might be due in part to the sampling process: Ibope surveyed protesters on Thursday, June 20th, a point at which the protests had already started to encompass a wider swath of society, distinct from the left-leaning individuals that mobilized early (who would be, presumably, less well-off than the protesters on June 20th).

There are other possible explanations: it is not uncommon for those who engage in political activity, in particular mass-based political action, to be better off than those who do not. This hypothesis has taken many shapes and forms and it is commonly referred to in political science literature as the socioeconomic status (SES) model and there has been systematic evidence supporting it in various places, including Brazil (Verba, 1995; Norris, 2002; Reis, 2000).  This model is known for not taking into account variation in mobilization over time, events that trigger mobilization, and the power of organizations, which are patently important in times of nation-wide mobilizations, but, despite all these pitfalls, it is interesting to see the predictions made by the SES model supported by these simple analyses.

However, support for this stripped-down version of SES model receives only very modest support even if one turns a blind eye to all methodological issues underlying this quick-and-dirty analysis of the Ibope data. According to the SES model, individual who engage in political activity also tend to be more active in “non-political” organizations. This does not seem to be the case among the protesters surveyed on June 20th in 7 cities in Brazil – they are no more likely to be engaged in non-political associations.

Rather, it was found that protesters are less likely to identify with a political party and less likely to be affiliated with a political party than the population overall. This is not surprising given the likely effect of social desirability bias when answering these questions in protests that block streets to make their dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs heard – whatever this dissatisfaction means in more specific terms is still to be determined.

In summary, students and young people do seem be the largest groups out on the streets, and those who are mobilizing have attended school for longer, and have higher incomes than most of the population. Also, they seem to feel less represented by a political party than most of the population – even though this is a tough comparison given the unstable nature of party “sympathy” in times like these.  Despite this interesting protester profile, however, we still do not have answers to all of our questions.

Are these protesters very different from the early joiners whose protests mostly focused on reducing bus fares? It is hard to say, even though the type of demand and the way in which they mobilized (mostly through civil society organizations) seems to indicate as much.

Protests continue to shake the country: mayors from all over the country have backed down on the increase of bus fares and are starting to rethink their public transportation contracts and policies, governors have started to become less supportive of police repression (at least publically), the federal government is starting to play a more active role in pushing laws and reforms, and the Congress is rushing to discuss and vote on some of the issues raised by protesters (such as committing all oil royalties to spending on education and health and repelling a controversial constitutional amendment on the investigative powers of the Public Ministry). Protesters are still shaking the trees, but the characteristics of the protesters will help determine on which side the fruit will fall.

[I used data from PNAD 2011 to make the plots about the demographic characteristics of the Brazilian population and I used the population from the states in which Ibope surveyed protesters. For the plots about questions on representation and population, I used data from ESEB 2010. Both of these datasets can be found in Centro de Estudos da Metrópole and Consórcio de Informações Sociais.]

Exploring Patterns of Human Rights Funding

Who are the main donors for the global human rights movement? What kind of causes is this funding devoted to? Does the allocated funding reflect the salience of various human rights causes? The Foundation Center and the International Human Rights Funders Group recently released a report Advancing Human Rights: The State of Global Foundation Grantmaking, outlining quantitative data about the scale of response to human rights violations. The reports finds that $1.2 billion in grants were given out for various human rights causes in 2010, with the following organizations being the main donors for human rights causes worldwide.

Though this report is a good start for analyzing global funding patterns for human rights, a caveat is in order. First, the methodology followed to produce this report reflects a bias in favor of US and European donors because of the relatively easy accessibility of grants data for organizations based in these regions. More precisely, the report looks at funding practices of donors affiliated with the Foundation Center, Ariadne/European Human Rights Funders Network and the International Network of Women’s Funds. A number of organizations across Asia and Africa may not be affiliated with these centers, leading to their absence from the report.

Nevertheless, since most of the biggest donors are American and European and are accounted for in this report, this data helps us identify issues where the scope of the problem may not align with the scale of the response.  For instance, there is a startlingly low amount of funding given to address gender-based violence, with only $5.3 million directed to the issue of domestic violence and another $8.6 million to the issue of gender or identity-based violence in 2010. Combined, these account for only about 1 percent of all of the $1.2 billion in grants included in the study. However, non-alignment between the scope of the problem and scale of the funding is more than just an issue of donor preferences. In many countries such as Egypt, India and Russia, foreign donors are often regarded with suspicion, preventing the channeling of funds to donors’ intended targets. A next step thus should be to look at indigenous philanthropy, how its volume varies across regions due to intimidation from domestic authorities, and whether funding from local sources can increase the legitimacy of particular agendas and strategies.

For more on funding patterns of human rights debates, stay tuned for the debate on Open Global Rights over at OpenDemocracy.

Snowden and Rawls

Edward Snowden continues his journey down the Freedom House ladder. He left the United States (56 on on Freedom House’s 60-point civil liberties scale) for Hong Kong (51) then on to Moscow (19). In the last 24 hours, rumors have had him going to Venezuela (24) or Cuba (10), though the present top contendor is Ecuador (36), a middling protector of civil liberties. If he does make it eventually to Uruguay (58) or Iceland (60), then his earlier talk of Hong Kong’s  “spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent” will seem less instrumental than it currently appears. 

Setting aside Snowden’s current excursions along the despotism trail, I wanted to reflect briefly on whether it is possible to think through the ethical obligations of being a whistleblower. We live in a democratic society where we have decided to allow our representative institutions to make certain decisions on our behalf. Those institutions have decided certain aspects of governmental functioning can be secret. Secrecy is inherently in tension with representative government because the content of the secrets might inform the representation we choose. Recognizing that there is a tension, however, does not allow us to relieve that tension through unlimited whistleblowing.

The U.S. system has accommodated whistleblowing by accepting two channels in addition to the formal chain of command: the inspector generals at various executive departments and the U.S. Congress. All indications are that the Select Committees on Intelligence in both the House and the Senate were informed of the program, though Director of National Intelligence Clapper’s statements in unclassified sessions are understandably worrisome. In a March hearing of the Senate Intelligence committee, Clapper responded to Sen. Wyden’s question of whether the NSA collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans” by saying “no” and then adding “not wittingly.” Clapper has subsequently clarified his answer as the “most truthful” or “least untruthful” answer possible. All indications suggest that Wyden had been informed of the scope of the program in classified briefings, even if Clapper’s response in the March unclassified session is dubious.

The fact that two Senators—Udall and Wyden—were concerned about the program is not proof that the program should have been unclassified or eliminated. Wyden and Udall had both appropriations and legislative mechanisms they could have availed themselves of if they wanted to force greater disclosure of executive activity or restrict it, and if they were able to convince their colleagues of the validity of their concerns. They were unable to do so.

In addition to legislative oversight and inspector generals within the executive, there is an additional check on classified activities in this area: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, which provides legal authorization for certain types of intelligence gathering activities, and was created by the eponymous Act. The consensus view in the media about the FISA court suggests it is an inadequate oversight body, largely because it rejects very, very few requests. I say suggests because there may be an important selection bias if reports are true that the FISA court often asks the government to modify or withdraw unsatisfactory requests. We do not have data on modification or withdrawals of FISA warrants, and if the FISA court routinely informs executive officials that a warrant will not be viewed favorably, it would be no surprise if the formal rejections are scant.

But, let’s imagine that one buys the argument that U.S. inspector generals, and the U.S. Congress, and the FISA court are all insufficient checks on the executive. Is there a right to whistleblowing other than through the channels established by law? I’m not certain. But to the extent that there is, it seems as if it must occur after established channels have been attempted. Why? I think whistleblowing only makes sense morally if is viewed as a type of civil disobedience.

I’m not a political theorist, so I go back to major works when I’m trying to think through something. And John Rawls has a long section on civil disobedience in A Theory of Justice. Rawls frames the issue: “At what point does the duty to comply with laws enacted by a legislative majority (or with executive acts supported by such a majority) cease to be binding in view of the right to defend one’s liberties and the duties to oppose injustice.” He defines civil disobedience as “a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government.”

So, sounds like whistleblowing. But are they the same? And does Snowden meet the definition? Rawls lays out several requirements, but two are especially germane to the Snowden case. The first is “that normal appeals to the political majority have already been made in good faith and that they have failed. The legal means of redress have proved of no avail.” It’s unclear in Rawls whether this is an individual or general requirement. Could Snowden, perhaps seeing the Wyden-Clapper interaction, determine normal appeals have failed, even if Snowden himself never pursued “the legal means of redress”? I’m dubious that Snowden met this requirement, but I can at least see what the argument on the other side looks like.

The other requirement is civility, met through publicity and nonviolence. Rawls is reasonably explicit on these requirements, and he goes further: civil disobedience expresses “disobedience to the law within the limits of fidelity to the law, although it is at the outer edge thereof. The law is broken, but fidelity to the law is expressed by the public and nonviolent nature of the act, by the willingness to accept the legal consequences of the act.” (Emphasis added.) Rawls goes on at some length, but the basic mechanism he outlines is that by accepting the legal consequences, it forces society to reflect on the rules it has enacted. If the society, even upon the reflection engendered by the act of civil disobedience, proceeds with the punishment, this suggests the convictions of the political community differed from the dissident, which happens in democratic countries. In Rawls’s words: “We must pay a certain price to convince others that our actions have, in our carefully considered view, a sufficient moral basis in the political convictions of the community.” Otherwise, individual’s nullification of rules they deemed unjust would lead to considerable social instability, even in a “nearly just” society. We would permit an individual to arrogate to himself governing authorities that were not vested in him.

I find exile, Snowden’s apparent choice, to be insufficiently similar to the requirement of acceptance of legal consequences, and hence the act is not civil disobedience by definition. It does not meet Rawls’s requirements of publicity, since it was only public after Snowden had escaped legal consequences. Even if I were to view Snowden’s actions as civil disobedience, it is still possible for me to view it as something that deserves punishment. By accepting punishment, the civil disobedient only forces us to face society’s rules squarely. The civil disobedient is not always right and so hence the civil disobedient should not always go unpunished. 

I do think this opens up interesting questions of whether an individual can ethically “shoot and scoot,” via civil disobedience followed by pursuit of political asylum elsewhere. By no means would these requirements prohibit asylum more generally. Snowden could have sought political asylum if he would have been badly treated in the United States for his political opinions. This is not what occurred. Snowden poor treatment  is a result of his violation of a non-disclosure agreement. His political opinions could have been expressed vocally without consequences, as is evidenced by his contributions to the 2012 Ron Paul campaign.

At the outset, I said secrecy is special because it is in tension with representative institutions. But it is special in another way, that complicates the acceptability of civil disobedience in such cases. Secrets once revealed cannot be un-revealed. They are forever public in a society free of censorship. I am troubled by this lack of reversibility. A “sit-in” or an unauthorized protest march does not permanently alter a social situation in ways that unified social action cannot fairly quickly repair. An individual that leaks state secrets—particularly in large quantity—might do lasting damage, something I think insufficiently considered in Rawls’s treatment several decades ago.

What We’re Reading

• From the Monkey Cage: John Huber asks whether theory is getting lost in the “identification revolution.”
• David Ignatius with a great overview of the difficulties with Obama’s new approach to Syria.
• The struggles of General Salim Idriss, the consensus cool, moderate head of the Free Syrian Army.
• The Wall Street Journal features the work of the Smoke-Filled Room guest contributor and Yale Political Science PhD Candidate Rory Truex. In particular, they overview Truex’s work on business interests and the National People’s Congress.
• Drones don’t work…wait! They absolutely work!

We’re One Year Old!

A little over a year ago, on June 16th, 2012, we created The Smoke-Filled Room, a graduate student political science blog. We hoped to give graduate students a voice on the internet, a chance to express our thoughts on politics and to put to practical use what we were learning in the classroom. We learned very quickly that maintaining an active blog wasn’t easy, but were helped in the task by an excellent group of political science PhD students from around the country. We were flattered to be selected as one of the finalists in The Duck of Minerva’s annual blogging awards, in the Most Promising New Blog category (we’ll get you next year, Political Violence @ a Glance). We look forward to another exciting year of blogging and hope you’ll keep reading.

Bringing the State Back In (to the discussion on redistribution and innovation)

In recent months, the New York Times has published a series of opinion pieces that read like an abbreviated syllabus in comparative political economy. An analytic piece from late April chronicling the (perhaps) excessive generosity of Danish social democracy kicked off the discussion, prompting a response from Nancy Folbre as well as a “Room for Debate” roundtable on the sustainability of continental welfare states. The Folbre piece linked above makes brief reference to a recent(ish) paper by Acemoglu, Robinson and Verdier (ARV) which argues that while some countries may be able to combine robust welfare states with sustained economic growth, all countries can’t do so at the same time without retarding global innovation rates. They explain their argument succinctly in the short version of their piece:

The fact that technological progress requires incentives for workers and entrepreneurs results in greater inequality and greater poverty (and a weaker safety net) for a society encouraging more intense innovation. Crucially, however in a world with technological interdependence, when one (or a small subset) of societies is at the technological frontier and contributing disproportionately to its advancement, the incentives for others to do so will be weaker. In particular, innovation incentives by economies at the world technology frontier will create higher growth by advancing the frontier, while strong innovation incentives by followers will only increase their incomes today since the world technology frontier is already being advanced by the economies at the frontier.

America: enduring child poverty and substandard education so you don’t have to. You’re welcome, Sweden.

Thomas Edsall has a piece from April evaluating this argument in light of some countervailing claims, and it’s well worth a read. Whether redistributive incentives are really the key driver of cross-national innovation rates deserves serious critical scrutiny. It’s also worth thinking in normative terms about whether one might tolerate a slower iPhone development cycle (or even – gasp – a lack of iPhones altogether) for the sake of greater social equity.

That aside, however, the ARV model seems plausible. Anyone who has dug a bit into the literature on Varieties of Capitalism will recall the basic claim about innovation: both ‘cutthroat’ liberal market economies (LMEs) and ‘cuddly’ coordinated market economies (CMEs) innovate, but do so differently. LMEs, with their flexible labor markets and ubiquitous-but-impatient venture capital, make radical technological leaps, while CMEs are better at incremental advances. America develops the Fordist production system, Germany makes cars that don’t suck. The ARV model takes this observation to its logical conclusion: CME incrementalism relies on LMEs to expand the technological frontier. For those of us who would like to see a more robust safety net and more egalitarian distribution of post-transfer income, this is discomfiting.

I don’t have anything close to the formal chops necessary to critically evaluate the technical specifics of the ARV model. I would, however, make two observations about its real-world importance and applicability. First, as the authors briefly acknowledge, people have tried to test some of the implications of their thesis. Taylor (2004) and Akkermans, Castaldi and Los (2007) both use patent data to compare innovation rates between “cutthroat” LMEs and “cuddly” CMEs. The former article finds no discernible difference between them, while the latter finds limited and industry-specific support for the notion that LMEs innovate the fastest and/or most radically. ARV do cite both of these efforts, but don’t really address the complications they present to their central argument.

Second, and more crucially, much of the discussion around this question ignores the state’s potential to drive innovation through direct investment in science. ARV treat innovation as a function of incentive structures facing potentially innovative individuals or firms. “Cutthroat” economies, with their looser regulation and weaker redistributive regimes, provide innovators with stronger incentives to invest capital in risky-but-potentially-innovative ventures. State investments in R&D, though, could plausibly drive innovation on the supply side by providing resources in a manner divorced (or at least estranged) from market pressures.

To cite a few well-worn American examples, many of the technological advances crucial to the twenty-first century economy happened outside the private sector. The first general-purpose computer was developed to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army. The microprocessor was developed by NASA in order to miniaturize computers for guidance and navigation during the Apollo program. The packet switching network that became today’s internet was first developed by ARPA (now DARPA), an advanced research agency within the Pentagon. Today, the National Institutes of Health commits a budget of roughly $30 billion per year to biomedical research, including the kind of risky basic research that may not generate immediate commercial returns, but can lead to radical innovations over time. The NIH alone represents almost a third of the money spent on health research in the United States, and is likely the reason that America is a leading innovator in this sector. The National Science Foundation commands another $7 billion to fund research across scientific disciplines (with one, ahem, notable exception). More trivially, that self-driving car that Google has been promoting like mad recently? It also has its roots in a series of DARPA initiatives.

I don’t mean to suggest that the private sector doesn’t drive a substantial majority of innovation in contemporary developed economies. Even the NIH budget, colossal by any standard, represents less than half the capital devoted to biomedical research in the United States. Nor is all state-funded research created equal. Some work suggests that state subsidies of private sector R&D initiatives may crowd out, in whole or in part, private investment in similar projects (a cursory lit review indicates mixed evidence on this score). Still, if the concern is that more egalitarian societies might de-incentivize the kinds of risky bets that lead to radical technological leaps, that effect could be at least partially offset by direct public investment. It may yet be possible to subsidize school lunches without gutting technological progress.

Turkey: A Nation of Joiners

(Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Candas Pinar, PhD candidate in Sociology at Yale University, focusing on state-society relations and political demography in the Muslim Middle East.)

Given the sheer breadth and volume of demonstrators and the rapid proliferation of political slogans across social media platforms, the Occupy Gezi movement would have us think that political engagement has always thrived in Turkey. But that hasn’t always been the case.

The United States has traditionally been described as “a nation of joiners,” a phrase used by Alexis de Tocqueville to capture the willingness of American citizens to form and join associations. Turkey, on the other hand? Not so much.

For decades, academics and policymakers have underscored the importance of a vibrant civil society for viable democracy. In the 1960s, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba argued that the vitality of democratic institutions is dependent on a robust “civic culture,” which entails “civic cooperation and trust,” “expectation of fair treatment from government authorities,” “an emotional involvement in elections,” and “self-confidence in one’s competence to participate in politics.” More recently, Robert Putnam has written that “networks of organized reciprocity and civic solidarity” are what sustain democracies.

And for equally as long, these academics and policymakers have bemoaned the lack of such a civil society in Turkey. A 2011 report, prepared by the Third Sector Foundation in Turkey and CIVICUS, revealed alarmingly low rates of civic engagement in Turkey. In the past five years, only 12% of Turks engaged in political activism (e.g., signing a petition or attending a peaceful demonstration). And just 5% of Turks are members of civil society organizations, such as youth groups or trade unions. It was widely believed that democracy in Turkey could not take hold until citizens became involved.

Many point to the 1980 military coup as the cause of this widespread political disengagement. The coup came after more than a decade of sustained clashes between labor activists and student movements on the left and Islamists and ultra-nationalist groups on the right. Leftists and laborers sought to liberate Turkey from what they considered to be an unhealthy dependence on the capitalist West, and adopted guerrilla warfare to do so. Right-wing youth groups retaliated in kind, targeting schools and homes of prominent intellectuals. In total, approximately 5,000 lives were lost to the conflict.

During this period, the country was paralyzed. Martial law was declared and renewed every few months. Strict curfews were enforced. Universities across the country were shut down. In the name of “law and order,” the government banned all student groups, as well as teachers’ unions. The country was so divided that even a man’s facial hair revealed his political leanings (mustache = left-wing; sideburns = right-wing).

It was around this time that my own parents chose to emigrate to the U.S. to seek respite from the chaos. As university students, they were in the thick of it, whether they wanted to be or not. Their classes were often abruptly canceled because professors had been arrested. Social gatherings on campus were often forcibly dismissedwith gunfire. Childhood friends went missing, and resurfaced after years of imprisonment or torture. The military coup in 1980 brought an end to the civil unrest, but at great cost.

After the coup, parents strongly discouraged their children from becoming involved in politics. In the wake of such national turmoil, political activism – beyond the casting of a ballot – was thought to be dangerous and divisive. Not unlike personal traumas, national traumas stay with people. They become embedded in the collective consciousness of a nation. What happened in the ‘60s and ‘70s was not just an individual memory of those who experienced it, but a collective memory. Personal experiences with political activism – and the often deadly consequences it entailed – were transmitted from generation to generation, through story-telling, music, literature, and film.

Among subsequent generations, civic engagement and political participation dwindled. University students and leftists groups continued to organize annual Labor Day protests in Taksim Square, but most everyone else was too frightened or too disillusioned to engage.

Until now.

After riot police cracked down on peaceful protesters in Gezi Park more than two weeks ago, Turks were enraged. They cried. They shouted. And they joined.

Environmentalists joined. College students and their professors joined. Marxists, Kurds, and Alevis joined. Rowdy football fans not only joined; they mobilized. Doctors, lawyers, artists, and musicians all joined. Mothers and fathers joined. Grandmothers and grandfathers joined too. My mother – who was once so traumatized by what she had witnessed as a student – joined, in her own capacity. She attended a demonstration in Rhode Island, where my parents live now.

Images, videos, and anecdotes from Taksim Square continue to proliferate across social media sites. They reveal a strong and merciless state apparatus – police brutality against peaceful demonstrators, silencing of domestic and international media, and the detention of lawyers and doctors attempting to provide assistance to protestors. But they have also revealed an equally strong, revitalized civic culture in Turkey. Protestors, from all walks of life, organized trash disposal and street sweeping; provided urgent healthcare delivery for injured people, veterinary services for injured animals, and legal counsel for those detained; circulated and signed petitions; and held public piano concerts and yoga sessions. These are all concrete manifestations of the social cooperation and trust characteristic of an engaged civil society. We can still talk about the strong state in Turkey, but we can no longer call the civil society weak. No longer can we point to a disengaged public as the barrier to democratization in Turkey.

It’s still unclear what triggered the Occupy Gezi movement. Was it the park? The alcohol?

And we still don’t know how it will end. This past weekend in Istanbul has showcased the lengths the state is willing to go to in order to silence opposing perspectives. EU Minister Egemen Bagis and Prime Minister Erdogan have called the demonstrators “terrorists.” Reports of a draft law intended to limit social media content are emerging. And riot police, under government instruction, continue to disregard basic democratic principles, such as due process and medical neutrality. The current scene is beginning to look eerily similar to what happened four decades ago.

This is a dark chapter in Turkey’s history. But let us take a moment to recognize that the Occupy Gezi movement is testament to the renewed will of the Turkish people to engage, to care, to protest. Demonstrators continue to regroup in any alleyway or street corner that has been cleared of tear gas, and this shows that one thing is clear. Turkey is now, undeniably, a nation of joiners.

São Paulo Demonstrations: It’s Not About 20 Cents, Stupid!

(Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Raphael Neves, PhD candidate at the Politics department at the New School for Social Research, and assistant professor of politics at the University of São Paulo)

São Paulo, the largest city in the Southern hemisphere and Brazil’s financial center, is located thousands of miles away from Istanbul but its 11.3 million inhabitants still know what it feels like to be in Taksim Square. This month, both bus and subway fares
increased by 20 cents of real – the equivalent of 9 cents, USD. Protesters took to the streets following the raise, leading to several clashes with the police. Authorities
claim the increase was below the inflation rate (6.50% in the last 12 months). The mayor, Fernando Haddad, a philosophy professor and the former minister of education under Lula, had stated during his election campaign last year that the city would have to raise the already subsidized fares, frozen since 2011. Brazil has received some of the best combined democracy, economic growth and income distribution scores among the BRICS. So why are people complaining? The demonstrations have been organized by the Free Fare Movement, which promotes free public transportation for all (a demand the mayor says would cost almost 3 billion USD/year). As the event page of one of the protests on Facebook shows, the demands range from the decrease in public transportation fares to better salaries for teachers; from increased freedom on the Internet, to objections of the construction of soccer stadiums for the next World Cup. Furthermore, the São Paulo state police, commanded by governor Geraldo Alckmin, has overreacted and stepped out of the law. Countless people were arrested for bringing vinegar to the demonstrations. According to police officers, vinegar may be used to produce a bomb. In fact, demonstrators say, it alleviates the effects of tear gas. As a result, protesters have embraced a campaign to “legalize” vinegar. They’ve made Guy Fawkes masks their symbol and “V for Vinegar” has become an immediate hit on social networks. Mockery and creativity are central in these protests as
they’ve helped keep people mobilized. Even when they are forced to split up by the police, they keep connected online.

As the construction of a shopping mall at Taksim square became the last straw for protesters in Turkey, in Brazil, the 20 cents increase has catalyzed dissatisfaction. The perplexed may wonder whether ten years of Workers’ Party rule – Lula’s first term inauguration was in 2003, Dilma, his successor, in 2011 – have contributed to
fight inequality. The answer is yes. However, and here we may have a sharp distinction between Turkey and Brazil, the protests are not directed only towards the government. They are much more dispersed and fragmented. On the one hand, a large part of the population has been integrated into the economic market and consumption levels have never been so high. On the other hand, this possibly made people more aware of other problems way beyond material needs. A minimum wage worker may now choose which cell phone or TV she or he is going to buy, but one is unable to have dominion over basic
aspects of everyday life. In São Paulo, where rent is as expensive as in New York, someone who lives in a poorer area will spend at least two hours in an extremely crowded bus or train to get to work. To lose control over one’s own time and space is enough reason to revolt, isn’t it?

“São Paulo will shut down if the fare doesn’t go down!”

All in all, the political system has not been capable of processing this generalized and
fragmented dissatisfaction. The increasing scale of the demonstrations is probably due to their rejection of any sort of party commitment. Of course, the risk of such detachment between civil society and political institutions is to give even more autonomy to bureaucratic structures that administer Brazilians’ lives. In this sense, mobilization may lead to political change, although the result is not necessarily more “progressive” – think,
for instance, of Indignados in Spain, a movement that demanded a radical change of the political system but was followed by the election of Mariano Rajoy. The challenge Brazil
faces is to make democracy more visible; to go beyond the right to cast a ballot in order to empower citizens to exercise effective control over all realms of their lives. These 20 cents are worth a change.

Raphael on twitter: @politikaetc