As the world reels from the COVID-19 gut punch, established routines and status quos have descended into turmoil, while uncertainty and panic have spread with the virus. The question on everyone’s mind is: “What do we do?” Nowhere is this lack of direction more apparent than in Latin America, which is where outbreaks of the disease have yet to peak. COVID-19 came relatively late to Latin America, whereas most countries saw cases emerge in early March. The region thus had more time than other parts of the world to prepare; Asia and European countries, plus the United States, all reported cases in January and February. One might assume that Latin American governments used this extra time to institute the safeguards necessary to prevent a public health crisis. They did not.

COVID-19 intersects with and exacerbates other, more hidden, societal crises in Latin America. In the case of Mexico, this intersection offers crucial insight into the government’s erratic response to the virus. Mexico is currently dealing with three societal challenges—a political crisis, a public safety crisis, and a public health crisis—and its established social context has set the stage for a poor response to COVID-19.

Mexico’s Political Crisis: Polarization

Political theorists often characterize Mexico’s political institutions during the 20th century as being, to use Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa’s phrase, the “perfect dictatorship.” During this time, the nation had a one-party system controlled by the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) that oversaw a state-dominated economy. These same theorists gush at how Mexico democratized in 2000. They miss the point.

Mexico underwent a profound ideological transition in the 1980s when an economic slowdown triggered discontent with the ruling party and prompted a wave of electoral liberalization. This liberalization saw the creation of NAFTA under PRI President Salinas de Gortari and the privatization of many state industries. The resulting rise in economic inequality, already a source of frustration for many Mexicans, initiated a prolonged backlash against the PRI, culminating in the historic election of Vincente Fox of the PAN (National Action Party) in 2000.

Yet, despite the change in party, Fox’s administration was a continuation of the status quo. The PAN historically championed many of the neoliberal policies that the PRI had adopted. In other words, the PRI had moved to the economic right, into the PAN’s ideological sphere. In 2012, the PRI was voted back into power after frustration with the PAN’s corruption. Yet, by mid-2017, approval ratings for the PRI were as low as 28 percent due to the same problems of systemic corruption and inequality

The 2018 election presented a turning point in Mexican history. It was seen as a moment of reckoning, in which the future of the country hung in the balance. Such a climate heightens existing polarization.

Mexican polarization, however, is not traditional: it is not based on differences between political ideologies or parties. Rather, it is rooted in divisions over the identity of the government, setting those who are pro-status quo against those who are anti-establishment. It is in this context that Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador, referred to as AMLO, became president in a grand victory for the anti-establishment movement. AMLO won by a greater margin than any other president in contemporary Mexican history, largely because Mexicans could no longer stomach the thought of another six years of the PRI or PAN.

The rise of polarization in Mexico has led to an increase in fake news, particularly now in the age of social media, as both sides paint the other as a threat to society. People in favor of the status quo, generally members of the upper classes, portray AMLO as a “good for nothing president” who is intent on tearing down Mexican society and destroying its economy by driving businesses and investors away through his antagonistic stances. Those in favor of AMLO and the anti-establishment movement retort that AMLO is fighting corporate and political corruption. AMLO’s supporters argue that it is more important to have a leader who is a public advocate rather than a corporate puppet, even if he is rough around the edges. In this context, when individuals distrust those with differing opinions, confronting a societal crisis becomes even more challenging. This is especially true in Mexico, which is where the government lacks the support and confidence of a significant portion of the population.

Mexico’s Public Security Crisis: Drug Violence

Although the birth of major cartels and drug organizations dates to the 1980s, Mexico’s history with the drug trade can be traced back a century to when Miguel Ángel “The Godfather” Félix Gallardo became the first Mexican liaison to infamous Colombian drug trafficker Pablo Escobar. At the time, Mexico was divided among the influential cartels, allowing the cartels to coexist peacefully as they focused on their territories. Law enforcement largely considered cartels to be out of their reach, and the cartels accepted what few arrests did occur as occupational hazards. This was the case until the United States, frustrated that Mexican cartels were selling drugs across its borders, put pressure on Mexican authorities to crack down. In 2006, former president of Mexico Felipe Calderón declared a “war on drugs” and directed the army and law enforcement to confront the cartels. The directive was equivalent to whacking a hornet nest with a stick.

Since then, the registered homicide rate in Mexico has more than quadrupled, placing it as number 19 in the list of countries with the highest rates of intentional homicide. In 2019, Mexico surpassed Syria as the most dangerous country in the world for journalists. Cartels have taken advantage of the chaos and begun to fight amongst each other for the most lucrative territory.

Mexico’s Public Health Crisis: COVID-19

By all accounts, Mexico has responded to the pandemic poorly. As of August 20, 2020, Mexico has 531,239 COVID-19 cases and 57,774 deaths at a death rate of 14 percent, and there is evidence that these numbers are significantly underreported. In March, many were already criticizing the government for an insufficient response to the crisis. AMLO has repeatedly flouted his own government’s public health guidelines, and the bulk of the responsibility has fallen to local and state officials.

Following the imposition of a quarantine in March, the government announced its plans to reopen in early June, before the pandemic had even peaked. Most of Mexico’s hospitals are operating at full capacity, yet the government continues to project confidence that “the worst is over.”

It seems that the worst is only to come.

How Polarization Affected the Response to COVID

Unfortunately, as the United States demonstrates, the existence of COVID-19 can be a political issue. AMLO’s position, therefore, has had significant consequences.

The OECD estimates that approximately 60 percent of Mexicans work in the informal sector, which is almost entirely composed of in-person jobs that lack a formal employer, such as street vending and housekeeping. By virtue of their trades, these workers would need to be supported solely by the government in the case of a lockdown. Informal workers do not contribute to social safety nets nor pay taxes. With more people requiring coverage than there are funding the system, the government is already at a reduced capacity to afford massive social spending programs. Any prolonged lockdown and quarantine would therefore place a massive strain on the budget of the Mexican government and the majority of the Mexican populace.

This majority is AMLO’s crucial base of support. AMLO campaigned on a platform of improving the lives of those most affected by economic inequality and poverty. Now, AMLO is caught between a rock and a hard place. AMLO either opens the economy, risking the most vulnerable population—his key supporters—to a massive public health disaster, or keeps it closed, instigating a financial collapse of catastrophic proportions in which the most vulnerable population will still suffer the brunt of the impact. AMLO has stumbled into a lose-lose position in which the only way out is a massive, state-bankrolled effort that distributes social benefits to individuals that the government already has difficulty reaching. It is unlikely the affluent members of Mexican society and business, who already dislike AMLO, will be inclined to contribute to such an action.

This is not, however, to absolve AMLO of his own mistakes. AMLO has contradicted his public health minister’s recommendations, adamantly refused to wear a mask, and continued to hold large media and publicity conferences. AMLO has also continued to attack businesses for corruption, even as the Mexican economy is in dire need of investment and support.

Mexicans have taken note. While AMLO’s approval ratings have been in a steady decline from their height at 80 percent shortly after his election, the approval ratings recently registered as low as 46 percent. Many, however, still believe AMLO is handling the pandemic well, a testament to their frustration with the current alternatives.

COVID-19 and the Public Safety Crisis

The public safety crisis has also impacted the government’s ability to successfully curb the spread of COVID-19. The Mexican government has long had difficulty reaching isolated rural communities. Drug cartels and organizations are therefore strongest in these areas and serve as the primary authoritative body. The government’s inability to extend and enforce the rule of law in these regions makes it even harder to establish social programs and assist the citizens living there. The increasing violence of the drug cartels only exacerbates this difficulty.

While Mexico’s public safety crisis has been detrimental to its COVID-19 response, the inverse relationship is more significant, and likely longer lasting. First, the pandemic is straining the government’s ability to respond to the drug cartels’ growing violence. For every police officer infected or exposed, four need to be quarantined. Additionally, some officers are submitting dubious sick notes to get out of work.

This sharp decline in available personnel coincides with a 2.7 percent increase in homicide rates from 2018 to 2019. On June 7, 2020, Mexico registered one of its most violent days of the year, with 117 murders, largely because drug cartels are taking advantage of the security voids that the pandemic is exacerbating. As cartels continue to fracture and war over different territories, violence is only likely to rise.

Cartels are simultaneously using the pandemic as an opportunity to increase their social and political capital. In their dominant areas, cartels are filling the roles that the government can or will not. Cartels have been recorded distributing food, soap, and other necessities to communities. Cartels have imposed curfews in some places to stem the spread of the virus. These efforts may make some communities view the cartels more favorably, consequently strengthening their position at the local and municipal level.

There are two different types of cartels operating within Mexico’s communities: drug trafficking cartels and extortion cartels. The cartels based on extortion are generally considered more successful because these cartels can tax the communities within which they operate. Drug trafficking cartels need to manage complex supply chains with long-term investments and payouts and are thus seen as having greater vulnerability.

The pandemic is flipping this conventional wisdom on its head. The cartels that rely on complex supply chains can carry on with business as usual, generating income from their usual sources. These groups may even receive high amounts of political capital by continuing operations in poppy fields, which provide employment to many rural poor and will be an important source of revenue during the current economic recession.

Meanwhile, those extortion cartels will have a greatly diminished tax-base. Extortion cartels will likely struggle, as preying on local populations will worsen and prolong the economic recession in those communities. The ensuing desperation may cause violence to spike as the extortion cartels begin confronting each other for territory and the drug trafficking cartels for product.

The precarious state of cartels places AMLO in another serious dilemma. Cracking down on cartels could potentially escalate the violence, leading to more brazen attacks on the federal government and continuing the loss of federal control in the rural countryside. Conversely, AMLO risks being branded as corrupt and soft on crime if he plays the peacemaker.  Either way, AMLO may be seen as “just another status quo” president—a perception that would weaken his base and push the anti-establishment movement to further extremes.

Ultimately, the pandemic will hinder the Mexican government’s ability to reduce the violence and influence of drug trafficking cartels. The resultant security voids may inspire cartel competition, in which citizens are caught in the crossfire. Yet, it is difficult to see how the government can reasonably respond to the pandemic and cartels without furthering polarization. Mexico illustrates that a poor response to the COVID-19 epidemic indicates flaws in the larger social, political, and economic system. The pandemic has had devastating consequences but also offers a valuable insight into underlying problems that need to be addressed.

The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others have changed the scope of political discourse within America, bringing to the forefront questions of the method by which officers are held accountable and the scope of police authority itself. However, policing does not pivot merely around the police force; it also entails the institutions which empower police to enforce, and indeed that which they are entrusted to enforce. It is in this context that counterterrorism must be examined, expanding the conversation about policing, so that fundamental questions asked about those who police at home are also asked about those who police abroad. Although it is far too easy to forget,

“We Remain a Nation at War.”

• President Donald J. Trump, National Strategy for Counterterrorism of the United States of America

In the wake of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush initiated the defining military campaign of the modern world: the global War on Terror, which authorized a wide array of strategies to defeat the new global specter of terrorism. This campaign, led by the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and others, has involved direct military intervention, military assistance, intelligence gathering, drone warfare, economic sanctions, domestic surveillance, diplomacy, international cooperation, and more. While counterterrorism policy is hotly debated in political cycles, the fundamental US strategy has not been meaningfully altered. Counterterrorism involves aggressively capturing or killing terrorists. It means dismantling their networks so they never rise again.

The point of this article, however, is not to evaluate the success or failure of the War on Terror, speculate on a potential endgame, or engage in a debate over global counterterrorism policy. Rather, it will pose the same questions that communities across the world are asking of those entrusted to guard their safety. Simply put, who are the world’s police, and more importantly, what are they empowered to do?

The Unitary Executive

“When it comes to terrorism, we will do whatever is necessary to protect our nation.”

“In these efforts, we will take appropriate steps to protect privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.”

• President Donald J. Trump, National Strategy for Counterterrorism of the United States of America

An undeniable reality of the last 18 years has been the expansion of executive authority, at the expense of traditional checks and balances. The Patriot Act in the United States expanded authority to conduct surveillance, restrict the rights of both citizens and noncitizens, and lower the standard of probable cause for warrants. Proponents constitutionally and pragmatically justified this strategy, arguing that the counterterrorism operations conducted fall under the war power authority of the President. As the power of the sovereign executive expanded, three strategies flourished under its protection, invulnerable to democratic constraint.

1. Targeted Killing

A core counterterrorism strategy has utilized aggressive drone warfare. The vast majority of these attacks are “signature strikes,” which target “people whose behavior is assessed to be similar enough to those of terrorists.”

However, data on these strikes is sparse. Trump reversed a President Obama-era requirement which mandates reporting civilian casualties. The executive’s argument pointed to the existence of congressional reporting mandates. However, those congressional mandates do not cover information on CIA-led strikes. Despite these limitations, independent research indicates that there have been between 910 and 2,200 innocent civilians killed in US drone strikes since 2004.

Opportunities for individual redress are also low. Lawsuits on behalf of innocent victims of signature strikes, which are likely to hit civilians, are rejected as non-justiciable by the court because doing so would be ruling on whether the actions of the executive in this case were prudent, regardless of whether they were “mistaken or not.”

2. Expanded Military Presence

The War on Terror involves 39 percent of the world’s countries. The United States has military bases, provides military assistance, provides combat troops, and conducts airstrikes in one of the most expansive, worldwide operations to date. The image below illustrates the depth and pervasiveness of the war the executive is empowered to conduct.

Image from the Costs of War Project, at Brown University’s Watson Institute.

The gray areas on this map include a war in which US-made weapons have obliterated hospitals and the death toll has risen to 100,000, a war in which US troops were convicted of 50 million dollars worth of war crimes, and a war in which soldiers and military contractors committed and were given immunity for 53 individual acts of sexual violence. The question then becomes to what degree will terrorism be the Trump card to procedure, human rights, and an accountable police.

3. Surveillance and Detention

Obama viewed his failure to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay as one of the largest blemishes on his record. Overwhelming pressure overcame his initial vow to close the facility. Opting for a different stance, Trump vowed on the campaign trail to “bring back waterboarding, and [...] bring back a Hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” A leaked memo revealing this intended plan included the detention of Americans within the prison. However, Trump has yet to deliver on this particular campaign promise.

Independent of the boom and bust of the political cycle, the power of indefinite detention remains in the hands of the executive. The 2018 National Strategy for Counterterrorism lays out that detention of suspects “pending their transfer to the United States for criminal prosecution” preserves the “ability to detain terrorists at the detention facilities at the United States Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and explore ways to better integrate and maximize the utility of this capability.” Individuals detained in these situations have little access to the courts, appeal, and their agency.

This strategy appears to have been modeled elsewhere. In the Phillippines, the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 enables warrantless arrest and detention of those suspected of terrorism for up to 24 days. Multiple human rights watchdog groups have argued the bill’s expanded definition of “terrorism” could criminalize free expression of dissent and could easily be employed for political goals. The bill additionally removes a provision of current law that penalizes law enforcement agents who wrongfully detain suspects of terrorism, potentially imposing US$10,000 per day of illegal detention. The Anti-Terrorism Council, an executive agency staffed by the president, will functionally exercise sole authority over cases of the surveillance or arrest of individuals suspected of terrorism.  

A fascinating parallel emerges in the United States with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. Section 215 of the Patriot Act removed the FISA Court’s original requirement that the government must present “specific and articulable facts giving reason to believe” a subject of surveillance was a foreign agent. In fairness, that is old news but the implications are still relevant. Section 702, which was recently reauthorized, broadly permits gathering of foreign surveillance. The issue here is simple. Foreign agents do not necessarily only communicate with other foreign agents. However, as long as the government is surveilling the “foreign agent,” the person on the other end of the line could very easily be a US citizen.

Transparency and Accountability

Faced with an unaccountable and dramatically powerful security institution, and in a striking parallel calls to defund domestic police, progressives in Congress introduced legislation to slash the Pentagon budget by ten percent, pointing out its bloated spending and unaccountable operation. Its reception was also akin to defending the police—an idea which galvanized the left, but failed to overcome conservative legislative power.  

What, then, could be the path forward? The answer is two-fold.

First, increased transparency. The impact of such a norm cannot be understated. It is loud public outcry and deep public discussion that shapes public policy. Widespread backlash to the facts revealed in Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing forced a secretive Obama White House to adopt significant improvements to rights protections and transparency.

Beyond simple platitudes on democracy, there are specific actions which would vastly improve governance surrounding counterterrorism. Through executive mandate, government officials with classification authority could be required to document the reasoning behind the classification. Furthermore, the laws governing behavior themselves could also be declassified, such as legal memos within the Department of Justice.

Second, there is an impetus to increase the oversight external bodies have on executive action. In the context of targeted killing, some advocate a sort of “drone court”—an oversight body designed to review drone strikes, either post hoc or ex ante. This would not be a judicial body but would serve a similar review purpose.

When it comes to judicial review, however, there is functionally a moratorium on progress: the political question doctrine, which designates certain actions as “political questions” and are not justiciable by the Supreme Court. Under war powers authority, presidential authority cannot be second guessed by the courts.

Presidents are adamant in protecting this doctrine, emphasizing the centrality of their authority to use military force. The legal justification for the War on Terror itself, including campaigns against ISIS in Iraq and Syria under both Obama and Trump, employs the 2001 and 2002 Authorization on the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which gave the president authority to fight the Taliban/Al Qaeda and invade Iraq, respectively. Litigation that could potentially spillover to affect this legal basis is consistently avoided.

Some argue that adjudicating “objective questions” (Was [X-target] a member of a terrorist organization?) is perfectly within the capabilities of a court, since these adjudications do not infringe on the political decisions of the executive (Was it strategic to strike at this time?), but are merely a review of the facts of the case.

Beyond this, it is genuinely important to gist out the government’s legal reasoning for taking a certain set of actions. A lack of judicial contestation over drone strikes or any of the other tactics employed by the executive means that federal action could skate by without any debate over its legality, which is already intensely contested. Not being allowed to even pose the question of legality is a recipe for unchecked abuse of power.

The Imperative to Act

“Domestically, we must empower our frontline defenders—our state and local law enforcement professionals—as well as many other government, civil society, and private sector partners to prevent and counter terrorism in the United States.”

• President Donald J. Trump, National Strategy for Counterterrorism of the United States of America

The imperative to address the growing gap between accountability and counterterrorism becomes clearer as the line between terrorist and citizen blurs. The deployment of federal troops to police citizens protesting police brutality following George Floyd’s death sparked outrage, as soldiers in full riot gear marched on protestors in bike helmets. As new videos were released of protestors being tracked and forced into vans, the legal justification remained the same as it was in 2001: an expansive view of federal police power, the overarching imperative of security, and a sovereign executive.

The chilling characteristic which unites these policing strategies is the erosion of mechanisms through which democratic constraint can and ought to be exercised. While there is independent debate about the efficacy of detention, surveillance, troops, drone strikes, etc., there is little justification for the level of opaqueness which currently surrounds the agents of counterterrorism. Ultimately, the authority we have vested in the global police is one that must be questioned.

On June 9, 2020, Sri Lankans occupied the streets outside the US Embassy in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, holding signs condemning the racism, police brutality, and other maladies plaguing the United States. Sri Lanka’s social issues also came to light at this protest. The country, after all, has its history of ethnic strife and is currently mending after the end of a long, brutal civil war. As the nation attempts to heal, Sri Lanka continues to sustain new injuries to its social and political structures that reveal much larger systemic problems. Police arrived at the demonstration and violently dispersed protesters—arresting at least 53 individuals—supposedly to enforce public health restrictions related to the COVID-19 outbreak. However, the police’s ferocity was unsettling. Some footage, for instance, “showed a young woman being tossed into a police vehicle, head first.” One of the protest’s organizers, Pubudu Jayagoda, indicated that the Sri Lankan government had been “downplaying coronavirus health risks,” implying that the police perhaps had ulterior motives and revealing his disillusionment with the government’s policing power. Such growing disenchantment with the Sri Lankan government represents just one problem amongst the country's history of ethnic tensions.

Sri Lanka’s present is haunted by memories of the island’s decades-long civil war, which began in 1983 and ended just over 10 years ago. The war was mainly a clash between the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) insurgent group, the latter of which had hoped to establish a separate state for the Tamil minority. The mainstream narrative suggests that the civil war was derived from tensions between the Sinhalese and Tamil ethnic groups. However, the war also represented the legacy of British imperialism. This alternative analysis suggests that the ethnic conflicts were symptoms of a much larger problem, rejecting the oversimplified narrative that Sri Lanka is home to a people that are perpetually clashing with one another due to ethnic incompatibilities. Instead, the analysis surrounding the legacy of British imperialism embraces the idea that Sri Lanka’s conflict has much to do with each group fighting to reclaim its dignity and power, albeit at the expense of the other. A post-colonial analysis reveals that both the Sinhalese and Tamils acted to recover what they believed they had lost during their respective golden eras, imperial rule for the Sinhalese and shortly after for the Tamils. Present moments like the June 9th protest are no longer surprising and clearly align with Sri Lanka’s broader history under this interpretation. Perhaps more importantly, this post-colonial narrative suggests that Sri Lanka’s conflicts are not in the past; rather, the conflicts continue to manifest through the government’s leadership in moments much like the Colombo protests.

An Origin Story

Sri Lanka is 74.9 percent Sinhalese and 11.2 percent Sri Lankan Tamil. Within these two groups, Sinhalese tend to be Buddhist and Tamils tend to be Hindu, displaying significant linguistic and religious divisions. However, the strife between the grounds purportedly began much further back in Sri Lanka’s ancient settlement history. Though the Sinhalese people’s arrival in Sri Lanka is somewhat ambiguous, historians believe that the Tamils arrived on the island both as invaders and traders from India’s Chola Kingdom. These origin stories suggest that the Sinhalese and Tamil communities have experienced tension from the very beginning—not out of cultural incompatibility, but rather out of power disputes.

During British imperial rule, the tensions between the two groups worsened. The CIA suggested in 1985 that the Sinhalese community felt threatened by the Tamil group’s prosperity partly due to the British favoritism of Tamils during the British occupation of Sri Lanka. Because Tamil communities also existed in several other British colonies like India, South Africa, and Singapore, Sri Lankan Tamils benefited from broader commercial networks and a wider range of opportunities. Moreover, British colonial authorities often placed English language schools in predominantly Tamil areas, providing Tamils with more civil service and professional opportunities than their Sinhalese counterparts. This pattern of Tamil favoritism left Sinhalese people feeling isolated and oppressed. Despite the tension between these groups before British colonization, the events that followed Sri Lankan independence suggest that imperial rule had provoked the ensuing conflict. Indeed, soon after British occupiers left the island in 1948, these patterns of Tamil dominance changed dramatically.

The Story Reverses

After British independence, many Sinhalese worked their way into the upper echelons of government. These Sinhalese gained power and went on to gradually pass acts effectively disenfranchising their Tamil counterparts. One such act was the Sinhala Only Act, a 1956 bill that made Sinhala the only official language of Sri Lanka and created barriers for Tamil people trying to access government services or seeking public employment. Former Sri Lankan President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga frames the act, which her father passed, as a move to nurture and reclaim a Sri Lankan identity following an extended period of British rule. If Kumaratunga’s statements about her father’s legislation are sincere and accurate, her commentary may reveal that legislators at the time hoped to recover the dignity of their Sinhalese ethnicity that they felt was lost during British imperial rule—not that they wanted to actively minimize Tamil culture. Retrospectively, though, the minimization of Tamil culture is precisely what the laws accomplished.

Another pertinent policy was that of standardization, which aimed to provide more educational opportunities for disadvantaged Sinhalese students. The policy required Tamil students to achieve higher exam scores that their Sinhalese counterparts in order to be admitted Sri Lankan universities. Legislators created a program that resembled affirmative action for the Sinhalese, who lacked opportunities and were disadvantaged during British imperial rule. Yet, when coupled with the Sinhala Only Act, standardization took opportunities from Tamil students, several of whom had turned to educational avenues to compensate for their lack of professional civil service opportunities. Thus, this legislation passed by a Sinhalese-dominated government failed to level the playing field; instead, it tilted the odds in the other direction and effectively discriminated against Tamil students. Ostensibly, these ethnic frictions had roots in the social destabilization caused by British occupation, and had more to do with reclaiming Sinhalese power and dignity than to cultural tensions between the Tamils and Sinhalese. Even so, before long, a few militant Sri Lankan Tamils organized an insurgency.

The War Itself

Some Tamils responded to these discriminatory policies with the idea of Tamil Eelam, a separate state for Tamils. While the idea appears to be extreme, the two groups already lived in somewhat separate spheres of the country: the Sinhalese in Southern, Western, and Central Sri Lanka, and the Tamils in the Northern and Eastern parts of the island. Tamil Eelam aimed to formalize this existing geographic separation. The movement was built on the idea that Tamils and Sinhalese represented distinct ethnic groups in Sri Lanka. However, post-colonial thought would suggest that the underlying reasons for both Sinhalese and Tamil actions in the immediate post-colonial period were not due to untenable differences, but rather a desire for power across the country’s communities and a feeling of frustration about the lack of opportunity caused by factors beyond the groups’ control.

Nonetheless, Tamils had mixed reactions to the concept of Eelam. While a handful of groups supported Tamil Eelam, only one prevailed: the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). LTTE destroyed other budding Eelam groups like the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization (TELO) to become the “sole representative of the Tamils.” The conflict then escalated into civil war. The war officially began after a day of riots targeting Tamils in Colombo in July 1983, a month which has since been dubbed “Black July.” The fighting lasted just under three decades and ended in May 2009, when the Sri Lankan government announced that they killed the LTTE leader.

LTTE was an uncompromising group inspired by Che Guevarra and his guerilla warfare tactics. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) soon labeled the LTTE a terrorist group after they initiated terror tactics including suicide bombers, the suicide belt, and female-led suicide attacks. The group even assassinated two world leaders: Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa. Indeed, the LTTE’s activities extended beyond Sri Lanka’s borders. However, LTTE was not the only perpetrator of heinous crimes during the Sri Lankan Civil War. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights determined that both the Tamil insurgent group and the Sinhalese-dominated government have been implicated in war crimes such as the torture of war prisoners and citizen disappearances. In one notably brutal example, the government’s forces murdered five Tamil students in the port city of Trincomalee. These conflicts, rooted in a quest for power and dignity, descended into brutal violence on both sides, and memories of this violence still haunt the country today.

The Situation Now and the Protests Revisited

Although the Civil War ended in 2009, the current situation in Sri Lanka has only partially improved. A large portion of the Tamil population remains displaced. While there are fewer political and civil rights issues, instances of torture and enforced disappearances persist even in recent years. Moreover, the Sri Lankan government often surveils and tracks people linked to LTTE. The Sri Lankan military still occupies predominantly Tamil areas designated as “high-security zones,” though to a lesser extent than during the war. The government’s Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) targets mostly Tamils. In a more subtle sense, the Sri Lankan government continues to disenfranchise the Tamil community. Through the process of “Sinhalization,” for instance, Sinhalese culture has slowly replaced that of the Tamil population. Sinahlese monuments, road signs, street and village names, as well as Buddhist places of worship became more common in predominantly Tamil areas. These efforts have infringed upon, and in some cases even erased, the Tamil perspective on Sri Lankan history, as well as Tamil and Hindu elements of the country’s culture.

Perhaps the conflict has devolved into an ethnic issue, but it did not start that way. It may not stay that way either. The Sri Lankan government has alienated the Tamil minority since the civil war ended, but, more recently, it has come to disappoint its Sinhalese constituency as well. The government's actions since the end of the civil war have become increasingly undemocratic for Tamils and Sinhalese alike. Its response to the Black Lives Matter protests, for example, was only the latest instance in which the government exercised an unprecedented amount of power. The Sri Lankan government began growing its power during the civil war—a conflict that stemmed from ethnic tensions rooted in the legacy of British imperialism on the island. The government continues to expand its authority now many years later. What this means for the future of Sri Lanka is unclear. Still, one thing is for sure: even if the wounds caused by the Sri Lankan Civil War and its accompanying ethnic divisions heal, the country will remain haunted by much larger structural issues in its history and government. However, a unified citizenry in Sri Lanka could be a powerful tool in responding to its government’s growing power. Ethnic unity on the island may be the key to a more secure future.

Wade Henderson was the President and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which was founded as the legislative arm of the civil rights movement. Additionally, Wade was the head of the Washington Bureau of the NAACP and worked with the ACLU. Henderson spoke with Indu Pandey in early August.

Can you comment on the role that American anti-racist movements have in international struggles and how our current political moment might contribute to an international reckoning with discrimination, racism, and identity?

In order to answer your question properly, I need to provide just a bit of history. You mention that the civil rights movement, and we’re really talking about the modern movement of the 20th century, could be seen as a product of the anti-colonial movement in Africa in particular. To a degree, that’s true, but I honestly think it’s the other way around. The domestic advocacy for civil and human rights by the NAACP beginning at its founding 1909 helped to lay the foundation for the anti-colonial activity that followed World War I. The NAACP as an organization was born in fire.

In the 1930s and 1940s, there were real efforts on the part of W. E. B. Du Bois, who had an early stint with the NAACP as the editor of Crisis Magazine, but came back for four years from 1944 to 1948 and helped lead the organization in pushing for anti-colonial activities along with people like Paul Robeson and others. They gave that movement vitality. But, I think in 1948, the NAACP made a judgement that investing in a two-front campaign became a challenge beyond their capability. They devoted themselves really beginning in 1948 or 1950 more exclusively to domestic advocacy.

There has long been a recognition on the part of civil and human rights advocates in this country that we are tied to an international movement of liberation. And often at times we have been in a position to offer leadership and support. The African National Congress, for example, credits the NAACP and its founding, its structure, with some of the advance efforts that have taken place in South Africa. There is clearly, you know, an appreciation even now of the Black Lives Matter Movement. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing, not only did it explode domestically, but there have been over 4,000 demonstrations globally that have used the Black Lives Matter emblem as an indication of its own involvement. And, yes, it has inspired the people of color citizens of those countries to respond to their own domestic challenges around race. I think the movement has already had broad impact and is consistent with the way that the civil rights movement would have hoped to influence liberation.

Reparations for slavery have seen a resurgence in interest. Given your efforts to secure reparations for Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II, why do you think reparations are justified? What would you say to someone who disagrees?

The issue of reparations for injustices that have been experienced by you or your predecessors in ways that have contemporary impact on your life today is a concept that’s almost as old as Judeo-Christian law. There’s a concept in Roman Law: ubi sum ibi remedium. It means for every wrong, the law recognizes a remedy. That’s an idiom, a Latin idiom. But, it’s handed down over the generations to establish the concept both in law and in equity. When injustices occur, there has to be a remedy in the law to address that injustice once the injustice has been established. Reparations legislation has been around for quite some time, in fact, since 1989, when Congressman John Conyers, the to-be first African American chair of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced the first version of H.R. 40. H.R. 40 was the bill to establish the commission to study reparations, and it has been introduced every term in Congress since John Conyers first proposed it. The bill has begun gaining traction on the notion that the concept of reparations should be studied.

You note that I worked on the Japanese American redress bill. It was called the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. And in fairness, my role was de minimis in comparison to the non-governmental organizations like the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and the Asian American congressional leadership, including Congressman Norman Mineta, Spark Matsunaga, and others. But, it was JACL that in 1970 voted on a resolution urging the federal government to provide a commission to study reparations for Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II. From that effort, a movement grew, which ultimately demanded justice under law. And, in the end, we compensated Japanese Americans inadequately (there is no adequate compensation in this context) with US$20,000 in cash payments, a monument here in Washington D.C. dedicated to that injustice, and an apology from the federal government. This is obviously scant relief. But, it was symbolically very important and very satisfying.

I understand that there is a concern about the indebtedness for those who had themselves no direct holdings of enslaved people. On the other hand, there are many that have benefited significantly from the system that provided the benefits and the stature that they have enjoyed and their families have enjoyed. This is an issue for which the time has come. And, I think that the George Floyd murder and the Breonna Taylor killing have not only invoked a conversation about criminal justice reform but a much broader discussion that the American people for the first time seemed to have embraced. There is an abundance of documentation that more than justifies a more thorough review of the reparations question. I just think the issue is finding the courage as a people to do so.

The slave trade was an international phenomenon. It occurred between a number of European countries, the United States, present-day Canada, a number of countries in the Caribbean, South America, and Africa. Clearly the discussion has to acknowledge many actors’ complacency and perpetration of violence. How do we go about understanding the reparations question in an international context?

First of all, as you say, the United States was not the only country that engaged in the enslavement of African people. Yes, there were many in Europe that took part in the slave trade and made considerable fortunes for their countries in their abuses. Back in 2016, the 15 CARICOM nations, those are the Caribbean nations and former colonies of European countries that are now independent, have explored the option and, in fact, have filed a suit in international court against 11 European countries, who were former colonial powers. They are pushing Europeans to acknowledge the current circumstances under which these countries fare and that they attribute to the existence of slavery. It’s going to be a hard lawsuit to win. And, bringing it before the International Court of Justice has its own sort of built in limitations. But, to assume that the European Union and the individual countries don’t have some indebtedness to their former colonies is something that needs to be deeply explored.

These questions are not merely to be limited to African Americans when there are appropriate remedies. The Supreme Court of the United States just handed down what looks like a landmark decision in the rights of Native Americans: McGirt v. Oklahoma. It upheld treaty rights of the Native American tribes of Oklahoma and their ability to assert their jurisdiction over certain criminal justice issues. It seems like an esoteric matter, but it was one of the first significant Supreme Court cases to uphold tribal rights for the indigenous population of the United States in a way that I think has significant implications for the future.

These questions of reparations are not just questions of how we reconcile the past but also what the past’s impact is on the present. Reparations are not merely compensation for past injustice. It is a recognition that current circumstances flow from these difficult questions. Intersectionality, which has been mentioned in some instances between race, sex, and class, also comes into play. You see it here in the COVID-19 crisis with the irony of the so-called essential workers being defined as people who are on the frontlines providing food services, groceries, meat packing plants, providing essential services. They’re given this lofty title of essential workers, but they are paid a pittance, they lack the protections in the workplace that a union would provide, and they are exposed in life-and-death circumstances without adequate protection. These practices trace their roots back to the intersection of race, poverty, and enslavement. This is not an accident or coincidental. It is a result of law and policy and only by recognizing that are we able to make advances.

You mention intersectionality. How do we find common ground between people who have some interests that converge and some that diverge?

That is, I think, an especially difficult and challenging question. I think it is the basis for much of our international involvement. And, the birth of the United Nations stems from that kind of need for a forum where international disputes could at least be discussed and potentially resolved. As difficult as international affairs have been since the birth of the United Nations and as challenging a time as we have had for the last 75 years, this is a time to appreciate the importance of that concept and rededicate ourselves to those international bodies that play such an important role.

I think that in this post-pandemic world—I hope—there will be a renewed appreciation for the importance of engagement at the international level. The World Health Organization (which has been criticized by the United States and has been to some degree scapegoated for the COVID-19 pandemic reaching American shores) is perhaps more important now than ever. And, that has been demonstrated by the experience that we’ve had. The level of cooperation that is needed is obvious now, especially after some of the scandals that have come out of the administration’s handling of international affairs. I would say that as part of a fresh start initiative, that hopes to rebound from some of the real difficulties that confront democracies around the world and American allies is that there needs to be a renewed commitment to human rights, to engagement at the international level. I think that all of that has become increasingly important, and I think that a wider appreciation of that from the American people is going to have to be encouraged, nurtured. We’re going to have to go against this effort at American exceptionalism in a way that has been portrayed in the last three or four years.

And, as I said, this country has been envied, we’ve been hated, we’ve been admired, imitated. But never have we been pitied. And, currently we are being pitied by others in the world because of the way in which we’ve responded to the pandemic. I think that it has exposed some weaknesses in American democracy in ways that need to be shored up. I think that the current circumstance involving our race in this country is a national security question in addition to being a civil rights issue. It has made our country vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation that was the example of Russian intermeddling in the 2016 race using Facebook to articulate Black and African American hostilities and concerns. I wager that that’s part of the problem we’re going to have to face going forward.

The United States has had very public confrontations with its handling of identity, race, and power. Does that affect its ability to challenge human rights violations in countries that might be outwardly worse than itself? Does it lose its credibility in those instances?

I know that the Obama administration made a significant effort to invest in some international human rights issues around race. And, in August of 2014, we saw an instance of how the United States was viewed internationally. The United Nations in Geneva was holding a review of US compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. This is one of the international covenants that the United States ratified, back in 1994, and calls on the country to make efforts to reduce racial bias, discrimination, and racism in its own policies and laws. The United States had an impressive delegation to Geneva to represent our country’s interest.

While we were there and preparing to testify, Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. And the commission that was to review US compliance exploded with that news because the story of how Brown was killed, his body left lying in the street for hours, shocked and appalled members of the international commission. As impressive as our delegation was, it embarrassed the hell out of the American government and raised serious questions about our commitment to the very human rights principles we seem to enshrine. And, the United States has had this problem really from the inception of the United Nations. So it’s not a pretty history.

The one thing I will say though, as far as civil rights advocacy, there were people who understood that contradiction and how to exploit it. W. E. B. Du Bois was one of them, who sent a delegation to the United Nations in the 1950s to argue on behalf of the rights of African Americans. So, there have been attempts in the past to use that contradiction to advance the broader goal of equality. And, that pertains not just to the United States, but to other parts of the world as well.

How do we renew the credibility of international organizations for smaller or more peripheral countries that don’t believe in the power of those organizations or view them as not in their interests?

That’s tough. You know, I am hopeful that the climate change debate will attract a greater focus in this country in the aftermath of the pandemic and hopefully some other changes in our government’s approach to these issues. I think the withdrawal from the Paris Accord sent an incredibly damaging signal to the smaller countries that are facing tremendous impact from climate change unchecked. And, we are reaching a critical point in the world’s ability to respond to the problem, and I think that urgency—I hope—coupled with a recognition that the global economy is so incredibly interconnected that solutions have to be more than nation-based. They have to be more global in nature. So, I do think there are certain urgent international functions that I hope will have renewed focus. Again, I mention the World Health Organization. I think in the aftermath of this pandemic, there has to be a renewed focus on ensuring a level of cooperation and collaboration that helps to facilitate our next response when needed. So, I do think that’s important.

And I think that there has to be a greater appreciation for the role that journalists are playing in helping to educate the world about what’s going on. I note with great concern, the circumstances of journalists around the globe who are doing incredibly courageous work and face a serious threat. Again, I think Jamal Khashoggi and his murder raises to the highest level the threat that journalists face around the world. And, there has to be a greater appreciation on the part of Western powers, hopefully to be led by the United States in a more robust fashion, a commitment to speaking up on behalf of those who report the information so necessary to understand what’s happening in the world. Now, these countries may not have a First Amendment as we do, but nonetheless, the principle of protecting a “free press” is something that is enshrined as a principle of American democracy. I hope that this becomes a point of attention.

Respecting the rights of indigenous people is inherently an international issue. How do we start the conversation on indigenous rights? Is there a place for solidarity?

I believe in the power of coalition. The organization that I was privileged to lead for 20 years, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, is a coalition of over 200 national organizations, working to advance civil and human rights. We have discovered only in coalition do you have the strength to advance these broad societal changes and goals. Only in coalition do you have that kind of strength. Intersectionality is a huge part of that discussion. Let’s think about it in practical terms.

Right now we have a policy change that is under consideration by the administration: to shut down the decennial census a month earlier than it would have ordinarily be scheduled to end. That means in all likelihood that there will be thousands of uncounted individuals whose absence from the political sphere that the census addresses means that we won’t have the resources for the communities in which they live, apportionment questions and redistricting questions will be adversely affected. In other words, the curtailment of this important function and service is going to have a profound impact on our own democracy. There are clear interests we share in common with a host of groups, the Indigenous being among them, the Latinx community, the Asian American community, persons with disabilities, the count for LGBTQ Americans becomes a huge piece of this.

So, you know, the COVID-19 crisis, ensuring that there is adequate testing, resources, the personal protective equipment, and other things are shared concerns as Americans we share in common. And, we need to find solutions for those problems. But, there are specific areas of focus that have issues involving criminal justice reform that have come into sharp focus or the economy. There will be a shared interest in rebuilding those activities. And, lastly, there is a shared interest in protecting American democracy from subversion. We’ve got to contend with the problems of international targeting, perhaps from Russia or China. But we certainly know that there is a history of that kind of involvement previously, and then we have the problems here of voter suppression, which have been proposed in ways that you see obvious and horrendous.

Stepping back again, for a minute, I do think there has to be a more formal engagement, and that’s why I suggested this resolution on truth, racial healing, and transformation. It is profoundly important and I think needs to be taken into account very seriously. I think there are obviously international examples where those truth commissions have proven some value, not always in the manner we hope. But, I also recognize that our own civil rights movement draws some of its strength from its inter relationship with truth movements aboard. So, the movement by Mahatma Gandhi in India and the recognition by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that Gandhi’s principles deserved emulation in this country. The efforts of Congressman John Lewis, who has lauded the importance of a truth, racial healing, and transformation commission. So, I think there are methodologies if you will for addressing these issues. There has to be a willingness to confront. I think right now that consensus is building. That consensus is actually building.

The topic for our magazine for the fall issue is the relationship between security, identity, and power. We wanted to be responsive to the national and international conversation we’re having about these sorts of topics, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you think the relationship between power and identity is?

The United States had an identity that was shaped by certain fundamental principles, but that also reflected a level of power, particularly in the aftermath of World War II when we emerged as one of the world’s great super powers. And, part of our identity and power were based on a perception that had not been tested in the most rigorous way. I would think that the Vietnam War was one of the first efforts to test our power and, in doing so, exposed the limits of American power and authority and exposed to the world a bit of a myth that it had been based. Obviously the acquisition of weaponry, including the atomic bomb, gave us a sense of profound invincibility.

As I said before, we have been admired, feared, loved, and hated, but we never have been pitied. And, I think that the current response to the pandemic and the other crises that we face: the race question which has burst onto the scene (not just domestically but internationally); the economy which is in shambles; and our civic engagement—the voting apparatus is being questioned in ways that I hope do not undermine—or could undermine— the election in significant ways. That is affecting the way the United States is perceived abroad. The decision to invoke a philosophy of “America First” which seems to suggest a new isolationist policy that has us withdrawing from international bodies, disrupting prior agreements (like the Iran Nuclear Accord). Having total disdain for our allies (NATO) is another example. So, right now, I think the perception is one of instability, uncertainty, and anxiety. And, while we have power, it is potentially being used indiscriminately internationally. For example, the murder of the Iranian general, which was considered an extra-judicial killing, raised real questions about our functioning under the rule of law.

That undermines the perception that we were a country committed to core democratic values. The use of power, and the indiscriminate use in some ways, coupled with our incompetence in handling a globally shared crisis, that other countries with fewer assets and resources and capabilities, seem to handle the crisis better than we, raises real questions about our perception of us internationally, the perception of ourselves domestically, and the power that we have and how we think we’re going to use it. I think the relationship between identity and power at the international level is symbiotic. However, you see instances where identity can be shaped by power. I’m sort of thinking about Turkey. Turkey went from being the Ottoman Empire to being a modern state. Kemal Atatürk turned Turkey into a modern and secular state and took conscious efforts to remove religion from the civic life of Turkey. And thus, he helped Turkey help lay the foundation for Turkey being a part of NATO because it was perceived as a European-style—I won’t go too far in that regard—but less of a Muslim nation.

When Turkey decided to take its museum, the Hagia Sofia, and restore it to a mosque, it seemed to be a reversal of that effort to create the secular identity, which has existed for 80 years or so. And, you know, it’s an example of power being used to shape identity. And, that is just another example. It’s a complex question you’ve asked.

In an otherwise scenic coastal city surrounded by rocky, lush terrain and buzzing with tourists, smoke and chaos consumed Budva, Montenegro as a clash between police and demonstrators ensued. On June 17, 2020, Montenegro’s police and SAJ (Special Anti-Terrorist Unit) raided the government municipality building of Budva.

Their primary instruction was to disperse the “opposition” demonstrators and arrest Mayor Marko Carević. Hundreds of demonstrators had gathered in front of the municipal building to protest President Milo Ɖukanović’s uncovered hush deal that tipped the municipality’s majority in favor of Ɖukanović’s DPS Party (Democratic Party of Socialists), forcing incumbent Mayor Carević out in the process.

In 2016, a coalition between the DF (Democratic Front) and Democratic parties had secured a majority in Budva’s municipality, placing the oversight of Montenegro’s thriving tourist city under the control of Ɖukanović’s most vociferous political opponents. Carević, elected as mayor from the DF party, saw his short-lived tenure as mayor come to an abrupt end after Ɖukanović bribed a DF Party councilor to switch parties.

When it came time to transfer power to Nikola Divanović, Ɖukanović’s newly appointed mayor of Budva, Carević, refused to step down, calling it an unfair, undemocratic political selection process. Carević’s refusal led Ɖukanović to order the police and SAJ to forcefully take him down, inciting demonstrators across Budva to stand in front of the municipality building in solidarity with Carević. As police started making their arrests, what started as a peaceful protest and stand-down escalated to an abhorrent example of police brutality.

Among the arrested were: Carević, Manager Milo Božović, Secretary of Investments Mladen Mikijelj, Chief of Cabinet Nikola Jovanović, and Advisor Ɖorđe Vujović. There were dozens more injured, experiencing acts of overt overuse of force. An officer kneeled on Mikijelj’s neck despite his being in handcuffs and showing no signs of resistance. Vujović was thrown down cement stairs and had to be hospitalized for serious spine injuries.

The chaos in Budva did not end there. Eight days following the raid on the municipality, police threw tear gas at Serbian children who were at basketball practice.

However, the incidences of police brutality filmed in Budva are far from being isolated events. They are a part of a longstanding history of Ɖukanović forcefully targeting, silencing, and intimidating his political opponents, whom he has collectively and strategically termed “pro-Serb and Russian” forces. Ɖukanović’s terror has turned to outright political oppression and in many instances, even ethnic and religious discrimination and persecution of Serbs.

In 2015, a few months before Montenegro’s general elections, thousands of demonstrators peacefully assembled in the capitol of Podgorica, demanding Ɖukanović’s resignation from politics. After nearly thirty years in “public service,” Ɖukanović had been accused of corruption, including voter fraud, organized crime, nepotism, cronyism, and kleptocracy. Ɖukanović was even named 2015’s “Man of the Year in Organized Crime and Corruption” by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

Then, like now, the Montenegrin police and SAJ unduly arrested and beat demonstrators in hopes of dispersing them. Since then, Montenegrin watchdog and human rights groups have urged for the dissolvement of the SAJ, claiming that their training makes them ill-equipped to peacefully handle demonstrations.

Yet, the police and SAJ continue to harass and terrorize demonstrators, breaching their powers and committing severe human rights violations without any repercussions. Largely serving as their protector is Ɖukanović, who is suspected of intimidating and incentivizing the Montenegrin police and SAJ into acting as an “anti-opposition” force. As Boris Raonić, Director of the Civil Defense watchdog group explained, “The [SAJ] continue to use excessive force…with no responsibility for their actions; they obviously enjoy political protection.” Former SAJ member Brajusko Brajusković added, “The SAJ has been used to beat up opponents of the regime, journalists, and opposition leaders [on behalf of Ɖukanović] since the late 90s.”

Ɖukanović’s political alliances extend beyond his close relationship with Montenegrin police and SAJ. Greatly contributing to Ɖukanović’s one-party, autocratic rule is the continued support of the West, largely led by the US.

A Political Strategy: Securing a Western Alliance

2015 proved to be an exceptional year for Montenegro. Exhausted by Ɖukanović’s tainted political legacy, demonstrators laid the foundation for what has since then become a large opposition force.

Faced with a serious threat and disruption to his long reign, Ɖukanović had to muster a propaganda campaign to delegitimize the opposition. Such a propaganda campaign constituted a “pro-Serb and Russian,” anti-West enemy that would unequivocally legitimize Ɖukanović’s re-election and achieve recognition by the then-allied West.

Nevertheless, Ɖukanović’s friendly alliance with the West is a recent phenomenon of the 21st century. In the early 90s, Ɖukanović entered politics under the influence of Slobodan Milošević, the former president of the Socialist Republic of Serbia and later president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. However, after becoming heavily entangled in crime and corruption charges, Ɖukanović realized that critical to his desired one-party rule and kleptocracy was the support of the world’s largest collective power: the West.

Thus, in a span of just fourteen years, Ɖukanović has successfully campaigned for Montenegro’s 2006 independence from the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 2017 NATO entrance, and candidacy in the EU. Throughout this process of “Westernization,” Ɖukanović has earned the advice and respect of Western colleagues, including the Obama administration. As the US Ambassador to Montenegro, Judy Rising Reinke, noted: “[Montenegro’s] historic accession to NATO has solidified [the US-Montenegro] partnership as allies.”

After carefully establishing a close “partnership” with the West, Ɖukanović has accused the demonstrators of being “pro-Serb and Russian” and anti-west to delegitimize their assembly. Since 2015, the Montenegrin protests continued to grow, even escalating into the 2018-19 “Balkan Spring,” with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators across the Western Balkans protesting the autocracies of their respective states. Indeed, there is some truth to Ɖukanović’s “pro-Serb and Russian” allegations. More than a third of Montenegrins identify themselves as ethnic Serbs, while 88 percent of Montenegrins are members of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, Ɖukanović’s “pro-Serb and Russian,” anti-West rhetoric is really meant to “capitalize on the West’s anxieties over Russia’s attempts to cement its traditional Balkan alliances in Serbia and Montenegro.” By manufacturing an anti-West enemy, Ɖukanović is aware that he can commit voter coercion and fraud, maintain power, and still be perceived as a legitimate, respected, and even admired leader by the West.

Contrary to Ɖukanović’s allegations, the “pro-Serb and Russian” opposition are not conspirators seeking to undermine Montenegro, but rather individuals seeking to finally actualize democracy in Montenegro. Nevertheless, an anti-West sentiment does exist among Ɖukanović’s opposition, although not for the reasons falsely perpetrated by Ɖukanović and his Western allies. The opposition’s hesitation lies in the lack of economic stability and government transparency promised by the West. Instead, the West has proven more interested in securing geopolitical, military alliances, even at the expense of its democratic promises.

There is evidence to bear on the West’s tainted campaign and intervention in Montenegro. During the 2016 general elections, Ɖukanović’s DPS Party barely secured more seats than the opposition after a plethora of evidence hinted at vote-buying and voter fraud. With the size of the opposition, it is estimated that during the 2016 general elections, the opposition really secured 40 parliamentary seats while Ɖukanović’s DPS Party only secured 36. However, due to bought, fake ID cards and voter coercion through money, job, and travel offers, the DPS Party ended up winning more seats. Videos showing DPS members coercing Montenegrins from the Yugoslavian diaspora with travel offers were leaked on the internet. From Montenegrins in the diaspora alone, Ɖukanović’s DPS Party secured 6,000-7,000 extra votes, or two parliamentary seats. Given such voting violations, several watchdog groups filed over 114 criminal complaints against the DPS Party to the Montenegrin Prosecutor’s Office and the International Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. The respective DPS-run, Western-biased offices, without a thorough investigation into the charges, concluded that there were no “violations of freedom of choice in voting” and that the elections were “generally free.”

After the West turned a blind-eye from Ɖukanović’s gross voting infringements during the 2016 general elections, Ɖukanović and his DPS Party were quick to repeat their same violations during the 2018 general elections. Again, after propagating information about a “pro-Serb and Russian,” anti-West opposition, Ɖukanović’s election as president was quickly recognized and approved by the West. Ultimately, Ɖukanović’s “pro-Serb and Russian conspirators” allegations  came at a pivotal moment of growing dissent against him in Montenegro, implying the true motives behind Ɖukanović’s pro-Western campaign and rhetoric. In order to appease the Western powers, Ɖukanović continues to maintain his pro-Western campaign and rhetoric, leading to his continued rule of Montenegro that the Western powers uphold.

The Ethnic and Religious Discrimination and Persecution of Serbs in Montenegro

Understanding how integral Ɖukanović’s ethnically and politically divisive campaign and rhetoric is to his overall success illuminates the motives behind the DPS Party’s ethnic and religious discrimination and persecution of Serbs in Montenegro.

On December 27, 2019, the DPS-majority Montenegrin Parliament approved the ironically named Law on Freedom of Religion or Belief and the Legal Status of Religious Communities. Under the law, the Serbian Orthodox Church has to prove ownership of property dating before 1918. On this day, the Kingdom of Montenegro joined the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes after the First World War. Ɖukanović and his DPS Party are using this history as grounds to acquire state ownership of religious property, violating the common democratic tenet of “separation of church and state.”

The Serbian Orthodox Church owns 66 monasteries and dozens of churches in Montenegro, most of which date to the Middle Ages. Among them, Ostrog Monastery remains the most important and famous, attracting nearly one million Orthodox, Catholic, and even Muslim religious followers every year. Housed in the monastery is St. Basil: born to Serbian parents, he dedicated himself to an ascetic, religious life as a monk. After Ottoman Turks destroyed Tvrdoš Monastery, St. Basil was forced to move to Ostrog. There, St. Basil spent the remainder of his life expanding the Serbian monastery and performing religious miracles. When he died, his perfectly preserved body was moved to a cave, where it remains to this day. However, following his death, “the site of Ostrog and St. Basil’s relics have had to be defended many times in the last 300-plus years.”

The most recent attack on Ostrog Monastery coincidentally came on St. Basil’s birthday, December 28, when Ɖukanović signed the parliament-passed legislation on Freedom of Religion. Despite the close history between the Serbian Orthodox Church and Montenegro’s monasteries and churches, Article 62 of the law does not explicitly describe how church property ownership can be proven.

As Montenegrin political analyst and journalist Boris Marić explained, “The legal text itself contains a number of legal illogicalities, vagueness, and conflicts of law. This is especially true when it comes to the issue of registration of religious communities, where no clear answer has been given and any discretionary decision has been removed as to who is obliged to register and who does not have that obligation.”

Another contentious issue regards the principles of constitutionality. Assistant professor of political sciences at the University of Belgrade, Milan Krstić, explained, “Property rights are guaranteed by international agreements signed and ratified by Montenegro, such as the European Convention on Human Rights and the Stabilization and Association Agreement. A simple transfer of church property built before 1918 into state ownership, made possible by this law, effectively nationalizes property that is not state property outside ordinary court proceedings, contrary to the opinion of the Venice Commission [advisory board of the Council of Europe].” Krstić added that the burden of proving such property ownership specifically targets the Serbian religious community, despite having the largest Montenegrin following, as other religious communities are protected by individual, special treaties.

The third major issue stems from a lack of justification regarding the public interest behind the retroactive nature of the law. Marić said, “In a situation where this law would be considered in practice as a lex specialis, it would, as written, produce a retroactive effect. In order for a legal text to have norms prescribing retroactivity, it must be enacted in a special procedure that would justify the public interest in introducing such norms into the country’s legal system.” Ɖukanović has failed to offer any logical justification for the Law on Freedom of Religion or Belief and the Legal Status of Religious Communities. Instead, he promotes the Montenegrin Orthodox Church that is widely unrecognized and barely came into existence in the 1990s, after the Serbian monk Antonije Abramović was defrocked.

Ɖukanović and the DPS Party’s legislative attack on Serbs has recently forced the Serbian Orthodox Church to protest Ɖukanović’s regime. Ɖukanović has used the Montenegrin police and SAJ to harass, arrest, and beat the clergy and religious protestors, disguising their discriminatory attacks as punishment for violating COVID-19 regulations. Except, tracing back Ɖukanović’s past offers an abundance of evidence that proves that Ɖukanović’s harassment of Serbs is not an isolated, reactionary response influenced by COVID-19 restrictions. Rather, it is yet another example of forceful and tragically legal ethnic and religious discrimination of Serbs. An incident on June 10, 2020 further proves that Ɖukanović’s discriminatory actions are unmotivated by COVID-19. Without any demonstrators present to incite a disguised reaction from Ɖukanović, clergy from Ostrog’s monastery watched as a section of the monastery was illegally destroyed. Montenegrin police and SAJ guarded the company ordered by Ɖukanović to destroy the religious property.

Unfortunately, while Ɖukanović and his DPS Party seek to undermine the Serbian presence in Montenegro, their actions are truly undermining every common Montenegrin citizen. Nearly 90% of all Montenegrins identify as belonging to the Serbian Orthodox Church. While many Montenegrins are nationally Montenegrin, their ethnic and religious identity and political beliefs are closely tied to Serbia and through that Serbia’s long-time ally Russia (hence Ɖukanović’s successful “pro-Serb and Russian conspirators” propaganda campaign and rhetoric).

Not only has Ɖukanović’s terror deprived most of Montenegro of ethnic and religious rights and protections, he has left most Montenegrins severely politically and economically disadvantaged. Ɖukanović’s autocratic, oligarchic, kleptocratic rule has deprived Montenegrins of fair political representation and the same levels of economic prosperity Ɖukanović and his family continue to enjoy.

Montenegro: The Story of a Crumbling “Democracy”

Milo Ɖukanović’s autocratic legacy demands international attention and scrutiny, especially as his political strategy will likely secure his concentration of power for years to come. In his wake, Ɖukanović leaves behind a complex story of corruption that can resonate with many other countries and world leaders, especially those of the Western Balkans. As Eastern European leaders succumb to the demands and pressures of an increasingly Westernized world, they paradoxically drive their countries further away from achieving the coveted “Western democracy” and closer to a state where democratic tenets are compromised. The ongoing police brutality used to perpetrate infringements on political, ethnic, and religious rights, exemplified by Ɖukanović’s regime, underscores the lack of freedom of speech and religion that plague Montenegro. More so, it highlights the determination of Ɖukanović’s Western allies to secure geopolitical, military alliances, even at the expense of truly bolstering and improving the conditions of the intervened country. Thus, the significance of police brutality is not rooted in the abhorrent human rights and democratic violations, but its symbolic nature and connection to a larger, crumbling society and infrastructure of autocratic states propagated and disguised as leading examples of “democracy.” The only way forward: protest, as seen by the hundreds of thousands of Montenegrin demonstrators. Their protests, inherently democratic, demonstrate how revolutionary collective action can be in ultimately bringing attention to pressing issues, sparking conversations, and setting the impetus for change.

Picture credit for cover photo: "Thousands in Montenegro March Against Religion Law" by Stevo Vasiljević.

Dominique Day is the vice chair of the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent. She is also the founder and executive director of Daylight, which aims to promote justice across borders, boundaries, and sectors.

What motivated you to found Daylight, and what are some of its most significant achievements over the last couple of years?

I've been in practice for a little over 20 years, and I found myself wanting to have a platform where I could draw on all the different skills I felt like I developed. Additionally, I felt that our approaches to systemic racism needed to be more interdisciplinary, driven by complex solutions and not necessarily constrained by our roles as lawyers, litigators, or policy folk. I found a lot was lacking in the way that legal and policy institutions approached capacity building, so Daylight became a space to really build out both an implementation arm where we can build capacity but then also a much more complex way to think about strategy or to think about what it really looks like to make durable change.

In terms of accomplishments, I've definitely worked on a good number of projects looking at strategies around systemic racism in specific organizations or institutions. We've done some interesting research studies that are hopefully leading to practice changes. One of the instruments we use is the KAP study, knowledge, attitudes, and practices. These are big studies of a sector to look at how people's knowledge, attitudes, and practices influence a particular issue, whether it's race or gender-based violence. Obviously, you're getting a lot of qualitative data, but if you project across a large number of people in the way you collect it, it can be quantified. Then, you can perform very sophisticated statistical analysis to really think about where our points of leverage were or what are the interesting correlations.

Being able to do that internationally has been really great. We did a WHO report a few years ago with an NGO in Afghanistan. One of the most fascinating things we found was completely unexpected. We were looking at doctors as first responders to gender-based violence, and we interviewed people in every single clinic in this particular region. We found that doctors who understood that men could be raped were significantly more likely to address gender-based violence and the possibility of intimate partner violence with their female patients. The ways in which all of these things interconnect and really play on each other has been really satisfying, especially for my intellectual curiosity.

It doesn't seem to me that there's been a lot of groups like this doing international work and working on racial justice in an international context, not just an American domestic content, and I think that's something that's really unique and really interesting.

Yeah, of course. As we found out very quickly, protests that sprung up in the US were quickly mirrored by protests all over the world. While I think Americans might want to see that as some kind of solidarity or a gift, people are protesting about their own local conditions and the ways in which white supremacy and anti-Black racism manifests locally in their countries. We've seen really compelling and provocative examples of those. We’ve seen videos coming out in England and Canada. There’s been really interesting stuff happening in Brazil as well. In all, being able to take a look at it globally has been very interesting.

Let’s turn to your work on the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent. That’s definitely a mouthful to say.

That’s definitely a United Nations name. The United Nations operates by consensus, so it has long bulky names and long bulky documents. This is a global body that's looking at anti-Black racism as it manifests globally. Technically, we're looking at the ways in which people of African descent can enjoy and express their human rights, but we focus on the violations of that a lot. We do country visits, where we visit a country and do a deep dive into the ways that people of African descent experience their human rights in a local context. We’ll speak with the government, we’ll speak with civil society. We go to all the towns that have a sizable population of people of African descent. We talk to anybody who's going to talk to us. We meet in the morning, and we meet at night. Finally, we prepare an analysis which we share with the government and ultimately the entire world. We do a good amount of individual work through our communications procedures, and then we obviously report to the Human Rights Council on the status of people of African descent globally.

What were some of the more salient country visits that you've done? Were there any surprising findings that you found from those country visits?

To be honest, since COVID-19, everything has been shut down and all UN travel was stopped, so our last visit was basically three days before the quarantine went into place. I was in Peru at the end of February and beginning of March. We did a country visit there, which was great. An interesting thing to know is, irrespective of the level of development of these countries, we see very similar stories for people of African descent. For example, we were in Belgium last year, which is at the very top of the development spectrum. Peru is in the bottom third, yet we hear a lot of the same stories from people. We hear people of African descent lacking access to education, access to health care, people unable to get the jobs at the appropriate education level, and people being discriminated against explicitly and openly because of the color of their skin.

In Peru, we found an almost entire denial of any public accommodations or public goods. Public services were almost entirely cut off from communities of African descent. Even where they were acknowledged initially, they were often subsequently ignored. For example, when a big agricultural company comes in to institute a big project somewhere in the rural areas of Peru, there would be an environmental impact statement, which has to happen, and there would be an acknowledgement that communities of African descent lived there. They would talk about the food, the culture, the music. They would put pictures of people in traditional dress. But when the drought comes, the same companies are bringing in their big machines, drilling extra deep wells, and sapping the water dry from all the communities of African descent. The same companies are working people from five in the morning until eight o’clock at night and not paying what they deserve. The same companies are using a lot of sharecropping there. The companies are bargaining the contracts in one currency but paying out in another to constantly maximize their profit.

What's interesting is when we go to Belgium, the other end of the spectrum, you're seeing the exact same thing. You're seeing people with college and graduate degrees working as laborers. You're seeing children systematically diverted into vocational education, so kids of parents who went to college or graduate school, often in Africa, are ultimately being pushed out of mainstream education. When the parents fight about it, they're being threatened with child welfare cases. They're being threatened with anything that teachers can come up with. This is a systematic practice. Kids who do make it to college are routinely denigrated and suffer from this culture of low expectations from their professors. People who go to the job centers are told, “We can't place you because you don't look Belgian. Companies don't want you in their front office.”

As Americans, we have an idea that maybe some of these practices are practices of the past. But, not only are we seeing them in the United States, we’re certainly seeing them all over the world. I think what's as troubling is that every time we present this to governments, they don't believe it. They often ask us to confirm that it happened in this town or in their spaces. There's one space where women were seeking to report domestic violence, and the police were telling them, “Well, you're African. Isn't this what you're used to? You’re fine,” and they wouldn’t take the complaints. I talked with the government in that case after civil society, and I said, “This is what we’re hearing in your town.” They absolutely couldn't believe it. In all, there’s a massive invisibility, and the ways in which white supremacy has been exploited is global.

Have there been any instances where the Working Group has been successful in changing practices or procedures?

I don't know what changes things, but after our reports come out, we usually see some acknowledgement from the government that they need to do more. In Belgium, for example, immediately after our report came out, there was an apology for a very specific colonial atrocity. These mixed-race children who were born to Belgian fathers and African mothers in Congo were taken from their mothers and forcibly transferred to Belgium as children of these white fathers.  It's something that the Catholic Church has been involved in; the Catholic Church apologized many years ago. Very recently, since these new uprisings, and given our report which they've referenced again publicly, they issued a statement of regret for colonialism, which is not an apology.

I think our hope is that we offer a set of not just analyses, but also tools for the government and also for civil society to rethink the ways in which they can see and respect people of African descent. A lot of what we're doing is really amplifying for them the ways that the trade and trafficking of enslaved Africans persists, or these legacy mindsets persist. A lot of our reports very openly talk about the ways in which these societies are treating people of African descent, often very openly with reference to a second class status, a lesser status, or a slave-like status, and how much of that goes back to a national image crafted in a moment of enslavement.

Do you think the United Nations overall as a body has been doing enough to address these issues?

Absolutely not. There was this debate, maybe two weeks ago [from June 15-17, 2020] in the Human Rights Council as the uprisings happened here in the United States and elsewhere. The African nations approached the Human Rights Council and asked for an urgent debate and a resolution around systemic racism in law enforcement and elsewhere in the United States and globally. This debate was held, and many, many member states got up and said Black lives matter. Many, many member states spoke very compellingly about their commitments to anti-racism. Several states specifically mentioned the reporting we had done in our country visits and their commitments to implementing our recommendations. All of that is great, and the debate took two days.

However, the resolution at the end of the debate was not operational. The resolution talked a lot about the death of George Floyd as a trigger for rethinking how we think about racism and how pervasive it is as a systemic violator of human rights, but at the same time, the resolution itself did not actually call for significant operational investments. There had been talk about a commission of inquiry, which is a fact-finding body, but that was removed. In the end, what it looks like is that the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights will do a hopefully robust analysis, investigation, and report, and it will be reporting to the Human Rights Council on that. That's something, but the reason, of course, that the resolution was not as robust as initially envisioned had a lot to do with the same structures that are perpetuating anti-Black racism. The power differential between the Global North and the Global South also strong-arms countries into watering down a resolution to something that is much less robust and much less operational than it could be.

Our mandate allows for two country visits a year and asks us to do a whole bunch of other reporting, all of which we do, but we're also unpaid. We also have to find ways to feed ourselves in the meantime. Even inside the United Nations, if you ask people, you’ll hear an acknowledgment, but outside of things like the Anti-Racism section, very few human rights personnel really see race as a driving factor in their work, even though we know that race persists, globally, as one of the clearest metrics for lesser access to human rights.

To be honest, nobody's doing enough. I'm not sure who is doing enough. I think a lot of activists are doing enough. I think it's on us who care about human rights, for us who have institutional affiliations, to leverage that activism into support. But, the United Nations is absolutely not doing enough nor is any government on the planet.

Well, I was going to ask if there are any countries that had any bright spots in this area, but I'm assuming from your previous answer that there is not too much going on.

I feel like I do actually sound very negative, but I'm a very optimistic person. There are many countries that are doing something here and there. We’ve seen really interesting Truth and Reconciliation Commissions happening in some countries in Africa. I always say that people love to denigrate South Africa, but to me, South Africa is a miracle. People forget how unlikely the arc that I've been able to see in my lifetime is, from Mandela in prison to the space we have today.

I have seen really impressive local government actions. There's definitely spaces that have really embraced this idea that racism requires attention and that is all of our jobs to actually do something about it. I think we've seen some interesting things coming out of Cuba. I've been really impressed from what I've seen in Nova Scotia; it has made real commitments to dismantling systemic racism, at least before the coronavirus pandemic. Brazil is not a good example today because it's quickly unraveling, but we are seeing really interesting Afro-Latinx activism and civil society throughout Latin America and South America. I think that's actually as important as what the government does or does not do. There's a Black vice president in Costa Rica, Epsy Campbell Barr, who has chosen to be a leader on calling out racial issues and doing more about it.

We do have really incredible people who offer both leadership and commitment. And the question is, how much scope can they really have? How much support do they really get? It's not a hopeless issue at all, yet nobody's actually doing enough.

Cover image: Credit Daylyt.

Arvid Bell is the director of the Negotiation Task Force at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He focuses on negotiations in the post-Soviet sphere and designing immersive negotiation simulations, including the NTF’s annual Red Horizon exercise.

Could you start off by telling us more about your work at the Negotiation Task Force?

The Negotiation Task Force is applying negotiation analysis methods to security and other problems across the Eurasian sphere. We're looking at conflicts ranging from Europe, especially Eastern Europe, Central Asia, all the way to Asia. And we are trying to make sense of them from a negotiation perspective. And then we do research and training work. We have different offerings for Harvard students all the way to senior practitioners from the government and military who participate in our advanced negotiation training programs.

You also teach an undergrad course on post-Soviet conflict. Could you explain the difference in running negotiation simulations for undergraduates, who may not have as much experience in negotiations, as opposed to senior practitioners?

I think for Harvard undergraduate students, especially, the big thing that “Post-Soviet Conflict” brings to the table is closing the gap between knowing and doing. Harvard students are usually very, very bright fellows, so we always have interesting discussions. People already bring a lot of knowledge to the table; they always walk the extra mile when it comes to readings and studying. But there's a big difference between having read a lot of books about something and having been in the room when negotiations take place. You also need to deal with the emotional and psychological impacts of negotiation. That's what these realistic multi-party simulations in the classroom do. They force you to be in the situation, to think about it not just from a theoretical academic perspective, but also to think about, “How can I put all my ideas into action?”

For example, I have one teaching block on the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Students read one of the most recent books on that conflict, called Everyone Loses by Sam Charap and Tim Colton. We read that book, which is the rather traditional course component, and then people are tasked to write a negotiation strategy memo about the complexities in Ukraine from the perspective of an actor that they are assigned: the Ukrainian government, the Russian Federation, or the separatists, for example. After people have written their strategy memo, they engage in this day-long, multi-party exercise. Then we bring in an interesting guest speaker. So this semester, we invited Alexander Hug, who is the former deputy monitor of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine. He has been in the room with separatists and negotiated with them dozens of times on the ground. So we bring him in, and he will speak with the students directly. This semester, we did have an agreement in our Ukraine negotiation exercise, and then Hug provided his feedback. He basically looked at the agreement that students negotiated, and said, “Okay, this would be realistic in the real world. And this detail here is a very innovative, creative idea.” Or he might say, “In this case here, maybe one of you didn't do an especially good job,” and he would share why he thinks that, based on his experience. That way we can bring together the knowing and the doing.

Could you talk about your approach to Red Horizon, given that these are experienced negotiation practitioners and the approach on bringing together knowing and doing will be a little different than for undergrads?

Absolutely. Red Horizon is the most advanced training scenario we have in our portfolio. It is a three day, highly advanced workshop, which features a day long, highly immersive systemic negotiation and crisis management exercise for up to 70 participants, most of who are senior government or military officials. Over the course of almost a year, our research team analyzed and then duplicated the internal decision making structures of the United States, Russia, China, and NATO as it relates to political and military chains of command in crisis situations. We have the top political and military leadership reflected in this scenario, and it's a very, very immersive, highly realistic exercise. It unfolds over dozens of rooms that we decorate as political or military headquarters. We have a digital combat simulator where people can track their military assets in real time. For example, if you are based in the American military room, you have all these screens on the wall with where bombers and fighters and aircraft carriers are positioned. If political leadership decides to make certain decisions, the military leaders need to figure out how they can adjust the force posture accordingly and move units around. Other countries will be able to track these movements through their military headquarters in real time, and then their military leaders consult with their political leaders and must figure out a response. It's a very advanced system.

In addition to this military side, all actors also have the option to engage in political action. For example, they can attend UN Security Council meetings and try to negotiate issues diplomatically. Because it's a global scenario, it features a variety of different hotspots where the situation can spiral out of control depending on what negotiators do. The main crisis is about a North Korean regime collapse, but because actors have assets positioned all around the globe and because the scenario is very deep in terms of its realism, the situation in Europe may escalate, something could happen in Africa or someplace else. It's very challenging to manage all these conflicts simultaneously.

This gets back to a couple of advanced negotiation concepts that we built into the scenario. The first is the issue of negotiation networks, the idea that stakeholders are connected often in very complicated ways, not in simple coalitions where you can say it's Team A against Team B. But instead you might have some actors on the China team who have different interests when it comes to Russia than some of their Chinese colleagues from another political or military committee. The second aspect is what we call cascading decision effects: You make decisions in international politics and the consequences can be unintended, indirect, or delayed, and we can simulate that very nicely. For example, we simulate intelligence capabilities which help you uncover some of these patterns, and then you need to adjust your strategy because you realized that another country did not interpret the signal that you sent the way you thought they would. The last one is what we call cognitive maelstroms, which relates to the psychological and emotional implications of high stakes, high pressure situations. If you're leading a team of 20 people in a highly immersive crisis exercise, and you know that many of them are also rather senior, then, yes, it’s still a simulation and no real shots are fired, but the pressure’s on to really deliver. You don’t want to let down your team.

Participants also learn from each other. For example, two Red Horizons ago, the person who was assigned the role of the Chinese president was a rear admiral with the US Navy in the real world. People like him obviously have a lot of leadership experience and apply some of those skills, but even they get something out of it. If you are forced to see the entire world or even just a part of it from the perspective of another country than your own for an extended period of time, that is a very intriguing experience, especially for American policymakers and military leaders. In that case, our US military colleagues saw what it's like to sit in Beijing and see all these American aircraft carriers coming for your coast. What does it feel like? What are your options? What do you do? Even for senior practitioners, sometimes there is a little bit of a knowing-doing gap.

Moving away from negotiation exercises into negotiations themselves, can you talk about the most recent developments in the real world from the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine? Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky met Vladimir Putin in December 2019. How did that turn out? Did anything come of that?

So I think it still remains to be seen if there will be some real sustainable change on the ground. The situation in Ukraine is still an ongoing conflict; that's something we often forget. There are still people dying. Yes, it's not as bad as the hot phase of the war, but this is not a frozen conflict.

There are some hopeful signs; the Ukrainian and Russian presidents made some moves towards de-escalation. But the conflict in Ukraine is so intertwined with the relationship between the United States, Russia, and the European Union, it's very difficult for negotiators on the ground to make meaningful progress without being given a little more breathing space. Of course, the pandemic has added an additional layer of complication. I think there's still hope that things will change, but because of these interconnections between the local conflict and the broader strategic issues, it's a bit of a complicated situation.

Your undergraduate course talks a little bit about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and I must admit, I'm not exactly familiar with that. Could you briefly go over the conflict and the proposed solutions to stop that conflict? Why have those either succeeded or failed?

This is actually a conflict that one might call a frozen conflict because it has been unresolved for decades, not just since the 1994 ceasefire which is crumbling. It relates to disputed territory between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the issue is deeply connected with the history of these countries. So were not just talking about different economic and political interests, but about identity and sacred values. For many Armenians, Nagorno-Karabakh is important for religious reasons; for many Azeris, the land carries huge cultural significance. Essentially, what the question comes down to: Is there any way for Nagorno-Karabakh to have a future as an independent entity, could it be integrated with Armenia or Azerbaijan, or could there be another solution? If one isn't too familiar with it, a way of thinking about the conflict is maybe thinking a little bit about interesting parallels between this conflict and the Israel-Palestine situation, as far as territorial integrity and self-determination are concerned. It's also a conflict that’s heavily driven by diaspora, especially in Western countries who send back a lot of money or maybe rally to the cause of their country from the outside. So that's another aspect that plays a role. Finally, it’s one of those conflicts that happens in the Russian periphery, meaning Russia has some security interests that it wants to be met. Russia stands on the Armenian side of the conflict, but it’s not the only external power that plays a role here. Another one is Turkey which supports Azerbaijan.

Because of recent domestic changes in Armenia, it actually looks like there may be some changes on the way ahead. So it also remains to be seen here. But I think there are reasons to believe that a solution may be more realistic now than in the last decade or so. One of the problems with this conflict is that because it has been frozen for quite a while, it's very difficult to generate new momentum towards a new agreement, and that's something that has been shaken up now by some of the domestic developments. A lot of conflict managers and negotiators have been wrestling with the question, “How can civil society play a more active role in reducing the tensions?” The longer such a conflict goes on, the more it spills over into public narratives and the way people are raised, so it also becomes more difficult to overcome that later on. It's not really a conflict that is on the radar outside of the region, but it’s one of those lingering conflicts that still remains to be resolved.

What do you think caused the failure of the talks to renew the INF Treaty with Russia in 2019?

When it comes to the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was negotiated in the late 1980s between Reagan and Gorbachev, it makes sense to distinguish between political and technical aspects of these negotiations. This treaty was pretty revolutionary when it was signed, because it did away with an entire weapons category. Namely, all nuclear and conventional ground launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers in the possession of the United States and the Soviet Union back then were destroyed, not just in Europe, but worldwide, even though it was mostly about the European theater. Since then, not only has technology evolved significantly, but the overall political situation has also changed dramatically.

I think this is where two issues need to be resolved. First, negotiators have to figure out how they can account for the development of new weapons categories and systems in a renegotiated INF Treaty. Tactical nuclear weapons, long-range precision strike technology, hypersonic glide vehicles, etc. This is complicated because then the issue becomes not just about an extension of a treaty but a renegotiation, which is very difficult. It’s not made easier by the fact that a lot of the technical arms control expertise in the respective foreign ministries has eroded since the end of the Cold War, so you simply don't have that many people left dealing with all these technical details. The second aspect are the political circumstances, which might be the bigger problem. This relates not only to the very complicated relationship between Washington and Moscow, but also to the question of other actors who have these missiles. How do you bring China into the equation, for example? Because the Chinese have not voiced any desire to be part of any intermediate range nuclear forces disarmament or arms control regime, should Washington and Moscow move forward without them, or should they try to bring them in? If so, how?

One way to look at that is to think about it from the short term perspective of the United States and Russia. You might say the good thing is to get rid of those shackles, and we can invest in all these weapon systems; arguably, it's way less problematic for American security than for Russian security that this treaty goes away. And the current US administration does not seem to be a fan of international agreements in general, as they pulled out of INF, Open Skies, the Iran nuclear deal, and the Paris Agreement. But there are at least two things that you don’t consider coming from that perspective. The first is the security of America’s European allies, who are deeply worried about an arms race on the European continent because they would have to carry the burden of that if the situation gets out of control. Maybe if the Europeans were a bit more vocal about their security interests, it could influence the calculus in Washington. The other thing is also, isn't there something to be said about the United States and Russia now taking the lead on arms control, as long as they still are in the position to shape the global arms control regime before China's rise accelerates even more? Wouldn’t it make sense for Moscow and Washington to figure out where they actually share some interests? The nuclear issue is still pretty much a bilateral game between the United States and Russia. By far, the vast majority of the nuclear stock globally is American or Russian. So there's also a sense of shared responsibility that these two countries have.

Unfortunately, the INF Treaty has now collapsed. And experts say that the next treaty to sadly go away might be New START, which is coming up for an extension next year. I think it's one of those situations where leaders in both countries need to look beyond the short term interests and think about the long term interests here. In the long run, you do de-escalate some of the great power tension through smart, renegotiated arms control, allow your country to spend its limited resources on other important priorities, and you make the world a more secure place for everyone.

In the last iteration of the post-Soviet conflict class, you did an immersive simulation to these three conflicts. Were there any things in the simulation that give you hope for these three conflicts or these three negotiations moving forward?

Let me say two things. For our capstone exercise on the future of Georgia, we brought in a couple of external participants to negotiate directly with our students. One thing that was very interesting to see as we conducted this negotiation exercise was that people who had more experience or prior training were more effective negotiators. I was also very happy to see that the students taking this class did a couple of things that good negotiators do, such as asking more questions, not just talking all the time, or looking beyond someone’s position and trying to figure out their underlying interest. That's something that my students have in common with some of the people who are more experienced and have seen it over a decade or so of negotiation experience. That gives me hope that training and knowledge and education matters. It matters if you're genuinely interested in international affairs as a Harvard student, and that attitude of curiosity carries over into your professional life. So that gives me hope.

The other aspect is somewhat related. We had an interesting development, also in our Georgia negotiation, where we had large teams negotiating, maybe four or five people on one team, on the Russia team or the America team or the Georgia team. And I should note that we really had, in addition to the Harvard students, individuals from Russia and a few with Georgian backgrounds who participated in this. There was a moment when tensions between two teams were very, very high. I think it had to do more with developing this “us versus them” mentality without a reality check on whether they were reading the other side correctly. One of the mediators, who represented the OSCE, was able to very skillfully de-escalate tensions by pointing out some misperceptions that one team had about the other side. And I think this is something that is also very true for a lot of complex conflicts: If you have third parties who can provide a different perspective of looking at issues, you might be able to force actors who are very entrenched to rethink some of their assumptions. It might be as simple as, “Are you really so sure that everyone on the other side is not even interested in this agreement?” Or, “Yes, maybe there was this one public statement that was rather harsh, but don't you think there are people in this other ministry on the other side who are very interested in negotiating? Maybe we should talk to them.” It's very easy to see the other side as a monolith, but once you dig a little deeper and ask a lot of questions, you will see that it’s actually so much more nuanced. Somewhere there is an opening for negotiations. You just have to find it.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Cover photo: Mikhail Gorbachev (left) and Ronald Reagan (right) signing the original INF Treaty in 1988. Public domain.

Andrej Babiš has served as Prime Minister of the Czech Republic since December 2017. After becoming the second-wealthiest person in the country, Babiš started a center-right political movement in 2012 to challenge establishment parties; he remains one of the most polarizing figures in Czech politics to this day. Babiš spoke with Garrett Walker in early August.

Czechia was the first country in Europe to mandate face masks, and an early crackdown allowed for partial reopening. What inspired you to take action against COVID-19 so early on? Would you have done anything differently?

To be frank, nobody anticipated the scale of the epidemic of COVID-19 in Europe. After the rapid spreading in northern Italy and Austrian ski resorts, our leading epidemiologists and mathematicians made a prediction, and it was clear that the risk of a medical system overload was too high. So, the government pursued a complex set of measures suggested by the board of epidemiologists and public health officers (i.e. face masks, closing schools and businesses, and travel restrictions), which kept human contact to a minimum and gave us time to fight the epidemic. Basically, it was a controlled shutdown of the entire country, never experienced before and I hope never again. A quick response—within days—was crucial.

But there was another essential factor to our success: astonishing discipline and restraint of Czech citizens. I can say that 99.9 percent of Czechs followed the recommendations and cooperated with state agencies. I am immensely thankful that Czechs kept a cool head facing the biggest challenge since World War II, showed respect, and helped each other unselfishly. When others were buying guns, Czechs were sewing masks. And that matters.

Eight years ago you founded a new political party, ANO 2011, which upended Czechia’s political landscape. How would you distinguish your party’s success from the success of other European populist movements?

The term “populist” is nonsense. I started the ANO movement with one simple goal in mind: to break down the political-economic matrix of corruption, endless mismanagement, and abuse of power that I witnessed during the 1990s and 2000s. I offered the Czech citizenry an alternative to traditional political parties (especially the Civic Democratic and Social Democratic Parties) and a different style of management without behind-the-scenes-deals and clientelism. It all works. Now, after seven years in government, the ANO movement is no longer a protest party, as you are suggesting. Populist politicians are hotshots, they skyrocket in popularity using catchy promises, but the reality of day-to-day decision-making in office makes them highly unpopular and they then fall into oblivion. ANO succeeded in every election since 2011. We have MPs, senators, MEPs, mayors, and thousands of ordinary members. ANO became the most stable and successful political force in the Czech Republic in a few years. That cannot be done only through marketing or efficient PR. You must be in touch with people, especially with those who were left out by traditional parties.

From the beginning, you made anti-corruption a key part of your appeal to voters. Are you satisfied with the progress your cabinet has made on that front?

We have done a lot of work in this field. For example, crucial laws about funding political parties and government spending transparency could hardly have been adopted without ANO initiative and my supervision. But fighting corruption requires more than laws when the mafia controls the highest circles of power, as it did in the Czech Republic before 2013 when the mistress of the prime minister abused the state’s secret service for personal goals. You must cut off the heads of the “Corruption-Hydra,” get rid of people in governmental bodies on the mafia payroll, then get rid of their friends and the friends of those friends. This is slow and non-rewarding work, but we managed to clean up the most important state circles. But the Hydra is still strong and, with the help of some media platforms, is pushing back using pseudo-scandals and denunciation campaigns against me and other figures of the ANO movement.

Speaking of “pseudo-scandals,” a 2019 European Commission audit found that you channeled subsidies to your conglomerate, Agrofert, while in office. You rejected that finding, and called the subsequent protests “hysteria.” That investigation was nonpartisan; where do you feel it went wrong?

In my case, you can see how disinformation campaigns are waged. I can only say over and over again that I on every occasion followed the Czech and European law. The fact that my former company, Agrofert, was a recipient of European money does not have to turn me into an EU vassal, someone under EU influence. Every single euro that my former company received in subsidies was received in accord with current EU rules. This whole campaign was started by Czech politicians as a part of their efforts to criminalize me and my family. However, the investigation of the Čapí hnízdo subsidy case is still in progress with no conclusion yet. Speculation that I have committed any crime, or that I am in fact guilty before the investigation has ended, does not belong in Europe today.

You rank among the most popular politicians in Czechia despite an unorthodox path to power. Why do you think so many voters have grown frustrated with establishment parties?

Sorry, but my way to power was very “orthodox.” What should a citizen do when he is not satisfied with the current parties and their politics? When he is disappointed by everything that is going on? When he sees that “professional politicians” care only for money and influential posts, not for the people? Start his own movement, articulate basic principles, form a credible team, and join the political process through elections. It is simple as that. Citizens in the Czech Republic were simply fed up with the political reality. They wanted a change. And I offered politics based on a few simple principles: a managerial style of decision-making, a small but effective state, and the nomination of state officials based on skills and transparency, something that was not common before 2017 when I was appointed prime minister. People want to be heard and they want to see results, so they put their faith in you.

Some have called you the “Czech Trump” because of your business background and rapid political success. How has your career experience changed your approach to politics?

The comparison with the 45th US president is not accurate. Donald Trump was born with a silver spoon in his mouth in one of the richest cities in the world, in contrast to me: born into a middle-class Slovakian family with no business background in socialist Czechoslovakia. So, our life and success stories are completely different.

I think that starting from scratch had a significant impact on my approach to decision-making. Some things are easier for me than for old-school partisan politicians. I am able to direct things on my own without a middleman or support staff; that is an advantage because I stay oriented in most of the agendas and keep track of every important issue. I am aware that this is a very time-consuming technique—I sleep for only five hours a day—but this is my style. Every minute in office must be filled by working on the promises I made during the election campaign. And experience in business, a field in which everything can be taken away through one bad decision, is tremendous preparation for politics in general.

In 2015, you took a strong stance against EU refugee quotas during the migrant crisis. Now that migration to Europe has slowed, are you still opposed to welcoming more refugees?

The quotas? Over my cold dead body. Not one Czech citizen agreed to a situation in which some EU officials and foreign actors decide who will be accepted into the Czech Republic. EU refugee quotas are a symptom of something more serious—an inability of some EU members to defend their territory, their citizens, and the provisions of the Schengen Agreement at the same time. Solidarity does not mean allowing everybody in. We offered the affected EU members and other countries our personnel and financial aid—for example, Czech policemen were stationed in Greece and Northern Macedonia. All “activists” helping refugees from the African coast to Europe are naive idiots to me. They allow the whole smuggling business to go on. Any system of redistributing illegal migrants can only worsen the situation of desperate people in Africa and Asia, and the Czech Republic cannot participate in these short-sighted and useless solutions. I am glad that other countries, especially those in the Visegrád Four [Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia], supported our view, and that the whole idea of quotas is dead now.

Czechoslovakia experienced profound institutional transformation in the 20th century: independence in 1918, Nazi annexation, membership in the Warsaw Pact, the Prague Spring in 1968, and the Velvet Revolution and Divorce in the 1990s. How did Czechia emerge to such stability?

Czechs have existed right in the middle of Europe for more than a thousand years now, so we have lived through both golden ages and national disasters. As you are suggesting, the 20th century was very turbulent for Czechia. We experienced both Nazi and communist totalitarian regimes, so Czechs are very cautious about their freedom and independence. We have learned that simple answers to complex problems can be dangerous, and that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. No revolution, no ideology, no enlightened leader can solve your problems. Only hard work and understanding each other can.

But, the bloody 20th century is gone, and I am convinced that the Czech Republic is on its way to becoming one of the top 10 most successful countries in the world. We have a large pool of experienced and highly innovative experts in many promising areas such as gaming and nanotechnology, we are European leaders in e-commerce, and we have one of the best public-funded medical systems. As we combine healthy public finances and a society that sticks together, we can make the 21st century our century.

In 2019, 75 percent of Czech citizens opposed adopting the euro. You have not made adoption a legislative priority, despite a legal obligation to join the eurozone. Do you see a future for the euro in Czechia?

The Czech Republic is ready to enter the eurozone. But in this situation, when we expect some reforms to EU governance, we choose to wait. The euro is more of a political than an economic project. Besides that, we are now seeing serious structural challenges that are potentially very dangerous: tensions between the prosperous northern members of the EU and the stagnating south were clearly visible during the post-pandemic recovery package negotiations. And while the 19 states of the eurozone have a common currency, they still have different economic approaches and follow different budget strategies. No one has the power to force heavily indebted countries to act more reasonably. That is the main problem that must be urgently solved. Still, the fact that we criticize some aspects of the EU integration process does not mean that we are against the idea of the European integration in general. Constructive criticism in the post-Brexit EU is necessary.

Finally, what do you want your legacy to be after you leave office?

Nothing special. No legacy with statues or an indelible place in history books. I would like to be “that guy” who finally allowed state agencies to work as well as private companies. The Czech administration historically lacked rational decision-making and long-term planning; our government, for example, was the first to plan all necessary investments for the next 30 years. Nobody had done this before. But only with a clear vision of Czechia’s direction can we stay successful long into the 21st century and beyond. That will be a tremendous task.

The interview was lightly edited for clarity.

The CBS magazine title, “Churches, Schools, Shows Closed: Epidemic Puts Ban on All Public Assembles” may feel relevant to the world today; however, it is actually from 1918, following one of the world’s deadliest pandemics. Resulting in 50 million deaths, the 1918 influenza pandemic shook the world. Even without that scale, though, COVID-19 has shaken our society to its core 102 years later. Now, five months into the pandemic, the issue of race has resurfaced to the forefront of many Americans' minds following the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. Is this timing coincidental? Few have identified another similarity between the 1918 pandemic and the current one: the heightened awareness surrounding issues of race and how health crises disproportionately harm racial minorities in the United States.

It is important to note that COVID-19 and the 1918 influenza are two very different diseases. The virus that causes COVID-19 is a coronavirus, while an influenza virus (H1N1) caused the 1918 pandemic, also known as the Spanish flu—even though it did not originate in Spain. Nevertheless, similarities in our responses begin to emerge upon closer inspection.

Today’s mass cosmopolitan shutdowns are not unfamiliar to US states, as during the influenza pandemic many cities and governments took early action in imposing quarantines. Closing down schools and banning mass gatherings led to lower death rates than places that implemented fewer measures or did it later. Although the world was nowhere near as prepared as it could have been in 2020, the modern pandemic has come at a time when science and technology are rapidly advancing to improve this crisis. As of July 31, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has infected around 17 million people around the world and produced an estimated death toll of 600,000. By comparison, the 1918 pandemic lasted for four years and infected about half a billion people.

Different Time, Same Problem

In 1918, the pandemic not only broke out right before the U.S. entered World War I but also, during the Great Migration, where hundreds of Black southerners migrated north to escape Jim Crow laws—laws that allowed for segregation to be legal following the Civil War. However, this coincidence heightened the sense of alarmism and scapegoating that is still seen today. Black citizens were blamed for bringing influenza and spreading it in cities like Chicago, when in reality everyone was becoming sicker. Out of the 50 million deaths around the globe, 675,000 of them were American. By March of 1918, one-third of the Americans hospitalized were Black. One study concluded that Black people had a higher risk of dying if exposed to the illness. However, it was not the virus that discriminated, but the people and systems put in place.

In cities across the United States, Black patients received lower-tier healthcare from segregated hospitals and were often left to fend for themselves. Outside of inadequate healthcare support, racial discrimination spread like influenza. In 1919, the city of Baltimore’s white sanitation department employees refused to dig graves for Black flu victims after the city’s only Black cemetery, Mount Auburn, could not accommodate any more graves. Similarly, although everyone was being negatively affected, the Chicago Daily Tribune March 5, 1917 headline, “Rush of Negroes to City Starts Health Inquiry,” paints a picture of the prejudice and racial bias that many Asian Americans are now experiencing today.

Following the COVID-19 outbreak and its origin in China, numerous counts of discrimination and violent attacks were reported against Asian Americans throughout the United States. A 16 year-old student in California was attacked in his high school after being accused of having COVID-19 simply because he was Asian-American. This virus has increased the use of racist, xenophobic, and perpetual foreigner stereotypes, and provided insight into Asian discrimination, a historically under-reported area. The most startling aspect, similarly tied to the discrimination against many Blacks in 1918, is the level of discrimination against Asians solely based on outward appearance rather than their actual ethnicity. Similar to the feelings and perceptions of “driving while Black'' there is a new fear of “coughing while Asian.”

Today, the pandemic shows us that these structural systems of inequality are still in place. Out of all the victims COVID-19 has claimed, the highest rates are associated with Black and Brown bodies across various states. In New York City, Latinos represent 34 percent of the people who have died of COVID-19 but make up only 29 percent of the city’s population. Similarly, according to preliminary data from the city’s Health Department, Black people represent 28 percent of deaths but make up 22 percent of the population. In the South, the state of Louisiana reported that 70 percent of the people who died from COVID-19 were Black, but they only make up 30 percent of the state’s population. As the current pandemic continues to disrupt the world, researchers and scientists can only predict what the final results will be.

An Unequal Equalizer

However, why do these racial disparities exist through what is called an “equalizing” disease? How come the same effects from a hundred years ago still exist today in a “desegregated” world? Most researchers point to two main reasons.

First, in both pandemics, minorities can be seen at the front line working jobs and serving roles that put them at higher risk of exposure. During the 1918 influenza, many Black soldiers had the worst or most at risk duties, such as being sent out to clean the trenches after a battle or to exhume and rebury dead soldiers’ remains. Influenza overwhelmed the resources of medical training camps under the burden of urban density and unequal living conditions. Today, Black Americans are more likely to be employed in essential jobs on the front line, where they are more prone to exposure. A study from Scott Stringer, the New York City comptroller, found that 75 percent of front-line workers in the city, from grocery clerks, bus and train operators, janitors, mailmen, and child care staff, are minorities. More than 60 percent of people who work as cleaners are Latino, and more than 40 percent of transit employees are Black.

Secondly, studies have shown that there is implicit racial bias within the healthcare system. This was evident in 1918 when segregation was still legal, but racial bias continues to exist implicitly among healthcare professionals. Not only do Black Americans have lower levels of health insurance coverage, but even with health insurance the quality of care provided is often questionable. According to a study conducted in 2005 by the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), “racial and ethnic minorities receive lower-quality health care than white people—even when insurance status, income, age, and severity of conditions are comparable.” Another study of 400 hospitals in the United States found that Black patients with heart disease received older, cheaper, and more conservative treatments than their white counterparts, with Black patients less likely to receive coronary bypass operations and angiography tests. After surgery, they are discharged from hospital earlier than white patients, sometimes at a stage some professionals would consider inappropriate. Simply stated, Black patients were more likely to receive less desirable treatments. It is often difficult to isolate these experiences, as Implicit Association Tests often show that physicians who harbor racial biases can either consciously or unconsciously hold these beliefs.

The question many have been struggling with is where can we go from here? After recognizing that these inequalities exist, what should people do? It would be unrealistic to ignore the lasting negative impact that racism has had in the United States. The level of social and economic inequality within housing, education, jobs, and health all have underlying roots and connections with race that have exacerbated the spread of COVID-19 for minority and ethnic populations.

Therefore, on the federal, state, and local level, active measures are necessary to protect these vulnerable populations. Providing protections for front line workers— who are disproportionately minorities—and adequate resources to minority communities in particular, such as testing centers, masks, sanitary stations, paid sick leave, and releasing timely and accurate demographic information, can help decrease the rate of spread and prevent further harm coming to these groups of Americans.

Frequently, issues such as these have endured for so long because of the lack of attention brought to them. Therefore, on an individual level, people have the responsibility to stay aware, informed, and place pressure on their government and communities to provide support. No one deserves to suffer from this disease in the first place, much less because of their race. While it is certainly unrealistic to say that staying informed and providing protection to minorities from COVID-19 will solve racism, but it is a good first step to collectively make in a time where empathy, support, and community are more needed than ever.

On May 4, police in Ixtlahuacán de los Membrillos, a small town outside Guadalajara, Mexico, arrested Giovanni López, a 30-year-old bricklayer. They beat and tortured him for three hours. The next day, his family arrived at the hospital to find his dead body. Jalisco’s Human Rights Commission concluded that “all the blows and lesions he incurred were of a conscious and disproportionate manner, which led to his death ... By hitting him on repeated occasions, the police tortured him, violating his right to personal integrity.”

The mayor offered the family 200,000 Mexican pesos to keep quiet. When they initially refused, the mayor threatened them with the same fate as Giovanni, forcing them to remain silent. After George Floyd died in Minnesota, Giovanni’s brother, Cristian, went to the media with a video of his brother’s arrest on June 3, heartened by the global response to Floyd’s death. The next day, massive protests broke out across Mexico.

Unfortunately, el caso Giovanni, as Mexicans have taken to calling the case, does not exist within a vacuum. It is the latest in a string of police brutality incidents in Mexico. Partly because of the influence of police reform movements in the United States, police reform has again entered the national conversation in Mexico. But Mexico is not the United States, and it must adopt Mexican solutions to its intractable problems of police corruption, abuse, and inefficiency. In that vein, it should redouble its efforts to professionalize its often under-resourced police forces and invest more into independent accountability bodies.

“It Could Have Been in Any State or Any Time of Year”

Statistics collected by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography paint a disturbing picture of police abuse in Mexico. According to its report on police abuses, 64 percent of those arrested between 2010 and 2016 reported some sort of physical aggression during their arrest, with 35 percent reporting choking or asphyxiation. Furthermore, a United Nations report noted that 2,751 people died of violent causes in Mexican prisons between 2013 and 2018, implying a failure to protect inmates from violence at best and downright police brutality at worst. Finally, according to the National Human Rights Commission, citizens lodged 13,262 reports of arbitrary arrests between 2001 and 2017.

However, these statistics do not paint the entire picture of Mexican police abuse. In 2011, federal police extorted money from a Monterrey taxi driver on two occasions, and the third time they encountered him, they tortured him and forced him to confess to being a member of the Zetas cartel. The officers have still not been brought to justice. In 2017, the police arrested Alejandro C.M. (whose last name was not released) one night because he looked suspicious. In the scuffle that ensued, Alejandro ended up dead. “The place and date are the least important part of the story,” investigative journalism site Animal Político wrote. “It could have been in any state or any time of year.”

Police abuses committed in collusion with the cartels are another matter. In 2016, five students disappeared in the state of Veracruz on the orders of cartel leader Francisco Navarrete Serna, with the help of state police. But the most famous incident occurred on September 26, 2014, when police stopped a bus of 43 students from a teacher training college in Ayotzinapa heading to a protest in Mexico City and forced the students into police vans; the students were never seen again. Notably, multiple municipal police agencies colluded in the forced disappearance, and federal police agencies did nothing in the attack’s immediate aftermath. While investigative journalist Anabel Hernandez suspects that the police worked with a local gang to reclaim a package of heroin hidden in the bus, no conclusive proof has emerged. In all, the Ayotzinapa case demonstrates the consequences of cartel-police collusion, and the state’s inability to establish even basic facts about the case shows its ineffectiveness in solving crime, much less preventing it.

Officers that do not work with the cartels are afraid to fight them, and for good reason. More than 215 police officers have been killed in 2020 as of May, and that number has certainly grown since then. In June 2020, the Jalisco Cartel attempted to kill Mexico City’s police chief in broad daylight, a testament to both the cartels’ feeling of impunity and the ineffectiveness of the police. Due to their lack of resources, police officers often fail to pursue investigations effectively; in 2008, researchers estimated that only 22 percent of crimes committed in Mexico were reported to the police. Nearly 32 percent of those cases did not even have a police report attached to them. Overall, Mexican police are often underpaid, underequipped, and undertrained.

Furthermore, tales of police corruption abound. Motorists complain about the feared “mordida,” or bite, in which police officers invent traffic offenses in order to extort a bribe from the motorist. Meanwhile, high-ranking officials within Mexico City’s police force often solicit bribes from lower-ranking officers in return for promotions or cushy assignments. As a result, the top officers are not necessarily the most qualified or most competent. Finally, the cartels often pay off entire police forces, sometimes with bribes totaling two or three times their official salary.

“Giovanni Didn’t Die, the State Killed Him”

While corruption, abuse, and inefficiency appear to be ingrained in Mexican police culture, the global anti-police brutality protests following George Floyd’s death likely reassured protestors that demonstrations have the potential to spark a broader conversation or even prompt policy changes. As a result, major protests occurred throughout Jalisco on June 4, the day after Giovanni’s brother went to the press and one month after Giovanni’s arrest. “Giovanni didn’t die, the state killed him,” many signs read. Violence broke out, and police arrested at least 26 protestors on the first day.

Protests lasted for several consecutive days and spread to other cities in Mexico, including Mexico City. There, police violently assaulted a 16-year-old protestor, and public outrage forced Mexico City authorities to arrest the two police officers involved. In Jalisco, the state governor, Enrique Alfaro, put the three officers responsible for Giovanni’s death in prison and released those arrested in demonstrations over the preceding days.

Like the George Floyd case, the caso Giovanni also prompted discussion in Mexico about other victims of police brutality. When a video of Yair Lopez (no relation) being choked to death during his arrest in Tijuana emerged, it prompted an investigation into the circumstances of his death and motivated more protests across the nation. Likewise, protests spread to Veracruz in response to the May killing of Carlos Andrés Navarro at the hands of police.

In the political arena, Giovanni’s death exacerbated the battle between Mexico’s governors and its president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (commonly known as AMLO) over the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Even before Giovanni’s death, AMLO had largely proven unwilling to announce strict coronavirus-related lockdowns, leading state governments to pick up the slack with measures to reduce its spread, including limitations on social gatherings and mandatory mask wearing. Indeed, under Alfaro’s leadership, Jalisco was one of the first states to shut down, sparking criticism from AMLO. “Pandemics won’t do anything to us,” he scoffed. Even as the pandemic has progressed, AMLO has argued for lifting restrictions. Since Alfaro heads an opposition coalition of eight governors all taking aim at AMLO’s party, this battle over COVID-19 restrictions seems to presage congressional elections scheduled for 2021.

The dispute over the causes of Giovanni’s arrest has echoed along these battle lines. While the Jalisco state government has claimed that the police arrested him for aggression against the police, the federal government has fiercely insisted that he was arrested for not wearing a mask. Indeed, the country’s Ministry of the Interior has argued that Giovanni’s arrest is yet another example of the abuse of power that coronavirus-related restrictions have enabled, pointing to 412 other arrests for violations of Jalisco state quarantine ordinances. “These measures have a disproportionate effect on those historically discriminated against or excluded,” the Ministry wrote, later arguing that Alfaro has intruded on the federal government’s responsibilities by taking a stricter stance on the virus. Although AMLO himself has taken the high road publicly, it seems his government has used the murder to make a broader point against coronavirus restrictions.

Alfaro struck back. “Behind everything that’s happening in this case in Jalisco, there are powerful interests constructed from Mexico City, from the hallways of power, that search to damage Jalisco,” the governor said, accusing the president and his party of fomenting the protests for political gain. “I have no interest in fighting with any governor,” AMLO responded, accusing Alfaro of manufacturing a political controversy. Nonetheless, a political controversy certainly exists, and it seems like AMLO has come out ahead: most of the negative press surrounding Giovanni’s death has criticized Jalisco’s handling of the murder, the protests, and the investigation, which has still not produced a clear rendering of Giovanni’s arrest. Interestingly, Ayotzinapa has come up several times during the potshots: Alfaro claimed that he avoided another Ayotzinapa by arresting the three officers responsible, while his political party, Movimiento Ciudadano, accused Morena, AMLO’s political party, of creating the impression of a new Ayotzinapa.

The State of Police Reform

In addition to the immediate debate over COVID-19 restrictions, Giovanni’s death has rekindled a larger public conversation about police reform in Mexico. For instance, Mexico City-based newspaper La Reforma identified several problems that contributed to the poor initial response to Giovanni’s death. In particular, the newspaper called out the Jalisco public prosecutor’s office for making little progress in investigating Giovanni’s death, the police for lacking a nonviolent strategy for confronting protests, and the National Guard for not arriving on the scene until after protests had dispersed.

Unlike in the United States, where the systemic racism that produced Floyd’s death has prompted calls for the wholesale abolition of police forces or major reductions in their budgets, the conversation in Mexico has largely focused on two major solutions: reforming the complicated structure of municipal, state, and federal police forces, and increasing accountability within the various police forces. After the Ayotzinapa mass kidnapping, then-President Enrique Peña Nieto proposed several major reforms to Mexico’s police system: replacing the country’s 1,800 municipal police forces with state police forces, enabling the central government to dissolve any municipality captured by cartels, boosting the country’s federal security forces, and creating a national emergency hotline. However, critics questioned the value of an increased federal presence, as federal police are not necessarily less corrupt or more effective than local forces, and they also noted that a national emergency hotline would not automatically increase trust in police officers.

AMLO’s administration has taken a slightly different tack. Several days after his inauguration, AMLO announced that the country would combine federal police and military police units into a new force, the National Guard, with a corresponding recruiting campaign to boot. He also gave the army the power to intervene in 12 functions previously limited to the police, such as arresting suspects, thus deepening the militarization of policing. Reactions were strongly negative. Several hundred federal police barricaded themselves in the police headquarters in Mexico City, complaining that military commanders do not understand the realities of civilian policing. Indeed, increasing military involvement in police work has led to police brutality in other countries in Latin America, such as Brazil. Beyond that, many worry that the state should allocate scarce resources towards buttressing police forces rather than changing institutions every six years when a new president comes around.

Given these concerns, reforms at the state and local level offer a more viable path towards police reform in Mexico. In the cities of Morelia and Chihuahua, municipal police reforms focused on community policing. The Morelia police force hired more female officers to respond to domestic violence complaints, spent more time conducting community outreach efforts, and relied more on social workers to mediate low-level disputes. In Chihuahua, the local police force reversed a longstanding policy that rotated police officers frequently to reduce corruption. It reasoned that continuity in the officers present in a particular neighborhood would allow the officers to develop a rapport with the community while giving the community more leverage to combat corruption and abuse in their assigned officers. Meanwhile, the state of Nuevo León made the distinction between state-level and municipal-level police clearer by dissolving its previous state police force and replacing it with a new police force, the Fuerza Civil. That body would focus on fighting cartel violence at the state level, leaving municipal police forces to handle “common crime policing” and community policing.

The reforms in Morelia, Chihuahua, and Nuevo León all had one thing in common: they aimed to further professionalize the police force by improving training, equipment, and salaries. This professionalization would make the police more effective against crime and reduce the incentives for corruption, since higher salaries mean that police officers do not need to take cartel money to make ends meet. Other state and local governments, however, lack the political will or funds to implement what has been the academic and policy consensus for decades, noted Daniel Sabet, a Georgetown University professor who studies police reform in Mexico.

Beyond actually implementing police professionalization, Mexico should also create stronger independent bodies to hold police accountable. It could do so by strengthening its National Human Rights Commission, which currently does not have the power to make police forces adopt its recommendations, or the resources to conduct robust investigations. Citizen observatory bodies and NGOs can also play a part in holding police forces accountable. If anything, the recent protests surrounding Giovanni López’s death have demonstrated that public scrutiny can force change in established bodies.

In that sense, Mexico resembles the United States. Just as George Floyd’s death catalyzed a wave of public outrage over police brutality in the United States, Giovanni López’s death catalyzed public outrage over police brutality in Mexico. It is now up to both governments to make sure these deaths were not in vain.

Suraj Yengde is a post-doctoral fellow at the Initiative for Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability at the Harvard Kennedy School, the author of the bestselling book Caste Matters, and a co-founder of the Dalit-Black Lives Matter symposium and Dalit and Black Power Movement.

To get started off, how did India react to the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests after George Floyd's death?

I think the fundamental difference between India and the rest of the world is that India has not reacted in the scale that we have seen elsewhere. There have been some social media posts, but that's about it. I think the reason for that is the COVID restrictions, especially the curfew that the state has put on, explaining why we don't have that much activity on the streets. However, the Dalit community [members of the lowest rung of the Indian caste system] has been very active in protesting in solidarity with the Black movement. I've seen a spate of protests and messages circling in the Dalit community, which has historically felt connected with the Black people in America. They have reintroduced their own historical connections and, as usual, stood steadfast with their African American sisters and brothers in the United States.

That segues perfectly into my next question. Historically, how have the Dalit and the Black community stood in solidarity with each other? How have they influenced each other historically?

The connection between Dalits and the Black community is 140 years old. Historically, one thing we need to understand is that those in the Dalit movement have always looked up to their African American compatriots. The Dalit Movement has tried to learn from them and to get inspired from the struggle. In the aftermath of the American Civil War and the slaves had become free, the Dalit community looked at itself and said, “You know what, this is literally us. We are just separated by different reasons of oppression, because race in India is caste.” The historical connection builds upon that. In the post-independence era of the 1970s, the Dalit Panthers, a Dalit version of the Black Panther movement, came into force.

Today, in the twenty-first century, I inaugurated two initiatives, the Dalit Black Lives Matter movement and the Dalit Black Power movement in India. Our connections are rich and historical, but it's just that it never materialized in the scale that we are seeing it is materializing now. I am the one who facilitates this conversation, and I am doing the work that was initiated 140 years ago.  

If you could elaborate a little bit more on your work with those two initiatives, that would be wonderful.

When I came here, I saw the gap that existed between the Dalit and Black struggles; they were literally not talking to each other, although they were in solidarity. It's kind of weird, like they knew each other, but the black community was very much distant. They didn't know who to talk to from the Dalit community, with few exceptions, like Angela Davis, who had a little access. But I don't think she utilized a platform to advocate for Dalit rights internationally. As a result, I thought it was about time that I collaborated with our comrades in the BLM movement here and facilitated a conversation to include that. BLM Boston is very sensitive to the caste issue, to the Dalit people. They raise it whenever they go to rallies, alongside the issues of Roma people, Palestinian people, and all the people who are oppressed across the world. I think that's a significant kind of intervention.

Meanwhile, the Dalit Black Power movement was inaugurated in India, and its intention is for Dalit youth to be sensitive to the Black struggle in America and across the world. It's not only confined to America, but it looks at the anti-Black racism in Europe and in the broader Americas. It tries to explicate that the word “black” refers to not only the melanin “black,” but also anyone who is not white and who is oppressed across the world. That could be due to colonialism, imperialism, historical atrocities that were imposed upon the native people, for example, the indigenous people of Australia. Then we talk about the oppressed caste people of the Middle East in Yemen and the neighboring regions.

We utilize that as a broader framework, and then we put ourselves in solidarity. The Dalit Power movement in India works simultaneously. Some of our comrades in South India facilitate an Africa dialogue, where they get students from African origin who are studying in India and have a joint graduation ceremony to share culture, dance, and music.

You wrote in your column for The Indian Express, “Everyone, it seemed, was interested in understanding my perspective on the racial question in America. No one, it seemed, was interested to look at obvious parallels.” I guess I’d like to be one of the few people who’s interested in explicitly asking about this here.

It's very unfortunate that these parallels were never made apparent. With very few exceptions, African-American scholarship, especially when it comes to global scholarship, is not very invested in the Dalit struggle. The parallels are so glaring and obvious that we’re screaming loudly for people to pay attention.

You can see the obvious parallels between these groups: the oppression, the police brutality, the incarceration. Then, you see the economic atrocities imposed upon these poor people. They don't have assets, they don't have land, they are homeless. We can equate this to the situation that happens in America, not in the beggar conditions, but the people who are on the streets trying to hustle and make ends meet. The exclusion of Dalits from important positions of power that happens in the same way that Black people are excluded from power.

Similarly, there is a historical legacy of slavery, making people into products and commodities. In India, it was an enslavement of the untouchables under the religious norms of Hindu code. Of course, the scale of Dalit oppression is more than 3,000 years old, compared to the African Americans with 400-year-old oppressive structures. Then there is a structural kind of denigration of the black body. That same happens with the Dalit. The institutions that we have raised are anti-Dalit. Similarly, in a racialized America, it's anti-Black. When you look at how politics is defined, there is a tokenization of Black politics. Similarly, we have a tokenization of Dalit politics.

And then there is the verbal “support,” but there is no concrete action when it comes to uplifting the Dalit people from the wretched conditions of their lives. I can see that similarly reflecting here. More importantly, India benefits from the enslavement and the oppression of the Dalit people, and the United States also benefits from the oppression of Black communities. One can write a dictionary of similarities of these people separated by distance, yet connected by their oppression.

We are all striving for dignity. The Black person fighting here is fighting for dignity. The Dalit person there is fighting for dignity. Dignity is very central to our political praxis. Whatever we do, we want dignity. We want respect as human beings. We don't want more respect, we don't want less respect. We want equal respect.

Why do you think that these parallels or these similarities haven't been discussed as much in the international media?

First, Dalits like me and others were not here in the United States. It took so many generations for me to be here at Harvard, to be able to claim my identity and fight for it with confidence. It hasn’t been imagined before, and I am one of the very rare exceptions to the rule. When they were here, they were not talking to Black people as actively as I do.

Second, structural barriers, but especially distance, prevented cooperation. Nobody facilitated this conversation. Nobody informed Black people in America about the Dalit Panther movement or asked them to be in solidarity, and I think there was a little bit of oversight within the Black Panther leadership, which did not pay attention to the Dalit cause.

What do you see as the next steps moving forward for these movements?

I think the Dalit and Black people need to be in blood and flesh next to each other, so there need to be more exchange initiatives. The Dalit people need to come to America, spend time in the Black colleges and Black universities with Black intellectuals, Black communities, Black ghettos. Similarly, the Black people of America should go to India and spend time with the Dalit ghettos, attend Dalit schools, spend time with Dalit scholars, cultural activists, artists. Once we have this cultural exchange, we can then build upon that with a new kind of solidarity and I'm very desperate right now to start this initiative. I've been trying to do this for the last five years.

Hopefully, at this moment, we are able to bring back the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King went to India, but he couldn't spend time with the Dalits. Now, the intellectual progeny of Dr. King can take forward his legacy when they go to India and spend time with their Dalit brothers and sisters. Dr. King himself was very concerned about the condition of Untouchables. That is unfortunately not discussed much, and people are unaware of that, but when Dr. King went to India, he was very concerned about the condition of poor Untouchables. In fact, he mentions them in his Palm Sunday Sermon when he came back to India. I'm giving an opportunity for our African American sisters and brothers to come back and relive the dream that Dr. King couldn't finish.

Cover photo: A Dalit woman in India. Photo by Meena Kadri, CC-BY-ND-2.0, accessed via Flickr.

Daryl Davis is a jazz musician who engages directly with members of the Ku Klux Klan to broaden their worldviews. He has directly inspired over 200 Klansmen to leave the organization, and dismantled the Klan’s operation in the state of Maryland. Davis spoke with Garrett Walker in July.

Tell me about your background.

My parents were US Foreign Service, so I grew up as an American embassy brat traveling all over the world. When I was overseas in elementary school, my classes were filled with other kids from embassies all around the world: Nigerians, Italians, Russians, Germans, Swedes, whoever. That was the norm, so we all got along. But when I came home, I went to all-black schools, or black-and-white schools. I was one of two black kids at my school in Belmont, Massachusetts. I had been living years ahead of my time when I was overseas.

A number of the guys in my class were members of the Cub Scouts, and they invited me to join. One day, when I was 10 years old, we had a parade from Lexington to Concord to commemorate the ride of Paul Revere. Everything was going smoothly. Then, suddenly, a group of four or five people started throwing bottles and small rocks at me. My first thought was that those people must have had something against the Scouts. It wasn’t until my Cub master and other adults huddled over me and escorted me out of the danger that I realized I was the only one getting hit.

Later that day, as my parents cleaned me up, they explained what racism was for the first time. I had never heard the word “racism” because I had never been exposed to it. It made no logical sense to me. How could someone hate me when they didn’t even know me? My parents had never lied to me, but I thought they had to be lying to me. People didn’t do things like that.

A month or two later, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. And nearby Boston burned to the ground in the name of this new word I had learned. I now knew my parents had been telling the truth: racism does exist. But I still didn’t understand why. I read all kinds of books about racism, white supremacy, and black supremacy, but they never explained how people came to believe those ideologies.

How did you go from that experience to sitting down with members of the Klan?

I got my degree in jazz performance. Music is my profession, race relations is my obsession. In the 1980s, I was the only black guy in a country band, and usually the only black guy in the places we played. One night, I played this bar in Maryland called the Silver Dollar Lounge. After the first set, we went on break, and a white gentleman put his arm around my shoulder.

He said, “You’re the first black man I’ve heard play like Jerry Lee Lewis.” I wasn’t offended, but I was surprised; he was an older man, so he should have known the origin of Jerry Lee’s style. “Where do you think Jerry Lee Lewis learned how to play?” I asked. “What do you mean?” he responded. I said, “Well, he learned from the same place I did: from black blues and boogie-woogie piano players.” “Oh, no, no, no, Jerry Lee invented his style. I’ve never seen a black man play like that.”

Even though I was friends with Jerry Lee Lewis and knew his background, the guy didn’t believe me. But he still invited me back to his table and said, “You know, this is the first time I’ve ever had a drink with a black man.” I asked why. One of his friends started saying, “Tell him! Tell him!” Finally, the guy said, “I’m a member of the Ku Klux Klan.” I burst out laughing because I didn’t believe him—until he pulled out his Klan membership card. Then I stopped laughing.

Still, the man was friendly, and he was very fascinated with me. Eventually, he gave me his phone number and told me to call him whenever I came back so he could bring other members. So I did. On my breaks, I would go to his table and say hello. Some of his friends would hang out, while others would see me coming and go to the other side of the room.

I eventually quit that band and went back to playing rock and roll. But some time later, I realized the answer to my question of how someone could hate me when they don’t even know me was right in front of me. Who better to ask than someone who would join an organization with a 100-year history of hating people? I decided to show up at the guy’s apartment unannounced. “Daryl!” he said. “What are you doing here?” After we caught up a bit, I told him I wanted to interview his Klan leader, Roger Kelly.

As the “Grand Dragon” of Maryland, Mr. Kelly oversaw all Klan operations in the state. It took some convincing, but the guy finally gave me Mr. Kelly’s phone number and address on the condition that I not tell anyone where I got it. Then he warned me. “Daryl,” he said, “Do not fool with Roger Kelly. Roger Kelly will kill you.” That was exactly why I needed to meet him. I had my secretary, Mary, schedule an interview without telling Mr. Kelly what color I was.

Right on time, there was a knock on the door of the motel room we had set up. Mary hopped up, ran around the corner, and opened the door. In walked Roger Kelly’s bodyguard, known as the “Grand Nighthawk,” with a handgun on his hip. He froze when he turned the corner and saw me, so Mr. Kelly, who was walking right behind him, knocked him forward. After I saw the utter confusion on their faces, I stood up and showed my palms to indicate I didn’t have a weapon. Next, I walked forward, stuck my right hand out, and I said, “Hi, Mr. Kelly. I’m Daryl Davis.” He shook my hand—so far, so good.

Before I could start the interview, he asked if I had any identification, so I pulled out my driver’s license and gave it to him. “Oh,” he said. “You live on such-and-such street in Silver Spring.” Why was this man looking at my street address? Was he going to burn a cross in my yard? I didn’t want to let him know that I was concerned, though, so I said, “Yes, Mr. Kelly, that is where I live. And you live on such-and-such street.” He smiled and nodded. If he came and visited me, I wanted him to know I might come and visit him. (I found out much later that I had been presumptuous. One of Mr. Kelly’s members lived down the road from me, and Mr. Kelly often traveled down my street to see him.)

Anyway, the interview went smoothly. Then, a little over an hour in, we all heard a crashing noise out of nowhere. Very fast and very short: chachut. Everybody jumped. I didn’t make the noise, so by process of elimination, I knew Roger must have made it. And I was wondering what I just did to irritate him. I flew out of my chair and got ready to come across the table. I couldn’t run. My only option was a preemptive strike: grab Roger Kelly and the Nighthawk, slam them both down, and disarm the Nighthawk.

At that moment, I looked right into Roger’s eyes. I didn’t say a word, but I knew that he could read my eyes. My eyes were saying, “What did you just do?” And his eyes were fixated on mine, and his eyes were saying, “What did you just do?” And the nighthawk was looking at both of us, and his eyes were saying, “What did either one of you just do?”

Mary, my secretary, was the only one who realized what had happened. The ice she had put in a cooler had melted, and a few soda cans had fallen down. We all began laughing at how ignorant we had all been. It wasn't a learning moment—that would come later. But it was definitely a teaching moment. We became fearful of one another over a bucket of ice.

Ignorance breeds fear, fear breeds hatred, hatred breeds anger, anger breeds destruction. We almost saw the whole chain completed: the bodyguard could have drawn his gun and shot me, or I could have gone across the table and hurt one of them.

How do you have productive discussions in those circumstances? What mistakes do most people make when expressing disagreement?

Racism is trickle-up. If you want to solve problems in a business, you often have to address issues at the top. It doesn’t work that way with racism. If you start with destruction at the top, it’s too late. Look at George Floyd. To address bigotry, you have to start at the bottom, addressing the ignorance that precedes fear, hatred, anger, and destruction. Thankfully, education is a cure to ignorance. Expose and educate people to the things they don’t understand. You can make laws, but people don't change how they feel until they realize that they’re wrong on their own.

Klansmen I interview often say, “Mr. Davis, you know black people are prone to crime. All you have to do is look at our prison system.” I listen, and I don’t interrupt. They’re telling a half-truth. Yes, there are proportionally more black people in prison than there are white people, but they’re not considering the inequality in the judicial system, or the role poverty plays in legal representation. Nevertheless, one’s perspective is one’s reality. Others have told me, “Black people are inherently lazy and scam the government welfare system.” Or they say, “Black people are born with a smaller brain. All you have to do is look at high school SAT scores.”

I find those statements to be offensive. But I am not offended by them. Most people would hit back: “No, you’re the criminal! You’re the one burning crosses! You’re the one hanging people from trees and bombing churches!” Now comes the hatred and anger. Now you’re on the verge of physical violence. Nothing productive can come from that; everything shuts down. But if I know what these guys are saying is not true, why should I be offended by a lie? I know who I am. All this guy sees is the color of my skin. And he tells me I’m a criminal, I’m on welfare, my brain is small?

When a Klansman walks into a room, his wall is up. I’m trying to bring that wall down.  I’ve been to 57 countries on six continents. But no matter how far I’ve gone, I’ve observed the same thing: we human beings all want the same things. We want to be respected. We want to be loved. We want to be heard. And we want the same thing for our families as everybody else wants for their families.

Roger Kelly wanted to be heard in that interview, so I let him be heard. I knew I didn’t fit into the categories he described, and neither did any of my friends, so I let him spew his hatred. And because I wasn’t pushing back on him, and he was used to pushback, I threw him off his game. Now the wall was coming down. He reciprocated by letting me be heard. I responded to some of his claims calmly but firmly: I don’t have a criminal record, I have never been on welfare, and I went to college.

Former Klansmen have told me what happens after a conversation like that. They go home, and they think about it, and they realize that they just sat down and talked with a black man for three hours. Maybe we didn’t agree on everything, but we agreed on some things. Cognitive dissonance starts to emerge: he was black, but he made sense, but he was black, but he made sense. The seed is planted for the next time I see them. Eventually, they have to decide: Do I ignore the fact that he’s black and change my direction, or do I continue living my life as a lie?

Is there a way to scale ideas like that? I’ve seen a lot of literature trying to “explain” frustrated white voters, but there isn’t a lot of goodwill toward the opposition on either side these days.

Okay, let’s talk about those voters.

Not everybody who votes for Donald Trump is a racist. I have a lot of friends who are Trump supporters, and they’re not racist. But I will say that every racist votes for Donald Trump. How does that work? I’m not a psychologist, but I know a lot about people and how they operate. To simplify a bit, you can put people into two categories: those who use emotion to make most decisions, and those who use logic to make most decisions. One is not better than the other, and no one is purely logical or purely emotional, but people usually lean one way or the other.

Donald Trump appeals to emotional people, whether they’re racist or not. He appeals to those who fear that their landscape is changing, those who want to Make America Great Again. Power is an emotion. Fear is an emotion. That’s what he’s appealing to. Racists on the right use the same kinds of appeals. I always hear Neo-Nazis and Klansmen say, “Daryl, I don’t want my kids to be brown.” They call it the “browning of America” or “white genocide through miscegenation,” and rely heavily on that idea to recruit new members. Those are codewords; they’re not speaking out against immigrants from Europe.

Here’s why that’s a problem. In 2042, just over 22 years from now, the United States will be 50 percent white and 50 percent non-white. There are plenty of white people who embrace that, but there are also plenty who will be very disconcerted about that. Power is all white people have known in this country for 401 years, and now some people feel their status being taken away.

It’s easy to identify overtly racist groups like the KKK, but it’s far harder to come to terms with our own tribalistic tendencies. How do we reckon with our personal biases?

Racism is to some degree cultural. Back in the 1940s and 1950s, a lot of black people moved to France. Why? Because French people treated black people more fairly. It’s not a white thing—French people probably have whiter ancestors than many white Americans.

What you said about tribalism is spot-on. Newton said that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Reverse discrimination exists, too, but nothing can be reversed unless it’s gone forward first. Neither one of them is right; they both need to stop. And it all goes back to education. A missed opportunity for dialogue is a missed opportunity for conflict resolution.

Specifically, we have to lift the taboo off the topic of race while kids are young and sponging information. That may be uncomfortable for some parents. But when I was in junior high school back in the 1970s, sex education was being introduced, and parents freaked out. However, if we didn’t learn about sex from our parents, and we didn’t learn it from our teachers we were going to learn out in the street. Today, sex education is just part of the curriculum, and kids are better informed than ever before. The same thing needs to happen with race. Teach race and reinforce it; don’t confine it to the shortest month of the year.

Finally, we’ve been dancing around the recent protests. What do you think of the progress that’s been made? Where do we go from here?

The protests could have been handled better, but I think this is the greatest thing that has happened in the modern history of this country. I’m not downplaying any of the accomplishments of Dr. King or anybody else from the 20th century, but we're seeing the page turn a lot faster than it’s ever turned before. If police officers were ever fired or charged, it used to take months; now it takes a few days.

George Floyd was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but there have been hundreds of George Floyds. This isn’t some anomaly; these things have been happening all along. We’re just seeing it more and more because people have video cameras in their phones. What is new, though, is the ripple effect. Statues are coming down. NASCAR—ground zero for the Confederate flag—has banned the Confederate flag. Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben’s changed their brands. Mississippi removed a symbol of hatred from its flag. This is all real, meaningful progress.

Now, taking down statues and banning flags does not change somebody’s attitude. That’s where the education and exposure come in. One of my favorite quotes comes from Mark Twain: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” What I have seen has enabled me to do what I do.

I know it can work. Tribalism can be resolved. We are not the Confederate States of America, we are the United States of America. That’s what we have to focus on.

The interview was condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Joshua Fowler specializes in Chinese infrastructure investment and trade in East Africa and South Asia. He is a former Visiting Researcher at the United States Air Force Academy and served with the International Trade Administration at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

The South China Sea and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) are two highly contentious topics at the heart of US-China affairs. Many analysts evaluate them independently: the South China Sea revolves around island-building and military infrastructure in the Spratly and Paracel Islands, while BRI engages with infrastructure investment and trade throughout Asia and Africa. However, there is more than meets the eye with China’s prominent foreign policy initiatives. Historically, the South China Sea played an important role in China’s ancient Silk Road trade. Merchant trading vessels sailed from China’s eastern shore to deliver goods to markets around the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean.

With the launch of BRI, the South China Sea has once again occupied a central role in transpacific relations. The region boasts the busiest shipping routes in the world, which will continue to grow as China strengthens trade with partners in Europe, Africa, and South Asia. China’s president Xi Jinping launched BRI in 2013; construction on military infrastructure in the South China Sea’s Spratly Islands began shortly after in 2014.

Moreover, the initiatives have a shared history in the Second Sino-Japanese War in the leadup to World War II. Japanese military strategy at the time revolved around the South China Sea: Emperor Hirohito planned to surround China and isolate it. China imported oil from the East Indies and Persian Gulf until 1949, making the South China Sea a critical fuel and military supply route for the Chinese economy. By taking control of Chinese ports, French Indochina (Today’s Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar), and the Dutch East Indies, Japan forced China to suffer fuel shortages and severe famines in certain regions. The encirclement strategy also cut off the country’s oil and military supply route along the Burma Road in 1942, making the unmaintained Xinjiang province the only way into China. Soon, inflation, malnutrition, and anti-government sentiment were rampant—a legacy that has left China fearful of encirclement to this day. As a result, China continues to reference the Second Sino-Japanese War as the culminating event in the Century of Humiliation, an era that began with European aggression in the Opium Wars.

Today, BRI is strengthening routes through Kazakhstan, Myanmar, and Pakistan, providing options should Chinese ports be constrained in any capacity. China is also building a railway and pipeline along the iconic Burma Road, installing energy pipelines through Central and South Asia, and establishing rail linkages between Western China and Southern Pakistan. China’s efforts in the South China Sea, by contrast, are about protecting China’s southern flank, including the historical and critical supply routes through Southeast Asia.

How might China’s actions in the South China Sea be a model for BRI? For any initiative by an authoritarian government, strategic communication and narrative-crafting are key. China followed a specific progression on communication in the South China Sea: the initial narrative focused on a priority to protect the livelihoods of citizens living on remote islands. Over time, the narrative became about providing the region with storm and weather warning systems. And today, we see more militant messaging with the deployment of SA-6 missiles and coast guard frigates.

Djibouti, a key BRI proponent and one of the most indebted countries to China, saw a very similar progression. China’s modern engagement with the East African nation began in earnest with the financing and construction of the Addis-Ababa-Djibouti Railway beginning in 2011. While the relationship originally began with the stated goals of international trade and infrastructure investment, just two years later China proposed its first overseas military base in Djibouti. China initially branded the overseas installation as a support facility without capacity for combat operations. But gradually, the facility developed into a fully operational military facility, including live-round combat simulations.

We are starting to see the same paradigm exported all over the developing world. In the eyes of China, its efforts in the South China Sea have been a success. It successfully implemented three airfields in the Spratly Islands in 2016, exploits and surveys oil reserves in Vietnam’s exclusive economic zones, and secures access to prized fishing waters. If China can get the same results in other areas without international censure, it will. And if the South China Sea is any model for BRI’s progression, the United States and her allies should expect more Chinese overseas military installations, and an increased capability to project power.

Fumiko Sasaki, PhD, is a faculty member of SIPA at Columbia University, teaching Asian politics-related courses.

When the Economist called the US-China rivalry “a new kind of cold war” in 2019, tensions were largely over trade, technology, and geopolitics. Today, relations are significantly poorer, with the United States demonizing China as an incompatible and perilous competitor. A US-China Cold War is emerging, and there are several forces trying to isolate China. Japan should lead the nations of the Asia-Pacific region in opposing these forces. By using the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, Japan can maintain a calming engagement with China and avoid taking sides in a clash of powers.

This year, Japan’s position in regard to China has been tested. In May, China introduced its infamous National Security Law in Hong Kong, prompting US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to assert that the Chinese Communist Party seeks “the destruction of Western ideas, Western democracies, Western values.” Facing the Hong Kong crisis, the governments of the UK, Canada, and Australia followed the United States in asking Japan to join a statement condemning China. However, Japan declined the request. The same week, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy leaders wrote to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, imploring him to “think twice about whether [he] really needed to invite President Xi to Japan.” Again, Japan’s response was to dodge: Abe also kept his distance from President Trump and US criticisms of China for its handling of the coronavirus.

Japan’s decisions may appear feckless, but Japan has no better option: however repressive and aggressive the Chinese government is, Japan must realize that it has no choice but to engage with China. Unlike the United States, Japan is right next door to China, a nation of 1.3 billion people and nuclear weapons. Evidently, any Chinese decisions will have an outsized impact on Japan and the wider East Asian sphere.

Japan has avoided conflict with China for decades even before China became the economic powerhouse it is today. In 1989, Japan had 15.3 percent of the world GDP compared to China’s 1.7 percent share. This was the same year the Chinese government attacked protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. However, when the leaders of the seven largest world economies (G7) were set to harshly denounce China for the massacre, Japan protested. Despite fierce opposition, Japan successfully inserted a phrase into the joint declaration that the G7 nations did not want to isolate China. And eventually, Japan was the first of the G7 countries to ease sanctions on China imposed in the wake of Tiananmen Square.

Thirty years later, Japan and China’s relative economic strength have changed dramatically: Japan’s share of the world GDP has declined to 5.9 percent while China’s has surged to 16.0 percent. More than ever, Japan needs to have a good relationship with China—not just geopolitically but economically, particularly as Japan struggles to recover from the coronavirus-caused downturn.

However, just when Japan needs China most, Washington is hawkish toward Beijing. With rising negative feelings toward China among Americans, experts say that a cold war between the two has already started and that the confrontation will “force countries to choose a side,” democratic or authoritarian. In Japan, while Abe remains conciliatory toward China, 85 percent of Japanese respondents had a negative view of the regional power in a poll taken in 2019. Some members of Abe’s party have publicly stated they are opposed to President Xi visiting Japan. In both the United States and Japan, there is strong anti-China sentiment.

Nonetheless, the US-China cold war is ultimately a matter of security, not public opinion. As Lee Kwan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore, said, “When elephants fight, the grass is trampled.” While Lee Kwan Yew was describing Asian countries caught between the giants of the US and the USSR, Japan should be guided by a similar sense of realpolitik, the calculation of national interests, not lofty principles.

Historical diplomacy provides a roadmap for Japan’s best path forward. Before attending the 1989 G7 summit, Hiroshi Mitsuzuka, the Japanese foreign minister, met the leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to gather their voices. He represented these leaders at the summit by quoting Mr. Lee: “I prefer a peaceful China as my neighbor to an angry and annoyed China.” Just as it did in 1989, Japan should not praise China’s authoritarian regime, yet it should soften China by engaging it. This time, Japan is relatively weaker but has a stronger and more effective tool.

That tool is the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). RCEP has the aim of creating a free-trade partnership in the Asia-Pacific, including China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand, and the ten ASEAN members. These nations want a harmonious China and are ready to engage it. Japan is well-positioned to lead these efforts as the world’s third-largest economy and the leader of another free-trade agreement: the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. Because China is eager to conclude RCEP, Japan should use this leverage to improve the region’s ties with China.

China needs security and respect. RCEP can facilitate negotiations, compromise, and bargaining among the members. Through these processes, the Asia-Pacific countries can and should nurture trust among themselves and provide China with a sense of partnership and a channel to the West. All this can be done without allowing China to dominate RCEP.

However, RCEP and warming relations face several challenges, including China’s increasingly aggressive behavior in the South and East China Seas and against Taiwan. In response, some ASEAN countries have toughened their attitude toward China. Nonetheless, RCEP can survive such geopolitical disputes. Opposing China’s policies is not the same as isolating China. Engaging is not the same as appeasing. To solve these very issues, stakeholders need to engage China, the most powerful Asian country. RCEP should help achieve that goal.

It is often said that unlike western nations, Asian nations don’t seem to care about universal values like human rights and democracy. This is not true. Realpolitik is universal. As a leader of the European Union, Germany condemned Russia’s annexation of the Crimea Peninsula in 2014 and imposed sanctions on Russia. Today, however, Germany imports Russian gas despite strong US opposition. And the United States, while condemning China for its authoritarianism, supports Saudi Arabia, a different autocracy.

Japan must be wise in avoiding another cold war. At the coming G7 meeting this year, Mr. Abe should represent the Asia-Pacific nations in their need for a peaceful China and accept the responsibility of modulating China’s behavior.

This is part 4 of a 4 part series on Esports.

Riot Games is the masthead company behind League of Legends, with their name being plastered all over the esports leagues and the game itself. Their global headquarters are located in their studios in Los Angeles, not far from where the company first started developing their game. This would make Riot Games a primarily American company responsible for managing a global game and network?

Well, that’s partially true. In 2015, a company that has flown under the radar of Western societies purchased a 100 percent ownership stake in Riot Games: China’s multinational internet holdings company, Tencent.

On the one hand, this has had minimal impact on League of Legends. Riot Games is still the developer and publisher, meaning they maintain the game and produce content. People who focus on running the League professional circuits and developing the game are still technically employees of Riot Games, although the professional circuits tend to be splintered into various offshoot companies themselves. In some cases, it has even been a major boon for League. The only way League was able to expand as quickly and dominantly as it has in China was due to Tencent’s work. Indeed, it is unlikely that Riot would have been able to break into the Chinese market at all without Tencent’s presence.

But while the effects of Tencent’s acquisition of League haven’t been felt within the game, it has major implications on esports around the world. This is mainly due to China’s increased ability to pressure companies to comply with its official narrative, and force western companies to give Beijing what it wants with the threat of being cut off from the lucrative Chinese market. So long as the western companies “play nice” with the Chinese wants, they get access to the billions of dollars that flows through the Chinese economy.

Tencent has risen to become the most valuable video game company in the world, topping USD$500 billion in 2017, and its Chairman and CEO, Ma Huateng, is the richest man in China. But how has this obscure company developed a worth that eclipses well known triple-A studios like Sony, Activision Blizzard, Microsoft, and Electronic Arts?

The answer? Tencent seemingly has its fingers in every esports-related pie. The company has invested in an incredibly large number of companies and has purchased the rights for an even larger number of games. Besides owning League and Riot Games, Tencent also owns a 40 percent stake in Epic Games, publisher of Fortnite; the rights to Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG, Fortnite’s predecessor); a significant stake in Activision Blizzard; and the rights to distribute Candy Crush in China. It even owns Finland’s Supercell, which develops Clash of Clans and Clash Royale, two of the most popular mobile games in the world.

Tencent’s unique business strategy allows them to remain mostly behind the scenes. Their approach involves investing in developers and allowing them to retain autonomy, making everyone happy. The developers get a funder, and Tencent gets a lot of money. But since Tencent is the gateway to the lucrative Chinese market, it also gives it a lot of control over companies and their actions. Displeasing the Chinese giant could threaten a developer’s access to China, which would likely see revenues plummet off of a cliff.

And due to the Hong Kong protests, this was thrust into the spotlight. In fall of 2019, Tencent effectively shut down the NBA’s activities in China due to Houston Rockets’ general manager Daryl Morey tweeting in support of the Hong Kong protests. This sent the NBA into a financial panic and led to intense pressure from the league to undo the damage. The tweet was deleted, players backpedaled their statements of support, and the protests were actively suppressed during broadcasts and games. China was appeased.

Then along came professional Hearthstone player Ng “Blitzchung” Wai Chung. At the end of a post-match interview at the Hearthstone Grandmasters Tournament, Blitzchung pulled down his Hong Kong protester mask and yelled “Liberate Hong Kong! Revolution of our age.” In response, Activision Blizzard, the developer of the popular online deck building card game, promptly issued Blitzchung a year-long ban effective immediately, effectively kicking him out of the Grandmasters tournament and denying him any winnings he would have earned during that period. They also terminated the contracts of the two interviewers involved in the incident because they appeared to encourage Blitzchung’s statement. Blizzard’s reasoning for the harsh response was to preempt China’s angry disruption of the company’s services and subsequent loss of revenue. Again, China was appeased and Tencent kept Blizzard’s Chinese market access open.

This isn’t restricted to Hearthstone or Activision Blizzard. Not long after this incident, Riot Games issued a statement where it stipulated that its broadcasters should refrain from discussing sensitive topics on air. The statement was in response to fans angrily pointing out that its broadcasters seemed to be censoring the name of the administrative region from the broadcasts, with the name of the team Hong Kong Attitude exclusively referred to as HKA. While broadcasters often refer to teams interchangeably between their abbreviation and full name, they never begin to say the full name and then quickly switch to the abbreviation, as occurred during one of the broadcasts of the 2019 World Championships.

This indirect control of companies through access to a market ought to worry all of us. It means players could have their careers ended for supporting a political movement or voicing criticisms. This goes against some of the fundamental principles that professional athletes have adhered to for decades. Most professional sports teams in the world are founded on some degree of community service and dedication to activism. Indeed, many sports players retire from their careers as athletes and move on to the world of activism; Clark Kellogg’s activism on social justice in sports being one such example. Even esports has strived to instill its players with a degree of activism. Twitch streamers, including professional players, combined raised over USD$200,000 to fight the fires ravishing the Australian countryside. China’s attempt to censor entire sports, electronic and traditional, goes against sportsmanship itself.

Fortunately, although China was appeased by these capitulations, fans were not. The Blizzard scandal caused such outrage among the gaming community that angry fans, other developers, and even American lawmakers issued strong condemnations against Blizzard’s decision to ban Blitzchung. Epic Games issued a statement that it would never restrict speech of any kind, even though Tencent owns a 40 percent ownership stake in the company. The criticism against Blizzard was so scathing that the company returned USD$10,000 in confiscated prize money to Blitzchung and reduced his ban to 6 months, although they were adamant in refusing to reverse the decision completely.

It is critical to highlight the pivotal role played by Tencent in these developer-China relationships. Although the Chinese government is the one that orders the disruption of a developer’s economic activity within the Chinese market, the company that carries out that order in the esports world is Tencent. Just as Tencent is the gateway in, so too is it the enforcer of the Chinese government’s will. In the case of Riot Games, its 100 percent ownership stake means that the Riot leadership cannot risk displeasing China, or it will face serious repercussions from their only shareholder.

Already, Riot has proven developers’ willingness to play along with China to secure their spot within the Chinese market. In order to register for a League account in China, a player must provide their unique “national ID” number to the developer, in order to verify ages. This has recently begun to matter significantly. In line with a recent Chinese law, Tencent has recently placed a 2 hour time cap for minors playing League. Following those 2 hours, minors are automatically booted from the game and barred from playing any more. These have recently also been enforced recently in Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and Fortnite, and a one hour limit has already been in place for under-12 players of Tencent’s Honor of Kings. The Chinese government claims that this is an anti-addiction measure, which has the added benefit of improving eyesight. Failure to comply with this new rule would likely have seen Riot-Tencent lose the right to operate within the Chinese market, but it demonstrates the willingness Western companies have when dealing with China’s social controls.

The developers can’t even stand by China’s anti-addiction campaign because the campaign is completely founded on common misconceptions. Video games are rarely addictive, with negative, gambling-like patterns being exhibited by less than 1 percent of gamers. Even the WHO, which recently declared “video gaming addiction” a diagnosable condition, acknowledges that the majority of gamers will never actually develop addiction and that they haven’t really conducted their own study. We are basically creating a disorder that doesn’t exist and pathologizing a behavioral outlet, with China’s “computer recovery boot camps” being the prime examples of the illogical extreme—although developers are becoming cunningly adept at capturing more and more attention due to advances in technology and marketing.

Although studies haven’t been able to conclusively prove the existence of video game addiction, they have been able to show that video games may present some tangible benefits. Many studies have shown a direct correlation between video game playing and spatial processing, multitasking, perseverance, and attention control. When video games are played, the brain’s rewards pathway system is activated, leading to increased motivation and goal orientation, as well as the hippocampus, leading to increased learning and memory (probably the only way anyone is able to memorize all of League’s champions and items, especially if they play other games). Speaking from personal experience, I can pick up a game I last played years ago and still remember the controls and strategies without a second thought. Lastly, playing video games with people leads to strong social bonds. Many gamers end up playing in groups with people they’ll never meet, but will consistently go back to those same people.

This isn’t to say that there shouldn’t be limits nor that there aren’t negative side effects. There are dangers to interacting with random people on the internet, especially for kids. Research has shown that one to two hours of gaming time is ideal for teenagers, better than more than three or four and none at all. And we can’t forget about the radioactive toxicity of games like League and DOTA 2. Nor should the disastrous effects of a run-away compulsion to play video games be understated.

The time limit on the Chinese servers isn’t the only way Tencent has fiddled with League. Fans recently discovered that the global database of blacklisted words, the repository which detects profanity or inappropriate words, is also tailored to Chinese censorship. For instance, the word “Uyghur,”the name of the oppressed Muslim ethnic group in China’s Xinjiang province, seemed to be intentionally filtered out, even in servers outside of China. Riot responded by saying they had fixed the issue and began an internal investigation into the blacklisted words database. They pointed out that the chat filter occasionally blocks words erroneously, highlighting that certain phrases such as “Free Uyghurs” appeared fine. But League fans have responded that other words—such as “genocide,” “Tianenmen” in simplified Chinese, and “great firewall”—seemed to be blocked as well.

This all culminates with a further push from Tencent and China to co-opt the international professional League scene. Already, Tencent signed away the exclusive rights to stream League within China to Chinese media giant Bilibili, effectively barring Amazon’s Twitch or other Chinese platforms from streaming for the country’s domestic market. Quite conveniently, Tencent happens to own an 18 percent ownership stake in Bilibili, more than Bilibili’s Chairman—and no stake in Amazon. This deal will require all viewers in China to stream League games via Bilibili, but will still let Riot stream the games internationally via Twitch (mainly because Bilibili doesn’t have the appeal in order to justify broadcasting outside of China). This is mainly an internal deal designed to make Tencent more money and limit the amount of control Riot has over the LPL.

More importantly, Tencent is developing an exclusive, pro-only server in China. This means that the best players in the world would be given an exclusive place where they would be able to test their skills against their peers and their peers alone. This would provide players and teams an outlet where they could practice at a quality not seen anywhere else in the global professional League scene. The catch? These players would have to move to China. Obviously designed to give the Chinese teams a leg up on international competition and attract high-profile players to China, this pro-only server might possibly cement the LPL as the best League circuit in the world, and Chinese teams have already won Worlds twice in a row. The potential co-optation of the professional League scene would only further increase Tencent’s power over Riot and League’s global affairs.

Esports are an incredibly complex global phenomenon. Developers, players, teams, governments, viewers, and corporations are all players in its complex market. Hundreds of different games fall under the umbrella term esports, each with their own rules, teams, and players. Ultimately, they are set to become global sports at the level of, or even surpassing, soccer, potentially joining the Olympics by 2024. Yet for all their potential, they still have many problems. They aren’t timeless and are completely subject to the profit-seeking visions of their developers. There are very few legal precedents for any of the issues they are raising, and must go up against the stigma many have against video games in general. Tencent and China are pulling strings behind the scenes in most cases, leading to questionable circumstances where developers are willing to sacrifice civil liberties to guarantee their access to China’s lucrative market. And finally, we would do well to remember who is being left behind during the esports boom, and the implications that has on these fractured global professional circuits.