For our January 25th meeting, we read two articles. The first article, by Redie Bereketeab was “Self-determination and Secession: A 21st Century Challenge to the Post-colonial State in Africa.” This is a policy proposal which talks about the history of states in Africa and suggests what should be done about secessionist movements.

Bereketeab has a number of suggestions, but one of our chief criticisms was that many of them are not very specific. A lot of the proposals suggest trying to accomplish various things that may be at odds, or trying to be fair and balanced even when it is not clear how this would work.
For example, the fourth proposal is to reduce biased interventions into Africa, because in the past, other countries have helped induce secessionist movements that have resulted in conflict. Interventions should instead be “balanced and magnanimous” in Bereketeab’s words. We wondered whether it’s possible to have balanced intervention at all in a world where every state has its own agenda – if one country undertakes an unbalanced intervention, do other countries need to try to match the intervention with an opposite one? We also wondered whether balancing intervention is the best option. Could there be instances where helping a country secede requires unbalanced intervention in favor of the secession? We talked about the example of Yugoslavia as a warning against undertaking any sort of intervention in these cases, even if it is for noble reasons.

Another proposal Bereketeab makes is that Africa should revive the movement towards a Pan-African movement and eventually a United States of Africa, modeled on the EU, the United States of America, and other alliances. We wondered whether this paints with too broad a brush. Africa is such a diverse continent that there might not be good reason to think that Pan-Africanism is a good way of organizing countries together. Northeast Africa has a lot of countries that might prefer to see themselves aligned with the Middle East, for instance.

A third proposal Bereketeab advances is that we should realize that respect for territorial integrity and respect for the self-determination of people are not opposing goals. We wondered whether this is ever the case. It seems like this would only happen in nation states: states where the residents are almost entirely one people. In multinational states, or when it comes to nations spread across multiple states, it seems difficult to respect territorial integrity and self-determination at the same time. So, unless we think that all states should be nation states, it might be better to keep the two notions of self-determination and territorial integrity at odds, even if this sometimes leads to strife.
The second article we read was “Moral Cosmopolitanism and the Right to Immigration” by Yusuf Yuksekdag. Yuksekdag argues that any ethical policy of immigration needs to take into consideration not just whether it is okay to exclude people from one’s state but also whether it is permissible to let people leave their original state. If, for instance, an immigration policy results in a “brain drain” from poor countries which leaves them without any doctors, nurses, and other important experts, is the country they immigrate to responsible for preventing this? Yuksekdag says the country is: he argues that moral cosmopolitanism, the idea that every human being counts equally, tells us that we can’t ignore the people in the immigrant’s home country when it comes to calculations of whether we should let the immigrant immigrate.

Our discussion of the article touched on a few points. We wondered whether Yuksekdag was too quick to discount remittances as an option: if immigrants send money back to their home country, could this conceivably make up for the “brain drain,” even if the money isn’t always fairly distributed? We also wondered how to implement something like Yuksekdag’s proposal, and we came up with a few options. One would be for receiving states to pay for skilled immigrants that they receive, so that the state losing the professionals would be compensated. Another would be for us to reverse our current policy of favoring educated immigrants – we could instead bias our already limited immigration so as to prefer those with little to no education.

One issue we discussed is whether this is feasible. If America is already somewhat anti-immigrant, wouldn’t focusing on accepting less educated immigrants make it worse? We talked about how experts agree that immigration is a net economic boost to a society, even if the immigrants do not have a lot of education, and we thought back to earlier in America’s history when we had few compunctions about bringing in all sorts of immigrants (like the “tired, [the] poor, [the] huddled masses yearning to breathe free” from the poem on the Statue of Liberty).

- Danny Weltman

Hello! This is the blog for the reading group on Borders. We are an interdisciplinary group of scholars that meets more or less biweekly to discuss all sorts of issues about borders. With the help of a grant from UCSD’s Center for the Humanities, we’re investigating all sorts of topics related to borders and, hopefully, coming to some conclusions!

For our first meeting, we read three articles about the Peace of Westphalia. The Peace of Westphalia was a result of two treaties signed in 1648 which brought an end to fighting in Europe that was driven partially by religious differences. Various factions of Christianity would often invade neighboring territories and slaughter the inhabitants because they were of a different Christian denomination. The Peace of Westphalia ended this because the signatories to the treaty agreed that the ruler of each state would have the final say over the religion of that state, a practice known as cuius regio, eius religio. This is often seen as the beginning of our modern practice of state sovereignty, under which each state has full control over what happens within its borders: first, rulers controlled religion thanks to the Peace of Westphalia, and from there on out they began to control more.

At least, this is the classic story. The articles we read for our first meeting took issue with this idea. The first article, by Bruno Bueno de Mesquita, traced the origin of sovereignty back in time to the Concordat of Worms in 1122. The second article, by Andreas Osiander, argued that the treaties of Westphalia changed little in European political landscape and that most of their imagined significance is a result of modern scholars misreading the history. Along with the final article we read, by Richard Falk, we looked at whether a focus on the Westphalian notion of sovereignty is preventing us from understanding changes that are being wrought by the modern forces of globalization.

Our discussion touched on quite a few issues. For example, we tried to understand whether Bueno de Mesquita was correct about the significance of the Concordat of Worms, and whether it mattered if Westphalia itself was or was not the turning point. One of the key aspects of Bueno de Mesquita’s article focused on a conflict between the pope and kings, specifically the king of France, over which bishops would be appointed in various bishoprics. We talked about whether simplifying the conflict to one between these two forces might mean that we would be missing out on other important aspects, especially if the subjects who actually lived during this time did not perceive much of a divide between pope and king.

At our next meeting, we will read and discuss articles about social boundaries, historical borderlands, and a case study focusing on how the 1903 census in Ottoman Mongolia created and shaped national identity. Look for some highlights of that discussion on this blog soon after our meeting!

- Danny Weltman

For our last meeting, we discussed two articles: “Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide,” by Melissa Wright, and “Landscaping Palestine,” by UCSD’s own Gary Fields. Wright’s article discussed the horrifying femicides in Ciudad Juárez and the larger context of drug-related violence in that city. She provided ways to understand the intersection of gender and violence; I was struck, for example, by her point that in Mexican Spanish “public man” means “citizen,” while “public woman” means “prostitute.” Our group also considered the role that borders might have to play in this situation. Ciudad Juárez is right across the border from El Paso, and cross-border drug trafficking surely has something to do with the climate of violence. Perhaps this location on the border affects what it is to be a citizen—particularly a female citizen—of Ciudad Juárez.

Next, we moved on to Fields’s article on Palestine. When we discussed Hassanpour’s article on MED-TV last quarter, we discussed how this TV station gives the Kurds a form of sovereignty that is in no way tied to control over territory. But Fields in some ways offers a counterpoint to Hassanpour—for Palestinians, at least, control over territory appears to be necessary for sovereignty. One way Israel denies this sovereignty is by controlling mobility. So even if a town in Palestine is not directly affected by settlements or security fortifications, its members may not be able to get to other towns or even to their own farms. In this way, mobility is tied to identity. If a town is made up of farmers who suddenly can’t get to their farms, their identity is likely to change significantly as they are essentially forced to urbanize.

There was also an interesting echo back to Torpey’s history of the passport, which we read in the winter. When we read that, I was struck by Torpey’s point that an ID requirement amounts to a statement by the state that you cannot be trusted not to lie about your identity. I’d never thought of passports that way before. But when Fields discusses the much more onerous checkpoint system in Israel and Palestine, I think about how ID checks take place within a framework of relationships between the party presenting ID and the party checking it. This surely affects the way each party sees the other and the way it sees itself.

Fields’s article was essentially descriptive, but we considered what it might mean for what a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might look like. We concluded that it shows the importance of mobility as well as control over territory. Any solution will have to keep in mind the ways people move through the spaces they occupy.

A couple of days before we met to discuss Wright and Fields, Democracy Now! had a two-part interview with Emad Burnat, a Palestinian filmmaker who documented the construction of the Israeli West Bank wall near his home. Here are those interview clips:
5 Broken Cameras: Home Videos Evolve into Stirring Film on Palestinian Resistance to Israeli Wall
Part 2: Acclaimed New Film "5 Broken Cameras" Captures Palestinian Village’s Nonviolent Resistance

Well, that wraps up our meetings for this year. I’d like to thank the Center for the Humanities once again for giving us the opportunity to form this group. It’s been a real boon to my work, and I think the same thing is true for many members of the group.
–Amy Berg

Scott Lucas (Political Science) presented a paper at Professor Kymlicka’s recent visit, in which Lucas argued that “a plausible account of intersubjectivity can support an argument for domesticated animal citizenship, but has some difficultly accounting for wild animal sovereignty or liminal denizenship.”

The full paper may be found here: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity as Conditions for Citizenship

Danny Weltman (Philosophy) presented a paper an wild animal sovereignty, in which he argued that ” because sovereignty is divisible, when it comes to animals, we should divide it such that animal sovereigns are sovereign only over the things that animals as autonomous beings would need to have sovereignty over.”

The entire paper can be found here:An Expanded Concept of Animal Sovereignty

During Professor Kymlicka’s visit, Kyle Hains (Political Science) presented a paper on how animal citizenship may close the gap between ecological thinking and animal rights. He argued that, “the citizenship model succeeds as a clear extension of the existing structure of negative rights in ART which incorporates some more overarching ecological concerns.”

[link redacted]

Just in time for Professor Kymlicka’s visit (tomorrow, May 16, at 2 pm in SSB 101; everyone is welcome), the New York Times considers the relationship between domesticated and liminal animals:

“Last week, Animal Care and Control sent out a stern written statement warning that “San Franciscans do not seem to be getting the message about how to coexist peacefully with local wildlife” because many dog owners were ignoring the law and letting their pets run loose. Animal Care posted a video on YouTube of an off-leash Rottweiler, filmed by his owner, harassing two coyotes apparently protecting a den.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/us/in-san-francisco-coyotes-in-parks-are-a-concern.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120515

-Amy Berg

For our sixth meeting, we read Zoopolis by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka. This is a political theory book about how we should conceive of our relation to animals. Donaldson and Kymlicka contend that traditional approaches to animals, which focus solely on animal welfare or on a limited set of animal rights, are too limited. Instead, we should think of animals as citizens, with all the rights and privileges that this entails. Domesticated animals like cats and dogs should be seen as fellow citizens of our state, wild animals should be seen as citizens of their own sovereign nations within which we typically ought not to interfere, and “liminal” animals that live among us, like the pigeons, mice, and raccoons that share our cities, should be seen in the same way that we see other non-citizen denizens, like foreigners who have taken up long-term residence in our country. Zoopolis gives a number of arguments in favor of this view and spends time exploring what it would mean to treat animals this way.

Our group considered a number of objections to Donaldson and Kymlicka. We first asked whether the conception of citizenship relied on is too thin: they argue that the ability to use moral reasoning is not necessary for equal treatment as citizens, because, for instance, babies are unable to do this, and they also present some evidence for the ability of certain animals (like capuchin monkeys) to undertake moral reasoning, but one might wonder whether most animals can do this and whether treating someone as a citizen might require this.

Another implication of Donaldson and Kymlicka’s view is that it is morally inappropriate to train dogs as guide dogs, because their entire lives are forced down a path that the dogs might not prefer if they had been given the choice. We asked on the one hand whether this went too far, considering the costs to blind humans, and on the other hand whether coercive training in one’s youth might actually be for one’s benefit, as when a child is forced to take tennis lessons but later becomes a tennis star.

We also considered some deeper challenges to the theory. The first is that Donaldson and Kymlicka might be relying on an unstated assumption that industry, growth, and production are desirable and that we must work to treat animals correctly while accommodating these things, but work by deep ecologists in the field of environmental ethics, for in stance, suggests that we need to rethink our place in nature before we can decide more specific questions about how to tolerate and treat animals.

Another challenge from a different angle is whether the theory presented in the book is much more revisionary than it first appears: if treating animals correctly means not just a cessation of animal slaughter for food but the redesigning of our cities and vast modifications in the ways we relate to animals, the end result might look very extreme. A third challenge is that the book is situated in the broadly liberal framework of political theory, and we may need to adopt liberalism as a starting point for the theory to be at all plausible.

Perhaps the deepest objection we looked at was about what beings have moral worth. Donaldson and Kymlicka take it as a given that most animals (fish, dogs, bears, birds, and so on) have moral worth because they have a subjective experience of life: they can be harmed or benefitted as individuals, and it matters to each animal whether their life goes better or worse. Inanimate objects, lakes, plants, bacteria, perhaps insects, and many other things don’t matter morally, because they do not have this kind of subjective experience. Building on this, Donaldson and Kymlicka present a theory of how to treat animals, but we wondered whether taking this for granted necessarily reifies this criterion of moral significance. How sure are we that Donaldson and Kymlicka know what animals we should care about and what things deserve moral treatment by virtue of their inherent worth? If we are wrong about this, do books like Zoopolis simply make the problem worse?

On May 16, 2012, Will Kymlicka will be coming to UCSD to discuss exactly these sorts of issues. He will give a talk from 2:00 to 4:00 in SSB 101. The talk is open to the public and everyone is invited and encouraged to come.

–Danny Weltman

Update: Will Kymlicka’s talk will take place on Wednesday, May 16, at 2 pm in SSB 101.

Are dogs part of the state? Is there a sovereign nation of bears out there? Do our political commitments travel all the way to non-human animals?

Professor Will Kymlicka of Queen’s University, noted political theorist, will deliver a public lecture on animal citizenship, based on his new book, Zoopolis. Extending his previous work on minority rights, he argues for a model of citizenship that extends to non-human animals.

The lecture will take place in Social Science Building Room 101 at 2 PM. Free and open to the public.

For more information, please contact Amy Berg or Scot Lucas. Professor Kymlicka’s website can be found here: http://post.queensu.ca/~kymlicka/

Please register here: https://www.facebook.com/events/395244783848645/?context=create

Sponsored by the Working Group on Borders, Territories, and Obligations, the UCSD Center on Humanities, and the Center for Global Justice.

This week’s discussion focused on two essays: David Harvey’s “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination” and Stuart Elden’s “Land, Terrain, Territory.”

The Harvey essay takes as its central issue the social nature of conceptions of space and time, and the way in which these conceptions affect our interactions with society and the world. One example of what one might consider a “conflict” between conceptions of space in different spheres of activity is the hidden nature of all of the economic relationships behind the consumer goods that we buy—what Marx calls commodity fetishism. The commodity, in a modern market economy, is presented to us on a shelf without a history, without connections. It’s presence on the shelf likely depended on the labor of hundreds, and it has probably travelled thousands of miles, all of this spatial and temporal information is obscured. In this way the reach of our moral connections are seriously constrained relative to our economic connections. One’s purchase of grapes creates a direct economic connection to the grape-picker working under slave-like conditions in Honduras, but the isolated commodity prevents the development of a moral-spatial connection as well. How one might respond to such a problem is hard to say. On the one hand one might argue that consumers should have information about far-reaching economic relationships so that the sphere of moral sentiment can be expanded to match. On the other, it might well be argued that this is unreasonable due to the endless reach of the market, and that the only way to balance these two conflicting conceptions of the interactive spaces is to strive for more local economic activity which is not so remote from our capacity for personal connection.
The possibility of different and perhaps incompatible conceptions of time can be seen in the example of comparing the time horizons of an economist and a geologist. While the latter might approach problems with an eye to development within that quarter or business cycle, the geologist might operate with a horizon of millions of years. Obviously, these two temporal modes will yield very different answers to similar problems—environmental change for example. But while important obligations might evaporate in the face of short-term economic considerations, the opposite also seems to be the case. As Keynes says, “in the long term we’re all dead.” A time horizon that is too distant neglects what is essential in the present and near future. There are no easy answers here, but it is clear that the way a society thinks about space and time has a deep impact on its behavior and understanding of the world.

Moving to the Elden essay, the focus shifts toward the different ways of understanding geographic space. That is, the difference between land, terrain, and territory. The central distinction in this piece is between an organic and a calculative orientation towards land. The peasant on his land might certainly consider a certain area to be his and another to be his neighbors, but this is more a practical than a political consideration. Their spheres of work are divided, but the land itself is not—it remains an organic whole. To treat land as territory is to abstract from what is there and impose a rational-political framework. Precise borders are drawn, areas are calculated; territory engenders territoriality, defense, conflict.
One of the central distinctions in the work of Martin Heidegger is between present-at-hand and ready-at-hand orientations toward the world. When the world is ready-at-hand it is treated as an organic part of one’s state of being rather than a separate thing to be categorized and analyzed. The peasant on his land has a ready-at-hand orientation; there is no calculative distance between him and the land, he is almost a part of it. On the other hand, a present-at-hand orientation abstracts from the world and distances the subject from it. This is essentially the process of scientific rationalization. The division of time is a perfect example of this. As methods of measurement become more precise over the centuries time is abstracted from basic human being. It becomes something separate from us which is then imposed upon our thoughts and behavior from outside. What was once an organic part of our experience of the world becomes something foreign and scientific. This is the transformation that occurs as land becomes territory. Man is separated from the land, and an invisible membrane of scientific and political calculation seals it off.