Mugen's Public Library
Political science
The Rohingya & Islamophobia: A Dire Situation
On August 31st, 2017, the lifeless husks of 9 women and 10 Rohingya refugees washed ashore the sands of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.1 Under dictatorial rule of the Myanmar army between 1962 and 2011, the Rohingya people of the Rakhine State have been handed a predicament of institutionalized oppression on the grounds of religious and ethnic discrimination. While these acts of terror are often justified by the supposed targeting of extremist subsets within the population, the scale and scope of these acts can only be regarded as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” says United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein. 2...
The Us invasion of Iraq: An Imperialist Diversion
On September 11th, 2001 the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization launched an attack on United States soil. With thousands dead at the hands of an elusive enemy, the global hegemon was left vulnerable and with limited options of retaliation. By September 2002, the US revealed their National Security Strategy which outlined the justifications for their subsequent invasion of Iraq. The US vowed to “rid the world of evil” (Bush 2001) and exercise its unilateral military and economic power of aggression against states that are actively supporting terrorists, developing weapons of mass destruction, or simply non-democratic (National Security Council 2002, 2). It would later be revealed that the Bush administration deceived the American public into supporting a baseless and genocidal moral crusade. Weapons inspectors and Iraq specialists concluded that Saddam Hussein lacked the means and motive to produce weapons of mass destruction (Hinnebusch 2007, 209). Moreover, Robert Jervis determined that even if the regime had the capacity to develop nuclear weapons, the threat on the US would be containable, and would not prompt the self-appointed right to pre-emptive attack that the US declared (Jervis 2003, 315). As for the professed intention to establish a democratic government in Iraq, this notion is muted by the system of political and economic patronage that the US left in its stead (Chomsky 2003, 251-254). What is left of the US mission in Iraq has puzzled realist and structural theorists in the field of international relations.
Architectural Modernity and Cold War Violence
In the 1970s at the height of the cold war era, the US and USSR were finding any grounds to battle on. One of these stages was architectural export. These two great states competed over the urban landscapes of foreign cities as a way of packaging their respective ideologies in the structures they plant abroad. American modernity took the architectural forms of mass developments for the middle class; suburbias that embedded in their makeup the liberal democratic ideologies prioritizing family, individualism and the capitalist promise of upward mobility for the lower and middle classes. On the other side of the Berlin wall the USSR was communicating to the world their own leninist communist ideologies through their form of architectural modernity. In Heidegger’s Being in Time he argues that individuals find themselves in a physical and temporal world of meaning that shapes the ideological landscape in which people construct meaning and identities. While the cold war battle for the world’s urban landscape might seem innocuous at first glance, Heidegger’s contributions stress how architecture can be weaponized to infiltrate the ideologies and cultural values of foreign states. This paper examines how the cold war was fought in the architectural world and considers the necessity of both ideological wavefronts in a complete architectural modernity. By abstracting from democratic and communist values, this paper concludes that architecture is incomplete without the free-spirit dreamer on one hand, to push the boundaries of what is deemed possible in structures, and the calculated scientist on the other hand, to ensure that these dreams are both practical and feasible.
The Immovable Olive Tree and the Unstoppable Force: The Obstacles to Deliberation Between Palestine and Israel
This paper examines the challenges to deliberation between Palestinians and Israelis under the Arendtian and Habbermasian conceptions of ideal communication. It draws on Palestinian and Israeli sources to determine a historically consistent account of the area’s factual reality. In doing so, the paper considers the asymmetric power relations between the two states and the impacts of occupation on Palestine’s embryonic constitution. By calling on legal critical race theorists and canadian indigenous law as the product of a completed colonial campaign, this paper tracks the genesis of Palestinian property law and situates it in an international legal framework. After developing an account of the contentious political and legal topography of modern day Palestine and Israel, this paper considers the phenomenological impacts of colonization on Palestinian’s experiences of time, statehood and history. In its concluding remarks, a Kantian model for cosmopolitan revolution is utilized for broadening the scope of ideal communication between Palestinians and Israelis in a globalizing world.
Two essays from a Course on Middle Eastern Politics
Prior to this course I viewed the Middle East as an area of the world that is yet to join the rest of the world in its glorious state of modernity and democratic freedom. I was convinced that what it took for a modern Arab state to be considered developed and free was to strive for what western nations have achieved. This course taught me that Middle Eastern politics represents its own unique set of challenges that can’t be narrowed down by a normative western frame. The Orient of today was shaped by deeply entrenched colonial histories, and yet the deepest impact wasn’t the geographic boundaries drawn up without regard, nor the derailing of economic growth by creating an insurmountable dependency on primary resources, but rather it was the more elusive colonial crime of lacerating the continuity of historical and socio-political thought in the near-East. Colonialism was based on the ideology that the west was better than the east and that the Orient needed to be saved from itself. While colonial legacies left a lasting and scathing mark on the orient, it also left the taste of that very ideology in traditional western academia and derivative policy. Through the various case studies and dives into the unique political systems which govern the Middle East, this course brought me to the doors of the following question: Why are we playing catch up with the West instead of with ourselves?
Quick and Dirty on the South African Apartheid
A history of colonization often lays the foundation for political instability. Colonial authorities codify their own values into domestic laws. White colonial authorities in South Africa concentrated their power through the institutionalization of discrimination which consequently established long-lasting institutions where white minority rule will continue to protect itself. South Africa saw laws restricting African rights, “especially land ownership” which saw the annexation of lands under the guise of pseudo-legitimate laws. Professor Douek once said that the apartheid was “state-sanctioned racism encoded in the laws and norms of state and society”. South Africa’s colonial past allowed this codification of discriminatory laws to represent a legitimized political stance on which the National Party grounded its platform on, thus sparking civil war and political violence.
Central Bank Independence and its impact on policy
Central bank independence from the executive branch is a mechanism set in place in order to ensure that monetary policy is conducted with the long-term sustainability of the economy in mind. If monetary policy were subject to the cyclical shifts of different political terms, economic fluctuations would be much more volatile and concerned with political hot-topics such as expanding the national potential output of the economy as a means to gain more influence on the global political and economic stage, irrespective of it’s alignment with the contractionary or inflationary needs of the economy at hand. Or even concerned with unemployment reduction as the sole means of steering public opinion in favor or against the party in power. Let's take an example of an economy that is currently experiencing an inflationary gap in output and an unstable rate of inflation. If the central bank were putting the health of the economy first it would attempt to restrict the monetary supply and rain back on consumption. If on the other hand, the executive branch of government were in control of the monetary policy and faced an upcoming re-election, it would attempt to make the economy look more “competitive” by continuing to encourage consumption and lower the natural rate of unemployment, despite its adverse effects on the unstable rate of inflation, and thus on the long term of health of the economy.
The Internet and Democracy
Kolbert’s “Who Owns the Internet” lays out the corrosive nature of Big Tech’s monopoly over power and culture in the modern era. She begins by stating that the media influencing national elections isn’t a new phenomenon. In 1876 the media was dominated by an elite few who controlled the flow of information. During the election that year when Hayes was running against Tilden, the western arm of the associated press under Henry Smith released scathing information about the Republican nominee as well as actively curtailed press releases to paint the democratic nominee in a positive light. While not new, Foer argues that this transgression of the media into democratic life is a lot easier to “fix an election these days than it was in 1876, and a lot harder for anyone to know about it”. During the 2016 elections a website called Departed was being run halfway across the world by a computer science student in Tbilisi looking to make a few extra bucks. While he began posting flattering stories about Hilary Clinton, he found that the fabricated pro-Trump stories which rode the wave of the President’s populist and demagogue image, produced much more revenue. The flow of information on the internet has very real and deep-rooted impacts on the outcomes of elections and on the choices that people make, and yet they have become as trivial as an afternoon pass time of a college student who’s low on funds.
Some Good, Bad and Ugly of The Internet
Although the Internet was created in the United States as a measure against the Soviet nuclear threat, the ideological wave that popularized and instigated the motion of its growth was one of idealistic peace and collective governance. On one hand, the Internet liberated the reserve of power that governments and corporations defended so ardently, effectively empowering civilians with unforeseen powers of collective action and naturally emergent associations outside the purview of traditional structures. On the other, it accelerated the spread of caustic ideologies, misinformation, and the corporate instrumentalization of users. While corporate interests have warped the transformative beginnings of the internet, I argue that the Internet has done more good than harm, especially considering that the web hasn’t yet wandered beyond redemption, leaving its humble beginnings untouched below the layer of industrial soot.
Three Historical Stages of Digital Infrastructure
Our digital infrastructures saw three main phases of its development, each with considerably different impacts on the politics and collective action possible using it. In the 1990s when the internet was still in its infancy, the digital sphere empowered individuals that were previously excluded from the public discourse which was traditionally dominated by states, economic elites, and the media. In Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, he espouses the spirit in which the cyber world was created, a spirit of freedom of the mind, and a dream of a civilization of the Mind aimed at achieving collective governance in its mission to transcend traditional hierarchical structures and systems of power. Individuals were empowered outside of the confines of the state and industry, and interactions between citizens were now a liberating form of communication mediated by none other than the constraints of the platforms they utilized, a medium that wouldn’t become disruptive until the profit models of social media and platforms dominate future versions of the internet. Through the rising tide of decentralized power, the notion of authority was now characterized by the horizontal communication of individuals placed on the same world stage, rather than traditional vertical hierarchical structures which derive authority from the legitimacy of the political or financial elite. This digital realm as Barlow describes it, “grows itself through our collective action” (2), aspiring to remove ourselves from the traditional constraints of political and corporate incentives as well as historical power dynamics amongst domestic and international institutions.
General Incorporation Acts in the 1800s
(also why corporations rule the world)
The widespread adoption of laws of general incorporations in the 1800s saw a dramatic shift in the number and monopolized power of legally privileged private corporations in the Western Hemisphere. Prior to the US Act of General Incorporation, corporations relied on federal and legislative charters in order to establish their organization as a legally empowered entity. Despite tremendous constitutional hurdles, this act was passed, giving way to mysteries surrounding a theory with sufficient explanatory power to bridge what seems like a contentious political matter surveying the friction of corporations’ special legal privilege and the democratic tenets of equal opportunity, as well as a shift that seems to be guarded by gatekeeping elites whose interests lie in the protection of this privileged access to markets and the capacity to restrict competition. Was this widespread adoption an implication of the rising tide of democracy, or would a results-based explanation underscored by shifts in economic ideologies moved by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations complement the phenomenon better? I argue that both these explanations provide a convincing model for the adoption of open access incorporations.
