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July 1, 2025

Air India crash in Ahmedabad sends reverberations to Canadian families of Air India Flight 182

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Chandrima Chakraborty, Professor, English and Cultural Studies; Director, Centre for Global Peace, Justice and Health, McMaster University

The June 12 Air India crash in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, with 230 passengers and 12 crew members aboard is sending deep reverberations through a group of Canadians who know all too well the shock, grief and horror of losing loved ones in hauntingly similar circumstances.

They are the families of those killed in the bombing of Air India Flight 182 en route from Canada to India 40 years ago this month.

I work closely with these families as a researcher and advocate. I began interviewing these families in 2014 and have witnessed firsthand their pain, advocacy and emotional turmoil of living in the shadow of a historical event.

As reports of the Ahmedabad crash came in, the WhatsApp account of the Air India Flight 182 families immediately flooded with expressions of shock, concern, sympathy and memories triggered by the latest incident.

On June 23, 1985, Flight 182 was brought down by terrorist bombs created and planted on Canadian soil. The devastating mid-air explosion occurred over the Atlantic Ocean near Ireland. It killed all 329 passengers and crew, including 268 Canadians. The crew and most of the passengers were of Indian origin.

Investigations into the causes of the crash of Air India Flight 171, en route to London’s Gatwick airport, shortly after take-off are still underway. At least 279 people died in the crash, which also impacted people on the ground.

Acknowledging losses as significant

A recent public conference at McMaster University commemorated the 40th anniversary of Flight 182, bringing together Indian and Canadian families, researchers, creative artists and community members.

a red cover with a woman in black dancing — Book cover for ‘Remembering Air India The Art of Public Mourning,’ edited by Chandrima Chakraborty, Amber Dean and Angela Failler.
University of Alberta Press

The conference dealt with critical themes, including the challenge of Flight 182 families recovering from their losses within a climate of broad indifference among their fellow Canadians.

Regardless of what may have caused the more recent crash in western India, these Canadian families know the shock and loss that a new set of victims’ families are facing, and how important it is to support them.

Hopefully, the home countries of last week’s crash victims — most of them Indian and British citizens, with at least one Canadian reported to have been aboard — will regard their deaths as significant losses. If so, this would be unlike what the 1985 victims’ families experienced in Canada.

A little-mourned Canadian tragedy

In Canada, we have a national day to remember on June 23, 1985. The bombing has been called a Canadian tragedy in a public inquiry report.

Yet according to a 2023 Angus Reid poll, “nine out of 10 Canadians say they have little or no knowledge of the worst single instance of the mass killing of their fellow citizens.” That essentially means the bombing has yet to penetrate the consciousness of everyday Canadians or evoke shared grief or public mourning.

The families continue to carry the torch of remembrance as they organize annual memorial vigils every June 23. Few others attend. Many victims’ relatives have died since 1985. Some spouses, siblings or parents are now in their 80s, wondering why the bombing is still not widely discussed in schools or in public discourse.

The grinding and unsatisfying criminal proceedings, the belated public inquiry and the welcome but lukewarm apology by the Canadian government 25 years after the fact have all contributed to the failure of this tragedy to adhere more solidly to the Canadian consciousness. In fact, many continue to deny the Canadian significance of Flight 182 and view the bombing as a foreign event.

A torch of remembrance

At last month’s conference, my research team launched the Air India Flight 182 archive to counter this collective amnesia and lack of acknowledgement.

Canadian archival consultant and writer Laura Millar has said that archives act as “touchstones to memory” and can aid the process of transforming individual memories into collective remembering. Adopting NYU professor Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care for the archive, we have been consulting with families to find ways to share their grief with the public.

The Flight 182 memory archive — both physical and digital — serves as a repository for artefacts, first-person narratives, memorabilia and creative works related to the tragedy produced by family members. Family donations of artefacts such as dance videos and pilot wings redirect notions of archives away from a documental deposit. Hopefully, they can move the public to learn and care for the impacts of the Flight 182 bombing.

The archive is a publicly accessible record of the tragedy, where scholars and everyday citizens can learn about the victims and their families.

Since the past involves both the present and the future, the archive will enable a meaningful recognition of marginalized voices and histories. It can offer a form of memory justice for those who would otherwise be forgotten by sustaining memory from generation to generation.

While the archive articulates the demand from families that the bombing of Flight 182 and its aftermath be incorporated into Canadian national consciousness, establishing this archive alone will not be enough to elevate the memory of Flight 182 to the place it deserves.

But at least it establishes a rich, permanent academic and personal legacy for the community of mourners, and for the Canadian and global public to find it, use it and learn from its many lessons.

Families of those on board the 1985 flight are preparing to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the terror bombing of Flight 182 that has devastated their lives.

As we learn more about the tragic Air India Flight 171 crash on June 12, the lessons of Flight 182 will hopefully prevent a new set of families from feeling the pain of indifference on top of the unimaginable agony of loss they’re already experiencing.

Chandrima Chakraborty receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

– ref. Air India crash in Ahmedabad sends reverberations to Canadian families of Air India Flight 182 – https://theconversation.com/air-india-crash-in-ahmedabad-sends-reverberations-to-canadian-families-of-air-india-flight-182-258991

July 1, 2025

Nineteen Eighty-Four might have been inspired by George Orwell’s fear of drowning

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Nathan Waddell, Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century Literature, University of Birmingham

George Orwell had a traumatic relationship with the sea. In August 1947, while he was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) on the island of Jura in the Scottish Hebrides, he went on a fishing trip with his young son, nephew and niece.

Having misread the tidal schedules, on the way back Orwell mistakenly piloted the boat into rough swells. He was pulled into the fringe of the Corryvreckan whirlpool off the coasts of Jura and Scarba. The boat capsized and Orwell and his relatives were thrown overboard.

It was a close call – a fact recorded with characteristic detachment by Orwell in his diary that same evening: “On return journey today ran into the whirlpool & were all nearly drowned.” Though he seems to have taken the experience in his stride, this may have been a trauma response: detachment ensures the ability to persist after a near-death experience.

We don’t know for sure if Nineteen Eighty-Four was influenced by the Corryvreckan incident. But it’s clear that the novel was written by a man fixated on water’s terrifying power.

This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.

Nineteen Eighty-Four isn’t typically associated with fear of death by water. Yet it’s filled with references to sinking ships, drowning people and the dread of oceanic engulfment. Fear of drowning is a torment that social dissidents might face in Room 101, the torture chamber to which all revolutionaries are sent in the appropriately named totalitarian state of Oceania.

An early sequence in the novel describes a helicopter attack on a ship full of refugees, who are bombed as they fall into the sea. The novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, has a recurring nightmare in which he dreams of his long-lost mother and sister trapped “in the saloon of a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening water”.

George Orwell in a black and white photograph — George Orwell in 1943.
National Union of Journalists

The sight of them “drowning deeper every minute” takes Winston back to a culminating moment in his childhood when he stole chocolate from his mother’s hand, possibly condemning his sister to starvation. These watery graves imply that Winston is drowning in guilt.

The “wateriness” of Nineteen Eighty-Four may have another interesting historical source. In his essay My Country Right or Left (1940), Orwell recalls that when he had just become a teenager he read about the “atrocity stories” of the first world war.

Orwell states in this same essay that “nothing in the whole war moved [him] so deeply as the loss of the Titanic had done a few years earlier”, in 1912. What upset Orwell most about the Titanic disaster was that in its final moments it “suddenly up-ended and sank bow foremost, so that the people clinging to the stern were lifted no less than 300 feet into the air before they plunged into the abyss”.

Sinking ships and dying civilisations

Orwell never forgot this image. Something similar to it appears in his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) where the idea of a sinking passenger liner evokes the collapse of modern civilisation, just as the Titanic disaster evoked the end of Edwardian industrial confidence two decades beforehand.

A boy selling newspapers about the Titanic accident — The Titanic disaster had a profound impact on Orwell.
Wiki Commons

References to sinking ships and drowning people appear at key moments in many other works by Orwell, too. But did the full impact of the Titanic surface in Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Sinking ships were part of Orwell’s descriptive toolkit. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel driven by memories of unsympathetic water, they convey nightmares. Filled with references to water and liquidity, it’s one of the most aqueous novels Orwell produced, relying for many of its most shocking episodes on imagery of desperate people drowning or facing imminent death on sinking sea craft.

The thought of trapped passengers descending into the depths survives in Winston’s traumatic memories of his mother and sister, who, in the logic of his dreams, are alive inside a sinking ship’s saloon.

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There’s no way to prove that the Nineteen Eighty-Four is “about” the Titanic disaster, but in the novel, and indeed in Orwell’s wider body of work, there are too many tantalising hints to let the matter rest.

Thinking about fear of death by water takes us into Orwell’s terrors just as it takes us into Winston’s, allowing readers to see the frightened boy inside the adult man and, indeed, inside the author who dreamed up one of the 20th century’s most famous nightmares.

Beyond the canon

As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we’re asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn’t (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Nathan Waddell’s suggestion:

As soon as the news broke of the Titanic’s sinking, literary works of all shapes and sizes started to appear in tribute to the disaster and its victims. As the century went on, and as research into the tragedy developed (particularly after the ships wreckage was discovered in 1985), more nuanced literary responses to the sinking became possible.

One such response is Beryl Bainbridge’s Whitbread-prize-winning novel Every Man for Himself (1996). It reimagines the disaster from the first-person perspective of an imaginary character, Morgan, the fictional nephew of the historically real financier J. P. Morgan (who was due to sail on the Titanic but changed plans before it sailed).

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Nathan Waddell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Nineteen Eighty-Four might have been inspired by George Orwell’s fear of drowning – https://theconversation.com/nineteen-eighty-four-might-have-been-inspired-by-george-orwells-fear-of-drowning-251289

July 1, 2025

‘Making decisions closer to the wharf’ can ensure the sustainability of Canada’s fisheries and oceans

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Matthew Robertson, Research Scientist, Fisheries and Marine Institute, Memorial University of Newfoundland

The harbour in Bonavista, Newfoundland. Major reforms could fundamentally reshape fisheries science and management in Canada (Sally LeDrew/Wikimedia commons), CC BY-SA

During the federal election campaign, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that if elected, he would look into restructuring Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO). Carney stated that he understood the importance of DFO and of “making decisions closer to the wharf.”

Carney’s statement was made in response to protesting fish harvesters in Newfoundland and Labrador who decried recent DFO decision-making for multiple fisheries, including Northern cod and snow crab.

Although addressing industry concerns is important, any change to DFO decision-making must serve the broader public interest, which includes commitments to reconciliation and conserving biodiversity.

Major reforms could fundamentally reshape fisheries science and management in Canada, yet most Canadians are unaware of how DFO’s science-management process works, or why change might be needed.

The DFO’s dual mandate

DFO has long been criticized for its dual mandate, which involves both supporting economic growth and conserving the environment.

For organizations like DFO to be trusted by the public, they need to produce information and policies that are credible, relevant and legitimate.

However, DFO’s dual mandates have been viewed as antithetical and have at the least created a perceived conflict of interest. The issue at stake is how science advice from DFO can be considered independent, if it is also supposed to serve commercial interests.

One solution to this problem would be to shift control over the economic viability of fisheries to provinces. This is not a radical idea by any means, as most of the economic value of the fishery arises after fish are brought to harbour.

fishing boats in a harbour — Fishing boats in the town of Clarke’s Harbour, located on Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia in July 2011.
(Dennis G. Jarvis/Wikimedia commons), CC BY-SA

For example, licences to process groundfish like cod, haddock and halibut —which Nova Scotia has just announced will be opened for new entrants following decades of a moratorium — as well as policies governing the purchase of seafood already fall to provinces.

In 2024, all 13 ministers from the Canadian Council of Fisheries and Aquaculture Ministers indicated a desire for “joint management” between provinces and DFO.

This was driven driven by a concern that the department has not focused enough on provincial and territorial fisheries issues. This shouldn’t be seen as a criticism of DFO, but rather an opportunity to embrace differentiated responsibility.

DFO could maintain regulatory control for fisheries, like enforcing the Fisheries Act, defining licence conditions and performing long-term monitoring and assessments. As included in the modernized Fisheries Act, it could still consider the social and economic objectives in decision-making.

Regional decision-making

DFO is structured into regions with their own science and management branches, but many decisions end up being made by staff at DFO headquarters in Ottawa. In addition, the federal fisheries minister retains ministerial discretion for almost every decision, something that has been criticized as being inequitable.

During an interview with researchers looking into fisheries management policy, a regional manager stated that they no longer make decisions:

“Because of…risk aversion, much more of the decision-making has now been bumped up to higher levels. So I like to facetiously state that I am no longer a manager, I am a recommender.”

Centralized decision-making can limit communication between regional scientists and managers and federal government policymakers.

This communication gap can make it difficult for managers to use the latest science and adjust policies quickly and it can also lead to recommended policies that are challenging to implement at the local level.

Handing management decision-making power to regional fisheries managers could therefore benefit science and policy, and contribute to decisions that are deemed more equitable by those impacted.

a map of Canada showing the country divided into seven regions: Arctic, Pacific, Ontario and Prairies, Québec, Newfoundland and Labrador, the Gulf and the Maritimes — A map representing DFO’s regional structure.
(Fisheries and Oceans Canada)

Other countries use a regional management approach. In the United States, marine fisheries are managed by eight regional fishery management councils that use scientific advice from the National Marine Fisheries Service. Although not without their flaws, the successful rebuilding of overfished stocks in the U.S. has been attributed, in part, to the regional council system.

Governance systems that have multiple but connected centres of decision-making are generally expected to be more participatory, flexible to respond to changes and have improved spatial fit between knowledge and policy actions.

This type of approach could shift the focus of Ottawa-based managers and the fisheries minister to ensuring national consistency.

Local stakeholder involvement

Canada’s current methods for inclusion of social and economic considerations are limited and have produced scientific advice that is not fully separable from rights holder and stakeholder input.

Most of DFO’s scientific peer-review process is focused on ecological science conducted by DFO scientists. The peer-review process often also involves rights holders and stakeholders. While Indigenous rights holders and community stakeholders may not be trained in the presented analyses, they often contribute to these meetings by describing their knowledge and experiences.

However, because the meetings are focused on DFO ecological science, they are not designed to formally consider stakeholder and rights holder knowledge. This can lead to two key issues. First, it may blur the line between peer-reviewed science and rights holder and stakeholder input, reducing the credibility of the scientific advice.

Second, the valuable information provided by rights holders and stakeholders may be overlooked since it is not shared in a setting designed to incorporate it.

The lack of review of alternative Indigenous knowledge sources and social and economic science during peer-review processes inherently limits the advice that can be provided. It suggests that the government is not benefiting from the opportunity to incorporate diverse knowledge bases.

These problems could be addressed by developing procedures through which stakeholders and rights holders contribute their local and traditional knowledge to better inform ecological and socio-economic considerations.

By increasing the number of peer-review platforms, rights holder and stakeholder input could be reviewed similarly to ecological science. This change would likely increase the credibility, legitimacy and salience of information used to inform fishery managers.

Regardless of how rights holders and stakeholders perspectives are included, the process should be clearly structured and documented.

By reconsidering DFO’s mandate, decentralizing management decision-making and improving the scientific consideration of varied forms of knowledge, DFO could make decisions that are closer to the wharf.

Matthew Robertson receives funding from the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant and the Fisheries & Oceans Canada (DFO) Atlantic Fisheries Fund (AFF).

Megan Bailey receives research funding from multiple sources, including NSERC, SSHRC, CIRNAC, Genome Atlantic, Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus Centre, Ocean Frontier Institute (through a Canada First Research Excellence Fund), and the Canada Research Chairs program.

Tyler Eddy receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant, Fisheries & Oceans Canada (DFO) Atlantic Fisheries Fund (AFF) and Sustainable Fisheries Science Fund (SFSF), the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF), and the Crown Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC) Indigenous Community-Based Climate Monitoring (ICBCM) Program.

– ref. ‘Making decisions closer to the wharf’ can ensure the sustainability of Canada’s fisheries and oceans – https://theconversation.com/making-decisions-closer-to-the-wharf-can-ensure-the-sustainability-of-canadas-fisheries-and-oceans-254874

July 1, 2025

How pterosaurs learned to fly: scientists have been looking in the wrong place to solve this mystery

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Davide Foffa, Research Fellow in Palaeobiology, University of Birmingham

Ever since the first fragments of pterosaur bone surfaced nearly 250 years ago, palaeontologists have puzzled over one question: how did these close cousins of land-bound dinosaurs take to the air and evolve powered flight? The first flying vertebrates seemed to appear on the geological stage fully formed, leaving almost no trace of their first tentative steps into the air.

Taken at face value, the fossil record implies that pterosaurs suddenly originated in the later part of the Triassic period (around 215 million years ago), close to the equator on the northern super-continent Pangaea. They then spread quickly between the Triassic and the Jurassic periods, about 10 million years later, in the wake of a mass extinction that was most likely caused by massive volcanic activity.

Most of the handful of Triassic specimens come from narrow seams of dark shale in Italy and Austria, with other fragments discovered in Greenland, Argentina and the southwestern US. These skeletons appear fully adapted for flight, with a hyper-elongated fourth finger supporting membrane-wings. Yet older rocks show no trace of intermediate gliders or other transitional forms that you might expect as evidence of pterosaurs’ evolution over time.

There are two classic competing explanations for this. The literal reading says pterosaurs evolved elsewhere and did not reach those regions where most have been discovered until very late in the Triassic period, by which time they were already adept flyers. The sceptical reading notes that pterosaurs’ wafer-thin, hollow bones could easily vanish from the fossil record, dissolve, get crushed or simply be overlooked, creating this false gap.

Eudimorphodon ranzii fossil found in Bergamo in 1973 — *Eudimorphodon ranzii* fossil from Bergamo in 1973 is one of many pterosaur discoveries from southern Europe.
Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

For decades, the debate stalled as a result of too few fossils or too many missing rocks. This impasse began to change in 2020, when scientists identified the closest relatives of pterosaurs in a group of smallish upright reptiles called lagerpetids.

From comparing many anatomical traits across different species, the researchers established that pterosaurs and lagerpetids shared many similarities including their skulls, skeletons and inner ears. While this discovery did not bring any “missing link” to the table, it showed what the ancestor of pterosaurs would have looked like: a rat-to-dog-sized creature that lived on land and in trees.

This brought new evidence about when pterosaurs may have originated. Pterosaurs and lagerpetids like Scleromochlus, a small land-dwelling reptile, diverged at some point after the end-Permian mass extinction. It occurred some 250 million years ago, 35 million years before the first pterosaur appearance in the fossil record.

Artist's impression of a Scleromochlus — *Scleromochlus* is one of the lagerpetids, the closest known relatives to the pterosaurs.
Gabriel Ugueto

Pterosaurs and their closest kin did not share the same habitats, however. Our new study, featuring new fossil maps, shows that soon after lagerpetids appeared (in southern Pangaea), they spread across wide areas, including harsh deserts, that many other groups were unable to get past. Lagerpetids lived both in these deserts and in humid floodplains.

They tolerated hotter, drier settings better than any early pterosaur, implying that they had evolved to cope with extreme temperatures. Pterosaurs, by contrast, were more restricted. Their earliest fossils cluster in the river and lake beds of the Chinle and Dockum basins (southwest US) and in moist coastal belts fringing the northern arm of the Tethys Sea, a huge area that occupied today’s Alps.

Scientists have inferred from analysing a combination of fossil distributions, rock features and climate simulations that pterosaurs lived in areas that were warm but not scorching. The rainfall would have been comparable to today’s tropical forests rather than inland deserts.

This suggests that the earliest flying dinosaurs may have lived in tree canopies, using foliage both for take-off and to protect themselves from predators and heat. As a result of this confined habitat, the distances that they flew may have been quite limited.

Changing climates

We were then able to add a fresh dimension to the story using a method called ecological niche modelling. This is routinely used in modern conservation to project where endangered animals and plants might live as the climate gets hotter. By applying this approach to later Triassic temperatures, rainfall and coastlines, we asked where early pterosaurs lived, regardless of whether they’ve shown up there in the fossil record.

Many celebrated fossil sites in Europe emerge as poor pterosaur habitat until very late in the Triassic period: they were simply too hot, too dry or otherwise inhospitable before the Carnian age, around 235 million years ago. The fact that no specimens have been discovered there that are more than about 215 million years old may be because the climate conditions were still unsuitable or simply because we don’t have the right type of rocks preserved of that age.

In contrast, parts of the south-western US, Morocco, India, Brazil, Tanzania and southern China seem to have offered welcoming environments several million years earlier than the age of our oldest discoveries. This rewrites the search map. If pterosaurs could have thrived in those regions much more than 215 million years ago, but we have not found them there, the problem may again lie not with biology but with geology: the right rocks have not been explored, or they preserve fragile fossils only under exceptional conditions.

Our study flags a dozen geological formations, from rivers with fine sediment deposits to lake beds, as potential prime targets for the next breakthrough discovery. They include the Timezgadiouine beds of Morocco, the Guanling Formation of south-west China and, in South America, several layers of rock from the Carnian age, such as the Santa Maria Formation, Chañares Formation and Ischigualasto Formation.

Pterosaurs were initially confined to tropical treetops near the equator. When global climates shifted and forested corridors opened, pterosaurs’ wings catapulted them into every corner of the planet and ultimately carried them through one of Earth’s greatest extinctions. What began as a tale of missing fossils has become a textbook example of how climate, ecology and evolutionary science have come together to illuminate a fragmentary history that has intrigued paleontologists for over two centuries.

Davide Foffa is funded by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions: Individual (Global) Fellowship (H2020-MSCA-IF-2020; No.101022550), and by the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851–Science Fellowship

Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza receives funding from The Royal Society (Newton International Fellowship NIFR1231802)

Emma Dunne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How pterosaurs learned to fly: scientists have been looking in the wrong place to solve this mystery – https://theconversation.com/how-pterosaurs-learned-to-fly-scientists-have-been-looking-in-the-wrong-place-to-solve-this-mystery-259063

July 1, 2025

Haiti on the brink: Gangs fill power vacuum as current solutions fail a nation in crisis

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Greg Beckett, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Western University

Haiti is facing a multifaceted crisis unlike any in the country’s modern history.

Haiti recently marked the one-year anniversary of Haiti’s Presidential Transitional Council’s (CPT) new government — an internationally backed effort to restore governance in the country after Prime Minister Ariel Henry was ousted by gangs.

But rather than charting a path to stability, the CPT remains mired in dysfunction as Haiti’s crisis deepens with no end in sight. Armed gangs now control most of the capital, more than a million Haitians have been displaced and half the country faces acute food insecurity.

Criminal gangs have taken control of most of the capital city of Port-au-Prince and significant parts of the country. Since 2021, gangs have killed more than 15,000 people and forcibly displaced over a million people.

Beyond the security situation, there is a dire humanitarian emergency as more than half the country faces severe food insecurity.

The United Nations says the country may be reaching a point of no return and risks falling into “total chaos.”

Haitian friends tell me their whole country feels as blocked as the barricaded streets and choke points used by the gangs to control the capital.

A security crisis paralyzing everything

The impasse is undoubtedly shaped by entrenched gang violence. Armed groups have been used by political players for political ends in Haiti for decades.

But now, new, well-organized armed gangs have emerged as political entities in their own right.

For example, the G9 Alliance, the most notorious of gangs — actually a federation of gangs — is led by former police officer Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier.

Chérizier presents himself on social media as a revolutionary figure fighting the elites, but in the streets of Port-au-Prince most, see him as a violent criminal.

Last year, the G9 merged with rivals to form a coalition called Viv Ansamn (Live Together). Led by Chérizier and others, the group forced Prime Minister Ariel Henry from power. Henry had become prime pinister after the assassination of Haiti’s last elected head of state, President Jovenel Moïse, in July 2021, despite himself being implicated in the assassination.

Both Henry and Moïse were accused of paying gangs to maintain control.

Viv Ansamn’s takeover of the capital confirms gangs have become an autonomous political force. They have since expanded their power through their control over fuel supplies, critical infrastructure and key choke points.

It’s telling that the gangs have become so powerful despite the presence of a UN-approved, Kenya-led Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission. The mission has been in Haiti since shortly after Henry was forced out of power.

But with limited scope and funding from donor countries, including the United States, Canada and Ecuador, the mission has failed to achieve any major successes. Indeed, by the UN’s own estimates, gang violence continues to have a “devastating impact” on the population, despite the presence of the mission.

Last month, the U.S. government designated Viv Ansamn and Gran Grif, Haiti’s two most powerful armed gangs, as terrorist organizations. Canada and others have also imposed sanctions on politicians and gang leaders, and perhaps this could lead to more sanctions against those who most directly benefit from the crisis. But for residents of Port-au-Prince, little has changed on the ground, where many feel the gangs are holding the country hostage.

Democratic vacuum with no clear path forward

A common saying in Haiti goes like this: peyi’m pa gen leta, my country has no state. Once a criticism of a particular government, it now feels literal. Haiti has no elected national officials.

The CPT was established by the Organization of American States after Henry’s ousting, but has has done little to restore democracy. Elections are impossible under the current security conditions.

Instead, the CPT has become another obstacle to resolution. Mired in internal conflict, some members have been accused of bribery. With no framework for political compromise, the council reflects a system where some key players actually benefit from the political impasse.

Governing structures that can’t govern

Haiti is now in uncharted territory. The CPT operates in a legal vacuum, making decisions without a clear mandate or authority.

Still, the council is moving forward with a controversial plan to rewrite the Haitian constitution. The proposed changes will fundamentally alter Haiti’s government structure, including abolishing the senate and the prime minister, allowing presidents to hold consecutive terms, changing election procedures and allowing dual citizens and Haitians living abroad to run for office.

This constitutional reform highlights the paradox at the heart of Haiti’s crisis: an institution with questionable legitimacy is attempting to redesign the very framework that would determine its own authority.

These aren’t just procedural problems: they represent fundamental questions about who has the authority to govern and how decisions get made in a country where democratic institutions have always been fragile.

International responses miss the mark

International groups, including the UN, the Organization of American States and the Core Group that includes the United States, Canada and France, have overseen Haiti’s politics for decades. But their influence has often backfired. Many in Haiti see the international community as directly responsible for the current crisis.

Whatever internal problems have given rise to the current crisis, the role played by the international community in Haiti has undoubtedly contributed to the impasse.

The MSS mission is a stop gap at best and a liability at worst. It is insufficient for the scale of the crisis.

Some observers have called for a full UN peacekeeping mission, but there is little support for it and such a mission would likely face resistance within Haiti given the country’s fraught history with international interventions.

Can the international community undo the damage it has already done? And can Haiti make it through the impasse without the international community?

Beyond the impasse: What needs to change

There are no easy solutions. Addressing gang violence without legitimate governing institutions won’t create lasting stability. Yet the path to a legitimate government remains unclear as organizing elections without basic security is unrealistic.

The international community must stop treating Haiti as a series of separate crises requiring separate responses. The current piecemeal approach treats symptoms while ignoring the underlying causes that block political resolutions.

For Haitians, the stakes could not be higher. The question isn’t whether change is needed, but whether the international community and Haitian leaders can move beyond the impasse before the situation deteriorates even further.

Greg Beckett receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

– ref. Haiti on the brink: Gangs fill power vacuum as current solutions fail a nation in crisis – https://theconversation.com/haiti-on-the-brink-gangs-fill-power-vacuum-as-current-solutions-fail-a-nation-in-crisis-257948

July 1, 2025

Are Israel’s actions in Iran illegal? Could it be called self-defence? An international law expert explains

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Shannon Bosch, Associate Professor (Law), Edith Cowan University

Israel’s major military operation against Iran has targeted its nuclear program, including its facilities and scientists, as well as its military leadership.

In response, the United Nations Security Council has quickly convened an emergency sitting. There, the Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Danon defended Israel’s actions as a “preventative strike” carried out with “precision, purpose, and the most advanced intelligence”. It aimed, he said, to:

dismantle Iran’s nuclear programme, eliminate the architects of its terror and aggression and neutralise the regime’s ability to follow through on its repeated public promise to destroy the state of Israel.

So, what does international law say about self-defence? And were Israel’s actions illegal under international law?

When is self-defence allowed?

Article 2.4 of the UN charter states:

All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

There are only two exceptions:

when the UN Security Council authorises force, and
when a state acts in self-defence.

This “inherent right of individual or collective self-defence”, as article 51 of the UN charter puts it, persists until the Security Council acts to restore international peace and security.

So what’s ‘self-defence’ actually mean?

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has consistently interpreted self-defence narrowly.

In many cases, it has rejected arguments from states such as the United States, Uganda and Israel that have sought to promote a more expansive interpretation of self-defence.

The 9/11 attacks marked a turning point. The UN Security Council affirmed in resolutions 1368 and 1373 that the right to self-defence extends to defending against attacks by non-state actors, such as terrorist groups. The US, invoking this right, launched its military action in Afghanistan.

The classic understanding of self-defence – that it’s justified when a state responds reactively to an actual, armed attack – was regarded as being too restrictive in the age of missiles, cyberattacks and terrorism.

This helped give rise to the idea of using force before an imminent attack, in anticipatory self-defence.

The threshold for anticipatory self-defence is widely seen by scholars as high. It requires what’s known as “imminence”. In other words, this is the “last possible window of opportunity” to act to stop an unavoidable attack.

As set out by then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2005:

as long as the threatened attack is imminent, no other means would deflect it and the action is proportionate, this would meet the accepted interpretation of self defence under article 51.

As international law expert Donald Rothwell points out, the legitimacy of anticipatory self-defence hinges on factual scrutiny and strict criteria, balancing urgency, legality and accountability.

However, the lines quickly blurred

In 2002, the US introduced a “pre-emptive doctrine” in its national security strategy.

This argued new threats – such as terrorism and weapons of mass destruction – justified using force to forestall attacks before they occurred.

Critics, including Annan, warned that if the notion of preventive self-defence was widely accepted, it would undermine the prohibition on the use of force. It would basically allow states to act unilaterally on speculative intelligence.

Annan acknowledged:

if there are good arguments for preventive military action, with good evidence to support them, they should be put to the Security Council, which can authorise such action if it chooses to.

If it does not so choose, there will be, by definition, time to pursue other strategies, including persuasion, negotiation, deterrence and containment – and to visit again the military option.

This is exactly what Israel has failed to do before attacking Iran.

Lessons from history

Israel’s stated goal was to damage Iran’s nuclear program and prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon that could be used against it.

This is explicitly about preventing an alleged, threatened, future attack by Iran with a nuclear weapon that, according to all publicly available information, Iran does not currently possess.

This is not the first time Israel has advanced a broad interpretation of self-defence.

In 1981, Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, which was under construction on the outskirts of Baghdad. It claimed a nuclear-armed Iraq would pose an unacceptable threat. The UN Security Council condemned the attack.

As international law stands, unless an armed attack is imminent and unavoidable, such strikes are likely to be considered unlawful uses of force.

While there is still time and opportunity to use non-forcible means to prevent the threatened attack, there’s no necessity to act now in self defence.

Diplomatic engagement, sanction, and international monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program – such as through the International Atomic Energy Agency – remain the lawful means of addressing the emerging threat posed by Tehran.

Preserving the rule of law

The right to self-defence is not a blank cheque.

Anticipatory self-defence remains legally unsettled and highly contested.

So were Israel’s attacks on Iran a legitimate use of “self-defence”? I would argue no.

I concur with international law expert Marko Milanovic that Israel’s claim to be acting in preventive self-defence must be rejected on the facts available to us.

In a volatile world, preserving these legal limits is essential to avoiding unchecked aggression and preserving the rule of law.

Shannon Bosch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Are Israel’s actions in Iran illegal? Could it be called self-defence? An international law expert explains – https://theconversation.com/are-israels-actions-in-iran-illegal-could-it-be-called-self-defence-an-international-law-expert-explains-259259

July 1, 2025

Why Canada’s Strong Borders Act is as troublesome as Donald Trump’s travel bans

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Benjamin Muller, Professor & Program Coordinator in Migration and Border Studies, King’s University College, Western University

Was it just a coincidence that within days of Canada’s Liberal government announcing Bill C-2, the Strong Borders Act, Donald Trump’s administration in the United States released its long anticipated travel ban?

Perhaps. But the timing also highlights the longtime shared border saga between Canada and the U.S. — and should compel Canada to carve its own path.

Like Trump’s 2017 travel ban, his 2025 directives significantly prevent or limit access to the U.S. for citizens from 12 mostly African and Middle Eastern countries, with more possibly on the horizon. It’s likely to face judicial challenges and may not survive for long.

In contrast, Bill C-2 could lead to several significant and broad statutory changes that Canadians will contend with for years to come.

Data privacy concerns

Days before Trump’s announcement, the Canadian government advanced the controversial Strong Borders Act covering a wide swath of proposed legislative changes, from intensified border security measures to more restrictive immigration and asylum policies.

Embedded within the proposed legislation, as Canadian law professor Michael Geist and others have pointed out, are significant risks to digital privacy, along with increased executive authority — also known as “warrantless” powers — without judicial or civilian oversight.

In these respects, the proposed Canadian legislation could be considered more worrisome than Trump’s travel bans.

In the fog of the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and Canada, the focus is on American tariffs and their economic impact. But little attention is being paid to Canada’s longstanding co-ordination and co-operation with the U.S. in terms of border management.

Unfortunately, Canada has a history of appeasing the U.S. on the border. The period following 9/11 is worth noting.

Increased co-ordination post 9/11

Successive Canada-U.S border agreements have brought about significant institutional change and reform. These include the Smart Border Declaration — signed shortly after 9/11 — and Beyond the Border, inked a decade later between the Barack Obama and Stephen Harper governments.

These agreements included greater reliance on biometric and surveillance technology, binational information-sharing and accelerated, robust co-ordinated and co-operative border enforcement (specifically the Shiprider program and the Integrated Border Enforcement Team or IBET).

The early 2000s saw the rise of new institutions such as the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA), along with significant policy changes that included prolific and more robust American pre-clearance of people and goods, and authorizing CBSA agents to carry firearms (which was once controversial).

Frequently, these reforms were in response to American pressure or reactionary U.S. policies. The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), for example, is an American policy that has compelled travellers to produce passports when crossing the U.S. border for almost 20 years.

In contrast to the “elbows up” rhetoric of the last several months, Canada hastily made changes to its border policies.

The narrative of co-operative and collaborative Canada-U.S. border management, however, has not always been as it appeared. Frequently, negotiations and co-operation were difficult, and not without cost to some autonomy in Canada’s border management.

Asylum seekers

In the past year, there have been increasing concerns about the impact of potential increases in asylum claims in Canada because of American policies. Those raising concerns often make reference to Roxham Road, the unofficial border crossing that thrived during the last Trump administration due to a loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA).

Such gaps in legislation were modestly addressed, including in the proposed Bill C-2, which will require arriving migrants to claim asylum within 14 days of arrival. After that time, claimants will not receive a hearing and be subject to deportation.

It’s troubling to contemplate deporting asylum seekers amid the ongoing deportation spectacle in the U.S. being carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Trump administration

Amid renewed American pressures under Trump and a history of border co-operation, it’s not surprising Prime Minister Mark Carney is following his predecessor in trying to appease the U.S. president via Canadian border policy. And because asylum claimants often languish for up to two years in Canada’s immigration and asylum system, it’s clear there are problems.

But that doesn’t preclude the need to think critically about the sweeping powers proposed in Bill C-2.

In particular, enhanced executive powers — in many cases by institutions that have no civilian oversight — must be scrutinized.

Many of these changes are reminiscent of the kind of co-operative — and sometimes coercive — border policies that emerged in the post-9/11 years. It could be argued that Canadians should have expressed “elbows up” responses to American pressures to reimagine our border almost 25 years ago.

Furthermore, these changes serve as reminder that co-operative and co-ordinated management of our border is increasingly “baked in,” and despite tariff rhetoric, that’s unlikely to change dramatically without significant pushback from Canadians.

Revisionist history

It’s worth reflecting on the nostalgic and revisionist accounts of the coercive — not truly co-operative and collaborative — post-9/11 era of border security management, especially in the heat of the ongoing Canada-U.S. trade war.

Canadians should remember they live during a time of deep integration in border management — but Canada can always assert its own interests and marshal its own resources to manage borders and those who cross it.

In the long Canada-U.S. relationship, coercion has often masqueraded as co-operation. There are far fewer coincidences in border policy than we might think, possibly including the timing of the Strong Border Act. But Canada must always evaluate its policies in terms of whether they serve Canadian, not American, interests.

Unlike the Trump administration’s travel bans and deportations, Bill C-2 introduces a wide swath of changes Canadians could grapple with for decades.

Benjamin Muller receives funding from SSHRCC and King’s University College at Western University.

– ref. Why Canada’s Strong Borders Act is as troublesome as Donald Trump’s travel bans – https://theconversation.com/why-canadas-strong-borders-act-is-as-troublesome-as-donald-trumps-travel-bans-258366

July 1, 2025

Coral reefs face an uncertain recovery from the 4th global mass bleaching event – can climate refuges help?

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Noam Vogt-Vincent, Postdoctoral Fellow in Marine Biology, University of Hawaii

The Great Barrier Reef stretches for 1,429 miles just off Australia’s northeastern coast. Auscape/Universal Images Group via Getty Image

Tropical reefs might look like inanimate rock, but these colorful seascapes are built by tiny jellyfish-like animals called corals. While adult corals build solid structures that are firmly attached to the sea floor, baby corals are not confined to their reefs. They can drift with ocean currents over great distances to new locations that might give them a better chance of survival.

The underwater cities that corals construct are home to about a quarter of all known marine species. They are incredibly important for humans, too, contributing at least a trillion dollars per year in ecosystem services, such as protecting coastlines from wave damage and supporting fisheries and tourism.

Unfortunately, coral reefs are among the most vulnerable environments on the planet to climate change.

Since 2023, exceptionally warm ocean water has been fueling the planet’s fourth mass coral bleaching event on record, causing widespread mortality in corals around the world. This kind of harm is projected to worsen considerably over the coming decades as ocean temperatures rise.

A healthy coral reef in American Samoa, left, experiencing coral bleaching due to a severe marine heatwave, center, and eventually dying, right.
The Ocean Agency and Ocean Image Bank., CC BY-NC

I am a marine scientist in Hawaii. My colleagues and I are trying to understand how coral reefs might change in the future, and whether new coral reefs might form at higher latitudes as the tropics become too warm and temperate regions become more hospitable. The results lead us to both good and bad news.

Corals can grow in new areas, but will they thrive?

Baby corals can drift freely with ocean currents, potentially traveling hundreds of miles before settling in new locations. That allows the distribution of corals to shift over time.

Major ocean currents can carry baby corals to temperate seas. If new coral reefs form there as the waters warm, these areas might act as refuges for tropical corals, reducing the corals’ risk of extinction.

Coral reefs made up of many individual coral polyps. — A close-up of double star corals (*Diploastrea heliopora*) off Indonesia.
Bernard DuPont/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Scientists know from the fossil record that coral reef expansions have occurred before. However, a big question remains: Can corals migrate fast enough to keep pace with climate change caused by humans? We developed a cutting-edge simulation to find the answer.

Field and laboratory studies have measured how coral growth depends on temperature, acidity and light intensity. We combined this information with data on ocean currents to create a global simulation that represents how corals respond to a changing environment – including their ability to adapt through evolution and shift their ranges.

Then, we used future climate projections to predict how coral reefs may respond to climate change.

We found that it will take centuries for coral reefs to shift away from the tropics. This is far too slow for temperate seas to save tropical coral species – they are facing severe threats right now and in the coming decades.

How coral reefs form.

Underwater cities in motion?

Under countries’ current greenhouse gas emissions policies, our simulations suggest that coral reefs will decline globally by a further 70% this century as ocean temperatures continue to rise. As bad as that sounds, it’s actually slightly more optimistic than previous studies that predicted losses as high as 99%.

Our simulations suggest that coral populations could expand in a few locations this century, primarily southern Australia, but these expansions may only amount to around 6,000 acres (2,400 hectares). While that might sound a lot, we expect to lose around 10 million acres (4 million hectares) of coral over the same period.

In other words, we are unlikely to see significant new tropical-style coral reefs forming in temperate waters within our lifetimes, so most tropical corals will not find refuge in higher latitude seas.

Even though the suitable water temperatures for corals are forecast to expand poleward by about 25 miles (40 kilometers) per decade, corals would face other challenges in new environments.

Our research suggests that coral range expansion is mainly limited by slower coral growth at higher latitudes, not by dispersal. Away from the equator, light intensity falls and temperature becomes more variable, reducing growth, and therefore the rate of range expansion, for many coral species.

It is likely that new coral reefs will eventually form beyond their current range, as history shows, but our results suggest this may take centuries.

Two fish hide among the spikes of coral. — Fish hide out in the safety of Kingman Reef, in the Pacific Ocean between the Hawaiian Islands and American Samoa. Coral reefs provide protection for many species, particularly young fish.
USFWS, Pacific Islands

Some coral species are adapted to the more challenging environmental conditions at higher latitudes, and these corals are increasing in abundance, but they are much less diverse and structurally complex than their tropical counterparts.

Scientists have used human-assisted migration to try to restore damaged coral reefs by transplanting live corals. However, coral restoration is controversial, as it is expensive and cannot be scaled up globally. Since coral range expansion appears to be limited by challenging environmental conditions at higher latitudes rather than by dispersal, human-assisted migration is also unlikely to help them expand more quickly.

Importantly, these potential higher latitude refuges already have rich, distinct ecosystems. Establishing tropical corals within those ecosystems might disrupt existing species, so rapid expansions might not be a good thing in the first place.

A temperate reef near southern Australia, which could be threatened by expansions of tropical coral species.
Stefan Andrews/Ocean Image Bank, CC BY-NC

No known alternative to cutting emissions

Despite enthusiasm for coral restoration, there is little evidence to suggest that methods like this can mitigate the global decline of coral reefs.

As our study shows, migration would take centuries, while the most severe climate change harm for corals will occur within decades, making it unlikely that subtropical and temperate seas can act as coral refuges.

What can help corals is reducing greenhouse gas emissions that are driving global warming. Our study suggests that reducing emissions at a faster pace, in accordance with the Paris climate agreement, could cut the coral loss by half compared with current policies. That could boost reef health for centuries to come.

This means that there is still hope for these irreplaceable coral ecosystems, but time is running out.

Noam Vogt-Vincent receives funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

– ref. Coral reefs face an uncertain recovery from the 4th global mass bleaching event – can climate refuges help? – https://theconversation.com/coral-reefs-face-an-uncertain-recovery-from-the-4th-global-mass-bleaching-event-can-climate-refuges-help-255804

July 1, 2025

Computers tracking us, an ‘electronic collar’: Gilles Deleuze’s 1990 Postscript on the Societies of Control was eerily prescient

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Cameron Shackell, Sessional Academic, School of Information Systems, Queensland University of Technology

Our cultural touchstones series looks at influential works.

Gilles Deleuze was one of the most original and imaginative thinkers of postwar France. A lifelong teacher, he spent most of his career at the University of Paris VIII, influencing generations of students but largely shunning the mantle of public intellectual.

His complex, creative books mix philosophy, literature, film and politics – not to give clear answers, but to spark new ways of thinking.

Postscript on the Societies of Control, published 35 years ago in the countercultural L’Autre Journal is Deleuze at his most accessible and prophetic.

Written at a time when the Cold War was ending, computers were becoming more common, and the internet was beginning to connect institutions, the essay describes the emergence of a new kind of society – one not ruled by a single stern voice but by the soft hum of networks.

How societies work

Postscript was written as an update to the work of Deleuze’s contemporary Michel Foucault, who had died in 1984. Deleuze called it a “postscript” not just because of its brevity (it’s only around 2,300 words in English translation) but to highlight he wasn’t refuting Foucault, just building on his work.

A black and white photo of a man in a polo neck jumper. — Gilles Deleuze.
Tintinades/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-SA

From the 18th to early 20th centuries, Foucault had argued, Western societies were “disciplinary societies”. Schools, factories, prisons and hospitals – institutions with walls, schedules, routines and clear expectations – moulded behaviour. People were trained, observed, tested and corrected as they passed from one institution to the next.

But in the late 20th century, Deleuze saw something shifting. He thought the stodgy old disciplinary institutions were “in a generalized crisis” due to technological advances and a new form of capitalism that demanded more flexibility in workers and consumers.

New systems of management and technology were starting to reshape people without sending them through traditional institutions. Deleuze wrote presciently, for example, that “perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination”.

In business, he saw a growing idea of “salary according to merit”, transforming work into “challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions” – something much at odds with the old model of the standard wage and the assembly line. Traditional government institutions like hospitals and the classic factory were embracing the model of the corporation, driven always by a profit motive and the need for better human tools.

To Deleuze, all this meant people were becoming more “free-floating” – they could be still playing socially useful roles but were being gently steered into them. This greater freedom, however, required a new system to keep everyone in line. He called this “modulation” to underline its dynamic, enveloping nature.

Like nudging, but everywhere

Deleuze described modulation as “a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other”. He meant that people were beginning to live in an environment where everything shape-shifts to encourage or discourage us in the right direction without explicitly putting up walls.

A prime example of how modulation has since become commonplace is nudging – the use of psychological techniques, often subtle and data-driven, to shape people’s behaviour.

Nudging didn’t really exist in 1990, but governments and tech companies use nudges all the time now. We’re nudged to eat healthier, buy, save, recycle, donate. Web sites use “dark patterns” – tricky designs that steer (or nudge) us toward certain choices. Social media feeds use algorithms to exclude us if we say the wrong thing. In fact, entire teams of behavioural scientists operate behind the scenes to manipulate many aspects of our lives.

Nudges can be good and can save us from poor choices, but their newfound moral acceptability (sometimes called libertarian paternalism) is very much a clue that Deleuze’s control society has arrived.

Control in your pocket

Deleuze, who died in 1995, wrote Postscript before the advent of the smartphone, but he foresaw that an “electronic collar” would assume a central role in society. He envisaged a “computer that tracks each person’s position – licit or illicit – and effects a universal modulation.”

Smartphones more than fit the bill. In the old disciplinary ways, they track where we go, what we search for, what we buy, how many steps we take, even how well we sleep. But if we apply Deleuze’s ideas to these phones, detailed surveillance is no longer their most important function. Our phones present and curate options.

In effect, they shape how we see the world. When you scroll through news or social media, for instance, you’re reading about a version of the world built just for you, designed to keep you looking, clicking and reacting – and keep you very finely attuned to what is acceptable or dangerous behaviour.

In Deleuze’s terms, this is pure modulation: not a forceful “No” but a softly spoken, “How about this?” Your phone doesn’t lock you in – it draws you in. It shapes what you see, rewards your cooperation, ignores your silence, and always keeps score. And it does this 24/7. You might unlock it hundreds of times a day. And each time it’s updated to guide your next move more precisely.

At the same time our phones quietly turn us into a set of credentials useful for regulating physical access to workplaces, bank accounts, information: In the societies of control, writes Deleuze, “what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password.”

Data points not people?

Deleuze warned that, in a control society: “Individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses have become samples, data, markets, or ‘banks.’” A dividual to Deleuze is a person transformed into a set of data points and metrics.

You are your credit rating, your search history, your likes and clicks – a different dataset to every institution. Such fragments are used to make decisions about you until they effectively replace you. In fact, for Deleuze a dividual has internalised this treatment and thinks of themselves as a net worth, a mortgage size, a car value – psychological anchors for control.

He illustrates this point with healthcare, predicting a

new medicine ‘without doctor or patient’ that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation.

How many health decisions are now made for us collectively before we ever see a doctor? We should be grateful for advances in public health and epidemiology, but this has certainly impacted our individuality and how we are treated.

Hard to detect

An unsettling part of Deleuze’s perspective is that control doesn’t usually feel like control. It’s often dressed up as convenience, efficiency or progress. You set up internet-linked video cameras because then you can work from home. You agree to long terms and conditions because your banking app won’t work otherwise.

One problem is there are no longer clear barriers we can rail against. As Deleuze said:

In disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in control societies one is never finished with anything.

Control doesn’t always crush – it can enable. Digital networks bring real freedom, economic possibility, even joy. We move more easily – both mentally and geographically – than ever before. But while we move, it always inside a kind of invisible map shaped by capitalism.

It’s no conspiracy because nobody has the whole map. So it’s difficult to work out exactly what action, if any, to take. As Deleuze concludes: “The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.”

So what can we do?

Postscript doesn’t offer a political program beyond the sardonic comment that:

Many young people strangely boast of being ‘motivated’ […] It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve.

There are ways to resist control. Some people demand more privacy or digital rights. Others opt out selectively – logging off, turning off, refusing to be nudged. Some look to art as a way of resisting its smooth grip. These acts – however small – may offer what Deleuze and his collaborator, the French psychiatrist and philosopher Félix Guattari, called lines of flight: creative ways to move not just against control, but beyond it.

The real message of Postscript, however, is its invitation to consider a timeless perspective. Any society must have a way to make people useful. So, what kind of society do we want? What kinds of restrictions are we willing to live under? And, crucial to this current age, how explicit should control be?

Cameron Shackell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Computers tracking us, an ‘electronic collar’: Gilles Deleuze’s 1990 Postscript on the Societies of Control was eerily prescient – https://theconversation.com/computers-tracking-us-an-electronic-collar-gilles-deleuzes-1990-postscript-on-the-societies-of-control-was-eerily-prescient-254579

July 1, 2025

The politics of blame: Accusing immigrants won’t solve Germany’s antisemitism problem

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Oliver Schmidtke, Professor, Director of the Centre for Global Studies, University of Victoria

In response to a report on the virulence of antisemitism in Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently cast the blame on attitudes held by immigrants.

Merz stated in a Fox News interview that Germany has “imported antisemitism with the big numbers of migrants we have within the last 10 years.”

Merz is pointing to a real and pressing issue. Yet his emphasis on so-called “imported antisemitism” serves as a convenient diversion from Germany’s persistent failure to confront home-grown antisemitism.

His remarks also risk emboldening those who weaponize antisemitism as a rhetorical tool to fuel anti-immigrant sentiments.

Antisemitism in Germany

Antisemitic incidents in Germany have been on the rise since the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas and the subsequent war in Gaza.

According to a survey by the Research and Information Centre on Antisemitism (RIAS), antisemitic occurrences rose by more than 80 per cent in 2023. That year, 4,782 occurrences were documented, the highest number since the organization began tracking such cases in 2017.

However, RIAS’s most recent report found that the primary motive behind antisemitic crimes remained right-wing extremist ideology (48 per cent). It also noted that, since 2023, there has been a marked increase in incidents attributed to “foreign ideology.” These are understood as originating outside Germany and often linked to Islamist or anti-Israel sentiments, which accounted for 31 per cent of cases in 2024.

It should be noted that RIAS’s approach to classifying antisemitism has been subject to controversy, especially with regard to its treatment of criticism of or protest against the Israeli government’s actions.

The ‘imported antisemitism’ narrative

A recent survey of antisemitic attitudes among immigrants in Germany found that such attitudes are more prevalent among Muslim respondents compared to their Christian or religiously unaffiliated counterparts. The study revealed particularly high levels of antisemitism among individuals from the Middle East and North Africa.

Approximately 35 per cent of Muslim respondents — especially those with strong religious convictions and lower levels of formal education — “strongly agreed with classical antisemitic statements.” These statements reflect classical antisemitic tropes, such as attributing too much influence over politics or finance to Jews, accusing Jews of driving the world into disaster or relativizing the Holocaust.

At the same time, there is evidence that immigrants successfully integrating into German society is associated with lower levels of antisemitism.

Yet blaming a rise in antisemitism on “imported” attitudes or “foreign ideologies” signals a crude simplification. Antisemitism has remained prevalent in German society even after the Second World War, and political movements or leaders can easily mobilize it.

Although Holocaust education is mandatory in German schools, knowledge about the Shoah and the legacy of antisemitism remains limited among younger generations. A recent study by the Jewish Claims Conference found that among Germans aged 18 to 29, around 40 per cent were not aware that approximately six million Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators.

According to a 2023 MEMO survey, more than 50 per cent of 14- to 16-year-old students in Germany did not know what Auschwitz was.

Blaming immigrants for challenges in Germany’s memory culture oversimplifies a deeper issue: the growing difficulty of making the country’s dominant remembrance — centred on the horrors of the Nazi dictatorship and the Holocaust — politically meaningful and emotionally resonant for younger generations.

For many young Germans, the memory of the Holocaust feels increasingly remote, lacking the emotional immediacy that vanishing eyewitnesses once provided.

This problem is further exacerbated by the absence of innovative, impactful teaching capable of conveying the continued relevance of Holocaust memory and its political message.

In a 2023 article, American journalist Masha Gessen highlighted how Holocaust remembrance in Germany was becoming an elite-driven ritual, one that risks preventing a meaningful connection between its moral imperatives and today’s political realities.

The threat from Alternative for Germany

At the same time, the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party poses a direct threat to Germany’s culture of remembrance.

The AfD has made it a central objective to challenge the primacy of Holocaust memory, calling for a U-turn in Germany’s remembrance culture.

Leading party members have labelled Holocaust memorials “monuments of shame,” reflecting the party’s broader effort to promote nationalist reinterpretations of history.

Furthermore, the AfD’s staunchly anti-immigrant stance exposes a fundamental flaw in the imported antisemitism narrative. Across Europe, populist right-wing movements have increasingly mobilized anti-Muslim rhetoric under the banner of defending so-called “Judeo-Christian values,” even as they simultaneously draw on classic antisemitic tropes targeting “globalist elites” and conspiratorial power structures.

This use of Jewish identity as a rhetorical weapon against Islam, while perpetuating antisemitism in other forms, reveals the deep contradictions and opportunism underlying imported antisemitism claims.

Blaming Muslim immigrants for the rise of antisemitism offers German political leaders a convenient excuse for their own failure to confront entrenched antisemitic beliefs within German society.

In addition, Holocaust remembrance can sometimes exclude immigrants. For example, Germany recently added questions about the Holocaust and Nazi crimes to its citizenship test, committing newcomers to its memory culture.

Research shows this kind of policy can have unintended effects. It can make immigrants feel excluded if they are seen as not fully sharing in “our” nation and “our” history. Given the universalist values it is meant to embody, the commemoration of the Holocaust can also serve to alienate immigrants from full cultural citizenship.

Framing antisemitism primarily as an imported problem risks strengthening those forces that actively seek to undermine and ignore Germany’s confrontation with its Nazi past.

Instead, what is needed is a more nuanced approach, one that bridges the divide between antiracist and anti-antisemitism efforts, and aligns more faithfully with the moral and political commitments that this collective memory is meant to uphold.

Oliver Schmidtke receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

– ref. The politics of blame: Accusing immigrants won’t solve Germany’s antisemitism problem – https://theconversation.com/the-politics-of-blame-accusing-immigrants-wont-solve-germanys-antisemitism-problem-258705