Diplomacy & Crisis News

A number of B-1 seats could still malfunction after a dangerous May mishap.

« La tragédie du jour suivant, écrivait Edward Gibbon à propos des spectacles romains, consista dans un massacre de cent lions, d'autant de lionnes, de deux cents léopards et de trois cents ours. » Le temps de ces spectacles odieux est révolu (même si divers combats de coqs ou de taureaux font penser (...) / Animal, Idées - 2001/08 Humanisme

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Disruptors are becoming ever more prevalent as bold solutions are offered for global problems. In health, transport, and agriculture big ideas are at the centre of fierce debates about reform and innovation; nowhere is this more evident than in education.

In developing countries, quality education for the poor is rare:  263 million children are out of school and 330 million children are in school but not learning. 69 million more teachers are needed. With many calling for more funding to meet demand, it is only now that the global community is unifying around ‘outcomes’ rather than ‘access’ as a benchmark for success and calling for innovationto help solve the learning crisis.

Sadly, at the moment nearly 600 million children are being failed; enabling those 600 million to go to a school where they actually learn is a mammoth global task and underpins Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4). Re-building weak public school systems; putting in place capacity building programs; re-invigorating teacher training programs and enabling governments to generate enough financing to fund all this will take many years, if not decades.

Providing high quality schooling for all children clearly requires innovation, partnership and collaboration from all sectors that have the expertise and commitment to contribute. Yet many anti-reformists vehemently argue that SDG4 should not be pursued in partnership with the private sector. Their justification for this is often ostensibly rooted in Article 26 of the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The 1948 UDHR ‘strives to promote these rights and freedoms and secure universal and effective recognition’; but 70 years on; 600 million children are proof that the approach taken to fulfilling Article 26’s goals so far, has failed. Section one of the Article has five clear components a) Everyone has the right to education b) Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages and c) Elementary education shall be compulsory d) Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and e) higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

Many educators, including Bridge, believe that a strong free public school system delivering real learning for each and every child is the ideal. However, we must be pragmatic as well as idealistic if we accept the fundamental urgency of the learning crisis.If we believe that a) education is a right then we must strive to help fulfill that right urgently. If c) education must be compulsory, then we must urgently build and develop enough schools, classrooms and teachers for 600 million children to be served. If these rights, outlined in Article 26, cannot be urgently met by existing public systems then they must be met using other models. Otherwise, parents must wait until all governments build the will, the resources, and the capacity to provide the poor the education their children deserve. This is an unacceptable position and offers families no hope. Therefore, the ability to compromise on clause b, in the short term, is essential; a failure to do so will perpetuate the cycle of educational death for another generation of children. Clause b is often arbitrarily proclaimed by status quo defenders as most essential: education must be free. They argue, compulsory education for all (clauses a and c) must be delivered by existing public sector frameworks without any social impact investment; returns based financing or public private partnership models. According to them, governments must deliver the holy grail of strong, regenerated and reinvigorated public schools from within a failing system. Despite good intentions, this has been unachievable for the last 70 years.  This argument locates them firmly in the realm of the ideologues who place theory above the immediate needs of children.

It is only through embracing new, innovative, scalable and sustainable models that clause b will ever be achievable. The clear alternative to private sector assistance is that hundreds of millions of children remain uneducated for the years or decades it may take for all governments to reform and develop a strong primary education system. It is the verhement resistance to this logic which leads education reformers to talk about an ideological divide.

This ideological divide is increasingly visible through coordinated public attacks on the private sector and its innovations. Often driven by those that have no constituency in the communities or the countries benefiting from private sector interventions; by those that have neither experienced first hand the innovations they critique nor reviewed the materials they condemn. Perhaps, more importantly by those that do not offer any practical solutions to ensure that the 600 million can urgently learn.

Against this backdrop there are millions of parents who are choosing schools like Bridge. In Kenya alone, there are two million children alone attending ‘informal schools’. These parents are from communities living in extreme poverty, often in slums. These parents are choosing not to send their child to the nearby public school, for which they often pay, because their public school is failing; only 51% of Kenyan parents rated the quality of free to attend schools in Kenya as good.Children are not learning; teachers are struggling and parents are frustrated that their children are being failed. A parent with school aged children cannot wait for the rebuilding of public school systems; capacity building programs; re-invigorated teacher training programs. They have to send their child to school today. They choose schools where they can be intimately involved:  chairing regional and national PTAs; sitting on school boards; attending workshops. They are invested in their child’s education in every sense, as are their communities, and their children thrive. They are the living embodiment of Article 26’s section three: ‘Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.’

At the heart of parental choice is a parents’ desire for good teachers and  an environment that supports their child’s learning. However, teachers in developing countries face considerable challenges; they themselves struggle with literacy and numeracy; they often do not have materials with which to teach let alone good materials; they have overcrowded classrooms; often they are not paid on time, if at all; in remote communities with poor infrastructure there is no support or guidance and teacher absenteeism levels are extraordinarily high. This is the plight of many teachers and because of this, it is unfathomable that activists who claim to support teachers would seek to protect the status quo. They seek to protect labor and agitate against a focus on teacher performance. Whereas , teachers themselves are actively seeking environments where they have access to professional development opportunities and can practice their chosen profession with pride.

Nearly all primary schools in sub-Saharan Africa are failing their pupils. Solutions that utilize a wide range of partners is essential and using Article 26 to undermine these partnerships is nonsensical.

Joanna Hindley is the Vice President of Bridge International Academics. 

The post Education Is A Right That Must Be Fulfilled Urgently appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

Cette recension a été publiée dans le numéro d’été de Politique étrangère (n° 2/2018). Aurélien Denizeau propose une analyse de l’ouvrage de Kemal Kirisci, Turkey and the West: Fault Lines in a Troubled Alliance (Brookings Institution Press, 2017, 320 pages).

Alors que l’alliance entre la Turquie et les pays occidentaux s’est considérablement fragilisée ces dernières années, l’ouvrage de Kemal Kirisci propose une synthèse bienvenue. L’auteur est un bon connaisseur des relations extérieures turques ; il avait vu dans la diplomatie d’Ankara la pratique typique d’un trading state, avant que les enjeux sécuritaires ne reprennent le dessus. Son ouvrage a le mérite de ne pas simplement compiler les évolutions de la politique étrangère turque, mais de les relier aux évolutions internes du pays. En d’autres termes, plus le Parti de la justice et du développement (AKP) au pouvoir rejette le modèle kémaliste modernisateur aux origines de la République, et plus ses relations avec les pays occidentaux se tendent.

Turkey and the West s’inscrit dans une perspective historique large, revenant aux débuts de l’alliance occidentale turque. Une occasion de rappeler que cette relation a toujours été compliquée, traversée de crises et soubresauts. D’ailleurs, par certains aspects, l’arrivée au pouvoir de l’AKP en 2002, permet de rapprocher la Turquie de ses partenaires occidentaux, le pays semblant alors se rapprocher des standards d’une démocratie libérale. À l’ouverture politique interne et aux réformes audacieuses proposées par le parti de Recep Tayyip Erdogan correspondent une coopération réelle avec les États-Unis, et surtout les débuts du processus d’adhésion à l’Union européenne (UE). L’auteur rappelle, au passage, que l’anti-occidentalisme n’est pas en Turquie seulement le fait du camp islamiste : au contraire, dans les années 2000, kémalistes et nationalistes présentent l’AKP comme un instrument américain et européen pour affaiblir la souveraineté turque et son modèle républicain.

Kemal Kirisci, pour sa part, estime que ce lien transatlantique a eu de nombreux effets bénéfiques sur la Turquie. S’il s’efforce de garder un regard objectif, il est assez clair qu’il déplore la dégradation des relations entre Ankara et ses alliés américains et européens. À ses yeux, là encore, celle-ci doit être mise en parallèle avec un retour progressif à l’autoritarisme politique. Sûr de sa position hégémonique, mais également refroidi par les erreurs américaines en Irak et les réticences européennes à la candidature turque, l’AKP adopte une rhétorique de plus en plus critique envers l’Occident. La guerre en Syrie cristallise ces oppositions. Alors même que la Turquie et ses partenaires, notamment américain, français et britannique, semblent partager la même position hostile à Bachar Al-Assad, l’évolution du conflit les conduit à s’opposer. Un temps accusée de soutenir les mouvements djihadistes, Ankara accuse en retour les pays occidentaux d’armer les milices kurdes qu’elle combat. Cette rhétorique anti-occidentale rencontre un succès certain auprès d’une population déçue par l’UE et traditionnellement critique envers les États-Unis.

Les derniers chapitres de l’ouvrage reviennent plus spécifiquement sur la politique étrangère turque. L’auteur y remet notamment en question le rôle d’Ahmet Davutoglu dans l’élaboration de celle-ci. S’il reconnaît volontiers le rôle et l’influence de l’universitaire, il relève que la politique étrangère de l’AKP s’inscrit dans une certaine continuité avec les initiatives antérieures. Ce faisant, Kemal Kirisci renouvelle également le regard porté sur cette diplomatie turque, dont la relation à l’Occident n’est qu’un des aspects les plus symboliques.

Aurélien Denizeau

S’abonner à Politique étrangère

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At any given time, India contains an estimated 18.4 million victims of modern slavery. Of that number, 26 percent, or 5.5 million, are children.

India is no exception to the trend that trafficking and subsequent slavery are shown to be most prevalent in countries producing consumer goods through low-cost labor, as the rural elite have used slavery to augment their industrial financial gains for generations. Forced labor – debt bondage, indentured servitude, caste-based slavery, trafficking, enticement, abduction – is distinctly used by the rural elite to increase production in agricultural or textile industries. Often, at the mercy of the rural elite, the victims of slavery belong to poor families, a low social strata of the society, or from low caste poor families and mainly work in rural areas. Unfortunately, this is no surprise. Approximately 70 percent of trafficking victims in India belong to Scheduled Castes or Tribes – also called ‘Dalit’ classes – and are among the most disadvantaged socio-economic groups in India.

Though most in the Dalit classes are prone to economic and social vulnerability, they are the most susceptible to trafficking and other forms of slavery because of opinions of the rural elite. The rural elite may see control of lower classes as their divinely ordained, seigniorial right over people they view as serfs. To make matters worse, those in lower classes face the pressure of making wealth to survive, the need to repay debts, illiteracy and the lack of education, all of which may serve as driving forces in their vulnerability to elites who view them as lesser beings.

There is also an increasing trend of children being trafficked for domestic labor for the rural elite, who also have been shown to subject entire villages to debt bondage. Further, children forced into slavery, either from their villages or captured individually, by the rural elite may have previously been kicked out of shelters, forced beggars, gang members, or trafficked by illegal placement agencies.  

The market of sex slavery in India best illustrates the exploitation faced by victims of human trafficking. Close to 80 percent of the human trafficking is done for sexual exploitation and India is considered as the hub of this crime in Asia, with young girls also being smuggled from neighboring Nepal and Bangladesh. More than half of total commercial sex workers in India are from Nepal and Bangladesh, which can be attributed to prevailing abject poverty and ignorance in both these countries compared with India. Thus, India is not only a destination for human sex trafficking, but also a transit country for trading these victims internationally.

The prevalence of sex trafficking has additional implications for the status of women in India. Female victims with a lower social status, little to no possessions, or financially desperate have been historically easy targets for traffickers. Additionally, social pressures compel women to remain within the confines of the domestic sphere and the restricted movement, lack of education, and prevention from social and economic activities deprives the women from accessing justice, equality, and subjects them to abuses of human rights. As a result, traffickers are able to coax women into giving in to commercial sexual exploitation in order to support themselves or their dependents, as well as better their financial situation despite their circumstances. These empty promises often result in kidnapping, forced marriages, selling or bartering women for opium, wealth, or labor, and recurrent rape. Women who are sold – specifically to brothels, placement agencies, or as child brides – are bought through dealers on the black market. Once sold as sex slaves, particularly to brothels, victims seldom come back to normal life, as the impact of the suffering is so intense they often lose their mental balance and accept life as prostitutes. Those who try to escape are either killed or punished so brutally they become permanently mentally or physically scarred. These horrifying realities faced by millions of women and girls is a product of one of the fastest growing organized crimes and most lucrative criminal activity in the world that is increasing annually.

Actions taken by the Indian government and intergovernmental organizations, individually and in collaboration, to combat human trafficking have yielded mixed results. The 2008 Vienna Forum, a United Nations conference bringing together Member States, other international organizations, the business community, academia, and civil society, was planned to address different dimensions of human trafficking. The Forum examined existing definitions of and practices related to the prevention of trafficking and, by focusing on decreasing vulnerability, planned to broaden the strategic impact of existing prevention efforts.

While the global community addressing the issues of human trafficking is a stride towards preventing the crime, especially as it included the business world, limited actions were taken following this conference. In India specifically, identifying those vulnerable is not an easy task, as poverty alone cannot be the sole criteria to identify the poor. In addition to the lack of material resources, one needs to include indicators such as lack of power and choice. Reduction of vulnerability for the poor, therefore, is difficult for the government alone to accomplish.

Instead, the Indian government has looked towards crime prevention as an approach to combating human trafficking. This includes toughened criminal penalties for child prostitution and forced marriage, as well as improvements to protect victims, as well as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2016 demonetization scheme. This plan, announced in November of that year, was aimed, among other things, to hit out at black money, parallel economy and criminal activities to specifically impact industries run by the rural elite, as they thrive on illegally obtained income.

While this demonetization scheme will likely deal a severe blow to human trafficking activities, the India government will likely need to do more to aid victims and crack down on officials who are involved in human trafficking. In the meantime, the rural elite still profit from human labor and human rights violations continue to go undisturbed. The cycle of human bondage in India must be broken, and only time will tell if the efforts, past and present, of the Indian government and other outside organizations will pay off.

The post Human Trafficking in India: Abuse from the Rural Elite and the Wider Implications appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.