Week 3 The Aftershocks of Inequality

How does the 1948 UDHR relate to inequality?

Universalizing language has the ability to erase historical injustices and does not sufficiently delve into the relationships people have with these legal rights

• Despite the UDHR being supposed equal, is there access to rights equal?

UDHR Art 3: Right to life, liberty and security

UDHR Art 7: Rule of law

How does Week 3’s Aftershocks of Inequality [in the UDHR] link to Week 2’s The Gift and Politics of Aid?

We live in a world where some lives are given more value than others. This is a product of the contextual history, race, gender, economy and politics.

This is through several structures and technologies of power are constantly evaluating the worth of different human lives.

What are examples of different societal/structural valuations of human life throughout history?

• Atlantic Slave trade [of people ‘far away’] whole islands and coutries built upon a slave economy i.e. Caribbean

• Modernisation [‘in civilised western society’] built through genocide, slavery, large-scale acculturation, early and forced industrialization, and then, revolution.

Who is Michel-Rolph Trouillot and what did they do?

An Anthropologist, Historian and Writier who was in exile from Haiti’s dictatorship

Looked at how we create history selective archives curating a biased narratives.

• Questioning dominant sources and paradigms of history and the interests they serve, to produce scholarly work that self-reflectively engages with its own conditions of production

What does Trouillot focus on in his case study and reflection on history?

The ‘Silences of History’: Certain history gets unequal attention. Looking at not what is told, but what history isn’t told and why.

The making of sources, archives and narratives, with Archival power.

Looking at the Haitian revolution and confronting racism in how history creates winners/how the powerful define history.

How national days of commemoration: Columbus day —> Indigenous people’s day

“Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final insistence).”

Who is Paul Farmer and what did he do?

Anthropologist and practicing doctor who started a hospital in Haiti.

Looking at Structural Inequality as Strucutral Violence

What are key stats about access to healthcare in Haiti [i think in the time of Paul Farmer]?

• Where there are 1.2 doctors, 1.3 nurses, and 0.04 dentists per 10,000 Haitians

• 40% of the population is without access to any form of primary health care

Haiti was France’s most important colony. It is estimated that by the late eighteenth century two-thirds of all of Europe’s tropical produce and a great deal of French wealth came from Haiti alone

What is Spectacular violence compared to ‘Slow Violence’?

For most, the idea of violence brings to mind the deaths caused by a bomb blast or a terrorist attack. It is hard to identify the loss of life caused by hunger and poverty as violence.

The reason why there are different reactions to the violence of inequality and the violence of a bomb blast, is because the agents of the latter kind of violence are in the foreground and the agents of inequality are not immediately visible.

What are Merleau-Ponty’s arguments as to the philosophy behing structural violence in Liberal democracy’s?

• Defending liberty as an idea, instead of free people themself

As a liberal democracy, we fail to acknowledge some disgraceful forms of violence in a way that “liberty becomes a false ensign—a ‘solemn complement’ of violence— it becomes only an idea and we begin to defend liberty instead of free men” (Merleau-Ponty 1969: 14)

As the value of a society is “the value it places upon man’s relation to man.”

Who is the agent of slow violence and structural inequality/violence?

As Merleau-Ponty higlights its in the strucutres of a society

• He says, “to understand and judge a society, one has to penetrate its basic structure to the human bond upon which it is built; this undoubtedly depends upon legal relations, but also upon forms of labor, ways of loving, living and dying” (Merleau-Ponty 1969:  xxvii).

Moving the identifiable individuals, agents of inequality are out of sight - as violence is structural in nature

Legitimising certain forms of violence, i.e. police actions during protests or military action/martial law

Why is Structural violence insidious?

The causal blame of inequality as structural violence often given to the victims rather than active violence [victim blaming in structural violence]

Compared to an attack it’s clearer to attribute the blame of the violence on the perpetrator

How does Paul Farmer define the relationship between strucutral violence and structural inequality?

Structural inequality = structural violence, in terms of access to healthcare

• Social and economic structures thus hide the victims of inequality from its beneficiaries, further masking the violence of inequality as a nonevent

Paul Farmer: “structural violence is violence exerted systematically—that is, indirectly— by everyone who belongs to a certain social order: hence the discomfort these ideas provoke in a moral economy still geared to pinning praise or blame on individual actors”(Farmer 2004: 307).

What are the 5 key points of Strucutral violence?

1.      The importance of history

2.      Structural violence is violence exerted systematically—indirectly by everyone who belongs to a certain social order

3.      Social inequalities are at the heart of structural violence.

4.      Structural violence is structured and stricturing. It constricts the agency of its victims. Informed by a complex web of events and processes stretching far back in time and across continents.

5.      Structural violence, at the root of much terrorism and bombardment, is much more likely to wither bodies slowly, very often through infectious diseases.

What are over examples of everyday forms of violence and exploitation as Structural violence?

Everyday forms of violence and exploitation, because they do not explode into sensational events, are easier to overlook than the violence that causes gory bloodshed. Battles and riots are events; poverty and the slow death of the poor are not. From strucutral socio-economic factors beyond individual control

• In Boston, black babies in the inner city die before their first birthdays at three times the rate of white babies. (Gillian, 1996, p.193)

• 2-3x annually as many people die from poverty throughout the world, as were killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period [Source???]

• There are 14 to 18 million deaths a year caused by structural violence compared with about 100,000 deaths per year from armed conflict (Gilligan 1996: 195).

Who is Philippe Bourgois and what did he do?

• Anthropologist working with the homeless and crack dealers

Looking at the violence of society. and violence on each other

Agency within Structure

How does Bourgois expand on Paul Farmer?

Looking at people within structural violence inflicting violence on one-another and themselves [ideas of individual agency within structural violence]

• Not homogenising structures and individuals actions

• Where does agency end or small acts of resistance

How does Bourgois look at agency within structures in relation to poverty?

Bourgois says that most homeless people do not recognize the complex array of structural forces around ethnicity, gender economy, public policy, law enforcement, and social stigma that shape their subjectivities and habituses and constrain their survival options (Bourgois 2009: 17)

Oscillates from people’s individual agency in hurting one another and themselves, to the violence of the structures in which their everyday interactions and lives are embedded.

The analysis of political economy is not a panacea that can compensate for individualistic, racist, or otherwise judgmental interpretations of social marginalization. In fact, a focus just on structures often obscures the fact that human beings are active agents of their own history, rather than passive victims (Bourgois 2003: 17).

How does Bourgois demonstrate Individual agency be enacted within structural violence?

Over-emphasis on structures should not strip people of their individual capacities to govern their lives and their social relationships

Bourgois, in his work with crack dealers and addicts, argues that such groups of people “frequently mistreat the only people over whom they still have a shred of power—usually their loved ones, often themselves” (Bourgois 2009: 318).

What is Paul Farmer’s example of Individual agency within structural violence?

Paul Farmer in writing about Anite, a Haitian woman dying from metastatic breast cancer, says in relation to her condition that “the contours of this world, a world in which her options and even her dreams are constrained sharply”, have been shaped very directly by seemingly distant, but in reality very related, historical and economic processes of Haiti.

“The distribution of AIDS and Tuberculosis—like that of slavery in earlier times—is historically given and economically driven…social inequalities are at the heart of structural violence. Racism of one form or another, gender inequality, and above all brute poverty in the face of affluence are linked to social plans and programs ranging from slavery to the current quest for unbridled growth”(Farmer 2007: 317).

What is the conceptual debates around the Aftershocks of Disaster?

Aftershocks is mostly used in the context of earthquakes to describe the jolts felt after the initial quake. Aftershocks can continue for days, weeks, months, and even years after the “main-shock.”

The effects in aftershocks of a disaster, can compound the damage of the initial shock and create new urgencies that complicate recovery efforts. [i.e. damage to water pipes, increasing cholera?]

How does aftershocks of disasters link to strucutural inequality/violence?

Aftershocks after the natural disaster, in the structural inequality and violence

i.e. residents drowned in bureaucracy and institutional neglect [rooted in history e.g. colonialism defining the outcome of Hurricane Maria]

What can be taken when looking at the roots of Structural violence, and managing the aftershocks of disasters?

Demand something more than a mere recovery, if by recovery we are to understand a return to a previous state of affairs. [Take a moment to maybe dismantle the structures of inequality and structural violence]

Rather than promoting a frenzied rush toward “recovery” without assessing what was experienced, what was lost, and what was transformed, these contributors encourage us to dwell in fractured narratives that emerged from Hurricane Maria and its aftermath,

What is Disaster Capitalism as a type of an Aftershock of inequality?

Naomi Klein’s work on the Shock Docterine in Disaster capitalism.

• Shock doctrine “the brute tactic of systematically using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock—wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes, natural disasters—to push through radical pro-corporate measures”

The domination of the “free market”. How free market use disasters to enter spaces or further their positions…

• i.e. Private companies – from real estate agents, to hotel and hospitality groups, the energy sector, education sector all want to take advantage of a disaster and private the nation.