Archive for the ‘Democracy’ Category

Democracy on the Ropes Eugene Weekly – Eugene Weekly

The events of Jan. 6 are fresh in our minds, as is the refusal of the Senate to hold the chief insurrectionist accountable for the armed attack on our Capitol. The anti-democracy faction, as always, is in Big Lie mode, as if middle school code messaging can claim the battlefield.

The People are to swallow the poison elixir to wit, the rejected presidents inflammatory speech was not at all meant to incite the violence that immediately followed, but was mere metaphoric poetry designed to evoke peaceful participation in the mechanics of democratic government. But the People are not drinking the elixir. Those of us with at least half a wit and a dose of our parents old-fashioned common sense, who watched, listened and now recall the context of this historical episode of a defeated candidates attempt to overthrow an election and remain in power, had no problem navigating the thicket of lies to arrive at the sobering truth America came perilously close to totalitarianism.

And we are still far from being out of the woods.

Let me put the evidence in the record for the readers. First, a little background. I was a federal prosecutor for 21 years of my 45 years of government service in the criminal justice system. During that part of my career, half of which was spent in the very busy Southern District of California, I tried hundreds of jury cases, many of which involved complex fraud crimes where the intent of the defendant was a critical element of the offense e.g., intent to deceive as well as cases involving violent crimes, likewise involving proof of specific intent e.g., premeditated intent to kill.

Intent is rarely susceptible to direct proof without a confession from the defendant. Lacking such proof, the evidence must be supplied through indirect, or circumstantial, proof such as similar acts showing a pattern of deceit or violence. Keep these concepts in mind as I endeavor to articulate just some of the actions and statements of Donald Trump which put the activity and speech of Jan. 6 in context.

I begin with his first campaign for president. In August 2016, he gave a speech at a rally of his supporters in which he told them that if Hillary Clinton won she would abolish the Second Amendment and there was nothing you can do folks although the Second Amendment people maybe there is, I dont know The term Second Amendment solutions is a euphemism associated with political assassination, and has been regularly employed by right-wing militias to legitimize the supposed right to engage in armed insurrection against the government. Of course, Trump would later deny any such connotation.

Forwarding to March 2019, when talk of impeachment was in the air, Trump boasted in an interview with Breitbart that if he were to be removed from office (through impeachment), I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump I have the tough people it would be very bad.

On Sept. 30, 2019, Trump tweeted that if the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office it will cause a Civil War fracture in the Nation from which our Country will never heal.

In September 2020, during the first presidential debate, Trump was asked by the moderator whether he condemned the violence of white supremacy extremists, and he not only failed to do so, he exhorted the Proud Boys (a violent and extremist white supremacy gang) to stand by a slogan that the Proud Boys subsequently stitched to their clothing.

On April 17, 2020, Trump tweeted Liberate Michigan in a series of tweets critical of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for her COVID-19 shutdown measures in the state. Then in early October 2020, the FBI and Michigan State Police foiled an imminent plot by 13 members of a paramilitary group, the Michigan Watchmen, to kidnap and murder Whitmer and other state officials. After being fully briefed by federal law enforcement about the plot, Trump tweeted, I do not tolerate ANY extreme violence and added, Governor Whitmer open up your state

Months before the November 2020 election, Trump began broadcasting that he could only lose the election if it was rigged and there was fraud. To put these remarks in context, the readers need to keep in mind that Trumps advisers had long been informing him that the Democratic candidate most likely to beat him was Joe Biden, which had fueled his pressuring the Ukraine president to announce a criminal investigation of Biden (to no avail).

What followed was the foreseen catalyst to the Jan. 6 insurrection Trump lost the election by a large margin and initiated his claim of fraud, filing and losing some 60 lawsuits because his lawyers could not prove fraud despite the numerous opportunities to do so. That spurred his attempt to pressure election officials to change the vote tally to appear as if he had been the winner (e.g. the notorious recorded call to the Georgia secretary of state in which he demanded that 11,000 votes be switched from Biden to him).

Trump engaged in serial attacks on election officials in swing states, who endured death threats from his supporters for validating the election results as accurate after numerous recounts. Finally, Trump was left with one desperate move preventing the ceremonial opening of the Electoral College ballots officially confirming Biden as the 46th president of the U.S. by the vice president before Congress on Jan. 6.

That was the setting for the summoning of his tough people for a rally that very day of the very certification of the votes of the People which would terminate his term and install Biden in the White House. The attendees, not coincidentally, included Proud Boys, militia members, police, military officers and other such supporters he previously bragged would make it very bad.

This is some of the totality of context in which to judge the intent of the main orator at the Jan. 6 rally, moments before the crowd attempted to overthrow our government. The crowd got the message many of them have since affirmed they believed they were following the then-presidents orders. In the aftermath of the sedition, America is hardly out of danger in the threat against our Constitution and Democracy.

Had Trump succeeded in overturning the election results, we would soon be like all totalitarian governments with pretext elections that count only for show and must always favor the dictator to be considered legitimate. Our Senate has now encouraged armed conflict and sedition in election cycles by passing on any meaningful response to the Jan. 6 events, the attack on the very seat of our government, and thus feeding the evolving narrative that such may become the new normal of politics in America.

Look around America the so-called fraud at the heart of the Trump stolen election narrative is at its core the African American vote. The Trump Party has embraced fully the white supremacy/nationalist agenda, which has never acknowledged the legitimacy of the African American vote.

Research our nations history for decades after the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War, white supremacists employed voting suppression tactics and violence to prevent and deny the Constitutional right to vote to African Americans. A recent USA Today article on challenges to Black voting references the concerted efforts of that era to suppress the African American vote. I am afraid MAGA is a call to return to that terribly unjust and discriminatory period of Jim Crow laws.

The John Lewis Voting Rights Act must be enacted. Voting must be facilitated, not impeded. Gerrymandering must be prohibited, not allowed through specious pretexts which disavow its true purpose and motive racial discrimination.

A former federal prosecutor, Judge Thomas Coffin was a U.S. magistrate for the District of Oregon until his retirement in 2017.

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Democracy on the Ropes Eugene Weekly - Eugene Weekly

Biden is Right Not to Abandon Plans for the Summit for Democracy after the Capitol Siege – Geopoliticalmonitor.com

The Capitol Siege was a sobering reminder of democracys fragility, damaging the United States already faltering standing as a global beacon of democracy. Nonetheless, the Biden administration is right to continue its plans to host the Summit for Democracy despite opposition from some policymakers and commentators. The summit can improve the resilience of US democratic institutions by forming a new bloc of democratic actors guided by the Democratic 10 (D10) group, developing multilateral strategies to tackle dark money and other authoritarian-sponsored forms of corruption, and demonstrating the Biden administrations commitment to bolstering democracy abroad.

The summit must bring together an international bloc of democracies and civil society groups as a bulwark against the global decline of democracy and pluralism. This decline has been partially caused by authoritarian regimes increasing interference in democracies, as well as transnational repression worldwide. A bloc of democracies would correspondingly strengthen US national security and anti-corruption measures, as well as reaffirm the United States return to a consistent multilateral foreign policy based on democratic values.

Furthermore, the summit would be a good platform to encourage the formation of the D10 to replace the Group of Seven (G7) as a steering group for this bloc. The D10 would consist of the current G7 members along with South Korea, India, and Australia. Unlike the G20, which is a larger and more inclusive group without a shared set of values, the D10 can replace the outmoded G7 as a large multilateral group that affirms democratic principles. Given how the G7 is increasingly criticized for being too small, Biden should publicly support the D10 to further prove his administrations commitment to promoting democracy globally.

While skeptics have argued the D10 is solely designed to exclude China and Russia from global governance, it is not necessarily supposed to be an anti-China and anti-Russia coalition. Promoters of the D10 have noted it could work with China and Russia on climate change, nuclear non-proliferation, and international development. In addition, the D10 group can address a variety of other issues, including the coordination of international sanctions and data governance standards.

After the Trump administrations consistent rejection of multilateralism in the economic and security spheres, Biden has set his administration apart by stressing his support for multilateralism. This is both to reassert US integrity to its allies and complement domestic democratic reform, as well as to foster international anti-corruption measures that would reduce authoritarian-sponsored corruption in the United States itself. Now that the United States has experienced its own close call with authoritarian turmoil, the need for reform is even clearer, as it can no longer claim to be above democratic backsliding.

Importantly, authoritarian-sponsored corruption is increasingly agreed to be a serious security threat in democratic states. For example, authoritarian states like Russia have dark money networks supporting election interference throughout the United States and its allies. Coordinating anti-corruption strategies between the United States and its allies would create a more comprehensive sanctions regime, and further strengthen their own democratic institutions defenses too.

The United States can likewise support its democratic allies as it works to reform its own institutions after the Capitol Siege. Notably, the United States has just established a beneficial ownership registry to reduce anonymous (and potentially foreign) corporate ownership of domestic assets. As the United States lags behind other states in establishing this registry, the Biden administration should cooperate with allies in sharing registry information on potentially suspicious actors to address this oversight. The summit is a good place to foster agreement on how to share this information.

Although authoritarian states have publicly relished how the United States has lost its privileged standing, the Biden administration understands the threat of rising authoritarianism in other democracies even better now after experiencing it firsthand. Consequently, any reforms the Biden administration promotes at the Summit for Democracy are significantly more credible as it is working to prevent the same turmoil from happening again at the domestic level.

Nonetheless, issues remain on the summits bar of admission. A significant number of US state allies are not liberal democracies and may view a lack of invitation to the summit as a diplomatic snub. Conversely, if there are too few members, the summit will have too small of an impact. Biden has also been urged to extend invitations to opposition parties, some of which may be under threat from repressive regimes. Such invitations would likely complicate diplomacy with such governments in the future. Even the proposed D10 group may face issues with Indias inclusion as its protections for civil liberties have precipitously declined since 2014. Therefore, the success of the Summit for Democracy will hinge on what democratic reforms Biden can formulate before it is held and what the summits admission criteria will be.

In any case, the Capitol Siege should not dissuade Biden from hosting the Summit for Democracy. In fact, the Biden administration would stand to benefit considering how the United States relatability has improved following the Capitol Siege. Thus, the Summit for Democracy would be a strong opportunity to make use of this change.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect those of Geopoliticalmonitor.com

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Biden is Right Not to Abandon Plans for the Summit for Democracy after the Capitol Siege - Geopoliticalmonitor.com

MIT’s Robert A. Muh Award in the Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences Awarded to David Miliband, President and CEO of the IRC – International Rescue…

It is a pleasure to be back at MIT (albeit virtually). I had a wonderful year at the university as a graduate student in 1988/9; came back as UK Foreign Secretary in 2010 to give the Compton Lecture, arguing for a national and regional political settlement to end the war in Afghanistan; and then in 2011, after the electorate relieved me of my governmental responsibilities, came back to the Political Science Department for a week of teaching. It is a source of pride to come back this year to receive the Muh Award

The bookends for this talk are the changed geopolitical environment since I was a graduate student. I completed my Masters thesis in the summer of 1989, and vividly remember watching on TV the scenes in Tiananmen Square as I house-sat in leafy Belmont. Few of us had the sense that the post-war order was about to be turned upside-down by the fall of the Berlin Wall less than six months later. The idea of the End of History was only just going into academic articles. Certainly there was no sense that we were about to enter weeks in which decades happen.

This became the era of the Third Wave of Democracy, so called because the number of countries democratizing tripled from 25 to 75 in the span of a decade.[1] From Eastern Europe to Southern Africa to Latin America to the Far East, the tools of authoritarian rule did not seem to work anymore.

A new future was quite suddenly in view (perhaps too suddenly for clear thought). Not the end of arguments about the good society. Not the end of protest about equality or governance or foreign policy. Not the end of wars based on ethnicity or religion after all the 1990s were the decade of the Rwandan genocide. But the emergence of an arguable case that political history had a settled destination, reached at different speeds, in systems based on accountable government, human rights, and political democracy. In this telling, the Cold War had two sides. One was democratic, the other autocratic. The democratic side won. And history would bring more victories for democratic governance.

That is one bookend. The other is the present day. The contrast is stark. Not the Third Wave of Democracy but what the scholars at the Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg call the Third Wave of Autocratization. Across the world, democratic systems based on fair elections and the rule of law are in retreat. Here is what they are talking about:

Professor Larry Diamond of Stanford University says all types of regimes are becoming less liberal.[7] The data from the Gothenberg database put numbers on this. In the past decade 10 countries have moved from liberal democracies to electoral democracies where rights have been circumscribed.[8] Poland is an example of a democracy where the ruling party has consolidated and often abused its power. 13 countries moving from democratic ranking to electoral autocracies. This includes India, which was previously the worlds largest democracy. And 5 autocratic regimes moving into the most harsh category, closed autocracy. Whats happening in China fits this category.

Two academics, James Robinson and MITs Daron Acemoglu, have explained in their brilliant book The Narrow Corridor,[9] why this should not be a surprise. There is nothing natural about liberal democracy. If anything it is an unnatural creation, and certainly one that takes perpetual nurture if it is to endure.

Today I want to apply a particular lens to this story and link it to developments in foreign affairs. That lens is the idea of impunity. Its traditionally been a legal term, but I want to use it as a tool of political and policy analysis. As you know, impunity means the absence of consequence for an action, and in the case of an illegal action, the absence of punishment for that action. In more colloquial terminology, impunity is the exercise of power without responsibility, what the British PM Stanley Baldwin called the refuge of the harlot throughout the ages.

I am going to make three claims today.

First, that there is a growing age of impunity that is the international or foreign relations counterpart of democratic recession at home. Systems and cultures of impunity are leading to more acts of impunity.

Second, that international impunity is on the rise in international conflicts around the world because of a shift in power against the aspirations of the rules-based order established after 1945. I want to highlight two elements. Autocratic regimes are stronger. They insist that what happens within a country is only the responsibility of that state. And they have found unexpected bedfellows in this assertion of national sovereignty, and against the assertion of universal rights, in democratic states that are in retreat, turning inward, reasserting national sovereignty (as well as domestic focus) themselves and reeling from foreign policy failures.

The third claim is that to fight against international impunity we do not need new ideas about the laws of war or the rights of individuals. The ideas in the UN Charter and associated documents are good ones. What we need is a defining idea for how to defend them, a focus on some key issues, and the mobilization of the assets of government, private sector and civil society to do so. Since power has shifted against the defense of universal rights, a reversal of the trend depends on more than quoting laws to men with swords. It requires countervailing power to change their calculus.

The Rise in Impunity

When a coach of children is bombed in Yemen, when health facilities are bombed in Syria, when civilians are denied humanitarian aid in Ethiopia or Nigeria, we are seeing impunity because there is no consequence or punishment. At best there is pleading to stop.

The data is striking. There are more civilian victims of war. An average of 34,000 civilians are killed in conflict each year, more than double the average five years ago and nearly seven times the average in 2008.[10]

More civilians are fleeing conflict. A record 79.5 million refugees and displaced people around the world.[11] But its not just total numbers, its the way conflict is displacing more people. In conflicts since 1945, an average of 5 people were displaced for every one person killed. In the Syrian war, that ratio has been 25 to 1.[12]

There are more aid workers killed. 121 aid workers are killed each year on average, including several of my IRC colleagues, compared with an average of 53 aid workers killed each year in 2004.[13]

There are more attacks on health facilities. Since the UN passed a resolution condemning attacks on hospitals in May 2016, there have been 2,387 attacks on health worldwide[14] from the Ebola epicenter of the DRC to warzones in Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Far from abating during the global pandemic, these attacks have only worsened, with more health care workers and patients killed in 2020 than in 2019.

More children are living close to high intensity conflict. Today 160 million children are living in areas of high-intensity conflict according to Save the Children.[15] Thats more than the number of children who live in the United States and Europe combined.

There is more ethnic cleansing. The civil society group Genocide Watch lists 13 ongoing Genocide Emergencies where ethnic cleansing massacres are ongoing.[16] These involve powerful countries not just small rogue states.

And there is a remarkable direct link between poverty and conflict: nearly fifty per cent of the worlds extreme poor live in conflict and fragile states,[17] and that percentage is growing every year.

So there is the first claim: that there is a clear trend of growing international lawlessness and norm-lessness. Interestingly enough, the latest National Intelligence Council report, Global Trends 2040,[18] highlights the rule of law as one of the threatened norms of the global order.

This trend has been enabled by what the Munich Security Conference calls Westlessness the retreat of the West part of the second claim to which I now want to turn.

Shifts in the Balance of Power

The second claim is that this trend towards impunity in international affairs is a symptom of a shift in the balance of power. Those ready to abuse international rules have less reason to fear that they will be held accountable. There never was a Golden Age, but after the traumas of genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s and the massacre in Srebrenica in former Yugoslavia, there was a determined attempt to live up to the promises of the post-Second World War settlement, culminating in the so-called Responsibility to Protect principle in 2005. This was a unanimously agreed resolution of the UN General Assembly which promised that if nation-states abused the rights of their own citizens, then the international community had a responsibility to uphold them. That seems like another world today, because in many ways it is.

The causes of this shift are multiple but the essential dynamic is simple. There is less chance today that war crimes will be punished. And of course the confidence of combatants that war crimes will be unpunished is reinforced every time a war crime is unpunished. So there is a vicious circle in play.

The reasons for this shift are deep rooted. Three seem especially important:

So there has been a power shift. Secretary Blinken said recently: Look at the countries that run roughshod over the rights of their own people. Theyre almost always the same countries that flout internationally accepted rules beyond their borders.[20] The whole point of the UN Charter and the associated founding documents was to mitigate against this tendency, by creating rights for people against the over-mighty power of the state, and institutions with the mandate to defend those rights. Countries could choose their own political system, democracy or dictatorship, monarchy or republic, but they would sign on to international rules.

Just as Robinson and Acemoglu argue that at the national level, there is a constant, day-in, day-out struggle between the state and society to walk the narrow corridor between the fear and repression wrought by despotic states on the one hand and the violence and lawlessness that emerge in their absence, so international relations needs the rights of individuals to be upheld against the rights of states, or the result is despotism and impunity. This takes a balance of power, and that is what is missing in the worlds war zones.

The Need for Countervailing Power

The third claim is that the battle ahead, for those of us who fear a world of impunity, is to build the force of accountability to counter the abuse of power. I think this is a better way of encapsulating the challenge or the mission than building the power of democracy. Sure, I want to see democracy strengthened, notably in countries that are democratic but whose democracy is under assault. But democracy is the strongest form of political accountability and cannot be built on sand.

70 years ago, JK Galbraith published his book American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power. It offered a powerful critique of the development of the American economy after the Second World War, notably in the way concentrations of economic power at the corporate level were a threat to the interests and well-being of ordinary Americans. His answer was not anti-trust, though he did not oppose it, but the development of market and non-market institutions that could countervail the power of the big corporates. Where there were big producers, he favored big retailers. Where there were corporate consortia, he favored countervailing power from government. Where there were unorganized workers, he favored labor (trade) unions. As he put it: Liberalism will be identified with the buttressing of weak bargaining positions in the economy; conservatism will be identified with positions of original power.

I think Galbraiths concept needs to be brought back to life today. I can see applications in the national economy, where market concentration is again on the rise, fueled by political and legal attacks on the role of government in the economy.

However, to my thesis today, the idea of countervailing power has relevance in curbing the abuse of state power not just private power. And it needs to apply in the international domain not just the national one.

I am glad that the Biden Administration supports a meeting of liberal democracies to discuss how to defend the rule of law and democratic practice. But the big decision is not to have a meeting. It is to decide the agenda.

I would like to see it discuss defense of democratic institutions against cyber-attack; a common front to tackle laundering of money from autocratic states; common positions on the regulation of anti-social media; common positions on global trade issues, linked to human rights standards.

But I also want to see them take common action in international fora to impose costs on those who abuse international law. If impunity is the absence of consequence for actions, then accountability must be about creating consequences, and thereby worrying military commanders and political leaders about their actions.

In fact, I would go further, and say that if the rights to life of civilians in war zones cannot be defended, when they have been codified in international law, then we have less chance of defending other rights that are important, whether that be the rights of protestors against their government or the rights of women against abuse by men or the rights of minorities to freedom of religion or thought or sexuality.

So the idea that should animate the drive against impunity is that of countervailing power. The issues should include those of life and death, to curb the abuse of power that my colleagues and I at the International Rescue Committee see every day, as we work to help people whose lives are shattered by conflict and disaster survive, recover and gain control of their lives.

And the coalition that needs to be mustered should engage government, private sector and civil society. None alone will be enough. A world where accountability, not impunity, is on the rise, needs pressure comes from government, civil society and the private sector together.

Governments in the West need to get their own house in order. They need to combine their weight in political fora to apply political pressure for adherence to the laws of war. At the United Nations they need to be calling for genuinely independent and comprehensive investigations of war crimes wherever they happen. They need to be supporting efforts to use their own legal systems as in the recent German cases of Syrians accused of war crimes to hold people accountable. They need to be using military-to-military contacts, military training, and military coalitions of which they are part to stand against the drift to impunity in conflict. And they need to be engaging the private sector.

We have seen in the recent Georgia and Texas voting rights cases the power of major corporates like Coca-Cola and Dell to take a stand. This should be the demand of those who engage with governments who flout the rule of international law. If you are a weapons manufacturer, or a financier of weapons manufacturers, who thinks it is wrong for your weapons to be used to target civilians, then you have a duty to speak up and act up.

Money is often used to grease the wheels of impunity through corruption and patronage, but it can be a force for accountability if channeled properly. This includes targeted economic sanctions against individuals committing atrocities, such as freezing their bank accounts. This also means divestment and suspension of aid by public and private actors. For example insurance companies should decline to provide coverage for companies and countries engaged in activities that violate international humanitarian law. The drift to impunity will not be stopped without those with economic power taking a stand.

There is special responsibility on tech and media companies, because control of the information space is critical to sustaining systems of impunity. In conflict zones around the world, effective news blackouts are the norm not the exception. Breaking the blackout takes political pressure, but also requires technological innovation, to make it safe for civilians to record what is happening, and then get the information out.

And then there is civil society. The New York Times and independent actors like Bellingcat and the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights have done more to expose abuse of international law in Syria than any UN commission. This should be the inspiration to expose and hold accountable those perpetrating the worst atrocities.

The next decade promises to be a race or a fight between accountability and impunity, within our own countries and internationally. That applies in politics, in economics, even in respect of the environment, where ecological plunder can be considered a form of impunity, albeit a longstanding one. Impunity offers quick solutions, but feels brittle. Accountability courts the accusation of being slow. But the methodical tortoise sometimes beats the hyperactive hare.

The End of History was the Kool-Aid of the end of the Cold War. It was misdiagnosed. But the impulse that protested, unsuccessfully, at Tiananmen Square, and successfully in East Berlin, was strong and clear. It was the impulse for power to be held accountable. The coming age of impunity is only inevitable if we let it be so.

[1] V-Dem. (2021). Autocratization Turns Viral - Democracy Report 2021.

[2] The Economist. (2 February 2021). Economist Intelligence Unit - Democracy Index 2020.

[3] Foa, Roberto Stefan and Mounk, Yascha. (1 March 2019). When Democracy Is No Longer the Only Path to Prosperity. The Wall Street Journal.

[4] V-Dem. (2021). Autocratization Turns Viral - Democracy Report 2021.

[5] Ibid.

[6] The Economist. (2 February 2021). Economist Intelligence Unit - Democracy Index 2020.

[7] Diamond, Larry. (March/April 2008). The Democratic Rollback. Foreign Affairs.

[8] V-Dem. (2021). Autocratization Turns Viral - Democracy Report 2021.

[9] Acemoglu, Daron and Robinson, James A. The Narrow Corridor. New York, Penguin Press, 2019.

[10] Calculation of five-year annual rolling average based on data from Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. Number of Reported Civilian Fatalities from Direct Targeting by Country-Year.

[11] United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. (18 June 2020). Global Trends: Force Displacement in 2019.

[12] Feldstein, Steven (17 July 2018). Rethinking the Impact of War: Elevating Protections for the Displaced. Social Science Research Network.

[13] Calculation of five-year annual rolling average based on data from Aid Worker Security Database.

[14] World Health Organization. Surveillance System for Attacks on Health Care.

[15] Save the Children. (2020). Killed and Maimed: A Generation of Violations.

[16] Genocide Watch. Current Alerts.

[17] The World Bank. (2020). Fragility and Conflict: On the Front Lines of the Fight Against Poverty.

[18] National Intelligence Council. (March 2021). Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World.

[19] Peace Research Institute of Oslo.(March 2019.) Trends in Armed Conflict, 1946-2018.

[20] U.S. Department of State. (30 March 2021). Secretary Antony J. Blinken On Release of the 2020 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.

About the IRC

The International Rescue Committee responds to the worlds worst humanitarian crises, helping to restore health, safety, education, economic wellbeing, and power to people devastated by conflict and disaster. Founded in 1933 at the call of Albert Einstein, the IRC is at work in over 40 countries and over 20 U.S. citieshelping people to survive, reclaim control of their future, and strengthen their communities.Learn more at http://www.rescue.org and follow the IRC on Twitter & Facebook.

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MIT's Robert A. Muh Award in the Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences Awarded to David Miliband, President and CEO of the IRC - International Rescue...

COVID-19 and Its Effect on Inequality and Democracy – Council on Foreign Relations

The novel coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc on public health in most countries, but it has caused particular destruction in five of the most populous and powerful democracies in the world: the United States, Brazil, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. These states have five of the highest death tolls and caseloads from COVID-19 of any countries, and all have struggled to control the pandemic. Democracy itself is not the reason for their public health failures. Other democracies, from consolidated and wealthy ones such as Germany and Taiwan to politically shaky and middle-income ones such as Thailand, have developed effective responses that have minimized the viruss toll. Some democracies, such as Australia and Canada, have not only produced effectual public health responses but also taken robust measures to mitigate the pandemics effect on inequality. Several authoritarian states, such as Vietnam, have adopted policies that curtailed the viruss spread; other authoritarian states, including Iran and Russia, have failed in managing the pandemic.

Instead, the vast social and economic inequalities in these five ethnically and racially diverse countries have made the pandemic harder to control. These states have failed to handle the novel coronavirus in part because they have never addressed their historical internal divides, which COVID-19 has brutally revealed. In addition, leaders in these states who have attacked political systems and social cohesion have hindered the pandemic response.

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Beyond revealing inequalities and devastating public health, the pandemic has had two dangerous effects in all of these countries: COVID-19 actually has made socioeconomic inequality worse, possibly for years to come, and has significantly exacerbated democratic regression. In these five states, caseloads and death tolls of the novel coronavirus are falling hardest on racial, ethnic, and sometimes religious minorities and on the poor; poor and minority communities significantly overlap, and many of these same citizens have the preexisting conditions that make them more susceptible to getting extremely sick or dying from COVID-19. The pandemic seems to be further entrenching economic and social inequalities, and some leaders are passing pandemic-era measures that could further hurt poor and minority groups. Furthermore, as often has happened during past major emergencies, political leaders have taken advantage of the emergency to corrode democratic norms and institutionsin these five democracies and across the globe.

Yet the coronavirus pandemic, like many other past crises, simultaneously has caused this damage and offered the chance for societies to pull together and think big about potential policy reforms. Some politicians are finding that promoting major policy reforms in the wake of the devastating pandemic could boost their popularity and win support across the political aisle; in some smaller democracies, such as New Zealand, politicians who have fostered societal unity and equality and embraced major reforms during the pandemic have won electoral victories. Although no solution will be one-size-fits-all in these five democracies, policymakers could utilize the emergency of the pandemic to promote large-scale structural reforms to reverse democratic regression and address aspects of socioeconomic inequality. Because these five countries are among the biggest and most powerful democracies in the world, any steps they take to address their inequalities and combat democratic regression will set examples for states around the world. Yet, if they allow COVID-19 to worsen inequality and accelerate democratic backsliding, they will set examples for other countries as well.

Eyes on Asia

Insights and analysis from CFR fellows on the latest developments across Asia.Monthly.

This paper was made possible by the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation.

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I’m finally done with the Senate filibuster. We’re running out of time to save democracy. – USA TODAY

Noah Bookbinder, Opinion contributor Published 3:15 a.m. ET April 2, 2021

This sounds apocalyptic and maybe a little crazy. It is not. The Trump presidency showed how quickly and completely our foundations can be shaken.

I worked as a counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee for eight years. I heard senators that I admired repeat the apocryphal story of George Washington supposedly explaining to Thomas Jefferson that the Senate was the saucer that cools the tea, preventing the House from rushing through ill-advised legislation.

While the filibuster was not part of the framers plan and indeed some of the framers warned against a supermajority requirement for legislationit seemed consistent with this idea of the Senate as an intended obstacle to tyranny by a bare, partisan majority. Perhaps more importantly, I saw the cycles of control in the Senate. I saw how those tactics of delay and obstruction that drove a majority party crazy one year were lifelines when that party ended up in the minority the next.

Those seemed like compelling arguments to keep the Senate filibuster, so I passionately resisted the idea of eliminating it for years. Too slowly perhaps, it has become clear to me that times have changed. The old arguments are no longer enough in fact, our democracy might not survive at all unless Congress passes reforms that a minority seems determined to block. The Senate must get rid of the filibuster in order for us to maintain a democratic system of government going forward, and the sooner the better.

Our democracy already teetered on the brink when Donald Trump, who lost the 2020 presidential election by more than 7 million votes and a substantial margin in the Electoral College, falsely and repeatedly claimed to have won and then actually tried to convince officials in multiple states to overturn the results of the voting in those states.

When efforts by Trump and his supporters to undermine and overturn the election failed, Trumps supporters switched to a quieter but no less dangerous tactic. Bills have now been introduced in 47states to restrict access to voting, curbs which will disproportionately impact non-white voters. Many of these bills are on their way to passing. Efforts are also in the planning stages to aggressively gerrymander districts to benefit the former presidents party.

The cumulative effect of all thisis to prevent a mostly white minority of Americans from losing control of the United States government. There is legislation that could prevent this, but it looks like it will be blocked in the Senate by the filibuster, something that has often happened to bills meant to advance racial equity and justice.

U.S. Capitol building on March 24, 2021, in Washington, D.C.(Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/ AP)

Now, the combination of systematic disenfranchisement of Black and brown voters, aggressive use of gerrymandering, and a system of unchecked money in political campaigns could allow a minority of voters to ensure that those who supportedTrumps abuses are ushered into control of Congress and the presidency; once in power, they have already shown their willingness to use it to further degrade checks and balances for their own advancement. The democracy as we know it might begin to crumble.

We need H.R. 1:It would maintain voting rights and voting integrity that states saved amid COVID-19

This sounds apocalyptic and maybe a little crazy. It is not. We need only look at the four years ofTrumps presidency, moving from emoluments violations, obstruction of investigations, embrace of white supremacists, and sidelining of watchdogs and prosecutors who threatened him to full-scale attempts to overturn an election and incite insurrection, to see how quickly and completely the foundations of our democracy can be shaken.

Legislation before Congress can stop all this from happening. H.R. 1, the For the People Act, contains crucial voting rights protections that will prevent many of the efforts in states to restrict the ability to vote; it will ensure fair, non-partisan redistricting and reform money in politics, as well as curbing much unethical conduct and many abuses of power. We can also shore up our democracy against attack with billslike the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Protecting Our Democracy Actand anact to finally grant District of Columbiaresidents the same rights to democratic participation that people in all 50states have.

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But if the Senates intractable minority is allowed to continue to prevent all legislation to protect our democratic system, we will run out of time. Efforts in the states to curb voting rights and ensure rule by a shrinking white minority will be able to take effect without any check; after the rules are changed and the deck stacked, it might not again be possible to elect a Congress and a president amenable to protecting democratic participation and checks and balances.

The stakes couldnt be higher. The Senate must eliminate the filibuster while there is still time and quickly enact the For the People Act and as much other important pro-democracy legislation as possible. Once the democracy is secure, we can think about how to build a system of true comity and bipartisanship; but if we dont act now, there may not be a system to fix.

Noah Bookbinder, a former criminal prosecutor for the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, is the executive director ofCitizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Follow him on Twitter:@NoahBookbinder

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I'm finally done with the Senate filibuster. We're running out of time to save democracy. - USA TODAY