Abstract

After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, its twenty-seven successor states were charged with devising policies with respect to their ethnic minorities. This shock enables an analysis of the conditions that render states more likely to repress, exclude, assimilate or accommodate their minorities. One would anticipate that groups that are most ‘threatening’ to the state's territorial integrity are more likely to experience repression. However the data do not validate this expectation. Instead, the analysis suggests that minority groups’ demographics and states’ coercive capacities better account for variation in ethnic minority policies. While less robust, the findings further indicate the potential importance of lobby states and Soviet multinational legacies in determining minority rights. The results have implications for ethnic politics, human rights, nationalism, democratization and political violence.

The supercommittee's failure to reach an agreement on debt reduction will probably result in unexpected reductions of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. That possibility concerns the defense establishment, but it also presents an opportunity: It might finally be possible to have an honest debate about the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. strategy and the prospect for further arms reductions.

Before moving ahead with this conversation, though, it is critical to review and debunk three misguided ideas about nuclear weapons.

The first is that our nuclear world is safe and stable and that all we need to do now is prevent other nations from acquiring nuclear weapons. Though it is undoubtedly true that the U.S. stockpile is safer than ever, the dangers are far from over. Nuclear terrorism remains a threat. Mistakes are possible, too. In just one example, in August 2007, six nuclear warheads disappeared for two days between North Dakota's Minot and Louisiana's Barksdale Air Force bases.

What's more, unsafe nuclear weapons elsewhere remain a major threat. Tensions between nuclear India and Pakistan, the security of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal and the future of the North Korean nuclear weapons program all suggest that the commitment to making U.S. weapons more reliable and secure will not solve the problem.

The second piece of nuclear mythology is that nuclear disarmament has never taken place and never will. Put slightly differently, it is the idea that nuclear history is proliferation history. But nuclear disarmament is far from unprecedented. South Africa, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan all disarmed. Many nuclear-capable states chose to pursue security without nuclear weapons because policymakers recognized these weapons would endanger rather than protect them. Sweden went down the nuclear path and then decided against it in the late 1960s.

Germany had a nuclear weapons program during World War II but became a law-abiding, non-nuclear member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Japan had two nuclear weapons programs during the war and accumulated a significant quantity of plutonium; since then, its authorities thought about restarting a weapons program four times but decided against it.

In each of those cases, most analysts did not believe that giving up nuclear weapons ambitions was possible. They were wrong, and today we all are glad these countries chose the path they did.

The third misguided concept is that reducing the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal will lead to proliferation. Those who believe this think that countries that no longer feel protected by U.S. nuclear weapons will start building their own to protect themselves. Although this might have some validity, it should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

Historically, many of the states that have disarmed or given up their nuclear-weapon ambitions - including every non-nuclear nation outside of NATO - have done so despite the absence of a nuclear-security guarantee.

On the other hand, states determined to get the bomb, such as the United Kingdom and France, have done so despite security guarantees. Finally, this argument assumes that the role of nuclear weapons in future alliances and geopolitical relationships will be as important as it was in the past. This might be true, but it cannot be considered a fact. It is just a bet on the future and a set of policy priorities.

In 2007, "the four horsemen" - Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William Perry and George Shultz - wrote a highly influential opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing that relying on nuclear weapons for the purpose of deterrence has become "increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective." Coming from former Cold Warriors from both sides of the political aisle, it legitimized the goal of a world without nuclear weapons and challenged the conventional wisdom.

Now policymakers in Washington and candidates on the electoral trail should embrace the issue, and begin a real conversation with the electorate about the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. policy rather than allowing that policy to be driven by inertia or budget cuts.

From Oxford University Press:

There is a broad consensus among scholars that the idea of human rights was a product of the Enlightenment but that a self-conscious and broad-based human rights movement focused on international law only began after World War II. In this narrative, the nineteenth century's absence is conspicuous--few have considered that era seriously, much less written books on it. But as Jenny Martinez shows in this novel interpretation of the roots of human rights law, the foundation of the movement that we know today was a product of one of the nineteenth century's central moral causes: the movement to ban the international slave trade. Originating in England in the late eighteenth century, abolitionism achieved remarkable success over the course of the nineteenth century. Martinez focuses in particular on the international admiralty courts, which tried the crews of captured slave ships. The courts, which were based in the Caribbean, West Africa, Cape Town, and Brazil, helped free at least 80,000 Africans from captured slavers between 1807 and 1871. Here then, buried in the dusty archives of admiralty courts, ships' logs, and the British foreign office, are the foundations of contemporary human rights law: international courts targeting states and non-state transnational actors while working on behalf the world's most persecuted peoples--captured West Africans bound for the slave plantations of the Americas. Fueled by a powerful thesis and novel evidence, Martinez's work will reshape the fields of human rights history and international human rights law.

Features

• Forces us to fundamentally rethink the origins of human rights activism
• Filled with fascinating stories of captured slave ship crews brought to trial across the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century
• Shows how the prosecution of the international slave trade was crucial to the development of modern international law

Emerging nation-states like Libya and Palestine are constrained by local elites integration in socio-economic networks.

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Attention is fixed on Mahmoud Abbas' application for Palestinian statehood at the United Nations, and on the capture of state power by Libyan rebels. Have we forgotten to ask whether and under what conditions the nation-state is a viable political vehicle for justice and liberation?

A world composed of nation-states is less than seventy years old. Yet the ideal of "national liberation" dominates the political imagination of many oppressed peoples. Such a politics of emancipation has dire limits because serious power is organised and exercised on a global scale.

Before World War II, the world was made up mostly of empires and colonies. A state of their own seemed to promise freedom and recognition to colonised populations. This is because the world of nation-states masquerades as a world of sovereign equals. Each nation-state supposedly rules its own territory and people, free from outside interference.

Only for the others

This was the ideology behind the United Nations, which was conceived and organised by the Western allies during World War II. The war aims of the US and the UK, as expressed in the Atlantic Charter of 1941, included the idea that all "peoples" had a right to self determination. Winston Churchill was quick to claim that this only applied to those in Nazi occupied Europe, not the subject peoples of the British Empire.

But Churchill was a man of the old world. Already the US had pioneered in Latin America and in its "open door" policies towards China modes of intervention and informal rule that recognised the political independence of subordinate states. The diplomatic historian William Appleman Williams used the term "Anticolonial Imperialism" to describe what the US was up to.

Empires always operate in and through some kind of local administration, whether a colonial state, a kept Raja, or an informal relation with a client power. In mature colonies, much of the day to day work of government was carried out by indigenous people, trained up as civil servants, police, and soldiers. Businesses were often operated and even owned by locals.

Occupying such a colony with imperial officials was not only expensive, it caused friction and generated resistance. Why not give local power brokers a somewhat larger cut (but not too large) to run the place for you? The oppressed "nation" could celebrate "independence", the local elites could enrich themselves, and the imperial power could continue to enjoy the advantages of domination and unequal economic relations.

This was not only empire without colonies, it was an empire that could pose as a supporter of "national liberation".

The United Nations took this concept of the nation-state to a global level. The world came to be composed mostly of small, relatively weak states, each proudly sovereign and jealous of its prerogatives. But each one also enmeshed in the brutal and shocking disparities of wealth and power that have characterised global politics since the nineteenth century. Local elites prospered, while their people toiled away at subsistence level.

A nation-state organisation of the world offers advantages to those who want to sustain global hierarchies of power. It also poses immense challenges to those struggling for freedom.

The immediate problem is which group or set of interests will seize state power. Colonial borders encased many different peoples within the same territory, and divided others. Colonisation produced sectors of society which benefitted from and were in sympathy with imperial power in varying degrees. The result is intractable and recurring clashes of identity and interest.

These conflicts are evident now in Libya and they have fractured the Palestinian national liberation movement.

"Imagined Community"

Even in Europe, there was no "nation" behind the state to begin with. In myriad ways state power was used to create the "imagined community" of the nation, which often enough was a fiction propagated by a dominant ethnicity or social class.

It is one thing to build a nation-state while rising to world dominance, as in the West. It is quite another to do so when you are on the losing end of global inequities in wealth and power.

New holders of state power in the global South - even in a rich state like Libya - are profoundly constrained and face limited options. Local elites are often deeply enmeshed in economic, cultural and political networks that tie them to foreign powers and interests, Western or otherwise.

The usual outcome is some kind of neo-colony. A local political and economic class benefits from relations with outside powers and global elites, to the neglect of the ordinary people who brought them to power and of their political desires.

Such an arrangement takes many forms. One model is the resource rich country, which can sustain a hyper-wealthy elite, while keeping the masses in check with a combination of repression and bread and circuses. This is the likely fate of Libya, if it does not descend into internal conflict over the possession of state power and its benefits.

Another model is that of South Africa's Bantustans, "tribal" states that were given limited "independence". Their function was to outsource security. Like the Palestinian Authority, the Bantustans self-policed a restive population. They also served as a basis for the power and wealth of a local ruling class, connecting it to the larger order that oppressed everyone else.

None of this is to suggest that people seeking liberation should not seek state power. Among other things, the state has the potential to equal the scales between the public good and the private power of capital, foreign or domestic.

But it is to say that the seizure of state power cannot be the end goal of contemporary liberation politics. In the global South, to have a politics only about the nation-state is to play a game with dice loaded against you.

A liberation politics beyond the nation-state would from the beginning reach out to those in other societies struggling also for a just global order. In so much of both the global South and North right now, politics has been reduced to the servicing of narrow interests by cronies holding offices of state.

People around the world are suffering through the nadir of capitalism that is our times. Such circumstances offer possibilities for a local-global politics of liberation.

It is in the global South that liberation movements have the best chance of seizing local state power and its many advantages. At the same time, connections with global struggles for justice will give the free states of the South an international base, a source of power with which to resist becoming a neo-colony.

For it is ultimately only a just global order that long can sustain freedom and equality at home.

Tarak Barkawi is Senior Lecturer in the Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.