The theme of dignity is also appropriate for the winter season as part of the larger metaphor of renewal and the desire to start the year with robust reminders of positive engagements around the world. For a variety of reasons, this was a challenging undertaking. Many authors expressed being overwhelmed with workloads, while others expressed the challenge presented by the speed of developments; how, for example, could one write a good piece about dignity and the death penalty—with specific cases as examples—without the risk of it reading as tone deaf if it came to print following the execution of a profiled defendant? The answers to what initially appeared a simple and positive question—How does dignity fit into your work?—still wound up incorporating considerable description of ongoing struggles and challenges. Knowing that the same complexity will likely apply again, we welcome submissions for our next issue, on Decolonization.

In this issue, dignity is covered in a variety of contexts. We look at mandatory reporting of sexual assault in colleges and universities and its relationship to survivor dignity. Also in the context of higher education, we assess dignity in student services, with a focus on addressing the needs of undocumented students. We also include a looks at dignity and migration at the U.S. border as well as the fundamental indignity embedded in colonization and the experience of colonized people. Another article reflects on the theme of dignity in Gandhi’s philosophy. Amanda Byron’s poem muses, “ [w]hat can we do when dignity falls out of fashion?” and Izzeddin Hawamda’s poems examine a childhood in West Bank and the dream of returning to home.

These pieces are all incredibly personal and passionate. They help us explore nuances in current events that are frequently overlooked, and provide thick descriptions challenging and promoting themes of peace and justice. The overarching presentation argues the central role of dignity in our commitments and work.

I would like to acknowledge the editorial privilege I enjoyed in this process. It was a special bonus to have the chance to highlight the important work of my sister, Anna Laven, as she—like so many administrators—does truly valuable work that is frequently unrecognized, if not invisible. Her article presents a reality of the violence inflicted by the structure of higher education, and one way it is being addressed. I hope you all appreciate this motivation and present the Peace Chronicle team with more opportunities to include marginalized voices and important cases, dilemmas, and examples for our future issues.

Speaking for the Peace Chronicle team and our larger Peace and Justice Studies Association, I hope we can all find and foster increased dignity in 2020.

In Peace,

Wim Laven

The post From the Editors first appeared on Peace and Justice Studies Association.

Image 1: The author’s four children enjoying their new Hanukkah pajamas

I did, though, internalize the subtle rejection and unspoken threat of anti-semitism when my mother would insist I tuck my Jewish star necklace underneath my shirt before walking into a space she judged concerning. Though my grandmother never gave us detailed context for her economic boycott of the ice cream man on the Ventor, New Jersey, shore, I noticed when she called him an “anti-shemi.” My parents never corrected the cashiers who wished us a Merry Christmas, they never raised a fuss when the teacher scheduled a test on Yom Kippur, and they made no mention of the added security fee to cover the cost of cops guarding the doors of our synagogue. But it was part of our lives and we noticed.

This was the way I came to internalize anti-semitism: as subtle, omnipresent, unchanging. My experiences, I now see, shaped my political and professional path as an anarchist working in critical terrorism studies and occasionally acting as a securitization consultant. As a father of four young children, I see the manifestations of contemporary anti-semitism, and it is unfamiliar in profound ways. In the “United States,” devoid of scripture and practice, Jews are not “White people” in the traditional sense. After shooting Jews at a synagogue in Poway, California, on April 27, 2019—the last day of Passover and also Shabbat—the gunman told a 911 dispatcher, “I’m defending our nation against the Jewish people, who are trying to destroy all White people.”

Image 2: Flyer from neo-Nazi accelerationist group Feuerkrieg Division

It seems I had forgotten the lessons of pre-assimilated Jewry, namely that for a sizable portion of individuals, Jews were never White people. A childhood of microaggressions and deep-seated lessons summoned a great sadness when I finally came to connect them to the contemporary. Johnathan Weisman spoke of this moment is his book (((Semitism))), remarking:

For an assimilated Jew, that moment—the ‘Who, me? Why me [as a target of anti-Semitism]?’ shock is indelible. We live lives of unstudied ordinariness, not particularly proud or aware of our assimilation, unconscious of the conformity that has meshed us with American society over the decades. Jews don’t live in ghettos anymore; most don’t live in particularly Jewish neighborhoods….Then, in this odd moment, we are singled out for the one trait we have stopped thinking about: being Jewish.

Hearing of the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue massacre and later of the shooting at a syngogue in Poway, California, my heart hurt. My heart, which I used to believe was spared the anti-semitic pain that my European ancestors endured, has broken into fragments. I managed to avoid the pogroms, the blacklists, internment, and mass extermination, but I was not spared the splintering of my heart. I had endured plenty of pain over the years, but the shattering following the Tree of Life shooting cracked open an articulation of anti-semitism I did not realize I carried with me.

White privilege allowed me to forget I was a Jew

In his description of identity as formative of ideology, terrorism scholar J.M. Berger explains:

…in-groups and out-groups each represent an identity—a set of qualities that are understood to make a person or group distinct from other persons or groups. People who share a common identity may form an identity collective, a group of people who are defined by nation, religion, race, or some other shared trait, interest or concern.

Berger goes on to explain that extremist ideology is a “collection of texts that describe who is part of the in-group, who is part of the out-group, and how the in-group should interact with the out-group.” Reflecting on this simple point, I am reminded that the recent shootings, grave desecrations, assaults, synagogue fires, and coded slurs directed at Jews collectively formulate the textual ideology of today. These texts are written with bullets and fire and marked with kaddish and candles.

I am reminded that for those that wish us harm—the White nationalists, neo-Nazis, accelerationist fascists, Idenitarians, and the broader alt-right—my White skin which turns olive in the sun, my black hair and eyes and my circumcision are all unavoidable, embodied marks of otherness, of out-groupness, of Jewishness.

In retrospect, all of the othering experiences I lived through as a youth were minor. Sure, they identified who I was vis-a-vis others, but it could end there, right? They were not a source of sadness or fear, and while I felt a strong pull towards supporting social movements related to Jewishness—anti–White supremacy organizing, reproductive justice, and Palestinian solidarity—my identity as a Jew was hardly ever prominent in my consciousness.

Fast forward to 2019 and I feel like it’s plastered on my forehead, a yellow star on my black hoodie. I never felt myself to be the subject of an existential, genocidal, structural hatred of Jews as a kid. Then came the rise in right-wing populism, White nationalism, and the outright neo-fascism seen today. Suddenly I was reminded that for a growing portion of White, Anglo-Saxon Christians, Jews are not, nor have we ever been, White or American. To some, we are double agents with dual allegiance to the state of Israel, while for others, we are part of a global conspiratorial cabal that controls various combinations of the media, banking system, and government bureaucracy.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described the Nazi drive to eradicate Jews as the zeal of a gardener seeking to curate a perfect green space, noting that Jews’ transience, non-Aryanness, and resistance to assimilation allowed our people to be seen as “the weeds that spoil their design.” Bauman continues:

Modern genocide, like modern culture in general, is a gardener’s job. It is just one of the many chores that people who treat society as a garden need to undertake. If garden design defines its weeds, there are weeds wherever there is a garden. And weeds are to be exterminated. Weeding out is a creative, not a destructive activity…Like all other weeds, [human weeds] must be segregated, contained, prevented from spreading, removed and kept outside the society boundaries; if all these means prove insufficient, they must be killed.

Robert Bowers, the Tree of Life shooter, likely saw us as weeds; a barrier to his perfect garden—suitable for exclusion, removal and extermination. For many, we remain the permanent wanderers who can never be truly a part of the nation; a distinguishable, non-assimilable, interconnected network forming the diaspora.

Despite the efforts of men like Bowers and the many who quietly ally with him, we are still here. Despite assimilation, discrimination and outright genocide, we are still here.

As the refrain goes, “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”

References

Alain F. Corcos, The Myth of the Jewish Race (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2005).

Cheryl Greenberg, “‘I’m Not White–I’m Jewish’: The Racial Politics of American Jews,” in Race, Color, Identity:

Rethinking Discourses about “Jews” in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Efraim Sicher (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2013), 35–55.

Elliot Spagat, “Recording Details Synagogue Shooting Suspect’s 911 Call,” AP NEWS, Online edition, September 19, 2019.

J. M. Berger, Extremism, Essential Knowledge Series (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018), 24, 26.

Jonathan Weisman, (((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump (New York, NY: St Martins Press, 2018), 11.

Todd Endelman, “Jewish Self-Identification and West European Categories of Belonging: From the Enlightenment to World War II,” in Religion or Ethnicity?: Jewish Identities in Evolution, ed. Zvi Gitelman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009).

Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2001), 91, 92.

The post Burying Seeds on the Anniversary of the Tree of Life Shooting first appeared on Peace and Justice Studies Association.

One concern is that while campuses may have informed faculty about this interpretation of their reporting responsibilities—which generally involve reporting any incident of which they became aware to the designated Title IX official or some other campus authority—students may not realize that this is the case. As a result, faculty are put in the awkward position of having to interrupt a student who has begun to describe a traumatic experience in order to inform the student that the faculty member must report what the student communicates. “If a student comes to us and, because of the level of distress, begins pouring out their experience, it’s not the time—or it seems really insensitive to say—‘Stop, wait a minute, I’m a mandated reporter,’” said Catherine MacGillivray, associate professor and director of the women’s and gender studies program at the University of Northern Iowa.

One way that faculty have responded to the mandatory reporting requirement is to include language in their syllabi announcing it to students. Such statements can be useful in terms of informing students about the requirements and directing them to resources. But I contend that informing students does not go far enough, and that faculty should resist mandatory reporting for the betterment and safety of students.

Another concern is that mandatory reporting policies may stifle classroom conversations about these topics, which are essential in many disciplines. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has opposed mandatory reporting since 2013, expressing concern that is would have a chilling effect on faculty-student communication and that it limits the academic freedom of professors who teach subjects related to sex and gender.

In addition, Social Work and Counseling faculty have also been interpreted to be mandatory reporters on many campuses, including mine. Such requirements violate the ethical guidelines in these fields, which emphasize victim autonomy, confidentiality, and a survivor-centered approach.

I teach sociology and criminology, so the issues of sexual misconduct and sexual assault are often included in my courses. My students also know that, outside of my work on campus, I am involved with a nonprofit organization that assists victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking. As a result, they see me as someone who understands the issues, is connected to resources, and ultimately, as someone they can trust. I have often had students disclose abuse and assault—in class, in papers, and in the privacy of my office. My campus’s shift in how this must be handled has and will continue to reduce the likelihood that students will seek my assistance. Research has borne this out. In 2018, Newins and White found that students who were survivors of sexual assault were more than twice as likely as students who had no history of sexual assault to say that mandatory reporting decreased the likelihood that they would tell a university employee about their own sexual assault.

Mandatory reporting requirements are paternalistic and undermine the agency and dignity of sexual assault survivors. In nearly all cases on college and university campuses, the student disclosing sexual misconduct is an adult. As such, they have the right to make decisions about their own welfare, including who should know about traumatic life experiences. Mandatory reporting presumes that adults do not know what is best for themselves. I feel as though now I have to discourage students from confiding in me unless they want to report, and anyone educated on this issue knows there are myriad reasons students would choose not to take that course of action. For that reason, mandatory reporting runs counter to the purported goal of ensuring that victims get help, as now a trusted avenue of support has been removed. The presumption is that if students are ready to talk about an incident then they are ready to report it, but that is not consistent with research on sexual misconduct and assault. Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education (NASPA) has issued a statement opposing mandatory reporting, in particular when it involves notifying law enforcement against the survivor’s wishes:

Student gender-based violence victims are as capable of reporting experiences with violence to law enforcement as any other adult… Mandatory referral thus singles out an entire sub-group of adult violence victims from other adults with the same abilities and treats them legally as children. The fact that those infantilized in this manner are mainly women and girls makes these bills particularly contrary to Title IX’s purposes.

Another concern is that these policies do very little to actually help students. Robert Milardo, a professor of family relations at the University of Maine, said he and colleagues view the mandated reporter policy as “basically one-sided, in that it serves the needs of the institution, the University of Maine, to report and investigate allegations of sexual assault and related issues, but it doesn’t deal effectively with student advocacy.” Anita Levy, AAUP’s associate secretary, explained, “What seems to be happening is that institutions are really going overboard to make sure they’ve dotted all their i’s and crossed all their t’s.”

There are also concerns about student privacy, as faculty on many campuses are unclear what details must be in their reports. At Maine, for example, faculty must report “all relevant details,” which includes the names of all students involved, including witnesses. Unless the victim wants an investigation, there is no need for campus officials to have their name. The Clery Act of 1990, which mandates that campuses report statistics on various crimes, does not require personal information. A 2013 amendment to the Clery Act, the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination (SaVE) Act, also requires universities to report statistics regarding sexual, domestic, and dating violence, not personal information about victims.

Further, experts on sexual assault have expressed concern that faculty will not be prepared to appropriately handle student disclosures, and thus may do more harm than good. This is because research has shown that many campuses fall short in terms of training faculty. At the request of then-Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO), the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Financial and Contracting Oversight conducted a national survey in 2014 to assess university sexual assault policies, procedures, and resources. The survey found that 21% of schools did not train faculty and staff members on how to respond to sexual assault disclosures. Furthermore, of the schools that did provide training, 54% said this training was voluntary. Many campuses, mine included, offer one-time presentations, often led by Human Resources employees, rather than extensive training facilitated by sexual assault experts. For instance, inadequately trained faculty may ask questions that insinuate doubt or blame. This is what Smith and Freyd call institutional betrayal.

Finally, this type of approach does nothing to change the institutional culture. As Miron and Palacios explain, “Mandatory reporting principally addresses the victim-perpetrator dyad, doing little to change the institutional context that allows sexual misconduct to flourish or address larger patterns in sexual violence across the student body.”

In sum, several reviews of literature (see, for instance, Holland, Cortina & Freyd, 2018 and Newins et al., 2018) have found that there is little support for the purported rationale for mandatory reporting by all faculty. There are several alternatives that universities can consider. Title IX does allow institutions to designate certain faculty who are responsible employees, rather than the blanket approach, including selecting only specific faculty as mandatory reporters. Holland, Cortina and Freyd offer four alternatives to mandatory reporting: 1) instruct faculty to ask students disclosing sexual assault their wishes in terms of reporting and then follow those—the University of Oregon does this; 2) create a restricted reporting option, as has been done in the military, whereby students can make a report and receive services but no official investigation is launched; 3) use a third-party reporting technology like Callisto, which allows survivors to report, create an electronic record, and submit it to officials if they choose, and which compiles aggregate statistics for universities; 4) reform compelled disclosure policies to at least create some type of blended approach.

References

Brown, S. “Many professors have to report sexual misconduct. How should they tell their students that?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 16, 2018.

Campbell, R. “The psychological impact of rape victims.” American Psychologist, (2008), 63, 702–717.

Flaherty, C. “Endangering a trust.” Inside Higher Education, February 4, 2015.

Holland K., Cortina L, & Freyd J. “Compelled disclosure of college sexual assault.” American Psychology, (2018) 73, 256–268.

Miron, R., & Palacios, L. “Mandatory reporting policies protect universities, not survivors.” Gender Policy Report, July 10, 2018.

Newins, A., Bernstein, E., Peterson, R., Waldron, J., & White, S. “Title IX mandated reporting: The views of university employees and students.” Behavioral Science, 8(11), (2018), 106-25.

Newins A., & White S. “Title IX sexual violence reporting requirements: Knowledge and opinions of responsible employees and students.” Journal of Aggression, Conflict, & Peace, (2018), 10, 74–82.

Orchowski, L., Untied, A, & Gidycz, C. “Social reactions to disclosure of sexual victimization and adjustment among survivors of sexual assault.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 28, (2013), 2005–2023.

Smith, C. & Freyd, J. “Institutional betrayal.” American Psychologist, (2014), 69, 575-587.

The post University Mandatory Reporting of Sexual Assault Undermines Survivor Dignity first appeared on Peace and Justice Studies Association.

Fashion, turn to the left,

Fashion, turn to the right.

Oooooh Fashion.

We are the goon squad

and we’re coming to town.

–David Bowie

And so it goes.

What can we do when dignity falls out of fashion?

Merely turn to face what’s next, passively entertained?

Revel in the artistry without questioning the art?

How do we turn to notice the steady barrage of atrocities,

spreading like an oil spill, sullying our sacred waters,

gluing our feathers down, tacky, hampering flight,

silencing our songs of connection.

Whose responsibility is it to wave the flag of memory,

and demand a re-awakening to humanity?

Whose flag do we wave, as we steep

in this bath of humiliation?

Self-satisfaction is in fashion now, the bigger the better.

All of the safeguards, the scaffolding of democracy,

have turned out to be made of cheese,

folding and melting into a sour soup.

Peace has become a foreign object,

unseen, ignored, easily trampled

into broken pieces, fragmented pottery shards,

awaiting future archeologists to piece it back together.

I wonder what tomorrow’s fashions will bring,

what seedlings can be planted for future harvest, in such uncertain soil?

Will there be farmers to pull nourishment out of nothingness?

How might dignity bloom? Sprouting amidst the dirty tangle of brambles?

Scanning the horizon for signs of promise.

Seeking dignity’s return on the fluttering wings of peace,

sung in a cacophony of birdsong,

bringing balance.

The post Dignity: a Poem first appeared on Peace and Justice Studies Association.

Today, I am going to go for a bike ride, I will be using the alternative mountain highway. Until now, Palestinians have not been allowed to use theses designated ‘settlers highways’. But today, I will bike up and down the hilly roads. I will greet every tree, have tea with every cloud, and touch the face of the soil.

Today, I will take a long walk up to my grandparents’ land that we haven’t seen since ’67. There used to be a settlement on our land but with the removal of the barriers, I am free to visit. Today, I will plant a lemon tree and an olive tree. I will sing the song of sage!

Today, I will visit Jerusalem, I will start with the west side of the city. For over 40 years Arabs have not been allowed to enter this quarter of the city. But today, Jerusalem is just Jerusalem. I will have a meal, preferably shakshuka, with a Westerner, a Jew and a grandmother.

Today, I will swim in the Dead Sea and I won’t notice any flags or signs indicating where the Arab or the Jewish beaches are. I will swim freely, anywhere the current takes me. I will write my name on the face of the sand and share a secret with the sun.

Today, I will go to a Hebrew class at a local Palestinian university. Until now, Hebrew wasn’t allowed to be taught in Palestinian schools, despite the similarities between Arabic and Hebrew. I will learn to write a memoir about the face of this land. I will write it in Arabic and Hebrew so the world can see how the damask rose blossoms into a bridge between our worlds.

Today, I will travel freely from my city to another, I won’t need to carry my green Palestinian ID with me as I have before. I will travel freely. I will greet the mountain side and write poems on the shadows of the tall pines. I will look for an old brick home and open its window, inviting the sun to enter, warming up the old walls of the house. I will ignite my feelings in a broken rose so the word ‘Salam’ can be served from its leaves, so a bird can come and transfer pieces of my story all around the world.

Today, I will spend time at the wall. Oh, the wall! It has stood as the barrier between me and the sun! Today, I will open a thousand windows in the wall. I will paint each window with a different colour: green for the tall grass, yellow for the saffron, and red for blood as it flows through my veins. I will feel my heart merge with the Mediterranean Sea, solidifying that we are the ‘Ramush Aleayan’, the protectors of Palestine. That we are one.

The post Reimagining Childhood in the West Bank first appeared on Peace and Justice Studies Association.

Open fields singing for rainfall

I’m a reflection of harvest season

Wheat, olives, and the old wall

I’m the son of the headscarf

And a language of poetry

Like the sun in the middle of the sky

My land is heated; war and crime

But Home lays safe within me

I’m the kite maker, simple and fast

I’m the little boy running around the sheep

Making noise, watching Taeta sing and weep

I’m the mountain side, built to hold a sign of hope

Saying Salam, Shalom…Peace

I am who no one knows

My skin tone tells of war

Childhood memories dipped in teargas

All alone, still smiling

Picturing the old hut and the hilly road

Dear God, I miss home

When will the pain show restraint and hold?

My mother carries the stars and sings for the end of war

How can it be?

A million years reflected in her smile

Beneath her feet lay the world’s biggest fear

A future of forever missing children

I am the mud house

Witnessing children waiting for the return home…

The return of home

I will never forget bombed homes, stolen lives, and missing hopes

Will the day come when the sun will tell its story of me and peace?

Ma rah Ansa (Never Forget)

The post The Return of Home first appeared on Peace and Justice Studies Association.

One of the things that most afflicts our world today is the rise in religious fundamentalism. A fundamentalist is a person who cannot imagine any religion but his own being pleasing to God. I spot them in my classes from time to time. I remind the Christian that if she had been born in Saudi Arabia, she would be just as avid a Muslim as she is now a Christian. Or the Muslim that he would be quoting from the New Testament rather than the Quran if he had been born to Christian parents.

This lesson was not lost on Gandhi. He had a profoundly democratic mind, no doubt nurtured by the multi-religious community he was exposed to as a child. It went against his nature to assume that any one faith had a monopoly on the truth. “All faiths,” he once wrote, “constitute a revelation of Truth, but all are imperfect, and liable to error.” Gandhi was a Hindu, of course, but he once said, “I am a Christian and a Hindu and a Moslem and a Jew.” And Dr. Stanley Jones, a prominent American missionary, once remarked on the irony of “one of the most Christlike men in history” not being called a Christian. More importantly, he is arguably the world’s greatest apostle for peace in modern world history.

I remember well what it was like to be narrow. I grew up Catholic and from an early age felt sure I was in possession of the final truth. I had the great questions answered, because my church answered them all for me. Occasionally I wondered at my good fortune. Why me? Why was I so lucky to have been born in the true faith? One of the events that helped bring down this imperialistic attitude was hearing a Hindu swami when I was enrolled at a Catholic university in New York City studying theology. His saintliness blazed forth; it electrified me; I went home in a daze and wrote several pages in a journal. The seed that Gandhi’s teachers planted in him in his early teen years finally got planted in me. It took a Hindu to show me what religion at its best was, and when he did, my world expanded exponentially. Not only were there Catholic saints whose readings I had to explore; there was a whole world of saints from a number of traditions out there. I’ve been exploring them ever since. And when you cut away all the cultural accretions, they’re all saying pretty much the same thing. Listen to these words of a saint: “The love of God in its essence is the illumination of the heart by joy because of its nearness to the Beloved.” Is the speaker Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, or Jew? A ninth-century Sufi spoke these words, but there is no way to tell from the words themselves.

The great Catholic saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta was a missionary after Gandhi’s own heart. She hadn’t the slightest doubt that Hindus are as dear to God and Christ as Christians. So why uproot Hindus, she asked, from their traditions? “Be the living expression of God’s kindness,” she said: “kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes; kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greeting.” Never did she say, “Win them for Christ.” Gandhi’s biographer Louis Fischer says that Gandhi “could have converted many Christians to Hinduism. At a hint from him, Miss Slade and others would have become Hindus. He just told them to be good Christians.” He and Mother Teresa were cut from the same cloth.

So what do we have to learn from Gandhi?

1. That one of the greatest saints of the twentieth century was a Hindu. Christians who feel that Gandhi is undeserving of heaven because he fails to think about Christ in the approved way or to adopt him as his personal savior might ask what kind of God they are worshipping.
2. That we are all brothers and sisters. As we look around at faces both pale and dark, at dress both Western and Eastern, at medallions and insignia from religions that have historically hated and persecuted each other, we should remember the little man in the loin cloth who once said, “I am but a poor struggling soul yearning to be wholly good.” “To be wholly good”—not rich or famous or powerful —but good. Gandhi, like every other saint, calls us back to sanity, back to the fundamentals. We are not here to get a lot out of life, but to give a lot to.
3. The roots of the September 11 tragedy, and more recently the slaughter of 250 Sri Lankans, most of them Catholic Christians worshipping in their churches on Easter morning last April, are several. Most prominent is the feeling that there is only one religion that pleases God and only one scripture that contains his word. Today this attitude is particularly prevalent, as we all know, in radical Islam (a relatively small minority of Muslims), but its roots lie in the ancient Jewish notion of being God’s one and only chosen people. This is a notion that must die. The most thoughtful Jewish thinkers long ago repudiated the ugly side of the doctrine. Rabbi Abraham Heschel, for example, took it to mean that Jews should regard themselves not as uniquely favored by God, but as uniquely called to service. Let us do our part to ensure that Gandhi’s vision, that all religions at their best are facets cut from the same diamond, will never die. Only thus will peace come to our suffering world.

The post An Ideology of Dignity: A Time for Reflection on Gandhi’s Philosophy first appeared on Peace and Justice Studies Association.

Surprised, I asked him what was going on? He hung his head as he explained that he couldn’t afford it. “Aha!” This will be a quick conversation. One phone call to the Financial Aid Office and all will be well. His disbursement check is probably just delayed, caused by some glitch in the system. I asked if he had filled out his FAFSA on time; he had not—his voice dropped, he could not fill out a FAFSA—he lacked eligibility; as an AB 540 student he could not legally work; he was stuck.

His parents worked in the fields and were barely making ends meet. The out of pocket expenses—$400—a for books and student fees were unaffordable and he couldn’t pay it. There was nothing I could do for him.

In a whisper he explained: he came to the U.S. when he was three, and was the only sibling who was not a U.S. citizen in his family; he didn’t know of his status until he applied for college when he learned that he did not have a social security number. His brothers and sisters, due to their citizenship status, could apply, complete a FAFSA, and have access.

That 15-minute encounter is a real dilemma; we promote education as the way up in American society and most of the time I believe it. While I hope I treated the student well on a personal level, I was still a party to a dehumanizing process. Our educational system communicated that he had less value than others—even his brothers and sisters. Events that took place when he was a toddler caused him to leave the institution without completing a single course, and with a sense of shame and lacking worth.

There are numerous barriers to accessing postsecondary education for students who are undocumented. A short list of the many questions undocumented students face:

• During the outreach workshop, do I raise my hand to ask about the citizenship question?
• During the financial aid workshop, how do I get help without disclosing that I don’t have a social security number?
• There have been ICE raids in my community. Should I take the risk of walking out my front door to attend class?
• I just got a book voucher, but the DACA renewal is $495. Which should I choose to pay for?
• Which majors have courses with fieldwork that require a background check?
• My student club is taking a trip to another state; I am concerned about travel documentation or being detained. Who can I ask?
• I am meeting with a career counselor; how do I explain my worries about going into a field that requires a social security number for licensing?
• My dad was detained last night. How do I explain to my professor that my paper is late because of my family situation? Can my professor report me?
• I am worried ICE will come to campus. How do I know my information is safe?

Undocumented students carry a tremendous mental load, and research shows this impacts student success. Diversity theories present many impacts of the lack of access and social stratification of some groups when compared with others. Faculty, however, do not have training in immigration issues in the same ways as they do in other student stresses like title IX and sexual assault issues. These barriers and the high level of risk for undocumented students translate to the worth we place on this student group. For those of us working in public education, where access is meant to be universal and fair, this should represent a significant concern.

Non-profit “Immigrants Rising” estimates that 100,000 undocumented high school students graduate every year and that a third are in California (where I work); serving undocumented students should be fundamentally recognized as a need on college campuses, but it is not. None will have access to DACA (Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals) next year, making paying for a college education that much more difficult, and, like many policy decisions, a plan is not in place for responding to this predictable challenge in a way that offers dignity to the impacted student populations.

According to the National Immigration Law Center, if an undocumented person lives in Alabama, South Carolina, or Georgia, they are banned from attending college altogether. Undocumented students in those three states lack any access at all; they are completely segregated from their peers on the basis of their citizenship status.

Conversely, some access to resources and passage of legislation in states like California is beginning to change the experience of students who are undocumented. For many potential students, however, access and ability to pay for college is only available on a state-by-state basis.

I am at the forefront of the issue in this regard because California is leading in terms of legislation. Some of the ways California has addressed access to higher education for students who are undocumented, from my perspective, are working.

The passage of AB 540 in 2001 allows students who would otherwise be charged non-resident tuition to be exempted and charged at the in-state rate if they attended a high school for three years and graduated, or equivalent. The passage of AB 2000 and SB 68 expanded in-state exemptions to include elementary, middle school, adult school and some community college course work. The California Dream Act, in 2011, allows undocumented students the opportunity to access certain types of state provided financial aid covering some fees. California has also passed the TRUTH Act which became effective January 1, 2017. Discussion of the bill is ongoing; the Greater Bakersfield (where I live) Legal Assistance Inc. recently (October, 2019) held a second “Immigrant Civil Rights Conference,” to address the lack of transparency and accountability that the TRUTH act is intended to address by ensuring that all ICE deportation programs that depend on entanglement with local law enforcement agencies in California are subject to meaningful public oversight, to promote public safety and preserve limited local resources.

The California Master Plan for Higher Education, originally adopted in 1960 and reaffirmed in 2002, established three educational systems: the UC, CSU and the California Community Colleges. That Master Plan affirmed access within admissions for anyone who met eligibility criteria, affordability, equity and quality. There have been a number of efforts focused on adjusting budget and supporting advocacy for undocumented students within these three systems. The provision of dignity to undocumented students is demonstrated through the following initiatives and activities:

• The “California Dreamers Project” report.
• The California Campus Catalyst Fund supplies needed funds and supports initiatives at 19 campuses addressing the needs of undocumented students.
• The California Community College Chancellor’s Office has supported the recognition of the Undocumented Student Week of Action, in coordination with the Community College League of California and Immigrants Rising, for the last two years.
• The California State Universities have been allocated funds for each campus to house immigration legal services with the California Community Colleges soon to follow.
• October 12, 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom approved Assembly Bill 1645, requiring all California Community College and California State Universities and requesting the University of California to designate a Dreamer Resource Liaison who would assist students by streamlining access to all available financial aid, social services, state-funded immigration legal services and academic opportunities.
• AB1645 also encourages campuses to establish Dream Resource Centers.
• The new Vision for Student Success specifically pegs additional funds for every AB 540 student (full-time equivalent) enrolled at California Community Colleges.

Higher education is a unique place to talk about and think about dignity, particularly within public institutions. Frequently, dignity is conceptualized as a quality of being worthy, respected, and treated with value. Through the enactment of laws and policies that require access to financial aid, recognition of unique needs, and support of student engagement and advocacy, college campuses begin to reduce barriers, treating undocumented students with more dignity and respect than has been evidenced in the past. Are we completely there yet? No. Undocumented students still experience daily entanglements that look a lot like second-class treatment. States and colleges could learn a great deal from the efforts taking place in California, where efforts to provide equality of opportunity are being made. The leadership of the state government, coupled with the commitment of college leadership and the dedicated advocacy of campus allies, can certainly help us get to a place where all students are treated with dignity and respect.

The post Dignity in Student Services in Higher Education first appeared on Peace and Justice Studies Association.

Wim: You’re a co-founder of the Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA) and co-secretary general of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA). Could you describe the relationship and functions of the two organizations, as you see them?

Matt: IPRA has become the leading global network of peace studies for academic professionals and students. When one looks at the study of peace and conflict, IPRA really is the most significant global force that collects people, practices, and knowledge together. We’re just about 60 years old. We have five associations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe and North America. Some of those are fairly new, and some of them, like one predecessor of PJSA, were founded at more or less the same time as IPRA. IPRA really has been a truly international body for decades. That’s reflected in where we’ve had our conferences, who we’ve chosen as our secretary generals and the continuing political direction of the association. One of the points of greatest pride for me is that we don’t leave to chance the question of global leadership. We embody on a structural level that which many international peace organizations are trying to achieve. Our structure depends on a grouping of people that are always going to be at least 50% women. In some ways, my election as secretary general was in spite of that fact that I’m from North America. But I’m also a long-standing Africanist, so my election is very much part of the package of work with Christine Atieno. Certainly, the idea that we would consolidate IPRAs infrastructure, including the African pieces of the association, was on most people’s minds when we were elected. So that’s a little bit about IPRA.

As for PJSA, my role in the founding of this organization is one of the great prides of my life and career. Within North America, sectarianism has meant that organizations and associations split and split into little pieces, but very rarely do you hear about successful mergers. PJSA, though, is a creation of merger. The Consortium on Peace Research, Education, and Development (COPRED) was founded around the same time as IPRA. A couple decades ago, COPRED and the Peace Studies Association (PSA) were doing very similar work and had many overlapping goals, objectives, and members. So after years of talks and conversations, PSA and COPRED decided to merge into what became PJSA. That merger was based on the view that we could be stronger together.

I was the vice president of COPRED at the time of the merger talks. At a certain point, three of us from COPRED and PSA decided that we wanted to take “a walk in the woods,” as we called it. We didn’t want to have an agenda, we didn’t want to have official meetings, but we heard from our memberships that the overlap caused too much competition, and we needed to have a frank and loving conversation. Three people expanded to six, and after several years our conversations led to formal talks, fully authorized by the boards of our organizations. Eventually, we had a joint conference where the membership voted overwhelmingly to merge COPRED and PSA into one entity. We made two really significant decisions early on. First, the new organization would be called “peace and justice”; we wanted to add justice. Second, we would still focus on academics and building peace studies institutions, but would also have a peace activist and peace organizing component. Practitioners would be made to feel welcome both in the association and in its conferences. After close to two decades, PJSA is thriving.

There are two additional things worth noting. First, PJSA needs to liaise with international organizations in a very formal way. In fact, for many years, I was the PJSA liaison to IPRA. PJSA has continued to think internationally and globally even as our mission is regional. Second, from the institutional perspective, PJSA has a continental mandate of only two countries: The United States and Canada. Mexico prefers to work with Latin America and South America. So PJSA remains a North American association, but we talk about being not only part of the US, but being international. For PJSA, we need continuing relations with our Mexican brothers and sisters to the South, but building an organization with our Canadian comrades in the North has been a tremendous priority. For a long time, at least half of our chairs of PJSA have been Canadian and US co-chairs, and the PSJA conferences have been in Canada at least every three years. This is a truly binational Canadian-US group, and it has actually made PJSA a stronger organization.

Wim: What are two or three projects or events that would drive home the robustness of PJSA?

Matt: I don’t know if I can think of a specific project because there have been many over the years, but it’s not so much projects as what I’ve been involved in for years — all of the flashbacks. And the flashbacks are moments of individual excitement and wonder, moments of institutional and academic lightbulbs.

I can remember a few; I can remember that in one of the early conferences for PJSA we put together panels made up of one researcher or university-based academic, one k-12 teacher, and one activist. That model of having this group of people come together as PJSA was a priority. This proved very successful at a conference on disarmament and anti-nuclearism. We created a framework where one could talk about cutting edge issues from an academic perspective, from a k-12 educator’s perspective, and from a peace activist’s perspective. It was a stunning moment.

Of course, later Emily Welty and others who were founding members of International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), and who had done a lot of work at the United Nations, won the Nobel Peace Prize (2017). So that piece of PJSAs work was part of a movement that went from the academy to the streets and back again. It’s been one point of great pride and great memories. What else to say? It’s hard not to have flashbacks to proud moments.

Wim: As co-secretary general of IPRA, you’ve been visiting the other affiliate organizations around the world. What would you like to point out about what’s happening around the world in that role?

Matt: One of the great privileges of my year so far, has been the ability to attend and present at the regional conferences of PJSA, the African Peace Research and Education Association (AFPREA), the Latin American Peace Research Association (CLAIP), and the Asian Pacific Peace Research Association (APPRA). I didn’t get to the European Peace Research Association (EUPRA) conference, but Christine Atieno, my co-secretary general, was in attendance. The two of us were together at the African Peace Research Association conference. Africa is the youngest of the regional conferences, and it was a glorious. It brought together a small group of leaders from every corner of the continent, people who are really significant stakeholders and movers and shakers. We met at the Nelson Mandela launch site in Cape Town where one goes by boat to Robben Island, to the prison museum that held Mandela and others for decades. So it’s a very important symbolic site for us to gather at. We also met for one day in collaboration with the International Sports and Peace Association. This has been a local conference held in South Africa for many years, and I was honored to be an official part of it. Exploring the mixture of sports and culture was definitely one of the highlights, and we were really able to look deeply at the African context of war and peace at this moment.

Traveling to these conferences, I was hopping from place to place in a rather intensely fast pace. And yet, though it was exhilarating and exhausting, those experiences give me more hope and more energy than anything else. In fact, it was in many ways quite different from my daily realities in the US. People around the world, both from the academy and elsewhere, are not being stopped or stuck with the backlash that continues to take place. There’s no question, for example, that the current government of Brazil right now is not great. And yet, there was no sense of this moment in history being one that they wouldn’t quickly work themselves out of. That in some ways this is temporary. And so that level of energy and that level of hope is what really show through. In Brazil, it’s worthy to note, CLAIP recognized explicitly the need to build a new generation of leaders within the peace movement, and so held a youth camp in the days before the General Conference. I was very privileged to be part of the youth camp. There was no sense that there wouldn’t be significant positive change, radical change in the coming years. The question was how do we learn from history? How do we work better together? How do we create more student to student dialogue? The question was, how do we, as Latin American youth, get a chance to like better and have conversations with young people in North America, or young people in other parts of the world? So those were the questions, filled with energy and intensity and creative vision.

The post Interview with Matt Meyer first appeared on Peace and Justice Studies Association.

The seminal work on dignity is Donna Hicks’s book, Dignity. In it, she argues that people’s dignity—the idea that they matter by virtue of being human and that they are full members of society—must be secure. When dignity is violated through humiliation, isolation, or violation of rights, primal defensive reactions cause people to withdraw from each other; even if they cannot leave because of mutual dependence. Hicks writes in her 2011 work, “the relationship is characterized by hostility, and both people feel justified in demeaning the other. In short, life together is miserable.” Given the 44.5 million immigrants living in the U.S., of whom 11.3 million are living without documentation according to the Migration Policy Institute, the lives of migrants and U.S. citizens are intimately interwoven and unlikely to separate. Building a healthy society in which everyone coexists peacefully will require learning to affirm the dignity of all people living in society.

According to Hicks, there are ten essential elements of dignity, and when these elements are violated, conflict is likely to escalate and social relationships will rupture and decay:

• Acceptance of identity
• Inclusion
• Safety
• Acknowledgment
• Recognition
• Fairness
• Benefit of the Doubt
• Understanding
• Independence
• Accountability

I would argue that each of these elements has been systematically eroded by the immigration policies and practices of the United States on display at the U.S.-Mexico border. The racialized discourses equating all persons of Latin American origin or Latino ethnicity with illegal immigration and gang violence represent a willful refusal to accept the identity and recognize the legitimate presence of the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. Other policies make it impossible to claim asylum through legal channels at ports of entry by interdicting and returning people in boats or putting asylum seekers in detention centers for indefinite periods of time while separating their families. These actions rob forced migrants of safety, fairness, benefit of the doubt, and inclusion. The administration’s frequent violations of law and human rights, and its eagerness to hide the truth about these violations, undermines accountability.

In my research on the integration of migrants in host communities, I have identified a pattern that I call the invisibility bargain. This term refers to an unwritten, but strongly understood and enforced set of expectations that host countries have toward migrants. The presence of migrants is tolerated in the country and they are not actively persecuted or deported as long as they fulfill three expectations: making an economic or other contribution of value to the host community, and remaining politically and socially invisible. When public figures in the host community accuse migrants of not living up to one or more of these expectations, a backlash against their presence is likely to follow, and xenophobic rhetoric, exclusionary policies, or even violence can take place.

The social invisibility expectation can be seen in the Muslim headscarf bans in France, or social shaming of migrants speaking Spanish in public spaces in the United States who are admonished to speak English. These acts attack the dignity of migrants because they communicate that they cannot exist on their own terms, with the markers of their full identity intact, in the host country. They violate Hicks’s first two elements of inclusion, which would “make others feel that they belong,” and acceptance of identity, which calls on people to “approach people as being neither inferior nor superior to you. Give others the freedom to express their authentic selves without fear of being negatively judged.” It is precisely this freedom that is repressed under the invisibility bargain.

Political invisibility means that migrants are expected to act as grateful guests—they are allowed to be present by the generosity of the hosts, and do not have independent standing to make demands or participate in political decisions that affect their lives. Chris Zepeda-Millán has chronicled the 2006 nationwide protests of Latino activists to demand immigration reform, finding that the aftermath of this very visible political activity led to a significant backlash in increased hate crime, xenophobic rhetoric, and a 600 percent increase in the number of nativist extremist groups in the U.S. He also found that protests faded as many of the activists refocused their energies on more traditional (and less visible) political channels like electoral politics or lobbying because they were afraid of marches fueling resentment and backlash. Some within the U.S. population saw these protests as threatening their dignity because they perceived the focus on protections for and participation by undocumented migrants to be violations of fairness, by which Hicks means “Treat people justly, with equality, and in an evenhanded way according to agreed-on laws and rules.” The political invisibility expectation has been seen more recently in the savage criticism of Rep. Ilhan Omar, a congresswoman from Minnesota who came to the United States as a refugee from Somalia (and who wears a hijab), for her public speech, as political leaders and some in the media have suggested that she should be less vocal, and that she should merely be grateful to be here or “go back” to the country in which she was born. These attempts to silence the political presence of a prominent migrant are the epitome of the political invisibility expectation.

When political actors portray the political participation, cultural expression, or even presence of migrants as a threat, they use “securitizing” language to claim that migration represents a crisis. In the face of this crisis, they argue, those needing protection are U.S. citizens, whereas migrants are the potential threats to be protected against (migrant men and those who are racially distinct from the dominant group in the country are typically viewed thus), and the state is portrayed as needing to take extraordinary measures to offer this protection. These measures may require the suspension of normal rules and the creation of a “state of exception,” to use Carl Schmitt’s phrase developed by Giorgio Agamben. But as this latter theorist argued, states have a tendency to use the discourse of perpetual crisis in order to create a permanent state of exception that justifies stripping those who are targeted of rights, participation, and security as they are forced into a “bare life” without dignity. The barren and lethal geographies of the U.S.-Mexico border and the crowded and filthy cells of private detention centers illustrate the spaces of exception into which the government expels migrants. The lives that exist on the margins of survival in these spaces and those that do not survive this expulsion are treated as collateral damage to the state’s claim to protect “real” citizens against threats to their safety and identity.

One of the ways that advocates and sympathetic policymakers have pushed back on the politics of exclusion and the degradation of dignity for migrants in the U.S. is to emphasize human rights that all people enjoy by virtue of being human. All people, the argument goes, deserve basic protections and should be able to live with dignity regardless of immigration status. The challenge of the human rights discourse, however, is two-fold: which rights should be considered basic enough to be universally protected is contested, and strategically, Voss et al have found that using appeals to migrant rights does little to increase U.S. citizen support for protective policies, and in fact it may in some cases actually reduce such support. Certainly, invoking migrants’ human rights can help push back on restrictive policies by reminding states of the obligations they have committed to under various treaties and the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Ultimately, however, if the invisibility bargain renders migrants silent, and they are trapped by the state into spaces of exception, their very humanity may be denied as a mechanism for accessing rights.

Dignity requires meaningful and reciprocal relationships, a righting of power imbalances, and a commitment to each other’s humanity. When we all invest in these things, peaceful coexistence is possible. Those wishing to exclude and degrade migrants would do well to remember that dignity is a relational phenomenon. Stripping someone else’s dignity also degrades our own, and exacerbates conflict and violence as a result. A systematic overhaul of state practices at the border is needed, but in the meantime, non-state actors can advance competing discourses that rehumanize migrants, promote their political participation using less overt/visible strategies, and bring transparency to dark and violent spaces.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. University of Chicago Press, 2005.

d’Appollonia, Ariane Chebel. Frontiers of Fear: Immigration and Insecurity in the United States and Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012.

Entralgo, Rebeka. “Homeland Security Admits It’s Using Abhorrent Conditions at Detention Centers to Deter Migration.” ThinkProgress, July 1, 2019.

Hicks, Donna. Dignity. Yale University Press, 2011.

Jurecic, Quinta. “Donald Trump’s State of Exception.” Lawfare, December 14, 2016.

Pugh, Jeffrey D. “Negotiating Identity and Belonging through the Invisibility Bargain: Colombian Forced Migrants in Ecuador.” International Migration Review 52, no. 4 (2018): 978-1010.

Ryo, Emily. “Detention as Deterrence.” Stanford Law Review Online 71 (March 2019): 237-250.

Silber Mohamed, Heather & Emily M. Farris. “‘Bad Hombres’? An Examination of Identities in U.S. Media Coverage of Immigration.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2019).

Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Harvard University Press, 2014.

Voss, Kim, Fabiana Silva & Irene Bloemraad. “The Limits of Rights: Claims-Making on Behalf of Immigrants.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. (2019).

Williams, Michael. “Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics.” International Studies Quarterly 47 (2003): 511-531.

Zepeda-Millán, Chris. Latino Mass Mobilization: Immigration, Racialization, and Activism. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

The post Dignity and Migration at The U.S. Border first appeared on Peace and Justice Studies Association.

The same foreign power has troops in almost every nation on earth, significant bases in about half the nations on earth, and the earth itself divided up into command zones for control and domination. It dominates outer space for military purposes, and global finances for the purpose of extracting wealth from places with high levels of poverty. It builds bases where it wants, and installs weapons where it wants — including illegally placing nuclear weapons in various countries. For that matter, it violates laws when and where it wants.

Supposedly neutral nations like Ireland, nonetheless, allow the U.S. military to use their airports, and — for that matter — allow U.S. police to search everyone in Dublin airport before they fly to the United States. Many things can be questioned and condemned in Irish corporate media, but not the U.S. military and its use of Ireland. Some of the relevant corporations, such as those controlling billboards near Shannon Airport, are actually based in the United States.

This contemporary reality is a seamless part of a history to the earlier parts of which we’re supposed to apply the term “colonial.” Prior to “settling” the United States, some of the early settlers had previously “settled” Ireland, where the British had paid rewards for Irish heads and body parts, just as they later would for Native American scalps. The United States for many years sought out immigrants who could “settle” on native land. Genocide in North America was a part of U.S. culture from before the United States up through the 1890s. Colonists fought a war, still very much glorified, in which the French defeated the British, but in which the colonists did not cease to be colonists. Rather, they gained the opportunity to attack the nations to their west.

The United States wasted no time in attacking Canada to its north, the Spanish to its south, nations across the western expanse, and eventually Mexico as well. The exhaustion of North American land altered U.S. colonization, but hardly slowed it down. Colonization moved on to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, Alaska, the Philippines, Latin America, and ever farther afield. “Indian Country,” in the dialect of the U.S. military today, refers to distant lands to be attacked with dozens of weapons named for Native American nations.

The banning of military conquest also altered U.S. colonization, but actually sped it up rather than impeding it. The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 ended the practice of treating the conquest of territory as legal. This meant that colonized nations could break free and not be immediately conquered by a different aggressor. The United Nations General Assembly building was designed with 20 extra seats beyond the 51 for existing nations. By the time it was built, there were 75 nations, by 1960 there were 107. The total shot upward from there to quickly reach 200 and fill the seats that had been intended for a public audience.

Nations became formally independent, but they did not cease being colonized. The conquest of territory was still permitted for certain exceptional cases, such as Israel, and in particular for U.S. military bases, which would exist within supposedly independent states.

During World War II, the U.S. Navy seized the small Hawaiian island of Koho’alawe for a weapons testing range and ordered its inhabitants to leave. The island has been devastated. In 1942, the U.S. Navy displaced Aleutian Islanders. Those practices did not end in 1928 or in 1945 for the United States, as for most others. President Harry Truman made up his mind that the 170 native inhabitants of Bikini Atoll had no right to their island in 1946. He had them evicted in February and March of 1946, and dumped as refugees on other islands without means of support or a social structure in place. In the coming years, the United States would remove 147 people from Enewetak Atoll and all the people on Lib Island. U.S. atomic and hydrogen bomb testing rendered various depopulated and still-populated islands uninhabitable, leading to further displacements. Up through the 1960s, the U.S. military displaced hundreds of people from Kwajalein Atoll. A super-densely populated ghetto was created on Ebeye.

On Vieques, off Puerto Rico, the U.S. Navy displaced thousands of inhabitants between 1941 and 1947, announced plans to evict the remaining 8,000 in 1961, but was forced to back off and — in 2003 — to stop bombing the island. On nearby Culebra, the Navy displaced thousands between 1948 and 1950 and attempted to remove those remaining up through the 1970s. The Navy is right now looking at the island of Pagan as a possible replacement for Vieques, the population already having been removed by a volcanic eruption. Of course, any possibility of return would be greatly diminished.

Beginning during World War II but continuing right through the 1950s, the U.S. military displaced a quarter million Okinawans, or half the population, from their land, forcing people into refugee camps and shipping thousands of them off to Bolivia — where land and money were promised but not delivered.

In 1953, the United States made a deal with Denmark to remove 150 Inughuit people from Thule, Greenland, giving them four days to get out or face bulldozers. They are being denied the right to return. People are rightly offended when Donald Trump proposes to purchase Greenland, but for the most part oblivious to the U.S. military presence there and the history of how it got there.

Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Great Britain exiled all 1,500 to 2,000 inhabitants of Diego Garcia, rounding people up and forcing them onto boats while killing their dogs in a gas chamber and seizing possession of their entire land for the use of the U.S. military.

The South Korean government, which evicted people for U.S. base expansion on the mainland in 2006, has, at the behest of the U.S. Navy, in recent years devastated a village, its coast, and 130 acres of farmland on Jeju Island in order to provide the United States with another massive military base.

Virtually every new base, in Italy or Niger or anywhere else, displaces people, albeit within the nation occupied. And every new base displaces sovereignty, independence, and the rule of law. Persian Gulf kingdoms resist democracy with the help of U.S. bases, but they give up independence in the process and contribute to the status of the United States as a nation above the rule of law. At the same time, U.S. bases fuel popular hostility toward the United States and toward local governments.

U.S. bases are intended to be permanent, and so apparently are some of the wars they’re engaged in. The U.S. media writes about Trump’s “opposition” to endless wars, even while completely smothering any possibility of actually ending any of them. Permanent wars for effective control of a handful of places still lying somewhat outside U.S. influence that have been continued in the past three years by the U.S. government include wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Somalia.

The United States is not the only colonizer, but it does possess some 95 percent of the world’s foreign military bases. And it does operate on the basis of a belief in its own unique superiority. At World BEYOND War, we believe that a step toward holding the U.S. government to the rule of law, and a step toward abolishing war, is the closure of foreign bases. So, we are working to oppose new bases and close old ones around the world. This can be done. Numerous bases have been stopped or shut down.

Approaches we are taking include public education and nonviolent activism directed against bases and militarism in general. We also try to use the environmental damage of military bases against them. U.S. bases have poisoned ground water in numerous nations with “forever chemicals,” yet those nations and the relevant localities have been denied all right to compensation or control over their land.

We’re also trying an approach that could turn U.S. propaganda against itself. A pretense is generally maintained that having U.S. bases on every speck of land somehow makes the United States safer. A measure we’ve supported is now near passage through the U.S. Congress that would require the Pentagon to explain how each foreign base makes the United States safer, rather than endangering it or having no effect on its “security.” When that becomes law, we will be able to show that in fact — among many other disastrous impacts — foreign bases make the colonizers less safe than they could be without them.

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Thanks to those board members who are departing—Michael Minch, Elham Atashi, Elavie Ndura, Jinelle Piereder—you will always remain important parts of the PJSA fabric. Thankfully, we have a great set of new board members, many of whom were able to jump right in at the conference despite no obligation to do so. Welcome to our new secretary, my dear friend Robin Cooper; our new Women and Gender Issues chair, Alison Castel; Diversity Chair Pushpa Iyer, Canadian Membership Chair Anna Hamling; Liaison to Activists Sarah Doerrer, and our new publications chair, another good friend, Matthew Johnson. I am especially excited to work with my new co-chair, Jennie Barron, who I think will be a spectacular partner in crime!

We were elated to have so many people attend the Membership Meeting, but are aware that many members could not, so I will recap some of the announcements we made. First, we want to remind everyone to check their membership status. You may have noticed we have a new and very lovely website, but kinks in the previous version made membership renewals tricky. The problem has been corrected on the new website, but if members would be so kind as to attempt to log in to see if their membership is active, we would greatly appreciate it. If you are unable to log in, that means your membership has lapsed, and we would LOVE IT if you could renew! We do hope you find membership in PJSA valuable, and now we offer a multi-year renewal option to make it even simpler. Similarly, we encourage everyone to consider an institutional membership, as this is even more cost effective and brings more engaged individuals into our fold. For more detail about that, please contact our board member for institutional membership, Jeremy Rinker, at jarinker@uncg.edu.

Further, if anyone wishes to request an amazing speaker for their university or community, please see the website for information about our Speaker’s Bureau. We feature many well-known and talented scholars and activists who have agreed that, should they be booked to speak, they will donate a portion of their honoraria to PJSA. Likewise, if anyone would like to be added as a member of the Speaker’s Bureau, the website includes an application form.

The board also made an important decision during its meeting about our affiliated journal, Peace and Change. While we recognize the importance of having an academic journal, bureaucratic issues with Wiley, the company that produces Peace and Change, have become cumbersome and financially draining. Therefore, we have voted to cease our relationship with that journal. We have formed a committee to look into other journal options, and would love members to join. Additionally, if anyone has suggestions for journals that would be a good fit for PJSA, please let us know. Relatedly, we applaud the efforts of Michael Loadenthal and the team of editors of the newly revamped Chronicle—Shatha Almutawa, Matthew Johnson, Wim Laven and Gabriel Erstsgaard. The first issue was a dramatic improvement, and we hope members agree and consider contributing to subsequent issues. Finally, we encourage members to consider proposing books for our book series with Cambridge Scholars Press. Additional information and proposals can be directed to Co-Editors Laura Finley (lfinley@barry.edu) and Michael Minch (MMinch@uvu.edu).

Another important item we discussed was a small amendment to PJSA’s Bylaws. Currently, the Bylaws specify that board co-chairs must be of the opposite gender. The board voted to make this aspirational, rather than required. Additionally, the board voted to include specific language about Canadian members of the board, specifying that at least one member should be Canadian and more than one is welcome. The specific proposal is below, and we conducted an electronic vote on it 45 days after the conference. With no opposition, those changes have been made.

Finally, we have very exciting updates about the next PJSA conference and about conference planning in future. We will be trying something a little different in 2020, collaborating with the Association for Conflict Resolution (ACR) to co-host our conferences in Orlando, Florida. The joint event will be held September 23–25, and will offer us an opportunity to engage with mediators and other practitioners. It will look a little different than a typical PJSA conference, as it will be hosted at a hotel, but we believe that it will afford us all new perspectives, ideas, and friends. Stay tuned for more information!

That being said, we do not intend for PJSA to permanently move to a hotel model for our conferences. We do, however, need everyone’s help in identifying colleges and universities that have the capacity to host a conference. If your campus might be interested in the future, please let us know! The board also had a vigorous discussion about the importance of reducing our environmental footprint so is considering additional ways to do that as well as to cut costs while still offering our members authentic and inspiring connections.

The post Note from the PJSA Board Co-Chair first appeared on Peace and Justice Studies Association.

We continue to strive to make PJSA as effective and useful as possible for our members. In order to attract new members, we also want to spread the good news about all the work the association is doing. Without a strong membership base, we cannot do our work, so we are asking all members to try and recruit one colleague to join our association. Please tell your friends and colleagues interested in peace that we want them to join, engage, and help our work for peace—many hands make light work!

Currently, annual membership rates are in the following ranges::

• Individual memberships between $35 and $120
• Institutional memberships between $210 and $1500

For details, see our membership page.

To check if you are a current member, try to log in on the PJSA website. If you cannot log in, then your membership has likely lapsed. If you have questions, feel free to reach out to Executive Director Michael Loadenthal at michael@peacejusticestudies.org.

We continue to rethink PJSA membership costs, and welcome your feedback. We want to make institutional membership more attractive and are hopeful that the recent inclusion of the Journal of Transdisciplinary Peace Practice (JTPP) as a benefit of membership in 2020 will be welcomed by current members and attractive to prospective ones. This journal presents new, cutting-edge approaches to transdisciplinary peace praxis and encourages submissions from PJSA members. The third issue of JTPP will be out January 30, 2020, and will be available free online for all members. At PJSA, we encourage your feedback on this new partnership and believe that you will not be disappointed by this new partnership.

The information collected as a result of the survey allowed for many members to share their opinions about what they get out of their PJSA membership, but most of the information we hear as a board comes from the yearly members meeting during the annual conference. We hope that you will plan on attending the membership meeting at our 2020 PJSA conference in Orlando so that we can hear directly from you!

Finally, the PJSA listserv is another valuable perk of membership; we encourage you to engage in this space for members to stay connected and post important news and/or questions.

Please feel free to reach out to us directly at membership@peacejusticestudies.org if you have any needs, questions, or concerns regarding membership. May the coming year be one of justice and peace.

Sincerely,

Jeremy A. Rinker (Institutional Liaison) & Dean J. Johnson (U.S. Membership Chair)

The post Membership Update first appeared on Peace and Justice Studies Association.

I am happy to serve as the new Publications Chair. The timing is perfect for me because I am in the gap between training for a career change and finding the first opportunity in my new field. Within that gap exists both time and space for discovery.

While my new frontier is technology, which is often seen as being at odds with academia, my specialization—user experience design—is surprisingly relevant to my new role; it will guide my effort to ensure that all PJSA publications and partnerships are “on brand” and will bring delight and new perspectives to the membership.

This fall, the PJSA board agreed to cut ties with Peace & Change due to declining PJSA member subscription rates and the need for a journal whose content is more central to the research of most members.

PJSA has received proposals from the Journal of Resistance Studies (JRS) and the Journal of Transdisciplinary Peace Praxis (JTPP). JRS is published by scholar-activists deeply committed to strengthening nonviolent action (I should note that one of the editors is a former professor of mine). JTPP, for its part, offers a wide variety of articles on all things peace and justice—and as a designer I can confidently state that its online presence is very appealing.

Both journals offer compelling research that can augment the work of scholars and practitioners all over the world. The publications team holds the view that there is a place for both journals: JRS, which has no online version as yet, will be issued to members in print, and JTPP will be available online until we work out an arrangement to make its print version available as well.

PJSA also has a book series with Cambridge Scholars Press called Peace Studies: Edges and Innovations. It is edited by Laura Finley and Michael Minch. Books in the series may be monographs or edited volumes that address critical and timely topics, offer new insights, bridge the gap between theory and practice, and elevate important voices. More information about the books in the series can be found on CSP’s website. Queries and proposals can be sent to lfinley@barry.edu or mminch@uvu.edu.

Beyond these current initiatives, I hope to be a resource to members. I encourage you to contact me with all of your insights, questions, and feedback related to publications.

Onward,

Matthew Johnson

The post Letter from the Publications Chair first appeared on Peace and Justice Studies Association.