Defiant Imagination

August 6, 2012

Batman and the failed state – what Hollywood can tell us about modern foreign policy

Note: this post uses a lighter tone as other Defiant Imagination posts and shouldn’t be treated very seriously.

Watching the Batman trilogy can provide a few pleasant surprises. Yes, there are the good action scenes, the unexpected plot turns and the interesting references to Occupy Wall Street and the economic crisis. But it becomes even more interesting when you can find parallels with your own work. It has been noted before that Nolan’s trilogy portrays Gotham City as a “failed state”. This was validated in the Dark Night Rises when Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character, police officer John Blake, asks: “So you’re going to leave it under the control of a warlord, like some failed state?”

That’s when Batman became even cooler to me, because I’ve been exposed to the idea of failed states several times since I began researching Brazil’s favelas and South America’s pacification programs. And when Joseph Gordon-Levitt talks about my research, I feel it gives some sort of validation to all the unpaid hours I’ve been spending reading academic articles and conducting interviews.

Failed state is one of these cool terms that emerge once in a while out of academic circles and make their way to foreign policy jargon, before ending up, often misused, by the media. This one emerged it the 90′s in academic as an attempt to describe situations when countries have seen their government become essentially powerless. Typical examples of failed states are Somalia, Sudan, Haiti or Afghanistan. Each year, the U.S. think-tank Fund for Peace releases the Failed State Index, a list of countries classified according to their “failedness”.

Several critics have pointed out the inefficiency of the concept. To begin with, nobody knows what a failed state is exactly. “There is no clear universal definition of a ‘failed state,’ states the Wikipedia definition. Like in medicine where certain diseases with unknown causes are diagnosed by their symptoms, failed states are determined as such when certain signs are spotted, such as (but not always) widespread corruption, paramilitary groups, a weak justice system, displacement of population… Sometimes it is said that the state has lost the “monopoly of violence” when other armed groups are in control of certain regions, which is quite ironic, since the phrase itself acknowledges the state’s ability to exert violence, when in fact it should only be referring to defense and policing.

So, when the BBC ask if Nigeria is a failed state or whether Somalia can really be called a failed state, when the New York Times writes Greece is on its way to become one, or an MSNBC guest says even the U.S. is on the same track while commenting on the Aurora shooting, well nobody really has any clue of what they’re talking about. The fact is, the existing guidelines that point out to signs of failure can be used in a very subjective manner. Corruption exists everywhere (particularly where I live), justice systems in the wealthiest countries have many flaws, and the nature of democracy implies that the government’s actions should be questioned at all times. There is no clear line between a functioning and a failed state.

John Blake, it turns out, was already slightly behind in his foreign policy lingo. The term “failed states” has been overshadowed by the trendier “fragile states,” and even “fragile cities” in cases where problems are localized, and because studying cities is, you know, cool. So Rio de Janeiro is fragile and Medellín is fragile and Johannesburg and Kandahar as well, and it becomes very easy to make some generalizations and parallels and theories that apply to places that can be so different from each other. Then these theories make their way to think-tanks, foreign affairs departments, development banks, and financing gets approved on the basis of such theories. But that’s just the way things are in the field of foreign policy, failure of state or not.

I should add that I’m not entirely against this concept, since some of the research I’ve read has been very helpful. However I take everything I read with a grain of salt, and give priority to on-the-ground observation, which is why when this post will be published I will be in Colombia to visit the comunas of Medellín.

Photo credits: Flickr user jpellgen

Media

June 25, 2012

When GOOD magazine lost its cool

When it was announced earlier this month that GOOD Magazine had laid off most of its editorial staff for nebulous reasons (two of them quit right after), I barely raised my eyebrows. This kind of news is generally considered as disastrous, and since then there has been quite some talk about it on the Web. But I stopped caring about the magazine a while ago. I guess I got lost between two of the many direction shifts the company attempted during its short existence, and preferred to focus on publications that are slightly more reliable. Today, when I learned the laid-off staff teamed up for an intriguing project (for which they’ve already received funding on Kickstarter in just a few hours), I thought maybe it would be a good time to express all I think about the magazine, before to move on to other things.

When GOOD mag was launched in 2006 it was bold and fresh and surfing the nascent wave of guilt-based capitalism (these are my words. Writer Teju Cole calls it the White Savior Industrial Complex.) GOOD would give your $20 subscription to a good-doing NGO, and publish inspiring articles about farmers markets and talking to your neighbours, along with in-depth reporting pieces and stunning infographics. The magazine’s design was so good it won two National Magazine Awards.

I discovered GOOD when it published its second issue and blogged about it here. I guess they were on top of their social media marketing, because a few days later I received a thank-you email, followed by a gift subscription and a handful of promotional stickers in the mail. I was thrilled. I loved this magazine and it loved me back.

A couple of years later I was showing an issue to a friend who told me “this magazine looks quite empty to me.” And then I realized that between the second issue and the one we were looking at, the mag had become, yes, empty. GOOD started losing its substance when it increased its online presence and decreased its print schedule from bimonthly to quarterly. The website became a platform for curated content, with the occasional interesting infographics popping up once in a while. When my subscription ended I didn’t renew it, but still visited the website from time to time.

Then the “People are awesome” column showed up, and this was the definitive end of our relationship. Who’s awesome? The woman who lost her legs in a tornado to save her children’s lives? The doctors who induced labor on a woman so the dying dad could hold his daughter? The soldier who died so an Afghan boy could live? This is not awesome, it’s tragic! It’s tragic and these stories are voyeuristic. I mean, would you wish for that to happen to other people? In the meantime, we lost relevant, original reporting, the one thing I think people were really excited about when GOOD started, because we thought a magazine could exist and be profitable selling original stories about inspiring topics.

GOOD fired its staff the day after a company party, invoking a strategic shift. Then founder Ben Goldhirsh wrote a now-infamous email to explain the decision, which still doesn’t give us any clue as to where the company is heading. But I guess with the editorial team gone, we won’t be able to call it a magazine anymore.

It doesn’t make a big difference to me anyway. I stopped reading GOOD and don’t believe in what it stands for anymore. I think reading the news every day makes me a much better citizen.

Photo credits: Alex Hung/Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Business and Economics, Urbanism and architecture

June 13, 2012

Colombia is rising

Medellín’s cable car system. Credits: Flickr user Marcelo Druck

When you see three positive articles about Colombia in one week, it’s a sign. And the fact that two of them were published in magazines that cater to businesspeople shows it’s time for investors to look in the direction of this South American country.

Medellín seems to be the city du jour with much publicity about its metrocable and ambitious architecture projects. Colombia’s second city, with 3.5 million inhabitants, seems to be rising from its ashes thanks in part to an aggressive security program meant to kick the drug gangs out. This New York Times article has fallen into the “urban planning will save us all” rhetoric (and you know what I think of it.)

What sets Medellín apart is the particular strength of its culture of urbanism, which acts now almost like a civic calling card. The city’s new mayor, Aníbal Gaviria, spent an hour describing to me his dreams for burying a congested highway that runs through the middle of town, building an electric tram along the hillsides to stem the sprawl of the slums, adding a green belt of public buildings along the tram, rehabilitating the Medellín River and densifying the city center — smart, public-spirited, improvements. It’s as if, in this country whose relatively robust economy has underwritten many forward-thinking projects, every mayor here has to have enormous architectural and infrastructural plans, or risk coming across as small-minded or an outsider.

En Route’s June Edition concentrates on specific projects that are slowly building the city’s reputation: the Parque de los Deseos and Parque de los Pies Descalzos urban plazas, the Orquideorama at the Botanical Garden, the Parque Explora science centre, the Unidad Deportiva Atanasio Girardot sports complex, and the impressive Parque Biblioteca España library.

Felipe Mesa, the principal of Plan:b Arquitectos, had a hand in both the Orquideorama and the sports complex. I walk to his office in leafy El Poblado, an upscale neighbourhood in the city’s south end that’s also home to my hotel and – as I learn when trying to sleep in one morning – Guacamaya parrots and myriad other birds making a ruckus at sunrise. “Up to about five years ago, nobody came to Medellín. No tourists, no academics and no foreign tradespeople, so we had no choice but to learn how to do everything ourselves,” he says, explaining why the city now has so many high-calibre designers.

The title of this Monocle article (subscribers only) leaves no place to ambiguity. “Born Again” looks at the evolving economy of Colombia, noting that “over the last eight years, foreign direct investment has risen almost tenfold to €10bn.” The country’s steady economic growth and stable political climate will certainly make that number rise even more in the future. Colombia has also been putting a heavy emphasis on foreign relations and diplomacy, sending a clear message that it intends to become a regional power.

Few mentions are made in these reports about the FARC problem… The guerilla seems to have lost enough power to have trade partners and investors not worry anymore about having to conduct risky business.

June 28 update: This Pacific Standard article will help you understand the influence of architecture, planning and security policy on Medellín over the past 10 years or so.

Also, I’ll be going to Bogotá in August to report on this topic. Any other story ideas are more than welcome.

Business and Economics, Education

June 11, 2012

Is the student debt bubble about to burst?

Something’s definitely going on with student tuition in North America. It’s not just Quebec students fighting for affordable university education, it’s young Americans getting stuck with high debt. Taking on debt to pay for higher education used to be considered as an investment, but in a slow economy, the chances of being able to pay it back are dwindling. Sounds familiar? This New York Times article compares the student debt bubble to the mortgage crisis.

The current balance of federal student loans nationwide is $902 billion, with an additional $140 billion or so in private student loans.

“If one is not thinking about where this is headed over the next two or three years, you are just completely missing the warning signs,” said Rajeev V. Date, deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal watchdog created after the financial crisis.

Mr. Date likened excessive student borrowing to risky mortgages. And as with the housing bubble before the economic collapse, the extraordinary growth in student loans has caught many by surprise. But its roots are in fact deep, and the cast of contributing characters — including college marketing officers, state lawmakers wielding a budget ax and wide-eyed students and families — has been enabled by a basic economic dynamic: an insatiable demand for a college education, at almost any price, and plenty of easy-to-secure loans, primarily from the federal government.

Of course, the potential effects of seeing the bubble burst are not as high, but creating a generation of debt-ridden youth will not help the economy recover.

Urbanism and architecture

June 8, 2012

Curitiba: the end of a myth?

During my trip in Brazil I stopped for a few days in Curitiba, a city located in the South of the country. Curitiba has been praised for its exemplary urban planning for a good 20 years, and I wanted to see it for myself. I had been to Portland, Oregon with the same kind of curiosity, and there I realized that “urban planning fame” happens mainly because of concepts and theories.

Indeed my first impression of Curitiba was of a grey, spread-out city, better appreciated with a car. People there don’t fit Brazilian stereotypes (which are mainly built around Rio culture) and keep to themselves. Like in all major Brazilian cities they worry about crime, and everybody has a story of knowing someone who got mugged, or worse. Curitiba is not really walkable, nor does it encourage community building. And if you care to venture outside city limits, you encounter poverty and crime.

Here’s my article about Curitiba in The Atlantic Cities, published earlier this week.

Top photo credit: Mathieu Struck/Flickr

Education

May 24, 2012

On endurance (and protesting)

Anarchopanda, the mascot of the Quebec protest movement. Photo AFP

Last Tuesday marked the 100th day of the student strike. Close to 400,000 people, maybe more, marched pacifically in the streets of Montreal. Of course there were not only students but all sorts of citizens who have made the protest movement their own after the government issued its special law, restricting the right to protest. This movement is not about tuition hikes anymore. In fact, it has never been, since from the start it was a matter of principles – the right to accessible education. But students are now joined by citizens fighting for civil rights and against police brutality, environmentalists angry at the government’s massive plans to sell out the land to foreign mining companies (Quebec’s Plan Nord), unions, and more. It’s also one of the first obvious signs of a generation clash fueled by boomers hitting retirement age and youth suffering from a global economic slowdown.

Yesterday was also a symbolic turn – it was the 30th consecutive evening march. After 30 days there are no more organizers, no more plan, just a religiously attended 8:30pm meeting followed by a random march through the streets. The most symbolic number, however, is not 30, but 487 – the number of people who were circled by the police, then arrested even if there had been no incidents. Every evening the number of arrests grows, and as the number grows protesters remain peaceful and keep on showing up at 8:30pm, day after day.

A couple of days ago people started banging kitchen pots at 8pm, out in the streets or on their balcony. I think a lot of people wanted to take part in the protests even if they couldn’t join the evening march, because some of us have to work or have kids or are scared of getting arrested. So everyday now we bang pots at 8pm, and in some instances neighbours end up gathering in the streets and marching together, sometimes until they end up joining the main evening march (of the 487 arrests yesterday there was a number of pot bangers.)

Every night if I’m not joining the protest I keep on checking the #manifencours Twitter hashtag that people use to spread live updates about the march, and I tune in CUTV’s live broadcast. Every night I’m a little anxious that this time no one will show up or that the movement will slowly die, but I’m proved wrong. For weeks I’ve been expecting protesters to get fed up and turn violent and riot – this would not be right but somewhat logical. But I’m proved wrong, night after night. What’s incredible is that after 100 days of strike and 30 days of daily protests, this non-violent movement has gained an incredible energy, a strength and popularity that could not have been achieved with violence. It’s like a marathon runner who feels the pain disappear and enters a mental state of bliss after a couple of hours. The endurance of non-violent protesters leads to something much more powerful than any of us would have imagined.

Education

May 14, 2012

Quebec student strike: fighting for principles

Students march during a night protest. Photo credits: Flavie Halais

It’s quite remarkable that the Quebec student strike still continues to go unnoticed by international media, despite being the longest student strike in the history of Quebec (and possibly Canada). Protests are taking place everyday, the largest ones gathering up to 300,000 demonstrators.

The movement started last February, after the provincial government announced it would increase tuition fees by 75% over five years. Quebec’s university tuition fees are the lowest in North America, thanks to a unique history of student actions combined with a tradition of public subsidy of higher education. Students are protesting not so much about the raise itself (tuition fees after the raise would still be the country’s lowest, at $3793 a year) than the logic behind the government’s decision. They point at examples of mismanagement of universities and criticize the fact that higher education has become a commercial venture that is driven by profitability.

After fourteen weeks or so of striking, Quebeckers and Montrealers especially (the city is home to about 150,000 students) are getting tired. Protests have sometimes been violent, as a fringe of demonstrators favour aggressive tactics and last week, four people were charged with committing a terrorism-related prank after throwing smoke bomb in the subway, resulting in the entire system being paralyzed. Police brutality has also been a big issue, with unjustified use of pepper-spray and plastic bullets, beatings, and mass arrests. A protest in Victoriaville turned sour, prompting Amnesty International to criticize the police’s handling of demonstrations.

The Quebec government is being criticized for taking too long to take the movement seriously and engage into talks with student unions. A first deal has been rejected after the government made contradictory statements in the press. Now universities and colleges with departments on strike (not everyone is striking) have to face the possibility of canceling the semester altogether.

Anger has been mounting between the pro and anti-strike. Strikers have been described as self-absorbed and spoiled by some who, in my opinion, refuse to see what the movement is all about. Indeed, the strike has generated some fascinating conversation in the media about the role of higher education and the problems faced by students who have to deal with a much higher cost of living than their parents did. For people in my generation, the general feeling is that our parents went to school for cheap, got to buy cars and houses when they were still affordable, were able to find work without too much trouble, and did a wonderful job at f***ing up everything for us. And now they’re calling us lazy and spoiled.

One of the strikers’s arguments is that one only has to look south of the border to see that they’re just fighting to avoid this kind of future for Quebec. The New York Times’s recent exposé on student debt compares the situation to another mortgage bubble about to burst. Quebec tuition fees might be the lowest in North America, it’s already impossible to complete a bachelor’s degree without working full time during the summer, part-time during fall and winter semesters, and taking on some debt, if you don’t receive financial support from your parents. These are not suitable conditions.

I’ve taken part in some of the demonstrations and the atmosphere is generally lively and festive. It’s a beautiful, altruistic and necessary movement that I hope will be successful.

For an efficient summary of the movement, read this Guardian article.

Public Health

April 27, 2012

Psychedelic drugs and psychotherapy: the end of a taboo?

The preparation of Ayahusca. Flickr user Emma and Kunley.

Something interesting is happening to the world of psychotherapy. After decades of being banned from public discourse and medical research, due in large part to Timothy Leary‘s experiments and subsequent troubles with justice in the’60s and ’70s, psychedelic drugs are regaining credibility as a tool for therapy – but taboo and prejudice make the process extremely slow.

The first time I heard of experiments being conducted was through The Jungle Prescription, a documentary depicting the work of Dr Jacques Mabit in the Amazon and Dr Gabor Maté in British Columbia, who use the Ayahusca, a hallucinogenic concoction made of Amazonian plants, to treat drug addicts. The film was shown on CBC television, and filmmakers are currently preparing a theatrical version.

Ayahusca has traditionally been used by indigenous communities in the Amazonian regions of Brazil and Peru, as well as religious communities such as Santo Daime. When I was in Brazil is struck me that whenever I raised the subject of Ayahusca with Brazilians, they all seemed to view the drug as merely recreational. Many people take it without the necessary mental and physical preparation, resulting in scary experiences that have given the drug a bad reputation. Yet Drs Mabit and Maté have discovered that Ayahusca has powerful healing properties, helping those who take it to get over past painful experiences. It is therefore helpful to addicts who have been using drugs as a way to “cope” with such experiences.

Then earlier this month, BBC News ran a story about ibogaine, a substance derived from the African plant Iboga and traditionally used in tribal ceremonies, used as a treatment for drug addiction in South Africa. Ibogaine also suffers from an image problem because of its misuse by untrained or ill-intended medical practitioners, but Dr Anwar Jeewa reports significantly positive results with her patients, even if a considerable amount of research is still needed to improve treatment.

Lastly, the New York Times reported that studies are being conducted with cancer patients at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center and McLean Hospital in Belmont Mass. (Harvard Medical School,) New York University’s medical school and Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, using psilocybin and MDMA (ecstasy) to help them ease their fear of death. Patients reported that during the sessions, they were able to view elements of their lives from a different perspective, and came to see death as transition to another state of being and not an absolute end to their life. The effects of the sessions seemed to be lasting for weeks, or even months.

Rick Doblin, founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Study (MAPS), in Santa Cruz, Calif., would like psychedelic drugs to be used in a wider range of settings, such as therapy, or merely for personal growth. Many researchers won’t go that far, mainly because this would imply to build a strict set of regulations to avoid abuse, and, let’s be honest, a radical change in the way most people view psychedelic drugs, which will take some time to happen.

Weekly digest

April 8, 2012

Inspiring links from April 2-8 : CBC News Tumblr, HDC Connect, community mapping and risk-taking societies

CBC News launches microblog

CBC news has launched a Tumblr blog last week to showcase their multimedia and interactive content. Picks include charts, maps, galleries and other types of content, like this interactive “game” in which you become the main investigator in a kidnapping case that actually happened in Vancouver a few years back.

IDEO launches HDC Connect

IDEO, the international design consultancy firm famous for its innovative design thinking services, has launched a new platform called HDC Connect in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The platform is a place for people working on human centered-design projects around the world to connect and share stories and experiences.

IDEO is responsible for creating the Human-Centered Design toolkit, a handbook detailing the process of creating and implementing solutions to specific problems in low-income communities. The handbook is downloadable for free.

Map Your World

The highlight of the TEDxChange conference for me last Thursday was the short video about “The Daredevils”, a group of children living in a Kolkata slum who have been mapping their community. The kids have been collecting specific data about health issues, such as which families got their kids vaccinated against Polio. They use a cell phone to mark which houses have gone or not through the vaccination process so that these families can be directly targeted by vaccination campaigns. By doing so, they’ve brought the vaccination rate from 40% to 80%.

It seems the video that was shown is not yet available on the net, but I found that the Daredevils have inspired another project called Map Your World, which provides similar cell phone technologies and mapping utilities to kids around the world. They were also the subject of a documentary film called The Revolutionary Optimists.

Watch the first video that was shown at TEDxChange:

Oil-powered thinking

Yet another great read from Design Observer: an article by John Thackara in which he reflects on the idea of risk and the place it has taken in our society. From banking to environmental policies, we have given up on designing sustainable systems and are now relying on transferring the risks – and damages – to third parties. This is how oil companies spend fortunes on damage-control PR services instead of limiting risks in the first place. Thackara also gives the example of Germany and its renewable energy policy, which transfers the environmental costs to other countries. Add to that the fact that our minds are not capable of thinking as rationally as we think, and you get a recipe for disaster.

Weekly digest

April 2, 2012

Inspiring links from March 26 – April 1

Giving a voice to slum residents

Let’s start with the Radio Slum Project in Nairobi, Kenya, which aims at giving a voice to those living in the slums of Africa. The story is from Al Jazeera and is brief but informative.

Google Earth used by NGO in India

Next is a photo essay from French newspaper Le Monde telling the story of a NGO in southwestern India, Shelter Associates, which works with Google Earth to show slum dwellers where their new subsidized-housing will be located. Seeing the location of their future houses helps residents gain trust in the program and accept to leave their dwellings. To view the photo essay (in French) click here.

Drug-related deaths in Europe: what’s the story?

Another article that got my attention this week is from BBC News. A new synthetic drug is causing an overdose boom in Estonia and experts are concerned about the phenomenon spreading to other countries. Fentanyl is extremelly addictive and more potent and deadly than heroin. It is made in labs located across the Russian border. The article features a striking figure showing drug-related deaths in Europe:

Estimated mortality rates among all adults (15-64 years) due to drug-induced deaths

Source: EMCDDA

On top of the list comes Estonia (by far) but also Scandinavian countries, which I didn’t know where suffering from a drug-related mortality problem. Romania, Turkey, Hungary and Bulgaria, which do not have the highest standards of living, come at the end. I’d be curious to know more about this.

Read the BBC article here.

São Paulo residents build their own road signs out of frustration

Finally, in a run-down area of North São Paulo, some residents who were upset because the government didn’t seem in a hurry to put up traffic signs decided to do it themselves. There had been numerous accidents because of the lack of signs and bumps. After a child got killed by a motorcycle, a group of residents got together and built their own humps. The story made me smile because I love seeing people getting together to do something for their community when the government won’t do it for them. However their anger and frustration shouldn’t be understated. Road signs are a basic form of investment from municipalities. Their absence pretty much sends the message that the neighbourhood is not a priority for city hall. When added up to other such “messages,” it can lead to widespread discontentment and mistrust toward the government.

Read the original article from the Folha de São Paulo here.

Back next week with more links. in the meantime, you can get real-time updates on the Twitter and Facebook feeds.