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Introduction   Governments have launched a series of ambitious digital strategies over recent decades to improve how they operate and interact with citizens. However, many of their anticipated benefits have yet to be achieved, leaving governments ill-equipped to respond effectively to a growing array of social and economic policy challenges, both domestic and international. The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee recently expressed concerns at:   T he number of complex, large-scale digital programmes we continue to see fail […] Departments have failed to understand the difference between improving what currently exists and real digital transformation, meaning they have missed opportunities to move to modern, efficient ways of working. [1]   These setbacks come despite nearly three decades of digital initiatives in which the UK was a pioneer: its first pan-government website launched in 1994 and within a few years brought together information from 180 separate public sector organisations. [2]  By 1996, the UK government was exploring ‘the opportunity to transform the whole operation of government’. [3] And in 1998, work was underway to exploit technology to ‘facilitate fundamental changes in the relationships between the citizen and the state […] with implications for the democratic process and structures of government’. [4] By 2002, the ambition was ‘to enhance our democratic structures […] to give individuals more choice about how they can participate in the political process’. [5] Technology was increasingly seen as integral to the creation of a more participative, transparent, and collaborative form of democratic governance and citizen empowerment. [6]   However, between the idea and the reality falls the shadow. As futurist Alvin Toffler predicted over fifty years ago, governments’ industrial era institutions and practices have proved ill-equipped to cope with the pace of technological change. [7] In place of a democratic renaissance, subsequent decades have seen the mass digitisation and automation of governments’ industrial-era institutions and practices, creating often undesirable results. [8]  Technology has all too often become synonymous with processes that undermine the rule of law [9] and democracy. [10] It’s used to industrialise surveillance, [11]  erode legal but ‘offensive’ free speech, [12]  and automate injustice and inequality in the name of bureaucratic ‘efficiency’. [13]   These outcomes are the opposite of what was originally promised. They stifle democratic reform and disadvantage the most vulnerable members of society. [14] In parallel, governments exhibit a near-perpetual state of panic about all things digital—artificial intelligence, AdTech, the gig economy, hybrid warfare—and provide inadequate and lethargic political responses to proven harms, including the toxic impact of social media. [15]  No wonder many democracies ‘are experiencing serious institutional debilities and weak public confidence’, [16] with over half the world’s democracies reported to be in retreat. [17]   Western governments’ failure to exploit technology as a strategic asset stands in sharp contrast to its exploitation by authoritarian regimes. From China [18] to Iran, [19] North Korea, [20] and Russia, [21] autocracies have integrated technology deep within their policies and plans, from pervasive national surveillance and suppression of free speech and civil society, to disrupting the affairs of other nations using everything from bot-driven false information to deepfakes and cyber-attacks. [22]   Failing to harness technology as a means of democratic renewal has left our governments ill-placed to tackle an increasingly complex and challenging political landscape. If democracies are to survive and prosper, they need a more effective and principled approach to technology—rooted in a vision of what they stand for:   A n affirmative, persuasive, secure and privacy-preserving, values-driven, and rights-respecting view of how technology can enable individual dignity and economic prosperity, and also what they will stand against—the misuse and abuse of technology to repress, control, divide, discriminate, and disenfranchise. [23]   Rethinking government   The use of technology to digitise policy and administrative silos within and between central government departments and local, regional, and national administration, creates painful—and sometimes deadly [24] —divisions in people’s lives. These boundaries prevent governments from working across their historical organisational structures to become more effective in how they learn, plan, adapt, and respond to domestic and international challenges.   Ed Vaizey, a former UK government minister, commented in 2017 that he ‘would completely re-engineer government. I would abolish government departments, I would have government by task’. [25]  His remarks echo the earlier political desire to use technology as a force for good in the modernisation and reform of government, and to:   P rovide better and more efficient services to businesses and to citizens, improve the efficiency and openness of government administration, and secure substantial cost savings for the taxpayer. (1996). [26]   M ake sure that public service users, not providers, are the focus, by matching services more closely to people’s lives […] [and] deliver public services that are high quality and efficient. (1999). [27]   Such sentiments reveal an enlightened political interest in harnessing the positive potential of science and technology, one memorably expressed in Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s 1963 speech when he asserted that ‘The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry’. [28] However, the subsequent failure of successive governments to modernise their ‘outdated methods’ and ‘industrial era institutions and practices’ has become a contributory factor to the decline in democracy and our public institutions. [29]   Technology’s policy implications   Digital technologies and practices can help governments access, analyse, and model information within and between the silo boundaries of current public administration. They offer new opportunities to engage communities and individuals in shaping and co-creating their own futures. They can inform the evidence base, continuously enlightening policymaking to deliver better outcomes. And they have an essential role in helping to reshape, redesign, and optimise organisational structures and practices to deliver better outcomes that escape the outdated methods prevalent in both public and private sectors. [30]   However, the political perception of technology is stuck in the web-centric mindset of the late twentieth century. Digital government programmes focus on creating elegant website veneers over industrial era processes, [31] marginalising the citizen/state relationship into a transactional one between ‘customers’ and ‘services’. This digitisation of point-to-point online transactions comes at a high cost: it displaces the role of technology in transforming governments’ ability to better understand and solve complex and interweaving social and economic problems. And it prioritises bureaucratic structures and processes over the radical overhaul of public policymaking and administration. [32]   The customer/service mindset is in part a toxic hangover of new public management (NPM), the private sector concepts parachuted into the public sector during the 1980s. Digital government strategies adopt the language and mindset of NPM in their ideological emphasis on ‘users’ and ‘services’. They often lack formal mechanisms to assess whether digital initiatives are legally compliant: developers can make decisions and write code that creates or breaks policy, bypassing policymakers, legislators, and voters—a problem described by Lawrence Lessig, an American academic and attorney, as ‘code as law’:   The code regulates. It implements values, or not. It enables freedoms, or disables them. It protects privacy, or promotes monitoring. People choose how the code does these things. People write the code. Thus the choice is not whether people will decide how cyberspace regulates. People—coders—will. [33]   The mass digitisation of paper-era transactions has become the primary output of many digital programmes. Yet governments knew as early as 1996 that ‘applying technology to existing working practices, or at the customer interface, will not achieve the full benefits that information technology has the power to deliver’. [34]  The result is that digital strategies all too often fail three critical tests. The ‘Toffler test’—modernising governments’ industrial era institutions and practices. The ‘Wilson test’—tackling outdated methods. And the ‘Vaizey test’—reorganising government and public policy around outcomes.   The digitisation of government’s historical configuration presents a major impediment to progress. It makes the public sector harder to redesign and integrate around citizens, cross-cutting policies, better policy outcomes, and improved administration. The failure to modernise governments’ internal capabilities, data, structures, processes, policies, and operations undermines their ability to anticipate, react, and respond in more timely, appropriate, and effective ways to an increasingly challenging and volatile world. As a former UK Permanent Secretary, Jonathan Slater, recently commented, ‘Whitehall’s remoteness from the public and frontline results in policymaking which is fundamentally inadequate to address the challenges we face’. [35]   The threat   Technology itself is not inherently good or bad, but neither is it neutral, as historian Melvin Kranzberg reminded us. [36]  A relentless focus on the positive applications of technology is essential to protect and advance democracy. However, the absence of guiding democratic principles for the design, development, and implementation of technology leaves many digital government programmes serving less altruistic short-term goals. [37]   This democratic deficit has economic and societal ramifications that reach well beyond governments’ domestic political programmes. When former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared Russia to be on ‘the path of democracy and not of empire’, [38]  followed by the dissolution of the USSR in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed as if the citizen centred freedoms and practices of the West had triumphed. For a moment in time an opportunity existed to reforge a global democratic renaissance, to reaffirm technology as a force for good, rooted unashamedly in the principles of liberty, justice, and the rule of law proclaimed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.   However, as with Russia’s own subsequent retreat into autocracy and militarism, many democratic governments have chosen a very different path. At their worst, they mirror the behavioural traits of technology corporations and authoritarian regimes. They deploy often unproven technologies that automate inequality and undermine human rights and the exercise of justice in the pursuit of their own political goals. Many of the artificial intelligence governance principles belatedly being implemented by governments and businesses, for example, make no mention of human rights. [39]   These failings need an urgent fix: the number of countries in the world with full democracies remains low, at just 14.4% in 2022. [40] Most people live in flawed democracies, or hybrid or authoritarian regimes. The latter represents the largest group: 36.9% of the world’s population endures the diktats of a privileged, and often brutal, controlling elite. Across the categories assessed by The Economist Intelligence Unit —electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties—technology can play an essential beneficial role in re-asserting and protecting fundamental democratic rights, rather than accelerating their demise.   The opportunity   Today   Since the late 1990s, technology has been used to streamline citizens’ transactional interactions with government, from obtaining a new passport, to completing self-assessment tax returns, or making an appointment with a GP. Yet policymaking is little changed, and neither are governments’ associated structures, practices, and administration.   Citizens’ digital experiences of the public sector mimic the siloed, organisation-centric processes and forms that preceded them. Inside government, Ministers and officials lack timely access to basic information and insight about how their department is performing, what’s going well, what’s broken, what citizens think, or insight into the impact of their policies, short- and long-term, across departments and national, regional, and local government.   To paraphrase computer programmer Melvin Conway, any organisation that designs a system will produce a design that mirrors the organisation’s existing structure. [41]  In large-scale, siloed organisations like government, digital initiatives reflect and reinforce existing hierarchies and silos. It’s the opposite of what’s required: as Conway also noted, ‘flexibility of organization is important to effective design. Ways must be found to reward design managers for keeping their organizations lean and flexible’. [42]  Yet governments are well behind the curve in using technology to provide such flexibility, despite the long-known benefits of networked forms of organisation:   Networks are ‘lighter on their feet’ than hierarchies. […] [they involve] discrete exchanges [not] by administrative fiat, but through networks of individuals engaged in reciprocal, preferential, mutually supportive actions […] the parties to a network agree to forego the right to pursue their own interests at the expense of others. [43] Tomorrow   The UK government recognised over two decades ago that:   Many of the biggest challenges facing Government do not fit easily into traditional Whitehall structures […] [We need] a comprehensive package of measures to improve and modernise the way we handle cross-cutting issues […] the role of leadership; improving the way policy is formulated and implemented; the need for new skills; budgetary arrangements, and the role of external audit and scrutiny. [44]   Technology can help governments transition from their industrial era policy boundaries and rigid operational and financial hierarchies towards more effective, networked, and collaborative ways of working. Doing so will help officials work beyond ‘the boundaries of their agencies to accomplish the broad mission, rather than simply managing the more narrow activities within their agency’s walls’. [45]  It will improve the way policy is developed and informed, and provide more joined-up approaches to complex issues like intergenerational poverty and homelessness.   These changes will also have implications for administrative law. Departmental and process boundaries, funding, and accountability are often stipulated in legislation, including the naming of departmental Secretaries of State in Acts of Parliament. Redesigning policymaking and public administration around outcomes will require changes to existing processes, oversight, and accountability. Funding models will need major reform so that resources flow more effectively to where they have maximum beneficial impact instead of perpetuating silo organisational structures and processes.   Making it happen   To reset digital government onto a better track will require political vision and affirmative action on multiple fronts, including: Leadership   Technology’s strategic role in helping renew democracy and our public institutions needs to be understood at the most senior political and official levels. Governments will need to break the habit of handing digital political portfolios to junior, transitory politicians who lack the insight or experience to exploit technology as a tool of strategic improvement. If governments are serious about modernising the public sector, they need a Cabinet-level politician with the authority to deliver improvements across government’s policy and structural silos.   The political challenge of harnessing technology to reinvigorate democratic values and institutions is significant. David Freud, a former Minister for Welfare Reform, accurately pinpointed why digital programmes frequently fail: ‘We’ve been looking at this as a technology issue. It is much more than that, [it’s] a major cultural change in the relationship between the state and the people it needs to support’. [46]   Capabilities   To improve their capabilities, governments need to ditch the tactical, low-level ‘digital training’ of the past [47]  and move to education programmes [48] built around improved citizen engagement and the transformation of policymaking and policy outcomes, including the organisational structures, administrative processes, funding, and technology needed for their delivery. Similarly, technology leaders should have access to education programmes that develop their understanding of democratic principles, policymaking, and legislative processes to inform and guide their work.   Governments need to adopt more systems thinking to better understand how different policies, organisations, and processes interact with and influence each other. [49] For transformation to succeed, politicians and senior officials will need to work in more collaborative, participative, and outcome-based ways. This has major implications for Ministers and Secretaries of State: their portfolios will increasingly focus on cross-cutting issues rather than current departmental structures and need to be supported by updated processes for citizen engagement, policymaking, legislation, resourcing, and funding.   Open government   Governments need to open up their policy and administrative silos—and their associated systems, data, and processes—to liberate citizens from the experiences that William Beveridge, pioneer of the UK’s welfare state, criticised as long ago as 1941. He found that seven different government departments were involved in providing cash benefits. [50]  This was not only inefficient and costly but also created a dehumanising, demeaning, and fragmented experience for benefit claimants.   Similar citizen experiences still abound today. Duplicated functions and processes operate in hundreds of places, both within and between departments and across local, regional, and national administration. They frustrate public sector employees too, who find themselves caught in a web of contradictory policies, funding, processes, systems, and structures. An open government mandate will provide opportunities for modernisation and innovation inside and outside of the public sector.   However, an open government initiative that delivers solely at a technical level will not in itself encourage citizen participation and improve transparency and trust:   Technology does not drive anything. It creates new possibilities for collecting and analyzing data, mashing ideas and reaching people, but people still need to be moved to engage and find practical pathways to act. [51]   Governments should encourage a nationwide open architecture to support and inform systems thinking, and to provide opportunities for improved collaboration, evidence, and research into social and economic issues and better policymaking. This open architecture will let civil society and others add significant value, helping get important things done by letting people take the initiative, with government responding ‘in the here and now’. [52] Identity   For many of our interactions with government, proof of who we are is irrelevant, such as when we access online welfare or tax guidance. Other interactions, however, require a high level of assurance that we are who we claim to be and that the information we provide is accurate. High levels of assurance are needed not just for citizens and businesses, but public sector employees too.   Instead of emulating the state-dominant identity systems of authoritarian regimes, our governments need to create democratic exemplars that are citizen centred, private, and secure. The Estonian government, for example, lets citizens see when public officials have accessed their personal information, helping provide transparency and build trust. [53]   Good identity design protects and enhances democratic rights. It preserves citizens’ anonymity and pseudonymity, and lets them prove something about themselves, such as being ‘Over 18’ or their right to work, without disclosing unnecessary information or facilitating state monitoring and surveillance. David Birch, a digital finance and identity expert, points out that ‘we need a digital identity infrastructure that supports our transition to a new economy, not one that stutters along digitising the relics of the post-industrial revolution’. [54]   To protect and enshrine democratic principles, identity needs to be developed around the citizen and not the state. Government initiatives must adhere to high standards of privacy and security, tapping into initiatives such as the Decentralised Identity Foundation (DIF) [55]  and Solid, [56] together with ICAO digital travel credentials [57]  and ISO mobile driving licences. [58]   Personal data   Personal data safeguarded in departmental silos is often blamed for preventing governments from taking a holistic view of citizens and their circumstances to design and deliver integrated policies and processes that better meet their needs: ‘Currently, the information that government holds is scattered across disparate systems and saved in a variety of formats, making it difficult for policy makers to find what they need when they need it’. [59]   From a citizen’s perspective, we want more effective policies and better outcomes, but we don’t want officials and governments accessing and misusing our personal data. We need to improve public administration through smarter information management without invading citizens’ right to a private life or risking an increase in fraud. But transitioning public administration from a departmental responsibility to a government-wide one risks creating insecure and invasive approaches to our personal data, and the creeping extension of the state into citizens’ private lives.   In 2013, the UK Government’s Technology code of practice  stated that ‘Users should have access to, and control over, their own personal data’. [60]  Although the policy commitment has yet to be delivered, the principle remains sound. And effective regulation and technical and legal enforcement must accompany these rights. Just as Open Banking lets consumers manage their financial information across multiple organisations today, [61]  tomorrow citizens should be able to manage their information and experiences across public, private, and voluntary sectors, creating ‘new forms of citizen and state co-operation and dialogue for the 21st century’. [62]   Reduce and remove transactional interactions   Governments should question why so many paper-era interactions are still needed in the digital age. What prevents public administration operating without online forms? How can technology deliver better outcomes by working across silo organisational structures, processes, and data? And how can governments design better and less dehumanising and fragmented experiences for citizens?   As governments make better use of data and involve citizens and businesses directly in its curation and maintenance, they will be able to reduce or even remove many of their existing transactional interactions, and become more efficient and effective in the process.   Algorithmic injustice and the rule of law   Governments need to prevent the misuse of technology products and services across both private and public sectors. They also need to guard against replacing the prevailing New Public Management transactional ‘user/service’ mindset with the equally problematic pathologies of New Public Analytics (NPA), with their data-driven, automated injustice:   For those in positions of vulnerability who lack the skills, competences and ready internet access, and whose encounters with the state are now mediated primarily via digital systems rather than frontline human officers, their experience of the state has become increasingly and shamefully Kafkaesque, dehumanising and unjust. However, the capacity of these systems to function automatically and at scale enables the collective violation of the rights of affected individuals, including the presumption of innocence, producing serious injustice at scale […] there is an urgent and serious need for lawyers and legal scholars to work with policymakers and technical experts in order to ensure that systematic, practical and effective constitutional safeguards are in place . [63]   Digital government initiatives need immutable constitutional safeguards, public oversight, and design principles founded on the rule of law, human rights, privacy, and security—to defend and protect democratic values and ensure positive social and human outcomes. Although some promising work has taken place with algorithmic transparency in government, [64]  mandatory transparency is required of all algorithms with social and economic impacts, including those hyped as ‘artificial intelligence’. Routine algorithmic audits and impact assessments during the design, development, and deployment of new systems will help check for bias and regulatory compliance. [65]   Conclusion   The ambitious ideals of digital government will not be delivered until politicians and political parties weave the democratising potential of technology into the fabric of their thinking, their public consultations, their manifesto promises, and their policies, using it as an immutable force for good. As the US initiative to advance technology for democracy observes:   The first wave of the digital revolution promised that new technologies would support democracy and human rights. The second saw an authoritarian counterrevolution. Now, the United States and other democracies are working together to ensure that the third wave of the digital revolution leads to a technological ecosystem characterised  by resilience, integrity, openness, trust and security, and that reinforces democratic principles and human rights. [66]     Our governments need a radical rethink and reset of their digital initiatives if this third wave of digital revolution is to succeed. They need to commit to the open, participative, collaborative, and cross-cutting uses of technology to deliver fundamental and much-needed improvements to democracy and the relationship between citizens and the state.   The upsides of doing so are clear: technology can protect and improve democratic processes and institutions; make policymaking and public administration more accessible, more collaborative, more transparent, more accountable, and more effective; and deliver better, more just, and more enduring social and economic outcomes.   After three decades of unfulfilled promises, digital government stands at the crossroads: for the health of democracy and our democratic future, it’s clear which road it needs to take. Jerry Fishenden   Dr Jerry Fishenden FIET FRSA is a technologist, writer, and composer, with a career that spans both public and private sectors. Former roles include National Technology Officer at Microsoft UK; Senior Executive, Business Systems at the City of London’s financial regulator; Network Planning Officer of the House of Commons; and IT Director in the NHS. Jerry was the Specialist Adviser to two House of Commons Committee inquiries into digital government, and advises governments, businesses, and other organisations on the effective design and implementation of technology. His latest book, Fracture: The collision between technology and democracy—and how we fix it (2023), explores technological opportunities and challenges for the future of democracy and our democratic institutions. [1]  House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, ‘Challenges in implementing digital change’ ( House of Commons, 10 December 2021) < https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/8146/documents/83439/default/ > accessed 1 July 2023. [2]  Jerry Fishenden, ‘Remembering government direct - the first interactive green paper’ ( New Technology Observations from the UK , 20 March 2019) < https://ntouk.wordpress.com/2019/03/20/remembering-government-direct-the-first-interactive-green-paper/ > accessed 1 July 2023. [3]  ‘The Government IT Strategy: Annex E’ ( Central IT Unit, Cabinet Office, June 1996) < https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/uk-government-it-strategy-1996-from-the-ntouk-digital-archives.pdf > a ccessed  1 June 2023. [4]  ‘Electronic Government’ ( Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology , February 1998). < https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/post/pn110.pdf > a ccessed 1 June 2023. [5]  ‘In the service of democracy. A consultation paper on a policy for electronic democracy’ ( HM Government / UK Online , 15 July 2002)  < https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/e-democracy.pdf >   a ccessed 1 June 2023. [6]  Creative Research, ‘e-Democracy. Report of Research Findings’ ( Communications on behalf of the Office of the e-Envoy , 23 December 2002) < https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/full_report.pdf > a ccessed 1 June 2023. [7]   Alvin Toffler , Future Shock (Random House 1970) . [8]  Virginia Eubanks,   Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poo r (Macmillan 2018). [9]  ‘You Reap What You Code’ ( Child Poverty Action Group, June 2023) < https://cpag.org.uk/policy-and-campaigns/report/you-reap-what-you-code > a ccessed 1 July 2023. [10]  Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, ‘Many Tech Experts Say Digital Disruption Will Hurt Democracy’ ( Pew Research Centre , 21 February 2020)  < https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/02/21/many-tech-experts-say-digital-disruption-will-hurt-democracy/ > a ccessed 1 June 2023. [11]  Heather Brooke, ‘States haven’t stopped spying on their citizens, post-Snowden-they’ve just got sneakier’ The Guardian (London, 6 June 2023)   < https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/06/edward-snowden-state-surveillance-uk-online-safety-bill > a ccessed 1 August 2023. [12]  Ross Anderson and Sam Gilbert, ‘The Online Safety Bill. Policy Brief’ ( University of Cambridge and Bennett Institute for Public Policy , October 2022)  < https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Policy-Brief-Online-Safety-Bill.pdf > a ccessed 1 May 2023. [13]  Ed Pilkington, ‘Digital dystopia: how algorithms punish the poor’ The Guardian (London, 14 October 2019)  < https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/14/automating-poverty-algorithms-punish-poor > a ccessed 1 June 2023. [14]  ‘India’s high-tech governance risks leaving behind its poorest citizens’ The Economist (London, 16 October 2021)  < https://www.economist.com/asia/2021/10/16/indias-high-tech-governance-risks-leaving-behind-its-poorest-citizens > a ccessed 1 August 2023. [15]  Jean M Twenge, ‘Increases in Depression, Self‐Harm, and Suicide Among U.S. Adolescents After 2012 and Links to Technology Use: Possible Mechanisms’ 2020 2(1) Psychiatric Research & Clinical Practice 19-25. [16]  Thomas Carothers, ‘Why Technology Hasn’t Delivered More Democracy’ ( Carnegie Endowment for International Peace , 3 June 2015)  < https://carnegieendowment.org/2015/06/03/why-technology-hasn-t-delivered-more-democracy-pub-60305 > a ccessed 1 January 2023. [17]  Yasmeen Serhan, ‘Half of the World’s Democracies Are in Retreat. Here’s What to Expect in 2023’ Time (New York, 21 December 2022) < https://time.com/6242188/global-democracy-report-2022/ > a ccessed 1 March 2023. [18]  ‘China’s digital dictatorship’ The Economist (London, 17 December 2016) < https://www.economist.com/leaders/2016/12/17/chinas-digital-dictatorship > accessed 1 April 2023. [19]  ‘Iran’s cyberwar goes global’ The Economist (London, 14 September 2022) < https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2022/09/14/irans-cyberwar-goes-global > accessed 1 June 2023. [20]  ‘North Korea’s hackers are after intel, not just crypto’ The Economist (London, 7 July 2023) < https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/07/07/north-koreas-hackers-are-after-intel-not-just-crypto > accessed 1 August 2023. [21]  ‘ Russia is trying to build its own great firewall ’ The Economist (London, 19 February 2022) < https://www.economist.com/business/russia-is-trying-to-build-its-own-great-firewall/21807706 > a ccessed 1 June 2023. [22]  ‘FACT SHEET: Advancing Technology for Democracy’ ( The White House Briefing Room, 29 March 2023)  < https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/03/29/fact-sheet-advancing-technology-for-democracy-at-home-and-abroad/#:~:text=From%20AI%2Dpowered%20mass%20surveillance,critics%20at%20home%20and%20abroad . > a ccessed 1 October 2023. [23]  ibid. [24]  Linda Geddes, ‘Child deaths are linked to social deprivation in England—NHS report’ The Guardian (London, 13 May 2021)  < https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2021/may/13/child-deaths-are-linked-to-social-deprivation-in-england-nhs-report > a ccessed 1 February 2023. [25]  Nicola Hughes, ‘Ed Vaizey reflects on his time in government for the Institute for Government’s Ministers Reflect project’ ( Institute for Government , 8 December 2016)  < https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/ministers-reflect/ed-vaizey > a ccessed 1 May 2023. [26]  ‘Government Direct. A Prospectus for the Electronic Delivery of Government Services’ ( Cabinet Office , 1996)  < https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/government-direct.pdf > a ccessed 1 May 2023. [27]  ‘Modernising Government’ ( Cabinet Office , March 1999) < https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/modgov.pdf > a ccessed  1  May 2023. [28]  Brian Walden, ‘The white heat of Wilson’ ( BBC News , 31 March 2006)  < http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4865498.stm > a ccessed 1 May 2023. [29]  Jerry Fishenden, Mark Thompson, and Will Venters, ‘Better Public Services. The Green Paper accompanying Better Public Services, A Manifesto’ ( Digitising Government , March 2018) < https://digitizinggovernment.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/0/7/13071055/green_paper_interactive_pdf_compressed.pdf > a ccessed  1  June 2023. [30]  Jerry Fishenden, Mark Thompson, and Will Venters, ‘Appraising the impact and role of platform models and Government as a Platform (GaaP) in UK Government public service reform: towards a Platform Assessment Framework (PAF)’ 2017 34(2) Information Quarterly 167-182. [31]  ‘Design your service using GOV.UK styles components and pattern’ ( GOV.UK Design System , March 2023)  < https://design-system.service.gov.uk/ > a ccessed  1  July 2023. [32]  Mark Thompson, ‘UK voters are being sold a lie. There is no need to cut public services’ The Guardian (London, 12 February 2015)  < https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2015/feb/12/uk-voters-cut-public-services-amazon-spotify-uber > a ccessed  1  August 2023. [33]  Lawrence Lessig, ‘Code is Law’ ( Harvard Magazine , 1 January 2000)  < https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html > a ccessed  1  July 2023. [34]  ‘The Government IT Strategy’ (n 3).   [35]  Jonathan Slater, ‘Fixing Whitehall’s broken policy machine’ ( The Policy Institute, King’s College London , March 2022) < https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/fixing-whitehalls-broken-policy-machine.pdf > a ccessed  1  April 2023. [36]  Melvin Kranzberg, ‘ Technology and History: “Kranzberg’s Laws”’ (1986) 27 (3) Technology and Culture  544-560. [37]  Janna Anderson and Lee Raine, ‘Concerns about democracy in the digital age’ ( Pew Research Centre , 21 February 2020)  < https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/02/21/concerns-about-democracy-in-the-digital-age/ > a ccessed 1 September 2023. [38]   Graeme Gill ,   Symbolism and Regime Change in Russia  (Cambridge University Press 2013 ). [39]  Kate Jones, ‘AI governance and human rights’ ( Chatham House , 10 January 2023)   < https://www.chathamhouse.org/2023/01/ai-governance-and-human-rights > a ccessed  1  May 2023. [40]  ‘Democracy Index 2022’ ( Economist Intelligence Unit )   < https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2022/ > a ccessed  1  June 2023. [41]  In 1968, Melvin E Conway created an adage now popularly known as Conway’s law, namely that ‘ Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure ’ . [42]  Melvin E Conway, ‘How do committees invent?’ ( Datamation magazine , April 1968)   < http://www.melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html >   ac cessed  1  July 2023. [43]  Walter W Powell, ‘Neither Market Nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organisation’ (1990) 12(1) Research in Organisational Behaviour 295-336. [44]  ‘Wiring it up. Whitehall’s management of cross-cutting policies and services’ ( Cabinet Office , January 2000)  < https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/wiring-it-up-2000.pdf > a ccessed  1  May 2023. [45]  Donald F Kettl, The Next Government of the United States: Why Our Institutions Fail Us and How To Fix Them  (Norton  2009). [46]  David Freud,   Clashing Agendas: Inside the Welfare Trap (Macmillan 2 021 ). [47]  ‘GDS Academy’ (GDS Academy, November 2021)  < https://web.archive.org/web/20181130230208/https:/gdsacademy.campaign.gov.uk/ > a ccessed  1  August 2023. [48]  ‘Written evidence submitted by Dr Jerry Fishenden, Professor Mark Thompson, and Assistant Professor Will Venters’ ( House of Commons Public Accounts Committee , 6 December 2023)  < https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/39203/pdf/ > a ccessed  1 October 2023. [49]  ‘Systems thinking: An Introductory Toolkit for Civil Servants’ ( Government Office for Science , 2022)  < https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6290d241d3bf7f036cb7a09f/GO-Science_Systems_Thinking_Toolkit_2022_v1.0.pdf > ac cessed  1  March 2023. [50]  Jose Harris,   William Beveridge: A Biograph y (Macmillan 1997) 365-412. [51]  Rakesh Rajani, ‘Why Technology Hasn’t Delivered More Democracy’ ( Carnegie Endowment for International Peace , June 2015)   < https://carnegieendowment.org/2015/06/03/why-technology-hasn-t-delivered-more-democracy-pub-60305 > a ccessed  1  January 2023. [52]  Audrey Tang, ‘Inside Taiwan’s new digital democracy’ The Economist (London, 12 March 2019) < https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/03/12/inside-taiwans-new-digital-democracy > a ccessed  1  April 2023. [53]  Jaan Priisalu and Rain Ottis, ‘Personal control of privacy and data: Estonian experience’ (2017) 8(1)   Data Protection Journal 441-451. [54]  David Birch, ‘Doing Something About Digital Identity’ ( Substack , 25 August 2021)  < https://dgwbirch.substack.com/p/doing-something-about-digital-identity > a ccessed  1  February 2023. [55]  ‘Decentralised Identity Foundation’ ( Minutes of the Decentralised Identity Foundation , June 2023)  < https://identity.foundation/ > a ccessed  1  October 2023. [56]  ‘Solid: Your data, your choice’ ( New Think Tank , February 2023) < https://solidproject.org/ > a ccessed  1  October 2023. [57]  ‘Digital Travel Credentials’ (ICAO, March 2023)  < https://www.icao.int/Security/FAL/TRIP/PublishingImages/Pages/Publications/Guiding%20core%20principles%20for%20the%20development%20of%20a%20Digital%20Travel%20Credential%20%20%28DTC%29.PDF > a ccessed  1  May 2023. [58]  ‘ISO/IEC 18013-5:2021. Personal identification—ISO-compliant driving licence—Part 5: Mobile driving licence (mDL) application’ (ISO/IEC, March 2023)  < https://www.iso.org/standard/69084.html > a ccessed  1  May 2023. [59]  Lewis Lloyd, ‘Policy making in a digital world. How data and new technologies can help government make better policy’  ( Institute for Government , 2020) < https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/policy-making-digital-world.pdf > a ccessed  1  October 2023. [60]  ‘Technology code of practice’ ( Cabinet Office , 2013)  < https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/technology-code-of-practice-e28094-government-service-design-manual-2013.pdf > a ccessed  1  February 2023. [61]  ‘What is Open Banking?’ ( Open Banking Ltd. , June 2023) < https://www.openbanking.org.uk/what-is-open-banking > a ccessed  1  June 2023. [62]  Tang (n 52).   [63]  Karen Yeung, ‘The New Public Analytics as an Emerging Paradigm in Public Sector Administration’ (2002) 27(2) Tilburg Law Review. [64]  ‘Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard Hub’ ( Central Digital and Data Office , 5 January 2023)  < https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/algorithmic-transparency-recording-standard-hub > a ccessed  1  October 2023. [65]  ‘Examining the Black Box: Tools for assessing algorithmic systems’ ( Ada Lovelace Institute , 29 April 2020)  < https://www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Ada-Lovelace-Institute-DataKind-UK-Examining-the-Black-Box-Report-2020.pdf > a ccessed  1  April 2023. [66]  (n 22).

Blue and white, occasionally with touches of yellow, ceramic tiles adorn not simply the façades and interiors of countless Portuguese buildings, but also the design imaginary of the nation. Spanning abstract and geometric patterns to illustrative figurations in engrossing detail, azulejos tiles are a firm fixture of Portuguese design. Their distinctive palette misleads many into locating the etymology of azulejos in azul , the Portuguese word for blue, which tidily frames the ceramic tiles within their popular discourse as an aesthetic of Portuguese monumentality—an ornament of national identity and strength. However, the term finds its origins in al-zulayj , the Arabic term for a small, smooth polished stone, which twofold troubles categorizations of the ceramic tiles—both highlighting their complex function as an architectural material and illuminating a complex and often forgotten period of Portuguese history and identity. Since the eighth century, when al-Andalus Muslims sailed from North Africa, occupying the Iberian Peninsula and in so doing introducing their ceramic compositions, azulejos have stood Janus-faced at the complex intersection of utility and ornament. They have solidified as a distinct aesthetic of Portuguese national identity while simultaneously gesturing at the assemblages of influences which constitute the nation.    It was precisely this reflective quality, this hybrid language of azulejos, that stood as a threat to the Second Portuguese Republic. Under controversial dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, the Estado Novo (New State) fascist regime sought to create a so-called modern image and so saw the brief disappearance of the ceramic tiles from Portuguese design. The resulting architectural style of Português Suave (Soft Portuguese) articulated in concrete a national identity without memory. This period of absence, and the re-emergence of azulejos following the Revolução dos Cravos  (Carnation Revolution), brings into stark relief the politics that underscore the unique design qualities of the ceramic tiles. Indeed, the Portuguese struggle against the Estavo Nuovo  fascist regime is a struggle of memory against forgetting, of azulejos against concrete.    Hybrid Materiality   Azulejos fall somewhere between decorative art and architectural material. This hybrid position of ornament and design is reflective of the more complex politics which underscores the ceramic tiles. Azulejos are an ornamental art form with a specific functional capacity: their composition of porous clay covered by a protective glaze reflects light and insulates against humidity and corrosion from salty air, making them an ideal design material for Portugal’s Mediterranean climate. [1]  Scholars are unanimous in their praise for the sleek efficiency of the material, accrediting its function as the source of its widespread and ubiquitous presence in the Portuguese design imaginary. João Miguel dos Santos Simões, one of the first and only scholars on azulejos and the founder of the Museu Nacional do Azulejo (National Azulejos Museum), describes how the ceramic tiles transcend their utilitarian function as a protective parietal finishing, taking on a monumental spirit as a ubiquitous part of Portuguese culture. [2] Indeed, the ceramics can be found in all realms of Portuguese life: lining the walls of secular sites like train stations, restaurants, bars, fountains, and murals with triumphant historical scenes; composing the political sphere in the contours of monuments and parliamentary buildings; enclosing the domestic sphere in geometric and floral motifs which adorn the fa ç ades of homes; and articulating sacred space, composing altars and icons for Catholic worship. Yet these expressions of Portuguese monumentality are not a Portuguese invention, but rather a vestige of the al-Andalus Muslim occupation. In this way, the azulejos are always gesturing as much away as towards Portuguese national identity—serving as a testament to the past as it builds the future. The concept of hybridity illuminates the genesis of the aesthetic and conceptual layers of the ceramic tiles, illuminating the complex relationship of medium and message. The azulejos represents not only the fusion of ornament and design, but also embodies the memories of strength and weakness in Portuguese history.    The history of the azulejos illuminates not simply their hybrid and complex language, it also exists as a politically urgent practice of memory. Azulejos are vestiges of the al-Andalus Muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula, which lasted over five hundred years, from the eighth to the thirteenth century (711-1492 CE). Currently, there is a lack of English-language scholarship discussing this period of Portugal’s design history, especially concerning the al-Andalus occupation of the Iberian Peninsula and its influence, and particularly regarding azulejos ceramic tiles. Also notable is that most English-language Portuguese scholarship avoids the mention of the al-Andalus within discussions of azulejos. It is therefore necessary for scholarship to explore this forgotten history and unpack the politics of memory. While the precise genealogical evolution of the azulejos is underexamined, and is not the subject of this paper, through the assemblage of visual analysis with the historical records which do  exist, it is possible, and indeed urgent, to locate the azulejos within its al-Andalus Muslim origins.    Materiality of History Azulejos are a composite material. They are composed of a porous clay-based ceramic body, the terracotta, covered by a protective glassy phase, the glaze, which operate together to form a larger pattern or image. The term azulejos describes their function as smooth polished stones operating within a mosaic composition, many of which have the interlocking curvilinear, geometric, and floral motifs characteristic of Islamic art and design. [3] It is possible to surmise that Portuguese azulejos find their lineage in zellij  (الزليج), a form of Islamic mosaic tilework characteristic of Islamic architecture from the end of the first millennium. Zellij are a mosaic composition where an ‘architectural surface is entirely covered by a pattern arrangement of small pieces of tile which have surface glazes of different colours’. [4] A precise historical visual analysis of al-Andalus zellij  tile against the azulejos is not possible, as al-Andalus architecture and art were either completely destroyed or whitewashed and appropriated after the Reconquista, the period of military campaigns waged by Western European Christian kingdoms in order to retake the Iberian territories. In fact, scholars note that nothing remains from the al-Andalus period of occupation or the first Portuguese kings. [5] However, a comparison of traditional Portuguese azulejos with traditional Islamic zellij  can illuminate their shared genealogy.    Some of the earliest azulejos can be found in the Palácio Nacional de Sintra (The Palace of Sintra), a site which is not only replete with ceramic tiles but also the nationalistic gestures which obscure their history. The Palácio Nacional de Sintra  was originally the residence of the al-Andalus Taifa of Lisbon, set up as the palace of the Islamic kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula. The interior walls of the palace are still adorned with ceramic tiles, but critically they are not the original zellij  tiles from the tenth century, rather being azulejos from the fifteenth century. Most scholarship on azulejos locates their origins during this period, citing this palace as one of the first instances of the ceramic design and attributing their introduction to King Manuel I of Portugal (r. 1495-1521 CE). The azulejos stand as an import of luxury within this national narrative—a whim of a monarch’s visit to Seville, Spain and the Alhambra palace in Granada as an exercise in national taste. Indeed, the palace is celebrated as a testimony to the Portuguese reconquest and early affirmation of nationality. However, a comparison of decoration choices accredited to King Manuel I with traditional architectural Islamic tile design hardly illuminates the beginnings of a national tradition and aesthetic of strength, rather gesturing towards the unshakable influence of 500 years of occupation.  Sala dos Brasões, Palácio Nacional de Sintra © Caroline DeFrias One of the earliest examples of Islamic tile decoration is the Qubbat al-Sakhra  (قبة الصخرة or ‘The Dome of the Rock’). The edifice sits atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It is a holy site for Muslims, enclosing the Foundation Stone that lies at the heart of the structure, which is believed to be the location of the miraji (ascension) of the Prophet Muhammad. The Qubbat al-Sakhra historically functioned and continues to serve as a shrine and important site of pilgrimage since its construction in 692 CE. [6] It is therefore reasonable to surmise this site would have held great importance and influence for the al-Andalus Muslims, making it a suitable site for comparison through which to examine the Islamic influence of the Palácio Nacional de Sintra .    The Qubbat al-Sakhra encloses the Foundation Stone in two ambulatories and an exterior wall. The exterior wall has an octangular structure with a raised circular platform that is capped with a golden dome. There are four entrances, each aligned with a cardinal direction. Marble clads the lower register of the exterior of Qubbat al-Sakhra , while faience, or tin glazed ceramics tiles, form a zellij  composition on its upper registers. The glazed tiles, which dazzle in hues of blue with accents of green and yellow, are composed of precise shards of ceramic placed together to form abstract geometric and floral patterns, as well as calligraphy. This aniconic imagery is characteristic of Islamic design, which avoids direct reflections of sentient beings in art which decorates religious and holy sites. [7] The placement of the tiles on the upper registers of the exterior structure function to draw the eyes towards heaven, urging an ascent of vision and thought which echoes the journey of the Prophet Muhammad. Each tile seems to gesture in kind with one another towards the creator of such sites of beauty, speaking in glistening rays a reflection of gratitude and wonder.    The interior of Qubbat al-Sakhra is similarly ethereal, as the light from the windows which line the octagonal wall illuminate the ceramics which grace the interior of the dome. Golden zellij compositions shimmer atop supporting columns with corinthian capitals. Swirling vegetative motifs compose two rows above the columns and seem to swirl upwards towards the glistening golden and bejewelled dome interior, itself comprised of a geometric rhythm of gilded teardrops contoured in a deep red, which seem to fall from the eyes past the body and towards the rock which the Qubbat al-Sakhra houses. The ceramic tiles crowd together like the pilgrims who come to admire the site they adorn. Ibn Battua, a fourteenth-century travel writer, described the Qubbat al-Sakhra  as ‘a building of extraordinary beauty, solidity, elegance, and singularity of shape […] Both outside and inside, the decoration is so magnificent and the workmanship so surpassing as to defy description’. [8] Here, the zellij  composition works in harmony with the architecture of the building to accentuate the excellence of either, and articulate a beautiful testament to the Islamic faith.   The Palácio Nacional de Sintra  has perhaps less lofty goals despite its similar use of ceramic tiles. Here, despite their kindred function, the azulejos gesture not towards the divine, but rather towards the Portuguese body politic as articulated by King Manuel I, and reflectively towards the Islamic kingdom who occupied the territory and its people for half a millennium. Originally constructed by the al-Andalus, following the Reconquista  and subsequent forceful expulsion of Muslims from Portugal, the Palácio Nacional de Sintra was quickly vandalised, its walls whitewashed by King João I (r. 1385-1433). The history of the palace during the reigns of successive kings is unknown until the reign of King Manuel I, who refurbished the Palácio Nacional de Sintra in the early sixteenth century with ceramic tiles. Importantly, these azulejos would adorn the very walls whitewashed of their previous al-Andalus zellij compositions—a gesture widely considered to be the origins of the azulejos tradition must thus be seen as a move to obscure their history. Most scholars cite the waiting room to the palace meeting chambers (known today as Sala dos Árabes,  or in English, the Arab Room) as an iconic origin of the Portuguese tradition of azulejos, making it an important site of consideration of the hybrid gesture inherent in them.   Sala dos Árabes, Palácio Nacional de Sintra © Caroline DeFrias The  Sala dos Árabes  is a primary site of reception for the Palácio Nacional de Sintra , and the nation whose monarchs it houses. As a waiting room for the palace’s meeting chambers, the Sala dos Árabes offers itself as a vital impression to visiting guests as well as a reminder to ruling monarchs, seeking to communicate the national identity of the Kingdom of Portugal through its design. Similarly to the Qubbat al-Sakhra , Sala dos Árabe s has multiple entrances, showcasing the splendour of the interior to multiple wings of the palace. Different from the Qubbat al-Sakhra  is the availability or accessibility of the space, as the palace was reserved for visiting monarchs and other dignitaries; its design articulates a projection of national identity among a selected audience. As a site of reception, one was invited into the space by Portuguese monarchs in a political gesture echoed on the walls. The Sala dos Árabes  has a low ceiling, accentuated by its wooden material which works together with the white walls to further visually narrow the space. At the centre of the room is a marble fountain, which rises from an abstracted star based into a bronze sculpture of cherubs holding an acorn, a symbol of growth and expansion. This sculpture emerges from a blue tile segment on the floor which is echoed on the room’s walls. Interestingly, in opposition to Qubbat al-Sakhra , it is the lower register of the Sala dos Árabes  which is adorned in ceramic tiles while the upper register remains empty.  Sala dos Árabes, Palácio Nacional de Sintra © Caroline DeFrias  Blue, green, and white, with accents of yellow, glazed ceramic tiles adorn the Sala dos Árabes  in undulating geometric patterns. The principal pattern has an interplay of quadrilateral shards which create a three-dimensional effect of cubes, which together seem to form the waves of an abstract ocean. This motion, however, has little place to go as the tiles are reserved to the lower half of the room and trapped by the wooden ceiling. Through their shared use of blue ceramic tiles, the azulejos seem to gesture towards the foundation, highlighting the water as a site of reflection instead of the sculpture as a site of projection into the future. Atop the wall azulejos are accent ceramic tiles which secure the building in an arrangement evoking the top of a fence, protecting or perhaps entrapping the occupants of the Sala dos Árabes . These ceramic tiles are cut and arranged into fleur-de-lys, which were often used to mark the north direction on a compass rose by Portuguese cartographers. [9]  This reference to exploration seeks to celebrate Portugal’s growing colonial empire during the Age of Discovery, where the azulejos function as a medium of this national identity as a thalassocratic empire. Importantly, the resulting trading empire from Portugal’s imperial maritime network funded the voyage which inspired King Manuel I as well as his import of the ceramic tiles, yet this projection of power is undercut by the medium of their articulation. The projection of strength King Manuel I intended for the ceramic tiles is simultaneously a humble gesture, attesting also to voyages of the al-Andalus in their occupation of the Iberian Peninsula—a history hidden just beneath the surface of the azulejos of Palácio Nacional de Sintra .   Sala dos Árabes, Palácio Nacional de Sintra © Caroline DeFrias Many scholars fondly note the journey of King Manuel I to Seville and Granada, Spain, admiring his excellent  taste and financial prowess as the introduction of the azulejos tile tradition to Portugal. The resulting history of the azulejos is significantly better documented, and in virtually all scholarship the fifteenth century is regarded as the origin of the ceramic tile tradition. As this history is more easily accessible, it will be quickly summarised. In the sixteenth century, expedited by the Spanish Expulsión de los moriscos  (Expulsion of the Moriscos), the decree of King Philip the III which forced all remaining Muslims in Spain to either convert or leave the country, Portugal took off in earnest as not only a consumer, but a producer of azulejos. As Christian Portuguese tradesfolk began creating the ceramic tiles, the subjects of azulejos increasingly tended towards naturalistic artistic creations, becoming a visual language of Portuguese national identity, depicting its history, influences, and exploits for the next five centuries. This is the monumentality Simões speaks of—the ubiquitous presence as a uniquely Portuguese quality—which dismisses the politics and history of the medium itself.   Materiality of Erasure   As important as it is to uncover the past of the azulejos, it is equally valuable to examine their erasure. Chiefly, the whitewashed walls upon which King Manuel I introduced what many scholars refer to as the first use of ceramic tiles in Portugal function astutely as a metaphor for the history of the ceramic tiles they obscure. Indeed, the practice of whitewashing, a principle means of the erasure and destruction of the visual legacy of the al-Andalus occupation of Portugal, emerges—through a consideration of the work of the Swiss modernist architect Le Corbusier—not simply as the forgetting of past subjugation but an exercise in the purification of a national identity.   Le Corbusier first discusses the need for a ‘loi du blanchiment’ (law of whitening) as a cleansing moral act which expunges decorative art in favour of a ‘purity’ of body, sight, and mind, during a 1923 interview early in his career. [10]  For Le Corbusier, whiteness is both the effect and means of cleanliness, against a surface making disease and impurity visible. This measure of control was characteristic of his career in international design, characterised by the recurring gesture of an eradication of difference and a particular disdain for ornamentation. Art historian Mark Wigley argues that Le Corbusier’s whitewash ‘exposes every dimension of life in front of it to judgement’. [11] Yet another necessary dimension of gesture is concealment; it is necessary to consider that which is behind  the whitewash. The projection of cleanliness requires not simply a clean exterior, but the erasure of the material which previously stood where the whitewash now resides. Le Corbusier’s logic of purity emerges as a rejection of tradition, articulating a hyper-presence which requires not simply that one constantly attend to the present moment so as to maintain the aesthetic of cleanliness but also that one obliterates any indication of a past.    The whitewashing of the Palácio Nacional de Sintra , and doubtlessly countless other sites yet unexplored, stands as an attempted cleansing of the Portuguese body politic. Following the logic of Le Corbusier, the whitewash stands as an attempted purification of national identity through the obfuscation of the al-Andalus tiles. Yet this venture is incomplete, as the resurgence of azulejos, despite any nationalistic intentions to project strength and obscure origins, still gestures towards their Muslim origins and therefore the diversity of influence and experience which constitutes Portugal’s national identity. Unfortunately, however, the calls of modernists like Le Corbusier would be answered in earnest, the call for a sleek international style and its implications of national purity zealously executed within Portugal’s own modern period, as administered by the Estado Novo regime. This period oversaw the disappearance of azulejos from Portuguese architectural design, cited by the regime as a movement towards simplicity and efficiency and against ornamentation. However, it is precisely the hybrid language of the azulejos—the paradoxical message of national strength articulated in the medium of historical vulnerability—which made their continued use during the Estado Novo  period an impossibility. Estado Novo  (New State) was one of the longest surviving authoritarian regimes in Europe. It began with the military coup d’état of 28 May 1926, then declared the Revolução Nacional (National Revolution), now known simply as the 28 May Revolution, which ended the unstable República Portuguesa (Portuguese Republic). Also known as the First Republic, República Portuguesa was the complex 16-year period which followed the end of the Portuguese monarchy. The First Republic attempted and ‘fail[ed] to democratise and modernise the country’, [12] instead fostering growing unrest and distrust formed between the ideals República Portuguesa  espoused and their failed political materializations, caused in part by and coupled with the economic instability resulting from the First World War. Historian José Miguel Sardica describes how ‘within a few years [of the turmoil of República Portuguesa ], large parts of the key economic forces, intellectuals, opinion-makers and middle classes changed from left to right, trading the unfulfilled utopia of a developing and civic republicanism for notions of “order”, “stability” and “security”’, [13] which paved the way for the coming authoritarian regime. The 28 May Revolution established the Ditadura Nacional (National Dictatorship), which predicated itself on a ‘deep scepticism regarding the effectiveness of parliamentary democracy’, [14]  later crystallised in the 1933 constitutional referendum which institutionalised the Estado Novo  one party state led principally by António de Oliveira Salazar. [15]  The so-called ‘New State’ was an authoritarian regime concerned with enforcing the nova ordem  (new order) of a modernised Portuguese nation. [16]   From the moment Salazar seized power, he committed himself to the construction and promotion of ‘new public buildings as achievements that were in stark contrast with the inertia of the previous parliamentary regime’. [17] The resulting architectural style originally promoted as Estilo Português  (Portuguese style), now known as Português Suave  (Soft Portuguese),   sought to articulate a ‘future-orientated modernity’ [18] for the Christian fascist state, which included the discontinuation of the azulejos as a design material in all realms of Portuguese design and life. Português Suave  sought paradoxically to articulate a ‘more international language and a national style’, [19] achieved through the displacement of traditional techniques, materials, and styles in favour of a somewhat anonymous, austere, and efficient modernist style. Ponorama: Revista Portuguesa de Arte e Turismo ( Portuguese Magazine of Arts and Tourism ), a publication overseen by the Estado Novo  regime, described in a 1941 article entitled ‘Campanha do bom gôsto’ (‘Campaign for good taste’) the kind of modern design identity the Estado Novo  promoted:    Good taste is imposed even in technical areas. […] Experience teaches scientists, engineers, architects, builders, that the artistically and scientifically correct solutions are always the simplest, the most elegant, the most attractive [ O bom gosto impõe-se mesmo nas áreas técnicas. […] A experiência ensina aos cientistas, engenheiros, arquitetos, construtores, que as soluções artística e cientificamente corretas são sempre as mais simples, as mais elegantes, as mais atraentes .] [20]   Modernist Portuguese architects responded to this imperative, designing sleek buildings which adhered to the principles of simplicity of form and material. These calls can be understood in relation to the modernist architectural movement more broadly, as architects and designers who worked for Salazar’s regime were encouraged to attend international fairs, subscribe to foreign journals of design, and maintain acquaintances and professional relationships with foreign designers. [21] The resulting fierce rejection of the past must be understood not simply within a Portuguese context, but alongside an analysis of International Design and the implications of its implementation.   The Salazarian regime was preoccupied, like other European fascist regimes, with newness. During a 1940 commemoration of the Estado Novo  he stated: We are not just because we were, we do not live just because we have lived, we live to carry out our mission and claim to the world the right to do it. [ Não somos só porque fomos, nem vivemos só por termos vividos; viver para bem cumprir a nossa missão e perante o mundo afirmamos o direito de cumprir-la ]. [22] This sentiment resonates with Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture , which itself is an appeal to ‘disdain the work of so many schools, so many masters, so many pupils, and to think thus of them: “they are as disagreeable as mosquitoes”’. [23]  The modernist identity emerges for both as a rejection of the past, which resulted in a nova ordem  (new order) or l’esprit nouveau  (new spirit) of a hyper-present orientation. For Português Suave , this impulse lived not only in the architecture but the design materials; principally, in the exclusion of the azulejos.   The fall from grace the azulejos experienced during Português Suave  is typically associated with the material’s ornamentation, framed within modernist discussions of efficiency of material. Concrete instead became a favoured material, [24] constructing buildings which stood in austere, lacklustre silence compared with the ceramic tiled buildings which preceded them. The Praça do Areeiro (Areeiro Square), constructed in the midst of the Estado Novo regime from 1938-1949 by architect Luís Christino da Silva, stands as a testament to this forgetting—its edifice seeming to yearn for memory, for azulejos. Typical of Português Suave , the buildings of Praça do Areeiro utilise reinforced concrete as their primary medium, and highlight its smooth form in large, looming, plain walls. A marble base of archades evoke a robust sense of uniformity and strength, accentuated by a slight horizontal stripe which emphasises the scale of the buildings. The upper register of the buildings has uniform rows of square windows against a plain concrete facade, which upon close analysis reveals itself to be made of evenly placed rectangular concrete panels. This style is both a representation and trace of the lost contours of traditional Portuguese architecture which maintains similar structure but crucially maintains a stripped down, simple aesthetic. During the 1940s, Salazar sought to restore  much of the capital’s architecture through ‘sharpening’ or ‘correcting’ their facades as a testament to his commitment to restore the values of Portugal’s past and future. [25] Importantly, this restoration of Portuguese identity omitted its most perhaps monumental medium: the azulejos replaced by concrete panels.   The Português Suave decision to retire the azulejos functions as a complex political gesture to not simply modernise Portuguese design but also purify Portuguese identity. The azulejos function as a design structure which builds other structures, a story with which other stories are told; they are a complex hybrid language that remembers aspects of Portuguese history and identity which the Estado Novo regime in particular would like to forget. In particular, the azulejos attest to the presence and significance of the al-Andalus Muslim occupation of the territory for 500 years. The erasure of ceramic tiles from the so-called modern Portuguese nation functions as a politics which seeks to kill politics; an eradication of difference, of time, and of history. The urgency of uncovering the history of the azulejos, of not letting it be lost in false nationalistic narratives, and of maintaining their place within Portuguese design history and practice, is a struggle precisely against a fascist regime which seeks to eliminate opposition in service of power.   It is important to note the countless historic azulejos are visible in Portugal today. Despite their distaste for the ceramic tiles, the Estado Novo  regime did not remove azulejos from all historic buildings. In fact, regardless of their lack of favour during Português Suave  and the imperative to be modern delivered by the regime, many Portuguese architects such as Raul Lino maintained a strong affinity for the ceramic tiles. Interestingly, Lino maintained a close personal relationship with Salazar, and did not use the ceramic tiles in his work, though he wrote passionately of their possibilities. Lino took issue with the increasingly ‘amorphous, spiritless, faceless aspect of the Western metropolis’ that was taking over Portuguese design and felt the azulejos stood as an integral articulation of the ‘eternal spirit of the Portuguese people’. [26] Soon after the Revolução dos Cravos (Carnation Revolution), which ended the near 40-year rule of the Estado Novo  regime, the azulejos returned as a design material; a triumph not of will, not of determination or power of a fixed national identity, but an embrace of a democratic, fluid, and hybrid nation.    The urgency of memory does not end with a singular recollection nor the fall of one fascist regime, but rather requires constant attention and care for history. Currently, the azulejos are under a different threat of disappearance: commodification. The manufacture of contemporary azulejos is principally for tourist markets which covet the ceramic tiles as aesthetic objects, often disregarding their design value and history. The implications of the commodity fetishism of azulejos are yet unexplored. Likewise, an inquiry into how this reflects the contemporary national identity of Portugal remains unwritten. There is an urgency to attend to this emerging history, as the lust for azulejos has grown so strong that numerous historical sites in Portugal are filled with gaping holes, thieves having removed the ceramic tiles for sale on the black market. The commodification of the azulejos appears to be eradicating its history twice, removing both the idea and the object. As more scholars emerge to build robust histories of the movement and design of these ceramic tiles, further questions and knowledge can be gleaned about the nature of Portuguese identity.[27] Caroline DeFrias Caroline DeFrias (CDF) is an artist-academic, currently operating in Mi’kma’ki territory in Kjipuktuk (so called Halifax, Canada). Their work, through a variety of mediums and disciplines, seeks to explore the construction of gallery space and the encounter of the art object, notions of inheritance and identity in relation to immigration and (re)settlement, as well as the ethics and pathos of the archive. They hold a Combined Honours with distinction Bachelor of Arts from the University of King’s College in Social Anthropology and the Historiography of Science, with a certificate in Art History and Visual Culture, and are pursuing a Masters of Fine Art in Art History from Concordia University. [1]  Catarina Geraldes, ‘The Integration of Azulejos in the Modernist Architecture of Portugal as a unique case in Europe’ in Marluci Menezes, Dória Rodrigues Costa, and J Delgado Rodrigues (eds), Intangibility Matters: International Conference on the Values of Tangible Heritage (LNEC 2017) 139-147. [2]  João Miguel dos Santos Simões, Estudos De Azulejaria  (Imprensa Nacional Casa Da Moeda 1956) 268. [3]  Oleg Grabar, ‘What Makes Islamic Art Islamic?’ in Islamic Art and Beyond, volume III, Constructing the Study of Islamic Art  ( Routledge 2006), 247–251, 248. [4]  Donald N Wilber, ‘The Development of Mosaic Faiënce in Islamic Architecture in Iran’ (1939) 6(1) Ars   Islamica 16. [5]  See eg Mark Cartwright, ‘Portuguese Empire’ ( World History Encyclopedia , 21 July 2021) < https://www.worldhistory.org/Portuguese_Empire/ > accessed 1 July 2024.         [6]  Erdal Eser, ‘The First Islamic Monument Kubbet'üs-Sahra (Dome of the Rock): A New Proposition’   (2017) 23 Pesa International Journal of Social Studies 135-147. [7]  Grabar (n 3) 250. [8]  Quoted in Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis, ‘The Dome of the Rock (Qubbat Al-Sakhra)’ ( Khan Academy ) < https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/west-and-central-asia-apahh/west-asia/a/the-dome-of-the-rock-qubbat-al-sakhra#:~:text=The%20Dome%20of%20the%20Rock%20is%20a%20building%20of%20extraordinary,surpassing%20as%20to%20defy%20description > accessed 1 July 2024. [9]  Maria Fernanda Alegria, Suzanne Daveau, João Carlos Garcia, and Francesc Relaño, ‘Portuguese Cartography in the Renaissance’ in David Woodward (ed), The History of Cartography, Volume 3, Part 1: Cartography in the European Renaissance  (University of Chicago Press 2007) 956-1068, 1033. [10]  Le Corbusier quoted in Guillaume Janneau, ‘L’Exposition des arts techniques de 1925’ (1923) Le Bulletin de la vie   artistique 64. [11] Mark Wigley, ‘Chronic Whiteness’ ( e-flux Architecture , November 2020) < https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/sick-architecture/360099/chronic-whiteness/ > accessed 1 July 2024.   [12] José Miguel Sardica, ‘The Memory of the Portuguese First Republic throughout the Twentieth Century’ (2011) 9 e.Journal of Portuguese History 63. [13]  ibid 67. [14]  Raquel da Silva & Ana Sofia Ferreira, ‘The Post-Dictatorship Memory Politics in Portugal Which Erased Political Violence from the Collective Memory’ (2018) 53(1) Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 26. [15]  ibid. [16]  Fernando Rosas, ‘O salazarismo e o homem novo: Ensaio sobre o Estado Novo e a questão do totalitarismo’ (2011) 35(157) Análise Social 1033. [17] Rita Almeida de Carvalho, ‘Ideology and Architecture in the Portuguese ‘Estado Novo’: Cultural Innovation within a Para-Fascist State (1932–1945)’ (2018) 7(2) Fascism 146. [18]  ibid 155. [19]  ibid 154. [20]  ‘Campanha Do Bom Gôsto’ (1941) 1 Ponorama: Revista Portuguesa de Arte e Turismo; my translation. [21]  De Carvalho (n 17) 159. [22]  António de Oliveira Salazar, Discursos e Notas Políticas: 1938-1943 , vol 3 (2nd edn, Coimbra Editora 1944) 259; my translation. [23]  Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture  (14th edn, Dover Publications 1986) 84. [24]  De Carvalho (n 17) 170. [25] Ellen W Sapega, ‘Image and Counter-Image: The Place of Salazarist Images of National Identity in Contemporary Portuguese Visual Culture’ (2002) 39(2) Luso-Brazilian Review 47. [26]  De Carvalho (n 17) 163. [27] Possibilities for future research include the exploration of the ceramic tiles within Portugal’s own imperial project; and the complex meanings and evolution of the azulejos in Brazil, India, the Philippines, East Timor, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Equatorial Guinea. Attending to the history of the Portuguese export of the ceramic tile will further critical studies into the nature of Portuguese imperialism and colonialism, as well as the national identity that fostered them.

The largest protest movement in Iraq’s history, Thawrat Tishreen of 2019, shouldn’t have achieved so little. The movement pursued well-tested tactics, which had succeeded elsewhere, against a weak Iraqi regime for months on end, refusing to be swayed by brutal repression, token concessions, or elite co-option. [1]  Despite the sustained mobilisation of a massive, cross-sectarian, cross-class coalition around a core set of clear demands, Thawrat Tishreen resulted in incidental, though not entirely insignificant, political gains, but failed to change its primary target, Iraq’s Muhasasa system of sectarian power sharing. In this piece, I will argue that this failure is best explained by the decentralised, diffuse character of the Muhasasa system, the weakness of which engenders opposition by failing to deliver robust governance, but, paradoxically, also enables its durability. Other factors did contribute to Thawrat Tishreen’s failure: the protest movement suffered from some organisational weaknesses; the political machinations of different factions in Iraq like the Sadrists undermined the cause; and exogenous factors such as foreign intervention and the COVID-19 pandemic played a role. Nonetheless, these obstacles acquired causal force because of the dynamics of the Muhasasa system and would not have otherwise created such significant difficulties for the opposition.   This essay will proceed as follows: (1) I will contextualise and analyse the salient features of Thawrat Tishreen, especially its organisation, its demands, and responses to the protests; (2) I will argue that, despite limited political successes, the movement should be coded a failure; and (3) I will establish that, above all else, the intractability of the Muhasasa system made failure very likely. I demonstrate this argument (3) by (a) pursing a deeper analysis of why the nature of the Muhasasa system made success unlikely; (b) outlining ways in which the protest movement was deficient, while linking the significance of these deficiencies back to the Muhasasa system; and (c) accounting for exogenous factors, which played a role, but are not of primary significance. Conversely, I will not attempt to fully explain the historical development of Iraq’s Muhasasa system or its subsequent trajectory, but rather focus on why Thawrat Tishreen failed to bring about its demise.   Thawrat Tishreen has attracted attention from scholars, analysts, and practitioners focused on the MENA region both because of its significance to the domestic politics of Iraq and its occurrence alongside the other protest movements of the ‘Second Arab Spring’ of 2018-19. [2]  Scholarly attention has broadly sought to situate the protest movement in Iraq’s post-2003 politics, assess its aims, and suggest reasons for its failure. I draw on these academic interventions to a certain degree but also rely heavily on articles published by think tanks, newspapers, and NGOs during and after the crisis. I also utilise polling data, protest datasets, and analyses of social media posts. Furthermore, I have drawn inspiration from informal conversations with academics, diplomats, activists, and citizens of Iraq. To situate my piece, then, in the emerging discourse on Thawrat Tishreen, my main goal is not to contribute new primary material, but rather, as the dust settles, to take stock of contemporaneous data and analyses of events. I focus on (1) the extent to which Thawrat Tishreen should be coded a failure and (2) the determinants of failure, because these two questions are still the main objects of contention in both academic and quotidian discussion around the uprising.   1. Context, Events, Organisation, and Responses   Thawrat Tishreen did not come out of nowhere. Since the US-led invasion of 2003, Iraqi politics has been characterised by violence, instability, and elite infighting, breeding widespread discontent. Iraq’s 43 million strong population is composed of three main sectarian groups: Shi'i Arabs (c. 61%), Sunni Kurds (c. 20%), and Sunni Arabs (c. 15%). [3]  The 2005 Constitution attempted to resolve the sectarian question, which had been a thorn in the side of Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime and the main priority of the Shi'i-dominated Iraqi opposition, by introducing a consociational sectarian power sharing agreement, the Muhasasa system. The word ‘Muhasasa’ comes from the Arabic for ‘apportionment’ and, in political terms, stipulates that the Iraqi government is divided among sectarian groups in an informal quota system. In institutional terms, the Presidency is reserved for a Kurd, the position of Prime Minister for a Shi'i and the Speaker of Parliament a Sunni. Cabinet positions are allocated roughly in proportion to the share of the population made up from each group, and a certain level of representation is guaranteed for Iraq’s Assyrian and Turkmen minorities. [4]  In practice, this results in a system of political economy in which the Iraqi state is divided by deeply entrenched patronage networks, political advancement depends on factional loyalty rather than competence, systemic corruption based on sectarian affiliation is rampant, and foreign interference through political parties and non-state armed groups is widespread. [5]   The Iraqi government formed in 2005 took over the reins of a very weak state. After wars against Iran in the 1980s and the US-led coalition in 1990-91, as well as severe sections and multiple uprisings in the 1990s, the Iraqi state was all but dismantled by the US-led invasion of 2003 and the Coalition Provisional Authority’s campaign of ‘De-Ba'athification’. Institutional fragility, the US occupation, and the dysfunctional politics of post-2003 Iraq led to major civil wars from 2006-8 and 2013-17. This weakness was compounded by a reliance on oil, which makes up 99% of Iraqi exports, 85% of government budget, and 42% of total GDP. [6]  While Iraq’s oil wealth is considerable, it is largely siphoned between different factions as part of the Muhasasa arrangement, leading to acute governance failures. Especially after 2011, Iraqi citizens began protesting against government dysfunction, corruption, foreign influence, and the excesses of the Muhasasa system. [7]  These protests increasingly acquired a non-sectarian character despite the sectarian nature of Iraqi politics.   The outbreak of massive protest in Iraq in 2019 can be traced to several domestic drivers but must also be contextualised in regional and international terms. The 2010-11 Arab Uprisings ‘missed’ Iraq in the sense that no major, sustained protests broke out and the Iraqi system was never threatened by popular mobilisation. Nonetheless, like other states in MENA, Iraq was experiencing the demographic pressures of a youth bulge in the 2010s, with 67% of its population under 30 years old by 2019. [8]  Indeed, major protest movements also broke out in Sudan, Algeria, and Lebanon in the 2018-19 period. While there were strong links between the protests in Iraq and Lebanon where a similarly ‘sectarianised’ political economy exists, the eruption of protest in Sudan and Algeria was largely incidental. Overall, though, the 2010s was a particularity ‘revolutionary’ period for the MENA region as a whole.   In the context of rising corruption, economic problems, unemployment, sustained US and Iranian foreign penetration, and appalling governance failures—road, electricity, water, and sewage systems in much of the country are not functioning—government legitimacy in Iraq was steadily decreasing through the 2010s, with lower and lower turnouts at elections. [9]  So why 2019? On a basic level, Iraqi society has spent most of the post-Saddam Hussein period either recovering from the trauma of 2003 invasion and 2006-8 civil war or facing down the threat of Daesh up to at least mid-2018. Thus, these critical existential challenges to Iraq as a unified country precluded the formation of such a large-scale protest movement. Two immediate triggers, moreover, precipitated the extraordinary protests that began on 1 October 2019. First, the security forces’ violent suppression of a protest by holders of advanced degrees in Basra on 25 September generated widespread outrage on social media. Second, the demotion of Abdul-Wahab al-Saadi from the prestigious Counter Terrorism Service to a position in the Ministry of Defence on 27 September stoked anger against perceived Iranian influence in Iraq. The demotion of Saadi, who was celebrated as a war hero in Iraq’s defeat of Daesh, was interpreted by many as another capitulation by Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi to Iran-aligned factions in the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), who opposed Saadi.   Nothing, however, could have predicted the scale, intensity, or duration of the protest movement, which lasted from October and petered out by early March. [10]  Berman, Clarke, and Majed’s dataset (fig 1) of weekly protests coded by main demand usefully elucidates the goals of the protestors and separates the protests into four main phases: escalation, dispersion, resuscitation, and demobilisation. [11]  A few key events are worth reflecting upon in this narrative. First, the ‘escalation’ phase was fuelled both by the protests’ original demands and by anger at the violence of state and state-affiliated actors, including the PMF and other non-stated armed groups. With the resignation of Abdu-Mahdi, the escalation phase came to an end, however protests were sustained through December by calls for more systemic reform. Massive protest was resuscitated in January, first by reactions to the assassination of Qasem Souleimani, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds force, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the head of the PMF; and second by anger at the failure of the political elite to form an alternative government to Abdul-Mahdi by the so-called ‘Nasiriyah deadline’. The final demobilisation of protest was the result of several interlinked factors, which will be the focus of part (4). Fig 1. Thawrat Tishreen Graph. © Asa Breuss-Burgess The decentralised, non-hierarchical leadership structures of Thawrat Tishreen make it difficult to definitively ascertain its goals, but the bottom line is that protesters wanted an end to the Muhasasa system’s institutional division of the state along sectarian lines. Protestors also demanded fresh elections, accountability for regime violence, the technocratic improvement of public services, better employment opportunities, and the erosion of foreign influence by the USA and Iran. Berman, Clarke, and Majed’s dataset (fig 1) utilises local, Arabic-language newspapers to categorise both non-violent and violent popular mobilisation according to their primary demand. As the figure shows, protests were overtly political in character, calling for new elections and changes to the political system. Chants such as ‘No to Muhasasa, no to political sectarianism!’ and ‘The people want the fall of the regime!’ were widespread. [12]  Large scale analysis of protestor signs found on social media provides another effective mode of delineating Thawrat Tishreen’s main goals. Numan’s research employs exhaustive research on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to identify and code 2113 distinct protestor signs; his findings sustain the assertion by most commentaries on the movement that Thawrat Tishreen was overtly anti-sectarian and cast itself strongly in terms of Iraqi nationalism, with about 50% of all protestor signs containing the uniting symbol of the Iraqi flag. [13]   In organisational terms, Thawrat Tishreen was characterised by massive, spontaneous youth mobilisation, initially organised through local networks and social media, but later coordinated by committees of activists. Like the first phases of the 2011 Arab Uprisings, leaderlessness was a defining feature of the protests. [14]  Crucially, protestors did not mobilise according to class or sectarian identity, but rather Shi'i and Sunnis united across sectarian lines around Iraqi nationalism, even if some political parties were more energetic than others in sending their supporters to protest. [15]  It is worth noting, however, that protest was concentrated in Baghdad and the Shi'i-dominated South, and a majority of protesters were working class. [16]  Action was overwhelmingly and intentionally nonviolent, manifesting through demonstrations, sit-ins, the occupation of squares, and the construction of barricades. In many activist spaces, an air of ‘fun’ and ‘communitas’ emerged, a feature of Iraq’s protests that was shared in Lebanon. [17]  Still, the use of nonlethal violence on the part of protestors was not uncommon, for example, with the burning of Iranian consulates or attacks on buildings. Attacks on security forces were sporadic and usually in response to state or state-affiliated violence.   In contrast to the avowed nonviolence of the Tishreen protesters, regime and especially regime affiliated forces meted out considerable repression, resulting in the death of at least 600 protesters, the injury of over 20,000, and incalculable trauma. [18]  This ranged from internet blackouts and curfews on the one hand to the intimidation, beating, torture, kidnapping, and killing of protestors on the other, often by hidden snipers overlooking occupied public squares. Repression inflicted by non-state actors, primarily non-state armed groups and anti-Tishreen political parties, was generally more violent and brutal than that of the regime. [19]  The facelessness of repression by non-state and state-affiliated armed groups further shielded the government from accountability.   2. Political Successes, Failed Revolution   Thawrat Tishreen failed to realise its core aims, even if it did not accomplish nothing. Following Chenoweth and Stephan, I define success as the ‘full achievement of its stated goals within a year of the peak of activities and a discernible effect on the outcome such that the outcome was a direct result of the campaign’s activities’. [20]  It has been noted that the organisational form of Thawrat Tishreen prevented the coalescence of a single, definitive list of aims, but it has also been shown that certain core demands were common across the entire movement—better governance, the reduction of foreign influence in Iraqi politics, the improvement of the economic situation, and, centrally, the end of the Muhasasa system of sectarian power sharing. In this section, I argue, contrary to some commentators, that Thawrat Tishreen had some significant successes before reflecting that, despite these successes, the revolution should be considered on the whole a failure. [21]   In direct response to sustained pressure from the Tishreen protests, Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi resigned on 29 November despite repression and attempts behind the scenes to keep him in power. In addition, the Council of Representatives passed a significant electoral reform law on 24 December, which responded to the demands of protestors by eroding the power of the political establishment in picking candidates and establishing an independent High Electoral Commission. Early elections were scheduled for July 2021. Furthermore, when he was finally able to form a government in May 2020, the new Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi formed a more technocratic cabinet than Abdul-Mahdi, compensated the families of killed protestors with 10 million dinars each, better mitigated foreign influence, and held several meetings with Tishreen activists. [22]  Since Thawrat Tishreen, moreover, a new ‘culture of perpetual protest’ has emerged in Iraq. [23]  Largely rooted in the legacy of Thawrat Tishreen, this holds Iraqi politicians more accountable to some degree, but also has been coopted and instrumentalised by many political factions that are deeply tied to the Muhasasa system. [24]  The longer term effects of Thawrat Tishreen on Iraqi political culture remains to be seen.   Overall, however, public opinion data and a more thorough analysis of political developments demonstrate that Thawrat Tishreen ought to be considered a failure. While the revolution forced Abdul-Mahdi to resign, the Muhasasa system remains in place. Prime Minister aspirants Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi and Adnan Zurfi both failed to form governments during the protests because they did not command the support of the Muhasasa political class, and Kadhimi only succeeded because he did. [25]  Kadhimi succeeded because he was able to balance different sectarian factions against each other as well as placate both the USA and Iran. Government formation witnessed the same costly and corruption-ridden ‘horse-trading’ of previous ministries. The ‘early elections’ of 2021 brought about a political crisis that lasted over a year and was emblematic of everything the Tishreen protestors had rallied against. To make matters worse, only 36% of eligible voters turned out to vote in 2021, demonstrating a lack of faith in politics. [26]  While Kadhimi was perhaps more skilful at mitigating the power of non-state armed groups, the actions of non-state actors during the protests remains unpunished and these groups retain a powerful role in Iraqi politics. For example, while both Kadhimi and his successor, al-Sudani, were temporarily able to restrain violence between non-state armed groups like Kata’ib Hezbollah and US forces, the Israeli assault on Gaza that followed the 7 October attacks has led to several fatal exchanges between the US and Iran-affiliated groups. In addition, the Iraqi economy remains dependent on oil markets, having been hit hard by COVID in 2020 with a contraction of 10% and an 18.5% devaluation of the Iraqi Dinar against the dollar. [27]   Polling data, moreover, evidences the widespread perception that Thawrat Tishreen failed to change the Iraqi system. In 2021, Arab Barometer found that just 22% of Iraqis trust the government. [28]  Only 3% believe corruption is ‘not at all’ a problem, 68% felt corruption was ‘to a large extent’ prevalent, and, perhaps most worryingly, just 27% believed the government was working to crack down on corruption. Negative perceptions of democracy have increased since 2019; 72% of Iraqis link democracy to their country’s poor economic performance and 67% link democratic government to indecision and problems, even if 68% of Iraqis still believe that, despite democracy’s problems, it is a better system than others. [29]  Nonetheless, 37% of Iraqis expressed a desire to emigrate, with the figure rising to 48% for 18-29 year olds. [30]  This widespread discontent reflects the underlying problems that drove Iraqis to protest in 2019. At the same time, it demonstrates that Thawrat Tishreen failed to bring about systemic change.   3. Strength through Weakness: Muhasasa as the Primary Cause of Failure   The fragmented character of the Muhasasa system caused Thawrat Tishreen to fail. Not only does the nature of the system make meaningful reform very difficult, the structures of Muhasasa gave causal force to other factors which would not otherwise have undermined the revolution. I will demonstrate this part of my argument by (a) dissecting the aspects of the Muhasasa system that make reform so difficult; (b) explaining how the organisational structure of the protests contributed to failure—not because of inherent deficiencies per se, but as a result of their relationship to the Muhasasa system; and (c) outlining the role of exogenous factors, while also pointing out the ways in which their causal significance was enhanced in the context of Muhasasa.   a. The Intractability of the Muhasasa System   The last two decades have shown Muhasasa to be a poor system of government in Iraq, and yet its very frailty became a lifeline during Thawrat Tishreen. The system of factional bargaining and internal division is rooted in an elite pact model whereby disparate, mutually antagonistic elites representing distinct sectarian groups share an interest in the continuation of the system of rule, even if they are perpetually in competition over how the spoils of government are allocated. [31]  As a result, the resignation of individual politicians does not precipitate systemic change because, unlike the (temporarily) successful 2010-11 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, there is no Ben Ali or Mubarak to remove and replace with a democratically elected executive. [32]  In short, there is no king whose head the revolutionaries can cut off. Furthermore, Muhasasa’s system of power sharing means that any attempts to bring about meaningful reform are likely to be interpreted by some political actors in sectarian terms, which risks the outbreak of violence and, in the worst case, civil war. Non-state armed groups are another source of its durability; they pressure the state to do their bidding, advance the interests of foreign powers, coordinate illicit economic activity, and intimidate, abduct, and assassinate opponents. [33]  To provide a visual analogy, Muhasasa operates like a chain of people holding hands in a circle, leaning back away from one another. It is hard for the ring to move in any single direction, but also nearly impossible for one hand in the chain to pull away without being pulled back into the fold or precipitating total collapse.   Strong financial incentives exist for the continuation of the Muhasasa system. [34]  Competition over state resources, primarily derived through oil rents, has defined post-2003 Iraqi politics from the beginning. [35]  Indeed, between 2005 and 2018 the government payroll expanded from $3.8 billion to nearly $36 billion. [36]  Although corruption is very difficult to measure, through confidential interviews with high ranking members of the Iraqi political elite Dodge has estimated that around 25% of government resources are lost through contractual fraud. [37]  Non-state armed groups and affiliated political parties benefit directly from access to these resources, but also use their elevated position to extract tolls at checkpoints and attract foreign patronage, mainly from Iran. As Majed forcefully argues, Muhasasa is intimately bound together with a system of political economy of corruption by design. [38]  Factions have consciously fought ‘over’ the state with this system in mind. As one PMF affiliate, Mohammad al-Basri, put it: ‘Do they really think that we would hand over a state, an economy, one that we have built over 15 years? That they can just casually come and take it? Impossible! This is a state that was built with blood’. [39]  Ultimately, the nature of the political system, financial incentives for its perpetuation, and a perception by groups of having ‘won’ control over portions of the state make the Muhasasa system extremely difficult to reform.   b. Deficiencies in the Organisation of the Protests   The organisational structure of the Thawrat Tishreen protests weakened the movement, but primarily because of the correspondent form of its target, the Muhasasa system. As a result of the targeting of opposition figures by non-state armed groups, as well as the protesters’ rejection of mainstream politics, the protests were largely leaderless, preventing them from offering clear alternatives to the political elite. [40]  Much like the first wave of the Arab Uprisings, the protestors demanded that the political class reform itself. Unlike the 2010-11 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt where protestors had a single, unified state to rally against, the internal fragmentation of Iraqi institutions into siloed sectarian groupings made it more difficult to effect change. Furthermore, at the 2021 elections Tishreen activists failed to set up political parties that could attract widespread support. Scholars have noted that revolutionary movements in democracies often face this obstacle because they arise from diverse, negative coalitions. [41]  The non-hierarchical organisation of Thawrat Tishreen is a case in point.   It must be noted, however, that non-hierarchical, negative coalitions have succeeded in regime change elsewhere, with the uprisings of 2010-11 being the most obvious example. [42]  With this in mind, Thawrat Tishreen’s organisational patterns must be understood as deficient primarily in relation to the system they were targeting. First, the demand that the Iraqi political elite reform itself was precluded by the strong incentives for elite collusion. Second, no alternative ‘pacted-transition’ option existed; in Grewal’s comparison of the 2018-19 uprisings in Sudan and Algeria, he suggests that the opposition in Sudan (temporarily) succeeded because an organised civil society arranged a transitional pact with the regime under the aegis of the Sudanese Professionals’ Association. [43]  In contrast, the target system of oppression in Iraq is diffuse and hard to pin down, which makes a packed transition impossible.   c. Exogenous Factors: Political Contingency, Foreign Interference, and COVID-19   Prevailing narratives often suggest that Thawrat Tishreen was brought down by exogenous factors such as Iranian influence, the political machinations of Muqtada al-Sadr, the assassination of Qasem Souleimani by the USA, or the COVID-19 pandemic. While all of these factors were relevant, they—like the organisational form of the protests—acquired causal significance primarily by affecting the operation of the Muhasasa system.   Iraq is so vulnerable to foreign interference to a large degree as a result of the Muhasasa system. Indeed, this is partially by design. The Coalition Provisional Authority approved the system of sectarian power sharing proposed by Iraqi Shi'i exiles in the 1990s because the US envisioned future influence being channelled through these structures. The actual result has been the massive expansion of Iranian influence in Iraqi politics. For example, Iran controls several political parties and non-state armed groups to a considerable degree, using them to assault Tishreen protestors and as part of its ‘Axis of Resistance’ against American forces. Despite its often radical rhetoric, Iran should be understood as a counterrevolutionary actor, especially in Iraq where Tishreen reforms threatened its interests. [44]  Partially as a result of Iranian penetration of Muhasasa, respect for Iraqi sovereignty by external powers like the USA or Türkiye is lower than for most states in the world—hence the Trump administration’s decision to conduct a drone strike on an Iranian government official, Qasem Souleimani, and Iraqi citizen Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis on 3 January 2020 without any prior Iraqi authorisation. The effect of these attacks was to rally many Iraqis against America, taking some of the pressure off Iran.   Another direct result of the assassinations was the split between the Sadrists and the Tishreen movement. [45]  Muqtada al-Sadr leads a broad-based political movement in Iraq that emphasises Shi'i Islamism as well as social justice. From around 2015, Sadr became increasingly willing to ally himself with secularist protest movements and supported the Tishreen protests in autumn 2019. After Tishreen organisers refused to join Sadr’s 24 January anti-American protests, however, the powerful cleric withdrew his support for the movement and directed his ‘Blue Helmets’ to join the attacks on protestors. With the PMF leader Mahdi al-Muhandis assassinated, Sadr saw an opportunity to bolster his leadership credentials among the various anti-Tishreen Shi'i groups that compose the PMF. [46]  The Sadrist reversal had far-reaching effects—many of the millions of Sadrists who had protested as part of Thawrat Tishreen were now violently attacking its protesters—but it did not kill the revolution by itself. Instead, it must be recognised that the decision of one faction to change sides could only have been so pivotal in the context of, first, a political system as convoluted as Muhasasa and, second, a decentralised, non-hierarchical, negative coalition like the Tishreen movement. [47]  Foreign interference and political machinations played such a significant role primarily because of their interaction with the highly intractable Muhasasa system. By the time Iraq introduced COVID-19 response measures in March 2020, the durability of Muhasasa had broken down the bulk of Thawrat Tishreen’s support. [48]   4. Conclusion   I would like to end by restating my two main contentions: (1) Thawrat Tishreen achieved certain important political successes but ought overall to be considered a failure; and (2) the movement failed primarily because of the intractability of the Muhasasa system. Although other factors, including the character of protest mobilisation, foreign intervention, the political machinations of the Sadrists, and the COVID-19 pandemic played a role, the decentralised and entrenched Muhasasa system endowed causal agency to these factors, which would otherwise have been less important. It must be noted that the full effects of Thawrat Tishreen remain to be seen. As Iraq’s post-Saddam Hussein, post-civil war political trajectory continues to unfold, time will tell whether the foundations laid down by Thawrat Tishreen prove central to future attempts at establishing a more just and robust system of government in Iraq. Asa Breuss-Burgess Asa Breuss-Burgess is a researcher, writer, and geopolitical risk analyst based in London. His work focuses on the intersection energy, climate change, and power politics in Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula. He holds an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and a BA in History and Politics from the University of Oxford.  I would like to express my sincere thanks to Professor Killian Clarke for his guidance and support throughout my research. In addition, I am immensely grateful for the counsel and inspiration of Yehya Abuzaid, Haley Bobseine, Dr Aaron Faust, Mustafa Afif Abdulazeez al-Nuwab, Dr Angeline Turner, and Dr Joseph Yackley. Of course, all opinions expressed in this piece, and the mistakes therein, are entirely my own. [1]  For successful cases that used similar methods to Iraq, see Erica Chenoweth and Maria J Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works   : The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press 2011). [2]  Leonid Issaev and Andrey Korotaev (eds), New Wave of Revolutions in the MENA Region   : A Comparative Perspective  (Springer 2022). [3]  The remaining 4% identify with various other minorities, including Christians, Yazidis, Assyrians, and Turkmen. Central Intelligence Agency, ‘Iraq’ in The World Factbook 2021 (Central Intelligence Agency 2021). [4]  Toby Dodge, ’The Failure of Peacebuilding in Iraq: The Role of Consociationalism and Political Settlements’ (2020) 15(4) Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 460. [5]  ibid 459-75. [6]  The World Bank , ‘The World Bank in Iraq’ ( The World Bank , 1 June 2022) accessed 16 June 2025. [7]  Hafsa Halawa, Iraq’s Tishreen Movement: A Decade of Protests and Mobilisation, (Istituto Affari Internazionali 2022) 7. [8] Maria Fantappie, ‘Widespread Protests Point to Iraq’s Cycle of Social Crisis’ ( International Crisis Group , 10 October 2019) < https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/iraq/widespread-protests-point-iraqs-cycle-social-crisis > accessed 16 June 2025. [9] Turnout reached a low point of 10% in Basra at the 2018 election. Renad Mansour, ‘Why Iraq’s Elections Were an Indictment of the Elite’ ( World Politics Review , 18 May 2018) < https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/why-iraq-s-elections-were-an-indictment-of-the-elite/ > accessed 16 June 2025. [10] Halawa (n 7) 7. For the inherent unpredictability of a revolutionary episode, see Charles Kurzman, ‘Can Understanding Undermine Explanation? The Confused Experience of Revolution’ (2004) 34(3) Philosophy of the Social Sciences 328-51. [11]  Chantal Berman, Killian Clarke, and Rima Majed, ‘Theorizing Revolution in Democracies: Evidence from the 2019 Uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq’ (2023) 15 < https://doi.org/10.35188/UNU-WIDER/2023/359-8 > accessed 16 June 2025. [12] Arwa Ibrahim, ‘Muhasasa, the political system reviled by Iraqi protesters’ ( Al Jazeera , 4 December 2019) < https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/4/muhasasa-the-political-system-reviled-by-iraqi-protesters > accessed 16 June 2025. [13] Haitham Numan, ‘The Multimodal Framing Demands by Protesters’ Signs in Social Media: Meaning and Sources of Visual and Textual Messages: The Case of Iraq’ (2022) 15(3-4) Contemporary Arab Affairs 19. [14] Asef Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (Stanford University Press 2017) 153. [15] Berman, Clarke, and Majed (n 11) 9. [16] Fanar Haddad, ‘Perpetual Protest and the Failure of the Post-2003 Iraqi State’ ( MERIP , 22 March 2023) < https://merip.org/2023/03/perpetual-protest-and-the-failure-of-the-post-2003-iraqi-state/ > accessed 16 June 2025. [17] Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford University Press 2013) 129-150; Rima Majed, ‘“Sectarian Neoliberalism” and the 2019 Uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq’ in Jeffrey G Karam and Rima Majed (eds), The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution  (Bloomsbury 2022) 85. [18] UNAMI and OHCHR, ‘Human Rights Violations and Abuses in the Context of Demonstrations in Iraq October 2019 to April 2020’ (August 2020) < https://reliefweb.int/report/iraq/human-rights-violations-and-abuses-context-demonstrations-iraq-october-2019-april-2020 > accessed 16 June 2025. [19] Berman, Clarke, and Majed (n 11) 16. [20] Chenoweth and Stephan (n 1) 14. [21] Higel, for example, significantly downplays the achievements of the movement in Lahib Higel, ‘On Third Try, a New Government for Iraq’ ( International Crisis Group , 8 May 2020) < https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/iraq/third-try-new-government-iraq > accessed 16 June 2025. [22] Andrey Mardasov, ‘Revolutionary Protests in Iraq in  the  Context of Iranian-American Confrontation’ in Issaev and Korotaev (n 2) 95. [23]  Haddad (n 16).  [24] Renad Mansour and Benedict Robin-D’Cruz, ‘The Basra Blueprint and the Future of Protest in Iraq’ ( Chatham House Blog , 8 October 2019)   19 < https://www.chathamhouse.org/2019/10/basra-blueprint-and-future-protest-iraq > accessed 16 June 2025. [25]  Raad Alkadiri, ‘Can Mustafa Kadhimi, the Latest Compromise Candidate, Repair Iraq’s Broken System?’ ( LSE Blogs , 21 April 2020) < https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2020/04/21/can-mustafa-kadhimi-the-latest-compromise-candidate-repair-iraqs-broken-system/ > accessed 16 June 2025. [26] Lahib Higel, ‘Iraq’s Surprise Election Results’ ( International Crisis Group , 16 November 2021) < https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/iraq/iraqs-surprise-election-results > accessed 16 June 2025. [27] Arab Barometer, ‘Arab Barometer VI: Iraq Country Support’ (2021) 6 < https://www.arabbarometer.org/wp-content/uploads/Iraq-Arab-Barometer-Public-Opinion-2021-ENG.pdf > accessed 16 June 2025. [28] ibid 10. [29] Arab Barometer. ‘Democracy in the Middle East & North Africa’ (2022) 4-9 < https://www.arabbarometer.org/wp-content/uploads/ABVII_Governance_Report-EN-1.pdf > accessed 16 June 2025. [30] Arab Barometer (n 27) 9. [31]  Haddad (n 16).  [32] Berman, Clarke, and Majed (n 11) 6. [33] UNAMI & OHCHR (n 18) 27-36. [34] Haddad (n 16).  [35] Zahra Ali, ‘Theorising Uprisings: Iraq’s Thawrat Teshreen’ (2023) Third World Quarterly   1–16.  [36] Dodge (n 4) 469. [37] Toby Dodge, ’Iraq’s Informal Consociationalism and Its Problems’ (2020) 20 Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 148. [38] Majed (n 17) 76; Ali (n 35) 4. [39] Quoted in Fanar Haddad, ‘Iraq protests: There is no going back to the status quo ante’ ( Middle East Eye , 6 November 2019) < https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/iraq-protests-there-no-going-back-status-quo-ante > accessed 16 June 2025. [40] Majed (n 17) 83-4. [41] Berman, Clarke, and Majed (n 11) 2. [42] Chenoweth and Stephan (n 1);   Bayat (n 14). [43]  Sharan Grewal, ‘Why Sudan Succeeded Where Algeria Failed’ (2021) 32(5) Journal of Democracy 102. [44] Danny Postel, ‘The Other Regional Counter-Revolution: Iran’s Role in the Shifting Political Landscape of the Middle East’ ( New Politics , 7 July 2021) < https://newpol.org/the-other-regional-counter-revolution-irans-role-in-the-shifting-political-landscape-of-the-middle-east/ > accessed 16 June 2025. [45] Mansour and Robin-D’Cruz (n 24) 6. [46] Benedict Robin-D’Cruz & Renad Mansour, ‘Making Sense of the Sadrists: Fragmentation and Unstable Politics’ ( Foreign Policy Research Institute , March 2020) < https://www.fpri.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/iraq-chapter-1.pdf > accessed 16 June 2025. [47] Don Jacobson, ‘Millions rally in Iraq to demand removal of U.S. military forces’ ( United Press International , 24 January 2020) < https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2020/01/24/Millions-rally-in-Iraq-to-demand-removal-of-US-military-forces/7411579868399/ > accessed 16 June 2025. [48] Berman, Clarke, and Majed (n 11) 10.

Dr Alison Gilliland was Dublin’s 353rd Lord Mayor in 2021/2022. She is currently a Dublin City Councillor for the Labour Party, representing her local area of Artane / Whitehall and works as a facilitator, advisor, and researcher. Her community-oriented council work is underpinned by her previous experience as a training and equality officer for her trade union, the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation. CJLPA : Dublin has had a mayor for nearly 800 years. How do you view your role as mayor this year? Dr Alison Gilliland : The role of mayor this year is a particularly pertinent one in the sense that we're transitioning out of a global pandemic. And then suddenly, we have the dark cloud of a war in Ukraine. So it's a year with lots of ups and downs. When I was elected in June, I had three priorities: the sustainable recovery of our city, giving visibility to women and girls, and housing. I chose those three because they were issues in our city, like other cities around the world that are trying to recover from COVID, but they also speak to the global perspective—of the climate crisis, for example. Firstly, COVID gave us great opportunities here in Dublin to accelerate some of the plans we had, particularly with regard to active travel and mobility. You might see a huge increase in cycling infrastructure around the city. That change took place over a couple of months, to allow people greater space to walk around and to cycle, conscious that people didn't want to get on public transport, but also conscious at the back of our head that we need to keep people less dependent on private cars. So there's an element of human and community recovery as well one of climate resilience. Women, secondly, because globally women are not equal partners at the decision-making table. I'm only the 10th female Lord Mayor of Dublin City. The 10th in the last 80 years, because our first female was in 1939. So I'm very conscious of that gender imbalance. Also, from the perspective of urban planning and development, we need to have both views. How women move around the city and their experiences of work, culture, and recreation are very different to those of men. And finally housing. We have a massive housing crisis in the country, but more so in Dublin as our capital city and biggest urban centre. We have people struggling to make rent, and people who would like to buy their own home but can’t, due to lack of supply. We’re seeing an excess of ‘build-to-rent’ development, generally funded by investment funds demanding very high rents. That has a financial impact on people's ability to live and work in the city, and a knock-on impact on our domestic economy. The question is: how can we square that circle? We do as a city have responsibility for the provision of what we call social housing, housing for people under a certain income threshold. While we don't technically have a responsibility for the provision of housing for those above that threshold, we're very conscious of those at a middle income that are struggling, so we've taken it upon ourselves to build cost-rentals: lower rent, not-for-profit rentals on public land. They're the three big issues for me. And, of course, other issues pop up during the course of the year. One of the issues that has come up for me is the high level of street issues: on-street homelessness, on-street addiction and substance misuse, and on-street safety. CJLPA : You said earlier that ‘we only have a responsibility for social housing, but have taken on developing cost-rentals on public lands’ to ameliorate the housing crisis. Who is ‘we’? Is that the Dublin City Council? AG : Yes, it's the Council. At the national level, the Minister for Housing, Local Governments, and Planning produced legislation that allows for what we call cost-rentals. As a local authority, we own some of the public land in Dublin City, with other public land owned by state bodies or the Office of Public Works. What we are doing on some of our larger developments is mixing social with cost-rental. I think one of the reasons we have got into a situation where we have so little housing stock in public ownership is because we've had a scheme whereby local authority tenants could buy out their local authority rental house. We've ‘lost’ 25,000 units because of that and I'm very concerned about the long term. We have people now paying very high rents. My question is: what will happen to those people when they retire and they take a significant drop in their income? They won’t be able to afford those rents. We need to build and increase our housing stock so that we have a cushion there for that eventuality down the line. We also need to increase our stock to accommodate those on social housing waiting lists. As a state, I believe we have a responsibility to help those who can’t afford housing because we need sustainable communities. If we don't have sustainable mixed income communities, we're going to get different ghettos and communities isolated from each other. CJLPA : How has Russia’s invasion of Ukraine impacted Dublin? AG : We now have refugees arriving in the city every single night. We have established several ‘resting centres’ with the civil defence and housing section, where we look after them for 24 or 48 hours until they're allocated somewhere for accommodation. That's our role at the moment. I can see that developing into the provision of housing and also integration. I’m conscious that most of the families are women and children, who will need schools, and involvement in local community activities. They are safe here, but probably suffering trauma and we need to figure out how we can best support the manifestation of that trauma. CJLPA : You have been a Dublin City Councillor from 2014 to 2021. Over those seven years, which of Dublin’s issues have grown in salience and which have shrunk? AG : What has particularly grown in importance is the climate crisis. Every report that we get is worse. The national government does have a Climate Action Plan, which is very good in the sense that it sets out very clear objectives. But I don't feel that we are doing enough. I don't feel a sense of urgency from some of the actors at a national level. So for ourselves at council, it's our responsibility, and my responsibility as Lord Mayor, to push that agenda. The climate lens permeates everything I do. For example, in the sustainable COVID recovery, we’re concerned with accessibility in the city, permeability in the city, walking, and cycling. This ensures sustainability, but also enhances the quality of our air. I’m old enough to remember smog in Dublin clinging to your clothes. We've come a long way, but we still have a long way to go. We also need to be more conscious of greening our city, not only from the carbon and climate change perspective, but also in terms of quality of life and the aesthetics in the city. We started a pilot to pedestrianise some of our streets. We have two main areas that are pedestrianised, and a third one which we trialled on weekend evenings last summer. That is now going to be made permanent. This should really enhance the city. What we hope to do is have people arrive into the city by Connolly Station, which is our north-south access, and be able to walk at least five kilometres in a pedestrianised or traffic-free area. That will give great accessibility to the city, a lovely sense of flow, and a sort of added ambience. CJLPA : The Dublin City Development Plan 2022-2028, and the development strategy of other cities such as Paris, emphasise the ‘15 minute city’. Can you speak to the significance of this? AG : Yes. What the idea of the ‘15 minute city’ will do for Dublin is make us focus on creating communities that have all the services they require within a 15 minute walk, cycle, or journey by public transport. There are two challenges in that. Obviously, it's about reducing your carbon footprint by limiting the need for private transport, but it's also about growing communities and bringing people back together. I think we all saw that during COVID lockdowns, with small enterprises developing within local communities. The challenges we have in this respect are getting more people to live in the city centre, because that's where a lot of the employment is, and getting employment into local communities. We now need to be more conscious of the balance between employment opportunities and housing. We can’t build residential units and housing on every single piece of land we have and take every piece of land, because it's more than houses. You need community infrastructure, recreation, and employment. One of the issues I'm working on is over-the-shop vacancy, or what we call upper floor vacancy. I hosted an online summit just before Christmas, where we brought in a lot of the stakeholders, owners of some of those buildings, architects, developers, and businesses, to identify what the key challenges were. There are challenges around planning requirements. But one of the biggest challenges is that those who own them are not motivated to go through the pain of planning, financing, and regenerating the floors of the shop. In a lot of cases, they don't need the income. Many of the owners don't even live in Dublin. So that is a challenge. We have a few ideas of how we might partner with private developers and owners to help regenerate those upper floors because they're such a valuable resource. We can't demolish and rebuild everything. We need to be sustainably ‘recycling’ these buildings, reusing them and not releasing any more carbon into the atmosphere. CJLPA : Do you compare Dublin to other cities? And if so, are they other Irish cities, other EU capital cities, or global cities? AG : I consider Dublin a European capital city. The size of our country and the size of our capital is similar to Denmark, one of the smaller European countries. Every city, particularly Dublin, has its own unique characteristics, but we do aspire to be one of the leading European capital cities and I think we're well respected. Tourists love Dublin because of its unique character and the people. Dublin people make Dublin. And we have similar challenges to other European countries with regard to climate, housing, resilience, and post-COVID recovery. So there are a lot of similarities, but Dublin has its own unique context. One of the things that really struck me this year was the reaction from Dubliners to outdoor dining. We don't have a tradition of outdoor dining in Dublin because of the climate, but with COVID we introduced outdoor dining as a way of enabling the hospitality industry to get back on its feet while there were still restrictions on eating indoors. We doubled the number of seats and tables in an outdoor space in the city in a couple of weeks. And I think that that atmosphere, along with the pedestrianisation of a lot of the streets, has really increased the European vibe in the city. I know a lot of people have fed it back to me and said the city now feels like those modern European capital cities. You have it in Paris, and it rains in Paris as well. I think we don't mind sitting outside, under the heater, with coats on. It's an element of the city that we can then enjoy. CJLPA : How has COVID impacted Dublin? AG : No more than any other European city. We've lost businesses, particularly in the hospitality sector because they suffered most from the lockdown and the restrictions. I wouldn’t say we ‘lost’ our arts and culture and industry, but they really, really suffered. I think that had a two-fold impact on us. We realised how central arts and culture are to our well-being, and the balance that we need in every community within our city. Previously, there was focus on the city centre and on people coming into what we call ‘town’ to go for a bite to eat, go to the theatre or cinema. COVID exposed the dependence the city centre had on workers coming in every day for retail, for hospitality, and for culture. When they weren't there, communities in the periphery of the city were flourishing because everybody was located at home in their own area. And the city centre was vacant and empty. That has given us a real impetus to work harder on upper floor vacancies, for example, to get more people living in the city. CJLPA : Why are arts and culture important to communities? AG : I suppose it's the coming together of the community. Even though you may not know most of the people in the cinema, everybody laughs at the same thing. It's that sharing. As there can be such a focus on academia, and business, and the economy, people tend to forget the importance of people who work and thrive in the arts, how we as humans thrive through the arts. One of our challenges is to find more arts and culture spaces. Because it's not a business as such, it's hard to make a profit that will allow you to pay the high rents. When we came out of lockdown just after my election last year, myself and the head of city recovery approached some of the big landlords on our main retail shopping street, Grafton Street, where they had vacant commercial space, and asked them if they would give us the space for six months at a very cheap rent, where we could experiment with pop ups. Whether that be arts workshops or the circular economy and upcycling, to see what people would react to, what they wanted in a space, and at the same time create footfall. CJLPA : Where, and in what way, is Dublin’s local art and culture under threat? AG : We’re particularly conscious of ‘The Liberties’, Dublin 8. We’ve had a significant amount of applications for build-to-rent. We’re looking at thousands of new apartments. But it’s also one of the areas that has the fewest green spaces. We’re in favour of preserving green spaces for recreational use. If we’re going to be true to the concept of a 15-minute city, you should also be able to walk to your local football pitch to play, or your local club. So there’s always a tension around use of land. The other challenge we have is where private owners develop older buildings that might have a cultural space in them. One earlier this year was called the Cobblestone which, for all intents and purposes, is a pub. But it’s bigger than that! It has rooms for people to learn to play Irish traditional music or take Irish language classes. It brings people together for that Irish cultural space, and you just can’t recreate that. That was going to be demolished, and a hotel built on it, but planning wasn’t given. We’ve written a compromise into our Development Plan: where a cultural space is going to be redeveloped, the size of the cultural space has to be retained and recreated as far as possible. One of our problems, in the interaction between national and local, is that we have no definition of ‘cultural spaces’ in national legislation. So for some, as in this case, a pub was a cultural space, even though that would generally come under hospitality. The other is the architecture of the place. These new shiny buildings are beautiful, but it's almost like we’re sanitising the city. We have to be conscious to retain what makes Dublin City’s character and hold onto some of those old buildings. We have a beautiful theatre, Smock Alley Theatre, and we’re in the process of reclaiming that as a municipal theatre space. We have the old school of music off Grafton Street, which is vacant at the moment. In our Development Plan, we’re looking at how we can best use that space. We’re giving it over to artists for temporary use, but questions remain in the long term. Should we use it as a museum? My preference would be using it for something that’s more interactive. That could be science, tech, or arts, but the aim would be something that people can actually go in and interact with, instead of just passively looking. My underlying principle when it comes to developing our city is: if it works for Dubliners, it’ll work for tourists alike. I think there was an over-emphasis during the early 2000’s on the tourist economy. We’re creating an experience in the city for tourists without thinking about our own Dubliners who need experience. Another challenge is that our public cultural experiences like museums all close at six, which isn’t always accessible to families with children or workers. We hosted an exhibition at the Round Room of the Mansion House this past summer open until eight o’clock, and the public reception towards this showed these opening hours are more accessible. CJLPA : In an architectural sense, how do you balance progress with culture and heritage? AG : We have a scheme called ‘Protected Structures’, according to which we are conscious of buildings with a particular architectural, social, or historical value. Once they're included in that record of protected structures, the physical and cultural integrity of those buildings has to be preserved. In some cases, planning would just require the façade to be retained, whilst the inside can be regenerated in a more modern way. Other times it’s the integrity of the entire building, including the contents. That's probably the best way that we can retain our cultural and social architectural heritage. CJLPA : Who puts structures on that protective list? AG : We retain the list. Anyone can apply and say ‘let's save this building, we think this building is of significant architectural heritage’. You make an application, then it is assessed by heritage officers in the Council. Every building has some sort of architecture, culture, or social value to it. It is a balancing act, since you have to ensure you’re not blocking a huge amount of modern development, but we're very conscious of the need to preserve our cultural and architectural heritage. CJLPA : How does a city facing a housing crisis balance the rapid delivery of houses with social infrastructure? AG : We use our Development Plan. In this Plan, we have certain criteria with regard to social and community infrastructure. For example, our Development Plan requires a childcare or creche facility for every X number of residential units. There are requirements in some of our zonings for 20% of the land to be used for public open space. It's not always easy. Take schools, for example: the Department of Education decides where schools are. If we own the land we can work with them, but where private owners own the land this isn’t possible. One of the difficulties we have run into is that the Department of Education doesn't take account of the 15-minute city or sustainability. They look at a five kilometre radius, but you cannot walk five kilometres, and you probably couldn't cycle it if you're a young kid. Again, it's trying to align national and local parameters. CJLPA : Dublin is a short city, slow to incorporate skyscrapers. But are they a viable solution to the housing crisis? AG : We've been gradually moving to higher buildings in the city. Our docklands are a wonderful example of height when it's well planned. I think that there's an aesthetic ‘skyline’ consideration. There are questions with regard to them being the solution to residential needs. I'm not sure about that. There is a cost: the higher you build, the more expensive it is. And with regard to our own fire safety requirement, once you pass a specific height, you then have to increase your fire safety installation requirements. There's also the energy concern as regards the installation of lifts up and down. There's a lot to consider there. We have some very high-density areas that are low; height doesn't necessarily give you density. The other consideration is the amount that a residential skyscraper would cost either to buy or rent. We have a lot of very high end, high buildings that are financially inaccessible to those who need housing. While developers will say ‘I want to build a 42 storey residential building that will provide X amount of residential units’, my question is: well, how much will they cost through rent? Because if it's more than 30-40% of somebody's disposable income, it's not going to serve the city. CJLPA : What would be some popular misconceptions about solutions to the housing crisis? AG : That there is a solution. It's very, very nuanced. We do have to build, but planning regulations can inhibit this. The new, special planning policy requirements that were brought in nationally, which superseded our development plan, particularly with regard to height, have held up so many planning applications. With regard to social housing, we have to jump through hoops with the Department of Housing when we're building. It takes about a year and a half to go through that application process with them. The big challenge now is how to build sustainably. The war in Ukraine has created difficulties with international trade and prices of construction products have increased. There is a difficulty finding people now to work on construction. So there are lots of factors and no one simple solution, except just build! And build sustainably. This interview was conducted by Kylie Quinn, who was born in Dallas, Texas, and studies Law and Political Science (LLB) at Trinity College Dublin. Focusing her final year on Law, Sustainability, and Finance, she will graduate in 2023.

Manuel Rabaté is Director of Louvre Abu Dhabi. He has taught Arts & Cultural Management at Paris-Dauphine University and Paris-Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi. He is a Knight of France’s National Order of Merit.   Dr Souraya Noujaim is Scientific, Curatorial & Collections Management Director of Louvre Abu Dhabi. She has studied the British Museum’s Arabic weights and measures, and has been Islamic Art History Chair at the École du Louvre.   Louvre Abu Dhabi sits at a tense but enriching cultural crossroads. The museum brings the name of France’s most treasured cultural institution to the desert of the United Arab Emirates. The museum is innovative but its geopolitical context is difficult: a background of continuous government negotiations, and the cultural friction between East and West. The institution’s Director, Manuel Rabaté, and Curatorial Director, Dr Souraya Noujaim, discussed their creative vision and difficulties with honesty.   CJLPA : Louvre Abu Dhabi arose in 2017 out of a 2007 agreement between France and the UAE. What was the intention behind the agreement?   Manuel Rabaté : This agreement was extraordinarily visionary. You cannot read it in isolation. It was part of a master plan to make Abu Dhabi an important international centre of knowledge, education, sustainability, and tourism. It was made in tandem with other agreements that led to Sorbonne Abu Dhabu, Berkley Abu Dhabi, New York University Abu Dhabi, Zayed University and National Museum, and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Tourism was undoubtedly an important motive. The government of Abu Dhabi was keen to ensure diversification of economic assets, and found that strong investment in its educational and cultural fibre was an excellent way of achieving this. The UAE federation dates only to 1971, but the place has a rich, much older heritage. The UAE wants to preserve this and create a cultural legacy. There is much more there than just the sun.   The community is built on other institutions and ideals too. Many of the buildings in which Abu Dhabi’s cultural institutions sit have been designed by Western architects, and many institutions bear Western names. But they are not necessarily extensions of Western points of view and ways of doing things. A key part of the vision behind Louvre Abu Dhabi, as well as the wider cultural objectives of the Abu Dhabi government, was to promote a universal story. Much like the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris are not museums of British art or French art, Louvre Abu Dhabi is place where you invite the world to come and see how you perceive human interconnectedness. We want to tell the story of the world through artworks and objects of beauty, at the same time raising points about Arab identity and the interaction of East and West. This may sound like a cliché, but I mean it truly.   CJLPA : What are your goals as Director?   MR : My mission as Director can be structured around four pillars, which chime with what my view of what a museum is. First, I want to focus on the building itself and its surroundings. We have an incredible, delicate building on the sea. It is a challenge to maintain, but I take pride in being its custodian and improving its health and accessibility.

As described by The Arts Desk , Dr Laura Bowler is ‘ a triple threat composer-performer-provocatrice ’ . She is the vocalist in Ensemble Lydenskab, and as a composer she has been commissioned by orchestras and ensembles across the globe. She is a Tutor in Composition at the Royal Northern College of Music and Lecturer in Composition at Guildhall School of Music and Drama.   I interviewed Dr Laura Bowler on the evolving relationship between music and politics through the captivating, yet sometimes overlooked sphere of contemporary experimental music.   Bowler really is one of kind. Described by The Arts Desk as a ‘triple threat composer-performer-provocatrice’,[1] she is a renowned composer, vocalist and artistic director, specialising in theatre, multidisciplinary work and opera. Her works have been performed by some of the world’s leading ensembles, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Manchester Camerata. Bowler is also a Tutor in Composition at the Royal Northern College of Music, where she invites her students to also explore the unique fusion between music and theatre in the realm of contemporary experimental music. However, it is Bowler’s utilisation of pressing political topics as central themes for her music—including climate change, social media and political ‘slacktivism’—which were the prime sources of intrigue in this illuminating dialogue. Indeed, by incorporating brash and provocative theatrical techniques, Bowler urges her audiences to subsequently reflect on the issues she presents to them. In our discussion, I invited Bowler to consider the mechanics by which compositional praxis and the production and consumption of new music can act as political intervention. By placing special emphasis on her two most notable works, Antarctica and FFF  (Freeze, Flight, Fight), Bowler addresses the complex dialectic between content and form, unpicking the functions that compositional intervention and dissemination can offer political objectives. Especially in the realm of contemporary experimental music, where her target audience may seem narrow, Bowler also considers the limits and challenges faced when mobilising musical material for social change.   Before unpacking her music, I was intrigued to hear about Bowler’s rather unique educational background. Born in Staffordshire, Bowler first studied Saxophone at the Royal Northern College of Music as an undergraduate, before switching to Composition after a term because of stage fright. This is ironic, of course, since she performs in all her musical projects. However, it was not until her master’s studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London that theatre started to play a central role in her work. After coming across the provocative Theatre of Cruelty  manifesto by the French dramatist Antonin Artaud, she made the text the focal point in her master’s thesis: ‘It made such an impact on me because of Artaud’s desire to search for the real  and the raw  in performers’. Experiences outside of music college at the   time further fuelled her passion for the theatrical, including a trip to the National Theatre in Warsaw to watch a production of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis  . Language barrier notwithstanding (the play was translated into Polish), it was the physicality of the performance that moved Bowler above all else. Indeed, she ‘could not believe the level of sacrifice of these performers, and what they were giving and sharing’.   ‘How can I find this  in the western Classical music tradition?’ It was this question, Bowler asserts, which became the focal point of her doctoral work. Finding any solutions to this puzzle proved challenging. Despite Bowler’s passion for theatre, she had not received any formal training in theatre or drama. To overcome this barrier, she embarked on a theatre master’s degree at the Royal Academy of the Dramatic Arts (RADA), a move which, for Bowler, was fundamental to where her work is now.   The wonderful thing about the course [at RADA] was that not only did you get incredible training on how to facilitate rehearsals and facilitate a room and a psychology of a room, but you also got physical theatre training from the Theatre Ensemble Course there. I studied Grotowski theatre—very much linked to my work on Artaud at conservatoire—and focused on physicality and the ‘raw’ in performance and pushing my body to the extreme.   This passion for physicality is not only transferred to her work but also in her composition teaching. At the Royal Northern College of Music, Bowler leads a ‘Physicality and Performance’ course. By introducing her students to ‘Jerzy Grotowski theatre’ (which aims for complete integration of the actor’s mental and physical senses to reveal the core substance of a character) and the ‘Stanislavski Technique’ (a system comprising various techniques designed to allow actors to create and embody believable characters), Bowler is constantly questioning her students (an ‘interrogation’ method, she jokes) to find their true ‘rawness’.   This approach is perhaps similar to how theatre directors work today: Constantly questioning their actors, their motivations within the character, so that they then can reflect back on that, and find what it is they are ‘doing’ but not quite ‘doing accurately ’.   It was after her ‘fundamental’ studies in the Dramatic Arts that Bowler’s urge to write political works came about. She realised that abstract music on its own terms was not a strong enough vehicle to fully communicate the true human experience of the world; a composition could, therefore, be ‘directed’ if it wants to be. However, it was actually during her final years of her undergraduate degree when she first gained an interest in moulding her works around sociopolitical issues and, more importantly, in using her unique compositional idiom to convey a fully human experience. Bowler wrote a work on her experience of anorexia as part of a collaboration with the BBC playwright Lavinia Murray. Bowler toured this very human work round schools in her hometown in Staffordshire where, before performing the piece, she would also talk to students about her experiences of anorexia. This was especially provocative at the time, because she was still ill. This compositional ethos—that of writing music based on personal experiences which, subsequently, invites her audiences to reflect on their own actions—pervades her writing today.   I was very much doing it because this was my experience of the world, and that was what I was using to create this work. This certainly became the starting point for this need to communicate about the human experience in a more direct way than what was possible with ‘abstract music’.   This forms the crux of one of her most significant works, Antarctica , an immersive multimedia work for orchestra and   vocalist which was co-commissioned by the Manchester Camerata and BBC Radio 3. As suggested by the title, it is the pressing issue of climate change which takes pride of place in this piece. Before writing, Bowler realised that, like most people in privileged populations, her view of climate change was too obscure, preventing her from creating a truly personal, provocative work. So, in order to overcome this limitation, she embarked upon a voyage to Antarctica. While sailing, she recorded videos and took audio samples which, upon writing the work, were manipulated and juxtaposed to create an evocative ‘soundscape’ work. By essentially bringing back her experience of this environment that so few people get to experience first-hand, Bowler’s immersive experience persuades her audiences to reflect on this beautiful, fragile landscape, ‘so that it remains that way’. This is especially the case with the work’s ‘dark turn’.   The flipside of the work is the politics surrounding climate change and the manipulation of governments, the presentation and rejection of climate laws, and the use of text from the media and politicians. That complete juxtaposition with this beauty and landscape was important. The point of it all was to allow audiences to wallow in that beauty, only to be hit by the grotesqueness of the reality and our ignorance.   What do audiences themselves think? For Bowler, discussions with her listeners—or more accurately, ‘spectators’—are crucial for understanding whether the messages conveyed were powerful enough that they then felt the need to take action. These engagements have clearly stuck with Bowler, and she seems surprised by the things she has been told or asked. For example, after Antarctica , an elderly couple approached her, since they had also visited Antarctica, but on a cruise ship.   They were saying that ‘we did not see any rubbish when we were there, and we didn’t see any of the things that you described’. I then told them that the areas a cruise ship ventures in are obviously maintained for tourism, thus explaining the differences of our own experiences. Yet, because their experience of Antarctica was so pure and untainted, they almost could not accept what I had presented to them. It ruined their memory of it, which was very interesting.   The question Bowler seems to be asked most often is this: what new solutions is she presenting in her works? This question is certainly relevant here, especially since we are exploring this work through the lens of political action. Certainly, the theatrical elements embedded in her work imbibe connotations of protest. However, Bowler simply sees her unique musical idiom—her responsiveness to the ‘indirectness’ she perceives in pure abstract music—as a vessel to encourage audiences to simply reflect on the issues at hand and take action.   I don’t have the solutions. I’m not a scientist. Audiences experiencing this piece should then go home and think a little bit more about it. It takes them one step further on their path to acknowledging climate change and doing their individual bit towards it. That is what I see my role as here.   Bowler is excited to be addressing climate change again in a work provocatively titled temperatures aren’t what they used to be , which she is currently writing for the London Sinfonietta as part of a collaboration with play-writer Cordelia Lynn, theatre director Katie Mitchell, and documentary filmmaker Grant Gee. In stark contrast to Antarctica , the work centres on the issues of climate denial and climate psychology, inspired by responses she received on the subject by people completing a questionnaire.   It is a very individual experience. It does not really concern science or facts, but it’s about the process of going ‘OK, climate change is a thing, what does that mean? What can I maybe do as an individual?’ It is quite broad with regards to the spectrum of responses I got. Some people are activists, others do not do anything, and some recycle but drive an SUV. As you can see, this is a hugely complex topic, which is what I want to explore here.   Alongside her interest in global warming, Bowler’s works also address the problems associated with political ‘slacktivism’. This is an informal term which the Oxford Dictionary defines as ‘the practice of supporting a political or social cause by means such as social media or online petitions, characterised as involving very little effort or commitment’.[2] Some of her frustrations are addressed by her most physical work, FFF  (Freeze, Flight and Fight) for ensemble and vocalist, co-commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.   I came to write this piece because, like everyone else, I was on social media and sharing various things that were making me angry, and I was getting very involved in very heated conversations online, which were generally not very helpful for either party. I realised the physical  impact it was having on me, that although the existence of social media is one step removed from reality, it was affecting me so much on a really physical level.   What has this got to do with ‘Freeze, Flight, Fight’, a phrase which describes our instinctive and physiological response to danger? Well, while thinking about the physical effect on social media, she came across an article concerning the relationship between ‘Freeze, Flight, and Fight’ and politics, in relation to how one behaves in relation to political news. Bowler was intrigued and decided to write a work which conveyed this paralysing physical response to social media.   Like most of her works, moulding these very physical ideas into music comes with many challenges. One big obstacle to overcome is the fact that Bowler herself performs all of her music. Indeed, she sings through her pieces before writing them, which substantially aids the compositional process. I asked Bowler a question many have asked her before, namely whether she would ever give her pieces to someone else to perform. She replied with a firm ‘no’. Perhaps, Bowler states, she would consider it at some point, but would want to be present in the rehearsal process. It is clear how attached she is to her music, given that the messages reflected emanate from her own experiences. Audiences, therefore, are moved by such authentic, visceral projections of these messages, and are perhaps inclined to reflect on what they have just witnessed.   What about the players she works with? While watching FFF , I was immediately struck by how physical the orchestra was. Not only did the complexity of the instrumental texture lead to extremely gestural playing, but the players themselves were required to act at times and make various vocalisations. This is all very demanding, but Bowler’s training in Theatre Directing is a crucial asset here as she goes through all the actions in detail to ease the players’s tension. Of course, while her ensemble enthusiastically seeks to grasp and perform her ideas, Bowler is willing to compromise because, at the end of the day, musicians perform better if they are comfortable. Furthermore, Bowler’s role as a performer here also helps because her passionate demeanour in performance is very much absorbed and echoed by the players. A sense of comradeship evolves here, which also fuels the powerful messages of this work.   FFF is formed of three movements named ‘Freeze’, ‘Flight’, and ‘Fight’, with chaos and disorder emerging right from the work’s outset. The first movement commences with Bowler announcing, ‘In the beginning’, words from the opening of Genesis: words which, contrary to Bowler’s musical texture here, reflect stillness, serenity and, more importantly, order. The connotations of immobility and self-protection associated with the ‘Freeze’ are vividly captured in this movement.   The conflict between music and text is exactly to do with the passiveness with the experience of social media. It addresses how ‘pervasive’ social media is becoming in society and how it is slowly but surely affecting our behaviour. The movement shows how incredibly violent social media is, even if we do not know that it is. All of these juxtapositions of how it behaves is what I am trying to capture in some way in that first section.   The second movement ‘Flight’ sees Bowler appropriately embody the role of an air stewardess. Anger is momentarily sidelined, as she is seen signing sheets of paper, scrunching them up and throwing them across the stage. This all represents the act of signing online petitions, which Bowler considers to be emblematic of political ‘slacktivism’.   The movement functions as a commentary on our privilege to not only want the internet, but to want the internet to go ‘Yes, I can sign it, and then I’ll share it as a good deed, because I’m a good person’. But, how many people would sign it had they not been exposed to it on social media in the first place? I am certainly guilty of this, but it is important to reflect on that, and notice this process as ‘slacktivism’.   The chaos then resumes for the final movement ‘Fight’, where Bowler puts on an ‘emoticon’ head mask, repeatedly shouting the words ‘You capitalist! You socialist’. This represents a call to arms demanding that, instead of sitting there, scrolling and doing nothing, we take action. This is perhaps the most intense we see Bowler, shouting and pushing her voice to breaking point. However, Bowler then shuts down and a pre-recorded video of herself appears playing for the remainder of the piece. At this point, the players are spraying themselves with detergent and Bowler is passing round disinfectant wipes to the audience, though this has nothing to do with the current pandemic. While this is all happening, the virtual Bowler tells the audience that they ‘all need to get into a great big bath of disinfectant and we need to disinfect ourselves’. Bowler explains: ‘This moment here the idea of “cleaning” ourselves before we go out and take part in the “true and honest” fight, and not the “slacktivist”, easy one’.   While these works engage provocatively with global issues, challenges arise when presevnting them in the elitist world of contemporary experimental music, let alone Western classical music. Bowler is always aware that her music attracts a very niche type of audience and, as a result, thinks a lot about what is presented in her works and how. This is certainly an arduous task, since one can never predict what her audience is going to think or whether her ideas have come across in the way she intended. However, what is vital for Bowler is that, when one makes political works, regardless of what artistic medium one is working in, the formatting which is presented has to be fundamental to the context in which it is performed in. She unpacks this a little further:   With FFF , for example, the work was specifically designed for that form of the contemporary music festival. It wouldn’t work the same it if was presented at Bridgewater Hall for the Manchester Camerata, because the people who go would not experience the piece with the same kind of context of works that they know, and it would mean very different things, and they may be drawn the ‘peculiarity’ of the work rather than what’s in  the work.   However, despite the apparent solidity of her craft, Bowler poignantly reveals that she is constantly learning, seeking new ways to communicate the issues she is so passionate about, to ensure her audiences feel that same ardour to take swift action and to reflect on their own actions. It was inspiring to hear Bowler’s thoughts on music’s multifaceted power to express pressing political issues. Filippo Turkheimer, the interviewer, is a postgraduate Music student at New College, Oxford, where he holds a Senior Scholarship. He previously read Music at New College, sang in the college’s prestigious chapel choir, and was president of the music society. [1] Rayfield Allied, ‘Laura Bowler’ < http://www.rayfieldallied.com/artists/laura-bowler > accessed 30 March 2021. [2] ‘Slacktivism, N’. ( Oxford English Dictionary Online ) < https://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2446/view/Entry/51394141?redirectedFrom=slacktivism#eid > accessed 30 March 2021.

Dr Mostafa El Feki is Director of the New Library of Alexandria. He has been a Professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo, and has held numerous posts in the Egyptian government, including Ambassador to Austria.   Dr Mostafa El Feki has witnessed five Egyptian presidencies and been prominent in the political sphere for the last four and a half decades. He is well placed to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of each Egyptian President to have served over the last 50 years. He outlines in detail how each President has helped or hindered Egypt’s status as a major Middle Eastern state, in addition to how the Egyptian populace have felt about each President.   I have to be honest and say that if I answered this question based on my own personal emotions, I would favour President Nasser’s legacy above all else. However, objectively speaking, with regard to stratagem and policy-making, I am compelled to highlight President El Sadat’s policies for their success. At first glance, this may feel like a contradiction. However, I don’t feel it is so. To offer you just a snapshot of my thought process regarding your question, President Nasser’s charisma and leadership were extremely attractive to my generation. For us, and many after us, he was a national hero. However, President El Sadat’s wisdom and political initiatives were also well received by the majority of the Egyptian people, especially in relation to the breakthrough he accomplished towards securing peace between Egypt and Israel in 1978, an accomplishment for which he was rightfully recognised by virtue of his ascertainment of a Nobel Peace Prize.   Having ‘worked most closely with [Hosni Mubarak] during [his] time as Political Secretary’ (July 1985–October 1992), Dr El Feki speaks candidly of this highly controversial President, whose 30-year reign incited the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Acknowledging that ‘Mubarak was a highly nationalistic leader and had a great career in the military service within the Egyptian Air Force’, Dr El Feki also expresses his reservations. ‘His problem was that he didn’t take full advantage of the “time factor” despite his extensive presidency, hence losing out on several valuable opportunities for the country during his term in office’.   With respect to the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Dr El Feki identifies ‘the main goal of the revolution’ as ‘the call for social justice and equality in Egypt. This is the reason you could see signs reading “A loaf of bread and justice” at the heart of the mobilisation in Tahrir Square […] This is also why many raised the picture of Nasser, as he was considered the symbol of social justice during his period of leadership’. Dr El Feki insists, ‘[i]t is also important to note that none of the slogans of the Egyptian revolution made an indication towards foreign policy or propaganda against Israel’.   When asked about Mohammed Morsi, a President yet more controversial whose term was cut short after one year and one month, Dr El Feki keeps his response brief and forthright. ‘With respect to President Morsi, he had no remarkable achievements during his tenure and his policies were widely considered to be a reflection of those the Muslim Brotherhood adopted’. When pressed on why Morsi’s tenure proved fruitless, Dr El Feki insists that ‘he made no progress whatsoever in any field of development. In fact, I believe his entire presidency was an immense failure’.

John Dewey Distinguished University Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Elizabeth Anderson is famously redefining egalitarianism in the field of political philosophy. Conventionally, philosophical debate has imagined the two concepts of equality and freedom to be polar opposites. Anderson has sought to challenge this perception by subordinating the popular egalitarian notion of distributive equality to that of democratic equality, which brings the concepts of freedom and equality together. Anderson’s groundbreaking work extends beyond political philosophy and engages in interdisciplinary research across fields and topics such as racial integration, the philosophy of economics, theories of value and rational choice, and the history and philosophy of the work ethic. In this interview, Anderson reveals the importance of empirical analysis within philosophy, what we can learn through an analysis of the history of egalitarianism and the role of social movements within its discourse, and how present inequalities have come about.   CJLPA : Could you perhaps tell us a bit about your trajectory to becoming a philosopher?   Professor Elizabeth Anderson : I started off in college studying economics, but there I noticed issues that I had at a very foundational level. These were questions like: should we assume that preferences are all in the person’s self-interest? We often choose to observe social norms: for example, out of norms of etiquette, you don’t take the last roll in the basket. But if the host offers it to you, you would prefer that to not having it. I thought economics wasn’t sorting out the distinctions well, and that was leading to mistakes in welfare economics. If people are declining to do things just out of social norms, it doesn’t necessarily mean that their welfare is being advanced, even though they’re doing what they want in the sense that they are choosing to do it. Such foundational questions moved me into philosophy, because philosophers want to put pressure on concepts that are used in the social sciences that maybe haven’t been probed adequately, and to think about introducing other ideas that could call into question some of the normative conclusions that people are drawing from their social scientific research. So that moved me into philosophy, but I have always been engaged in the social sciences. I think economics would be enriched if it drew distinctions that better tracked normatively important ideas.   CJLPA : Your current research interest is in the history of egalitarianism. What was your motivation behind this recent research interest?   EA : If you look in contemporary political philosophy, you see that much is written about freedom, and what freedom means, and why it is important. Equality is there, but I found it to be under-theorised. In particular, there’s the dominance of a certain distributive notion of equality that is kind of cosmic, which I think makes no sense. It applies to situations like this: imagine there is a distant world out there with beings just like us, only they have half the welfare levels that we do. Some conclude that there would be this unfairness in the universe because there’s an inequality. I think this notion of inequality has nothing to do with the inequality that people care about in real society. What people care about is not just some abstract difference between what I have and what you have. It’s all about social relations and social processes. How did those rich people get all that money? Did they get it at others’ expense? And are they using that wealth to dominate others? Does society turn wealth disparities into grounds for stigmatising the less advantaged? If it’s just some cosmic inequality with some distant planet, there’s no causal connection between our well-being and their well-being, and there is no injustice in that.

Mark Cazalet, born 1964, trained at the Chelsea and then Falmouth Schools of Art, after which he held scholarships in Paris and India. He works in a variety of media, including engraved glass, paint, prints, mosaics, and graphic media. He has taught in several art institutions and has been a Senior Member of Faculty at The Royal Drawing School since 2012. Travel has always played an important role in his art. Through the experience of his journeys, he has opened up rich colloquy between contemporary and traditional arts, between classical and folk forms. Architecture, film, fiction, and theology have all played a role in his creative evolution.   Professor Frances Spalding, CBE, FRSL, PhD, the interviewer, is an art historian and biographer. After studying History of Art at the University of Nottingham, she became a specialist in twentieth-century British art. Following the publication of her British Art Since 1900 , in the Thames & Hudson ‘World of Art’ series, she was commissioned by the Tate to write its centenary history. She has also produced five biographies of artists as well as one on the poet Stevie Smith. She taught at Newcastle University 2000-15, becoming Professor of Art History. In 2014 she guest-curated the exhibition ‘Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision’ for the National Portrait Gallery. During the year 2015-6 she acted as Editor of The Burlington Magazine and became a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge.   This conversation took place at Clare Hall, Cambridge, on 25 February 2021.   Professor Frances Spalding: Our guest this evening is Mark Cazalet. Mark is an artist who has pursued a very wide-ranging career. He could be described as a latter-day John Piper, for, like Piper, he has worked in a variety of media, received major public commissions, has a strong sense of place and has travelled widely. Both Piper and Cazalet remind me of Beethoven’s remark, ‘Art demands of us that we do not stand still’, a challenging statement that refers to much more than travel. Travel, however, is something which many of us have greatly missed during the COVID crisis. Some years back I heard a speaker at a conference in Cambridge say, ‘The most radical thing you can do today is to stay at home’. This was with reference to ecology, but today we understand this command in relation to COVID, as well as in relation to our carbon footprint. Yet the fact that a common swift can stay in the air for ten months without touching ground shows how innate within the natural world, including within us, is the need to move, to migrate, to travel. Friedrich Nietzsche advised, ‘Never trust a thought that didn’t come by walking’. And I want to suggest that the current interest in reviving a habit that began seven hundred years ago, namely that of pilgrimage, is further evidence of our need to locate ourselves in place and time, and to realise that remembrance is key to the continuing of life.   This evening Mark Cazalet will deliver a presentation on his work and travels, and the understanding he has gained from the latter. So, over to you, Mark.   Mark Cazalet : Frances wrote the first important essay on my work back in 1994, and since then has put her finger on the pressure points in my work, consistently, sparingly but fiercely. This opportunity to present the role that travel has had in my work has made me aware that my creativity has been subject to two forces: a centrifugal force, and a gravitational force. Since the seventies, the opportunity to propel ourselves out into the far corners of the world has been an exciting liberation. But it has come at a cost. I think we are now beginning to ask ourselves why we are travelling such big distances. What do we really learn from these travels? And how might—in this present time and after the pandemic—our notions of  significant  travel change? That is what I call the gravitational aspect—what matters to us here and now and within our environment, and which calls on our need to stay still, the alternative to travel.   Because I will start by showing you some of my early work, which I’m frankly terrified to see again, I thought I’d jump ahead in this first slide to a recent work from my Kyoto Zen gardens series which I’m pleased with and excited by (fig 1). But I want to compare it with work from my degree show (such as fig 2). The comparison makes me aware that, as an artist, you don’t travel forward in a linear way, but are endlessly bumping into old iterations of yourself. With creative work you travel cyclically. Things you thought you had dealt with come up again. While studying at Falmouth, in Cornwall, I imagined myself as another Peter Lanyon, in a glider, flying over the countryside and becoming a Cornish abstract painter. As so often happens on long journeys, you end up doing the very opposite thing you thought you would do. I ended up as a student hunting in charity shops collecting detritus and creating strange, theatrical, mise-en-scène, dark cityscapes. Fig 1. The stillness the dancing, Kyoto Zen garden collage (Mark Cazalet 2020, collage papers, inks, MT tape, pencils, and oil pastels, 46 x 130cm).

Well-known for her book  Bananas, Beaches and Bases , exposing the embedded systemic and institutionalised patriarchy that is evident not only in global politics, but in the political science and literature of international relations, Professor Cynthia Enloe is one of the most compelling feminist theorists and political scientists of the twenty-first century. Currently a Research Professor of Political Science at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, Professor Enloe has written countless articles and books on the important role gender plays in the areas of militarism, war, and globalisation. In this interview, Professor Enloe outlines the difficulties faced by feminist theorists and researchers, how to identify gender disparities during crises (with reference to the current pandemic), and the questions one should ask in order to be able to expose patriarchy, as well as the importance of asking these gender-curious questions.     CJLPA : In your most recent book, The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy , you write that, contrary to common belief, patriarchy is not weakening, but modernising and adapting to current times. Why has this happened?   Professor Cynthia Enloe:  First of all, I’m not a pessimist. I’m not somebody who says that all the efforts of women around the world in so many different countries that challenge patriarchal practices, patriarchal beliefs, and patriarchal institutions are fruitless. That’s not my message. But what I am more and more aware of is how those people who are committed to patriarchy—even if they don’t call it that; they call it ‘preserving normalcy’—constantly are updating their ways of preserving their privileges. That’s what I mean. Here’s one example: when a comics artist and a comics company, for example, together created Wonder Woman  in 1940, that looked then like a big breakthrough: a woman could be a fictional superhero! But Wonder Woman ’s creators and marketers—she was created by a man and a male-owned comics company—deliberately dressed her in a sexualised costume. Wonder Woman  didn’t look like most women in the world. Opposition to her sexualised portrayal motivated dozens of UN staff women dramatically to protest this comic book figure being named (by a male-led UN department) the ‘ambassador for women and girls’ in 2016. To these hard-working international civil servants, that UN choice looked like an updated version of patriarchy. So, on the one hand, the creation of a woman superhero seemed to challenge the patriarchal presentation of the usual masculinised superhero; on the other hand, though, the creative innovation seemed designed to perpetuate the sexualisation of women with power. Patriarchal imagination was simultaneously being challenged and confirmed.   Here’s another example of patriarchy’s adaptability. There used to be no women cabinet officers in virtually any government. I have a friend whose mother was the first woman to be a cabinet minister in Chile, becoming the Minister of Education back in the 1960s. She was a Chilean feminist pioneer. Women’s breaking into the masculinised world of government cabinet officers has been indeed a real gender achievement in any country. Nevertheless, while we recognise that, we still have to keep asking when and how the male political elite transformed their cabinets so as to feminise some cabinet posts—for instance, now routinely appointing women to the posts of Ministers of Environment, Culture, Health, and Education, while carefully ensuring that the most powerful cabinet posts have remained in the hands of male ministers (Defence, Interior, and Finance today still are the most commonly masculinised).   You’ll notice that the ‘patriarchal sustainability formula’ relies on masculinising some things, while feminising other things, and—this is key to any patriarchy’s perpetuation—always acting as though the things that are masculinised are more serious, more valuable, more significant than the things that are feminised.   With this understanding in mind, we can take a fresh, feminist look at the still-unfolding history of women and men in governments’ cabinet posts. Patriarchal people’s preferred scenario is: first, men (and a few ‘Margaret Thatcher’s) with political power stubbornly resist women being allowed to take up senior cabinet posts. But then, though, when women begin to stick their collective feet in the political door, thereby managing to gain a few senior cabinet offices, the male political elite begin to appoint them to ministries that, in their shrunken masculinised political imaginations, are deemed less politically important.   Now is the point where you probably want to intervene and ask, ‘But nowadays, in our current era of climate crisis, how can even patriarchal politically powerful men imagine that their own government’s environment ministry is less important for their country than, say, their defence ministry?’ Or, put another way, you might ask, ‘With climate change threatening entire populations’ ways of life, how can patriarchal men kid themselves into thinking that environmental policy-making can be feminised, that is, shoved to the political margins?’.   These are exactly the sorts of questions feminists— as thinkers, researchers, and activists— pose. So we have to stay on our toes. Will ministries of environment today start to acquire more political saliency? As they do, will the proportion of all of the world’s ministers of environment who are women begin to drop? As climate change acquires the precious mantle of a ‘state security issue’, will male political elites begin to deem environmental policy ‘too important’ to be left in the hands of mere women? Stay tuned!   People who are invested in patriarchal ways of doing things, I’ve learned, are always trying to update their strategies, trying to convince the rest of us that their revised formulas amount to ‘progress’. Patriarchal people, in other words, are never just old fusty men in pinstripe suits, smoking cigars in their private clubs. Patriarchal people are now the hip Silicon Valley guys working out, eating salads, and sporting black T-shirts. I think it’s a big mistake for us ever to imagine that patriarchy is old-fashioned. It can be as up-to-date as tomorrow.   CJLPA : In your opinion, what current challenges do feminist thinkers like yourself face more generally, and more specifically within the field of international relations?   CE:  Lots of people who ask feminist questions about international politics face not so much direct hostility as in attention. Feminist questions—and their answers—about the gendered causes and consequences of Brexit, Iran’s weaponry, Palestinian rights, Myanmar’s military coup, the world trade in Xinjiang cotton, implementing the Paris Climate Accord, the trials at the International Crimes Court, too often are met with ‘Who cares?’ The scores (really scores!) of us who are seriously pursuing these and many similar questions (nothing is out of bounds for feminist international politics specialists!), have become convinced, as a result of what we’ve uncovered in the workings of international politics, that we can help citizens and policymakers be more effective by helping them become more realistically informed about the complex workings of power.   Our findings over the last 50 years of gender-curious research have shown us, first, that there are a lot more wieldings of power in more sites (especially efforts to control women—as mothers, wives, girlfriends, daughters, sex workers, factory workers, plantation workers, domestic workers, refugees, and widows) than non-feminist commentators want to admit. Non-feminist commentators constantly underestimate power. Second, our collective investigations have revealed that power takes many more forms than most commentators acknowledge. That’s one of the findings that all the activists and their academic allies who’ve made #MeToo into a genuinely global movement have lit up in neon.   In the academic field of what is called ‘IR’, gender-curious scholars have made a lot of headway. There are now new books and whole book series by publishers like Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Palgrave, and Routledge focused on gender and international politics. That’s big. Major transnational NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, The International Crisis Group, and Refugees International now fund and publish gender-conscious investigatory reports. In no small part that is due to there being a lot more feminist-informed staff people inside those NGOs. We also have created or transformed dozens of academic journals that publish very interesting articles that explore the workings of gender and power—that explore the relationships between diverse women, men, and power, as well as the contests over the norms of masculinity, femininity, and those contests’ implications for gaining, losing, and wielding power.   Furthermore, we’ve created academic associations and caucuses within academic associations around the world. Both the US-based International Studies Association and the British International Studies Association have large and lively gender studies sections. Just recently, I was talking with women who have created a Women and Gender Caucus inside the Brazilian International Relations Association. Last week, I was talking with a professor in Bucharest who has launched a new network of South-eastern European feminist security experts. There also are now at least two separate Feminist Foreign Policy groups.   Still, it can be hard for feminist researchers to get a hearing in the most prestigious media or most prominent international politics academic forums. What oftentimes happens is that you look at undergraduate and graduate course syllabuses and what do you see? The faculty member teaching the course doesn’t think of themselves as knowing much—or, frankly, caring much—about the workings of gender in international politics, yet nowadays feels they’ve got to give at least a token nod toward gender and IR (this is progress!). So, they squeeze the topic of gender and international politics into just one week. One week for the world’s workings of masculinities: really?  One week for exploring women’s resistances to abuse and   privilege:  really?  And, of course, this single week is put at the end of the term. This means that by the time the faculty member gets to the end of the term, she—or usually he—hasn’t covered everything else they consider important and therefore zips over gender political analysis without serious consideration.   That’s how patriarchy works. It was a big success to get most people who teach international politics—especially in the introductory undergrad or grad courses—at least to assign one reading on gender in international politics, and to devote at least one week to the topic, but neither in a way that might infuse the entire course and its students with a deeper feminist curiosity. Despite tokenisms, though, there are nowadays more and more graduate students in more and more countries—South Korea, Japan, India, Sweden, Poland, Argentina, Brazil, Romania, Turkey—who are really serious about investigating and teaching about the multiple gender dynamics shaping international politics. There’s where hope lies.   CJLPA : That’s exactly why I wanted to ask that question because I have spoken about it quite a lot recently with some of the female peers in my course. We have asked in seminars, for example, why should feminist critiques not be incorporated in other module topics?   CE:  You are so right: ask ‘Why?’ See if you can get the instructor in the course to be a little uneasy about their own segregating of gender dynamics into a separate section, as if it had nothing to do with everything else you all are investigating. I call this ‘patriarchal siloing’. It’s a teaching practice that is designed to foster the risky notion that most of international political life is pristinely un-gendered—as if contests over manliness do not shape militarism, as if practices of making women’s factory labour ‘cheap’ does not affect international trade, as if efforts to control women’s reproduction do not play roles in migration, development, or nationalism. You could even suggest that the instructor reorganise the course. Everyone is very possessive about their own course syllabuses. Still, you might suggest, ‘Next term, couldn’t you place the gender-curious analytical questions up in the second week of the course so that then we will be prepared throughout the rest of the course to ask those probing questions?’ That’s not asking the faculty member to completely reorganise his or her thinking, though it might have that effect on the students! Give it a try, and then tell me what happens!   CJLPA : What has been the effect of COVID-19 on gender inequalities across the world, and what are we likely to see happen to these inequalities post-pandemic?   CE:  This is so interesting. In recent months as the pandemic lockdowns have rolled across diverse countries, I’ve been hearing two things: first, that the ‘politics of care’ finally, after decades of neglect as a mere ‘women’s issue’, might be taken seriously; second, that what has happened in so much conventional (that is, not gender-curious) political commentary is that a lot of people who are treated as ‘experts’ because they presumably know how to talk about budgets, balance of payments, and national security, but haven’t a clue about the workings of child care, are having to move over and give at least a bit of authoritative space to those feminist economists, feminist sociologists, feminist historians, and feminist labour researchers who do know the broad policy implications of low-paid and unpaid gendered child and elder care.   One of the things I’m very hopeful about in the new Biden–Harris administration here in the US is that both care and experts on care are getting a lot of official attention. Joe Biden has appointed specialists in the gendered political economies of care to senior posts both in the White House and in several cabinet departments. Women representatives in the House (for instance, Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut) and the Senate (Patty Murray of Washington stands out) are finally getting the legislative and executive backing their childcare and family bills deserve.   Perhaps the biggest conceptual innovation in US politics today is that ‘infrastructure’ now includes not only the conventional bridges and highways, but also family care provision. Talk of government funding for bridges and childcare in the same policy sentence—that’s big!   Since eldercare and childcare in so many countries relies not only on women’s unpaid labour but also on the low paid labour of migrant women workers, of course, that means—as it has long meant— that the political economy of care is an international political phenomenon. This means that in the not-quite-yet-post-COVID world, all of us who do international political analysis had better get up to speed on the gendered international politics of care.   During my doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, nobody ever urged me to investigate the politics of paid and unpaid care. But when I was researching what became the first edition of Bananas, Beaches and Bases , it dawned on me that I should look at the international migration of domestic workers. It was Filipinas who stirred my curiosity. I’ve been interested in Philippines politics for decades because of its experience as an American colony, because of its serving as the site of major US military bases, because of its vibrant electoral politics, and because of its prominent women’s movement. So, when researching Bananas , my attention was caught by the data showing that remittances sent back home by thousands of Filipina women and Filipino men working abroad was a significant factor in the Philippines’s balance of payments. The men were working especially as crew members on globalised cargo ships. The women were working as nurses and as domestic workers. Suddenly I realised, ‘I should pay attention to that’.   One reason that I think I was kind of ready—not an expert, but intellectually ready—for the COVID-19 era was that I had already been tutored by women in international domestic migration networks (which now include Brazilian, Sri Lankan, Ecuadorian, as well as Filipina women) to keep track of domestic work as an international political phenomenon, even if most political commentators weren’t paying much attention.   As we haltingly, stunningly, unevenly move beyond COVID, what will the gendered patterns of paid and unpaid work look like? Will the economic inequalities between women and men in post-pandemic UK, Brazil, US, India, and Australia gape even more widely than they did before 2020? What will be the consequences for both national and international politics? We had better start paying attention now.   CJLPA : Do you think that we also need to keep an eye on the kind of crisis management that goes on afterwards?   CE:  What are the gender analytical skills required today by employers of anybody who gets a crisis management job? My guess is none. That likelihood is despite a burgeoning literature on the gender differences in what happens in all sorts of natural disasters and public health crises to men and to women.   For example, feminist geographers have investigated what happens to men in earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis and what happens to women. Gender differences, they have found, loom large. Who was taught to swim, who wasn’t? Whose customary attire enables them to run fast? Who must rescue the children? Who fishes in boats out the ocean, who harvests seafood close to shore? Who in any household is responsible for collecting firewood and fresh water? Who in a hastily assembled refugee camp is most likely to be threatened with sexual assault? If crisis managers don’t know of these findings or do not integrate their lessons into their organisations’ preparedness practices and their response practices, they will not only fail to address the particular needs of women and men; their gender-ignorant actions will deepen gender inequities.   CJLPA : Would you say you are quite hopeful in this instance?   CE:  Wherever any gender analytical skills are being seriously taught is a cause for hope. Any university that is making the acquisition of gender analytical skills a degree requirement gives me even more hope. We can’t wait until people are hired into policy-making or crisis management jobs, and then imagine that they’ll suddenly become gender-curious—though, thankfully, I’ve seen this happen occasionally. Far more effective is to build gender curiosity and gender analytical skills acquisition into the career-building curriculum.   CJLPA : Do you have any recommendations on how to be a conscious feminist?   CE:  Each of us is most likely to see the value of a feminist curiosity in our own lives as citizens and in our own work in any field if we can grasp how gender dynamics of any sort shapes the thing we care about. So, first, I’d suggest that everyone plunges into case studies. In most of my writings I try to mix case studies with larger analytical questions and patterns. The big picture and the small picture—I never choose one over the other. It’s the relationships between the two that I’ve found most revealing. I’m wary of those commentators who imagine that their own badges of ‘intellectual sophistication’ are earned by talking only about the big picture.   I think we all learn lasting lessons from exploring grittily detailed case studies. We learn to appreciate complexity; we learn to stay wide awake to subtleties; we train ourselves to have long attention spans. We can learn a lot too from delving into case studies of poor policy-making.   Look, for instance, at the relationships between men and women and the operations of masculinities and of femininities in London’s Grenfell Tower fire disaster, in Flint, Michigan’s water contamination tragedy. Investigate the workings of masculinities in the Boeing MAX 8 disasters. Explore the sexual abuse of local Congolese women by international male health workers during the country’s recent Ebola outbreak. Take a close look at the gender dynamics shaping responses to COVID in New Zealand, India, and South Korea.   Second, I would suggest that we all pay attention to what data are being collected and what data are not being collected—with what consequences. It’s amazing how much feminist energy has been and is still being spent trying to get national and international agencies to collect gender-disaggregated data for the sake of making better, fairer, more effective, more sustainable policies. For years, the UN collected nutritional data by ungendered household caloric intake. Households, though, do not eat! Men and women and boys and girls eat—and, lo and behold, gender-smart data collectors found that, even within poor households, adult men consume more calories and especially more protein than do adult women.   Finally, data must be gender-collected and gender-disaggregated on everything: illness, deaths, carers, students, teachers, paid work, unpaid work, bankruptcies, arms manufacturing, policymakers, budget expenditures, policing, market vendors, vaccinations, contractors, detentions, weapons possession, mining, farming, banking, peacekeepers, donors, sexual assault perpetrators, child marriage…everything. Teresa Turkheimer, the interviewer, is a final-year undergraduate in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, working towards an MSc in European and International Public Policy at the London School of Economics in the 2021-22 academic year. Her interests lie in European politics, European Union foreign and security policy, and political philosophy.

Professor Andreas Rahmatian is Professor of Commercial Law at the University of Glasgow School of Law. Originally from Vienna, he obtained his first degree in law and a PhD in Private Law from the University of Vienna, and completed another degree in musicology and history there. He holds an LLM from the University of London. He worked as an associate attorney-at-law in Vienna and qualified as a solicitor with a City firm in London before he became a full-time academic. He has been a fellow at the Institut d’études avancées in Nantes, France. His research focuses on intellectual property law and commercial law. His books are  Copyright and Creativity: The Making of Property Rights in Creative Works (2011),  Lord Kames: Legal and Social Theorist (2015), and Credit and Creed: A Critical Legal Theory of Money (2019).    CJLPA:  Do you think all forms of creativity should be protected by the law? Professor Andreas Rahmatian : It’s a difficult question, of course, because it depends what you mean by creativity. Here we probably talk about creativity in relation to copyright in particular, because creativity can otherwise be in relation to all sorts of things. Now the problem with copyright creativity is that it’s not necessarily dealing with artistic creativity. Obviously, artistic creativity is also part of copyright creativity, but the understanding of creativity in copyright is based on a normative definition, if not a completely clear one. Whether that is artistic creativity as an artist understands it is actually immaterial. So the question is, when you ask, ‘Should all forms of creativity should be protected by the law?’, it is already the case that non-artistic creativity is protected by the law. Whenever you have got a kind of selection or arrangement which somehow points back to some individual, then you have got, as it were, creativity in the sense of copyright as ‘originality’.   The judgment of Infopaq [1] and the following cases of the CJEU in the EU didn’t change very much the originality ideas in the UK, in my opinion. In the United States the understanding of originality is pretty much the same, but whether that original work is also artistic in any way is rather irrelevant. It [the work] can be rather trivial. That is actually immaterial for the protection. And this is how copyright laws envisage creativity—even on the Continent, where they operate with all sorts of devices to water down the (theoretically) more personal requirement of the author’s input. In theory there is an approach more geared towards creativity in the sense of artistic creativity, but in reality this is much less so. There is, for example, this nice legal concept of ‘small change’, or kleine Mü̈nze —it is really called like that in Germany—where you have works of everyday use, really ordinary works which can have some notional modicum of creativity put in, and you still get protection. Then below that level you quite often have neighbouring rights, for works which do not fulfil the required creativity level or originality level, but the neighbouring rights still protect them. Then below these, you have under certain circumstances protection against parasitical competition in the sense that you actually have a prohibition to copy someone else’s work. So you have got all sorts of protection levels, both on the Continent and in the UK (or in the common law countries), and they achieve protection in different conceptual ways.   Now some people will say ‘creativity’ also means creative investments, or even ‘creative’ accounting, which is usually illegal but perhaps also creative. So it’s very hard to pin down ‘creativity’. A typical problem is restoration work in the arts, by a picture restorer, or a restorer of musical pieces. The classical case in that area in the UK was the Sawkins v Hyperion  case, 2005,[2] which shows that for copyright protection you need not be creative in the sense that you are actually creating anything new. Artistic creativity, if you go to an art school or to a conservatoire as a composer, has a tinge of novelty, but we are not interested in novelty in copyright law. So the restorer, who actually writes his counterpoint in the style of the music of the late seventeenth century, as Sawkins did, in order to restore the missing parts to produce a performing edition, did exactly not [sic] mean to be creative but faithful to the work to be restored. It’s meant to be in the style of the Baroque composer. And yet it is protected as original for copyright purposes, and there’s no doubt that this also applies on the Continent: the result in such a case would have been, and in fact was, the same, because in France, in a parallel case, Sawkins’ work was viewed as being original. That was decided under French copyright law, although the French authors’ rights system is supposed to be totally different. It’s a very nice case where we have two different legal systems with essentially the same facts, the same claim in both cases, and the same result, based on a different conceptual system. Although it may be quite difficult to appreciate this from an ‘artistic’ viewpoint, the creativity or the skill of a restorer should get protected. In fact, in France and in Italy there are quite a few cases in relation to restoration, especially in the visual arts, and there is no doubt that they get protection.

Currently Professor of Government at King’s College London, Professor Vernon Bogdanor is a leading expert in British constitutional politics and history and has received a CBE in recognition of his extensive contribution to the field. In his most recent book, titled Britain and Europe in a Troubled World , published in 2020, Professor Bogdanor traces Britain’s historical relationship with the European Union in order to understand how Brexit came to be. In this interview, Professor Bogdanor tackles the constitutional issues that the United Kingdom is likely to face in a post-Brexit era, the different lessons learnt as a result of the referendum vote in 2016, and the role that the monarchy has to play in the current British parliamentary democracy . This interview was conducted across 28 and 29 April 2022. CJLPA : What brought you to research and understand British politics? What fascinated you the most about British politics or the British political system? Professor Vernon Bogdanor : Our very strange constitution. The Queen once said that the British constitution has always been a puzzle and always will be. I have tried to elucidate that puzzle. We are in fact one of just three democracies in the world which do not have constitutions. The other two are New Zealand—whose population is half that of Greater London—and Israel, although the Israelis are working towards a constitution. Now, some people in Britain ask, ‘Should we have a constitution?’ But in a sense, that is an absurd question. The real question is: ‘What is there about the air in Britain that means we should not have a constitution, not do what every other country does?’ This problem has become more acute since we left the European Union (EU). In my view, when we were in the EU, we were in fact living under a constitution, namely the treaties of the EU, which provide for a division of power both at the centre between the Commission, the Council of Ministers, the Court of Justice, and the Parliament, but also territorially between the EU itself and the member states. Also, in recent years, the EU has yielded the protection of rights in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights which was enacted in 2009. That led to a remarkable episode in British constitutional history which has not been very much noticed. In Benkharbouche v. Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs [1], Ms. Benkharbouche claimed against the Sudanese embassy unfair dismissal, failure to pay her the national minimum wage and holiday pay, as well as breaches of the Working Time Regulations. The Sudanese embassy claimed immunity under the provisions of the 1978 State Immunity Act. But the Supreme Court ruled that sections of the Act were incompatible with Article 6 of the European Convention providing for a fair trial. The remedy for this would be a declaration of incompatibility which is not a strictly legal remedy, since it has no legal effect. But Article 47 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights provides that if rights had been violated by the Convention, they have also been violated by the Charter. So, the relevant parts of the State Immunity Act were disapplied. For the first time in British history, the Court disapplied part of an Act of Parliament because it conflicted with human rights. That, I think, would have Dicey turning in his grave. It was something new and unprecedented. As we have now left the EU, the Charter no longer applies, but Benkharbouche, nevertheless, is an important precedent. The European Charter protects a far wider range of rights than the European Convention. The Convention was enacted in the early 1950s and human rights are, in my view, a dynamic phenomenon. For example, in those days there was no thought of the right to protect the environment which is in the European Charter. Few thought of the right to academic freedom which is in the European Charter. But the most important right is the right to equality in terms of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion and so on which is not in the European Convention. There is also a right to healthcare in the European Charter but not in the Convention. The Convention provides a right to education but not healthcare. Leaving the EU took us out of a constitutional system. We have incorporated almost all EU law into our own law, so that the government and parliament can decide what they want to keep, what they want to modify, and what they want to repeal. That is, of course, a huge task. Incorporation itself is nothing new. For example, our ex-colonies incorporated British law so that they could decide which British laws they wanted to keep. But when they did that, it was because they wanted to develop a constitution of their own. We have done something perhaps unique in the democratic world and instead of entrenching we have been dis-entrenching. We have moved away from a constitutional system to an unprotected constitution. This is emphasised by the fact that one part, almost the only part I think, of EU law that we have not incorporated is the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. This means we have moved from a system which protects rights, to one which does not protect rights. We do have the European Convention, but the way we have adopted it is rather different from almost every other country because judges are not given the right by the Human Rights Act to disapply legislation conflicting with the Convention. All they can do is to issue a declaration of incompatibility. That is just a statement which has no legal effect, and it is then up to Parliament to decide whether to take action. Parliament has a special fast track procedure by which it can take action if it so wishes, but courts in other European countries have much greater powers because they can disapply legislature. This raises a very interesting question because the other 27 member states of the EU do, of course, retain the European Charter. So, I would ask this question: Are our Members of Parliament (MPs) so much more sensitive to human rights than the legislators of other countries in Europe that they can be entrusted with this very important function? I will leave the answer to this question to those reading the interview! It is worth stressing that rights are not solely for nice people like ourselves, but also for very small minorities who may not necessarily be very nice, for example, prisoners, suspected terrorists, suspected paedophiles, and so on—also, asylum seekers, a very small minority not effectively represented in Parliament, also have rights. Brexit raises this issue of whether we should continue to live under an unprotected constitution which does not effectively protect human rights. And there is a further question arising from Brexit. Does the devolution settlement need further protection in Scotland, Wales, and particularly in Northern Ireland? I will discuss devolution a little later. With our strange constitution, law and politics are closely intertwined. Much more of our constitution than in other countries is based on convention. These conventions, in turn, often depend upon popular feeling. For example, we have the case now of Boris Johnson and Partygate. A Prime Minister who has deliberately misled Parliament must, so the Ministerial Code declares, resign. But this convention depends in large part on popular feeling. Are people angry enough to protest to their MPs or do they say that it does not matter too much? A great writer on the constitution, not as well-known as Bagehot, but well worth reading, Sidney Low, author of The Governance of England first published in 1904, said, ‘We live under a system of tacit understandings, but the understandings are not always understood’. That seems to me a very perceptive point about the British constitution. CJLPA : I am assuming on the basis of the points you have just mentioned, do correct me if I am wrong, you are a supporter of a codified constitution in the UK. In light of this, has this been received or acknowledged by figures in the political system? Are there supporters for a constitution at the moment? I can imagine that the current opposition might not be keen on that idea. VB : When we had a Labour government, Gordon Brown who was Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010—and I think it no accident that he came from Scotland—favoured a constitution. If he had been re-elected in 2010, he would have tried to enact one in 2015 which was the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta—but he was not re-elected. The Liberal Democrats have long been in favour of a constitution, and I think some in the Labour Party are. Perhaps the longer Labour is in opposition, the more likely it is to support a constitution. But the Conservatives are, in general, not in favour, partly because they are the natural party of government in the sense that they tend to be in power most of the time. I mentioned that it was not an accident that Gordon Brown, being Scottish, was in favour of a constitution, for many Scots have never accepted the idea of the sovereignty of Parliament. They say that it is the Scottish people who are sovereign, and that point has been tacitly accepted by Westminster. There was a referendum in Scotland on independence in 2014. The Scots voted against it, but had they voted for it, they would have become independent. There was also a referendum before devolution was introduced. In both cases it was accepted that it was for the Scots to decide, even if their decision went against the wishes of Westminster. So, for the Scots, the central principle is perhaps less the sovereignty of the Westminster parliament than the sovereignty of the Scottish people. That is also accepted in Northern Ireland. If a majority in Northern Ireland were to decide that it wished to join with Ireland, that would be accepted by Westminster. An American once said that in politics where you stand depends upon where you sit. Perhaps that is true in Britain because it may be that the sovereignty of parliament is primarily an English concept. The Welsh government favours a quasi-federal system for the United Kingdom (UK). The Scots believe in the sovereignty of the Scottish people. In Northern Ireland there is a divided community, but there also, the principle of the sovereignty of parliament is overtaken by the principle of the sovereignty of the people. There are, however, two different views about the Northern Ireland constitution depending on whether you are a unionist or a nationalist. CJLPA : Say Gordon Brown is attempting to get re-elected again and he has the idea of codifying the constitution within his manifesto. What is the extent of the risk of the codification of the constitution becoming a politicised issue in the media? VB : I doubt if there is much risk. Enacting a constitution would be a long process because it would require popular consent. Most people in England do not think much about the constitution, although they do in Scotland and Northern Ireland. We would first have to have a body to draw up an agenda; then you would need a Royal Commission which would have to travel around the country having evidence sessions. That would be a kind of learning exercise for the public. Then the government would draw up a constitution and then there would have to be a referendum, probably with a majority needed in all parts of the UK, unlike the Brexit referendum. So, it would be a long process. I do not think it would necessarily be party political. I think, however, that it will be a long time before we get a constitution. It is not an immediate issue, and it is very low on most people’s priorities. Human rights also are very low on most people priorities, though one lawyer, former MP and former attorney general Dominic Grieve, has made the interesting suggestion that the European Convention should include a right to healthcare as the European Charter does, in addition to the right to education. The reason is that the right to healthcare would affect large numbers of people, and therefore it would be more likely that more people would feel they own the Convention, which they do not at present now because they think of it as defending disreputables such as criminals. But they would then own it and there would be more respect for human rights. Otherwise, constitutional issues are a minority concern. There are no mass meetings in Trafalgar Square with crowds clamouring for a constitution! CJLPA : If a human rights issue is quite prominent and has a lot of media following, perhaps it could grab some attention? VB : Only amongst a small group of the intelligentsia, the academics—the chattering classes if you like, not amongst the people as a whole. I do not think academics are very representative of public opinion in general or necessarily have much insight into public opinion. Opinion polls show that enacting a constitution is not a priority. CJLPA : I think you would agree with me that there have been many, but not all, British politicians who have been out of touch with the citizens that they are trying to represent: take the recent Partygate scandal that you mentioned earlier and the fact that it is currently difficult to punish a misbehaving government, or Brexit where even though the referendum was a close result, MPs were evidently not representative of the UK because a majority of them actually wanted to remain. In light of that, to what extent is the current UK political system truly a representative democracy? VB : I think your introduction of the referendum is very important. For, as you say, the majority of MPs were against Brexit, and the government was against Brexit. For the first time in British history, Parliament was enacting legislation in which it did not believe. Legally, Parliament is still sovereign, it could have ignored the referendum, it would not have been unlawful to do so. But, in practice, it was not possible to ignore the referendum. So, Brexit is a milestone in our constitutional history. Not only was Parliament no longer in practice sovereign, it was shown not to be representative of the people. As you know, many in the British political elite were fervent Remainers and did not want to accept the result. The EU does not like referendums either. In 1974, shortly before we were to have our first referendum, the ex-President of the European Commission Monsieur Jean Rey said these matters should be left to trained people. ‘You cannot’, he said, ‘have a system in which housewives should be allowed to decide the future of Britain!’. A lot of the arguments against referendums, in my opinion, are similar to the arguments used against extending the suffrage—that the people are ignorant, that they do not understand the issues, and that political decisions are best left to elites. A French reactionary, Joseph de Maistre, declared that the principle of the sovereignty of the people—which is now a part of our constitution I believe—is so dangerous that even if it were true, it would be best to conceal it! Not only is the referendum now part of our constitution, but there are, what we might call, ‘shadow referendums’, referendums which were not held because of fear of the result, but which nevertheless influenced the political agenda. For example, when Tony Blair was Prime Minister from 1997 to 2007, he very much wanted Britain to join the Euro, but he believed that this required a referendum. However, he never put the issue to referendum because there was not one single opinion poll which showed a majority in favour of the Euro. You may say looking at the experience of continental countries, particularly Mediterranean countries such as Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece, that we were lucky not to join the Euro! CJLPA : On the topic of democracy, I would like to ask a question specifically about the role of the British monarchy because monarchs by now are the exception, not the rule. Especially now, in Britain, it is quite difficult to support the monarchy when its role in the UK constitution might be minimal but its influence, as we have seen, has proven to be plenty. What role, if any, does the monarchy have to play in a democratic system? VB : The main role of the monarchy is not constitutional. Its constitutional powers are almost nil. But as well as being head of state, the Queen is head of the nation. She can, as it were, represent the whole country to itself. By contrast, if you have a president, you either have a president such as Macron in France or Biden in America who is head of the executive. They represent not the whole country, but just half of the country. Or you can have a constitutional president without political power which, for example, Italy and Germany have. I suspect that very few people could name the presidents of Italy and Germany, I certainly could not, and the position is usually given to a harmless retired politician who is put out to grass. Do we want that here? President Cameron or President Blair? They could not represent the whole country. This is particularly important with the devolution settlement because any elected person would be either English, Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish. The Queen is none of these and all of them at the same time. We are lucky in the Queen because she instinctively understands, what you might call, ‘the soul of the British people’, which it would be very difficult for a politician to do. Unlike a politician, she has no party-political history. No one knows whether she is Labour, Liberal Democrat, or Conservative, or what her views are on politically controversial matters. I think we are fortunate to have a constitutional monarchy. The constitutional monarchies in Europe are very stable, moderate countries: some Scandinavian countries, Britain, the Benelux countries, and Spain. We are lucky that we have never had a revolution because revolutions or defeat in war tend to get rid of monarchies. For example, in Italy the monarchy was removed after the defeat in the Second World War because the king was thought to be associated with fascism, in Germany after the First World War, and in France after the revolution. We are lucky, perhaps because we are an island, that we have never been involved in revolutions or upheavals. In 1945, when we had the first Labour majority government, the American president Harry Truman was visiting Britain and he said to King George VI, ‘I see you’ve had a revolution here’, and the King said ‘Oh no we don’t have things like that’. CJLPA : You say that the monarchy is the ‘soul of the British people’. I would perhaps counter that. You mentioned the Nordic countries and the role that their monarchy has to play. I would say that the level of influence is completely unparalleled. It is true that the power is minimal, but the influence and the presence is not. VB : I do not know if the Queen has much political influence. When has she exerted political influence? I do not think that is right. CJLPA : I was thinking more of the case of Prince Charles. VB : Yes, that is interesting. He has had influence, but not on party political matters. His technique is to raise an issue which he thinks has been hitherto ignored by politicians, for example, the environment and climate change. When the politicians do take up the issue, he steps back. He has also spoken on a number of other issues that he thinks important which are not party political, for example architecture, teaching Shakespeare in schools, and so on. He has said controversial things, but they are not controversial in the party-political sense. He has never spoken publicly about Brexit or whether we should have a Conservative government or Labour government. He is very careful in all his speeches not to appear partisan. He does not speak on advice like the Queen but, out of courtesy, he shows his speeches to ministers. I suspect that if ministers said, ‘Well, look, this does entrench on government policy’, he would back down. He has known since birth what his role will be, and he has been trained and brought up in the constitutional tradition. He has not been party-political, but he has influenced opinion in other ways. I agree with you on that. CJLPA : With race and identity coming up a lot, regarding the institution itself and its imperialist past, rather than the Queen more specifically or the members of the family, I think people disagree that it is representative of the British people. VB : The monarchy in Britain is unlike the other monarchies I have mentioned because it has an international dimension thanks to the existence of the British empire, now the Commonwealth. Of the 54 countries which are members—around a third of the world’s population—15 of them, now that Barbados is a Republic, are Commonwealth monarchies. The rest are republics. The Commonwealth is a voluntary organisation of equals, while the empire was based on domination. But the empire cannot have been quite as terrible as some suggest if almost all of the colonies have voluntarily agreed to join the Commonwealth. The only former countries ruled by Britain that have voluntarily left the Commonwealth are Burma, now Myanmar, and Ireland. Two counties which were not part of the empire—Mozambique and Rwanda—have joined. The Commonwealth gives the monarchy an international dimension. The majority of people in the Commonwealth are not white and not Christian. This means that the monarchy must stand and does stand for racial and religious equality. In her Diamond Jubilee in 2012, the Queen’s first visit was to Leicester which is an example of a multiracial city where integration has proved successful. And in 2004 she made a particularly interesting Christmas broadcast. She spoke of the parable of the Good Samaritan, the implication of which was clear. ‘Everyone is our neighbour, no matter what race, creed or colour. The need to look after a fellow human being is far more important than any cultural or religious differences. Most of us have learned to acknowledge and respect the ways of other cultures and religions, but what matters even more is the way in which those from different backgrounds behave towards each other in everyday life’. She then went on to say: It was for this reason that I particularly enjoyed a story I heard the other day about an overseas visitor to Britain who said the best part of his visit had been travelling from Heathrow and into central London on the tube. His British friends, as you can imagine, were somewhat surprised, particularly as the visitor had been to some of the great attractions of the country. ‘What do you mean?’, they asked. ‘Because’, he replied, ‘I boarded the train just as schools were coming out. At each stop children were getting on and off—they were of every ethnic and religious background, some with scarves or turbans, some talking quietly, others playing and occasionally misbehaving together, completely at ease and trusting one another’. ‘How lucky you are’, said the visitor, ‘to live in a country where your children can grow up in this way’. We can also see the influence of the monarchy in the Queen’s broadcasts on COVID and in broadcasts commemorating D Day and VE Day where she was able to speak for the whole country. In my opinion, the case for constitutional monarchy is unanswerable. CJLPA : To what extent did the countries in the Commonwealth remain within the Commonwealth for economic reasons? VB : That is part of the argument, but one should not exaggerate it because, after all, when countries become independent, they do not ask whether they will be better off or worse off. If you had said to the Nigerians in the 1960s, ‘You will be economically worse off outside when you are no longer a British colony, when you are no longer ruled from Westminster’, they would have said ‘That’s completely irrelevant. We want to govern ourselves’. The Indians and other newly independent countries would have said the same. So, I would not overstress that argument. The Commonwealth is in a way a sentimental organisation which does a great deal of good because one of the main problems in the world is the relationship between people of different ethnic groups and religions. It is often forgotten that the Queen’s Christmas broadcast is not delivered in her role as Queen of Britain but as Head of the Commonwealth in which a majority are neither white nor Christian. I think it must be valuable to bring together people of different countries and different ethnic groups. CJLPA : We know that the Northern Ireland protocol is a particularly precarious issue, and a very delicate part of the Brexit process. We know it has been ruled by the High Court and the Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland as legal. If it is not constitutional, on the other hand, what does that mean for Brexit as a whole, or even just the UK constitution in general? VB : What it means is that at the very least the Protocol must be radically amended. The Protocol may or may not be constitutional. But the courts were asked to pronounce on whether it is lawful—a different matter. They have said that it is lawful, but it does not follow that it is constitutional. After all, a statute that is incompatible with the Human Rights Act is lawful, but it is not constitutional. It would be lawful for the government to have ignored the Brexit referendum, which was an advisory referendum. But most of us think it would not have been constitutional. CJLPA : What is likely to happen from here on in with the Northern Ireland protocol? What are we likely to see? VB : The Northern Ireland Protocol is a consequence of Brexit. Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK with a land border with an EU country. That has become of greater importance since Brexit because Britain will probably diverge from EU rules and regulations. The question is whether the regulatory and customs border should be on the island of Ireland or in the North Sea. Wherever it is, there is going to be trouble because if it is in the island of Ireland, the Irish nationalists are going to be annoyed. If, as is the case, it is in the Irish Sea, the unionists will be annoyed. Brexit goes against the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement or Belfast Agreement—I should say that there is no agreement on what it is to be called. If you are unionist you will call it the Belfast Agreement, if you are nationalist you will call it the Good Friday Agreement. But whatever it is called, the Agreement was an attempt to resolve the Irish problem. It enabled residents of Northern Ireland to identify as British, Irish, or both, and to enjoy Irish citizenship as well as British citizenship. But, with Brexit, if someone decides on Irish citizenship, she cannot access in Northern Ireland the rights of an EU citizen. She cannot, for example, access the European Charter for Fundamental Rights. So, Brexit does complicate the Irish problem. Both John Major and Tony Blair said in Northern Ireland that this would be a consequence of Brexit. Northern Ireland, as it happens, did not vote for Brexit: 56% voted to stay in the EU. But Britain is not a federal state and so Northern Ireland was overruled by the rest of the country. The Northern Ireland courts have been considering the contention by the unionists that the Protocol is unlawful because it goes against the Act of Union of 1800 which provided that there should be no customs barriers between Britain and Ireland. The courts have said that the relevant part of the Act of Union was overridden by the Withdrawal Act which is also a constitutional statute. Parliament well knew what it was doing when it enacted the Protocol, and in so doing, it implicitly repealed the relevant part of the Act of Union. The argument against the constitutionality of the Protocol would be that the Act of Union is absolutely fundamental because it is constitutive of the UK itself. So, it cannot be implicitly repealed but has to be explicitly repealed. That issue may go to the Supreme Court, I do not know whether leave to appeal to the Supreme Court has been given but the unionists are seeking it. CJLPA : Because of the fact that it was brought by staunch unionists to the courts, is conflict almost inevitable? VB : Yes. The withdrawal agreement is a victory for the Irish nationalists. It is a zero-sum game. The Good Friday Agreement, or the Belfast Agreement, tried to avoid the zero-sum game. Both unionists and nationalists could win, one could be both British and Irish. But, in relation to the Protocol, one can understand the unionist position, since the Protocol divides the UK economically. CJLPA : Regardless of how the Northern Ireland protocol is likely to turnout, are we likely to see a chain reaction of similar, but more sovereignty-related, issues in the other devolved nations? VB : Yes, Brexit has caused renewed conflict between Westminster on the one hand and Scotland and Wales on the other, for this reason. When the devolution settlement was made in the late 1990s the assumption was that Britain would stay in the EU. The devolution of some functions, for example, agriculture and fisheries, was fairly meaningless because almost all policy in those areas was determined by Brussels, so there was no real scope for an independent policy in these areas from Edinburgh or Cardiff or, indeed, Westminster. In theory, with the incorporation of EU law back into Britain, all EU powers relating to devolved matters should go to Scotland and Wales. But this raises a problem since we cannot have, for example, four different systems of agricultural subsidies in the UK, especially when agriculture will almost certainly be the subject of trade negotiations. Suppose we seek an agreement with America. The Americans would want to ensure that they had access to the whole of the UK market, not just England. So, in the Internal Market bill, the government reserved some powers which had been devolved. There has been much annoyance in Scotland and Wales and their governments have tried to amend the law through the courts. They have, however, not succeeded since we do not have a federal system. So, Parliament can still legislate on matters devolved to Scotland and Wales. But in Scotland and Wales many say, ‘This may be lawful but it’s unconstitutional, you shouldn’t be legislating on devolved matters without our consent’. So, Brexit has raised problems in Scotland and Wales as well as in Northern Ireland. CJLPA : On a similar note, there is the looming possibility of a second independence referendum. In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon has promised the Scottish people that in a stable post-COVID era she would propose to them the question of independence. VB : That is possible, but contrary to what many think, Brexit makes independence more of a gamble because there would then be a hard border between Scotland and the rest of the UK. The rest of the UK is Scotland’s largest trading partner: almost all its exports go to the rest of the UK, not to the Continent. So, independence could be economically catastrophic for Scotland. In addition, Scotland gets more per head in public spending than England thanks to the Barnett formula. And she would face the same problem she faced in 2014 of what her currency should be. If it were to be the pound, she would have her monetary policy controlled from London. A similar arrangement caused Greece and Italy many problems with the EU. They were restricted in their economic policy since they had no control of monetary policy which lay with the European Central Bank. If Scotland had her own currency, interest rates might rocket sky high, since the new currency would be such an uncertain quantity. If Scotland joined the Euro, she would have to reduce her budget deficit to around 3%. Her budget deficit is now at around 7 or 8%. The cuts in public expenditure or increases in taxation would need to be huge. They would make George Osborne, the austerity Chancellor, look like Santa Claus! Scotland would not get the benefit of Margaret Thatcher’s EU rebate either, I suspect. So, independence is a less viable project than when Britain was in the EU, but, as I mentioned a moment ago, it might be argued that these economic factors are not really fundamental when it comes to independence. When India and Nigeria became independent, they did not ask whether they would be better off of or worse off. Nor did Ireland when she became independent. Pressure for independence seems to be receding a little at the moment, though it is stronger amongst younger voters than older ones. The current Conservative government will not grant a second referendum but if there is a Labour government dependent on the Scottish National Party (SNP), the SNP might insist on a second referendum as a price for supporting that government. So far, we have been talking about the British problem, but I think Brexit gives rise to great EU problems as well. Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, said it was a mistake to believe that the factors leading to Brexit are not also present in other EU countries. Brexit, he said, should be a warning signal for the EU. President Macron of France—on the Andrew Marr Show in early 2017—could not guarantee that if a referendum were held in France that it would not yield the same result as in Britain—Frexit. The EU faces problems and I think the main problem is that the original model—the Jean Monnet model, the Jacques Delors model—has reached its limit. As the EU comes to entrench upon national sensitivities, it encourages a populist reaction, particularly in areas such as immigration and control of economic policy. I think it would be better for Europe to develop along Gaullist lines, as a Europe des etats , a Europe of states (De Gaulle has often been mistakenly accused of using the phrase Europe des Patries ). The Commission remains the only body that can initiate legislation. Many find that odd since it is not elected and cannot be dismissed by the voters. Some Gaullists have said that it should become a secretariat of the Council, and that seems to me sensible. The federalists, Jean Monnet and Jacques Delors, wanted the Commission to be eventually responsible to the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers to become the upper house of member states. But Europeans do not regard the European Parliament as their primary legislature. Their primary allegiance is to their domestic legislatures and the European Parliament is seen as part of an alienated superstructure – representing them not us. There is a conflict, exacerbated by the EU, between the political class and the rest. The political class favours integration but the people are sceptical. This is particularly so in France. It was first revealed 30 years ago when the French, thought to be at the centre of European integration, only narrowly accepted the Maastricht treaty. Then, in 2005, they rejected the European constitution. Nevertheless, the elites go ahead regardless and that seems to me foolish. They need to take account of popular feeling. The EU was founded in a different age, the early 50s, when there was much greater deference, and I am not sure it works as well today when there is a demand for greater accountability. So, Brexit contains important lessons for the EU as well as for Britain. CJLPA : What lessons have the member states themselves learnt? And do they have a responsibility for how Brexit played out? VB : I think they need to look at how to combat populism and I have tried to suggest how that might be done. What is remarkable in Britain, contrary to many predictions—and I was myself a Remainer – is that Brexit, paradoxically, has liberated Britain’s liberal political culture. Survey after survey has shown that the public is more sympathetic to immigration than it was. We have developed more liberal attitudes to immigration than most EU member states, and immigrants have more of a chance of finding employment here than in many other European countries. The present government contains six members from non-white ethnic minorities. Angela Merkel’s last government in 2017 had none at all. When we left the European Parliament, we took a large percentage of ethnic minority Members of the European Parliament with us. A number of European countries have none at all. Contrary to what many predicted, we have not become a more insular racist country, we have become a more liberal country. Populist forces seem to have been weakened. The EU must itself learn how to combat populism. CJLPA : After Brexit we saw many far-right parties recoil very quickly from their own plans to exit from the EU. What has the far-right learnt with regards to Brexit? VB : The far-right benefits from general alienation from government, particularly on immigration and on the fact that the EU makes it very difficult for national governments to control economic policy. In the Mediterranean countries—not so much in Italy but in Spain and Portugal and possibly Greece—the far-left has gained more. The far-left has gained in France as well. It is the entrenching by the EU on national sensitivities that is so worrying. If you look at past federal states, many have been built after war—the American Civil War, the German wars under Bismarck, the Swiss war in 1848—and took a long time to form, even in America where everyone speaks the same language. There is not going to be any sort of federation in a Europe comprising so many different national traditions, languages, and cultures for a long time. One might have got it and might possibly still get it if an inner core of the original six got together—Germany, Italy, France, and the Benelux. But there is very unlikely to be a federation of the 27 member states. CJLPA : In light of some of the negotiations being postponed to a later date, when will we see a post-Brexit life? Will we be seeing it anytime soon? VB : Brexit is a process not an event. I think the process will continue for a long time. And it will be some time before we can judge the economic and constitutional effects of Brexit. On these matters the jury is still out on whether Brexit will prove beneficial or not. The jury is also still out on the future of the UK. Will Scotland remain part of it? Will Northern Ireland? No one knows, and I am not going to predict. It is difficult enough for the historian to find out what has happened in the past let alone what will happen in the future. This interview was conducted by Teresa Turkheimer, an MSc student in European and International Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her main interest lies in understanding the causes and effects of inequalities that characterise the labour market today, and is hoping to pursue a career in research in the coming years. [1] [2017] UKSC 62.