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On 12 January 2022, there was an attempt to destroy, or at least damage, the statue of Prospero and Ariel installed outside the BBC’s Broadcasting House in London, on the grounds that its sculptor, Eric Gill, was a ‘paedophile’. A petition has been launched on the website of the left-wing petition organiser, 38 degrees, calling for the removal of the statue. At the time of writing (February 2022), it has nearly reached its target of 3,000 signatures. Save the Children has withdrawn its recommendation that one of the many type-fonts developed by Gill—Gill Sans—should be used in its publicity material. In the course of the media response to the attack, Gill was described as a ‘known paedophile’ who ‘sexually abused his two eldest daughters’[1] and ‘a monster, a depraved paedophile who abused his daughters and others […] a man who committed horrific sexual crimes’.[2] The Wikipedia entry on Gill has a section on his ‘sexual crimes’. The 38 Degrees petition reads: Please sign to demand that the BBC remove the sculpture depicting a naked child, created by known paedophile Eric Gill, which is above the main entrance of BBC Broadcasting House. Gill had an incestuous relationship with his sister, sexual relationships with two of his pubescent daughters and even his family dog. The BBC likes to think a naked boy submissively leaning into the raised leg of a wizard is simply a metaphor for broadcasting. To the BBC Eric Gill was a major British artist rather than a child and animal abuser. Why is this important? I believe that the BBC would regain some credibility with their reputation, if they were seen to act upon the image of a naked child created by a known pedophile. It will show that they do not approve of the crimes committed by their past stars, Savile, King, Hall and Harris and show that they don’t condone anybody who carries out child abuse . [3] Comments left by signatories include: ‘To have a sculpture made by a pedo outside a building that harbers [sic] pedos is a disgrace to decent normal people. pull down the statue and also the building the BBC is a disgrace to the British people’; ‘The BBC are a disgrace from savil to hall and all the other monsters they helped. the pedos statue want smashed into a million bits and the building burnt to the ground’; ‘Because it’s absolutely grim mate, how is there a child penis on a sculpture of all things?? We don’t even celebrate some of our greatest heroes yet we apparently support wizards and pedos, no thanks I’ll stick to dungeons and dragons’.[4] The controversy, such as it is, turns on whether it is right to admire work done by a depraved monster (‘Eric Gill’s crimes were unforgivable, but his statue is blameless’[5]; ‘Eric Gill: can we separate the artist from the abuser?’[6]) and, if it is, whether such work should not be shown in a more discreet setting, perhaps adorned with some sort of explanatory text. There seems to be little disagreement over whether or not Gill can be characterised as a ‘paedophile’—‘a man who committed horrific sexual crimes’.[7] I developed an interest in Gill through my interest in the French Cubist painter, Albert Gleizes. Both Gill and Gleizes were in correspondence with the Ceylonese metaphysician and writer on traditional art, Ananda Coomaraswamy. Both were fond of quoting Coomaraswamy’s well-known dictum: ‘An artist is not a special sort of man but every man is a special sort of artist’. Neither Gill nor Gleizes knew each other but Coomaraswamy grouped them together with himself and the American engraver (friend and correspondent of Gill) Arthur Graham Carey as people assumed to be ‘mediaevalists’, though of course that wasn’t how he saw it himself. He preferred the term ‘traditionalist’.[8] I set about reading Gill and was impressed by his general philosophy on the nature of work and art, which could perhaps be summarised in the opening two paragraphs of his essay from 1918, Slavery and Freedom : That state is a state of Slavery in which a man does what he likes to do in his spare time and in his working time that which is required of him. This state can only exist when what a man likes to do is to please himself. That state is a state of Freedom in which a man does what he likes to do in his working time and in his spare time that which is required of him. This state can only exist when what a man likes to do is to please God.[9] DH Lawrence, who disliked Gill’s prose in general (‘Crass is the only word: maddening like a tiresome uneducated workman arguing in a pub—argufying would describe it better—and banging his fist’), nonetheless, and despite the mention of ‘God’, found ‘more in those two paragraphs than in all Karl Marx or Professor Whitehead or a dozen other philosophers rolled together’.[10] Gill’s life and work was a long protest against everything that ‘art’ has become in our own time. He recognised and vigorously asserted the principle put forward by William Morris that ‘art’ is just another word for work well done; he successfully established the kind of rural community life which provides the best conditions for such work; he recognised that the function of his own art form—sculpture—was inseparable from religion and that indeed all art, which is to say all work, can only realise its highest value if it is done in a spirit of worship; he detested the business spirit and mechanised production, always asserting the importance of the human over the economic. All that brought him very close to the thinking of Albert Gleizes, who also distrusted ‘art’, emphasised the importance of craftsmanship, tried (with much less success than Gill) to establish a communal way of working and living, and believed that painting and sculpture had lost their way with the Renaissance and its imitation of the external appearances of nature. Both Gleizes and Gill liked to quote the dictum of Thomas Aquinas (also favoured by Coomaraswamy): ‘Art imitates nature not in its effects but in its way of working’. It seemed to me, reading Gill, that, like Gleizes, he was one of the necessary voices of the twentieth century. The Autobiography , in particular, struck me as one of the most delightful books I had ever read. I was therefore upset when, just at the moment that I was discovering him, his reputation as a moral thinker was trashed with the publication of Fiona MacCarthy’s biography.[11] The book was published in 1989 with a great deal of publicity, including a special TV programme on Gill and an article in The Independent colour supplement, all pursuing the theme that startling revelations were to be found in it concerning sexually aberrant behaviour with his daughters, at least one sister, maybe two, and even the family dog. It is a theme hammered home by the Introduction. Gill is presented as a ‘tragic’ figure riven by contradictions between his fine religious and social ideal and his disorderly life and passions: He was taken very seriously in his day. At his death, the obituaries suggested he was one of the most important figures of his period, not just as an artist and craftsman but as a social reformer, a man who had pushed out the boundaries of possibility of how we live and work; a man who set examples. But how convincing was he? One of his great slogans (for Gill was a prize sloganist) was ‘It All Goes Together’. As I traced his long and extraordinary journeys around Britain in search of integration, the twentieth-century artistic pilgrim’s progress, I started to discover aspects of Gill’s life which do not go together in the least, a number of very basic contradictions between precept and practice, ambition and reality, which few people have questioned. There is an official and an unofficial Gill and the official, although much the least interesting, has been the version most generally accepted.[12] She refers to ‘the smokescreen Gill himself and others so determinedly erected’ and affirms boldly: ‘At least I can be confident that Gill was not what he said he was. The Autobiography is full of obfuscation’.[13] And yet this is not at all the impression that is conveyed once we get into the substance of the book. Indeed, even the Introduction itself makes it plain that, whatever the details of his sexual activity, no-one who came into contact with him could be in any doubt that he regarded sex as a matter of immense importance, of endless wonder and delight and that he was, or seemed to be, completely lacking in any inhibitions on the subject, that he expected the same of all the others around him. I don’t myself share that attitude and, for the sake of the ideas that he had in common with Gleizes, I regret that he had it. But I can’t accuse him of ‘obfuscation’ on the matter. Having made this accusation, the Introduction continues: In earlier years Eric Gill had alighted on and promulgated in his own version Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Hindu doctrines of the erotic elements in art. Later on, at Ditchling, with the same conviction, he began propounding a complicated theory, or succession of theories, in which sexual activity is aligned to godliness, in which the sexual organs, far from their conventional depiction as the source of scandal, are ‘redeemed’ by Christ and ‘made dear’. It is a very radical and interesting theory, where Gill challenges Christendom’s traditional confrontation of matter and spirit, and indeed his theory is justified in part, at least for connoisseurs of art, by the wonderful erotic engravings of that period. But one senses something frantic in the zeal with which Gill exfoliated his passion, in contexts likely and unlikely, and in his evident enjoyment of the waves of consternation which followed, particularly from the monasteries.[14] When she comes to discussing the Autobiography she herself quotes, with evident relish, the wonderful passage in which Gill recounts his first discovery of the joys of masturbation:[15] But how shall I ever forget the strange, inexplicable rapture of my first experience? What marvellous thing was this that suddenly transformed a mere water-tap into a pillar of fire, and water into an elixir of life? I lived henceforth in a strange world of contradiction: something was called filthy which was obviously clean; something was called ridiculous which was obviously solemn and momentous; something was called ugly which was obviously lovely. Strange days and nights of mystery and fear mixed with excitement and wonder—strange days and nights, strange months and years.[16] Not much sign of ‘obfuscation’ there! Nor in the passage which she quotes with equal enthusiasm in which Gill describes the beauty of the flowers of the field as a magnificent display of sexual parts designed to entice for the purpose of procreation.[17] And accordingly invites us to see our own genitalia, male and female, as our most precious ‘ornaments’.[18] She makes the remarkable, almost perverse, observation that: ‘Gill the patriarchal figure surrounded by what at times seems dozens of his children and his grandchildren, is also a scene of pathos, fertility run wild, the all-too-logical conclusion of his “let ‘em all come” theories’.[19] She is referring to a passage, again in the Autobiography , when at the time of their marriage Gill and his wife, Mary (or Ethel as she was before her conversion to Catholicism) agreed not to bother with contraception: ‘“Always ready and willing” was our motto in respect to lovemaking and “let ‘em all come” was our motto in respect of babies’.[20] But they only had three daughters as well as one adopted son. Gill came from a family of thirteen children and he and Mary may well have wanted more but after a series of miscarriages they knew it was not to be. The ‘fertility run wild’ was the fertility of their daughters. Is Gill to be blamed—assuming it is a bad thing—for that? She says that she has ‘come to see Gill as a rather tragic figure’, because of the contradiction between his role as a model English Catholic ‘paterfamilias’ and his unruly sexual appetite.[21] What is astonishing about Gill, however, and this book confirms it, is the apparent absence of any such contradiction. Gill had sexual relations with his housekeepers, with female colleagues, the wives of his friends, his sisters (or at least one sister), and even his daughters. Yet the book gives little evidence of the ill-feeling, tension, and jealousy which such behaviour should normally have provoked. It is as if the normal rules don’t apply, and at one point, MacCarthy (following one of Gill’s Dominican friends) asks: ‘Was Gill honestly entitled to the privilege of innocence? Had he really been unaffected by the Fall?’[22] The question is an interesting one, given that Gill believed in the Fall and Fiona MacCarthy, one assumes, does not. In fact, the whole prurient glee with which the media establishment has swooped on Gill’s sexual misdeeds is interesting. In theory, sexual innocence should be an easy matter for those who do not believe that the sinfulness of sexual passion has been revealed by God. Yet here is a man who is apparently incapable of feeling sexual guilt and whose sexual activities seem to have caused no lasting damage to anyone, and Fiona MacCarthy tries to persuade herself that he was unhappy, tragic, eaten up by contradictions, even though all the evidence she gives proclaims the contrary. While MacCarthy thinks that there should have been a tension between Gill’s sexual activity and his Catholicism, Gill maintains that the two were mutually complementary. She tells us about a visit Gill paid with his then protégé, the Welsh writer and artist, David Jones, to a certain ‘big fat man with a taste for true pornography […] The walls of his flat in Lincoln’s Inn Fields were almost papered over with pornographic postcards. At the sight of these, Gill turned to David Jones, saying: “If I were not a Catholic, I should have been like this”’.[23] Again, Gill complained about his brother whose marriage was breaking up that ‘Brother Max is so virtuous by nature and so stupid and muddle-headed […] that he prefers to cast M. adrift and break up the home (thus depriving his children of all that home implies) rather than have a love affair to go to confession about’.[24] The same attitude to acknowledging sin is found in the Autobiography , in which he proclaims it as a privilege, an assertion of one’s pride in being a man and thus capable of sinning.[25] One has the feeling that having a good sin to confess was all part of the fun (one of his confessors, incidentally, was Fr John O’Connor, thought to have been the model for Chesterton’s Father Brown. That must have made things easier). He develops an argument that Catholics, confident in their membership of the True Church, can afford to take a lighter attitude to life than Protestants and agnostics, who continually have to prove themselves.[26] And, especially towards the end of his life, MacCarthy tells us, new visitors to Pigott’s, the last of the rural artistic communities he founded, had to pass through a sort of initiation test in which Gill held forth to them about Christ’s genitals which, given that He was the Perfect Man, could be assumed to have been of a goodly size. While he was receiving instruction to enter the Church in 1913, he was working on a life size marble replica of his own phallus. One feels a certain sympathy for MacCarthy. He ought to have been a neurotic and unhappy soul. It somehow seems unjust that he wasn’t. MacCarthy argues in support of her view that he was a tragic figure, that ‘a chain of destructiveness began at Ditchling, not long after his conversion to Catholicism. Perhaps a part of his tragedy is that he was both ahead of his times and behind them. His urge to experiment with social conventions, especially the prevailing sexual mores, became more obviously and more painfully at variance with the Gills’ accepted role as the ideal Catholic family, the public demonstration of fidelity and cohesiveness’.[27] In fact, Gill’s life at Ditchling Common, at Capel-y-ffin, and at Pigott’s (the three rural craft communities he founded or co-founded after his conversion to Catholicism) was astonishingly creative, not just for his own work but for his ability to attract and train loyal followers and apprentices, bringing out their own creative capacities. Of course there were immense problems, and it is quite believable that he was crushed by his workload, his financial responsibilities, and his despair at the direction in which political events were moving in the 1930s. But anyone who knows anything about the difficulties of maintaining his kind of life, and of holding such communities together, will be impressed by his achievement, especially remembering that, unlike Ruskin, Morris, Carpenter, or Ashbee, he had no inherited wealth. All his ventures were financed only by his own work. The main evidence for Gill’s ‘destructiveness’ is his quarrel with his former close friend, the printer, Hilary Pepler. But though MacCarthy discusses this at some length and tells us that there is a long correspondence on the subject, she doesn’t in my view quite come to grips with it. Was it, as she hints in the Introduction, prompted by jealousy because his eldest daughter Elizabeth had fallen in love with Hilary’s son, David (whom she eventually married, against her father’s opposition)? Or did his opposition to this affair spring from an already established rift with Pepler, which he attributed to questions of finance and also (a major part of the account in the Autobiography ) to his complaint that Ditchling was more and more taking on the character of a Catholic tourist resort. This would seem to be confirmed by his withdrawal to the—at the time—nearly inaccessible Capel y Finn. MacCarthy’s account of the joyous arrival at Capel and the subsequent life there (and a couple of years later when the whole menagerie moved again to Pigotts, near High Wycombe in the Chilterns) hardly fits the idea that it was a ‘chain of destructiveness’. Gill, MacCarthy says, was both ahead of his times and behind them. Presumably it is as a sexual libertarian that he was ahead of the times, and as a Catholic family man, who loved being surrounded by children and grandchildren, that he was behind. But Gill’s sexual libertarianism is utterly different from the unhappy obsessions of modern society. He lived in a different world from that of William Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr, Peter Greenaway, or Tom Sharpe. What is so striking about post-war sexual permissiveness, chronically so in the case of pop music (David Bowie, Lou Reed, Ultravox, The Smiths, Prince), is the carefully cultivated atmosphere of misery and degradation that surrounds it. There is a feeling of the obsessive scratching of an itch, knowing that it will only make the wound deeper. Compare them with Gill, in a passage from the diaries which I have taken at random from MacCarthy’s book: C.L. [the discretion is my own—P.B.] came in and I drew her portrait. We talked a lot about fucking and agreed how much we loved it. Afterwards we fondled one another a little and I put my penis between her legs. She then arranged herself so that when I pushed a little it went into her. I pushed it in about six times and then we kissed and went into lunch.[28] Gill, incidentally, was a strong opponent of artificial contraception. It is a curious thing that, while he had three daughters by his wife, he does not seem to have had any children outside marriage. I think we can safely assume that he would have accepted responsibility for them if he had. MacCarthy gives what might be the answer in her account of his exchanges with Dr Helena Wright, well-known as an adviser on sexual matters and advocate of contraception. After telling her ‘You are entitled to believe in and work for a matriarchal state. Men are equally entitled to resist it’, he continues: ‘I believe in birth control by the man by means of:– (1) Karetza. (2) Abstinence from intercourse. (3) Withdrawal before ejaculation. (4) French letters’ but ‘I don’t think 3 and 4 are good. I don’t think abstinence from orgasm is necessarily a bad thing. It depends on the state of mind and states of mind can be cultivated’.[29] ‘Karetza’ is a form of sexual activity without orgasm. Gill, as we know, did not practise abstinence from intercourse. Karetza may also explain the willingness of the most improbable women to have sex with him. They didn’t take it very seriously. But this brings us to the question of sexual relations with his daughters. Considering the impact her revelations have had on Gill’s reputation, MacCarthy’s attitude, expressed in the Introduction, is surprisingly casual: There is nothing so very unusual in Gill’s succession of adulteries, some casual, some long-lasting, several pursued within the protective walls of his own household. Nor is there anything so absolutely shocking about his long record of incestuous relationships with sisters and with daughters: we are becoming conscious that incest was (and is) a great deal more common than was generally imagined. Even his preoccupations and his practical experiments [sic. She only mentions one—P.B.] with bestiality, though they may strike one as bizarre, are not in themselves especially horrifying or amazing. Stranger things have been recorded.[30] Well, yes, certainly, stranger things have been recorded. But, she continues: ‘It is the context which makes them so alarming, which gives one such a frisson. This degree of sexual anarchy within the ostentatiously well-regulated household astonishes’.[31] But what is truly astonishing is the change of mood that occurs at the end of her introduction: ‘No one who knew him well failed to like him, to respond to him. And his personality is still enormously arresting. In his agility, his social and sexual mobility, his professional expertise and purposefulness, the totally unpompous seriousness with which he looks anew at what he sees as the real issues, he seems extremely modern, almost of our own age’.[32] But maybe she is wrong about ‘our own age’ catching up with Gill’s ‘sexual mobility’. At least if the man chipping away at the BBC’s Prospero and Ariel can be taken as representative of our age. Indeed, in an article written for The Guardian she suggests that ‘Gill in 2006 would no doubt be in prison’.[33] The only deeds she records that could have landed him in prison are of course his sexual relations with his two eldest daughters, Elizabeth and Petra. This takes up one paragraph in MacCarthy’s book: For instance in July 1921, when Betty was sixteen, Gill records how one afternoon while Mary and Joan were in Chichester he made her ‘come’, and she him, to watch the effect on the anus: ‘(1) Why should it’, he queries, ‘contract during the orgasm, and (2) why should a woman’s do the same as a man’s?’ This is characteristic of Gill’s quasi-scientific curiosity: his urge to know and prove. It is very much a part of the Gill family inheritance. (His doctor brother Cecil, in his memoirs, incidentally shows a comparable fascination with the anus.) It can be related to Gill’s persona of domestic potentate, the notion of owning all the females in his household. It can even perhaps be seen as an imaginative overriding of taboos: the three Gill daughters all grew up, so far as one can see, to be contented and well-adjusted married women. Happy family photographs, thronging with small children, bear out their later record of fertility. But the fact remains, and it is a contradiction which Gill, with his discipline of logic, his antipathy for nonsense, must in his heart of hearts have been aware of, that his private behaviour was at war with his public image—confused it, undermined it. Things did not go together. There is a clear anxiety in his diary description of visiting one of the younger daughter’s bedrooms: ‘stayed ½ hour – put p. in her a/hole’. He ends almost on a note of panic, ‘This must stop’.[34] The paragraph begins ‘For instance […]’, and in the Guardian article I quoted earlier MacCarthy says that ‘during those years at Ditchling, Gill was habitually abusing his two elder daughters’ so we must assume that these are not the only examples. But, so far as I know, this paragraph is all there is in the public domain, the sole basis on which Gill has been characterised as a ‘paedophile’ (MacCarthy gives no examples of sexual relations with any others among the many young teenagers and children in Gill’s circle). We’re not told if these two incidents are typical, if similar things occurred frequently, if these are particularly bad cases, or if there is worse. Nor are we told, in the second case, if, when he says ‘This must stop’, it did stop, or if this is—or isn’t—the only case of penetration occurring. In 2017, the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, which has a very important collection of his work, put on the exhibition Eric Gill—The Body , designed to face up to this embarrassing part of its legacy. This might have been an opportunity to explore the Diaries further, but it does not appear to have been taken. Instead, the assumption was that all that needed to be known was known. To quote an account prepared by Index on Censorship: ‘awareness of this aspect of his biography is widespread and has been fully discussed and debated’.[35] The approach was to invite visitors to the exhibition to respond to the works—many of them naked bodies, lovers embracing, detailed studies of male genitalia—in light of the knowledge that they were done by a man who abused his daughters. According to a statement by the Museum director, Nathaniel Hepburn: This exhibition is the result of two years of intense discussions both within the museum and beyond, including contributing to an article in The Art Newspaper in July 2015, hosting #museumhour twitter discussions on 22 February 2016 on ‘tackling tricky subjects’, a workshop day with colleagues from museums across the country hosted at the museum with Index on Censorship, and a panel discussion at 2016 Museums Association Conference in Glasgow. Through these discussions Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft feels compelled to confront an issue which is unpleasant, difficult and extremely sensitive. It has by no means been an easy process yet we feel confident that not turning a blind eye to this story is the right thing to do. This exhibition is just the beginning of the museum’s process of taking a more open and honest position with the visitor and we already have legacy plans in place including ensuring there will continue to be public acknowledgement of the abuse within the museum’s display.[36] It was a delicate exercise. There were consultations with charities helping survivors of abuse, there were two writers in residence, helplines, and support literature for people who could have been adversely affected by the content of the show. The sculptor Cathie Pilkington was co-curator and had a little exhibition of her own, based around a wooden doll Gill had made for Petra when she was four years old. In its atmosphere of high seriousness, it was all a far cry from MacCarthy’s summing up of the life at Ditchling, where the cases of misconduct she describes occurred – she says there's no record of them occurring later: It was not an unhappy childhood, far from it. All accounts, from the Gill and Pepler children, the children of the Cribbs and the other Ditchling families, so closely interrelated through the life of the workshops and the life around the chapel, verge on the idyllic. Simple pleasures, intense friendships, great events – like the annual Ditchling Flower Show and the sports on Ditchling Common, with Father Vincent, as timekeeper, stopwatch in hand; followed by a giant Ditchling children’s tea party. There were profound advantages in growing up at Ditchling. But the children always felt – this was the price of self-containment – that it was other people who were odd.[37] Among the ‘frequently asked questions’ prepared for the exhibition, there was this: Isn’t it true that Gill’s daughters did not regard themselves as ‘abused’? They are reported as having normal happy and fulfilled lives and Petra at almost 90 commented that she wasn’t embarrassed by revelations about her family life and that they just ‘took it for granted’. Aren’t we all perhaps making more of this than the people affected?[38] The quote comes from an obituary of the weaver, Petra Tegetmeier, which appeared in the Guardian : A remarkable aspect of those liaisons with Petra is that she seems not only to have been undamaged by the experience, but to have become the most calm, reflective and straightforward wife and mother. When I asked her about it shortly before her 90th birthday, she assured me that she was not at all embarrassed—‘We just took it for granted’. She agreed that had she gone to school she might have learned how unconventional her father’s behaviour was. He had, she explained, ‘endless curiosity about sex’. His bed companions were not only family but domestic helpers and even (to my astonishment when I heard about it) the teacher who ran the school at Pigotts.[39] The Museum’s reply to the question was as follows: Elizabeth was no longer alive when Fiona McCarthy’s book was published, and those who met Petra certainly record a calm woman who managed to come to terms with her past abuse, and still greatly admired her father as an artist. I don’t think that we should try to imagine her process to reaching this acceptance as we know too little about her own experiences. So, although we are told that ‘we know too little about her own experiences’ the idea is reaffirmed that ‘her past abuse’ was a problem she had to come to terms with, despite her own statement that it wasn’t. A certain disquiet about the position of Petra in all this is expressed by some of the people involved in the project. One of the writers in residence, Bethan Roberts, wrote a short story about her called ‘Gospels’, which was posted on the Ditchling Museum website but now seems to have disappeared. The other, Alison Macleod, commented: Yes, the biography is upsetting disturbing in part and there was clearly a history of abuse that is without question. But it is made slightly more complex by the fact that the two daughters [who] were abused said they were unembarrassed about it, not angry about it, loved their father, and didn’t give the response that perhaps I’m imagining, or some people expected them to give – to be angry about it and condemn their father’s behaviour. They didn’t. So maybe they have internalised their trauma, but you could say that that response is almost patronising to the two women, the elderly women who were very clear about what they felt, so it goes into a loop of paradoxes of riddles that you cannot really ever solve.[40] The resident artist, Cathie Pilkington, carved a series of heads based on the doll Gill had made for Petra and labelled them ‘Petra’. Steph Fuller, an artistic director of the Museum who said that she had been on the outside of the project but ‘recruited while the show was on’ felt uneasy about this: The real legacy issue, which I am grappling with at the moment, is that the voice that was not in the room, was Petra’s. She was very front and centre as far as Cathie’s commission was concerned, but there is something about how the work conflated Petra with the doll and being a child victim, that I’m a bit uncomfortable about actually. There is lots of evidence of Petra’s views about her experiences, and how she internalised them, that was not present at all anywhere. It is easy to project things on to someone being just a victim and Petra would have completely rejected that. In terms of legacy how we continue to talk about Gill and his child sexual abuse and other sexual activities which were fairly well outside the mainstream, I think—yes acknowledge it, but also—how? I am feeling my way round it at the moment. There are plenty of living people, her children and grandchildren who are protective of her, quite reasonably. I need to feel satisfied that when we speak about Petra, we represent her side of it and we don’t just tell it from the point of view of the abuser, to put it bluntly. If it is about Petra, how do we do it in a way that respects her views and her family’s views?[41] According to Rachel Cooke, who was brought in as a sort of resident journalist, Pilkington had commented on the doll: ‘This is a very potent object. It looks to me just like a penis’. She continues: Her installation, central to which are five scaled-up versions of the head of Petra’s doll (one decorated by her 11-year-old daughter, Chloe), will explore different aspects of Gill’s practice, and the way we are inclined to project his life on to his work, sometimes in contradiction of the facts: ‘The tendency—if there is a picture of a figure—is to chuck all this interpretation on it […] it can’t just be a beautiful drawing or a taut piece of carving. But sometimes it is. Where, I’m asking, is Petra in all this? There are aspects to her life apart from the fact that her father had sex with her’.[42] Exactly. Though I for one was left wondering how exactly her installation—a sort of doll’s house full of little knicknacks including the doll’s heads—contributed to our understanding that Petra and Elizabeth were something other than just victims of sex abuse, and that there was more, much more, to their relation with their father than the sex. A catalogue was produced.[43] Apart from Cathie Pilkington’s installation it consisted largely of highly representational life drawings, including some of his studies of his friends’ (male) genitalia. Material that will appeal to the ‘art connoisseur’ for whom Gill expressed such lofty contempt. It leaves me wishing that he had taken Thomas Aquinas’s instruction to imitate nature in its way of working not in its effects—the renunciation of post-Renaissance representational art—more seriously, as Gleizes did when he advanced into non-representational art, an art that Gleizes claimed might eventually be worthy of comparison with the non-representational art of the oriental carpet.[44] Rachel Cooke quotes Fiona MacCarthy saying: She has watched in ‘dismay’ as the fact of Gill’s abuse of his daughters has grown to become the thing that defines him. ‘My book was never a book about incest, which is what one would imagine from many hysterical contemporary responses’, she says. ‘It was a book about the multifaceted life of a multi-talented artist and an absorbingly interesting man’. As people demand the demolition of his sculpture in public places—the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral, Prospero and Ariel at Broadcasting House—she asks where this will end: ‘Get rid of Gill, but who chooses the artist with morals so impeccable that they could take his place? […] I would not deny that Gill’s sex drive was unusually strong and in some cases aberrant’, she says, ‘but to reduce the motivation of a richly complicated human being to such simplification is ludicrous’. Reducing art to a matter of the sexual irregularities of the artist, she believes, ‘can only in the end seriously damage our appreciation of the rich possibilities of art in general’.[45] MacCarthy’s book is impressive and enjoyable and does indeed give a good account of the ‘multifaceted life of a multi-talented artist and an absorbingly interesting man’. I have no problems with the mention of sexual relations with Elizabeth and Petra, which are unquestionably part of the story. But the book was sold vigorously and no doubt successfully on the basis of the scandals it revealed. That may have been the responsibility of the publisher, but MacCarthy played this element up in her Introduction, which has an atmosphere all its own and may well have been the only part most of the reviewers bothered to read. The result is that, as she says, ‘the fact of Gill’s abuse of his daughters has grown to become the thing that defines him’.[46] I have no idea why the man who attacked Gill’s statue or the people who have signed the 38 degrees petition have felt so strongly on the matter. It may well be that they themselves suffered some sort of abuse in their childhood, and I can hardly blame them for their feelings confronted with the work of a man whom they know, simply and exclusively, as an abuser. The more so when the BBC’s own ‘culture editor’ characterises him as ‘a monster, a depraved paedophile who […] committed horrific sexual crimes’. But it also needs to be understood that different kinds of sexual activity can cover a wide variety of feelings and reactions on the part of both ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’, and that a blanket categorisation that would throw Eric Gill and his relations with his daughters (unquestionably very loving independently of the sexual side) into the same category as Jimmy Savile and his relations with his victims doesn’t contribute very much to our understanding of what it is to be human. Peter Brooke Peter Brooke is a painter and writer, mainly on interactions between art, politics and religion. He has a PhD from Cambridge on ‘Controversies in Ulster Presbyterianism, 1790-1836’ (1980) and he is the author of the major study of the Cubist painter, Albert Gleizes: Albert Gleizes, For and Against the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press 2001). [1] Kate Feehan, ‘Man scales BBC Broadcasting House and spends four hours destroying sculpture by paedophile artist Eric Gill’ Daily Mail (12 January 2022) < https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10395493/Hammer-wielding-activist-scales-BBCs-Broadcasting-House-starts-destroying-Eric-Gill-sculpture.html >. [2] Katie Razzall, ‘The Artwork vs the artist’ BBC (13 January 2022) < https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-59972806 >. [3] Trevor Stanski, ‘Remove BBC Statue by Paedophile Eric Gill’ (2021) < https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/remove-bbc-statue-by-paedophile-eric-gill >. [4] ibid. [5] Andrew Doyle, ‘Eric Gill’s crimes were unforgivable, but his statue is blameless’ The Spectator (16 January 2022) . [6] Rachel Cooke, ‘Eric Gill: can we separate the artist from the abuser?’ The Observer (9 April 2017) < https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/apr/09/eric-gill-the-body-ditchling-exhibition-rachel-cooke >. [7] I should say that the use of the word ‘paedophile’ as a synonym for ‘child molester’ seems to me to be an abuse of language. To characterise someone who wants to rape children as a ‘paedophile’ is rather like characterising someone who wants to burn books as a ‘bibliophile’. [8] I discuss Gleizes’s relations with Coomaraswamy, with a glancing reference to Gill, in my essay ‘Albert Gleizes, Ananda Coomaraswamy and “tradition”’, accessible on my website at . I am the author of the major study of Gleizes: Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes: For and Against the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press 2001). [9] Eric Gill, ‘Slavery and Freedom’, in Art Nonsense and other essays (Cassel and Co Ltd & Francis Walterson, 1929) 1. [10] D.H. Lawrence, ‘Eric Gill’s Art Nonsense’ Book Collector’s Quarterly (no XII, Oct-Dec 1933) 1-7, quoted in Malcolm Yorke, Eric Gill, Man of Flesh and Spirit (Constable 2000) 48-9. Yorke goes on to quote Gill saying that Lady Chatterly’s Lover ‘states the Catholic view of sex and marriage more clearly and with more enthusiasm than most of our text books’. [11] Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill (Faber and Faber 1989). The book was republished in 2017. [12] ibid vii-viii. [13] ibid x. [14] ibid xi. [15] ibid 20. [16] Eric Gill, Autobiography (The Right Book Club 1944) 53-4. [17] MacCarthy (n 11) 290. [18] Gill (n 16). [19] MacCarthy (n 11) xi-xii. [20] Gill (n 16) 132. [21] MacCarthy (n 11) x. [22] ibid 214. [23] ibid 212. [24] ibid 287. [25] At least that is how I interpret the passage in the Autobiography , 223-7. [26] Gill (n 16) 164. [27] MacCarthy (n 11) xi. [28] ibid 262. [29] ibid 261. [30] ibid viii. [31] ibid. [32] ibid. [33] Fiona MacCarthy, ‘Written in stone’ The Guardian (22 July 2006) < https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/jul/22/art.art >. [34] MacCarthy (n 11) 155-6. [35] Julia Farrington, ‘Case Study—Eric Gill/The Body’ (15 May 2019) < https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/05/eric-gill-the-body-case-study/ >. [36] Nathaniel Hepburn, ‘Eric Gill / The Body: Statement from the Director’ Index On Censorship (7 May 2019) < https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/05/eric-gill-the-body-statement-from-the-director/ >. [37] MacCarthy (n 11) 154. [38] ‘Eric Gill / The Body: Q&A for visitor services’ Index On Censorship (7 May 2019) < htps://www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/05/eric-gill-the-body-qa-for-visitor-services/ >. [39] Patrick Nuttgens, ‘Unorthodox liaisons’ The Guardian (6 January 1999) < https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/jan/06/guardianobituaries >. [40] Julia Farrington, Case Study (n 35). [41] ibid. [42] Cooke (n 6). [43] Nathaniel Hepburn and Catherine Pilkington, Eric Gill: the body, with Catherine Pilkington, Doll for Petra Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, Exhibition catalogue (29 April-3 September 2017). [44] Unpublished ms note in the Gleizes archive formerly kept at Aubard. [45] Cooke (n 6). [46] MacCarthy (n 11).

Introduction Gamal Abdel Nasser savoured the moment: it is 26 July 1956 and he has just announced the nationalisation of the Suez Canal. The thousands packed into Alexandria’s Mohammed Ali Square are ecstatic.[1] This bold and highly contingent decision marked the beginning of the Suez Crisis, a complex mixture of war and diplomacy that tested the 1950s international system. Despite intense disagreement and violence, the crisis eventually reached a peaceful (if not uncontested) resolution. In this study, I will pursue a comparative analysis of international organisations (IOs) in order to understand their role in bringing the conflict to a close. Beginning with a narrative and historiographical background, the purpose of this section is to demonstrate how the introduction of new primary and secondary material can help us to understand this role and, consequently, enrich scholarship on the Suez Crisis. The crisis itself can be divided into three phases. First, after Egypt nationalised the Canal, a period of diplomatic deliberation ensued between Britain, France, the United States, and Egypt, which failed to bring about the international control of the Canal. Second, as planned in the clandestine Sèvres Protocol of 24 October 1956, an Israeli invasion of Egypt commenced on 29 October. Two days later an Anglo-French force intervened on the pretext of ‘police action’ to protect international shipping. Hostilities ended with a ceasefire on 6 November. Third, a withdrawal period began, which entailed intense diplomatic pressure on Britain, France, and Israel as well as the stationing of UN Peacekeepers (UNEF) in Egypt. UNEF supervised the withdrawal of troops, the clearing of the Canal, and the keeping of the peace on the Israeli-Egyptian border. British and French personnel evacuated by 22 December and the last Israeli troops left Egypt on 12 March 1957. Each of the crisis’ protagonists regarded their vital interests to be at stake as they entered the crisis. President Nasser felt compelled to nationalise the Canal in order to fund the Aswan High Dam project, the cornerstone of his plan for Egypt’s socioeconomic development. The West had withdrawn funding for the dam over fears of Soviet influence in Cairo; thus, by nationalising the canal, Nasser could both enrich Egypt and capture an important symbol of both the old imperialism and contemporary Western influence. Indeed, Britain had maintained a Protectorate over Egypt between 1882 and 1922 as well as a massive military base in the canal zone primarily to protect what a young Anthony Eden once called the ‘swing-door of the British empire’.[2] Regarding the 120-mile waterway as essential to communications, trade, and (increasingly) oil-supply, Britain and France had together owned most of the shares in the Canal Company.[3] The imperial powers could not accept that Nasser, who lambasted the French presence in Algeria and the British-led Baghdad Pact, would have control over a strategic interest that British leaders still regarded as their ‘jugular vein’.[4] Israel, constantly under threat from its numerous hostile neighbours and cross-border Fedayeen raids, was also unsettled by the fervently anti-Zionist Nasser. For these reasons, the botched British-French-Israeli operation had attempted to precipitate Nasser’s downfall and restore international control to the Canal.[5] Broadly speaking, three waves of writing on the Suez Crisis can be identified. The first of these was the publication of personal memoirs by contemporaries of the crisis, which, from the late 1980s, a second wave of scholars used alongside newly accessible archival material to structure a lively academic debate.[6] These diplomatic histories have understood the resolution of the Suez Crisis as a product of Britain and France’s inability to withstand American pressure to withdraw.[7] Since the turn of the century, however, historians have emphasised the importance of non-state actors in the course and resolution of the crisis.[8] International relations theory provides us with analytical tools that help us understand the role of IOs in history. I will draw inspiration from Abbott and Snidal’s argument that IOs affect agency through their ability, first, to centralise diplomatic engagement in a single, stable forum, and second, to remain independent.[9] I will also draw on Barnett and Finnemore’s idea that their ‘control over technical expertise and information’ gives them a special role in making international norms.[10] To understand IO agency, I will focus on the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Though other IOs—notably the World Bank—played a role, these three organisations embodied the three central loci of multilateralism during the crisis: diplomatic cooperation (UN), international monetary stability (IMF), and humanitarian aid (ICRC). While my comparative methodology certainly adds complexities, this type of analysis will, I hope, allow me to make new and insightful conclusions about both the collective role of IOs and their place in the wider international society approach. I will proceed as such: in the first chapter, I will investigate the aims of IOs. In the next chapter, I will outline their operations and assess the degree to which each organisation achieved its stated aims. Across both chapters, I will compare their aims, operations, and outcomes. In my final chapter, I will discuss how my research changes our understanding of the course and resolution of the Suez Crisis. I will explore an under-utilised body of archival material from the ICRC, IMF, and UN to address the questions I have outlined. The ICRC reported its aims and operations in the Revue Internationale de la Croix-Rouge (hereafter RICR ) whereas the IMF and UN employed press releases. Meeting minutes and resolutions from the UN Security Council and General Assembly also elucidate the organisations’ activities. IMF press releases were infrequent and relatively uninformative, so I draw on the Executive Board Series, composed of internally circulated documents that appeared before Executive Board Meetings. Whereas the RICR and the UN documents I am using were immediately available to the public, much of the IMF material was strictly confidential. The RICR was mainly of interest to ICRC delegates, other humanitarian organisations, Red Cross societies, and the organisation’s sponsors; whereas UN Secretariat documents, meeting minutes, and resolutions were generally addressed to ‘the world’, which, perhaps vaguely, we can take to mean the international community.[11] Though I rely on self-reporting by officials from each organisation, which lends itself to the presentation of activities in a positive light, I approach the sources critically and with reference to other primary and secondary sources. In this way, it becomes possible to appreciate the agency of IOs in the history of the Suez Crisis. ‘Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained’: The Aims of International Organisations Three central consequences of the Allied victory in 1945 characterised the 1950s international order. First, a superpower confrontation between the American-led West and the Soviet-led East permeated all areas of geopolitics. The rapid proliferation of nuclear weapons made the prospect of this incipient Cold War turning hot particularly frightening. Second, the power and legitimacy of European imperialism was quickly falling away. Especially after the Bandung Conference (1955), anti-colonial movements and post-colonial states increasingly challenged European political, economic, and ideological domination. Third, several international organisations, including the UN and IMF, were set up after 1945 to preserve the postwar peace. Despite the intensifying East-West Cold War confrontation and North-South contestation over decolonisation, states continued to engage with multilateral institutions through the 1950s. Sequentially, I will locate the mandate of the ICRC, the IMF, and the UN in this international order before outlining their articulated aims at the Suez Crisis and concluding with a comparison of these aims.[12] The ICRC The ICRC was founded in 1863 ‘to protect and assist people affected by war’.[13] Though technically a private Swiss association, the ICRC was mandated by the 1949 Geneva Conventions—international treaties governing armed conflict—to inspect the treatment of civilians, prisoners of war, and the wounded.[14] Its role as the centrepiece between various national Red Cross and Crescent Societies and in the 1949 Geneva Conventions was justified with specific reference to the organisation’s neutrality.[15] Thus, its humanitarian role at Suez would be to implement the Geneva Conventions as a ‘specifically neutral and independent institution’.[16] By the time the Suez Crisis arrived, moreover, the ICRC badly needed to prove its worth: since 1945, it had not only lost major portions of its funding, but also the confidence of governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain.[17] Its failure to expose the Holocaust and the wholesale abuse of Soviet prisoners during the Second World War as well as its supposed anti-communist biases during wars in Korea and Indochina had especially harmed its standing in the East, though relations had improved somewhat since 1945.[18] Moving from the general to the particular, ICRC delegates had identified specific risks for the humanitarian management of conflict in the Middle East; an ICRC delegate who toured the region between January and May 1956 noted ‘l’absence de préparation pour le temps de guerre’.[19] Furthermore, in Autumn 1956, the ICRC would at the same time be stretched to address humanitarian issues arising from the Hungarian Revolution. As the first interstate war where the ICRC was tasked with implementing the untested 1949 Geneva Conventions, the Suez Conflict was expected to test the ICRC. The ICRC articulated specific aims prior to its involvement in the Suez Crisis that corresponded closely to its general mandate. On 2 November, it released the following radio broadcast: the ICRC ‘a prié les Gouvernements des pays impliqués dans le conflit…à assurer l'application des quatre Conventions de Genève’.[20] In addition, the ICRC announced that it was ‘prêt à assumer les tâches prévues pour lui par les Conventions de Genève’, which have been outlined.[21] In addition, the ICRC committed to organising the direct provision of aid.[22] Overall, an analysis of the ICRC’s mandate in international law and its press releases ahead of the Suez Crisis suggests that it aimed to mitigate the effects of war on civilians, prisoners of war, and the wounded by means of the neutral allocation of aid and by coordinating the efforts of various national societies. The IMF The IMF was set up in 1946 technically as part of the UN Economic and Social Council, but in effect operated as a fully independent organisation. During the 1940s, a consensus formed among economists that one key failure of the post-1919 world order had been the resort to manipulative currency practices in the 1930s, which had led to autarky, economic stagnation, and (indirectly) war.[23] The IMF was set up to prevent a regression to capital controls by resolving balance of payments issues through technical advice and temporary credit support.[24] Thus, it is possible to conceive of the IMF’s formally economic role as consciously related to the maintenance of the post-1945 peace; the June 1956 Annual Report’s reference to the organisation’s ‘obligations to the international society’ supports this view.[25] In practice, member states, who pooled resources in the Fund, could request withdrawals of ‘tranches’ of their ‘quota’ when problems arose. This process protected the stability of the Bretton Woods international currency system, which governed monetary exchange outside of the Soviet bloc. Before 1956, however, the Fund had not made any major interventions in the international monetary system. The most revealing feature of the IMF’s aims at the Suez Crisis is that they were never publicly announced. The absence of press releases related to the crisis was not surprising given the organisation’s functions as articulated in the Articles of Agreement. The Articles mandated the IMF ‘to promote international monetary cooperation’[26] and ‘to facilitate the expansion and balanced growth of international trade’.[27] Given the technical, jargon-laden focus on economics in the Articles, it is unsurprising that political neutrality was a tenet of the IMF.[28] Article 12 states that ‘the Managing Director and the staff of the Fund, in the discharge of their functions, shall owe their duty entirely to the Fund and to no other authority’.[29] Thus, the IMF presented itself as a technocratic institution with technocratic goals. There was, however, one private reference to the Fund’s aims with regard to the Suez Crisis at an Executive Board meeting in September 1956. When Egypt’s request to withdraw its gold tranche was accepted, the IMF acknowledged that the crisis might crop up in the press; thus, it was noted that ‘if the press raised any questions on [the dispute over the Canal], the management would reply that the transaction was of a routine nature and consistent with Fund rules and practice’.[30] It appears, then, that the IMF was committed to discharging its functions apolitically and intended to treat any incidental involvement in the crisis as routine. In sum, IMF documents suggest that the organisation sought to perform its normal function as guarantor of international monetary stability and, by consequence, to remain as neutral as possible. The UN The United Nations was established in 1945 as the world’s premier multilateral organ ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’.[31] Though by 1956 its membership contained a large majority of the planet’s population, Cold War divisions within the Security Council and disputes about decolonisation in the General Assembly had circumscribed its grandiose collective security ambitions.[32] Especially after disputes between the West and East over the use of the UN mandate in Korea, many feared that the organisation would repeat the sorry demise of the League of Nations. Appointed in 1953, however, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld had worked to win the trust of the Warsaw Pact countries and the Global South in order to develop collective security in the absence of Security Council consensus.[33] The UN Charter laid out shared principles that national representatives and UN officials were obliged by international law to serve. Article 1 defined the fundamental purpose of the UN: ‘to maintain international peace and security’.[34] Enshrining the ‘principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members’, the Charter commits signatories to only engage in self-defensive wars.[35] Though UN organs all worked under these shared principles, our assessment of the organisation’s aims must distinguish between the UN as diplomatic forum—the Security Council and the General Assembly—and the UN as international diplomat and civil servant—the Secretariat.[36] The two UN diplomatic forums never expressed unanimous ‘aims’ because of intense disagreement between member states, but did pass resolutions that indicated where consensus could be found. The one substantive resolution passed by the Security Council during the crisis, SCR/118, preceded the invasion of Egypt and formed part of Britain and France’s deceitful ‘agenda within an agenda’, which merely set the stage for invasion.[37] On 31 October, moreover, the Security Council deferred the crisis to the General Assembly, noting a ‘lack of unanimity of its permanent members’.[38] Thus, the Security Council professed collective aims either disingenuously or not at all. Invoking the ‘Uniting for Peace’ Resolution for the first time, an Emergency Special Session of the General Assembly set three goals: a unilateral ceasefire, the withdrawal of invading troops, and the restoration of free navigation to the Canal.[39] On 2 November, GAR 997 ‘[urged] as a matter of priority that all parties now involved in hostilities in the area agree to an immediate ceasefire’; it passed with an overwhelming majority, but not unanimously.[40] Even if the General Assembly was only a diplomatic organ, it could authorise the Secretariat to take action in the pursuit of its goals—the setting up of UNEF, for example.[41] Mandated by the General Assembly, Secretary-General Hammarksjöld’s aims would then be aligned with those of the Assembly as well as the Charter. Although Article 97 of the Charter describes the Secretary-General as ‘the chief administrative officer of the Organisation’, Dag Hammarskjöld expressed an intention to use his position to broker peace.[42] For example, on 13 October 1956, a Secretariat press release indicated a desire to facilitate ‘a just and peaceful solution to the Suez problem’.[43] In addition, Hammarskjöld personally emphasised his aspiration to ‘discretion and impartiality’ in his role.[44] In sum, the Secretariat aimed to restore peace with a special focus on remaining neutral. To conclude, the ICRC, the IMF, and the UN Secretariat expressed different specific aims, but shared a commitment to neutrality and the service of their core values. Interestingly, the ICRC, IMF, and UN presented humanitarianism, monetary stability, and peace as neutral, universal goals. This presentation of neutrality and universality fits nicely into the wider discourse of twentieth century internationalism, which is defined as ‘values which were supposed to be valid to all people at all times…everywhere’.[45] These commonalities, moreover, strengthen the case for considering IOs collectively in the wider question of the international society approach to the Suez Crisis. As the dispute over the Suez Canal entered its militarised phase, then, the ICRC, the IMF, and the UN Secretariat aimed to go about protecting those affected by war, ensuring monetary stability, and promoting peace as neutral parties. ‘Acting Neutral’: The Operations of International Organisations Now for the action: in this chapter, I will examine primary and secondary accounts of what IOs did after the beginning of hostilities on 29 October and outline the outcomes that had emerged by the end of the crisis the following Spring. By referring these outcomes back to the aims I described in the last chapter, it becomes apparent that IOs for the most part achieved their articulated goals: atrocities were, by and large, avoided, monetary stability maintained, and the status quo ante bello restored. By looking at the actions of each organisation sequentially and then comparatively, I will analyse the processes employed by IOs in the realisation of their aims. With this in hand, it will become possible to assess the collective contribution of IOs to the resolution of the Suez Crisis, which will be the focus of the next chapter. The ICRC Today, our popular memory of the Suez Crisis (if such a thing exists) tends to forget the extreme threat to human security that it precipitated. That threat was all too apparent to the ICRC, however. Accounts of the organisation’s intervention in this ‘short but intensive war’ show that: it effectively supervised the implementation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, recording very few violations; it coordinated the allocation of its own aid supplies reserves alongside those of other national Red Cross and Crescent societies; and it maintained neutrality in the eyes of states during its activities.[46] These outcomes can be attributed to three core activities: diplomacy, information gathering, and coordination. Upon the outbreak of hostilities on 29 October, the ICRC’s first response was to push for the application of the Geneva Conventions. After the ceasefire came into effect on 6 November, however, the ICRC went about ensuring that civilians, the wounded, and prisoners of war received proper treatment and humanitarian aid; negotiating the repatriation of prisoners; and organising the departure of Jews fleeing persecution in Egypt.[47] The ICRC’s supervision and diplomacy ensured the near universal adherence to the new Geneva Conventions. On 2 November, it issued a radio broadcast reminding all parties in the conflict the contents of the Conventions.[48] One day prior, it had used its diplomatic positions to receive guarantees from Anthony Eden that Britain would adhere to the Conventions, even though they had not yet been ratified.[49] Similarly, given the ambiguous position of UNEF in international law, the ICRC worked to receive a guarantee from Dag Hammarskjöld on 4 December 1956 that the UNEF would ‘observe the principles and spirit’ of international humanitarian law if it had to use force.[50] Thus, the ICRC used its diplomatic position to ensure that all parties in the Suez conflict would in principle adhere to the Geneva Conventions. This diplomatic position allowed the ICRC to negotiate and supervise the reciprocal transfer of prisoners. By the time the ceasefire had come into effect, Israel held some 5600 Egyptian prisoners with France and Britain in possession of a further 400.[51] Conversely, Egypt captured one Frenchman, who died unavoidably soon after detainment, and four Israelis.[52] The ICRC was essential for organising the repatriation of 48 seriously injured Egyptians held in Israel on 18 November; flights between Egypt and Israel had been banned since 1949 and no diplomatic relations existed between the two countries.[53] Using its position as Israel’s protecting power to negotiate with Egypt, it had organised the final repatriation of all prisoners by 5 February.[54] Especially in view of the difficulties faced repatriating prisoners after the 1947-9 Palestine War, the ICRC’s formally neutral diplomatic position appears to have facilitated dialogue between Egypt and Israel that would otherwise have been impossible.[55] Except with regard to the maltreatment of Israeli prisoners in Egypt, ICRC accounts suggest that the organisation’s formal neutrality and the special ability of its personnel to gather information allowed it to minimise violations of the Conventions. Newly established delegations in Alexandria, Port Said, and Tel Aviv secured permission to inspect prison facilities and the administration of occupied zones.[56] In the occupied Sinai, Dr. Louis-Alexis Gailland spoke to prisoners in Israeli, British, and French captivity, securing the release of those imprisoned unjustly.[57] On the other side of the ceasefire line, however, Egypt initially prevented the inspection of Israeli prisoners. Indeed, it was reported on 27 January that Israelis had been beaten and even tortured in captivity.[58] After further investigation, the ICRC received the almost certainly disingenuous reply from Egypt that the Israelis had fought amongst themselves.[59] Thus, the ICRC ultimately depended on the cooperation of states. The maltreatment of Israeli prisoners suggests that we cannot entirely accept the assertion in the March 1957 Revue Internationale that ‘pendant leur captivité tous les prisonniers ont été assistés, en Israël et en Égypte’.[60] Still, there is nothing to suggest that this was not mostly the case. In sum, even if it could not prevent any violations of the Geneva Conventions from occurring, it is possible for the most part to accept the ICRC’s assertion that the Suez Crisis ‘demeure très caractéristique de l’accomplissement des tâches du [CICR] dans le cadre des Conventions de Genève’.[61] The attitude of the belligerents to the ICRC suggests that its formal neutrality made it more trustworthy than various national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, which helped it to both gather information on humanitarian conditions and allocate humanitarian aid. From the start of the conflict, ‘un fonds spécial de secours aux victimes des événements est immédiatement ouvert;’ the ICRC was better placed than national Red Cross societies to allocate this aid.[62] For example, on 10 November, the Egyptian Red Crescent tried to gain access to the heavily damaged Port Said; only one ambulance of supplies was permitted entry, and only for one day.[63] Access was again denied on 26 November.[64] In contrast, ICRC delegate Maurice Thudichum was able to enter Port Said on 12 November and negotiate the passage of a large freight train of cargo across the ceasefire lines on 16 November.[65] It is clear that Britain’s understanding that the ICRC was neutral was a condition for this; on 10 November, the British army had told Egyptian Red Crescent personnel that groups entering Port Said ‘should consist of neutral and not (repeat not) Egyptian personnel’.[66] Consequently, by the time the Egyptian Red Crescent was given full access to Port Said on 12 December, the ICRC had long been running regular convoys of aid.[67] Egypt also perceived the ICRC to be neutral; despite great suspicion of European encroachment in Egypt, the organisation’s European delegates were given free reign to inspect Port Said after the British-French withdrawal.[68] Thus, because ‘‘neutrality’ was…achieved more easily by the ICRC than by the various national societies’, the ICRC provided aid where other actors could not.[69] The ICRC’s position as an international aid agency allowed it to coordinate national Red Cross societies and to convert the international community’s solidarity with Egypt into concrete aid commitments. By February 1957, forty-seven national Red Cross societies had answered the ICRC’s call three months earlier for aid to be sent to Egypt.[70] For example, Denmark and Italy donated planes for the ICRC to transport the wounded out of Israel. ICRC inspectors in occupied areas were able to distribute vaccines and other supplies, including juice, games, and cigarettes.[71] According to reports from ICRC delegates, the organisation worked ‘en liaison étroite’ with other aid agencies such as the UN Relief and Works Agency.[72] Thus, the ICRC for the most part achieved the goals it set for itself during the Suez Crisis. With the notable exception of the treatment of Egyptian prisoners, its sources indicate that it was able to inspect the treatment of prisoners and civilians, ensuring the adherence of the combatants to the Geneva Conventions in the process. Through information gathering and diplomacy, it was also able to delegate aid in ways that were not available to other organisations. Through this examination of the ICRC’s functions, moreover, an interesting observation emerges: its neutrality in the eyes of states gave it special access. The construction of neutrality, it appears, was essential to the ICRC’s achievement of its goals. The IMF To understand the IMF’s role in the resolution of the Suez Crisis, I will assess how far the IMF maintained international monetary stability as well as its neutrality. I will pursue my investigation by evaluating the extent to which the Fund approved loans according to its own rules during the crisis. With this in mind, I will assert that the Fund prevented a calamitous rupture in the international monetary system and maintained a significant though not unqualified degree of neutrality by allocating aid according to the rules of the international monetary regime and producing technical economic information. Viewing the conflict as just another economic factor on its balance sheet, the organisation avoided involving itself in politics. Even if the United States did use its disproportionate voting power in the IMF as leverage over Britain, I will seek to understand the operations of the IMF on its own terms. Overall, I find that when confronted with questions relating to the crisis, the Fund worked almost entirely according to ‘business as usual’. During the diplomatic phase of the Suez Crisis, the archives do not suggest that IMF officials were much preoccupied with the dispute, even when dealing with requests from its main protagonists. On 21 September, the Egyptian government made a request to draw its gold tranche. Noting that ‘in recent months the payments position has been complicated by international developments’, the loan was rapidly approved on 22 September as a normal response to a short-term trade imbalance.[73] In any case, it was rare for a gold tranche withdrawal to be denied. Business as usual with Egypt. It took longer for IMF staff to approve a French stand-by arrangement for its gold and first credit tranche, which it requested on 11 October. Delays arose because of concerns over the Franc’s par value and the size of the withdrawal, but not over France’s involvement in the Suez Crisis.[74] Staff were of the opinion that France’s massive current account losses were a result of ‘temporary factors’, including the import demands of the booming postwar economy, a bad harvest in 1956, and the intensifying war in French Algeria.[75] Indeed, Suez was not mentioned in any of the multiple staff reports which were considered at the 17 October Executive General Meeting where the stand-by agreement was approved.[76] The 18 October press release announcing the arrangement did not mention any political concerns.[77] Staff analysis recommended its approval on the basis that the balance of payments issue would be temporary. France was able to withdraw funds allocated by the stand-by arrangement as normal between February and June 1957. Business as usual with France. When war broke out in the Middle East the IMF moved more cautiously, albeit still according to its normal rules. Tranche withdrawals were designed to ease short-term pressures on balance of payments, rather than to support ‘large and sustained’ outflows of capital—such as a protracted war.[78] The continued presence of Israeli troops in Egypt complicated its request for a first credit tranche withdrawal on 25 January 1957; staff analysis noted that ‘the full impact of [the Suez] crisis on the Egyptian economy cannot yet be assessed’.[79] Still, on 4 February the withdrawal was approved on the basis that difficulties had arisen from the loss of dues from the closed Canal and sanctions imposed by Britain and the US the previous summer.[80] Business is more complicated, but again business as usual with Egypt. As a result of the Suez Crisis, discussions between Israel and the Fund on increasing its quota and setting a par value for the Israeli pound were stalled; the matter was removed from the 31 October Executive Board Meeting agenda because of the invasion of Egypt.[81] However, despite the continued presence of Israeli troops in Egypt, consultations continued from December to February, culminating in a long report in February 1957 on the economic situation in Israel; the report steered clear from sensitive policy matters, referencing the ‘international situation’ only once.[82] Israel’s quota was increased on 27 February to $7.5 million and on 6 March the Fund recommended that Israel’s par value be set at 1.80 Israeli Pounds to the dollar all while boots were still on the ground in Egypt.[83] Despite Israel’s recent transgressions in Egypt, its request on 15 May 1957 for a gold and credit tranche was also dealt with largely apolitically. The staff consultation document presented to the Executive Board, explained Israel’s large trade deficit with reference to increased immigration from Poland and Hungary; the words immigration and immigrant are together mentioned 11 times, whereas Suez is only (indirectly) referenced once.[84] Thus, the loan was approved, again for economic reasons. Business was more complicated and temporarily delayed, but almost as usual with Israel. No precedent existed in the Fund’s history for resolving the problem brought by Britain in December 1956. The crisis of confidence in Britain precipitated by the Suez dispute created a massive speculative pressure on the sterling that almost forced the British government to devalue and/or impose capital controls. Bank of England director C.F. Cobbold had already been warned in October by Commonwealth central bankers that ‘a further devaluation of sterling would mean the end of the sterling area‘.[85] Not only was the sterling area considered to be a binding force in the Empire and the Commonwealth, it also ensured to a large degree the stability of the Bretton Woods exchange system, financing over 50% of global transactions.[86] Thus, the importance of ‘the continued existence of the sterling area to the British government in 1956 cannot be over-emphasized’.[87] Naturally, Britain began seriously considering an IMF withdrawal request in November alongside relief funds from EXIM and the delay of lend-lease repayments due to the US and Canada. When Chancellor of the Exchequer Macmillan informed Cabinet on 6 November that the US would not allocate this aid so long as Britain maintained operations in Egypt, a sense of crisis grew.[88] Indeed, the IMF’s weighted voting system gave the United States disproportionate influence over the allocation of funds. As a consequence, Diane Kunz argues that in this position Britain had ‘complete and utter dependence’ on US support for its continued presence in Suez because to continue Britain needed money that only America could release from the IMF.[89] Diplomatic histories have conclusively demonstrated that the US used its leverage in the IMF, alongside other bargaining chips, to force a British withdrawal from Port Said by threatening to block a tranche release.[90] It does not follow, however, that the IMF failed to approach the British loan request neutrally when it arrived or, indeed, that the Fund ever contravened its rules. In fact, if we look at the way that the IMF handled Britain’s request—rather than the way that the US threatened to handle the IMF—it becomes clear that its decision making conformed to the normal technical approach. On 7 December, British Director Lord Harcourt made a request for the release of Britain’s gold and first credit tranches ($561.47 million) with its remaining quota available on standby ($738.53 million) for reasons, in his own words, entirely ‘consistent with the provisions of the Fund Agreement’.[91] It would be the technical recommendations of IMF staff and not American geopolitical interests, it appears, that decided the approval of this massive tranche release. The Executive Board was presented with a background material document that noted the ‘improvement in the situation, both internally and externally’ of Britain’s 1955 trade deficit into a surplus in 1956.[92] Staff analysis concluded that ‘reserves were influenced not only by the United Kingdom’s trading position but also by its role as banker and by the international use of sterling’.[93] During the Executive Board Meeting itself, executive director F.A. Southard remarked that ‘if the Fund did not act to bolster such a key currency as sterling…all members would regret it and…the consequences would be serious’[94] because of its status as reserve currency. The Fund granted Britain support because it recognised that the sterling’s problems resulted from a speculative attack rather than from fundamental problems with the British economy. It applauded Britain, furthermore, for avoiding the introduction of trade controls.[95] Case by case, IMF internal documents suggest that the organisation operated according to its own rules during the Suez Crisis. Even if Executive Board documents were available to top officials in member countries’ central banks, which incentivises the presentation of impartiality, I find that the willingness of the IMF to deal with Israel while it sustained troops in Egypt suggests that it was not so extensively influenced by the US, who at the same time vehemently sought an Israeli withdrawal in the UN. Still, Kunz presents the IMF as just another instrument of American economic leverage.[96] Indeed, she goes as far as to describe Britain as an American ‘client state’ because of its reliance on IMF aid.[97] However, Kunz’s view likely stems from her reliance on British-American diplomatic correspondence; in ‘The Economic Diplomacy of the Suez Crisis’, which is nearly 400 pages long, she references IMF sources just once.[98] Relating IMF documents to secondary material, in contrast, demonstrates that it is inappropriate to see the Fund merely as another weapon in America’s economic arsenal. Thus, we must circumscribe Kunz’s argument. Instead, ‘the IMF was able to act upon [loan requests] without becoming embroiled in the crisis’.[99] Turning to outcomes, it appears that the technical information and neutral decision making affected by the Fund mitigated the short to mid-term monetary problems associated with the Suez Crisis. The 1957 annual report ‘found it encouraging that difficult internal adjustments had been made with considerable success, and that it had proved possible, with the assistance of the Fund, to avoid a reintroduction of the restrictive practices [in Europe]’.[100] Indeed, after the announcement of the IMF package, staff analysis found that ‘speculative pressures [on the sterling] virtually ceased’.[101] Despite the role of direct US aid in reviving the sterling, Boughton argues that ‘a much larger multilateral package would have to be assembled to end the crisis, and the IMF was the institution that was best placed to do so’.[102] The pound retained its exchange rate with the dollar until 1967. In February, an Executive Director noted that ‘the current balance of payments was better than one would have thought possible some months ago’.[103] Thus, the IMF maintained the stability of the international monetary system during the Suez Crisis. Even if its decisions affected the diplomacy of the crisis, it has been shown that they were by and large formulated according to a neutral application of the Articles of Agreement. Like the ICRC, then, the IMF could perform its functions in no small part because its neutrality was credible. Its unprecedented achievement in keeping countries financially buoyant and open for trade in this time of crisis is captured in the Business Week headline of 30 March 1957: ‘IMF wins over the sceptics’.[104] It had put its technical powers to effective use in a testing time for the international monetary system. The UN Though the UN had been involved in the first, diplomatic phase of the Suez Crisis, its operations began in earnest after Israeli tanks rolled into the Sinai Peninsula.[105] With the military conflict in motion, the organisation’s aim became the restoration of peace with a full withdrawal by all the belligerents. In fact, a ceasefire was declared within a fortnight of the Israeli invasion and the full withdrawal of foreign troops from Egypt completed inside six months; however, it is necessary to draw direct causal links between the UN’s intervention in the conflict and the outbreak of peace. The UN affected four key processes: it set international norms and directly encouraged states to follow them; it solved technical problems; it shaped interstate diplomacy by creating a neutral forum for debate; and it created the world’s first peacekeeping force, which acted as a physical extension of its diplomacy. The UN acted as the primary shaper of norms during the Suez Crisis, a position that proceeded from the ‘strength of its [near] universal membership’ and its status as the premier diplomatic organ in world politics.[106] Crucially, the UN Charter commanded what Weiss calls ‘international legitimacy’.[107] Security Council and General Assembly Resolutions were the main vehicle by which the UN made normative pronouncements over the crisis. From the outset of the crisis, belligerents attempted to frame their actions in terms of the normative mandate of these resolutions. Indeed, even though Britain and France ended up completely transgressing the principles of SCR/118 both countries presented their invasion as a ‘police action’ to protect international shipping—i.e. in terms broadly consistent with the Charter.[108] Unfortunately for Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet, however, deliberation at the UN affirmed the opposition of most states to the invasion. The First Emergency Special Session of the General Assembly passed Resolution 997 on 2 November, which called for a ceasefire, withdrawal, and clearance of the Canal. These demands were repeated in motions passed on 4, 7, and 24 November.[109] After the British-French withdrawal, Israel was pressed further through motions on 19 January and 2 February.[110] Though some countries (notably Australia), voiced their support for the British-French ‘police action’, the General Assembly, overall, conclusively condemned the tripartite aggression with large majorities in the General Assembly.[111] On 3 November, the Egyptian representative rebuked Britain and France’s ‘false pretext of separating the Egyptian and Israel armies until a solution has been found to the Suez Canal question’.[112] In an address on 7 November, the delegate for Ceylon noted that, ‘the Assembly, by its resolution [GAR 997], rejected in unmistakable terms the explanation that their [Britain and France’s] action was a ‘police action’; it was an invasion, a military operation conducted against Egypt. In those circumstances, they have no legal or moral right to remain there’.[113] Thus, the role of the African-Asian bloc in admonishing the imperial powers is especially important.[114] Britain and France had attempted to prevent this by framing their invasion as a ‘police action’, which demonstrates a key diplomatic dimension of the Suez Crisis: UN norms mattered. The diplomatic operations of the Secretariat were also crucial in the UN’s pursuit of peace, facilitating consensus-building deliberation on the General Assembly Floor as well as behind the scenes. On 29 October, Secretary-General Hammarskjöld convened private meetings with American, British, French, and Soviet diplomats to discuss the situation.[115] Working with Canadian Foreign Minister and committed UN advocate Lester Pearson, he led backroom discussions from 2 November that helped to distil the principles of UNEF, which would replace British-French ‘police action’.[116] While it was important that the superpowers supported UNEF, the independent diplomatic action of the Secretariat was essential. Between 16 and 18 November, Hammarskjöld opened talks in Cairo to secure Nasser’s approval, spending seven hours alone on 17 November to sway his doubts about the inclusion of Canadian forces—whose head of state was the Queen of England—in the operation.[117] Nasser’s acceptance of foreign UNEF troops on Egyptian land depended on his trust in Hammarskjöld. To understand the agency of the Secretariat, we also have to appreciate its use of what I call ‘hard diplomacy’—diplomatic process that bolsters verbal negotiations with action on the ground. The Secretariat’s status as a neutral, international body allowed it to provide the technical aid needed to clear the several ships scuttled in the Suez Canal at the start of the invasion. Whereas Britain and France argued that their own engineers would be needed, Hammarksjöld organised an alternative pool of technical expertise, which was accepted because it was not deemed to undermine Egypt’s sovereignty.[118] As a result, France and Britain lost an important justification for their continued presence in Egypt. The United Nations began work in mid-December and the Canal was in full working order by 10 April 1957. The UN’s provision of neutral, technical aid, then, both resolved a material problem created by the Suez Canal—the blocking of a major seaway—and increased diplomatic pressure on Britain and France to withdraw. A more impressive example of the UN’s ‘hard diplomacy’, however, is the formation of UNEF. By establishing a peacekeeping force that was neutral and ‘fully independent of the policies of any one nation’, the security of the Suez Canal could be assured without undermining Egyptian sovereignty.[119] With the first UNEF troops entering Egypt on 15 November to supervise the Egyptian-Israeli truce, the basis for British-French occupation began to evaporate. Indeed, the forceful appeals of GAR 1121 for the three invading countries to withdraw emphasised the presence of UNEF.[120] Though only mandated to act in self-defence, these forces were a physical embodiment of the UN’s mandate for peace as Dag Hammarskjöld emphasised in a radio address to his soldiers: ‘You are the frontline of a moral force which extends around the world…Your success can have profound effect for good‘.[121] In sum, the UN was an active participant in the restoration of peace in the Middle East. First, the UN set norms that carried real weight due to the organisation’s near universal membership and commitment to high ideals. Second, the UN’s body of international civil servants in the Secretariat facilitated diplomatic engagement between states, especially through the personal work of Dag Hammarskjöld.[122] Third, this diplomatic engagement was bolstered by ‘hard diplomacy’, including technical aid and UNEF. Overall, international organisations were active participants in making their articulated goals happen. Interestingly, despite their varying aims and institutional designs, there were remarkable similarities between the operations that each international organisation used in the pursuit of its goals. The IMF, ICRC, and to some extent the UN were very active gatherers of technical information. Furthermore, the ICRC and UN facilitated diplomacy between different entities, acting both as diplomatic agents and forums of dialogue. This overlap in function can explain apparent clashes between organisations; in an address on World Red Cross Day, Dag Hammarskjöld noted that ‘when…the United Nations arranged and carried out the transfer of prisoners of war, the International Committee of the Red Cross lent valued assistance’.[123] The ICRC claimed credit for supervising the same operation—such contradictory reporting was rare, but it demonstrates the extent to which overlapping interests could lead to conflict.[124] While the IMF 1956 Annual Report noted that the UN and IMF ‘have worked together in close association, whenever their interests required it’, there is no evidence they actively cooperated during the Suez Crisis.[125] Still, IOs employed common processes in a way that allows us to consider their role in the resolution of the Suez Crisis collectively, strengthening the argument for an international society approach. Most importantly each of these international organisations sought to embody neutrality in the eyes of states both as an end in itself and as a means to achieving their goals, presenting their actions through a discourse of internationalism.[126] Thus, the humanitarian, monetary, and diplomatic rules and norms promulgated by the ICRC, the IMF, and the UN respectively held weight because they were deemed to be neutral. A Crisis for the World? It is clear that international organisations were deeply involved in making the history of the Suez Crisis. Yet in some ways this conclusion begs more questions than it answers. In this chapter, I will argue that the similarity of the processes affected by IOs and the analogous way that they constructed neutrality in the eyes of states necessitate certain adjustments to the historiography. Most importantly, international organisations must be central to how we understand the course and resolution of the militarised phase of the crisis. Though IOs were not always the principal shapers of events, their status as neutral actors with internationalist aims allowed them to exert an important agency that has hitherto been overlooked. Furthermore, the similarity of the processes that they employed supports the application of the international society approach to the Suez Crisis. I will close with some tentative research recommendations for future scholarship into the crisis International organisations were at the centre of the Suez Crisis from the first shots fired in the Sinai Desert on 29 October 1956 to the reopening of the Canal on 10 April 1957. Though they achieved their articulated goals, the role of states in this process remains to be fully examined. Indeed, most histories of the Suez Crisis have understood international organisations merely as instruments of states; however, this ignores the way that IOs shaped norms, which directed state power.[127] The UN is of primary importance here. For example, the United States exerted diplomatic and economic pressure on Britain, France, and Israel to withdraw in a large part because the UN had laid bare the way that the invaders’ actions violated international norms, which jeopardised the West’s position in the Cold War.[128] As Sir Charles Keightley, Commander in Chief of the British forces, put it, ‘the one overriding lesson of the Suez operation is that world opinion is now an absolute principle of war and must be treated as such‘.[129] In sum, ‘the UN…established norms of government but did not rule’.[130] For just this reason, British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd had attempted to cast Britain’s invasion in terms of ‘an international policing role’, reflecting on 8 November that Britain ‘have heartily welcomed the idea of sending a United Nations force to the area to take over the responsibilities which we have felt bound to shoulder’.[131] A similar narrative of the crisis is repeated in Eden’s memoirs.[132] By consequence, the establishment of UNEF necessitated a French-British withdrawal. Thus, norms coming from the UN exerted agency on state action. It has been noted that international organisations pursued courses of action unavailable to states. Paradoxically, the unique ability of the ICRC to supervise the implementation of humanitarian law and the IMF to maintain monetary stability has led their influence in the crisis to be overlooked. Given the preoccupation of diplomatic historians with state action, it is unsurprising that the historiography has ignored the several problems that states did not face because of IO activity . For example, although the US aid helped to ease pressures on the sterling, it could not have resolved Britain’s balance of payments problem alone.[133] Furthermore, the ICRC’s unique position in the supply of aid to civilians, prisoners of war, and the wounded prevented human disasters and public relations difficulties for the invading powers, which were explicit concerns of British commanders in Port Said.[134] The impact of these two organisations does not appear in the state archives precisely because they were successful. Reflecting on this point, one might model the agency of IOs, then, along a continuum between ‘stage-setting’—the ICRC’s preemption and mitigation of humanitarian problems—and ‘actioning’—the deployment of UNEF. Each IO shaped the crisis in both of these ways, with the UN engaging in the most actioning, the ICRC in stage-setting, and the IMF somewhere in between. Across both of these processes, though, the construction of neutrality by IOs was a means to achieving their goals and an end in itself. Indeed, as research of their aims has shown, the neutral promotion of universal values was central to the internationalist mandates of the UN, the IMF, and the ICRC. Still, the realisation of these goals during the Suez Crisis depended to some extent on the support of the two superpowers, the USA and the USSR. For example, they both supported the intervention of a UN peacekeeping force because each wanted to bring about a British-French withdrawal without facilitating the intervention of the other superpower.[135] Still, though it was important that American and Soviet diplomats accepted the idea, the UN occupied a unique position as an international organisation designed to serve internationalist goals in the formation of an international peacekeeping force. Though the IMF acted according to its own rules in approving the massive rescue package for Britain, its approval was by then in the USA’s interests as Britain had already committed to withdraw from Port Said. In addition, circumstances at Suez did not present the ICRC with difficult questions on how to remain neutral that were faced in other conflicts.[136] Thus, if by their own accounts IOs operated as neutral actors, this depended to some extent on favourable background conditions. Overall, I contend that this study has bolstered the importance of international society as an object of analysis in international history. I have not pursued such an analysis outright, but rather have drawn inspiration from it and examined one facet of building a more holistic, international understanding of the Suez Crisis. By examining the aims and operations of IOs, I have shown that they pursued similar aims and generated influence in comparable ways. Indeed, they often interrelated in their functions. For example, the UN and ICRC jointly managed the transfer of prisoners in the Sinai peninsula. In addition, they sometimes exerted a joint influence of states, even unintentionally. For example, the flight on the sterling was to a large degree motivated by Britain’s weak position at the UN, which pushed Britain into the hands of the IMF.[137] The main point, however, is that the internationalist, neutral aims of IOs were realised through some combination of diplomacy, information gathering, technical aid, and normative influence, which are processes I have identified through primary research. This suggests that in an international society approach to the Suez Crisis individual IOs ought to be examined together. In sum, this study impels the historian to approach the Suez Crisis—and indeed international history—more holistically. In 2008, Scott Lucas noted that ‘various collections from 1991 have tried to represent Suez as a multinational affair, only to run the risk of merely re-scripting the historical play with more actors’.[138] What this study has sought to show is that future research should seek to understand the crisis in terms of international society, a singular category that brings all of these actors—and the historiographies they bring with them—together. My research throws up other future areas of exploration into the Suez Crisis. Most importantly, the Suez Crisis must be recognised as an important moment in the history of the organisations themselves. Indeed, the way that IO officials discussed the crisis reveals a palpable sense of their ‘making history’ for their respective organisations.[139] In addition, historians should build on this study to revisit state archives with international society in mind and perhaps new material will become useful. It will be important to study how different actors shaped norms and other features of international society. Furthermore, the interaction between normative rhetoric in foreign relations and domestic policy ought to be addressed. In view of postcolonial approaches, further study should go into the Eurocentrism lurking behind the ability of IOs to construct neutrality. Perhaps this study of the Suez Crisis begs more questions than answers, but it is certainly a start in the right direction. *** On 4 November 1956, Omar Loufti, the Permanent Representative of Egypt to the United Nations appealed to the sovereign nations of the world, ‘The solution of the problem is in your hands. The eyes of the world are upon you. Yours is a great responsibility’.[140] Several states responded to his call for support, but the resolution of the problem to which he referred—the Suez Crisis—could not have happened in the way that it did without the intervention of international organisations. Acting in ways that states could not, the ICRC, the IMF, and the UN together shaped the course of the crisis and contributed significantly to its conclusion. This study has shown that states did not underestimate their influence; neither should history. 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.  Appendix: Archival Sources Washington D.C., International Monetary Fund Archives (IMF) Executive Board Minutes (EBM/169483) Executive Board Documents (EBD/169391) Executive Board Specials (EBS/169337) Press Reports (PREP/183443) Press Releases (PR/169465) Staff memoranda (SM/169374) New York City, United Nations Archives (UNA) Fonds: Secretary General Dag Hammarkjold (1953-1961) Series: Press Releases Items: S-0928-0001-04; S-0928-0001-05 UN Digital Library Security Council Documents Resolutions S/3675, S/3721 Procès Verbal S/PV.743, S/PV.751 Letters S/3649, S/3654, S/3656, S/3674, S/3679, S/3683, S/3712, S/3721, S/3728 General Assembly Documents Resolutions A/RES/377(V), A/RES/997(ES-I), A/RES/998(ES-I), A/RES/999(ES-I), A/RES/1000(ES-I), A/RES/1001(ES-I), A/RES/1002(ES-I), A/RES/1003(ES-I), A/RES/1120(XI), A/RES/1121(XI), A/RES/1123(XI), A/RES/1124(XI) Procès Verbal A/PV.562; A/PV.563; A/PV.565; A/PV.567; A/PV.572; A/PV.594; A/PV.596; A/PV.642; A/PV.652 Committee Reports A/3256; A/3275; A/3276; A/3290; A/3308; A/3309; A/3329; A/3383(Annex)/Rev.1; A/3385/Rev.1; A/3386; A/3501/Rev.1; A/3517 [1] Jean Lacouture and Simone Lacouture, ‘The Night Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal’, Le Monde diplomatique (Paris, July 2002), < https://mondediplo.com/2002/07/12canal > accessed 6 March 2022. [2] Quoted in Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East (2nd edn, I.B. Tauris 2003) 7. [3] Jacob Coleman Hurewitz, ‘The Historical Context’ in William Roger Louis and Roger Owen (eds), Suez 1956: The Crisis and Its Consequences (Clarendon Press 1991) 19-30. [4] ibid 22. [5] Mordechai Bar-On, ‘David Ben-Gurion and the Sèvres Collusion’ in ibid 145-60. [6] For memoirs, see Anthony Eden, Full Circle: The Memoirs of Sir Anthony Eden (Cassell 1960); Dwight Eisenhower, The White House Years vol. ii: Waging Peace, 1956–1961 (Doubleday 1965); Howard Macmillan, Riding the Storm, 1956–1959 (Macmillan 1971); Muḥammad Ḥasanayn Haykal, Nasser: The Cairo Documents (New English Library 1972). [7] For diplomatic histories, see Diane Kunz, ‘The Economic Diplomacy of the Suez Crisis’ (Yale University Ph.D thesis 1989); Kyle (n 2); Louis and Owen (n 3); W Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis (Hodder & Stoughton 1996) . [8] See for example James M Boughton, ‘Northwest of Suez: The 1956 Crisis and the IMF’ (2000) 00/192 IMF Working Papers ; Norrie MacQueen, Peacekeeping and the International System (Routledge 2005) 61-79; Amy Sayward, The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organisation and World Health Organisation changed the world, 1945-65 (Kent State University Press 2006) 56-63; Esther Moeller, ‘The Suez Crisis of 1956 as a Moment of Transnational Humanitarian Engagement’ (2016) 23(1-2) European Review of History: Revue Européenne D’histoire 136-53. [9] Kenneth W Abbott and Duncan Snidal , ‘Why States Act through Formal International Organizations’ (1998) 42(1) The Journal of Conflict Resolution 4. [10] Michael N Barnett and Martha Finnemore, ‘The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations’ (1999) 53(4) International Organization 707-15. [11] For example, United Nations General Assembly (hereafter UNGA), ‘565th Plenary Meeting’, 4 November 1956, UN, A/PV.565 80. [12] Odd Westad, ‘The Cold War and the International History of the Twentieth Century’ in Melvyn Leffler and Odd Westad (eds), The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Vol. 1 Origins, 1945-1962 (3 vols, Cambridge University Press 2010) 1-19. [13] François Bugnion and Françoise Perret, From Budapest to Saigon: History of the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1956–1965 (ICRC 2009) 2. [14] ibid 5. [15] Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field (adopted 12/08/1949), 75 UNTS 31, Art 9 < https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%2075/volume-75-I-970-English.pdf > accessed 1 March 2022. [16] ICRC, Handbook of the International Red Cross , (10th ed, ICRC 1953) 305-11. [17] David Forsythe, ‘On Contested Concepts: Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and the Notion of Neutrality’ (2013) 12(1) Journal of Human Rights 65-6. [18] Gerald Steinacher, Humanitarians at War: The Red Cross in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press 2017) 237-44. [19] ‘The absence of preparation for wartime’. Comité International de la Croix-Rouge (hereafter CICR), ‘De Retour du Moyen-Orient…’ (1956) 38(449) Revue Internationale de la Croix-Rouge (hereafter RICR) 278. [20] ‘Has requested the Governments of the countries involved in the conflict…to guarantee the application of the four 1949 Geneva Conventions’. CICR, ‘La Croix-Rouge et le Conflit de Suez’ (1956) 38(455) RICR 659. [21] ‘Ready to assume the tasks laid out for it by the Geneva Conventions’. Ibid. [22] ibid 661. [23] John Keith Horsefield and Margaret Garritsen De Vries, The International Monetary Fund, 1945-1965: Twenty Years of International Monetary Cooperation (3 vols, International Monetary Fund 1969) ii 40. [24] ibid 3-18. [25] ‘Annual Report, 1956’, 23 May 1956, IMF, SM/56/43, 134. [26] Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund (adopted 27/12/1945), 2 UNTS 39, Art. 1(i) < https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%202/v2.pdf > accessed 1 March 2022. [27] ibid Art. 1(ii). [28] Ian Hurd, International Organizations: Politics, Law, Practic e, (4th edn, Cambridge University Press 2021) 146. [29] Articles (n 26) Art. 12, section 4, (c). [30] ‘Executive Board Meeting’, 22 September 1956, IMF, EBM/56/48. [31] Charter of the United Nations (adopted 24 October 1945), 1 UNTS 16, Preamble < https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b3930.html > accessed 1 March 2022. [32] MacQueen (n 8) 61. [33] ibid 68. [34] Charter (n 31) Art. 1. [35] ibid Art. 2. [36] Thomas G Weiss, ‘The United Nations: Before, During and After 1945’ (2015) 91(6) International Affairs 1230. [37] United Nations Security Council (hereafter UNSC), ‘Resolution 118’, 13 October 1956, UN, S/3675; Kyle (n 2) 148. [38] UNSC, ‘Resolution 119’, 31 October 1956, UN, S/3721. [39] UNGA, ‘Uniting for Peace’, 3 November 1950, UN, A/RES/377(V). [40] UNGA, ‘Resolution 997 (ES-I)’, 2 November 1956, UN, A/RES/997(ES-I). [41] For example, see UNGA, ‘Resolution 998 (ES-I)’, 4 November 1956, UN, A/RES/998(ES-I). [42] Charter (n 31) Art. 97. [43] ‘Statement by Secretary-General after Security Council Action over Suez’, 13 October 1956, UNA, Press Release SG/510. [44] UNSC, ‘751th Meeting’, 31 October 1956, UN, S/PV.751 1-2. [45] Sandrine Kott, ‘Cold War Internationalism’ in Patricia Clavin and Glenda Sluga (eds), Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge University Press 2017) 340. [46] Moeller (n 8) 137. [47] Bugnion and Perret (n 13) 63-82. [48] CICR (n 20) 659-60. [49] Bugnion and Perret (n 13) 68. [50] ‘Letter from the UN secretary-general to the ICRC president’, 4 December 1956, ICRC Archives, B AG 201 139-001 quoted in Bugnion and Perret (n 13) 79. [51] CICR, ‘Le rapatriement des prisonniers de guerre dans le Proche-Orient’ (1957) 39(459) RICR 162. [52] Moeller (n 8) 143. [53] CICR, ‘L’action du Comité International dans le Proche-Orient’ (1957) 39(458) RICR 92. [54] CICR (n 51) 163. [55] Moeller (n 8) 144. [56] CICR, ‘L’action du Comité International dans le Proche-Orient’ (1956) 38(456) RICR 732. [57] CICR (n 20) 661. [58] Moeller (n 8) 145. [59] Bugnion and Perret (n 13) 73. [60] ‘During their captivity all prisoners in Israel and Egypt were supported’. CICR (n 51) 158. [61] ‘Remains characteristic of the fulfilment of the tasks of the [ICRC] within the framework of the Geneva Conventions’. CICR (n 53) 90. [62] ‘Special aid funds [were] immediately opened up to the victims of the events’. CICR (n 56) 732. [63] CICR, ‘Égypte’ (1957) 39(461) RICR 283. [64] Moeller (n 8) 141. [65] CICR (n 53) 91. [66] ‘That a request was made by two Red Crescent vehicles, containing Egyptians, to proceed to Port Said and inquires if General Burns could be approached on the Subject’, 10 November 1956, TNA, JE 1094/90, fo. 371/1118906 quoted in Moeller (n 8) 141. [67] CICR (n 56) 734. [68] CICR, ‘La Croix-Rouge au secours des sinistrés de Port-Saïd (1957) 39(459) RICR 165. [69] Moeller (n 8) 142. [70] CICR (n 20) 661; CICR (n 53) 89. [71] CICR (n 56) 733; CICR (n 53) 94. [72] ‘In close contact’. CICR (n 53) 94; CICR, ‘L’activité du Comité’ (1957) 39(457) RICR 27. [73] ‘Use of the Fund’s Resources - Egypt’, 21 September 1956, IMF, EBS/56/28 3. [74] Boughton (n 8) 10. [75] ‘1956 Consultations - France’, 17 October 1956, IMF, SM/56/61 (Supplement 2) 2. [76] ‘Executive Board Meeting’, 17 October 1956, IMF, EBM/56/51. [77] 18 October 1956, IMF, PR/243. [78] Boughton (n 8) 5. [79] ‘Use of the Fund’s Resources - Egypt’, 30 January 1957, IMF, EBS/57/7 (Supplement 1) 4. [80] ‘Minutes of Executive Board Meeting’, 4 February 1957, IMF, EBM/57/5 2-3. [81] ‘Israel - Revision of Quota’, 19 October 1956, IMF, EBS/56/31, 1; ‘Par Value for Israel’, 26 October 1956, IMF, EBD/56/124. [82] ‘1956 Consultations - Israel’, 5 February 1957, IMF, SM/57/12 16. [83] ‘Minutes of Executive Board Meeting’, 27 February 1957, IMF, EBM/57/10 15. [84] ‘Use of the Fund’s Resources - Israel’, 13 May 1957, IMF, EBS/57/26 (Supplement 1). [85] ‘Cobbold to Macmillan’, October 17 1956, TNA, T 236/4188 quoted in Kunz (n 7) 197. [86] Kunz (n 7) 353. [87] ibid 152. [88] ibid 230. [89] ibid 246. [90] Kyle (n 2) 464; Boughton (n 8) 19. [91] ‘Use of the Fund’s Resources - United Kingdom’, 7 December 1956, IMF, EBS/56/44 1. [92] ‘United Kingdom - Background Material’, 7 December 1956, IMF, SM/56/83 7. [93] ‘1956 Consultations - United Kingdom’, 11 February 1957, IMF, SM/57/14 19. [94] ‘Executive Board Meeting’, 10 December 1956, IMF, EBM/56/59 3. [95] ibid. [96] Kunz (n 7) 1. [97] ibid 5. [98] See footnote in ibid 279. [99] Boughton (n 8) 5. [100] Horsefield and De Vries (n 23) i, 441. [101] ‘1957 Consultations - United Kingdom’, 10 December 1957, IMF, SM/57/101 4. [102] Boughton (n 8) 26. [103] IMF, EBM/57/10, 11. [104] ‘IMF Wins Over the Skeptics’, 30 March 1957, IMF, PREP/57/3. [105] Edward Johnson, ‘The Suez Crisis at the United Nations’ in Simon C Smith (ed), Reassessing Suez 1956: New Perspectives on the Crisis and Its Aftermath (Ashgate 2008) 170. [106] Weiss (n 36) 1226. [107] ibid 1227. [108] UN, S/3675; UNGA, ‘567th Plenary Meeting’, 7 November 1956, UN, A/PV.567. [109] UN, A/RES/997(ES-I); UN, A/RES/998(ES-I); UNGA, ‘Resolution 1002 (ES-I)’, 5 November 1956, UN, A/RES/1002(ES-I); UNGA, ‘Resolution 1120(XI)’, 24 November 1956, UN, A/RES/1120(XI). [110] UNGA, ‘Resolution 1123 (XI)’, 19 January 1957, UN, A/RES/1123(XI); UNGA, ‘Resolution 1124 (XI)’, 2 February 1957, UN, A/RES/1124(XI). [111] Peter Lyon, ‘The Commonwealth and the Suez Crisis’ in Louis and Owen (n 3) 257-274; UN, A/PV.567 126-7. [112] UNGA, ‘563rd Plenary Meeting’, 3 November 1956, UN, A/PV.563 46. [113] UN, A/PV.567 124. [114] Ibid., 106; UN, A/PV.563 59. [115] Kyle (n 2) 277-88. [116] M. Tudor, ‘Blue Helmet Bureaucrats: UN Peacekeeping Missions and the Formation of the Post-Colonial International Order, 1956-1971’ (Manchester University Ph.D thesis 2020) 47. [117] Manuel Fröhlich, ‘The ‘Suez Story’: Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations and the creation of UN peacekeeping’ in Henning Melber and Carsten Stahn (eds), Peace Diplomacy, Global Justice and International Agency: Rethinking Human Security and Ethics in the Spirit of Dag Hammarskjöld (Cambridge University Press 2014) 334. [118] ibid 330. [119] UNGA, ‘Second and final report of the Secretary-General on the plan for an emergency international United Nations force’, 6 November 1956, UN, A/3302 2. [120] UNGA, ‘Resolution 1121 (XI)’, 24 November 1956, UN, A/RES/1121(XI). [121] ‘UN Pamphlet on UNEF’, 1 March 1957, UNA, S-0313-0002-12, 17 quoted in Tudor (n 116) 64. [122] Fröhlich (n 117) 308. [123] ‘Message from United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld on World Red Cross Day’, Security Council Action over Suez’, 3 May 1957, UNA, Press Release SG/591. [124] CICR (n 53) 93. [125] IMF, SM/56/43 141. [126] Eva-Maria Muschik, ‘Managing the World: The United Nations, Decolonization, and the Strange Triumph of State Sovereignty in the 1950s and 1960s’ (2018) 13(1) Journal of Global History 122. [127] See for example Kyle (n 2); Lucas (n 7); Nigel John Ashton, Eisenhower, Macmillan and the Problem of Nasser: Anglo-American Relations and Arab Nationalism, 1955-59 (Macmillan 1996); Simon C Smith, Ending Empire in the Middle East: Britain, the United States and Post-war Decolonization, 1945-1973 (Routledge 2012). [128] Peter G Boyle, ‘The Hungarian Revolution and the Suez Crisis’ (2005) 90(4/300) History 564. [129] Sir Charles Keightley, 11 December 1957 quoted in Kyle (n 2) 392. [130] Muschik (n 126) 125. [131] Tudor (n 116) 61; UN, A/PV.567 112 [132] Eden (n 6) 522-27. [133] Boughton (n 8) 26. [134] Moeller (n 8) 144. [135] John C Campbell, ‘The Soviet Union, the United States, and the Twin Crises of Hungary and Suez’ in Louis and Owen (n 3) 247. [136] Michael N Barnett, The Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Cornell University Press 2011) 133. [137] Kyle (n 2) 464. [138] Scott Lucas, ‘Conclusion’ in Smith (n 105) 239. [139] Bugnion and Perret (n 13) 80; Horsefield and De Vries (n 23) i, 426; UNGA, ‘594th Plenary Meeting’, 24 November 1956, UN, A/PV.594 295. [140] UN, A/PV.565 80.

Introduction   Arendt’s account of modernity and The Human Condition  (1958)[1]   Opening the final section of The Human Condition  (1958), ‘The  vita activa  and the modern age’, Hannah Arendt references a quote by Franz Kafka:   He found the Archimedean point, but he used it against himself; it seems that he was permitted to find it only under this condition.[2]   With the advent of space flight, humankind had decisively located Archimedes’ point—the hypothetical vantage point from which one can view the entire Earth, and perhaps even move it. For Arendt, this event marked the continuation of a centuries-long trend, beginning with Galileo’s invention of the telescope, whereby scientific and technological progress alienated humanity from its natural, earthbound existence. In this essay, I will explore two dimensions of Arendt’s opposition to the Space Race: firstly, the Space Race as antithetical to humanity’s natural, earthbound existence, as embodied by her concept of ‘earth alienation’; and, secondly, the Space Race as symbolic of a rejection of human political existence, this being exemplified by the civic republicanism of Arendt’s ideal polity. Taken together, Arendt’s writings on space illuminate her broader theory of the relationship between technology and modernity, for the space race ultimately serves as a metaphor for the technicalisation of modern life, which alienates human beings from the essential realities of the world. Her utopian vision of the modern American republic acts as an antidote to these ills.   This discussion must be located within Arendt’s account of modernity and the basic conditions and activities of human life, as outlined in The Human Condition . For the purposes of this essay, two of Arendt’s   basic conditions of human existence are of particular importance. The first of these, the condition of ‘plurality’, is at the core of her critique of the Western tradition of political thought since Plato. In opposition to the tendency of political philosophers to fetishise the lone individual, she presents plurality: the fact that ‘men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world’.[3] Human plurality is the foundational condition of political life, because politics necessarily takes place in the spaces and interactions between people.[4] The second condition, that of ‘natality’, is ‘the new beginning inherent in birth’.[5] If all politics requires plurality, political action is made possible by natality, which reflects the human capacity to take initiative and begin anew, the wellspring of all political acts.   These conditions, plurality and natality, have a close and co-constitutive relationship with the three basic activities of active human life, or the vita activa , which Arendt contrasts with the vita contemplativa , the life of contemplation. She identifies these activities   as follows. Firstly, the activity of labour , the natural, cyclical activities undertaken by animal laborans  (man as a labouring animal) to meet physical and biological needs, for instance by farming crops for consumption. Secondly, the activity of work , those ‘higher’ forms of production through which homo faber  (man the maker) creates the objects that together comprise the stable, enduring world of human ‘artifice’. Finally, the activity of action , ‘the political activity par excellence’, those activities performed in the public realm, with deliberate intent and in concert with others.[6]   Arendt does not put forth a political programme in The Human Condition . It was neither intended to present an exhaustive list of the activities undertaken by human beings, nor to make claims about human nature  as such. This reflects Arendt’s view that the activities and conditions of human life are not immutable—in fact, technological developments have the potential to fundamentally disrupt them. She gives the example of future scientific advancements enabling the artificial creation of human life, thereby disrupting the condition of natality, the emergence of life itself.[7]  The Human   Condition  traces the development of the human condition and its associated activities through the lens of modernity.   Arendt’s account of modernity is structured around four key features: world alienation, earth alienation, the rise of the social, and the victory of animal laborans . These features reflect two stages in the development of the modern age. The first, from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, ‘corresponds to world alienation and the rise of the social’; the second, from the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘corresponds to earth alienation and the victory of animal laborans ’.[8] While ‘world alienation’ and ‘the rise of the social’ are   also linked to Arendt’s account of the Space Race, this essay will foreground its connection to ‘earth alienation’ and ‘the triumph of animal laborans ’, as the two features of modernity which correspond   to the advent of the twentieth century, and which—in contrasting ways—embody the phenomenon of the Space Race.   Philosophical context   Arendt’s understanding of alienation has its origins in the thought of Martin Heidegger, with whom she critically reengaged throughout the 1950s. Although this essay will not explore his philosophical doctrine in detail, two foundational concepts are of critical importance for understanding Arendt’s analysis of the Space Race: alienation and disclosure. Alienation refers to Heidegger’s belief that formal or technical modes of thought, as found in scientific and technical disciplines, estrange human beings from the object they seek to understand.[9] This prevents them from knowing ‘Being’, understood as the unknowable source that emanates from all beings, including human beings. Conversely, disclosure refers to Heidegger’s belief that humans can only know Being when they stop attempting to force knowledge of it through formal and technical means.[10] Only then will Being ‘disclose’ itself to them.   Arendt’s interpretation of alienation is particularly relevant to Part 1 of this essay; her reworking of Heidegger’s theory of disclosure is central to Part 2. This reflects the fact that many political and historical phenomena, including the Space Race, can become allegories for alienation and disclosure. Within this framework, Part 1 will analyse the Space Race as a rebellion against humanity’s natural, earthbound existence, with particular reference to the concepts of earth alienation and the triumph of animal laborans .   The Space Race as a rebellion against humanity’s natural, earthbound existence   Situating the Space Race   Earth alienation refers to humanity’s attempts to escape from the ‘shackles of earth-bound experience’, as demonstrated by the drive towards the conquest and exploration of space.[11] Given that the Earth ‘is the very quintessence of the human condition’, it is perhaps unsurprising that in the prologue to The Human Condition , Arendt calls the 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, an event ‘second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom’.[12] Yet her account of the relationship between the Space Race and earth alienation must be situated within her thought on science and technology.   In the cultural discourse of France, West Germany, and the United States—the countries in which Arendt ‘spent significant amounts of time during the 1950s’[13]—the thorny problem of technology, and humanity’s ability to control its growing technological powers, was a recurring theme. In Einfü̈hrung in die Metaphysik  (1953), the published version of lectures given in 1935, Heidegger praises National Socialism for staging an ‘encounter between global technology and modern humanity’.[14] He analogises the USA and USSR to technology, and Germany to modern humanity. Although Arendt departs, of course, from her mentor’s invidious comparison between the United States and Germany, she shares his concern with technology ‘as a feature of modernity’,[15] as do many other twentieth century theorists with whom she is critically engaged, including Max Weber and Karl Jaspers.   Arendt’s concern with the Space Race as earth alienation therefore reflects a broader problem with which she, with Heidegger, was consistently preoccupied: the ‘technicalisation’ of modern life. This term refers to the ‘growing artificiality’, driven by technological development, which was replacing humanity’s natural environs with man-made artifice.[16] In the twentieth century, existing debates about technicalisation were revived by key developments of modernity:[17] automation,[18] space flight, and nuclear fission, with its potential to provide a limitless energy source or ‘destroy all organic life on earth’.[19] In the post-war era of ‘Big Science’, with vast amounts of government funding funnelled into scientific research, a sense of technological possibility abounded.[20] However, this sense of possibility was both utopian and dystopian, as reflected in the contrasting cases of astrofuturism and Arendt’s thought on technology.   Astrofuturism: A contrast case   Astrofuturism, a genre of science fiction writing and expression of utopian dreaming, developed in American intellectual and popular culture after World War II, although its historical roots lie in nineteenth-century imperialism and the myth of the colonial ‘frontier’.[21] Its central preoccupation is with ‘an escape from terrestrial history’ by eschewing humanity’s earthly limitations for the final frontier of space.[22] As with the Space Race and the atomic age, there exists a tension between war and peace in astrofuturism, which encompasses visions of American space colonisation—evident in the militaristic fantasies of authors like Robert Heinlein—as well as the ‘utopian, socialist hopes’ of contemporary astrofuturists like Kim Stanley Robinson.[23] Central to all astrofuturism, however, is the ideology of ‘techno-utopianism’: the belief that technological progress is both imminent and a potential cure for social, political, and economic ills on Earth.[24] As Imre Szeman notes, techno-utopian discourse is ‘employed by government officials, environmentalists, and scientists from across the political spectrum’, as well as by astrofuturists.[25]   Astrofuturism and techno-utopianism significantly influenced, and were influenced by, the Space Race. Their utopian vision thus offers a useful context and contrast case for Arendt’s more dystopian thought on science and technology. Space, for Arendt, is far from an astrofuturistic ‘site of renewal’.[26] While she does not believe a reversal of existing technology is possible or desirable,[27] her writings, from The Origins of Totalitarianism  (1951) to The Human Condition  (1958) to ‘The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man’ (1963), reflect two major concerns about modern technology: firstly, that humanity’s lack of control over its rapidly developing technological powers may spell catastrophe, and secondly, that, in the modern age, the natural is gradually being subordinated to the artificial and technical, facilitating the rise of consumer society.[28]   The Space Race as earth alienation   Arendt understands the Space Race as the culmination of a deeply rooted tendency within modern scientific and technical knowledge. This view is also reflected in her treatment of nuclear power, which supports her diagnosis of the alienating consequences of modern technology. As Brent Ryan Bellamy writes, in contrast to the techno-utopian discourse surrounding space flight and nuclear energy, the militarisation of both phenomena with the development of atomic bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) returned ‘terror … to the technological object’.[29] Arendt’s worries, however, are ontologically oriented. She is less concerned by the destructive power of nuclear technology than by its tendency to divorce ‘technical capability from social understanding’.[30] The inability of the general public to understand nuclear technology makes ‘conscious’, informed decisions about its use difficult, if not impossible.[31] For Arendt, this is an example of what happens when technical knowledge is divorced from ordinary speaking and thinking.   Arendt’s second concern, relating to the triumph of the ‘artificial’ and the technicalisation of modernity, is embodied by the Space Race as the pinnacle of earth alienation. She traces the origins of earth alienation to Galileo’s invention of the telescope in 1609, which first alienated ‘man from his immediate earthly surroundings’.[32] With Galileo’s discovery of the Archimedean point, human beings, now capable of imagining themselves at a vast distance from Earth (see fig 1), began to feel that they were ‘terrestrial not by nature’ but only by chance.[33] To leave Earth behind seemed fitting of their true nature as ‘universal beings’.[34] This is the phenomenon of earth alienation. Fig 1. Archimedes’ lever (unknown, Mechanics Magazine 1824). Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. Wikimedia Commons. accessed 8 June 2021. The crucial result of the discovery of the Archimedean point, then, was a rebellion against aspects of the human condition which were previously ‘earthbound and subject to contingency’.[35] This event marked the beginning of earth alienation and, in fuelling the corresponding development of the natural sciences and astrophysics, led to the technological advances which, many centuries later, gave birth to nuclear fission and the Space Race. The Space Race both embodies and facilitates earth alienation, and its use of technology to escape Earth is symbolic of the triumph of the ‘artificial’ over the ‘natural’. For Arendt, this is evident in the creation of ‘new heavenly bodies’ in the form of satellites like Sputnik I[36] and in the astrofuturist dream of space colonisation. The central figure in Arendt’s analysis is, of course, the astronaut. As she writes in ‘The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man’, which was published after the departure of USSR probes to the Moon in 1959, and the launch of the first American satellite in 1962:   The astronaut, shot into outer space and imprisoned in his instrument-ridden capsule where each actual physical encounter with his surroundings would spell immediate death, might well be taken as the symbolic incarnation of Heisenberg’s man—the man who will be the less likely ever to meet anything but himself and man-made things the more ardently he wishes to eliminate all anthropocentric considerations from his encounter with the non-human world around him.[37]   Here it is appropriate that Arendt should treat the astronaut as a ‘symbol’. Lying behind her portrait of a man cut-off from the world by man-made instruments, we catch a glimpse of Heidegger’s metaphysical account of how technical knowledge alienates man from ‘Being’. Arendt’s critique of the Space Race, particularly as it relates to the supremacy of technical language and instruments over the natural world and ordinary language (as in the above passage), can be viewed as an allegory for Heidegger’s concepts of Being and alienation, as outlined in the introduction to this essay. The Space Race, as the embodiment of earth alienation, is the highest form of Heideggerian alienation. Earth itself is a symbol of Being, while the artificial technologies of the Space Race and the atomic age are symbols of the alienation of knowledge from Being—and, ultimately, of humanity’s disconnect from the primal reality of the world, for this is how Arendt conceptualises ‘Being’.[38]   As the logical outcome of earth alienation, Arendt’s Space Race marks a key event in the technicalisation of modernity: the gradual replacement of humanity’s natural surroundings with the man-made and the artificial. Crucially, for Arendt, technicalisation is not inherently undesirable.[39] Human artifice has ‘strongly positive connotations’ for her, as the reflection of homo faber ’s capacity for invention and in the classical tradition, which equates human artifice with civilisation.[40] The great danger of technicalisation, however, is that it accelerates existing patterns of consumption . The logical result of this acceleration is that society will eventually be subsumed by ‘an enormously intensified life process’—an infinite process of production and consumption—until a ‘true consumers’ society’ dominates.[41]   As a result of her deep commitment to the idea that human beings are tethered to the Being from which they devolve, Arendt views the conditions of human existence as fundamentally worldly , where the world acts as a proxy for the notion of Being. It is for this reason that Arendt argues that the colonisation of space would pose ‘the most radical change’ imaginable to the human condition.[42] As the embodiment of earth alienation, the Space Race represents, for Arendt, a rejection of humanity’s natural , earthbound  existence—understood as humanity’s attachment to Being—and thus a rejection of the capacity of the human being to be at home in the world. This is the fundamental thought that lies behind her idea that the Space Race symbolises the triumph of the artificial over the natural, which is itself characteristic of the technicalisation of modernity and the rise of consumer society.   The Space Race as the triumph of animal laborans   At the same time, however, Arendt also puts forth a differing conception of the ‘natural-artificial’ dichotomy as it relates to modernity, and here the Space Race plays a different role. In this account, modernity ‘has brought us too close to nature … by elevating labor … to the highest point within the vita activa ’.[43] Labour is the most natural of human activities because it exists to fulfil our base biological needs. Its rise over work and action is the phenomenon which Arendt labels ‘the triumph of animal laborans ’, the second defining feature of modernity since the twentieth century. Her account of the relationship between labour, nature, and modernity must be understood in relation to her history of modern science, as outlined in ‘The vita activa  and the modern age’, the final section of The Human Condition .   Here, Arendt posits a relationship between ‘science, secularization and the emergence of modern politics’.[44] She argues that, from the sixteenth century onward, the development of the natural sciences supported secularisation by undermining popular faith in the divine. Secularism and the precepts of the natural sciences became the foundation of modern politics and philosophies of history. She finds evidence of this in Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism, which justifies ‘experimental interventions’ into society guided by natural laws.[45] Crucially, it is also demonstrated by the victory of labour, the only activity within the vita activa  which is driven by an eternal, cyclical ‘process’ much like the processes of the natural sciences.[46]   This account of secularisation and modernisation is pessimistic, a fact exemplified by Arendt’s treatment of the Space Race. In this alternative account of modernity, the Space Race represents a rejection not of humanity’s natural, earthbound existence, but of human consciousness  as it currently exists. From the distance of the   Archimedean point, all human activity resembles a ‘large-scale biological process’, akin to watching the operations of an ant colony from a great height, rather than the result of deliberate human and cultural innovation.[47] With the publication of Earthrise  in 1968, a decade after Arendt’s publication of The Human Condition , the Archimedean point became image (see fig 2). This reduction of human life to a process signals the triumph of labour, that eternal biological process, over work and action. Fig 2. Earthrise (William Anders 1968). National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Washington, DC, USA. Wikimedia Commons. accessed 8 June 2021. Arendt finds two repercussions following from this account of labour and the Space Race highly concerning. The first of these is that a species of labourers, as humanity will become, lacks the judgment necessary to control its growing technological powers. Her second concern—that the transcendental nature of space travel might disrupt the human psyche—filtered into the popular culture of the era. In his short story ‘The Dead Astronaut’, JG Ballard writes of relic hunters who collect the mummified corpses of astronauts killed in orbit, treasuring the remains like ‘the saintly bones of medieval shrines’.[48] Yet the remains of a NASA astronaut turn out to be radioactive—he ‘was carrying an atomic weapon!’[49] Ballard’s tale of cursed bones echoes premodern superstitions about the ‘reckless handling of sacred objects’, rewritten for the space age.[50] It is possible to imagine an Arendtian reading of Ballard’s dead astronauts, cut off from life by their instrumental cocoons, but Ballard’s gore seems to owe more to Mary Shelley than Martin Heidegger.   Other writers of the period rejected Arendt and Ballard’s pessimism. Although not explicitly, these writers are often ‘thinking with Arendt against Arendt’.[51] They deploy her categories of natality and plurality—the miracle of life and plural human existence—to argue that in (temporarily) leaving Earth behind, human beings’ connection to their home and one another is strengthened, rather than disrupted. The publication of Earthrise (see fig 2) energised these responses, as captured by a line from Archibald MacLeish’s ‘Riders on the Earth’ (1968):   To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.[52]   Ambiguities in Arendt’s account of modernity   Ultimately, Arendt reconciles her contrasting accounts of modernity by labelling them a paradox: the triumph of animal laborans  over homo faber  and zoon politikon  (the political animal) has transformed   human beings into ‘human animals unconscious of their capacities and responsibilities’.[53] Such a species is ill suited to exercise the ‘earth-threatening powers’ bestowed upon it by technological development and earth alienation.[54] Nevertheless, Arendt’s assessment of modernity, the role of ‘nature’ within it, and the relationship of the Space Race to the ‘artificial/natural’ dichotomy retains a fundamental ambiguity. The modern era is both ‘too natural and too artificial’[55]—not only in a paradoxical sense, but in a manner which obscures the boundaries of the categories of ‘nature’ and ‘artifice’ themselves.   Arendt’s concern with the Space Race also contains a strongly normative element. The Space Race is anathema to her ideal of human political existence. This is because action, particularly action as a spatially grounded phenomenon , is integral to Arendt’s conception of ‘the good life’. In The Human Condition , she does not explicitly link the Space Race to her account of action and the public realm. As such, while Part 1 of this essay was drawn directly from Arendt’s writings on the Space Race and modernity, Part 2 is my own interpretation, and aims to elucidate the full implications of the Space Race for Arendt’s ideal of human political existence. It might thereby contribute to existing bodies of literature examining her writings on technology and modern politics.[56]   The Space Race as antithetical to Arendt’s ideal of human political  existence   Action and the public realm in Arendt’s ideal polity   Kei Hiruta rejects the common narrative that Arendt is an anti-utopian thinker.[57] Arendt belongs to a group of émigré intellectuals and liberal critics of totalitarianism, including Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Talmon, and Karl Popper, who argue that the utopian impulse is inherently totalitarian because the utopian ‘blueprint’ demands the punishment or eradication of all that fails to meet its impossible standards.[58] While Arendt certainly rejects the blueprint narrative of the classical utopian tradition, Hiruta argues that her writings display another kind of utopian dreaming, which consists of ‘an imaginative and idealized reconstruction of existing polities’.[59] For Arendt, this ideal polity is the modern American republic, reimagined in the civic republican tradition of thinkers from the ancient Greeks to Montesquieu and Alexis de Tocqueville. America’s primary appeal is that it enables its citizens to live ‘the good life’ in Arendt’s understanding of the term, within which public political participation is central.   Politics, in this account, is the process of active civic engagement in the public realm. The public realm is the site where many unique individuals meet and act together to begin things anew, thus reflecting the conditions of plurality and natality. Action in the public realm symbolises hope and possibility. This is why the meaning of action, for Arendt, is exemplified by moments of revolution—she often references the American Revolution and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956—where the enactment of something new lays the foundation for the attainment of greater freedom. However, freedom, in Arendt’s account, is not freedom of choice in the liberal tradition. It is the capacity to do something new or unexpected, thereby actualising the condition of natality, the miracle of life itself.[60]   Action is not without its drawbacks, and The Human Condition  should not be read as a treatise on its assets relative to labour and work. Just as Max Weber draws attention to the irreversible and unintended consequences which result from political action, Arendt notes that action is ‘boundless’ and ‘unpredictable’.[61] Nevertheless, the public realm is of profound importance to Arendt because of the benefits which accrue to the individual, political life, and to human civilisation, from human beings acting together in the public realm. For the individual, action in the public realm is a crucial means of disclosing one’s identity—that which makes a person ‘who’ they are.[62] For political life, action is essential: it is the means by which human beings constitute political communities, develop a sense of political agency, and form opinions and judgements in concert with the diverse perspectives of their peers.[63] For human civilisation, the public realm enables the remembrance of great deeds, words, and individuals long gone, and it functions as the ‘locus of a civilisation that transcends generations’.[64]   Some of the themes implicit in these benefits—the ability of the individual to shape politics through action, the centrality of political agency, and the importance of remembrance—should be understood in light of twentieth-century experiences of war and persecution. These led to a revival of ‘anti-materialist, epic and tragic values’ in many émigré intellectuals, including Arendt.[65]   Yet the most important characteristic of the public realm, for Arendt, is that only in the public realm can reality disclose itself . As Margaret Canovan notes, the critical importance of the disclosure of reality to Arendt must be situated within two contexts.[66] The first of these is The Origins of Totalitarianism , where Arendt highlights an open public realm as a necessary site of resistance to the ‘ideological fictions’ of totalitarian regimes.[67] The second is her intellectual engagement with Heidegger, who claims that Being is disclosed in those spaces that people create together, when individuals stop thinking about Being using formal and technical instruments. The difference between humans and animals lies in this ‘unique human capacity for experiencing reality in its fullness’.[68] Arendt’s theory of action, then, should be read as an allegory for the suspension of formal thought that allows Being to disclose itself to humans. With this allegory, Arendt de-alienates humans from the world and one another. In her account of action as it relates to politics, then, politics is a de-alienated ‘relatedness to others’, to oneself, and to Earth.[69]   Specific to Arendt’s account of disclosure is her new definition of the ‘space’ in which reality discloses itself. Heidegger was uninterested in participatory politics, but for Arendt the space of disclosure is the public realm, formed by the discourse and action of plural human beings. In other words, reality can only be disclosed in a free and open political realm—‘the opposite of the regime to which Heidegger gave his support’.[70] In her chapter on ‘Action’ in The Human Condition , Arendt focuses on the transformative importance   of disclosure to the individual. Their own reality, identity, and sense of self as a unique individual, in contrast to the homogeneity of animal laborans , can only be affirmed through interactions with their fellows in the public realm.[71] Without this, human beings are ‘deprived of things essential to a truly human life’.[72] Seen in this light, in treating political action as the condition of self- and world-disclosure, Arendt locates participatory politics as the great antidote to the technological alienation of human beings from the world that she allegorises to the Space Race. The Space Race should be viewed as antithetical to Arendt’s ideal polity because its technological basis threatens to disrupt the existence of the public realm, and thus the disclosure of reality.   The Space Race as antithetical to the public realm   In the space age of the 1950s-1960s, informed by a sense of technological possibility and such discourses as astrofuturism, humanity’s colonisation of space was viable, even imminent. As late as 1974, the front page of The New York Times declared ‘Proposal for Human Colonies in Space is Hailed by Scientists as Feasible Now’.[73] Within this context, the Space Race disrupts the existence of a different kind of space to the space of Being, namely the physical space of the public realm. The public realm has two core features: the ‘space of appearance’ and the existence of a ‘common world’. The polis , or space of appearance, is not a physical location but a space for   action which is created and re-created by the interactions between individuals. The polis  requires, however, a physical foundation from which this space of appearance can emerge: a ‘common world’, involving physical and temporal proximity between people and their shared world of artifice.[74] People must meet with one another, in physical spaces and institutions, to hear one another’s opinions, discuss and debate political issues, and act in concert to achieve political goals. Spatiality is central to the ‘common world’, and thus also to the public realm, to Arendt’s conception of citizenship, and to her ideal of political life. The Space Race, therefore, is antithetical to Arendt’s ideal of humanity’s political existence—antithetical to her utopia, although she would not have termed it as such.   Conclusion   This essay has explored two dimensions of Hannah Arendt’s critical writings on the Space Race: firstly, the Space Race as a rejection of humanity’s natural, earthbound existence, as embodied by the concept of ‘earth alienation’; and, secondly, that the Space Race is antithetical to her ideal polity—as exemplified by the modern American republic—because it serves as an allegory for the technological disruption of the public realm and the disclosure of reality. The Archimedean point, located by the astronauts of the Cold War Space Race, threatened to alienate human beings from the reality of Being, the Earth, and one another—a dystopian prospect indeed. Clare Francis   Clare Francis graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in summer 2020, where she placed first in Human, Social, and Political Sciences (HSPS). She was Co-President of Trinity Politics Society and wrote for and edited the Cambridge Globalist . She intends to work in foreign affairs. [1] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition  (first published 1958, University of Chicago Press 1998). [2] ibid 248. [3] ibid 8. [4] ibid 176. [5] ibid 9. [6] ibid 7-8. [7] ibid 268-9. [8] Maurizio Passerin d’Entreves, ‘Hannah Arendt’ in The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy  (Fall edn, 2019). [9] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time  (John Macquarie and Edward Robinson trs, SCM Press 1962) 91-107. [10] ibid 256-9. [11] Arendt (n 1) 265-7. [12] ibid 1-2. [13] Waseem Yaqoob, ‘The Archimedean point: Science and technology in the thought of Hannah Arendt, 1951-1963’ (2014) 44(3) Journal of European Studies 199, 204. [14] ibid 204. [15] ibid. [16] d’Entreves (n 8) 1. [17] Benjamin Lazier, ‘Earthrise, or the Globalization of the World Picture’ (2011) 116(3) American Historical Review 602, 604. [18] Brian Simbirski, ‘Cybernetic Muse: Hannah Arendt on Automation, 1951-1958’ (2016) 77(4) Journal of the History of Ideas 589, 590. [19] Arendt (n 1) 148-50. [20] Malisa Kurtz, ‘Utopia…: Science Fiction in the 1950s and 1960s’ in Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan (eds), The Cambridge History of Science Fiction  (Cambridge University Press 2018) 201-2. [21] De Witt Douglas Kilgore, ‘Introduction: The Wonderful Dream’ in De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space  (University of Pennsylvania Press 2003) 1. [22] ibid 1-2. [23] ibid. [24] Kurtz (n 20) 202. [25] Imre Szeman, ‘Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster’ (2007) 106(4) South Atlantic Quarterly 812. [26] Kilgore (n 21) 2. [27] Yaqoob (n 13) 207. [28] Arendt (n 1) 268-9. [29] Brent Ryan Bellamy, ‘…or Bust: Science Fiction and the Bomb, 1945- 1960’ in Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan (eds), The Cambridge History of Science Fiction  (Cambridge University Press 2018) 220. [30] Simbirski (n 18) 594. [31] ibid 595. [32] Arendt (n 1) 251. [33] ibid 263. [34] ibid. [35] Yaqoob (n 13) 211. [36] Arendt (n 1) 268-9. [37] Hannah Arendt, ‘The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man’ (first published 1963; The New Atlantis , Fall 2007) 1 < https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-conquest-of-space-and-the-stature-of-man > accessed 1 May 2021. [38] Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought  (Cambridge University Press 1992). [39] Arendt (n 1) 132. [40] Canovan (n 38) 109. [41] Arendt (n 1) 132-3. [42] ibid 10. [43] d’Entreves (n 8) 1. [44] Yaqoob (n 13) 200. [45] ibid 200. [46] Arendt (n 1) 308-16. [47] Arendt (n 37) 1. [48] JG Ballard, The Dead Astronaut: 10 Stories of Space Flight  (Playboy Press 1968) 2. [49] ibid 6. [50] Umberto Rossi, ‘A Little Something about Dead Astronauts’ (2009) 36(1) Science Fiction Studies 101, 107. [51] Patchen Markell, ‘Arendt, Hannah (1906-75)’ in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought  (2014). [52] Quoted in Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination  (Johns Hopkins University Press 2001) 259. [53] Margaret Canovan, ‘Introduction’ in Arendt (n 1) x-xi. [54] ibid x-xi. [55] d’Entreves (n 8) 1. [56] Canovan (n 38); d’Entreves (n 8); Kei Hiruta, ‘An “Anti-Utopian Age?” Isaiah Berlin’s England, Hannah Arendt’s America, and Utopian Thinking in Dark Times’ (2017) 22(1) Journal of Political Ideologies 12; Markell (n 51); Simbirski (n 18); Yaqoob (n 13). [57] Hiruta (n 56). [58] ibid 12-3. [59] ibid 12. [60] d’Entreves (n 8) 1. [61] Arendt (n 1) 192. [62] ibid 178. [63] d’Entreves (n 8) 1. [64] Canovan (n 38) 111. [65] ibid 139-40. [66] ibid 110-2. [67] ibid 111. [68] ibid 112. [69] Arendt (n 1) 210. [70] Canovan (n 38) 112. [71] Arendt (n 1) 208. [72] ibid 58. [73] Walter Sullivan, ‘Proposal for Human Colonies in Space is Hailed by Scientists as Feasible Now’ The New York Times (New York, 13 May 1974) 1. [74] Arendt (n 1) 198-99.

Singapore-based corporate darling Hyflux made sure that it ticked all the right boxes when it came to governance and regulatory compliance. But its recent fall from grace is a cautionary tale on how management styles, charismatic CEOs, and directors’ personal interests can work against even the toughest corporate governance framework.   Grit and Persistence: The Rise of CEO Olivia Lum   In her 2015 speech to students at the National University of Singapore, Olivia Lum not only extolled the virtues of grit and hard work, but revealed some very personal details. The founder of much-lauded water treatment company, Hyflux, recounted how, in the early days, she would worry about paying next month’s rent.   It was a difficult, decades-long, journey that started in 1989, when Lum sold both her house and car to start Hyflux as a sales agent for large multinational companies. In 2003, Hyflux was listed on the Singapore Exchange (‘SGX’). In 2006, UK-based Global Water Intelligence recognised it as Water Company of the Year. Over the years, Lum’s personal fame also rose. From 2002 to 2005 she was a Nominated Member of Parliament. In 2011, she was named the EY World Entrepreneur of the Year.   Yet a decade later,   in November 2022, Lum, along with a former CFO and four independent directors, were charged with violations of the Securities and Futures Act[1] for non-disclosure of information relating to Hyflux’s sale of Tuaspring, its integrated water and power plant.   The Appearance of Corporate Governance   Hyflux certainly appeared to be at the forefront of Singapore’s regulatory compliance regime.[2] Its annual reports made the required disclosures on the sixteen principles of the Code of Corporate Governance (the ‘Code’). With the exception of a departure from Principle 3 on the separation of the Chairman and CEO roles, there was nothing noteworthy about the disclosures. The company also had an internal Code of Conduct and Ethics. In 2006, it published its first sustainability report—in accordance with Global Reporting Initiatives—a year ahead of when such reporting was made mandatory.   As a prominent business personality, Lum gave many interviews over the years where she pointed to corporate governance as one of Hyflux’s core values.[3] No one in Singapore’s business community could have expected the circumstances of the Tuaspring sale.   The Tuasping Debacle   In 2016, Hyflux decided to sell Tuasping, but couldn’t complete the sale by December 2017. Nevertheless, Tuasping remained on the balance sheet, and on March 2018, a KMPG audit report showed a healthy liquidity position.   Just two months later, Hyflux announced that it had run out of cash to pay creditors. An impairment loss of SGD 916m was recorded in 2018—the true extent only confirmed when the Public Utilities Board valued it at a negative purchase price and took over the business at zero dollars. Retail investors suffered losses on perpetual capital securities that Hyflux had issued.[4] In November 2020, Hyflux was placed under judicial management and, two years later, Lum and other executives were charged with violations of the Securities and Futures Act. Lum was also charged under the Companies Act for Hyflux’s non-compliance with accounting standards. In May 2023, three KPMG auditors were issued with orders by the Public Accountants Oversight Committee.   But to really understand how and why Hyflux got to this point, it can be instructive to look over the preceding years—marked by an exodus of senior executives, an uneven balance of power on the board, utilitarian-style leadership, a lack of director independence, and a toxic internal culture.   A Dominant CEO   In 2018, Hyflux’s key management committee consisted of five persons (see Appendix 1). Between 2013 and early 2014, Hyflux’s CFO, COO, and Deputy CEO, all resigned. Analysts at the time noted that the stock market hardly reacted to the resignations—an indication that the market based its evaluation of management quality solely on Lum.   With dual roles as chairman and  CEO, it’s undeniable that Lum had an overbearing influence on the management team. The arrangement was a departure from Principle 3 of the Code, but the board explained that vesting the two roles in Lum ‘provides the Group with strong and consistent leadership’.[5]   Using Finkelstein’s model[6] of power dynamics, it is possible to score key management personnel on the dimensions of structural power, ownership power, expert power, and prestige power. Applying this framework to Lum places her as a dominant figure in the management team—with the highest power score by a large margin​ (Appendix 2). On the one hand, this placed Lum as a visionary who could chart the company’s course. On the other hand, domineering CEOs often lead to conflict avoidance and cognitive blindness, which results in weak boards.[7]   Hyflux did appoint a Lead Independent Director to address the balance of power issue in accordance with the Code. However, the company failed to strengthen its structure for risk and controls where the Code was silent. For example, it didn’t have a chief risk officer, and its Risk Management Committee met only once in 2017.[8] Also, the Head of Internal Audit was not part of its broader management committee.[9]   Lack of Board Independence   The board of directors is responsible for supervising management. In Singapore, a combination of statute[10] and general law imposes duties on directors. The Singapore courts have stated that ‘[t]he ‘interests of the company’ is not just profit maximisation. Neither is it profit maximisation by any means’.[11] In a survey, close to 91 percent of Singapore directors agreed that directors are ‘permitted to take into account the interests of stakeholders other than shareholders when performing his functions’.[12] Generally, research indicates that boards function more effectively when they are independent of management.[13]   The Hyflux board comprised Lum and seven independent directors, including lawyers and finance professionals (See Appendix 3). The proportion of independent directors far exceeded the requirements of the Code. However, there were questions about whether the board was truly independent.[14]   Over the years, some of these independent directors had other relationships with the company that made them non-independent. Until 2005, Gay Chee Cheong was deemed a substantial shareholder.[15] Between 2013 and 2015, Gary Kee was an executive director. Until 2010, Christopher Muragasu was employed as senior vice-president of corporate services. Between 1996 and 2006, Muragasu’s sister held a number of positions, including COO, Deputy CEO, and as a senior advisor. Teo Kiang Kok’s brother was vice-president of business development between 2005 and 2008.   Between 2005 and 2010, Kok’s law firm, Shook Lin & Bok, provided legal services to Hyflux and earned fees totalling SGD 364,000. Lee Joo Hai, a partner at professional services firm BDO LLP, had similar potential conflicts of interest. Between 2005 and 2008, BDO Raffles provided internal audit services to Hyflux, earning fees amounting to SGD 186,000. While this was below the SGD 200,000 annual threshold that determines a director’s independence, the perception of a potential conflict of interest remains. Kok and Hai also served together on two other boards. The Code is silent on such interlocking directorships, but research has identified them as a threat to directors’ independence.[16]   The Impact of Utilitarian Morality   The academic literature indicates that corporate governance regulations tend to be informed by the utilitarian foundation of morality—which aims to produce the best consequence for the greatest number of persons—while ignoring deontology and virtue ethics.[17] Deontology concerns fundamental duties that should be followed regardless of consequences. Virtue ethics emphasises traits such as honesty and diligence.   However, for directors, a utilitarian application is far from straightforward. The interests of multiple stakeholders need to be considered when making decisions in the ‘best interest’ of the company—and ‘best interest’ is not limited to shareholders’ interest in maximising profits. For example, the risk-reward profiles of shareholders and perpetual note holders might be different when the company enters a new market. Also, for a company with a strong CEO who also has substantial shareholdings and a board that is arguably less independent than it looks, what is in the ‘best interest’ of the company will depend on the CEO’s vision and management style.   When a CEO applies corporate governance rules based mainly on utilitarianism, the rules are simply treated as conditions to be fulfilled in order to pursue bigger corporate goals—without a deeper regard for the reasons behind the rules. In this scenario, director’s duties are not linked to categorical imperatives, but are a means to an end. There are concerns that utilitarianism alone might not promote behaviours in line with ethical and societal norms.[18]   Lum’s management style was clearly aligned with utilitarianism: results alone were important, regardless of how they were achieved. When, for example, Hyflux was preparing a bid to run Singapore’s first water treatment plant, Lum told staff—who spent months working nights in preparation—that, ‘This is the only chance we can make it big’. And when speaking about Hyflux’s values, such as its ‘can-do’ spirit, she said that they are critical because they ‘helped us win contracts and deliver projects’.[19]   A Toxic Company Culture   Employee reviews can provide an insight into company culture—which can in turn contribute to poor ethical decisions by management. Glassdoor reviews of Hyflux reveal employee concerns about a ‘toxic’ culture—‘top-down’, not receptive to feedback, involving ‘micro-management’, and ‘fast-paced’ .[20]     A top-down approach can deprive employees and directors of their voice, and consequently personal responsibility for their actions. Modern supporters of utilitarianism accept that ethical decisions need to be agent-centric—that the actor must be themselves rather than a neutral third-party observer thinking in the abstract.   Also, a fast-paced environment that does not value individual opinion is not conducive to deliberate thinking that is less vulnerable to biases—what Kahneman calls System II thinking.[21] Research indicates that people make more rational decisions when slow, deep thinking is activated.[22]   Finally, when individuals are given space to be themselves, they have more capacity to process their emotions and reach a more balanced view of ethical issues. Research shows that emotions are related to a deontological way of thinking.[23] In the classic Fat Man trolley problem, while pure, rational calculation may lead us to push a man onto the tracks to save more lives, it is emotions that hold us back from hurting him with our own hands. Emotions can be a counterforce to utilitarianism, which is inadequate by itself.[24]   Conclusion   The Hyflux case clearly shows that corporate governance can be complied with on paper, and publicly, but its actual application can be difficult to evaluate. Management and media might paint a picture of a company guided by purpose and values, but this can differ from employees’ reality.   It’s critical to understand how  management are making ethical decisions, both in the normative and the behavioural view, their personal and outside interests, and how corporate culture can be shaped to nudge them into making better decisions. Andrew Leo Andrew Leo studied accounting at the National University of Singapore and University of Cambridge. Based in Singapore, he currently works as an accountant in a global asset management company and serves as vice chairperson of the audit and risk committee of a large charity. He is interested in internal controls, corporate governance, and leadership. Appendix 1: Key Management Personnel (2018) No. Name Title 1. Olivia Lum Executive Chairman and Group CEO 2. Lum Suat Wah Group Executive Vice President and CFO 3. Wong Lup Wai Group Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer 4. Cheong Aik Hock Group Executive Vice President and CEO of Tuasping 5. Chang Cheow Teck Group Executive Vice President, Operations Appendix 2   Note: Scores are on a simplified basis based on publicly available information.   Appendix 3: Board of Directors (2018) No. Name Role Committee(s) Profession 1. Olivia Lum Executive Chairman and Director Nominating, Investment CEO 2. Teo Kiang Kok Lead Independent Director Audit, Nominating, Remuneration, Risk Management Lawyer 3. Lee Joo Hai Non-Executive Independent Director Audit, Risk Management Accountant 4. Gay Chee Cheong Non-Executive Independent Director Audit, Nominating, Remuneration, Investment Investment Management 5. Christopher Muragasu Non-Executive Independent Director Nomination, Remuneration, Risk Management Formerly Hyflux’s senior vice-president of corporate services 6. Simon Tay Non-Executive Independent Director Risk Management, Investment Lawyer 7. Lau Wing Tat Non-Executive Independent Director Audit, Risk Management Investment Management 8. Gary Kee Eng Kwee Non-Executive Independent Director Investment General Management, Consultant; Formerly Hyflux’s Executive Director for Finance and IT [1] Securities and Futures Act 2001. [2] Singapore’s corporate governance framework comprises rules found in the Companies Act 1967, the Securities and Futures Act 2001 and, for companies listed on the SGX, the Listing Manual and guidelines set out in the Code of Corporate Governance. The Code is based on the ‘comply or explain’ principle that is set out in the Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance report (the Cadbury Report), and adopted in the Combined Code (now known as the UK Corporate Governance Code) in 1998. [3] ‘The boldness to dream’ Leaders Magazine, Inc. (January 2012) < https://www.leadersmag.com/issues/2012.1_Jan/ROB/LEADERS-Olivia-Lum-Hyflux-Ltd.html > accessed 12 August 2022 [4] Amir Yusof, ‘“We have not lost faith”: Hundreds of Hyflux investors gather to express concerns at Hong Lim Park’ ( Channel News Asia , 30 March 2019) < https://web.archive.org/web/20211205091648/https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/we-have-not-lost-faith-hundreds-hyflux-investors-gather-express-concerns-hong-lim-park-896896 > accessed 5 December 2023. [5]  Hyflux Limited, ‘Hyflux Ltd Annual Report for FY2017’ (2018) < https://links.sgx.com/FileOpen/Hyflux%20Ltd%20Annual%20Report%20for%20FY2017.ashx?App=Announcement&FileID=498672 > accessed 12 August 2022 . [6] S Finkelstein, ‘Power in top management teams: dimensions, measurement, and validation’ (1992) 35(3) Academy of Management Journal 505-538. [7] E Heemskerk, K Heemskerk, and M Wats, ‘Conflict in the boardroom: a participant observation study of supervisory board dynamics’ (2017) 21 Journal of Management & Governance   233-263. [8] Hyflux (n 5). [9] ibid. [10] The Companies Act requires directors to be honest and diligent in carrying out their duties. Singapore courts have indicated that these statutory duties are based on general law expectations for directors to act bona fide in the interests of the company ( Ho Kang Peng v Scintronix Corp Ltd ) and exercise due care and diligence ( Falmac Limited v Cheng Ji Lai Charlie ). [11]  Ho Kang Peng v Scintronix Corp Ltd  [2014] SGCA 22. [12] P Koh and HH Tan, ‘Directors’ duties in Singapore: law and perceptions’ (2019) 14(1) Asian Journal of Comparative Law 37-63. [13] James D Westphal, ‘Collaboration in the Boardroom: Behavioural and Performance Consequences of CEO-board Social Ties’ (1999) 42(1) The Academy of Management Journal 7-24. [14] Kenneth Cheng, ‘Hyflux’s fall from grace: What went wrong’ ( TODAY , 23 May 2018) < https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/hyfluxs-fall-grace-what-went-wrong > accessed 12 August 2022; Mak Yuen Teen, ‘Hyflux’s board ticked boxes but let down stakeholders’ The Business Times (24 May 2019) < https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/opinion-features/columns/hyfluxs-board-ticked-boxes-let-down-stakeholders > a ccessed 12 August 2022 . [15] Mak (n 14). [16] ibid. [17] Abhijeet K Vadera and Gerard George, ‘The morality of doing business purposefully’ SID Directors Bulletin (2018) < https://www.sid.org.sg/images/PDFS/Publications/DirectorsBulletin/DirectorsBulletin_4Q2018.pdf > accessed 12 August 2022. [18] ibid. [19] Hyflux (n 5). [20]  Hyflux employee reviews about senior management ( Glassdoor , 2023) < https://www.glassdoor.sg/Reviews/Hyflux-senior-management-Reviews-EI_IE39115.0,6_KH7,24.htm > a ccessed 12 August 2022 . [21]  Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Penguin 2011). [22]  ‘Gained in translation’ The Economist  (17 May 2014) https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2014/05/17/gained-in-translation  accessed 12 August 2022 . [23]  Norbert Paulo, ‘Law, Reason, and Emotion? The Challenge from Empirical Ethics’ (2017) 103(2) Archives for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy 239-259. [24]  Arthur Dobrln, ‘Three approaches to ethics: principles, outcomes and integrity’ Psychology Today (18 May 2012) < https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/am-i-right/201205/3-approaches-to-ethics-principles-outcomes-and-integrity > accessed 12 August 2022 .

Abstract   The authors, faculty members at Northeastern University and Boston University, highlight the shifting values and priorities of their Millennial and Gen Z students as they prepare for work in the innovation and entrepreneurship fields. In their classes with both undergraduate and graduate students, they explore the rich intersection between creativity, business, and social impact.   In alignment with worldwide trends, their students want to launch ventures that are meaningful, economically viable, and socially responsive to the challenges of our time. As witnesses to increasing economic disparity, the effects of climate change, political upheaval, culture wars, and pandemics like Covid-19, these generations see clearly that business models based only on profit are outdated. The next generation is demanding a shift in the profit-driven paradigm toward one that is inclusive and responsive to a triple bottom line: People, Planet, and Profit.   Gen Z and Millennial students want to solve problems that truly matter while honouring their individuality; they want to make a positive impact in their communities in a way that is also financially sustainable.   The authors share case studies that emphasize the importance of integrating their four part Make/Care/Strategize/Implement (MCSI) Framework into the fabric of organizations from the visioning stage to implementation:   MAKE like artists CARE like activists STRATEGIZE like entrepreneurs IMPLEMENT like organizers   By implementing the MCSI Framework, the next generation of entrepreneurs will have the building blocks necessary to embrace a more holistic, sustainable approach to business that lays a foundation for a lifetime of meaningful, impactful work.   Bringing Meaning to the Marketplace   Let us paint a picture for you. Or better yet, we will share our story in three acts:   Act 1: Individuals   We see a need for the next generation of students to gain entrepreneurial skills to develop meaningful ventures for the future. Starting with artists and arts administrators, and branching out across university silos to incorporate students from across disciplines, we create graduate and undergraduate courses and introduce the Make/Care/Strategize/Implement (MCSI) Framework.   Act 2: Community   We host a symposium, Art and Ideas in Action: Arts + Business + Social Impact,  utilizing the MCSI Framework, and confirm that imaginative thinking, strategic partnerships with key stakeholders, and clear measurable outcomes are essential to inspire meaning and hope during complex times, not just for students but for broader community-based audiences. This symposium is a catalyst for what is now the largest conference for students interested in innovation and entrepreneurship, IDEA  Con , hosted annually by Innovate@BU, Boston University. [1]   Act 3: Society   With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and a host of other challenges, we recognize the importance of the integrated MCSI Framework to develop a human-centered economy. Through intentional, strategic integration of creativity, higher education can take the lead in providing a clearer sense of purpose and promoting innovative solutions amongst its students.   Act 1: Individuals   The Beginning: Teaching Professional Skills to Artists   Art students (visual, performance, and music) spend thousands of hours perfecting their craft with little space to gather the tools they need to market their work. Many art students graduate with highly developed artistic expertise in their chosen disciplines but lack the entrepreneurial skills necessary to create the impact they want, and arguably the impact society needs.   When we were asked to co-create an experimental course called Cultural Entrepreneurship  within the graduate Arts Administration program at Boston University, we welcomed the challenge to teach artists and arts administrators how to reimagine new revenue streams that support their creative expertise and competencies. With backgrounds in   arts, social impact, political organizing, and entrepreneurial consulting, we as instructors emphasized a practical and experiential learning-based approach.   As faculty members, we are committed to unlocking students’ creative and entrepreneurial mindsets, and our courses help students to recognize their potential to be change makers. We challenge our students to create vibrant, economically viable ventures that extend from their visionary entry points as artists and arts leaders. Introducing our students to the vocabulary of startups, from Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to Return On Investment (ROI), we teach the distinctions between various business models, including nonprofit, for-profit, and benefit corporations. While this is basic information for business students, it is rarely talked about in art schools.   Cultural Entrepreneurship as an academic discipline has had a 20+ year history in the UK, drawing international attention with the publication of John Howkins’s book, The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas . [2] Nonetheless, in the context of Boston University’s arts administration program, the introduction of this class in 2013 was groundbreaking. Since the course began, we have taught thousands of students, many of whom continue to remain in contact with us. As of 2023, over 40% of those surveyed have launched their own ventures, as both entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, at the intersection of Arts & Culture, Business & Technology, and Social Impact.   We treat our course as an incubator for real-world startup ideas, taking students through ideation, testing, and pitching their new ventures. Our students are excited and energized by this learning-by-doing approach. For many, this is the first time they are learning about the workings of the rapidly evolving creative economy, along with the challenges and opportunities for art entrepreneurs.   Our students are growing and thriving, using words such as ‘transformative’, ‘exhilarating’, and ‘eye opening’ to describe their experiences in our class. We have tapped into a desire for a new definition for success: one that includes financial viability, but also creative engagement and social relevance. This makes honing a creative, entrepreneurial mindset an important professional skill. Our primary focus when we first started in 2013 was to teach artists and arts administrators the importance of keeping an eye on the broader markets and communities while also fulfilling their individual creative purpose. We created a safe community-oriented classroom that encouraged students to get comfortable taking risks while developing their entrepreneurial skills and perfecting their artistic crafts so that they could generate their own economic opportunities.   While we started by teaching artists the skills and language of the innovation and entrepreneurship world, our interdisciplinary approach has now expanded to students from various disciplines. We use a framework that teaches a creative mindset to serve a broader population.   It was in these first classrooms that our MCSI Framework originated:   MAKE LIKE ARTISTS:  While creativity is inherent in every individual, we help students access it and integrate creativity into their day-to-day lives. Using the Creative Re/Frame M.A.K.E. Framework we help students get Messy to activate idea generation, be Awake and Aware of opportunities around them, Keep going through their challenges and Enjoy the process.   We offer our students the tools and techniques to foster a creative mindset, unlocking imagination to envision new strategic and innovative solutions.   CARE LIKE ACTIVISTS:  Caring for the larger community makes for better business and for deeper personal fulfilment. Using a Creative Re/frame C.A.R.E Framework, we help students hone in on the powers of Curiosity, Awareness, Responsibility, and Empathy and connect these elements to unique organizational value propositions.   STRATEGIZE LIKE ENTREPRENEURS:  Using design thinking, we empower our students to develop their ventures step-by-step. By right-sizing and strategically structuring business models, students can successfully set specific, measurable, and achievable goals.   IMPLEMENT LIKE ORGANIZERS:  We help students translate ideas into action. Urgency, tasks, timelines, and measuring impact are crucial for success. We stay highly focused on final products aimed at the systemic change needed to create long-lasting impact.   CASE STUDY: BENDADA MUSIC FESTIVAL [3]   Inês Andrade, a doctoral candidate in performance classical piano at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts, traveled from Lisbon to her family’s home of Bendada, Portugal. While she had driven the mountainous windy roads countless times in her life, this year was different. She had been asked to perform a Christmas concert in the newly inaugurated Casa da Música da Bendada , a well-appointed music school built with funding from a European Union grant. The building was beautiful; its soundproof practice rooms and a modern concert hall overlooked the valley below. But aside from the Christmas concert, the hall was largely empty the rest of the year. The town of Bendada has had a long history with music, starting in 1870 when the Sociedade Filarmónica Bendadense  was established. This musical history, combined with the economic demise of the region from the 1970s, got Inês thinking. She was performing in a gorgeous music hall, and she realized this was an opportunity to create something more. The seed for the Bendada Music Festival was planted. ‘I always knew I wanted to do more with music than just perform concerts’, she says. ‘I wanted to create something that could make an artistic and economic impact that could help revitalize the whole community. My community’.   As a committed artist dedicated to piano from an early age, Inês had the artist’s discipline to finely hone her expertise, connecting to a purpose that she then shared with others. Inês came to the first part of the MCSI Framework (Make Like an Artist) from an authentic entry point. As an artist, she channelled her creative practice to an intention that fuelled and inspired both herself and others.   Back in Boston for her final semester prior to receiving her doctorate, Inês enrolled in the Cultural Entrepreneurship class. Inês used the course to workshop her vision and build skills using the MCSI Framework to:   Make Like an Artist by building on her credibility as a well-established musician. Care Like an Activist by owning her authentic connection to the town of Bendada, its long history as a music centre, and undertaking research to more fully understand its current plight. Strategize Like an Entrepreneur by networking to build a sustainable funding model. Implement Like an Organizer by partnering with the Portuguese Secretary of Economic Development, Portugal State Tourism office, and the Boston University community.   Integrating the four pieces of MCSI, Inês was able to turn her idea into a viable international program that has had a quantifiable impact in the region and beyond . But she knew she couldn't do this alone, nor did she want to. She formed a formidable partnership with a fellow doctoral candidate in performance piano, Edoardo Carpenedo. Edoardo took the same graduate class the following year so they could have a common language and vision as they prototyped their venture they founded together, the Bendada Music Festival.     In the summer of 2024, the Bendada Music Festival completed its 9 th  year with a record number of students, ranging in age from 14 to 22 years old. Music teachers from around the world, and corporate, community, and governmental partners, all gathered to enjoy captivating concerts. Thousands of audience members from local communities came together in unique concert venues ranging from 12 th -century castles to 16 th -century churches. The local community participates in the Bendada Community choir, hosts a folk festival in the town square alongside the music festival, and houses students in individual homes. Along with the hundreds of students and instructors who hone their skills through the festival each year, Bendada citizens participate as musicians and concert goers, and restaurants and hostels benefit from the increase in tourism and revenue. Act 2: Community   The Ripples: Recognizing the Need for MCSI in a Larger Context   As impact-oriented educators as well as community-based professionals we wanted to share our learnings in the classroom with a larger audience. We set out to create an opportunity for our students to network with innovators within the corporate, nonprofit and political arenas, as well as to share our resources and learnings with the broader Boston community so that it was not sequestered to the campus. We understood the importance of igniting the power of interdisciplinary partnerships to scale the impact of what we were creating in the classroom. Building on the MCSI Framework, we partnered with the BU’s College of Fine Arts, Questrom School of Business, and the BU Arts Initiative to introduce a unique, creative public symposium: Arts & Ideas in Action: Arts + Business + Social Impact .   Tapping into our own collective creative mindset to make  our vision a reality, we cared like activists, reaching out to cross-disciplinary stakeholders to work with us to infuse energy, hope and purpose into a welcoming space. We strategically  built cross-disciplinary alliances across the campus as well as the city to create an impactful agenda. And we  implemented  a rich, community-based, inclusive conference filled with energy, hope, and measurable outcomes at Boston University on 11 November 2016.   The theme of the conference was optimism and hope. We planned to model how the arts and business communities could work together toward a common good, despite being unlikely bedfellows. We incorporated our students into conference planning through an Ambassador program and invited our communities from outside of the university. The planning committee agreed that it would be best to hold the event after the US Presidential election. The 11 November 2016 date seemed ideal—the event would happen toward the end of the semester but not too close to the holidays. Three days before the symposium,   surprising election results revealed a very divided country. And as any good organizer, innovator, entrepreneur, or improv actor knows, our job was to remain nimble while working with dynamic variables.   After the US Presidential election, the direction of our symposium shifted from confidence to confusion, from optimism to uncertainty. We were bringing together Boston’s business and arts community after a highly divisive election. We asked ourselves, ‘How can we acknowledge the tense post-election climate without being political? How can we maintain a tone of collaboration and promote goodwill among people who potentially held opposing beliefs?’. Originally, we thought that the symposium would offer innovative networking opportunities; now we feared that the audience would be unable to span their differences.   Our sold-out crowd filled the newly renovated Boston University Graphic Design department’s space. Attendees from Boston-based for-profits, nonprofits, and government agencies gathered with higher education administrators, faculty, and students to explore the question, ‘What happens when art and business join forces to create stable economic opportunities and build vibrant communities while addressing societal needs?’.   To acknowledge the political sea change, we updated our introductory slide deck to include a Toni Morrison quote: ‘This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no time for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal’. We knew that no matter how people voted or what political views they held, we stood by the belief that the arts have the power to connect, fortify and help us to build equitable, healthy, empathetic, respectful communities that benefit everyone.   To our delight, the tone of the symposium honoured our original vision to create an atmosphere of hope and possibility, but with even more energy and focus. Not only did artists need economic opportunities, but it was abundantly clear that businesses needed creative partners to help reimagine new ways forward. We began to think about the potential for arts and business collaborations to develop in a larger socio-economic context.   When Boston University’s BUild Lab IDG Capital Student Innovation Centre opened their doors in 2017, we partnered with them as creative practitioners in residence to expand upon the model of the Arts & Ideas in Action: Arts + Business + Social Impact   symposium to design and grow what is now the largest cross disciplinary student innovation conference in the USA, IDEA Con. [4]  Fast forward to October 2024 and IDEA Con, now with over 700 participants registered from 25 colleges and universities, incorporated an exercise from the MCSI second module of CARE Like an Activist through interactive CARE Cafés with all the participants in the auditorium.   These CARE Cafés were introduced by first posing the questions: ‘Where does creative innovation come from? And ‘What are problems worth solving?’. The CARE Cafés provided an opportunity for attendees to verbalize to each other what motivates them to get involved in something beyond themselves by exploring their CARE: an acronym for Curiosity, Awareness, Empathy, and Responsibility.   Prompts included:   WHAT  big problems are you curious about? HOW  do you want to address these problems? WHERE  do you think this interest/desire comes from? WHY are you the one to address this? Why now? WHAT  is your unique entry point into this problem? WHO else do you want to talk with to explore this problem/opportunity?   Once attendees had an opportunity to gather their individual ideas through a journaling exercise, they were put in two long lines and participated in a time-based speed dating-like activity. By giving individuals an opportunity to explore what they care about and articulate it to others, we allowed them to make authentic connections with a larger community, hatch partnerships, and deepen their sense of meaning from the event.   In addition to the CARE Cafés, IDEA Con highlights young creative entrepreneurs by giving them opportunities to share their stories in five-minute, TED Talk-style presentations. These speakers follow the MCSI Framework, inspiring attendees to tap into their own wellspring of curiosity. Over the years IDEA Con has featured student innovators such as:   Max Bard . [5]  A graduate of Boston University’s MFA program, Max is an interdisciplinary artist who uses recycled materials for his pieces with clients ranging from Google to national parks and galleries. IDEA Con hired Max to create a sculptural piece during the day-long conference emphasizing the theme of sustainability. His pop-up artist studio on the first floor of the Questrom School of Business at IDEA Con was an interactive practice inviting attendees to comment, share and discuss his piece in real time emphasizing the importance of Making like an Artist.   Ellice Patterson . [6] While studying for her MS from Boston University, Ellice was also establishing her non-profit organization Abilities Dance Boston that uses dance as a tool to advocate for intersectional disability rights. Ellice was a speaker for IDEA Con and modelled the importance of Caring like an Activist by creating a venture that aligns with her belief that dance should be inclusive of all body types. Her dance troupe then joined her on the stage to share their work and a performance with the audience.   Anj Fayemi . [7]  A rap artist and computer scientist from Nigeria, Anj was studying at MIT when he stumbled across a problem he was uniquely suited to solve. He was getting ready to release a new album and wondered, ‘How can artists use technology to directly interact and grow their fan base?’. He founded his for profit company, Rivet, in his third year at MIT and shared his story at IDEA Con from ideation to implementation underling the critical aspects of Strategizing Like and Entrepreneur and Implementing Like an Activist.   While continually refining the MCSI Framework, we have had opportunities to introduce the approach to thousands of students, professionals, and international dignitaries. We have found that no matter the age, experience, or industry there is a deep connection to incorporating the four quadrants of the MCSI Framework to make more meaningful work. The MCSI Framework clarifies and encourages participants to pay attention to the distinct puzzle pieces starting with authenticity and ending with solving problems that matter.   Act 3: Society   Reframing Future Economies   We have arrived at Act 3 in our story. In Act 1, our goal was to introduce entrepreneurial skills to art students, which we then grew into an interdisciplinary approach to creative entrepreneurship integrating our MCSI framework. In Act 2, our perspective broadened to reveal how the MCSI framework can serve a larger community through the symposium Arts & Ideas in Action: Arts + Business + Social Impact and later, through the IDEA Con Student Innovation Conference.   Our Gen Z and Millennial students are acutely aware of the uncertain economic future with the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and a host of challenges including climate change, economic disparity and political unrest. They seek employment that reflects their triple bottom line values, provides financial security and offers hope for the future. If they can’t find these opportunities in existing companies, they are committed to building new ones. And our students are not alone—in the Deloitte 2023 Gen Z and Millennial Survey: Waves of Change: Acknowledging progress, confronting setbacks, 22,000 Millennials and Gen Z’ers across 36 countries responded with a deep concern for unethical business practices and political unrest. [8]  With businesses holding the locus of power in our time, Millennials and Gen Z’ers look to business leaders to rise up to address economic greed, disparity and the impending impacts of climate challenges.   Researchers from UK-based research organizations, Nesta and Pearson, assert that the future will require both human and machine capacities. As automation and artificial intelligence expand in the workplace, so will the need for deeply human skills like ‘originality, active learning and the fluency of ideas’. [9] The MCSI Framework offers student innovators the opportunity to cultivate and integrate deeply human skills into their ventures. As educators, we believe higher education is poised to lead a paradigm shift, providing students with the language and tools to become our future creative, caring, and strategic innovators.   We have arrived at the end of Act 3, but the curtain does not close. Universities are poised to play a key role as incubators for interdisciplinary collaboration and socially responsible innovation. Through a holistic approach that integrates making, caring, strategizing, and implementing, together we can create the meaningful businesses of the future. Wendy Swart Grossman and Jeannette Guillemin Wendy Swart Grossman is both a faculty member at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University as well as a co-founder of Creative Re/Frame, LLC.  With a background in global presidential politics and NGO and non-profit social impact organizations, she infuses creativity into her classrooms and client spaces to drive authentic community centered change to amplify the voices of her students and clients missions.    Jeannette (Jen) Guillemin is both a faculty member at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University as well as a co-founder of Creative Re/Frame, LLC. With a background spanning arts leadership, counseling, and experiential learning, she integrates creativity and reflection into her classrooms and client collaborations to cultivate ethical leadership, foster resilience, and spark community-centered innovation. [1]  See ‘IDEA Con 2024’ ( Boston University ) < https://www.bu.edu/innovate/events/idea-con/ > accessed 19 December 2024. [2]  John Howkins, The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas  (Allen Lane 2001). [3]  See ‘Bendada Music Festival’ < https://bendadamusicfestival.com/ > accessed 19 December 2024. [4]  See (n 1). [5]  See ‘Home’ ( Max Bard ) < https://maxbard911.com/ > accessed 19 December 2024. [6]  See ‘Abilities Dance Boston’ < https://www.abilitiesdanceboston.org/ > accessed 19 December 2024. [7]  See ‘Where we began’ ( Rivet ) < https://www.rivet.app/about-us > accessed 19 December 2024. [8]  ‘2023 Gen Z and Millennial Survey’ ( Deloitte ) < https://www2.deloitte.com/cn/en/pages/about-deloitte/articles/genzmillennialsurvey-2023.html > accessed 19 December 2024. [9]  Hasan Bakhshi, Jonathan M Downing, Michael A Osborne, and Philippe Schneider, ‘The Future of Skills Employment in 2030’ ( Pearson and Nesta , 2017) < https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/the_future_of_skills_employment_in_2030_0.pdf > accessed 19 December 2024.

The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall […]. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.[1]   1. Introduction Prior to the spring of 2020, two notable events occurred in quick succession: surveillance vans equipped with Live Facial Recognition (‘LFR’) technologies were seen patrolling Cardiff City Stadium before the club’s football match with Swansea City,[2] and the Metropolitan Police Service announced that it had installed an LFR camera at Oxford Circus, a highly-trafficked area in the Westminster borough of London.[3] Facial recognition is by no means the only way in which personal data is captured and used by the police,[4] but it is certainly one that has gripped the imagination of the public. Civil society groups have described the technology as an ‘Orwellian mass surveillance tool’ not unlike the instruments used in the fictional state of Oceania in 1984 .[5] The increasing use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement agencies, therefore, poses an acute regulatory challenge, with many concerned that ‘existing legislative and policy frameworks are outdated and fail to account for the new and various ways in which biometric data is, or might be, accessed and used’.[6]   This article seeks to contribute to evolving scholarship on the use of LFR by law enforcement from the vantage point of international human rights law (‘IHRL’).[7] It begins by situating the regulation of LFR within the parameters of the relationship between the law and technology, before elaborating on how LFR operates, as well as on the justifications for its deployment by police forces. The article then examines the main sources of international law on discrimination that apply in this context, focusing in particular on the issue of racial bias. It does not, however, set out an exhaustive checklist of the potential systemic biases inherent in LFR technology; rather, it addresses the underlying normative question of when, if ever, the police may make use of such tools in a manner compliant with IHRL principles on equality and non-discrimination.   2. LFR and the relationship between law and technology   The nature of the relationship between the law and technology has been debated at length. Proponents of technological exceptionalism have suggested that the ‘essential qualities’ of technology ‘drive the legal and policy conversations that attend them’.[8] This school of thought reinforces what Carter and Marchant have described as the ‘pacing problem’: the idea that ‘rules-based regulation cannot keep up with the pace of new developments’.[9] Indeed, the notion that the law is ill-equipped to deal with the extent and rate of technological advancement has received traction amongst scholars. Johnson and Post, for example, in response to the limitations of ‘territorially-based law-making and law-enforcing authorities’,[10] have argued in favour of a new form of Internet governance, unbound by geographical boundaries. Similarly, Calo has suggested that the interaction of new and emerging technologies with outmoded legal frameworks prompts a ‘systematic change to the law or legal institutions in order to reproduce, or if necessary, displace, an existing balance of values’.[11] This process is not framed as static in nature, but as one continually on the move, since ‘technology has not stood still’.[12]   However, there are those that have expressed reservations about attempts to linearise the relationship between the development of the law and technological change. Jones, in particular, has criticised theories of technological exceptionalism for failing to account for the fact that ‘the story of law and technological change is much more varied, messy, and political’.[13] According to Jones, rather than linearly following technology, ‘a great deal of legal work shapes technology and the way in which it will be understood in the future’, with ‘scholars, judges, regulators, and legislators often [making sense] of technologies in a way that is forward-looking’.[14] In a similar vein, Balkin indicates that it is ‘[unhelpful] to speak in terms of ‘essential qualities’ of a new technology that we can then apply to law’.[15] Although acknowledging that Calo’s thesis ‘is destined to be the starting point for much future research in the area’, Balkin argues in favour of assessing the evolving uses of emerging technology for the purposes of developing the law, given that ‘people continually find new ways to employ technology for good or for ill’.[16]   The global governance of LFR and so too its uses in law enforcement contexts are thoroughly interconnected with competing conceptions of the relationship between law and technology. On one hand, the essentialist tendencies of technological exceptionalism have been borne out in descriptions that stress the novelty of facial recognition as ‘an attractive solution to address many contemporary needs for identification’, bringing together ‘the promise of other biometric systems […] and the more familiar functionality of visual surveillance systems’.[17] On the other hand, a number of authors have raised concerns about the uses (and abuses) of such technology on human rights grounds.[18] For instance, scholars including Bu have attempted to evaluate the lawfulness of facial recognition technology by reference to both EU data protection rules and the privacy jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (‘ECtHR’).[19] Whilst attention has naturally focused on the extent to which infringements upon privacy and data protection rights may be ‘justified as a necessary and proportional invasion’,[20] the extent to which the use of LFR has been tested against international legal principles and standards on discrimination remains under-developed.[21] Indeed, in the British context, Bradford, Yesberg, Jackson, and Dawson have described ‘potential bias and discrimination’ as a ‘significant controversy’ in the use of LFR by police forces—a concerning possibility which requires consideration of two issues.[22] First, what justifications have been raised in favour of the use of LFR by police forces? Second, what specific aspects of LFR usage by law enforcement raise the spectre of potential discrimination?   3. The operation of LFR   In perhaps the most sustained independent analysis of the use of LFR in the context of British policing, Fussey and Murray identify four salient features.[23] First, facial recognition technology allows ‘for the real time biometric processing of video imagery’; unlike CCTV cameras, the process by which individuals are identified and tracked through their facial features is partly automated.[24] Second, compared to open street surveillance cameras, LFR possesses ‘additional and powerful capabilities’ in the form of ‘enhanced data-matching’.[25] Third, LFR is integrative in nature: it is possible for such technology to be accommodated into ‘police body worn cameras or city-wide surveillance camera networks, on a 24/7 basis, and for the resultant data to be subject to automated analysis’.[26] Fourth, the objects identified in the deployment of facial recognition technology are not disposable or transferable: the software ‘creates a digital signature of identified faces, and then analyses those digital signatures against a database (referred to as the ‘watchlist’) in order to determine whether there are any matches’.[27]   4. The rationales for police use of LFR   Having briefly outlined how facial recognition technology operates, there is one remaining question that warrants consideration: why, exactly, has LFR been promoted in modern policing practices? The answer to this question rests on the belief that the technology advances the aims of effective policing and crime prevention. It is my proposal that this assumption is predicated on two rationales—efficiency and impartiality—and that the orthodoxies upon which these rationales in turn rest have unstable foundations. The gaps and inconsistencies responsible for this instability are significant to the extent that they impinge upon the discrimination risks associated with the use of facial recognition tools by law enforcement agencies.   a. Efficiency   In attempting to justify its deployment by police forces, advocates of LFR have repeatedly lauded its ‘efficiency’ in enhancing surveillance capabilities. As Hamman and Smith have put it, ‘[facial recognition] technology has benefited law enforcement in innumerable ways, such as creating reliable evidence, enabling efficient investigations, and helping to accumulate data that allow law enforcement to react quickly and effectively’.[28] This emphasis on the functionality of facial recognition technology can be directly correlated with the increasing use of such tools ‘to ensure security and combat terrorism around the world’.[29] Yet LFR also has the potential to be employed in situations that fall outside the scope of national security and counterterrorism operations. As observed by the Divisional Court in R (Bridges) v Chief Constable of South Wales and Ors [2019] EWHC 2341:     Like fingerprints and DNA, AFR technology enables the extraction of unique information and identifiers about an individual allowing his or her identification with precision in a wide range of circumstances. Taken alone or together with other recorded metadata, AFR-derived biometric data is an important source of personal information.[30]   There is cause for concern with regard to the potential mission creep of facial recognition technology into operational policing writ large. Whilst efficiency-based arguments in favour of using LFR in law enforcement contexts hinge upon its putative benefits, what is less clear is whether they are grounded in empirical evidence. At present, the Face Recognition Vendor Test, a series of large-scale assessments of LFR systems realised by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (‘NIST’) in the United States, represents the most comprehensive independent evaluation of cross-demographical performance inconsistencies in such technology.[31] Its 2019 study of 189 LFR software programs identified that racial minorities were up to 100 times more likely to be wrongfully identified than White males in facial recognition deployment exercises.[32] Other analyses have also identified problems with LFR software in relation to the accurate identification of juveniles and darker-skinned women.[33] These inconsistencies raise serious concerns as to the effectiveness of LFR as a mode of data-driven policing and undermine the extent to which the attendant disruption to ‘the balance of power between governors and the governed’ is normatively warranted.[34]   b. Impartiality   Morgenthau’s conception of the police as ‘law-enforcing agency’ usefully illustrates how the notion of police impartiality is, at its very core, a protean concept.[35] On one hand, the meaning of police impartiality may be viewed as identical to that of equality before the law: ‘the police are in this sense impartial if they mete out equal treatment to persons and situations which the law requires to be so’.[36] Nevertheless, the impartiality of the police also ‘performs a social and political function similar to that performed by the reputation of the courts for being the impartial “mouthpiece” of the law’.[37] As it is the purpose of law enforcement agencies in this context to ‘defend that legal order and maintain that status quo’, an institution whose purpose is ‘the defense of the legal order cannot be impartial with regard to it, but must rather be for or against it’.[38]   With respect to the use of LFR by law enforcement agencies, impartiality is closely allied with the notion of accuracy. The NIST’s Face Recognition Vendor Test clearly illustrates this association.[39] NIST assesses the correctness of classification procedures so that ‘face recognition system developers, and end users should be aware of these differences and use them to make decisions and to improve future performance’.[40] In correlating the ostensible precision of algorithms with notions of fairness and objectivity, the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement agencies promises to improve the accuracy of suspect identification[41] and curb discriminatory uses of police discretion, such as in the stop and search context.[42]    There is, however, one problematic point that can be drawn from the use of impartiality as a rationale for the deployment of LFR by police forces. As mentioned earlier, the social and political function of police impartiality—that is, to defend the legal order and maintain the status quo—inevitably raises the question of whether LFR may in fact entrench existing biases amongst law enforcement agencies. The long and difficult history of communities of colour feeling the sharp edge of the law as a consequence of police action heightens the significance of such an inquiry.[43] Given that the disproportionate representation of Black people in the criminal justice system has, in the words of one author, become ‘the single most vexed, hotly controversial and seemingly intractable issue in the politics of crime, policing and social control’, the reinforcement of this status quo via LFR technology engages fundamental issues as to the categorisation of relations between the police and minority ethnic communities.[44]   5. International human rights law on discrimination   The principle of non-discrimination has served as a constant since the nascence of human rights law in the form of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which applies without ‘distinction of any kind’.[45] The Intentional Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (‘CERD’) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (‘ICCPR’)—the two most important treaties on the prohibition of discrimination in the context of civil liberties—provide fertile ground for an analysis of whether the use of LFR by law enforcement agencies is IHRL-compliant.   International law prohibits both direct and indirect discrimination and places positive and negative obligations on States to uphold these prohibitions. The CERD prohibits discrimination on the basis of ‘race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin’,[46] and obliges States, in particular, to legislate against racial discrimination and ensure compliance amongst public authorities with the obligations set out in legislation.[47] Discrimination on the same grounds is prohibited under the ICCPR. Indeed, the ICCPR further clarifies that the right to not be discriminated against ‘on the ground of race, colour, sex, language, religion or social origin’ is non-derogable,[48] even in situations such as public emergencies where States may permissibly limit other rights (freedom of expression, for example).[49] Framed within the parameters of this overarching framework, the question that falls to be determined is whether international law prohibits the use of race, or a proxy for race, as a factor in the deployment of LFR technology by law enforcement.   For the sake of this inquiry, it is necessary to outline the elements of direct and indirect discrimination under international law. Direct discrimination occurs when an act has the ‘purpose’ of ‘nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise’ of a particular group’s rights or freedoms.[50] Of most direct relevance to the use of LFR by law enforcement, indirect discrimination involves actions or policies that are ostensibly neutral but which in practice have a disproportionate impact, or ‘effect’, on a particular group’s enjoyment of rights or freedoms.[51] The particular context and circumstances of an act are relevant considerations for these purposes; as confirmed by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in L.R. v Slovakia, ‘indirect discrimination can only be demonstrated circumstantially’.[52] Notwithstanding the recognition of ‘purpose-based’ and ‘effect-based’ discrimination under IHRL, not all forms of disparate or disproportionate treatment are impermissible. A difference in treatment will not constitute discrimination if the criteria for such differentiation are ‘legitimate’.[53]   The practice of ‘racial profiling’ in policing—namely, ‘the use of race, ethnicity, religion, or national origin rather than individual behaviour as the basis for making law enforcement decisions about who may be involved in criminal activity’—exposes the slippage between ostensibly legitimate forms of discrimination and conduct which violates international law.[54] Bowling and Phillips, for instance, have argued that crime statistics could be seen as both a ‘shield’ for law enforcement agencies in the United Kingdom ‘with which to defend the disproportionate use of stop search’, and a ‘sword’ by which ‘police officers might select suspects’ within groups purported to be likely participants in criminal activity.[55] In the American context, Morris has demonstrated how violations of international law are revealed in evidence concerning the disparate impact of pretextual traffic stops on African Americans.[56] These instances of disproportionality do not just incur profound costs at an individual level, but also directly impinge upon the relationship of minority ethnic communities with the criminal justice system: ‘the systematic profiling of black and minority ethnic groups inevitably leads these groups to lose faith in the very authorities that are meant to protect them’.[57] As a consequence, racial profiling conducted under the auspices of crime prevention objectives undermines the very enjoyment of rights guaranteed under the CERD and ICCPR. The significance of LFR in this paradigm relates to its use as a medium by which discriminatory police practices are not only reflected but entrenched.   A textual analysis of the CERD and its interpretative instruments illustrates its potential utility as a means of regulating the deployment of LFR by the police. The object and purpose of the Treaty, according to its Preamble, is to ‘combat racist doctrines and practices’.[58] Article 2 of the CERD obliges States to ‘engage in no act or practice of racial discrimination’, [59] as well as to ‘amend, rescind or nullify’ any local, national or governmental policies which are identified as having the effect of perpetuating discrimination.[60] Regarding the administration of justice, General Recommendation No. 31 provides that States must take necessary steps to prevent ‘questioning, arrests and searches’ based solely on ‘that person’s colour or features or membership of a racial or ethnic group’, or any profiling which exposes him or her to greater suspicion.[61] Correspondingly, General Recommendation No. 13 provides that law enforcement officials must be ‘properly informed about the obligations their state has entered into under the Convention’ and conduct ‘intensive training to ensure that in the performance of their duties they respect as well as protect human dignity and maintain and uphold the human rights of all persons without distinction’.[62] These provisions are significant to the extent that they provide a framework against which the discriminatory impacts of facial recognition technology can be tested, recognising the role of the police as an entry point into the criminal justice system and a means by which States can exercise coercive measures.   6. LFR and racial bias   The issue of racial bias is a point of contention amongst critics and proponents of LFR.[63] Whilst comprehensive studies such as NIST’s Face Recognition Vendor Test have identified extensive demographic biases in deployment exercises, localised assessments conducted in recent years suggest that these discrepancies have been overstated. Indeed, in April 2023, the National Physical Laboratory (‘NPL’), the national measurement standards laboratory of the United Kingdom, tested two facial recognition systems currently used by the Metropolitan Police Service and South Wales Police.[64] Although the NPL study confirmed that the LFR software had the poorest performance on Black-Female faces, it noted that the demographic inconsistencies in accuracy rates were statistically insignificant.[65] The suggestion that statistical insignificance is decisive in overcoming the issue of demographic bias, however, dislocates the use of such technology from its immediate context. The implications of inaccuracies in LFR, however miniscule they are purported to be, can be severe when paired with historical racial disparities in police contact. A false positive match places an individual at risk of being subjected to escalated action in the form of police stops, detentions, and arrests because of an incorrect match against a database.   The divergence in empirical evidence on demographic bias goes to the heart of an assessment of the legality of LFR. In Bridges , the Court of Appeal determined that, in failing to take reasonable steps to make enquiries about whether facial recognition software had bias on racial or sex grounds, the South Wales Police had failed to comply with the Public Sector Equality Duty (‘PSED’) under section 149 of the Equality Act 2010.[66] Despite the lack of clear evidence of racial bias, as Gikay observes, the Court’s findings in respect of the PSED ‘demonstrates that the current equality law [in the UK] can effectively address the concerns of inaccuracy and bias that are raised by the use of LFR technology by law enforcement authorities’.[67] In light of the widespread cross-jurisdictional use of LFR technology, the question remains as to whether IHRL principles on discrimination can be used to these same ends.[68]   7. LFR and indirect racial discrimination   Whilst law enforcement agencies generally do not make use of LFR technology for the purposes of direct discrimination, the effects of potential biases and errors, as discussed, mean that these tools can have a disproportionate impact on racial minority groups compared to other ethnic groups. This amounts to a form of indirect discrimination under the CERD, so long as the ‘criteria for such differentiation, judged against the objectives and purposes of the Convention [are not] legitimate’.[69]   The jurisprudence of the ECtHR is particularly instructive with regard to the issue of legitimate differentiation under international law.[70] The ECtHR has defined discrimination as differential treatment, ‘without an objective and reasonable justification, [of] persons in relevantly similar situations’.[71] A difference in treatment is discriminatory under Article 14 of the ECHR if it has no objective and reasonable justification—that is, if it does not pursue a ‘legitimate aim’ or if there is not a ‘reasonable relationship of proportionality between the means employed and the aim sought to be realised’.[72] Examining a discrimination claim in this context thus requires a two-tiered approach, focusing first on the aim pursued, and second on the relationship between the impugned difference in treatment and the realisation of that aim.   Although the aim of efficient and effective law enforcement is likely to be recognised as a legitimate objective, the second, more difficult undertaking relates to whether the use of biased, error prone LFR technology is proportionate to this aim. Given that Contracting States’ margin of appreciation is narrower in cases involving so-called ‘suspect’ discrimination grounds, in which the category of race falls,[73] ECHR case law mandates that ‘very weighty reasons’ are required to justify why differential treatment appears both suited to and necessary in the realisation of a legitimate aim pursued.[74] Any putative gains in efficiency and so-called impartiality from the perspective of law enforcement agencies must, therefore, be balanced against the infringement upon discrimination rights and the plethora of other freedoms affected by dint of LFR technology.   The unique human rights impacts of LFR suggest that a restrictive approach should be adopted in such a proportionality assessment. As previously mentioned, the use of LFR technology in law enforcement contexts negatively affects the right to a private life due to the ‘capture and processing of biometric information without an individual’s consent’.[75] Deploying LFR technology in public places also has profound negative implications for the enjoyment of rights to freedom of expression and association. The ECtHR’s recent determination in Glukhin v. Russia is a valuable illustration to this effect.[76] In Glukhin , the Court determined that the conviction of a protestor for failing to notify Russian authorities of his intention to hold a solo demonstration, and the use of LFR technologies within this context, violated his rights to respect for his private life and freedom of expression, protected under Articles 8 and 10 of the ECHR respectively.[77]   Viewed in light of this catalogue of rights violations, the potential demographic biases in LFR technology ‘portend a strong foundation for further restricting how governments use’ such tools on indirect discrimination grounds.[78] Indeed, as previously stated, Article 2 of the CERD mandates States to nullify laws and regulations which have the effect of perpetuating racial discrimination.[79] General Recommendation No. 31 further provides that States must ‘implement national strategies or plans of action aimed at the elimination of structural racial discrimination’.[80] The significance of these provisions in relation to the governance of LFR is made clear by the absence of a legal framework in various jurisdictions that clearly define the use, regulation and oversight of such technology.[81] In the absence of targeted regulation, the increasing deployment of facial recognition technology in policing will only perpetuate existing societal divisions and erode confidence in the criminal justice system amongst minority ethnic communities.   8. Conclusion   Like the telescreens that captured Winston’s attention in the opening pages of 1984, the human rights impacts of LFR may be dimmed, but cannot be shut off completely. Taking stock of the positive IHRL obligations on States and the rights affected by indirect discrimination, this paper has suggested that the use of biased and error-ridden facial recognition technology is unlikely to be proportionate to a legitimate aim of effective law enforcement. Such practices should, in this author’s opinion, amount to impermissible indirect discrimination under the ECHR and under international law in general. Whilst this conclusion is necessarily qualified by the divergence in evidence on demographic bias, it recognises the possibility of technological advances either heightening or mitigating the risk of indirect discrimination in the deployment of LFR. This latent risk means that police forces making use of such technology ought to be alive to the prospect of racial profiling occurring and the possibility of trust amongst minority ethnic groups being further diminished. Udit Mahalingam Udit Mahalingam is a recent LLM graduate from the University of Cambridge. He is interested in civil liberties and human rights issues, particularly within the context of national security and law enforcement practices. [1] George Orwell, 1984 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2013) 3-4. [2] Steven Morris, ‘Anger over use of facial recognition at South Wales football derby’ The Guardian (London, 12 January 2020) < https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/12/anger-over-use-facial-recognition-south-wales-football-derby-cardiff-swansea > accessed 1 January 2024. [3] Zoe Tidman, ‘Metropolitan Police deploys facial recognition in central London with two hours’ warning’ The Independent (London, 20 February 2020) < https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/met-police-facial-recognition-technology-city-westminster-a9346831.html > accessed 1 January 2024. [4] Indeed, the use of LFR by law enforcement can be viewed as part of the broader phenomenon of so-called ‘predictive policing’. See Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, ‘Big Data and Predictive Reasonable Suspicion’ (2015) 13(2) Pa. L. Rev. 327. [5] Sam Shead, ‘“Orwellian” Surveillance Cameras Face Legal Battle’ ( Forbes , 25 July 2018) < https://www.forbes.com/sites/samshead/2018/07/25/orwellian-surveillance-cameras-face-legal-battle/?sh=433d578e1e39 > accessed 1 January 2024. [6] Matthew Ryder KC, ‘Independent legal review of the governance of biometric data in England and Wales’ (‘The Ryder Review’) ( Ada Lovelace Institute , June 2022) [1.3]. [7] Although the focus of the present article, policing is not the only area in which issues around the regulation of LFR arise—see Information Commissioner’s Office, ‘Information Commissioner’s Opinion: The Use of Live Facial Recognition Technology in Public Places’ (18 June 2021) < https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/2619985/ico-opinion-the-use-of-lfr-in-public-places-20210618.pdf > accessed 1 January 2024. [8] Ryan Calo, ‘Robotics and the Lessons of Cyberlaw’ (2015) 103 Calif. L. Rev. 513, 549. [9] Ruth B Carter and Gary E Marchant, ‘Principles-Based Regulation and Emerging Technology’ in Gary E Marchant, Braden R Allenby and Joseph R Herket (eds), The Growing Gap Between Emerging Technologies and Legal-Ethical Oversight (Springer 2011) 165. [10] David R Johnson and David Post, ‘Law and Borders—The Rise of Law in Cyberspace’ (1996) 48 Stan L. Rev. 1367, 1367. [11] Calo (n 8) 552. [12] ibid 515. [13] Meg Leta Jones, ‘Does Technology Drive Law? The Dilemma of Technological Exceptionalism in Cyberlaw’ (2018) Journal of Law, Technology & Policy,   101, 101. [14] ibid 130. [15] Jack M Balkin, ‘The Path of Robotics Law’ (2015) 6 Cal L. Rev 45, 45. [16] ibid 45. [17] Lucas D Introna and Helen Nissenbaum, ‘Facial Recognition Technology A Survey of Policy and Implementation Issues’ 3 < https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1437730 > accessed 1 January 2024. [18] See, for example, Vera Lúcia Raposo, ‘The Use of Facial Recognition Technology by Law Enforcement in Europe: A Non-Orwellian Draft Proposal’ (2022) 29 European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 515; Diego Naranjo, ‘Your face rings a bell: How facial recognition poses a threat for human rights’ < https://repository.gchumanrights.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/61aa23ad-0262-4f46-bcfe-fc74a1d485f3/content > accessed 1 January 2024; Daragh Murray, ‘Facial recognition and the end of human rights as we know them?’ (2024) 4(2) Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights. [19] Qingxiu Bu, ‘The global governance on automated facial recognition (AFR): ethical and legal opportunities and privacy challenges’ (2021) 2 International Cybersecurity Law Rev 113, 116-118. [20] Amy K Lehr and William Crumpler, ‘The Impact of FRT Deployment on Human Rights’ in Facing the Risk: Part 2: Mapping the Human Rights Risks in the Deployment of Facial Recognition Technology  (Center for Strategic and International Studies 2021) 10 . [21] Discrimination issues arising from the use of LFR technology have, however, been considered in the context of federal laws and regulations in the United States—see, for example, Rachel S Fleischer, ‘Bias In, Bias Out: Why Legislation Placing Requirements on the Procurement of Commercialized Facial Recognition Technology Must Be Passed to Protect People of Color’ (2020) 50(1) Public Contract Law Journal 63. [22] Ben Bradford, Julia A Yesberg, Jonathan Jackson, and Paul Dawson, ‘Live Facial Recognition: Trust and Legitimacy as Predictors of Public Support for Police Use of New Technology’ (2020) 60(6) The British Journal of Criminology 1502, 1504. [23] Peter Fussey and Daragh Murray, ‘Independent Report on the London Metropolitan Police Service’s Trial of Live Facial Recognition Technology’, ( University of Essex Human Rights Centre , July 2019) < https://repository.essex.ac.uk/24946/1/London-Met-Police-Trial-of-Facial-Recognition-Tech-Report-2.pdf > accessed 1 January 2024. [24] ibid 19. [25] ibid 19. See also ‘Facing the Camera: Good Practice and Guidance for the Police Use of Overt Surveillance Camera Systems Incorporating Facial Recognition Technology to Locate Persons on a Watchlist, in Public Places in England & Wales’ ( Surveillance Camera Commissioner , November 2020) [3.42] < https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5fc75c5d8fa8f5474a9d3149/6.7024_SCC_Facial_recognition_report_v3_WEB.pdf > accessed 1 January 2024. [26] ibid 20. [27] ibid 19. [28] Kristine Hamman and Rachel Smith, ‘Facial Recognition Technology: Where Will It Take Us?’ ( Criminal Justice Magazine , 12 April 2019) < https://www.americanbar.org/groups/criminal_justice/resources/magazine/archive/facial-recognition-technology-where-will-it-take-us/ > accessed 1 January 2024. [29] Irena Nesterova, ‘Mass data gathering and surveillance: the fight against facial recognition technology in the globalized world’ (2020) 74 SHS Web Conf 2. [30]  R (Bridges) v Chief Constable of South Wales and Ors [2019] EWHC 2341 (Admin) [57]. [31] Patrick Grother, Mei Ngan, and Kayee Hanaoka, ‘Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) Part 3: Demographic Effects’ ( National Institute of Standards and Technology , December 2019) < https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2019/nist.ir.8280.pdf > accessed 1 January 2024. [32] ibid 2. [33] Lindsey Barrett, ‘Ban facial recognition technologies for children-and for everyone else’ (2020) 26(2) Boston University Journal of Science and Technology Law. [34] Joe Purshouse and Liz Campbell, ‘Automated facial recognition and policing: A Bridge too far?’ (2021) 42 Legal Studies 209, 209. [35] Hans J. Morgenthau, ‘The Impartiality of the International Police’ (1968) 21(2) Revista Española de Derecho Internacional 267, 269. [36] ibid. [37] ibid. [38] ibid. [39] Grother, Ngan, and Hanaoka (n 31) 3. [40] ibid. [41] Kyriakos Kotsoglou and Marion Oswald, ‘The long arm of the algorithm? Automated Facial Recognition as evidence and trigger for police intervention’ (2020) 2 Forensic Sci Int Synergy 86, 87. [42] See, for example, Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry (Cm 4262-I, 1999) [6.45]. [43] See, for example, Joel Miller, ‘Stop and Search in England: A Reformed Tactic or Business as Usual?’ (2010) 50(5) Brit. J. of Criminology 954, 954. [44] Robert Reiner, ‘Race and Criminal Justice’ (1989) 16(1) Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 5, 5. See also Julia A Yesberg, Arabella Kyprianides, Ben Bradford, Jenna Milani, Paul Quinton, and Oliver Clark-Darby, ‘Race and support for police use of force: findings from the UK’ (2022) 32(7) Policing and Society 878, 878. [45] Universal Declaration of Human Rights, G.A. Res. 217 A(III), U.N. GAOR, 3d Sess., U.N. Doc. A/810 (1948), Art 2. [46] Intentional Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), Art. 1(a), 660 U.N.T.S 195 (1966). [47] ibid, Art. 2(a), Art. 2(c). [48] International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), G.A. Res. 2200A (XXI), UN GAOR, 21st Sess., Supp. No. 16, Art. 4(1). [49] ibid, Art. 19(3); Human Rights Committee (‘HRC’), General Comment No. 34, Freedoms of opinion and expression [21] (2011). [50] HRC, General Comment No. 18, Non-discrimination [1] (1989). [51] ibid. [52]  L.R. v. Slovakia, Communication No. 31/2003, Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination [10.4] (1996). [53] See, for example, Broeks v. The Netherlands , Communication No. 172/1984, Human Rights Committee, U.N. Doc. CCPR/C/OP/2 [13]: ‘The right to equality before the law and to the equal protection of the law without any discrimination does not make all differences of treatment discriminatory. A differentiation based on reasonable and objective criteria does not amount to prohibited discrimination within the meaning of article 26.1’. [54] Open Society Justice Initiative, Addressing Ethnic Profiling in Policing  (Open Society Initiative 2009) 17. [55] Ben Bowling and Coretta Phillips, ‘Disproportionate and Discriminatory: Reviewing the Evidence on Police Stop and Search’ (2007) 70(6) MLR 936, 948. [56] Maria V. Morris, ‘Racial Profiling and International Human Rights Law: Illegal Discrimination in The United States’ (2001) 15 Emory Int’l L. Rev 207, 211. [57] Michael Shiner, Zoe Carre, Rebekah Delsol and Niamh Eastwood, ‘The Colour of Injustice: ‘Race’, drugs and law enforcement in England and Wales’ ( StopWatch , 14 October 2018) iv < https://www.stop-watch.org/what-we-do/research/the-colour-of-injustice-race-drugs-and-law-enforcement-in-england-and-wales/ > accessed 1 January 2024. [58] CERD (n 46), Preamble. [59] ibid, Art. 2(1)(a). [60] ibid, Art. 2(1)(c). [61] ‘General Recommendation No. 31, General Recommendation XXXI on the Prevention Of Racial Discrimination in the Administration and Functioning of the Criminal Justice System’ (Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 2005) 20. [62] General Recommendation No. 13, General Recommendation XIII on the Training of Law Enforcement Officials in the Protection of Human Rights’ (Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 1993) 2. [63] See, for example, the Court of Appeal’s observations in R (Bridges) v Chief Constable of South Wales and Ors [2020] EWCA Civ 1058 [199].   [64] Tony Mansfield, ‘Facial Recognition Technology in Law Enforcement Equitability Study: Final Report’ ( National Physical Laboratory , March 2023) < https://science.police.uk/site/assets/files/3396/frt-equitability-study_mar2023.pdf > accessed 1 January 2024. [65] ibid 4. [66]  Bridges (n 63) [201]. [67] Asress Adimi Gikay, ‘Regulating Use by Law Enforcement Authorities of Live Facial Recognition Technology in Public Spaces: An Incremental Approach’ (2023) 82(3) CLJ 414, 431. [68] The repression of the Uyghur community in Xianjiang represents one of the most notable instances of systematic LFR deployment and is illustrative of the technology’s wide-ranging human rights impacts. Indeed, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have reported on the existence of ‘a sophisticated, large-scale and systematized surveillance system’ in Xinjiang that is ‘driven by an ever-present network of surveillance cameras, including deploying facial recognition capabilities’. See UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, ‘OHCHR Assessment of Human Rights Concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China’ ( OHCHR , 31 August 2022) [96] < https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countries/2022-08-31/22-08-31-final-assesment.pdf > accessed 1 January 2024. [69] ‘General Recommendation No. 14, General Recommendation XIV on Article 1, Paragraph 1, of The Convention (Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 1993) 2. [70] See: European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, Sept. 3, 1953, art. 14, 213 U.N.T.S 221. Article 14 of the ECHR is materially similar to the anti-discrimination provisions in the ICCPR and CERD. It provides that ‘the enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Convention shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status’. [71]  D.H. and Others v. the Czech Republic , App. No. 57325/00, [44] (ECtHR. Feb. 7, 2006). [72]  Molla Sali v Greece , App no. 20452/14, [135] (Eur. Ct. H.R. Dec. 9, 2018); Eweida & Others v United Kingdom , App nos. 48420/10, 59842/10, 51671/10 and 36516/10, [88] (ECtHR. Jan. 15, 2023). [73] For a comprehensive overview of the development of ‘suspect’ discrimination grounds in ECHR case law, see: Oddný Mjöll Arnardóttir, ‘The Differences that Make a Difference: Recent Developments on the Discrimination Grounds and the Margin of Appreciation under Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights’ (2014) 14(4) Hum. Rights Law Rev. 647, 649-652. [74] The ECtHR originally developed the ‘very weighty reasons’ test in cases involving sex or gender discrimination. See: Abdulaziz, Cabales and Balkandali v United Kingdom , App nos. 9214/80, 9473/81 and 9474/81 [78] (ECtHR, 28 May 1985). Even if not referring expressly to the ‘very weighty reasons’ test as such, the Court has reasoned that racial discrimination is ‘a particularly invidious kind of discrimination’, which ‘in view of its perilous consequences, requires from the authorities special vigilance and a vigorous reaction’: Timishev v. Russia , App nos. 55762/00 and 55974/00 (ECtHR, December 13, 2005) [56]. [75] Lehr and Crumpler (n 20) 10. [76]  Glukhin v. Russia, App   no. 11519/20 (ECtHR, 4 July 2023). [77] ibid [90]-[91] [78] Monika Zalnieriute , ‘Glukhin v. Russia App. No. 11519/20 Judgment’ (2023) 111(4) American Journal of International Law 695, 696. [79] CERD (n 46), Art 2(1)(c). [80] General Recommendation No. 31 (n 61), 5(i). [81] In 2022, the Ryder Review recommended, inter alia, that there was an ‘urgent need for a new, technologically neutral, statutory framework’ for the governance of biometric data in the United Kingdom. See Ryder (n 6) para 8.2. For a comprehensive overview of ‘potential legal and regulatory approaches in selected jurisdictions’ towards LFR governance, see Bu (n 19) 116.

‘I am staying unsettled and trying not to talk for three years’, the painter Agnes Martin wrote to a friend in the late 1960s, adding, ‘I do not think that there will be any more people in my life’.[1]   This vow of silence was soon broken, the prediction of solitude proving false. Nevertheless, Martin did leave New York City rather dramatically, or at least unexpectedly, in 1967. She had spent ten years there as a working artist, belatedly gaining, in her mid-fifties, some recognition for her work’s intimate geometries and whispery colours. Following her departure, she spent eighteen months wandering, mainly in the American Northwest, before resettling in New Mexico. There, she established herself, at first, on a punishingly remote mesa. Turning her back on the rising capital of the international artworld forged a cultish image of Martin as a kind of saint of the desert. Fig 1. Falling Blue (Agnes Martin 1963, oil and graphite on linen, 183 x 183 cm). She wasn’t alone in being distinguished for her withdrawal. In ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, written at the time of Martin’s retreat from New York, Susan Sontag surveyed the many artists who were turning away from public institutions, proclaiming, ‘Most valuable art in our time has been experienced by audiences as a move into silence (or unintelligibility or invisibility or inaudibility)’.[2] Louise Bourgeois, an artist born a year before Martin, in 1911, made some of her most recalcitrant work in the mid-sixties. Bourgeois’ stubbornly formless sculptures in plaster and latex described, roughly, a series of hideouts: nests, lairs, caves. The work’s hermeticism matched Bourgeois’ own, as her fame, cemented by very different bodies of mostly figurative work, was then still a decade in the future.   In Idra Novey’s acclaimed 2023 novel Take What You Need , both Martin and Bourgeois figure as joint spirit guides for the protagonist, Jean, a mad old bird living alone in rust-belt America, sustaining herself on junk food while welding towering assemblages from scrap metal. Having myself written a biography of Martin,[3] and embarked on one of Bourgeois, I read Novey’s book with interest. ‘I had no nerve in the morning if I skipped my nightly Louise’, [4] Jean reveals. ‘To keep from passing out, I tried to call up my Agnes Martin mantra about letting expectations go—to accept inaccuracy or accept failure’,[5] she says, while stanching a gaping wound caused by the errant blade of an electric grinder. Gruff, but kindhearted, and determined to live independently in her inhospitable, isolated studio, Jean is impervious to pain and deprivation. Fig 2. The Couple (Louise Bourgeois 2003, bronze, 155 x 76 x 66 cm). Novey’s admirable, albeit fanciful, portrait of Jean typifies a popular—if generally misleading—notion of artistic vocation as marked by determined retirement from the world. It also speaks to the fact that few artists achieve fame. When attention comes, it often takes its time. Bourgeois wasn’t well known until she was 70—a wait only a little longer than Martin’s—but she was hardly in hiding until then. Married to an esteemed art historian and curator, socially connected to many artists both French and American, and the mother of three sons, Bourgeois lived in the thick of things. Martin spent her decade in New York City living in Coenties Slip, a close-knit Manhattan community of artists who, paradoxically, craved privacy (and, not coincidentally, were largely queer, at a time when being homosexual was acutely dangerous). She, too, consorted with notable colleagues and frequented various vanguard art events. Her closest friends at the Slip included Ellsworth Kelly and Lenore Tawney; Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were neighbours. It’s true that both Martin and Bourgeois were beset and sometimes sidelined by internal clamour, which was diagnosed and treated, if not exactly cured (an outcome that neither really sought). Both wrote copiously, if elliptically, the snippets that were publicly released proving helpful to admirers with a narrative bent.   Most importantly, both artists were immensely ambitious, for their work and also for its public. Martin’s pledge to abstain from speaking was made to Sam Wagstaff, a prominent curator and collector as well as a friend. She had left her beloved New Mexico for New York on the urging of a visiting gallery owner, the renowned Betty Parsons, who made the move a condition of Martin’s representation. From the late 1940s on, Bourgeois actively sought, and periodically attained, exhibitions in both museums and commercial galleries. After she became famous, her appetite for engagement with peers, younger artists, and others in the artworld only grew (although at the end of her long life she became increasingly reclusive). Recognition never comes by accident. When Virginia Woolf mused a century ago on the history of female writers’ suppression and encouraged women to insist on a room of their own—one with a lock on the door—she also insisted they have an income (and, unafraid of crass specifics, named an amount). She advocated neither monasticism nor vows of poverty. In the 1979 classic, The Madwoman in the Attic , Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar compare Emily Dickinson’s self-description to that of her contemporary, Walt Whitman: ‘While Dickinson, the “slightest in the House”, reconciles herself to being Nobody, Whitman genially inquires, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then, I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes)”’.[6] But Dickinson, the authors maintain, not only wrote prodigiously, she wanted to be read . Gubar and Gilbert argue that while Dickinson struggled with the ‘double bind’ of the woman poet incapable of self-assertion, yet determined to succeed’,[7] she chose, on occasion, a voice of no small aggression. ‘My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun’,[8] she wrote.   I have so far focused on departures from public life made by women, arguing that such absences are often both overstated and involuntary. My emphasis has been on those artists (and writers) whose emotions and thoughts were subject to disorder, and on their determination to succeed nonetheless. Hypostasizing the contradictions of this position is the decidedly publicity-friendly Yayoi Kusama, one of the world’s most widely celebrated artists. Now best known for spectacular installations of lights, mirrors, and shiny patterned objects, the ninety-four-year-old has been a resident in a mental-health facility for five decades. The spectrums on which lie solitude and agoraphobia, melancholy and clinical depression, flights of fancy and schizophrenia, do run through many women artists’ biographies. But this propensity might say more about a genre of biographies than their subjects.   Equally important, there is no shortage of men whose professional and personal lives can be plotted along the same lines. This is true not just of Van Gogh and Gauguin, or social isolates Adolf Wölfli, Henry Darger, and James Castle, but also plain ornery dudes like Donald Judd, who headed to the ends of the earth (well, Marfa, Texas) only to have the artworld follow him. Men not only compel attention with less effort than women, but can retreat with less suspicion. If the tourism that Judd’s removal produced is unusual, his choice to leave New York wasn’t. The cosmopolitan artworld can be soul-sapping, and many artists depart to more salutary places once they’ve established their careers, some ostentatiously (consider Anselm Kiefer’s palatial rural strongholds, glorified in a misty, if epic, recent film by Wim Wenders), most more modestly. At the same time, two mid-century modernists deeply associated with a certain kind of removal from the grubby business of making and selling art objects—John Cage, whose Zen-inspired work hovers at the edge of materiality, and Duchamp, who famously excused himself from showing art at all for several decades—were both consummately urbane showmen, ready and willing to reel in audiences and fully engaged throughout their lives with contemporary culture.   To be clear, many artists do choose retreat for both secular and spiritual reasons. Just as important, there is a political valence to exiting society. At present, survivalism—living off the grid—is generally promoted by those rather far to the right, politically. While few artists fit the profile of conspiracy-theorizing deep-woodsmen, commitment to progressive art does not necessarily equate with left-leaning political positions. For artists of whatever political (or religious) stance, there is also historical variability in the choice—or possibility—of silence. Visual art has always been, almost by definition, a way of exceeding (or evading) verbal language. But ever since art education shifted, in the mid-20 th  century (and especially in the US), from academies and ateliers to degree-granting institutions with liberal arts as well as studio curricula,[9] artists have been trained to speak up. Crafting and presenting an artist’s statement is a culminating exercise in the majority of graduate-level studio programs. Many artists are at heart opposed to this mandate, but opposition to (or discomfort with) articulating one’s thoughts has long since been a professional nonstarter.   Here, art discourse, and in particular art criticism (of which I am a practitioner), comes into the arena. Inside the dwindling publications that still include coverage of contemporary art, artists’ voices are increasingly favoured over those of writers. Contours around criticism redrawn decades ago by the Internet were reinforced during the pandemic: at home with a screen, everyone can be their own exegete (or press agent). And while expertise has fallen into disrepute, the composition of art writing’s readership has grown increasingly murky. Obscure though its outline may be, the artworld—its current slump notwithstanding—has in recent years grown mightily. One thing is certain: fame and critical approval have conclusively parted ways.   Ben Davis, critic for Artnet , wrote in late 2023 about the sudden rise of Devon Rodriguez, whom Davis described at the time as ‘almost certainly the most famous artist in the world’. Still in his 20s, Rodriguez, working spontaneously and without announcing himself to his subjects, has been sketching people in the subway then turning the sketches into paintings. Photography was also involved. Davis, who judged the work skilled and appealing but hardly novel, reported that Rodriguez had more than 30 million followers on TikTok (in 2024, Time.com puts the number at 33 million), and made more than $20,000 per day for sponsored content. He met with then-US President Joe Biden. Yet, Davis writes, ‘[a]lmost no one I know has ever heard of him’.[10] Davis is thoughtful and deeply informed—it would be hard to accuse him of social or cultural bias—but he was clearly not spending a great deal of time on TikTok. Should he have been? Is Rodriguez an obscure young artist, or a global celebrity? Is he working, as the punning title of his 2023 exhibition in a pop-up gallery in Chelsea had it, underground? A comparison might be made with social-practice artists, who commit their efforts to communities of various kinds in projects that involve service and activism, often at the expense of their personal status and income. How should they measure their impact against that of someone like Rodriguez?   Addressing the question of withdrawal requires specificity about the public that is being spurned. The confusion that currently prevails concerning art’s constituency could make anyone want to run and hide. Yet engagement is more important than ever—and many artists said to have foresworn it in fact did no such thing. Nancy Princenthal Nancy Princenthal is a New York-based writer whose Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art received the 2016 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. She is also the author of Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s and Hannah Wilke , and her essays have appeared in monographs on Doris Salcedo, Alfredo Jaar, Willie Cole and Gary Simmons, among others. A longtime Contributing Editor (and former Senior Editor) at Art in America , she has also written for the New York Times , Hyperallergic , and elsewhere, and taught at Bard College, Princeton University, Yale University, and the School of Visual Arts. [1] Samuel J. Wagstaff papers, AAA.wagssamu, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. [2] Susan Sontag, ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’ in Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will  (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1976) 7. [3] Nancy Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art  (Thames and Hudson 2015). [4] Idra Novey, Take What You Need  (Viking 2023) 25. [5] ibid 17. [6] Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination  (Yale University Press 1984) 556. [7] ibid 584. [8] ibid 607. [9] Howard Singerman makes this argument in Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University  (University of California Press 1999). [10] Ben Davis, ‘TikTok Star Devon Rodriguez Is Now the Most Famous Artist in the World. But What About His Work?’ ( Artnet , 6 October 2023) < https://news.artnet.com/art-world-archives/devon-rodriguez-painter-tiktok-underground-2373157 > accessed 8 December 2024.

This time, it feels like it is finally happening—until Abu Salah comes home with the dreaded news: ‘Wait another two days until the strong winds die down ’. Roliana cannot understand. ‘Daddy, why don’t we just take the airplane?’ she asks. [1]     I. Introduction   Seeking safety and entry into the territory of a state to initiate an asylum procedure, is often a life-risking and traumatising endeavour. Yet, thus far, the state parties to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951 Geneva Convention) including all member states of the European Union (EU) refuse to offer accessible safe passage.[2] The lack of sufficient humanitarian visas exacerbates the situation and forces refugees on perilous journeys across deserts, the sea, and violent borders.[3] Five-year old Roliana and her family fled from Aleppo, in 2012.[4] Part of the city was captured by rebels; regime forces subsequently dropped barrel bombs on densely populated urban areas.[5] Due to the escalating conflict, the family moved up north, towards Afrin, but the war caused water and electricity shortages, dysfunctional schools, and a lack of work.[6] The family decided to cross into Turkey, and eventually to Greece.   This is not a single story, the Syrian conflict has displaced over 12 million.[7] While the forced movement of refugees is one aspect of war and conflict, no conflict is waged without grave breaches of the laws of war, without violence against civilians. The barrel bomb attack on Aleppo by the Syrian regime as well as the indiscriminate shelling by Opposition groups as a response most likely constitute war crimes.[8] Those fleeing conflict zones and wars such as in Syria, like the family of Roliana, but also in Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ukraine, or Sudan, have often experienced these unimaginable crimes. They may have been victims and/or witnesses of war crimes, crimes against humanity or even genocide.   However, instead of issuing visas and thereby opening a safe route by air, the EU imposes sanctions on carriers such as airlines which forces people on dangerous journeys.[9] At Europe’s land borders, the search for a safe haven is answered with entry prevention measures and violence, a systematic practice depriving refugees of their right to seek asylum and freedom from harm that may itself amount to crimes against humanity.[10] Having fled the crimes in their home countries, asylum-seekers are likely to become victims of international crimes in transit again.   Disconnected Realities And yet, even upon arrival in states that provide access to regular asylum procedures, this essential part of a refugee’s experience—the manifest violations of human rights relevant under international criminal law (ICL) before and during the flight—remains outside the scope of the asylum process. The asylum procedure only aims to determine if the applicants meet the legal criteria according to the 1951 Geneva Convention. If so, beneficiaries of international protection are granted a respective residence permit as well as the 1951 Convention travel document .[11] The individual interest of many refugees to seek truth and justice for the harm suffered remains unaddressed in the asylum context.[12] It is only recognised in international treaties dealing with severe harm[13] and under the rules of international criminal law, above all, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).[14]

‘Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph’. Haile Selassie, United Nations General Assembly, 4 October 1963.[1] Introduction The continuing suffering of the Sudanese people illustrates the futility of international policy-making in the absence of the political will necessary to enforce treaties. As worthy as conventions on human rights and genocide prevention are, without a robust enforcement architecture, the world’s dictators and war lords will continue to persecute and eliminate minority groups with impunity. In Sudan, the blame does not rest on the international community or the legacy of colonialism alone. Faced with human rights abuses, the African Union prioritises state sovereignty and leaders’ immunity from prosecution, and the Islamic world shows little concern for the systematic elimination of Muslims in Darfur. In addition, Khartoum skilfully manipulates American security concerns post-9/11, rendering humanitarian initiatives toothless. This article will draw on personal experience: interviewing survivors in Darfur in 2004, and founding Waging Peace, a charity supporting thousands of Sudanese refugees in the UK. Fig 1. The drawing shows Aishbarra village in Darfur, which was attacked by Janjaweed militia. Houses are set on fire by one of the attackers using a match. Villagers are shot and one person is shown with his left leg severed from the knee down. The villagers that were attacked are coloured in black pencil, while the attackers have lighter (orange) skin – showing the ethnic nature of the attacks (i.e. Arabs attacking ‘black Africans’ – in this case those from the Massaleit tribe). On the bottom right of the drawing are two young men, attached by the neck, led away by a Janjaweed fighter. These young men/boys could be taken into slavery, or may become child soldiers. The Islamist mission On 30 June 1989, the National Islamic Front (NIF) led by Field Marshall Omar Bashir overthrew the democratically elected government of Ja’afar Nimeiri, establishing the world’s second Islamist republic (after Iran). At the previous year’s election, the NIF polled less than 10%. Yet, Sudan specialist Gill Lusk says, the NIF secured power because its members had spent years rising through the ranks of Khartoum’s institutions, guided by their ideological leader, Hasan Turabi. ‘El Turabi and his colleagues had read their Lenin’, says Lusk. ‘The infiltration was patient and systematic and it included uncountable sleepers who revealed their beliefs after the 1989 coup’.[2]

The 2011 Western and Arab intervention in Libya was born of the lessons learned (or, as the case may be, not learned) from the international community’s previous two decades of responding to the outbreak of conflict and commission of gross violations of human rights in various contexts. More precisely, the Libyan case was informed by the international community’s previous failure to stop the horrific genocide in Rwanda and to halt what had been up to that point the largest mass killing on European soil, in Srebrenica, since the Second World War.   During those anxious months in the late winter and early spring of 2011 as observers watched events unfolding in Libya, these lessons ‘weighed heavily on the decision-makers in Washington, London, Paris and beyond’.[1] The world was monitoring a domestic Libyan uprising which was being met, particularly in the city of Benghazi, by the excessive use of force by units under the command of Muammar Qaddafi. The ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) doctrine was invoked by some international figures to push for the ultimate passage of UNSCR 1973 on the premise of preventing potential crimes against humanity and indeed the resolution contains language pertaining to R2P.[2] This UN resolution paved the way for the NATO and Arab intervention in Libya, which morphed from a protection mission to one of regime change, leading to Qaddafi’s downfall.   Ian Martin, the first UN Special Representative in Libya, in his meticulously documented book All Necessary Measures?  has detailed the initial international decisions taken on Libya in 2011-12. While questioning whether R2P indeed played a seminal role in international decision-making, Martin notes: ‘the Libya experience has done such damage to the limited international consensus there was around the R2P doctrine’.[3]   Whether or not R2P was central to the passage of UNSCR 1973, the lack of serious international investment in the Libya that emerged after Qaddafi regime’s demise was a singular failure on the part of the world’s leading powers especially given the legacy of Qaddafi’s four-decade plus quixotic, chaotic, and terrorizing reign. The international clarity and vision that were applied before the passage of UNSCR 1973 have seldom been in evidence since Qaddafi’s downfall.   As the world has turned its gaze away from Libya, Qaddafi’s successors have spent the past decade quarrelling—often violently—over the shallow legitimacy of the country’s institutions instead of working together to build a functioning state. As a consequence, the ordinary Libyan citizen has been left materially less secure and too often prey to abuse at the hands of the thugs (both home-grown and imported), while some of the victims of Qaddafi’s abuses themselves became victimizers.

Gaza: Can Anyone Hear Us?[1]   In a Washington Post  article published on 16 December 2023, the reporter David Ignatius wrote:   For three days this past week, I traveled the West Bank, from the arid hills below Hebron in the south to the chalky heights of Nablus in the north. What I saw was a pattern of Israeli domination and occasional abuse that makes daily life a humiliation for many Palestinians—and could obstruct the peaceful future that Israelis and Palestinians both say they want.  Driving the roads of the West Bank is—forgive the term—a ‘two-plate’ solution. Israeli settlers with yellow license plates zoom along on a well-guarded superhighway called Route 60. Palestinians with white plates navigate small, bumpy roads. Since Oct. 7, many of the entrances to their villages have often been closed. Traveling in an Israeli taxi with a Palestinian driver, I saw some of both worlds.  I watched backups at Israeli checkpoints near Bethlehem and Nablus that were over a half-mile long and could require waits of more than two hours. The delays, indignities and outright assaults on Palestinians have become a grim routine. ‘If I’m in a yellow-plate car, does that change my blood?’ asked Samer Shalabi, the Palestinian who was my guide in the Nablus area.  My tour of the West Bank was a reality check about what’s possible ‘the day after’ the Gaza war ends. President Biden and other world leaders speak hopefully about creating a Palestinian state once Hamas is defeated. I’d love to see that happen, too. But people need to get real about the obstacles that are in front of our eyes.[2]    I was struck by this piece of reporting—well-intentioned though it was—for the absence of context and history that it reveals. Is Mr. Ignatius only now discovering the occupation and its pernicious impact on Palestinian life, the relentless oppression waged against Palestinians over nearly six decades? Can he now, finally, begin to see the context that led to the current horrific loss of Palestinian and Israeli lives?   In the more than four months since the 7 October conflict erupted, Israel has dropped over 45,000 bombs on Gaza weighing more than 65,000 tons, which is equivalent to three atomic bombs like those dropped on Hiroshima. This has resulted in a level of destruction that is ‘comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern period’, comparable to the bombing of Dresden during the second world war. According to Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist, ‘the word “Gaza” is going to go down in history along with Dresden and other famous cities that have been bombed. What you’re seeing in Gaza is in the top 25% of the most intense punishment campaigns in history’.[3]   Between 7 October 2023 and 19 February 2024, over 29,092 Palestinians have been killed (approximately 70 percent are women and children), 69,028 injured (or 3.0 percent of Gaza’s population) and 1.7 million (out of 2.3 million or 74 percent) have been internally displaced. During the same period, there have been over 1200 Israelis killed (including foreign nationals), approximately 5,400 injured and 134 remain hostage in Gaza.[4] Conservatively, between 29-37 percent of all buildings have been damaged or destroyed[5] including over 60 percent of Gaza’s homes (over 70,000 destroyed or made uninhabitable and over 290,000 damaged) in addition to apartment buildings, water and sanitation infrastructure, factories, businesses hotels, shopping malls, theaters, mosques, and churches. Approximately 92 percent of all school buildings have been damaged (in addition to 392 educational facilities) or are used as shelters. All of Gaza’s universities have been damaged or destroyed and are no longer operational. Similarly, the number of functioning hospitals has dropped from 36 to 14 (11 are partially functional and three are running at minimal capacity).[6] By the second half of November, the World Bank estimated that ‘60 percent of Gaza’s ICT, health and education infrastructure had been destroyed [and] 70 percent of its commerce-related infrastructure’, resulting in an unemployment rate of 85 percent (given the closure of 56,000 businesses and a loss of 147,000 formal sector jobs).[7]   The northern Gaza Strip has no access to clean water and the south receives a meager water supply from one pipeline coming from Israel. By 2 January, there was a full electricity blackout throughout the Gaza Strip, which has continued.[8] The systematic destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure has led to the ‘rapid spread of infectious disease’.[9] Consequently, the World Health Organization warns that the outbreak of disease could ultimately kill more Palestinians than Israeli bombs.[10] According to Professor Devi Sridhar, the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, ‘A quarter of [Gaza’s] population could die within a year due to outbreaks of disease caused by this unprecedented conflict’[11] where ‘indirect health related deaths…can outnumber direct deaths by more than 15 to 1’.[12]

Introduction   The epitome of the 21st century’s Russian war against Ukraine manifested itself in Vladimir Putin’s speech on the morning of 24 February 2022.[1] In his address, the Russian President announced a series of wars against the collective West and the sovereign state of Ukraine. The massive Russian military attack on Ukrainian land, air, and sea was presented to the Russian public as ‘a special military operation’. According to President Putin, ‘The purpose of this operation was to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime. To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation’. Putin’s bold statement was uttered notwithstanding the facts that, during those eight years, Russia had annexed Crimea and effectively occupied Donbass, two Eastern regions of Ukraine.[2] The Russian government machine failed, however, to gain control over the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian people beyond the occupation borders.[3]   Arguably, the full-scale Russian invasion, accompanied by an overwhelming scale of atrocious crimes against the Ukrainian nation, creates a ‘context of a manifest pattern of similar conduct directed against’ the Ukrainian nation to destroy it as such, in whole or in part, within the meaning of the crime of genocide.[4] The thesis of this essay is that such a manifest pattern includes a crime that could itself affect such destruction ie the forcible transfer of children of the group to another group (from Ukraine to Russia or Russian-controlled territory).   It is uncontested that since 2014, and later, after February 2023 on a larger scale, a substantial number of Ukrainian children have been transferred, under the control of the Russian authorities, from their homes or places of residence to the territory of the Russian Federation or to the Ukrainian regions under Russian occupation.[5] Based on an analysis of Russian law and the reports of public officials in the field of education and children’s rights, the necessary conclusion is that all such acts were carried out by the state’s centralized system of governance under the control and leadership of President Putin. It is posited that such actions reflect the intent to destroy the nation of Ukraine and eliminate its identity as a separate entity from Russia.   On 17 March 2023, the Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Mr Vladimir Putin and Ms Maria Lvova-Belova, Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation. They both are allegedly responsible for ‘the war crime of unlawful deportation of the population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of the population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation (under articles 8(2)(a)(vii) and 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute)’.[6]