What remains to be seen is how the parties will respond. The Republicans appear set to put their rhetoric into action: they’ve declared that compromise will involve the Democrats meeting them all the way over on the right rather than halfway in the middle. The Democrats are yet to throw the gauntlet down. In one predictable light, the Democrats can be trusted to back away from the fight, deciding to take a Republican platform as evidence of “incremental gains.” The caucus will disintegrate, and any positive change will be credited to the “fresh ideas” of the right.

The Democrats cannot shy away from the fight that confronts them. They must set an agenda and follow it. They must get their party together on a core set of principles that make it clear that government not only can but must be trusted to take care of its citizens. Set aside the moral obligation that the government ensure the security of personhood for its citizens (more on that in a graduate thesis); this is a time where the strategy of recovery must be followed. There should be no doubt that the economy will improve; booms bust, then they even out and boom again, usually within the span of five years, and since we haven’t really learned much about self-control we can only assume that the boom will have the same rate and magnitude as our bust had. This model implies that the outlook will become much better by the time the next election rolls around. The people, however, don’t understand this; they think it’s the leaders that drive it, which is a better explanation for tonight’s wave than any other. When the people see a positive outlook, they think the incumbent had a say in it; when the positive outlook happens, then, the incumbent Democrats will look much better for it.

But this won’t happen if the narrative becomes driven by Republican ideas. If, say, a Republican-written tax bill gets the support of enough Senate Democrats to pass, it suddenly turns into the Republicans benefiting the economy. The “fresh ideas” of the right turn into the ideas that are changing the country. The wave, then, will continue. If, instead, the Democrats refuse to comply and run with their own agenda and the country improves in the vacuum of progress, their ideas are the narrative. Their ideas save the country. Their ideas stem the tide.

Tonight and the next two years ought to make it incredibly clear that an economic look at political science simply is ineffective. We’re told as political scientists to believe that a legislative body behaves like a market, with bills passing on lines that create the smallest of consensus possible. Politics is not a rational event. Politicians know that their jobs are on the line when they appear to lose spine; they not only let their platforms fall by the wayside but also earn scorn from their supporters for a refusal to follow their principles. This draws the politician to dig his heels in. The model should not be a left-right continuum where the median voter is the point where a bill passes. It is instead a model where the middle is no man’s land; the sides are on different pieces of paper. Nothing will pass.

While it would be nice to call for civility, we must also know what is too much. We must know what needs to be seen out (health care reform, economic stimulus, banking and credit reform). We must realize that with forward-thinking ideas, we don’t need to adapt them to the countervailing voices that destroyed this country in the first place. Intransigence may be the best thing for this country right now. The key will be spine. Do Democrats have enough of it to stand firm, stand principled, and stand by their record? One can only hope; moreover, one can only doubt.

This is a repost of a Facebook note entitled “On punk rock, anarchism, and life in general” written in November of 2007. I’m reposting it because of an intriguing idea of a Punk Rock Anthropology brought up by a comment at this post on Jams: http://musicasdiscourse1.blogspot.com/2010/09/assignment-1-listening-to-and-being.html One thing you may notice is the author of the post. Yes, for Music as Discourse I will be from time to time writing blog posts. I’ll alert you, faithful reader, if I say or see anything of note that requires added commentary. Anyway, consider this my step IV:

The Against Me! show I saw last night was a fitting end to my punk show-going career.

“What?!?” many of you exclaim. “Colin not going to a punk show ever again?!?”

Yes, it’s the end of the line for my mosh days. I’ve realized a lot about the punk scene in the past year or so and have come to a few conclusions.

1. Punk, in and of itself, is the best example of why an anarchistic society doesn’t work. Punk rock, which bases itself on anarchistic principles of removing all sense of structure in order to make a perfect society, still will like the anarchistic society inherently run on the archetypes that run social order. Killing people is, unless you’re a complete psychopath, a bad idea that people will persecute you for. People generally resist any change to their system, even ones to solidify chaos. The thoughts in my head are not meant to be yours, but I can express them with the same sort of passion and/or vitriol that you do. The best way to live is by holding to your ethos. The problem is that archetypes create an unworkable stricture. If someone challenges the sanctity of the systemless system, they become an apologist. That’s echoed in the punk scene. A band like AM! gets vilified by the punk community because they decided to change their ethos and add elements of dance-rock. When they were challenged, they consciously decided to rail against the stricture of the scene. By challenging and innovating punk rock, they’ve become pariahs. Anarchism, like punk rock, devours its promising young too often to progress.

2. Punk rock is a means for inspiring thought. When I was in 6th grade, my mom bought me Green Day’s International Superhits. That summer, I bought the Punk-o-Rama Volume 7 sampler and went to the Warped Tour the next day. All of those were revelatory experiences for me because it was the sound of what I had begun to think. It was the sound of anger, of frustration, and of an awareness of the world surrounding me, personal or global. When I looked out at the Against Me! show last night, I would guess that half of the people in there were under the age of 16. They all had not gotten that message yet, that it’s time to open your eyes and notice that within your life and world things are screwed up. It’s not healthy for a country to foster a generation of kids expecting to have the world, many of whom went to the show. Punk music is what helped me, what was the catalyst, to become socially alert, aware, and involved, and I truly believe that a band like Against Me! is still the sort of band to do that.

3. Once you’ve been converted, you can’t get as high as you got on that first night. Punk shows, after you’ve seen what they can do to your life, continue to have an undeniable power for a long time as a testament to that first feeling that the world had been revealed. You look around and see that there’s 200 people just like you that understand the trials of the world. They came to that show for a feeling of rebirth. Over time, however, it’s difficult to continue feeling that same way ever again. You can’t continually be 14 all over again. You start realizing that when you slam into someone in the pit, it sort of hurts for both you and them. You begin to think and question yourself, “Why am I looking to feel something again when there’s other experiences out there?” You can’t regain the feeling of revelation totally, and as you realize that you begin to look elsewhere.

4. I’m too old for this. I’ve seen my life totally changed by punk rock, yeah, but I’ve become detached from the politics, the emotion, and the want to hit someone. If a punk band is saying something, I can listen, but the sound is usually better on vinyl than it is with the microphone gain cranked to Hell. I can love the message still and believe in it, but I can live without destroying my vocal cords.

Against Me! was a fitting end to my punk show going career, particularly since their encore was three of their oldest songs, a throwback to when I was still young and more naive than I am now, all played with Tom Gabel on acoustic instead of electric. The final song, “Walking is Still Honest,” sums up my life in the scene:

“Dear shithead/This isn’t happening/The sky is really falling/The paint’s all made of lead/There’s asbestos in the walls/Hell’s coming to rip off the doors/To your privileged heaven/Do you want to love and feel it?/You can look but you can’t taste it/You can reach but you’ll never have it/We are untouchable/Untouchable is something to be…You can be almost anything/When you’re on your fucking knees/Not today/Not my son/Not my family/Not while walking is still honest/
And you haven’t given up on me.”

Yeah, there is still a load of problems in the world. One of the greatest continues to be that theory never become anything but that. Punk rock stands as a testament to the idea that changing minds is the first step. I’d like to start taking the second one.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of the Consultative Group on the Past on Northern Irish Transitional Justice

The Troubles were a lengthy period of political turmoil and violence in Northern Ireland that spanned from the mid-1960s to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Over four decades of turmoil, sectarian clashes between republican forces, represented by the Irish Republican Army, and loyalist forces, notably the Ulster Volunteer Force, waged a long conflict with motivations spreading from secession to the Republic of Ireland, religious divides, and general retaliation. All told, the conflict killed over 3,500 people. With the signing of a power sharing agreement in 1998, a coexistent peace has been part of the agenda of both the Ulster Unionists, the loyalist party, and Sinn Feìn, the political wing of the IRA. As part of this peace, there has been a movement toward the use of transitional justice techniques. The Eames-Bradley Group, also known as the Consultative Group on the Past, researched these techniques and made a lengthy list of recommendations for the continuation of the transitional justice process.

The group set out in September 2007 after an initiation by Peter Hain, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. It sought out views on three core areas: the legacy of the past 40 years of violence and reconciliation, the lessons to be learned, and the public’s suggestion for steps to “support Northern Ireland society in building a shared future that was not overshadowed by the events of the past.” Concerns of a Northern Irish diaspora forced the group to solicit views from the entire world, namely in Britain and the United States. All told, the group received 290 written submissions and over 2000 letters; it also took private meetings with 141 people/groups and held public meetings in seven cities including Belfast and Derryⁱ. The Group sought to take elements from the history of post-conflict justice, analyzing truth commissions and other forms of transitional justice done in Northern Ireland and abroad; including amnesties, reparations, and dealing with sectarianismⁱⁱ.

The Consultative Group on the Past has been a critical part of the transitional justice process for Northern Ireland. It is important to study their work. By analyzing their conclusions and recommendations in light of transitional justice theory and history; understanding the shortcomings in the report; and by looking into the difficulties inherent in transitional justice for the Northern Irish situation; it will be clear that while the report’s suggestions are made with excellent intentions, they are lacking in an ability to solve the conflict manifest in the Troubles.

Chapter 2: Establishing a Need for Reconciliation and Outlining the Report Ahead

Chapter 2 begins by citing the key principle of the group’s work: “The past should be dealt with in a manner which enables society to be more defined by its desire for true and lasting reconciliation, rather than by division and mistrust, seeking to promote a shared and reconciled future by all.” This principle led to key ways to analyze the conflict and the way forward. First, dealing with the past is a process, not an event, making it necessary to have evolutionary change. Second, sensitivity to victims and survivors is essential. Any methods undertaken must include an understanding that there is a huge amount of people who were victimized in the conflict, and that dealing with the past includes a society-wide effort to care for the victimized, including perpetrators. Third, recommendations should be human rights compliant, respecting the European Convention on Human Rights and other decisions that respect individual rights along with the rights of society. Fourth, relationships matter and are the foundation for reconciliation. Reconciliation involves mutual understandings about blame that doesn’t marginalize certain sects. To reconcile, relations need to be built between the different sides. Finally, consensus agreement is the ideal. Leaders have to take whatever consensus exists in a divided society and build upon that for reconciliationⁱⁱⁱ.

The Group asks a central question: How should the country deal with the past? Simply forgetting seems to not be an option, according to the Group. As memories come out, it becomes clear that burying memories only makes the wounds fester; understandings of the past impact views of the present and future. To stop from having two different moral judgments about the past, the report reasons, people need to listen to other sides and understand their viewpoints. The experience of the Group through the public meetings is that partisans can change their views on what happened and understand that the other side has both failures and dignity, leading to “mutual forgiveness and reconciliation of a shared past.” In terms of the transitional justice implications, reconciliation isn’t necessarily about reconciling two different nations but reconciling even the basic notions of truth^iv.

To reconcile the country for the future requires significant steps in forgiving the past and understanding the truth. It’s important to understand that forgiveness doesn’t involve forgetting the past; rather, in Northern Ireland, both sides must understand the truth that both sides were culpable in some forms. It’s necessary to make steps to agree on what the truth of the conflict is; this involves conversations to tell differing versions of truth. The Commission that comes out in the propositions should push for these conversations, with an end result a signed agreement between parties and paramilitary groups to never kill again on political grounds^v.

For the sake of victims, the Group states, there is a necessity to have an investigatory body to look into the cases of individual crimes. Instead of having a South African-style TRC, the complexities of Northern Irish culture require a private, non-judiciary system that avoids adversarial public trials. Any system needs to be based on keeping both sides open to agree to their guilt and innocence instead of placing guilt on the opposite sect. According to the report, the public side of truth telling should be based on letting each side tell their story without the fear of incrimination. There is a concern that the reticence on both sides to tell any side of the truth will get in the way of this sort of effort; however, there has been work through both sides through non-governmental organizations to get these mutual discussions going, providing hope for the future^vi.

Northern Ireland has a justice system that can handle claims from the past. The major problem with future justice is that while both sides favor continued prosecutions and abhor the idea of blanket amnesties, both sides don’t necessarily support the idea of prosecuting themselves. The private compromise seems to be to draw some sort of line in crimes to avoid how “the very demand for justice can militate against the main goal of reconciliation,” but to keep the door open for prosecutions and have an end goal to determine where the line is to be drawn for amnesties in the future^vii.

Chapter 2′s explanations do not necessarily suggest any methods for reconciliation; rather, they make the case for further ones. They note the difficulties of post-conflict justice in a complex sectarian society like Northern Ireland; these continuing conflicts are part of the justification for keeping portions of the reconciliation process out of the public eye. The methodology of truth telling in the report contains clear parallels to the South African TRC; ironically, the Group recommends against some of its basic ideas. In the South African TRC, there was a major effort on the part of Desmond Tutu to be victim-centric instead of retributive^viii; this focus is repeated in the Northern Irish investigations, which aim to focus on answers for victims instead of prosecuting their perpetrators. Furthermore, the expectations for victims and survivors are similarly lowered. The Reparations Committee of the South African TRC made it clear to victims that there should not be an expectation of much financial assistance, citing a lack of resources^ix. A similar tone runs through the feeling of a de facto Irish amnesty process. Finally, both the South African and Northern Irish processes make it clear that the end result must be a record of the conflict that is objective and amenable to both sides.

The differences between the two, however, are striking. First, there is the cited need to have a closed process in Northern Ireland, rather than the catharsis of the South African TRC. Northern Irish justice requires initial admissions of guilt that cannot come out in public; unlike in South Africa, where there was a knowledge that acts were criminal, the Northern Irish case finds sects assigning blame to the other side with no personal incrimination. Only in private discussions, the Group noted, were victims and political groups able to stand off of the posturing of victimhood. The privacy of incrimination flies in sharp contrast with the South African case, where testimony in front of the Human Rights or Amnesty Commissions involved admitting to society your level of guilt^x. Last and most striking, the Northern Irish do not give de jure amnesty, as will be exposed in Chapter 7.

Chapter 3: Creating a Cohesive Truth to Reconcile Around

Part of the Consultative Group’s work was to develop an unbiased and coherent version of the past. It opened this effort in Chapter 3 with some staggering statistics: between 1969 and 2001, violence between Republicans and Loyalists killed 3,523 people. Roughly speaking, 60% were killed by republican forces, with 30% killed by loyalists and 10% killed by British and Irish police. The violence was centered primarily around Belfast and within Northern Ireland, with some violence spreading into the Republic of Ireland, into mainland British cities like London and Birmingham, and also into continental Europe with IRA attacks on British Army troops. A majority of the deceased are believed to be civilians. An estimated 47,000 were injured in the violence, with scores more the victims of armed robbery, arson, and other crimes that led to nearly 20,000 imprisonments. The report then attempts to reconcile the different views of Northern Irish society on how the conflict has had a lasting impact. Victims and survivors, the report claims, are suffering from not only the physical impacts of their injuries, but also the loss of loved ones. To the “wider society,” there was an effort to stay out of the conflict by continuing their lives; their ideal move is to move on. Republicans and nationalists, in different ways, see themselves as victimized by the British push for Ulserization, with republicans arguing that this led them to necessary violence. Loyalists and unionists, similarly, saw the reign of terror by the IRA’s campaign as reason to fight back to defend their legal status with the United Kingdom. The security forces feel that their place was to keep the rule of law in place, while the church found itself overwhelmed with being both a consolatory and divisive institution. Clearly, all sides see themselves to some extent as victimized by the conflict. To reconcile Northern Ireland, the report states, it is necessary to let these competing views be heard^xi.

The conflict continues in many avenues in Northern Irish society. A debate surrounds the idea of victimization; the definition of who was victimized in the conflict varies on sectarian lines, with affiliated political parties forced to co-opt their related side’s victims groups. The Northern Irish government’s definition of “victim and survivor” is remarkably broad and inclusive of anyone who can display physical or psychological injury from the conflict, a caregiver of a victim, or someone widowed by the conflict. While this isn’t inclusive of the society at large, it is inclusive of victims on both sides^xii.

The report then lists the many types of victimization that come outside of this explanation. One comes from what loyalists view as an Ulsterization of blame by the United Kingdom; there is little acceptance of blame by the British government in issues of collusion between the Ministry of Defense and the Royal Ulster Constabulatory. Communities at large on both sides saw the security situation in the conflict take away their rights. The youth of Northern Ireland are marked by the scars the conflict left on their families and society. The group sees the issues of sectarianism playing a prominent part in perpetuating the issues of the conflict, citing the notion of “peace ‘walls’” blocking reconciliation. The church is given a fair amount of blame for the problems in both the past and present; it gave an initial wedge, then gave an avenue for continued division without providing a method to stitch the country together. The conflict’s impact on the economy of Northern Ireland is still felt in sectarian areas of the country, necessitating dual programs to support the poor. 4,600 people are believed to have been exiled, either by fear of arrest or reprisal from paramilitary groups. Those who were arrested for their activities in the conflict are finding it difficult to secure jobs and loans^xiii. All of these are continuing the conflict’s victimization; all of these, the Group concludes in different ways, must be addressed.

In terms of the transitional justice implications, Chapter 3 can be split into two parts. First is the establishment of the record. Establishing an objective truth is a part of transitional justice practice, particularly in models based on truth and reconciliation. South Africa emphasized this in the TRC; Rwanda, additionally, made the gacaca more based on providing a cathartic confession to the community than leaving it in a courtroom. Where Northern Ireland may avoid the inherent problems with this model is in its private nature. The model for confessions crafted by Leigh Payne suggests that truth telling is based equally in the truth itself as well as the staging, emphasizing that the “truth” of a confession can be obscured by how the teller says it. This has been tested in cases in Argentina and South Africa, both where the threat of personal incrimination comes with the public nature of the confession^xiv. Northern Ireland skirts this by offering the public catharsis of storytelling to those willing to listen to both sides and keeping the investigatory side behind closed doors. Protections from self-incrimination mixed with no pretense of full amnesty allows for the perpetrator to avoid dramatizing his or her story. The development of the public record, then, is not subject to the masking of truth.

The second section details the depth and breadth of division in society, leading to a need for reparations. Victimhood in Northern Ireland runs across the spectrum, leading into not only the parts of the country that show a physical mark from the conflict but also into the education system. The country became visibly more segregated through the conflict, with neighborhoods in Belfast experiencing a flight of residents and a deeper entrenchment of ethnic and sectarian division^xv; it is no shock, then, that resources are divided between the sects. There is also a level of societal lustration displayed by the inability for those convicted for political violence to obtain jobs and loans. While this isn’t necessarily modeled after the post-Soviet styled actions in the Czech Republic (there notably isn’t a reference to it being governmental in the report), it has had a detractive impact on the lives of foot soldiers for the related causes^xvi. The report, then, makes it clear that the process of lustration has victimized ex-convicts in Northern Ireland, and recommends that laws be changed to prevent it.

Chapter 4: Reparations as Care for “Victims and Survivors”

The Consultative Group sees one of its most pressing and difficult concerns as caring for the victims of the conflict in a way that “make[s] sure that we, as a society, do not create another generation of victims.^xvii” In other words, there is an understanding that reparations and victim care must be in the interest of reconciliation. The Group understands the difficulty with this in Northern Irish society, noting that any sort of overtures to assist victims on one side, even as a universal project, marginalizes the other. Because of this legacy, the report makes it clear that any sort of reconciliation must include respect for victims that transcends nationalism and sectarian divides^xviii. Chapter 4 addresses many of these concerns.

A major concern to victims groups is the availability of funding in a competitive environment. While some groups work together to enhance care resources, others reportedly compete with affiliated non-governmental organizations as well as statutory care mechanisms due to either sectarian or inter-sect divisions. Among all groups, there is a complaint that the funding is inadequate in size and time. The Group suggests that these victims groups have actually led to further destabilization in the community, fueling suspicions that groups on certain sides of the community receive better and more adequate funding. The report also suggests that these groups advocate viewpoints that go beyond what their group believes and mandates, turning them into “mini political parties.^xix” These issues make it so victims can be exploited if they join groups and marginalized if they seek individual care.

Victims, the report claims, have dealt with post-traumatic stress conditions in a number of detrimental ways, including resorting to drugs and alcohol, suffering from depression, and domestic abuse. Action has been taken to ameliorate these issues, but the public health concern of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder continues to plague society. As such, the report directs the health care system to take more beneficial action to assist victims^xx.

The group hails the government’s new Commission for Victims and Survivors for Northern Ireland, or CVSNI, as a way to tackle the “shortfalls in services highlighted.^xxi” CVSNI is best placed to understand and consolidate the approaches to victim needs, as well as to coordinate the approaches taken by victims groups and to make a better-focused effort to care for caregivers and government workers. It also will create a Victims and Survivors Forum to discuss further funding, as well as to bring up concerns and suspicions with other groups’ motives. This, the Group believes, will foster greater dialogue and relationships between the two sides of the continued conflict^xxii.

The Consultative Group emphasizes in these recommendations the use of victim-centric institutional change. These issues, to some extent, fall under an expanded idea of reparations. While a reparation can simply be a check, it can also come in the form of a new care center to treat injuries caused by a conflict. It can come in the form of education about the conflict’s events, and how to avoid that conflict from happening in the future. These actions play not just a tangible role in making a victim’s life easier, but also the symbolic role that comes from recognition. Where the Consultative Group is going above and beyond is that it links these reparations to reconciliation. Instead of acting to make the reparations a form of apology, the Consultative Group’s suggestions are designed to transcend the sectarian divide to provide healing for all in society. This type of approach skirts some of the concerns of reparations, namely that they can instill animosity by making one group privileged^xxiii. In the case of Northern Ireland, it also has a pragmatic role in reducing the cost of providing separate services to more than one sector of society.

This approach is contrasted with most controversial part of their report: direct compensation for victims. The Group notes that there have been governmental approaches to compensating victims of conflict-related violence, then suggests that these have been narrow in their approach to only include those who were not members of a “proscribed” organization or had not been convicted of a crime^xxiv. Additionally, these payments were criticized when they were made in the 1970s and 80s for only addressing lost pay and a payment for “loss or injury” instead of the emotional toll of losing or caring for a loved one. While CVSNI seems well-placed to provide support in reparations involving victim care, it doesn’t have the capability to pay for other aspects that grieving families require. These families, the report declares, need to have recognition for the grief that the conflict brought upon them, regardless of what side and in what capacity. As such, the Consultative Group recommends what they call “an ex-gratia recognition payment of £12,000″ to the next of kin of anyone who died in the conflict after January 1966, paid by the UK government^xxv.

Within transitional justice theory, financial reparations have been both a positive notion and a negative idea. The positive side of reparations is clear: providing money to the marginalized is a statement against the pain they encountered, and it helps to financially account for the problems they face due to their victimhood. The internment of Japanese-Americans is an example of successful reparations: the government was able to clearly define those who were wronged by war hysteria and compensated them for their hardship. Likewise, African-Americans have had a far more difficult time receiving money for their issues because of the abstract nature of their population; there is no one left who lived through slavery^xxvi. The program brought forward by the Consultative Group seems more like the Japanese model than the slavery one, considering that a record exists of every death caused by the conflict. The reparations should theoretically be successful.

However, financial reparations inherently fall into conflict displayed through the Northern Irish case. This issue brought the widest public criticism to the report. The Group’s website had an open comment page, now since closed, that allowed for general comments on the findings. 24 of the final 40 comments, at some point, directly and negatively address the issue of compensation. None positively address it. The vast majority of negative comments call the families of IRA members some version of the word “terrorist” or “murderer,” often from a widow or family member of someone killed by paramilitants^xxvii. This displays the sensitive nature that reparations have; those who did not necessarily oppress a certain people feel no obligation to compensate them for acts they weren’t a part of. The Irish case extends this to bring in conflict that still runs in society. The anger is both that reparations must be paid, but that they must be paid to a group still seen as an adversary to those who will be paying, forcing a notion of being a perpetrator on people who don’t accept blame for their actions.

Chapter 5: Memorialization of the Conflict

In Chapter 5, the report cites a wide variety of opinions on the notion of public remembrance of the past in Northern Irish society. While many accept that the past must be remembered as a part of life in Northern Ireland, there are questions as to whether this should be a private event on a public date, physical memorialization by the government, or programs that promote storytelling. The Consultative Group chooses to take on three key areas under the premise that, despite what could be seen as a perpetuation of pain by the victims, the past must be remembered to have a viable future^xxviii.

The Group places high emphasis on the virtue of telling stories about experiences in both a private forum set up through victims groups, and community efforts. These efforts, the report states, “has led to some degree of healing and should continue.^xxix” There is higher virtue, in the eyes of the Group, to have these storytelling events be a two-way street, with the tales leading to a shared catharsis. The report also suggests that some sort of archive be set up to collect these stories, as well as to support efforts to independently validate these stories^xxx.

The Group also notes the success of Healing Through Remembering, an NGO launched in 2002 dedicated to making a community remembrance of the past^xxxi, at creating a national “Day of Private Reflection” on June 21 every year. The holiday has been praised as a way to reflect on the past, either alone or as part of a small community; it has also been criticized as being overkill to communities that commemorate events like Easter Sunday or the Remembrance Day Bombing, as well as to individuals that were not directly impacted by the violence and simply did not feel a need to remember. The Group promotes the idea of June 21 continuing as an unofficial holiday with a mix of the existing private reflection and a public commemoration of the continued commitment to peace by the government and both loyalist and republican groups^xxxii.

Memorialization is also discussed in depth by the Group. Supporters of memorials note that memorials stand in for graves and more morbid locales as a place for those who suffered loss to congregate and remember their loved ones. Furthermore, a memorial that serves all instead of smaller communities and localities can help to bridge the gap of sectarianism, something that has plagued other memorials in the past^xxxiii. The Group brings up the idea of building physical memorials, such as a monument or garden of peace, as well as a living memorial that could take the form of a museum or as part of other healing methods; namely, the report suggests “a hospital [or] trauma center^xxxiv“. The Group’s opinion of these ideas, however, is pessimistic; citing resistance to memorials in the first place as well as the lack of consensus on what this would memorialize, the decision is to defer this to a future commission^xxxv.

Further questions exist as to whether or not memorials, including holidays, are able to effectively convey these messages. Memorials largely play to people who seek them out; unless there is some other attraction to the place like its artistic and architectural merit, the wider public tends to ignore their significance, as is the case in the Memory Spiral in Argentina, now used as a commons area at the University de la Plata^xxxvi. This appears to be the case with the Day of Private Reflection; Healing Through Remembering notes, according to the report, that the holiday is still lacking in popularity among the wider community, serving more the victim’s community than anyone else^xxxvii. Storytelling programs appear to be an under-appreciated part of the transitional justice canon; searches of JSTOR and other Internet databases bring up no literature on it. This, coupled with little by way of anecdotal evidence, makes it difficult to analyze in light of transitional justice. On its base, storytelling programs that emphasize mutual catharsis without incrimination appears to be a positive development; the question is whether or not these stories would be tales of mutual victimhood or types of confessions. If the tales are of victimhood, there seems to be less likelihood of a disingenuous confession; while there would be some embellishment, it wouldn’t be to the extent of a character like South Africa’s Paul Van Vuuren, who used the media to go over the top in showing penance^xxxviii. The victim-centrism of the report suggests that the tales would be less confessional than stories of how the conflict changed lives.

Chapter 6: Investigations Into the Violence — Retributive or Reconciliatory?

Chapter 6 details a lengthy list of avenues for legal recourse from conflict-related violence. Specifically, it cites the work of the Historical Enquiries Team, or HET; the investigation by Northern Ireland’s Police Ombudsman; public inquiries in the past; inquests by the coroner’s service; and reviews of convictions by the Criminal Cases Review Commission^xxxix.

The HET was established in 2005 to review all 3,268 deaths related to the conflict between 1969 and 1998. It does this through contacting families to determine what they need to know about their loved one’s death, then giving each crime a thorough review to find any new evidence. It has since taken on post-1998 cases to allay concerns of police partiality. As of January 2009, the team has completed 471 cases out of 1370 it has reopened; chronologically, it has only investigated up to 1976 due to the early toll of the conflict. HET’s work has not resulted in many prosecutions, due in part to victim disinterest and an amnesty provision in the Good Friday Agreement that limits convictions longer than two years for conflict-related crimes. The Group suggests that there be a new commission to continue the HET’s work after its mandate ends in 2011^xl. Coupled with the HET, the Police Act of 1998 established a Police Ombudsman to rule on cases of police misconduct. Much of the work of the Ombudsman has been to review cases during the conflict. It has reviewed 122 such cases, not all of which resulted in death, and has referred 55 cases to the HET for further investigation. It has complained of not having adequate resources to complete its work, saying in a 2008 report that, “The Office cannot continue to cope from the strain of meeting these challenges without additional resources… at present, the Office is one of the few means available [to provide resolution for victims of the conflict]^xli.”

Multiple inquiries have been taken by the UK government to look into violence during the conflict. In January of 1998, then-Prime Minister Tony Blair announced the Saville Inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday, the massacre in Derry on January 30, 1972. The inquiry was scheduled to make its report in fall 2009^xlii, but has since been pushed back indefinitely, with members of the government openly suggesting it will never take place^xliii. There has also been the Cory Inquiry, which has looked into allegations of police collusion through the conflict; the inquiry has prompted follow-up investigations into three different murders, with one currently waiting in limbo. The Irish government, meanwhile, has established investigations into collusion between its agents and republican forces in the murders of two chiefs of the Royal Ulster Constabulatory in 1989, as well as an inquiry into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings in 1974. These inquiries have been criticized for staggering costs; the Bloody Sunday Inquiry alone has cost over £185 million. Additionally, these inquests have involved a diversion of investigatory resources from the Northern Irish police, as well as exacting a heavy toll to protect evidence and inquiry workers. The inquiries have also been criticized by victims groups for the traumatic nature of testimony^xliv.

The coroners service in Northern Ireland has also been called to investigate deaths from the Troubles. The European Convention on Human Rights dictates that some sort of investigation must be carried out where a death is believed to have been caused by force; a decision by the European Court on Human Rights in R v. West Somerset Coroner, in turn, led to a massive rethinking of the coroner service’s role in investigations. While there is not a requirement to investigate crimes before 2000, when the UK became signatory to the Convention through the Human Rights Act of 1998, the Attorney General has the power to launch a coroner’s inquest in any case deemed suspicious or unresolved^xlv.

Additionally, the UK government’s Criminal Cases Review Commission, or CCRC, which reviews cases to determine if there has been malfeasance in the court system that can be rectified by an appeal, has had a part in reviewing cases revolving around the conflict. Between 1997 and 2008, the CCRC heard 175 cases from Northern Ireland, closing 141. 24 cases have been heard by the Court of Appeals, with 22 resulting in a reduced sentence. Within these cases, allegations of misconduct ranging from unlawfully admitted evidence, mishandling of informants, and the non-disclosure of evidence have led to serious questions about the government’s handling of the criminal side of the Troubles; not surprisingly, an estimated 300 additional cases will be brought forward to the CCRC after reviews by the HET, Ombudsman, and other inquiries and inquests are completed^xlvi.

These actions fall into a questionable area of transitional justice: retributive justice that seems oriented against action that punishes perpetrators of violence. These types of criminal investigations would appear to happen in cases that would result in a trial; the work of the HET displays this most clearly by working with police resources to finish a criminal investigation. However, this information is not intended for trial — trials, if anything, are told to not be expected due to the resources and the belief that further criminal proceedings will get in the way of reconciliation. Instead, the investigations serve to provide a historical record for the sake of the victims. In the case of the HET, the families of victims are given the final reports to provide a sort of closure, while the work of the Police Ombudsman and the CCRC act to rectify injustices carried out by the police force and court system. The difficulties of the Good Friday Agreement’s amnesty provisions^xlvii and the apparent want for closure instead of recrimination underscore this orientation away from retribution. In this regard, it almost seems right to classify these as restorative actions. The actions all work toward establishing a victim-sensitive type of closure by exposing the truth about criminal acts without forcing continued legal action on society; there is no real retribution involved.

The report also lists three secondary parts of criminal investigation that, to a large extent, deal in the trade of amnesty. Within the Good Friday Agreement’s amnesty provisions, those who were arrested and sentenced for conflict-related crimes and agreed to disavow terrorist activities were granted release from prison after two years from the Agreement’s signing date. These people are under what could best be described as probation; if found to be committing acts related to political violence, they are immediately sent back to prison by fiat of the Secretary of State^xlviii. Further amnesty has been granted to what the British and Irish government call “on the runs;” if it can be determined that an at-large former member of either paramilitary or security forces under investigations of a crime is no longer a risk to commit acts of terrorism, he or she is eligible, after review, for the Agreement’s amnesty provisions^xlix. Finally, the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, or ICLVR, was enacted in 1999 with the blessing of the Irish and British governments to coordinate efforts to find the remains of victims of violence by the IRA and other affiliate groups. To inspire honest confessions, the Commission is backed by an act by the British government making it illegal to use evidence from the ICLVR’s deliberations in a criminal trial. It has led to the recovery of five bodies out of the fourteen investigated^l.

Chapters 7 and 8: Recommendations For Change

Section 4, “The Way Forward,” outlines the Consultative Group’s recommendations for the Northern Irish government and society to undergo to continue the work of transitional justice. Chapter 7 deals with how to reform the justice sector, primarily through the establishment of a Legacy Commission. Chapter 8 deals with the responsibilities of the Legacy Commission in restorative justice.

The Group has found that while the preexisting structures have done some work in providing justice for victims, many problems still exist stemming from an unreasonable work load given to the police to investigate not only present crimes, but also crimes from the conflict. The length and breadth of the inquiries has increased through the years, and these inquiries have been far too costly to continue. Most importantly, the criminal justice system has been focused primarily on fighting the battles of the past through investigations without regard for a reconciled future. This necessitates a non-police approach^li.

This new approach, the Legacy Commission, would establish a Reviews and Investigation unit to take over the work of the HET and Ombudsman. This unit would conduct investigations both into individual crimes, as well as themes of the conflict like police collusion and paramilitary activity. It would take over the inquiry process, including a review of the of-yet unquestioned Patrick Finucane murder, and make the process private to facilitate more open discussions with lessened threat of self-incrimination. The Commission would last for five years; at that time, decisions would be made on how to end discussions of a past and orient them towards the future. This would entail an end to historical inquiries and investigations, with a potential for no prosecutions for “on the runs.^lii

The report continues to discuss ways forward in certain areas. In justice, the Group argues that while investigations and prosecutions should continue as victims demand it, it should be approached with an eye on the scarcity of resources. This scarcity, coupled with the dimming reality of prosecution for crimes in the Troubles, leads one to argue for shifting the focus toward information recovery than criminal investigation^liii. The Group contends that the Commission should have a relatively vast ability to subpoena evidence without having an actual trial. It also should be able to hold its proceedings in private, rather than the public forum that has tended to act as a sounding board for tensions. This, the Group realizes, must come within the framework of judicial rights^liv. Evidence found out within the Commission that may be self-incriminating must be reviewed in light of the person’s involvement in the situation; if a person testifies before the Commission, he or she is not necessarily given an amnesty, but is protected from the testimony being used against themselves. Furthermore, the Commission must work independently of the police force to avoid the risk of conflicting interest, primarily in questions of police collusion with loyalist forces. This would also delete duplication in investigations between the HET and Ombudsman, as well as freeing up resources to focus on present day crimes^lv. The costs of the recommendations through the report are high; the investigative wing of the Commission likely will require a purse of £170 million, with the bursary for social needs at £100 million and the recognition payments totaling around £40 million^lvi. The notion of amnesty is brought up as a method of moving forward; it would allow for the focus to be on recovering information, rather than investigating crimes, and would be a cost-efficient way to convince society to move into the future. The problem with this type of thinking is that amnesties are forbidden by various charters that the UK and Ireland are signatory to. As such, a general amnesty cannot happen, with an expectation on the sides of victims that prosecutions will be a possibility but will not necessarily be sought^lvii.

Chapter 8 then discusses what types of actions the Legacy Commission will carry out. It spells out its mandate as having the historical focus outlined in Chapter 7, along with a need to address community issues rising from the conflict, such as sectarianism, to create a reconciled future. This would happen through programs coordinated with CVSNI through a Reconciliation Forum. Cases would be taken by the Legacy Commission and would go through Review and Investigation. If prosecution occurs, it would go to trial in the Northern Irish courts; if not, it would either go to the Informational Recovery unit given family support, or it would go to the Thematic Examination unit to analyze what the case says about society^lviii.

The Legacy Commission would be headed by an international commissioner with the responsibility to oversee and direct thematic examination. The Review and Investigation unit would be commissioned by someone with experience in policing and criminal justice, while the Information Recovery and Thematic Examination unit would be headed by a trusted member of the community that could be viewed as completely impartial. The Commission would have a mandate of five years, and would be supported by both the British and Irish governments; the Group suggests that both governments give some sort of legislative sanction to the group that includes a funding mechanism. At the end of five years, the group believes many of the issues brought forth in the conflict will have been examined; at that time, the Commission should hold a remembrance ceremony^lix.

The Legacy Commission will largely be tasked with overseeing reparational work in Northern Ireland. This work will be directed toward ending sectarianism, working with youth and the education system to get a balanced understanding of the past as part of curriculum, improving health care services to better deal with trauma, spreading economic benefits to underprivileged areas, and repatriating exiles. This would be done through a Reconciliation Forum between the Legacy Commission’s Chair, CVSNI, and the Community Relations Council of Northern Ireland; the Northern Ireland Human Rights Council, the Equality Commission, and the Office of the First Minister would also be invited. This forum would analyze what actions are being done in reparational work and would direct resources with a focus on addressing the issues of the community at large; this differs from the past focus on individual victims^lx.

The Chair’s primary responsibility would be to address the sectarian divide through challenging society’s institutions to break down “peace walls” that continue to divide society and the distribution of resources. It would also work to promote the Day of Private Reflection, renaming it a Day of Reflection and Reconciliation that would include speeches by the First Minister. Finally, it would control the £100 million bursary of reconciliation funds and direct it through the Reconciliation Forum’s discussion and guidance^lxi.

The Review and Investigation Unit would essentially take over the work of the HET and Police Ombudsman in all forms; it would have the right to re-open cases the two bodies had closed, but would work to continue the chronological order of cases and forward cases that needed review to the Director of Public Prosecution. Its primary goals would be information recovery instead of an orientation toward prosecutions; this information would be both to provide closure to families and to assist the Thematic Examination unit’s work^lxii. The Thematic Examination Unit would examine cases linked either by the perpetrators or an overriding theme, i.e. police collusion or specific areas of paramilitary activity. The work would not be public during its run to promote honesty and truth-telling; furthermore, statements to the Commission would not be admissible as self-criminating evidence^lxiii.

Overview: Can The Report Act as a Guide For Transitional Justice?

Overall, the Consultative Group’s report prescribes a wide variety of restorative-based justice mechanisms that may or may not help certain parts of Northern Irish culture to deal with its wounds from the Troubles. There are two clear issues, however. First, the report skews heavily toward an imbalance away from retributive justice. Second, it is questionable as to whether even the most effective methods of transitional justice can mend the sectarian divides that the Troubles represented.

The report’s recommendations are, to a vast extent, based on the need to bring sects together; this, in the minds of the Consultative Group, appears to be achieved through eschewing methods of retributive justice in favor of more holistic, restorative approaches. The Group does this through three ways: first, it orients methods that would otherwise be used to build a case for retributive justice toward the establishment of the historical record, ending up with a methodology that takes on the look of a private truth commission; second, it gives a heightened level of credence to traditional restorative justice approaches like memorializing holidays and the use of societal and direct reparations; third, it grants a level of de facto amnesty by its downplaying of the role of prosecutions and its suggestions to “draw a line” in the future. These suggestions are a response to an overarching theme: the Group sees a fundamental distrust on both sides of the sectarian debate that the decisions will be biased toward their opponents. By taking a stance that benefits both sides of Northern Irish society, the Group would say, this conflict would be avoided.

The issue with this logic is that it vastly skews the balance of justice necessary for transitional justice to be fully effective. The work of the University of Wisconsin’s Transitional Justice Data Base has shown that in cases where only singular approaches, i.e. a truth commission without trials, a trial without amnesty provisions, or a blanket amnesty without an investigation into the past, have been thus far ineffective in the promotion of democratic stability and human rights; instead, approaches that blend trials with amnesties and those mechanisms coupled with a truth commission have, historically speaking, had a net positive effect on human rights^lxiv. This can be extended to say that having exclusively restorative methods or exclusively retributive methods of transitional justice would not bring as positive effect as balancing the two.

The work of the Consultative Group, then, can be criticized in two ways. First, the report does not fulfill the needs of the justice balance; specifically, the methods through which transitional justice has historically worked are not in place. While it can be argued that the work of the Legacy Commission carries out many of the responsibilities of a truth commission insomuch as it develops a uniform record of the truth of the conflict, it leaves out many aspects of the truth commission approach. It leaves this record in the back room instead of in public, leaving the level of societal incrimination in the background in favor of individualized victim’s justice. The report can also be argued to provide some levels of amnesty through its insistence on downplaying expectations of prosecutions, as well as the realization that some forms of amnesty already exist through the Good Friday Agreement. However, it explicitly states that a de jure amnesty is illegal through the European Convention on Human Rights; because of this, those who testify to the Commission may not be held accountable to their testimony in court, but are still under risk of prosecution if other evidence is available. That said, the downplaying by the report of trials, which the Group believes can “militate against the main goal of reconciliation,” makes it clear that this aspect of the justice balance will not be filled.

Second, the report’s lack of clear avenues for victim retribution skew the balance of justice toward an unhealthily restorative approach. The recommendations for societal reparations, storytelling, and an established record of the past for victims are all fine and good, but they avoid the real societal healing that comes from the punishment that both sides deserve. This justice comes at a cost of societal stability in the beginning, to be sure, but the data does suggest that using trials within the larger picture of transitional justice establishes a culture that puts impunity on those who aim to continue the conflict through violence. In the case of Northern Ireland, the arguments against society’s instability are even weaker; Northern Ireland, as part of the United Kingdom, is a well-functioning democracy, and though its power sharing does impact the democratic process, it doesn’t impact it to the point where politicized trials will dramatically harm the effectiveness of the political process. There still is a functioning legal system that can handle the trauma of a Troubles-related criminal trial. There are leaders on all sides; loyalist, republican, police, and government officials that all could be brought to justice through a prosecution of their crimes. It is a critical mistake by the Consultative Group to push against this part of Northern Irish healing. Retributive justice is necessary to fix the harm that the past has done on sects of Northern Irish society, but it appears unlikely to be put into practice.

There is another concern that deals with the notion of restorative justice’s viability in Northern Ireland; namely, can something be “restored” or “reconciled” to a place it has never been? The history of Northern Ireland is one that has experienced sectarianism in some fashion since the British arrival in the 1600s. The Troubles were not an independent event, but a long and bloody part of a history of conflict between British Protestants and Irish Catholics; furthermore, this is a conflict still entrenched in society. Transitional justice is limited in its capacity to deal with a case like Northern Ireland because it is more complicated than a simple era of authoritarian rule that ended with the promise of peace and equality. South Africa is a possible analogue to parts of the Northern Irish situation, as its transition involved bringing together a white society that had always made itself superior to the black society it colonized; the British experience in Ireland, which saw the whole of Ireland annexed until the Home Rule Act of 1914 and eventually led out of the British Empire in 1922, has heavy twinges of the colonizing force. However, the end of apartheid and the release of Nelson Mandela came with the Afrikaners admitting some culpability and guilt for the pain that segregation had caused. This sort of admission of societal guilt is lacking in Northern Irish society; the Good Friday Agreement has acted as a loose ceasefire agreement that has created power sharing, but has done little to mend the damage that sectarianism that has spread over four centuries has caused. The Consultative Group on the Past appears to not recognize this contradiction in its report, constantly emphasizing the need for reconciliation; instead, approaches in Northern Ireland must be focused on either conciliation that attacks the root causes of sectarianism or a co-existence that tolerates the other side’s right to exist. Given that two soldiers and a police officer were shot in a pair of IRA-related incidents this past March^lxv, along with an attempted bombing of a police station in June followed by a car bomb planted to kill a police chief in Belfast in October^lxvi, a level of skepticism may be wise that such a conciliation or tolerance is imminent, or even possible.

Conclusions

The Consultative Group on the Past’s report outlines a number of methods for transitional justice for Northern Ireland. These methods are victim-centric and tend toward restorative means of repairing the damage of the Troubles, along with the establishment of a clear record of violence. However, the imbalance away from retributive approaches, namely trials to result from the investigations prescribed, along with the inherent difficulty with truly reconciling Northern Ireland’s constantly warring sects, shows that the Consultative Group’s report, if even put into practice, will still be lacking in its ability to bring transitional justice to the Northern Irish people.

On Christianity, Being “Alive,” and the Abortion Debate

In discussions of human nature, a conflict arises concerning what being a human entails. There are simple answers; being of the species counts, as does having a heartbeat, any level of cognition¹, ability to subsist. But in Christian doctrine, there is a further question about being a human. David writes in Psalm 139 of a god who “didst weave me in my mother’s womb²,” speaks separately of man being “shapen by iniquity” in Psalm 51. There is to a great extent a belief in Christian doctrine that being human, and specifically being alive, is more complicated than the scientific explanation.

This complication leads to the difficulty with accepting abortion as part of Christian society. Abortion is avoided throughout the Bible; no concordance ever refers to the word³. As such, scholars and advocates on both sides are able to contort the words of the Psalms, the Mosaic Code, the Pauline Epistles, and other portions of doctrine into a narrative that both condemns and supports abortion. But is a discussion of an ambiguous hole in church doctrine enough to fully understand the Christian response to one of the great questions that comes from a study of humanity? Other concerns clearly need to be addressed, namely the central question that leads to the abortion debate: what does it mean to be alive? Additionally, there is a question of Christianity’s insistence on a level of mind-body dualism; the soul seems to exist on its own, with the body being its earthly vessel between the fall to earth and ascendance to Heaven. How does this idea of a soul that must be transferred to a body play into the idea that a fetus is a human with equal rights? Finally, what of the Sixth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill?⁴” Does that automatically ban abortion or is there still a debate about what constitutes killing? What about Exodus 21:22, which suggests that the penalty for striking a pregnant woman and causing a miscarriage is a fine instead of the capital offense that killing the woman would be?

By framing the abortion debate through the lens of being “alive,” a discussion of the dualism of existence in Christian doctrine, and the difficulty in understanding the Bible’s conflicting verses used to frame the abortion debate, one comes to the realization that abortion may in fact be permissible in the confines of Christianity.

What Constitutes Being “Alive?”

The central question and point of evidence in the abortion debate plays on what it means to be alive. Christian pro-life advocates, to an intriguing extent, assert that liveness is contingent on the scientific concepts of conception. Prolife Across America billboards trumpet the age that an embryo develops a heartbeat, has fingernails, and has cognitive skills while in the womb⁵, all suggestions that, even for Christians, science gives a relatively good explanation of being alive. Biologist Paul Davison cites the ability to reproduce, acquire and metabolize energy, and sense and respond to environmental stimuli as basic characteristics of life throughout the world⁶; all of those, to some extent, exist in the embryo and fetus, which sees rapid cellular reproduction and metabolization of nutrients. There may be a question with the ability to react to environmental stimulus; a study at San Jose’s Brain Research Laboratory suggests that while some cognition appears by the seventh week of gestation, the ability to react to vibrations in the uterus comes between week 20 and 27⁷. Taking this understanding of biological life and brain development would mean that by week 20, the fetus may be alive. Science, though, can only go so far in explaining what it is to be alive. Cognitive development doesn’t necessarily mean that the fetus is capable of thinking, as can be understood by the body’s ability to reflexively react to stimulus when other cognition is absent. Taking this into the animal world makes this more clear; a chicken, after all, can still run after decapitation, as the nervous system continues to power action until it bleeds out. Calling this chicken alive after being slaughtered would be an odd turn of phrase.

Liveness, then, may need an extra dimension found in philosophy that debates the difference between existence and life. Early ontology found in Parmenides’s proem to On Nature exposes the idea that existence is eternal. This idea may be true, but it lacks a dimension brought on by Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Book Zeta exposes the thesis that there is a difference between existence and “being,” or what it is to exist. The idea of ti esti, or “what it is,” bases the question of life in an idea that supersedes simply existing. With that in mind, being alive in a philosophical sense means many things. It involves identity; to be alive, a being must understand that it is both a being and a specific being. It must, as Leibniz describes it, understand that it is x and not y. Additionally, consciousness plays into the notions of being alive; the ability to understand one’s surrounding and selectively impact it leads to being alive. If this is not complicated enough, consider the problem of when all of these start. Where Parmenides would suggest that you exist even before and after you are alive⁸, you are not alive until you exhibit self-identity and consciousness. It is inconclusive to determine whether this occurs in utero or after a fair amount of development; child psychologists point to the idea of the mirror stage, which happens after six to eight months from birth, as the point where a child develops the notion of their own existence.

These concerns are compounded by the Christian concept of being alive. An analysis of Genesis 1 and 2 brings up the same questions of what being alive means as are found in the philosophical ideas. Genesis 1′s notion of mankind’s development follows the same style as the development of the rest of the world: God willed it to be so. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness… So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them⁹.” This explains that humans exist; it doesn’t explain the central question of how that existence turned into life. Genesis 2 brings that into the forefront: “the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature¹⁰.” A reading of this passage in light of abortion complicates the view of the pro-life lobby. God created “the man,” or Adam, as a corporeal body before breathing life into him and making him alive; if this extends to the rest of the world, a body isn’t made alive until it already exists and God breathes life into it. While this may be in utero, the passage seems to say that this happens well after that happens when Adam is fully formed.

All of these theories about being alive bring up different conclusions, particularly when pointed to the idea of abortion. Science points to the ability to metabolize energy and reproduce, which occur almost instantaneous with the embryonic stage, but also includes cognitive ability, which happens later in fetal development. Philosophy is equally inconclusive, bringing in metaphysical quandaries about the difference between when existence and liveness that bring in issues of consciousness. Christianity’s two creation stories make the question equally murky as to when Adam, and in turn the rest of humanity, became alive. This makes the question of when the fetus is alive almost impossible to answer; the closest to a conclusive answer is at 20 to 27 weeks.

The Dualistic Tradition

Abortion is also complicated by the idea of the soul and body being separate in Christian thought. This is manifest in many different ways through the Christian tradition. Genesis 2 certainly touches on this dualism, with God breathing life into Adam. It is also discussed in Paul’s depiction of sin in Romans 7 and 8. Paul describes the link that people have to sin by saying, “For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death¹¹.” While it is clear that the passage is meant to show that sin does not lead to perpetual bondage through Christ’s death, it is based off of a notion that there is a dualism between the mind and body; the end of the chapter demonstrates this even more clearly, saying, “So then, I serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin¹².” Romans 8 continues this dualism between the corporeal sin and the ethereal soul and spirit of Godliness, saying,

“If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you… if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.¹³“

To Paul, then, a rejection of sin in favor of Jesus frees the soul from the sinful, earthly body, suggesting that dualism exists.

This dualism plays into the debate on abortion as part of the question of when a Christian views the fetus to be alive. The soul clearly exists on its own; the question is whether this soul exists as part of the fetus or if it is transferred later. Catholic doctrine suggests the former, taking lines like Psalm 139′s assertion that God “knit [David] in my mother’s womb;” this explains how the aborted reportedly go into purgatory or limbo, as they never received the holy rite of baptism. However, this relies on an interpretation of the Bible that isn’t necessarily substantiated; a model of how one becomes a human from Genesis 2 can shoot holes in this argument. A decision on when the soul exists in Christianity is critical to a decision on abortion. Christian doctrine, not surprisingly, varies on this decision. Within Catholicism, a creationist understanding is taught that suggests strongly that the soul is made upon conception¹⁴. Orthodox and Protestant traditions don’t necessarily address the genesis of the soul, opting more for an approach that explains the end of life; some take a traducian position, suggesting that the soul comes from the parents at either conception or a later time. The Mormon tradition takes a pre-existent understanding, suggesting that the soul is a merging of an already existent spirit and the corporeal body.

By taking a creationist viewpoint, abortion is clearly verboten. Abortion would involve the killing of a body carrying a soul specifically created by God at conception, condemning that soul to a fate that it did not sanction. This viewpoint is a hallmark of pro-life theology; it provides the most conclusive argument that has only holes that involve fundamental differences in the soul’s genesis, and it has been a part of Christian doctrine through the centuries. The Catholic Church recently reaffirmed this in the 2008 encyclical Dignitis Personae, which states that since the embryo has a soul, it carries the same rights as a person. However, taking the opposite stance and suggesting that a pre-existent model or even a traducian view leaves plenty of room for different opinions that are open to abortion. Neither of those models suggest that the soul must be within the embryo or fetus; pre-existence goes so far to say that the soul’s status in an already created spirit makes it so it is completely separate, leaving no problem for abortion rights supporters. Outside of doctrinal (and not Biblical) precedence, the soul’s existence in utero is an unanswered question.

Where the Biblical Truth is Unclear

The Bible has already been shown to lead to different interpretations on critical verses that discuss abortion. An analysis of further verses, used by both sides of the abortion rights lobby, make the questions even more difficult. Consider the Sixth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” It seems like an incredibly conclusive statement against abortion; abortion, to the pro-life movement, involves killing a fetus. However, the questions surrounding whether or not the fetus is biologically or theologically alive makes this a difficult passage to interpret. Pro-life advocacy would suggest that the question is moot. Clearly, the embryo is alive in a biological sense that includes cellular reproduction at an immediate date and a resemblance to a fully formed human within a short amount of time; theologically, the existence of a soul created specifically for the embryo is something that requires protection, just as Proverbs 24:11 states¹⁵. Pro-choice advocates, likewise, contend that the biology is inconclusive at least in determining whether the fetus should count as being alive; the cognitive side isn’t fully formed for months after conception, and the likelihood of normal viability that early in development is low. The theology, which has equal Biblical background as that of the pro-life view, makes it vague as to whether the soul exists only with the body, as a separate and free entity, or if it is even yet there at all. With these questions, “Thou shalt not kill” becomes incomprehensible without knowing if abortion even constitutes killing.

Psalm 139, another oft-quoted passage in the abortion debate, contains another issue in textual analysis. In it, the Psalmist David glorifies God for all of the majesty of his existence. Lines from it display what the pro-life movement proclaims to be the clearest and most profound evidence that God’s hand is in the creation of man in utero:

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made… Your eyes saw my unformed existence; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me¹⁶.

There are the obvious lines; “knitted me together in my mother’s womb” suggests to pro-life advocates that everything is made by God through conception and pregnancy, including an everlasting and newly existing soul. “Your eyes saw my unformed existence” continues this view, stating that God knew the Psalmist’s (and the reader’s) life and soul before birth. But consider the line, “…for I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” and its alternate translation, “…for I am wonderfully set apart.” The first and traditionally used translation is used as a creationist manifesto, implying that God crafts everyone individually in utero; under this idea, abortion would be the termination of one of God’s creations. The second translation leaves it open to a pre-existent interpretation. “Set apart” does not mean that God crafts the fetus in utero; it could mean that God created the soul separately, or simply views the Psalmist as being special in His eyes. This soul and body is not specifically created and existent through God; instead, it could be a body that exists with a completely dichotomous soul. Understanding the dualistic tradition of Christianity gives credence to this view, which gives credence to abortion rights theologians.

Then there is the issue of Exodus 21:22. Exodus, outside of telling the details of Moses’ life and departure from Egypt¹⁷, begins to expose the Commandments and the resultant Mosaic Code, the basic structure of Old Testament and Jewish law. As part of a discussion of what punishments come from the destruction of property, this choice phrase appears: “When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman, so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined, as the woman’s husband shall impose on him, and he shall pay as the judges determine.¹⁸” Upon first glance, this verse implies that abortion is at least criminal in Mosaic law. However, it is not the mortal sin that is exposed in verse 23: “But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life.” This makes it clear that, while the Mosaic Code implies that there is some wrong to abortion, it is not a wrong that is commensurate with the murder implied by pro-life advocates; instead, it is merely a petty crime worthy of a few sheckels to pay for damages.

Can There Be a Conclusion?

It is increasingly evident through an understanding of modern Christian life, including deference to science and philosophy that complements the theological background, that abortion is a questionable topic. There isn’t a consensus that suggests either way; on one hand, readings of verses strictly condemn the practice, while readings from a different viewpoint allow for it, or at least remove the condemnation.

Here, then, is one coherent viewpoint: The Bible’s explanation of abortion, while skirting use of the phrase, leaves the important questions unanswered with the important terminology undefined. In the absence of these Biblical truths, my interpretation is that certain types of abortion is within the law of God. This is based on an understanding of the science of abortion; to a certain threshold, abortion does not involve “killing” a fetus that cannot be considered independently alive, as its brain has not fully developed to have real consciousness outside of reflexive motions. It also involves a pre-existent understanding of the soul’s genesis; to me, Genesis 2′s version of the soul entering Adam after he was formed follows how I believe God creates and transfers the soul. These views satisfy my interpretation of the Sixth Commandment, following the logic that one cannot kill something that is not living. They also allow for God to “wonderfully set apart” each individual, and they seem in line with how the Bible treats a forced miscarriage in the Mosaic Code.

This, however, does not mean that I would advocate having an abortion in the case of an unplanned pregnancy. Regardless of Biblical justification, there is a feeling that the blood is on my hands; this child would be mine, and I personally could not live with the guilt yielded by the act afterward. Instead, I advocate the right to terminate a pregnancy and advocate with equal strength the moral imperative to avoid the situation and explore other options like adoption or accepting responsibility in the event that it occurs.



Terrorism in the Context of Cultural Globalization

An adage first suggested by Thomas Friedman suggests that there has never been a war between two countries that share a common trait: golden arches. Conflict seems to avoid countries that each have a McDonald’s. This adage suggests that in countries with economic ties, it would be counter-productive to go to war; the gains of going to war go in sharp conflict with the hurt on the economy by losing a valuable trading partner. But this adage also suggests something about culture. In countries that share a hallmark of Western culture like McDonald’s, there is a bond; going to Beijing and seeing a Pizza Hut makes the people seem less foreign. Listening to African music has the same effect, as does watching The West Wing on German television. With that familiarity, there would be less support for going to war against a foreign-feeling tyrant, leading to increased peace and prosperity between countries. This makes a conclusive case for cultural globalization: the roots of international peace can come from a unified global culture.

Unfortunately, understanding global violence is not this easy given the rise of non-state actors. The rise of terrorism displays this very clearly; groups like al-Qaeda violate the traditional structure of war by acting independently from, and often against, the wishes of the states they live in. In this new structure, it is critical to assess what is at the root of terrorism. Cultural globalization is one such answer. Through an understanding of cultural globalization, an analysis of theories concerning non-state violence, a merging of the theories to discuss terrorism, and a critical look at recent acts of terror, it becomes clear that the threat of cultural globalization is, in the very least, a part of the inspiration for terrorism.

–Framing Cultural Globalization

First, it is critical to understand what exactly cultural globalization is. The globalization of culture is difficult to define, as it encompasses a wide variety of fields that mesh the economic, the political, the religious, and popular culture. In a rough sense, it can be described as the new interrelatedness of cultures that transcends the nation-state; this, however, doesn’t necessarily address how that globalization works (Hopper 182). The development of a global culture is tied to the rise of economic globalization; in economic globalization, companies utilize outside markets to both develop and market their products, creating greater wealth for the company and greater access to goods for the new consumer. Cultural globalization takes this one step further, linking the product to what it represents. For example, an economic globalist would view the sale of a pair of Levi’s in Bangalore as an exportation of a product; the cultural globalist would view the exportation of the “cool” that wearing those jeans brings. In essence, what is being sold is more than just the tangible product, but how that product is perceived. This leads to a feeling of a homogeneous culture; the sight of those Levi’s in not only Bangalore but also Abidjan, Tokyo, Berlin, and Buenos Aires means that the entire world shares the aesthetic that jeans are valued, either as part of or a replacement for traditional forms of dress.

It is important to draw in different parts of what culture itself is in analyzing cultural globalization. A dictionary definition of culture suggests that it involves “the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group” (Merriam Webster). The material traits are clear; what is worn, consumed, and purchased. The customary beliefs are more varied to include religion and secularism, political beliefs, artistic aesthetics of beauty, the notion of consumerism, and other forms. The social forms include rights structures, constitutions, and gender roles. As a national culture takes on forms of the new global culture, it is not merely the products that change. The social forms and customs also change. Furthermore, cultural globalization can be found in other globalizing forces, namely in international relations theories of global governance (Hopper 3). The sphere of culture can be extended to the philosophies that condone actions; by doing so, economic and cultural globalization are correlated, as the cultural side of an economic globalist act is the philosophy that rationalizes it.

In all forms, it seems, there is a growing feeling of a Westernized and specifically Americanized feel to the global culture. Hallmarks of American and European popular culture dot the landscape all over the globe, from a cineplex showing the latest film by Tom Cruise in Prague to a Minneapolis radio station playing music by Icelandic rockers Sigur Ros. Among globalization scholars, there is a widely held thesis concerning the “McDonaldization” of culture; George Ritzer espouses a belief that Americans and the rest of the world have incorporated the products as well as the social norms and structures of the fast-food industry as part of culture (Hopper 90). This is partially credited to the United States’ relative monopoly on the tools of globalization. The United States was among the first countries to have the Internet, a major tool in the promotion of culture, and is home to many of the industries that are exporting cultural product (Hopper 85-92). At the same time, there is a growing sense of a unified structure of human rights; the United Nations has worked tirelessly to create norms of gender rights, the criminality of torture, and religious tolerance. Many of these norms have come from the evolution of the Western tradition and are seen as responses to draconian laws in Eastern countries. In essence, the West has used the United Nations as an avenue to globalize structures of human rights. The flip side to this is proves the Westernizing force that globalization is; in Minneapolis, it is nearly impossible to get Russian food outside of a small area of Russian settlement near Loring Park, yet McDonald’s has 103 outposts in places scattered through the country from Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod to St. Petersberg (McDonald’s), lands where there is not a commensurate American population. The West, seemingly, has avoided taking concrete steps to incorporate other cultures into more than tokenism, hammering in the idea that the global culture is, in fact, a Western one.

Cultural globalization, then, is a vast melange of actions that create a unified look and feel to culture throughout the world. It manifests itself through what people purchase, but also through how they evaluate the world, what social norms are emphasized, and rights structures. This expanse of culture happens through many avenues, namely through commerce’s exportation of cultural values and the political notion of global governance. In the globalized world, it has become increasingly clear that this new global culture shows striking similarities to Western culture, specifically American culture.

–Understanding Terrorism

It is important to understand acts of non-state violence and terrorism. Terrorism is a difficult method of war and violence for the West to understand; it operates outside of the state structure, a conflict seen by the United States in its response to September 11 (Cronin 30). It encompasses many different types of methodology and ideology, but can usually be stated as violence by a non-state or para-state actor intended to promote ideas, often at the peril of innocent civilians. Paul Ehrlich succinctly defines it by calling it “actions carried out by militarily weak sub- or trans-national groups to gain political ends through violence… [in the] means available to the relatively frustrated but relatively powerless” (Ehrlich 184-185).

The discontent voiced through terrorism comes, in part, from a feeling of being left socioeconomically behind. An analysis of data on factors ranging from per capita income to gender rights suggests that nations like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, consistently cited as hotbeds of terrorist activity, trail other Western countries by a wide margin, leaving countries left behind and struggling to catch up. This leads to higher birth rates, increased rates of hunger, and a greater amount of young men (Ehrlich 187-189) — all of which are cited as agents of political instability, and eventually terrorism. The competing thesis with this idea is that as a country becomes better developed and the socioeconomic gap disappears, there is less reason for angst and a dissipation of terrorism (Li and Schaub 231, 250-251). Coupled with the socioeconomic side, there is a notion that societies that have greater amounts of democratic participation and other factors of institutional freedoms experience differing amounts of terrorist activity. Debate ranges in the academic community as to whether the democratic process yields or stunts terrorism, as well as positing if the correlation between terrorism and democracy is in victimhood or in birth (Li 278-280).

In all descriptions of the root motivations of terrorism, an important question remains: how does the discontent turn into violence? Frantz Fanon advances an influential theory in his essay “On Violence,” from the book The Wretched of the Earth. In it, he suggests that revolutionary violence by actors outside of a state structure is the only right and necessary step to achieve goals. He analyzes this through decolonization movements, saying that in such times, “The need for this change exists in a raw, repressed and reckless state in the lives and consciousness in repressed men and women,” continuing to say that the need to break out of that repression forces the colonized into “resorting to any means, including, of course, violence” (Fanon 3). To Fanon, colonization involves creating a structure that demoralizes the colonized into thinking they are inferior to the ruling colonizing class (Fanon 3-5). They are taught that their ways and morals are inferior, and eventually know only oppression and arrest through decades of socialization (Fanon 8-9). This oppression feeds off the economic side of being colonized; the colonizing force, after all, takes power to use the nation’s resources, leaving the poor and peasantry in hunger and want (Fanon 23). The colonized becomes resentful of the colonist, particularly when rights begin to be granted (Fanon 10). They begin to realize that, “The colonized subject is a persecuted man who is forever dreaming of being the persecutor” (Fanon 16), and act on such dreams through instruments of guerrilla warfare, working towards heroic moments like Dien Bien Phu where the colonizing force is shocked backward by an overwhelming wave of revolutionary violence (Fanon 26, 30-31). An extension outside of the state structure makes it clear that Fanon’s analysis ties into terrorism. Terrorists act against what they interpret to be an equally encroaching structure upon their lives; the difference, usually, is that it is not a force that politically governs them. Trans-national terrorism acts against different types of forces that exert control over their lives, be they corporations, governments, or societies as a whole. The same type of motivation is at play in this type of terrorism, namely that the marginalized feel as though these controlling forces are leaving them impoverished in money and human rights; this ties into the argument that the socioeconomic gap leads to terrorism, as well as the debates around democratization. Through these correlations, Fanon’s analysis of violence can be applied to terrorist acts.

Terrorism is an act of violence by non-state or para-state individuals to advance political gains. This violence is prompted by a feeling of marginalization; socioeconomics and structures of rights and democracy are believed to play a role in this marginalization. This marginalization leads to Fanon’s analysis of revolutionary violence, which finds that people who feel repressed see violence as the only way to achieve their goals.

–Linking Terrorism to the New Global Culture

How, then, does the reality of cultural globalization tie into the rise of terrorism? If terrorism is understood as a Fanon-style response to colonization, the link is clear: cultural globalization acts as a colonizing force in the world. Fanon’s notion of the colonizing force subjugating its subjects appears to follow the action of cultural globalization exactly; the top-down feel that the colonizing force creates appears to be the same as the one-way Westernization that cultural globalization presents as an institution of norms and ideology to a culture. Economic globalization utilizes a country’s resources like land and a work force; cultural globalization arrests and enforces it by creating the norm that the philosophy must be followed for the country’s benefit. Cultural globalization also introduces the notion of human rights, including gender rights and the right of expression, into a society; at this point, the culturally globalized understand, as does Fanon’s colonized, that “the colonist’s… look can no longer strike fear into me or nail me to the spot… to hell with him” (Fanon 10). This yields a cycle of decolonization; the modern expression of it is terrorism.

Other aspects of cultural globalization play into the discontent shown through terrorism. Robert Lieber and Ruth Weisberg advance an idea that cultural globalization tears at the identity of the globalized. The integration of parts of American and Western culture into the world at large, they argue, leads to tensions both at the surface and at the core of a society’s sense of self. The basic ideas are straight-forward: how does adding McDonald’s, American music, styles of dress, slang, and other tangible forms of cultural globalization fit into a society without completely alienating it? How jarring should it be, they ask, to hear “rap music echoing through the streets of Barcelona[?]” At a deeper and more important level, however, the questions deal with the difficulty that conservative cultures have with modernity. Cultures in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa, they argue, appear to have more intense hostility to these concerns of identity in a modern and Western world (Lieber 274-276). This hostility of a lost, or at least troubled, identity can act as an oppressing and destabilizing agent in these societies.

Audrey Cronin expands this view to suggest that modern terrorism’s context in globalization includes a great deal of shared ideology against a perceived “Western imperialism” (Cronin 37), particularly in the world of jihadist movements. She posits that this alienation has merged with powerful movements involving religion to draw in followers, calling it “a dangerous mix of forces that resonate deeply in the human psyche” (Cronin 38). Terrorism in the modern era, or “the fourth wave,” invoking David Rapaport, involves far deeper links to political and religious ideology than ever before (Cronin 38-41). She also links the rise of these movements to other parts of the globalization movement, saying that as terrorism grew in the 1970s and 1980s, it became increasingly reliant on technology to grow from being localized to international (Cronin 36). These tie into the aspects of cultural globalization in a major way. Cultural globalization is viewed as a secularizing force; the “Western imperialism” she cites is manifest in this type of action. Terrorist movements play into the discontent this brings within a society, as a reading of Osama bin Laden’s fatwa of 1998 that will come in the next section will clearly show. Furthermore, the use of technology by terrorist movements notes that cultural globalization is not only a reason for violence, but an agent of it. As terrorists co-opt cultural globalization’s methodology, they in turn act as a globalizing force to their own members.

Through applying the constructs of cultural globalization to the framework of terrorism suggested by Fanon, it becomes clear that terrorism and cultural globalization are intrinsically linked. Lieber and Weinberg extend the idea of cultural globalization’s destabilizing affects by suggesting that cultural globalization tears at the identity of the nation-state, drawing its citizens to violence. Audrey Cronin further extends cultural globalization’s impact, linking terrorism’s use of religion as a form of inspiration as well as its use of globalization’s agents of interconnectivity.

–Case Studies in Globalized Terror

Now that terrorism can be understood in the context of cultural globalization, it is imperative to test theories against acts of terror throughout the world. By critically analyzing acts by al-Qaeda as well as domestic terrorism in the United States, one can find that the same themes of a uniform global culture are at play.

The acts of September 11, 2001, vaulted terrorism into the consciousness of the American people. 3,000 innocent civilians died in the attacks, which disrupted not only the U.S. economy but also the way of life Americans shared. September 11 falls into the sphere of culturally globalized terrorism because it is a strike back against what al-Qaeda viewed as an encroaching United States and Western presence on the Islamic world. Osama bin Laden cites this clearly in his 1998 fatwa, decrying the United States “occupying the lands of Islam in its holiest places… dictating its rulers, humiliating its people.” He declares that the United States’s interest in the Middle East is religious as much as it is economic, then notes that “the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state,” Israel (bin Laden). On its face, these comments simply seem to be a call to remove U.S. forces from Mecca; analyzing the discontent bin Laden expresses shows that it is more complicated. bin Laden and al-Qaeda view a U.S. occupation of the Middle East as a way to level Muslim culture into a secularized world; he claims that the U.S.’s moves are a “clear declaration against God.” bin Laden sees the fight of al-Qaeda as a battle against Western imperialism, and while there is a clear economic interest, he makes it known that he views the U.S. as working to destroy the religious culture that he holds dear by inserting secularism into the Muslim world. This, to bin Laden, suggests that the globalized culture that the United States and its allies promote must be stopped by any means necessary. September 11 was one such attack.

September 11 was not the first, nor the last, response to a globalized culture that al-Qaeda leveled on the United States or its Western allies. al-Qaeda utilized the discontent of globalization in Africa to launch the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1999 (Devji), and has followed it up recently with a bombing on Pakistan’s Danish embassy. In response to a 2006 Danish editorial cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a supporter of terrorism, al-Qaeda directed its followers “to attack ‘in revenge against the state of infidelity called Denmark’,” which led to a suicide blast on the exterior of the Danish embassy in Islamabad, killing six (al-Jazeera). The attack was directed in response to multiple facets of cultural globalization. First, the Danish newspaper story was picked up in part because of the new global culture’s desire for an interconnected media. There is a desire for multiple view points, which leads to media consumers finding news sources from all corners of the globe; until now, that desire was minute and otherwise difficult to achieve. An interconnectivity brought on by the Internet brought the story out of Scandinavia to the Middle East. Second, the cartoon itself represented a level of religious insensitivity found in the Western culture. Muslims were offended that the cartoon depicted Allah’s messenger as a terrorist, to be sure, but they were also offended by the violation of the Hadith that any depiction of Muhammad causes. This insensitivity comes from the notion that, despite rhetorical claims of pluralism, the West has limited knowledge of Muslim law and culture; in the globalized culture that trumpets a Christian-influenced secularism, in the eyes of al-Qaeda, such a slight is part of an encroaching Western hegemony. Thirdly, the notion that the cartoon falls under free expression suggests that Western artists, and by extension the West, has the power to offend the Muslim world without fear of recourse. A free press is less than guaranteed in many Middle Eastern countries, with a recent report by Reporters Sans Frontières placing six nations, including Pakistan, under the top 150 most free press institutions in the world (RSF). The notion that the Danish cartoonist should not be punished is a remarkable institution of norms on the freedom of the press on the Muslim world — another example of Westernization. All of these lead to an escalation of hatred against Western cultural imperialism, and in acts like the Danish embassy bombing, the backlash is political violence.

It is unwise, though, to suggest that terrorism is exclusively like the jihadist violence of al-Qaeda, where violence is a response to a growing threat against American and Western imperialism on Muslim culture. Within the United States, even, there have been acts of domestic terrorism that act to critique the cultural globalization occurring at home and abroad. The rioting that occurred during the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle in 1999 is one such example. Over the course of the WTO meetings, peaceful protesting turned to violence with the introduction of anarchist elements that overwhelmed the police force. These riots destroyed shop fronts in posh areas of the city, including the well-known attack on a Starbucks (Reynolds). It is not a stretch to call their actions an act of terrorism; it was applied as a form of statement violence against a civilian target.

The rioting in Seattle can be explained through the lens of economic globalization; the World Trade Organization, after all, seeks to create a unified trading field for countries and, by extension, companies that seek to exploit those new openings. However, taking that narrow approach and not extending it to the cultural side of globalization is a critical misstep. In John Dobson’s analysis of the riots, he pegs the protesters as coming from a wide variety of ideological backgrounds, with religious zealotry fighting side by side with environmentalists and trade unionists. The common thread was a distrust of free-trade economics, specifically the multi-national corporation. While these thoughts play into the economic side of globalization, they play into the cultural aspect as well. Dobson views these insecurities with the multi-national corporation as playing into our norms against money providing the good life. The sacrifice required on the part of the globalized is immense; how can the West impose it knowing that the benefits are lacking? Furthermore, there’s a distrust of the motives of the corporation; will it violate the resources, either human or land, in its quest for profit (Dobson 404)?

The Seattle rioters, in this case, acted almost as preemptive terrorists against the threat of cultural globalization. The protesters and rioters saw the actions of the WTO as a threat to cultural determinacy, acting to level the playing field while the players stayed on it. Actions by the WTO, the protesters feared, would lead to the oppression of workers around the globe through a subjugation into a corporatist agenda (Reynolds) against their will. Corporatism acts both economically and culturally to globalize the world; economically, it brings corporations and businesses into heretofore untouched lands, while it also introduces capitalist ideology and increased materialism into a culture. The Seattle riots, then, can be considered culturally globalized terror.

In each of the aforementioned case studies, cultural globalization plays a key element in the motive and ideology of terrorist acts. al-Qaeda’s war against the United States is a response to what it views as an Americanization of the Muslim world’s religious culture. Its actions against the Danish embassy in Islamabad reflect this, as well as elements of angst against the enforcement of different norms on press freedom. The rioting in Seattle was a response by the West against the notion of introducing the culture of capitalism into the rest of the world as part of trade policy.

–Conclusions

Cultural globalization, a force that acts to create a unified global culture through avenues like consumerism, norms on human rights, governmental structures, and a changing role of religion, is active in the world. While that may lead to positive events, it also creates a backlash against the West as a whole that has recently manifest itself through acts of terrorism. An understanding of actions both by al-Qaeda against the West and by leftists against the WTO shows that cultural globalization has its hand not only in the theoretical constructs, but also in the real world. Cultural globalization, then, does have a major negative drawback. The exportation and sharing of culture can lead to greater peace and a lessened reason to go to international conflict, but the cost is a risk of alienation that fuels individual actors to become violent and act out in terroristic methods.

Works Cited

“‘Al Qaeda’ claims embassy blast.” Al-Jazeera English. 5 June 2008. Web. 15 Dec. 2009. <http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2008/06/200861503034320788.html>.

Bin Laden, Osama. “Osama Bin Laden Fatwa – 1998.” MidEastWeb. Web. 15 Dec. 2009. <http://www.mideastweb.org/osamabinladen2.htm>.

Cronin, Audrey. “Behind the Curve: Globalization and International Terrorism.” International Security vol. 27.3 (Winter 2002-2003) pp 30-58. Print.

“Culture.” Merriam-Webster Online. Web. 15 Dec. 2009. <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/CULTURE>.

Devji, Faisal. Landscapes of the Jihad. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Print.

Dobson, John. “The Battle in Seattle: Reconciling Two Views of Corporate Culture.” Business Ethics Quarterly Vol 11.3 (July 2001) pp. 403-413. Print.

Ehrlich, Paul, and Jianguo Liu. “Some Roots of Terrorism.” Population and Environment. Vol 24.2 (November 2002) pp 180-192. Print.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Date unprinted. Online. <moodle.umn.edu>

Hopper, Paul. Understanding Cultural Globalization. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Print.

Li, Quan. “Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Trans-national Terrorist Incidents?” The Journal of Conflict Resolution. Vol 49.2 (April 2005) pp. 278-297. Print.

Li, Quan, and Drew Schaub. “Economic Globalization and Trans-national Terrorism: A Pooled Time-Lapse Analysis.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution. Vol. 48.2 (April 2004) pp. 230-258. Print.

Lieber, Robert, and Ruth Weisberg. “Globalization, Culture, and Identities in Crisis.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. Vol 16.2 (April 2002) pp. 273-296. Print.

“Press Freedom Index 2009.” Reporters Sans Frontières. Web. 15 Dec. 2009. <http://www.rsf.org/en-classement1003-2009.html>.

Reynolds, Paul. “Eyewitness: The Battle of Seattle.” BBC News. 2 Dec. 1999. Web. 15 Dec. 2009. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/547581.stm>.

“Russia.” McDonald’s USA. Web. 15 Dec. 2009. <http://www.mcdonalds.com/countries/russia.html>.

Journals on 30 Rock

1. On Finally Actually Watching 30 Rock

I will readily admit that, until now, 30 Rock had been the show that I told people I watched to appear smart and cool. Thursday nights had traditionally been the night that I either worked or had activities in high school; in my first year of college, my part time second job only needed me Thursdays and Saturdays. Moreover, I hadn’t bothered to venture onto the Internet to find it, likely because until halfway through the show’s third season I only had dial-up at home. In short, 30 Rock was the show that I feigned ignorance on for the early parts of its run

But it is difficult to say that you don’t expend the effort to watch a show that wins multiple Emmys in a genre you enjoy, particularly when said show includes the only two parts that made Saturday Night Live watchable in the 2000s in Tina Fey and Tracy Jordan. And then there’s Alec Baldwin, who by all accounts was making up for every misdeed he had ever made on film (considering that his only passably acted role was a late-career work in The Departed, he had ground to make up) as the egomaniacally aloof Jack Donaghy. Add in an ensemble cast including the criminally underrated Judah Friedlander and you have a show that would draw interested viewers, including me.

It’s refreshing and nice, then, that I finally have an excuse to watch the show instead of lying about it to my friends and family. I can avoid the hipster bullshitting (see Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit for a succinct and philosophical discourse on this) that occurs with many shows as critically praised and popularly unwatched as 30 Rock and understand what all of my comedy writer friends have been raving about for the past few years. Besides, it gives me an excuse to take time out of my schedule to write about television – as homework!

Comparing 30 Rock to its Thematic Victim Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

Much debate revolves around whether 30 Rock was the reason that Aaron Sorkin’s show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip ended in its sad demise. That analysis makes sense; both shows revolve around an extremely similar premise, the idiosyncrasies of head writers on a major sketch comedy show and their interactions with remarkably odd actors and an overbearing studio head. Both shows also suffered from low ratings compared to high expectations — Tina Fey, after all, left Saturday Night Live for this, while Sorkin’s run of TV hegemony with The West Wing coupled with not only Bradley Whitford but Matthew Perry rebounding from Friends by doing a secretly self-critical role as “Matthew Perry at the helm of a writer’s room” suggested great things. One show could survive the grudge match, no matter what NBC would claim. So why was it 30 Rock?

As a big fan of Studio 60, I will readily admit that 30 Rock was the better show. 30 Rock met up to its handicap of being a comedy by providing an even sharper satire of the sketch comedy genre than Sorkin could craft out of his melodrama. 30 Rock achieved its goal of homage and criticism by actually being that show; the meta humor is what drove the interest. On Studio 60, there is a feeling of the inartificial, as if Sorkin genuinely doesn’t know how to write a comedy show. Such a feeling makes the fiction seem more unbelievable. Then there is the fact that, as with many Sorkin shows, he focused on the personal instead of the situational. The problem was that unlike the ones he crafted on The West Wing that drew in the situational drama of politics (example: the President has MS, Toby leaks a military space program to save his brother) Sorkin’s side stories scarcely counted as drama, let alone drama that led the viewer to care. A romance between Matt and Harriet seemed pedantic compared to the sexual tension between Josh and Donna. The characters developed without any of the smolder that The West Wing had through its first few seasons; it was immediate, and the show suffered.

There is also the truth of the matter: both shows had promise in their first season that wasn’t commensurate with the ratings. Studio 60 just cost a lot more to produce. It wasn’t a good investment for NBC. Nothing personal, nothing based on artistic merit; just business.

Watching 30 Rock On Netflix

Watching a television show became considerably easier with the dawn of both the DVD and the Internet. A busy viewer needn’t be inhibited by their schedule to catch up on the latest shows, get a refresher right before a new season, or get a first viewing of a show that otherwise won’t hit syndication for another three or so years. But does this alter the natural order of TV viewership?

I posit this because for the past few weeks, I’ve been catching up on the episodes of 30 Rock I never actually watched from seasons past by going on Netflix.com and streaming seasons one and two. This style of TV watching seems completely foreign to me as someone raised on the week gaps between my favorite shows; the time before a new season always felt jarring to me, namely because the last season’s cliffhanger isn’t as fresh in the mind after a summer’s hiatus. With Netflix and other methods of streaming, I’m able to watch the entire first season of 30 Rock in one long and wasted day, then watch the second season right afterward. No cliffhanger (though admittedly, since there were questions about whether or not the show would be renewed and there are only loose story arcs anyway, 30 Rock isn’t much of a concern) happens in a show that you can watch in a marathon sitting. It makes it considerably easier on the viewer.

But is this right considering that television as a medium is produced with the constraint of a season (and episode) change in mind? The gap between episodes is supposed to build excitement and buzz for the next week. Writers understand this and, in more episodic shows, build plot twists and resolutions around the gaps. Watching on DVD nullifies this, turning the experience almost into watching a twelve-hour movie if done correctly. If watching a show en version originale is the ideal, the DVD and the Internet is providing the hammer to syndication’s death nail. Then again, is this necessarily a bad thing? Shouldn’t the viewer have the power to consume the art in the way he or she chooses? Artistic intent can only go so far to dictate how art is viewed, and in the case of watching a television show, I sincerely doubt that how many episodes are watched at once even crosses the mind when a joke is written. In that case, let me watch six discs on a Sunday afternoon.

“The Language of 30 Rock“: Is 30 Rock Truly That Culturally Relevant?

Mark Peters’ blog post “The Language of 30 Rock” brings up an interesting point: since 2006, there hasn’t been a comedy that has been “more quotable” than 30 Rock, inserting words like “blurgh,” “lizzing,” and “mind grapes” into the American lexicon. It’s questionable, though, as to whether or not Peters’ analysis is correct, particularly since it relies on a fair level of hyperbole.

Peters’ thesis, after all, suggests that the quotability of a show like The Office or The Daily Show is immediately lessened. “That’s what she said!” is used far more commonly than the lines and catchphrases on 30 Rock. His early insistence on the quotability of Tracy’s non-sequiturs, too, rings difficult to agree with. Anecdotally, my co-worker, who never found a non-sequitur he didn’t use past levels of nausea, has never quoted 30 Rock. He watches the show on occasion, but hasn’t “loved something so much I want to take it behind a middle school and get it pregnant,” something that he would certainly quote. Instead, most of his random, off-the-cuff remarks come from Family Guy or Robot Chicken. Tracy is quotable, but knowledge of his odd remarks are not

What appears most questionable, though, is his method of research. Peters relies on three random tweets from Twitter, claiming it is the home of “unselfconscious language use,” to give evidence to each of his three words. Each quote has no real context outside of the fact that each were clearly spoken by a 30 Rock fan. Using this shows that some people use the word, but not to the widespread way that he claims. Fans of the show would understand what “lizzing” means, or how to peel one’s “mind grapes,” but to the outsider such a phrase would sound like a drunken lisp. His reference to Trekkies may be more perfect than he admits to; these are simply within the fan community, with the outsiders being confused and derisive.

Peters has presented an interesting idea, that 30 Rock‘s cleverness and relative popularity have led to words and catchphrases emanating from it and permeating the American lexicon. But he goes too far in his analysis to suggest that they are permanent and widespread additions to speech on the cultural scale of “d’oh,” “meh,” and “yada yada yada.” Instead, they are niche parts of the linguistic tradition.

“Season 4″ and Avoiding Bakhtin: The Humor of the Elite

30 Rock‘s season premiere brings up an interesting parallel to the carnivalesque ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, though not necessarily one that proves it. The idea of the episode is that the comedy of TGS is failing to resonate with the common man in “real America,” a concept that Jack Donaghy thinks is somewhere in the midwest or south. The result: Jenna turns into a hypersexualized country star, Tracy goes off to find his roots, and Liz and Pete are tasked with finding a new cast member with mass appeal to the part of America that turns the show off.

Some of the jokes in the episode play with the notion of the carnivalesque that Bakhtin exposes and Virginia Wexman applies to The Honeymooners; Tracy’s soul searching in the ghetto and with the janitor are filled with slapstick and bodily humor. However, Bakhtin comes up short in adequately describing the real humor that comes out in the episode: the vast dichotomy between the elite played up through both the cast’s wealth and Liz and Pete as the intelligentsia, and the unwashed masses watching the show. Tracy’s humble South Bronx roots seem real, but it’s not his references to defecation that translate to laughter. The audacity of his wealth, displayed by his talks about a skylight over his bed leaking on his wife, are what are so funny. Jenna’s humor partially comes from how much skin she is revealing, but most of it comes from the juxtaposition of her country image on a bourgeois sport like tennis, as is shown in the end of the show. The Kenneth subplot is based on how ridiculous Jack’s bonus check is; the topical humor of that, given the discussion of bonuses in the federal bailout, is one of the funnier acts the show has done.

In that case, a Bakhtinian analysis of the episode, which I did in my Thinkpiece, seems wholly inadequate. Bakhtin’s idea of the genesis of humor doesn’t play into the outlandish characters and situations on 30 Rock (save for Frank, played by Judah Friedlander). Instead, the humor is based on the cultural structure of a sketch comedy show; the wealth, the power, the smarts. Clearly then, the correct theorist to keep in mind when analyzing 30 Rock is Marx.

Post-modernity and 30 Rock

It is difficult to call sitcoms post-modern; any genre based on a structure that has little room for change cannot have such an honorific. 30 Rock exemplifies this by a number of ways, then shows the opposite by displaying a few traits from post-modernity.

First, 30 Rock follows the sitcom genre’s clear conventions of existing only at a home or a workplace. Sitcoms do not leave these environments, partially for fear of alienating viewers but also for the fact that these situations do create a fair amount of comedy. If 30 Rock were to take on a more post-modern tilt, the writers room would likely be replaced with a park on a Saturday and not involve recurring characters.

Second, 30 Rock follows conventional episodic forms of storytelling. In “Stone Mountain,” the issue of needing to hire a new cast member (and the conflict resulting from it) is exposed in the first act, the adventure to see an aspiring comic is shown in the second, and the resolution of the conflict (Liz was right; they need someone who can act) appears in the third act. Post-modernity would find this flipped; the show would start with the adventure, then the resolution would occur, thereby revealing the conflict in the first place.

Where 30 Rock does succeed in the post-modern sphere is in its self-referentiality. 30 Rock thrives partially on the meta humor of Tina Fey’s career on Saturday Night Live; part of it comes from understanding, the other from the clear homage that her character and stability is to Lorne Michaels. Furthermore, jokes on the show refer back to obscure moments from seasons past; an example of this is in “The Problem Solvers,” season four’s fifth episode. In it, Padma Lakshmi is slated to take Liz’s spot on a talk show pilot, leading Liz to confess her obsession with Top Chef that had played a key role in a different episode — “Cougars,” from season two. Additionally, the heroism of the protagonist is often mocked on the show. While Liz often is proven to be the moral and right character, she also is proven to be dim-witted in the face of her writers and to Jack. “Audition Day” proves this, as her choice for a TGS actor is secretly egomaniacal; Jack picks a street performer who plays a robot anyway.

“Stone Mountain” and the Stereotypes of “Americans”

30 Rock‘s season four continued on October 29 with “Stone Mountain,” Jack Donaghy’s search for middle American comic genius. The episode reveals some stereotypes about American cultures varied and vast; all are funny, but some ring hollow. The chief stereotype in the show is that of the hick Southerner. 30 Rock deals in this stereotype in every episode with Kenneth the Page, but in “Stone Mountain” the side stereotype is turned into high art (or, well, low art) as Liz and Jack immerse themselves in Georgia culture to find a new cast member for TGS. They find Jeff Dunham and his dummy Bubba J, cast as “Rick Wayne and Pumpkin,” doing a remarkably unclean bit about being Southern and the kinkiness of ventriloquism. In what might be Dunham’s first and last humorous role, he lambastes the pair for coming into their town and seeking out cheap Americana, attacking the generalization that Jack had about the “simple folk” that GE was looking to market to. This generalization is then beaten to a pulp; namely, Jack smashing Pumpkin. Stereotypes about American celebrity are also alluded to through Tracy’s freakout of the night. Playing on the celebrity rule of threes in death shown by the recent deaths of Michael Jackson, Billy Mays and Ed McMahon, Tracy’s egomania turns into a deadly fear of, well, death as two minor celebrities die. Tracy’s expectation that he’ll be next leads him to attempt to frighten Betty White to death, then smash Jimmy Fallon’s head open in a hallway. It ties into the American stereotype of the vain celebrity worrying only for their ego; the stereotype is reassured as Pumpkin dies, returning Tracy to his normal state of blissful worry about himself. Then there is the stereotype about homosexual Halloween parties. As Jenna flips over the prospect of a new cast mate, she taunts the writers with an invite to her gay friends’ Halloween bash on the soundstage that reportedly would feature Cerie and other straight women getting lewd and lascivious with each other and random men. It’s an odd stereotype, sure, but it’s one that the gay community oddly deals with.

What do all of these have in common? They satirize but in turn reinforce negative stereotypes about their victims. 30 Rock does it cleverly, but it still counts as a cheaper shot than necessary.

“The Problem Solvers”: Introducing the Robot

TGS gained a cast member in “The Problem Solvers,” adding the mildly awkward and extremely Canadian Jack “Danny” Baker onto the show and bringing the mildly awkward and extremely talented Cheyenne Jackson onto television. Adding a new cast member is really what the show needed to freshen up the script, but it also messes with the natural order of things in the sitcom.

For the show’s sake, Danny is a breath of fresh air. Even the creativity of Tina Fey can only go so far in crafting topical and workable scripts off of shtick that, while still funny, becomes increasingly tired after a few seasons. Subplots between characters seem outdated after a while. Enter the new character, Danny. Danny seems remarkably unremarkable upon first glance; he’s overly polite to Kenneth, seems aloof to the rules of acting, but is otherwise very vanilla. Then it comes out that he is Canadian. The possibilities are endless when introducing a stereotype like the Canadian into an American show; the accent is fair game, as are jokes about socialized health care, Canadian Football (which thankfully got a shoutout), and the impending Olympics on NBC; the latter will certainly get play given the show’s love for shameless comedic network promotion (Season 2′s “SeinfeldVision”).

Yet this is also one instance where the wall in the sitcom is broken. Sitcoms are well known for having an unbreakable continuum that has the nuclear family/work environment that never breaks open after the end of an episode; a guest star can pop in to provide that show’s conflict, but he or she disappears to fix the status quo. This is why adding a cast member to a show is a risk; on a genre-specific show, it is difficult to mess with the formula without ruffling some feathers. 30 Rock actually has addressed this problem over the past few episodes with Jenna’s fear of being replaced on the show. Her pathological fear of someone else entering her sphere reflects a consciousness of the sitcom’s realities.

Adding Danny, then, is a calculated risk. It gives the show a thematic shot in the arm that, after watching these last few episodes, it may need badly. If it backfires, it is because it represents a shift in the sitcom’s formula.

“Sun Tea”: Frank as the Carnivalesque

Remember what I said about 30 Rock needing a Marxist instead of a Bakhtinian reading? I wrote that before considering “Sun Tea,” the show’s episode lampooning Green Week at NBC. I am a changed man, mainly because I have found new watering techniques I never dreamed of seeing.

“Sun Tea” refers to Frank, a writer on the TGS staff played by Judah Friedlander, and his unique fertilizer for the show’s window basket gardens. Apparently, during work, Frank will urinate into one of many Mason jars and let it sit for a few days; the exchange for this is the use of a Yale sweatshirt to guard the scent of farting by he and Toofer. It’s unsanitary and vile, which leads Liz to call for this practice to stop; however, in the spirit of Green Week at NBC, Kenneth convinces her to allow him to continue the behavior by making it a choice between the jars staying or her mini-fridge going.

This clearly is a show of a Bakhtinian carnivalesque character. There’s the downright boorishness of the behavior; it involves Frank urinating in a jar. There’s the expression of bodily functions, the shameful and the profane. There’s also the fact that not only is Frank a comedy writer, but is fashioned as the class clown of the crew; Bakhtin ascribes carnivalesque acting to the clown of medieval times in his analysis of comedy. Furthermore, the fact that it comes from Frank, known throughout the office for his poor hygiene, makes it even more clearly carnivalesque.

Even more interesting is that “Sun Tea” is used as a way to mock NBC Universal’s company wide “Green Week” initiative. 30 Rock used a Bakhtinian model for lowbrow comedy in a way that doesn’t require the show to change its aesthetic or formula; knowledge of Judah Friedlander and his character makes it make complete sense to have something so disgusting be the root of a joke. However, Bakhtin doesn’t necessarily play into the show so often, in the very least not as clearly. It was a genius play for the writing staff to sketch comedy theory into the show without making it so obvious.

One complaint though: since Frank is dumping those jars out his window, can the workers in the floors below call for an OSHA violation? That’s clearly a health hazard.

“Dealbreakers Talk Show #0001:” Television in an HD World

A sight gag in 30 Rock’s episode “Dealbreakers Talk Show #0001” led me to ponder the future of how television will look in new technologies. Here’s the setup: Liz Lemon is filming a pilot for her upcoming talk show DealBreakers. During filming, Jack observes the camera work to dictate whether to film the show in standard or high definition. Jack looks over to Liz on the standard view; she looks normal, as she always does on the show. The high definition makes her look like a character from a Brothers Grimm fable. Jack’s response: “Let’s do this in standard.”

The joke plays off a difficulty in TV production: how do producers make their stars look normal in a new technology that borders on hyperreality with the HD view? This was a huge concern in the early days of the technology – makeup artists, who became used to stage makeup used on standard, noticed that their stars looked much older, more sickly, and far more unattractive when the camera switched to HD. With more detail, a spray tan looks the correct orange color in HD instead of a form of normal human tone in standard; wrinkles look clearly more pronounced. Katie Couric was a major offender in this when the CBS Evening News changed to HD, and while she has softened the harshness a bit, she still looks years older than she had in her days on NBC’s Today, especially compared to Meredith Vieira, her replacement.

HD offers makeup artists a difficult challenge. Now that the televisual medium is bordering on hyperreality, at least in the level of detail visible through 1080i, how do you adapt to make someone equally greater than real? Makeup, after all, is used to present a greater than real look to the actor, tricking the viewer into not noticing lighting and other stage effects. This difficulty is accentuated by the fact that many viewers still consume television with standard definition; the extra effort is wasted on these folks. Furthermore, can HD serve as a platform for artistic advancement in makeup design? Can it be a new way to show the human face, to use different tones and shadowing to better use the literal paint for a director’s canvas? I doubt it; such experimental thoughts get squashed when art students need to pay their rent after college. Still, it’s a thought.

“Secret Santa” and the Use of the Guest Star

30 Rock is well renowned for its use of guest stars to provide that “outside conflict” in the closed sphere of the work environment; its guests have earned 13 Emmy nominations, with four wins in the three seasons it has been eligible. “Secret Santa” continued this trope with the introduction of Julianne Moore as Jack Donaghy’s high school flame Nancy Donovan. Nancy spends the episode in a coquettish chase after Jack’s affections before leaving for Boston with her son, leaving the door open for a recurring role. This would make sense; the episode developed Jack’s character to show that he is, in fact, capable of love and related human emotions, and Julianne Moore pulled off a fake Boston accent to perfection.

The guest star is an easy way to provide the exterior conflict when the show cannot be self- contained. They fit within the genre’s status quo; the character enters, the character screws with the natural order of things for 20 minutes, the character leaves the status quo unchanged. They provide some avenue for character development, revealing parts of the main characters that wouldn’t plausibly happen within the dynamics that the regulars have. They also make for different jokes and material than would otherwise happen in the run of an episode.

Where 30 Rock deserves renown is that all of these guest roles fit into the show’s aesthetic. 30 Rock is uniquely set up to have its guest stars as parts of the NBC Universal world overhanging the narrative; “SeinfeldVision,” the second season premiere, exemplifies this. But instead of opting for the obvious plug and run, 30 Rock uses these characters to create conflict for individual storylines and treats their brief appearances as if an entire story needs to be developed, milked for all of its humor, then closed within the timeframe. In other sitcoms, a guest star is brought on simply for something new; 30 Rock uses it as a narrative device with the same sort of care that is put into each main character. It doesn’t hurt that they pick quality actors capable of making these interactions seem more real than a plot device.

Evaluating the EU’s Role in Afghanistan

Two major facts stand out in a review of the war on terror. The first is clear: it is a transatlantic issue. The United States has had its defining moments; the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center complex was followed by 1999′s African embassy bombs in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, followed by the attacks on September 11, 2001. At the same time, Europe has had internal attacks over the same timeframe, continuing through the 2000s to include attacks in London, Glasgow, and Madrid, as well as outside its borders in Bali and Islamabad. All sides of the transatlantic bargain feel an existential threat from the specter of terrorism. The second fact is equally clear: Afghanistan presents the clearest battleground for the war on terror. The intelligence consistently paints the leadership of al-Qaeda as hiding in the border areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a stronghold that they have held since the days of the Taliban’s rule. To destroy the infrastructure of terrorism as the West knows it, it is critical to keep Afghanistan out of the hands of radicals.

The conflict in Afghanistan is at a critical moment. The Taliban has made increasing gains in rural areas, allowing al-Qaeda to regain strength. Terror has spread into Pakistan. The opium trade has flourished, the government has fallen to corruption, the economy hasn’t been able to overcome its state’s instability. The United States has sent an additional 18,000 troops to the country in the past year and, on December 1st, President Barack Obama announced plans to surge 30,000 troops before a phased withdrawal beginning in 2011 (Obama). At this point, it is imperative to review the actions of all actors in the conflict; the European Union is one such actor.

As an institution, the EU has played a large role in the war in Afghanistan. A review of the Union’s military policy, economic and humanitarian work1, and how their role has been impacted by changes in the dynamic of the conflict leads to the central focus of this paper: Has the European Union been an effective partner in the conflict in Afghanistan?

EU Policy in Afghanistan: An Exercise in Soft Power

The conflict’s military side has been largely based around the actions of the United States and its partners in NATO. Military operations commenced in September and October of 2001 as the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom displaced Taliban rule. 2003 saw command shift over to NATO leadership through the International Security Assistance Force, commonly referred to as ISAF. ISAF forces are a mix of forces from NATO’s member nations, the lion’s share of which come from the United States; leadership of ISAF rotates every six months between upper-level generals from member nations with most to all planning conducted by U.S. generals such as David Petraeus, David McKiernan, and current leader Stanley McChrystal. The role of ISAF forces has evolved rapidly from its inception, leading to the 2006 shift to have the force be in charge of operations throughout the country under a UN Security Council mandate. After this 2006 shift, ISAF troops have conducted combat operations, assisted in voter registration work (“Chronology”), and have trained Afghan soldiers for the eventual handover of control to the Army; this last mission has already been somewhat successful, as the Afghan Army runs security operations in Kabul province (“Facts and Figures”).

It stands to note that in that description, there is no mention of the European Union. The EU has had a non-existent military role in Afghanistan. ISAF leaders give instructional briefings to ESDP and related agencies within the EU structure; an example was the recent presentation by ISAF Deputy Commander Jim Dutton to OSCE on “ISAF’s Mission and its Implications on OSCE participating States” in October 2009 (“EU Statement in the OSCE”). This inaction is not a result of a force being unavailable. In January of 2007, the EU and ESDP announced the ability to launch up to two rapid response battlegroups of up to 1,500 forces to any location within 6,000 kilometers of Brussels. Such a force has not been used in Afghanistan, with the EU denoting its role as being a quick action force to provide immediate relief to areas of conflict (“EU Battlegroups”). This is not to suggest that the EU hasn’t been supportive of its member nations that participate in ISAF forces. The OSCE commentary thanking ISAF for the presentation, as well as earlier statements, points out EU member nations’ commitment of 29,000 troops to ISAF’s Afghanistan forces (“EU Statement in the OSCE”). Furthermore, the EU’s statement upon Barack Obama’s announcement of the planned surge “welcomed” the U.S.’s renewed and extended commitment to ISAF, declaring that it will work with its partners, i.e. member states, to continue to work for peace and security in the country (“Declaration by the Presidency”). In other words, the EU is supportive of the presence of an outside military force in Afghanistan; it just has not been their own.

While the EU has shied away from using hard power in Afghanistan, it has been a leading force in providing economic aid and other methods of soft power throughout the conflict. The EU has pledged over 1.4 billion euro in economic aid since the fall of the Taliban in 2002 by addressing needs from the Afghan government’s National Development Strategy, or ANDS. It has designated three major areas of focus for its efforts: governance, rural development, and health. Its efforts on governance have largely been to create and strengthen the new Afghan government’s institutions. It has directed funds through these efforts to build and sustain schools, create local governmental sub-structures, and create stronger customs stations at its borders; all of these efforts, the EU believes, strengthen the stability and legitimacy of the government. The EU’s rural development focus has been used to fund Afghanistan’s National Solidarity Program, or NSP, and its efforts to build infrastructure in outlying areas with local labor and support. These efforts include the rebuilding of the Torkham road, the main artery between Kabul and the border with Pakistan; after a 60 million euro project, the travel time between the border has dropped by nearly 70%, facilitating commerce throughout the country and empowering rural agriculture. Public health has been addressed primarily through the EU’s capacity development of the country’s health ministry; these efforts have been specifically focused on the institutional side of medicine, like building hospitals and getting the training mechanisms in place for future doctors. The EU has also has made social protection and mine reduction secondary focuses. 24 million euro has gone toward supporting human rights and social security in Afghanistan through the promotion of women’s rights and an effort against human trafficking; meanwhile, the EU has spent upwards of 67 million euro on clearing one-quarter of the 960 square kilometers believed to hold land mines from the conflict with the Soviet Union between 1980 and 1989 (EUROPA).

A major part of the EU’s economic aid packaging is the use of either extra- or non-governmental organizations to achieve goals. The EU has been a heavy contributor to the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund, or ARTF, a fund established in 2002 by the World Bank to oversee both debt repayment and the implementation of infrastructure projects. ARTF funds have gone toward rebuilding roads and power grids, as well as providing microfinancing for enterprising business owners (“Country Overview 2009″). The fund works through ANDS to act as the international community’s steering mechanism for the Afghan government; it has worked, as ARTF funds made up around 27 percent of the Afghan budget for core development and over half of the non-security related development expenditures during SY 13872 (ARTF 4-6). The EU has used ARTF to fund its governmental aid packaging, directing funds toward NSP to fund locally-based development projects. Additionally, the 230 million euro spent since 2002 has gone toward paying recurrent costs for the Afghan government, namely teacher salaries (EUROPA). The EU has also contributed 180 million euro to the UN’s Law and Order Trust Fund, a fund that pays the salaries of a civilian police force; the EU suggests that this has employed over 60,000 Afghan citizens. Furthermore, the EU’s public health effort has been partially based on building rural clinics with NGOs like Doctors Without Borders. These efforts, the EU says, have brought basic health care to over one-third of Afghanistan’s population (EUROPA). This comes somewhat in conflict with the EU’s rhetoric, which emphasizes the need to “utilise Government structures wherever this is feasible” to implement policies (“Country Strategy Paper 2007-2013″ 19).

The overarching theme is that the EU’s focus in Afghanistan policy has been one of soft power. It has avoided entirely the use of a military force, leaving that role to the United States and NATO, though it has endorsed their policies. Instead, it has used a vast portfolio of economic aid to achieve its goals of democratization and the reduction of poverty.

The Changing Face of the War and EU Policy

The dynamics of the conflict have evolved since 2002 for a myriad of reasons. Conditions on the ground have ebbed and flowed between strength and deterioration of the government’s legitimacy. The Taliban has gained strength, chipping away at security in rural areas. The drug trade has increased during the conflict, creating both concerns in the funding of terrorism as well as the spread of opium through a porous border (“Country Strategy Paper 2007-2013″ 7-9). The ISAF force has changed greatly as upper level commanders from the United States, as well as troops, have been shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq (“Chronology”3); this has led to a drain of talent and focus on the part of the United States that has helped to destabilize the already tenuous security situation. On a positive note, Afghanistan’s provisional government has turned into a democratically elected one; the Bonn process is over, and the result is a structurally autonomous National Assembly. Additionally, Afghanistan is implementing structures of a market economy, and is seeing some growth in GDP and other economic indicators (“Country Strategy Paper 2007-2013″ 11).

With all of this change, it’s interesting to note that the EU has held a very solid line on both its economic and military policy. The EU has had two phases of economic aid packaging that have each followed multi-year plans; the first coming in 2003 after both the Bonn Agreement and the Tokyo Pledging Conference, the second coming from the London Conference, a meeting to discuss the next steps after the plan’s expiration in 2006 (“Country Strategy Paper 2007-2013″ 37). In both of those plans, the same types of general goals were outlined, focusing primarily on solving the humanitarian crisis of the war and providing support for the rebuilding of infrastructure. The 2007 Strategy Paper makes it clear that the EU sees their new aid package as a continuation to their previous policies both in what is funded and how the funding mechanisms are used. The paper outlines an aid package that appears remarkably similar to the previous one; aid levels are similar, as are the targets for aid and the programs. The EU reasserts its desire to work with both the Afghan government and the World Bank, effectively saying they wish the same type of dispersion as in the previous four year plan. The goal of aid continues to be to build institutions and infrastructure that promote economic growth and human rights to take the country out of abject poverty and authoritarianism. Where the EU has shifted its policy is in rhetorical focus; the Union cites a change from its original goals in humanitarian aid as the shift from “responding to an immediate humanitarian crisis to one of tackling the more long-term development and migratory challenges of displaced populations” (“Country Strategy Paper 2007-2013″ 16). In reviewing the changes overall, however, there isn’t evidence of this being more than words; both plans appear to have the same focus of creating initial democratizing structures as part of addressing immediate aid concerns. Additional changes in policy appear more to be based on refining what was already in place; the EU cites a need to be more geographically focused in its rural rebuilding efforts instead of working in all but one of the country’s 34 provinces, as well as a new focus on decentralization of governmental aid to the rural provinces (“Country Strategy Paper 2007-2013″ 15-17). Still, the changes that the EU has undertaken in its aid policy are minute, providing no substantive difference that reflects the changing face of Afghanistan.

Militarily speaking, the EU has also stayed consistent in not providing a troop force. The papers from both the 2003-2006 and 2007-2013 strategies leave out substantive discussion of the military presence in the country provided by the United States and NATO; the EU states bluntly and succinctly that, “The security sector is another area where the Commission is not involved” (“Country Strategy Paper 2007-2013″ 18). In both the 2003 and 2007 strategy papers, no money is pledged for a military or security force (“Country Strategy Paper 2007-2013″ and “Country Strategy Paper 2003-2006″). The EU’s presence in a military sense comes solely from the institutional link between the Afghan army and its police force. EUPOL has a training mission in Afghanistan to teach Afghan police officers methods to stop human trafficking and the drug trade through a strengthening of the country’s border patrols; this is a part of ESDP, as the EU sees the drug trade as a way to harbor military instability. This is a relatively new development in the war; EUPOL has instituted this force since 2007 (“EU Police”). However, it is a very minor portion of the security and military aspect of the war at large.

Analysis: The EU as a Role Player in Afghanistan

An analysis of the effectiveness of policies in Afghanistan must be pessimistic considering the extent to which the country is currently in shambles. According to the CIA World Factbook, Afghanistan’s economy is “extremely poor, landlocked, and highly dependent on foreign aid… the Afghan government’s inability to extend rule of law to all parts of the country pose challenges to future economic growth.” Its per capita GDP ranks tenth-last in the world. Its unemployment rate hovers around 40%, and it ranks in the lower quarter percentile of countries for exports when illicit activities like narco-trafficking and arms dealing are left out. Its chief agricultural export is opium, a crop that funnels money to the Taliban and other terrorist organizations. Its infant mortality rate ranks third highest in the world. Its death rate is eighth highest, and its life expectancy rate of 44.64 years is eleventh worst. Only 28.1% of adults are basically literate. Its most recent election was marred by allegations of fraud by President Hamid Karzai; a subsequent runoff against Abdullah Abdullah in October of 2009 was canceled in protest. The Taliban has made gains in the south and east of the country along its border with Pakistan, an area still believed to be harboring terrorists like Osama bin Laden (CIA World Factbook). In short, the rebuilding of Afghanistan has been a slow work in progress.

Such a view raises a nihilistic analysis of the effectiveness of aid by all sides, including the EU. The economic aid that the EU has provided has clearly been insufficient to pull Afghanistan into even relative levels of poverty. Statements that the EU makes about improving literacy and public health may be true, but only because there was nothing to initially work from. Concerns exist that the infrastructural support the EU has brought on through the work of the ARTF has, for lack of a better term, paved the road for the Taliban’s rise. The Taliban uses infrastructure built with EU aid dollars as targets for insurgent attacks; sixteen IED attacks have been launched against women’s schools, which Human Rights Watch calls “the only symbol of government,” since 2005 (Human Rights Watch). Equally important is the notion that through performing and funding the basic roles of government through humanitarian aid, the EU is propping up a Karzai government that has been otherwise slow to meet its citizens’ needs, as well as corrupt. With all of this in mind, it is easy to say that the efforts of all parties, including the EU, have been ineffective.

That type of analysis, however, does not ask why the efforts have been ineffective. Afghanistan is clearly a work in progress; nation building does not take place overnight, and the change to capitalism and democracy in a country that has known authoritarianism for centuries simply draws out the length of time for real change to occur. The issues that have plagued the reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan do not appear to be a failure of economic aid; schools and hospitals are being built only to be destroyed or overtaken by Taliban forces. The continued rise of the drug trade appears less a product of inadequate diversion by the government and more a product of inadequate policing. The expanse of the Taliban’s intimidation and power in rural Afghanistan, then, can be seen as less an inadequacy of soft power resources by the EU and more as an indictment of failed hard power by the U.S. and NATO.

The central question in analyzing the EU’s effectiveness in Afghanistan, then, is to debate whether its role was to provide a soft power counterbalance to the efforts of NATO or to have its efforts work independently of the war itself. If the EU’s comments are to be trusted, the Union visions its role to be precisely the former. Its comments after the U.S.’s announcement to send additional troops to the region outline this view:

The European Union underlines the need to maintain a comprehensive approach to the

challenges in Afghanistan. A positive development will require a combination of political,

military and civilian/development instruments, the main purpose of which should be to

enable the government of Afghanistan to gradually assume full responsibility for the

stabilisation and development of the country, and to deliver rapid, tangible results. (“Declaration by the Presidency”)

In this regard and in context of the policies it has taken, it’s clear that the EU sees itself as a partner with the United States; the partnership is based on the EU’s use of soft power methods that contrast with the United States and NATO’s use of hard power.

Bearing this in mind, the EU’s work in Afghanistan has followed the same sorts of limits that soft power always has. Soft power is limited in its ability to craft a state in an inverse way that hard power is; hard power gives the crafting state the avenue to implement change, while soft power puts said changes like democratization into process. In other words, hard power clears the way for soft power’s rebuilding. The flip side of this is that just in the way that exclusive militarism cannot build a school, exclusive humanitarianism cannot secure a newly built school. This has been the issue with the resurgence of the Taliban in rural Afghanistan: where security stops, the Taliban is able to take control and use new infrastructure to their gain. The EU has not necessarily failed in Afghanistan if their role is as delineated as it says; the failure thus far has been in providing security for new growth.

Where the EU has failed, though, is that it has kept their role delineated instead of adapting it to the realities on the ground and with U.S. policy. The EU acted without respect to reality in thinking their efforts would be sufficient without proper security. As the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated with the United States’ shift of focus, the EU had not only an opportunity to take charge in more than a humanitarian aid fashion, but an increasing level of means. The United States’ move toward an Iraq-centric security policy coincided with the development of EU battle groups, and the EU had the capacity to send targeted forces to the region by 2007 (EU Battlegroups). Instead, the EU opted against doing so, continuing to rhetorically support their member nations who contributed to a NATO force. It held its role as the soft power balance to the hard power that had grown thin on the part of the United States. The result was twofold: the security situation fell apart to the point that the EU’s economic aid efforts became insufficient to rebuild Afghanistan, and the EU missed a major chance to test and assert its military capability.

In summary, the EU’s role in Afghanistan has been to provide economic aid on a large scale to advance the goals of democratization and the amelioration of poverty. It has been consistently reluctant to act as a military power, opting instead to leave that role to the United States and NATO. Its policies remained steadfast through the changing phases of the war, and while it can be criticized for not adapting its policies to include a military aspect as the United States drew its focus toward Iraq, it has been as effective as reasonably possible in standing as the soft power force in the rebuilding efforts.

Works Cited

“Afghanistan: Civilians Bear Cost of Escalating Insurgent Attacks | Human Rights Watch.” Human Rights Watch. Web. 7 Dec. 2009. <http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2007/04/15/afghanistan-civilians-bear-cost-escalating-insurgent-attacks>.

“Afghanistan.” EUROPA – European Commission – Homepage. Web. 2 Dec. 2009. <http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/where/asia/country-cooperation/afghanistan/afghanistan_en.htm>.

“CIA – The World Factbook — Afghanistan.” CIA World Factbook. 2009. Web. 8 Dec. 2009. <https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/af.html>.

“Country Overview 2009.” World Bank: Afghanistan. Web. 7 Dec. 2009. <http://www.worldbank.org.af/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/SOUTHASIAEXT/AFGHANISTANEXTN/0,,contentMDK:20154015~menuPK:305992~pagePK:141137~piPK:141127~theSitePK:305985,00.html>.

“EU statement in the OSCE in response to the presentation on ISAF.” Swedish Presidency of the European Union. Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Web. 5 Dec. 2009. <http://www.se2009.eu/en/meetings_news/2009/10/14/eu_statement_in_the_osce_in_response_to_the_presentation_on_isaf>.

European Commission. Country Strategy Paper: Islamic Republic of Afghanistan 2007-2013. 2007. Web. 5 Dec. 2009. <http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/where/asia/documents/afgh_csp_07_13_en.pdf>.

European Commission. External Relations Directorate General. Country Strategy Paper: Afghanistan 2003-2006. 11 Feb. 2003. Web. 8 Dec. 2009. <http://ec.europa.eu/external_relations/afghanistan/csp/03_06_en.pdf>.

European Security and Defense Policy. EU Police Mission in Afghanistan. Mar. 2009. Web. 3 Dec. 2009. <http://www.eupol-afg.eu/pdf/factsheet0309.pdf>.

European Union. European Security and Defense Policy. EU Battlegroups. July 2009. Web. 8 Dec. 2009. <http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cmsUpload/090720-Factsheet-Battlegroups_EN.pdf>.

European Union. Office of the Presidency. Declaration by the Presidency on behalf of the European Union with regard to President Obama’s decision on reinforced US engagement in Afghanistan. Newsroom. Council of the European Union, 7 Dec. 2009. Web. 7 Dec. 2009. <http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/en/cfsp/111660.pdf>.

“ISAF – Chronology.” NATO. Web. 1 Dec. 2009. <http://www.nato.int/isaf/topics/chronology/index.html>.

NATO. International Security Assistance Force. Facts and Figures: Afghan National Army. Dec. 2009. Web. 7 Dec. 2009. <http://www.isaf.nato.int/images/stories/File/Dec_2009-Fact_Sheet_ANA.pdf>.

Obama, Barack H. “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Speech. United States Military Academy, West Point, NY. 1 Dec. 2009. Press Office. White House, 1 Dec. 2009. Web. 2 Dec. 2009. <http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-address-nation-way-forward-afghanistan-and-pakistan>.

World Bank. Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund. 1387 Annual Report. By ARTF Management Committee. 20 Mar. 2009. Web. 6 Dec. 2009. <http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTAFGHANISTAN/Resources/Afghanistan-Reconstructional-Trust-Fund/ARTF_Annual_ReportSY1387.pdf>.

The following is my GAME BY GAME predictions for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, from the group stages all the way to the final.

I don’t necessarily think that analyzing these shows in the light of cinematographic techniques is a good idea; far from it, in fact. A close reading of the episodes brings out these characteristics if you’re digging for them, sure, but I find it difficult to think that the people who write, shoot and act these shows are well-steeped in cinematic theory. The same sort of issue pops up when analyzing texts in light of tropes; you skirt giving an analysis of what people are saying if you focus exclusively on how they say it. In that spirit, I added the caveat in the end of the essay: the producers of The West Wing and 24 aren’t effective in their use of suture because they follow the norms, but because of how subconscious, or unintentionally, it feels.

Analyzing Methods of Suture in Political Melodrama

In her book The Subject of Semiotics, Kaja Silverman presents a series of arguments about the cinematographic technique suture. Silverman defines suture as, “the name given to the procedures by means of which cinematic texts confer subjectivity upon their viewers.” These procedures are rooted in the syntactic difficulties that plague language. French theorist Jacques Lacan notes that it is impossible to anchor a signifier to a signified; instead, meaning comes from the discourse that presents the signifier and signified (195¹). Silverman applies these difficulties to cinema: “When a subject… views a film it performs only… identification. The representations within which we recognize ourselves are clearly manufactured elsewhere, at the point of the discourse’s origin” — in short, the discourse of film is one-way and requires the context of the origin. In cinema, “that point of origin must be understood as both broadly cultural [i.e. as the symbolic field] and as specifically technological [i.e. as encompassing the camera, the tape-recorder, the lighting equipment, the editing room, the script, etc.]” (197). Silverman suggests through the citation of many theorists that suture works through shot relationships like the 180° rule (201), through presenting ideology (215), and through a relationship with sexual difference that includes fetishizing women (222).

Silverman’s summary of suture is clear in a close reading of a wide variety of television genres, including the political melodrama. In analyzing Silverman’s presentation of suture, I will use the pilot episodes of The West Wing and 24. These shows present clear parallels in the sense that both are melodramas that both use basic cinematic norms and are based around present-day political issues and fears, but also striking differences that make and expand the points of Silverman and the theoreticians she cites. Namely, each show clearly represents suture’s use of cinematography and its use as an apparatus to advance ideology.

Suture relies on the use of a variety of film techniques to draw the viewer into the text, or as Silverman paraphrases Jacques-Alain Miller, “the subject inserts itself into the symbolic register in the guise of a signifier, and in so doing gains meaning at the expense of being” (200). These film techniques specifically include shot relationships, which Silverman declares replace the syntactic relationships from linguistic discourse and in turn create cinematic discourse. Film’s most seemingly prevalent shot relationship is the 180° rule, which finds two shots shown back to back. In these shots, the first, shot 1, acts to show the subject head on. Shot 2 then pivots 180° to show the view of the subject in shot 1, often the second person in a conversation or the landscape (201-203). By presenting the view of the subject, it achieves the goal of cinematic organization: “The operation of suture is successful at the moment that the viewing subject says, ‘Yes, that’s me’” (205). The importance of the shot relationship’s form is not necessarily sacrosanct. Theorist Stephen Heath suggests that the argument for its use as part of suture isn’t based on the syntax but, as Silverman describes, as part of how it works as “cinematic signification” and “its relationship to the viewing subject” (203). Furthermore, Silverman displays alternate uses of camera work in suture in an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho, specifically noting the nine different camera shots in the shower scene and the editing in how the viewer becomes disoriented into having “no choice to identify with Marion in the shower” (210-211).

The West Wing both uses and contorts the conventions on shot relationships that Silverman presents. The contortion from the traditional is most evident in the show’s use of the Sorkin Effect, an effect that writer/creator Aaron Sorkin is renowned and notorious for. In the Sorkin Effect, the camera follows two characters in movement, briefly abandoning the 180° rule in favor of straight-on or perpendicular shots through windows, doors, or even walls before stopping and continuing with a more classic shot relationship. This effect sutures the viewer into the text by giving a visible representation of what the character is feeling; the speed of the camera as it passes through a wall and the appearance of a cramped hallway disorient the viewer into feeling as rushed as the characters appear to be, with the abrupt shift to the traditional shot 1/shot 2 relationship acting as a beat that feels less like a shot transition and more comparable to a car braking in rush hour traffic. “Pilot” uses this effect multiple times, notably in the first scene inside the White House. The camera follows Chief of Staff Leo McGarry, portrayed by John Spencer, as he enters the building. The first shot, taken in the vestibule, pans out to show the expanse of the White House, before taking the Sorkin tour of the West Wing bullpen with a tight closeup on Leo’s head and shoulders. Leo stops only for brief meetings with a staffer, his deputy Josh Lyman, and the presidential secretary before reaching his office. During all of these short encounters, some variation on the 180° rule is used; in the meeting with the staffer, for example, the camera sits at desk level, with Leo standing and the staffer seated to display his authority. As soon as the encounter breaks, Leo continues down the halls and the tight shot running through hallways continues.

24 is also known for its use of alternative versions of cinematographic suture. The first is obvious: the use of “real time.” 24‘s format displays one hour of narrative within the 45-minute episode; in “12:00 A.M.-1:00 A.M.,” the action begins at midnight and ends an hour later. Doing this creates a sense of reality for the viewer; the volume of events within the hour even creates a sense of hyperreality. The sense of reality comes from how the viewer isn’t forced to accept any leap of faith about the length of time² that other shows present; one need not consider that a DNA test takes longer than fifteen seconds, or a heart surgery often is an all-day affair. Instead, a viewer of 24 can accept that a minute is a minute. It helps that the show uses this timing as a beat; its commercials roughly come in at the same amount of time into the show as is real time, with gaps in time and action falling during the commercial break. Next, the show uses multiple frames to show action. In these shots, the main character is often shown in two to three different camera angles; one continues the previous shot, another comes from farther out at an opposing 180° angle, while a third shows action going on outside of the traditional frame. It sutures the viewer into the action by presenting the peripheral vision lost through the 16:9 or 4:3 camera view and fosters an enhanced view of reality. For example, in “12:00 A.M.-1:00 A.M.,” Jack Bauer often appears in this style of shot while on a phone call; the first shot is his side profile, the second is the other side profile or a straight-on shot from farther away (in the episode, one shot is lower to the ground and zoomed out), while the third is often the pensive glance of the other person on the call or a busily working and highly suspicious co-worker. Additionally, 24 is known for, in times of action, diverting from the use of a steady cam. Using shaky camera work disorients the viewer, which enhances the view of action if used appropriately. 24 utilizes this effect in shots that present tension; an example is in the presentation of Palmer’s assassin. Instead of showing a traditional shot one-style view of the staffer/co-conspirator, the camera shakes as it pans in for a close-up, which in turn shakes the viewing subject. The queasiness that comes in when the steady cam is removed makes the viewer feel unsafe in the text; 24 abuses this fear and uses it to denote the villain.

Both The West Wing and 24 represent a shift in television and cinematography away from conventional views of suture and toward Heath’s view of suture as signifier. Each show uses cinematography as a signifier of reality; The West Wing applies it to the feel of the White House, while 24 uses it as a utility of an uneasy rush. In each, the viewer’s need for something that looks and “feels” more real than what is conventionally presented is satisfied, even if it involves the manipulation of actual reality. But suture does more than make the viewer say, “Yes, that’s me.”

Daniel Dayan first posited the idea that suture can be used for ideological coercion, declaring that in a shot 1/shot 2 relationship, a code is created and attracted, then disappears as shot two is visible, becoming fiction. “The code, which produces an imaginary, ideological effect, is hidden by the message… His imaginary is sealed into the film; the spectator thus absorbs an ideological effect without being aware of it” (215). Silverman refers heavily to Louis Althusser’s discussion of ideology, which he declares to be “the imaginary [or culturally initiated, as Silverman explains] relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live” (216). Silverman summarizes Althusser and melds the discussion of ideology into cinema, saying that the link between the subject and the discourse of film often involves the story: “films re-interpellate the viewer into pre-established discursive positions not only by effacing the signs of their own production, but through the lure of the narrative.” She also declares that suture acts to “re-articulate the existing symbolic order in ideologically orthodox ways” (221).

24 presents one of the most clear examples of this impressment of the “existing symbolic order” through its depiction of terroristic threats on the United States. The series’s glamorization of the Counter-Terrorism Unit has been widely interpreted as a not-too-subtle endorsement of conservative policies on national security. Such an interpretation rests on the show’s elevation of Jack Bauer to heroic status. Bauer will readily use brutal torture to extract information from suspected terrorists³, taking a page from Machiavelli in justifying terrible means with the threat of a deadly terrorist attack. “12:00 A.M.-1:00 A.M.” introduces the element of fear and protection and the conservative ideology involved in two ways that impress the writers’ ideology in a way that satisfies Silverman’s interpretation of Althusser. First, there is the aspect of torture. The initial view is that torture and other questionable methods are a right and reasonable way to keep the world safe, no matter how morally questionable they may be. This is turned on its head through the series and its depiction of Jack as a less than sane actor; Jack’s actions are shown to be irrational and immoral. However, by the end of the day, the threat is lessened — the terrorists lose, the government wins. This follows an Althusserian model of ideological coercion; the ideology is presented, effaced, then shown to be the correct thought all along. The second exposition is far more subtle and is never explicitly stated. The initial suggestion is that the policies of CTU are an appreciable method of keeping America safe. However, the show suggests that David Palmer “would gut the agency,” and glamorizes him as what appears to be a Democrat. This would seem to be a promotion of Democratic policies, particularly with the deference and respect that Palmer commands through the show. In the end, though, it ends that the work of CTU saves Palmer. The conservative ideology of the show is first presented, coyly effaced, then is validated through Bauer’s heroism.

In a politically flipped way, The West Wing presents a variety of ideologies that are impressed on the viewer throughout its pilot and its seven seasons. The West Wing details the work of the policy shop in a Democratic-held White House; naturally, then, there is a tendency to promote liberal politics and values. The narrative includes a level of moralization that follows Silverman’s assessment of how ideologies are impressed on the viewer; namely, the plot sees moral issues turn from a presentation in the ideology of the screenwriter to an opposite ideology before being re-presented in the original. In the episode, a large group of Cubans are attempting to defect to the United States; meanwhile, a firestorm is brewing over anti-Christian jokes made by Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman. Furthermore, the president embarrasses himself by riding his bicycle into a tree, and Deputy Communications Director Sam Seaborn inadvertently calls an escort service upon discovering his pager has been switched with the prostitute he slept with overnight. The Cuban tale initially plays out with the staff suggesting a humanitarian mission to rescue them; as a weather system threatens their safety, a xenophobic attitude creeps in. The episode ends with much of the group going missing; the president calls on the staff to direct the INS to grant them asylum. The other tales cycle in the same way: Josh is demonized by the staff and press, then is exonerated in a meeting with religious leaders, then belittled by the president; Sam’s issue starts a story arc in which prostitution is moralized and vilified again; the president returns from the hospital and begins a series-long discussion about respecting leaders that ebbs between the ridiculous (a season four episode where he takes far too many Valium after a surgery) and the stately.

Political melodrama presents a clear format for the presentation, deconstruction, and reconstruction of ideologies because of its nature. All political melodramas use the melodramatic trope of inserting social issues into the narrative, but because they involve political action to drive the narrative they require a stance to be taken. 24, through the use of non-elected and theoretically non-partisan characters, uses broad strokes in drawing off of societal fear of terrorism to paint a need for security at all costs that only conservatism can bring; The West Wing, which uses microcosmic anecdotes to create a wider narrative, promotes a leftist world view. They are able to take this sort of stance because of the success each has in suturing the viewer into the text. Without suture, each show would be seen as cheap propaganda or sloganeering; instead, the feeling that the viewer is within the show and the identification that occurs between the viewer and the subject makes it possible to incorporate ideological discussion into the discourse of television. The viewer becomes privy to the discussion instead of prisoner to it.

In this regard, political melodrama utilizes suture in a way that validates the analysis of Silverman. The West Wing turns to action shots and the Sorkin Effect to use cinematography while utilizing small events to advance the ideologies of its characters. 24 takes elements of fear and hyperreality in the construction of its narrative to suture the viewer into a broad picture that glorifies conservatism in an age of terrorism. Caution must be paid, however, to avoid a conflation of the use of suture with its effectiveness, as Stephen Heath eludes to. The two shows are effective not necessarily because they use the syntax of suture, but that they use it effectively, sparingly, and with artistic talent. Each show’s use of the elements is done with a certain level of skill, avoiding the self-consciousness that plagues melodrama and weakens its plausibility. Suture, then, involves not only the rules of syntax that film norms create but a level of quality.

“How Long Must We Sing This Song?”: Analyzing Transitional Justice in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland’s long history of ethnic, religious, and political sectarianism manifested itself in a thirty-two year war known to locals as “the Troubles.” The Troubles saw Northern Ireland torn apart by violence from paramilitant groups divided between republicanists, a mainly Catholic minority that supported succession to Ireland, and loyalists that wished to remain part of the United Kingdom. As with many conflicts, Northern Ireland has enacted some forms of transitional justice, though such work has been tepid at best. Of late, however, there has been a glimmer of hope with the release of a new report by the Consultative Group on the Past.

A History of Violence

Much discussion exists as to what scope Northern Ireland’s Troubles had. Some scholars ascribe the tensions that started the Troubles to the same divisions that led to Northern Ireland’s refusal to join the Irish Free State in the 1920s (Munck 211). As a result, a divide among both religious and ethnic/national lines became incredibly apparent, with ethnically Irish Catholics supporting a united Ireland and ethnically British Protestants supporting Unionism, an ideology that allied itself with being part of the United Kingdom (Doherty 521). This divide drew at all parts of the culture and turned into first a civil rights struggle, then a prolonged war that acted first as a paramilitary struggle, then as a series of terrorist attacks by both Unionist forces and Republicanists, represented by the Irish Republican Army. The violence officially ended in 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. In the agreement, the British government agreed to devolve power to the Northern Irish, who in turn agreed to split power between Unionists and Republicanists, namely the IRA’s political wing, the Sinn Féin (Lloyd 109).

The numbers involved with a thirty-two year war are staggering: 3,523 killed between 1969 and 2001, over 1,800 of whom were civilians (“Full Report” 60-61). 43,200 people injured during that time. Thousands left in exile. Within 1972, the year of Bloody Sunday in Derry, nearly 500 people were killed (Kuuisto-Arponen 123). Violence spread not only into England, with a series of IRA bombings in London through the 1980s, but also into Germany, where paramilitary forces shot and killed an RAF officer in front of his family.

One event in the war was the Falls Curfew of 1970. In it, the British Army took control of the Catholic Lower Falls neighborhood of the Northern Irish capital, Belfast, over a weekend. Without consent and authority of the local authorities, the Army blocked entry and exit from the neighborhood, into which they proceeded to launch gas canisters, raid houses for Irish Republican Army members or materiel, and fire 1,500 live rounds. The attack saw the arrests of 337 republicanists, and four people, all believed to be civilians, died (“Falls Curfew” 343).

Despite the end of violence and the signing of accords like the Good Friday Agreement, tensions still are high in Northern Ireland. Neighborhoods continue to be settled along ethnic and religious lines that continued to grow more and more segregated throughout the conflict (Doherty). Actions as simple as going grocery shopping are seen as a political act that show where your nationalistic intentions lie. Frequenting neighborhood A over neighborhood B suggests your religion, your politics, your trust and mistrust of the opposite sect (Kuuisto-Arponen 121). Northern Ireland suffers still from a triplicate or quadruplicate identity: Irish, Northern Irish, Northern Irish Protestant, and British (Grove 727), all of which are competing both electorally and culturally. Debates continue as to what value religion can have in either perpetuating or stopping violence (Mac Iver 135-136), whether legitimatizing a once terrorist organization can lead to harmony (Lloyd 109), and whether the structures of government that remained largely intact from the 1920s would be able to rectify the issues that were not solved before 1969′s explosion of violence (Boyle 271).

The Slow Process of Transitional Justice

What has frustrated transitional justice scholars is that little to nothing had been done in Northern Ireland to address the past between 1998′s signing of the Good Friday Agreement and 2006. Trials had not taken place to convict members of the IRA or of the loyalist forces like the UDR for their actions during any stage of the conflict, though it had not been from a formal amnesty. Instead, there simply had not been investigations. There had been no framework for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission enacted by the government. The lustration and vetting that had already existed in Northern Irish society by sect had, by and large, continued, though this was clearly a result of the continued ethnic divisions instead of any sort of victor’s justice.

Three actions that can be loosely interpreted as transitional justice occurred before 2007. First, in January of 1998, months before the Good Friday Agreement was signed, British Prime Minister Tony Blair introduced a new inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday. Known both as the “Bloody Sunday” or the Saville Inquiry, it first heard testimony in Derry in March 2000 and heard testimony from over 900 witnesses (“Bloody Sunday inquiry”). The second was the 2002 Cory Collusion Inquiry. In it, retired Canadian justice Peter Cory reviewed testimony suggesting that a series of deaths in the Troubles were the result of collusion between paramilitary groups like the IRA and RUC with their subjugate national security forces (“Collusion Inquiry”). The third was the September 2005 establishment and January 2006 commencement of the Historical Enquiries Team. The HET has been tasked with investigating 3,268 deaths attributed to the violence during the Troubles from 1968-1998 and could result in a series of trials if perpetrators are deemed guilty of aggressive and non-security related violence (Connolly 416-417). All three instances are forms of retributive justice that are limited in scope; none intend to address the core issues the Troubles represent, opting instead for individual cases.

Only one major instance of restorative justice that took its direction from the state existed before 2007. In 1997, the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland directed Sir Kenneth Bloomfield to develop avenues of recognition for the victims of the Troubles. His report, published in April 1998, outlines recommendations of a purely restorative nature. In it, he suggests that the Northern Irish and British governments make a concerted effort to provide for victims that are physically and mentally suffering from trauma, that the governments consider but not enact a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission, that a “Memorial and Reconciliation” holiday be enacted, and that a garden memorial be created (Bloomfield 50-51).

The common link with the elements of transitional justice that Northern Ireland used before 2007 is that none of them saw a result. The Saville Inquiry, after 13 years and an estimated cost of 181 million pounds, has yet to publish a final report, with Secretary of State Shaun Woodward declaring in 2008 that he did not think that report was soon to be completed (“Bloody Sunday inquiry”). Of the four cases in the Cory Collusion Inquiries involving collusion with British forces, further investigation into three were delayed until a more strict inquiry act was ratified in 2005, rendering any investigation that could result in charges toothless; the fourth received no discussion of an inquiry (Massimino 4-5). A limited number of prosecutions have come out of the work of the HET with few expected to occur (Connolly 417). Few of the recommendations of the Bloomfield Report were enacted by the Northern Irish or British governments (Connolly 422).

In this context of limited transitional justice, the Consultative Group on the Past was instituted by the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in June of 2007 to analyze the deep-seated tensions that the Troubles displayed and to recommend actions for the future. The Group reviewed testimony for five months, interviewed community members and victims groups, reviewed files from the British government, and discussed over two thousand letters from individuals that had suffered from violence during the Troubles (“Executive Summary” 12-13). After a lengthy deliberation, they released both the Full Report and Executive Summaries in January of 2009.

The Full Report and Executive Summary detail the deep-seated divisions in Northern Irish society and suggest a series of changes be enacted. First, the report suggests that a Legacy Commission be enacted “to deal with the legacy of the past by combining processes of reconciliation, justice and information recovery. It would have the overarching objective of promoting peace and stability in Northern Ireland.” This commission would act much like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the sense that it would promote victims telling stories of how the violence impacted their lives. The Legacy Commission would work with the Commission for Victims and Survivors of Northern Ireland on a Reconciliation Commission to promote nation-building and nation-healing activities with the aim of lessening sectarian sentiment. Next, the report suggests a recognition payment of 12,000 pounds to the next of kin of any person who died during the conflict, paramilitant or citizen. Additionally, the report emphasizes the need to fund services for all citizens who are suffering from psychological trauma and chemical dependency, a plague that has hit citizens and is often blamed on the residuals of post-traumatic stress. The report details the structure and aim of the Legacy Commission to investigate and analyze cases from the Northern Irish past and to determine proper ways to deal with the societal issues they present. The Legacy Commission would take over the work of the HET and replace it with a non-police Review and Investigation Unit. In regards to further inquiries, public inquests would largely stop, with the Commission tasked to “draw a line” on where prosecution would occur — a line that is explicitly not intended to be an amnesty. Finally, the report suggests methods of restorative justice, including the state adoption of the Day of Remembering enacted by the NGO Healing Through Remembering; workshops that involve victims telling their stories without politicization; rhetorical affirmations of the need for a united and non-sectarian Northern Ireland by the First Minister; a ceremony involving the governments of the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Northern Ireland to mark the past and remember those who died, and a suggestion to all political parties to sign an agreement to never again kill or injure because of political division. All of this work would occur within the five year term of the Commission (“Executive Summary” 6-10).

Further Analysis of the Consultative Group’s Report

The reports by the Consultative Group on the Past warrant academic analysis that, thus far, has been hard to come by. The Transitional Justice Database bibliography contains no reviews of the reports and, unfortunately, only includes one unrelated paper written on the conflict after the reports were issued (Reiter). Much of the literature on Northern Ireland bemoans the lack of transitional justice that has taken place and the fact that victims groups are clamoring for some sort of institutional action (“Frontiers” 341). The existence of the reports renders the literature out of date, and a review of the report can determine if the literature is obsolete.

Therefore, I plan to research the following question: “What does the Consultative Group on the Past’s recommendations do in the field of transitional justice in Northern Ireland?” The paper will provide an analysis of the Consultative Group on the Past’s Full Report and Executive Summary. In it, I intend to review the recommendations made, analyze those recommendations in light of transitional justice methods and theories, and then analyze the recommendations in light of the conflict itself and the complications that Northern Irish culture presents.

There are a pair of competing tracks of analysis, that of skepticism and optimism. There are serious issues raised by all parties about the report’s findings and recommendations, chiefly the issue of reparations for all who died in the conflict instead of solely civilian families. Additionally, the report does seem to be ambiguous at best in dealing with the issue of amnesty; while the report doesn’t suggest amnesty for perpetrators of violence, it also plays down the notion of mass prosecutions (“Legacies of 40 years of violence”). Coincident with that, an initial reading suggests that the justice involved with the report’s recommendations should be restorative first with retributive justice pushed aside. Finally, the report’s suggestions tend to involve devolution of power from groups that are performing transitional justice already, namely the investigations into deaths by the Police Ombudsman that will now fall under the Legacy Commission (“Executive Summary” 29). My personal skepticism is based exclusively with my lack of familiarity with restorative programs, but I do think taking a narrow track in the scope of justice is a clear misstep.

All those concerns aside, the report is clearly a start of institutional transitional justice in Northern Ireland. The nation had largely shied away from discussing methods of transitional justice in the past, even going against deciding on what an objective truth of the conflict was. This allowed all sides to continue the political antagonism that had plagued the nation for centuries and manifested itself from 1966-1998, and to a different extent to the present. The Good Friday Agreement provides no route for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and instead skirts the issue of there being greater forces at work than simple political division (Connolly 414-415). As late as 2003, theoreticians were debating how to frame the conflict in the lens of transitional justice, let alone enact it. Colm Campbell and Fionnaula Ni Aolain argue with some resignation that transitional justice has difficulties with a state like Northern Ireland, which operates not in the structure of authoritarianism but as a “leading Western democracy” (“Frontiers” 339). While the state did enact a pair of inquiries into violence of the past, notably the Saville Inquiry that investigated the Bloody Sunday killings of 1972, the state ignored the past in order to create legitimate rule — a fact bemoaned by the Consultative Group. In essence, there have been nearly no moves by the Northern Irish or British governments in the arena of transitional justice, an issue that has perpetuated tensions. The Consultative Group, which had elements of a TRC and recommends further like-minded actions through the Legacy Commission, is the first step in transitional justice in Northern Ireland and can be an effective one.

Works Cited

“Bloody Sunday inquiry costs £181m.” BBC News. BBC, 20 Feb. 2008. Web. 27 Oct. 2009. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7254911.stm>.

Bloomfield, Kenneth. Rep. Northern Ireland Memorial Fund, 2004. Web. 27 Oct. 2009. <http://www.nimf.org.uk/bloomfield.pdf>.

Boyle, Kevin, and Tom Hadden. “The Peace Process in Northern Ireland.” International Affairs 71.2 (1995): 269-83. JSTOR. Web. 27 Oct. 2009. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2623434>.

Campbell, Colm, and Ita Connolly. “A Model for the ‘War against Terrorism’? Military Intervention in Northern Ireland and the 1970 Falls Curfew.” Journal of Law and Society 30.3 (2003): 341-75. JSTOR. Web. 26 Oct. 2009. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1410535>.

Campbell, Colm, Fionnaula Ní Aoláin, and Colin Harvey. “The Frontiers of Legal Analysis: Reframing the Transition in Northern Ireland.” Modern Law Review 66.3 (2003): 317-45. JSTOR. Web. 24 Oct. 2009. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1097560>.

“Collusion inquiry may take two years.” BBC News. BBC, 10 June 2002. Web. 25 Oct. 2009. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/2037261.stm>.

Connolly, Christopher. “Living on the Past: The Role of Truth Commissions in Post-Conflict Societies and the Case Study of Northern Ireland.” Cornell International Law Journal 39 (2006): 401-34. Hein Online. Web. 27 Oct. 2009. <http://www.heinonline.org.floyd.lib.umn.edu/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/cintl39&id=1&size=2&collection=journals&index=journals/cintl>.

Doherty, Paul, and Michael A. Poole. “Ethnic Residential Segregation in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1971-1991.” Geographical Review 87.4 (1997): 520-36. JSTOR. Web. 27 Oct. 2009. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/215229>.

Eames, Robin, and Denis Bradley. Executive Summary. Rep. Consultative Group on the Past, 28 Jan. 2009. Web. 17 Oct. 2009. <http://www.cgpni.org>.

Eames, Robin, and Denis Bradley. Full Report. Rep. Consultative Group on the Past, 28 Jan. 2009. Web. 17 Oct. 2009. <http://www.cgpni.org>.

Grove, Andrea K., and Neal A. Carter. “Not All Blarney Is Cast in Stone: International Cultural Conflict in Northern Ireland.” Political Psychology 20.4 (1999): 725-65. JSTOR. Web. 27 Oct. 2009. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3792193>.

Kuusisto-Arponen, Anna-Kaisa. “The End of Violence and Introduction of ‘Real’ Politics: Tensions in Peaceful Northern Ireland.” Geographiska Annaler 83.3 (2001): 121-30. JSTOR. Web. 26 Oct. 2009. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/491073>.

Lloyd, John. “Ireland’s Uncertain Peace.” Foreign Affairs 77.5 (1998): 109-22. JSTOR. Web. 26 Oct. 2009. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/20049054>.

Mac Iver, Martha A., and Emily H. Bauermeister. “Bridging the Religious Divide: Mobilizing for Reconciliation in Northern Ireland.” Review of Religious Research 32.2 (1990): 135-50. JSTOR. Web. 27 Oct. 2009. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3511761>.

Massimino, Elisa. Speech. Northern Ireland Human Rights : Update on the Cory Collusion Hearings. House Subcommittee On Africa, Global Human Rights, and International Operations, Washington, DC. 16 Mar. 2005. Human Rights First, 16 Mar. 2005. Web. 27 Oct. 2009. <http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/defenders/hrd_n_ireland/HIRC-collusion-031605.pdf>.

Munck, Ronnie. “The Making of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.” Journal of Contemporary History 27.2 (1992): 211-29. JSTOR. Web. 26 Oct. 2009. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/260908>.

“Northern Ireland: Legacies of 40 years of violence -.” International Center for Transitional Justice. Web. 27 Oct. 2009. <http://www.ictj.org/en/news/features/2269.html>.

Reiter, Andrew G. Transitional Justice Data Base Project. University of Wisconsin, 3 Apr. 2009. Web. 27 Oct. 2009. <http://users.polisci.wisc.edu/tjdb/bib.htm>.