As sociolinguists, we have centered social justice in our research, teaching, and administrative work for many years. But as with many other academics, this issue took on renewed collective urgency for us in the context of the events of 2020, from toxic ...
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OUPblog » Social Sciences


Why decolonization and inclusion matter in linguistics?

Why decolonization and inclusion matter in linguistics?

As sociolinguists, we have centered social justice in our research, teaching, and administrative work for many years. But as with many other academics, this issue took on renewed collective urgency for us in the context of the events of 2020, from toxic politics and policies at the federal level, to state-sanctioned anti-Black violence and the ensuing racial reckoning, to the Covid-19 pandemic and the many inequities it exposed and heightened.

Troubled by the often-misinformed efforts to make institutional change that we saw around us, we wanted to take action that was both specific to our disciplinary context and wide-reaching in its effects. We started with an article in the flagship linguistics journal, Language, calling for the centering of racial justice within the discipline. That article was the lead piece in the journal’s Perspectives section and was accompanied by a range of responses from linguists worldwide, which we responded to in turn.

We wrote with the hope that institutional change could start from the individual and (especially) collective actions of linguists. We were also motivated by the hope that the discipline our students will enter will be radically different from the one that we have spent our careers within. This hope fueled our work for the next several years, as we collaborated with linguists within and beyond linguistics departments and throughout the academy to create concrete, specific, and action-centered models for how to do the work necessary to transform the discipline. The results of this intensive collaborative process are two companion volumes, Decolonizing Linguistics and Inclusion in Linguistics, and their websites, which provide additional information and resources. 

Some linguists, particularly those for whom linguistics is structured and whom it best serves, may be asking themselves, “What’s so bad about linguistics in its current form?” Many linguists we interacted with as we embarked on this project were defensive, baffled, or even outright hostile. Fortunately, many others were curious and eager to learn how the discipline could do better and what they could do to help. Most importantly, the people for whom we do this work—those who have been made to feel unwelcome in linguistics and who have been shut out, pushed out, or relegated to the disciplinary margins, as well as those who have succeeded despite rather than because of linguistics-as-usual—understood and welcomed our project. Many of these current, former, and would-be linguists have been engaged in like-minded efforts of their own.

Some critics see our work as “politicizing” linguistics. But these commenters miss the point that linguistics (and academia) has always been political. The discipline has its roots in empire and the colonizing practices of categorizing and classifying languages in order to control those who use them. As the discipline has taken shape over the centuries to the present day, linguistics has become a field limited by its own exclusionary practices and ideologies—a field that, in our view, is simply too small. In Decolonizing Linguistics and Inclusion in Linguistics, we envision and work to build a linguistics that is capacious and welcoming, particularly to those whose lived experiences give them fresh and much-needed insights into the kinds of questions linguistics should be asking, the kinds of methods it should be using, and the kinds of real-world impacts it should be making.

Inclusion in linguistics

Most linguists are familiar with the concept of inclusion through institutional discourse in academia and elsewhere, particularly the acronym DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) or its many variants. Too often, however, inclusion is used to mean recruiting members of formerly excluded groups into often hostile institutions, without making significant changes to the workings of the institutions themselves. True inclusion is not a matter of making space within existing institutions for new people to do the same old thing. Instead, true inclusion requires the transformation not only of who is in institutional spaces but what they do, how, and why. Transformation demands that we ask ourselves who is and isn’t present in linguistics, whether they have full and equitable access, and whether the community of linguists will value their full humanity, rather than treating them merely as sources of linguistic data or as token representatives and spokespersons for the groups to which they belong.

Inclusion in Linguistics offers abundant examples of how linguists can and already are creating genuine inclusion within the discipline. The authors challenge limited notions of who gets to be included, calling attention to a wide range of groups who remain marginalized on the basis of race and ethnicity, gender identity, disability, geography, language, class and caste, and more. The authors issue a powerful call for a linguistics that does not simply make space for but purposefully centers those who have been excluded. We collectively urge linguists to think bigger, to abandon long-cherished ideological investments in what is and isn’t legitimate within linguistics, and to build a discipline that doesn’t hide in the ivory tower but engages with the world and makes it a better place.

Decolonizing linguistics

Compared to inclusion, decolonization may be a less familiar concept to many linguists. Some academics in the US may have first encountered the idea, along with related concepts like settler colonialism, through student activism on their campus in recent years and months. (In fact, the New York Times recently published an explainer on the term settler colonialism, assuming—no doubt correctly—that its predominantly white, liberal, and highly educated readership is not well versed in decolonial theory and activism.)

We chose the title Decolonizing Linguistics to invoke the long and ongoing history of linguists’ global academic exploitation of Black and Indigenous people and the discipline-based extraction of their languages for professional and economic gain. Contributors identify some of the forms of colonialism that linguistics has taken and continues to take. We emphasize the importance of Black-centered and Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies in undoing colonizing structures. We also highlight community-driven collaborative projects that provide a comprehensive picture of the powerful social and scholarly impacts of an unsettled, decolonized linguistics.

Both volumes offer specific roadmaps and pathways for how to advance social justice, through programs, partnerships, curricula, and other initiatives. Our work is a necessary first step toward institutional and disciplinary change: a linguistics built by, around, and for groups that have confronted colonization, oppression, and exclusion—that is, precisely the people whose languages so often fascinate linguists—is also a linguistics that prioritizes the new ideas and practices that these groups bring to the discipline and recognizes these new directions as precisely where linguistics needs to go.

We do not consider Inclusion in Linguistics and Decolonizing Linguistics as definitive statements but rather as an invitation for others to join us in ongoing conversations. We invite linguistics scholars and students, educators and higher education leaders, around the world to engage with the ideas in both volumes with an eye toward what you can do in your own local context, what we have inevitably left out, and how you might build on, adapt, and push us forward to create the kind of inclusive, decolonized, and socially just linguistics that you would like to be part of.

Featured image by Fons Heijnsbroek, abstract-art via Unsplash.

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The origins of the war in Ukraine [timeline]

The origins of the war in Ukraine [timeline]

The fall of the Soviet Union meant independence for Ukraine, and radically altered the shape and power structures of Eastern Europe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was the culmination of a number of growing fissures and collisions in the region—between Russia and Ukraine, but also between Europe and Russia, and Russia and the United States. Michael Kimmage, a historian and former diplomat who served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State where he handled the Russia/Ukraine portfolio, looks at the origins of this conflict dating back to 24 August 1991.

Feature image by Max Kukurudziak via Unsplash.

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Homer’s Penelope and the myth of the ‘model military wife’

Homer’s Penelope and the myth of the ‘model military wife’

Ostensibly a tale of the adventures of a soldier, Homer’s ancient Greek epic Odyssey also has at its heart the remarkable story of Odysseus’ waiting wife Penelope, who is renowned for her patience and her fidelity. Left behind for 20 years while Odysseus spends ten years fighting in the Trojan War and then a further ten years on his meandering journey home to Ithaca, Penelope is faced with multiple challenges in her husband’s absence. Her story, although it comes from a millennia-old tale set in a mythical past, echoes some of the experiences undergone by military spouses in contemporary society. We can also find in Homer’s Penelope an ancient archetype for the idealised image of the ‘model military wife’ which still persists in the modern world.

In her husband’s absence, the Odyssey’s Penelope is faced with a whole array of emotional and practical struggles, many of which modern-day military spouses might recognise. The poet describes how she has trouble sleeping, worries crowding her mind as she lies in bed at night (Odyssey 19.513-17), and frequently throughout the poem she is to be found weeping, overwhelmed by the grief and stress of her situation. This mythical waiting wife has no idea whether her husband is alive or dead—he is what we might describe today as ‘missing in action’—and if or when he might return home to her. Modern military spouses often talk about the dread of the ‘knock on the door’ bringing bad news while their partner is in a war zone: Penelope too is simultaneously desperate for news of Odysseus but living in constant fear of what that news might reveal. At the same time, she must deal with the day-to-day responsibilities of being home alone: parenting the child, Telemachus, who was a baby when Odysseus left for Troy, and managing the household alone. In this patriarchal ancient society, the absence of the male head of the royal household is felt especially strongly. Nonetheless, there are parallels here with contemporary situations; when a partner is away on active duty, their spouse must often take on domestic responsibilities which would ordinarily be shared.

‘Penelope and the Suitors’ (1912) by John William Waterhouse, via Wikimedia Commons.

Penelope’s already difficult situation is exacerbated by the presence of 108 suitors, who are vying for her hand in marriage—a marriage which would also grant them Odysseus’ kingly power, his possessions, and his estate. It is her response to this situation which cemented her reputation for fidelity in the ancient world; that response also enables her to demonstrate her resourcefulness. In her hope that Odysseus will eventually return, and in order to buy time, Penelope deploys what in the ancient world is a typically feminine stratagem: she tells the suitors that she will choose which of them to marry once she has finished weaving a shroud for her father in law. What her suitors don’t know is that she is unpicking each day’s weaving in secret every night. The shroud trick not only keeps Penelope occupied during much of Odysseus’ absence, but it also represents a life which has been placed on hold while he is away. Both the notion of ‘keeping busy’ as a coping strategy and the feeling of being unable to move forward with their own lives—with career plans or education, for example—while awaiting the return of a serving partner are recurring elements of the first-hand accounts of modern-day waiting wives.

Yet it is not merely some of the day-to-day elements of Penelope’s life that might feel familiar to contemporary military spouses. There is a broader sense in which this ‘myth’ of the model military wife is fundamental to upholding the patriarchal structures which still endure in some military institutions. In modern UK and US contexts, the armed forces still rely heavily on the support of the spouses of personnel. Those spouses are still overwhelmingly female, despite the fact that women and same-sex couples are now eligible for military service. The feminist political theorist Cynthia Enloe, in her 2000 book Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, set out a lengthy list—which still holds up almost 25 years after first publication—of the ideal characteristics of today’s ‘model military wife.’ This is someone who, among other things, is unfailingly supportive and content for all aspects of her life to be subordinated to her husband’s military role, and who, like Penelope, is both faithful and resourceful in coping alone for long periods of time while her partner is away on deployment.

Moreover, the model military wife is expected to do all of this without complaint. The focus of policy-makers, media reporting, and the military itself, still rests predominantly on combatants themselves. The voices of those whose lives are also profoundly affected by their partners’ career choice are often silenced. Similarly, in the Odyssey Penelope is given little room to share her experiences. Nowhere is this more apparent in the poem than when the couple are finally reunited. Here only four lines (Odyssey 23.302-5) are set aside to summarise Penelope’s story; by comparison, despite the fact that the majority of the poem’s 12,000 lines describe Odysseus’ exploits, 32 lines (Odyssey 23.310-41)—eight times as much space—are devoted to recalling his adventures. If at times the warrior’s wife takes up less space, both in Homer’s poetry and in the minds of the public today, that should merely make us more determined to give her more of our attention.

Featured image: ‘Penelope and the Suitors’ (1912) by John William Waterhouse via Wikimedia Commons

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Policy meets politics on the frontiers of world urbanization

Policy meets politics on the frontiers of world urbanization

At a time when funding for urban infrastructure and the promotion of an overarching global goal—the hard-won SDG 11—have catapulted cities up the international policy agenda, it’s hard to believe that urban issues could ever have been considered marginal.

In relation to much of Africa, however, until about 15 years ago urban development challenges were quite a fringe concern in both policy and academic research. Many governments on the continent—particularly in Eastern Africa, where a suite of countries were governed by regimes whose rebel origins lay deep in the rural peripheries—viewed city-dwellers either with indifference or active hostility. International donor agencies ploughed funds into rural development, and later into aspatial ‘social’ sectors such as education and health. Meanwhile, the renewed interest from China in Africa in the early 2000s was largely seen as being focused on natural resource extraction.

This all changed from around 2010. The intense refocusing of international attention on African cities has sometimes been taken for granted as a natural consequence of the continent’s urbanisation, and of evolving international aid and investment priorities. Yet the focus on external and demographic drivers can obscure how this reorientation has been shaped in strikingly diverse ways by different political contexts.

Against the background of this ‘urban turn’ in twenty-first century Africa, my book Politics and the Urban Frontier explores how domestic politics and power struggles harness the demographic force of urban growth, alongside diversifying flows of international finance, to produce very different kinds of cities. I explore this in a set of countries in East Africa (specifically, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda), which I argue is the global urban frontier: the region with the lowest proportion of people living in urban areas, but also on average the fastest rates of urbanisation. Globally-sanctioned ideals of urban progress have been central to urban development in this region, yet their fate in any given city is partly determined by how they become entangled with other political and economic agendas.

What’s missing in ‘global’ urban policy debates?

The kinds of blueprints that have often been promoted for cities in low-income countries (think of the vogue for ‘self-help’ housing schemes in the 1970s, the prescriptive urban ‘good governance’ reforms dominating the 1990s, or the supposed panacea of land titling since the early 2000s) are rooted in certain generic assumptions about how cities work. These policy approaches are steeped in ideas of private property, infrastructure planning, and capitalist social relations that are largely rooted in industrialised countries elsewhere. African cities are often seen by foreign donors and external investors as substandard versions of the urban norm: low-income, dysfunctional nearly-cities that can be ‘lifted’ with the application of enough funds and the right regulatory frameworks.

Yet cities are not just bundles of land, regulations, and economic resources. They are also fundamentally political arrangements of people and things, and in much of the world in the twenty-first century they are shaped by three intersecting variables, about which conventional urban debates say little.

Yet cities are not just bundles of land, regulations, and economic resources. They are also fundamentally political arrangements of people and things.

First, cities are conditioned by shifting geopolitics, both in terms of regional dynamics of trade, movement, and diplomacy, and in terms of the diversifying forms of international finance on offer from donors and creditors. These financial flows, which wax and wane in response to geopolitical conditions, provide scope for bargaining and deal-making over big investments in and around capital cities, where national government priorities jostle with urban ones.

Second, cities are increasingly subject to dynamics of resurgent authoritarianism—but the nature and impact of this varies by country, given different levels of prior democratic institutional development and very different distributions of power among urban social groups. These differences affect how easily a governing regime can crush urban social opposition and repress city-level institutions.

Third, and related, cities are sites of intensifying quests for political legitimacy by governments seeking to build and hold urban power in the context of competing socioeconomic demands. In East Africa, postcolonial legitimacy to govern has often been sought among the rural majority. This is no longer adequate in the face of rapid urban growth. Urban legitimacy is now a central concern, even for authoritarian regimes—but precisely which urban groups matter most, and what needs to be done to court their support, will differ substantially by context.

Cities, then, are geopolitical hubs in which leaders and governing coalitions draw international flows into localised bargaining processes, in pursuit of (often authoritarian) urban power and legitimacy—not just globalising sites of ‘travelling’ urban planning visions and ideals of entrepreneurialism. The latter aspects of cities—which are no doubt important—have received much greater attention than the former. Politics and the Urban Frontier is part of an attempted rebalancing.

Urban analysis as political work

Focusing on East Africa, the book develops a detailed analytical framework to explain differences in urban trajectories between three cities that face many similar socioeconomic and demographic pressures, and similar flows of ideas and finance. It aims to explain why we see a stark contrast between a sustained commitment to top-down master planning processes in Kigali, accompanied by drive towards high-end service sector-led development, in contrast with a long-term ‘anti-planning’ political culture in Kampala where major urban infrastructures are fragmented and targeted as sources of private gain. Meanwhile, Addis Ababa has seen huge investments in the kinds of large-scale mass transport and housing projects that never get off the ground in the other two cities (though these have taken on a life of their own, due to widespread use by social groups for which they were not initially designed). These differences between the cities are above all rooted in power relations, rather than economic might or depoliticised notions of ‘state capacity’.

Why does all this matter? Aside from academic rebalancing, the book’s argument aims to enhance understanding about which kinds of urban investments will be taken seriously in a given context, and which may collide with political dynamics that mean they founder or twist into radically new directions during implementation. Having the analytical tools to better understand the political agendas and conflicts that underpin urban policy in a given context is essential if the international push towards more inclusive urban futures is to produce results in actual urban places. But attention to the politics of urban development is not just about tailoring urban interventions to political contexts to enhance implementation. It’s also about recognizing how such interventions can either bolster or reconfigure existing power relations, and therefore influence politics itself in a particular place—for better or worse.

There is a lot at stake in Africa’s urban century. We have seen the forms of radical socio-economic polarisation, spatial segregation, and authoritarianism that are possible in cities across the world. Indeed, many African cities were created this way during colonialism, and have struggled to escape this shadow. As the continent becomes an increasingly urban, it is vitally important that investors, donors, analysts, and advisors, who often see themselves as providing technical assistance, realise they are doing fundamentally political work—and not always in the ways they intend.

Featured image by Daggy J Ali via Unsplash (public domain).

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Analysis of the Nuclear Risk Reduction Agenda

Analysis of the Nuclear Risk Reduction Agenda

Nuclear risk analysis will not save us

In a context of intensifying great power competition and deep divergences of view between nuclear and non-nuclear powers on the urgency of nuclear abolition, ‘nuclear risk reduction’ has gained renewed attention as a pragmatic framework for managing and reducing nuclear dangers. The pitch is simple. With more fundamental policy changes either undesirable or out of reach, government officials, parliamentarians, and civil society actors invested in nuclear arms control and disarmament should focus their efforts on humanity’s ‘shared interest’ in curtailing the risk of nuclear weapon use. This means collectively identifying, analysing, and sequestering so-called nuclear risk scenarios.

Centring the nuclear policy conversation on the risk of use, so goes the argument, promises to slash political polarisation between nuclear and non-nuclear powers, increase trust between states, and, most fundamentally, help manage or gradually depress nuclear dangers—perhaps even to the point of a ‘permanent escape’ from nuclear jeopardy. There is broad support among experts and officials, including many supporters of abolition, for devoting time and resources to discussing nuclear risk and risk reduction measures across domestic, bilateral, and multilateral political forums.

In a new article for International Affairs, we interrogate the assumptions underpinning the line of thinking set out above and conclude that the diplomatic orientation variously referred to as the nuclear risk reduction ‘framework’, ‘template’, ‘agenda’, or ‘approach’ offers a false promise for those seeking durable, shared solutions to the nuclear predicament.

To be clear, our gripe in this article is not with specific diplomatic measures or attempts at progressively reducing the salience of nuclear weapons in world politics. We do not mean to suggest that limited technical or diplomatic measures—be it the fitting of electronic locks on warheads, maintenance of systems for crisis communications, or doctrinal changes—cannot be worthwhile or even risk reducing in an objective sense. Instead, our contention is that these measures are not categorically derivable from risk analysis, that nuclear risks and deterrence cannot be reliably ‘managed’ over the long term, and that risk analysis offers a poor overarching framework for those eager to advance nuclear devaluing and disarmament. Advocates of the latter, we suggest, would be better off anchoring their demands either in explicit normative commitments or a general ethic of restraint.

We see three big problems for the risk reduction agenda. The first is that meaningful risk analysis requires access to a level of knowledge and foresight that is quite simply unattainable in the secretive and often contingent world of nuclear politics—a world where even a single error could prove disastrous. Epistemic errors and knowledge gaps could end up leading policymakers down dangerous paths. A second challenge is that risk thinking often encourages an unduly instrumental view of complex techno-political systems, inviting potentially catastrophic overconfidence. As we show in the article, central luminaries of the risk reduction school have systematically underestimated the chances of disaster, placing outsized faith in leaders’ ability to maintain control in difficult situations. The third and final problem we identify is that the risk reduction framework is too indeterminate to steer diplomatic action. As a result, discussions of nuclear risk can easily be coopted, and nuclear-armed leaders cannot be held accountable for their actions one way or another.

Tellingly, the risk reduction agenda has lent itself to everything from calls for deep nuclear stockpile reductions to demands for new nuclear weapons acquisitions and a resumption of explosive nuclear testing. And as long as nuclear risks remain effectively unmeasurable, risk analysis cannot adjudicate these disagreements. What’s more, and contrary to what its proponents often claim, the risk reduction agenda is severely circumscribed by the putative requirements of nuclear deterrence. Deterrence practices, after all, are necessarily ‘risky’ as the credibility of nuclear deterrence, in particular extended nuclear deterrence, depends on ‘threats that leave something to chance’.

Proponents of the nuclear risk reduction agenda would be right to point out that the current international security environment does not look particularly conducive to radical nuclear policy changes. Implementing common-sense measures of restraint would be better than doing nothing, they might argue. We do not disagree. Our objection is that the radical uncertainty that defines the nuclear world renders ‘risk reduction’ a poor overarching frame for diplomatic action; the discourse of risk, we suggest, does not offer advantageous terrain for advocates of change. If what proponents of nuclear risk reduction really want to do is to promote nuclear de-alerting, new or improved communication hotlines, ‘deterrence only’ postures, risk reduction centres, or the adoption of no-first use policies, they should just do that and not invite a discussion about unmeasurable risks that can easily be coopted by those eager to do the opposite. The search for a consensus-based, ‘pragmatic’ approach to nuclear arms control and disarmament—a nuclear politics without politics—is in vain.

Feature image by Kilian Karger via Unsplash.

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