Tag: Global South

Preparing for the day after COVID: notes from a short talk by Adil Najam

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Event invite sent on my personal email. Najam sb advertised the talk on Twitter. There were roughly 110 participants in the discussion hosted on zoom.

Based on his experience & analysis about the novel coronavirus so far, Najam sb speaks on the magnitude of disruption & rehabilitation effort, rethinking human & global security, role of poorer nations like Pakistan, changes in higher education & dealing with anxiety. I missed the first 10 minutes of this roughly 50 minute session. Following excerpts are mostly from the Q&A. Although I have quoted him as accurately as I could please treat the following content as a paraphrasing. If you want to quote Najam sb publicly from this post, I suggest you drop a line to Aga Khan University requesting permission to do so.

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Given the scale of disruption related to the novel coronavirus experts that I know agree that the recession will not be of the usual kind. 

The closest example that comes to our mind is that it will be like the Post-war reconstruction, i.e. after the Great Wars.

That’s the bad thing.

Good thing is that you now have time to think.

Think about how I can make that big change (that is required)?

Social changes are the most uncertain. How work will happen, how our communications will happen, how education will change etc.

How society will think about its understanding of security?

We will have to rethink security. If security for us is important than what is it that makes us insecure?

For instance, front line work has become dangerous for medical staff. Nature of (security related) work is changing.

We find ourselves unprepared for calamities like health emergencies for instance. Why was that?

Human arrogance is a big issue.

But right now we have time where billions of people are introspecting. 

This is not just about health. After this we have the issue of climate change. We were already aware of these problems before but now we are forced to act. 

I don’t believe in conspiracies when truth is already so strange.

Governments versus people

This virus won’t be beaten by government action. It will be beaten by personal action. 

This is a test for people. Not governments.

The crisis is not just that we don’t know much about the virus itself. The crisis we are facing everywhere is the crises of the health system. Don’t have enough beds, enough trained people, field camps are coming up, stadiums are being transformed. This is a rethinking of security.

But we are far prepared to kill each other than save each other. 

Why is it that when someone dies because of enemy is declared a martyr/patriot but when someone dies due to drinking dirty water it is not as important? I’m not saying taking a bullet for your country is not important. But it makes you wonder. This doesn’t mean making defense less important but making health security more important. We must think this very seriously. 

Will there be a World War III ?

With the technology of destruction available to us my hope is that we would not need bullets to fly. 

Some experts believe that we may be already living in a third world war, or even fourth or a fifth. That the third war already happened somewhere around the Cold War era. 

Have you noticed that in the last few months we have been talking about availability of mask, instead of oil? Our conception of what is valuable is changing. It may be that nations with food stores, medical doctors (which Pakistan has many), will become important. 

Regarding IMF & poor nations like Pakistan

Imran Khan (IK) statement requesting aid is very understandable. It should have come earlier. There is a major IMF meeting happening next week. I’m convinced there will be debt relief. IK is being polite, but poor nations should be asking more because the scale of crisis is so huge that even aid won’t be enough. 

Now what will happen with Chinese Aid, I don’t know. 

But we need to decide what kind of work matters, what relationships matter. Basically, what are our priorities.

Is there a power shift from West to Asia? & what is the role for Pakistan?

Shift was already happening. Rise of Great Power China & the reaction of US was already happening. COVID 19 has just put this shift on high momentum.

Pakistan should chart an ‘even’ ‘even’ course. We should keep out of it. There are those who are still advocating playing this game but we should not become a playground for Great Powers. We must make ourselves economically, socially, politically stronger when Great Powers are in transitions. When you are not a Great Power yourself and play these games, you become fodder. There is a saying in Africa that when elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled. 

Impact on higher education

It’s clear that big changes are around the corner.

In education there will be difficulties in the short term. Value of higher education will increase. 

Nearly certainly classes will go hybrid. 

An army of professors in US are findings new ways to teach. Many are using online classes for the first time and have realized that it works. On the other end, students are becoming more open to online learning. 

In the US another issue is what subjects people will want to learn?

The corona generation will create a new kind of intellectual environment. For those set to join higher education in their lives now things are about to change completely. These people maybe even more important than generation before or even after this period. 

Older generation of professors like me will not be in the forefront because our minds are wired in a previous era.

Dealing w/ anxiety

With all that is happening every day. There is not a night in the last month where I didn’t go to bed with at least these two thoughts; 1- how small my problems are in comparison to other people problems, that student of mine that is cramped in a two room apartment that now has to be converted into a class room, those students who may have contracted COVID, those who have lost loved one; 2- gratitude, a sense of how lucky I am. That there is someone standing at the grocery store who will serve me rice, or at the hospital who will treat me when I’m sick. 

Because I’m so lucky I owe it to everyone to be a more responsible person. 

The Rise of the Global South

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The emergence of the Global South has become an increasingly popular colloquialism within the academic community. It refers to most of the countries of Africa, Central and Latin America and Asia as opposed to the Global North which makes up the developed part of North America, Europe and East Asia.

The term, traditionally synonymous with the third world now represents countries that have experienced rapid economic growth in the past three decades, even during times of recession. At present, if we consider an obvious indicator of growth – that South-South economic cooperation now exceeds South-North cooperation by $2.2 trillion i.e. over one quarter of global trade- and by UNDP 2013 estimates that 80% of the world’s middle class will be living in developing countries – it can be assured that the South will have a tremendous impact in reshaping international political and economic systems.

The launch of the New Development Bank (NDB) last month by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa collectively known as the BRICS nations is one such impact. The move is being looked upon as a practical measure to counter shortcomings of existing world development institutions – specifically the World Bank and the IMF –  which through their prejudice for the US and European national interests and harsh constitutionalities have always been a bone of contention for emerging economies.  

But the bank is a small chapter in a wider debate surrounding shifts in the global balance of power. This shift is not simply the result of better policies on infrastructure development, research investment and trade; it marks a broader ideological evolution in the world’s understanding of such systems by learning from South-South direct intellectual and cultural dialogue which was tradtionally always contextualized through the West.  

In a recent Time Magazine editorial Wall Street’s Values Are Strangling American Business, Rana Foroohar talks about how in highly globalized capitalistic markets, such as the US, the need to please the shareholders outweigh the needs of long term sustainable growth of companies. This result in markets influencing businesses more than vice versa; against what capitalist system originally sought to achieve. The financial crisis of 2007-2008 thus has increased the grasp of finance on corporate America.

Faroohar goes further by citing a McKinsey Global Institute report, that by 2025, 7 out of 10 largest global firms will be from emerging economies. Moreover, they will primarily be family owned!

Although the significance of the Global South gets lost in our World’s multipolar political rehtoric in the public sphere, the knowledge economy operates at a scientific level. Thus in conferences and lecture rooms, academics from the Global North are debating on poignant lessons that can be gleaned from researches based on South-South interactions.

For instance, Kanchan Chandra, Professor of Politics at NYU, taking Indian ethnic politics as a case study in her paper Ethnic Party and Democratic Stability, suggests a model that counters conventional wisdom that ethnic divisions destabilize democratic institutions. In fact she proposes ways in which certain dimensions of ethnicism in state institutions can enhance their efficacy for South Asian democracies.      

Similarly, Hearns-Branaman, lecturer at National Institute of Development Administration in Bangkok, on defining the political economy of media of China writes that post-1970s period has seen all Chinese news media become completely financially independent from the government while remaining an integral part of the government and adherence with the Communist Party’s line. This is in stark contrast to the widely held dystopian beliefs about media in China.

Such papers are a miniscule glimpse of the large body of excellent work that is being produced through South-South interactions. More importantly they have even greater significance for developing countries like Pakistan, Indonesia, Chile, Poland and Nigeria where template solutions adopted from mature democracies are deemed to fail; where indegenous solutions along the lines of similar transitioning democracies are more relevant.           

If we take the example of our media industry, it’s not mere coincedence that out of the five telecommunication companies operating in Pakistan – perhaps the only area of the communication industry where private foreign investment is officially allowed – four have investors in Russia, Middle East and China. Furthermore, it is widely believed that the decision for electronic media liberalization was influenced by the vibrant Indian media.

It is highly likely that in future developments in our media industry, such nations will play an important role. It is thus imperative for Pakistani scholars and policy makers to rethink their position in the globalsphere by looking beyond the West. Three of the BRICS economies share our part of the continent and we share borders with two of them. There are fascinating propsects for infrastructure development, trade, cross-cultural dialogue and knowledge transfer usually dominated by a North-South aid paradigm.

However, we must approach the developing world with cautious optimism. Verily, unlike the North the political systems in the South are rather diverse and volatile. But Dr Brilliant Mhlanga, a research fellow at Brown University International Relations Institute, who sees interesting comparisons between the ethnic issues of Pakistan and South Africa says that that itself should be seen as a point of strength than a weakness. If anything, it (NDB) buttresses the view of ‘Unity in Diversity’, as opposed to unity in oneness.

For now we should see the NDB as coming to fruition of ideas whose inception dates back to the Bandung Conference of the 1950s. Perhaps, the non-alignment movement is relavent more than ever now.