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The Rise of Digital Propaganda – An ‘Alt-Right’ Phenomenon?

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by Tom Ascott

Co-founder of Breitbart News Steve Bannon described the news website as a platform for the alt-right (Image Credit: Wikimedia)

Without social media, the alt-right would not exist, Donald Trump would not be president, and the UK would not be leaving the European Union. As the American Sociological Association put it ‘the rise of the alt-right would not be possible without the infrastructure built by the tech industry’. Social media is becoming the most important way for political campaigns to reach out to potential voters, and online misinformation campaigns use coordinated inauthentic activity to subtly manipulate citizens. It is the fastest and can also be the cheapest way of targeting an audience, much more so than door to door campaigning or flyering.

The alt-right isn’t simply more popular online than the left. In fact, there are far more left-wing political blogs, and blog readers often skew left-wing. Right-wingers tend to engage less with political discourse online and, when they do, they are more likely to be bi-partisan. Despite that, the alt-right is far more successful online when they do engage.

The Success of Alt-Right Activity

Right-wing political groups have had a significant impact on international affairs through their online activity. By successfully using data harvesting, micro-targeting and meme warfare, they have sent out tailored, political messages to individuals or small groups, which are never seen by others. The messages leverage the data they have mined to be as effective as possible. It may appear unusual that there has been no left-wing equivalent of the Cambridge Analytica scandal – and it could be quite a while before we see the emergence of such – but it will be crucial to understand how the left might channel such activities.

The closest we have seen to a left-wing version of Cambridge Analytica is Project Narwhal, the database that the Obama team built in 2012. Project Narwhal started by slowly and manually joining discrete databases, each with a few data points on a single voter, to build their profile. Years later those profiles had grown, and the project had 4,000– 5,000 data points on each American voter. Looking back at the ways the media fawned over Obama’s data strategy, it is not a surprise that the right took the ball and ran with it.

It is an anomaly that the alt-right thrives online. Identification can be risky for the alt-right. Those who are seen and identified attending rallies can lose their jobs or face other repercussions. Extreme-right opinions that are clearly racist, sexist or xenophobic can lead to users being blocked on mainstream platforms, so these users begin to ‘join smaller, more focused platforms’. Alt-right figures Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos were banned from Facebook because they ‘promote or engage in violence and hate’. Laura Loomer, an alt-right activist, was banned from Twitter for tweeting at Ilhan Omar that Islam is a religion where “homosexuals are oppressed… women are abused and… forced to wear the hijab.”   As a result, the alt-right has become more digitally agile, using tools to exploit larger platforms and reshare their views. Platforms like Gab have a much higher rate of hate speech than Twitter. Discord has also been used to radicalise and ‘red pill’ users towards extreme-rightist beliefs.

The tools of the alt-right represent tools for disruption. It is only by disrupting the status-quo that Breitbart founder Steve Bannon believes that the alt-right can break into the political spectrum. These tools can be used to persuade or dissuade; Pro-Publica found that adds targeting liberals often urged them to vote for candidates or parties that did not exist.

The Left’s Slow Response

One reason why left-wing political parties have not used similar tools is exactly that conflation of such activities with the alt-right. Though there is plenty of dissent in left-wing politics over how centered or left-leaning it should continue to be, groups from the left simply do not identify as alt-left. Cambridge Analytica has offered the alt-right a chance to disrupt the right-wing, but there is much less desire to disrupt on the left. Instead of a true alt-left there is only ‘an anti-Alt-Right‘. Bannon believes that Cambridge Analytica, and the chaos it created, was a tool that the right-wing needed in order to survive. The ability to harvest data and use it to target specific individuals with political messaging appears to be a content-neutral process.

Any organisation could have done it, but the first to do so was Cambridge Analytica. It was an act of ‘evil genius’ to find individuals who weren’t motivated enough to engage in politics, target them with personalised messages and convert them to their specific brand of right-wing thinking, or to urge left-wing voters to disengage. It is hard to assess how prevalent online misinformation campaigns are. Groups will use neutral-sounding names, mask the political nature of their ads, or identify as partisan. Their only aim, however, is to confuse or dissuade voters.

Consequences for Social Media Platforms

The first-comer has it the easiest and copying the process will be extremely difficult. Following the scandal, the infrastructure for data harvesting has started to be regulated. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) was granted new powers in the Data Protection Act 2018 and the European Union introduced its General Data Protection Regulation in response to the scandal. Facebook has been forced to refine its policies on data sharing and, as a result, new data from the platform is less available now than previously.

After the scandal broke, the platform started to audit data that apps could collect and began blocking apps that continued to take users’ data. As Mark Zuckerberg’s continued appearances in front of Congress show, if Facebook will not regulate itself, then perhaps it will be broken up. Where anti-trust laws may seek to punish companies for harming the consumer, it will be hard to penalise Facebook. Users continue to opt-in, voluntarily hand over data, and enjoy time browsing their personalised, if pyrrhic, feeds.

Tom Ascott is the Digital Communications Manager at the Royal United Services Institute. You can find more of his articles here.

Conflict, Competition and Legitimacy: Holding on to the Memory of Aung San

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by Anna Plunkett

A defaced statue of Aung San in Myitikyna (Photo credit: The Irrawaddy)

 

General Aung San is venerated throughout Burma as the father of the nation. He is remembered as a strong leader and switched on politician, remembered as a man of honour and loyalty that has awarded him the local title of Bogyoke. He was the leader of the Thirty Comrades movement and was set to become the much-loved leader of Myanmar’s first independent government and as such has been memorialised throughout Myanmar with statues, buildings and roads among the most common commemorations. Perhaps the most famous use of his name sits with his own daughter who conflated their names as she is known today – Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. He is a man of great importance in modern day Myanmar, his status only growing since his daughter took up the mantel as state counsellor after the 2015 election. Yet, the growing endorsement of Aung San has proved controversial with students and locals in Karenni state being arrested for their opposition to the erection of a General Aung San statue in the state capital’s local park. This article will analyse the reasoning behind the growing popularity of the General’s iconic image and why such increases in popularity lack uniformity throughout Myanmar.

Legitimacy behind the General’s Image

General Aung San’s image can be found throughout Myanmar and there is no doubt it demands a great level of respect. He is remembered as the father of the nation, the leader of the Thirty Comrades, a Japanese-trained liberation army that fought the allied forces during World War Two. He transcended his military might to show his political prowess as a statesman, leading the Burmese forces to switch allegiance from the Japanese and strike deals with the allied forces toward the end of the war.[1] Then negotiating with British colonial forces to bring Burma its independence soon after the war in 1947. During this time, he also married a nurse, Ma Khin Kyi who would later become one of the country’s first diplomats and had three children. Yet, in the post-war period the Burmese nationalists began to factionalise and on 19 July 1947, he was assassinated during a committee meeting in Central Rangoon. It is suspected to have been an act by his political rivals within the nationalist movement. His death shocked and saddened the new nation, which -now leaderless- suffered from a power vacuum that left the central government scrabbling for control over Myanmar’s expansive territories. It would take General Ne Win’s military coup in 1962 and the famous ‘four cuts’ counter-insurgency strategy to restore the central government’s control over the majority of the country.

For his leadership role as a military general and as a politician General Aung San has historically been dubbed the father of the Burmese nation. He has also been titled as the father of the army. Though the relationship between the two has been turbulent over the successive military governments in Myanmar, he was a great source of legitimacy throughout the Ne Win period (1962-1988) as Ne Win himself was a member of the Thirty Comrades led by Aung San. This close relationship to General Aung San provided Ne Win with personal legitimacy as ruler and caretaker of both the military and the Burmese state. As such, during this period the imagery and promotion of General Aung San was profligate. Yet the bond between the father of the nation and his armed forces, which controlled the state lost favour after the 8888 uprising when his daughter rose to popularity on the back of the pro-democracy movement.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and her Father’s Image

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi returned to Myanmar to care for her dying mother in 1988. Having studied at Oxford, she had married an academic there and settled down in her university town with their two children. Her father died when Suu Kyi was only two years old, she found herself witness to a growing uprising against Myanmar’s autocratic state. Approached by leaders of the movement Aung San Suu Kyi joined and lead the pro-democracy activists, appealing for non-violent and peaceful protest against the state. Support for the pro-democracy movement and the soon to be founded National League of Democracy blossomed under her leadership. Much like her military opponents in government she claimed her right to speak and lead the people of Myanmar through her relationship to her father, giving her first speech to the masses in-front of a poster of the General. She reclaimed the icon of the father of the nation for the opposition, using it to build her own support and support for the NLD. The importance of familial connections and networks in Myanmar can be evidenced through the success of this manoeuvre. After the brutal repression of the 8888 uprising which ended with widespread bloodshed in the capital, images of both ‘the lady’ and Aung San plummeted in popularity with the former being officially being banned under the  new military government[2].

An Aung San Statue in Bogyoke Park Taunggyi (Photo credit: author)

Since 2015 the military and the National League for Democracy have become uncooperative partners in the halls of government in Myanmar. Daw Suu’s party have taken over the parliamentary houses with landslide victories in both, yet the military’s grip on power remains. Their twenty-five per cent seat allocation in those same houses and control of central department have solidified their role as overseers of Myanmar’s political arenas[3]. It is therefore, perhaps surprising to see the increasing propagation of an image over which these two political forces have competed over in the past. General Aung San and his memory have become something of a myth tied to the legitimacy of the political forces within Myanmar’s political arena. His period of dis-favour is over, with the seventieth anniversary of Martyrs Day receiving special commemoration in Yangon in 2017. He is both the father of the army and nation and the father of the democracy movement (or at least its leader) and now this image of fatherly support is not in competition but rather represents the rightness of such cooperation between the two sides. As these two competing political forces, the military and the NLD attempt to navigate the spaces of co-existence they have found a common ground, or at least common imagery for legitimacy within General Aung San.

Aung San’s Image: Divisive Locally

Whilst the institutional support and favour has returned to General Aung San and his sacrifices to the establishment of the Burmese State, support at the local level has not followed. With the centenary of the Bogyoke’s birth in 2015 and the seventieth anniversary of his death in 2017 the unveiling of a new set of statues may not be that surprising, particularly given the changing political arena.  Nevertheless, such celebrations have been far from uniform. Protests in Karenni and Mon against the dedication and commemoration of new statues and bridges respectively have highlighted underlying tensions within Myanmar’s memory of the Bogyoke. Despite rising tensions the erection of such statues has continued including the unveiling of the largest General Aung San Statue in Mandalay in June 2017 prior to the July commemoration.

For whilst the memory and iconic image of General Aung San may legitimise the current governmental institutional establishment it has left many minority groups dissatisfied. General Aung San may have been the father of the nation that delivered Myanmar its independence, however many minorities felt betrayed by the independence negotiations which left them without a right to an independent state or secession. The infamous Panglong Agreement the General Aung San brokered with the ethnic minorities in 1947 provided some vague commitments to equality with few specifics on minority rights or protections.

The failure of the successive governments to protect minorities or recognise their independence from the state has left most with a sense of betrayal in relation to the father of the nation. The image and icon which is now appearing in their capitals, on their road signs, in relation to the infrastructure projects being developed throughout the borderlands. Rather then promoting the cooperation between the two major political forces within Myanmar, Aung San imagery is becoming the face of an encroaching hostile state within minority regions. Rather then unifying or celebrating the diversity of Myanmar through the promotion of a diverse set of icons the focus on the first nationalist leader is being perceived as at best centrist arrogance and at worst forced domination by the ethnic majority.

Conclusion

The manipulation of such imagery and historic icons within any state’s history is an important part of building a state narrative and sense of homeland. It is a history and discourse that will always be built by the victor of the struggle. Yet if Myanmar’s wishes to increase the inclusion of its ethnic minorities rather then lengthen the already extensive civil war in Myanmar they may do well to tread lightly with the establishment of such a uniform and state centric narrative in its borderlands. Myanmar is an ethnically and politically diverse state, it is also a community waiting for change and development away from the historical state domination. The commemoration of those from outside of the government-military institution even just within these localities could be an effective tool to build cooperation and goodwill over the hostility that is being entrenched through the dominance of majority narratives in minority and historically weak state regions.

Anna is a doctoral researcher in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. She received her BA in Politics and Economics from the University of York, before receiving a scholarship to continue her studies at York with an MA in Post-War Recovery. She was the recipient of the Guido Galli Award for her MA dissertation. Her primary interests include conflict and democracy at the sub-national level, understanding how minor conflicts impact democratic realisation within quasi-post conflict states. Her main area of focus is Burma’s ethnic borderlands and ongoing conflicts within the region. She has previously worked as a human rights researcher focusing on military impunity in Burma and has conducted work on evaluating Bosnia’s post-war recovery twenty years after the Dayton Peace Accords. You can follow her on Twitter @AnnaBPlunkett.

[1] See Seekins(2000) for an in-depth analysis of the special Burman-Sino relationship and the role of Aung San as a political and military leader.

[2] Testimony from authors in field interviews with activists from the 8888 student protests

[3] For further analysis on the role of the military in Myanmar’s parliament see Than (2018)

A Balancing Act? Women’s Participation in Indian Politics

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By Saawani Raje

17 May 2019

Indian Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman with military chiefs (Indian Express)

On 9 August 1942, Aruna Asaf Ali walked into a highly charged gathering of thousands of Indians at the Gowalia Tank Maidan in Mumbai and unfurled the tricolour flag launching the ‘Quit India’ movement against British rule. A prominent political leader in the Indian nationalist movement, she later went on to become the first mayor of Delhi in 1958.

Female leadership of this kind was not without precedent in India. As early as 1925, Sarojini Naidu became the president of the Indian National Congress, the main nationalist party in India before and after independence. Since then, the number of women in leadership positions in Indian politics has only increased. Indira Gandhi became the first female Prime Minister of India in 1966 and the second democratically elected female leader in the world. Sonia Gandhi, President of the Congress Party from 1998 to 2017 was one of the most powerful women in India and led her party to power twice at the Centre in two general elections. Other prominent female figures include Jayalalitha Jayaram– the first female Opposition leader in India, Mayawati, the leader of the third-largest party in India in terms of vote share, and Mamata Banerjee, the only female Chief Minister in India today.

Significantly, both the Defence Minister and the External Affairs Minister in India today—Nirmala Sitharaman and Sushma Swaraj— are women, holding portfolios that have been traditionally male-dominated. While cause for celebration, these examples are the exceptions to the rule when it comes to female participation in politics and decision-making.

This piece explores the juxtaposition of women’s participation in politics in India—as voters and as political leaders. It argues that using examples of powerful women leaders to point to the success of female empowerment in India ignores more structural and systemic limitations women in politics face in India today.

Women as voters 

Women have played a key role as voters since the first election in India. With the introduction of Universal Adult Franchise, women were given equal voting rights to men since India became independent in 1947.  However, in a stunning manifestation of the entrenched patriarchy, many women, especially in North India, wanted to be registered on the electoral role as “wife of” or “daughter of” instead of under their own names. The electoral officials did not allow this and Ornit Shani estimates that out of a total of nearly 80 million potential women voters in independent India, nearly 2.8 million failed to disclose their names and therefore could not be included in electoral rolls.

Women’s participation as voters in the decades after Indian independence remained low—female voter turnout lagged behind male turnout by 11.3% in 1967. This gap began to narrow in the 1990s, falling to 8.4% in 2004 and further reducing to 4.4% between 2004 and 2009. The past election in 2014 saw the closing of this gender gap to its narrowest on record—only 1.8%. In fact, in half of all Indian states and union territories, the female turnout surpassed the male turnout. This trend was repeated in the recent state elections held between 2012 and 2018 where women voters surpassed the male turnout in twenty-three Indian states.

Women casting their vote in a recent election (LiveMint)

This has made female voters a significant voter block for the leading political parties in the run up to the elections—and women and women’s issues have started to come to the fore in election rhetoric. At a recent rally in Rajasthan, Congress President Rahul Gandhi said that his party would seek to appoint women as Chief Ministers in half the states it rules by 2024. Another example is the controversy surrounding Gandhi’s statement that the Prime Minister had “asked a woman to defend him”, referring to Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s speech in a parliamentary debate about the contentious Rafale deal. The BJP responded with alacrity. Prime Minister Modi immediately rebuked the Congress leader for his “insult to the women in the country,” while BJP President Amit Shah demanded that Gandhi apologise for the remark. This seems to reflect an increase in the power of women voters. Women are now a significant enough voting block for political parties to turn comments like these into a battleground for their rhetoric in the run-up to the election. In contrast however, women continue to be underrepresented in policymaking roles within politics.

Women as political leaders 

Women have occupied positions of power in Indian politics. Women made up almost five percent of elected representatives in the first Lok Sabha (lower house) in 1952 as compared to two percent in the US House of Representatives and three in the UK Parliament during the same period. However, over the next seven decades, women’s growth in policymaking roles has stagnated. Women make up only 11.2% of the members of the Lok Sabha after the 2014 elections[1] and only 9% in state legislatures. India ranks fifth in women’s political representation in parliament in South Asia, behind Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal.

There are many reasons for this underrepresentation. A significant factor is patriarchal attitudes towards female leadership in politics, where women politicians are often seen as fulfilling certain gender-specific roles. An exemplar of this is Indira Gandhi’s rise to the Congress party leadership—a move orchestrated by senior Congress leaders who saw Gandhi as a puppet willing to do their bidding. According to the Economic Survey 2018, other major obstacles faced by aspiring female representatives include domestic responsibilities, female illiteracy, financial disparity, lack of confidence and an increase in threats of violence.

An initiative to combat this disparity was implemented in 1993 as part of the 73rd amendment of the Indian constitution, whereby 33% of all seats in local self-government institutions were reserved for women. Since the enactment of this legislation, the representation of women in local administrations has increased to 44.2%. A study commissioned by the Poverty Action Lab showed that this increase in female representation heightened police responsiveness to crimes against women, improved children’s nutrition and education, improved male perceptions of female leaders, increased the aspirations of girls, and helped women get elected in subsequent elections.

In spite of this, deep-rooted structural problems remain. In 1996, the Women’s Reservation Bill was introduced which proposed to reserve 33% of the seats in the Lok Sabha for women. The bill was passed by the Rajya Sabha (upper house) in 2010 but lapsed in 2014 with the dissolution of Parliament. Passing this bill was also an election pledge of the current government but, five years later, there remains little sign of it becoming law. This bill has been left languishing for 22 years, and the representation of women therefore remains severely limited. The women voters turning out in large numbers actually have very few women to represent their issues and views in law-making bodies.

The political imbalance

Female representation in Indian politics thus remains conflicted and suffers from deep structural and systemic difficulties. The many examples of female leadership in Indian politics do tell a story of female empowerment—but celebrating this without looking deeper into existing disparities risks only half the story being told. To really address the gender disparity in Indian politics, the focus instead needs to turn to the representation of women as decision-makers and policymakers—the keepers of real political power in the world’s largest democracy.

Saawani is a PhD candidate at the King’s India Institute and a recipient of the King’s India Scholarship. Her PhD research is primarily a historical examination into civil-military decision-making during crises in independent India. After graduating from the University of Cambridge, she obtained an MA in South Asia and Global Security. She was previously a Research Associate at the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi, on the Oxford University Press Handbook on Indian Foreign Relations. While at King’s, she has been the Programme Manager for the FCO Diplomatic Academy South Asia Conference and has been teaching undergraduates at the Department of War Studies. Her wider research interests include diplomatic history, foreign policy, diplomacy and the study of contemporary conflicts. You can follow her on Twitter @saawaniraje.

Strife Feature – Political leaders with military backgrounds: a comparison of India and the US

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by Saawani Raje

George Washington at the Battle of Monmouth

The US and India are similar nations in many respects. They have both had fairly stable trajectories of progress in the course of their democratic histories. Covering large areas of geographical territory, they are both nationalistic territorial nations with a colonial past. Significantly, they both have a history of successful civilian rule uninterrupted by military coups or takeovers. However, they appear to differ in one important aspect— in America, civilian leaders having military experience is common and politically advantageous. Multiple Presidents were serving Generals prior to ascending to the Presidency. In India by contrast, it is rare for political leaders at any level to have come from a military background.

This difference is interesting because it speaks to the civil-military ‘problematique’, which has been a central concern of civil-military relations theorists for the past several decades. This problematique is the challenge of reconciling a military strong enough to do anything civilians ask them to, with a military subordinate enough to do only what civilians authorise them to do.[1] A key question in this civil-military debate is the role of the military in the polity of a nation, especially in its decision-making process. A brief survey of military involvement in political decision-making in two of the world’s biggest democracies— India and the US — brings forth an interesting distinction. The difference in American and Indian attitudes towards military participation in  politics, I argue, stems from the role conflict has played in the creation of both these nations.

 

Military involvement in the United States 

In a TIME article of April 2016, Mark Thompson discusses why Americans wanted a military general in the White House. Looking back at American history, the trend of military leaders eventually becoming civilian leaders is fairly typical. George Washington was the first general who went on to serve as the President of the United States, and twelve Generals have won American Presidential elections since. Significantly, only twelve out of the forty-three American presidents have never served in the military. In the 2017-2018 Congress, 102 members (18.8% of the leadership) had served or were serving in the military.

A 2017 Gallup poll shows that American society’s confidence in the military remains high, at 72%. Additionally, public endorsement of presidential candidates by retired Generals and military officers has become a mainstay of the presidential race. In the 2004 Bush-Kerry presidential race, twelve retired generals and admirals endorsed Kerry, himself a military veteran. Kerry’s Vietnam war record became a matter of controversy, and General Merrill McPeak eventually appeared in television advertisements defending Kerry and his service in Vietnam. On the other side, retired General Tommy Franks who had the distinguished military record of being the architect of the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, endorsed George Bush and went on to speak in support of his candidacy at the Republican National Convention. In 2008, Colin Powell , a retired four-star general and the National Security Advisor under George Bush (2001-2005) famously crossed party lines to endorse Obama on national television. Political endorsements from military leaders reached a fever pitch during the Clinton-Trump race. In September 2016, Clinton touted 100 endorsements from former military leaders after Trump displayed 88 retired military figures who backed his campaign. The involvement of military officials in American politics, whether as leaders or leader-makers continues unabated.

 

Civil-military gap in India 

The situation in India could not be more dissimilar. The civil-military dissonance is so pronounced that there seems to be no evidence of polls, policy briefs or literature that even engage with the notion of a civilian leader with military experience taking office. This lack of any evidence points to how deeply entrenched the civil-military separation is in the minds of the Indian populace and political and military elites alike. Since 1947 (when India became independent), there has not been a single Prime Minister with military experience. Defence analyst Nitin Gokhale opines that the ‘havoc’ wrought by ‘an indifferent polity and insensitive bureaucracy’ to India’s armed forces ‘has hit the ordinary soldier hard….The Indian soldier today stands at the crossroads, confused about his status in the society and unsure about his own role in a nation led by “faux peaceniks”’. Retired military men make rare appearances on news channels— never the campaign trail— and restrict themselves to talking about military matters. In recent years, the military has shown an increased willingness to get involved in the polity. In 2007, for example, the Indian army opposed the demilitarisation of the Siachen glacier. The Army chief General J J Singh publicly expressed his views  more than once in a country where it is extremely unusual for military leadership to vocalise their disagreement with civilian leaders. These instances are, however, not a mainstay of political debates around policymaking and certainly never crossing the border into civilian leadership, in sharp contrast to the US.

 

Role of military conflict as influencing factor 

This poses an interesting question: What could be the factors that influence this significant difference in the way military involvement in politics is perceived in the US as opposed to India? I would argue that the role military conflict played in the formation of a nation and national identity is a significant factor in influencing attitudes to military involvement in politics. Military conflict played a significant role in the development of the US as a nation. The US has been in a state of either declared war or conflict for 79 of the 179 years, from just before the founding of Jamestown until 1785, nominally known as the end of the Revolution. It thus had a predominantly military experience of colonialism. The military also played a crucial role in the War of Revolution marking the end of colonial rule. The War was an event with mass participation— according to some historical estimates, two out of every five white American men who could serve did so either in the state militias or the Continental Army.

Royster proposes that military service was the source of an ‘American’ character.[2]  The Revolutionary War created a ‘dual army’ tradition that combined a citizen-soldier reserve (which was the militia) with a small professional force ‘that provided military expertise and staying power’.[3] This democratised and nationalised military service has lasting legacies on the psyche of American society regarding attitudes to military service. Furthermore, Congress in 1775 created the Continental Army commanded by George Washington. This Continental Army was built on ideological motivation and a sense of loyalty that surprised most foreign observers. Baron von Closen of the French army exclaimed: ‘It is incredible that soldiers composed of men of every age, even children of fifteen, of whites and blacks, almost naked, unpaid, and rather poorly fed, can march so well and withstand fire so steadfastly!’[4]

This and Washington’s appointment as General of the Continental Army despite the ‘hypersensitive fear of military ascendancy’ are significant.[5] Washington remained deferential to Congress even when its inefficiency threatened the army’s survival. Despite the prominent position held by the military, Washington set forth an example of civil supremacy while commanding the army. This attitude and his later Presidency could have contributed to erasing civilian suspicion of ex-military men becoming civilian leaders.  In sum, it can be argued that armed conflict and the military experience— whether for independence or for individual rights as Englishmen within the empire played an intrinsic role in shaping the American identity as a society and nation.

 

Transfer of Power from the British to Indian government on 15 August 1947

 

Indian independence and the military

 The Indian experience of the handover of power was very different. First, unlike in America, the Transfer of Power from the British to the Indian government was a predominantly administrative procedure that did not involve physical military confrontation. The army was seen as a tool by the British and Indian civilian leaders who used it for their own political ends. Second, the British recruitment policy for the colonial Indian army focused on drawing recruits from select communities, alienating the armed forces from the rest of the population involved in the nationalist movement. This was in contrast to the experience of the US militias, which democratised and nationalised military service and experience. This also built a deep-rooted suspicion between the civilian leaders of India and the military (which was headed by British commanders-in-chief for a few years even after India became independent). This suspicion led to institutional arrangements separating civilian and military spheres. The position of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces was abolished, soon after independence in 1947, and the President of India (a nominal civilian head) was made the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.[6] Significantly, a Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs occupied the top tier of higher defence management in India. This was a purely civilian committee and included senior ministers from the Prime Minister’s Cabinet.[7]

Additionally, lasting attitudes of civilian and military leaders also did not allow the overlapping of military and civilian leadership to the extent that was prevalent in America. In September 1946, a year before India became independent, Jawaharlal Nehru (the first Prime Minister of India) wrote to the Indian Commander-in-Chief Sir Auchinleck. As a ‘coup-proofing’ strategy, Nehru felt ‘the need to make the army firmly responsible to India’s elected representatives in the future’. This resulted in Indian institution-building regarding defence and military matters that continuously evaluates the army to  prevent it from getting ‘out of control’. For example, the Commander-in-Chief was removed from the Cabinet in 1946— a privilege he had enjoyed thus far— to keep him out of political decision-making. Additionally, all significant communications and decisions have to go through civilian officials and politicians at the Ministry of Defence little or no military experience. Thus, decision-making in India with regard to military matters was firmly established as the preserve of the civilian bureaucrats.

 

Conclusions

 It can be proposed that the stake of military conflict in the creation of an independent nation is a factor influencing social and political attitudes towards the mixing of civilian and military spheres. This is not to argue that this is the only factor. The time periods in which India and the US secured independence are drastically different. Furthermore, India follows the Westminster parliamentary system and not the Presidential system, which influences public opinion on political leadership in general. Additionally, while India has been involved in a protracted conflict with Pakistan over Kashmir since independence, it has not had the direct experience of experiencing the World Wars or Cold War as an independent state or major party. These factors contribute to civilian perceptions of military involvement in political spheres.

 Lawrence Freedman in his recent work ‘The Future of War: A History’ emphasises the need to keep context central to the study of war and conflict.[8] Differences such as the one identified in this article raise pertinent questions about the applicability of seemingly generalisable civil-military relations theories. This post makes a case for viewing these theories through specific historical contexts.

 

Saawani Raje is a Doctoral Candidate in the King’s India Institute. Her work focuses on civil-military relations in India and decision-making during military crises. She holds an MA in South Asia and Global Security from King’s College London and a BA from the University of Cambridge. Her other areas of research interest include security studies, strategy, diplomatic history and South Asian politics. You can follow her @saawaniraje

Notes:

[1] Peter Feaver, “The Civil-Military Problematique: Huntington, Janowitz, and the Question of Civilian Control,” Armed Forces and Society 23, no. 2 (January 1996): 149- 78.

[2] Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People At War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1979).

[3] Alan Millet, Peter Maslowski and William Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607 to 2012 (New York: Free Press, 2012), 165.

[4] Millet, Maslowski and Feis, For the Common Defense, 175.

[5] Millet, Maslowski and Feis, For the Common Defense, 179.

[6] Ayesha Ray. The Soldier and the State in India. (California: Sage Publications, 2013), 37.

[7] Ayesha Ray in Harsh Pant (ed.) The Handbook of Indian Defence Policy (New Delhi: Routledge India 2015).

[8] Lawrence Freedman, The Future of War: A History (London: Allen Lane, 2017).

 

Image Source: 

Banner/image 1: http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~cjd327/military.html

Image 2: https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/india/images/9/9f/Transfer_of_power_in_India%2C_1947.jpg

Decrypting the effects of the Russian Presidential Election

by

By Jackson Oliver Webster

 

Credit Image: БЕЛАРУССКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ

 

This article is part of a two-part pre- and post-election analysis of the Russian elections and their significance for the country and region going forward. The pre-election break-down can be found here.

 

It came as no surprise that, late in the evening of 18 March 2018, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was announced as the clear winner of Russia’s Presidential Election, with 56,430,712 votes representing 76.69% of participating voters. This result represents more votes in real terms for any president in the history of the Russian Federation. The most important figure for the Kremlin however was not Putin’s score in terms of votes, rather his score in terms of turnout, which fell below the announced target of 70%. The runner up was the Communist Party candidate, billionaire Pavel Grudinin, who won 11.77% of the vote, performing slightly better than expected, possibly as a result of his personal notoriety compared to Putin’s liberal challengers.

This article will outline the performances and reactions of several opposition candidates, as well as the fate of the opposition following the election. The second part will briefly discuss how Putin’s victory and eventual succession might affect Moscow’s foreign policy and defence posture over the coming years.

 

Opposition Candidates

Liberal candidates performed particularly poorly, with Ksenia Sobchak, the self-styled “other choice against all” (“Sobchak protiv vsekh”), winning a whopping 1.68% of the vote, and veteran politician Grigori Yavlinski of the Yabloko Party obtaining only 1.05% of the vote, according to official results. Perhaps the best-performing liberal candidate was Abstention, with turnout rates especially low in the traditionally opposition-leaning city of Yekaterinburg, where, according to the Mayor’s office, only 434,000 of the city’s over 1,300,000 residents participated. Navalny will continue to claim abstaining voters as his own supporters, given his repeated calls to boycott the elections, having changed his campaign hashtag from #Navalny2018 to #NeVybory2018 (“non-elections2018”). Fraud occurred in multiple polling stations, and independent observers including Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) noted less-than-clandestine ballot stuffing on security camera footage. Grigory Melkonyats of the NGO Golos said fraud was “partly in reaction to Navalny’s boycott campaign.” In Chechnya, due to political repression and fraudulent polling, Putin won over 99% of the vote, duplicating his other strong showings in the Autonomous Republic against which he fought a war in 1999, his first action as Russia’s Prime Minister.

During the  vote, Navalny and a campaign manager sat in Navalny Live’s studio with Sobchak and a member of her staff to watch the results roll in on a broadcast later replayed by Dozhd, Russia’s only non-state owned TV network. After it was evident that, to everyone’s surprise, Putin was to emerge the clear winner, Sobchak proposed that she and Navalny’s party form a united opposition for the upcoming State Duma elections. Navalny, in his typically direct style, launched into a speech ultimately condemning Sobchak as part-and-parcel of the system she claims to oppose, saying he wants nothing to do with her ‘opposition’ which he views as ‘permitted’ and ‘selected’ by the Kremlin. Some Russian political commentators have alleged that the Kremlin will begin reorganizing a straw man ‘opposition’ based on an engineered entente between nationalist and ‘liberal’ forces, with caricatures like Zhirinovksy and Sobchak serving as rhetorical punching bags for United Russia. This would be reminiscent of the early days of the Putin presidency, when Kremlin political technologists used rapid party creation and dissolution to engineer a surprise victory for pro-Kremlin factions over the Communist Party, and later reorganised these elements into United Russia. Though your author usually avoids conspiratorial thinking, he would be less than surprised if the Kremlin tapped Sobchak for some sort of role in a post-Putin political order, however this speculation will be left for another, much longer article.

Liberal movements such as Sobchak’s and Navalny’s are caught between a rock and a hard place. Either they follow Navalny’s model and refuse to take part in an unfair election process and exclude themselves; or they participate, thus legitimising an election campaign run by a politicised Federal Electoral Commission and influenced by highly-biased state-run media with rampant voter fraud. The despondent mood of the liberal opposition is best summarised by Yabloko political consultant Max Katz:

“The opponents of Putin have put forward many strategies. And none of them has worked. The boycott hasn’t worked: the turnout is very high and — it seems — will not be artificially propped. The calls to spoil bulletins haven’t worked — there are few of them. Voting for Sobchak hasn’t worked: her score is very low. Voting for Grudinin hasn’t worked . . . his score is lower than Zyuganov’s [the leader of the Communist party] in the last presidential elections. And our calls to vote for Yavlinsky haven’t worked either.”

Navalny for his part is falling back on his “political machines”, the Civic Platform Party and the FBK, to give him and his campaign longevity beyond the presidential election. His YouTube presence has been particularly active since the elections, attacking the government over its handling of a deadly mall fire in Siberia and denouncing the elimination of direct mayoral elections in Yekaterinburg. Most recently, he called for protests on 5 May in a video entitled “Putin is not our Tsar” (“Putin nam ne tsar’”).

 

Consequences

So what can be expected, particularly from a European perspective, in the coming months and years from a reelected Putin?

Before the elections, most Western media were fixated on Putin’s particularly bellicose State of the Federation address. He boasted of all sorts of first-strike, high-tech weapons clearly in development with Western conventional foes in mind: hypersonic intercontinental cruise missiles, underwater tactical nuclear platforms, and other weapons. Many defence analysts have argued that these systems are either not beyond the conceptual stage, and may not provide any significant strategic edge should they become operational. However, the spirit of the address seemed to mark a shift towards openly aggressive rhetoric which may come to define Putin’s fifth term foreign policy.

Russian historian Irina Pavlova argues that Putin’s comments represent his will to “raise the stakes” of his current confrontation with the West. This belligerence is, she continues, a demonstration of Putin’s confidence in his own competence and position relative to his adversaries. She concludes that this assertiveness follows the general framing of Kremlin foreign policy by state media, which sets Russian civilisation against a weak and decadent Western world. It also feeds into Kremlin talking points, namely the framing of the Ukraine conflict in terms of the fight against so-called ‘Ukrainian fascists’. This creates a “modern Stalinist’” confrontation with the West in which Putin himself is the hero. “As for the sanctions the West threatens, they only strengthen this regime above all in the eyes of its own population,” argues Pavlova.

NATO defence planners[1], on the other hand, operate largely under the assumption that succession is, eventually, inevitable, and that this succession period will be extremely unstable. Many Western governments may view the current Russian regime as undesirable, but there is a general respect for the current Kremlin’s competence and strategic rationality. Thus, the key strategic goal for NATO in the east is to raise the cost of miscalculation for Moscow by strengthening Baltic defences. A legitimate concern is that, in the coming years, a succession battle within the Kremlin combined with long-term economic instability may cause Russia —or rather certain powerful actors in Moscow— to lash out in the ‘near-abroad’.

 

Conclusion

Moving forward, the most important developments in Russian politics worth following will be the fate of the ‘liberal’ opposition, in all its various forms, and eventually the succession process. The main question for the opposition is whether or not a united front will form between various factions —old liberals, Navalnyites, nationalists, communists, and so on. As for succession, there are multiple possible outcomes over the next six years. We will either see a reordering of the current elite as Putin steps down from power, or a constitutional amendment abolishing the two-term limit. Regardless, the West can expect an assertive stance from Moscow as Putin attempts to reinforce his domestic credibility in the face of a stagnant economy and shrinking European demand for fossil fuels.

 

Jackson Webster is a graduate of the Department of War Studies, and is currently reading for a master’s in International Security at Sciences Po Paris. His research focuses on Russia, its relationship with Central Europe, and cybersecurity. He is currently working on cybersecurity issues with a legal tech consultancy in Paris.

Notes

[1] Section based on an off-the-record conversation between the author and senior NATO officials.

Image source

http://journalby.com/news/navalnyy-protiv-rossii-rossiya-protiv-evropy-i-sobchak-protiv-vseh-1099 (in Russian)