[Tore]: It's my huge pleasure to welcome you all to nothing less than the world stage.
[Tore]: All more modestly to the parallel session dubbed Global Perspectives in English.
[Tore]: I'm very pleased to see that so many of you care about the state of the world.
[Tore]: Kadafi is a man, a journalist with Norwegian TV 2 since 2006, and a man with much experience from covering both foreign and domestic affairs,
[Tore]: currently one of the hosts of the documentary series "Norge bak fasaden", Norway behind the facade, will chair the discussions.
[Tore]: I'll leave it to you to introduce the topics and the speakers, Kadafi, the floor is yours.
[Kadafi]: Thank you very much.
[Kadafi]: It's a great honor to chair this session called Global Perspective.
[Kadafi]: Now I would like to introduce our first panel to the stage.
[Kadafi]: Øyvind Østerud, professor of political science here at the University of Oslo.
[Kadafi]: Dan Banik, professor of political science at the Center for Development and Environment, also here at the University of Oslo.
[Kadafi]: and Janina Dill, professor of global security at the University of Oxford.
[Kadafi]: So, some of the questions we are looking into today is how does the world look like right now, viewed from both the north and the global south?
[Kadafi]: What is the role of the superpowers in a multipolar world?
[Kadafi]: And how is the state of democracy?
[Kadafi]: So Professor Østerud, before we start our conversation, could you please give us your perspective on the headline, Geopolitical Change and Democratic Developments?
[Øyvind]: Yeah, thank you so much.
[Øyvind]: It's very nice to be here.
[Øyvind]: I hope the microphone is OK, so you can all hear what I say.
[Øyvind]: I have a small cold, or sort of afterlife of a cold, but should be OK.
[Øyvind]: Geopolitical change, democratic developments.
[Øyvind]: I would like to specify a few connections.
[Øyvind]: Some of you might remember Francis Fukuyama's dictum by the end of the Cold War, The End of History and the Last Man.
[Øyvind]: That was the title of his book from 1992.
[Øyvind]: That is, now the dialectical or the historical dialectics of dictatorship and democracy is over.
[Øyvind]: Liberal democracy is the only game in town.
[Øyvind]: This was during the so-called third wave of democratic transitions, starting with the revolution in Portugal in 1974.
[Øyvind]: During the next 20 years, to the early 1990s or mid-1990s, more than 30 authoritarian countries became democratic.
[Øyvind]: It was a wave sweeping through Latin America, the Asia-Pacific, sub-Saharan Africa, and finally Eastern Europe.
[Øyvind]: The 1990s was also the heyday of globalization, free movement of goods and capital, deregulation of public control,
[Øyvind]: more open borders for migration from poor to rich countries, a new mix of cultures across the globe.
[Øyvind]: Russia was supposed to converge with the liberal systems after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
[Øyvind]: China was supposed to converge with liberal systems as it was joining the World Trade Organization from 2001, in a period of sensational economic growth in China.
[Øyvind]: Globalization was supposed to benefit everyone with fast growth and more efficiency.
[Øyvind]: Now we know that all this was wrong.
[Øyvind]: Russia gradually became more authoritarian with a program for regaining influence in the former Soviet Union, culminating in the attack on Ukraine on the 24th of February 2022.
[Øyvind]: China gradually became more authoritarian with autocratic capitalism at home and a global reach based on what was called the Beijing Consensus.
[Øyvind]: The Beijing Consensus was an alternative to liberalization.
[Øyvind]: In the Middle East and in the Global South generally, China has challenged the West as economic and political partner.
[Øyvind]: Democracy is definitely not the only game in town anymore.
[Øyvind]: The liberal hegemony in many parts of the world was short-lived,
[Øyvind]: The ideological hegemony of democratic rule is over.
[Øyvind]: If we look at the BRICS countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, they have recently expanded into the Middle East with Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
[Øyvind]: It's now a self-assertive geopolitical bloc opposed to Western and US dominance, financially and economically and politically.
[Øyvind]: There is a growing tendency towards non-alliance or multi-alliance in the Global South, throughout the Global South.
[Øyvind]: And this is very manifest in reactions to the war in Ukraine, where many, very many countries refused to take a clear stand.
[Øyvind]: Democratic rule has generally backslided from the financial crisis onwards, the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
[Øyvind]: Perhaps even more telling, there has been an anti-globalist backlash in the United States and in most of Western Europe.
[Øyvind]: Most astonishing was Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election in November 2016, and Brexit in Britain in June the same year.
[Øyvind]: The established party systems in the West are in crisis.
[Øyvind]: The center-left and the center-right have lost trust as they came to be associated with hyper-globalization, reduced national sovereignty, too open borders, too many migrants.
[Øyvind]: Globalization had a backside for many people, a downside.
[Øyvind]: Growing inequality, growing insecurity for vulnerable regions and vulnerable classes.
[Øyvind]: The far left and the far right got a sensational following on a program for recapturing national control.
[Øyvind]: Fratelli d'Italia is now the governing party in Italy.
[Øyvind]: Front National or Rassemblement National is the biggest Labour party in France.
[Øyvind]: Marine Le Pen might very well be the next president in France from 2027, as it looks at the moment.
[Øyvind]: Gert Wilders' party won the last Dutch election last autumn.
[Øyvind]: There has been an amazing growth in the Freedom Party in Austria, the Swedish Democrats, the True Finns, etc.
[Øyvind]: These are protest parties from the fringes who have acquired center stage in quite many countries.
[Øyvind]: It's really a political earthquake.
[Øyvind]: This is not necessarily a democratic backslide in itself, but it means growing polarization, lack of trust between groups and classes, instability at home and abroad.
[Øyvind]: In Europe, there is now a gap between two quite different notions of democracy, one that concentrates on human rights and the rule of law,
[Øyvind]: the other that concentrates on popular sovereignty and the majority vote, and the deep antagonism between them.
[Øyvind]: Political scientists like Yascha Mounk and Carl Smudde have argued that this is a contrast between illiberal democracy on the one hand and undemocratic liberalism on the other.
[Øyvind]: Illiberal democracy, that is except for majority rule,
[Øyvind]: but it is a disregard for the rule of law, a disregard for independent courts, a disregard for autonomous media, and a disregard for obligations across borders.
[Øyvind]: Non-democratic liberalism, on the other hand, that is celebrating human rights,
[Øyvind]: It's celebrating transnational decision-making.
[Øyvind]: It's celebrating minority protection.
[Øyvind]: It's celebrating the rule of law.
[Øyvind]: But it is, on the other hand, less concerned with popular sovereignty, with national autonomy, and with the buying power of the ballot.
[Øyvind]: An integrated conception of democracy, which most of us favor.
[Øyvind]: As political scientists, I favor that.
[Øyvind]: An integrated conception of democracy is now split into antagonist camps with little mutual understanding.
[Øyvind]: in the language which the camps use about each other, the populist entrepreneurs on the one hand, the liberal transnational elites on the other.
[Øyvind]: This polarization is the core of the political crisis in the West and the crisis in the party system in the West.
[Øyvind]: The uneven effects of globalization and Europeanization are the processes behind this growing political cleavage which we see in the West.
[Øyvind]: So yes, there is a close and quite specific connection between geopolitical change on the one hand and democratic processes on the other.
[Øyvind]: Thank you so much.
[Kadafi]: Thank you very much.
[Kadafi]: Mr. Dan Banik, we are listening to words like political earthquake, political crisis, political cleavage, a totally new situation in many Western countries.
[Kadafi]: How do the Global South look at this from their perspective?
[Dan]: Okay, so I think that is a difficult question because there's a lot of talk about this term global south, but nobody really knows what it means and there's a lot of pushback.
[Dan]: But south not in sort of the geography of the south,
[Dan]: but a lot of emerging, rising powers.
[Dan]: You have the BRICS that Øyvind mentioned, but you also have other countries in Africa and Latin America that are aspiring.
[Dan]: And I suppose my argument, and I agree with quite a lot of what Øyvind said,
[Dan]: I would argue that there's actually a fundamental problem in the way the so-called global north and the global south are talking or not talking.
[Dan]: And the challenge is that
[Dan]: We often, in Norway and elsewhere, we talk about climate change, global public goods, we preach democracy,
[Dan]: but we don't talk about necessarily enough what these countries really want, and that is development.
[Dan]: We're talking still about hundreds of millions of people living in poverty.
[Dan]: There are lots of challenges with health and education.
[Dan]: So in terms of, say, the responsibility of the global north to actually do something on these concrete developmental issues is lacking.
[Dan]: So the rallying cry for this really diverse group of countries that you can call the global south, and by the way, they don't always agree with each other.
[Dan]: India and China are fighting across the border.
[Dan]: There are lots of problems within this entity.
[Dan]: I would say that they want some sort of economic development.
[Dan]: It's not like they're against democracy.
[Dan]: China would say they're a democracy, but there are many other countries, including India, that's going to the polls tomorrow.
[Dan]: would still say that they're democracies, they're not electoral autocracies, but even though a lot of people actually support democracy, they're not necessarily satisfied with it.
[Dan]: This is something that Afrobarometer and my colleague Boniface Dulani, he's been working with it.
[Dan]: There's enormous support, at least on the African continent, for democracies, but people are dissatisfied with what democracy has given them.
[Kadafi]: What kind of, what role does China play in this, I mean, in this game?
[Dan]: A very important role, because as I said, I mean, my beef with the Global North is that we have a tendency of maybe, you know, coming with very well-intentioned efforts,
[Dan]: but we are often seen to be preaching.
[Dan]: we often seem to be dictating, right?
[Dan]: And this is where, you like it or not, China has been diplomatically, in my view, far more suave
[Dan]: far more sophisticated by saying, we don't want to intervene.
[Dan]: I mean, they may or may not, but the rhetoric is non-intervention, whereas the global north is seen to be interventionist.
[Dan]: And so China's rhetoric often, whether you like it or not, is couched in global solidarity, win-win, and all of that,
[Dan]: whereas the north says we have good intentions, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
[Dan]: So there's a lot of talk,
[Dan]: but very little action, action as in infrastructure.
[Dan]: That's what people want, that's what countries want.
[Dan]: They want roads and bridges, et cetera.
[Dan]: While democracy is important, human rights promotion is important, you also have this huge challenge of persistent poverty that people want to come out of.
[Dan]: So again, it's not like these countries or people don't like democracy, but they're really struggling.
[Dan]: And, you know, it's bread and freedom.
[Dan]: Sometimes it's very difficult to make that choice.
[Øyvind]: Yes, I agree.
[Øyvind]: I think it has very much to do with the economy.
[Øyvind]: Certainly, certainly.
[Øyvind]: Other things have been important for Western countries.
[Øyvind]: It was also the case in the early 2000s that Western countries didn't really deliver economically.
[Øyvind]: They came in in crisis.
[Øyvind]: They had a slower economic growth.
[Øyvind]: China, on the other hand, really delivered.
[Øyvind]: China had an enormous economic growth.
[Øyvind]: It invested abroad.
[Øyvind]: It did not have any political demands in contrast to Western countries.
[Øyvind]: It could cooperate with anyone as far as it was profitable, with Venezuela, with Myanmar, with African countries, whatever.
[Øyvind]: And they were more useful for the Global South in many ways because they had this phenomenal economic growth
[Øyvind]: in a period where Western countries were stagnating in many ways and got into a crisis, particularly from 2007 and the backlash from then.
[Kadafi]: Janina Dill, with this geopolitical change that is being described, what's the situation of international law?
[Janina]: So part of the promise of the 90s was certainly the idea that finally the Security Council freed from the gridlock of great power competition
[Janina]: could really start to enforce international law and that we would see basically what is the equivalent of democracy in the international system,
[Janina]: which is subjecting international relations to the rule of law.
[Janina]: And this promise to some extent materialized in the 90s.
[Janina]: There was the rise of human rights law, peacekeeping missions that were very consistently sent into the worst conflicts of the globe.
[Janina]: There was a legalization of military affairs by and large.
[Janina]: But in the end, this promise, much like many of the promises of globalization, hasn't materialized.
[Janina]: And international law now is under enormous pressure.
[Janina]: There's a little bit of a paradox in the sense that international law is as relevant as ever.
[Janina]: It's constantly invoked in public discourse.
[Janina]: States from the Global South, as well as the kind of typical Western states that we associate with legal arguments,
[Janina]: very systematically use international law in their discourse to justify their actions.
[Janina]: So it is relevant.
[Janina]: It is constantly invoked.
[Janina]: It is part of the public imagination.
[Janina]: And at the same time, we have seen that international law doesn't fulfill the functions that we expect law fulfills.
[Janina]: So it should constrain action.
[Janina]: It should allow us to make moral judgments.
[Janina]: It should hold wrongdoers to account.
[Janina]: And yet, when we look at the context in which international law is particularly often invoked, for instance, Israel's war in Gaza, the context of Ukraine,
[Janina]: we see that international law doesn't fulfill any of these functions quite to the extent that we expect it to do.
[Janina]: And so there's a backlash against international law.
[Janina]: There's a denouement, so to speak, where people say, well, it doesn't do what it's meant to do.
[Janina]: Is there even a point in it?
[Janina]: And to me, that is a mistake, right?
[Janina]: We need to strengthen international law.
[Janina]: We need to come back to where it can, in principle, fulfill these functions.
[Janina]: Why hasn't it?
[Janina]: There's never just one cause for a development like this, but it's partly political choice.
[Janina]: It is partly that Western democracies and Western countries that were meant to be the champions of international law in the 90s and the early 2000s made the choice to not comply to fraglantly
[Janina]: disregard international law at critical junctures when it suited their interests, hoping that they could still invoke it vis-à-vis their adversaries and in a general kind of ordering fashion,
[Janina]: but not understanding that every obvious instance of noncompliance paired with a legal claim undermines the authority of international law.
[Janina]: And that's where we are now, where it's not clear who the champions of international law are anymore,
[Janina]: and whether there are enough states that make legal compliance a priority, that channel their foreign policies through international law,
[Janina]: so that in principle international law can fulfill the ordering function it ought to have.
[Kadafi]: And what should be done?
[Kadafi]: I mean, you mentioned Gaza, you mentioned Ukraine.
[Kadafi]: Western countries have a totally different approach.
[Janina]: So international law, because it is not enforced like domestic law, so there's the sovereign power of the state where the police comes if you violate international law, it's never going to be just like that.
[Janina]: And particularly for that reason, international law works through its normative authority.
[Janina]: And that entirely depends on it being applied in consistent ways so that like cases are treated alike.
[Janina]: So nothing is more harmful to international law than the supposed champions of international law very obviously and deliberately enforcing it only vis-a-vis their adversaries and completely disregarding it vis-a-vis their allies.
[Janina]: And I can be more specific here, right?
[Janina]: It is in fact the perfect storm for international law that we have the juxtaposition of the Ukraine war and the war in Gaza.
[Janina]: where the United States but also other European states very, very consistently call out Russian violations of international law, sanction Russian violations of international law,
[Janina]: invoke the courts against violations of international law by Russia, and don't do anything of the sort in relation to Israel.
[Øyvind]: Just a small comment.
[Øyvind]: After the 1990s, early 2000s, international law became more of a contested field.
[Øyvind]: It became a contested field when Western countries started to talk about humanitarian intervention, responsibility to protect, to protect people against their own government.
[Øyvind]: Many authoritarian countries reacted against that.
[Øyvind]: And there was one idea of international law saying that the unit in international law is also the individual, and its group is not only states.
[Øyvind]: Why countries like China and Russia continue to say that, no, the unit is states, and we have to preserve non-intervention,
[Øyvind]: national sovereignty instead of humanitarian intervention and responsibility protect and all these other things, which is a slippery slope in their view towards Western dominance.
[Øyvind]: So I think that also played a great part in the sort of fate of international law afterwards.
[Dan]: Yeah, I just want to pick up on something Janina said, because I think what we should be really calling out is the hypocrisy, the double standards.
[Dan]: So if you're not consistent in applying...
[Dan]: you know, whatever principle that you agree on across the board, then you will be called out.
[Dan]: And what is fascinating today with the rise of the Global South is that that hypocrisy is being called out.
[Dan]: So you have, and to answer your previous question on China, given that China has become such an important economic power, and so has India and many others,
[Dan]: you have a situation where many of these countries feel that most economic growth predictions are going to take place in the global south, and yet most of the decisions are still concentrated,
[Dan]: if you look at representation in the international bodies, the power relations, the international architecture of global governance is still dominated by the G7 or, you know, some countries.
[Dan]: So there's this frustration that the international structure is not democratic.
[Dan]: They want a seat at the table.
[Dan]: If you don't come to the table, you don't get to speak.
[Dan]: And so they want representation, especially because most of the growth is going to take place in their parts of the world.
[Dan]: So why is Europe still as dominant?
[Dan]: So I think that is part of the frustration.
[Dan]: And the second part has to do with not being consistent in policies and being called out on hypocrisy.
[Dan]: I have to also mention, since I even mentioned Fukuyama's end of history,
[Dan]: He's a colleague of mine, and I've known him for a while, and one of the things I bug him about is, you know, because everybody does, is, you know, what did he get wrong?
[Dan]: And a lot of people say he got everything wrong.
[Dan]: He doesn't believe so.
[Dan]: The thing he got wrong, he says, or he underestimated, was the rise of China.
[Dan]: He did not think, he did not, he could nobody at that time
[Dan]: could realize that China, the system, would actually survive.
[Dan]: Not just survive, but it would become this economic superpower that it has.
[Dan]: So, by and large, that end of history argument is still there, except for the rise of China.
[Janina]: If I could push back a little bit against this narrative of, like, we got overly ambitious with international law and now we're getting the payback, right?
[Janina]: I honestly don't think that's necessarily the problem because, yes, the human rights discourse never reached all parts of the planet, right?
[Janina]: It has a very intrinsic attractiveness and had a lot of momentum, and I think it still has that momentum,
[Janina]: but it was always a long shot to think that states that are very, you know, guarding of their sovereignty, like China, would get on board, and they never had to get on board.
[Janina]: If I had to pinpoint the two reasons for why international law is facing the challenge that it does and why it kind of didn't deliver on the promise of the 90s,
[Janina]: it would be, in some sense, the choices I already mentioned, that democracies, you know, thought they could afford to not comply with international law when it suited their interests, and that would leave international law intact.
[Janina]: and the other thing, and sort of arrogance that actually goes back to the very deep philosophical roots of liberalism and gentlemen like Francis Fukuyama,
[Janina]: which is the idea that in the West people think liberalism is so intrinsically attractive that you don't have to work for it, that everyone would want just a seat at the table.
[Janina]: the China rising and the BRICS rising and the Global South becoming more powerful, that all they would want is to join the existing institutions, have a share at this, have a seat at the table,
[Janina]: rather than the notion that they would have ideas of their own, that they would have visions of their own, that they would want parallel institutions to build, that they would want to redistribute.
[Janina]: Renegotiate, redistribute the gains of globalization in manners more than that means just like, can the West recognize that we are also here, right?
[Janina]: And this goes back to the very, very deep Kantian foundations of liberalism and the idea that as human beings, we're all drawn to it, and that's ultimately all anyone wants, right?
[Janina]: And I think there's a kernel of truth to that in the sense that everyone wants human rights and participation.
[Janina]: But the notion of what kind of institutional shape democracy and liberalism should take is much more contestable than the Western powers gave it credit for.
[Janina]: And there's a sort of arrogance or complacency that I think coming out of the 90s, we thought all it takes is everybody joining us here at the table,
[Janina]: and then we're going to be fine, rather than it needs to be contested and negotiated with the rest of the world in a pluralist way.
[Øyvind]: Just a little remark about the question of double standards.
[Øyvind]: I think that's quite important because there is definitely an accusation of double standards against the West.
[Øyvind]: It started in full in 1999 with the NATO attack on Serbia in the Kosovo conflict.
[Øyvind]: Putin has mentioned that nearly every time he is talking about the international law, he states that, what did you do in Kosovo?
[Øyvind]: It was a pure NATO attack, no mandate from the United Nations, and it was the end of sort of the idyllic period in the early 1990s.
[Øyvind]: History will forgive us.
[Øyvind]: Yeah, it's true.
[Øyvind]: And the argument of hypocrisy or the accusation of hypocrisy came up again in full in the vote in the United Nations in early March 2022
[Øyvind]: on the Russian attack on Ukraine, where five, six countries voted against.
[Øyvind]: Thirty-five countries, many of them quite big, did not vote at all.
[Øyvind]: They abstained.
[Øyvind]: And what did they say?
[Øyvind]: They said, this argument about international law is hypocrisy from the Western side.
[Øyvind]: It's double standards.
[Øyvind]: And in the Middle East, that was an extremely widespread idea that the Western countries are sort of, they attack countries in the South if they think it is in their interest.
[Øyvind]: to promote democracy or whatever, but they neglect the demand for unanimity in the Security Council and other things, which they have sort of proved several times.
[Øyvind]: Whether we like it or not, there is a widespread accusation against the West for double standards and hypocrisy.
[Dan]: There's also criticism.
[Dan]: With my students in certain parts of the African continent where I've been teaching, and also with my colleagues, they're actually cracking jokes about how bad democracies are in the West.
[Dan]: Given the dysfunctional state of American democracy, and given that election observers were typically sent to monitor African elections, now African citizens are saying,
[Dan]: we should go and monitor elections in Europe and in the United States because we have such good elections.
[Dan]: Malawi has been a consistent democracy for many years, Botswana.
[Dan]: So I think I find this quite fascinating that the roles are being reversed.
[Dan]: So you have countries in the global south that were being lectured to be democratic and now saying, hey, come on, it's about time that you learn some lessons from our democracies.
[Dan]: And I think that is...
[Dan]: a new era, so to speak.
[Kadafi]: Does that also mean that some or many of these countries look at the China model as a good model?
[Dan]: Well, I wouldn't say necessarily good, but what China has done is certainly given an alternative
[Dan]: And an alternative that on paper looks attractive, because if you can come, as the Chinese do, to African countries and say, listen, we have no ambitions of being the global superpower.
[Dan]: This is, again, very diplomatically swapped.
[Dan]: They say, we're the largest developing country in the world.
[Dan]: We know how to resolve hunger and famine and health.
[Dan]: We will roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty, and we will do South-South cooperation, which is more realistic than North-South.
[Dan]: What does Norway have to teach some of these countries?
[Dan]: That experience is very different.
[Dan]: Our experiences are much more closer.
[Dan]: So when you make that argument, whether you like it or not here, I mean, that's not, you know, the empirical evidence varies,
[Dan]: but it is certainly a persuasive alternative, and that is why, you know, it's not just China.
[Dan]: It's also the Rwandan model, and Rwanda's going to have elections.
[Dan]: You have a president there for life, probably, just like in China.
[Dan]: But then people say, but at least he's delivering the goods.
[Dan]: There's, you know, visionary leadership.
[Dan]: So you may say that there is a restriction on political rights,
[Dan]: But in relation to many of the other challenges, they seem to be delivering.
[Dan]: I mean, again, the jury's still out.
[Øyvind]: But I think they deliver, and with no political strings attached.
[Øyvind]: I think that's quite crucial.
[Øyvind]: They don't have political demands for delivery.
[Dan]: Not overtly.
[Øyvind]: Not overtly, yes.
[Øyvind]: So tacitly, or in many ways, they certainly do.
[Øyvind]: They expect some sort of loyalty or some sort of...
[Øyvind]: non-discrimination against them.
[Øyvind]: They have demands, certainly, but not overtly.
[Øyvind]: Not clear-cut political demands, at least.
[Øyvind]: Not human rights or something like that, which many countries are sort of hesitant about.
[Janina]: Having unmasked the kind of hypocrisy of American hegemony, I don't think we should wish for Chinese hegemony.
[Janina]: I think ultimately all empires are forces for very significant morally problematic developments in the world, and we should expect the same of China,
[Janina]: never mind its internal record for respecting even the most basic individual rights.
[Janina]: And similarly, I think we should try not to become too nihilistic, right, to say, well,
[Janina]: democratic liberalism and international law, even though they haven't delivered on the promise they once had, that's what we have, and they're worth fighting for, right?
[Janina]: So the notion shouldn't be for us to kind of just engage in kind of the intellectual deconstruction of saying, like, you know, we blew it, right?
[Janina]: We had a chance, we blew it, like...
[Janina]: you know let's you know brave new world um under chinese hegemony,
[Janina]: I think we need to find a way to understand how international law can be made to work again how it can harness its moral authority again
[Janina]: and that is by holding to account our own governments that they actually make enforcement of international law a priority,
[Janina]: compliance with international law, their own compliance with international law a priority and that they start to build and invest in international institutions again
[Janina]: Successive US governments, Democratic or Republican, have eroded international institutions, the critical ones, not just the ones that we all have our eyes on,
[Janina]: but even those that provide just functional backbone for international relations working, right?
[Janina]: That trend needs to be reversed, and I think there's still a chance to reverse it,
[Janina]: but it is incumbent on all citizens of democratic states that have a voice to actually hold their own governments to account,
[Janina]: to invest again in liberal democratic international institutions and in the rule of law.
[Dan]: Can I just pick up on that, because I think some of the challenges you rightly point out, Janina, is among us, the citizens, ourselves,
[Dan]: because you could have Western governments building the liberal international order, which they have, globalization, China being one of the biggest beneficiaries of globalization, by the way,
[Dan]: But then the accusation is, and some of your colleagues have just come up with a book called actually Geopolitics and Democracy at Oxford.
[Dan]: And the argument is that one forgot about the domestic audience.
[Dan]: Right?
[Dan]: And that's what you were... Anti-globalist revolt.
[Dan]: Yeah, exactly.
[Øyvind]: That book is sort of crucial.
[Dan]: But you also have the Norwegian columnist in the Financial Times, Martin Sundby, has also written about this.
[Dan]: So you created a so-called class of people feeling they're losers.
[Dan]: They're losers in the globalized economy.
[Dan]: So in Britain and in the United States, you had the pushback, Brexit, and Trump.
[Øyvind]: They vote far left or far right.
[Dan]: But which also meant that these countries were then less interested in investing in this international liberal order,
[Dan]: and that is why they were pulling out of international institutions, whether it's the World Health Organization or whatever.
[Dan]: So I absolutely agree that we have to sort of reinvest and make sure, but we also need the backing of citizens.
[Dan]: That is important, right?
[Dan]: But I also think we should stop lecturing.
[Janina]: Okay.
[Dan]: And I think we should be making a case that something is of intrinsic value and that people should choose rather than what the United States and European Union have been doing in Africa,
[Dan]: saying, oh, we've missed the boat and China's taken over and doing all the infrastructure stuff
[Dan]: Now we're going to build infrastructure.
[Dan]: And what they've done is they've formulated plans with explicit references not to the fact that they want to do something for African citizens,
[Dan]: but they say, we're doing it not because we love you, but to combat the rise of China.
[Dan]: And that is so silly.
[Dan]: If you want to get people to love you, if you want to win hearts and minds, the last thing you should do is to say, I'm not doing it for you, but I'm doing it for somebody else.
[Kadafi]: Janina, Dan is talking about United States.
[Kadafi]: How much damage has the era of Trump or even Bush done?
[Janina]: I mean, they started this trend of the erosion of international law.
[Janina]: Bush and Trump had slightly different approaches to international law.
[Janina]: I mean, the Bush administration in some sense is one of the most glaring examples of very sophisticated, well, sophisticated is maybe giving too much credit,
[Janina]: but very detailed and forceful legal claims paired with policies that were very obviously against international law.
[Janina]: And that's very damaging, I mean, particularly the Iraq war, but also the whole torture memos notion,
[Janina]: where you really had international lawyers being the handmaiden of cruel, inhumane, and obviously illegal policies, right?
[Janina]: And this is, in some sense, something that is very difficult for any normative code to recover from, the notion that it was successfully used to promote the opposite of what it is meant to do, right?
[Janina]: And this is, in some sense, the legacy of the Bush administration as far as international law is concerned.
[Janina]: Trump had a much more ham-fisted vision, where he just said, we're going to break international law whenever that suits us.
[Janina]: That's also damaging, particularly for specific institutions that he was damaging, where he was either withdrawing US funding or US participation or blocked the appointment of judges.
[Janina]: It is damaging in a different way.
[Janina]: It's in some sense easier to reverse that than the notion that international law becomes the handmaiden of cruelty and violence,
[Janina]: which is something that the Bush administration did, and which I'm sad to say the current administration isn't at least not preventing.
[Janina]: So this kind of trend where international law is used against its own purposes continues to some extent,
[Janina]: and that's much, much harder to reverse than simply a policy of having for four years a government that simply isn't committed to funding or to participating in international legal institutions.
[Øyvind]: Yeah, I agree on this, but I think there is a basic difference between the Bush administration and the Trump administration.
[Øyvind]: The Trump administration was extremely much more erratic.
[Øyvind]: It was irresponsible in many ways.
[Øyvind]: You couldn't really know beforehand what they could do.
[Øyvind]: And if a president is losing an election and refuses to step down, that's really a crisis for democracy.
[Øyvind]: And what would happen now if Trump loses the election?
[Øyvind]: What would he say?
[Øyvind]: Just guess.
[Øyvind]: It's peanuts what happened in 2020.
[Øyvind]: What would happen now if we lose the election?
[Øyvind]: Of course, this is stolen.
[Øyvind]: This is not true.
[Øyvind]: And that is really a crisis for democracy, which means that also internationally, the Trump administration would be more sort of erratic, more irrational in many ways.
[Øyvind]: And there was some stability during the Bush years.
[Dan]: I think we can raise our focus actually to the fact that this is 2024 and we have a lot of elections coming up.
[Dan]: And what I think is really exciting is that we've had already some elections, but we're going to have elections in traditional autocracies.
[Dan]: We're going to have elections in so-called democracies that are backsliding.
[Dan]: We're going to have elections in democracies that are not really on entire sure footing.
[Dan]: There are lots of problems.
[Dan]: South Africa could be one.
[Dan]: We've had problems in Pakistan, etc.
[Dan]: And then there are elections in the United States and in the UK, but also in many European countries where there's this worry about the far right.
[Dan]: And we haven't actually even talked about that democratic deficit or that problem that a lot of countries in the global south feel
[Dan]: that European elections have led to the growth of these far right movements, which again...
[Dan]: for many other countries looks very strange.
[Dan]: What kind of democracy are you guys promoting?
[Dan]: And then you have the final category of elections where there's been coup d'etats.
[Dan]: And the military is very active.
[Dan]: So I'm just saying that there are all of these countries that are all going to the polls, and I think geopolitics, this is going to be the most important discussion for the rest of the year.
[Dan]: But again, as Janina was also saying,
[Dan]: I think we need to reinvest in this.
[Dan]: I think we need to get our act together and say, what is our strategy, and make a persuasive case.
[Dan]: We have to use persuasion.
[Dan]: You can't just say the smell of democracy is good, it looks good.
[Dan]: It has to also deliver, and so the instrumental value of democracy perhaps needs to be made a better case for.
[Janina]: I mean, I think Dan is absolutely right that democracy starts at the social level inside various states, right?
[Janina]: And that we have to sort this out.
[Janina]: The UK has to sort it out around Brexit.
[Janina]: The US has to sort it out whether it actually wants to be a democracy, right?
[Janina]: Various at the sub-state level.
[Janina]: I think it's important, though, to understand what the challenge is of having democracy at the global level, right?
[Janina]: Having international relations subject to the rule of law.
[Janina]: That is that democracy at the national level, democracy championing international law,
[Janina]: It's absolutely necessary for that.
[Janina]: It doesn't work without it, but it is not sufficient.
[Janina]: And that's, I think, what the 90s have taught us, right?
[Janina]: You can have a wave of democratization.
[Janina]: You can have various democracies around the globe with a lot of political power
[Janina]: and still not actually allow the gains of that to materialize at the international level if these democracies do not choose to actually invest in international law
[Janina]: and democratic institutions at the international level.
[Janina]: At the same time, democratic erosion at the domestic level obviously undercuts international democracy.
[Janina]: That is the challenge at the global level, right?
[Janina]: Having democracies, having healthy democratic states is necessary, but it isn't sufficient.
[Janina]: And we've seen that, unfortunately, play out.
[Kadafi]: We are out of time.
[Kadafi]: Those were the final words from our guests from Oxford.
[Kadafi]: Thank you to Professor Østerud.
[Kadafi]: Thank you to Professor Banik.
[Kadafi]: Thank you.
[Dan]: Thank you.
[Kadafi]: There is no break, so we'll go straight to our next session.
[Kadafi]: The Arab Spring gave hope for a democratic development in the Middle East.
[Kadafi]: I was sent there as a journalist myself in 2011 in Cairo, and I remember the optimism among the people.
[Kadafi]: That is long gone.
[Kadafi]: Now, with the ongoing war in Gaza, things look bleaker than ever.
[Kadafi]: To discuss this topic, I would like to welcome our next panel.
[Kadafi]: Bjørn Olav Utvik, professor of Middle East Studies here at the University of Oslo.
[Kadafi]: Marte Heian-Engdal, author and historian who specializes in the Middle East.
[Kadafi]: And Jacob Høigilt, professor of Middle East Studies also here at the University of Oslo.
[Kadafi]: Welcome.
[Kadafi]: And
[Kadafi]: I think we can start with you, Professor Utvik.
[Kadafi]: Let's start with a brief introduction and bring us back to the Arab Spring.
[Kadafi]: What happened?
[Bjørn Olav]: Can you hear me?
[Bjørn Olav]: Yes.
[Bjørn Olav]: Well, in 2011, I mean, referring to the question here, is there hope for democracy in the Middle East?
[Bjørn Olav]: In 2011, there was a massive outburst of pent-up
[Bjørn Olav]: hope for democracy, for the end of corruption, for freedom, for social justice across the Arab world.
[Bjørn Olav]: And a wave of demonstrations, uprisings shook the region and the autocratic regimes to the core.
[Bjørn Olav]: In four countries, in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Libya, and in Yemen, these demonstrations and uprisings forced the resignation of the president, dictators, as it was common to call them at that time.
[Bjørn Olav]: And after that, there were initiated, in these four countries, processes supposedly to lead to democracy.
[Bjørn Olav]: There were, in three of them, there were free elections in Tunisia, in Egypt, and in Libya.
[Bjørn Olav]: In Yemen, there was a process of national dialogue with huge involvement from all parts of the country.
[Bjørn Olav]: Yet, it did not end well, at least for the moment, now 13 years after.
[Bjørn Olav]: A pivotal moment was the military coup against Egypt's first popularly elected president.
[Bjørn Olav]: In 2013, the military took over, Egypt being the vastly most populous country with over 100 million inhabitants and
[Bjørn Olav]: the center of the Arab world, so this had tremendous consequences.
[Bjørn Olav]: In Libya and in Yemen, it all ended in civil war between different centers of power.
[Bjørn Olav]: In Tunisia, democracy and elections and shift of power existed for 10 years, until in 2021, the president, who was also elected in a free election,
[Bjørn Olav]: decided to cut democracy out.
[Bjørn Olav]: He dissolved the parliament, he abolished the constitution that had been decided by a freely elected constitutional assembly, and made his own constitution.
[Bjørn Olav]: So it ended also in Tunisia.
[Bjørn Olav]: And why did this happen?
[Bjørn Olav]: It's a complex question, of course.
[Bjørn Olav]: But first of all, there were tremendous forces working against it.
[Bjørn Olav]: the incumbent power elites that continue to control the military, the judicial system, the huge bureaucracies in these countries.
[Bjørn Olav]: They were intact and were not reformed and worked against the revolutions.
[Bjørn Olav]: And then also the West.
[Bjørn Olav]: I mean, the so-called international community dominated by the West, as we heard.
[Bjørn Olav]: To caricature it a bit, I used to say that, first, the West was pleasantly surprised.
[Bjørn Olav]: Oh, these Arabs, they want democracy?
[Bjørn Olav]: How interesting.
[Bjørn Olav]: Let's see.
[Bjørn Olav]: Let's talk to them.
[Bjørn Olav]: Let's do something.
[Bjørn Olav]: When the military coups came, when the backlash came,
[Bjørn Olav]: And they said, no, it was like we thought.
[Bjørn Olav]: They never wanted democracy.
[Bjørn Olav]: They wanted the strong man.
[Bjørn Olav]: So there was no real support, no real protest against this rollback of democracy.
[Bjørn Olav]: And they're back to what the West used to do before, to cooperate with the autocratic governments in the name of stability.
[Bjørn Olav]: Is there hope now?
[Bjørn Olav]: Well, that hope that expressed itself in 2011 certainly has been battered, and it's laying low.
[Bjørn Olav]: But the factors driving these uprisings have not disappeared.
[Bjørn Olav]: The lack of economic development, the lack of democracy, the lack of freedom, the widespread corruption.
[Bjørn Olav]: So the forces are still at work.
[Bjørn Olav]: Does it mean hope or fear?
[Bjørn Olav]: At least it means that we haven't seen the last of change and uprisings in the Middle East, I think.
[Kadafi]: Jacob, 13 years after the Arab Spring, who do you think wants democracy in the Middle East?
[Jacob]: Yeah, that's the question, isn't it?
[Jacob]: The premise for this whole conference is, of course, that democracy is a good thing,
[Jacob]: And how, as we talked about in the first session this morning, how can we retain it?
[Jacob]: How is the state of democracy?
[Jacob]: And then it's a given that people want democracy.
[Jacob]: But when it comes to the Middle East, we really have to seriously ask that question, who really wants it?
[Jacob]: And it's clear, as Bjørn Olav has talked about just now, the rulers certainly don't want it.
[Jacob]: The people currently in power,
[Jacob]: Nobody, I think none of them, really wants democracy strongly.
[Jacob]: I mean, some can begrudgingly accept it, like Erdogan, but nobody really wants it.
[Jacob]: Among the people, ordinary people, in the last Arab Opinion Index, 71%, I think, this was in 2022, answered that they believed in democracy as the best form of governance.
[Jacob]: 19 emphatically didn't.
[Jacob]: and then some people are undecided.
[Jacob]: So a clear majority thinks it's a good thing, but, you know, far from everybody.
[Jacob]: Now, that leaves the third sort of major actor in these processes, which is, you know, Western countries.
[Jacob]: And, you know, we all talked about the role of Western countries or their perceptions during the Arab Spring.
[Jacob]: This harks back to the previous conversations, too, about the West's attitudes and double standards.
[Jacob]: I read a book in 2009 by David Gardner, the late political editor of the Financial Times.
[Jacob]: The book was called Last Chance.
[Jacob]: And it was, he argued, the Western countries' last chance in 2009 to show that they really wanted democracy and prosperity
[Jacob]: for the Middle East and that they were prepared to support, not by intervening, but support morally and otherwise peaceful forces in the region that wanted democracy.
[Jacob]: And he said, we have consistently failed to do this.
[Jacob]: The double standards don't start necessarily in 1999.
[Jacob]: Go back to 1978 when Edward Said wrote The Question of Palestine about how Western countries have dealt with the Palestine question.
[Jacob]: So there's a long history of double standards and not supporting democratic forces.
[Jacob]: He was preoccupied with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, obviously.
[Jacob]: So 2009, right?
[Jacob]: And then one and a half years later, you have the Arab Spring, which the Western countries, either they didn't support it at all, or they bungled their support.
[Jacob]: At any rate, the result was that Western countries were seen not to support ordinary people.
[Jacob]: And even by that time, David Gardner was right to predict that the West had lost legitimacy.
[Jacob]: We don't have legitimacy as a spokesperson for democracy.
[Jacob]: After the Arab Spring and up until now, rulers in the Middle East can take away the credibility and legitimacy of internal opposition by saying that they're supported by Europe or the US.
[Jacob]: That's the level of, and they get away with it, and people, you know, people then think that these forces are discredited.
[Jacob]: So that's the level of, you know, people not believing in Western values and Western rhetoric and Western actions,
[Jacob]: that we're actually, you know, when we try to help democratic forces, we do more harm than good.
[Kadafi]: Marte, do you agree?
[Kadafi]: And why are we so concerned about democracy in the Middle East?
[Marte]: Well, thanks, first of all, for inviting me here.
[Marte]: Are you OK in the middle?
[Marte]: I feel like especially those in the middle here were trapped after the first session.
[Marte]: You had no escape route.
[Marte]: Are you still interested in democracy in the Middle East?
[Marte]: Because it's a very bleak picture.
[Marte]: I agree, of course, with my colleagues.
[Marte]: And why do we care about it here today?
[Marte]: Well, if you look at the map, ours is in the indexes that usually rank democracies and freedom in different countries.
[Marte]: The traffic lights is the usual standard.
[Marte]: So ours is a green and happy zone, right?
[Marte]: And it's not just because we're democratic, but it's also because we are free and safe.
[Marte]: So the connection between security and peace and democracy is still quite strong.
[Marte]: It's one of the theories that hold up to evidence.
[Marte]: And this poor neighborhood is red, very red belt across the whole Middle East, North Africa region.
[Marte]: Also other countries, but those are the ones we're talking about here.
[Marte]: So I think for us not to acknowledge today that in our green zone up in the north, Scandinavia, the green belt that we can proudly call ourselves a part of, at this point when they're
[Marte]: with a six-month devastating war in Gaza, a potentially huge regional escalation, I don't think that we can afford not to be interested in this question.
[Marte]: So then the next, so if we all agree on that, then the next thing is what are this region's experiences with democracy?
[Marte]: So we've already, Bjørn Olav and Jacob rightly point to the Arab Spring.
[Marte]: We of course also have Israel as a state in this region.
[Marte]: It still is a green dot.
[Marte]: So in this belt of red, the state of Israel is still green.
[Kadafi]: I mean, Israel always says that it's the only democracy in the Middle East.
[Kadafi]: How true is that?
[Kadafi]: What is the situation of the Israeli democracy?
[Marte]: Well, that's the thing, and that's where it becomes also extra interesting to us, because we're very happy in our green democracy up here,
[Marte]: is that the Israeli case, I believe, shows that you can also not take it for granted.
[Marte]: It doesn't last unless you keep it.
[Marte]: It doesn't last unless you take care of it, and it doesn't last unless you give it nourishment.
[Marte]: And the Israeli case is...
[Marte]: that it's dwindling.
[Marte]: It's been a green-indexed country, democracy and freedom-wise, for many years, but the last two years it's been going down.
[Marte]: And this has to do, some of it has to do with the judicial reform suggestions of the current Israeli government.
[Marte]: And some of it has, of course, to do with the war that broke out 7th of October last year, but some of it also has to do about the level of trust between the public and the institutions.
[Marte]: And this is where the Israeli case is also relevant to us, because I think one of the great things about
[Marte]: Well, we're in Norway now, so let's not talk about other Scandinavian democracies, but our gold, our most valuable currency is this,
[Marte]: I believe, the level of trust between people in society, but also between people and their institutions that are set to govern them,
[Marte]: precisely giving us what the Global South are lacking to see in their evidence of their efforts to have democracy.
[Marte]: And if I can just add one last thing before we discuss further on,
[Marte]: is that in addition to the Middle East and North Africa's experience with democracy being the state of Israel and the Arab Spring, there was a Palestinian election in 2006.
[Marte]: And I don't know if anyone remembers this, but it was a free and fair election.
[Marte]: And what did they choose?
[Marte]: They chose Hamas.
[Marte]: We can like that or not, and we certainly showed them that we didn't like it.
[Marte]: And this, I think, is the third really crucial experience for the region.
[Marte]: And again, to sort of underline my own point, that it also shows the...
[Marte]: really the parallel lives of democracy and security.
[Marte]: Because when the world did not accept the Palestinian election victory, isolation politically and geographically became the answer from not just Israel, but also from huge parts of the world.
[Marte]: And this is what has led to the situation where we are at now.
[Kadafi]: Jacob?
[Jacob]: Just to pick up on that last point about Hamas and also to try and
[Jacob]: be a bit constructive.
[Jacob]: I realize I wasn't entirely constructive in my last intervention, and the situation is certainly bleak.
[Jacob]: So what can we do to support democracy?
[Jacob]: Western countries have pretty little leverage, given the lack of confidence in us from people of the region, and rightfully so.
[Jacob]: So one thing we can do is to actually respect election results when they happen.
[Jacob]: even though we don't like the people who win.
[Jacob]: And that's a crucial point, because not only in the short term, but at least in the medium term,
[Jacob]: if you have democratic elections in many of these countries, you will have some sort of illiberal regime coming out of it.
[Jacob]: And at least here in Norway, most people wouldn't like that kind of regime.
[Jacob]: But you have to respect the rules of the game.
[Jacob]: Otherwise, our words mean nothing.
[Jacob]: That's one thing.
[Jacob]: A second thing that we can actually do without intervening or anything is to actually support the peaceful, good forces that can foster democracy.
[Jacob]: One of them has to do with your profession, Kadafi.
[Jacob]: I did a project with my good colleague, Kjetil Selvik, some years back, about journalism in hybrid contexts, journalism in Middle Eastern and Arab countries.
[Jacob]: And we saw there how much good western danish and other professional organizations did for training journalists,
[Jacob]: not with you know values about democracy and so on and so on but just you know they hadn't received proper training throughout years of authoritarian regimes,
[Jacob]: there was an opening of some years when when organizations like media international media support in Denmark could deliver that and that really helped you had an upsurge of quality information.
[Jacob]: Now, it's gone down again later because of political development.
[Jacob]: But I mean, information is crucially important and professionally conveyed and critical information.
[Jacob]: And that's where we can actually do something without intervening in the politics of these countries.
[Bjørn Olav]: Yes, getting back a bit to why the Arab Spring has not led to democracy.
[Bjørn Olav]: First of all, I talked about the internal forces working against it and the more or less betrayal of the West.
[Bjørn Olav]: Of course, there are also tremendously strong forces like Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, who were scared to hell by the Arab Spring and used their huge finances to support
[Bjørn Olav]: military coups and rollbacks.
[Bjørn Olav]: But also Israel, as Marte mentioned.
[Bjørn Olav]: Of course, talking about the environment, so there's an environment of autocratic regimes, but Israel is there as the green light,
[Bjørn Olav]: even though it has deteriorated, but in some sense, it is a democracy more than any other country in the region.
[Bjørn Olav]: So why didn't that spread, sort of, people could learn from Israel?
[Bjørn Olav]: I think that, well, from the Israeli point of view, one might ask the question, do Israel want more democracies around it?
[Bjørn Olav]: I think not.
[Bjørn Olav]: For what would Arab democracies mean?
[Bjørn Olav]: It would mean that the populations who are
[Bjørn Olav]: strongly pro-Palestinian would elect governments, and if the governments acted on that, I don't think it would mean more war necessarily,
[Bjørn Olav]: but it would mean that the Arab represent international fora would work with great legitimacy to promote Palestinian rights according to international law.
[Bjørn Olav]: For Israel, it's much better to have these autocratic regimes, which they also then strike deals with and can play against each other.
[Bjørn Olav]: So that's one.
[Bjørn Olav]: And then just one, pick up another thing, which when you talked about trust as important.
[Bjørn Olav]: Because that was, now we talked about sort of forces working against the Arab Spring.
[Bjørn Olav]: What about the forces working for the Arab Spring?
[Bjørn Olav]: their problem was that they easily became divided among themselves.
[Bjørn Olav]: And that's, I mean, in established democracies like Norway,
[Bjørn Olav]: I will be so honest that I would not like that the Progress Party got the majority in the Norwegian parliament.
[Bjørn Olav]: But I would still trust that it wouldn't mean the end of democracy.
[Bjørn Olav]: It would mean that the parties that I might support or vote for would have the chance to work better, to garner support from the voters and come back in the next elections.
[Bjørn Olav]: But when you have lived under a dictatorship, and dictatorships that have also been good playing groups against each other for 50, 60, 70 years, that's not that trust.
[Bjørn Olav]: So if you are a leftist and the Muslim brothers are elected to parliament, it is not obvious that you would trust them.
[Bjørn Olav]: And that's what actually happened.
[Bjørn Olav]: This lack of trust undermined the alliance that was there for a crucial period when they sort of toppled the rulers.
[Bjørn Olav]: it disappeared.
[Bjørn Olav]: And the temptation to say that, okay, we don't like these people, let's lean on the military rulers to get away with them,
[Bjørn Olav]: and then we can have the democracy where we can win, you know, that was a big problem.
[Kadafi]: Marte, you were talking about the experience of democracy in this region, and you mentioned the election where Hamas was elected.
[Kadafi]: But before democracy, you need freedom.
[Kadafi]: Israel has been an occupying force for many decades.
[Kadafi]: How do you see the Western approach?
[Marte]: Well, I agree with Jacob's point that as a basic premise, it seems to be a good idea if you want to promote democracy elsewhere to respect outcomes of democratic elections.
[Marte]: But of course, the elections, it's not even half the story.
[Marte]: The democratic culture that has to take root,
[Marte]: If trust is to be built and if, I mean, the place for, for example, a free opposition is a great success criteria for democracies that you can actually accept your opponents.
[Marte]: And I think in the case of Palestine and their efforts to try to have democracy and to have it overruled by external powers and internal powers.
[Marte]: I think this is certainly from my experience from having spent quite some time there that
[Marte]: people really wanted to break out of this stalemate, this bind that they were caught in between having no elections and having no representation.
[Marte]: Because that's the problem, of course, if you are... It's a double negative.
[Marte]: They are caught in a conflict where they don't have anyone negotiating on their behalf because their opponent says, you don't have a democratically elected...
[Marte]: counterpart for me to negotiate with.
[Marte]: So that sort of double bind that they had been in before October 7th, I definitely think is a huge part of the rationale behind this upheaval that happened on October 7th.
[Kadafi]: We've spoken about the Arab Spring, about Israel.
[Kadafi]: There's another main actor in this region also, Iran, and an ongoing escalation.
[Kadafi]: How do you see what's happening now, and how could that change the dynamics of the Middle East, Jacob?
[Jacob]: You're talking about the threat of impending war between Iran.
[Jacob]: Yeah.
[Marte]: Yeah, thank you.
[Marte]: We're going to go home now.
[Jacob]: Of course, that would be devastating on so many levels because a very serious and terrible conflict
[Jacob]: between Israel and Hamas in Gaza would, also affecting the West Bank seriously, would then escalate probably to the whole region and draw in countries like Lebanon, Syria,
[Jacob]: Iran itself and Yemen and so on, and wreak even more havoc in the region.
[Jacob]: I mean, that can only be negative.
[Jacob]: And just to, let's not forget also that, I mean, as terrible as that is, this is not the only war in the region.
[Jacob]: You have Yemen still being in a state of civil war.
[Jacob]: There's been famine in Yemen too.
[Jacob]: You have Sudan, which is just a horrible, horrible war driven on by elites.
[Jacob]: And this is, to a very large extent, the common denominator for all these conflicts.
[Jacob]: You have elites, whether it's Netanyahu in Israel, or it's the Sudanese generals, or it's the Iranian leadership,
[Jacob]: who don't care much about their own people, but who are prepared to do whatever it takes to keep their privileges.
[Bjørn Olav]: Yeah, talking about the role of Iran in the region.
[Bjørn Olav]: Actually, in the decade before 2011, before the Arab Spring, Iran was quite popular in the Arab world because Iran was seen to stand against the autocratic regimes.
[Bjørn Olav]: and against Israel, and they supported Hezbollah, and Hezbollah drove Israel out of Lebanon, which was a major victory, or at least that's how it was seen.
[Bjørn Olav]: And also when the Arab Spring emerged, Iran gave positive, they actually said, now you're doing what we did in 1979, now you're driving away the autocratic rulers like we did
[Bjørn Olav]: with the Shah.
[Bjørn Olav]: So there was a very brief honeymoon, but then came the uprising in Syria, and Syria had one of the worst of these very bad autocratic regimes, most brutal.
[Bjørn Olav]: But it was an ally of Iran for strategic reasons, not really for ideological reasons, but strategically it was important for Iran to keep Syria.
[Bjørn Olav]: And so Iran decided to go all in and support the dictator in Syria and also recruited Hezbollah from Lebanon to do the same, fighting on the side of Bashar al-Assad.
[Bjørn Olav]: And that, of course, destroyed the image of Iran as anything supporting the Arab Spring,
[Bjørn Olav]: and broke those bonds.
[Kadafi]: But in Gaza, Iran has support, a lot of support.
[Kadafi]: What's the main reason?
[Bjørn Olav]: I think you have to look at, I mean, where do the Palestinians go?
[Bjørn Olav]: I mean, of course there is the administration in Ramallah, which has more or less had at least good relations with the West and with
[Bjørn Olav]: with Norway and so on, but which is seen as impotent, as corrupt maybe, and as being too involved with Israel,
[Bjørn Olav]: working on the security of Israel, rather than development and freedom for the Palestinians.
[Bjørn Olav]: So for those forces, and we may discuss Hamas, but those forces in Palestine that want to fight for freedom more actively,
[Bjørn Olav]: And at least if you want to have an armed struggle, you need funding.
[Bjørn Olav]: And so I think they basically, I mean, historically, it's not, again, it's not an ideological alliance.
[Bjørn Olav]: Hamas is a Sunni Muslim movement.
[Bjørn Olav]: Iran is Shia.
[Bjørn Olav]: But it was, you know, it's pure pragmatism.
[Bjørn Olav]: I think that here you can get funding and support.
[Bjørn Olav]: There was a short break, especially on the question of Syria, where Hamas broke with, more or less broke with Iran and moved out of Damascus, where they had their
[Bjørn Olav]: an important office.
[Bjørn Olav]: But again, I think it's a question of, well, that's how I can see it.
[Kadafi]: We're running out of time.
[Kadafi]: Marte, you're coming with a new book very soon on the situation.
[Kadafi]: So back to our headline.
[Kadafi]: Is there a hope for democracy in the Middle East?
[Marte]: Look,
[Marte]: I, the short answer is no, not in this, in the medium, short to medium term.
[Marte]: But I also have the strong sense that it is a very awkward exercise to be standing up on a very safe podium in a green spring Oslo city day to discourage the whole idea that you can have hope
[Marte]: for anything in this tormented region.
[Marte]: I don't think I would rather end on a note that echoes Jacob's, that the importance is that we use our democracy to take care of it ourselves, to learn from what's not good,
[Marte]: in other places, democracies or not, but also to do what Jacob says, support those actors that are keeping the hope alive,
[Marte]: and that can be the freedom of speech, that could be freedom of assembly, it could be education, it can be any part of democratic culture.
[Marte]: That's where we can still
[Marte]: Yes, that is hope for democratic culture, but to hope for democracy at the same time that the region is in its worst state for.
[Marte]: I don't know what's the historical parallel here, but of course we all
[Marte]: follow the news and know that it's extremely dire situation, I think it would be foolish of us to say that, yes, there's hope for democracy in the Middle East right now,
[Marte]: but it doesn't mean that we can stop trying.
[Kadafi]: Final remarks?
[Kadafi]: Jacob?
[Jacob]: I think that sums it up very well.
[Jacob]: I don't have any more to say.
[Bjørn Olav]: Of course, I agree with Marte, but also I would say that, well, maybe you said it, that is there hope for democracy in the Middle East?
[Bjørn Olav]: Well, there is hope in the sense that there are millions of people hoping for democracy.
[Bjørn Olav]: And at least not all of them are sitting quietly.
[Bjørn Olav]: Also, they're working in different ways, the ways that they can find to promote it.
[Bjørn Olav]: And
[Bjørn Olav]: Then again, I'm like Marte, I'm a historian by training.
[Bjørn Olav]: So there was a French Revolution in 1789, and we like to think that that was the start of development towards democracy.
[Bjørn Olav]: It took 100 years in France.
[Bjørn Olav]: If they have a stable democracy now, we don't know, but it took at least 100 years.
[Bjørn Olav]: I don't want to be cynical about it, but I agree.
[Bjørn Olav]: In the short term, things will happen.
[Bjørn Olav]: There will be uprisings and upheaval, but stable democracy maybe is far off.
[Bjørn Olav]: Thank you very much.
[Bjørn Olav]: Thank you.
[Kadafi]: It's our final session.
[Kadafi]: We had a panel of three persons.
[Kadafi]: One of them has become ill.
[Kadafi]: The state secretary is ill.
[Kadafi]: We just got the message this morning.
[Kadafi]: And the Norwegian government couldn't find a stand-in.
[Kadafi]: But we have two other honorable guests.
[Kadafi]: I would like to welcome Mr. Boniface Dulani.
[Kadafi]: Director of Surveys at the Afrobarometer and Senior Lecturer at the University of Malawi.
[Kadafi]: Welcome.
[Kadafi]: And we have Mr. Dan Banik, who was earlier also at the stage, Professor of Political Science here at the University of Oslo.
[Kadafi]: Please welcome.
[Kadafi]: Our topic is...
[Dan]: I think he wants to shut down.
[Kadafi]: is the green transition.
[Kadafi]: There is a general agreement that there is a need for green transition worldwide.
[Kadafi]: And while the North has enjoyed long periods of economic growth, this has partly been at the expense of the South.
[Kadafi]: Now, as the South has picked up its speed, it is asked to transit into green economy.
[Kadafi]: So, before our conversation, I would like to request Mr. Dulani to show us some data from the situation on the ground in African countries.
[Kadafi]: Please.
[Dulani]: Thank you.
[Dulani]: Do we have the presentations?
[Dulani]: Thank you so much and thank you for having me at this important workshop.
[Dulani]: I was asked to share some thoughts, I think, on the green transition from an African perspective.
[Dulani]: And I thought, you know, what a better way of doing this by sharing some of the survey findings from Afrobarometer, for which I'm the director of surveys.
[Dulani]: given, I think, the importance of people in a democratic context.
[Dulani]: And I think just to learn about Africans' thoughts and African challenges, especially when it comes to the green transition.
[Dulani]: I do come from Malawi, in a country that struggles with the
[Dulani]: access to electricity, where when you talk about electric cars, as I do with my friend, Professor Banik,
[Dulani]: people tell you that most of those cars will be stationary on the roads because we do have unreliable electricity.
[Dulani]: So I thought I'd just start by sharing some of the data from our surveys on
[Dulani]: access to electricity from Afrobarometer.
[Dulani]: One of the areas that we ask for in Afrobarometer is to look at access to electricity and its availability, especially at the local level.
[Dulani]: So when our field teams go out, they do record the availability of electricity grid.
[Dulani]: And as you can see, I think we do have quite a lot of variation in terms of access
[Dulani]: access to the electricity grid across Africa.
[Dulani]: For the most recent surveys that we did in 39 countries, we see that countries like Tunisia and Seychelles are saved more or less universally by availability of electricity.
[Dulani]: And then when you look at the bottom end of the scale, countries like Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, and even in my own country, Malawi,
[Dulani]: barely half of our enumeration areas have access to electricity.
[Dulani]: And of course, there's also a rural-urban divide here, with urban areas better safety with electricity, almost universally, whereas rural enumeration areas only have
[Dulani]: access to electricity at 44%.
[Dulani]: And I think across, when we look at over time trends, we also see that in terms of availability of electricity, there's been a very modest increase over the last 10 years of just about 4 percentage points.
[Dulani]: More or less, we're seeing an aesthetic picture in terms of electricity availability.
[Dulani]: Of course, having access to electricity does not necessarily mean that everyone is also connected.
[Dulani]: You can have the power lines passing through your area, but you're not connected.
[Dulani]: And again, when we look at this...
[Dulani]: I'm not particularly proud, Dan has worked in Malawi with me quite a long time,
[Dulani]: but Malawi does anchor the tables here in terms of connectivity with only 17% of households being connected to electricity.
[Dulani]: Of course, we do have countries like Mauritius and again, Morocco and others at the top that have more or less universal connectivity.
[Dulani]: And again, the same picture that we see in terms of access, we see it also in connectivity with the urban households being more likely to be connected to the electricity grid.
[Dulani]: Now, again, for those of you who've traveled to Africa, including countries like South Africa,
[Dulani]: we had a conference in South Africa a few months ago, you will also experience a lot of power outages.
[Dulani]: I mean, in South Africa,
[Dulani]: It's become more, let's say, a daily occurrence with the power going off for almost four or five hours a day.
[Dulani]: So when you consider that only very few people have access to electricity,
[Dulani]: we also see that even that small group of people that have access do not have regular electricity access.
[Dulani]: So, again, you know, when we look at, I think, the 39 countries for which we have this data, only, you know, less than half, 44%, tell us that they have electricity that works most or indeed all of the time.
[Dulani]: And, again, looking at the across time comparison, just, again, a slight increase of four percentage points.
[Dulani]: So, in the case of Malawi and Madagascar and others, in Malawi only 10% of households tell us that they have regular electricity all the time,
[Dulani]: and includes also countries like Nigeria, which is the most populous country on the continent.
[Dulani]: And again, rural households bearing the blunt lack of access to electricity.
[Dulani]: So moving on then to the issue, the topic at hand about the green transition.
[Dulani]: Do Africans really value environmental protection over job creation and others?
[Dulani]: And we see that there is more or less an even split.
[Dulani]: 47% tell us that governments should prioritize environmental protection, whereas 44% of Africans tell us that
[Dulani]: Governments should not even care about the environment.
[Dulani]: They should prioritize job creation and addressing issues to do with poverty because that's really a priority issue for most citizens.
[Dulani]: And then when we ask them, who should be responsible for addressing climate change?
[Dulani]: Interestingly, I think a majority of Africans tell us that the most important stakeholders for fighting
[Dulani]: for addressing a climate change are actually domestic actors.
[Dulani]: They are only governments and the citizens themselves to feel that they can play a role and because acknowledging that they are also part of the problem
[Dulani]: in contributing to environmental damage.
[Dulani]: Of course, developed countries also do come in there, but only 11% tell us that the development countries should do more.
[Dulani]: But that said, I think 71% of the African citizens that we have surveyed tell us that developed countries need to do a lot more to limit climate change.
[Dulani]: So, you know,
[Dulani]: Just to close here, I think, you know, these few remarks, to just highlight that, you know, Africans do have, do value,
[Dulani]: the issues of fighting climate change, but they do face enormous challenges.
[Dulani]: So this issue of the green transition, it places them really in a bind, that do you prioritize the green transition
[Dulani]: and then at the expense of, you know, basic needs and basic survival.
[Dulani]: So for African citizens to be much more involved, I think it is needed to address some of these challenges.
[Dulani]: I'll stop here for now, and then we'll engage more with my colleague, Professor Banik
[Kadafi]: Thank you very much.
[Kadafi]: Before we move on, just to get a clear picture, what are the main reasons for so bad connectivity, electricity connectivity?
[Kadafi]: Like in Malawi, you were saying one out of ten households.
[Kadafi]: Is it the production?
[Kadafi]: Is it the infrastructure?
[Kadafi]: What are the reasons?
[Dulani]: It's mostly production.
[Dulani]: I think Malawi's electricity production stands at 328 megawatts.
[Dulani]: And that is really to save a country of more than 20 million.
[Dulani]: So it's just not enough.
[Dulani]: And some of it is, of course, cost a lot of people cannot afford because they are poor.
[Dulani]: And then, of course, even when the few people that are connected, the power itself is not regularly available.
[Dulani]: And as I'm sure, my colleague will tell you that forces people,
[Dulani]: even when you are connected to the electricity grid, to rely on other sources of energy, including charcoal as well as wood, because that is at least something
[Dulani]: that you can use when the power is off or when you don't have the power, you're not connected.
[Kadafi]: Dan, when you see these figures, I'm sure you've seen them many times, is it reasonable to talk about green transition before giving people the basic electricity?
[Dan]: Well, firstly, I apologize that you have to listen to me again.
[Dan]: I'm just stepping in.
[Dan]: I'm a last-minute replacement.
[Dan]: So, yes, so the dilemma is that people want development.
[Dan]: This is a continuation from the first panel, right?
[Dan]: And one of the many surveys that Boni has done from Afrobarometer shows they asked African citizens, what is it that you prioritize most?
[Dan]: And in 39 countries, the number one priority was unemployment.
[Dan]: You have to do something about that.
[Dan]: And then it was health and, no, the economy.
[Dan]: Number two was management of the economy.
[Dan]: Number three was health, infrastructure, roads, etc.
[Dan]: Number 11 was corruption.
[Dan]: I don't know where environment figured on that list.
[Dulani]: Number 33.
[Dan]: Number 33.
[Dan]: Now, there are many ways of looking at it, right?
[Dan]: I mean, one way of looking at it is to say that, obviously, environmental damage and destruction is causing many, many hardships, and this is not something that we need to debate.
[Dan]: I mean, the poorest are the hardest hit.
[Dan]: And so sometimes one is, when you're living in poverty, when you're facing this, you're fearing starvation,
[Dan]: when everything is just, you know, when push comes to shove, you're not thinking about necessarily the causes, what caused this.
[Dan]: You want, you have a specific problem and you want to resolve that problem.
[Dan]: And so it's that immediate thing.
[Dan]: I want a job, I want to make sure that I have an income for my family, I don't have a welfare state, those are things.
[Dan]: It does not mean, and I don't think that number 33 should be taken very seriously, it does not mean that people don't care about clean water.
[Dan]: They know that if you have still water, stagnant water, you can get malaria, right?
[Dan]: So there is an awareness.
[Dan]: It's just that one prioritizes the very immediate development needs.
[Dan]: And what I think is really fascinating is the fact that the African citizens want their governments to do
[Dan]: the climate change or the environmental job, not the donors.
[Dan]: I thought that is fascinating, and that's something that we can actually talk more about.
[Kadafi]: Yeah, how is that perception?
[Dulani]: So, you know, Dan is right.
[Dulani]: And I wanted to also, you know, follow up, I think, on this issue of jobs.
[Dulani]: Because I do recall, I think, there was a time that we visited one village with Professor Banik just to do a study on charcoal production.
[Dulani]: And this village, I remember meeting this young man who had completed school, but he couldn't get a job.
[Dulani]: He waited and waited, and then I think at some point he said, look, there's no job.
[Dulani]: I need to start to earn a living for my family and support my family.
[Dulani]: So then he decided to follow all the people in his community to go and cut trees in their nearest village.
[Dulani]: forest so that they could burn charcoal and sell it to earn some income.
[Dulani]: So I just wanted to agree with Danny that most of the time, most African citizens are pushed into, you know, going to cut trees, to furrow trees,
[Dulani]: Not because they want to, but there are just no other alternatives.
[Dulani]: And that's why we see from the data that most African citizens really are worried about immediate needs.
[Dulani]: It's not because they don't care about the environment, but that's something in the long term future.
[Dulani]: Because if they don't go out and cut down the trees today, then there's not going to be any future for them in any way.
[Dulani]: So they have to meet their daily needs.
[Dulani]: Every day I tell my friends that I actually see more forests when I come to Norway and the developed world than I actually see back home
[Dulani]: because back home I think the trees are just a resource that you just have to use for your survival.
[Dan]: So if I have one message here today, and that is that we really should be talking about energy poverty,
[Dan]: okay, in relation to the green transition, and this is what Boni was saying, the very fact that electricity coverage is almost non-existent in many parts of the continent,
[Dan]: that's why it's called the dark continent, because it's
[Dan]: It's not just production but also access.
[Dan]: People rely on charcoal and firewood.
[Dan]: You know, the stuff that we rely on to, you know, we're looking forward to the summer, our barbecues and, you know, that kind of stuff that we like, the exotic smell of coal-fired, you know.
[Dan]: meat or whatever, that is the daily life of people.
[Dan]: Without that charcoal, you can't really boil water, you can't cook.
[Dan]: It's firewood and charcoal.
[Dan]: Now, where does that come from?
[Dan]: It comes from the forest.
[Dan]: So people are very aware that the forest cover is depleting, fast depleting.
[Dan]: People are cutting down the forest, but they're not doing it because they think that's a good thing.
[Dan]: They're doing it because there's very little alternative.
[Dan]: So if you don't have electricity, if you don't have access to cooking gas, if you don't have solar-powered batteries, if you don't have wind turbines,
[Dan]: Where is that energy going to come from?
[Dan]: It comes from the forest.
[Dan]: And I think that is where we should be really focusing our attempts.
[Dan]: And that is where I think the international community, and if I can don the hat of maybe a rich country government, et cetera,
[Dan]: again, you may be tired of hearing me say that we often preach something, but the international community would tell a country like Malawi, you have to pursue climate-smart agriculture.
[Dan]: you have to make sure that the forest is not cut down, deforestation must be controlled, and you should make charcoal illegal.
[Dan]: So you can have a legislative focus making something that is bad, like use of charcoal, illegal.
[Dan]: But the reality is that that law exists.
[Dan]: 99% of the charcoal that is produced in Malawi is illegally produced.
[Dan]: But the puzzle is that the first thing you do when you step out of the aircraft, or the airport, not the aircraft, is you see bags of charcoal openly.
[Dan]: It's being transported.
[Dan]: So this is the paradox.
[Dan]: The international community would say, you know, make something illegal, but in reality, in the absence of an alternative, you see it flourishing.
[Dan]: So I think we should be thinking about energy poverty.
[Dan]: And it has many, many other aspects to this.
[Dan]: I mean, one of the biggest sources of ill health in many African households is when you cook.
[Dan]: It's the household pollution from use of firewood and charcoal.
[Dan]: Can you imagine cooking, not having a very efficient stove, inhaling all those fumes?
[Dan]: And this is particularly bad for women's health.
[Dan]: So there are many, many arguments for doing something about energy poverty, but it doesn't help just to say, don't cut down the forest.
[Dan]: It helps to say, here is a viable alternative.
[Kadafi]: And Boniface, if the state secretary had been here, what could a country like Norway do?
[Kadafi]: What should they do?
[Dulani]: I think, as Dan is saying, I think there's of course need to support African countries to address these energy challenges that we face.
[Dulani]: But as you can also see, our citizens are saying, look, we can also play a role in this situation.
[Dulani]: we can ourselves help to mitigate against, I think, climate change.
[Dulani]: We can do more in stopping deforestation, but we need to be in a position where our basic needs have been met.
[Dulani]: So as Dan was saying, I think issues to do with employment,
[Dulani]: If we don't have employment, then we will have these kind of challenges.
[Dulani]: As our citizens are telling us that the priorities for them are employment, economic management, and some of this really does not necessarily require financial support to African government.
[Dulani]: It's actually to get them to do a better job.
[Dulani]: Because there has been a lot of support that has been given to African countries, and we know that we do face a problem of corruption.
[Dulani]: And the African citizens also do acknowledge that this is really a big problem in terms of
[Dulani]: their priorities that they want governments to be addressing issues to do with the economic mismanagement, corruption.
[Dulani]: So we need, I think, countries like Norway to put pressure on African governments to do better in economic management, to do better in creating jobs, to address these challenges of corruption.
[Dulani]: so that the resources, the resources that are there can be channeled to uplift the lives of ordinary African citizens and in the process, I think,
[Dulani]: get them to be more involved in addressing these challenges, environmental challenges
[Dulani]: that Africa faces today.
[Dulani]: Otherwise, I think we can talk about the green transition.
[Dulani]: It will be something that African governments will say, oh yes, are there some financial rewards after that?
[Dulani]: And we say, okay, if there are, give us the funds, we will do our part, and then the citizens themselves will say, okay,
[Dulani]: So what can we do?
[Dulani]: I mean, how does that help our lives?
[Dulani]: How does that really help us to rely less on harvesting wood as a source of energy?
[Kadafi]: Dan, we are living in a country which we produce a lot of gas, a lot of oil, and make a lot of money.
[Kadafi]: But we still, and I mean rightly, talk a lot about green transition.
[Kadafi]: Do you think like...
[Kadafi]: Or how green are we?
[Kadafi]: Like, let's talk about Norway.
[Dan]: You know, I don't really know the answer to the question.
[Dan]: I think we like to think we're green.
[Dan]: I think, as Boni said, that, you know, we are marveling about all our electric cars, etc.
[Dan]: But there's a fundamental problem here.
[Dan]: Again, going back to the hypocrisy.
[Dan]: that we are one of the biggest beneficiaries of the war in the Ukraine.
[Dan]: We are making trillions of dollars in selling our gas to Europe, and oil, and if Bjørg had been here,
[Dan]: a representative of the Norwegian government, it would have been interesting to ask her, are we consistent in our advice to other countries?
[Dan]: Because the taxpayers in Norway want a green policy, we are telling
[Dan]: countries in Africa and Asia, whatever, if you have oil and gas, we're not going to support the exploration of these resources, okay?
[Dan]: Because that's not what our taxpayers want.
[Dan]: But, and this is the fundamental problem, most African leaders who lead countries with a rich oil deposit or natural gas, like Senegal or Mozambique,
[Dan]: Uganda has oil.
[Dan]: They want to mine it.
[Dan]: They want this out of the ground.
[Dan]: And the rich country, the typical advice is, let it be.
[Dan]: Don't invest in oil and gas.
[Dan]: That's going to be obsolete in 20 years, 30 years.
[Dan]: But the leaders, they don't believe that.
[Dan]: They say, we're not asking for handouts.
[Dan]: Just help us use whatever natural resources we have, just like you used it to get rich.
[Dan]: And this is where the debate is.
[Dan]: Many rich countries are reluctant to help these other countries use that fossil resource.
[Dan]: And that is fine, right?
[Dan]: I mean, if the taxpayers don't want that, that's fine.
[Dan]: It's just that when you tell a country, don't get your gas out of the ground,
[Dan]: and then you're doing it yourself and making millions and trillions in the process, then again, that advice loses a lot of its bite.
[Dan]: So again, consistency in the message.
[Dan]: If it was, I mean, just to answer your question that you asked, Boni, what should Norway do?
[Dan]: Put in, I mean, just focus on energy poverty.
[Dan]: just somehow resolve, I mean, you know, whether it is making sure that we have more, scaling up solar power, it could be,
[Dan]: you know, in the household level, it could be just going, because hydro, which is what a country like Malawi relies on, water is decreasing.
[Dan]: I mean, the rivers are getting drier because of climate disruption.
[Dan]: And so one has to think about alternative sources.
[Dan]: If we don't think about energy poverty, we can't make a dent in any of our efforts
[Dan]: in this so-called green transition.
[Dan]: So it's energy poverty, energy poverty, energy poverty.
[Dan]: That is, for me, the key.
[Dulani]: Just to add, I think, to what Dan is saying.
[Dulani]: I mean, I already said how little power we generate as a country.
[Dulani]: And as Dan has said, it's all hydropower.
[Dulani]: And again, because of deforestation, as well as climate change, the water levels have been going down.
[Dulani]: And I think a few years back, there was a debate in Malawi on whether we should build some coal plants.
[Dulani]: And again, I think when we asked Malawians in a survey, more or less like 90% of them said, yeah, what we need is power, and we don't really care how that power is generated.
[Dulani]: And of course, at the end of the day, there was a pressure on the Malawi government that, no, coal is so old-fashioned.
[Dulani]: You're not going to, in such a form of energy, you should not do that.
[Dulani]: And that project really was stopped.
[Dulani]: And now Malawi is where we were 10 years ago in terms of our power generation.
[Kadafi]: And another topic in this segment is food security.
[Kadafi]: What kind of, or what role does food security play in the green transition?
[Dulani]: Well, I think I will speak more from my own experience, again from my Malawian experience,
[Dulani]: that the majority of Malawians, not just Malawian farmers, almost 80% of Malawians are subsistence farmers.
[Dulani]: Basically, they're just growing
[Dulani]: Not just enough food to eat, because the majority of them don't even have enough food to eat at the end of the day.
[Dulani]: So in an environment like that, and then you ask people that, okay, your production should also be sustainable.
[Dulani]: It's just language that doesn't exist in that kind of context.
[Dulani]: Mind you, most of the production, I would consider it green, not by design, but rather by default, because most people cannot afford agricultural inputs,
[Dulani]: most cannot afford even technology, so they're really using very traditional
[Dulani]: implements to go and cultivate their crops.
[Dulani]: But at the end of the day, the production levels are very low.
[Dulani]: And I think we, as a country, we have actually one of the lowest, you know, production, I think,
[Dulani]: food production per acre of land because of the, you know, the lack of technological inputs that go into that.
[Dulani]: So, of course, you know, this is still another area of challenge that we need, I think, people obviously need food as a basic thing.
[Dulani]: And, I mean, at the end of the day, if they cannot afford to purchase agricultural inputs, and as a landlocked country, you know, the prices have been going up, and most recently, of course, with the
[Dulani]: the Ukraine war that has also caused a lot of disruption in the fertilizer supply chain.
[Dulani]: And that has no effects on people's ability to use the fertilizers and grow and improve their agricultural inputs.
[Dulani]: So at the end of the day, you find that the food production has been going down.
[Dulani]: But as I said, in terms of the productivity, it's kind of green, but it's really by default rather than by design, I would say.
[Kadafi]: Dan, do you have any comment on the food security?
[Dan]: Well, I used to work on famines, and I'm really worried that we're already seeing, you know,
[Dan]: the use of the word famine has now become really common the last few weeks because of what's happening in Gaza.
[Dan]: But, you know, many, many recent famines have taken place on the African continent.
[Dan]: Some countries, like Boni's country, Malawi, has resolved this by using pumping fertilizer, which we know is not necessarily the best way.
[Dan]: So you can boost food production in the short term, but there will be environmental consequences.
[Dan]: India's rice bowl, Punjab, the state of Punjab, did that, and now many of the areas are facing environmental,
[Dan]: I mean, there's just not enough water because high-yielding varieties of seeds sucked all the water out of the ground.
[Dan]: So you had food production prevented a famine, but you had other causes.
[Dan]: So I think there is a need to step back.
[Dan]: There are lots of reports now saying that going forward from until 2040, many countries can experience 10, 15, 20 percent decline in food production.
[Dan]: And this is really worrisome.
[Dan]: And so one of the things that I know that Norway has been prioritizing is something called conservation agriculture.
[Dan]: It's basically not using fertilizers.
[Dan]: When you do the harvest, you don't remove all the waste, you just let it be so that the soil remains wet.
[Dan]: And so you can use it for several sort of
[Dan]: several cultivation periods.
[Dan]: So there are many of these tactics, but again, we are back to persuasion.
[Dan]: If you come to a small farming household, who are used to just fertilizers being doled out by the government, and they're having fantastic production,
[Dan]: and then you say, hey, don't use fertilizer, use this more environmental climate smart agricultural method, and they're not really willing to take that risk.
[Dan]: And so there is that transition period to convince people to adopt a different technique.
[Dan]: But people are afraid to take that risk because, you know, you may end up not having any harvest at all.
[Dan]: What happens to the family then?
[Dan]: They would starve.
[Dan]: So I think we should think a bit long term, not just come up with a technical or technocratic solution, but to say,
[Dan]: if it doesn't work out, we'll be still there for you, you know, to cushion whatever problem that may potentially arise.
[Kadafi]: Boniface, in the first session we discussed China and China's role.
[Kadafi]: In this section, does China have a role in the green transition in Africa?
[Dulani]: More like even contributing, I think,
[Dulani]: the harvesting of natural resources rather than contributing it to the green transition.
[Dulani]: I think while China has, of course, contributed quite a lot in terms of infrastructure developments, they've really supported African countries.
[Dulani]: In road construction, building railways, sometimes building petty projects for politicians, including soccer stadiums and sometimes palaces and the like.
[Dulani]: But I think there's also been a side to that in terms of deforestation, harvesting, especially indigenous wood,
[Dulani]: You know, wildlife, you know, wildlife.
[Dulani]: There's been an attempt, of course, to stop, I think, wildlife, poaching of wildlife and the like.
[Dulani]: But, of course, there are still people, especially with the market for some of, you know, wildlife, you know, trophies
[Dulani]: and parts in India, I mean, not India, sorry, in China, there's still been, I think, a lot of illegal harvesting of wildlife and the like that's been exported.
[Dulani]: But I think, you know, listening, I think, to that first panel when Dan was talking about China want to ask questions.
[Dulani]: So China will not come and tell African countries, don't do this, don't do that.
[Dulani]: And that's why maybe African governments like it when they're dealing with China, because Chinese support does not come with any conditionalities.
[Dulani]: African governments will tell the Chinese that we want you to construct a road here, and you can cut down all the trees you want, and there'll be no questions asked about it.
[Dulani]: I would say it is contributing maybe to worsening the green, I mean, environmental damage rather than, I think, facilitating the green transition.
[Kadafi]: Do you agree, Dan?
[Dan]: I actually, usually I agree with him on most issues, but perhaps not on this one.
[Dan]: I think most of the responsibility should be really faced just because, as you showed, African citizens want their governments to make an effort on the environmental issue.
[Dan]: And a big, big problem on the continent is that African leaders often ask for the wrong projects.
[Dan]: So imagine, rather than asking for a football stadium, or a fancy palace for the president, or a parliament building, one said, you know, build me the world's largest solar power station.
[Dan]: And China's every day reducing the price of its solar panels,
[Dan]: I mean, imagine the amount of sun that you have in that part.
[Dan]: I mean, you know, we should all move there.
[Dan]: The air is clean, beautiful blue skies, lots of sun.
[Dan]: You know, China could do that.
[Dan]: And it has to be said that China was building these very polluting coal-fired power plants, talking about energy poverty for many years.
[Dan]: And then, as you know, the sustainable development goals were adopted in 2015.
[Dan]: There was a lot of pressure on China.
[Dan]: Locals in Kenya were protesting against these very polluting power plants.
[Dan]: And then the president of China announced in 2017 that China will stop building coal-fired power plants outside China.
[Dan]: They keep building these within China, but they are not building it outside.
[Dan]: And now the Chinese policy is small and beautiful, which may or may not be good news for African governments
[Dan]: because often one needs these very big mega projects that very few Western actors would want to finance unless it is China.
[Dan]: So I think there's certainly a case to be made for negotiating better deals,
[Dan]: with China, with whichever actor.
[Dan]: Middle Eastern companies are very active, if it's Japan, South Korea, saying, can you come and build us a renewable energy facility?
[Dan]: And can you help finance this?
[Dan]: We can't do this on our own.
[Dan]: So I think there has to be this vision.
[Dan]: But I think what often a lot of leaders struggle with is to deliver it immediately.
[Dan]: They come to power and they say, I'm going to give you electricity tomorrow.
[Dan]: One of the opposition leaders in South Africa has said within six months he's going to solve the problem.
[Dan]: And most likely that is not going to be possible.
[Dan]: And when you don't have this kind of long-term perspective, and that's where the green transition struggles,
[Dan]: because we are always thinking about five-year sort of election cycles, we have to think medium-term and really long-term.
[Dan]: Some sort of long-termism is required here.
[Dan]: Unfortunately, the politics of energy transitions, the politics of sustainable development is extremely short-term oriented.
[Dulani]: I do agree, Dan, that I think African governments can do more and can do better, certainly, in terms of what they ask of China.
[Dulani]: I mean, yesterday we were discussing, I think, the issue of Kenya, where a Chinese company builds a new road,
[Dulani]: and then the government says, no, we want to show you to, you know, they build an overpass road and do something about this other road as well.
[Dulani]: And then, can you please make sure the trees are replanted?
[Dulani]: And then the government of Kenya goes back and says, but
[Dulani]: those trees need watering, and maybe they're asking China, the Chinese company, to come and water the trees at the same time.
[Dulani]: So certainly I think there's a lot more, and that's why our data are showing that Africans want their governments to do more, and they also want they themselves to do more.
[Dulani]: But I think my point here is that China will not ask African governments to say, don't do this, don't ask us for a stadium,
[Dulani]: don't ask us for all these kinds of, you know, fancy projects, you know, huge projects, and they will certainly not,
[Dulani]: you know, impose any conditions when there is a railway to be built, when there is a road to be built, there will be no conditions whatsoever.
[Dulani]: When they could use that if they wanted to,
[Dulani]: to leverage, I think, the support that they've been giving African governments.
[Dulani]: That's my point.
[Dan]: I see that.
[Dan]: So one of the things that I really think that China, and not just China, but also Western countries need to do, is to really change their practices.
[Dan]: Even if one does not want to preach and intervene, and wants to promote sovereignty of decision-making,
[Dan]: If an African government comes to me, and let's say I'm a Chinese actor, saying, you know, build me a polluting kind of power plant, I can say, you know, sorry, I can't do that.
[Dan]: However, I can take something out of my pocket and say, I have a better suggestion, and this is renewable.
[Dan]: This is green.
[Dan]: Will you consider it?
[Dan]: So I think that non-intervention or non-interference principle has gone too far.
[Dan]: I think all major powers have to basically put their foot down and say, if you're asking for something really dirty, and coal is dirty, you need to find another solution.
[Dan]: So I think it's on both sides really.
[Dan]: But there's a very practical reason why many governments choose very polluting industries, because they're cheaper.
[Dan]: To construct a coal-fired power plant is a lot cheaper than a hydroelectric power plant.
[Dan]: It takes longer too.
[Dan]: So again, we're back to the short-termism.
[Dan]: You want it now, right?
[Dan]: People don't have... Can you imagine... Remember when we had a lot of electricity?
[Dan]: I came to this country 33 years ago, and I was astounded.
[Dan]: We always had everything on, you know, like the shopping malls and the office buildings.
[Dan]: The lights were always on, and I had come from India, where I was, you know, very sort of bothered with all these power cuts.
[Dan]: And I would ask people, and I've also discussed this with our foreign minister, and he said, you know, because we had so much hydro.
[Dan]: You know, it was just so cheap.
[Dan]: That's why we did not think about it.
[Dan]: And then think about two years ago when the Ukraine invasion happened, our electricity prices increased and we are like, you know, we don't care how it is.
[Dan]: The only thing that was important in our election campaigns was to get the price of electricity down.
[Dan]: And suddenly we had become a bit like many of these countries saying, don't tell me where it's coming from as long as it's under 70øre.
[Dan]: I mean, so I think we're back to this thing, right?
[Dan]: I mean, when push comes to shove, I think even in this country, the green transition has gone backwards.
[Dan]: We were far ahead before the war, before the pandemic, and now it's like we can justify everything because, you know, the insecurity of the world economy,
[Dan]: or whatever, so again, I don't think we are very consistent in our green policies in this country, and so then our advice loses a lot of that influence when we tell others to do something similar.
[Kadafi]: That will be the final words.
[Kadafi]: Thank you very much, Mr. Dan, Mr. Boniface, and thank you to the audience.
[Dan and Dulani]: Thank you very much.