We were meeting at offices owned by the Yesevi Alperenler Association, a nationalist Islamist organization run by Mican, who also leads a coalition of conservative Turkish nongovernmental organizations. Dressed in a blue suit and shirt, Mican fidgeted with his pen as we talked. The 41-year-old was affable, but was eager to get to his next task.

“There was a belly dancer in front of a mosque, there were naked statues where you can see their body details, and symbols of satanism,” Mican told me. He was describing the works featured in an exhibition at ArtIstanbul Feshane, a cultural center in Istanbul’s Eyup neighborhood. In Mican’s view, the show was disrespectful of Islam and Turkey, and an attempt at spreading LGBTQ “propaganda.” “The owners of the artwork and the organizer of the exhibition will be punished,” he said.

Titled “Starting from the Middle,” the exhibition featured a diverse set of works by 300 artists and was organized by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, whose president is Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, a member of the CHP, the secular left-wing party that represents Turkey’s main opposition party. Pieces included photographs of the Gezi Park protests in 2013 against the government’s creeping authoritarianism; a video that explores a massacre of Alevi Kurds by the Turkish army in the 1930s; and a text accompanying an installation that talks about the artist’s struggles as an LGBTQ person in Turkey.

Although the show had support from CHP-aligned public officials, other elements in Istanbul’s city government saw it differently. Last month, prosecutors in Istanbul launched an investigation into the organizers of the exhibition, which ended of its own volition in late September, on allegations of “fomenting enmity and hatred among the public or insulting them” under Article 216 of the Turkish Penal Code. The law has frequently been used to criminalize blasphemy or retaliate against critics of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

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But the case against the art show didn’t exactly start with Turkish authorities. A few days after the opening, a headline in the state-aligned newspaper Sabah read: “Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality supports LGBT perversion! Outraged exhibition in Feshane: It should be closed immediately.”

The next day, Mican led a group protest outside the exhibition with people chanting, “We don’t want perversion in our neighborhood.” ArtIstanbul Feshane is situated in the Eyup neighborhood of Istanbul, a symbolic area to Muslims in Turkey as it is home to the burial site of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, a close companion of the Prophet Muhammad.

In early July, after they attended one of Mican’s speeches about the event, a group of men tried to break through a line of police officers in an effort to vandalize the space. Mican says he did not encourage the violence, but also said that if the exhibition had not been held in such a religious area, the reaction would have been more muted.

“The police struggled to hold the people when I was reading the statement, they had to get 10 times more security,” Mican said. “If they hadn’t done it in the Eyup neighborhood we wouldn’t see that much reaction, so many people wouldn’t even know about it. I didn’t encourage the people to do that, but the people were angry and they gave a reaction.”

And now prosecutors have launched their investigation, following a criminal complaint against the exhibition, filed by Mican’s organization. 

None of this came as a shock to the show’s curators or to the artists involved. “Every time we want to open an exhibition, especially in a conservative area, we open it with the fear of being attacked,” said Okyanus Cagri Camci, a transgender woman and interdisciplinary artist whose work was featured in the show.

For artists like Camci, the prosecution’s investigation is part of an increasingly familiar pattern, in which criticism from conservative groups and the state-aligned media are followed by legal repercussions. 

Figures like Mican appear to have increased their influence on prominent political leaders in Turkey, drawing them down a more conservative path than they walked in the past. Grappling with a steep economic downturn and public frustration with the government’s slow response to the devastating earthquakes that hit southeast Turkey in February, Erdogan and his allies have seized the opportunity to make the LGBTQ community a scapegoat, using similar language to a burgeoning global anti-LGBTQ rights movement.

This newer shade of Erdogan and his AKP party was on full display during presidential and parliamentary elections in May, when Erdogan ramped up attacks on the LGBTQ community to rally support among his right-wing and religiously conservative base. “The family institution of this nation is strong, there will be no LGBT people in this nation,” said Erdogan at a rally in April. Erdogan and his allies are also seeking to turn rhetoric into legislative changes, starting with an amendment to the constitution that would define marriage as solely between a man and woman. 

Suleyman Soylu, deputy leader of the AKP and a former interior minister, made the erroneous claim to a group of NGOs in April that the LGBTQ community “also includes the marriage of animals and humans.” He accused the community of being under the control of Europe and the U.S., who “want a single type of human model where they follow a single universal religion, are genderless, and no one is in the family structure.” The tone and messaging in these speeches echoed the language of a swelling global movement that claims Western liberals are staging an assault on traditional family structures by imposing homosexuality and transgenderism on societies across the world. This movement has anchors in Russia, Hungary and the U.S. and is gaining a foothold in countries around the world, including, it seems, in Turkey. Mican confirmed to me that his organization has connections with groups in Russia, Hungary and Serbia — another place where LGBTQ people are facing increased hostility.

It wasn’t always like this under Erdogan, who has been president of Turkey since 2014, and served as prime minister for more than a decade prior to that. Mican lamented that as recently as two years ago, Erdogan was unwilling to talk about LGBTQ issues in the same way as he is now.

Kubra Uzun, a singer and DJ who is non-binary, has observed the same evolution, albeit from a different vantage point. Life under Erdogan was not always as bad as it is now, they said. But Uzun told me that in recent years, they’ve felt increasingly unsafe. “If I’m not playing or if I’m not having anything outside to do, like if I’m not shopping, I don’t go out anymore,” they said. “I mostly stay at home and read and listen to music.”

When we met at their home in late September, there was a small group of friends sitting in their kitchen. One was a trans woman who Uzun was hosting after she fled her home city in part because she feared for her safety. The community refers to Uzun as a mother, but they do not like being called that. “I am non-binary and mothering feels binary to me,” they told me.

Lying on the sofa and puffing on a cigarette, Uzun recounted a “golden period” in Turkey in the early 2000s, when there were fewer restrictions. 

“It was like you were in London clubbing,” they said. “You can walk freely, you can wear whatever you want.” But those times are long gone.

Although the tides began to turn following an economic recession in 2009, it was after the Gezi Park protests of 2013 that people like Uzun saw a real shift. At that time, what began as a vocal rejection of plans to build a shopping mall in a public park in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square ultimately drew hundreds of thousands of Turkish people to take a public stand against what they saw as the AKP’s erosion of secularism in Turkey and the dismantling of key democratic institutions, namely press freedom. It became a seminal moment in deepening the divide between liberal secular Turks and Islamist conservative supporters of Erdogan. 

Three years later, Turkey witnessed a failed coup attempt that was carried out by military personnel, but which Erdogan has long insisted was orchestrated by the U.S.-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen. In the ensuing period, Erdogan launched a major clampdown on Turkish society, imprisoning thousands of critics of the government that he and his allies accused of being stooges of the West seeking to undermine Turkey. By 2020, nearly 100,000 people had been jailed pending trial for alleged links to the Gulen movement. From Kurds to followers of Gulen and now, increasingly, gay and trans people, Erdogan has framed a variety of groups as enemies of the state, allowing him to cast out critics while boosting his popularity among his political base. He has passed sweeping legislative and constitutional changes that curtail freedom of expression, cementing his hold on power.

Along the way, Mican and other leading conservative figures have pushed politicians to harden their stance on the issue. Prior to Istanbul’s Pride march in 2016, Mican told state officials he and his organization would intervene if the event went ahead. Mican was later fined for making threatening remarks, but the march was also banned by the Istanbul governor’s office after they cited security concerns and the need to protect public order.

For the ninth consecutive year, the Istanbul pride march was banned in June, with the AKP governor of Istanbul saying it posed a threat to family institutions. Police clad in riot gear detained 113 people who marched despite the restrictions.

The more Erdogan focuses on homosexuality and transgenderism, the more other parties have started putting anti-LGBTQ policies into their agendas. Mican himself underlined this point in our conversation. The Vatan Party, a nationalist secular party that has supported Erdogan, in the past used protection from the threat of terrorism as a central tenet of its platform. Now it has shifted to the so-called threat of the “LGBTQ agenda.”

Even the CHP and other opposition parties thus far have remained quiet on discrimination against the LGBTQ community, particularly around the election period, said Suay Ergin-Boulougouris, a program officer at Article 19, an international organization that promotes freedom of expression. When I asked Uzun about whether they would have felt better if the CHP had won instead of Erdogan, they responded, “Same shit, different color.”

Uzun fears that Turkey is turning into Russia, where the state frequently equates homosexuality with pedophilia and has passed a series of anti-LGBTQ laws over the past decade. Erdogan further solidified his position on gay and trans rights on the global stage in 2021, when he pulled Turkey out of the Istanbul Convention, an international treaty opposing violence against women, after religious conservative groups criticized the law, arguing that it was degrading family values and wrongly advocating for the rights of the LGBTQ community. The convention has come under attack from leaders in several Eastern European countries, who argue that the document’s definition of gender is a way to dismantle traditional distinctions between men and women and a way to “normalize” homosexuality.

Another state that has notably hit the brakes on accession to the convention is Hungary. The government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has also tried to push through a ban on the use of materials seen as promoting homosexuality and gender change at schools. The law is currently being challenged before the Court of Justice of the European Union, which interprets EU laws to make sure they are applied equally in every EU member state. 

Populist leaders have positioned the family as something sacrosanct and used the idea that it is being destroyed by Western liberals as a way into power, said Wendy Via, president of the U.S.-based Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

Right-wing leaders in the U.S. and Europe have framed LGBTQ rights as an agenda, personifying the concept as an enemy entity that is taking over. But Via argues the real entity that is taking over is a vast, well-resourced network of organizations with anti-LGBTQ and anti-woman agendas.

In Turkey, that network consists of dozens of conservative NGOs, who on September 17 held a large rally called the “Big Family Gathering” in the Eminonu area of Istanbul, for which Mican was one of the key organizers.

At the gathering, conservatively dressed mothers and their children held signs that read “Stop Pedophilia” and milled about while speaker after speaker decried Western imperialism before a crowd estimated by organizers to number in the thousands. Part way through the rally, Alexander Dugin, the far-right Russian political philosopher with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, appeared on a large screen and gave the crowd a speech about the need to fight global liberalism. It is “the fight of all normal people,” he told the crowd, “to save the normal relations between sexes, to save the family, to save the dignity of the human being.”

At the end of the rally, sitting on a park bench as people bustled around us clearing away equipment, I spoke to two men in their 20s, Kayahan Cetin and Yunus Emre Ozgun. They lead Turkiye Genclik Birligi, a youth organization closely associated with the pro-Russia Vatan Party. Cetin spoke in Turkish and Ozgun helped interpret into English, sometimes chiming in himself.

The pair were proud to note their connections with Dugin and Putin’s United Russia party. Cetin and his group are associated with Vatan, but they also identify as Kemalists, a secular ideology that seeks to follow the principles of the Turkish Republic’s founder Kemal Ataturk. This means they may not always see eye to eye with the Islamist right who dominate the anti-LGBTQ movement in Turkey. But they share the common belief that LGBTQ rights present an existential threat to Turkish society and that they are an agenda being imposed by the West.

Cetin is trying to push legislation that would crack down on what they call “LGBTQ propaganda and institutions” and pointed to similar laws on the books in Russia, Hungary and China. Cetin says he has no problem with people’s individual “choice” to be gay, but wants parliament to place restrictions on organizations who are using their platforms to support LGBTQ rights through the media, including streaming platforms such as Netflix and Disney Plus. These kinds of cultural interventions are already underway — Turkey’s Radio and Television Supreme Council in July fined Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video and Mubi among other streaming platforms, accusing them of depicting homosexual relationships that are “contrary to social and cultural values and the Turkish family structure.”

With local elections in March 2024, the LGBTQ community fears Erdogan’s attacks on them will be amplified further. The government is seeking to implement laws that will ban content seen to promote LGBTQ identities in schools, a blow to younger gay and transgender people already struggling in the current environment. Last month the national education minister, Yusuf Tekin, said that authorities must fight homosexuality and that a new optional course called “The Family in Turkish Society” had been added to the school curriculum.

Two days after our first meeting, I met Uzun again at a club in the heart of Istanbul’s tourist district. There was a power cut soon after I arrived. When the lights came back on again, Uzun was quick to get back on the dancefloor. The room filled with a red glow as queer Istanbulites danced freely, the jubilant scene in stark contrast to the seismic shifts occurring beyond the walls beaded in sweat.

At the end of the night I had to wait my turn to say goodbye to Uzun. I asked them one final question about why Istanbul’s queer scene seemed to be thriving despite all the restrictions and threats against it. Uzun shouted over the music, “Text me your question.” They texted me their response the next morning: “RESISTANCE.”

But this isn’t the whole story. It is hard to resist when you fear being attacked on any street corner. Uzun told me that over the course of the past year, more than 50 of their friends had left Turkey. And they may be next. If their visa application is accepted, Uzun will leave for London.

The post How the global anti-LGBTQ movement found a home in Turkey appeared first on Coda Story.

“Let’s all go out and round them up,” the man says in the video, urging Greeks to follow his lead and perform citizen’s arrests on migrants. “They will burn us.” 

The Greek police arrested the man who made the video, and he is currently awaiting trial. The police also arrested the migrants the man claimed he had caught attempting to start fires. They were later released without charges.

The video, and others like it, tapped into suspicions among residents of Evros that the wildfires were the fault of migrants, thousands of whom pass through the region’s thick forest every year en route to inland Europe. Simmering anger against migrants has bubbled to the surface in Greece, aided by social media, as locals seek to apportion blame for intense wildfires that have been torching their region since July.

More than 300 square miles of land along Greece’s border with Turkey have been devastated by the blaze, which is the worst wildfire ever recorded in Europe. Lightning strikes were suspected to be the cause, but the arrests of 160 people across Greece on charges of arson — 42 for deliberately starting fires and the rest for negligence leading to fires — have heightened local anger.

Speculation that foreigners ignited the fires was also linked to the charred remains of 18 suspected migrants, two of them children, found on August 22. The deceased, sheltering in the forest, appear to have been trapped as gale-force winds spread the blaze with devastating speed. One group was found huddled together, appearing to have clutched each other as the fire claimed their lives. Earlier this month, the Greek authorities said they had rescued a group of 25 migrants who were trapped in the Dadia Forest, where fires blazed for more than two weeks.

A few days after the video began circulating on social media, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis stood in front of parliament to defend his government’s performance in the face of mounting cries of incompetence. 

“It is almost certain,” Mitsotakis claimed, “that the causes were man-made.” He added: “It is also almost certain that this fire was started on routes that are often used by illegal migrants who have entered our country.”

Mitsotakis didn’t present any evidence to back up his certainty. Indeed, the only thing he conceded he didn’t know was if the fires were caused by negligence or if they were “deliberate.”

Armed militia groups, some linked to extreme far right political parties, seized on the tension to conduct illegal arrests. And elected officials, like the ultranationalist Paraschos Christou Papadakis, gave them a boost. “We’re at war,” Papadakis has been filmed saying. “Where there are fires, there are illegal immigrants.”

On X, previously known as Twitter, and Facebook, it is easy to find Greek users who contend that migrants are to blame for the fires and that the fires are indeed deliberate. In the comment fields on videos in which Greek vigilantes are filmed “hunting” and restraining migrants, it is not unusual to find people calling for migrants to be burned and thrown in the fire.  

For decades, migrants have crossed through the forests and the cold, fast-moving Evros River to get from Turkey to Greece. Sometimes, they find themselves in no-man’s land, trapped on islets that appear to be controlled by neither Greece nor Turkey. Last year, Human Rights Watch reported that migrants, if they make it over to the Greek riverbank, are sometimes turned over by the authorities to “men who appear to be of Middle Eastern or South Asian origin,” who are tasked with forcing the migrants onto rubber dinghies and leaving them in the middle of the Evros River. From there, the migrants either take shelter on an islet or wade back to the Turkish side where they are also not welcome.

Political scientist Pavlous Roufos, who has written extensively about Greek social movements and the 2010 economic crisis, told me, “There’s a kind of dehumanization of the migrant situation happening in Greece at the moment.” Now a professor at the University of Kassel, in central Germany, Rouflos monitors both the physical violence migrants face and the disinformation being spread online about their responsibility for the wildfires in Evros. 

“What we are seeing online,” Roufos told me, “is just a fraction of what’s happening in these communities. You can multiply those videos by 20 or 30 to get the real picture.”

Local antipathy towards migrants in Evros shows, Roufos suggests, how little has changed since February 2020, when Turkey announced that it would open its western borders for migrants and asylum seekers looking to go to Europe. In what became known as the “Evros Crisis,” Greece responded by shutting its borders, suspending asylum laws and violently arresting and pushing refugees back over the border toward Turkey. Armed citizen groups, similar to those who rounded up migrants in Evros last month, stood shoulder to shoulder with Greek border guards to repel asylum seekers trying to enter Greece.

In September 2020, when fires tore through the Moria camp, a squalid housing unit for 13,000 refugees in a village in the northeastern Greek island of Lesvos, anti-immigrant groups helped police block people from getting to safety in neighboring towns. Six Afghans were convicted on arson charges, though human rights lawyers familiar with the case have argued that the refugees were framed and that their jailing was a matter of political expediency rather than justice.

During both events, there were huge surges of activity in online groups promoting extremist and anti-migrant narratives, according to a study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The researchers tracked nearly 2,000 Facebook and Twitter accounts that promoted harmful rhetoric around the incident: They pushed the narrative that refugees deliberately started the Moria fires and were, in some cases, burning their children to elicit sympathy. The accounts also pushed white supremacist campaigns like #TheGreatReplacement, which refers to a conspiracy theory that foreigners are seeking to culturally and demographically replace the white race. 

The researchers wrote that their work “makes clear that the refugee crisis has acted as a catalyst for mobilizing a transnational network of actors, including far-right extremists and elements of the political right, who often share common audiences and use similar tactics.”

After the German government promised to accommodate 1,500 asylum seekers from Moria, German far right groups were also set off, with accounts linked to far right political parties, like the Alternative for Germany, spreading new rounds of hate and disinformation targeting migrants. 

The spread of these narratives has coincided with the rise of the far right in Europe, where populist movements are uniting across borders and merging with previous center-right factions over issues like migration, identity and Islamophobia. Similar to Austria and Italy, Greece is seeing a shift to the right. Three ultranational parties won 12% of the seats in parliament in recent elections, and the ruling conservative New Democracy party has been accused of pandering to extremist agendas to keep poll numbers up.

“The toxic narrative against migrants has been going on for a long time,” Lefteris Papagiannakis, the head of the Greek Refugee Council, told me. “The violence was to be expected as we have already seen it in Lesvos in 2019,” he added, referring to racist attacks against migrants housed on the Greek island. Attacks in the past have targeted not just migrants but also rights activists and NGOs assisting refugees. Lefteris says he and his colleagues are “worried, of course.”

But the wildfires and the damage they have caused have catalyzed a fresh wave of anti-migrant anger. By implying that migrants might be arsonists, Greek politicians, including the prime minister, appear to have the backs of the vigilantes.

The post While Greece burned, politicians blamed migrants appeared first on Coda Story.

On August 21, officers from India’s Intelligence Bureau visited the campus as part of what was meant to be a routine procedure to renew Ashoka’s license to receive foreign funds. But the questions that the officers asked instead concerned an academic paper that had cast the country’s ruling party in a negative light. They also questioned the “intent” of the professor who had written the paper.

Even before the visit by officials, the professor had resigned from Ashoka. It is just the latest example of India’s shrinking space for research and criticism. 

Nandini Sundar, a writer and professor of sociology at the University of Delhi, told me that the Modi administration has censured and put pressure on academics it believes threaten its Hindu nationalist agenda. “Academic freedom in India is under attack,” she said, “and has been ever since 2014,” when Modi became prime minister. The Academic Freedom Index 2023, which assessed academic freedom in 179 countries, placed India in the bottom 30%. The report included India among 22 countries in which standards of academic freedom had fallen. 

The Index also traced the beginning of the decline in India’s academic freedom to 2009, when the now-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party were not in power. But the report noted that “around 2013, all aspects of academic freedom began to decline strongly, reinforced with Narendra Modi’s election as prime minister in 2014.” It concluded that “India demonstrates the pernicious relationship between populist governments, autocratization, and constraints on academic freedom.”

Bolstered by India’s recent feats in space research – becoming on August 23 the first country to successfully land a craft in the southern polar region of the moon – Modi likes to describe his government as being devoted to science and innovation. But it has little time for the humanities, or the social sciences, or any research that does not fit its definition of “progress.” Apoorvanand, a professor at the University of Delhi and prolific commentator on political and cultural affairs, told me that the “real challenge is self-censorship by academics due to legitimate fears of reprisal by university administrations and physical violence by right-wing groups.” 

He said academics rarely have the freedom to design their own curriculum, and research scholars are told to avoid certain subjects. “There has been an unprecedented ideological bias in new hirings,” he told me, meaning that the BJP has been eager to place friendly academics on faculties and in positions of power in universities across the country. Students at Indian universities have been some of the Modi administration’s most dogged and committed opponents, with even the United Nations noting the Indian government’s propensity for using violence and detention to intimidate student protestors.

On July 25, the paper in question, written by Sabyasachi Das, then an economics professor at Ashoka, was posted on the Social Science Research Network website which publishes “preprints,” that is, papers which await peer review and journal publication. Das had reportedly presented his findings at a talk in the United States. Titled “Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy,” the paper claimed to document “irregular patterns in 2019 general election in India,” comprehensively won by the Modi-led BJP, and to “present evidence that is consistent with electoral manipulation in closely contested constituencies.”

According to Das, the “manipulation appears to take the form of targeted electoral discrimination against India’s largest minority group – Muslims, partly facilitated by weak monitoring by election observers.”

Once news of the still unpublished, yet-to-be reviewed paper emerged on social media, it caused a political furor. M.R Sharan, an Indian economics professor at the University of Maryland, explained on X (formerly known as Twitter) that although Das’ “astonishing” new paper showed that the BJP had perhaps gained a dozen seats through electoral manipulation, this was a negligible number in an election in which the BJP won 303 seats, 31 seats more than the number required to win an outright majority in parliament.

But the impact on the results of the election or lack thereof was beyond the point, argued prominent opposition figures such as Shashi Tharoor, once a candidate for the post of secretary- general at the U.N. Das’ conclusion, Tharoor said, “offers a hugely troubling analysis for all lovers of Indian democracy.” The “discrepancy in vote tallies,” he wrote on X, needed to be accounted for by the government or India’s Election Commission “since it can’t be wished away.”

The BJP responded to Das’ paper with fury. On X, Nishikant Dubey, a BJP member of parliament, demanded to know how Ashoka University could permit a professor, “in the name of half-baked research,” to “discredit India’s vibrant poll process?” 

Das also became a target of online trolling by Hindu nationalists and BJP supporters. Ashoka tried to distance itself from Das, claiming it had no responsibility for “social media activity or public activism by Ashoka faculty, students or staff in their individual capacity.” By the middle of August, Das had handed in his resignation. It was quickly accepted by the university administration.

On August 16, student journalists at the university’s newspaper reported that a public meeting was held in which “students, alumni and faculty expressed their escalating dismay regarding academic freedom at Ashoka.” 

In an open letter to administrators posted on X, the economics department wrote that the governing body’s interference was “likely to precipitate an exodus of faculty.” The letter also warned that if Das wasn’t given his job back and the administration continued to interfere with research, the faculty “will find themselves unable to carry forward their teaching obligations in the spirit of critical inquiry and the fearless pursuit of truth that characterize our classrooms.”

But only a couple of days later, the fledgling protest fizzled out. The promised exodus or strike never happened. Only one professor resigned. Instead, the administration told students that the economics department had “reaffirmed its commitment to holding classes, a sentiment echoed by almost all other departments.”

The episode with Das isn’t the first time that the university has been embroiled in matters of academic freedom. The tacit acceptance of Das’ departure suggests that Ashoka, set up as a U.S.-style liberal university with private donors, continues to have  little stomach for confrontation with the government. 

In 2021, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a professor and former Ashoka vice chancellor, resigned from the university. Mehta, a public intellectual steadfast in his opposition to Modi’s Hindu nationalist politics, was told that his presence at Ashoka was turning into a “political liability.”  His “public writing in support of a politics that tries to honor constitutional values of freedom and equal respect for all citizens, [was] perceived to carry risks for the university,” he said. 

As far back as 2016, just two years after Ashoka University was founded, the Indian magazine Caravan revealed that the administration might have forced the resignation of staff members who had signed a petition protesting state violence in the disputed Indian territory of Kashmir. 

Few academics at Ashoka are now willing to speak to journalists about Das or the issues of academic freedom that have surfaced since  the BJP’s angry response to his paper. Economist Jayati Ghosh, another prominent critic of the Modi government, wrote on X that she was “truly shocked at the lack of solidarity displayed by senior faculty” at Ashoka. “They have so little to lose from defending basic academic freedom,” she added. “Silence enables injustice, and it spreads.”

A professor at Ashoka who asked to remain anonymous told me that there were “plenty of caveats in Das’ paper and it had yet to go through rigorous peer review but the outsized reaction shows that the paper hit home.” Another liberal intellectual, who also asked to speak anonymously, told me that the paper questions the “most fundamental aspect of India’s claim to being a democracy – free and fair elections.” By continuing to send a message that academic insubordination will not be tolerated, they added, “the BJP is warning universities to control areas of research.” 

Mehta, who resigned from Ashoka in 2021, was also a former president of the Center for Policy Research, a well-respected Delhi think tank. In July, The Hindu reported that the center’s tax-exempt status and license to raise foreign funds had been revoked. Nearly 75% of its funds were raised abroad. In the absence of an official reason for the decision, the media has speculated that what might have led to the crackdown were the frequently combative articles that CPR staffers publish about Modi administration policies and the independent research that the center undertakes, which  has often contradicted the official government line. 

The BJP appears determined to stamp out criticism of Modi. In January, when the BBC broadcast a documentary in the U.K. examining Modi’s actions as chief minister of Gujarat in 2002 when 1,000 people, most of them Muslim, were killed in riots in the state, the Indian government banned it from being screened in India. When students tried to organize public screenings in defiance of the ban, they were allegedly detained by the police and suspended by their universities. 

Academic freedom and the need to ask questions, it appears, is less important to Indian universities than appeasing the government of the day.

The post In India, academic freedom is at stake in a row over research appeared first on Coda Story.

Across the water, shimmering in the heat, stand imposing steel and concrete structures — the brand new plants built by Sinomine, one of the several Chinese companies that have invested in Zimbabwe’s nascent lithium mining industry. Soon, Sinomine will be exporting the lithium from its Bikita mines to massive battery manufacturing factories in China. This neglected rural district is now one more pawn in China’s gambit to control the world’s supplies of rare earth elements and minerals.

The Mungezi River forms the border between Bikita and the equally poor neighboring district of Gutu. On a Friday afternoon in July, Nelson Chamisa, the young, charismatic leader of Zimbabwe’s opposition, is on the campaign trail.

“Our minerals are being exploited,” Chamisa says to the crowd at a rally. “You are getting nothing. The only thing you are getting are cracks in your houses from the dynamite blasts. Our people are still jobless, they still remain poor.” 

On August 23, 2023, Zimbabweans are scheduled to vote in a general election. Chamisa and the incumbent president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, are — as they were in 2018 — in a standoff, with none of the other candidates expected to be in the running. Mnangagwa took over the presidency in Zimbabwe in 2017, when long-time president and strongman Robert Mugabe was deposed in a coup. A year later, Mnangagwa won a disputed election. During his time in office, Zimbabwe has lurched from one economic crisis to another.

But now Zimbabwe has been marked as a potential lithium hub. “Lithium batteries,” Elon Musk tweeted last year, “are the new oil.” China is, by a significant margin, the world’s largest manufacturer of these batteries, which are used to power electric vehicles, laptops and mobile phones among other things. And as the pressure to transition away from fossil fuels grows, the demand for lithium has been outstripping supply, raising prices and setting off a scramble to discover alternative sources.

Chinese and Western companies have their eyes on mining minerals across Africa, including, for example, Morocco and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The cobalt reserves in the DRC are critical to the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries, leading to a rush to mine the metals often under inhuman conditions. When Pope Francis visited Kinshasa, the DRC’s capital, he said that the “poison of greed” was “choking Africa” and that the continent was “not a mine to be stripped or a terrain to be plundered.” 

But with the value of the EV battery market projected to increase from about $56 billion in 2022 to an estimated $135 billion in 2027, Zimbabwe’s lithium deposits represent an enormous economic opportunity for a debt-ridden country that has been suffering from international economic isolation and U.S. sanctions for 20 years. 

Sanctioned by the United States, Mnangagwa has turned to China, Russia and Iran for support. In July 2023, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi stopped in the Zimbabwean capital Harare as part of his three-country African tour. The crowd waved Zimbabwean and Iranian flags. Mnangagwa described Raisi as his brother. “When you see him, you see me,” said Mnangagwa. “When you see me, you see him.” 

And at the 2023 Russia-Africa summit in Saint Petersburg, Vladimir Putin reportedly gave Mnangagwa a helicopter. Putin also included Zimbabwe among a half dozen nations that Russia promised to supply with grain for free after refusing to extend the Black Sea grain deal that enabled exports of Ukrainian grain to Africa. Victims of American sanctions must cooperate, Mnangagwa said, “and this is the cooperation we are seeing.”

In Mnangagwa’s view, the West has had decades to mine and invest in Zimbabwean minerals and has done little. Sinomine and other Chinese companies, on the other hand, have moved quickly. The fruits of Chinese investment are evident across Zimbabwe. Last year, Mnangagwa delivered a State of the Nation address from a new $200 million parliamentary building entirely funded and constructed by China. Opponents of Chinese investment, Mnangagwa says, just want to hand Zimbabwe to the West. “They want our lithium,” Mnangagwa says of Western companies, “they want our minerals.”

Instead, it is Chinese companies, the Zimbabwean government argues, that offer Zimbabwe the best deal. For instance, Sinomine expects to create 1,000 jobs at its two Bikita plants and export up to $500 million of lithium concentrate every year. By comparison, the plants’ previous European owners did nothing for 50 years.  

Standing on the back of a pickup truck, Nelson Chamisa tells cheering supporters that these projections of Chinese success mean little unless locals benefit from the jobs and the profits. “Do you see any development from the lithium here?” Chamisa asked his supporters in Gutu. “Kana,” they roared back. Nothing.

According to the Zimbabwe Investment Development Agency, international investors are flocking to the country for lithium. Of the 116 investment licenses issued to foreign investors in the first three months of 2023, 42 were given to companies seeking to buy into the lithium industry. “Without doubt, mining outstrips every other area,” Tafadzwa Chinhamo, the head of ZIDA told me. “Most of our licenses right now are for lithium mining, prospecting and processing.”

His list of applications for licenses tells the story of the race to mine Zimbabwean lithium. In the first half of 2023, he told me, ZIDA received 160 investor applications from China, up from 53 over the same period in 2022. By contrast, there were only five U.S. applications and 10 U.K. applications. The Chinese applications for the first quarter of 2023 pledged investments of $944 million, compared to $166 million proposed by U.S. investors.

Zimbabwe’s opposition claims that Chinese companies are being given free rein over the nation’s mineral resources and allowed to cut regulatory corners and scar the environment. The ruling party says the opposition are megaphones for the West.

This has not gone unnoticed in Washington, D.C.

At a March confirmation hearing for Pamela Tremont, the U.S. ambassador-designate to Zimbabwe, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was clear on what they expected her to do — go to Zimbabwe and counter China’s influence. Chinese and Russian interests, Tremont told the committee, “comprise about 90% of the foreign direct investment in Zimbabwe’s mineral sector.” Expressing doubt about the terms of the contracts, Tremont added that she “would certainly hope the Zimbabwean government is ensuring that the Zimbabwean people are getting fair compensation for the minerals taken from their country.”

Her comments riled the Chinese embassy in Harare. A spokesperson told The Herald, Zimbabwe’s state-owned daily newspaper, that “Zimbabwe should not be used as a wrestling ground for major-country rivalry.” China, the spokesperson said, was focused on bringing more development to Zimbabwe, while the U.S. was slapping “illegal” sanctions on Zimbabwe and meddling in its internal affairs.

But Chinese investment in Zimbabwe is not without controversy.

Goromonzi is a farming area just east of Harare, the capital. Standing on a red-soiled ridge, I saw maize fields stretching to the horizon on one side of the Nyaguwe River. On the other side, Shengxiang, a small Chinese company, has started mining for lithium. According to the local office of the Environmental Management Agency, the company is operating in the area illegally.

“We inspected the mine, found them in breach of regulations, fined them and ordered them to stop operations until they got an EIA [environmental impact assessment authorisation],” said Astas Mabwe, the officer in charge of the area. Still, Mabwe told me, the company kept mining.

A member of the ruling party told me anonymously: “Who is going to go out and fight an investor when the president is calling for more investment?”

The Chinese Chamber of Enterprises in Zimbabwe, which represents over 80 companies in the country, insists that companies like Shengxiang are in the minority. Allegations of illegal operations, Chinese authorities say, are part of a campaign of deliberate misinformation.

Last year, local newspapers published a series of articles that argued that Chinese companies in Zimbabwe had flouted a number of laws safeguarding the environment and labor rights. The reporting was attributed to the Information for Development Trust, a journalism program funded by the U.S. embassy in Harare.

Aja Stefanon, from the U.S. embassy’s economic affairs department, said last year that the program’s “work has ensured that the media plays its watchdog role in safeguarding shared goals in labor, human rights, and natural resources governance.”

Predictably, the Chinese embassy saw it differently. It told The Herald that the Information for Development Trust was “a puppet sponsored and manipulated by the U.S. Embassy to attack Chinese investment in Zimbabwe.” It “had long fabricated false information and published anti-China news,” the Chinese embassy said.  

Back in Bikita, Sinomine, under the conditions of its mining license, will spend an extra $2 million to supply uninterrupted power to local villages. This June, Sinomine started to drill 35 boreholes to provide water to these villages.
Until then, Molly Mandityira, a local village head said, eight villages shared a single borehole. “This,” she told me, “changes everything.” With people in rural areas generally voting in far greater numbers than people in urban areas, Mnangagwa might be counting on Chinese investment to win him the election

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This is what the Kremlin wants Russians to think happened when the battle-hardened mercenaries of the Wagner Group swept through Russia, unopposed, for over 600 miles before its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin called off the march to Moscow. 

As Wagner’s supposed coup attempt unfolded, Prigozhin became the undisputed star of the global news cycle. A former Kremlin caterer, Prigozhin, once an elusive figure, gained world renown following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As Wagner soldiers took on an increasingly prominent role on the frontlines, Prigozhin’s acerbic, angry rants about the incompetence of generals and legislators arguably represented the only sustained evidence that Russians were unhappy with how the war was going.  Given Prigozhin’s adept use of Telegram, it made sense that he would seize the initiative through his now infamous Telegram voice notes, effectively offering listeners a blow-by-blow account of his troops’ journey to Moscow.

But now that the uprising has seemingly fizzled out — with Prigozhin apparently having negotiated safe passage to Belarus — the Kremlin is scrambling to gain control of the narrative. According to Maria Borzunova, an independent Russian journalist who hosts a show debunking Russian state propaganda, Kremlin pundits on state TV have, so far, parroted four key narratives to explain the coup. 

First, the propagandists argued that the Russian military strike on the Wagner camp — which Prigozhin says precipitated his ill-fated march on Moscow — was staged. They also suggested that no one in Rostov-on-Don, the city Wagner briefly occupied, supported the mercenaries. This claim relies on a few shaky videos of Rostov residents confronting Wagner fighters. It also completely ignores widely circulated evidence of crowds in Rostov cheering Prigozhin’s private army. 

During the rebellion, and in the days since, state propaganda channels have also continued to remind viewers that Prigozhin’s actions played into the hands of Russia’s enemies, in particular Ukraine. But it is in the way pro-government talking heads describe the bewildering resolution to the standoff that is most instructive. 

According to the Kremlin’s version of events, the Russian people rallied behind Putin, displaying unity and resolve and undermining the enemy’s — likely foreign-funded — plot to bring Russia to her knees. “Their argument is that the civil war did not succeed because everyone rallied around the president,” said Borzunova. “However, this is not entirely true.” In fact, during the Wagner advance, a number of government officials recorded identical videos with the same text: “We support the president in this difficult situation.” Instructions for what they should write on social media were circulated to officials, Borzunova explained, and even then, some failed to publish the template text. 

On June 27, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an unannounced speech, his third in four days. Having already addressed the nation, he separately addressed the soldiers, who, he said, “have protected the constitutional order, the lives, security and freedom of our citizens, kept our homeland from descending into turmoil and stopped a civil war.” He handed out some medals and held a moment of silence for the pilots who were killed by Wagner mercenaries. 

No state channels carried this particular speech live, but Russian state media received a written set of guidelines for reporting on it. Independent media outlet Meduza managed to obtain these instructions. 

The document prompts reporters to refer to Wagner mercenaries as “rebels,” “traitors” and “false patriots,” whose actions could have plunged the country into chaos. It dubs the security forces “the real defenders of Russia” who worked to bring about a peaceful resolution. Putin, the guidelines remind journalists, is considered to be a “real leader” who prevented a “negative scenario of turmoil.” The explanation for Wagner’s sudden retreat is simple: The traitors realized that the Russian army “was not with them” and agreed to solve the conflict “without shedding blood.” 

The word “Prigozhin” is notably absent from the guidelines. Putin, too, has meticulously avoided mentioning Prigozhin in all his recent speeches — a tactic reminiscent of his well-documented refusal to utter the name of jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

Russian state propagandists have largely mimicked this rhetoric. “When virtually no one in society and in the government supported the rebellion, it became clear that the march on Moscow was meaningless,” said state TV presenter Dmitriy Kiselyov two days after the uprising. “Russia has once again passed the test of maturity, and the stronghold of unity has remained unshaken.” Russia’s commissioner for human rights, Tatyana Moskalkova, dubbed the uprising a lesson that “has once again demonstrated that Russia is undefeatable when it is united.” 

As for Prigozhin, he has been branded a traitor, a label he is unlikely to ever shake. This was a complicated narrative shift for many Kremlin pundits to execute, Borzunova told me. Prigozhin had been loyal to Putin, and many in the government and state media shared the grievances he levied at the defense ministry before the uprising. 

Still, the propagandists, though shaken, have quickly fallen in line. The rebellion has been quashed, the brave Russian soldiers commended and the coup leader mercifully exiled. Of course, the picture of unity that the Kremlin propaganda is working hard to paint is a fantasy. “The fabric of the state is disintegrating,” wrote Andrei Koleniskov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. Prigozhin’s actions were “an antecedent of civil unrest unfolding in real time.” 

And while speculation about the longevity of Putin’s regime continues around the world, the Kremlin propaganda machine keeps spinning its wheels, trying to narrate its way out of a crisis. The media guidelines that accompanied Putin’s recent speech emphasized the narrative that “the huge media machine of the rebels” attempted to destabilize the situation in the country. Evidently, it will take an equally powerful blitz of state propaganda to put Russia back on track. 

“Propaganda is doing everything to say that Wagner fighters are patriots, they were used,” said Borzunova. “Prigozhin is the main villain. Whether this works or not, we’ll see.”

The campaign to villainize Prigozhin is far from over. On June 28, Putin acknowledged, for the first time ever, that the Wagner Group had been financed out of Russia’s state budget for the past year, to the tune of $2 billion. “I do hope that, as part of this work, no one stole anything,” Putin said, in a clear signal that Prigozhin — still reeling from last week’s “armed mutiny” criminal charges, which were dropped — might be charged with financial crimes next. In fact, independent Russian journalist Dmitry Kolezev reported on June 29 that the Kremlin has now decided to focus its information campaign on the “commercial” character of Prigozhin’s rebellion. “Allegedly, there was no political dimension to the rebellion at all,” Kolezev wrote. “It was all for money.”

If the Kremlin succeeds at convincing Russians that Prigozhin’s actions were a money-grabbing ploy, then the rebellion that, only days ago, seemed existential for the regime might actually strengthen Putin’s hand. 

When every viable alternative to Putin — from the pro-Western, liberally-minded Navalny, formally jailed for fraud, to the Kremlin loyalist who took Bakhmut — is only after the nation’s coffers, there really is no alternative. Or so the Kremlin would have Russians believe. 

CORRECTION [06/30/2023 11:19 AM EDT]: The original version of this story said that Maria Borzunova hosts “Fake News.” Borzunova is the former host of “Fake News” and currently hosts her own show debunking Russian propaganda.

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Yazidis gathered to demonstrate against the return of the refugees. Videos quickly circulated online claiming to show Yazidis throwing stones at a mosque, and the rumors soon turned into explosive accusations that Yazidis were burning the mosque.

The Sunni Endowment Office, the body that administers Sunni mosques in Iraq, confirmed that the reports were false and that no damage was inflicted on the mosque. It was too late. Muslim religious leaders in Iraq released dozens of videos referring to Yazidis as devil worshippers — a historical trope frequently leveled against Yazidis — and called for them to be murdered. Fear spread among the thousands of Yazidis still residing in refugee camps in Iraq that another wave of violence is on the horizon.

Much of the fomenting of violence against Yazidis occurred on Facebook, but hate speech also spread in WhatsApp groups. A member of one WhatsApp group, for example, said they would bring a machine gun to a refugee camp in Kurdistan and kill as many Yazidis as they could. The French Embassy in Iraq released a statement condemning the proliferation of hate speech.

In August 2014, the Islamic State attacked Sinjar, killing over a thousand Yazidis during the first day alone and enslaving thousands of Yazidi women. A coalition of state and non-state actors supported by the United States pushed the Islamic State out of the region, but some 3,000 Yazidi women and children are still missing.

Sinjar is officially under the control of the Iraqi government, but it is a disputed territory claimed by the authority in charge of the autonomous Kurdistan region. In 2020, the Kurdistan Regional Government and the Iraqi government signed an agreement to jointly manage Sinjar, but the area is effectively under the control of different militia groups, including the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (better known as the PKK), a Kurdish militant group, and an umbrella organization called the Popular Mobilization Forces, which has dozens of mainly Shia Muslim armed factions connected to both the Iraqi and the Iranian states.

Between June and December 2020, it was reported that 38,000 Yazidis returned to Sinjar. Around 200,000 Yazidis still reside in refugee camps in the Kurdistan region, unable to return to Sinjar because of a lack of security and financial resources. Human Rights Watch has documented how the Iraqi government failed to provide thousands of Yazidis from Sinjar compensation for the destruction to property caused by the Islamic State, which they are entitled to under Iraqi law.

Sinjar — which is about the size of Rhode Island in the U.S. — is rife with competing interests, said Bayar Mustafa, the dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Kurdistan Hewler in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, putting Yazidis and other minority groups in Sinjar at heightened risk. The Iraqi government and its army are unable to guarantee security in Sinjar, and there is potential for a re-emergence of a movement similar to the Islamic State.

Islamic State was not just a military organization, but a social, religious and ideological movement, and there has been little effort to defeat the lingering influence of the terrorist organization, according to Mustafa.

Within the Kurdistan Region, Yazidis are under the protection of the Kurdistan Regional Government, which has largely welcomed Yazidis and shielded them from mass killings. But the government has not done enough to tackle hate speech, said Hadi Pir, the co-founder of Yazda, an organization that advocates for Yazidis and other minority groups in Iraq and Syria.

The fear that Yazidis may once again become the target of mass killings is compounded by the specter of chaos. “If a big political issue happens, for example the Iraqi government failed, or the Kurdistan Regional Government had some problems between the different groups in power, then again, there is a possibility Yazidis will be the target,” said Pir.

Yazidi activists say that efforts to educate the Iraqi public about Yazidis and past mass killings committed against them have largely failed. Meanwhile, international efforts to hold the perpetrators of the crimes accountable have been slow. Islamic State members have been prosecuted for terrorism, but the Iraqi justice system and international courts have been unwilling or unable to prosecute them for the crimes they committed against Yazidis. German courts have taken matters into their own hands, prosecuting one Islamic State member for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity. He killed  a five-year-old Yazidi girl, Reda, by tying her up in the sun as punishment for wetting her bed.

Attempts at transitional justice, the process whereby a society tries to come to terms with past acts of repression, are largely nonexistent in Iraq, and the current political system is failing to address these issues, said Zeynep Kaya, a lecturer in international relations at the University of Sheffield. “I think people really underestimate the long-term consequences of sexual violence, of conflict, of displacement. These things continue to simmer in societies, and then they just don’t disappear easily,” said Kaya.

Many Yazidis face a choice of staying in camps in the Kurdistan region, where the Iraqi government has reportedly stopped providing aid, or returning to Sinjar where they face an insecure environment. Many now are considering leaving Iraq altogether.

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Khan, who became prime minister in 2018, was a former superstar cricketer known for his dashing good looks and his complicated love life. He ran for office, though, as a religious conservative, eager to clean up corruption in Pakistan. He now faces corruption charges himself and was arrested for allegedly receiving free land as a bribe from a Pakistani real estate tycoon. 

Ousted from office in April 2022, Khan remained a powerful opposition figure with a large and fervent support base. In November, just months after he had lost a parliamentary vote of no-confidence, Khan was shot while leading a protest rally to the Pakistani capital Islamabad. 

He was in a wheelchair when he was arrested on May 9, 2023 by a paramilitary force on the steps of the Islamabad High Court, where he was appearing on a separate matter. After Khan’s release on bail, he blamed the Pakistani army chief for his arrest, claiming he had a personal vendetta against him. Khan’s supporters turned much of their fury, after his arrest, on the army. In Pakistan’s 75-year history as an independent nation, it is unlikely that the army, a venerated and feared institution, has ever been confronted with such a show of public disgust. One protester was interviewed holding peacocks he had taken from the lavish house of an army officer in the northeastern city of Lahore. Army officers, the protestor said, were living in grand style on the “people’s money.”

As videos of Khan’s arrest went viral, and in the face of growing violence nationwide, the Pakistani government chose to suspend mobile internet across the country for an “indefinite period” and ban access to sites such as Twitter, YouTube and much-used messaging services such as WhatsApp. At the time of writing, while the internet was largely restored, social media services were still being disrupted.

The economic impact of the internet shutdown on an already crumbling economy has been significant. P@sha, a trade association for Pakistan’s information technology industry, said the industry is losing $3 to 4 million every day that the internet is blocked. Pakistan’s central bank reserves currently cover barely a month’s worth of imports, and the crisis is so severe that the ratings agency Moody’s believes Pakistan could default on its debts without a bailout from the International Monetary Fund.

I spoke to Hija Kamran, a digital rights advocate from Pakistan who has been working to defend the rights of Pakistani citizens to access information online for almost 10 years. Hija strongly condemns the current internet shutdown and is concerned about the long-term damage it will inflict on the international investment climate in Pakistan and on the country’s once-exciting tech startups industry.

What has been the impact of the internet shutdown since May 9, when Imran Khan was arrested?

The shutdown has drastically impacted the ability of people to work, to earn money, and in this economy that is very concerning. Fiverr, a global hub for freelancers, has literally just barred Pakistanis from getting any jobs on the website due to the internet shutdown.

The banning of entire websites such as Twitter and YouTube is effectively censorship. We know from past experience that when YouTube is banned in Pakistan, industry is left behind, and it can take years to recover. Countries around us that were starting at the same point have now raced ahead of us. And we are never going to be able to compete because censorship and control over people’s access to the internet hinders tech companies and puts investors around the world off investing in Pakistan’s economy.

But is the internet shutdown necessary right now because of the internet’s potential use to incite violent protests? 

Internet shutdowns, either complete shutdowns or partial shutdowns, do not help Pakistan in any way whatsoever. Right now, the justification for the shutdown is national security, but there is no evidence we can point to anywhere in the world that shows that shutdowns help to restore security. In Pakistan, once the authorities shut down mobile internet services, did the protests stop? People were still killed, and public property was still destroyed. 

Are the authorities afraid of disinformation being spread if they do not shut down the internet?

Disinformation cannot be stopped through internet shutdowns. There have been multiple instances when there has been political unrest and the government resorted to internet shutdowns. What that has done is to promote even more disinformation. The internet is a way for people to access critical information, to fact-check information and to connect with each other. People still talk, still find ways to send WhatsApp messages, but now there is no way to provide credible information to large numbers of people. So shutdowns only promote disinformation and misinformation and, as a result, promote chaos.

How will this shutdown hurt Pakistan’s economy?

We can agree that there is a lot of money in the technology sector globally. Just across the border in India, Google has been making a lot of investments, and Apple has opened its first store. These are the kind of investments that Pakistan, too, could see in the future, but the atmosphere is too uncertain, too volatile.

Our technology startups have been doing very well over the past few years, but continual crackdowns on internet access and internet shutdowns are a major hurdle that prevent startups from raising any funding.

What is the way forward?

Immediately unban all platforms that have been banned and open up access to the internet. And that must be the only way forward. After Imran Khan’s release, you would expect that now the internet would be restored. But again, the internet shutdown was not about his arrest, it was about the protests. The shutdown ends up hurting ordinary people and the economy. Students use mobile data and wireless devices. So when you suspend the internet, you are also depriving children from attending class or accessing educational material. You also deprive people of their livelihoods. These are the hidden costs of internet shutdowns.

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After the February earthquakes that destroyed so much of the region, Syrian refugees became the targets of resentment, hate speech and violence. Politicians were quick to seize upon the public mood. Exploiting the anger directed at refugees became a key tactic for candidates in tense, often ugly campaigns. Turkey will vote in the first round of the presidential election on May 14, and, for the first time in two decades, it appears that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan could lose his hold on power. 

In Antakya, three months after the earthquakes, hollowed-out homes with cracked walls hang precariously over a sea of rubble, trinkets and clothing. In Hatay province alone, over 23,000 people died in the earthquakes. Many in the area still live in camps. The luckier ones live in homes made out of shipping containers provided by the state. As Turkey faces repair bills totaling tens of billions of dollars, container homes — indeed, whole container cities — will be required as construction gets underway.  

Across the region most affected by the earthquakes, Syrian refugees are still living in makeshift tent colonies. NGO workers and Syrians I spoke to said they had been pushed out of official, state-run campsites by Turkish citizens and even the local authorities.

In April, Amnesty International accused the Turkish police of beating and torturing alleged looters in Antakya and reported that Syrians were targets of xenophobic abuse by Turkish officials.

Mouna, a Syrian refugee in Antakya whose home was destroyed in the earthquakes, told me she’d been forced to leave a state-run camp by the Turkish residents. She now lives in a tent she has set up beside the ruins of her former home. Resourcefully, Mouna has built an extension to her tent that contains a kitchen and a toilet. A washing machine and a fridge are powered by electricity rerouted from a nearby power supply. Her neighbors are all Syrian refugees who go in and out of the crumbling buildings around them to retrieve possessions to put in their tents. 

A 46-year-old single mother of two sons, Mouna left Syria in 2012, during the early phase of the Syrian civil war. She has been slowly building a life in Turkey. Her job in a dessert factory paid enough for her to afford rent and keep her family safe. 

After the earthquakes struck in February 2023, Mouna and her sons were housed in an official camp but were soon driven out by Turkish people who resented having to share scarce facilities with refugees. She says Syrians were bullied and told that they could not use the toilets. A little girl, Mouna says, hit her and told her that “Syrians should go home.” The authorities did little to help. Mouna and her neighbors rely on a Syrian NGO for water and food.

Syrian refugees in Turkey are “caught between two earthquakes,” says Murat Erdogan, a professor at Ankara University. “One is the physical earthquake,” Erdogan (no relation to the Turkish president) told me, “and the other is a political earthquake.” Even before the disaster, he adds, “social cohesion was not easy because of the number of the refugees.” There are over 3.5 million registered Syrian refugees in Turkey, and for nearly a decade Turkey has hosted more refugees than any other country in the world. 

Unpublished data Erdogan collected in January 2023 for the “Syrian Barometer,” an annual survey he conducts, showed that 28.5% of Turks see Syrians as the number one problem in Turkey, an increase of 3% from the year before.

But now, Erdogan believes, the earthquakes have cemented in people’s minds the image of Syrians as criminals and a drain on public services.

Throughout Antakya, Syrians living in camps dotted around the city told me stories that echoed Mouna’s experience of discrimination. One woman, heavily pregnant, was hit so hard in the stomach by a group of Turkish men that she lost her baby. Another woman told me her son was beaten by military officers who accused him of stealing. She showed me photos on her phone of a child’s mangled and bruised limbs.

But there are also many stories of Turks and Syrians helping one another to deal with the aftermath of the earthquakes. Mouna told me she knew Turkish people who remained kind and supportive. But the rise in anti-Syrian sentiment is evident and impossible to ignore.

A Turkish man I met in Hatay province boasted that he had shot a looter in the leg. He suspected the man was Syrian. “How could you tell?” I asked. “From his mustache,” the man replied.

The earthquakes have caused a massive spike in anti-Syrian hate speech online, said Dilan Tasmedir, who runs Medya ve Goc Dernegi, an organization that monitors rhetoric about migrants in the Turkish media. Slogans like “We don’t want Syrians” and “No longer welcome” trended on Twitter. The comedian Sahan Gokbakar wrote to his 3.7 million followers on the platform: “Health, shelter and all our material resources should be used only for our own people, not for foreigners.” While some criticized the comment for its divisiveness, the tweet racked up more than 280,000 likes.

When protests against the regime of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria erupted into a civil war in 2011, millions fled the country. Turkey’s tiny refugee population mushroomed as the Turkish president welcomed Syrians into the country as guests. “When a people is persecuted,” Erdogan declared, “especially people that are our relatives, our brothers, and with whom we share a 910 km border, we absolutely cannot pretend nothing is happening and turn our backs.”

When Erdogan allowed Syrians to seek refuge in Turkey, he was breaking with a long nativist tradition in his country of not accepting high numbers of refugees. But he also now had a powerful bargaining chip in negotiations with Europe.

In 2016, a year after Europe faced its largest migrant crisis since World War II, the European Union signed a deal with Turkey in which the country received six billion euros to help with improving conditions for refugees. Turkish nationals were granted visa-free travel to Europe, and, in return, Ankara agreed to prevent refugees from leaving Turkey illegally for Greece and to take back refugees who had left Turkey illegally and been turned away at EU borders. The aim was for the EU to process the asylum requests of Syrian refugees while they awaited a decision in Turkey instead of trying to cross illegally into Greece. But the EU was slow to hold up its end of the bargain, keeping the flow of immigrants granted entry into European countries to a trickle. 

Erdogan temporarily reneged on the deal in 2020, letting migrants pass through Turkey to Greece. He said that the EU was providing inadequate support. By 2021, about 28,000 Syrians had been resettled in Europe, well below the maximum threshold of 72,000 outlined in the original agreement.

The EU deal prompted a shift in attitudes inside Turkey, as it dawned on many Turks that their Syrian “guests” were in fact not there temporarily, but permanently, said Tasmedir of Medya ve Goc Dernegi. More than 200,000 Syrians have been granted citizenship in Turkey since 2011. And many will vote for the first time during the May 14 general election. Opposition groups claim that Erdogan granted these Syrians citizenship in an attempt to expand his own electoral base.

Erdogan could use all the extra votes he can get. Public frustration over Turkey’s economic crisis, botched earthquake relief efforts and endemic corruption have all weakened Erdogan’s appeal to the point that defeat in the first round seems like a distinct possibility. The pressure of the election on both the government and opposition parties is extremely high, and the hot button topic of much of the campaigning has been the nationwide hostility toward Syrian refugees.

Regardless of political ideology, Turkish political parties are now promising to send refugees back to Syria. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, a 74-year-old economist and social democratic politician, is Erdogan’s main contender for the presidency. He’s promised to “fulfill people’s longing for democracy,” repair strained relations with the West and unseat Erdogan. He’s also said that returning Syrians to Syria within two years is one of his top goals. Kilicdaroglu’s party,​​ the Republican People’s Party, is the largest in a coalition of opposition parties called the National Alliance. While Kilicdaroglu has a lead on Erdogan in most polls, the results of the first round of voting are expected to be close.

Then there’s the Victory Party, a far-right, anti-immigrant party formed in 2021, with only one representative currently in the Turkish parliament. But, Ankara University professor Murat Erdogan told me, it has had a “profound effect” on political discourse.

Last month, Umit Ozdag, the leader of the Victory Party and its sole representative, tweeted a video of a group of people he implied were Syrians. He depicted them as Arab invaders who, he said, would transport the “Middle East’s understanding of religion, culture of violence, humiliation of women, rape of children, rape of boys, drugs” to Turkey. Ozdag’s central policy proposal is to expel all Syrians from Turkey within one year.

In January, the Victory Party began its “Bus to Damascus” fundraising campaign, in which it asked supporters to name people they wanted returned to Syria and to provide donations for bus tickets. As people across the region sought shelter just days after the earthquakes hit in February, Ozdag began accusing Syrians of looting and called for the police and soldiers to shoot looters on sight. In one instance, he shared a video on Twitter of a live news broadcast which he claimed showed a Syrian man stealing a phone during rescue operations. 

Ozdag later admitted he was wrong but refused to apologize, even after it emerged that the man was a Turkish volunteer helping with the search-and-rescue operations. One Turkish rescue worker became so frustrated with Ozdag’s divisive rhetoric that he confronted him on camera. “We, whether Muslim or Christian, are fed up with hearing this sort of talk,” the man told Ozdag.

In Europe and the United States, the question of how to deal with refugees has been highly polarizing, with voters’ views on migration often correlating with where they might be placed on the political spectrum. In the U.K., for example, voters on the left tend to be less hardline on immigration than voters on the right. But in Turkey, the desire to send Syrians back is now the status quo, receiving widespread support from an estimated 85% of voters. In some cases, I found that voters on the left express even more hostility toward refugees than those on the right.

At a May 6 rally held by Kilicdaroglu’s party, I spoke with several younger supporters of the social democratic candidate who saw Arab migrants as an existential threat to liberal secular values. Nida Koksaldi, a 21-year-old architecture student, told me she supports the Republican People’s Party because she supports women’s rights, animal rights and LGBTQ rights. Had I met Koksaldi in California, I might have expected her to have included refugees in that list. But she agrees with Kilicdaroglu’s proposed policy of expelling Syrians. They are violent, she said of migrants generally, bad for Turkish society and bad for women’s rights. “They even rape us,” she told me. 

Friedrich Puttmann, a doctoral researcher at the London School of Economics, believes that much of the resentment toward Syrians is rooted in Turkey’s own struggle for its identity. The Republican People’s Party was the party of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic who espoused a philosophy of secularism and encouraged Turks to look to the West as a model. Kemalists, who support Ataturk’s sweeping reforms, tend to be more liberal and firmly support women’s rights. Historically, voters who support the party have feared cultural influence from the Arab world, which is often painted by Kemalist politicians as uniformly conservative and patriarchal. 

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party is more aligned with religiously conservative voters, and therefore, according to Puttmann, has historically been more closely linked with Arab culture. Prior to the Syrian civil war, in the early years of Erdogan’s leadership, the country had already become more economically tied to Arab states. So when hundreds of thousands of Syrians entered Turkey as refugees, supporters of the Republican People’s Party were already angry at what they saw as the “Arabization” of Turkey.

Over time, as more Syrians have come to the country, voters in both blocks have become increasingly hostile toward Syrians. Supporters of Erdogan’s party, torn between their duty toward fellow Muslims and their resentment over cultural differences and the economic impact of migration, have begun reframing Syrians as bad Muslims. 

More secular Turkish people see the presence of Syrian refugees in Turkey as evidence of a cultural shift that has occurred under the Justice and Development Party, with Turkey becoming a more conservative, religious and Arabicized country. They see Syrians as part of a system that has eroded Turkey’s secular, liberal identity, Puttmann says. This perception seems to ignore the fact that many Syrians are also secular and liberal.

In an attempt to match the opposition’s rhetoric on returning Syrian refugees to Syria and in the face of mounting public pressure, Erdogan’s government has shifted its policies. Last year, Erdogan announced a plan to send up to a million refugees back to Syria, though the country is still at war. There have been reports that the Assad regime has tortured and disappeared refugees who returned to the country. Reports also emerged last year of Syrians being arrested and forced into northern Syria at gunpoint by Turkish officials. More recently, Erdogan has begun trying to negotiate with the Assad regime to reach a deal that would facilitate the return of Syrian refugees. Assad’s precondition for any settlement is that Turkey withdraw its troops from the parts of northern Syria that it has controlled since 2016 following successive military operations aimed at limiting Kurdish control of the region.

Kilicdaroglu says he will negotiate with Assad and is widely seen as a more appealing negotiating partner for the isolated dictator. Kilicdaroglu has also said he will withdraw Turkish troops from northern Syria, secure his country’s border and repatriate Syrians — as long as Turkey’s security requirements in northern Syria are met.

Back in Antakya, the election feels like a battle fought in a distant land. Political posters with gleaming candidates are the only new and shiny objects in an empty, dust-covered city. Most Syrians living in the camps are too focused on surviving from one day to the next to concern themselves with elections they can do little to influence.

More than a decade after the first Syrians fled the civil war and arrived in Turkey, it is hard to find hope among the refugees in Antakya. What future they might have had, they say, has disappeared with the earthquakes.

Mouna told me she brought her kids to Turkey so that they could have a better future than in Syria. Now she fears they have none in a country that doesn’t want them. But Mouna also recalled that when she first arrived in Turkey, people were hospitable and she was able to make friends. “And I think this will happen again,” she said, “because not all the people are bad.”

The post In Turkey, anger at Syrians reaches boiling point as elections loom appeared first on Coda Story.

Disinformation in the Czech Republic has boosted vaccine skepticism and whittled away at public support for the government’s pro-Ukraine policies. Although the country has been targeted by Chinese and Russian disinformation, much of the information pollution that seeps into peoples’ homes is generated by around 39 Czech websites. The people behind these platforms seek a mix of advertising profits and societal influence, undermining legitimate news outlets and eroding trust between the electorate and the government in the process. 

Despite having a vibrant news landscape with audiences engaging with TV and print journalism, significant numbers of Czechs have been swayed by pro-Russian narratives. It’s a situation connected to both the history of the country, which was under communist rule until 1989, and to the success of disinformation campaigns targeting societal fears. The war in Ukraine and the uncertainty it has created across the region have exacerbated the spread of false narratives.

The situation has become so bad that countering disinformation and strengthening public media became important campaign promises for Prime Minister Petr Fiala in the 2021 election, but have resulted in largely failed policies.  

Disinformation experts point to several reasons for this outcome. Fiala leads a five-party coalition government, which can find little consensus on how best to counter disinformation. Moves to tackle false narratives have also been met with concerns about censorship and free speech, even from within Fiala’s own party, the Civic Democratic Party. When the government asked Czech internet services to block eight websites known to push out pro-Russia narratives following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it energized Fiala’s opponents who believed the move signaled an authoritarian bent.

More urgent issues, such as energy prices, have diverted government attention from efforts to counter disinformation. And a lack of consistent action by social media companies, which play a pivotal role in the spread of disinformation in the Czech Republic, has fueled apathy. In late March, the government of the Czech Republic, along with allies from across Central and Eastern Europe, sent a letter to tech firms urging them to do more to counter disinformation by rejecting revenue from sanctioned individuals and boosting accurate information through its algorithms. 

“Until the end of this winter, the Czech government was running in crisis mode” because of the neighboring war in Ukraine, said Jonas Syrovatka, a researcher at Masaryk University in the south of the Czech Republic. He added that there has been a “lack of political courage” to make substantive policy changes. 

The effects of disinformation on Czech society are hard to miss. Not only has information pollution affected vaccine uptake, it has also drawn people onto the streets in anti-government demonstrations. Spurred on by narratives that Fiala’s government is putting support for Ukraine ahead of the welfare of Czech citizens, over 70,000 people turned out to protest in September 2022. Scattered among the crowd were individuals who subscribed to pro-Russian narratives and called for an end to sanctions against Russia. Veronika Kratka Spalkov, a disinformation specialist at the European Values Centre for Security Policy, told me the demonstrations aimed to “create a gap between Czech citizens and Ukrainian refugees” in particular.

A promising step by the Czech government in the battle against disinformation came in March 2022 with the creation of a position of media and disinformation commissioner. But from the outset, there was confusion about the role, which combined two portfolios — strategic communication and disinformation. Soon after becoming the first commissioner, Michal Klima led a small team that drafted an action plan to increase the effectiveness of proposed laws that would shut down government-identified disinformation websites when there was an immediate threat to national security. The plan also proposed increasing financial support for anti-disinformation nonprofits working in media education and cutting off the advertising that the government spends on websites that engage in disinformation.

The path to government advertising on disinformation is a complicated one: State-owned companies, such as the Czech post office, would buy so-called “programmatic advertising” packages from organizations such as Google while not knowing where the ads will appear. In the Czech Republic, disinformation sites can have a high volume of traffic Spalkov told me.

Shortly after Klima’s action plan was circulated, it was denounced by disinformation hawks and perceived by a distrustful electorate as a government attempt to censor the media and curtail free speech. Almost as soon as Klima was hired, the media and disinformation commissioner role was scrapped by the government and the disinformation portfolio was moved to the jurisdiction of the government’s national security advisor. 

Disinformation in the Czech Republic is complex and dynamic, according to Syrovatka, the researcher from Masaryk University. It usually originates on free-access websites whose anatomy is wholly composed of false information. It is then amplified across social media. Telegram has also become an important platform for disinformation circulation.

The Czech Republic is also host to a novel mechanism for the spread of disinformation: email chains. With around one-third of the Czech population receiving these threads straight into their inbox, they have been effective in creating hysteria around key issues such as vaccines and migration. This method of communication has become popular among older people and allowed Czech disinformation to bypass mainstream media and successfully appeal to a receptive audience. “We have a chain email problem, and I think we are the only country in the world with this problem,” Veronika Spalkova of the European Values Centre for Security Policy, told me. “These emails target peoples’ emotions, and they play a role in important events in this country.” 

It’s not just email chains, text messages laden with disinformation have been successful in fueling hysteria. In early January, people in the Czech Republic began to receive messages that claimed to be from Petr Pavel, the presidential candidate. The content falsely said that they were being mobilized to fight in Ukraine, and it set off enough panic to warrant a response from the police.

The post Why the Czech government can’t beat back online disinformation appeared first on Coda Story.

India has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, abstaining from voting on half a dozen resolutions at the United Nations General Assembly that called for Russia to withdraw from Ukraine and end the war. In a tightrope balancing act, India has stated that the “sovereignty and territorial integrity” of the countries involved must be respected while simultaneously maintaining close defense and economic ties with Russia. A recent report from a Finnish think tank named India one of five “laundromat” countries that have significantly increased their imports of Russian crude oil, which they go on to sell — in the form of refined oil products — to other countries, including those in Europe that have committed to helping restrict Russia’s revenue stream from fossil fuel sales.

This was the diplomatic backdrop against which a small Ukrainian cultural festival was held in the Indian capital Delhi last week — a tentative step toward the people-to-people contact Dzhaparova described. I met Masha Kondakova, a Ukrainian film director, at a screening of her 2020 documentary, “Inner Wars.” In 2017, Kondakova began to follow three Ukrainian women who served on the battlefield, two as combatants in the Donbas region, fighting against pro-Russian separatists, and one as a doctor in the Ukrainian army. The resulting film is a rare and urgent look at life as a woman on the front lines of war.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What prompted you to make a film about women soldiers?

I saw a lot of movies about war from the male gaze. I always saw the men as the main characters, and I thought, ‘no, wait a second,’ and I discovered that there are women fighters on the front lines in Ukraine. When I started to work on the movie in 2017, we had limited positions for women in the army.

For example, even if a woman was a sniper or working in a mortar squad, she would be registered as a kitchen worker or someone making clothes. This meant even if women were joining as fighters or combatants, we would not receive the same treatment as male soldiers. If you’re a veteran, the government helps you. It’s not the same if you’re registered as working in the kitchen. By 2018, things changed. The women that I filmed joined the army when there were no positions for them as combatants. So these rare women warriors had to be brave enough to fight at the front line and also brave enough to fight for their rights within the army. These women proved they had a place in the army.

I wanted to give these women their voices, to show their faces, to show that women too are war heroes.

You said things changed for women in the army in Ukraine in 2018. What specific challenges do women soldiers defending Ukraine from Russia’s invasion now face?

Women form about 23% of the army in Ukraine. It’s huge. Today we have more than 50,000 women who serve in the army. Around 7,000 are fighters on the front line. There are many more women now who are combatants in the war. This is voluntary. It’s not an obligation, it’s a choice. The army has never been adapted to suit women. But women are resilient. A friend of mine, an actress, learned how to be a first responder and give medical help on the battlefield. Also, there are a lot of women who have learned how to shoot. Until the beginning of 2022, before the invasion, even the uniform was not adapted for a woman’s body. All of that is changing now.  

Are any of the women you filmed in 2017 on the front lines again? Have you been in touch with them?

Yes. One of the women I followed, Elena, was in Bakhmut. She is a senior sergeant in the mortar battery in the Donetsk region. When I spoke to her, she told me about this terrible moment when her 10-year-old son called her at 4 a.m. and said that he was scared. There were explosions in Kharkiv, where he lives. She was defending the country, she told me. But at that moment, she couldn’t protect her son.

You live in Paris now, but you still have family in Kyiv. When were you last able to visit them?

My father and mother are physicians. My sister is a pianist. They never talk too dramatically about the war. My mother and sister temporarily joined me in Paris, but my father didn’t want to leave Ukraine. He is 70 years old. He can’t fight but he said, “I will at least protect my house.” I last went to Ukraine in August. I heard the sirens. It was powerful and kind of scary. I visited places where buildings were destroyed, where it was horrible like in Hostomel and Bucha. But people were still walking around. People were still kissing on the street. Life is stronger than death, that’s what I learned.

On your visit to India, what sort of response have you received about the war in Ukraine?

I met two people who were very supportive, who told me they felt ‘very, very sorry.’ These people were young. I met one tuk-tuk driver who was around 60 years old and spoke Russian. He said, ‘I talked to Vladimir Putin and he said everything will be okay.’ I said, ‘Oh great, for which country?’ There is a war. We are free to take positions, and I respect that. But when he said, ‘Ukraine and Russia are together,’ I had to say, ‘no, it’s been a long time, almost a century.’

I don’t judge anyone. But if somebody believes Ukraine somehow belongs to Russia, please educate yourself. I know Russian propaganda is very strong. I also know that Russia and India have a long relationship. From my point of view, supporting Ukraine doesn’t mean you become an enemy of Russia. But when innocent people are dying in Ukraine, children, women, I don’t understand the tolerance. Ukrainians showed from the very beginning of the invasion that they wanted to remain sovereign. They don’t want to be the slaves of Russian imperialists.

The post Documenting the women warriors of Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

They are in a shrinking minority. In Italy today, 3 in 10 gynecologists provide abortion care. The rest refuse on the grounds of “conscientious objection.” And in numerous hospital systems around Italy, it’s impossible to find a single gynecologist willing to provide an abortion.

“If your boss is an objector, your working life will be difficult. He might not lay it out in black and white, but he’ll let you know he won’t make it any easier if you continue giving abortions,” said Silvana Agatone, a gynecologist in Rome who leads the Free Italian Gynecologists’ Association, a group dedicated to protecting abortion rights in Italy. “It’s psychologically taxing.”

The group chat has become a refuge where doctors can exchange advice about how to keep doing their work and find some support too. This is critical for doctors like Agatone, who are facing a new wave of anti-abortion sentiment brought on by Italy’s ruling government and by forces across the Atlantic.

“You’re given the hardest shifts, you’re sent continuous letters being reprimanded for this, that or the other. You’re ground down in an environment where you’re persecuted every day,” Agatone told me.

It wasn’t always like this. In 1978, joining a global wave of reforms that followed the legalization of abortion in the U.S., Italy passed a law protecting a woman’s right to an abortion — and doctors’ rights to provide abortion care — in the first 90 days of pregnancy. While the law stipulates that doctors can refuse to provide an abortion on the grounds of conscientious objection, it also says that this should not limit women’s access to abortion care. 

But today, abortion access is harder and harder to come by. Catholic universities run many of Italy’s top hospitals — so the heads of gynecology units tend to oppose abortion, Agatone told me. In many cases, entire facilities don’t offer abortion care, due in part to their religious affiliation. Patients regularly come up against doctors who try to coerce them out of the decision or deny them access to abortion pills.

As the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade has galvanized far-right, anti-abortion campaigns around the world, the mood among Italian gynecologists who carry out abortions has reached a new low.

“It worries me. It worries me a lot. This movement has touched everyone in different countries. It’s as if we’re having to start all over again to get our rights back,” said Agatone. “It feels like we’re on a roller coaster — we got our rights, now they’re being taken away, and now we have to fight to get them back.”

More and more of Italy’s doctors have declared themselves anti-abortion in recent years, as they’ve faced ever-increasing challenges to their work and their well-being. In the 1970s, 59% of doctors opted out of providing abortion care. But for the last decade, the number has hovered around 65%, with some regions seeing objector rates as high as 80%.

In September 2022, Italians voted in a new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who campaigned for years on a platform claiming to champion “family values.” She has made consistent pledges to raise Italy’s birth rate, warning voters that without intervention, the nation is “destined to disappear.”  

When she first took office, Meloni softened her stance, saying she had no intention of going after abortion rights. In an interview in March 2023, she pledged that the state would financially support women who might otherwise seek abortions so that they don’t “miss out on the joy of having a child.” But under Meloni, the joy she spoke of is not intended for everyone. The same month, the Italian government stopped the city of Milan from officially recognizing LGBTQ parents on birth registers, leaving these families in legal limbo. Milan was previously the only city in the country where LGBTQ families had full legal recognition. In other regions that had been moving toward a similar equal rights regime, Meloni’s government threatened legal action on the matter shortly after she came to power.

“Everything is linked to this movement that doesn’t want contraception, divorce or homosexuality,” said Agatone, who believes that the money and influence of these groups continue to be a top concern in Italy.

In some parts of Italy, abortion access is hanging on by a thread, with just one pro-choice gynecologist serving entire regions. Patients needing an abortion have to navigate a number of bureaucratic and practical obstacles before the 90-day deadline. They must observe a mandatory “cooling-off period” of seven days before undergoing the procedure. And some now have to make journeys of hundreds of miles before they can find a doctor willing to provide the care they need. For a person facing serious health repercussions from an unviable pregnancy, these obstacles are dangerous. It’s a system that Human Rights Watch described in 2020 as “labyrinthine” and “burdensome,” demonstrating “how the country’s outdated restrictions cause harm instead of providing protection.”

Agatone described how her colleagues would thwart her when she was trying to take care of her patients by refusing to give them the medication they needed or by putting women having abortions into labor and delivery units, where other women were giving birth. “I would try in every way to have them put in a different ward, and I’d have to fight with the staff,” she said.

Obstetricians and gynecologists in Europe only have to look at the United States to see what might come next. This January, anti-abortion activists firebombed a Planned Parenthood clinic in Illinois. And the U.S. is facing an acute shortage of OBGYN specialists, particularly in anti-abortion states, where the number of medical students pursuing gynecology residencies has plummeted since the reversal. 

“The fact that abortion has been overturned in America has made people think that they can’t be complacent about the right,” said Mara Clarke, the co-founder of Supporting Abortions for Everyone (SAFE), a European abortion charity she started in February 2023 to combat the attack on abortion rights in Europe. “When the right rises,” she said, referring to the political right, “women, children and LGTBQ people are the first targets.”

Italy — alongside other European states like Poland and Hungary — has long been a target for pan-Christian conservative movements that promote anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and lobby for a rollback of those rights in Europe. Often, the first step in their strategy is to limit access to abortion care with tactics like imposing waiting periods and restrictions on abortion medications. But the ultimate goal is to introduce a blanket ban, according to research by the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights.

Rather than banning abortion completely, the current strategy is “more a chipping away of rights,” said Irene Donadio of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, who spoke to me in a personal capacity.

For years, these networks and their myriad backers — including Russian oligarchs, Italian politicians, European aristocrats and American Christian conservatives — have made significant inroads. One network, Agenda Europe, is thought to have played a key role in influencing Poland’s abortion ban, while successfully lobbying against same-sex marriage during referendums in Croatia, Slovenia and Romania.

The “family values” movement reached a fever-pitch in Italy in 2019, when Verona played host to the World Congress of Families, the flagship event of the U.S.-based International Organization of the Family — a coalition of groups that promote anti-abortion and anti-LGTBQ agendas in the name of “affirming, celebrating and defending the natural family.” Among the speakers was Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s far-right League party, and Giorgia Meloni herself. In a speech at the event, Meloni warned of a world in which a woman is “forced to have an abortion because she sees no viable alternative” and added: “Is it right for a society to spend a lot more energy and resources on finding immediate, easy, quick ways to get rid of human life rather than on fostering it? Is that normal? Can you call that ‘civilization?’” She also spoke of her opposition to the use of surrogates by gay families, likening it to “snatching a puppy dog away from its mother.”

“In this cultural climate, which is becoming heavier and heavier, it’s becoming harder every day for young gynecologists to declare themselves non-objectors,” said Agatone, referring to the high number of OBGYN practitioners who opt out of providing abortion care. At 69, she sees pro-choice doctors like herself, who trained in the 1970s and 1980s, during an impassioned era of pro-choice activism, aging out of the system.

“I believe abortion access in this country could lapse,” said Agatone. “Because even if there’s a law protecting people’s rights to abortion, if no one’s there to do them, then that’s that.”

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A slender man of 54, with piercing blue eyes and a gentle manner, Andrii knew that if anything happened to him on the battlefield, Yurii, his partner of nearly 25 years, would not be able to make medical decisions on his behalf. If Andrii died, Yurii would not be allowed to pick up his body from the morgue or arrange a funeral. Under Ukrainian law, the love of Andrii’s life would be little more than a stranger.

Following the 2014 Maidan revolution that overthrew a pro-Kremlin leader and installed a president dedicated to pursuing integration with the West, Ukraine took a handful of steps toward protecting its LGBTQ population, including an amendment to Ukraine’s labor code that made it illegal to fire a person on the basis of their sexuality. “The Ukrainian LGBTQ movement never had any support from our authorities until around 2015,” Andrii told me. 

But past gay pride parades in Kyiv have been marred by violence, and the country of 43 million people has stopped well short of offering the full civil rights of citizenship to gay people. This could all change if those pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to protect the civil rights of LGBTQ people achieve their aims. LGBTQ soldiers have been particularly influential in changing public opinion. An estimated 200 people who openly identify as gay serve in the Ukrainian military, upending existing ideas of what constitutes a national hero.

So far, the country has taken fitful steps toward protecting gay rights. After the invasion, a petition for Ukraine to amend Article 51 of its 1996 constitution — which states that “marriage is based on the free consent of a woman and a man” — gathered 25,000 signatures, enough to necessitate a presidential review. Zelenskyy’s office replied that Ukraine’s constitution “cannot be changed during a state of war or emergency.” The response did say that the government would look into the legalization of civil partnerships, which would extend certain financial benefits to LGBTQ couples, but exclude others, such as adoption rights. 

For Ukraine, the fate of proposed LGBTQ protections during the war with Russia carries special significance. Russian President Vladimir Putin has framed Russia’s invasion as an existential holy war that pits Russia’s blood-and-soil religious, political and social values against Ukrainians who support a jaded, morally corrupt West. He has called LGBTQ people vessels of Western amorality, targeting them for violence and censure inside Russia, and enacted a law that banned children from accessing any media that positively portrays LGBTQ identities. Any legislative protection extended to LGBTQ people in Ukraine now would be cast as a cultural rebuke of Putin’s — and by extension, Russia’s — worldview. 

It’s not only in the war between Russia and Ukraine that LGBTQ rights have become a singular litmus test for whether a country has decided to evolve toward a more tolerant vision of society or to join the wave of emerging authoritarian states around the world. A crucial legal battle is currently underway at India’s Supreme Court, in what could be a landmark moment for LGBTQ communities in the country. The increasingly authoritarian government of Prime Minister Narenda Modi is pushing back against the legalization of same-sex marriage, calling it an “urban elitist concept.” The hearing is expected to go on for at least two weeks. A favorable verdict would be historic and would make India only the second country in Asia, after Taiwan, to legalize same-sex marriage. 

In Hungary, the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has vowed to defend a law that bans the use of materials seen as promoting homosexuality and gender change at schools. A case before the Court of Justice of the European Union, which interprets EU laws to make sure they are applied equally in every EU member state, has the potential for a clash with Hungary, where Orban’s insistence on preserving the law has reinforced Budapest’s increasingly authoritarian bent. 

Andrii, the man called up to fight, did what he could to mitigate his lack of civil rights. He went to a notary and drafted his will to ensure that his partner Yurii could at least inherit the apartment they owned together in Kyiv — the city that the couple has called home since fleeing Luhansk in 2014, when fighting erupted there between Russian proxies and the Ukrainian military. Yurii would not be entitled to death benefits should Andrii pass away.

“I don’t refuse to protect my country, it’s my duty. But I don’t have my ordinary rights,” Andrii told me recently when we met in central Kyiv. After following his military’s summons, he received a temporary deferral. This allowed him to continue his work with Nash Svit, one of Ukraine’s oldest LGBTQ rights organizations. Andrii co-founded the organization in 1997, just six years after the fall of the Soviet Union, at a time when the gay rights movement in the region was only beginning to stir.

Since then, progress on equality has been blocked by Ukraine’s religious institutions and ultra-conservative groups. Same-sex marriages and civil partnerships are not recognized by the state. But the Russian invasion has changed minds. Some Ukrainians, who were previously unsure of their personal views on LGBTQ rights, are taking a pro-gay rights position simply because it is contrary to Moscow’s. While around 41% of Ukrainians do not support “the introduction of a registered partnership for same-sex couples similar to ordinary marriage,” a growing number are uncomfortable with the rights of soldiers in wartime being undermined because of their sexual identity.

Ukraine follows a global trend in which negative attitudes towards LGBTQ people can be deeply entrenched in the country’s armed forces. It’s a situation that has been exacerbated by disinformation pumped out by Russia. Detector Media, a media research group, has tracked the rise of false pro-Russian social media narratives about Ukrainian troops having AIDS “because they are gay.” This has made some members of the Ukrainian military sensitive to any steps taken to encourage the acceptance of gay soldiers. When LGBTQ Military, an NGO fighting for equality in Ukraine, promoted the establishment of a gay-fiendly unit in the armed forces in 2021, the head of PR for Ukraine’s army told local media that reports of a so-called “Ukrainian LGBTQ battalion” were false and accused LGBTQ Military of having Russian origins. LGBTQ Military continue to deny this allegation.

For many LGBTQ soldiers, the flurry of talk around equal rights has sparked hope over the past year. Vlad, a cadet from the southern Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, told me that official recognition of same-sex partnerships would mean real freedom for him. Currently based in Odesa, the 18-year-old endured years of bullying. When he joined LGBTQ Military, he found power in numbers. “I took an example from the guys who have already come out,” he told me in a Telegram message.

Among Ukrainian lawmakers, the leading voice on equal rights for LGBTQ people is Inna Sovsun, a 38-year-old opposition member of parliament from the eastern city of Kharkiv. We met last month at a Crimean Tatar restaurant in Kyiv. A few days before, she had proposed a law on same-sex partnerships that received bipartisan co-sponsorship. The bill would offer an alternative path to official same-sex partnerships, as Zelenskyy’s government drags its feet on the legislation it promised in its 2021 National Human Rights Strategy.

“For a while we were thinking that we should introduce a bill which would give the right to same-sex partnerships only to those where one person was in the military as that would have a greater chance of getting through parliament,” she told me. “But we decided against it because that would be discriminatory.”

And it’s good timing. Her new bill could help mitigate a wave of negative publicity that is expected to follow a pending judgment by the European Court of Human Rights, in Maymulakhin and Markiv v. Ukraine. The case, filed in 2014, was brought against Ukraine by a gay couple who claimed the state discriminated against them by refusing to legally recognize same-sex family partnerships.

“The argument I am going to use is: We are going to have to use this legislation to pre-empt this negative decision against us,” Sovsun told me. Depending on where things land, Sovsun’s bill could give policymakers a way to demonstrate a concrete commitment to equal rights straight away. 

But support for LGBTQ equality legislation will not come easy on the floor of Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, where the Ukrainian Council of Churches wields considerable influence. In a statement issued in late March, the organization said it was “outraged” by Sovsun’s bill, alleging that it threatens “both the institution of the family and the value foundations of Ukrainian society as a whole.” Ultra-conservatives will also coalesce against the law. The mayor of the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk declared that “a gay cannot be a patriot.”

Recognizing the long odds of receiving legal recognition of same-sex marriage, some of Ukraine’s soldiers have gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure their wishes are respected in death.

Last November, Leda Kosmachevska, a 33-year-old woman from Crimea, received a call from a childhood friend. Would she marry him? The man on the other end of the phone had been in a committed relationship with another man for 15 years.

She thought it through and agreed. 

Leda wasn’t surprised when she got the call, she said. Her friend had been in the army since March 2022, and she was well aware of the kinds of pressures and discrimination that gay people face in Ukraine.

“He doesn’t have any close relatives and was raised by his grandmother,” she told me. “We’ve known each other since we were eight. He told me he was gay when we were 18.”

The two friends talked through the logistics. They laid out the terms around his medical care, what to do if he went missing, funeral arrangements. As their conversations continued, Leda grew more comfortable with the idea of being a liaison between her friend’s actual partner and the state. But she was also nervous. The stakes were incredibly high.

Leda wrote about what she was doing on Facebook. She posted her story with a high-quality photograph of herself, sitting on a sofa, wrapped in a white sheet. She explained to me that her public name, Kosmachevska, is different from what appears on her official documents. This was done, she said, to protect her friend, and herself, from hostile actors.

When the post went viral, her story ricocheted around Ukrainian media and became another example of the extraordinary measures some Ukrainians have taken to protect each other in wartime. It also triggered a torrent of abuse from Facebook users who tried to shame her. Still, she left the post up.

“There are people who will use those details to apply to the courts and say the marriage is fictional,” she said, but “my friend is still on the frontline fighting for our country.”

Tusha Mittal contributed additional reporting to this article. 

The post The LGBTQ rights debate is testing Ukraine’s commitment to Europe appeared first on Coda Story.

“We’re a Russian-speaking media,” Rakovitsa told me as we settled in at the lobby bar of the InterContinental hotel in central Kyiv, now a hub for foreign journalists reporting on the war as the world looks on. Born and raised in Mariupol, Rakovitsa is also in the business of storytelling, but her audience is closer to the action than most.

The Institute’s online newsroom, News of Donbas, is aimed at people in Ukraine’s Russia-occupied territories.

“In order to reach our audience, we don’t use hate speech,” Rakovitsa told me. “We use the principles of conflict-sensitive journalism, and we don’t label people as orcs and Rashists,” she said, referring to the slang epithets that many Ukrainian media now use to describe Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.

As the war grinds on into its second year, Ukraine’s news organizations have worked hard to showcase the brutality of Russian military forces and to keep the war on the international agenda. In the reporting of smaller media based in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainians who have Russian sympathies or are apathetic about living under Moscow’s hand are still somewhat present. But they have all but disappeared from coverage by outlets that are considered mainstream.

Rakovitsa’s organization is working to show how people in eastern Ukraine are experiencing the war and to counter the relentless tide of pro-Russian disinformation. They do this by reporting straight facts in a style that is bone dry, in both Russian and Ukrainian.

Among Ukrainian media, their approach stands out. And it is exactly what some people are looking for. Since the invasion, News of Donbas and its sister YouTube channel have seen their audience numbers skyrocket. People living under occupation have engaged with the newsroom’s mix of news updates and short features. And Russians hungry for facts have driven traffic to the YouTube channel in particular. More than 70% of the channel’s 169,000 subscribers are logging on from Russia, although some portion of this figure is likely Ukrainians who were forcibly moved to Russia over the course of 2022.

In the past, the organization’s divergence from the norm has led to criticism or doubt from other media outlets. Before the war, much was made of News of Donbas’ decision to publish photographs of Denis Pushilin, the Russia-backed leader of the unrecognized Donetsk People’s Republic. The site also ran a photo of the region’s unofficial flag, a move that some saw as legitimizing Pushilin’s initiative. But since the war began in 2022 Ukraine’s journalists have united around a common enemy.

“The journalists in this country started a marathon of coverage over a year ago,” Rakovitsa told me between swigs of her non-alcoholic beer. “24/7 we’re covering this story and in so many ways it has brought us together. At times, yes, there are people who still criticize us, but I understand that they are also suffering from this war.” Ukrainian journalists, she said, are living with “nerves with no skin,” covering a war that is challenging their very existence as a people.

The Institute first launched in 2009, with a goal of shining light on corruption and life in Donetsk. In 2014, the work expanded to a YouTube channel, which focused on the Maidan revolution and human rights violations that proliferated as fighting erupted between Russian proxies and the Ukrainian government. With the majority of its reporters from eastern Ukraine, the newsroom became adept at obtaining and explaining information about what was happening inside occupied territories.

Now funded by major Western donors like the Council of Europe and USAID, the non-profit has developed various arms, including a think tank, the annual Donbas Media Forum and Crimea Today, a separate news outlet that focuses on communities in the annexed peninsula. “Our audience there watches us, trusts us, knows we are pro-Ukrainian media,” said Rakovitsa. “We don’t say they are fools and blame them for Russia’s actions,” she said.

This, too, sets them apart from the norm. Further west, many believe that a lack of local resistance to Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea helped set the stage for the 2022 invasion. 

Rakovitsa sees her organization’s work as integral to Ukraine’s future and thinks that discussions about what to do after the war need to start now, even as the battles rage on. People liberated from the occupied territories will have to be weaned off a robust diet of Russian propaganda, she told me.

Indeed, the Ukrainian information sphere has become highly charged, with people quick to judge one another and seemingly eager at times to define who has betrayed Ukraine and who has not. In the occupied territories, people are also experiencing wartime fervor, but for many, it is mediated instead by Russian propaganda. Rakovitsa expects that whenever the war ends, those who have only been fed the Russian side of the story will have a deeply distorted view of what has happened. She worries that this clash of narratives could result in a whole new round of conflict. 

“We need to ensure that there is no second war after the first one,” she said to me, a few times over.

In February 2022, the organization’s offices moved west following the invasion. In total, 50 staff members work under Rakovitsa. Most are now working remotely, due to the constant threat of shelling. And new obstacles arise each day. But the sense of mission is palpable and sustaining. 

“The people we are reporting to, they are our people,” Rakovitsa said to me, as we walked out of the hotel doors and onto the street. “We’re fighting for them.”

CORRECTION [04/28/2023 10:20 AM EDT]: The original version of this story said that the offices of the Donetsk Institute of Information moved west amid the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The editorial offices moved west in February 2022.

The post The Ukrainian journalists on the front lines of Russian propaganda appeared first on Coda Story.

Almost two months later, Kocer is still being investigated and does not know if he will be sent to trial under a controversial law, the so-called disinformation law, which criminalizes the spreading of false or misleading information. If convicted, Kocer could face a prison sentence of up to three years.

Critics say the disinformation law, passed in October 2022, is the latest example of the gradual dismantling of democratic freedoms in Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has run the country for over two decades now.

As Turkey approaches its presidential election on May 14, the disinformation law, which was used to silence journalists in the aftermath of the earthquakes, casts a shadow over free speech in what some Turkish people see as the most important election in the Republic’s 100-year history.

On election day, the state will use the law to suppress the reporting of what is happening at polling stations and justify detentions and arrests, said Baris Altintas, the co-director of the Media and Law Studies Association, a non-profit organization which offers legal assistance to journalists in Turkey. The Turkish government might also initiate internet shutdowns, website blockings and bans on Twitter accounts, she told me. 

One of the most controversial changes under the disinformation law was an amendment to the Turkish criminal code called Article 217. It states that people can be imprisoned for up to three years for disseminating false information related to the country’s domestic and foreign security. The law specifies that the false information has to be related to the “internal and external security, public order and general health of the country” to be considered a crime.

What this means in practice is unclear — which may be the point.

“Such wording, within the Turkish context can refer to anything and everything and often concepts such as external security and/or national security as well as public order are taken lightly,” said Yaman Akdeniz, a professor of law at Istanbul Bilgi University.

The law states that disinformation must be distributed in a way that disturbs public peace, with the motive of creating concern, fear and panic among the public. But, Akdeniz explains, it does not define anxiety, fear or panic, leaving its interpretation up to public prosecutors who consider whether to bring forward a case, as well as the criminal courts if an indictment is issued.

Turkey has low levels of judicial independence, with most judges appointed by the president and the parliament, which is dominated by Erdogan’s party, the AKP, and its coalition of allied parties.

Unpublished research by the Media and Law Studies Association shows that six journalists were detained under Article 217 for their work covering the aftermath of the earthquakes. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, only Iran, China and Myanmar currently jail more journalists than Turkey.

The earthquakes, which killed more than 45,000 people in Turkey alone and destroyed around 214,000 buildings, have put the AKP under immense pressure in the lead up to the elections. The party has been accused of undermining construction safeguards, thus worsening the impact of the earthquakes. It has also been criticized for overseeing a chaotic response to the disaster, fueling widespread anger against what many see as a corrupt government.

In response, the government has described its critics as “provocateurs” and shut down access to social media sites, including homegrown sites, on some service providers, all while people were using these platforms to search for survivors.

Two journalists arrested in February, Ali and Ibrahim Imat, were reportedly only released on Friday, having spent weeks awaiting trial for allegedly spreading fake news. The brothers had raised allegations that the Turkish authorities in Osmaniye were withholding tents from people made homeless by the earthquakes.

On at least two occasions, when reporting from the earthquake-affected region, Mir Ali Kocer said he was confronted by police officers in order to stop him from filming. One incident was caught on camera. This was something several journalists have reported experiencing.

When he was summoned to the police station, the policemen told Kocer he was being investigated for spreading disinformation for comments he had posted on social media. According to Kocer the posts that the police showed him included one in which he said he could smell dead bodies.

Kocer told me he was simply sharing information, obtained from survivors of the earthquakes or local officials and the police, which the government refused to share. He said his posts are usually supported with a photo, a video or an interview with someone. Kocer, who refers to the disinformation law as the “censorship law,” believes the police were just trying to intimidate him. But, he told me, he will continue to be a journalist even if he is forced to report from inside a prison.

Prior to the disinformation law, the state already had a wide range of legal tools available to target critical voices, including an anti-terrorism law that has forced dozens of journalists and dissidents to flee while many others have been imprisoned. 

Another law, forbidding people to insult the president, led to 33,973 prosecutions in 2021 alone. Schoolchildren and a former Miss Turkey, the 2006 winner of a national beauty pageant, have been prosecuted under the law. In 2016, a man was sentenced to a year in prison for posting images on Facebook comparing Erdogan to the Lord of the Rings character Gollum.

Often, the anti-terrorism law is used against journalists who make accusations against judges or police officials tasked with combating terrorism, says Ozgur Ogret, the Turkey representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists. In cases where this charge does not stick, the disinformation law gives the state another way to target the same journalists and imprison them for doing the thing that is, by definition, their job — spreading information.

In December 2022, Sinan Aygul became the first journalist to be arrested under the disinformation law, after he posted a tweet accusing police officers and soldiers of sexually abusing a child. He later retracted the story for inaccuracies.

Aygul could have been charged by the police for making targets of those who are tasked to combat terrorism, said Ogret. But instead the state decided to use the disinformation law.

The impact of the law extends beyond journalists. Hundreds of people had legal proceedings initiated against them and dozens were detained for spreading “provocative” posts on social media in the wake of the earthquakes. It is unclear at this stage how many of these people were held under Article 217, but it is likely that a lot of them were detained using the law, said Altintas, the director of the Media and Law Studies Association.

Article 217 poses a bigger threat to NGOs, academics and ordinary citizens than journalists, who are more seasoned in dealing with the state and have been targeted for years using a mixture of laws, Altintas told me. Now the disinformation law means anything anyone tweets or says can be used against them.

The disinformation law also imposes heavy sanctions, including six-month bans on advertising, on social media platforms that fail to comply with content removal requests from prosecutors or the courts. These same companies are also obliged to provide user data, when requested, in relation to specific crimes, including when people are accused of disseminating fake news.

The authorities can limit access to social media platforms by slowing down the speed of the service for non-compliance with these requests. The platforms have been put in a further bind as they are now required to set up subsidiaries in Turkey, making them more criminally, administratively and financially liable. “The disinformation law forces social media platforms to be complicit in the state’s censorship regime,” said Suay Boulougouris, a program officer at Article 19, an international human rights organization that promotes freedom of expression.

The opposition in Turkey, after years of elections riddled with fraud, have become highly organized in election monitoring, in which social media plays a vital role, allowing citizens to share information on irregularities, including ballot stuffing, violence and the deliberate miscounting of votes. The new disinformation law makes it easier for the government to remove content en masse or to clamp down on the social media sites themselves — a real possibility, says Bolougouris, as Erdogan, who is lagging behind the opposition in the polls, scrambles to find a way to secure his presidency.

“The implications of these amendments go beyond Turkey,” she told me. “Because if Turkey is able to implement these amendments without a strong pushback from platforms, for example, it will set a dangerous precedent and it will have implications for the open functioning of social media around the world.”

Turkish government officials have over the years been keen to draw parallels between Turkey’s internet laws and a law in Germany, referred to as NetzDG. The German law has been heavily criticized for requiring social media companies to comply with content takedown requests from German authorities. But Boulougouris disagrees with the comparison, saying that the operating environment in Turkey, with its weaker institutions and judiciary, is totally different from Germany.

As the election approaches, the opposition is looking more unified, with six parties backing one candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. The opposition have rallied around pledges to implement constitutional changes that roll back presidential powers, crack down on corruption and give state media organizations back their independence and impartiality.

But Yaman Akdeniz, the law professor, cautions against being overly optimistic that these changes will be implemented if the opposition wins. Turkey has a long history of censorship, he told me, “don’t expect this to be a smooth process.”

The post As elections near, Turkey weaponizes the law to suppress speech appeared first on Coda Story.

The videos were fake, said the Tamil Nadu police. A controversy had been manufactured, said the Tamil Nadu government, by politicians from India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party. “The spread of fake videos,” said the state’s chief minister, M.K. Stalin, on March 10, “was initiated by BJP leaders from North India.” He accused these unnamed leaders of having an “ulterior motive,” of trying to create unrest just after he had “spoken about anti-BJP parties uniting.”

With the BJP, led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, firm favorites to win a third consecutive national election in 2024, most analysts deem the formation of an ad hoc alliance of regional parties and the fast-fading Congress — which has governed India for the vast majority of its 75 years as an independent nation — as the opposition’s only hope.

If Modi remains by far India’s most popular politician, there is little love lost for him in Tamil Nadu. For years, whenever he visited the state, he would be greeted with signs that read, “Go back Modi.” But the BJP, which has never had an electoral presence at any level in Tamil Nadu, surprised observers last year by winning several seats in municipal elections in the state. It led the party’s state chief to declare his intent to turn the BJP into a third political force in a state that has been dominated by two parties since the 1960s, both of which emerged from an equal rights movement for oppressed castes. Despite the progress made last year, the BJP is currently in disarray in Tamil Nadu, with 13 party workers quitting dramatically just last week.

Meanwhile, Bihar is currently led by an anti-BJP coalition. In August 2022, the state’s chief minister walked out on an alliance with the BJP and formed a new government with other partners including the Congress. The fake videos of Bihari laborers being attacked in Tamil Nadu were spread by BJP supporters, politicians from both states said, to drive a wedge between parties in both states that were opposed to the BJP.

Sylendra Babu, the extravagantly mustached head of the Tamil Nadu police, told me that he had to form 46 special teams to coordinate with the Bihar police to combat the viral spread of videos and social media commentary about attacks on Bihari laborers. “It was a war-like situation,” Babu said. 

Arrayed against the police in both Tamil Nadu and Bihar were right-wing influencers with followings of up to 60 million people, local BJP politicians and even some media. The Hindi-language Dainik Bhaskar newspaper — the largest circulated daily in India and by some estimates the fourth largest in the world — reported that more than 15 Bihari laborers had been murdered in Tamil Nadu. The article was based on a single phone call with a laborer and the accompanying video showing clips of unrelated violence.

Following up on the report, a BJP spokesperson tweeted that Bihari laborers were being attacked and killed for speaking Hindi in Tamil Nadu. To counter the misinformation, the Tamil Nadu police took to Twitter to threaten legal action against anyone it found to be deliberately making false posts. Babu himself posted a video on Twitter describing the claims that Bihari workers were being attacked in Tamil Nadu as “false and mischievous.” 

Bihar, linguistically and culturally, is part of India’s so-called “cow belt” — including the Hindi-speaking states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in particular. Back in the 1980s, an Indian academic coined the pejorative acronym BIMARU to refer to these states, a pun on the Hindi word “bimar,” meaning ill or sick. These states lag behind the rest of the country, particularly the south, in terms of prosperity and education.

Tamil Nadu is a southern state. Like its neighbors, it outperforms the North when it comes to providing healthcare, education and jobs to its residents. But the Hindi-speaking northern states dominate national politics, a dominance that has become even more stark since the Modi-led BJP came to power in 2014, gobbling up votes in the region at an unprecedented scale.

States like Tamil Nadu and Kerala have always been fiercely vigilant that their languages be recognized as integral to the Indian union. Many in the South prefer to communicate in English as their pan-Indian link language rather than Hindi. But Modi, critics point out, has not disguised his ambition to make Hindi the country’s national language. The Indian constitution recognizes 22 languages, while giving Hindi and English “official” language status. English, therefore, is equal to Hindi as a language of government communication. 

By trying to further privilege Hindi, Modi and his closest political ally, Home Minister Amit Shah, have been accused of inflaming tensions with the south. Stalin, the Tamil Nadu chief minister, has himself written to Modi to demand that the latter stop his “continuous efforts to promote Hindi in the name of one nation.” Stalin described attempts to “impose” Hindi as “divisive in character” and warned against provoking another “language war.” Tamil Nadu has a long history of resisting the adoption of Hindi as the language of government.

While Hindi is by far the single most spoken language in India, there are hundreds of millions who do not speak it and who fear being at a disadvantage were learning Hindi to become compulsory. The rumors and fake videos tapped into the prejudices and resentments of both Hindi speakers and those in the south who speak entirely different languages and write with a different alphabet. The videos made national headlines because they appeared to expose yet another historical division still resonant in contemporary India.

S. Anandhi, a professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, told me that the politics of the BJP is inherently opposed to the federalism that has long characterized politics in Tamil Nadu. The BJP, she said, “is against autonomy, democratization of language, and plurality of culture and religion.” 

The fomenting of social media outrage over the last couple of weeks provides an insight into what campaigning might look like over the next year as the general election approaches. The journalist Arun Sinha, author of “Battle for Bihar,” an inside look at the state’s politics, told me that the level of organization shown over the last few weeks, as fake videos were spread about anti-migrant violence in Tamil Nadu, suggests that the BJP wants to establish itself as the voice of the large population of disenfranchised Bihari migrant workers.

Spreading rumors about anti-migrant feelings in states like Tamil Nadu and maligning the non-BJP coalition government of Bihar as unresponsive, he said, “is like killing two birds with one stone.” And, as ever, the BJP’s tight control of the social media narrative in India helps it to advance its electoral goals. The question is whether the opposition can, as it tried to do in Tamil Nadu, effectively marshal social media to stop the spread of disinformation.

The post Fake videos of mob violence deepen India’s North-South divide appeared first on Coda Story.

Bulchak’s case is not unique. On the day Moscow’s military campaign in Ukraine began, another Catholic priest, Father Alexander Baran, posted a photo of the Ukrainian flag and the flag of the Belarusian opposition movement on social media. He was subsequently arrested, charged with “illegal picketing” and the “dissemination of extremist materials” and sentenced to 10 days in prison. Around the same time, Father Andrei Kevlich, another Belarusian Catholic priest, was detained and later fined for reposting content about the war from banned independent media. 

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has tightened the space for the Catholic Church and its priests in Belarus to criticize the government and its authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Although the clampdown on the Church began soon after the rigged presidential election in August 2020, which saw Lukashenko claim 80% of the vote, the Belarusian regime has taken advantage of the attention given to the war in Ukraine to gain an even greater hold over a key religious institution in Belarusian society. 

It has also proved to be an opportunity to end what the Belarusian government believes is a dangerous pocket of Western influence in a country that allows the Russian military to use its territory to wage its war on Ukraine.

For Catholics in Belarus, “the whole atmosphere has become one of fear,” said Natalia Vasilevich, a Belarusian theologian and human rights lawyer based in Germany. “Sermons are being watched, trust is even being tested inside some communities, even the social networks of priests are being checked. People cannot trust any structures anymore. They can only trust the relationships in front of them.”

Historically, the Belarusian Catholic Church has close ties to the Polish Catholic Church, which, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, helped to beef up the numbers of the Belarusian Catholic clergy. By working to sever the ties between these two Churches, Lukashenko believes he has exorcized a malign Western influence hanging over the country’s second-largest religious community.

If the Catholic clergy in Belarus was hoping that the Vatican would advocate for their right to free speech, they have been mistaken. In fact, Vatican diplomacy has seriously weakened the ability of the Catholic Church in Belarus to withstand the slings and arrows of Lukashenko’s government. Instead of defending its priests, the Vatican’s ecclesiastical diplomats have taken a conciliatory tone with the Belarusian regime, ensuring that the Church’s high-level influence is not diminished. It’s a move reminiscent of Ostpolitik, a Cold-War era strategy that saw the Vatican open communication channels with the Communist governments of Eastern and Central Europe.

“The role of the Vatican in Belarus has been to make the Catholic Church less visible as a protesting institution,” said Vasilevich, the Belarusian theologian. The justification for such a move, Vasilevich argues, is that the Vatican has seized an opportunity to become a bridge between Lukashenko and the West while foreign diplomats close their doors in response to Belarus’ alliance with Russia. 

In November 2022, nine months after the first Russian tank rolled across Belarus’ border to invade Ukraine, the Vatican’s ambassador to Belarus gave a speech to celebrate 30 years of relations between the Holy See and Belarus. He stated that the relationship between the two states “continues to be supplemented with new wonderful pages.” His speech came weeks after mass was banned in Minsk’s iconic Catholic Red Church, which was damaged in a mysterious fire that September. Later that year the same Vatican ambassador, Ante Jozic, told Belarusian state TV that Minsk could host peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, a line also parroted by Lukashenko.

To Belarusian Catholics, no other example reflects the Vatican’s coziness with the Belarusian government than the case of Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz. After defending the rights of anti-government protesters in 2020, the widely respected cleric was denied entry to Belarus on his return from a ceremony in Poland. When he was eventually allowed to return to Minsk following an intervention from Pope Francis, Kondrusiewicz was forced to retire and replaced with a Belarusian bishop, Iosif Stanevsky, thought to be more sympathetic to the regime. In November 2022, Stanevsky gave a papal Order of St. Gregory to Alexander Zaitsev, a close ally of Lukashenko and businessman subject to EU sanctions. 

“Now there is no illusion among Belarusian Catholics about the Vatican’s stance. However, at the parish priest level, almost all Catholic priests are against the authorities,” said Aliaksei Lastouski, a researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University in Sweden. The Vatican declined to comment for this article.

In response, Catholic priests in exile from Belarus have mobilized to counter the threats to Catholic priests who remain in the country. Father Viachaslau Barok, an exiled parish priest, sent a letter to Pope Francis that questioned the Vatican ambassador’s relationship with the Belarusian government and pleaded with the pontiff not to be swayed by the regime. “Everyone can see that by calling you ‘the best Pope,’ Lukashenko only seeks to hide behind the authority of St. Peter’s successor,” he wrote. 

It’s not only the Vatican. The Belarusian Orthodox Church, the largest religious denomination in the country, has also sought to placate the regime. After the 2020 presidential election, the leaders of the Orthodox Church were reported to have removed senior members known to be critical of Lukashenko. Since the full scale Ukraine invasion, it has transferred priests as punishment after they showed opposition to the war. This alliance between the Belarusian Orthodox Church and the state was on display when Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, visited Minsk last June to celebrate the 1,030th anniversary of Orthodoxy in Belarus, a visit that highlighted Moscow’s willingness to drag Belarus, a nation widely regarded as one of the most secular former Soviet states, into its religious sphere of influence. 

All the while Belarus’ Catholics are becoming less engaged with the Vatican and more frightened of their precarious position in the country. “The Vatican is no longer a pillar that you know will always be on your side,” said Vasilevich.

The post The Vatican is turning its back on Belarus’ Catholics appeared first on Coda Story.

As it turned out, it was murder. But this was no gangland killing, no drug deal gone sour or any other cinematic cliche. 

The bodies found in the car were those of two Muslim men, Nasir and Junaid, from the neighboring state of Rajasthan. Their families had reported both men as missing and, after their bodies had been found, alleged that they had been kidnapped and burned alive by activists from the militant Hindu supremacist group Bajrang Dal. One of the murdered men had been accused previously of so-called “cow smuggling.” 

In India, transporting cattle across state lines is restricted because, in several states, cattle slaughter is illegal. Many Hindus consider cows to be holy — symbolic of Mother Earth, of nature and its bounties. While cow slaughter is taboo in much of India, beef is still a part of the diet for many Indians, including Hindus. Much of this “beef” is water buffalo meat, and its export has made India one of the world’s largest beef-exporting countries alongside Brazil, Australia and the United States. 

But since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014, a cottage industry of vigilantes has mushroomed, claiming that they are protecting cows from being transported for slaughter. These vigilantes, almost always Hindu, beat up, torture and even kill men, almost always Muslim, who they claim are cattle smugglers. Sometimes they film these actions for their followers on social media.

The violence of these cow protectors, gau rakshaks as they are called in Hindi, are a bloody reminder of India’s divisions under Modi. For all his talk of a resurgent India, an India defined by its world-beating economic growth, its geopolitical maturity and its superpower ambitions, Modi’s legacy might yet be tainted by the actions of militant Hindu groups.

Several men have been identified as suspects in the kidnapping and murder of Nasir and Junaid last week, though only one has been arrested. Chief among these suspects is Monu Manesar, a man widely reported to be a local Bajrang Dal ringleader. He remains at large. And while he has yet to speak to the police, he has protested his innocence through video messages posted on social media. Manesar is so popular on social media that he has received a YouTube Creator Award, the Silver Play Button, for amassing over 100,000 followers. (At the time of writing, he has over 200,000.)

And so influential is Manesar in the state of Haryana that at a local meeting attended by hundreds of villagers and right-wing activists, the Rajasthan police were openly threatened with violence if they dared to search for Manesar or speak to his family. The leader of one right-wing Hindu group said the “inhuman” behavior of the Rajasthan police — asking questions — “would not be tolerated.” 

These groups, including the Bajrang Dal in which Manesar is prominent, are not part of some ragtag fringe. They are the footsoldiers of the “Sangh parivar,” the broad family of right-wing organizations, which includes the Bharatiya Janata Party that forms India’s federal government led by Modi. 

According to one study, 97% of attacks connected to cow smuggling between 2010 to 2017 occurred once Modi came to power in 2014, and 24 of the 28 people killed in these attacks were Muslim. Another study finds that just four cow-related hate crimes were reported by the Indian media between 2010 and 2014, compared to 71 between 2015 and 2018. 

Human Rights Watch, in April 2017, called on the Indian authorities to “promptly investigate and prosecute self-appointed ‘cow protectors.’” These vigilantes, said HRW South Asia director, Meenakshi Ganguly, “driven by irresponsible populism are killing people and terrorizing minority communities.” In the Kolkata-based Telegraph newspaper, Indian academic and writer Mukul Kesavan observed acidly that the “cow is so totemic for the BJP that the murder of human beings in this animal’s cause makes responsible leaders resort to silence, deflection, denial, defensiveness or arguments in mitigation that would shame the moral sense of a three-year-old.”  

In June 2017, a young Muslim man was beaten and stabbed to death by a mob on a train. What began as a fight over seats descended into insults about “beef-eating,” said the young man’s brother, and then violence. Modi, as if shamed by the scrutiny of cow vigilantes — scrutiny that was going global and had the potential to embarrass a prime minister not yet halfway into his first five-year term — publicly denounced cow vigilantes. “Killing in the name of a cow is unacceptable,” Modi said. “We belong to a land of non-violence.” 

Just to be sure that questions about cow vigilante violence wouldn’t continue to crop up, the BJP simply stopped tracking hate crimes after 2017. As recently as last year, the BJP informed the parliament that the data “was unreliable,” which was why they had stopped collecting it.  

While Modi has gone on the record more than once to condemn cow vigilantes, the violence itself has not stopped. In fact, it could be argued that the authorities enable the violence. In 2021, the Haryana government appointed “special cow protection task force” teams, which were staffed by several vigilantes, including Monu Manesar. 

Since Manesar was named as a suspect in the murders of Nasir and Junaid, a couple of Indian newspapers and fact checking organizations have revealed just how connected he was not just to BJP officials in Haryana but to the top brass in Delhi. 

Asaduddin Owaisi, one of India’s few Muslim members of parliament — fewer than 5% of MPs in India are Muslim, though Muslims comprise about 15% of the population — told me that Haryana’s special task force gave “arbitrary powers to vigilante groups that circumvent the police and the rule of law.” He said the BJP wants to “create an atmosphere of fear and establish Muslims as anti-Hindu and anti-national, which benefits its politics.” 

Apoorvanand, a professor at Delhi University and prolific commentator on politics and culture, says that the special task force is an exercise in “parallel policing.” He argued that Modi’s previous condemnations of vigilante violence should be taken with a large pinch of salt because the BJP has “normalized a culture of impunity in which vigilantes like Manesar thrive.” What was once a crime, he told me, “is now posted on social media and treated as if it is in service of the greater good.”     

The links between cow protection vigilantes and the Haryana authorities are so tangled that, in the course of my reporting, I discovered that the car in which the Rajasthan police said Nasir and Junaid were abducted once belonged to the Haryana government. It is a car that has appeared in at least two videos posted on social media by cow vigilantes that show them assaulting people and pointing guns at them.

As I interviewed people, I learned that Manesar and his fellow cow protectors terrorized whole neighborhoods, all the while filming their high-speed car chases, their victims with bruised and swollen faces and their guns. Owaisi said more scrutiny should be directed at social media platforms that allow such footage to be posted. In one video Manesar posted to Instagram, men can be seen beating a Muslim ragpicker with bamboo sticks. These are the men, Manesar captioned his video, “who throw stones at our soldiers and Hindutva supporters.”

Last month, Manesar was involved in another suspicious death. He posted footage of three young Muslim men with facial injuries. Off camera, a man was aggressively asking for names. One of those men, Waris Khan, died hours later in hospital. His cousin told me that he believes the violent video was shot by the same gang of cow protection vigilantes who killed Nasir and Junaid. Manesar admitted that he shot the footage to the Indian press but denied beating the men who appear in the video. He had just happened upon some men who had been in an accident. The Haryana police, too, said the men had been in an accident.    

The Indian government is notorious for the volume of its requests to take down Tweets, often by verified journalists, for resorting to internet blackouts and for seeking to ban YouTube channels. Big Tech platforms usually comply with these demands. Strangely though, the ugly, brutal videos posted by Manesar and other vigilantes are rarely taken down, even though they violate all reasonable rules of conduct.

When I put the question to Meta, owners of Facebook and Instagram, they bargained for time, claiming to be “investigating the issue” and asking for “specific links/pages that you can share with us,” though links had been shared and the videos widely reported. YouTube did not respond to my numerous questions. “How can these companies be allowed to fund violence,” Owaisi, the member of parliament, asked. “How can they be giving silver buttons to people accused of lynching and mob violence?” 

It’s a question that, more importantly, should be put to the authorities, at both state and federal levels. Why are people still being killed in the name of cow protection on your watch?

UPDATE (2/28/23): After this story was published, YouTube reached out to me to say Monu Manesar has been “indefinitely suspended” from its “YouTube Partner Program,” which means he can no longer make money from the videos he posts. YouTube has also taken down nine videos from his channel for violating “Community Guidelines” and put age restrictions on two others. 

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The Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church have worked in lockstep to promote a conservative idea of “family values.” Russia has taken upon itself the role of principal opposition to the supposed excesses of Western progressives. Its soft power strategy, particularly evident since the start of its war in Ukraine, is to persuade much of the world that it is defending “traditional values” on the frontlines of the global culture wars. 

Kristina Stoeckl, a sociology professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, has spent years embedding herself in the transnational Christian conservative movement. It’s an alliance that spans borders and religions and is dedicated to protecting conservative values, a worldview that leads it to lobby and agitate against policies that protect women, the right to abortion and LGBTQ rights, among others. 

Co-authored with Dmitry Uzlaner, Stoeckl’s new open-access book, “The Moralist International,” examines how the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church have built up international alliances and support for its version of Christian social conservatism, in part by emulating the strategies of international human rights organizations.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Can you explain what the moralist international movement is?

It’s a movement of transnational moral conservatives, often religious, that try to work against liberal institutions and international human rights movements, which they see as too heavily driven by progressive liberal goals. These moral conservative alliances are often rooted in different religious traditions, but you also now get right-wing actors that are hooking onto the movement. Like Italy’s Lega Nord, or Hungary’s Fidesz for example. 

In the book, you talk about the World Congress of Families, a United States-based coalition that promotes conservative Christian values around the world and historically has strong ties with Russia. Tell me a bit about embedding yourself in this movement. 

I’m a sociologist and I do empirical research and fieldwork, and being inside that conservative milieu for a long time — it’s tiring. It’s also challenging. What I’m trying to do is to reconstruct their meaning. I want to understand why they think what they think, why they say what they say, and not just dismiss things at face value as illogical lies or propaganda. 

Because for them, it makes sense. And as scholars, we should understand how they construct their world and their meaning. So that’s the spirit in which I approach that world. Now that we’ve published our book, I’m not sure if it will be possible to go back.

I attended World Congress of Families events in Tbilisi, Chisinau and Budapest. My sense from the research was that a lot of people come to this milieu or begin attending something like the Congress of Families because of a very specific set of grievances. Maybe, for example, someone is worried about abortion and just thinks it’s wrong or it shouldn’t happen. Interestingly, I came across other people, like environmentalists who just think the world is heading in the wrong direction. 

And what this moralist movement does is couch their grievance in a bigger story. 

So what is that bigger story? 

The international moralist worldview tells the whole story of the 20th century in a new way. It reframes ideas around the society we live in and the political divisions we face. It tells people that capitalism and communism have both been equally bad for family values because in both systems, women have to work. 

It talks about how rights pertaining to sexual orientation and gender identity are useful to the capitalist system because confusing our identities means we can more easily be controlled as consumers. One layer of this worldview after another is introduced. And then a proposal for a new order of things is proclaimed. 

So for that person who is against abortion — maybe they’re not against gay marriage at first. But then this story is told to them, that gay marriage and abortion are both part of a bigger design that’s bad for families. And it becomes one big narrative all packaged up. And that’s threatening for democracies because it prevents solutions. 

What kind of solutions does a worldview like that prevent?

Take domestic violence for example. Domestic violence is a real problem, both in Russia and in many other countries. But it can’t be discussed properly in this movement. Because if you start talking about women’s rights, you also talk about gender, and then you talk about homosexuality, and then it all goes down a slippery slope. Real solutions to real problems are blocked by ideology.

In the book, you describe Russia as a “norm entrepreneur” for international moral conservatism. Can you describe what that means?

For a while, Russia wanted to become a leading actor in that moralist international world. And it did quite well at first. So in places like the U.N., Russia was very effective in pushing certain resolutions. For instance, the resolution in the United Nations Human Rights Council that says that a better understanding of traditional values can contribute to the protection of human rights. That’s clearly an agenda to say, ‘Well, the West should stop pushing a certain definition of human rights, and other definitions are also legitimate.’ At one point, the Russian Orthodox Church started to become very attractive to conservative Christians outside of Russia. Especially for those who believe that laws against hate speech are threatening conservative Christians. Russia became a kind of hero when it passed its so-called gay propaganda laws. And so, Russia began to push for this conservative agenda abroad, by financing NGOs, and I think that for a while, transnational moral conservative alliances were thriving because Russia was leading the way.  

What’s been the response from this movement since the war?

So the Christian groups that used to engage directly with Russia — for example, the American Homeschool Legal Defense Association and [conservative activists] CitizenGO — I get the sense they’re trying to hide or obfuscate their relationship with Russia. But I don’t think they have changed their views.

What has been Russia’s goal in establishing and funding these transnational conservative alliances?

One goal is basically to disturb what they perceive as a Western-dominated liberal world order, made up of the United Nations, the international human rights regime and so on. They do that by sponsoring and funding NGOs in the West that criticize these institutions and say, ‘We don’t agree with the direction our society is taking.’ 

From the Kremlin’s side, I think the second goal — which hasn’t really worked out — has been to build more stable alliances. Perhaps, when they invaded Ukraine, they thought that sanctions wouldn’t happen and protests against the war wouldn’t happen because of the alliances they had built around traditional values. That has not really worked, but Hungary is an example of how the moralist alliance can effectively lead to the blocking of EU sanctions.

Now with the war in Ukraine, it’s all become a lot more difficult for Russia. But things might easily have gone another way. Think about Italy. The response to the invasion might have been different if, instead of the Brothers of Italy, Salvini or Berlusconi, who are much more pro-Putin, had won. Or if Marine le Pen had won in France. So for Russia, it was about weaving political alliances from the beginning. 

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Now in her third year at Kozminski University, Wesolowska has a front row seat to observe what she describes as moral corruption seeping into Polish law facilities. Seasoned academics duel with opportunist colleagues willing to parrot the right-wing government’s line in order to collect low-hanging promotions. “There are two teams of professors,” she told me when we met in central Warsaw. “One that does things in the right way, and another more dangerous team. You learn how to accept that you can’t be outspoken because there is a possibility it could affect your exam results.”

This is a silent element of Poland’s descent into a rule-of-law crisis: the impact on law students and early-career professionals who, in trying to negotiate bewildering changes and political influencing, have been subject to academic whiplash and relentless government disinformation. The effect has been chilling. Many young Poles in the law field appear to have gone to ground.

Law and Justice came to power in October 2015 with the promise of improving the efficiency of the courts and ridding the country of the remnants of communism. It began to make its presence felt by seeking to influence the composition of the Constitutional Court, a powerful institution with the authority to assess the constitutionality of Polish laws. When five of the Court’s 15 judges were due to retire around the 2015 elections, Law and Justice tried to oust three candidates who had been legally chosen by the outgoing pro-EU Civic Platform party and push through five of their own judicial appointments instead. 

The new government had not only set out to dismiss elected judges but bypassed the Constitutional Court entirely while it was discussing the legality of the Civic Platform judicial candidates. In the end, the Court admitted only two Law and Justice judges, but the chain of events — and the government’s later decision to change the quorum in the Constitutional Court — brought hundreds of people out onto the streets of Warsaw in protest. The Law and Justice party and its leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski took no notice.

With the Constitutional Court quickly falling under the influence of the government, Law and Justice turned to the Supreme Court and the National Council of the Judiciary, a body responsible for protecting the independence of judges and courts. In 2017, the government pushed through reforms that gave them control over the process of electing new judges, a key function of the Council of the Judiciary. Around the same time, steps were taken to reduce the retirement age of Supreme Court judges, a move that the Court of Justice of the European Union later said violated EU law. A Disciplinary Chamber was established in 2017, which critics argued was a scheme to intimidate judges who refused to walk the party line. Confronted by this illiberal sea change, the European Union has tried to fight back by withholding funds from the bloc’s sixth largest economy. The results have been mixed. The Disciplinary Chamber was disbanded in July 2022 and replaced with the Chamber of Professional Responsibility. Nonetheless, key legal institutions in Poland are still operating at the whim of the government despite the outcry from Brussels.  

This turmoil has trickled down into the halls of Poland’s public and private universities. A clear example is the approach to teaching. Some professors have continued to teach the law within its political, social and economic context. Others have become hesitant. A few have decided to teach their classes in a vacuum and avoid the rule-of-law crisis and its implications altogether. 

It’s not only teaching in the classroom that has become an issue. According to Dr. Aleksandra Kustra-Rogatka, an associate professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, in central Poland, the role of academia itself is also up for debate. In the pages of academic journals, a few Polish intellectuals have declared that their role is simply to present the facts and not opinions. Their peers have shot back, arguing that during a constitutional crisis the academic community is duty bound to actively participate in discussions and not hide behind a veil of neutrality. “We cannot say to students anymore that the law is objective and nothing changes, that it’s politically neutral. We must change our way of teaching and what we teach,” Kustra-Rogatka told me.

There have also been moments when political influence on universities has been spectacularly blatant. In 2021, Kozminski University broke off its relationship with Judge Igor Tuleya, 12 months after the 52-year-old was stripped of his immunity and suspended by the Disciplinary Chamber for ruling against the Law and Justice party. The call to suspend Tuleya came from the vice president of a district court in Warsaw, Przemyslaw Radzik, a government ally who is reported to have said that the judge could “demoralize” students.

To get a clearer sense of these events I spoke to Dr. Agnieszka Grzelak, a professor of European law at Kozminski University. We met at Green Café Nero, not far from Poland’s Palace of Culture and Science, on a rainy Warsaw afternoon. Direct in her assessment of the rule-of-law situation in Poland, Grzelak told me that when news emerged of Judge Tuleya’s dismissal, it sent shock waves through Kozminski’s law facility. Almost immediately 18 colleagues came together to write an open letter to the rector, Grzegorz Mazurek, calling for the university to change tack. The “autonomy of the university” was at stake, they wrote. Hours after receiving the correspondence, Judge Tuleya’s agreement with Kozminski was restored, but in many regards the reputational damage was done. “There is a collapse of the rule of law in every aspect. Starting from legislation to the way the law is adopted, to the situation in the parliament, to the situation in the courts, everything you touch there is some problem,” Grzelak said.

Watching these events unfold are Poland’s law students. If the expectation was for the next generation of lawyers to seriously refute the ruling party’s manipulation of democracy, those hopes have been put to bed by their professors. In several discussions I had while researching this story the conclusion by some faculty was that law students have generally shrugged off the rule-of-law crisis. One reason was their communication patterns, with today’s youth living more insular lives governed by the algorithms of TikTok and Instagram. Another was a lack of enthusiasm for proper legal sourcing, with students opting to reference short online texts rather than harvest information from the context-rich pages of legal journals. 

Adam Bodnar, the dean of the law facility at the private SWPS University, told me that students “treat freedom like air” and often struggle to connect the rule-of-law crisis to the future of the country. Of course, there are students, like Katarzyna Wesolowska, who are driven to be a part of the solution. 

I also spoke with Adam Buwelski, an impressive 21-year-old at the University of Warsaw, who, on top of a rigorous schedule of classes, finds time to sit on the law students’ association. He reluctantly agreed with the assertion that his generation could do more to engage with Poland’s constitutional crisis. “There is an anger in us that is often hidden because we are living with this day in, day out,” he said. “There are scandals all the time and as a group we are used to it. We don’t have heated discussions about everything going on. That’s a very different position to our parents and professors who are discussing everything all the time. We’re calm but, yes, I don’t think that’s a good thing.” 

Certain issues do arouse the attention of supposedly apathetic students. When the Constitutional Court outlawed abortion in cases of fetal abnormalities in October 2020, students took part in the nationwide protests. The issue of LGTBQ+ rights has also sparked outrage as the Law and Justice party and its close ally, the Polish Catholic Church, work relentlessly to strip away the rights of this community. The University of Warsaw has also been embroiled in scandal which ignited students’ frustrations. In January 2023, a lecture by the former deputy commissioner for human rights, Dr. Hanna Machinska, was canceled by the rector weeks after the academic was dismissed from her job. After student protests and a public outcry, the lecture eventually took place, but it was a worrying repeat of a pattern established by the Judge Tuleya case, signaling that critics of the government might not be welcome at universities either.

But the disengagement of students is also grounded in very practical challenges. For individuals wishing to enter the judiciary, the moral corruption of the Council of the Judiciary has the ability to undermine their hard work. In order to be nominated for a role in the courts, trainee judges must be proposed by the Council to the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, a close ally of the Law and Justice party. The fear among students is that when the Law and Justice party is finally voted out, they will be seen as tainted judges despite their education and personal beliefs. “[When] starting a career as a judge or a prosecutor, legal jobs connected to the public system of education run by the Ministry of Justice, the students doubt if they should start it,” Grzelak, the professor in EU law, told me. “They ask: What if I graduate from training, will I become a judge or will I become a fake judge?”

On everyones’ minds in Poland at the moment are the 2023 parliamentary elections. Should Law and Justice continue in office for another four years, the party will continue to damage to democratic values and institutions in Poland. Up against opposition parties who have so far failed to ignite any real fervor across the country, Law and Justice candidates are leading in the polls. For Buwelski and his peers at the University of Warsaw, many are getting ready to vote for The Left, a small political alliance of leftist parties. In some law students’ eyes, the salient issues affecting Poland’s younger generation, such as rising house prices and inflation, are not addressed to suit the needs of their generation. Law and Justice, Buwelski says, caters to their base, and the opposition to anyone who doesn’t like the ruling party. No one takes much time to think about the youth and their future. 

But even if the election spells the end for Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his band of spoilers, Poland won’t be out of the woods. The damage being done to the rule of law has been so great that it will take more than one term in office to rectify it. For Katarzyna Wesolowska, the student in Kozminski University who will graduate in 2025, that means the road to fixing her country won’t be easy.

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His crime? To have been one among dozens of journalists from around the country to have made a beeline for Uttar Pradesh in 2020, to the district of Hathras where a 19-year-old Dalit woman had been gang raped. Dalits are on the lowest rung of the Indian caste ladder and were once referred to as “untouchables.” The young woman died two weeks after the rape in a hospital in Delhi. As protests gathered steam, police compounded the outrage felt around the country by attempting to hastily cremate the woman’s body in the middle of the night — forcibly, according to the family; “as per the family’s wishes,” according to the police.

The rape and murder and the perceived police indifference led to expressions of anger, horror and disgust across India. While many compared the case to a gang rape and murder in Delhi in 2012 that led to several legislative reforms, others pointed out that there is a long and gruesome history in India of upper caste violence against lower castes, much of which has gone unpunished.

An established journalist of several years’ experience, Kappan told me, just days after his release, that “like any Delhi-based journalist,” he too wanted to travel to Hathras to report on a story of national interest, a story that threatened to spill over into caste unrest. But the Uttar Pradesh government, led by a hardline Hindu monk Yogi Adityanath — a star within the Bharatiya Janata Party firmament, outshone say some observers only by Prime Minister Narendra Modi — was wary of the political fallout after some right wing groups, including a former BJP legislator, expressed support for the alleged rapists.  

Kappan had traveled to Hathras with activists linked to the Popular Front of India (PFI), a politically radical Muslim group. He had written for the PFI’s Malayalam-language publication Thejas in the past. The PFI, which was banned in India last year, was accused by mainstream Indian media of pumping over $12 million into trying to foment riots in Hathras, claims that were later denied by authorities. At the time though, Kappan’s supposed PFI connections led him to being dubbed a “journarrist” on social media (a terrorist masked as a journalist).

Mohamed K.S. Danish, a Supreme Court lawyer and part of Kappan’s legal team, told me that he believes Kappan was “made a scapegoat” by the Uttar Pradesh government to tamp down growing dissent. The police charged Kappan with crimes under the most stringent sections of Indian law, including a draconian anti-terror law which enabled them to hold him for months before they even had to bring him before a judge. Kappan had become, his lawyer said, an easy target for state authorities that were sensitive to criticism and eager to assign blame.

Even before Kappan was arrested, the Uttar Pradesh authorities had taken an adversarial position against the media, barring the girl’s family from speaking to reporters and trying to prevent reporters from traveling to Hathras. It was part of a growing animus between Indian authorities, particularly in states governed by the BJP, and critical journalists. In 2021, just months after the Hathras rape, the website Article 14, which investigates and deeply reports failures of Indian justice, revealed evidence that the use of sedition charges to silence critics had markedly increased since Modi became prime minister in 2014.

Article 14 reported that 96% of sedition charges against 405 Indians in the decade leading up to 2021 had been filed after Modi became prime minister; 149 of those charged were accused of “making ‘critical’ and/or ‘derogatory’ remarks against Modi,” noted the website, while 144 people had been charged for remarks against Yogi Adityanath. Twenty-two cases of sedition were filed after the Hathras rape and murder was covered by the Indian media.

When I spoke to Kappan after his release from prison, he told me he had been beaten by the Uttar Pradesh police, that they had slapped him repeatedly and made absurd, irrelevant accusations. “They tried to force me to admit having links with Maoists and terrorists,” Kappan said. “They asked if I had ever visited Pakistan or if I used to eat beef.” (Indian Muslims are often accused of being “less” Indian than the majority Hindu population because they have no dietary taboo about beef, cows being sacred to some Hindus, and because they supposedly support Pakistan at cricket.)

He also said the police had denied him medication for his illnesses, including diabetes. Kappan caught covid twice while he was in prison and his wife told the Indian press that he was chained to his hospital bed and was not allowed to use the bathroom. Kappan told me he had to urinate into a plastic bottle for a week.

According to his lawyer, the police even tried to produce material Kappan had read about the Black Lives Matter movement as evidence of his intent to create communal unrest in Hathras. “When the prosecution read out this charge of inciting locals in Hathras through English pamphlets about a foreign protest in the Supreme Court, the whole court was laughing,” Kappan’s lawyer said. Blaming social unrest on foreign interference is a familiar trope in India, frequently extended to ridiculous lengths.

In February, 2021, a young climate activist was arrested and accused of sedition because she had circulated a “toolkit” tweeted by Greta Thunberg in support of ongoing farmers’ protests in India. The toolkit, the Delhi police said, as they arrested the activist from her home in Bangalore, was evidence of a conspiracy to “wage economic, social, cultural and regional war against India.” Apart from Thunberg, conspirators also included the pop star Rihanna.

Eventually, in September, last year, after Kappan had already been imprisoned for nearly two years, the Supreme Court gave him bail. In its order, the bench noted that “every person has the right to free expression.” Referring to Kappan, the bench said he was trying through his reporting to “show that the victim needs justice,” that ordinary people can ask questions of those in power — “Is that a crime in the eyes of the law?”

Despite the court’s order and its apparent bemusement at Kappan’s incarceration, the authorities took months to release him from prison. He had to secure bail on what his lawyers described as frivolous charges of money-laundering and routine procedures were delayed as if only to prolong Kappan’s time in prison.

Rituparna Chatterjee, the India representative of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) told me that Kappan’s case “is an example of government overreach and the violation of rights. He should never have been arrested in the first place.” She spoke too of the authorities’ “weaponizing of outdated colonial laws such as sedition to harass journalists.” 

In the most recent RSF World Press Freedom Index, India has slipped eight places to rank 150 out of the 180 countries on the list. Kappan’s arrest is an example of why India, despite Modi describing it as the “mother of democracy,” is developing an international reputation for its shrinking freedoms.

“Kappan’s arrest,” says Chatterjee, “was a chilling message from the Uttar Pradesh police to all reporters that there are matters they should not investigate and that it will cost them dear if they do.” RSF has said that the “violence against journalists, the politically partisan media and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis in ‘the world’s largest democracy.’”

It’s a position that is echoed by Kunal Majumder, the India representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). “We have been observing,” he told me, “a sharp increase in the number of journalists who have been detained and arrested.”

According to CPJ data, he said, “six out of seven journalists imprisoned in India as of December 1, 2022, are being charged with or being investigated for offenses under the UAPA.” Majumdar is referring to India’s notorious anti-terror law, most recently amended in 2019 to allow the government to designate even individuals as terrorists before proven guilty in a court of law. In 2020, special rapporteurs of the United Nations noted that the amendments were “raising concerns in relation to their compatibility with India’s obligations under international human rights.” They were particularly troubled, they wrote, by “the designation of individuals as ‘terrorists’ in the context of ongoing discrimination directed at religious and other minorities, human rights defenders and political dissidents, against whom the law has been used.”

The prominent Indian politician Shashi Tharoor described the amendment, in a tweet lauding the release of Kappan, as a “menace to democracy.”

Kappan, and the men arrested alongside him, including the driver of their taxi to Hathras, may be out on bail now but their case remains pending. “It is a moment of happiness for us,” said Kappan’s lawyers, “but we have to fight the case for acquittal.” Kappan is just glad to be out. “I now realize the true meaning of freedom,” he told me, even though the court’s bail order confines him to Delhi for six weeks before he can return to Kerala. “I am happy to be back with family and to be able to meet with friends.”

As Kappan left jail, he told reporters that the justice he’d received was “half-baked,” that he had been framed, that nothing was found on him except his laptop and mobile phone. “I had two pens and a notebook too,” Kappan added. He was a working journalist on an assignment, he told me, and he had to spend two years in jail for just doing his job.

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“It was a philosophical question but, according to textbook science, grass isn’t really green, it’s just the light reflected from it has a certain wavelength,” Vickers says. “I thought there’d be a consensus on it.”

Instead, Vickers’ question prompted fierce semantic debate. Some colleagues argued that grass has objective properties — color being one of them. Others contended that only light exists in a physical form: what a human perceives as green is merely certain molecules reflecting electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength between 520 and 570 nanometers.

The open-ended, theoretical question rendered the survey data nearly worthless. Rather than general agreement, all that emerged was lively scientific and philosophical discussion across academic inboxes. But the high response rate gave Vickers encouragement: his idea for an Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus could really work. All he needed was to ask a more straightforward line of inquiry.

It was while writing his book on the relationship between science and truth, Identifying Future-Proof Science, that Vickers became convinced that there should be a more accessible way to establish general academic agreement on disputed topics. “The traditional theory, even for non-experts, is to decide what to believe based on the science itself,” he explains. “But the more I wrote, the more I thought, ‘That’s not how the real world works.’ You’d never say to someone worried about getting vaccinated, ‘Here, read this textbook on the science of vaccines’ — it’s summarizing decades of research; you’re asking someone who might not have the background knowledge to read, judge and understand it.”

Help for the time-stressed non-academic, says Vickers, will come in the form of a large-scale poll of global experts responding to popular scientific issues via a set of four options, ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” at the extremes, and “weakly agree” to “weakly disagree” in the center. Results will be published in academic journals, with the eventual aim of a physical institute housing vast teams of researchers, data scientists and IT experts working towards the goal of greater societal consensus on subjects like climate change and pandemics.

Vickers’ hope is to also aid academia itself: there is a lack of hard data quantifying how many experts agree on the biggest topics of the day. “It’s actually difficult to find how many global scientists believe that Covid-19 is caused by a virus,” he says. “And the best attempt to quantify the scientific community’s opinion on whether climate change is driven by human activity has 2,780 respondents: a tiny fraction of the world’s scientists you could ask, and nearly all were from Western countries.”

Driving the initiative is the fight against misinformation. Expertise has long been weaponized as means of power and deception, particularly among marginalized and minority communities, says Nicole Grove, editor-in-chief at the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. In some cases, it’s created a sense of mistrust, undermining the credibility of some institutions. “It wasn’t that long ago that doctors were recommending ‘healthy’ brands of cigarettes to their patients, where seemingly scientific research was used by tobacco companies as verifiable evidence that we now know was completely manufactured.”  

Experts say that there has perhaps never been more dispute than there is today on what makes a fact, a fact. “The internet is an amazing access point for knowledge, but it’s also changed the way people are able to produce what appears to be evidence to support any point of view,” adds Grove. “One can always find someone with credentials who will take on any position at any time. My sense is misinformation is more about bombardment than a lack of information.”

Social media has also created echo chambers that fan the flames of conspiracies, even in the face of incontrovertible proof. “Research suggests that people are attracted to conspiracy theories when their psychological needs are frustrated,” says Karen Douglas, professor of social psychology at the University of Kent. “They can turn people away from mainstream politics and science in favor of more extreme political views and anti-science attitudes. And these theories seem to arise even when the scientific consensus is clear.”

Vickers acknowledges that his proposed consensus-finding institute won’t appeal to sections of the population that think the whole system is corrupt. But he believes his idea could benefit broader society, particularly on health issues. He cites a June 2022 study showing that Covid-19 vaccine uptake was significantly boosted in the Czech Republic once a skeptical public were shown that 90% of 9,650 doctors trusted in its safety. “The high consensus helped correct a misconception that only half of physicians were confident in the vaccine,” he says. “It ultimately led to higher vaccinations, meaning fewer deaths. It may sound dramatic, but the cost in a lack of consensus can be that stark.”

Beyond health crises though, there are questions over whether experts should be burdened with an altruistic role in educating the public on what they consider to be a scientific fact. “Scientists shouldn’t be loaded up with societal duties no one else has,” says James Ladyman, professor of the philosophy of science at the University of Bristol. “The rise in misinformation is a matter for regulation and government — it has nothing to do with science.”

There are also concerns that a frictionless polling model could supersede the complex, nuanced pursuit of acquiring and discussing knowledge. “Science is a highly structured social organization in which consensus is achieved semi-formally through conferences, meetings and journal publications,” adds Ladyman. “It’s not a flat structure where people vote and everyone has equal say. When a scientific institution wants to take a position on a topic, it typically sets up a subcommittee that writes a report with details of their inquiry — it doesn’t poll all its members.”

While a hard figure may not exist, there is a consensus among the scientific community that smoking cigarettes is a leading cause of cancer and that human activity is the main driver of climate change. Determining a general agreement among more debated topics, such as whether biological sex is the main determinant of gender, may pose more of a challenge. 

“A shared commitment to telling the truth about nature, and to getting that truth out there, still leaves a lot of room for disagreement among even the most expert of scientists,” says Gregory Radick, professor of history and philosophy at the University of Leeds. “And much is lost when scientific knowledge gets boiled down to an answer to a simple ‘yes or no’ question.”

It means that facts can be disputed by experts. Ladyman says that a mass-survey model risks creating more noise in a system already blasting information round-the-clock. “In principle, finding out the scientific consensus on a topic could be good. But it presupposes that the information can’t be found out already. I find it unlikely that a significant number who don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change would change their mind if they saw there was a huge scientific consensus about it — they probably wouldn’t care.”

However, Vickers believes that his Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus needs to happen, especially if it can help people make better informed health decisions. “In the 20th century, it was too easy for the tobacco industry to make it look like there were two sides to the story — a global poll would have shown there were perhaps only 2% of rogue scientists that existed,” he says. “The goal isn’t to tell the public the facts — it’s to accurately measure the opinion of the scientific community and then provide people with data that could be useful to them.”

Vickers’ epistemic agency is still in the funding stages. His team is currently debating who qualifies as a scientist, from the obvious choice of an academic affiliated to a relevant science department or institute, to the borderline cases of a former nurse now giving health lectures at universities. 

Then, there’s dividing the scientists up: a meteorologist and, say, a pediatrician may receive an equal vote on a climate change question; the consensus among each scientific discipline, however, could be shown separately. Finally, there’s the issue of ensuring a high enough response rate for strong enough data — the plan is for a personalized email to be sent within institutions, just like in the original question to Durham scientists, to get as many survey queries answered.

Consensus for an institute determining scientific consensus is, ironically, difficult. The next step is a pilot program in April, involving 18,000 scientists from 31 institutions across 12 different countries. The planned opening question should, at least, elicit strong assent: “Has science proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Covid-19 is caused by a virus?” “It’s not a particularly interesting question as most people accept that it’s been established, but we want to set a baseline for what solid scientific consensus looks like,” says Vickers. 

In an age where a rabbit hole of misinformation is only ever a few clicks away, Vickers’ hope is his idea will reach well-meaning people left confused by the online maelstrom. “Had a mass survey of global scientists existed when the pandemic began — questions on how Covid is transmitted, mask efficacy, vaccine safety — I think it would have helped the public,” he says. “There’s a mess of information out there.”

The post A philosophy professor proposes an Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus appeared first on Coda Story.

Then the new year came, bringing with it Heger’s determination to cobble together a new parliamentary majority to see out his party’s four-year term. However, after going cap in hand to all possible partners, Heger conceded defeat on January 17 and said he would begin discussions about early elections this fall.

For Robert Fico, the former prime minister and one of Slovakia’s leading populists, a return to the ballot box couldn’t wait. Fico, who resigned from office in 2018 following the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak, has said multiculturalism “is a fiction” and called for Slovakia to cease all aid to Ukraine. Now buoyed by growing support in the polls, Fico’s Smer party initiated a referendum on January 22 that would have cleared the way for early elections by amending the country’s constitution. Despite these efforts the plebiscite failed to meet the 50% turnout needed to validate the results.

Now Slovakia, a small country roughly the size of West Virginia, is holding its breath. With elections likely to be held on September 30, 2023, the race for power is expected to be rife with disinformation and old-fashioned scare tactics. The shadow of populism also looms. Fico’s Smer party is second in the polls to HLAS–SD, a social democratic party founded in 2020 by former members of Smer.

There is also a lot at stake. Slovakia is facing a cost-of-living crisis and its health care is in disrepair. The country is also on the frontline of Russian disinformation in Europe and its 5.4 million residents share a border with Ukraine. To better understand the mood in Slovakia and why the country might take another populist turn, I spoke to Juliana Sokolova, a Slovak philosopher and writer based in the eastern city of Kosice. Her key message: Slovakia’s descent is not guaranteed. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

There has been a lot of political turmoil in Slovakia recently, but what is the general mood in the country?

At the moment, the political situation and the general atmosphere influence each other. To me, it feels like an intermediary period because we’re waiting for what’s going to happen. Of course, we know that there are people ready to vote because they are swayed by populist narratives but that is not something which surrounds me daily. There are also people who resist these narratives and have other views, so I wouldn’t say it’s completely bleak. It’s truly difficult to generalize at the moment because the situation is different depending on where you work or where you live.

If you look at the polls in Slovakia, there is support for populist narratives. Why is that the case?

Populism anywhere is successful because populists test issues and use ones that will resonate with people by arousing strong emotions, so it doesn’t arise randomly. It’s calculated and it’s the same in Slovakia. Of course, the issues are country-specific, but the mechanisms are the same. When I was growing up, the main nationalist and populist issue was around Slovak-Hungarian relations, they tried to create this idea of Slovak nationality away from the Hungarian minority and their language. Today, this topic no longer resonates, so they turned to the language of suspicion in relation to the LGBT community. They use the words “ideology,” or “agenda,” or “platform,” to create the idea that there is a scheme which is a threat to people.

The LGBT topic is one that has been pushed and massaged in Slovakia. It’s also a narrative across Russian disinformation media. It’s a mix of these factors, along with algorithmic targeting through the creation of sensationalist headlines, that have made the issue what it is. If you look back, 10 to 15 years ago people in Slovakia weren’t saying LGBT was their main issue. It’s to an extent a created feeling.

Slovakia’s southern neighbor, Hungary, has become isolated on the world stage due to its position on Ukraine. Its Prime Minister Viktor Orban is also looking for friends. Could early Slovak elections help in this regard?

I do think Orban is waiting to see what is going to happen with Putin’s imperialist project and how it will impact the future of his own [illiberal] project. Fico dreams of being an Orban, that was always his ambition, but he wasn’t able to entrench himself in the same way Orban did in Hungary. Slovaks were also able to check Fico more than Hungarians were able to check Orban. But, yes, Fico is the same cut of populist with the same ambition. 

That said, Fico’s return to frontline politics is not a done thing. What is more likely in early elections is that the party that separated from Fico, HLAS, will make it. Now, that party is full of former Smer people who have tried to situate themselves on a more traditional spectrum, but we must remain suspicious of them. They have the ability to bend their views depending on possible power-sharing agreements. 

Slovakia is subject to a lot of Russian disinformation. Does this highly charged language and information pollution affect your work?

As a writer, you are very sensitive to the context in which you write, and even though it’s not always a conscious dialogue, it can affect your work. When the language of politics is stale and removed from life, you can feel the need to balance it out by using words that are fresh and strong. It’s also very useful to think about how we can describe the life we are living with different words. We often use clichéd or standardized sentences that block our thinking. A good example of this is the word “bubble,” as in social bubble. It has such a fixed meaning. So, we need other sentence structures and words that open new ways of speaking, and then maybe thinking. 

It’s also socially important to try and see how very manipulative and highly charged language can be neutralized or converted into something else. When it comes to Russian disinformation in Slovakia we have a big problem with the quality of education. I think our education system is not strong on fostering critical analysis of the media. This is very important. 

Given everything happening in Slovakia, a war next door, a contentious election coming up, disinformation swirling around, how do you see the country going forward?

It’s difficult because I’m not feeling gloomy, I cannot explain why. Of course, when you name all these things, our situation might not look great. But I do think that Slovak society is varied enough, that there are deeply entrenched progressive and educated groups and individuals operating throughout the country that can sustain us. The main thing for me is seeing what I can do to ensure that parties that employ controversial rhetoric have the least influence in the future government, that is a key priority. But I don’t have a sense that this country is heading to a dark place. 

The post A hard line Slovak nationalist plots his return to power appeared first on Coda Story.

The undiplomatic language from an experienced diplomat was striking because he was referring to a BBC documentary about events from decades ago in one of India’s 28 states, albeit events that leave a deep, abiding and likely indelible stain on the reputation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Part One of the documentary — “India: The Modi Question” — was broadcast in the U.K. on January 17, and Part Two was broadcast a week later. Neither part has been screened in India.

Invoking “emergency” powers, India has blocked even the sharing of links to clips from the documentary on social media. On January 21, before Part 2 had been screened in the U.K., Kanchan Gupta, a former journalist and the senior advisor to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, described the documentary in a tweet as “hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage,” as he announced the decision to block tweets and links “under India’s sovereign laws and rules.”

What so incensed the Indian establishment was the documentary’s revelations that a British government inquiry into communal riots in Gujarat in 2002 held Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, “directly responsible” for enabling three days of horrifying violence. The riots resulted in the deaths of a thousand people — nearly 800 of them Muslim, according to official figures. 

Modi was alleged to have told the police to stand down because Hindus needed to respond to the burning of a train by a Muslim mob (though the specifics of how the train caught fire continue to be disputed) that resulted in the deaths of 59 Hindu pilgrims and activists, including many women and children. They were returning from a religious ceremony in Ayodhya, the presumed birthplace of the Hindu god Ram and site of a disputed mosque that had been torn down by Hindu nationalists a decade earlier. The veteran and respected Indian journalist and commentator Saeed Naqvi wrote in his 2016 book, “Being the Other: The Muslim in India,” that for “Indian Muslims, their place in Indian society changed radically after the Babri Masjid demolition.”

It was then, he argues, that the “whole charade” of Indian secularism was exposed and that prejudice against Muslims became easier to express, a process that some might argue reached its apogee when Modi was elected prime minister in 2014.

Modi has been prime minister of India for almost nine years. He is very likely to be elected for a third consecutive five-year term in 2024. He might have been forgiven for thinking the Gujarat riots were behind him.

In the aftermath of the riots, Modi was an international pariah. He was denied a visa to the United States in 2005 on the grounds that he was guilty of “severe violations of religious freedom.” Only when Modi became prime minister in 2014 was he able to return to the U.S. because, as a head of state, he was immune from prosecution. Modi’s immunity was cited when U.S. President Joe Biden made the controversial decision last November to grant immunity from prosecution to Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

As the prime minister of India, Modi has received rapturous welcomes in stadiums and convention centers in both the U.S. and the U.K., where a member of the House of Lords admiringly referred to him, in the wake of the controversy over the BBC documentary, as “one of the most powerful persons on the planet.” It’s the kind of image Modi likes to project. He is, he frequently says, the leader of a new, more assertive India, an India that is on the cusp of superpowerdom and unignorable wealth.

Protecting this image of himself and India might explain why the government reacted so sharply to a documentary about events that occurred long before Modi became prime minister. It is an indication that by describing the documentary as anti-India (though it is about riots in Gujarat), the entire apparatus of the government appears to be dedicated to spreading the message that Modi is India and India is Modi.

Hartosh Singh Bal, the political editor of the Caravan magazine, told me the BBC documentary was “journalistically sound.” (The Caravan and Coda have embarked on a publishing partnership over the next nine months.) Bal appears as a commentator in long stretches of the documentary and said that the response of India’s Ministry of External Affairs was “particularly stupid.” He added that the irony of Bagchi’s criticism of the BBC’s supposedly “colonial mindset” is that it reveals “how in thrall the government remains to Western media” and how “hypersensitive it is to criticism from the English-language international press.” 

If these criticisms had appeared in the Caravan, Bal argues, the blowback would have been less anguished, less wounded. As if to underline his point, a significantly more polemical and damning Indian documentary pointedly called “Final Solution” is available for Indians to watch on YouTube. It was made in 2004 and was initially banned. It has never been screened on Indian television, but, unlike the BBC film, it’s accessible without a VPN.  

Writing in the Indian Express, Vivek Katju, a former diplomat, deplored the government’s “paroxysms of pique” but largely endorsed a widespread Indian view that the documentary was mean-spirited and gratuitous, that it had “not taken into account that the Indian judicial process has fully exonerated Modi.” 

In fact, the BBC documentary does place on record, several times, that India’s Supreme Court has found that Modi, as chief minister of Gujarat, does not bear responsibility for the riots and, as recently as last June, reiterated that the failures of individual officials does not rise to criminal conspiracy. But a lack of clinching evidence does not mean Modi bears no moral responsibility for what happened.

And what is an observer of Indian politics meant to conclude when Modi’s closest ally, Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah, tells a crowd in November, in their shared home state of Gujarat, that perpetrators of violence “were taught a lesson in 2002”? During campaigning for local elections in Gujarat, held in early December, Shah told a rally in Gujarati that under the rule of the opposing political party, certain people were used to getting away with violence but that Modi established permanent peace in the state. 

After the riots, judges in Gujarat mostly closed cases and acquitted those accused of killing Muslims. It was only after India’s Supreme Court intervened in 2004, describing the Gujarat government led by Modi as “modern-day Neros” who looked the other way while Gujarat burned, that the police were ordered to investigate cases.

Modi has never expressed remorse for the riots that happened under his watch. In a revealing scene in the BBC documentary, he tells a BBC correspondent that the only mistake he made was in failing to handle the media. 

India currently holds the presidency of the G20. Modi hopes to use it to showcase India’s growing importance on the world stage. The G20 presidency, he told the Indian Parliament at the start of its winter session in December, was an opportunity for the world to know India as “the mother of democracy, with its diversity and courage.”

Instead, the world is garnering a different impression of India, one in which journalists and free expression are increasingly imperiled. Reporters Without Borders now ranks India 150 out of 180 countries in its 2022 World Press Freedom Index, down eight places from the previous year. Several people who refused to be interviewed by the BBC for its documentary, despite contributing significant reporting and research, told me anonymously that they feared the response of a vindictive government. 

And some who did participate told me they no longer wanted to speak about the documentary because they were being threatened with violence on social media. As Rana Ayyub, a journalist who has felt, and continues to feel, the wrath of the Modi government and its supporters for her outspoken views, tweeted: “This is not a good look for India.” For a government so concerned with its international image, it has succeeded only in bringing more attention to a BBC documentary that uncovers little that is new, little that Indian journalists have not already reported.

The post Modi does not want India to watch this documentary appeared first on Coda Story.

DJ Switch flipped to her Instagram story to livestream the chaos — gore, live ammunition going off and victims lying in pools of blood — at a protest site in Lekki, a wealthy suburb of Lagos, Nigeria. At least 12 people were killed in that shooting according to Amnesty International, and DJ Switch now lives in Canada, having had to flee Nigeria for fear of reprisals from the government. 

That October, thousands of young Nigerians had been protesting over 13 days across the country against police brutality. The protests, aimed at a rogue police unit called the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, began after a video surfaced online of a police officer killing a young man in Delta, an oil-rich area of Nigeria. But what started as a protest against police brutality morphed into demands for better governance, which continued even after the government shut down the police unit.

Then came the atrocity at Lekki.

Nkemchor Guru, 20 years old at the time, watched the event unfold live in her Lagos residence. Now in her final year as a student at a Lagos university, she recalls the sound of gunshots. “I saw people writhing on the floor. The whole situation was just horrible,” Guru said. “It caused a very big pain and anger in me and I know that was the story for a lot of young Nigerians.”

The government has denied responsibility for the shooting and clamped down on activists calling for justice. But the mowing down of 12 protesters has upended Nigerian politics and the comfortable, business-as-usual environment for the two dominant parties, the All Progressives Party (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). A third force has emerged from the corners of social media, making the upcoming February 25 presidential election a three-horse race for the first time in modern Nigerian history.

Exhausted by the unprecedented level of insecurity, record inflation and unemployment rates and currency devaluation, among many other issues, young people in Nigeria are using social media to disrupt the system and support Peter Obi, a former governor and Nigeria’s insurgent Labour Party presidential candidate.

Unlike the two dominant parties, who have shared power between themselves since 1999, Obi and his Labour Party do not enjoy a political grassroots infrastructure and are instead being propelled forward in the race by angry social media users.  In 2021, the Nigerian youth now making up Obi’s base revolted when President Muhammadu Buhari banned Twitter for seven months after the company deleted the president’s genocidal post, catalyzing widespread anger among those who have relied on the platform to criticize the government’s policies and the state of the nation.

Buhari is term-limited out of participating in this year’s election. And several polls have called the election for Obi. “We desperately need a leader who is committed to changing things,” Guru said. 

Obi had been a member of the Peoples Democratic Party, serving two terms as a state governor in the country’s eastern region, and was once that party’s vice presidential candidate. He was an unlikely figure to challenge the politicians backed by the two dominant parties — Bola Tinubu, a two-term governor of Lagos and kingmaker in Nigerian politics, and Atiku Abubakar, a perennial presidential candidate.

Before moving to the Labour Party, a fringe party with no political reach, Obi had run in the Peoples Democratic Party primary. As the primary approached, it became clear that Obi would lose the race and lose the support of the party’s upper echelons, so he left the party and dropped out of the running. Without the political machinery available to the candidates of the big parties, a bid for the presidency of Africa’s most populated country and largest economy was viewed as quixotic at best.

But thousands of youth who had participated in the social justice protests were looking for a leader who would back their calls for a change in the government and mete out punishment for the October 20 killings.

Nigeria is currently reeling from record 22% inflation, an unemployment rate of 33% and insecurity that includes terrorism, deadly banditry, mass abductions and all manners of violence. This situation has made many Nigerians feel the country is at an existential tipping point and led to the death of thousands of people across the country since Buhari began his first presidential term in 2015.

At 61, Obi is the youngest of the major candidates. The youth movement propelling his candidacy calls itself “the Obidients.” It is a gathering threat to Nigeria’s political establishment — young voters make up the largest demographic voting bloc in this year’s elections at nearly 40% of the 93.4 million eligible voters. While especially pronounced in Nigeria, how younger voters respond to social media messaging is poised to play a pivotal role in other important elections around the world, in countries like Pakistan, Argentina, Bangladesh and Turkey.

“It is clear to everybody who will want to be very honest in their evaluation of the current Nigerian situation that Nigeria is headed in the wrong direction,” said Joseph Onuorah, a national administration member of Take Back Naija, one of the several youth coalitions working for the Obidient movement.

“We are mounting up debt at a rate that is simply unsustainable, the government does not seem to have a formula for what educational system they want to run, medical care is simply non-existent, insecurity pervades the entire country,” he added.

That the street-level protest movement would combine with social media to evolve into a major factor in presidential politics was all but inevitable, said Ifeomah Areh, a social media expert and communications consultant. This is despite the perception that Nigerian youth are apathetic in elections. 

“This model [of online mobilization] is new in some ways but also not that new. People are always looking for where they can come and rally together,” she said. “All over the world, young people are beginning to form communities that are standing against whatever inequality they perceive.”

“In 2015, young people did not endorse any candidate. But in this election, you will find young people are getting more partisan,” said Amara Nwankpa, director of the Public Policy Initiative at the Yar’ Adua Foundation, a think tank engaging citizens and policymakers on democracy in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital.

In the din of Nigeria’s rancorous retail politics, disinformation has also been prominent. With social media as a major battleground for debates, online disinformation has been spreading with little in the way of restraint. For example, Obi, who is a Christian, has been accused of ransacking Muslim communities when he was governor and has been portrayed as sympathetic to the Indigenous People of Biafra, a secessionist organization in the country’s east.

Onuorah, the administrator of one Obidient organization, told me the movement has an army of internet-savvy youth whose work is to debunk the accusations. “Every disinformation you throw at the movement, there are people that are able to go into data and history and bring to nothing that particular disinformation,” he said.

“People assume that [the Obidient movement] is totally organic but it is not, it is an effective use of young people. If you look behind it, there is always a concerted effort,” Areh, the social media expert, said of the movement’s use of social media.

Nevertheless, it remains to be seen if the Obidients can displace the two major parties and if social media advocacy will spur enough turnout among the youth demographic to be decisive.

Offline, however, hundreds of thousands are flocking to Peter Obi’s campaigns across Nigeria, catching the country by surprise. It is due to the work of young people like Guru, the university student, who work tirelessly online to sell their candidate and offline to bring more young people into the fold.

“Up till now, nobody has been held accountable, that is just the crazy part,” said Guru, who has now amassed tens of thousands of online followers in her constant campaigning for the Labour Party. “I hope Nigerians are able to choose right and look past tribalism, religion and everything that has held us back for years. I was 15 years of age when Buhari came to power and I felt like the past eight years of my life have been a waste.”

CORRECTION [01/19/2023]: This article previously said that Obi had lost the Peoples Democratic Party primary to Atiku Abubakar. Obi dropped out of the primary before it took place.

The post The rise of the Obidients appeared first on Coda Story.

But just like at the start of the invasion, physical resistance to mobilization soon began to fade. Russian resistance to the war today is mostly an online operation, and Telegram has become its central platform. With Facebook and Instagram banned under an “extremism” law, and Russian social media giant VK under almost direct control of the Kremlin, Telegram has offered a relatively safe harbor where one can find Russians expressing grief, anger and frustration about the war. But this comes right alongside political narratives and disinformation from across the spectrum and plenty of tall tales from the twisted world of conspiracy theories. It is from these foundations that an organization called the Council of Mothers and Wives has sprung into existence.

The Council launched its Telegram channel on September 29, just days after Putin instituted the partial draft, and now has more than 23,000 followers. Behind it is Olga Tsukanova, a 46-year-old mother who had a brief moment in the limelight when a video she posted on VK went viral. In the video, Tsukanova spoke of how her son was pressured on two separate occasions to sign a contract to be “voluntarily” sent to the front. “I address all Russian mothers,” she said into the camera. “Stop winding snot on your fist and crying into your pillow. Let’s band together.” After her video touched the hearts of mothers across the country, she decided to create the Council.

When I first sat down to read through the channel, I found testimony about conditions on the front and stories of families’ difficult experiences after their loved ones were drafted. In its second post, the Council demanded practical information about the deployment: How much training would draftees receive? What winter clothing would they be issued? How would food be organized? All were reasonable demands, given the news that Russian troops were hugely under-equipped for war. Pictures of supporters across the country, mailing their demands to the authorities, right up to the office of President Putin, followed.

But then another side of the channel began to emerge. Again and again, when I clicked through the links shared, I found myself on the page of another organization, the National Union of the Revival of Russia (OSVR). Established in 2019 to restore “the destroyed state of the USSR,” the OSVR looks longingly at the bygone days of the Soviet Union. It also fosters conspiracy theories on the coronavirus and 5G. According to the OSVR’s manifesto on partial mobilization, which was shared by the Council on Telegram, the war in Ukraine was “started by Chabad adherents” to build a “new Khazaria” on the territory of Russia and Ukraine — an antisemitic conspiracy theory that is grounded in the geography of the medieval Khazar empire and has prospered since the invasion. The OSVR is led by Svetlana Lada-Rus, a conspiracy theorist who believes that a third force is committing atrocities in Ukraine and has claimed that dangerous reptiles from the planet Nibiru would fly to earth and unleash chaos.

The OSVR’s influence on the Council is not an accident. Tsukanova spoke at an OSVR meeting in October and was a member of the now-defunct Volya party that Lada-Rus once led. Tsukanova told a reporter from Novaya Gazeta that the OSVR helped her to create the Council: “A lot of effort is needed for this, without the support of like-minded people, it is difficult to do this. The movement itself supported me.” Both women hail from Samara, a small city near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan.

“Internationally there has been a slight misinterpretation, or at least a superficial understanding, of this [Council] movement that is not to be confused with the more long-standing Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia,” Jaroslava Barbieri, a doctoral researcher on Russia at Birmingham University, told me. “If you look at Olga Tsukanova’s social media prior to the announced [partial] mobilization there is not so much talk about the so-called military operation, actually you will find content about conspiracy theories, a rogue government,” she said. “That is a bit more emblematic of a broader political stance of the members of this Council of Mothers and Wives.” 

In addition to promoting OSVR materials, the channel also features a not-so-healthy dose of anti-vax propaganda. Coda Story’s partners at Democracy Reporting International ran an analysis of the channel and found that more anti-vaccination content was reposted in the first week and a half of its existence than content that could be described as clearly anti-war.

This peculiar cocktail of quackery, conspiracy and seemingly genuine grief about the war maintained a steady beat until mid-November, when the Council staged a public demonstration. On November 14 and 15, 2022, members of the group picketed the Western Military District headquarters in St. Petersburg where they demanded the return of mobilized troops from the Belgorod region near the border with Ukraine. Eager to get media attention, the group stressed on their Telegram channel that “no anti-war statements” were made, only a wish to open “dialogue with officials” about “specific shortcomings.” After the event, the Council got some national media coverage, which they hailed as a success. 

Several days later, Putin announced plans to meet with a select group of soldiers’ mothers on the outskirts of Moscow. Handpicked for their association with pro-war NGOs, or for their outright support of the so-called special military operation, these were the women the Kremlin wanted to use to calm fears around mobilization. “This is a sensitive topic for [Putin],” said Maxim Alyukov, a research fellow at the King’s College Russia Institute. “The government perceives this issue of mothers and wives as a more dangerous issue than some kinds of political criticism, because it is something which can resonate with the public, and that’s why [the Kremlin] ran their own council of mothers and wives,” he told me.

For Tsukanova and her followers, the roundtable was a snub. They duly took to social media to air their grievances. “[Putin] wants to declare real mothers and wives extremists and agents. CIA?”, one Telegram post read. International media also took note. The BBC ran clips of Tsukanova saying that the Russian authorities were “absolutely” afraid of women. Democracy Reporting International’s modeling for Coda Story shows that, in the midst of these events, the Council’s Telegram channel saw a significant increase in followers. 

Soon, the Council’s VK page was blocked on orders from the Prosecutor General’s office and a car carrying Tsukanova was stopped in Samara under the pretext of a drug search while the passengers were questioned. But while thousands have been arrested for their anti-war activism, and others subjected to exile, the Council has been able to continue its work weaving concerns about mobilization with the world of conspiracies. Pro-Kremlin media have been quick to point out links to the OSVR, and Russia’s pro-government, anti-cult organizations have also taken pains to call out the Council and accuse them of being provocateurs. The Center for Religious Studies, led by Alexander Dvorkin, also accused the OSVR of being financed by Poland and Ukraine, a common tactic used to undermine anti-war individuals and groups in Russia.

For Jakub Kalensky, a senior analyst at the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, criticism from these corners is not surprising. “This might be very beneficial for you [as the Kremlin], if you have an anti-mobilization organization that is headed by questionable characters,” said Kalensky. “You can use their background to discredit the anti-mobilization position as a whole, this is a hypothesis we could work with,” he told me. 

In this landscape, Russia’s anti-war activism has become ever more fragmented. Years of authoritarian rule have hollowed out the country’s civil society and stripped people of the ability to express dissent without serious repercussions. More than 2,300 people have been arrested in anti-war street protests since the partial mobilization was announced. In March 2022, legislation was introduced imposing prison sentences of up to 15 years for spreading “fake news” about the so-called special military operation. The war has only made the stakes higher, no matter which side you’re on. 

Motivations for subscribing to Telegram channels undoubtedly vary — from a desire to stop mobilization to an outright anti-war, anti-Putin position. Groups that gain traction are quickly branded as extremist by the authorities. Those that aren’t often attract suspicion as having some nefarious link to the FSB, Russia’s security service. “There has been a history of infiltration of different opposition movements by the FSB either directly by speaking to members of those movements or most probably trying to send different messages to make them less appealing to different audiences,” Kasia Kaczmarska, a lecturer in politics and international relations at Edinburgh University, said. “This can sometimes work via multiple channels which the FSB is capable of organizing.” 

“It’s important to highlight these more complex networks and the processes of how certain institutions came about, to not conflate them with genuine anti-war movements,” Barbieri, the Birmingham University doctoral researcher, added. “We also need to start thinking about how these disinformation narratives could also work as a coping mechanism for people so as not to face the reality of how the war in Ukraine began.”

Meanwhile the Council of Mothers and Wives continues to grow. As the full-scale invasion approaches its one-year anniversary, the channel blasts out condemnations of the mobilization alongside the wholesale promotion of conspiracy theories. It’s clear that the channel offers solace for some people, a place to vent their frustrations with a war they didn’t want in their lives. But for its leaders, it may be better understood as a vehicle for bringing an organization on the fringes of society to a new, and much more influential, audience.

This story was produced in partnership with Democracy Reporting International

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In the months leading up to the country’s presidential election in October — in which, in a close runoff, Lula da Silva from the leftist Worker’s Party defeated the right-wing incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro — social networks were flooded with disinformation, calls in Portuguese to “Stop the Steal” and Bolsonaro’s insistence that the elections would be rigged. 

On January 8, a week after Lula began his third term as Brazil’s president, followers of Bolsonaro took the country’s capital by storm. Frustrated right-wing radicals armed with weapons, flags, mobile phones and conspiracy theories occupied and destroyed the three pillars of the federal government in Brasília: the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace. They not only left a trail of destruction but also stole documents and hard drives, and destroyed artworks and infrastructure. 

“There was no surprise at all, they [right-wing radicals] followed the extreme-right playbook, step by step. They are just pawns in a bigger game,” said researcher Michele Prado, an independent analyst who studies digital movements and the Brazilian far-right. According to Prado, people who stormed the capital were “domestic terrorists” moved by conspiracy theories that reject liberal democracy and its institutions. The researcher added that the group views violence as a legitimate response to what it wrongly perceives as a fraudulent election. Prado also called attention to how people were proud to take part in the invasion, boasting of their presence on social media and inviting others to join. “It raises their in-group status,” she said. “The more they perform on social media, the higher their ‘score’ before their peers, the more radicalized they become.”

Bolsonaro has always welcomed and incentivized radicalization. His so-called “Office of Hate” — a pro-Bolsonaro online apparatus known for attacking government opponents and journalists — and his supporters have a long record of spreading hate speech, fake news and disinformation online. But since he lost his re-election bid in a highly-anticipated runoff vote, tensions and accusations have taken on a tone of all-out denialism. This narrative has dominated B-38, a pro-Bolsonaro Telegram channel with military roots and more than 60,000 members. On the night Bolsonaro lost the runoff, before the results were even announced, a member of B-38 claimed that the Brazil Supreme Court’s vote-counting “algorithm” — no such thing exists — was stealing votes from Bolsonaro and giving them to Lula. An avalanche of baseless rumors about election fraud followed.

Refusing to accept defeat, Bolsonaro supporters blocked roads and camped out in front of the quarters of the Brazilian Armed Forces, calling for a military intervention. All of these efforts were orchestrated online. By the end of November, paid ads on Facebook and Instagram called for a military coup, spreading misinformation and disinformation about the elections. Despite this going against Meta’s content policies, Agência Pública, a Brazilian investigative journalism outlet, found that the ads were viewed more than 400,000 times. In December, lawmakers aligned with Bolsonaro began taking to the floor of Brazil’s Congress to call for a military coup and generate online engagement. These calls were broadcast on TV Senado, Brazil’s version of C-SPAN, and were viewed by more than two million people. 

Bolsonaro’s international allies were also quick to respond to his defeat. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former strategist, had warned of a “stolen election” in the lead-up to polling day and promoted the hashtag #BrazilianSpring across his social media channels. On the day of the invasion of Brasília, Bannon applauded the insurrectionists, calling them “freedom fighters,” even as Bolsonaro himself was keeping a low profile. Bannon’s strategy worked. Some rioters were photographed holding up a banner demanding (in both English and Portuguese) the “source code” of the elections, a reference to the technology behind voting machines that right-wing figures like Bannon and Trump have accused of swinging the election.

Right-wing radicals and their puppeteers baptized the invasion as “Festa da Selma,” or, in English, “Selma’s Party.” The #FestadaSelma hashtag saw plenty of action on Twitter, where users tracked its popularity in southern Brazil and Miami, Florida. According to the Washington Post, Elon Musk recently fired nearly all of the company’s staff in Brazil, except for a few salespeople, leaving the country of 217 million people with virtually no staff dedicated to  moderating content that incites violence in Brazil.  

The term “Festa da Selma” began popping up on social media on January 5. It is a word play on “Festa da Selva,” which is a military war cry: organizers substituted the “v” for an “m,” perhaps in hopes of avoiding detection by Brazilian authorities or even by social media platforms. “A very common practice of [right-wing radicals] is to talk things over through codes, under the radar. They use codenames and words with modified spelling,” said Leonardo Nascimento, a professor at the Federal University of Bahia and a researcher at the Internet Lab, which monitors more than 500 extreme-right Telegram groups. Nascimento explained that on mainstream platforms, far-right individuals are more careful about the content they post and promote because they fear being banned. But the same caution does not apply to  “low-moderation” platforms. The researcher said that Telegram’s architecture, built on groups and the diffusion of messages, makes it a relative safe haven for extremism.

Telegram took on a key role in Brazilian elections in 2021, when Bolsonaro’s more prominent family members created profiles and began to direct traffic from their other social networks to Telegram. “But the platform is just a vessel. The real center of disinformation isn’t Telegram itself, it’s YouTube and YouTube videos that circulate on Telegram,” said Nascimento. And then the safe haven was forced to dissolve, at least in part. In 2022, in anticipation of the highly contested elections ahead, Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered the company to shut down select Telegram groups and remove election-related disinformation they had distributed. The aforementioned B-38 group was temporarily suspended shortly thereafter, presumably due to this decision.

The move made Bolsonaro and his supporters turn to other platforms in the far-right online ecosystem such as Gettr, Parler and CloudHub, but also to more ephemeral and privacy-intensive applications like Zello and Signal. Still, according to Nascimento, four days before “Selma’s Party,” Telegram messages were circulating among extreme-right groups advising followers on what to bring to demonstrations, how to behave on arrival and how to withstand tear gas. They also posted information about caravans and buses heading for Brasília. 

“They [rioters] wanted to make it look spontaneous so people would believe [Selma’s Party] was a movement that worked on a certain degree of legitimacy, of popular demand,” said Viktor Chagas, a professor at Fluminense Federal University in Rio de Janeiro state who researches online far-right movements. Chagas contends that Brazil’s extreme-right is now in deep dispute over the identity of Bolsonarism. “The Bolsonaro supporters are losing cohesion. We have the ultraliberals, the monarchists, the gun owners, the neo-Pentecostals and other subgroups going from a process of high centralization in the figure of Bolsonaro to a high level of fragmentation with his defeat,” explained Chagas. “We now have a network that is much more dispersed and much more difficult to monitor.”

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The fallout from the war in Ukraine

This year, we have been tracking how propaganda around this war has been weaponized in Europe and around the world, particularly in Africa. In our weekly newsletter Disinfo Matters, we’ve stayed on the story of Russian wartime disinformation, such as the Kremlin’s use of social media to spread its narratives. We have also highlighted how Ukrainians have turned to photography and music, among other things, to mourn the Russian invasion, to express defiance and to point toward a brighter future. A major development has been the extensive, even unprecedented, use of technology like killer robots and drones in a war otherwise characterized by grinding, wearying ground battles in which heavily outnumbered Ukrainian forces have managed to force Russia to retreat from some occupied territories. While the story of the Russian invasion has been one of boots on the ground, including Russia calling up its reserves, an extraordinary and dystopic subplot is how this war, as one of our writers noted, is “serving as a testing ground for cutting edge, but unproven, technology.” Sign up here for the newsletter we are launching in 2023 that will be entirely dedicated to covering the global fallout from the war in Ukraine.  

Rewriting history

2022 has been marked by governments and regimes around the world seeking to influence, inflect and even entirely rewrite their national histories. Some of this has taken the form of quite literally rewriting school textbooks to reflect political trends and ideologies. One of our Big Ideas dove deep into revisionist agendas in Poland, Spain, the Channel Islands, Northern Ireland and Lithuania. In each of these places, uncomfortable questions are being asked about national identity. 

How, for instance, should Poland reflect on its wartime history? A right-wing government is using the country’s National Institute of Remembrance to spin a nationalist narrative about Polish heroism in the face of Nazi atrocities. It embraces and promotes a vision of Polish resistance, of ethnic Poles helping the country’s Jewish community, while refusing to countenance a serious conversation on Polish collaboration in Nazi crimes. Collaboration is also a taboo topic of conversation in Alderney, one of the Channel Islands occupied by the Nazis where they built concentration camps. Nazi crimes on British soil have been buried far into the recesses of the national memory but, some historians argue, it’s time to revive those memories. 

A simmering, resentful silence continues to hold in parts of Northern Ireland over the Troubles, decades after the Good Friday Agreement. Is it possible to simply draw a line under the violence without also finding a way for people to be told the truth, to grieve together and to move forward without burying the past? This is a question that echoes in Spain’s Valley of the Fallen, where a national pact of forgetting has failed to erase the cataclysmic violence of the Spanish Civil War. People still want answers, even as others claim answers are no longer possible or too politicized. Meanwhile, the politicization of medieval symbols has created rifts between Lithuanians and Belarusians, as each nation clings to versions of its distant history as guides to present-day national identities.  

Cross-border repression 

Governments reaching across borders to harass and persecute their own citizens, whether digitally or physically, is an increasingly prevalent phenomenon that scholars label transnational repression. Some of the worst offenders include China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran. We have written about the few Uyghur journalists and translators who are able to tell their stories about the harassment they have suffered in Xinjiang. Surveillance tactics and censorship have made it difficult for members of the Uyghur diaspora to speak out against the atrocities of the Chinese authorities both within and outside China’s borders. Just months ago, the FBI indicted men it said had been helping Chinese authorities to execute a campaign to force political dissidents living in the United States to return to China. So alarmed are some members of Congress that they have introduced a new bill to jail those convicted of helping authoritarian regimes to attack dissidents based in the U.S. for up to 10 years. While this would be a significant deterrent and a recognition of the threat certain regimes pose to their own citizens abroad, questions remain about enforcement and sincerity when the United States’ close political relationships with countries such as Saudi Arabia come under pressure. This is a theme that Coda will devote much of its energy to reporting on as 2023 unfolds. 

Climate denial and pseudohealth

The ongoing Russian aggression in Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis are contributing hugely to climate anxieties, as European countries desperate for alternative energy relationships ignore their commitments to combating climate change by signing deals to exploit natural gas resources in Africa. Shifts to sustainable forms of transportation in the U.K. have stirred up virulent online debates over environmental policies. Shortages of medicines at the center of TikTok trends, such as diabetes pills touted as miracle weight loss aids, are affecting patients who are struggling to access their regular medication. Meanwhile in India, the government’s ideological priorities mean that it is pushing Ayurvedic medicines that have been insufficiently tested as a “natural” homegrown alternative to Western science. In the United States, radical anti-trans actions have been a focus of Coda’s coverage, including bomb threats to children’s hospitals. Legislation passed in states like Florida have underscored attempts to push harmful rhetoric on transgender issues, rather than paying attention to experts or, indeed, trans people. 

The age of nostalgia

Our latest Big Idea series takes on our “infatuation with a mythologized history.” The series ranges widely. In Cambodia, the Vietnamese, rather than the Khmer Rouge who ruled Cambodia at the time, are blamed for the genocide of nearly two million people. In California, grieving the losses wrought by climate change revives the term “solastalgia” — the desolation felt by those who see their homes ripped away before their eyes. In Hungary, a right-wing government rejects the Europeanization of Hungary in favor of tracing its roots to a glorious, imperial Turkic past. And in Kuwait, the globalization of the 1990s was a way of life, rather than a trendy academic term, until the Iraqis invaded and forced Kuwaitis and expats alike to wrestle with questions of identity and home. Nostalgia for an imagined past, a somehow superior past, has contributed significantly to what we might also describe as an age of anger, a period in which countries around the world have become increasingly fractious and divided. Nostalgia has distorted the way in which we look at ourselves — our history and our present. It is a theme that threads through and connects many of the issues we cover at Coda and will continue to cover over the next year.

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In fact, this year’s renewal of Russia’s war in Ukraine emerged from pre-existing twisted narratives. Espousing an alternative reality, Russian President Vladimir Putin has grounded his “special military operation” in false claims that Kyiv was orchestrating a genocide against Russian speakers in the country. He has unfurled a web of lies about the Ukrainian government having Nazi sympathies. Putin’s venomous dislike of the truth has now resulted in thousands of deaths in Ukraine and millions of people displaced.

Since late February, the disinformation frontlines in this war have evolved. At first the disinformation from Moscow was pushed out by state-backed media outlets and a worldwide web of influencers and allies. But as sanctions limited the reach of Russian state broadcasters, and social media platforms attempted to curtail information pollution about the war, the Kremlin’s disinformation machine worked to influence the Russian diaspora and shore up support from vulnerable domestic media globally. 

As the conflict dragged on, some organizations have profited from the ad revenue accrued from Russian lies. An investigation by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that Yandex, the Russian version of Google and a Nasdaq-listed organization, helped “sites pushing false Russian claims make thousands of dollars a day through on-site adverts.” 

As the war shows little sign of slowing down, and with 2023 on the horizon, here are some of the key disinformation moments from the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Russia thought it could take Ukraine within a week. As tanks rolled across the border from Belarus and residents in Mariupol witnessed the brutal destruction of their city, a Belarusian-linked hacking group called Ghostwriter began to target the accounts of Ukrainian military and public figures. Like the tank assault on Kyiv, their campaign failed, and when it became clear to the Kremlin that the Ukrainians could successfully defend their country, the tone of the disinformation changed. The new messaging attempted to gaslight the world. Speaking on March 3 at a security council meeting in Moscow, Putin said that the “special military operation is going strictly according to schedule.” Since then, the same refrain has been used in spite of crushing Russian defeats both in the war and in the court of public opinion. But, as laid out by the Canadian government, “Russia wouldn’t need to mobilize another 300,000 citizens if its illegal war of aggression in Ukraine was going as planned.”

One of Moscow’s most incendiary lines of disinformation came early on in the war when the country’s Foreign Ministry claimed that special forces had found documents showing “evidence” of U.S.-financed military biological experiments in Ukraine. Playing off fears that the conflict would see casualties from the use of biological or chemical weapons, this disinformation flew around the world. It got the backing of Chinese officials, who had previously tried to distance themselves from the war. “This Russian military operation has uncovered the secret of the U.S. labs in Ukraine, and this is not something that can be dealt with in a perfunctory manner,” a Chinese spokesperson said at the time. In the United States, where the government was scolding Russia for its information war, QAnon conspiracy theorists were quick to capitalize on the disinformation to buttress their own narratives.

The mass murder and torture of Ukrainian civilians by Russian troops in Bucha became evident to the world in early April. At least 458 people were killed in this town west of Kyiv, their bodies left scattered on roads, in shallow mass graves and in destroyed buildings. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, children were among those who were unlawfully killed. The horrors of Bucha not only showed the world the brutality of Russian troops but crushed Moscow’s claims of superior military prowess. The Kremlin’s rhetorical response was to falsely assert that the massacre was faked by Ukrainian forces to provoke Russia. In the following weeks, Putin and his spokespeople would deny any responsibility for the same horrors that emerged in Irpin and Izium. To this day, Moscow claims its forces do not target civilians. 

The war in Ukraine has caused the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II. According to the U.N. there are approximately 7.8 million refugees from Ukraine across Europe, while 4.8 million people have received temporary protection. But even as Europeans threw open their doors to those fleeing the Russian advance, pro-Russian websites and social media accounts were able to circumvent EU sanctions and effectively spread disinformation about the refugee population. Allegations that Ukrainian refugees were financially well off, that they were depleting resources for native populations and presented a security threat to host countries were widely shared. In the Czech Republic, Russian disinformation poured into the physical world when, in September, over 70,000 people took to the streets of Prague to protest the Czech government, Russian sanctions and assistance given to refugees.

The hybrid war in Ukraine mirrors the Syrian experience. Rife with Russian disinformation, the Syrian civil war marked its 11th year in March. Meanwhile, on the African continent, the Wagner mercenary group is pushing disinformation through powerful social media influencers to shore up support for its war in Ukraine and involvement in local conflicts. The Kremlin’s disinformation machine in 2023 will not slow down.

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Antisemitic incidents — assault, harassment and vandalism — in the U.S. climbed to an unprecedented level in 2021 and look set to rise again in 2022, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The number of incidents has averaged more than seven per day.

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, said, in a recent interview to Michelle Boorstein and Isaac Armsdorf in the Washington Post, that “empirically, something is different. The level of public animosity towards Jews is higher than it’s been in recent memory.” 

Rothschild tries to figure out exactly why antisemitism has become different. A journalist, book writer and a frequent presence on cable news networks, Rothschild specializes in conspiracy movements, disinformation, antisemitism and QAnon. He believes the present moment is an interregnum between two conspiracy movement cycles.

We sat down — virtually — to discuss the attempted coup in Germany, aristocratic conspiracy theories, the centuries-long hate campaign directed at the Rothschild family (he’s writing a book on the European banking family, but there is no relation) and what’s next for QAnon. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

It does sometimes feel like we’re in a never-ending tailspin, what with the Musk takeover, the U.S. midterms, the Germany coup and the Ye news. But I guess for you, as a conspiracy theory expert, the past month must have been extra crazy. Or was it just another month at the office?

There’s never a day where not much happens. During the runoff in Georgia, there was just cycle after cycle of these really ridiculous candidates, saying these disqualifying things over and over that built to a crescendo. A lot of people were really afraid about how it would turn out. But some of the worst conspiracy theorists and election-denier candidates did lose in the end. 

I think for the past few years we’ve become used to prepping for the most unlikely, outlandish scenario. But that didn’t quite happen this time. 

We looked down the precipice and we took a step back. Who knows if it will last. We’re in a time where we’re not completely rid of the last cycle of insanity yet. The next one hasn’t really hit yet. For now, things seem a little bit calmer. 

People mistakenly think Kanye West’s outbursts contain something new. What’s your impression of where he might be getting these narratives?

Well, it’s a really good question. The stuff he’s spouting, none of it is new. This idea of “Jews are too powerful and too wealthy” is as old as time.

One of the things he talks about is how there are 300 Zionists who run the world. That’s a really specific reference to the conspiracy theory of the Committee of 300 — that there are 300 Jews who run the world. It’s not a number he picked out of thin air. Someone put that in front of him. 

It’s really important to understand that there is an antisemitic industry and it never completely goes away. Is there anything that’s more popular than antisemitism? Right now, the answer is no. 

I personally feel we’re in a kind of holding pattern until we graduate to the next level of crazy. 

Right. We’re in this weird time between conspiracy movements. The ideas around the “stolen election” are really sort of petering out. They tried to get it going with the midterms, but it didn’t really take. QAnon’s branding, the iconography and the catchphrases are receding. So it’s a good time for public antisemitism to make a resurgence.

We’ve been seeing it called “the high tide of antisemitism.” Do you agree?

I would say certainly it hasn’t been this bad since before the Second World War. We’re now at a point where there isn’t an obvious enemy right now — there might be in the future — so it’s easy to focus on “Jewish power.”

I’m interested in what you said about QAnon receding. Can you explain what you mean?

All the decoding, “Q-drops” and hashtag stuff is receding because ideas about the deep state, Covid being a hoax and the pedophile cabals are being talked about at a very mainstream level. The ideas behind QAnon no longer need to be hidden behind riddles. There’s just no need for QAnon. 

What do you think of the German coup attempt?

I knew about the Reichsburger movement because they were linked to QAnon. It’s kind of a grab bag of conspiracy beliefs. There’s a bit of Q, there’s some sovereign citizen, “the laws don’t apply to us” stuff. But it’s also very German. They are monarchists, wanting to restore the Kaiser and go back to the German Confederation of 1871.

What gave you the idea to write a book about the Rothschilds?

I’d like to put “no relation” on the cover. The influence of Rothschild conspiracy theories is really still being felt. Look at Alex Jones, who has pushed Rothschild conspiracy theories for decades. He was inspired when he was a kid by a book called “None Dare Call It Conspiracy.” And that book was inspired by books that came out in the 1950s about Jewish influence on the Federal Reserve, which in turn was inspired by the work of people like Ezra Pound. So it’s just one cycle after another. And of course tropes about Jews and money go back thousands of years. 

I’m always curious about people who follow conspiracy theories for a living — day to day. What’s it like for you, particularly as you’re Jewish?

I do find myself having to close the laptop and go outside or take a walk or water the plants or something. I live in Los Angeles, and there have been a lot of anti-Jewish incidents recently, with people hanging banners over the freeway saying “Kanye was right.” It’s a reminder that there’s always going to be a part of the public who looks at Jewish people with suspicion and paranoia and conspiracy. Jew hating never completely goes away. It’s stuck around for century after century after century because people get something out of it.

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“We are united by the rejection of the so-called ‘rules-based order’ that the former colonial powers are imposing on the world,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the audience via video message. “Russia greatly appreciates the fact that despite unprecedented and crude pressure, our African friends, like the overwhelming majority of the international community, have not joined the anti-Russia sanctions but continue developing dialogue and cooperation with us.”

Lavrov was warming the small crowd up for the event’s headline attendee Kemi Seba, who took to the stage for 20 minutes to condemn the West and wax lyrical about the benefits of Russian influence across the African continent.

Seba is part of a growing network of self-styled pan-African influencers who enjoy a close relationship with the Kremlin in return for spreading Russian disinformation. Ranging from disseminating anti-French rhetoric to extolling the virtues of sanctioned oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group mercenaries, these diligent mouthpieces have also justified Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Just hours after the Russian invasion on February 24, Seba took to Facebook to argue that Moscow was “trying to reconquer Russian lands.” Another well known influencer, the Swiss-Cameroonian Nathalie Yamb, commented that Ukraine is “full of neo-Nazis” and suggested that Kyiv is responsible for causing the conflict. The ferocity and reach of this disinformation has become so widespread that in early November the U.S. State Department issued an extraordinary statement that lambasted both Seba and Yamb and drew strong correlations between them and Prigozhin. “Understanding and exposing the role of disinformation in the Kremlin’s Africa strategy,” the State Department told us in response to written questions, “is a key step toward limiting its potential impact on the continent.”

French–Beninese Seba has amassed 1.1 million followers on Facebook and almost a quarter of a million subscribers on YouTube. The former head of the Russian-backed Afrique Media, the 40 year-old has crafted a reputation for spreading visceral anti-French rhetoric and claiming the West is on a mission to “destroy Vladimir Putin, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.” He is also the head of the organization Urgence Panafricaniste and the clout behind the relaunched media outlet Afrique Résurrection. 

Seba’s closest confidant is Yamb, whom he has described as “my blood.” Powered by 233,000 subscribers on YouTube, the 53-year-old has styled herself as “La Dame de Sochi” after attending Putin’s Russia-Africa Summit in 2019. Her repeated verbal attacks on Franco-African relations led to the French Minister of the Interior banning her from French territory in January for “incitement to hatred and violence.”

“Some of these influencers have gained quite a following recently, but the way to think about them is that they are just part of a broader disinformation system that Russia is deploying in Africa through Wagner,” said Mark Duerksen, a research associate at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, an academic institution within the U.S. Department of Defense. “[They are monetizing their work] through YouTube ad revenue, speaking engagements at universities in Russia, or paid attendance at conferences in Russia. They fashion themselves as pseudo intellectuals adopting tropes from a deep history of Pan-Africanism to their purposes,” Duerksen said.

Pan-Africanism, in its modern form, was established in the early 20th century in response to the enduring legacy of European slavery and imperialism. Supported by intellectuals such as the American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, Pan-Africanism, in its broadest form, seeks to unify all people of African heritage against racism and colonialism. Today, Russia has latched onto some elements of this anti-colonial feeling to generate support for the war in Ukraine. Using historical narratives that focus on Soviet Russia’s engagement with African nations and Cold War support for resistance groups in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, Moscow has successfully argued that, unlike its 21st century rivals in the West, it doesn’t have a colonialist past or attitude.

It is an argument that has popular resonance across much of Africa. According to the Zimbabwean writer and editor Percy Zvomuya, “in the minds of some people in southern Africa, Russia, not Ukraine, is the direct successor of the USSR, the state that supported us during our own struggles against colonialism and apartheid.” And, he said, “that Ukraine receives much of its weaponry and diplomatic support from Britain and America makes it easy for Russia to say ‘but, look, these are the people who oppressed you yesterday.’”

The West’s manner in dealing with Africa continues to grate. Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s minister of international relations and cooperation, complained in August about “patronizing bullying” by European countries over the war in Ukraine. Both she and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa took aim at the United States over a bill overwhelmingly passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, titled “Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa.” They said the bill would punish the economic aspirations of Africans for doing essential business with Russia. The bill, reports suggest, is highly unlikely to become law but the language rankled. Pandor described it as “offensive” and disrespectful of African sovereignty.

In reality, though, it’s not clear that the Kremlin is any more respectful of African sovereignty. In many areas that have a high concentration of Russian disinformation, the Wagner Group is operating in the background. Reported to have been founded around 2014, Wagner is a Kremlin-backed private military organization that helps undemocratic leaders hold onto power in return for access to natural resources or strategic locations. A key factor in ensuring their (and the Kremlin’s) foothold in a country is a vast sea of disinformation that spews from social media influencers and Russia-backed organizations such as the Association for Free Research and International Cooperation, which supports many small African media outlets.

This network of positive coverage has allowed Wagner to destabilize entire regions of the African continent. In the western Sahel region, Mali’s ruling junta has moved from traditional assistance from France to support from Russia. In December 2021, Wagner mercenaries arrived in the country. Under the guise of tackling the landlocked nation’s warring militant groups, Wagner’s presence has resulted in alleged human rights abuses and shored up support for the country’s leadership.

“The [Russian] disinformation campaign in the region began long before the war in Ukraine. It really started when the Malian government had tensions with France and made an agreement with the Wagner Group,” Rida Lyammouri, from the Policy Center for the New South, a Morocco-based think tank, told us. “We know one of Wagner’s objectives is natural resources and Mali is rich in gold, but there is no evidence yet that that’s what they’re looking for.”

At the three-day US-Africa Leaders summit, which concluded on December 15, Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo alleged that Burkina Faso, one of the largest gold producers on the continent, had paid the Wagner Group with a mine to come into the country to contain insurgent violence. There have been two coups in Burkina Faso this year alone, the latest on September 30. Earlier this month, the recently appointed prime minister flew to Moscow on a Malian jet; his visit was reportedly “private.”  

Back online the depth of Russian influence over social media users does not just extend to top-tier influencers who have well-established links to Moscow. Other individuals are also jumping in on the game, especially on the issue of the war in Ukraine. Pointing to hypocrisy in Western criticisms of the Russian invasion, “whataboutism” has become a typical rhetorical strategy for those eager to parrot a pro-Russia line.

General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the son of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and arguably the country’s tweeter-in-chief, said on February 28 that “the majority of mankind (that are non-white) support Russia’s stand in Ukraine.” Kampala has been drifting towards Moscow as the East African nation becomes increasingly authoritarian. In Nigeria, the burgeoning influencer Joseph C. Okechukwu has taken to Twitter almost daily to update his 38,000 followers on the war in Ukraine where he regularly alludes to Ukrainian soliders having Nazi sympathies. The Cameroonian influencer Franklin Nyamsi has railed against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, while praising Russia for supplying weapons to Mali. 

Some analysts argue, however, that the collective bark of these influencers is worse than their bite. Two reports by the Brookings Institution, a U.S. think tank, suggest that although Russia has targeted the African continent’s information sphere to shore up support for its war in Ukraine, Russian disinformation does not “gain the same traction or attention on Twitter” as narratives closer to the hearts of African audiences. 

“The same messages are being spread on Facebook and Youtube, but what we learned from our research on Twitter is that the disinformation about the war, even disinformation about grain, is not getting as much engagement as established grievances,” said Mary Blankenship, the author of the report alongside Aloysius Uche Ordu. “What I also found interesting was that it’s official channels that have the most effect, such as a tweet from the Russian Embassy, rather than accounts with a significant following.” 

It is unlikely that Moscow’s interest in the African continent will end anytime soon. Since 2020, Russia has been Africa’s biggest supplier of arms. Long before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin has been driving Russian foreign policy to engage more with African states, to piggyback on Chinese investments and to diminish Western dominance over the continent. However, even with Wagner’s malign influence, it is unclear if the Kremlin’s concentrated appeal to African anti-colonial sentiments, and pledges of support outside human rights frameworks, is actually yielding a return on both geopolitical and financial levels. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, it is also not known if Russian influence across the continent will create a Russian power base that will “expand its influence in the years to come.”

Towards the end of his speech at the “Russia-Africa: What’s Next?” youth forum in October, Lavrov made sure to reference the second edition of the Russia-Africa Summit and Economic Forum due to take place in St. Petersburg next summer and to promote “peace, security and development.” There is little doubt that sitting in the audience will be Prigozhin’s influencers dutifully taking notes for their audiences back home.

A quotation from Mark Duerksen has been changed post-publication to reflect his intended meaning.

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