Jeffrey Sommers
- Laid out the factors that led to Latvia having a mass migration exodus following attempted austerity measures to address the recent financial crisis.
- An example of how economic policy makers, money holders, and banking institutions can disrupt a peaceful society.
- Showed a situation with Poland being both victimized by Nazi Germany, but also having significant groups of people that were antisemitic (which many Pols don't want to admit) and those that cooperated with implementing Russian agendas.
- This has caused relations between Germany and Poland to become complicated.
- CDA reports on peace making processes summarized in two books: (missed the name of the first one), and Time to Listen.
- Many aid programs fail to analyze the conflict, therefore efforts miss the mark and strategies fail due to resistance and ignoring opportunities
- "Aid system" constraints: reductionist, needs vs capacities, templates and lists vs drivers and dynamics
- How to intervene: match international and local priorities , areas of impact and evidence takes a long time but it can be happening slowly over time (is nonlinear), linkages and convergences are critical (very important: attitudinal / skill and socio-political change, vertical linkages, coalitions, convergence of various efforts coalescing)
- Too often there are projects, not progress
- Lasting change happens when local people are seen as colleagues
- Mentioned by Sandra Braman: there us a very humorous book on issues an aid worker faced: Tropical Gangsters
- A quote: "There can't be peace in the world when a child suffers to get access to water."
- Definitions of violence by various scholars:
- Galtung: violence "as the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual"
- Zizek: subjective violence is immediate, visible; objective is in the background
- Nixon: slow violence ha a temporal dimension with invisibility, Inequality and environmental harm
- Foucalt: "bio-power": management if populations , life as a political object
- Municipalities in the late 19th centuries take over water provision and provide it to all because fires and disease don't sat in poor areas.
- But recently starting in 1990s new policies reversing to privatization and full cost recoup
- Two examples:
- 1. Cochabamba Bolivia - there was a water war that ended the privatization
- 2. South Africa - after apartheid, efforts take to expand access to water, constitution calls out access to water as a human right. But policies created to allocate a maximum of free water and then it costs money.
- Conclusion: new water policies are perceived as mid-paced violence. For the benefit of the population as a whole, it sacrifices some of its members.
- Documentary to watch: For love of water flow.
- Regarding the concern of scarcity in terms of population growth, it is agriculture and industry that uses the majority of water, so in that context it is unfortunate that poor people have to pay for what they use within reason.
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