Daily Archives: March 2, 2022

Only one clip of Meena speaking flickering, faded, just a few minutes long survives today, and it sounds like a prophecy. It is 1981. She is 24, in a pale blue turtleneck and a dark blue dotted pinafore, her wavy hair cropped short.

Meena had just delivered a speech in Valence, where she was invited by the new French Socialist government to represent the Afghan resistance movement at a party congress. Her speech so angered the Soviet delegation the USSR had invaded Afghanistan two years earlier, and she spoke forcefully against the occupation that they stalked out, glowering, as she raised a victory sign in the air.

In the clip, a snippet from an interview with a Belgian news channel, she predicts calmly, sombrely, pen in hand the victory of anti-Soviet forces. But she also warns of its cost: that the anti-democratic, misogynistic factions of the mujahideen being valorised by the West in their fight against the Soviets would, in turn, devour Afghanistan.

Amid the clumsy binaries of war, Meena was treading a tricky path.

Meena was born in 1956, in the final decades of Mohammed Zahir Shahs reign. The modernist king had nudged along a number of firsts for women: female voices on Afghan radio, voluntary abolition of the chadar, and ratification of the constitution by a Loya Jirga a grand legal assembly that included women.

She attended one of Kabuls best schools the Lycee Malalai, named after a beloved folk heroine who rallied flailing Afghan forces to victory against the British in 1880 but in her middle-class home, she saw her father periodically beat her two mothers.

Uncommonly alert to injustice her relatives casual mistreatment of Hazara servants, of the educational disparities between her architect father and her unlettered mother teenage Meena became increasingly fixated on the inferior status of women.

How men saw women and how women saw themselves as individuals with their own hopes and dreams, rather than in perpetual service to the family, the tribe, and the nation would not be transformed by state mandates alone. These roles would have to be renegotiated, Meena knew, by Afghan women themselves, from within the most fundamental unit of society, the family.

It is 1976. Three years earlier, the old king had been overthrown by his cousin, and the 225-year-old monarchy was replaced with an autocratic one-party state. Kabul University, where Meena is now studying law, is a microcosm of the forces buffeting Afghanistan: Marxists and Maoists, monarchists and Islamic revivalists.

Meena, 20, is married to a doctor 11 years older, the only man her family could find who fit her criteria: no bride price, no second wife, no objection to school or work. He is the leader of a Maoist group. Meena also leans left, but she is not interested in being relegated to the womens wing of a political outfit. She seeks an organisation that centres the liberation of Afghan women.

There is none, so she starts one herself. It is called the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA).

In the beginning, there were five. A year later, 11. They were not even all known to each other and rarely met all together. Once, when they did meet, they sat in a room partitioned by curtains so they could hear the rest but could not see more than three others. Years before the Taliban first took over Afghanistan, at a time when women had the right to education, were such extraordinary measures necessary?

RAWA was not plotting the downfall of the state. At first, it was organising adult literacy classes, a preliminary step in Meenas vision towards helping women from strict patriarchal families develop a sense of self. But in a stubbornly gendered society, where the only women with any real power tended to be mothers-in-law, the organisers knew their work would be perceived as a threat: it would, in Dari, be mushti dar dahan a fist in the mouth of patriarchy.

In 1978, on the heels of a violent coup, a new Soviet-backed government began rolling out reforms across Afghanistan. Land was redistributed, the tricolour flag turned a solid communist red, bride prices reduced, and marriage before the age of 18 outlawed. Afghan society bristled at these changes particularly, scholars have since noted, the changes concerning women. RAWA baulked, too: if the fight for their rights became associated with imperial power, it was Afghan women who would bear the brunt of the backlash. And so, it expanded its mandate, becoming, in Meenas words, an organisation of women struggling for the liberation of Afghanistan and of women. One could not be achieved without the other.

Anti-Soviet resistance mounted across Afghanistan, first percolating in the countryside, then spreading to the cities. The crackdown by the Soviet-backed government also intensified. Political prisoners in Afghan jails tribal leaders, clergy, public intellectuals, students tripled within six months. Executions were a daily occurrence. Many others vanished into thin air. Meena began visiting the families of the jailed and the disappeared, asking after them.

This is how many women joined RAWA. They were struck by the fact that Meena cared. Bereft of male protection but also male authority for the first time, they heeded her call to channel their rage and despair into a disciplined resistance.

In December 1979, Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan. RAWA members took part in popular demonstrations, surreptitiously distributing political pamphlets (shabnameh, literally translating to night missives, circulated under cover of dark), started Payam-e-Zan (Womens Message), a polemical magazine that they assembled by hand, and supported secular factions of the mujahideen on the war front, where they dispensed medical aid and learned to use and clean guns.

Melody Ermachild Chavis, author of a RAWA-authorised biography of Meena, recalls story after story of Meenas doggedness: disguised in an old burqa, she would visit women from dawn to dusk, talking for hours, returning every week.

That is the closest to a critique of Meena that Chavis who channelled 20 years of experience as a private investigator preparing death-row appeals in California into reconstructing Meenas life heard from RAWA members. Some of the older women would tell her, youve got to rest, youve got to protect yourself more. They told me how shed periodically collapse: from dehydration, exhaustion, malnourishment, sometimes pregnancy, she says.

And sometimes from grief. Once, thousands of women went to meet jailed family members being released under a general amnesty when only 120 were released, the women stormed the prison and found piles of dead bodies.

Meena, returning home from one of her prison visits, collapsed, unable to process what she had witnessed the screams of a mother whose son was killed in prison. That night, she shook in her sleep.

The first issue of Payam-e-Zan, published in 1981, shortly before Meenas trip to Europe, features an unsigned poem.

The midnight screams of bereaved mothers still resonate in my ears

Ive seen barefoot, wandering and homeless children,

Ive seen giant henna-handed brides with mourning clothes,

Ive seen the giant walls of prisons swallow freedom in their ravenous stomach,

Im the woman who has awoken,

Ive found my path and will never turn back

The poem was penned by Meena. By the time she returned from Europe, a number of RAWA members and supporters had been imprisoned. Her husband, after being jailed and tortured, had fled to Pakistan. As a political activist opposing the Soviet occupation who had garnered international attention, Meenas photos were being circulated at checkpoints across Kabul, so she too crossed the border, alongside millions of other Afghans seeking refuge from war.

Ultimately, she set up a base in the Pakistani city of Quetta, where RAWA began opening schools, clinics and orphanages for fellow refugees.

In 1986, Meenas husband was murdered in Peshawar by mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyars Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin an armed group said to have received more CIA funding than any other mujahideen group during the Soviet war.

Three months later, Meena went missing in Quetta. In August 1987, her body was unearthed from the compound of an abandoned house, identifiable only by her wedding band. She had been strangled to death, betrayed by a male RAWA supporter. Originally arrested for driving a truck filled with explosives into Pakistan, the two men who confessed to her murder had ties to KHAD, the Afghan secret police allied with the Soviets. In 2002, 15 years after her death, they were hurriedly executed by the Pakistani state. Afterwards, RAWA released a statement reiterating its opposition to capital punishment.

More than 10 years after Meenas assassination, scholar Anne E Brodsky recounts viewing that clip of Meena alongside young RAWA members in Pakistan. Watching their martyred leader predict a future they had lived through but one she did not live to see, the young women were moved to tears. Most of them had never met her, Brodsky writes in With All Our Strength (2003), her book-length account of RAWA, but they had heard the stories and they felt that the only reason they were where they were educated, safe, and with a deep purpose in life and a community of love and caring to support their struggle was the efforts of this woman.

Brodsky, a community psychologist, interviewed more than 100 RAWA members and supporters in the early 2000s. Time and again, women spoke of how RAWA gave them meaning amid the chaos of war. They chanted the slogans that were stuck in my throat; they spoke the words that I didnt dare speak, one member told Brodsky. Another, a premed student forced to stay home when the Taliban came to power in 1996, was able to claw her way out of depression through involvement with RAWA: I even forgot I didnt have rights and couldnt continue my studies because I was always busy.

RAWAs response to Meenas murder had been to double down on her lifes work. On both sides of the Durand Line the British-drawn boundary between Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan RAWA established schools and orphanages for Afghan boys and girls, literacy programmes for older women, health clinics and income-generating programmes.

In Afghanistan, then as now, most of these operations remained underground. In areas of Pakistan where it was relatively safer to operate for RAWA, many people remember Meenas visage having pride of place. Jennifer L Fluri, a feminist political geographer at the University of Colorado, recalls in the early 2000s nearly every room in an openly RAWA-run school or orphanage in Pakistan featuring Meenas portrait. She was very much a living presence, she says.

Meena remained the face of RAWA for another reason, too: after her assassination, the organisation became entirely anonymous, operating as a single, undifferentiated front. At the same time, it became even more decentralised, a collection of committees spread across Afghanistan and Pakistan that exchanged information on a need-to-know basis.

Chavis estimates that there were approximately 2,000 members in the mid-2000s membership is limited to Afghan women living in Afghanistan or Pakistan, while men and other women can join as supporters but there was no real way of ascertaining the actual number. For security reasons, RAWA did not maintain a consolidated list.

In 1997, a year into Taliban rule, they launched a website, helping them find international supporters and donors. It exists today, too, stuck in a 90s design warp, an ode to Meena as well as meticulous documentation of the conditions of Afghan women at large. Trigger warnings abound, followed by an unapologetic reminder: this is the reality for many.

In addition to their social work, RAWA also began documenting Taliban atrocities at a time when Afghanistan had been largely forgotten by the world. In 1999, members smuggled a camera into a football stadium in Kabul to film the public execution of Zarmina, a mother of seven accused of killing her husband. When RAWA approached Western media outlets with the video, most declined to air it it was too shocking, they said, for their viewers.

Then 9/11 happened. RAWAs footage of Zarminas execution, despite being two years old, began playing on a loop on CNN. Before dropping bombs on Afghanistan, US warplanes first dropped flyers over the country making the case for military action. Some of the pamphlets featured images of Taliban crimes plucked from RAWAs website. RAWA was appalled, says Sonali Kolhatkar, co-director of the Afghan Womens Mission, a US-based non-profit established in 2000 by RAWA supporters. To them, it was such a betrayal and a huge danger to be inadvertently associated with a US invasion that they staunchly opposed. The US never asked for their permission to use those images.

In her role as a RAWA ally, facilitating its advocacy work abroad, Kolhatkar had a front-row seat to Western liberal feminisms encounter with RAWA.

Prior to 9/11, some members came to the US for the first time on a speaking tour sponsored by a prominent womens organisation. The organisation sold these little pins with squares of mesh cloth on them, similar to what youd find on a burqa, Kolhatkar recounted. And one condition of the invitation was that at every event featuring RAWA, they would first have to play a five-minute video, produced by the organisation, highlighting the plight of Afghan women and after 9/11, they [RAWA] were dismissed by Western feminists as being too Western. This, to me, was the most infuriating part: to have their work co-opted and their legacy questioned by Western feminists.

The activists who came to the US, writes Brodsky, were also frustrated by Western attempts to individualise them, needling them for their personal stories, rather than engaging with RAWAs institutional message.

When a RAWA representative explained her role on RAWAs foreign affairs committee to the Western women in the room, Brodsky recalls the meeting room lapsing into baffled silence. The other women in the room appeared to strain to integrate this piece of information into their mental picture of this young woman and her grassroots organization, she writes in With All Our Strength. Finally someone responded, A Foreign Affairs Committee, isnt that organized of you?!

For RAWA, these experiences abroad were a vindication of Meenas fierce commitment to independence and her refusal to let the organisations mission be subsumed into a broader political project, whether at home or abroad. Her legacy remains really central to RAWA, especially with regard to independence, secular democracy, and the complete rejection of foreign intervention except when it comes to people-to-people solidarity, says Kolhatkar.

Fluri, as a geographer, was particularly interested in examining how RAWA negotiated power closer to home in Pakistan. She recalls spending time in a refugee camp in Peshawar in the early 2000s, where RAWA wielded great influence so much so that when a woman complained of her husband continually hitting her, they worked with male allies to have the man kicked out of the camp. It was almost like they had their own mini nation there, says Fluri. The camp was a microcosm of their vision of Afghanistan feminist, multiethnic, she says. I remember thinking, oh wow, they really are kind of creating this there.

Many of the major refugee camps in Pakistan were disbanded in the mid-2000s. As Afghan men and women returned to their homeland often involuntarily, hounded out by an increasingly hostile host country RAWAs activities in Pakistan began to dissipate. In Afghanistan, its work continues but remains underground: a mix of home-based schools and feminist study circles, rural health services, and income-generating projects for women, such as poultry farms.

RAWA did not respond to requests for an interview.

Much of RAWAs work today depends on donations from international supporters and is therefore especially susceptible to the fleeting attention span of the West. The situation right now inside Afghanistan is worse than it was last summer [when US forces withdrew]. But theres less attention being paid, and so its harder to raise funds and getting the money to RAWA has also become nearly impossible because of US banking sanctions, says Kolhatkar.

Still, RAWA soldiers on. Last December, they marked International Human Rights Day with a protest against the Taliban, concealing their identities by wearing masks of slain Afghan activists. In the absence of freedom and democracy, their placards proclaimed, human rights have no meaning!

Meenas legacy extends beyond RAWA, too. Years after that refugee camp in Peshawar was shut down, not too far away, another young Pashtun would become famous for demanding her right to education so famous that she too would be known by her first name alone. In 2014, asked about her childhood memories of reading, Malala responded: One of the first books I read is called Meena, about a girl who stood up for womens rights in Afghanistan.

Excerpt from:

The Afghan revolutionary who took on the Soviets and patriarchy - Al Jazeera English

Billionaires are making regular trips to space for a reason: they want to harness the potential economic payoff. We need to come up with a framework for property rights in space that will benefit all of humanity, not just the super rich, argues Rebecca Lowe.Under her proposal - inspired by philosopher John Locke - people could earn the right for the exclusive use of plots of moon land, as long as this advances certain moral aims.

Revisiting the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 that bans any appropriation of planetary or lunar land might be worth doing, writes Tony Milligan. But using John Lockes 17th century framework is not the way to think about property rights in space. The Solar System is a very different place from Earth, and a whole new type of economy would need to be invented for it.

In two separate articles, Rebecca Lowe and Tony Milligan put forward their arguments on how we should think about property rights in space.

Rebecca Lowe

Privatising the moon is a meme, or at least a caricature. Its used to emphasise the unrelenting greed of capitalists: Theyd sell off the moon if they could!. Cowboys on Earth. Cowboys in space. And fair enough, rocket-man billionaires arerarely out of the newsthese days.

Nonetheless, these billionaires give us good reasons to think hard about property rights in space. Firstly, its not enough just to state that doing something even as outlandish sounding as privatising the moon is wrong. You need to be able to explain why. What if humankind needed to escape Earth? Would it be fundamentally impermissible to try to inhabit the moon, in such a situation? Wed struggle without any recourse to private property.

Beyond that, itd be nice to think that these billionaires are spending their money on rocketships solely for the intrinsic value of knowing more about our universe. But presumably a large part of them taking on the serious financial and reputational costs of space exploration is a massive potential payoff. And that payoff is something that could be harnessed for the good of all humankind.

___

The more you think about it, the clearer it seems that a morally-justified system for assigning and governing property rights in space could present vast benefits.

___

The more you think about it, the clearer it seems that a morally-justified system for assigning and governing property rights in space in land, in other resources, even in the vacuum itself could present vast benefits. These potential benefits extend far beyond financial rewards for people becoming owners under such a system, and the other direct and indirect beneficiaries of these ownerships. They also relate to the provision of incentives for the responsible stewardship of space, as well as opportunities for new scientific discovery and democratised space exploration.

Of course, this doesnt mean that we shouldnt consider potential costs. Debate rages about property-related injustice and unfairness on Earth: not least regarding the decisions and actions of our forebears, relating to the acquisition of property rights, the distribution of access to natural resources, and the colonisation of areas already serving as the livelihood and homes of indigenous peoples. Debate continues about the future of Earth, too: about how we should act now if we are to conserve our planet appropriately, for its own sake, and for future generations. All this reminds us of the serious costs that property-rights regimes can impose, and the importance of ensuring that legal claims to ownership are morally justified.

___

The ways in which human beings meet some of their most urgent everyday needs involves something thats hard not to see, in a basic sense, as individual ownership.

___

Nonetheless, most people see property as a basic human need, the focus of a natural human practice, an inevitable part of life. And private property in the sense of individual ownership is typically deemed not only to improve standards of human welfare, but also the condition of many objects of ownership. Theres a vast multi-disciplinary literature describing private propertys instrumental value. This focuses on the stability thatclear and secure property-rights regimestypically engender. It also addresses the crucial roleprivate property plays within exchange and trade, which, themselves, have helped to driveglobal progress in domains including education and healthcare.

Private property is about more than efficiently meeting wants and needs, however. Theres also the intrinsic value of individual ownership reflected in the security and belonging that derive particularly from home and land ownership, not least within a community. Individual ownership enables human beings to exercise their basic capabilities, and live in accordance with human dignity. Of course, there are other valuable types of property arrangement. But the ways in which human beings meet some of their most urgent everyday needs not least the need to eat things involves something thats hard not to see, in a basic sense, as individual ownership.

The minimal conception of individual ownership Im interested in for current purposes, therefore, is the relation that a particular person has with a particular thing, of which a necessary condition is that this owner/owned-thing relation is exclusive and exclusionary. And, on which, this relations exclusive and exclusionary nature is protected by a moral right. If you believe that individual cavemen and cavewomen had some kind of obligation-generating claim to the particular bits of land they lived and depended on (which meant there were certain things that only they, exclusively, could do in relation to that land, to the exclusion of others), then you believe in this kind of non-legal, moral, property right. Now, none of this prevents an owner from choosing to open up an ownership relation by offering a slice of their apple to a friend, for instance. It does however, I think, get to the heart of the idea of private property.

To return to extra-planetary matters then, what might a justifiable space property-rights regime look like, on this narrow conception of ownership? What can we learn from the mistakes of the past to get matters of property right, this time, whilst with regard to space land we still have the chance to start pretty much from scratch? A recent think-tankpaperI wrote addressed these questions.

If youve read any of the surprisingly extensivepress coveragearound my paper, however or had some of this coveragetweeted into your timeline by Bernie Sanders then you might be disappointed to learn that I didnt actually propose selling off the moon. For a start, premised in the framework I set out at the end of the paper is the idea that nobody, morally, owns the moon. I also discuss the way in which, whilst much relevant space law is interpreted in competing ways, it seems clear that nobody legally owns the moon, either. Despite various nations attempts to press for change, the national appropriation and by effect, the individual appropriation of at least thephysical domain of space, remains outlawed bylong-standing treaty.

___

If youre hoping my framework will help you to acquire the whole moon to hold in perpetuity for your mega-corporation, youll be disappointed.

___

What I try to do in my paper, however, is look past the current legal situation, and consider what might be a morally justified way of governing individual access to space land, on a rights-based liberal account. This is not least because theres a convincing egalitarian argument that the arbitrary oppression of opportunity that some individuals already face simply by being born in, or otherwise inhabiting, particular countries shouldnt be entrenched further through a nation-focused approach to the governance of space opportunities.

The primary problem I address, therefore, is how to avoid the perils of first come first served. This is the problem regarding the way in which it seems wrong (and a missed opportunity, all round) to prevent individuals from realising any right they hold to acquire property. But that it also seems wrong if their doing so precludes others from ever being able to do so themselves. Of course, theres also that serious problem of how we get to the point of individuals being legally able to acquire space stuff in the first place. But whilst I discuss some relevant options, Im happy largely to set that problem aside for lawyers.

To get to practicalities, however, if youre hoping my framework will help you to acquire the whole moon to hold in perpetuity for your mega-corporation, then again, youll be disappointed. Rather, I set out a highly conditional Georgist-type system to enable the temporary rental of plots of moonland. Basically, individuals compete for the exclusive and exclusionary use of these plots, through a market-based competition consisting in the payment of rent. The term rent isnt quite right, however, because as above, I conclude that nobody owns the moon. Rather, renters pay their rent into a fund that is used to enable other individuals to compete against them for plots on the grounds that everyone has an equally strong potential claim, but only a tiny number of highly-privileged people would currently be able to realise this potential.

The size of the plots, and the rate of the rent, is variable dependent on supply and demand. Thanks toHenry George, renters own in full the profit they make from the use of their rented land. And they can use it for any morally-justified purpose. However, certain stringent conditions apply, relating particularly to the concerns of spoilage and urgent need concerns that betraythe Lockean theoryunderpinning the papers approach. Now, the rent is paid into a fund that, as above, generally serves to enable an increasing number of individuals to compete for plots of moonland, whilst partly through a rebate system helping to meet current urgent need, and to conserve land (on the moon and Earth).

On my system, therefore, Elon and Jeff will only be able to access moon plots in an exclusive and exclusionary manner if their payments, minimally: a) help to alleviate urgent human need; b) help to conserve land; and c) effectively ensure that increasing numbers of people gain the opportunity to compete against them for the use of these plots. Moreover, as part of the spoilage condition, renters must not destroy or remove parts of moon land, or the natural resources that form other parts of the moon or are found on the moon.

So, Im afraid my paper isnt truly about privatising the moon,and I dont do anything like estimating the financial value of owning space stuff. I do point out, however, that thinking about space in this way couldhelp us to assess the adequacy of ongoing approaches to property on Earth. Therefore, whilst I dont expect the peoplemaking fun of my paper on social mediato have read it, I think that if they did, they might find it less friendly towards the current economic order than they presume.

Tony Milligan

For several years now, there has been a phantom conflict going on between two political legacies of the 20th century, each trying to make headway within discussions about space futures. On the one hand, there are fierce opponents of private sector activity in space. Particularly when it is associated with billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. On the other hand, there are free marketeers who see space as an opportunity to base democracy around the free market, rather than treating the market as one democratic institution among many.

Both tend to radically over-estimate the role of the space private sector compared to the role of national space agencies which remain the primary players. The contrast is not even close. Neither Elon Musk nor Jeff Bezos are ever likely to be in a position to compete with the Chinese state. Nonetheless, the conflict goes on. One of the latest installments is the Adam Smith Institute paper Space Invaders: Property Rights on the Moon by Rebecca Lowe. This is more interesting than many of the routine contributions because it focuses upon the very idea of property rights in space, and the kinds of ethical and political principles that might underpin any replacement for the Outer Space Treaty (1967) which treats space as the common heritage of humanity, and currently outlaws the appropriation of planetary or lunar real estate. As a point of international law, nobody can own the moon.

___

We fall into a trap if we think of lunar resources as analogous to the kinds of resource that Locke was typically concerned with.

___

What we get in Lowes paper, as the way forward from the OST, is an application of John Lockes 17th century political theory to a partitioning of the lunar surface. Or, at least, the application of a version of Lockes account of how private property arises, is transferred and operates to the benefit of society at large. Lowes belief is that a clear, morally-justified, and efficient system for assigning and governing property rights in space in land, in other resources, in the vacuum itself, and in anything else that might be found -would present vast benefits. I have no particular opposition to private property rights, but believe that we cannot run plausible arguments about the distribution of space resources independently of a more detailed understanding of the resources in question.

We fall into a trap if we think of lunar resources as analogous to the kinds of resource that Locke was typically concerned with. The lunar resources that matter most are not laid out like large tracts of open and unworked land that might be divided up fairly among settler farmers whose claim will then be reinforced by their working of the land. Strategic lunar resources tend, instead, to be far more concentrated.

Here, we might think of lunar concentrations of Thorium, Uranium or Helium 3 for use in fusion reactors. Or we might think of the Peaks of Eternal Light. Highly concentrated resources in the South Polar Region, with raised crater rims sitting in near constant sunlight (useful for solar power), possibly shading frozen water and volatiles. An ideal combination, but heavily localized. A good-sized peak will be equivalent only to a narrow strip a few meters wide across a regulation-sized football field. It is no coincidence that the majority of lunar missions planned for the present decade are disproportionately targeting the South Lunar Pole rather than spread across the lunar surface.

Rather than dividing up tracts of land in the manner of the New World, we might do better to think of dividing up an art gallery. Someone will get bits of carpet from the stairwell, someone will get a cupboard, and someone will get a Picasso or a Cezanne. Lockes world is an obvious go-to reference point for transitioning from no-property to property, because it makes it seem like there is some clear, morally justified grounding for the resulting distributions. In the case of the Moon, nothing is so clear or readily justified.

An oddity here is that it is not at all obvious that private property is a great concern for prospective space miners. Those involved in Planetary Resources before its demise in 2020 were concerned more with security of tenure than individual property rights, i.e. is being able to complete licensed extraction projects. What matters for any actual mining operations is always likely to be the licensing system, rather than Lockean self-realization through property. This is also the way that space law is going, with extraction rights being put into law in the US back in 2015, and other countries such as Luxembourg, Japan and India following suit. The legislation and direction of travel is also flagged up in Lowes paper.

___

Lockes world is an obvious go-to reference point for transitioning from no-property to property, because it makes it seem like there is some clear, morally justified grounding for the resulting distributions. But in the case of the Moon, nothing is clear or readily justified.

___

The result is that when we drill down into the detail of the paper what we find is that the status of the property-right-holder amounts more to the status of a renter than the status of a full owner. John Locke will not be going into space any time soon. Instead, the rhetoric of property boils down instead to something other than actual property because Lowe gets the point about the obvious benefits of licensing over property. But the paper does not come to terms with the implications of licensing, and its larger departure from the moral universe of Locke. Two implications suggest a large departure.

Firstly, licensing is better adapted to a multi-player environment rather than a binary world of states and individual property owners, driven by much the same human nature. There are multiple, legitimate claims that may be made in relation to the Moon, by agents whose primary concern is science, environmental protection, state presence, political equilibrium between competing powers, and yes, private financial concerns. Trying to flatten out this uneven terrain of claims by appeal to any single institution (such as property or quasi-property) looks unrealistic.

Secondly, accessible space resources are finite, not infinite. It is far from obvious that we will ever be able to access resources beyond the Solar System. And, for practical purposes, it is also a closed system. Little, if anything, comes from the outside. This Solar System is everything that we and future generations may ever have to work with. And much of it is made up of gas giants whose gravity wells may be too deep for us to use in any large-scale manner. We have far less to work with than is sometimes imagined. One Moon, one Mars, a few smaller bodies and the asteroids.

___

The kind of economy need for space is something to be invented, rather than transplanted from the past and John Lockes theory of property.

___

The upshot, and a core point set out by Martin Elvis and myself in our 2019 paper How much of the Solar System should we leave as wilderness? is that the trajectory for a space economy will include either a dangerous exhaustion of new resources, or an eventual transition to a steady-state economy. Not a 20th century market economy geared to indefinite expansion, but a different kind of economy. One within which various sorts of regulated but extensive markets will no doubt operate, but without reliance upon an imagined endless stream of new resources, or new places where settler owners might be set down. Given the sheer unevenness of the distribution of strategic resources in space, a steady-state economy of this sort would have to have different sets of entitlements, spread across multiple sorts of players who relate to the finite resources of the Solar System in a variety of ways. This kind of economy is something to be invented, rather than transplanted from the past and John Lockes theory of property.

Recognition of the ultimate need for such an economy is not new. Almost all of the great classical political economists got the point. David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and Adam Smith all recognized that there were physical limits to growth. Economic expansion, under capitalism or anything else, would eventually end. Locke never quite came to terms with the problem. Nor did Marx. Both envisaged endless worlds to conquer. We do not have such worlds. And so varied are the ones that we can access, that a single fundamental grounding norm concerning property or its abolition makes little sense. We cannot even apply a single metric to tell how close we are to resource exhaustion. On planets, surface area will sometimes be a good measure of resource use. But not at any icy poles, where multiple systems may be needed. In the asteroid belt, mass will be a better measure, but it will not work on Ceres or Vesta where surface again is crucial.

No one measure will work, much less a single norm for claims and use. Plurality is our best option. It comes close to being our only option. And when it comes to the Moon, we would be wise to start as we mean to go on, by recognizing a plurality of claims upon the same resources and the need to protect as well as use.

Originally posted here:

Who owns the moon? | Rebecca Lowe, Tony Milligan - IAI

Late on Tuesday, US President Joe Biden was preparing to address a joint session of Congress, Supreme Court justices and dignitaries including specially invited guests as narrative devices.

The annual State of the Union address has no serious equal in our young republic; the Presidents Speech the reincarnated Throne Speech warms over the administrations manifesto. It rarely makes a full pronouncement on the state of the government at the point of delivery.

Over the years, we have had occasional report cards and propagandist paraphernalia trucked out in election campaigns but never a formal accounting to Parliament on the performance of the government. Budget speeches, once important set pieces in the fiscal calendar, have been relegated to the status of occasional footnotes since the introduction of value added tax.

But what Barbadians need to hear is not triumphalism, posturing or a blame game. They deserve more than an ersatz copy of an American State of the Union or Throne Speech in new garb. After two long and painful years of the worst economic and social crisis of the century, we should expect to see the administrations blueprint for reconstruction.

A standard Throne Speech ahem, Presidents Speech following Labours electoral triumph might soothe the party faithful and a few parliamentary traditionalists. But we have yet to know exactly how the Government plans to recover the lost years of 2020 and 2021.

The same timetable for reform, reconstruction and renovation that one would expect to follow a category five hurricane should be created to rescue Barbados from the doldrums of disease, death and dormancy.

We have had our hurricane. More than 300 people have died as a pandemic has become endemic. The response to the coronavirus has shifted to autopilot as vaccination rates stagnate.

We are chiefly concerned with the state of education, the spearhead of national development. The resumption of physical classes has not taken into account the incredible learning deficit that a generation of young Barbadians has experienced.

While ordering civil servants back to work, a great many students are restricted to no more than two or three days of instruction. On their days home, children as young as single digits are expected to engage in self-directed study, preferably under the watchful gaze of parents who are either unemployed, on sick leave or fortunate enough to work from home under a nebuious flexitime plan.

In addition to this, or perhaps, more aptly, in subtraction of, their schooling, classes are dismissed a full hour to 90 minutes early. And all this must continue during a school year that has not been lengthened by a day, despite the extraordinary situation in which our children find themselves.

As for those who are expected to enter secondary school this year, they are still to matriculate by means of the same examination whose imminent abolition had been declared in the first Mottley administration. The methodology for the reorganization of high schools, the timetable for this activity and the implications for students under unprecedented strain all remain unanswered. This cannot long continue.

The resumption of physical instruction seems to have had done nothing more than fill parents with dread for their childrens educational prospects. So a few parents who have weathered COVIDs economic storms will fork out large sums of cash for teachers to moonlight as private tutors. The lessons business not only thrives but has been given a new lease on life while the government to whom we hand over hundreds of millions of tax dollars apparently fumbles with undeclared certitude.

This sorry stasis is emblematic of the gaping hole where a recovery policy ought to be in vast swathes of national life agriculture, energy, culture, technology, health, law and order, constitutional reform. As Biden ascended the dais to speak on the State of Union, his troubled Build Back Better agenda lay on the operating table as politicians, including those in his own party, wield a rough scalpel.

At least there is a reconstruction agenda on the table of that republic. But where is ours?

Read our ePaper. Fast. Factual. Free.

Sign up and stay up to date with Barbados' FREE latest news.

Read the original here:

#BTEditorial - What, then, is the state of our nation? - Barbados Today