Category Archives: Socio-economic Collapse

More than half of Yemen's teachers and education personnel, or about 190,000 people, have been forced to find second sources of income to feed themselves and their families, including on-street work, as they have not received regular pay since 2016, Save the Children said.

More than 2.2 million children are now out of school in Yemen after seven years of conflict, and about 8 million require education support just to continue basic learning. About 1.7 million children are displaced in the country and cut off from basic services.

A lack of regular pay, attacks on schools and education, flooding and continued deteriorating economic conditions, with with more than 2.2 million children are now out of school in Yemen, and about 8 million require education support just to continue basic learning.

Hana, a Yemeni teacher, told Save the Children:

"How is it expected for a teacher to go to class and teach students while thinking about ways to feed their own children? Many of us do not even have money to pay for transportation to school.

"In addition to the psychosocial impact on teachers, the current financial conditions of teachers have pushed some to go for mediocre and/or on-street works. How do you expect a teacher to have self respect and to be able to stand in class in front of their students after seeing him working on street? How can we be role models to our students?"

**Save the Children Education Advisor, Chiara Moroni, said: **

*"Teachers and education personnel are naturally critical to the learning process and to ensure children receive the learning they need to fulfil themselves, and the continued disruptions in their pay will have a critical impact on the education process and would expedite its collapse, harming not only millions of children today but also the future of the country. *

"Teaching is a mission, and we need to take care of those who are raising the future generation. We all owe what we know today to at least one teacher in our lives who have put us ahead of themselves.

"Without education, girls and boys will be subjected to a whole host of protection risks, at a critical time of their development and progress into adulthood."

The situation has been aggravated by COVID-19, as the school year ended earlier than planned in both 2020 and 2021, reducing the learning time for nearly 5.8 million students, many of whom are at risk of not returning to school due to the socio-economic impact of COVID-19, especially girls.

School closures and the worsening economic situation due to COVID-19 restrictions in 2020 and 2021 increased the vulnerability of children and women to multiple protection risks.

As the needs deepen across the country, chronic underfunding remains a challenge. By October 2021, funding for the Humanitarian Response Plan in Yemen stood at around 50% of the required amount, while only 35% of the funding needed to maintain basic education activities has been received.

Save the Children calls on parties to the conflict to adhere to international law and protect schools, and other civilian objects, from the conflict.

Save the Children also calls on the international community to support a cessation of hostilities that allows children to return to education and fully fund the education ask as an investment in the children of Yemen today, and the future of the country.

ENDS

See the article here:

Teachers in Yemen take to street work with more than half without regular pay - Yemen - ReliefWeb

The Balkans, which lie at the crossroads of roads and civilisations, have established themselves throughout history as the powder keg of Europe. Religious and ethnic contradictions, a favourable geographical position, as well as the stronger countries desire to reduce the region for themselves and many other factors, have repeatedly turned the Balkans into a field of fierce battles.

Having destroyed Yugoslavia in the 1990s against the backdrop of the collapse of Europes real socialism, the West has begun to intensively impose the so-called European driver and vector of development on the Balkan countries. Recently it has also significantly intensified its actions in this direction.

At the beginning of February 2018, the European Commission outlined a new strategy for the apparent accelerated inclusion of six Balkan countries into the EU: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and also the partially recognised Kosovo.

How can we explain the EU's desire to quickly bring the Balkan countries into its ranks? Several factors play a role in this regard. First of all, the EU leaders will to show the world that Brexit has not undermined the unification positions and that the EU not only lives, but also expands. Considering that the movement eastwards is restricted and limited by Russia, the vector for EU enlargement has been directed to the Southeast.

The factor of the Russian bogeyman - whether Communist or not - has worked well also in this case: the EU does not want to allow the preservation and even more the strengthening of Russias positions in the Balkans.

Another driving factor is the close integration between the EU and NATO. According to the scheme already established, first the new members are admitted into the North Atlantic Alliance, and then - once they have gone through a series of procedures and implemented significant internal policy reforms, which actually deprive the States of their national sovereignty - they are invited to join the EU, although in Hungary and Poland (former peoples democracies like some Balkan countries) the US-style melting pot homologating pressures find strong obstacles.

The economic factor is further fuelling in the Balkans. After all, this is an additional market of 20 million people. The Balkan peninsula is rich in black coal and lignite. Oil fields and natural gas deposits are rare, but non-ferrous metal ore deposits are often found. It should also be recalled that the most important energy routes pass through the Balkans.

Finally, after having admitted the Balkan countries into its ranks, the European Union would very much like to assign them the role of "parking area for migrants", i.e. to reduce the flow towards the centre of the European Continent - the rich countries - which seek to dump the politically correct European burden on the shoulders of the Balkans and the former Socialist countries.

The United States of America bombed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 and then was refunded - after having presented the bill to the fearful EU - begging the Europeans for the possible opportunity to restore what had been destroyed.

Since 1999 the White House has firmly secured not only the right of leader and arbiter, but also the role of major player in the region. It is US politicians, the military and multinationals who play the first fiddle in the orchestra, besides being the conductor.

The European Union is busy with window-dressing and cosmetic exercises (first and foremost, human rights rhetoric, as well as various hypocritical prudery) and this is all in US interest. It is no coincidence that the two largest military bases in South-Eastern Europe were built in Kosovo, namely Camp Bondsteel and Camp Film City.

Another result of the bombing - postponed with respect to 1999 - was the secession of Montenegro from Serbia. In June 2017, that country with a smaller population (622,373 inhabitants) and strategic importance with landings in the Adriatic Sea, thanks to the efforts of precarious politicians and, above all, former Communist leader Milo ukanovi, became the 29th member of NATO. It is worth mentioning that Montenegro, not even a EU member, supported the sanctions against its Slavic sister Russia.

It should be noted that the bombing and actual occupation of the Balkan countries by the US and NATO troops enabled its proponents to get considerably rich.

For example, Gen. Wesley Clarke, who commanded NATO forces in Kosovo, now owns a Canadian energy company that relies heavily on coal and synthetic fuel products from Kosovo. The list goes on. The main fact is that US multinationals were given a solid jackpot in the Balkans, which they would never give up.

Serbia has the potential for alternative development. At the same time, it is under the strict control of the United States and NATO, and the most intense pressure is being exerted on it.

The position of the Serbian leadership can be described as an act of political balance. So far it has borne fruit, but this situation cannot last forever. Moreover, not Russia, but the West is insistently asking Serbia to decide with whom it stands. On the eve of Sergei Lavrov's visit to Serbia (February 2018), and coinciding with the anniversary of the establishment of mutual diplomatic relations, there was a long conversation between President Aleksandar Vui and the MI-6 British Intelligence Chief. The content of the conversation is unknown, but the fact that such a meeting was held speaks for itself.

After Minister Lavrov's departure, talks took place between President Vui and Chancellor Merkel, the essence of which - apart from set phrases - was not made public. Later there was the visit of Wes Mitchell, assistant to the US Secretary of State (2017-2019), who came to Belgrade with the US new plan for Kosovo.

Significantly, Mitchell visited Pristina for the first time, where he clearly stated that the Kosovar security forces would be turned into an "army of the Republic of Kosovo" and that no one had the right of veto on that issue. This was a fundamentally new phase in US policy, because beforehand US diplomacy insisted that only in accordance with the Constitution would all national minorities have to give the green light for the creation of the Army of the Republic of Kosovo.

Reverting to the issue of EU membership in socio-economic terms, the situation in all Balkan countries is very difficult: high unemployment, lack of social prospects, poverty, general degradation of infrastructure and all spheres of life. According to the World Bank, in recent years the official unemployment rate in the region has been 2-3 times higher than the EU average.

All this is compounded by an actual loss of sovereignty. The Balkans have turned into a world periphery, and some experts claim that there are many large and small dormant or even persistent conflicts there, each of which could blow the region up.

For historical, cultural, religious, political, socio-economic and geopolitical reasons, the Balkans have been and still are a particularly vulnerable area of world politics. A severe process is developing within the framework of Islamist extremism (mainly the Wahhabi movement originating in Saudi Arabia), whose advocates are proactively working to create the so-called Balkan Caliphate. The achievement of this goal requires close interaction of its sponsors and organisers with the structures of transnational organised crime and international terrorism.

As a result, outbreaks in the region pose a threat to the security and territorial integrity of the Balkan countries and the rest of the world.

Efforts are being made in the region to concentrate the flow of all migrants from Africa, Afghanistan and the Near and Middle East. On the one hand, migration is something ordinary for the Balkans. Throughout history, human flows have crossed and still cross the Balkans. On the other hand, since 2015 the phenomenon has acquired a large scale and has been matched by such negative reactions that the Balkan countries are not able to cope with it even with EU funds. The fact is that this migration flow can radically change the ethno-religious and political situation in the region.

The vast majority of migrants to the Balkans are people aged between 27 and 30, who practice Islam. They are not usually constrained by money but by religious motives. The route of the vast majority of refugees goes through Turkey, from which they reach Greece by sea. Then they cross the Macedonian border, and move on to the Serbian border. Some of the refugees stay in Macedonia while others, after crossing the border, settle in Southern Serbia in areas with a Muslim majority. Some penetrate into the deep regions of Serbia, while the bulk move to EU countries.

There is also a problem related to migration, namely drug trafficking. Currently the Balkans are not just a window on Europe for drug terrorists, they are five doors wide open for natural geographical reasons: Albania-Macedonia-Kosovo-Central Bosnia-EU; 2. Turkey-Bulgaria-Macedonia-Southern Serbia-Bosnia; 3. Dubrovnik-Debeli Breg border crossing; 4. Rijeka, only if in Croatia and Slovenia; 5. Northern Balkans-Czech Republic-Scandinavian countries.

With specific reference to Bulgaria in political and socio-economic terms, the situation is no better than in the post-Yugoslav area. Bulgaria is pursuing a policy line agreed with the USA and the EU, and primarily with the White House.

In recent decades Bulgaria's foreign policy has been aimed at separating Bulgaria from Russia. At the same time, Bulgarian politicians are not as aggressive in their rhetoric and actions as the Polish or the Baltic ones, but pursue a very consistent breaking line. It is significant that even in assessing Bulgarias liberation by the Russia during the war against the Turks in 1877-1878, Bulgarias government is engaged in a substitution of concepts.

No one downplays the significant feat of soldiers and officers, regardless of their nationality, but they liberated Bulgaria under Russian flags after 480 years of Turkish domination. This means that, in modern conditions, focusing on listing the peoples who fought, and not on Russias role, is a political act that fits into the general policy line of "pushing" Russia out of the region.

At the same time, although not being a Russophile, the current Bulgarian President, Rumen Radev, advocates pragmatism in world politics and has repeatedly stated publicly the need to break the stalemate in Bulgarian-Russian relations.

The President, however, is a representative figure. Bulgaria is a Parliamentary Republic in which the Prime Minister plays the main role. Bojko Borisov acts in Merkel-style: he makes no harsh statements, but operates according to the US pattern. There are three US positions in Bulgaria (Bezmer and Graf-Ignatievo air bases, as well as the Novo-Selo training camp) and this determines Bulgaria's foreign policy.

Finally, the less attention Russia pays to the Balkans, the further they move away from Russia. Collaboration, like non-cooperation, bears ripe or rotten fruit. In the history of the Balkans, Russia has never brought confrontation to the region, but has always tried to eliminate it. When Greece was to re-enter the Western zone of influence according to the Yalta scheme, Stalin did not object, and the Greek Communists were left to their own devices in 1949 and largely fled to Albania.

In 1948, when Tito's Yugoslavia preferred the US umbrella, it was the United States that interfered in the sphere of peoples democracies. After the collapse of the Wall, Titos paradise on earth of the sinkholes (the so-called foibe) no longer had any reason to exist and was used as a prop for the White House to intervene militarily in the region after 51 years of CIA-heterodirected Titoism.

Professor Giancarlo Elia Valori is a world-renowned Italian economist and international relations expert, who serves as the President of the International World Group. In 1995, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem dedicated theGiancarlo Elia Valori chair of Peace and Regional Cooperation. Prof. Valori also holds chairs for Peace Studies at Yeshiva University in New York and at Peking University in China. Among his many honors from countries and institutions around the world, Prof. Valori is an Honorable of the Academy of Science at the Institute of France, as well as Knight Grand Cross and Knight of Labor of the Italian Republic.

Read the original post:

Reflections on Russia and the Slavic Balkans - IsraelDefense

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Afghanistan is facing a breakdown of its economic and social systems that risks turning into a humanitarian catastrophe, the European Union's foreign policy chief said on Sunday.

Avoiding the worst-case scenario would require the Taliban to comply with conditions that would enable more international assistance, Josep Borrell wrote in a blog post.

"Afghanistan is experiencing a serious humanitarian crisis and a socio-economic collapse is looming, which would be dangerous for Afghans, the region and international security," Borrell wrote.

Food prices in the country have jumped more than 50% since the Taliban took power in August as the freezing of $9 billion of Afghanistan's assets held in foreign central bank reserves and the withdrawal of foreign income stokes inflation.

The Afghan banking system is largely paralysed, with people unable to withdraw money, while the country's health system - which was heavily dependent on foreign aid - is close to collapse, according to Borrell.

"If the situation continues and with winter approaching, this risks turning into a humanitarian catastrophe," he wrote, adding that this could trigger mass migration into neighbouring states.

The 27-country EU has increased its humanitarian aid to Afghanistan since the Taliban took power, but halted its development assistance - a move also taken by other countries and the World Bank.

The EU response to the crisis would depend on the behaviour of the new Afghan authorities, Borrell said, and any resumption of relations would require compliance with conditions including human rights.

"This requires above all that the Taliban take the steps that will enable the international community to assist the Afghan people," he said, adding that female staff from international agencies must be able to do their job.

Widespread reports of human rights abuses and the exclusion of girls from schools have dented optimism that the Taliban's approach has changed since it first ran Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001.

Story continues

Borrell met Qatari officials last week in the Qatari capital Doha, where the Taliban have a representation.

He said Qatar's contacts with the Taliban were aimed at moderating their behaviour, and urged Doha to use its contacts with them to ensure the "worst scenario" for Afghanistan could be avoided.

(Reporting by Kate Abnett; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

Follow this link:

Afghanistan on verge of socio-economic collapse, EU's top ...

Data HubThursday October 14 2021

The entrance to Fluorspar Mining Company in Elgeyo Marakwet County, on September 28, 2021. The factory collapsed in 2016. PHOTO | JARED NYATAYA | NMG

The collapse of Kenya Fluorspar Company, the single company that has been in operation in Elgeyo Marakwet county for over 50 years has impacted the socio-economic welfare of the residents negatively.

The multibillion-shilling mining company today is a pale shadow of itself after it wind up operations almost six years ago over what the management attributed to a prolonged global slump in commodity prices.

Fluorspar, used in the manufacture of fluoride for cooling plants, was for decades mined in the 970- acre swathe of Kimwarer, Keiyo South sub-county, forming part of the riches of Kerio Valley basin.

But the company that was the backbone of economic livelihood of thousands of residents through employment and business opportunities is just but a name.

Machinery that once roared with life now rusts away in the compound that is today bushy. Thousands of workers who were rendered jobless are faced with serious socio-economic challenges.

At its peak, the company exported over 106 000 tonnes of fluorspar before it scaled down its operations in 2014 before halting them in 2016 due to poor international market prices for the minerals.

It had assets worth over Sh5 billion and employed over 3,000 people directly and indirectly contributing to growth and development of economy of the semi-arid region.

What was the main administrative office, factory and Export Processing Zone(EPZ) have all been covered by bushes and tall grass. It has been turned into a grazing field for livestock roaming the region.

The once vibrant Kobil petrol station at the entrance of the main factory has been vandalised while the unprotected open minefields are full of water, posing danger to residents and livestock.

Operations of the company were instrumental in sustaining the transport and hotel industry that created a lot of job opportunities, said Ben Komen, a former logistic officer at the company.

Fluorspar mined at Kimwarer was transported by lorries across Kerio Valley to Flax market before being load on wagons and taken to Mombasa port via railway.

More than 300 lorries transported the minerals from the factory while 200 others were involved in transportation from Kaptagat to Mombasa. There were over 200 lorries operating in the mining field but such opportunities in the transport sector are all gone with the collapse of the company, said Wesley Kiplagat, one of the residents and former worker at the firm.

The Kimwarer Nyaru road, which was being maintained by the company, is now in a pathetic state and requires urgent repairs to facilitate smooth transport operations along the Kerio region belt.

The Kimwarer-Nyaru road was rendered impassable after the company closed shop, said Joseph Cheruiyot, Kimwarer village elder.

The company had primary and nursery schools and a medical centre and managed athletic programmes and other community activities. They too collapsed with the closure of the company.

The learning institutions have been taken over by the local community while the health facility was handed over by Elgeyo Marakwet County Government.

A prolonged global slump in commodity prices has negatively impacted extractive business including fluorspar. Low demand and prices since 2012 have led to losses for the last three years, said Nico Spangenberg, the then Company Managing Director in an interview before it suspended operations.

A collapse in market conditions led to a dramatic reduction in fluorspar prices and demand and thus the company operations have become unsustainable in the current market, explained Mr Nico.

At the height of its operations, the company paid an average of Sh20 million monthly for electricity.

The exit of the company now leaves South Africa and Morocco as the remaining African source countries in the world market.

South Africa produces 300,000 tonnes annually, Morocco 100,000 tonnes while Kenya produces an average of 120,000 tonnes.

In terms of global production, China produces 60 percent and Mexico 20 percent complicating the market situation resulting in the closure of mining firms including the Kenya Fluorspar and others in Bulgaria.

Some of the markets which were affected by the closure of the company include Muskut, Kimwarer, Turesia, Kabokbok, Kowochii and several trading centres in Soy.

Only three out of 13 shops survived when the company suspended its operations in 2009/2010 but the recent move has dealt a major blow to us, said Leah Jepkurui, an hotelier at Kimwarer market.

Micro-finance enterprises and hotels had set base at Kimwarer market banking on employees from the mining company.

We have no option but to relocate to other areas due to lack of business since the sacked employees were our main clients, said Mr Joseph Kwambai who operates an M-Pesa shop at Muskut market.

Local leaders petitioned the government to search for a strategic partner and revive the company.

Led by Governor Alex Tolgos they said machinery worth millions was going to waste.

It is unfortunate that the machinery is going to rust while hundreds of workers who were sacked are faced with serious economic hardships, Mr Tolgos said.

Revival of the company will go a long way in boosting socio-economic status of our people, Mr Tolgos added.

Leaders termed the exit as a calculated move to avoid paying compensation to the displaced families and evade remitting tax to the government.

Forensic audit need to be carried out on the company books of account to establish whether it has been remitting taxes, demanded Micah Kigen, one of the leaders. He demanded for implementation of a taskforce report that recommended the government to compensate for families displaced from the mining field.

Both the government and the company need to offer better compensation for the families to empower them to earn decent livelihood, said Mr Kigen.

He dismissed the Sh450 per acre the government had offered the families for land reimbursement, terming it as too little.

But the more than 1,400 beneficiaries of the Sh1 billion set aside by the government for compensation will have to wait until the National Lands Commission (NLC) completes its verification process.

The government is facing an uphill task in vetting thousands of claims to determine genuine beneficiaries.

According to NLC acting chief executive officer Kabale Tache Arero, the residents will only know their fate after the commission officials establishes the genuine beneficiaries.

Ministry of Mining, NLC came up with a taskforce to handle the issue of past and present compensation until then, no payment will take place, Ms Arero said.

In 2018, the government announced the start of vetting of residents in a bid to determine who will benefit from Sh1 billion in compensation after they were displaced to pave way for mining activities but the process is yet to be concluded.

The delay in compensation has been attributed to push and pull between the Ministry of Mining, NLC and office of the county commissioner of Elgeyo Marakwet over the records of previous payments.

PAYMENT DROUGHT

There were people who were compensated in the 1970s by the county council, when it was raised, we were summoned by the National Assemblywe had to request information from the county commissioner but he gave us inconclusive information barring us to finalise this matter, Ms Arero.

A cross section of residents have expressed fears that the payment process has taken longer as expected while the amount offered to them by the government is 'too little.

Since we were displaced 50 years ago, the value of land has been appreciating and that is why we feel the Sh1 billion announced by the government is a negligible figure, said Joseph Kandie Chairman Kimwarer Sugutek Community lobby group.

They want thousands of workers affected by the companys closure to be considered for employment should a new investor take over the management of the factory.

[emailprotected], [emailprotected]

Original post:

Collapse of fluorspar miner leaves Elgeyo residents ...

Fall of a complex human society

Desolation, from The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole (1836)

Societal collapse (also known as civilizational collapse) is the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of socioeconomic complexity, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence.[1] Possible causes of a societal collapse include natural catastrophe, war, pestilence, famine, population decline, and mass migration. A collapsed society may revert to a more primitive state (Dark Ages), be absorbed into a stronger society, or completely disappear.

Virtually all civilizations have suffered such a fate, regardless of their size or complexity, but some of them later revived and transformed, such as China, India, and Egypt. However, others never recovered, such as the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, the Mayan civilization, and the Easter Island civilization.[1] Societal collapse is generally quick[1] but rarely abrupt.[2] However, some cases involve not a collapse but only a gradual fading away, such as the British Empire since 1918.[3]

Anthropologists, (quantitative) historians, and sociologists have proposed a variety of explanations for the collapse of civilizations involving causative factors such as environmental change, depletion of resources, unsustainable complexity, invasion, disease, decay of social cohesion, rising inequality, secular decline of cognitive abilities, loss of creativity, and misfortune.[1][4][5] However, complete extinction of a culture is not inevitable, and in some cases, the new societies that arise from the ashes of the old one are evidently its offspring, despite a dramatic reduction in sophistication.[4] Moreover, the influence of a collapsed society, such as the Western Roman Empire, may linger on long after its death.[6]

The study of societal collapse, collapsology, is a topic for specialists of history, anthropology, sociology, and political science. More recently, they are joined by experts in cliodynamics and study of complex systems.[7][4]

Joseph Tainter frames societal collapse in his The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), which is a seminal and founding work of the academic discipline on societal collapse.[8] He elaborates that 'collapse' is a "broad term," but in the sense of societal collapse, he views it as "a political process."[9] He further narrows societal collapse as a rapid process (within "few decades") of "substantial loss of sociopolitical structure," giving the fall of the Western Roman Empire as "the most widely known instance of collapse" in the Western world.[9]

Others, particularly in response to the popular Collapse (2005) by Jared Diamond[10] and more recently, have argued that societies discussed as cases of collapse are better understood through resilience and societal transformation,[11] or "reorganization", especially if collapse is understood as a "complete end" of political systems, which according to Shmuel Eisenstadt has not taken place at any point.[12] Eisenstadt also points out that a clear differentiation between total or partial decline and "possibilities of regeneration" is crucial for the preventive purpose of the study of societal collapse.[12]

The social scientist Luke Kemp analyzed dozens of civilizations, which he defined as "a society with agriculture, multiple cities, military dominance in its geographical region and a continuous political structure," from 3000 BC to 600 AD and calculated that the average life span of a civilization is close to 340 years.[1] Of them, the most durable were the Kushite Kingdom in Northeast Africa (1,150 years), the Aksumite Empire in Africa (1,100 years), and the Vedic civilization in South Asia and the Olmecs in Mesoamerica (both 1,000 years), and the shortest-lived were the Nanda Empire in India (24) and the Qin Dynasty in China (14).[13]

A statistical analysis of empires by complex systems specialist Samuel Arbesman suggests that collapse is generally a random event and does not depend on age. That is analogous to what evolutionary biologists call the Red Queen hypothesis, which asserts that for a species in a harsh ecology, extinction is a persistent possibility.[1]

Contemporary discussions about societal collapse are seeking resilience by suggesting societal transformation.[14]

Because human societies are complex systems, common factors may contribute to their decline that are economical, environmental, demographic, social and cultural, and they may cascade into another and build up to the point that could overwhelm any mechanisms that would otherwise maintain stability. Unexpected and abrupt changes, which experts call nonlinearities, are some of the warnings signs.[3] In some cases a natural disaster (e.g. tsunami, earthquake, pandemic, massive fire or climate change), may precipitate a collapse. Other factors such as a Malthusian catastrophe, overpopulation, or resource depletion might be contributory factors of collapse, but studies of past societies seem to suggest that they did not cause the collapse alone.[15] Significant inequity and exposed corruption may combine with lack of loyalty to established political institutions and result in an oppressed lower class rising up and seizing power from a smaller wealthy elite in a revolution. The diversity of forms that societies evolve corresponds to diversity in their failures. Jared Diamond suggests that societies have also collapsed through deforestation, loss of soil fertility, restrictions of trade and/or rising endemic violence.[16]

Any society has periods of prosperity and hardship, but when decline from the height of civilization is that dramatic, one can safely say that it has collapsed.[17] However, in the case of the Western Roman Empire, some argued that it did not collapse but merely transformed.[18]

Archeologists identified signs of a megadrought for a millennium between 5,000 and 4,000 years ago in Africa and Asia. The drying of the Green Sahara not only turned it into a desert but also disrupted the monsoon seasons in South and Southeast Asia and caused flooding in East Asia, which prevented successful harvest and the development of complex culture. It coincided with and may have caused the decline and the fall of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization.[19] The dramatic shift in climate is known as the 4.2 kiloyear event.[20]

The highly-advanced Indus Valley Civilization took roots around 3000 BC in what is now northwestern India and Pakistan and collapsed around 1700 BC. Since the Indus script has yet to be deciphered, the causes of its demise remain a mystery, but there is some evidence pointing to natural disasters. Signs of a gradual decline began to emerge in 1900 BC, and two centuries later, most of the cities had been abandoned. Archeological evidence suggests an increase in interpersonal violence and in infectious diseases like leprosy and tuberculosis.[22][23] Historians and archeologists believe that severe and long-lasting drought and a decline in trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia caused the collapse.[24] Evidence for earthquakes has also been discovered. Sea level changes are also found at two possible seaport sites along the Makran coast which are now inland. Earthquakes may have contributed to decline of several sites by direct shaking damage or by changes in sea level or in water supply.[25][26][27]

Volcanic eruptions can abruptly influence the climate. During a large eruption, sulfur dioxide (SO2) is expelled into the stratosphere, where it could stay for years and gradually get oxidized into sulfate aerosols. Being highly reflective, sulfate aerosols reduce the incident sunlight and cool the Earth's surface. By drilling into glaciers and ice sheets, scientists can access the archives of the history of atmospheric composition. A team of multidisciplinary researchers led by Joseph McConnell of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada deduced that a volcanic eruption occurred in 43 BC, a year after the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March (March 15) in 44 BC, which left a power vacuum and led to bloody civil wars. According to historical accounts, it was also a period of poor weather, crop failure, widespread famine, and disease. Analyses of tree rings and cave stalagmites from different parts of the globe provided complementary data. The Northern Hemisphere got drier, but the Southern Hemisphere became wetter. Indeed, the Greek historian Appian recorded that there was a lack of flooding in Egypt, which also faced famine and pestilence. Rome's interest in Egypt as a source of food intensified, and the aforementioned problems and civil unrest weakened Egypt's ability to resist. Egypt came under Roman rule after Cleopatra committed suicide in 30 BC. While it is difficult to say for certain whether Egypt would have become a Roman province if Okmok volcano (in modern-day Alaska) had not erupted, the eruption likely hastened the process.[28]

More generally, recent research pointed to climate change as a key player in the decline and fall of historical societies in China, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. In fact, paleoclimatogical temperature reconstruction suggests that historical periods of social unrest, societal collapse, and population crash and significant climate change often occurred simultaneously. A team of researchers from Mainland China and Hong Kong were able to establish a causal connection between climate change and large-scale human crises in pre-industrial times. Short-term crises may be caused by social problems, but climate change was the ultimate cause of major crises, starting with economic depressions.[30] Moreover, since agriculture is highly dependent on climate, any changes to the regional climate from the optimum can induce crop failures.[31]

The Mongol conquests corresponded to a period of cooling in the Northern Hemisphere between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the Medieval Warm Period was giving way to the Little Ice Age, which caused ecological stress. In Europe, the cooling climate did not directly facilitate the Black Death, but it caused wars, mass migration, and famine, which helped diseases spread.[31]

A more recent example is the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century in Europe, which was a period of inclement weather, crop failure, economic hardship, extreme intergroup violence, and high mortality because of the Little Ice Age. The Maunder Minimum involved sunspots being exceedingly rare. Episodes of social instability track the cooling with a time lap of up to 15 years, and many developed into armed conflicts, such as the Thirty Years' War (16181648),[30] which started as a war of succession to the Bohemian throne. Animosity between Protestants and Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire (in modern-day Germany) added fuel to the fire. Soon, it escalated to a huge conflict that involved all major European powers and devastated much of Germany. When the war had ended, some regions of the empire had seen their populations drop by as much as 70%.[note 1] However, not all societies faced crises during this period. Tropical countries with high carrying capacities and trading economies did not suffer much because the changing climate did not induce an economic depression in those places.[30] Moreover, by the mid-eighteenth century, as global temperatures started to rise, the ecological stress faced by Europeans also began to fade. Mortality rates dropped and the level of violence fell, which paved the way for the Pax Britannica, a period that witnessed the emergence of a variety of innovations in technology (which enabled industrialization), medicine (which improved hygiene), and social welfare (such as the world's first welfare programs in Germany), making life even more comfortable.[17]

A mysterious loose confederation of fierce maritime marauders, known as the Sea Peoples, was identified as one of the main causes of the Late Bronze Age collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean.[33] The Sea Peoples might have themselves been victims of the environmental changes that led to widespread famine and precipitated the Collapse.[2] After the Battle of Kadesh against the Egyptians in 1285 BC, the Hittite Empire began to show signs of decline. Attacks by the Sea Peoples accelerated the process, and internal power struggles, crop failures, and famine were contributory factors. The Egyptians, with whom the Hittites signed a peace treaty, supplied them with food in times of famine, but it was not enough. Around 1200 BC, the Sea Peoples seized a port on the west coast of Asia Minor, cutting off the Hittites from their trade routes from which their supply of grain came. Hattusa, the Hittite capital, was destroyed. Some Hittite territories survived but would be were eventually occupied by the Assyrians in the seventh century BC.

The Minoan Civilization, based on Crete, centered on religious rituals and seaborne trade. In around 1450 BC, it was absorbed into Mycenaean Greece, which itself went into serious decline around 1200 BC because of various military conflicts, including the Dorian invasion from the north and attacks from the Sea Peoples.

In the third century BC, a Eurasian nomadic people, the Xiongnu, began threatening China's frontiers, but by the first century BC, they had been completely expelled. They then turned their attention westward and displaced various other tribes in Eastern and Central Europe, which led to a cascade of events. Attila rose to power as leader of the Huns and initiated a campaign of invasions and looting and went as far as Gaul (modern-day France). Attila's Huns were clashing with the Roman Empire, which had already been divided into two halves for ease of administration: the Eastern Roman Empire and the Western Roman Empire. Despite their decisive victory at the Battle of Chalons in 451 AD, the Romans were unable to stop Attila from attacking Roman Italy. Northern Italian cities like Milan were ravaged. The Huns never again posed a threat to the Romans after Attila's death, but the rise of the Huns also forced the Germanic peoples out of their territories and made those groups press their way into parts of France, Spain, Italy, and even as far south as North Africa. The city of Rome itself came under attack by the Visigoths in 410 and was plundered by the Vandals in 455.[note 2] A combination of internal strife, economic weakness, and relentless invasions by the Germanic peoples pushed the Western Roman Empire into terminal decline. The last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was dethroned in 476 by the German Odoacer, who declared himself King of Italy.

In the eleventh century AD, North Africa's populous and flourishing civilization collapsed after it had exhausted its resources in internal fighting and suffering devastation from the invasion of the Bedouin tribes of Banu Sulaym and Banu Hilal.[38] Ibn Khaldun noted that all of the lands ravaged by Banu Hilal invaders had become arid desert.[39]

In 1206, a warlord achieved dominance over all Mongols with the title Genghis Khan and began his campaign of territorial expansion. The Mongols' highly flexible and mobile cavalry enabled them to conquer their enemies with efficiency and swiftness. In the brutal pillaging that followed Mongol invasions during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the invaders decimated the populations of China, Russia, the Middle East, and Islamic Central Asia. Later Mongol leaders, such as Timur, destroyed many cities, slaughtered thousands of people, and irreparably damaged the ancient irrigation systems of Mesopotamia. The invasions transformed a settled society to a nomadic one.[41] In China, for example, a combination of war, famine, and pestilence during the Mongol conquests halved the population, a decline of around 55 million people.[31] The Mongols also displaced large numbers of people and created power vacuums. The Khmer Empire went into decline and was replaced by the Thais, who were pushed southward by the Mongols. The Vietnamese, who succeeded in defeating the Mongols, also turned their attention to the south and by 1471 began to subjugate the Chams. When Vietnam's Later L Dynasty went into decline in the late 1700s, a bloody civil war erupted between the Trnh family in the north and the Nguyn family in the south.[note 3] More Cham provinces were seized by the Nguyn warlords.[44] Finally, Nguyn nh emerged victorious and declared himself Emperor of Vietnam (changing the name from Annam) with the title Gia Long and established the Nguyn Dynasty. The last remaining principality of Champa, Panduranga (modern-day Phan Rang, Vietnam), survived until 1832,[45] when Emperor Minh Mng (Nguyn Phc m) conquered it after centuries of ChamVietnamese wars. Vietnam's policy of assimilation involved the forcefeeding of pork to Muslims and beef to Hindus, which fueled resentment. An uprising followed, the first and only war between Vietnam and the jihadists, until it was crushed.[46][47][48]

Around 1210 BC, the New Kingdom of Egypt shipped large amounts of grains to the disintegrating Hittite Empire. Thus, there had been a food shortage in Anatolia but not the Nile Valley.[2] However, that soon changed. Although Egypt managed to deliver a decisive and final defeat to the Sea Peoples at the Battle of Xois, Egypt itself went into steep decline. The collapse of all other societies in the Eastern Mediterranean disrupted established trade routes and caused widespread economic depression. Government workers became underpaid, which resulted in the first labor strike in recorded history and undermined royal authority.[33] There was also political infighting between different factions of government. Bad harvest from the reduced flooding at the Nile led to a major famine. Food prices rose to eight times their normal values and occasionally even reached twenty-four times. Runaway inflation followed. Attacks by the Libyans and Nubians made things even worse. Throughout the Twentieth Dynasty (11871064 BC), Egypt devolved from a major power in the Mediterranean to a deeply divided and weakened state, which later came to be ruled by the Libyans and the Nubians.[2]

Between 481 BC and 221 BC, the Period of the Warring States in China ended by King Zheng of the Qin dynasty succeeding in defeating six competing factions and thus becoming the first Chinese emperor, titled Qin Shi Huang. A ruthless but efficient ruler, he raised a disciplined and professional army and introduced a significant number of reforms, such as unifying the language and creating a single currency and system of measurement. In addition, he funded dam constructions and began building the first segment of what was to become the Great Wall of China to defend his realm against northern nomads. Nevertheless, internal feuds and rebellions made his empire fall apart after his death in 210 B.C.

In the early fourteenth century AD, Britain suffered repeated rounds of crop failures from unusually heavy rainfall and flooding. Much livestock either starved or drowned. Food prices skyrocketed, and King Edward II attempted to rectify the situation by imposing price controls, but vendors simply refused to sell at such low prices. In any case, the act was abolished by the Lincoln Parliament in 1316. Soon, people from commoners to nobles were finding themselves short of food. Many resorted to begging, crime, and eating animals they otherwise would not eat. People in northern England had to deal with raids from Scotland. There were even reports of cannibalism.

In Continental Europe, things were at least just as bad. The Great Famine of 13151317 coincided with the end of the Medieval Warm Period and the start of the Little Ice Age. Some historians suspect that the change in climate was due to Mount Tarawera in New Zealand erupting in 1314.[50] The Great Famine was, however, only one of the calamities striking Europe that century, as the Hundred Years' War and Black Death would soon follow.[50][51] (Also see the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages.) Recent analysis of tree rings complement historical records and show that the summers of 13141316 were some of the wettest on record over a period of 700 years.[51]

Historically, the dawn of agriculture led to the rise of contagious diseases.[52] Compared to their hunting-gathering counterparts, agrarian societies tended to be sedentary, have higher population densities, be in frequent contact with livestock, and be more exposed to contaminated water supplies and higher concentrations of garbage. Poor sanitation, a lack of medical knowledge, superstitions, and sometimes a combination of disasters exacerbated the problem.[1][52][53] The journalist Michael Rosenwald wrote that "history shows that past pandemics have reshaped societies in profound ways. Hundreds of millions of people have died. Empires have fallen. Governments have cracked. Generations have been annihilated."[54]

From the description of symptoms by the Greek physician Galen, which included coughing, fever, (blackish) diarrhea, swollen throat, and thirst, modern experts identified the probable culprits of the Antonine Plague (165180 A5) to have been smallpox or measles.[54][55] The disease likely started in China and spread to the West via the Silk Road. Roman troops first contracted the disease in the East before they returned home. Striking a virgin population, the Antonine Plague had dreadful mortality rates; between one third to half of the population, 60 to 70 million people, perished. Roman cities suffered from a combination of overcrowding, poor hygiene, and unhealthy diets. They quickly became epicenters. Soon, the disease reached as far as Gaul and mauled Roman defenses-along the Rhine. The ranks of the previously formidable Roman army had to be filled with freed slaves, German mercenaries, criminals, and gladiators. That ultimately failed to prevent the Germanic tribes from crossing the Rhine. On the civilian side, the Antonine Plague created drastic shortages of businessmen, which disrupted trade, and farmers, which led to a food crisis. An economic depression followed and government revenue fell. Some accused Emperor Marcus Aurelius and Co-Emperor Lucius Verus, both of whom victims of the disease, of affronting the gods, but others blamed Christians. However, the Antonine Plague strengthened the position of the monotheistic religion of Christianity in the formerly-polytheistic society, as Christians won public admiration for their good works. Ultimately the Roman army, the Roman cities, the size of the empire and its trade routes, which were required for Roman power and influence to exist, facilitated the spread of the disease. The Antonine Plague is considered by some historians as a useful starting point for understanding the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire. It was followed by the Plague of Cyprian (249262 AD) and the Plague of Justinian (541-542). Together, they cracked the foundations of the Roman Empire.[55]

In the sixth century AD, while the Western Roman Empire had already succumbed to attacks by the Germanic tribes, the Eastern Roman Empire stood its ground. In fact, a peace treaty with the Persians allowed Emperor Justinian the Great to concentrate on recapturing territories belonging to the Western Empire. His generals, Belisarius and Narses, achieved a number of important victories against the Ostrogoths and the Vandals. However, their hope of keeping the Western Empire was dashed by the arrival of what became known as the Plague of Justinian (541-542). According to the Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea, the epidemic originated in China and Northeastern India and reached the Eastern Roman Empire via trade routes terminating in the Mediterranean. Modern scholarship has deduced that the epidemic was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the same one that would later bring the Black Death, the single deadliest pandemic in human history, but how many actually died from it remains uncertain. Current estimates put the figure between thirty and fifty million people,[53] a significant portion of the human population at that time.[57] The Plague arguably cemented the fate of Rome.[53]

The epidemic also devastated the Sasanian Empire in Persia. Caliph Abu Bakr seized the opportunity to launch military campaigns that overran the Sassanians and captured Roman-held territories in the Caucasus, the Levant, Egypt, and elsewhere in North Africa. Before the Justinian Plague, the Mediterranean world had been commercially and culturally stable. After the Plague, it fractured into a trio of civilizations battling for power: the Islamic Civilization, the Byzantine Empire, and what later became known as Medieval Europe. With so many people dead, the supply of workers, many of whom were slaves, was critically short. Landowners had no choice but to lend pieces of land to serfs to work the land in exchange for military protection and other privileges. That sowed the seeds of feudalism.[58]

There is evidence that the Mongol expeditions may have spread the bubonic plague across much of Eurasia, which helped to spark the Black Death of the early fourteenth century.[59][60][61][62] The Italian historian Gabriele de Mussi wrote that the Mongols catapulted the corpses of those who contracted the plague into Caffa (now Feodossia, Crimea) during the siege of that city and that soldiers who were transported from there brought the plague to Mediterranean ports. However, that account of the origin of the Black Death in Europe remains controversial, though plausible, because of the complex epidemiology of the plague. Modern epidemiologists do not believe that the Black Death had a single source of spreading into Europe. Research into the past on this topic is further complicated by politics and the passage of time. It is difficult to distinguish between natural epidemics and biological warfare, both of which are common throughout human history.[60] Biological weapons are economical because they turn an enemy casualty into a delivery system and so were favored in armed conflicts of the past. Furthermore, more soldiers died of disease than in combat until recently.[note 4][57] In any case, by the 1340s, Europe faced a combination of overpopulation and famine. As a result, many had weakened immune systems, especially those living in squalid conditions.[17] Whatever its origins, the Black Death killed around one third of the population in medieval Europe,[17] or about 200 million people.[53] The widening trade routes in the Late Middle Ages helped the plague spread rapidly.[54] It took the European population more than two centuries to return to its level before the pandemic.[53] Consequently, it destabilized most of society and likely undermined feudalism and the authority of the Church.[63][17] In parts of England, for example, 80% of the population living in poverty were killed. Economic deprivation and war followed.[17] In England and France, for example, a combination of the plague and the Hundred Years' War killed about half the population.

With labor in short supply, workers' bargaining power increased dramatically. Various inventions that reduced the cost of labor, saved time, and raised productivity, such as the three-field crop rotation system, the iron plow, the use of manure to fertilize the soil, and the water pumps, were widely adopted. Many former serfs, now free from feudal obligations, relocated to the cities and changed profession to crafts and trades. The more successful ones became the new middle class. Trade flourished as demands for a myriad of consumer goods rose. Society became wealthier and could afford to fund the arts and the sciences.[58] The Black Death marked the end of the Middle Ages in Europe;[17] the Renaissance had begun.[58]

Encounters between European explorers and Native Americans exposed the latter to a variety of diseases of extraordinary virulence. Having migrated from Northeastern Asia 15,000 years ago, Native Americans had not been introduced to the plethora of contagious diseases that emerged after the rise of agriculture in the Old World. As such, they had immune systems that were ill-equipped to handle the diseases to which their counterparts in Eurasia had become resistant. When the Europeans arrived in the Americas, in short order, the indigenous populations of the Americas found themselves facing smallpox, measles, whooping cough, and the bubonic plague, among others. In tropical areas, malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, river blindness, and others appeared. Most of these tropical diseases were traced to Africa.[65] Smallpox ravaged Mexico in the 1520s and killed 150,000 in Tenochtitln alone, including the emperor, and Peru in the 1530s, which aided the European conquerors.[66] A combination of Spanish military attacks and evolutionarily novel diseases finished off the Aztec Empire in the sixteenth century.[1][65] It is commonly believed that the death of as much as 90% or 95% of the Native American population of the New World was caused by Old World diseases,[65][67] though new research suggests tuberculosis from seals and sea lions played a significant part.[68]

Similar events took place in Oceania and Madagascar.[65] Smallpox was externally brought to Australia. The first recorded outbreak, in 1789, devastated the Aboriginal population. The extent of the outbreak is disputed, but some sources claim that it killed about 50% of coastal Aboriginal populations on the east coast.[69] There is an ongoing historical debate concerning two rival and irreconcilable theories about how the disease first entered the continent (see History of smallpox). Smallpox continued to be a deadly disease and killed an estimated 300 million people in the twentieth century alone, but a vaccine, the first of any kind, had been available since 1796.[57]

As humans spread around the globe, human societies flourish and become more dependent on trade, and because urbanization means that people leave sparsely-populated rural areas for densely-populated neighborhoods, infectious diseases spread much more easily. Outbreaks are frequent, even in the modern era, but medical advances have been able to alleviate their impacts.[53] In fact, the human population grew tremendously in the twentieth century, as did the population of farm animals, from which diseases could jump to humans, but in the developed world and increasingly also in the developing world, people are less likely to fall victim to infectious diseases than ever before. For instance, the advent of antibiotics, starting with penicillin in 1928, has resulted in the saving of the lives of hundreds of millions of people suffering from bacterial infections. However, there is no guarantee that would continue because bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics, and doctors and public health experts such as former Chief Medical Officer for England Sally Davies have even warned of an incoming "antibiotic apocalypse." The World Health Organization warned in 2019 that the anti-vaccination movement was one of the top threats to global health because it has led to the return of almost-forgotten diseases such as measles.[57]

Writing in The Histories, the Greek historian Polybius largely blamed the decline of the Hellenistic world on low fertility rates. He asserted that while protracted wars and deadly epidemics were absent, people were generally more interested in "show and money and the pleasures of an idle life" than in marrying and raising children. Those who had children, according to him, had no more than one or two, with the express intention of "leaving them well off or bringing them up in extravagant luxury."[70][71] However, it is difficult to estimate the actual fertility rate of Greece at the time because Polybius did not provide any data for analysis but gave only a narrative that likely came from his impression of the kinds of Greeks with whom he was familiar: the elites, rather than the commoners. Otherwise, the population decline would have been abrupt. Nevertheless, the Greek case parallels the Roman one.[5]

But since more plenteous honor has come to planes that yield a sterile shade, than to any three, we fruit-bearers (if as a nut tree I am counted among them) have begun to lexuriate in spreading foliage. How apples grow not every year, and injured grapes and injured berries are brought home: now she that would seem beautiful harms her womb, and rare in these days is she who would be a parent.

Ovid, Nux[72][5]

By around 100 BC, the notion of romantic love started becoming popular in Rome. In the final years of the Roman Republic, Roman women were well known for divorcing, having extramarital affairs, and being reluctant to bear children.[73] Viewing that as a threat to the social and political order and believing that the Roman upper-class was becoming increasingly cosmopolitan and individualistic, upon the establishment of the Roman Empire, Caesar Augustus introduced legislation designed to increase the birthrate.[74][73] Men aged 20 to 60 and women aged 20 to 50 were legally obliged to marry, and widowed or divorced individuals within the relevant age range were required to remarry. Exemptions were granted to those who had already had three children in the case of free-born people and four in the case of freed slaves. For political or bureaucratic office, preference was given to those with at least three legitimate children. Diminished inheritance rights awaited those who failed to reproduce.[73] In a speech to Roman nobles, he expressed his pressing concern over the low birthrates of the Roman elite. He also said that freed slaves had been granted citizenship and Roman allies given seats in government to increase the power and prosperity of Rome, but the "original stock" was not replacing itself and leaving the task to foreigners.[75] Roman poet Ovid shared the same observation. (See right.)[5]

However, Augustan pro-natal policies proved unsuccessful.[5] All that they did was fuel nostalgia and disdain for the present and went no further than reaffirming the past-oriented, rural, and patriarchal values of Imperial Rome.[73] Like their Greek counterparts, Roman elites had access to contraception, though that knowledge was lost to Europe during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, and so could enjoy sexual intercourse without having to rear additional children. In other words, people of high socio-economic class of the Greco-Roman world were able to control their own fertility. Also, that ability likely trickled down to the lower classes. In any case, the result was predictable. The absence of modern medicine, which would have extended life expectancy, caused their numbers to start shrinking. Moreover, population decline coincided with people being less religious and more questioning of traditions, both of which contributed to falling fertility as more and more people came to the conclusion that it was up to them, rather than the gods, on how many children they had.[5]

Other population imbalances may occur when low fertility rates coincides with high dependency ratios or when there is an unequal distribution of wealth between elites and commoners, both of which characterized the Roman Empire.[76][77][78]

Several key features of human societal collapse can be related to population dynamics.[79] For example, the native population of Cusco, Peru at the time of the Spanish conquest was stressed by an imbalanced sex ratio.[80]

There is strong evidence that humans also display population cycles.[81] Societies as diverse as those of England and France during the Roman, medieval, and early modern eras, of Egypt during Greco-Roman and Ottoman rule, and of various dynasties in China all showed similar patterns of political instability and violence becoming considerably more common after times of relative peace, prosperity, and sustained population growth. Quantitatively, periods of unrest included many times more events of instability per decade and occurred when the population was declining, rather than increasing. Pre-industrial agrarian societies typically faced instability after one or two centuries of stability. However, a population approaching its carrying capacity alone is not enough to trigger general decline if the people remained united and the ruling class strong. Other factors had to be involved, such as having more aspirants for positions of the elite than the society could realistically support (elite overproduction), which led to social strife, and chronic inflation, which caused incomes to fall and threatened the fiscal health of the state.[82] In particular, an excess in especially young adult male population predictably led to social unrest and violence, as the third and higher-order parity sons had trouble realizing their economic desires and became more open to extreme ideas and actions.[83] Adults in their 20s are especially prone to radicalization.[84] Most historical periods of social unrest lacking in external triggers, such as natural calamities, and most genocides can be readily explained as a result of a built-up youth bulge.[83] As those trends intensified, they jeopardized the social fabric, which facilitated the decline.[82]

Historical analysts have proposed a myriad of theories to explain the rise and fall of civilizations.[17] Such theories have evolved from being purely social and ethical, to ideological and ethnocentric, and finally to where they are today, multidisciplinary studies. They have become much more sophisticated.[2]

The anthropologist Joseph Tainter theorized that collapsed societies essentially exhausted their own designs and were unable to adapt to natural diminishing returns for what they knew as their method of survival.[85] It matches closely with the historian Arnold J. Toynbee's idea that they were confronted with problems they could not solve. For Toynbee, key to civilization is the ability to solve problems and a society declines when its ability to do so stagnates or falls.[17] (See more in the section Toynbee's theory of decay.) The philosopher Oswald Spengler argued that a civilization in its "winter" would see a disinclination for abstract thinking.[2] The psychologists David Rand and Jonathan Cohen theorized that people switch between two broad modes of thinking. The first is fast and automatic but rigid, and the second is slow and analytical but more flexible. Rand and Cohen believe that explains why people continue with self-destructive behaviors when logical reasoning would have alerted them of the dangers ahead. People switch from the second to the first mode of thinking after the introduction of an invention that dramatically increases the standards of living. Rand and Cohen pointed to the recent examples of the antibiotic overuse leading to resistant bacteria and failure to save for retirement. Tainter noted that according to behavioral economics, the human decision-making process tends to be more irrational than rational and that as the rate of innovation declines, as measured by the number of inventions relative to the amount of money spent on research and development, it becomes progressively harder for there to be a technological solution to the problem of societal collapse.[6]

Edward Dutton and the social scientist Michael Woodley of Menie make the case in their book At Our Wits' End (2018) that to the extent that intelligence is heritable, once a society reaches a certain level of development and prosperity the tendency of the cognitive elite to produce relatively few children (the negative correlation between intelligence and fertility) precipitates its decline. These authors argue that in multiple historical societies, such as Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient China, and the Islamic Civilization, the more intelligent individuals not only had access to contraception but were also more likely to use it effectively. While measuring the level of general intelligence (the g-factor) in periods for which there is no psychometric data is problematic, the authors suggest that one could estimate it via proxies, such as the number of innovations per century per billion people.[5]

What produces modern sedentary life, unlike nomadic hunter-gatherers, is extraordinary modern economic productivity. Tainter argues that exceptional productivity is actually more the sign of hidden weakness because of a society's dependence on it and its potential to undermine its own basis for success by not being self limiting, as demonstrated in Western culture's ideal of perpetual growth.[85]

As a population grows and technology makes it easier to exploit depleting resources, the environment's diminishing returns are hidden from view. Societal complexity is then potentially threatened if it develops beyond what is actually sustainable, and a disorderly reorganization were to follow. The scissors model of Malthusian collapse, in which the population grows without limit but not resources, is the idea of great opposing environmental forces cutting into each other.

The complete breakdown of economic, cultural, and social institutions with ecological relationships is perhaps the most common feature of collapse. In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond proposes five interconnected causes of collapse that may reinforce each other: non-sustainable exploitation of resources, climate changes, diminishing support from friendly societies, hostile neighbors, and inappropriate attitudes for change.[86][87]

Energy has played a crucial role throughout human history. Energy is linked to the birth, growth, and decline of each and every society. Energy surplus is required for the division of labor and the growth of cities. Massive energy surplus is needed for widespread wealth and cultural amenities. Economic prospects fluctuate in tandem with a society's access to cheap and abundant energy.[88]

Thomas Homer-Dixon and Charles Hall proposed an economic model called energy return on investment (EROI), which measures the amount of surplus energy a society gets from using energy to obtain energy.[89][90] Energy shortages drive up prices and as such provide an incentive to explore and extract previously uneconomical sources, which may still be plentiful, but more energy would be required, and the EROI is then not as high as initially thought.[88]

There would be no surplus if EROI approaches 1:1. Hall showed that the real cutoff is well above that and estimated that 3:1 to sustain the essential overhead energy costs of a modern society. The EROI of the most preferred energy source, petroleum, has fallen in the past century from 100:1 to the range of 10:1 with clear evidence that the natural depletion curves all are downward decay curves. An EROI of more than ~3 then is what appears necessary to provide the energy for socially important tasks, such as maintaining government, legal and financial institutions, a transportation infrastructure, manufacturing, building construction and maintenance, and the lifestyles of all members of a given society.[90]

The social scientist Luke Kemp indicated that alternative sources of energy, such as solar panels, have a low EROI because they have low energy density, meaning they require a lot of land, and require substantial amounts of rare earth metals to produce.[1] Charles Hall and his colleagues reached the same conclusion. There is no on-site pollution, but the EROI of renewable energy sources may be too low for them to be considered a viable alternative to fossil fuels, which continue to provide the majority of the energy consumed by humanity (79% as of 2019[91]). Moreover, renewable energy is intermittent and requires large and expensive storage facilities in order to be a base-load source for the power grid (20% or more). In that case, its EROI would be even lower. Paradoxically, therefore, expansions of renewable energy require more consumption of fossil fuels. For Hall and his colleagues, human societies in the previous few centuries could solve or at least alleviate many of their problems by making technological innovations and by consuming more energy, but contemporary society faces the difficult challenge of declining EROI for its most useful energy source, fossil fuels, and low EROI for alternatives.[88]

The mathematician Safa Motesharrei and his collaborators showed that the use of non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels allows populations to grow to one order of magnitude larger than they would using renewable resources alone and as such is able to postpone societal collapse. However, when collapse finally comes, it is much more dramatic.[6][92] Tainter warned that in the modern world, if the supply of fossil fuels were somehow cut off, shortages of clean water and food would ensue, and millions would die in a few weeks in the worse-case scenario.[6]

Homer-Dixon asserted that a declining EROI was one of the reasons that the Roman Empire declined and fell. The historian Joseph Tainter made the same claim about the Mayan Empire.[1]

According to Joseph Tainter[93] (1990), too many scholars offer facile explanations of societal collapse by assuming one or more of the following three models in the face of collapse:

Tainter argues that those models, though superficially useful, cannot severally or jointly account for all instances of societal collapse. Often, they are seen as interconnected occurrences that reinforce one another.

Tainter considers that social complexity is a recent and comparatively-anomalous occurrence, requiring constant support. He asserts that collapse is best understood by grasping four axioms. In his own words (p.194):

With those facts in mind, collapse can simply be understood as a loss of the energy needed to maintain social complexity. Collapse is thus the sudden loss of social complexity, stratification, internal and external communication and exchange, and productivity.

In his acclaimed 12-volume work, A Study of History (19341961), the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee explored the rise and fall of 28 civilizations and came to the conclusion that civilizations generally collapsed mainly by internal factors, factors of their own making, but external pressures also played a role.[1] He theorized that all civilizations pass through several distinct stages: genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration.[94]

For Toynbee, a civilization is born when a "creative minority" successfully responds to the challenges posed by its physical, social, and political environment. However, the fixation on the old methods of the "creative minority" leads it to eventually cease to be creative and degenerate into merely a "dominant minority" (that forces the majority to obey without meriting obedience), which fails to recognize new ways of thinking. He argues that creative minorities deteriorate from a worship of their "former self", by which they become prideful, and they fail in adequately addressing the next challenge that they face. Similarly, the German philosopher Oswald Spengler discussed the transition from Kultur to Zivilisation in his The Decline of the West (1918).[94]

Toynbee argues that the ultimate sign a civilization has broken down is when the dominant minority forms a Universal State, which stifles political creativity. He states:

First the Dominant Minority attempts to hold by force - against all right and reason - a position of inherited privilege which it has ceased to merit; and then the Proletariat repays injustice with resentment, fear with hate, and violence with violence when it executes its acts of secession. Yet the whole movement ends in positive acts of creation - and this on the part of all the actors in the tragedy of disintegration. The Dominant Minority creates a universal state, the Internal Proletariat a universal church, and the External Proletariat a bevy of barbarian war-bands.

He argues that as civilizations decay, they form an "Internal Proletariat" and an "External Proletariat." The Internal proletariat is held in subjugation by the dominant minority inside the civilization, and grows bitter; the external proletariat exists outside the civilization in poverty and chaos and grows envious. He argues that as civilizations decay, there is a "schism in the body social", whereby abandon and self-control together replace creativity, and truancy and martyrdom together replace discipleship by the creative minority.

He argues that in that environment, people resort to archaism (idealization of the past), futurism (idealization of the future), detachment (removal of oneself from the realities of a decaying world), and transcendence (meeting the challenges of the decaying civilization with new insight, as a prophet). He argues that those who transcend during a period of social decay give birth to a new Church with new and stronger spiritual insights around which a subsequent civilization may begin to form after the old has died. Toynbee's use of the word 'church' refers to the collective spiritual bond of a common worship, or the same unity found in some kind of social order.

The historian Carroll Quigley expanded upon that theory in The Evolution of Civilizations (1961, 1979).[95] He argued that societal disintegration involves the metamorphosis of social instruments, which were set up to meet actual needs, into institutions, which serve their own interest at the expense of social needs.[96] However, in the 1950s, Toynbee's approach to history, his style of civilizational analysis, started to face skepticism from mainstream historians who thought it put an undue emphasis on the divine, which led to his academic reputation declining. For a time, however, Toynbee's Study remained popular outside academia. Interest revived decades later with the publication of The Clash of Civilizations (1997) by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, who viewed human history as broadly the history of civilizations and posited that the world after the end of the Cold War will be multipolar and one of competing major civilizations, which are divided by "fault lines."[94]

Developing an integrated theory of societal collapse that takes into account the complexity of human societies remains an open problem.[2] Researchers currently have very little ability to identify internal structures of large distributed systems like human societies. Genuine structural collapse seems, in many cases, the only plausible explanation supporting the idea that such structures exist. However, until they can be concretely identified, scientific inquiry appears limited to the construction of scientific narratives,[97][2] using systems thinking for careful storytelling about systemic organization and change.

In the 1990s, the evolutionary anthropologist and quantitative historian Peter Turchin noticed that the equations used to model the populations of predators and preys can also be used to describe the ontogeny of human societies. He specifically examined how social factors such as income inequality were related to political instability. He found recurring cycles of unrest in historical societies such as Ancient Egypt, China, and Russia. He specifically identified two cycles, one long and one short. The long one, what he calls the "secular cycle," lasts for approximately two to three centuries. A society starts out fairly equal. Its population grows and the cost of labor drops. A wealthy upper class emerges, and life for the working class deteriorates. As inequality grows, a society becomes more unstable with the lower-class being miserable and the upper-class entangled in infighting. Exacerbating social turbulence eventually leads to collapse. The shorter cycle lasts for about 50 years and consists of two generations, one peaceful and one turbulent. Looking at US history, for example, Turchin identified times of serious sociopolitical instability in 1870, 1920, and 1970. He announced in 2010 that he had predicted that in 2020, the US would witness a period of unrest at least on the same level as 1970 because the first cycle coincides with the turbulent part of the second in around 2020. He also warned that the US was not the only Western nation under strain.[6]

However, Turchin's model can only paint the broader picture and cannot pinpoint how bad things can get and what precisely triggers a collapse. The mathematician Safa Motesharrei also applied predator-prey models to human society, with the upper class and the lower class being the two different types of "predators" and natural resources being the "prey." He found that either extreme inequality or resource depletion facilitates a collapse. However, a collapse is irreversible only if a society experiences both at the same time, as they "fuel each other."[6]

Malthusian and environmental collapse themes

Cultural and institutional collapse themes

Systems science

See more here:

Societal collapse - Wikipedia

(Credit: Unsplash)

This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration ofThe European Stingwith theWorld Economic Forum.

Author: Jonny Hughes, IUCN Urban Alliance Chair and WCMC Chief Executive Officer, UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre & Lena Chan, Senior Director, International Biodiversity Conservation Division, National Parks Board

Cities can work for both people and nature, but they rarely do. Why is this? Part of the answer lies in our long-term failure to pull together truly interdisciplinary teams planners, ecologists, architects, engineers, social scientists, artists and citizens of all ages when creating or improving new urban neighbourhoods and places.

These specialisms too often clash rather than combine. So, while there is a growing list of inspiring case studies that show the substantial and socio-economic benefits that flow when we successfully pair brilliant ecological design with excellence in placemaking, such examples remain the exception, not the rule. But there is something else missing in addition to a deficit of interdisciplinarity.

In the coming weeks and months, the worlds governments will be signing off frameworks to tackle the twin nature and climate crises. These frameworks will contain globally agreed sets of outcomes, actions, and science-based targets to avert planetary collapse.

Whilst there are some important provisions for biodiversity contained within the New Urban Agenda and, more recently, the Edinburgh Process for Subnational and Local Governments on the Development of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, there is currently no international convention on sustainable cities per se. Mayors and city leaders therefore need robust, science-based standards within which they can measure urban nature and set targets towards a nature-positive future.

Networks such as C40 Cities have done an exceptional job in linking cities on the climate agenda, with C40 alone connecting 97 of the worlds largest cities to take climate action in line with the Paris Agreement. Whilst this tentative progress on climate targets for cities is welcome, there remains an urgent need to put something similar in place for nature, underpinned by credible science-based targets.

It was this need that motivated 1,400 government and NGO members of the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) to call for the establishment of an IUCN Urban Alliance. Over the past three years the Alliance has drawn experts from IUCN Members and Commissions and representatives of 28 local governments to develop a new global standard called the IUCN Urban Nature Index (UNI).

The UNI is now in an advanced stage of development with piloting ongoing initially in five cities Curridabat, Lagos, Mexico City, Paris, and Singapore. The UNI addresses head-on the need for a standardised set of robust science-based indicators and baselines from which targets can be set to protect, restore and sustainably use nature in the context of the city. Nature

Biodiversity loss and climate change are occurring at unprecedented rates, threatening humanitys very survival. Nature is in crisis, but there is hope. Investing in nature can not only increase our resilience to socioeconomic and environmental shocks, but it can help societies thrive.

There is strong recognition within the Forum that the future must be net-zero and nature-positive. The Nature Action Agenda initiative, within the Platform for Accelerating Nature-based Solutions, is an inclusive, multistakeholder movement catalysing economic action to halt biodiversity loss by 2030.

Dynamic and flourishing natural ecosystems are the foundation for human wellbeing and prosperity. The Future of Nature and Business report found that nature-positive transitions in key sectors are good for the economy and could generate up to $10.1 trillion in annual business value and create 395 million jobs by 2030.

To support these transitions, the Platform for Accelerating Nature-based Solutions has convened a community of Champions for Nature promoting the sustainable management of the planet for the good of the economy and society. The Nature Action Agenda also recently launched the 100 Million Farmers initiative, which will drive the transition of the food and agriculture system towards a regenerative model, as well as the BiodiverCities by 2030 initiative to create an urban development model that is in harmony with nature.

Get in touch if you would like to collaborate on these efforts or join one of our communities.

The UNI comprises six themes: consumption drivers, human pressures, habitat status, species status, natures contributions to people and governance indicators. Each theme has a set of five indicator topics which, once assessed, provide a baseline on which targets can be set for each of the six themes.

The UNI recognises that the ecological footprints of cities extend far beyond their boundaries, encompassing the immediate urban sphere but also the city-bioregional sphere and global spheres where cities have significant telecoupled impacts and dependencies. The UNI combines this three sphere approach with the established Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response framework to help make sense of the complexity and underlying drivers in urban-ecological systems.

When complete, the UNI will provide every city mayor or leader in the world with a cost-effective simple method for setting robust, transparent and science-based targets to protect and restore nature within and beyond their city. As baselines are assessed and targets are set, the IUCN Urban Alliance will also collate data from across the world in a central platform in order to track trends in urban ecosystem recovery, reporting these into global reporting frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the Global Biodiversity Framework as well as sharing learning through its extensive network of members and partners.

The UNI builds on and complements the pioneering work of the Singapore Index on Cities Biodiversity, a self-assessment tool for cities to evaluate and monitor the progress of their biodiversity conservation efforts over time. The Singapore Index comprises three components: native biodiversity in the city; ecosystem services provided by biodiversity and governance; and management of biodiversity. Those cities wishing to go delve into a deeper understanding of the management of biodiversity within their city jurisdiction will find the Singapore Index an invaluable practical tool. The Singapore Index has been implemented by over 50 cities spread across the globe for the past 12 years. An updated version with indicators relevant to current times can be found in the Handbook on the Singapore Index on Cities Biodiversity that be downloaded from http://www.cbd.int and http://www.nparks.gov.sg.

Those cities wishing to set science-based targets for natural capital assets within the city more broadly, and understand their telecoupled impacts beyond city boundaries, will find the UNI a similarly valuable tool. Undoubtedly however, implementing the two indices together, with the Singapore Index providing a level of detail on biodiversity to complement the UNI, is an approach most likely to generate the greatest insights to inform management actions.

Rolling out both the IUCN Urban Nature Index and Singapore Index is now urgent if we are to systematically transform the health of urban ecosystems and shift city footprints from nature-negative to nature-positive. Networks such as the World Economic Forums Global Commission on BiodiverCities by 2030, the Science-based Targets Network and the ICLEI-led CitiesWithNature platform will be key to achieving this. ICLEI in particular, have the boots on the ground to ensure these tools get into the hands of mayors and city officials, coupled with the expertise to build capacity and work directly with cities to deploy effective nature-based solutions in urban environments.

Having robust indices is one thing, following them up so they unlock transformative change will require us to unleash the collaborative and innovative power that lies within our networks. If we do this, by 2030 most of the worlds cities will be working systematically towards measurable targets for nature and reaping the health, well-being and economic benefits that will accompany the nascent ecological revolution soon to take place in our cities.

The IUCN Urban Alliance is supported by Arcadia, a fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

Like Loading...

Related

Go here to read the rest:

How to measure the ecological performance of cities so people and nature can thrive - The European Sting

South Africas 2021 local government elections are set to go down in history as a watershed moment in the countrys politics. Electoral support for the African National Congress (ANC) dropped below 50% for the first time since the party ascended to government 27 years ago. Although it won 161 of the 213 contested municipalities, the number of councils without a clear majority of any party nearly quadrupled from 18 to 70.

A significant portion of voters stayed away from voting stations. Most were former ANC voters, continuing the trend from previous elections.

Counting all eligible voters rather than only those who registered, voter withdrawal has reached a critical level. Less than a third of eligible voters - 12 million out of 42.6 million - made their crosses. Rather than apathy, this represents a deliberate stayaway vote, as the political analyst Moeletsi Mbeki has argued.

This concerted withdrawal should be read against the results of a recent survey by Afrobarometer, an independent pan-African surveys network. It found that local councils garnered the least trust out of 17 institutions in South Africa.

Almost three-quarters - 72% - of respondents trust local councils a little or not at all.

This staggeringly low level of trust has to do with deepening socioeconomic misery. The South African economy was in recession before the COVID-19 pandemic. The economic destruction caused by the pandemic has pushed the unemployment rate to 44.4%, when using the expanded definition that includes jobless people who have ceased seeking work.

The everyday struggle to survive becomes even harder in the face of a terminal deterioration in the provision of basic services by municipalities, such as water and sanitation, combined with corruption and infrastructural collapse that pose further threats to lives and livelihoods.

Read more: South African voters are disillusioned. But they haven't found an alternative to the ANC

A truism oft heard from politicians is that government cannot solve South Africas problems by itself. But what to do with a government that places impediments in the way of its citizens? This reality at local government level needs to be fixed for South Africans to regain their trust in the democratic process.

More than half of people canvassed by market research group Ipsos believe that local governments do not work optimally. Voter perception of malfunctioning municipalities is confirmed by the oversight reporting of the Auditor-General, Tsakani Maluleke.

She reported irregular expenditure of R26 billion (US$1.7billion) at municipalities in the 2019 to 2020 financial year. Only 27 out of the countrys 257 municipalities received clean audits. Moreover, 57 of municipalities failed to even submit the legally required audits.

Maluleke pointed to a lack of monitoring and supervision underpinning a lack of accountability, with resources being mismanaged and services not provided as they should be.

The Auditor-Generals conclusions accord with voter perceptions. The Ipsos survey found that almost a quarter of respondents thought that local councillors were incompetent or corrupt.

The perception of incompetence is further borne out by a recent study by the Bureau for Economic Research. It revealed that only about half of senior government officials and financial managers had qualifications appropriate to the posts they held.

The ANCs controversial policy of cadre deployment plays a significant factor. The policy entails appointing party apparatchiks to key state positions. Selection is not done transparently. The result is civil servants deeming themselves to be accountable to the party rather than to voters.

This leads to incompetent people being put in charge of finances, including income management, debt collection and municipal projects. The Bureau for Economic Research found operational budgets were over-spent, while capital expenditure stalled at the 2009 level.

As a result, environmental and health catastrophes have hit many municipalities, including raw sewage polluting drinking water.

Read more: South Africa's local elections: new entrants likely to be the big winners

The geographically central province of the Free State, a water catchment area, is in dire straits. Residents in small towns, from the northern to the southern parts of the province, have struggled for years with untreated human waste and other pollution flooding residential areas.

The crucial Vaal River, the border between the economic heartland of Gauteng province and the Free State, has become severely contaminated. As one of only three major rivers in a water-scarce country, it provides drinking water to 45% of Gautengs population. Apart from the risk to human health, scarce fish species have been pushed close to extinction.

The disaster is due to perennial failure on the part of the Emfuleni municipality to sustain maintenance at its wastewater treatment plants.

In a similar case, the Kgetleng Residents Association in Koster, North West province, won their court bid in 2020 to take control of the municipal waterworks. The high court found that the municipality had violated its constitutional obligation of supplying potable water.

This is one among a number of cases in which residents step in where municipalities fail. But, as the Socio-Economic Rights Institute argues, this is not a sustainable solution.

Companies that attempted to bear the overwhelming costs of failing municipal services have eventually faltered. For example, one of the countrys largest poultry producers, Astral Foods, was pushed into technical insolvency after spending millions to compensate for the collapse in electricity and water provision in Standerton in Lekwa municipality, Mpumalanga province.

Infrastructure collapse has also had a major economic impact in Lichtenburg in Ditsobotla municipality, North West province. After years of engaging the local council with no result, dairy company Clover closed the countrys largest cheese factory in Lichtenburg and moved its operations to an existing factory elsewhere. The economically depressed region lost 330 jobs.

Read more: South Africa's ANC dips below 50%. But opposition parties fail to pick up the slack

Residents despair is exacerbated by corruption.Corruption Watch, an NGO that tracks corruption, found that one in six reports received from whistleblowers fingered local government. Irregularities occurred in procurement and staff appointments. Bribery was a common form of corruption, amounting to an extra tax on the poor for state services that remain inefficient.

Given the colossal crises besetting local government, it remains to be seen whether newly elected councillors can win back the trust of the electorate. As these crises were in many cases created by the countrys political class, many voters will be sceptical about whether the appetite even exists to turn the dismal state of local government around.

But perhaps the plunging election turnout particularly shocking in a country where people struggled for democracy may finally jolt the political elite into action.

View post:

South Africa's local government is broken: could the 2021 election outcomes be the turning point? - The Conversation CA

Apparently accustomed to getting away with reckless claims, marked by outright concoctions attributed to dodgy sources and serving such through his Notes from Atlanta, Farooq Kperogi, the US-based professor and newspaper columnist, produced a 1, 541-word salad of dangerous speculations over the weekend. The article, Ikoyi Tragedy and Casual Bigotry Against Yoruba Muslims, was a merry dirge a poorly disguised expression of joy at the tragedy that befell Femi Osibona, the developer behind the ill-fated Ikoyi multi-storey building. For reasons not exactly hidden, the article instantly put him on the shit list of many of his fans, who cream off on his regular fusillade at the Mohammadu Buhari presidency.

Kperogis major material for the piece was the viral video of a young Yoruba graduate and self-identified Muslim, Adebowale Sikiru, who claimed that he was denied employment by Osibona for being a Muslim. Osibona, said Sikiru, asked him what church he attended during the interview and replied that he is a Muslim. His response allegedly sent the alarm bells chiming in the head of Osibona, who allegedly replied: Ah, I cant work with a Muslim. Osibona, claimed Sikiru, said he would not want to work with a man who would respond to Praise God with Alhamdulillah!

He added that Osibona blamed his inability to make progress in life on his Islamic faith. The wounding comments were allegedly made in the presence of artisans, many of whom must have been squashed to death like Osibona, when the building dissolved into a tall heap of concrete and metal.

The tragedy, most likely, has robbed the public of the chance to verify Sikirus claims. There is very little doubt that Osibona, as per videos dredged-up post-collapse, was a faith-on-the-sleeve Christian. I suspect that those videos must have helped convince Kperogi that Sikirus story was true. In one of the videos, Reverend Matthew Ashimolowo, who claimed to have anointed Osibona for many exploits (pardon the doctrinal lingo), said the property developer belonged to the Celestial Church of Christ (CCC). He also must also have fancied Pentecostalism, which has a dim view of white garment ministries and does not classify such as Bible-believing.

That he and Ashimolowo found a common ground, I suspect, was due to his appetite for the motivational mumbo-jumbo for which Ashimolowo is an exponent.

On account of Osibonas alleged rejection of Sikiru, Kperogi persuaded himself that Muslims in Yorubaland, which must include parts of Kwara and Kogi states, are routinely treated like children of a lesser god and are forced to hide their religious identities or convert to Christianity to find societal acceptance. In Kwara, home to a hefty Yoruba Muslim population? In parts of Kogi, with a decent number? No chance at all!

Kperogi would go on to claim that it is this unfair treatment that compels prominent Yoruba Muslims to publicize the Christian faith of their wives, so that they could be acceptable to Yoruba Christians. Only MURICs Ishaq Akintola, the G.O.A.T (Cum Laude) of bizarre utterances, can be relied upon to match that level of silliness. He has yet to.

The late Gani Fawehinmi always had a need to show that his wife was a Christian. Bola Ahmed Tinubu has a need to strategically let it be known that his wife isnt only a Christian, but a deacon (sic). House of Representatives Speaker Olufemi Hakeem Gbajabiamila concealed his Muslim identity until he needed the support of the Muslim North to become Speaker. After the fact, his handlers played up the fact that his wife and his mother are Christians. Prince Bola Ajibola, one of Africas finest jurists, who happens to be a devout Muslim, doesnt openly bear Abduljabar, his Muslim nameunlike his father, who bore Abdulsalam as his first nameperhaps, not being married to a Christian, it was his only way to reassure his Christian Yoruba brothers and sisters that he is Yoruba. Yet, he is so strong in his Muslim faith that he established the Crescent University, one of Nigerias first private Islamic universities, in his hometown of Abeokuta, Kperogi speculatively and dangerously wrote.

Fawehinmis first name, Gani, a circumcision of AbdulGaniy, was one he bore all through his life-without any hint of shame. His most visible wife, Ganiyat, was born a Christian and has remained one, but was given a Muslim name, despite not converting to Islam, by the husband, who Kperogi thought was made to be ashamed of his faith. It is probably strange to Kperoogi that it is not everyone that is illiberal as he is, and would wish to impose religious beliefs on spouses or force on them sartorial identities of his faith whether or not they are converted.

Gbajabiamila, Kperogi correctly claimed, became loud about his Muslim identity to appeal to the North, from where the columnist hails, in search of Northern support for his speakership ambition. That is politics. Bukola Saraki did not flaunt Abubakar, his Muslim name, until he wanted to be governor, in the predominantly Muslim Kwara.

Did Gbajabiamila consciously project the Christian identities of his wife and mom at the time? I do not remember that any attention was paid to the religious faith of his wife and mother in Yorubaland. I cannot recall that conversation on the subject was strident among the Yoruba. What was dominant at the time were concerns that all the three organs of government would be headed by Muslims-Buhari as President, Ahmed Lawan as Senate President, Gbajabiamila as Speaker of the House of Representatives and Justice Ibrahim Tanko Ahmad as Chief Justice of Nigeria.

Tinubus wife is an assistant pastor, not a deaconess, and I also do not recall her religious inclination attracting any attention. Ajibola apparently had a tete-a-tete with Kperoogi on why he has not been using his Muslim name. No law, religious or otherwise, prescribes that. The jurist attended a Christian school, Baptist Boys High School in Abeokuta, and never became a Christian. I attended the same school along with Muslims, who were never forced to convert. Many of them were members of the Muslim Students Society in a Baptist school. Even as he has established a faith-based university and is retired, Ajibola has not promoted Abduljabar to the status of a first name. But Kperogi, a word salad exponent, is unable to understand personal preferences.

There are many Christians and Muslims, whose first names are native ones, with their religious names less prominent or unknown. That is their preference.

I wanted to take Kperogis piece as an exercise in wild speculation, but changed my mind when I saw that he also claimed that Yoruba Muslims have no voice and seem to have accepted their fate with listless resignation, he wrote, adding that he knew he would come under attack for telling the truth.

He told no truth, but sought to incite Yoruba Muslims against Christians. He anticipated attacks, which are duly going in his direction. Being thoughtless and proud of it should attract mockery, of the vicious variety. It would have been nice to see him support his claim that being a Muslim predisposes a Yoruba person to the enjoyment of lesser socio-economic and political privileges with numbers. He did not.

He also failed to provide a proof of his claim that Muslims are numerically superior to Christians in Yorubaland. What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without one. So, this is dismissed as coming from a diseased mind with an agenda. As earlier stated, the Yoruba-speaking part of Kwara, his home state, has a huge Muslim population and it is safe to say that Yoruba Muslims there are not marginalized. Kperogi did not talk about the Southwest, but Yorubaland.

There is religious stigmatization/ bigotry in Yorubaland. It exists at the personal level between religions and within the same religion-not at a collective level. Beginning from the 80s and rising rapidly in the 90s through the noughties, Islam and Christianity have undergone revivals, with each trying to be more assertive. As part of its growth strategy, Pentecostalism deployed calumny against orthodox churches, especially the Catholic Church, branding them non-living or not Bible-believing, and, of course, Islam.

The popular praise song Jesus na you be Oga/ Every other god na so so yeye is sung in churches across Yorubaland and elsewhere. There is little doubt it denigrates other faiths, but it is not a Yoruba thing. Osibonas CCC, with its cocktail of Judeo-Christian and indigenous practices, is bad news among Pentecostals, for example. Of course, among some Christians in Yorubaland, Islam is viewed with suspicion and even derision. Earlier this month, as noted by Kperogi, the newly appointed Vice Chancellor of the Osun State University was mocked on social media for being bearded, a requirement of his faith. The same requirement, it has to be said, is made in the Old Testament.

Very recently, Bishop David Oyedepo told his followers that he would not offer alms to beggars who seek his help in the name of Allah.

Islams renaissance could be seen in the growth of movements/prayer groups, many of which seek to promote the identity of Muslims and assert their rights, the latter through agitation against perceived Christianization of the social space. The agitation finds intermittent expression in the demand for the hijab to be recognized in schools and for Friday, the day of Muslim worship, to be accorded the same status as Sunday. This brings occasional tension.

There are Yoruba Muslims, as elsewhere, who view Christians and Christianity as no better than dog poo. Christians, in the past, were branded kiriyo by some Yoruba Muslims. I do not know the origin of the word, but it suggests a person moving from home to home to be fed. I briefly flirted with the idea of marrying a Muslim girl, who told me upfront that my chances of being accepted by her family were sub-zero. I do not think this is exactly a product of hatred, but of fear that integration could be difficult should such a relationship end in marriage.

On both sides, there are insecure nutcases, who believe they are superior/ entitled to more privileges than others on the basis of faith. I, like many other Yoruba non-Muslims, relate well with Muslims and vice versa. You can also find Muslims whose relationship with fellow Muslims is frosty.

Around 2008, I accompanied a friend and former professional colleague, a Catholic, and his wife-to-be to see the young womans Muslim father, in Ota. The man, who was visiting from the UK, asked my friend what religion he professed. He said he was a Christian, a Catholic. His daughter, who sat with us, had switched to Christianity, so the man did not exactly have a problem beyond asking if my friend was not the fanatical type. I guess he asked the question to gauge if my friend would someday baulk at joining his in-laws for Muslim festivities. My friend said he was not.

The man then told us a story about a brother or cousin of his, whose daughter had strayed by marrying a wrong man. The daughter of his brother or cousin, he said, was to name her child the week after he visited. He was to stand in as the father because her biological father had sworn not to have anything to do with her for marrying a Muslim belonging to the Ansar-U-Deen movement. He wanted her to marry a Tebliq, a movement I was hearing of for the first time. It is similar to mainstream Christians attitude to Jehovah Witnesses, who are viewed as anything, but Christians.

Kperoogis blurry familiarity with the Yoruba was equally on display when he cited a single article as evidence that Yoruba Christians believe that Yoruba Muslims are in support of the herdsmen wreaking havoc in Ekiti State because they share the same faith. This has to be worse than poor. If the garbage produced by Kperogi over the weekend cannot be taken as having the buy-in of every Northern Muslim, the claim of cited articles writer cannot be taken as the position of Yoruba Christians. With his article, Kperogi has shown himself up for what he is: a religious supremacist. What he sought to do, in a roundabout way, was spit at Christianity-as insensitive as it is-using Osibonas misfortune. Nothing else.

Email: [emailprotected]

See the rest here:

Ikoyi tragedy and Kperogi's merry dirge - TheCable

Ignorance may be bliss, but this saying is certainly not valid when witnessing the humanitarian, political and economic ups and downs in the Middle Eastern region. The more you are not aware of whats going on in this area of the world, the less you can engage in world politics or establish a mechanism against the global security threat what we can call humanitys most urgent and pervasive issue to tackle.

Today, there is not a single security or stability crisis that is independent from others occurring in any corner of the world. All are linked and related. All have direct and indirect impacts on one another. Historically speaking, countless arguments can be found to explain this cross-relation between conflicts or cumulatively or correspondently growing tensions. However, this short piece of mine has the primary and specific goal of drawing attention to why the international community must contribute to peace in the Middle East.

In terms of the number of mini, major or proxy wars, instabilities or inhumane attacks, the region takes the lead among its peers. From Syria to Iraq, from Palestine to Yemen, almost every regional state is on the brink of political, economic or humanitarian collapse. This situation also deteriorates with the superpowers self-interested engagement and the presence of weak state mechanisms and terrorist groups. As a matter of fact, the entire region is day by day dragged into an increasingly blurry deadlock.

Just recently, world leaders met at another major international gathering in the heart of Italy and the Middle East was also among the topics. Any result? Literally none! Frankly speaking, the problem here does not lie behind the fact that countries lack the will and intention to end regional catastrophes but the miscalculation of diplomatic understanding regarding regional developments.

For instance, for a long period of time, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) all-around the world, including particularly Turkey, have rushed to get mobilized to reach out to people in need in the region, particularly in Syria. From basic survival needs to educational necessities, several different aid campaigns have been organized so far to help suffering people. On the one hand, it is both more than encouraging and admirable to see that there are still those who embrace and work for the values humanity shares while, on the other hand, unfortunately, we see an international community that does not provide the sufficient diplomatic and political support. The two sides of the coin tells us the world is supposed to shoulder responsibility just as ordinary people do.

Currently, it is reported that around 13.4 million people are in need of humanitarian aid in war-ravaged Syria. The World Food Programme (WFP) also warned that 12.4 million people nearly 60% of the population are facing food shortages. Only in northern Syria, there are around 3.5 million locals, the majority of whom are displaced, in dire need of basic necessities. More numbers and statistics follow each other to reveal the reality of life in the country since the war erupted back in 2011. Indeed, knowing whats happening in this country is enough to comprehend the state of the whole region.

According to the European Union, in the Middle East, a political and economic reform in each individual country in due respect for its specific features and regional cooperation among the countries of the region themselves and with the EU is what needs to be supported and encouraged. By reforming the region, the world can contribute to rebuilding the region, the bloc believes.

For another example, in the decadeslong Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is one of the hot topics of the region, the bloc sees coming to a resolution as its fundamental interest while supporting the two-state solution with an independent, democratic, viable and contiguous Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbors.

Or, take Iraq, whose socio-economic situation was severely damaged during the coronavirus pandemic. According to reports, some 2.4 million Iraqi people have acute humanitarian needs while the drop in oil prices and unemployment have collapsed the countrys economy. The presence of terrorism is another great challenge at hand. The EU is also of the opinion that, There is a need to improve access to basic services such as water, health care, education and legal assistance, as well as protection, psychosocial care and physical rehabilitation in the country.

For each country in the Middle East, the bloc has prepared a detailed report, showing the realities and providing key notes on what can be done to improve them. However, it also falls short as other developed or developing countries, organizations and institutions need to develop a common understanding. Since the path to global peace crosses through the Middle East, ignorance and intolerance toward the region cannot be accepted. Taking into consideration the direct and indirect impacts of the Middle Eastern problems on the world, no one can stay idle. Put simply, peace in the Middle East means peace in the world.

The Daily Sabah Newsletter

Keep up to date with whats happening in Turkey, its region and the world.

SIGN ME UP

You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

See the original post:

Peace in the Middle East, peace in the world | Daily Sabah - Daily Sabah

South Africas 2021 local government elections are set to go down in history as a watershed moment in the countrys politics. Electoral support for the African National Congress (ANC) dropped below 50% for the first time since the party ascended to government 27 years ago. Although it won 161 of the 213 contested municipalities, the number of councils without a clear majority of any party nearly quadrupled from 18 to 70.

A significant portion of voters stayed away from voting stations. Most were former ANC voters, continuing the trend from previous elections.

Counting all eligible voters rather than only those who registered, voter withdrawal has reached a critical level. Less than a third of eligible voters - 12 million out of 42.6 million - made their crosses. Rather than apathy, this represents a deliberate stayaway vote, as the political analyst Moeletsi Mbeki has argued.

This concerted withdrawal should be read against the results of a recent survey by Afrobarometer, an independent pan-African surveys network. It found that local councils garnered the least trust out of 17 institutions in South Africa.

Almost three-quarters - 72% - of respondents trust local councils a little or not at all.

This staggeringly low level of trust has to do with deepening socioeconomic misery. The South African economy was in recession before the COVID-19 pandemic. The economic destruction caused by the pandemic has pushed the unemployment rate to 44.4%, when using the expanded definition that includes jobless people who have ceased seeking work.

The everyday struggle to survive becomes even harder in the face of a terminal deterioration in the provision of basic services by municipalities, such as water and sanitation, combined with corruption and infrastructural collapse that pose further threats to lives and livelihoods.

Read more:South African voters are disillusioned. But they havent found an alternative to the ANC

A truism oft heard from politicians is that government cannot solve South Africas problems by itself. But what to do with a government that places impediments in the way of its citizens? This reality at local government level needs to be fixed for South Africans to regain their trust in the democratic process.

More than half of people canvassed by market research group Ipsos believe that local governments do not work optimally. Voter perception of malfunctioning municipalities is confirmed by the oversight reporting of the Auditor-General, Tsakani Maluleke.

She reported irregular expenditure of R26 billion (US$1.7billion) at municipalities in the 2019 to 2020 financial year. Only 27 out of the countrys 257 municipalities received clean audits. Moreover, 57 of municipalities failed to even submit the legally required audits.

Maluleke pointed to a lack of monitoring and supervision underpinning a lack of accountability, with resources being mismanaged and services not provided as they should be.

The Auditor-Generals conclusions accord with voter perceptions. The Ipsos survey found that almost a quarter of respondents thought that local councillors were incompetent or corrupt.

The perception of incompetence is further borne out by a recent study by the Bureau for Economic Research. It revealed that only about half of senior government officials and financial managers had qualifications appropriate to the posts they held.

The ANCs controversial policy of cadre deployment plays a significant factor. The policy entails appointing party apparatchiks to key state positions. Selection is not done transparently. The result is civil servants deeming themselves to be accountable to the party rather than to voters.

This leads to incompetent people being put in charge of finances, including income management, debt collection and municipal projects. The Bureau for Economic Research found operational budgets were over-spent, while capital expenditure stalled at the 2009 level.

As a result, environmental and health catastrophes have hit many municipalities, including raw sewage polluting drinking water.

Read more:South Africas local elections: new entrants likely to be the big winners

The geographically central province of the Free State, a water catchment area, is in dire straits. Residents in small towns, from the northern to the southern parts of the province, have struggled for years with untreated human waste and other pollution flooding residential areas.

The crucial Vaal River, the border between the economic heartland of Gauteng province and the Free State, has become severely contaminated. As one of only three major rivers in a water-scarce country, it provides drinking water to 45% of Gautengs population. Apart from the risk to human health, scarce fish species have been pushed close to extinction.

The disaster is due to perennial failure on the part of the Emfuleni municipality to sustain maintenance at its wastewater treatment plants.

In a similar case, the Kgetleng Residents Association in Koster, North West province, won their court bid in 2020 to take control of the municipal waterworks. The high court found that the municipality had violated its constitutional obligation of supplying potable water.

This is one among a number of cases in which residents step in where municipalities fail. But, as the Socio-Economic Rights Institute argues, this is not a sustainable solution.

Companies that attempted to bear the overwhelming costs of failing municipal services have eventually faltered. For example, one of the countrys largest poultry producers, Astral Foods, was pushed into technical insolvency after spending millions to compensate for the collapse in electricity and water provision in Standerton in Lekwa municipality, Mpumalanga province.

Infrastructure collapse has also had a major economic impact in Lichtenburg in Ditsobotla municipality, North West province. After years of engaging the local council with no result, dairy company Clover closed the countrys largest cheese factory in Lichtenburg and moved its operations to an existing factory elsewhere. The economically depressed region lost 330 jobs.

Read more:South Africas ANC dips below 50%. But opposition parties fail to pick up the slack

Residents despair is exacerbated by corruption.Corruption Watch, an NGO that tracks corruption, found that one in six reports received from whistleblowers fingered local government. Irregularities occurred in procurement and staff appointments. Bribery was a common form of corruption, amounting to an extra tax on the poor for state services that remain inefficient.

Given the colossal crises besetting local government, it remains to be seen whether newly elected councillors can win back the trust of the electorate. As these crises were in many cases created by the countrys political class, many voters will be sceptical about whether the appetite even exists to turn the dismal state of local government around.

But perhaps the plunging election turnout particularly shocking in a country where people struggled for democracy may finally jolt the political elite into action.

Read the original here:

could the 2021 election outcomes be the turning point? - Toys Matrix