Julia Gillard, you became the first female prime minister in Australian history in 2010, what have been the challenges and opportunities for you as a woman working in politics? Have the obstacles women face in positions of power changed over the years, and if so, how? 

I want to start positive and say I’m a huge advocate for people going into politics – particularly women. I believe there’s no better way of putting your values into action than going into politics but I’m not going to pretend that there’s no gender bit.

There still is a gender bit and I experienced that personally. A disproportionate focus on appearance, a disproportionate focus on family structures – for example the fact that I didn’t have kids – and the gendered insults becoming the go-to weapon when politics got turbulent, which inevitably happens, as governments make decisions that not everybody agrees with.

In terms of politics past and politics present, I think a lot has changed for the positive. There are more women in politics now which means more role models for other women. There’s been more of an attempt to have the system offer flexibilities for work and family life too. In Australian politics, famously, the non-members bar was replaced by a childcare centre, so that’s giving you a sense that there has been progress. We’ve also just hit the stage where our Senate is now 50 per cent men and 50 per cent women.

But I do think that there’s a new toxicity for women that’s been introduced through social media – through the fact that it’s anonymous and people can say anything and the kinds of revolting material many women politicians receive. I think that there’s a new coarseness in our traditional media too which means things will be said about people in politics today, especially women, which would not have been put in the pages of respectable newspapers 10 or 20 years ago.

So, it’s a mixed picture, where there has been major steps forward but there are still some huge issues to resolve.

Following this year’s elections, there are now a record number of female members of parliament in Australia, yet some argue that women are still underrepresented across the major political parties, and over the past 20 years, the country has fallen from 15th in the world to 50th for gender diversity in its parliament.

Given some of the recent experiences of women in Australian politics, do you think the major political parties are doing enough to address gender diversity in their ranks? 

I certainly think on the Labor side of politics important changes have happened in our political party and the benefit of those changes has showed. I’m of that generation of Labor women that fought for an affirmative action target and we had that adopted as a Labor party rule in the early 1990s. It started at 30 per cent, and it’s gone up over time, and the benefit of that now is that the Labor Party is almost at 50-50 per cent men and women, coming off a very low base in the early 1990s where we were at 14 per cent men and women. 

The Conservative side for politics hasn’t embraced a target or quota as of yet. They have done some things, through mentoring and networking and training, but that hasn’t seen as significant a shift in the gender diversity in their ranks. They’ve moved slowly from when they were 13 per cent women to now where they’re in the mid-20 per cent. 

Of course that doesn’t mean the work within Labor is done: we’ve got to keep delivering to the affirmative action target, having women come through for all of the ministries, the Cabinet and for all of the portfolios and to make sure that we’re embracing the full diversity of women too. Australia is a very multicultural society and there is more to do to make sure that women – and men – in the Australian parliament represents that diversity. 

During your premiership, you delivered a famous speech on misogyny and sexism and described there being 'gender wars' in Australian politics. How far has Australia addressed its problems regarding everything from unconscious bias to gender stereotypes? Do you think social attitudes in Australia to women in leadership are changing?

I don’t think these issues are particularly an Australian problem. When I left politics, people kept asking me about my experiences and it became convenient for them to say ‘That’s Australia and its macho culture and Crocodile Dundee and all of that.’ I was always quick to point out, actually, a number of the insults hurled at me were first hurled at Hillary Clinton when she originally put her name forward to be considered as a candidate for US president. So this is not an Australian problem – it’s a global problem. 

I can see progress in Australia though. When I was prime minister, the sort of fashionable analysis by the press was that nothing, in my experience, had anything to do with gender – I was just being treated like every prime minister had always been treated.

Today, there is a very lively debate about sexism in Australian politics and about how women can feel excluded from these structures with various conservative women making complaints about bullying within their political party. So the preparedness to report issues due to the understanding of gender is now much higher and I’m a big believer that you never solve a problem unless you start talking about it so I’m glad we’re talking about it now.

From the implementation of ‘womenomics’ in Japan, to gender-responsive budgeting in Indonesia, countries around the world are making progress towards addressing gender issues, yet, structural and cultural barriers that prevent women’s economic, political and social participation remain.

What are the biggest barriers that women face around the world and do you think enough is being done to address these barriers?

I think so much is context-specific that it’s hard to say, but I would say, in some parts of the world, unequal access to education is the fundamental barrier.

Now that’s not true in the UK or in Australia, where the statistics tell you that disproportionately graduates today are women and not men, but if we look at many of the poorer parts of the world, like in sub-Saharan Africa and other places, there are 260 million children out of school – and the face of a child most likely to miss out is a female face. So there still needs to be a lot more progress on things such as equal access to education around the world. 

In many parts of the developed world, there is actually an assault now on long-held rights around women’s reproduction so I think that is another foundation stone – and then really it comes to a set of issues and barriers around the world of work and full access to every level of work.

Much of this is what we research at the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership because we continue to see workplaces and organizations that have a very traditional view of what merit looks like. It’s a sort of male-defined view of the world and it is one that is not inclusive of women. We are still seeing the unequal sharing of domestic labour which has ramifications for women’s engagement in the world of work and their ability to achieve leadership within it too. 

With a broad brush, I would point to all of this, but the most pressing problems that women continue to face varies from place to place.

Globally, increasing numbers of women are being elected to political office, from the first female president of Slovakia to the first female mayor of Tunis. This comes at a time of record numbers of female ministers in Egypt and Jordan as well as gender-balanced cabinets in 10 countries worldwide – six of which were achieved in 2018 alone.

Do you think women’s rights and gender equality are benefitting from more female representation in politics and how are female voters responding, if at all, to this increase in the number of women holding political office?

I think, even if women didn’t bring new policy perspectives to the world of politics, I would still be an advocate of gender equality in politics because I believe merit is equally distributed between the sexes.

If you see women being represented at less than 50 per cent then that’s got to mean that there are women of merit who didn’t get there – who should’ve gotten there. I think it’s important to make that point otherwise we’re saying ‘Women should only be there if, when they are there, they do this, this and this’. We don’t tend to put that ‘if’ in sentences about men.

But I do think the evidence shows that more women, being involved in politics, does diversify the public policy agenda. That doesn’t mean that a male politician couldn’t focus his career and advocacy on childcare or domestic violence or combating sexual assault or furthering women’s reproductive rights. But I think the evidence shows that there is a lived experience that women bring to politics that enables them to mobilize around a set of issues that are of particular concern to women.

On the role model effect, I think the evidence shows that, if women and girls do see role models, they are more likely to think that that is a pathway open to them. One of the things that does slightly concern me is whether that evidence is now retrospective evidence and whether the prospective evidence is going to be – because of the toxicity of social media – more women thinking about the real-world threats that being in politics presents for them. And so the role modelling effect will work in reverse because it will show how women are treated in politics is more of a negative than a positive.

I certainly hope this doesn’t happen and young women are encouraged to go into politics. That’s where we still have to shine a light on the positive aspects of what working in politics has to offer.

Despite all of the progress we are seeing, women are still faced with gender-based discrimination and gender-based violence, virtually and physically, with 40 per cent of women and girls living in countries which fail to guarantee basic standards of gender equality. What do you think needs to happen to ultimately realize women’s rights and gender equality globally? Are you hopeful this will be achieved in the future?

Yes I’m an optimist overall. People like to quote the great Martin Luther King quote ‘The moral arc of the universe bends towards justice.’ I believe that but I think sometimes the imagery of the arc as if it’s always in a forward movement hides the nitty-gritty struggle that is there beneath. 

Inevitably, at some points, it feels like there’s more of a backlash against women than a forward movement. But, over time, I’m an optimist that the forward movement wins through. 

I do believe we can reach a stage where societies are generating societies where women can live their lives free from the threat of sexual violence or discriminatory treatment based on gender.

The ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ (FOIP) strategy, actively promoted by the United States with support from its allies and partners, is a significant geopolitical response to China's growing power and expanding influence in Asia and beyond. Beijing has adopted various new strategies to cope with the challenges related to FOIP. One of these strategies is to secure a robust relationship with south-east Asia in order to make these regional states either neutral to or less supportive of the Indo-Pacific vision. In addition to economic statecraft and soft power, Beijing believes that it can also tap into the domain of non-traditional security (NTS) to strengthen relations with this region to position itself better in the intensifying regional geopolitical competition. The article addresses the following question: what is the impact of China's NTS cooperation with south-east Asia on Beijing's geopolitical rivalry with other major powers in the Indo-Pacific region? The article argues that China's NTS cooperation with south-east Asian countries may help China maintain its geopolitical standing in the region, but it is unlikely to lead to any dramatic increase of China's strategic influence in the region. This essentially means that Beijing may be able to prevent ASEAN or most ASEAN member states from lending substantive and strong support to the Indo-Pacific construct, but it will not be able to stop ASEAN states from supporting some elements of the FOIP.

This event is part of the Inaugural Virtual Roundtable Series on the US, Americas and the State of the World and will take place virtually only. Participants should not come to Chatham House for these events.

In discussions to date about how international law applies in cyberspace, commentators have tended to focus their attention on how the rules on the use of force, or the law of armed conflict, apply to cyber activities conducted by states that give rise to physical damage, injury or death.

But in practice, the vast majority of state cyberattacks fall below this threshold. Far more common are persistent, low-level attacks that may leave no physical trace but that are capable of doing significant damage to a state’s ability to control its systems, often at serious economic cost.

Such cyber incursions might include network disruptions in the operation of another government’s websites; tampering with electoral infrastructure to change or undermine the result; or using cyber means to destabilize another state’s financial sector.

For these kinds of cyber operation, the principle of sovereignty, and the principle of non-intervention in another state’s internal affairs, are the starting point.

A UN Group of Government Experts (GGE) agreed in 2013 and 2015 that the principles in the UN Charter, including sovereignty and the prohibition on intervention in another state’s affairs, apply to states’ activities in cyberspace. The 2015 GGE also recommended eleven (non-binding) norms of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace.

However, states have not yet reached agreement on how to apply these principles. Until recently, there has also been very little knowledge of what states actually do in cyberspace, as they usually conduct cyber operations covertly and have been reluctant to put their views on record.

A new Chatham House research paper analyses the application of the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention to state cyberattacks that fall below the principle of use of force. As well as analysing the application of the law in this area, the paper also makes recommendations to governments on how they might best make progress in reaching agreement in this area.

Existing rules or new rules?

As the research paper makes clear, there is currently some debate, principally between countries in the West, about the extent to which sovereignty is a legally binding rule in the context of cyberspace and, if so, how it and the principle of non-intervention might apply in practice.

In the last few years, certain states have put on record how they consider international law to apply to states’ activities in cyberspace, namely the UK, Australia, France and the Netherlands. While there may be some differences in their approaches, which are discussed in the paper, there also remains important common ground: namely, that existing international law already provides a solid framework for regulating states’ cyber activities, as it regulates every other domain of state-to-state activity.

There is also an emerging trend for states to work together when attributing cyberattacks to hostile states, enabling them to call out malign cyber activity when it violates international law. (See, for example, the joint statements made in relation to the NotPetya cyber attack and malicious cyber activity attributed to the Russian government).

However, other countries have questioned whether existing international law as it stands is capable of regulating states’ cyber interactions and have called for ‘new legal instruments’ in this area.

This includes a proposal by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (led by Russia and China) for an International Code of Conduct on Information Security, a draft of which was submitted to the UN in 2011 and 2015, without success. The UN has also formed a new Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) under a resolution proposed by Russia to consider how international law applies to states’ activities in cyberspace.

The resolution establishing the OEWG, which began work earlier this year, includes the possibility of the group ‘introducing changes to the rules, norms and principles of responsible behaviour of States’ agreed in the 2013 and 2015 GGE reports. In the OEWG discussions at the UN in September, several countries claimed that a new legal instrument was needed to fill the ‘legal vacuum’ (Cuba) or ‘the gap of ungoverned areas’ (Indonesia).

It would be concerning if the hard-won consensus on the application of international law to cyberspace that has been reached at past GGEs started to unravel. In contrast to 2013 and 2015, the 2017 meeting failed to reach an agreement.

On 9 December, a renewed GGE will meet in New York, but the existence of the OEWG exploring the same issues in a separate process reflects the fact that cyber norms have become an area of geopolitical rivalry.

Aside from the application of international law, states are also adopting divergent approaches to the domestic regulation of cyberspace within their own territory. The emerging trend towards a ‘splinternet’ – i.e. between states that believe the internet should be global and open on the hand, and those that favour a ‘sovereignty and control’ model on the other  – is also likely to make discussions at the GGE more challenging.

Distinct from the international law concept of sovereignty is the notion of ‘cybersovereignty’, a term coined by China to describe the wide-ranging powers it assumes under domestic law to regulate its citizens’ access to the internet and personal data within its territory. This approach is catching on (as reflected in Russia’s recently enacted ‘Sovereign Internet Law’), with other authoritarian states likely to follow suit.

The importance of non-state actors

In parallel with regional and UN discussions on how international law applies, a number of initiatives by non-state actors have also sought to establish voluntary principles about responsible state behaviour in cyberspace.

The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace, a multi-stakeholder body that has proposed principles, norms and recommendations to guide responsible behaviour by all parties in cyberspace, recently published its final report. The Cybersecurity Tech Accord  aims to promote collaboration between tech companies on stability and resilience in cyberspace. President Macron’s ‘Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace’ has to date received the backing of 67 states, 139 international and civil society organizations, and 358 private-sector organizations.

It remains to be seen in the long term whether the parallel processes at the UN will work constructively together or be competitive. But notwithstanding the challenging geopolitical backdrop, the UN GGE meeting next week at the least offers states the opportunity to consolidate and build on the results of past meetings; to increase knowledge and discussion about how international law might apply; and to encourage more states to put their own views of these issues on the record.

To understand Lebanon’s financial collapse, look to its politics.

The country has been deeply damaged by an increasingly dysfunctional political system. A series of compromises have alienated it from its main markets in the Gulf and strangled its economy; anyone that has glanced at fluctuations in Lebanese bank deposits over the last 10 years can see the correlation.

Imagine if Boris Johnson or Donald Trump were obliged to form joint governments with Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders. The result would be paralysis and lack of accountability as each party pulls the country in opposite directions and blames the other for the state of limbo. This has been the state of affairs in Lebanon since the Doha agreement of 2008. 

That agreement followed an 18-month siege that paralyzed Beirut and an attack on the city by Hezbollah’s ‘black shirts’. The Doha formula imposed governments of national unity between Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s pro-Saudi camp and Hezbollah’s pro-Iran camp and their respective internal allies.

The pattern was set: each period of subsequent paralysis was followed by further compromise as the tug of war pulled the country away from its principal economic partners, the Arab Gulf states, with the regional balance of power tilting towards Hezbollah. 

It was not supposed to be like this. The Baabda Declaration in June 2012, reached after a process of national dialogue, was meant to secure Lebanon’s neutrality in regional conflicts, with both sides promising to hold back on external alliances and coexist despite difference over major regional issues like the war in Syria, the standoff between the US and Iran or relations with Israel or the Gulf states.

This has worn away. The Baabda declaration itself became a sham when Hezbollah inserted itself into the war in Syria in support of the Assad regime and overtly got involved in Iraq and Yemen as an Iranian proxy. This was followed by Saudi opposition to concessions by Hariri that led to the election of General Michel Aoun, an ally of Hezbollah, as president in October 2016; again, after a political paralysis that lasted 29 months with no active government and no head of state.  

The Saudis were also furious when President Aoun’s son-in-law, Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil, abstained from condemning the burning of the Saudi embassy in Tehran at an Arab League meeting in Cairo in January 2016, citing the need to preserve national unity.

Fearing that he was simply providing Hezbollah with protection in the guise of compromise, the Saudis pressured Hariri to resign in November 2017 during a trip to Riyadh, but he later challenged that by retracting on his resignation when back in Beirut. Lebanon was caught between two sides, and as the regional conflict intensified from tension to open confrontation, neutrality was no longer an option.

Gulf connections

An estimated 350,000 Lebanese expats live and work in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait. These countries are also the main clients for Lebanese contractors, consultants and advertising companies, some of which have offices there. The domestic tourism industry relies heavily on Arab Gulf visitors and they are a principal source of foreign investments especially in the real estate sector.

Lebanon also enjoyed a certain degree of political and economic protection from the US and the Gulf, and Hezbollah benefited indirectly from that protection, as it also shielded it to a certain degree from sanctions.

The deterioration of relations meant that the country was cut off by its Gulf partners. This was manifested in travel bans for Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nationals to Lebanon and a decrease in investments and bank deposits, as well as a decrease in remittances from Lebanese expats, partly because of economic crisis in the Gulf countries themselves.

Saudi Arabia withdrew $4 billion of aid to the Lebanese army and internal security forces, and no aid or deposits were forthcoming as the economic and financial situation deteriorated. 

The costs to the Lebanese economy include the opportunity cost created by the annual threat of war with Israel, after which trips are cancelled and projects postponed. Hezbollah also controls a section of Beirut port where it pays no duty or taxes. Add to that the economic fallout from the war in Syria, such as the impact on exports, the inflow of refugees and the cost of Hezbollah’s involvement.

The burden of these political factors is difficult to estimate but it constitutes the ransom that the Lebanese economy bears as a cost of the compromise. This is not to absolve Lebanese politicians from corruption or bankers of mismanagement but to add that political factors cannot be ignored.

The cumulative cost and economic impact of being cut off from its main economic partner eventually bankrupted the country. The fiscal and financial aspects, with Lebanon’s inability to service its debt, are but a reflection of these political factors. In the long run, the key to avoiding complete collapse is to restore relations with the GCC and free Lebanon from that very costly grip.

Historically, Iraq lay claim to one of the most abundant water supplies in the Middle East. But the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers has reduced by up to 40% since the 1970s, due in part to the actions of neighbouring countries, in particular Turkey, upstream.

Rising temperatures and reduced rainfall due to climate change are also negatively impacting Iraq’s water reserves. Evaporation from dams and reservoirs is estimated to lose the country up to 8 billion cubic metres of water every year.

A threat to peace and stability

Shortages have dried up previously fertile land, increasing poverty in agricultural areas. Shortages have also served to fuel conflict: communities faced with successive droughts and government inertia proved to be easy targets for ISIS recruiters, who lured farmers into joining them by offering money and food to feed their families. Economic hardship for those whose livelihoods relied upon river water has also driven rural to urban migration, putting significant strain on already over-populated towns and cities, exacerbating housing, job and electricity shortages, and widening the gap between haves and have-nots.

But scarcity isn’t the most crucial element of Iraq’s water crisis – contamination is. Decades of local government mismanagement, corrupt practices and a lack of regulation of dumping (it is estimated up to 70% of Iraq’s industrial waste is dumped directly into water) has left approximately three in every five citizens without a reliable source of potable water.

In 2018, 118,000 residents of Basra province were hospitalised with symptoms brought on by drinking contaminated water, which not only put a spotlight on the inadequacies of a crumbling healthcare system but sparked mass protests and a subsequent violent crackdown.

The water crisis is also undermining the stability of the country’s federal governance model, by occasionally sparking disputes between Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government, as well as between governorates in the south.

The crisis is both a symptom and a cause of poor governance. Iraq is stuck in a cycle whereby government inaction causes shortages and contamination, which result in economic losses, reduced food supply, increased prices and widespread poor health. This in turn leads to increasing levels of poverty, higher demand on services and civil unrest, increasing the pressure on a weak, dysfunctional system of government.

What can be done?

The first priority should be modernising existing water-management infrastructure - a relic of a time when the problem was an excess rather than a shortage of water (the last time Iraq’s flood defences were required was 1968). Bureaucratic hurdles, widespread corruption and an endless cycle of other crises taking precedent prevent good initiatives from being implemented or scaled up.

Diversifying energy sources to improve provision is crucial. Baghdad has a sewage treatment plant that originally ran on its own electricity source, but this capacity was destroyed in 1991 and was never replaced. The city continues to suffer from dangerous levels of water pollution because the electricity supply from the grid is insufficient to power the plant. Solar energy has great potential in sun-drenched Iraq to bridge the gaping hole in energy provision, but successive governments have chosen to focus on fossil fuels rather than promoting investment to grow the renewables sector.

Heightened tension with upstream Turkey could turn water into another cause of regional conflict. But, if approached differently, collaboration between Iraq and its neighbour could foster regional harmony.

Turkey’s elevated geography and cooler climate mean its water reserves suffer 75% less evaporation than Iraq’s. Given that Turkey’s top energy priority is the diversification of its supply of imported hydrocarbons, a win-win deal could see Turkey exchange access to its water-management infrastructure for delivery of reduced cost energy supplies from Iraq.

German-French cooperation on coal and steel in the 1950s and the evolution of economic integration that followed might provide a model for how bilateral cooperation over one issue could result in cooperation with other regional players (in this case Iran and Syria) on a range of other issues. This kind of model would need to consider the future of energy, whereby oil and gas would be replaced by solar-power exports.

These solutions have been open to policymakers for years and yet they have taken little tangible action. While there are leaders and bureaucrats with the will to act, effective action is invariably blocked by a complex and opaque political system replete with vested interests in maintaining power and wealth via a weak state and limited services from central government.

Breaking the cycle

To break this cycle, Iraq needs a group of professional and able actors outside of government to work with willing elements of the state bureaucracy as a taskforce to pressure for action and accountability. Publishing the recommendations from a hitherto withheld report produced in the aftermath of Basra’s 2018 heath crisis would be a great start.

In time, this taskforce could champion the prioritisation of water on the national agenda, the implementation of infrastructure upgrades, and hold more productive conversations with neighbour states.

With such a high degree of state fragmentation and dysfunction in Iraq, looking to the central government to provide leadership will not yield results. Engagement with a coalition of non-state actors can begin to address the water crisis and also open a dialogue around new models of governance for other critical issues. This might even be a starting point for rewriting the tattered social contract in Iraq.

This piece is based on insights and discussion at a roundtable event, Conflict and the Water Crisis in Iraq, held at Chatham House on March 9 as part of the Iraq Initiative.

In 2017 Trump expressed pity for the ‘beautiful babies’ killed in a gas attack on Khan Shaykhun in Syria before launching airstrikes against President Assad's regime. Images of suffering children in world politics are often used as a synecdoche for a broader conflict or disaster. Injured, suffering, or dead; the ways in which images of children circulate in global public discourse must be critically examined to uncover the assumptions that operate in these environments. This article explores reactions to images of children by representatives and leaders of states to trace the interconnected affective and political dimensions of these images. In contrast to attending to the expected empathetic responses prompted by images of children, this article particularly focuses on when such images prompt bellicose foreign policy decision-making. In doing this, the article forwards a way of thinking about images as contentious affective objects in international relations. The ways in which images of children's bodies and suffering are strategically deployed by politicians deserves closer scrutiny to uncover the visual politics of childhood inherent in these moments of international politics and policy-making.

Over the last five years, the prevailing order in the Horn of Africa has been influenced by increasing engagement from the Gulf states across the Red Sea. Their growing presence has presented governments in the region with significant policy challenges, as they seek to leverage interest and competition to further their own objectives with Gulf players and their allies, while simultaneously navigating the multiple overlapping tensions and disputes that have long marked the Horn region.

Balancing regional and global dynamics will continue to be a considerable challenge for states in the Horn that already have to deal with complex internal development and political and conflict challenges. Interventions by the Gulf states have heightened tensions around internal and cross-border relationships but they have also contributed to reconciliation and have the potential to fuel long-term regional economic integration. Developing a collective action plan and coordinated strategies for engagement on common issues with the Gulf states and along the shared Red Sea arena will enable countries in the Horn of Africa to better meet the challenges and benefits from external interest.

This high-level invitation-only roundtable will bring together the special envoys and representatives for the Horn of Africa and Red Sea, along with expert participants, to analyse regional dynamics and explore options to boost collaboration and burden-sharing towards greater integration, development and more durable peace and security on both sides of the Red Sea.

This article argues that practices of global finance provide a rich opportunity to consider gender's embodiment in everyday, but highly regulatory, financial life. Tracing a pathway through the rise of the ‘diversity agenda’ in global finance in the wake of the global financial crisis, the article asks how ‘diversity’ has shaped the global financial services industry, and whether it has challenged the reproduction of gendered power in global finance. Recent, innovative feminist political economy work has laid out a clear challenge to researchers of the global political economy to explore how everyday practices have become significant sites of gendered, regulatory power, and this article takes up this challenge, analysing how the rise of ‘diversity’ in financial services reveals the crucial intersections of gendered power and everyday economic practices. Using a conceptual framework drawn explicitly from Marysia Zalewski's work, this article advances critical inquiry into how gender has become an often unacknowledged way of writing the world of global finance, in ongoing, and problematic, ways. It proposes that the practices and futures of the diversity agenda in global finance provide a window into the persistent failure of global finance to reconfigure its foundational masculinism, and asks that financial actors begin to take seriously the foundational, gendered myths on which global finance has been built.

Historically, Iraq lay claim to one of the most abundant water supplies in the Middle East. But the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers has reduced by up to 40% since the 1970s, due in part to the actions of neighbouring countries, in particular Turkey, upstream.

Rising temperatures and reduced rainfall due to climate change are also negatively impacting Iraq’s water reserves. Evaporation from dams and reservoirs is estimated to lose the country up to 8 billion cubic metres of water every year.

A threat to peace and stability

Shortages have dried up previously fertile land, increasing poverty in agricultural areas. Shortages have also served to fuel conflict: communities faced with successive droughts and government inertia proved to be easy targets for ISIS recruiters, who lured farmers into joining them by offering money and food to feed their families. Economic hardship for those whose livelihoods relied upon river water has also driven rural to urban migration, putting significant strain on already over-populated towns and cities, exacerbating housing, job and electricity shortages, and widening the gap between haves and have-nots.

But scarcity isn’t the most crucial element of Iraq’s water crisis – contamination is. Decades of local government mismanagement, corrupt practices and a lack of regulation of dumping (it is estimated up to 70% of Iraq’s industrial waste is dumped directly into water) has left approximately three in every five citizens without a reliable source of potable water.

In 2018, 118,000 residents of Basra province were hospitalised with symptoms brought on by drinking contaminated water, which not only put a spotlight on the inadequacies of a crumbling healthcare system but sparked mass protests and a subsequent violent crackdown.

The water crisis is also undermining the stability of the country’s federal governance model, by occasionally sparking disputes between Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government, as well as between governorates in the south.

The crisis is both a symptom and a cause of poor governance. Iraq is stuck in a cycle whereby government inaction causes shortages and contamination, which result in economic losses, reduced food supply, increased prices and widespread poor health. This in turn leads to increasing levels of poverty, higher demand on services and civil unrest, increasing the pressure on a weak, dysfunctional system of government.

What can be done?

The first priority should be modernising existing water-management infrastructure - a relic of a time when the problem was an excess rather than a shortage of water (the last time Iraq’s flood defences were required was 1968). Bureaucratic hurdles, widespread corruption and an endless cycle of other crises taking precedent prevent good initiatives from being implemented or scaled up.

Diversifying energy sources to improve provision is crucial. Baghdad has a sewage treatment plant that originally ran on its own electricity source, but this capacity was destroyed in 1991 and was never replaced. The city continues to suffer from dangerous levels of water pollution because the electricity supply from the grid is insufficient to power the plant. Solar energy has great potential in sun-drenched Iraq to bridge the gaping hole in energy provision, but successive governments have chosen to focus on fossil fuels rather than promoting investment to grow the renewables sector.

Heightened tension with upstream Turkey could turn water into another cause of regional conflict. But, if approached differently, collaboration between Iraq and its neighbour could foster regional harmony.

Turkey’s elevated geography and cooler climate mean its water reserves suffer 75% less evaporation than Iraq’s. Given that Turkey’s top energy priority is the diversification of its supply of imported hydrocarbons, a win-win deal could see Turkey exchange access to its water-management infrastructure for delivery of reduced cost energy supplies from Iraq.

German-French cooperation on coal and steel in the 1950s and the evolution of economic integration that followed might provide a model for how bilateral cooperation over one issue could result in cooperation with other regional players (in this case Iran and Syria) on a range of other issues. This kind of model would need to consider the future of energy, whereby oil and gas would be replaced by solar-power exports.

These solutions have been open to policymakers for years and yet they have taken little tangible action. While there are leaders and bureaucrats with the will to act, effective action is invariably blocked by a complex and opaque political system replete with vested interests in maintaining power and wealth via a weak state and limited services from central government.

Breaking the cycle

To break this cycle, Iraq needs a group of professional and able actors outside of government to work with willing elements of the state bureaucracy as a taskforce to pressure for action and accountability. Publishing the recommendations from a hitherto withheld report produced in the aftermath of Basra’s 2018 heath crisis would be a great start.

In time, this taskforce could champion the prioritisation of water on the national agenda, the implementation of infrastructure upgrades, and hold more productive conversations with neighbour states.

With such a high degree of state fragmentation and dysfunction in Iraq, looking to the central government to provide leadership will not yield results. Engagement with a coalition of non-state actors can begin to address the water crisis and also open a dialogue around new models of governance for other critical issues. This might even be a starting point for rewriting the tattered social contract in Iraq.

This piece is based on insights and discussion at a roundtable event, Conflict and the Water Crisis in Iraq, held at Chatham House on March 9 as part of the Iraq Initiative.

In 2017 Trump expressed pity for the ‘beautiful babies’ killed in a gas attack on Khan Shaykhun in Syria before launching airstrikes against President Assad's regime. Images of suffering children in world politics are often used as a synecdoche for a broader conflict or disaster. Injured, suffering, or dead; the ways in which images of children circulate in global public discourse must be critically examined to uncover the assumptions that operate in these environments. This article explores reactions to images of children by representatives and leaders of states to trace the interconnected affective and political dimensions of these images. In contrast to attending to the expected empathetic responses prompted by images of children, this article particularly focuses on when such images prompt bellicose foreign policy decision-making. In doing this, the article forwards a way of thinking about images as contentious affective objects in international relations. The ways in which images of children's bodies and suffering are strategically deployed by politicians deserves closer scrutiny to uncover the visual politics of childhood inherent in these moments of international politics and policy-making.

World politics generates a long list of anxiety-inspiring scenarios that threaten to unravel everyday life with sudden and violent destruction. From total war and the concentration camps, through nuclear firestorms, global pandemics and climate disaster, the diabolical violence of the recent past and conceivable future is the stuff of nightmares. Yet International Relations scholars and practitioners are often criticized for being disconnected from the human realities of international calamity. The challenge for both is to engage world politics in a way that foregrounds the human consequences of extreme violence and depravation. In this article, we explore these difficult experiences through popular culture representations of the apocalypse, a subject of intense interest for researchers in a discipline where global destruction is a distinct possibility. However, we take a different route by engaging the apocalypse through the horror genre, the one place where human suffering is explicitly accentuated. We argue that the horror genre is at once an access point for ethical engagement with the human consequences of extreme violence and a complex terrain where dark imaginings can be politically loaded, culturally specific and ethically ambiguous.

This article uses the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) that took place in Tel Aviv to explore how cultural mega-events serve both as political arenas and as tools for identity construction, negotiation and contestation. These processes of identity politics are all conducted across national–subnational–international–transnational levels. The hosting of mega-events fleshes out these multiple processes in a very strong manner. We first discuss the politics of hosting mega-events in general. We then examine the identity politics associated more specifically with the Eurovision Song Contest, before examining in depth the complex forms of identity politics emerging around the competition following the 2018 Israeli victory. We suggest that it is important to study together the multiple processes—domestic, international and transnational—of identity politics that take place around the competition, as they interact with each other. Consequently, we follow the various stakeholders involved at these different levels and their interactions. We examine the internal identity negotiation process in Israel surrounding the event, the critical actors debating how to use the stage to challenge the liberal, western, ‘normal’ identity Israel hoped to project in the contest and how other stakeholders (participating states, national broadcasting agencies, participating artists) reacted to them, and finally we examine the behaviour of the institution in charge, the European Broadcasting Union, and national governments. We contribute to the study of mega-events as fields of contestation, to the understanding of the complex, multilevel nature of national identity construction, negotiation and contestation in the current era, and more broadly to the role that popular culture plays in this context.

This special section brings together diverse spaces and modes of visuality through specific, sustained attention to the various types of violence depicted. In doing so, these articles draw out a concern for the visual constitution of violence in global politics, and its emotional and political consequences. Individually and collectively, the contributions highlight the ways in which policy-makers and researchers are daily confronted by violent images that influence how complex political problems are seen and consequently understood. Paying attention to the power of the visuality of violence is necessary to understand how certain kinds of policy responses to direct and indirect violence unfold.

In this introduction to a special section of the September 2019 issue of International Affairs, we revisit the main themes and arguments of our article ‘Beyond seablindness: a new agenda for maritime security studies’, published in this journal in November 2017. We reiterate our call for more scholarly attention to be paid to the maritime environment in international relations and security studies. We argue that the contemporary maritime security agenda should be understood as an interlinked set of challenges of growing global, regional and national significance, and comprising issues of national, environmental, economic and human security. We suggest that maritime security is characterized by four main characteristics, including its interconnected nature, its transnationality, its liminality—in the sense of implicating both land and sea—and its national and institutional cross-jurisdictionality. Each of the five articles in the special section explores aspects of the contemporary maritime security agenda, including themes of geopolitics, international law, interconnectivity, maritime security governance and the changing spatial order at sea.

In discussions to date about how international law applies in cyberspace, commentators have tended to focus their attention on how the rules on the use of force, or the law of armed conflict, apply to cyber activities conducted by states that give rise to physical damage, injury or death.

But in practice, the vast majority of state cyberattacks fall below this threshold. Far more common are persistent, low-level attacks that may leave no physical trace but that are capable of doing significant damage to a state’s ability to control its systems, often at serious economic cost.

Such cyber incursions might include network disruptions in the operation of another government’s websites; tampering with electoral infrastructure to change or undermine the result; or using cyber means to destabilize another state’s financial sector.

For these kinds of cyber operation, the principle of sovereignty, and the principle of non-intervention in another state’s internal affairs, are the starting point.

A UN Group of Government Experts (GGE) agreed in 2013 and 2015 that the principles in the UN Charter, including sovereignty and the prohibition on intervention in another state’s affairs, apply to states’ activities in cyberspace. The 2015 GGE also recommended eleven (non-binding) norms of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace.

However, states have not yet reached agreement on how to apply these principles. Until recently, there has also been very little knowledge of what states actually do in cyberspace, as they usually conduct cyber operations covertly and have been reluctant to put their views on record.

A new Chatham House research paper analyses the application of the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention to state cyberattacks that fall below the principle of use of force. As well as analysing the application of the law in this area, the paper also makes recommendations to governments on how they might best make progress in reaching agreement in this area.

Existing rules or new rules?

As the research paper makes clear, there is currently some debate, principally between countries in the West, about the extent to which sovereignty is a legally binding rule in the context of cyberspace and, if so, how it and the principle of non-intervention might apply in practice.

In the last few years, certain states have put on record how they consider international law to apply to states’ activities in cyberspace, namely the UK, Australia, France and the Netherlands. While there may be some differences in their approaches, which are discussed in the paper, there also remains important common ground: namely, that existing international law already provides a solid framework for regulating states’ cyber activities, as it regulates every other domain of state-to-state activity.

There is also an emerging trend for states to work together when attributing cyberattacks to hostile states, enabling them to call out malign cyber activity when it violates international law. (See, for example, the joint statements made in relation to the NotPetya cyber attack and malicious cyber activity attributed to the Russian government).

However, other countries have questioned whether existing international law as it stands is capable of regulating states’ cyber interactions and have called for ‘new legal instruments’ in this area.

This includes a proposal by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (led by Russia and China) for an International Code of Conduct on Information Security, a draft of which was submitted to the UN in 2011 and 2015, without success. The UN has also formed a new Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) under a resolution proposed by Russia to consider how international law applies to states’ activities in cyberspace.

The resolution establishing the OEWG, which began work earlier this year, includes the possibility of the group ‘introducing changes to the rules, norms and principles of responsible behaviour of States’ agreed in the 2013 and 2015 GGE reports. In the OEWG discussions at the UN in September, several countries claimed that a new legal instrument was needed to fill the ‘legal vacuum’ (Cuba) or ‘the gap of ungoverned areas’ (Indonesia).

It would be concerning if the hard-won consensus on the application of international law to cyberspace that has been reached at past GGEs started to unravel. In contrast to 2013 and 2015, the 2017 meeting failed to reach an agreement.

On 9 December, a renewed GGE will meet in New York, but the existence of the OEWG exploring the same issues in a separate process reflects the fact that cyber norms have become an area of geopolitical rivalry.

Aside from the application of international law, states are also adopting divergent approaches to the domestic regulation of cyberspace within their own territory. The emerging trend towards a ‘splinternet’ – i.e. between states that believe the internet should be global and open on the hand, and those that favour a ‘sovereignty and control’ model on the other  – is also likely to make discussions at the GGE more challenging.

Distinct from the international law concept of sovereignty is the notion of ‘cybersovereignty’, a term coined by China to describe the wide-ranging powers it assumes under domestic law to regulate its citizens’ access to the internet and personal data within its territory. This approach is catching on (as reflected in Russia’s recently enacted ‘Sovereign Internet Law’), with other authoritarian states likely to follow suit.

The importance of non-state actors

In parallel with regional and UN discussions on how international law applies, a number of initiatives by non-state actors have also sought to establish voluntary principles about responsible state behaviour in cyberspace.

The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace, a multi-stakeholder body that has proposed principles, norms and recommendations to guide responsible behaviour by all parties in cyberspace, recently published its final report. The Cybersecurity Tech Accord  aims to promote collaboration between tech companies on stability and resilience in cyberspace. President Macron’s ‘Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace’ has to date received the backing of 67 states, 139 international and civil society organizations, and 358 private-sector organizations.

It remains to be seen in the long term whether the parallel processes at the UN will work constructively together or be competitive. But notwithstanding the challenging geopolitical backdrop, the UN GGE meeting next week at the least offers states the opportunity to consolidate and build on the results of past meetings; to increase knowledge and discussion about how international law might apply; and to encourage more states to put their own views of these issues on the record.

Michelle Bachelet, as a young woman you became involved with political issues, supporting Chile’s transition to democracy following the Augusto Pinochet regime. What first sparked your interest in politics and what was it like for you as a young woman in Chile at this time?

I guess it’s related to the environment that I lived in as a child because none of my parents were involved in politics but they were people who were interested in what happened to other people. We would have interesting discussions about what was going on in Chile and around the world and I had grown up being a person who wanted to be part of finding solutions to different challenges.

When I was a student, there were lots of things happening in Chile that I became interested in even though I was in medical school at the time. Then came an important political moment in the 1970s for Chile and I thought that I needed to help make Chile a better place for everyone – that my voice alone would not be enough – so I wanted to meet other people who might have answers to the questions I had. That’s when I became politically active.

I always say that, in my milk bottle, the word responsibility was included because I always have felt responsible for things. My parents also always used to tell me that we’re all human beings and, although we might have differences, we should all have dignity and be respected and have the same rights and opportunities because it is the right thing to do. So that’s how I became what I became.

You became the first woman in Latin America to hold the post of minister of national defence in 2002 and pushed to include more women in conflict resolution. Given that the inclusion of women in peace processes increases the likelihood of agreements being reached, yet women are largely excluded from the negotiating tables, why should more women in peace and security be prioritized? 

I used to push hard to have more women as negotiators and mediators at different levels when I was minister of national defence but I was told ‘We don’t have enough women with the capacity’. Of course that was not true. So one of the tasks I set myself was to build a roster of capable women so that tomorrow nobody could use this excuse. 

We built a roster, but still, as you say, there was a tendency not to have women included at all levels. I think this is because there’s still machoism and sexism that exists at some levels. Some men feel that women are weaker, that they’re not capable enough, and that’s not true. Women are important because women have the right skills to be negotiators and mediators.

I have to say that UN Secretary-General António Guterres has done a great job by appointing women in half of all the posts for special envoys and special representatives in conflict places. But we still need to do more. 

Why do I believe women make a difference? Conflicts matter to both women and men because they impact both, but usually, the experiences of women are invisible in the eyes of many who work in negotiating and mediating peace. That’s why you need people that can bring this perspective to the table. 

The other thing is that women can often get close to other women in conflict places, and in that case, they can get a lot of useful information from women on the ground because they don’t feel threatened by other women. This is particularly true of women who have been victims of sexual violence who are more willing to tell another woman what they have experienced. 

But, at the end of the day, women are half of the population of the world and I think we need them to be represented adequately.

In 2006, you became the first female president of Chile, what was this like for you and did you feel pressure taking up this mantle?

Yes of course. I mean, there were a lot of people who would say ‘I want to vote for you but I don’t think it’s a woman’s place’. Journalists would also ask you ‘You are divorced and don’t have a man by your side. How are you going to cope?’ and I would respond by saying ‘I have always done it myself.’

Sometimes if I took some time to make a decision, because I thought it needed a bit more time to reflect on what to do, they would say ‘She doesn’t take decisions’ but if you made a quick decision then they would say ‘She improvises’. I’m not complaining, I’m just describing the kinds of things that go on, and these are the things I have spoken about with other female leaders from around the world. For example, I once talked to Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the former prime minister of Denmark, and she would tell me that during the election campaign they would discuss the size of her purse and if she had a boyfriend. I mean, really, people tend to diminish women by talking about unsubstantial issues – there will be a lot of attempts to try to bring a woman’s self-esteem down. 

What I would say is, if you know exactly why you are there and what you want to do as a president, parliamentarian or whatever and you’re sure that what you want to do is the right thing – and the smart thing – then do it. Pick a team that is honest, that works with the same passion as you and that is loyal to you but is not afraid to tell you when things aren’t working. But it’s hard and difficult and politics is getting nastier every day.

You said politics is getting nastier. Julia Gillard recently spoke to me about the dark side of social media for women. In what ways do you think politics is changing for women in particular?

I remember seeing that, in the European Parliament, about 85 per cent of women have experienced psychological violence whether they have received death threats or threats of rape and all kinds of things just because they’re female.

There is also a bias against women during election campaigns where people say she cannot be elected because she’s not capable just because she’s a woman. 

Then there are those that, as I mentioned before, try to talk about personal things or spread fake news. Politics has always been about debate between people with different positions, and that’s fine, but I think sometimes you see it goes past the limit in terms of respect for the other person.

Then there is the language. Failing to understand that the other person is a competitor, not an enemy, and using language to, sort of, symbolically destroy the other one is not right. I see it everywhere and I think that’s not what politics is for – we came to serve the people and words matter. 

I think all of these things are making a lot of people not want to get involved in politics anymore because it’s not the kind of environment that we want to be in. But I hope, on the other hand, that if we have more women in politics, maybe we can turn that trend to a more positive and constructive one, where there can still be intense debate but in a way where everybody feels that we’re all part of the same country and we can all build the country together.

How did you find your male counterparts responding to you as leader? Was there a time, for example, your gender became an issue for you while you were in office?

When I was a student of medicine, what mattered was whether you were a good student or a good doctor, not if you were a man or a woman, but in politics, I found that when I appointed ministers, some of them struggled with me being a woman. For example, sometimes I would conclude a meeting by saying ‘We’re going to do this’ but there would be a male minister who would have to have the last word. Or some of them, particularly the more senior ones who had been in senior positions before, found it challenging to accept a secondary role to a woman.

On the other hand, with the military, I had no problem. Neither as minister of defence and neither as president because they understood the chain of command.

It’s interesting to look at women in other leadership positions too. For example, I remember a friend who worked in a place many years ago and she would tell me that she needed to swear and almost to spit on the ground so that men would respect her because the majority of the leaders there were men. I said to her ‘You don’t need to look like a man to be a leader.’

Perhaps sometimes it’s more difficult because strength is understood in different ways but my message would be that you can be a leader in your own way. 

While president of Chile, you introduced a number of policies aimed at addressing women’s rights issues notably on the gender pay gap and on sexual and reproductive rights for women.

How do you view your legacy on these issues? Were there other policies you wanted to implement but were unable to? And how would you like these initiatives to be furthered today in light of, for example, the rolling back of reproductive rights for women in some parts of the world?

We went from trying to improve the legal framework that applies to women to creating the Ministry of Women and Gender Equity. We also tried to push for changing the electoral roll with quotas for women which we got to an extent but not as much as I wanted. There was no appetite for having a quota for 40 per cent of all those elected to be women so we settled for 40 per cent of all candidates to be women. We still improved a little bit in terms of the number of women being elected from 14 per cent to 24 per cent through this but I didn’t get everything I wanted. Nevertheless, during my time in office, we were able to increase the representation of women in the Senate and the House which was positive. 

On sexual and reproductive rights, in Chile, abortion was criminalized so we were able to decriminalize abortion and we also advanced LGTBI rights and so on. We also developed a better legal framework for dealing with sexual violence but of course sexual violence is a complicated issue that cannot be solved in a short period of time and we need to continue working strongly on that.

The other thing I’m a believer of is the importance of early child development which is good for both boys and girls. So we set up a network of kindergartens free of charge, particularly for poorer people, because there are so many women who cannot afford to put their children in kindergartens while they study or work. So we tried to do lots of things to expand women’s opportunities and women’s rights during my time in office.

Women are increasingly making it to the top level of politics around the world, yet in Latin America, the number of female heads of states has dropped to 0 following a generation of female political leaders across the continent.

Why do you think this is the case and could we see this change again in the future? Do you think Chile is likely to see another female president soon, and if so, who do you think could take up the mantle?

The truth is that there was a moment that I think the region had four or so female heads of states, and although there are currently some female vice presidents, the number of presidents is 0 but I wouldn't be able to say that this is necessarily a bad thing. There doesn’t need to be a female president every time. We need to have female leaders where their citizens believe that they’re the best people to lead their countries.

But we do need to do more to support women making it to the top so they can have all the skills needed to be a president or a prime minister and work more with young women too so that they can think of themselves as being able to take up such positions of leadership in the future. 

In Chile, I hope, of course, there will be another woman president one day but I have no idea when. I will not run again, I can tell you that, but I hope when the time comes, the people of Chile will believe in them.

In your current role, you have said that ‘The climate crisis is the greatest threat to human rights’ and that climate change and gender equality are inextricably linked. How do you see this link and what does that mean for how these issues should be addressed?

Climate change is the biggest threat to human rights because it affects the right to life, to food, to health and to live without violence, and if we are not able to tackle it, it will lead to water scarcity, food insecurity, forced migration and conflict – all of which we are seeing already.

Why is it linked to gender equality? There are many reasons. One of them is that women, who make up half the global population, are usually among the most vulnerable people in the world. Today there are billions of people who don’t have access to water, sanitation or housing with women having less access to all of these tools that would permit them to adapt [to a changing climate].

For example, women will be more affected by food insecurity because imagine a woman who is pregnant without food. She will likely end up being underweight, and then afterwards, this will impact her child who will be at risk of malnourishment. We see it everywhere where women avoid eating so that their children can eat.

Furthermore, if we have water scarcity, that will also affect women because today, in many parts of the world, women and girls fetch the water for their families. If water becomes increasingly scarce, they will have to walk longer to fetch it, and today we already see women and girls who are subject to sexual gender-based violence as they carry out their day-to-day tasks. 

That’s why we need to provide women with the tools to empower them and to devise gender-responsive policies to climate change. 

Throughout your career, have you seen the scale and pace of change for human rights, particularly women’s rights, around the world that you would have wanted?

It depends on how you look at things. It has been over 70 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written when maternal mortality was incredibly high in many parts of the world and women did not have the vote everywhere.

If you look from that time to now, of course, women’s rights have seen a lot of progress. Maternal mortality has reduced and women can vote I think [in almost every democracy].

But over the last few years, we have seen a pushback on women’s rights, particularly in some areas like sexual and reproductive health rights, and that it something that concerns me a lot.

So I would say we’re not there yet. I hope we will be able to push back the pushback and move forward. Because if we go on along the same trajectory as we are now, we will have economic equality for women in 120 years, which is too long. I mean, nobody wants your great, great, great grandchildren to have to wait so long for equality. We need to stand up for women’s rights – and for all human rights – now and accelerate the progress we’ve been making.

In the past couple of months, there have been ongoing protests in Chile and around the world. What in your estimation is driving the protests and in what ways should governments, civil society and others respond to help address their demands?

I think it’s a phenomenon we are seeing in Chile and many places around the world. It’s a new process where young people are voicing their grievances but with no particular leaders. It’s what some people are calling a ‘new power’ and I think the situation in Chile is very similar to what’s happening in Lebanon, Hong Kong and elsewhere but with different triggers. 

In some places, people are challenging the outcome of an election; in other places, they are protesting because leaders want to change the constitution to be re-elected again; in other places, it can be, like in the case of Chile, a result of economic issues following the increase of the price of what you would call the Underground here. These inequalities lead to a mistrust in our institutions and in traditional leaders and I think this is a universal experience at the moment.

The current political and economic system is not delivering and it’s failing to meet people’s needs. So these young people protesting don’t see, in the current political and economic system, the solutions to the concerns they have.

The other thing that is interesting is the role social media has played in many of these recent protests. Social media has become a different way to allow people to learn from each other. When the students in Chile decided to protest against the increasing price of public transport, they went to the Metro and jumped over the barriers and then, two weeks’ later, I saw it in New York. Hundreds of students, for different reasons – against police brutality – doing exactly the same thing. So they learn from each other and they see what works in one place. 

So I think there is something in the world that is making people go to the streets. If it’s peacefully done then that’s fine. The problem is that sometimes it has triggered a harsh response from governments and that leads to more violence. 

I believe what needs to be done is to try to set up a national dialogue that includes all sectors of all societies where governments listen to the grievances that people have. You cannot change things in a day but I think people are reasonable enough to understand if you are committed to change. 

That’s why the UN has developed the Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development to leave no one behind. It probably won’t solve everything, but it will, I guess, if we are able to achieve the goals, help us have a planet that’s for everyone. 

This event is part of the Inaugural Virtual Roundtable Series on the US, Americas and the State of the World and will take place virtually only. Participants should not come to Chatham House for these events.

China’s resource diplomacy transpires in a world still dominated by the United States. Drawing on extensive research on global energy politics, the speaker will argue that despite Chinese claims that the US is instrumentalizing energy to contain its rise, there is little evidence to suggest that the latter intends to use the ‘oil weapon’.

This workshop will bring together experts from across Asia to discuss the challenges around natural resources that cause them to become drivers of conflict in the region, particularly in the context of territorial disputes, geopolitical competition and concerns over national sovereignty.

Attendance at this event is by invitation only.

This article uses the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) that took place in Tel Aviv to explore how cultural mega-events serve both as political arenas and as tools for identity construction, negotiation and contestation. These processes of identity politics are all conducted across national–subnational–international–transnational levels. The hosting of mega-events fleshes out these multiple processes in a very strong manner. We first discuss the politics of hosting mega-events in general. We then examine the identity politics associated more specifically with the Eurovision Song Contest, before examining in depth the complex forms of identity politics emerging around the competition following the 2018 Israeli victory. We suggest that it is important to study together the multiple processes—domestic, international and transnational—of identity politics that take place around the competition, as they interact with each other. Consequently, we follow the various stakeholders involved at these different levels and their interactions. We examine the internal identity negotiation process in Israel surrounding the event, the critical actors debating how to use the stage to challenge the liberal, western, ‘normal’ identity Israel hoped to project in the contest and how other stakeholders (participating states, national broadcasting agencies, participating artists) reacted to them, and finally we examine the behaviour of the institution in charge, the European Broadcasting Union, and national governments. We contribute to the study of mega-events as fields of contestation, to the understanding of the complex, multilevel nature of national identity construction, negotiation and contestation in the current era, and more broadly to the role that popular culture plays in this context.

Historically, Iraq lay claim to one of the most abundant water supplies in the Middle East. But the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers has reduced by up to 40% since the 1970s, due in part to the actions of neighbouring countries, in particular Turkey, upstream.

Rising temperatures and reduced rainfall due to climate change are also negatively impacting Iraq’s water reserves. Evaporation from dams and reservoirs is estimated to lose the country up to 8 billion cubic metres of water every year.

A threat to peace and stability

Shortages have dried up previously fertile land, increasing poverty in agricultural areas. Shortages have also served to fuel conflict: communities faced with successive droughts and government inertia proved to be easy targets for ISIS recruiters, who lured farmers into joining them by offering money and food to feed their families. Economic hardship for those whose livelihoods relied upon river water has also driven rural to urban migration, putting significant strain on already over-populated towns and cities, exacerbating housing, job and electricity shortages, and widening the gap between haves and have-nots.

But scarcity isn’t the most crucial element of Iraq’s water crisis – contamination is. Decades of local government mismanagement, corrupt practices and a lack of regulation of dumping (it is estimated up to 70% of Iraq’s industrial waste is dumped directly into water) has left approximately three in every five citizens without a reliable source of potable water.

In 2018, 118,000 residents of Basra province were hospitalised with symptoms brought on by drinking contaminated water, which not only put a spotlight on the inadequacies of a crumbling healthcare system but sparked mass protests and a subsequent violent crackdown.

The water crisis is also undermining the stability of the country’s federal governance model, by occasionally sparking disputes between Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government, as well as between governorates in the south.

The crisis is both a symptom and a cause of poor governance. Iraq is stuck in a cycle whereby government inaction causes shortages and contamination, which result in economic losses, reduced food supply, increased prices and widespread poor health. This in turn leads to increasing levels of poverty, higher demand on services and civil unrest, increasing the pressure on a weak, dysfunctional system of government.

What can be done?

The first priority should be modernising existing water-management infrastructure - a relic of a time when the problem was an excess rather than a shortage of water (the last time Iraq’s flood defences were required was 1968). Bureaucratic hurdles, widespread corruption and an endless cycle of other crises taking precedent prevent good initiatives from being implemented or scaled up.

Diversifying energy sources to improve provision is crucial. Baghdad has a sewage treatment plant that originally ran on its own electricity source, but this capacity was destroyed in 1991 and was never replaced. The city continues to suffer from dangerous levels of water pollution because the electricity supply from the grid is insufficient to power the plant. Solar energy has great potential in sun-drenched Iraq to bridge the gaping hole in energy provision, but successive governments have chosen to focus on fossil fuels rather than promoting investment to grow the renewables sector.

Heightened tension with upstream Turkey could turn water into another cause of regional conflict. But, if approached differently, collaboration between Iraq and its neighbour could foster regional harmony.

Turkey’s elevated geography and cooler climate mean its water reserves suffer 75% less evaporation than Iraq’s. Given that Turkey’s top energy priority is the diversification of its supply of imported hydrocarbons, a win-win deal could see Turkey exchange access to its water-management infrastructure for delivery of reduced cost energy supplies from Iraq.

German-French cooperation on coal and steel in the 1950s and the evolution of economic integration that followed might provide a model for how bilateral cooperation over one issue could result in cooperation with other regional players (in this case Iran and Syria) on a range of other issues. This kind of model would need to consider the future of energy, whereby oil and gas would be replaced by solar-power exports.

These solutions have been open to policymakers for years and yet they have taken little tangible action. While there are leaders and bureaucrats with the will to act, effective action is invariably blocked by a complex and opaque political system replete with vested interests in maintaining power and wealth via a weak state and limited services from central government.

Breaking the cycle

To break this cycle, Iraq needs a group of professional and able actors outside of government to work with willing elements of the state bureaucracy as a taskforce to pressure for action and accountability. Publishing the recommendations from a hitherto withheld report produced in the aftermath of Basra’s 2018 heath crisis would be a great start.

In time, this taskforce could champion the prioritisation of water on the national agenda, the implementation of infrastructure upgrades, and hold more productive conversations with neighbour states.

With such a high degree of state fragmentation and dysfunction in Iraq, looking to the central government to provide leadership will not yield results. Engagement with a coalition of non-state actors can begin to address the water crisis and also open a dialogue around new models of governance for other critical issues. This might even be a starting point for rewriting the tattered social contract in Iraq.

This piece is based on insights and discussion at a roundtable event, Conflict and the Water Crisis in Iraq, held at Chatham House on March 9 as part of the Iraq Initiative.