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Covid 19: Why International Relations Need The Anthropocene

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Anthropocene has generated intense and ongoing debate over the last decade. From seemingly diverse disciplines such as climatology, geology, philosophy, and the visual arts, scholars have taken up the task of thinking through the new Anthropocene epoch. This means pursuing various avenues of measurement, criticism, and reflection on the origins of the Anthropocene, its present character, and what kind of future it foretells. While geological evidence is still debated to officially state the existence of the Anthropocene, a large body of science has recently emerged that accepts its general premise – that humans are geological agents – and tries to figure out how and why it matters. Since the Anthropocene taught us about Earth science, it also reflects a return to humankind. At a fundamental level, it interferes with intellectual and psychological conceptions of who we are as human beings and how we relate to the world around us.

The term of the Athropocene actually is matter of ages on a geological scale, the time when humans have moved from the Holesen. According to the definition spoken by the creator of the term, the Anthropocene is an era in which humans are more powerful than nature. Paul Crutzen who first coined this in his book Anthropocene: A New Epoch in Earth’s History, and also in further words Jason Moore in his article explaining the meaning of anthropocene actually has two purposes, the first Anthropocene is interpreted as a scientific concept and object in geological science, the second meaning is an idea that questions the truth and authenticity of natural science. Anthropocene in this second term questions the relationship between humans and non-humans. Furthermore, Anthropocene is a term that connects natural science and social science.

Anthropocene is actually a human crisis, each crisis leading the way out to a new state of stability. Anthropocene crisis is an ecological crisis and the ecological crisis is not something that happened suddenly, also cannot be fixed suddenly either. Since Rachel Carson’s 1962 essay Silent Spring, the environmental crisis has become the most obvious crisis facing humanity. He states that humans are rapidly approaching many limits of what the biosphere and ecosystems tolerate.

Covid and the Anthropocene

One of the signs that we have entered the Anthropocene period is the emergence of many new zoonotic diseases. Although in the 2016 UNEP frontier report it was stated that environmental degradation and global warming would cause the emergence of many zoonotic diseases within duration of every four months, this of course could change more quickly. Zoonotic diseases in crude sense are diseases that originates from animals and with certain process and duration can infect humans through an intermediary (carrier host), which will then cause health problems for humans and even death.

In the last few decades, many zoonotic diseases have emerged, AIDS, Anthrax, Ebola and Malaria are zoonotic diseases that have hit several regions of the world. At least 60% of the 335 diseases that emerged between 1960 and 2004 were animal diseases. Until throughout 2002 to 2012, two types of had been epidemic, in 2002 SARS appeared in Guandong Province, China and caused the death of 800 people, which is 10% of the number of sufferers. After the SARS disease subsided, MERS disease appeared in Saudi Arabia. Until the end of 2019, a new virus appeared again in China which later became a pandemic, called Covid 19. Until now, it has not been totaled and it is estimated when it will really subside, because several countries are still fighting against it. The three viruses (SARS, MERS, and Covid 19 or n-Cov) are viruses of the same type, namely the Corona virus which often causes coughs and colds.

Even though there are debates and researchs are still being carried out to date, one of the articles published by Cristina O’Callaghan-Gordo and Joseph M. Anto entitled Covid-19: The Disease of Anthropocene, concluded that Covid-19 is a disease that is Anthropocene disease. This is stated by the discovery that the covid 19 virus was produced from the transmission of changes in the DNA/RNA structure of the virus that occurred due to environmental damage and human economic activities.

Covid 19 has changed the world more or less in the last two years, until now, although several countries in the world have been freed from the Covid 19 emergency status, several other countries are still recovering, and other part else still struggling. Covid 19 not only causes disease outbreaks and is the cause of death for many people around the world, but Covid 19 also ravages the global economy. Its presence is believed to be one of the typical diseases of the Anthropocene era. This is because Covid 19 is believed to be the result of human superiority over existing natural resources which then results in an imbalance in nature (virus growth) which further causes the imbalance to arise and develop diseases and viruses. About how and in detail this happened several scientists in the field of virology and the environment explained in their own language.

IR Studies and International Relations

As yet,  it has remained largely absent from International Relations (IR) analysis. This is puzzling given the monumental stakes involved in tackling planetary change and the discipline’s primary focus on crises. This silence may exist, however, as contemporary studies of international relations are disrupted by the Anthropocene, which shifts basic assumptions about how humans live in the midst of perpetual danger, danger, and risk. Since the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, dramatic human-driven changes in the functioning of Earth’s systems have occurred.

International Relations has largely not successful yet to engage the Anthropocene challenge, the abundance of information emerging showing the scale and type of impact humans are having on the world, this is no longer sustainable. Because of the reason above, International Relations must reconsider some of its core understandings, in particular the relationship between the normative categories of humanity, change, but also by the emerging awareness of Anthropocene entanglement. As Morgenthau has said, the ‘struggle for power and peace’ will not go away once the International Commission on Stratigraphy returns its verdict on whether we are now, officially, in the Anthropocene epoch. However, if International Relations remained attached to Holocene thought, defined most acutely as the separation of man from the world, it would be disastrous; both reflexively, and for the world. Further, Anthropocene that debated in International Relations was strongly influenced by the post-humanist and materialist schools of thought, after which it became a general trend to reject the destruction of nature. Regardless of the mutual commitment.

In his article, Cameron Harrington proves that the natural/cultural divide is at the heart of the liberal Enlightenment project is wrong. The Anthropocene also got rid of the liberal aspirations of progress and promises of protection, even on the contrary, the Anthropocene promoted the politics of adaptation of resilience which is a post-political form, where humans stop transforming living conditions and have to survive with what is.

The Anthropocene represents the potential failure of modern human societies to preserve and sustain themselves and other forms of life. All of this also reflects the failure of the International Relations assumption to think of a different world; not in the utopian sense of building a perfect political community, but thinking through the realization that we exist in a world far more complex, interactive and diverse than ever imagined in International Relations. The discipline of International Relations can no longer deny these interconnected risks, threats, and physical effects, or maintain an outdated image of a world built on a clean separation of people, nations, and global systems. Given its claim to research ‘global’, International Relations is no longer just a sub-discipline of political science and economics, but also geophysics. Discussing the various ways in which the Anthropocene and International Relations can coexist is no easy task.

International Relations has indeed made many contributions  from researching the difficulties of building an effective environmental regime complex to the murky role of climate change in conflict, however, the absence of International Relations in contributing to the Anthropocene debate suggests something more complex and troubling, namely myopic tendencies. to see people, nature, and security, as divisible layers that meet each other instrumentally. Such views reflect past forms of modernism and materialism, which have contributed to the crisis in humanity today.

Therefore, the task of International Relations scientists will become even more difficult in the years to come. Given its history of depicting the uneven global process of modern politics, International Relations seems well placed to engage the Anthropocene, which emerged directly from that process. Furthermore, IR’s commitment to tragedy as a political center is reflected in the ‘apocalyptic tone’ prevalent in Anthropocene studies. However, the Anthropocene also presented ‘worldly’ problems to International Relations. This forced International Relations to think about what is called mass murder: the danger to, and the potential end of the world. Such thinking is fundamentally complex and requires a broader and deeper level of ecological reflection than we see today.

Conclusion

The presence of Covid-19 is an alarm for humans that actually humans are currently not in the Holocene period anymore, but have shifted to the anthropocene period, a time when humans are so powerful towards nature that it produces a sustainable and serious impact that cannot be repaired in a short time. The study of International Relations in the Holocene period separated humans, society and nature. However, the Anthropocene is a time of connectedness and interaction between social and non-social. Natural science and social science are interconnected. Social interaction and nature become objects that cause each other. However, International Relations has contributed a lot and taught human security studies, cooperation, and many other things. What needs to be underlined is that, in this anthropocene era, International Relations is required to work hard to regenerate assumptions and theories that will and have been obsolete.

Syarifah Huswatun Miswar (孙美琳) from Indonesia. She received a Master of Law in International Relations from the School of International and Public Affairs, Jilin University, China. She is a research analyst with an emphasis on Environmental in International Relations issues. Now she is doing her doctoral degree in Central China Normal University (CCNU) in International Relations.

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Robotization and the Future of Humanity

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Robotization is the final form of capitalist degeneration of humanity. Capitalism does not transform robots into humans, but humans into robots. Instead of human evolution having a historical character, it takes on a technocratic character. Capitalism destroys man’s personality and reduces him to a functional component of technical processes through which capitalism destroys the human and living world. Marx’s concept of “reification” (Verdinglichung) points to the prevailing tendency of world development. Capitalism abolishes man as a human and natural being and turns him into technical means for the development of capitalism.

     Robots are a projection of the capitalistically degenerated humanity. Capitalism abolishes interpersonal relationships and, in doing so, abolishes man as social being. Society becomes a crowd of atomized individuals reduced to a labor-consumer mass. People lose the need for human connection. Man no longer seeks humanity in another man, but in virtual worlds, pets and technological devices. Robots become a substitute for human beings.

     Measured by capitalist criteria, one of the most significant advantages of robots over humans is that robots, as technical “beings,” can constantly be improved based on the productivist efficiency that has a profitable character. The rate of capital turnover is the driving force behind the robotization of humans and the technization of the world. In the end, the process of robotization comes down to the development of capitalism, which involves the increasingly intensive destruction of man as a human and life-creating being. Robotization indicates that there are no limits to the capitalist future.

      This is especially significant when it comes to the “conquest of space.” The technocratic approach to space and to the cosmic future of humanity is conditioned by a dehumanized technocratic mind. Man is abolished as a historical being, and thereby as a unique and irreplaceable cosmic being. Rather than endeavoring to create a humane cosmos, man is instead, through technical means, abolished as a human and natural being and reduced to cosmic processes that have an energetic and mechanical character.

      Robots are an organic part of the technical world, and their characteristics are conditioned by the nature of capitalism. They are mass-produced and, as such, disposable commodities. Robots are not social or historical beings; they lack emotions, mind, libertarian dignity, cultural and national self-awareness, moral criteria, rights, they don’t get sick, they work 24 hours a day as programmed, they are replaceable, and can be instantly turned off and destroyed…

      Capitalists do not strive to create robots that are increasingly similar to humans in their qualities but rather humans who are increasingly similar to robots. Humans are not the role models for robots; robots are the role models for humans. Through the spectacular model of robots, capitalist propaganda machinery imposes on people the image of the capitalist man of the future. In reality, robots are surrogates of humans turned by capitalism into ideal slaves.

      Sport is an area where the robotization of humans in the existing world has reached its highest level. The human body has become a technical means to achieve records, and the “quest for records” is based on a productivistic fanaticism with a technical and destructive character. This is what defines the personality of an athlete, as well as their relation to the world and the future.

      Considering that capitalism is increasingly destroying the living conditions in which man as a natural and human being can survive, the distinctive ability of robots to function in environments that are deadly to humans becomes of paramount importance. The destruction of the living environment devalues man as a human and natural being and further encourages the process of robotization.

      Robotization suggests that capitalism can survive without humans. In the capitalistically degenerated world, humanity is not just superfluous; it has become an impediment to “progress.” With the development of consumer society, which means capitalism’s becoming a totalitarian order of destruction, capitalism has come to the final reckoning with the living world and with man as a human and natural being. Man has become an “obsolete being” that is to conclude his cosmic odyssey in the capitalist landfill.

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Talking tolerance in polarised societies

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hijab

EU research projects provide fresh insights into what it takes for communities to accept different religious and world views.

By ALISON JONES

Ann Trappers harnessed a shock in her native Belgium to help heal social wounds across Europe. 

After Islamic terrorist attacks in Brussels in March 2016 left 35 people – including three suicide bombers – dead and more than 300 injured, Trappers and her colleagues at a non-governmental organisation called Foyer sought to rebuild community trust and cohesion. 

No taboos

They used the NGO’s long-established youth centre in the religiously and ethnically diverse neighbourhood of Molenbeek. Their experience fed into a research initiative that received EU funding to explore and foster religious tolerance in eight European countries. 

‘One of the ways in which we worked to counter radicalisation was to ensure it didn’t become a taboo subject,’ said Trappers, programme coordinator at Foyer. ‘We wanted young people to be able to talk about it freely and safely in the setting of the youth centre.’

Concerns about growing polarisation in Europe have pushed the issue up the EU political agenda. 

The portfolio of a vice-president of the European Commission, Margaritis Schinas, includes dialogue with churches as well as religious associations and communities. The portfolio is called “Promoting our European Way of Life”. 

The EU is also putting its weight behind various initiatives – including the Radicalisation Awareness Network – aimed at helping communities in Europe live harmoniously together. 

The EU project in which Trappers was involved ran from May 2018 through October 2022 and was called RETOPEA. It brought together academic organisations from Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Poland and Spain as well as non-EU countries North Macedonia and the UK. 

The project explored ways in which religion is regarded in the educational, professional and social realms. It also examined how peaceful religious coexistence has been established over history. 

Past and present

The idea was to use insights gained from the past to inform thinking about religious tolerance today. 

‘It’s not often you get the opportunity as a historian to make your work relevant,’ said Patrick Pasture, who coordinated RETOPEA and is a professor of modernity and society at Catholic University Leuven in Belgium. 

The project delved into more than 400 primary source extracts from historical peace treaties, contemporary news reports and cultural snippets. 

Based on these materials, teenagers from Foyer and other youth associations in each of the participating countries joined workshops to create their own video blog – or “vlog” – about religious tolerance and coexistence. 

The vlogs, available on the RETOPEA website, include interviews with passersby, drawings and other creative work.

Pasture said the act of working together took the focus away from the participants’ differences.

‘The most important thing will always be that people have to learn to talk – to refrain from immediately judging,’ he said. 

Spreading the word

Pasture was struck by the number of students who were unaware of the religious beliefs of classmates and by how open they were to talking about the issue. 

He said most participants were upset about the divisiveness of contemporary discussions of religion and ‘hated’ the rise of polarisation.

Around a year after RETOPEA wrapped up, the results and materials collected are informing actions by interfaith organisations, governmental bodies and European teacher associations. 

The project team is regularly invited to make presentations at teaching workshops and seminars in the EU and beyond – places ranging from Austria and Italy to Jordan and Wales. 

And the European Association of History Educators – established in 1992 to build educational bridges on the continent following the collapse of communism in eastern Europe – includes the RETOPEA materials on its website. 

Middle ground

Another EU-funded research project looked specifically at the notion of tolerance – how it feels for people to push themselves to accept “others” and what it feels like to be “tolerated.” The research relied mainly on questionnaires and online experiments. 

‘People have their own opinions and their own beliefs and we can’t just expect them to give them up and consider everything of equal value,’ said Maykel Verkuyten, who led the initiative and is a professor in interdisciplinary social science at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. 

Called InTo for Intergroup Toleration, the project ran for five years through September 2022.

In conducting studies in the Netherlands and Germany, Verkuyten and his team were pleasantly surprised to find that a clear majority of people regarded tolerance as an important societal value. 

He said that most respondents agreed with, for example, the following two presented statements: “I accept it when other people do things that I wholeheartedly disapprove of” and “Everyone is allowed to live as he or she wants, even if it is at odds with what I think is good and right”.

On a cautionary note, the team also found that it’s far easier to move people towards greater intolerance than it is to make them more tolerant. 

Verkuyten is driven by an interest in the middle ground of the whole subject – where space exists for differing views without any desire either to crush or to celebrate them. 

He said this zone must be promoted through civics courses, human-rights lessons and other educational initiatives to help ensure the health of democracies and multicultural societies. 

‘There is something in between being very negative, discriminatory, and fully embracing all diversity,’ Verkuyten said. ‘That’s essential for a functioning liberal democracy and indispensable for a culturally diverse society.’

Research in this article was funded by the EU via the European Research Council (ERC). This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.

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Women’s Health Security: Threats for Women in Refugee Camps

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A young Rohingya girl holds her brother outside a youth club in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. © UNHCR/Vincent Tremeau

Women’s Health Issues

Natural disasters and socio-political conflicts in a country are events that can disrupt people’s lives and encourage the flow of refugees. Refugees are people who have to leave their home areas for their safety or survival. A refugee’s home area can be a country, state, or territory. most refugee law is based on a 1951 United Nations document, the Convention, relating to the status of refugees. The 1951 Convention was created to deal with the large number of people displaced by World War II. (National Geographic, 2023).

In these situations, women and girls do not have access to basic materials, such as pads, clothes, and underwear, needed to regulate monthly blood flow. As the number of refugee women  increases,  health  problems  are  prevalent  due  to  the  lack  of  access  to women’s production health services throughout the refugee camps, even though women need a private space to change clothes, breastfeed, or rest. This high refugee population requires more than just basic care, including antenatal care, postnatal care, hygiene care, and care during menstruation, which is a widespread problem for women around the world. In the case of Rohingya refugee women, they mostly use natural materials such as mud, leaves, dung, or animal skins to regulate their menstrual flow. In addition, lack of access to water and private latrines and increased open defecation put women and children at greater risk of disease. therefore, this paper aims to discuss the constraints on vital hygiene practices that pose a health threat to women in refugee camps (Kashfi Pandit, 2022).

Syrian refugees often report high rates of gynecological problems, including menstrual irregularities,  reproductive  tract  infections,  severe  pelvic  pain,  and dysmenorrhea. Married Syrian  refugee  women  living  outside  refugee  camps  particularly  suffer  from micronutrient deficiencies, sexually transmitted infections, and mental health symptoms. In addition to the impact on physical health, women also have a significant impact on mental health due to the pressures of living as refugees, such as the lack of opportunities to earn a living, substandard living conditions, lack of access to food and transportation, the possibility of having to adapt significantly in bearing additional social burdens to ensure the care of their children (SAMS Foundation, 2019).

In 2017, Rohingya refugees also caught the attention of the public in large numbers, with more than 700,000 Rohingya people entering Bangladesh. With this influx of refugees, the condition of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) is greatly affected. SRH issues in Rohingya women and girls include increased risk of morbidity, mortality, and gender-based sexual violence, higher risk  of sexually transmitted diseases causing unwanted pregnancies, and the potential for unsafe abortion and its complications. The rape of women in refugee camps violates the sexual and reproductive health rights of adolescents, the non-use of contraceptives can increase their population and allow the transmission of HIV among them, but the absence of a good sanitation system and hygienic environment causes women to suffer (Semonti Jannat, 2022).

Similar to Syrian refugees, Rohingya refugee women and girls also urgently need sexual and reproductive  health  services,  including  antenatal  care,  delivery assistance, postnatal care, family planning services, menstrual health, safe abortion, and prevention and treatment of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS. As many as 85 percent of refugees still do not have access to latrines, which can lead to outbreaks of communicable diseases among refugees (Karin et al., 2020). The lack of gender-segregated latrines and hygiene means that women in refugee camps must walk to the forest in the dark, leaving them vulnerable to harassment, violence, and even attacks from wild animals. (Semonti Jannat, 2022).

Health Security

Health security is a state of freedom from disease and infection. Health is an essential component of human development and individual well-being and is recognized at the global level as a basic need if people are to achieve an optimal quality of life. Basically, human development and individual well-being cannot be achieved if the person is not adequately protected from threats and does not feel safe. Therefore, health security and human security are closely interconnected (WHO, 2002). In the case study of women’s health in refugee camps, it is clear that women and girls feel unsafe and have their health compromised. Thus, international assistance is needed to address women’s health issues in refugee camps because these refugees have difficulty getting adequate health facilities, causing insecurity to increase, and people find it difficult to take the initiative to protect themselves.

Contribution of International Organizations

In the case of Syrian refugees, there is a government organization called the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), which is a global medical aid organization that is at the forefront of crisis relief in Syria and surrounding areas to save lives for every patient in need. In 2016, SAMS supported 66 Syrian reproductive health centers, helping deliver nearly 40,000 babies and providing a quarter of a million reproductive health services. In 2017, SAMS also provided 457,043  reproductive health services in Syria and provided reproductive health training to communities. In Lebanon, the organization supports women’s health services through a specialized  Obgyn  mission,  as  well  as  opening  mental  health  and  psychosocial  services focused on helping mothers and supporting healthy parenting practices, treating anxiety disorders and speech disorders in children, and addressing the psychological wounds of conflict victims. SAMS reaches out to several countries, including Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Kurdistan (Society et al., 2023).

In the case of Rohingya refugees, there are also non-governmental organizations that address similar  issues,  namely  the  Bangladesh  American  Society  of  Muslim  Aid  for  Humanity (BASMAH), an organization based in the United States dedicated to providing assistance to Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. BASMAH has established health clinics to serve Rohingya refugees located in Bangladesh due to the lack of hygienic and sanitary quality of their living quarters, which are highly susceptible to diseases. Every day, hundreds of Rohingya patients, consisting of women, girls, the elderly, and men, also receive free services, free medicines, emergency  services,  and other health consultations. About 1.3 million Rohingya refugees, consisting of 75% women and children in a day there, are 300 patients receiving health services from doctors under BASMAH. Since 2017, BASMAH has been working directly in the camp and creating programs to help refugees. These programs include clean water, a learning center, an education project, medical care, empowering women, orphans & helpless children, dental care service, winter project, Qurbani, zakat / sadaqah, Ramadan iftar, feed the hungry, home for the homeless, rohingnya refugee support, skill development center, urgent earthquake relief, eid gifts for children (BASMAH, 2023).

However, women’s health problems in refugee camps still occur, and these organizations have not reached all refugees in the world. They only serve Syria, Bangladesh, and surrounding areas. But, in Africa it has not been equally assisted. The World Health Organization (WHO) has verified that there were 46 attacks on health workers that killed eight people, and health facilities were also looted and used by armed forces. The incident caused refugees in the African region to not get help. Thus, the issue of women’s health is still a problem and has not been resolved until now (Renewal, 2023).

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