'Each man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world'
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

'Artists are tricky fellows sir, forever shaping the world according to some design of their own'
-- Jonathan Strange, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Sunday 28 August 2011

Kenya, Somalia and the Ethics of Aid

The philosophy of famine and aid

In 1974, in the journal Psychology Today, the right wing American philosopher Garett Hardin published a controversial article entitled, 'Lifeboat Ethics: the case against helping the poor'. He makes the following analogy to model the rich/poor divide.

"If we divide the world crudely into rich nations and poor nations, two thirds of them are desperately poor, and only one third comparatively rich, with the United States the wealthiest of all. Metaphorically each rich nation can be seen as a lifeboat full of comparatively rich people. In the ocean outside each lifeboat swim the poor of the world, who would like to get in, or at least to share some of the wealth. What should the lifeboat passengers do?"

Hardin observes that the lifeboat has limited capacity. There are too many people in the water to fit in the boat, but here Hardin uses the principles of Christianity (each man is our brother) and Marxism (each man must be allocated what he needs - since each man is drowning, each man needs to be in the lifeboat) to suggest that by these rationales, all come in and everyone in the lifeboat ends up drowning as the boat sinks. 

Whilst it is "morally abhorrent" then to some people, Hardin asserts that none should be let in, since none is more deserving than the other, none can be chosen over others, and moreover, if you did choose arbitrarily, none should be let in the lifeboat anyway because we need a "safety factor". Indeed, to those horrified by the callousness, he proposes this:

My reply is simple: "Get out and yield your place to others." This may solve the problem of the guilt-ridden person's conscience, but it does not change the ethics of the lifeboat. The needy person to whom the guilt-ridden person yields his place will not himself feel guilty about his good luck. If he did, he would not climb aboard. The net result of conscience-stricken people giving up their unjustly held seats is the elimination of that sort of conscience from the lifeboat.

Hardin goes on to assert the value of private property:

Under a system of private property, the men who own property recognize their responsibility to care for it, for if they don't they will eventually suffer. A farmer, for instance, will allow no more cattle in a pasture than its carrying capacity justifies. If he overloads it, erosion sets in, weeds take over, and he loses the use of the pasture.
If a pasture becomes a commons open to all, the right of each to use it may not be matched by a corresponding responsibility to protect it. Asking everyone to use it with discretion will hardly do, for the considerate herdsman who refrains from overloading the commons suffers more than a selfish one who says his needs are greater. If everyone would restrain himself, all would be well; but it takes only one less than everyone to ruin a system of voluntary restraint. In a crowded world of less than perfect human beings, mutual ruin is inevitable if there are no controls. This is the tragedy of the commons.
  
On the giving of surplus foodstuffs, he argues that:

In the years 1960 to 1970, U.S. taxpayers spent a total of $7.9 billion on the Food for Peace program. Between 1948 and 1970, they also paid an additional $50 billion for other economic-aid programs, some of which went for food and food-producing machinery and technology. Though all U.S. taxpayers were forced to contribute to the cost of P.L. 480 certain special interest groups gained handsomely under the program. Farmers did not have to contribute the grain; the Government or rather the taxpayers, bought it from them at full market prices. The increased demand raised prices of farm products generally. The manufacturers of farm machinery, fertilizers and pesticides benefited by the farmers' extra efforts to grow more food. Grain elevators profited from storing the surplus until it could be shipped. Railroads made money hauling it to ports, and shipping lines profited from carrying it overseas. The implementation of P.L. 480 required the creation of a vast Government bureaucracy, which then acquired its own vested interest in continuing the program regardless of its merits.

He concludes that:

We are all the descendants of thieves, and the world's resources are inequitably distributed. But we must begin the journey to tomorrow from the point where we are today. We cannot remake the past. We cannot safely divide the wealth equitably among all peoples so long as people reproduce at different rates. To do so would guarantee that our grandchildren and everyone else's grandchildren, would have only a ruined world to inhabit.  

 Garett Hardin (1915-2003)
In the same year and reinforcing the theme, he published "living on a lifeboat" in BioScience. There are some points of contention here. Hardin wants to begin the journey from today, but as Foucault once noted, "how can history have a truth if truth has a history?". The journey that led to the massive disparity in wealth began decades ago. To start from today elides the historical trajectory in which we find ourselves, with the poor getting poorer, the rich, wealthier. 

According to the United Nations DP figures, in 1998, the 225 richest individuals have an aggregate wealth of $1 trillion. In today's figures, that means those 225 individuals have wealth equivalent to one fourteenth of the US budget deficit. Their wealth is equal to the combined annual income of the 2.5 billion poorest individuals. The lifeboat was a construct of the wealthy and when the nations were developing, there was no ocean in which some drowned whilst the wealthy did not. 

Consider Amartya Sen (1933-) writing in 1988 in his "Property and Hunger" who argued that inability to distribute food, systemic failings, has contributed to famines and about private property:

If property rights are taken to be morally inviolable irrespective of their consequences, then it will follow that these policies cannot be morally acceptable even though they might save thousands, or even millions, from dying. [...] A moral system that values both property rights and other goals - such as avoiding famines and starvation, or fulfilling people's right not be hungry - can, on the one hand, give property rights instrinsic importance, and on the other, recommend the violation of property rights when that leads to better overall consequences.

Peter Singer (1946-), the Austrialian philosopher who donates half of his income to charity, demonstrated his distaste for the affluent pursuit of material happiness in an article in the New York Times (1999):

The average family in the United States spends almost one-third of its income on things that are no more necessary to them than Dora's new TV was to her...so much of our income is spent on things not essential to the preservation of our lives and health. Donated to one of a number of charitable agencies, that money could mean the difference between life and death for children in need.

Onora O'Neill (1941-) in her influential "Kantian approaches to some famine problems", speaks of systemic abuse within the international system, seeing the multinationals pernicious influences as early as 1980.
Where a less developed country is pushed to exempt a multinational corporation from tax laws, or to construct out of its meager tax revenues the infrastruture of roads, harbours, or airports [...] that the corporation - but perhaps not the country - needs, then one suspects that some coercion has been involved.


For O'Neill, humanity must be treated as the end rather than the means. It is morally incumbent, regardless of whether the lifeboat will sink or not (Kantian ethics make fewer demands in this case that Utilitarian ethics) upon you to make people 'happy' - the only possible act therefore is to try to do something to alleviate poverty.
The giving of proportions of income is a fashionable if not now normative part of Western affluent lifestyles. Indeed, philanthropy is a very fashionable undertaking of the uber-rich, who host lavish charity events for worthy causes, without a hint of irony. But the giving of wealth is only the first part of the aid experience. The other end is what happens to the aid and this has been subject to rigorous scrutiny in a number of different theatres of conflict and famine. 

Kenya, Somalia inter alia 

In Mogadishu, it has been reported that thousands of sacks of food donated by the UN for Somalia's famine victims are being sold openly at markets in the capital. An official in Mogadishu was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that he believed that almost half of all recent deliveries of aid had been stolen. Foreign Policy show a photo in which demonstrators in Mogadishu denounce the United Nations mission in the country, accusing it of spending too much on flying diplomats in and out of Nairobi and not enough on fixing what's broken in Somalia.

The problem of the 'privatization' of aid once it reaches the danger zone is documented in myriad countries. Another problem, seen in Afghanistan especially, but most well documented in Haiti, is that the aid affort is often poorly coordinated and bypasses the very organs of the target country that it hopes to eventually bolster. This is the paradox of humanitarian intervention. The U.N. humanitarian coordinator, John Holmes, spoke openly of this problem with regard to Haiti. 

And then there is donor fatigue, the phenomenon in which each new 'catastrophe' is met with ever greater apathy. Donor fatigue was blamed for a poor response to the Pakistan floods in 2010 though it is probable that there was also a clash of civilizations antipathy to that country from many Western onlookers. 

Linda Polman catalogues the ways in which NGOs actually prolong insecurity in her book "War Games: The Story of War and Aid in Modern Times". In the review of the work by Joanna Bourke, she notes how aid give "succour" to the bad guys. Bourke further notes that:

Those who seek to profit from humanitarian aid have ingenious way of doing so. After starving his own people during the Biafran conflict of the late Sixties, Colonel Emeka Ojukwu enlisted a Geneva PR company to take photographs of starving children to help to mobilise world opinion in his favour. As John Graham, of Save the Children, complained: “If you don’t have starving babies, you don’t get the money.”

All of which makes the giving of aid a complex issue. So when the U.N pleaded for aid for the famine in Somalia at the start of August 2011, amid claims, notably from Baroness Amos that 2500 people a day could die from the famine with 3.7 million at risk. Sen is probably nodding though, as some believe that the famine is as much about failed government as failed rains. Kenya has turned into a refugee camp as 1300 Somalis a day cross the border. Across the entire Horn of Africa, it's believed that as many as 12.4 million people are at risk of starvation. It needs between $1.5 and $2.5 billion to fund a relief effort. Al-Shabab is blocking access to 2.2 million though it has lost control in areas of Mogadishu since the private US military contractor, Bancroft Global Development, has been training African troops in urban counter-insurgency tactics.  

So what to do - give, as a moral responsibility, aware that your contribution could end up funding the Shabab, an Islamist militia which has been subject to Mi5 warnings that British Somalis trained by the group will return to Britain and commit atrocities? The choice, of course, is a philosophical one. 

Monday 22 August 2011

Tyranny? No thank you. Democracy, please. The century? Fifth century B.C.

Thucydides is a man ahead of his time, or perhaps there are just one or two themes in human existence and they keep playing out, over and over. Here is the chronicler:

In the "states that were governed by tyrants, the tyrant's first thought was always for himself, for his own personal safety, and for the greatness of his own family. Consequently security was the chief political principle in these governments, and no great action ever came out of them - nothing, in fact, that went beyond their immediate local interests."

Thucydides goes on:

"The Spartans put down tyranny in the rest of Greece, most of which had been governed by tyrants for much longer than Athens. From the time when the Dorians first settled in Sparta there had been a particularly long period of political disunity; yet the Spartan constitution goes back to a very early date, and the country has never been ruled by tyrants. For rather more than 400 years, dating from the end of the late war, they have the same system of government, and this has been not only a source of internal strength, but has enabled them to interfere in the affairs of other states."

(History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 1)

Although Qaddafi sponsored terrorism globally most of the Middle Eastern and Maghreb dictators did focus solely on internal repression, their ideology propagated the ruler as a national hero. Thucydides suggests that when the tyrant is removed, and equality restored, international antipathy can flourish. Which is an interesting idea. Democratice Peace Theory (esp. Doyle, 1983) suggests that democratic countries don't war with each other (statistics critiqued by eg Barkawi, 2004). But what if nascent democracies in the Maghreb instead of internal schism, civil war, decided to coagulate national identity by forming a rivarly with a neighbour?
So with this in mind, let me end with the last lines of David Cameron's speech today (full transcript)

There will undoubtedly be difficult days ahead. No transition is ever smooth or easy. But today the Arab spring is a step further away from oppression and dictatorship and a step closer to freedom and democracy. And the Libyan people are closer to their dream of a better future.

Tuesday 9 August 2011

London 2012 Olympics tickets, anyone?

"Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them and they'll be distracted."
-- Senator Graccus, Gladiator, 2000

A task force has been drawn up, drawing on past lessons learned. It will deploy 15 000 men to maintain law and order, protect key installations, supervise prisons, secure archaeological sites and facilitate humanitarian aid.

This isn't the COBRA strategy for London, night 4 of the riots, rather it comes from the 70-page plan for Tripoli should Qaddafi's regime collapse, as seen by the Times.

The UK riots across its major cities has drawn witting and unwitting parallels with the Arab Spring. Darcus Howe came onto Radio 5 Live and drew parallels with "Asad" of Syria and his crackdown, saying that this wasn't the worst rioting in living memory and that it had been blown out of proportion. There was general sympathy for the police - seen as underresourced, understaffed and lacking suitable rules of engagement. They sat back, it was commonly thought, because they were in a lose-lose situation. I suppose because everyone now has a cameraphone and any police physical violence would almost instantaneously find its way to YouTube.


In an age of social media in which disgruntled youth are frequently more skilled with smart phones than are the adults who police them, London authorities believe handheld technologies may have helped those trying to instigate violence to spread their message. Rather than shouting through a megaphone — as in the infamous 1985 riots on the Broadwater Estate in Tottenham — today's rabble rousers are more likely to organize online and with the aid of their iPhones and BlackBerrys. As the riots unfolded, some used Twitter to encourage violence. "Everyone up and roll to Tottenham f*** the 50 [police]. I hope 1 dead tonight," one man tweeted.

Which brings me to the most interesting comment. One of the Radio 5 Live callers argued that last night, Twitter and Facebook should have been shut down. Now doesn't that sound familiar? There are those that denied social media played a defining role in the Arab uprisings, including Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker and David Kravets of wired.co.uk. But nobody told the ruling entities.

In Tunisia as early as August 2008, the regime shut Facebook for 16 days but lifted the ban after pressure from cyberactivists. Twitter played little role in the Tunisia uprisings, since there were only about 200 active accounts pre-revolution, out of 2000 registered accounts. Instead it was Facebook - two million people talking about action on their accounts. This didn't go unnoticed. One of the Tunisian activists suggested that  the Tunisian authorities attempted to harass those posting on Facebook. "If they became aware of you on Facebook they would try to divert your account to a fake login page to steal your password."

Egypt shut down all internal internet traffic to Facebook and Twitter during the uprisings. Syria shut down internet traffic briefly at the start of June. But the internet finds a way as I've blogged about. There are other tactics employed by the authorities - it's an incitement game. Reports have sprung up and propagated through social media that Mark Duggan's gun was a replica. This has been dismissed. But the report by the Times that both shots fired, including the one that hit the policeman's radio came from a police firearm have not been dismissed. Without social media, without 24 hour television to make the riots and the rioters famous, this wouldn't have escalated. The rioters have a stage, a recorded, globally disseminated stage that makes the police nervous.

I wonder if it's time for Mi5 to get on Facebook and Twitter. It's a routine that used against extremist ideologues - we just have to put it into practice with these social media galvanized riots. Develop false online users to spread disinformation, so-called sock puppets and astroturfing. If society lets the rioters employ social media successfully that's a big battle that the rioters and the opportunists who are aggregating, have won. They're tech savvy and enabled. They have a global stage and they know it. The global jury, they believe, will protect them from police outrages. The army on the streets? never!

There's a disturbing blueprint here. Heavy handed responses to protests in the Arab Spring found their ways to YouTube which galvanised and even enflamed public opinion, contributing to the reaction against the ruling system. The police could go in heavy handed in riots in London in the 80s but now every rioter has a cameraphone wired to the internet and thus is also a potential reporter. They can cause damage, elicit a response, get it recorded, and upload. The whole set could be done in a matter of minutes. The lawlessness is attractive, too, for the professional criminals, who can profit from the indiscriminate violence and police focus elsewhere.

How do the numbers add up? There were 6000 police on the streets of London last night. Cameron has indicated this will increase to 16000 tonight. According to official figures, the Met has about 32 000 and nearly 9 000 support officers and special constables, which represents a total force of 41 000. Specialist police officers and helicopters have been sent from other counties. The standard figures for each borough are small though - 719 police officers for Croydon; 738 for Hackney for example, but there are over 7000 police in specialist operations and part of the Specialist Crime Directorate (which tackles serious and organized crime) and many of these will have to be drafted. It's a really good time to be a part of organized crime in the capital. 

Over 400 people have been arrested in London, over 100 in Birmingham.

This is a good time for riots in the capital. The Met lost Sir Paul Stephenson and John Yates to the phone hacking scandal. Though they may have been compromised individually, they were the officers in charge, respectively, of the Met, and counter-terrorism at the Met. Yates was responsible for organizing police deployment for the London 2012 Olympics. It's August, and many police, politicians are on holiday. Both Cameron and Milliband have had to return from their holidays, in Italy and Cornwall respectively. Don't worry, Ed, you can get a taste of Italy in Cornwall here.

The numbers stack up on the sides of the rioters, because they can aggregate through social media. If one hooded criminal attacks a shop, several police officers can tackle them. But it's maths. If one hundred criminals attack shops, you need superior numbers and suitable rules of engagement. There's going to have to be anti-riot tactics employed because the numbers don't stack on the side of law and order. How many people can you arrest? There are seven million people in the capital. According to the 2001 census, Croydon alone has a population of 269 000. For the underclass and the criminals who live in the shadows, this is a once in a lifetime world stage, with the whole nation debating them. They have a voice, and the voice is other people.

What do you do with those arrested? Rioting is a public order offence (covered by the Public Order Act 1986), not terrorism. So the draconian anti-terror legislation that found its way into every avenue of society during the shadow of the Bush-Blair "Us against them" years, has no consequence. Curfews could be imposed under the Anti-social behaviour act, 2003. Non-lethal lachrymatory agents could be disseminated, even over a large scale by helicopter. There are going to be some incredible media images, whatever happens.

Cameron will have to authorise the use of riot control agents. There's no other way.Then the humanitarian language and moral high ground with which we criticize the abuses of other regimes will seem to ring slightly more hollow.There are some interesting precedents. The United States used riot control agents against the relatively peaceful Bonus Marchers in 1932. The public outrage was muted because it was generally felt that maintaining order justified these methods.

To quell the massive unrest in Los Angeles in 1992, following the acquittal of four police officers for the beating of Rodney King, 4000 armed forces personnel were drafted in on day four, with only sporadic violence for two days afterwards.  Fifty-three people died during those riots, as many as 2000 were injured and approximately $1 billion damage was done. After the Canucks lost ice hockey's Stanley Cup recently, police had to use tear gas to quell the protests.

The big society is quite real - it's out on the streets. Perhaps like the Indian cricketers, Cameron should just pray for rain. Lots of it.
Graffiti in Tahrir Square, Cairo
More: Rob Dover at Kingsofwar muses on the motivations of the rioters.

Wednesday 3 August 2011

William Dalrymple in Syria, mid-1990s

I was reading recently William Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (1997). The account of his passage through Syria I found extremely interesting vis a vis the current unrest. Dalrymple has always been interested more in the East meets West clashes and the interface between Islam and Christianity placed within a historical trajectory, but on Syria he observes:

"After Syria's independence [from Christian France] in 1946, this inevitably led to a backlash [concerning the influx of Christian refugees and the preferential treatment they had been given by their colonial masters]. Although Michel Aflaq, one of the founders of the Ba'ath Party, was a Christian, as was Faris al-Khuri, a leading figure in the Syrian Nationalist movement who later became Prime Minister, anti-Christian feeling was widespread (and, in the post-colonial circumstances, understandable). There were attempts to make Islam the official religion of the country, and at one stage the imam of the Great Mosque in Damascus declared that as far as he was concerned, an Indonesian Muslim was closer to him than al-Khuri, his own (Christian) Prime Minister. The increasingly Islamic tone of the Syrian establishment led to perhaps a quarter of a million Christians leaving Syria throughout the 1960s; from Aleppo alone as many as 125,000 Armenians emigrated to Soviet Armenia. These refugees included the current Armenian President, Levon Ter Petroysan.

The period of uncertainty for Syria's Christians came to an end with Asad's coup d'etat in 1970. Asad was an Alawite, a member of a Muslim minority regarded by orthodox Sunni Muslims as heretical and disparagingly referred to as Nusayris (or Little Christians). Asad kept himself in power by forming what was in effect a coalition of Syria's many religious minorities - Shias, Druze, Yezidis, Christians and Alawites - through which he was able to counterbalance the weight of the Sunni majority. In Asad's Syria Christians have always done well: at the moment, apparently,  five of Asad's seven closest advisers are Christians, including his principal speechwriter, as are two of the sixteen cabinet ministers. Christians and Alawites together hold all the key positions in the armed forces and mukhabarat [...]
The only problem with all of this, as far as the Christians are concerned, is the creeping realisation that they are likely to expect another, perhaps far more savage, backlash when Asad dies or when his regime eventually crumbles. The Christians of Syria have watched with concern the Islamic movements which are gaining strength all over the Middle East [...] 'Fundamentalism is building up among the Muslims.' said a pessimistic Armenian businessman...After Asad's death or resignation no one knows what will happen. As long as the bottle is closed with a firm cork all is well. But eventually the cork will come out. And then no one knows what will happen to us."

pp.153-5 (Flamingo, 1998)

As has been noted on this blog before, it is easy to protest against something but difficult to stand for something. In Egypt, with Mubharak expelled from power, the masses have not coalesced around any particular identity. Religious battles have also broken out - the Coptic Christians (the largest minority in Egypt, representing  about 10% of the eight million population) have been subjected to multiple, possibly systematic acts of violence.

The London Times reported that, 'The democratic gains of the Arab Spring are at risk from sectarian strife, struggling economies and counter-revolutions, William Hague has warned. Fledgling democracies produced by the wave of people power might prove too weak to deal with the deep rooted problems that they faced, the Foreign secretary told The Times. There would be a "a lot of problems and even convulsions" to come in the region. Mr Hague sounded particular alarm over Egypt, urging European leaders to help to ensure that the power struggle in Cairo did not allow the Arab Spring's pivotal country to slip backwards. "The next few months could be quite turbulent and difficult in Egypt," he said. He also warned of bloodshed across the Middle East and Maghreb as religious groups turned against each other. "One of the risks in the Arab Spring is the unleashing of sectarian divisions.""

('Chill winds threaten the Arab Spring', says Hague, Times, July 28, 2011, Watson, Coates, Fletcher, p.1)

When the cork comes off, knowing what will come out is the most important thing. Constructions of identity in the wake of the toppling of dictatorships is paramount - because their is no new national identity that allows the nation to coalesce around a single vision, looking outwards, the population are forced to look inward, to define themselves against others within the same society. 

KABOfest picks up on this, in an article on how Saudi Arabia killed the Arab Spring it argues that, "Arab despots have excelled at applying Machiavelli’s teachings; in many cases, they were successful at labeling their population as not one, often a sectarian split, political or ethnic in other: In Iraq and parts of the gulf, it’s Shias vs. Sunnis, in Syria, Sunnis vs. Aleweits, in Lebanon, one sect vs. your pick of the other ten, in Jordan, it’s Palestinians vs. Jordanians, in Palestine, it’s Fatah vs. Hamas, Egypt, Muslims vs. Copts, in Morocco and Algeria it’s Arabs vs. Berber. In any of these countries, should the “prince” to play up the Machiavelli reference, successfully label a revolution as the product of one sect, he immediately pits the other sect against it, and peaceful uprising turn more resembling of civil wars. The splits that were planted decades ago by despots and their western overlords are reaping reward in the first real challenge to the old ways of tyrant rule.
A successful revolution will come to fruition when the people reject these divisions, and see the despots as a common enemy."
 
But that's only half right and consequently half wrong. The despot may be the enemy but when he's gone, old divisions surface because their is no despotic dictator to define yourself against. It was easy to be "Us" against "Mubharak" but when Mubharak goes, who are "Us?" we define ourselves within smaller groups within the "Us". The "Us" becomes Islamists, progressives, Muslims, Christians, civil servants, private workers, employed, unemployed, Cairenes, Villagers.
The U.N resolution that Britain and the United States seek on Syria (a conflict which has cost an estimated 1700 lives) is opposed by Russia and China, ostensibly because the last U.N resolution on internal repression, 1973, on Libya, morphed into a document that appeared to legitimise regime change. But also, as analysts have noted, Russia and China have interests in the country and would be loathe to see the Asad regime crumble, and anarchy take its place. There are a number of powerful competing entities in Syria and neighbours that would emply proxies to ensure their own geostrategic interests are not threatened by developments. 

The Sunnis are the majority dissenters, being the largest group, they are excluded in the country. In Hama, the Muslim Brotherhood sees the violence as directed against the Sunnis there. "Syria is witnessing a war of sectarian cleansing," it said. "The regime has linked its open annihilation with the crescent of Ramadan. It is a war on the identity and beliefs of the Syrian nation … on Arab Muslim Syria." But the opposition is divided and fatigued, in the words of one supporter, by "constant initiatives and coalitions and gatherings that don't achieve much".
The regime's message was clear, he suggested: "We've the military power to crush dissent, even in a city where the entire population protested and which was visited by the US ambassador and was cited by the Turkish prime minister as being a red line.
"The international community is powerless to save you, if and when we decide to carry out the next massacre. We can escalate the conflict and turn it into a civil war if we want. If that happens, you [the opposition] will have no control over the situation, because radical Sunni elements will take charge and you will become totally irrelevant. Strike a deal with me now and you can share power with me, and moreover, you will have saved the country from a disastrous civil war."

Identity. Nascent steps towards democracy in countries such as Egypt will only generate new Us and Them identities as different groups push for power. You will identify with different groups and there will be many of them.