A reminder worth repeating: Why big-T transformation must be differentiated and more granular from the get-go

Initiatives that appear novel in certain geopolitical contexts may represent established practices elsewhere. For instance, calls for socio-ecological transformation considered ‘radical and advanced’ in the Global North have been embedded in the Global South ‘ecopedagogy’ since the 1990s (Hjorth Warlenius, 2022). The ‘right to repair’, now gaining traction in the West (Graziano and Trogal, 2019), is deeply rooted in subaltern practices of maintenance and continuity. Likewise, the concept of precarious work in neoliberal contexts presumes a lost past of stability and an uncertain future, whereas in other settings the same labour is simply situated in an enduring present with no expectation of change (Tilly, 2021). . . To regard repair as ‘innovative’ or work as ‘precarious’ is to normalise a progressive, linear temporality that may obscure other cyclical or continuous ways of inhabiting the present. . . .Experiences of post-communist transition sit alongside experiences of neoliberal precarity, colonial legacies, climate anxiety and so on. These are not merely different perspectives on a shared present but distinct temporalities: some students inhabit futures of promise while others carry legacies of loss; some experience time as acceleration and pressure, others as interruption or delay to something else entirely.

(accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507626141; my bold)

Emerging counternarratives on: migrants, border controls, digital networks, remittances, child labor, COVID’s impact (Africa and Europe), and global neoliberalism [newly added]

It’s easy to dismiss counternarratives. “To be ‘counter’ to hegemonic planning and history is to remain within their logic, playing the same game under a different banner. To be radical. . .is to make the game itself irrelevant.” That said, the sheer number of counternarratives already in a complex world is the best indication we have of the sheer number of radical alternatives also out there.

Climate Migrants

“The discourse of apocalyptic climate change-induced mass migration is now past its prime. Particularly since the early 2010s, it has been extensively critiqued (see Hartmann 2010; Bettini 2013; Piguet, Kaenzig, and Guélat 2018; Wiegel, Boas, and Warner 2019), and the majority of migration scholarship no longer expects a linear, massive and world-transforming movement of people under climate change. Indeed, an ever-rising number of studies shows the opposite is the case: that relations between climate change and human migration are often indirect, small-scale, and taking shape in context-specific ways, influenced by a host of other socio-economic and political factors. The ways in which people move in a changing climate are diverse, and typically consist of relatively local mobilities (for overviews see: Black et al. 2011a; Foresight 2011; McLeman and Gemenne 2018; Hoffmann et al. 2020; De Sherbinin 2020).”

(accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2066264#abstract)

Migrants into Europe

“Specifically, the current mainstream narrative is one that looks at these people as passive components of large-scale flows, driven by conflicts, migration policies and human smuggling. Even when the personal dimension is brought to the fore, it tends to be in order to depict migrants as victims at the receiving end of external forces. Whilst there is no denying that most of those crossing the Mediterranean experience violence, exploitation and are often deprived of their freedom for considerable periods of time (Albahari, 2015; D’Angelo, 2018a), it is also important to recognize and analyse their agency as individuals, as well as the complex sets of local and transnational networks that they own, develop and use before, during and after travelling to Europe.”

(accessed online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/glob.12312)

Latin American Mobility and Border Controls

“While this spectrum defines the cognitive horizon within which most migration law operates, it misses what the infrastructuring perspective is able to show, namely that border regulation in practice is less hermetic and controlled (by states), and that those on the move have considerably more agency than is often assumed, and that the particular legal configurations that enable or disrupt mobility are constantly being infrastructured and (thereby) changed. Again, Latin America is a prime case study here as it features all the factors that allow for such legal infrastructuring.”

(accessed online at https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qm9pr_v1)

Digital Networks

“With all the usual caveats about surveillance and manipulation by the big tech companies, digital technology has played a transformative role in the mobility and organisation of refugee, migrant and diaspora communities. People on the move make impressive use of GPS technology, increasing their capacities to anticipate danger, plan new routes, connect with family and communities at home and in their planned destinations, and liaise with sympathetic citizens in host settings. As well as for functions like sending remittances, refugee networks have turned to digital platforms to mobilise resources, share information, and advocate for their rights. For example, WhatsApp groups enable refugees to use digital tools to take control of their circumstances, particularly in regions where state infrastructure is weak or non-existent. Among Somalis, this use of digital technology has enabled a form of ‘platform kinship’, where online networks function as substitutes for state-based social welfare systems and even some functions of governance and justice – in the latter case, exclusion from a digital group provides a sanction for infraction and dereliction. In the Somali case this has been dubbed a ‘WhatsAppocracy’.”

(accessed online at https://reliefweb.int/report/world/rsc-working-paper-series-no-143-refugia-reflection-five-years-june-2025)

Remittances and the COVID Pandemic

“1.6% — The decline in global remittances, or money that foreign-born workers sent back to their home countries, to low- and middle-income nations last year. That drop was far less than the 20% decline projected by the World Bank early in the pandemic. Migrant remittances have become crucial economic lifelines as the recoveries of rich and poor countries diverge.” (accessed online at https://whatsnews.cmail20.com/t/d-e-qidpld-jdkdtdwtj-r/)

“Remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries in 2020 as a whole remained resilient, contrary to initial projections and despite having recorded a strong decline in Q2 2020. The latest available data shows remittances are estimated to have reached USD 540 billion in 2020, just 1.6% below the 2019 total of USD 548 billion. . .The decline was smaller than that recorded in 2009 during the global financial crisis. Fiscal measures in migrants’ host countries, including cash transfers and employment support programmes implemented in many large economies, the widespread use of remote work, and migrants’ commitment to continue providing a lifeline to families by cutting consumption or drawing on savings contributed to this better-than-expected outcome. However, there are important regional and intra-regional differences, including between the countries covered in this study.” (accessed online at https://www.esm.europa.eu/system/files/document/2022-11/ESM_DP_18.pdf)

Children’s Labor

“We examined a number of dimensions of children’s work in African agriculture in papers published in 2020 and 2022. It is certainly the case that some children are harmed by the work they do, and others may be forced to work, exploited or trafficked.

Yet, based on this and other work informed by extensive literature review and initial research, children who are harmed by working represent a minority of working children. And critically, neither their interests, nor those of other rural children, are necessarily served by ongoing efforts to eradicate child labour from African agriculture.”

(accessed online at https://www.ids.ac.uk/opinions/child-labour-on-farms-in-africa-its-important-to-make-a-distinction-between-whats-harmful-and-what-isnt/)

COVID Pandemic in Africa

“Viewed through the lens of the COVID-19 crisis narrative, Africa’s exceptionally low rates of COVID-19 mortality amid pervasive informality have widely been regarded as a delayed reaction, or a product of low testing capacity, masking a ‘ticking time bomb’. Yet, the statistical evidence shows that, nearly two years into the pandemic, high levels of informality remain inversely related to levels of COVID-19 mortality in Africa, and this pattern has continued to the present. The reality is, for a variety of reasons, larger informal economies are not associated with a higher level of COVID-19 mortality, either at a global level, or at the level of African sub-regions. However, social policy measures to facilitate lockdowns for precarious workers have been more problematic, supporting efforts to crowd the poor together in informal settlements and social provisioning activities.”

(accessed online at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9877792/)

COVID Pandemic in Europe (newly added)

“In the weeks that followed the late March summit [the EU Council’s video summit of March 26 2020), a new morality tale seemed to gain shape in the public debate around governing the pandemic. According to the interviews, it took a short time for the idea of a coordinated response to emerge as consensual and for divisions to emerge on
the relative weight of grants and loans: ‘By May everyone agreed that we had to throw money at this’ (Interview #3). Pushed by southern countries, but also by the heads of EU institutions, the crisis was framed not as a result of faulty domestic politics, but as an exogenous, symmetric (if delayed) shock for which, as the letter affirmed, no country could be held responsible. As an interviewee put it:

To phrase it in a very blunt way, as if I was Dutch, it was not their fault. It was not the question of spending on booze and women as Dijsselbloem [former Eurozone President and Dutch Finance Minister] said back in 2009 or 2010. . .(Interview #3)

During the pandemic, a consensus emerged that failure of EU coordinated action – and solidarity – would pose an existential threat to the bloc (Ferrera et al., 2021), already affected by the long and difficult process of partial disintegration posed by Brexit. As Conte said to the German media in April 2020, ‘we are writing history, not an economics textbook’ (Fortuna, 2020).”

(accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1017/s1755773925100295)

The World Bank’s Mixed Role in Global Neoliberalism (newly added)

“By developing this historical account, the article deepens our understandingnot only of the World Bank, but also of global neoliberalism. It draws out three principal insights. First, the article reveals that although neoliberalism was a global regime—in that it reached much of the world—it was never a universal one. Second, the article observes that the World Bank did not act straightforwardly as an agent for the United States, despite the considerable control that the United States held over the institution. Finally, the article suggests that by investigating the work of international organizations in China in the final decades of the twentieth century, scholars can find new linkages between two major historical developments of recent decades: the decline of neoliberalism and the global rise of state capitalism.”

(accessed online at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6072727)

NB. In some cases, footnote numbers and internal citations have been deleted for ease of reading.

Key Blog Entries: Updated February 22, 2026

—Latest blog entries include

**”Not anymore! in Infrastructure Studies“

**”The poorer we get, the more we become alike?“

When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene, along with a useful schematic, can now be found at

When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene (links to the Guide and schematic)

This working paper updates many blog entries prior to its June 2023 publication.

—Those interested in newly updated extensions of the Guide, please see:

**”Major Read: Sourcing new ideas from the humanities, fine arts, and other media for complex policy analysis and management (newly added)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/07/03/major-read-sourcing-new-ideas-from-the-humanities-fine-arts-and-other-media-for-complex-policy-analysis-and-management/

**”16 examples on how genre differences affect the structure and substance of policy and management [newly added]: https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/12/07/sixteen-examples-on-how-differences-in-genre-affect-the-structure-and-substance-of-policy-and-management-4-newly-added/

**”Major Read: Instead of “differentiated by gender, race and class,” why not “differentiated by heterogeneity and complexity”? Ten examples of racism, class, capitalism, inequalities, border controls, authoritarianism, COVID and more” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/08/31/major-read-instead-of-differentiated-by-gender-race-and-class-why-not-differentiated-by-heterogeneity-and-complexity-t/

**”New method matters in reframing policy and management: 14 examples (14th example newly added)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/01/07/major-read-new-method-matters-in-reframing-policy-and-management-14th-example-new/

**”Emerging counternarratives on: migrants, border controls, digital networks, remittances, child labor, COVID’s impact (Africa and Europe), and global neoliberalism” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/02/23/emerging-counternarratives-on-migrants-border-controls-digital-networks-remittances-child-labor-covids-impact-africa-and-europe-and-global-neoliberalism-newly-added/

—Other major new reads:

**”The ‘future’ in HRO Studies: the example of networked reliability” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/10/17/the-future-in-hro-studies-the-example-of-networked-reliability-as-a-form-of-reliability-seeking/

**”The siloing of approaches to discourse and narrative analyses in public policy” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/07/25/major-read-the-siloing-of-approaches-to-discourse-and-narrative-analyses-in-public-policy/

**”A National Academy of Reliable Infrastructure Management” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/08/21/a-national-academy-of-reliable-infrastructure-management-resent/

—Key blog entries on livestock herders, pastoralists and pastoralisms are:

**”New Implications of the Framework for Reliability Professionals and Pastoralism-as-Infrastructure (updated)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/09/06/update-and-new-implications-of-the-framework-for-reliability-professionals-and-pastoralism-as-infrastructure-updated/

**”A ‘reliability-seeking economics in pastoralist development” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/01/16/a-reliability-seeking-economics-in-pastoralist-development/

**”Recasting traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in pastoralist systems: the detection of creeping crises” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/08/18/recasting-traditional-ecological-knowledge-tek-in-pastoralist-systems/

**”Twelve new extensions of “pastoralists as reliability professionals” and “pastoralism as a critical infrastructure” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/12/20/new-extensions-of-the-framework-for-pastoralists-as-reliability-professionals-and-pastoralism-as-a-critical-infrastructure/

**”Other fresh perspectives on pastoralists and pastoralism: 17 brief cases (last newly added)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/05/11/other-fresh-perspectives-on-pastoralists-and-pastoralism-17-brief-cases-last-newly-added/

**”First complicate those for-or-against-pastoralism arguments and then see the policy relevance: four brief examples” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/08/12/four-briefer-points-of-policy-relevance-for-pastoralists-and-herders/

The poorer we get, the more we become alike?

In all three contexts we found that crises tend to be multifarious and compound in nature, affecting a diverse array of population groups. These groups are impacted differently and try to respond and cope in similarly diverse ways. Across the three contexts considered, it is not the case that a single or very simple set of characteristics unify the affected populations, which makes these groups difficult to identify using the kinds of standard eligibility criteria usual in social assistance programming.

(accessed online at https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/articles/report/Targeting_Social_Assistance_in_Protracted_Crises_Lessons_from_Ethiopia_Niger_and_Nigeria/30657650?file=59698364https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/articles/report/Targeting_Social_Assistance_in_Protracted_Crises_Lessons_from_Ethiopia_Niger_and_Nigeria/30657650?file=59698364)

“Not anymore!” in Infrastructure Studies

Remember the days when you could agree with the Bogotá mayor, “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation”?

Not anymore, if you believe the critiques!

First, if the rich actually did use more public transport, they’d demand more security and survellance systems. Here, the presence of what is already there needs to be corrected. But such surveillance is a big no-no for critics. Second, segments of the poor are routinely under-served, if served at all, by public transport. Here the absence of what is not there needs to be corrected. In this way, supporters of existing infrastructures rightly feel they are damned for what they do, and damned for what they don’t do.

What then do critics recommend? For some, the answer is, well, “people-as-infrastructure.” The hope is that the marginalized potential users would self-organize and coordinate their own transport services and care systems. Presumably, if in so doing they put up a lot of CCTVs and opened access to everyone (including the rich), only then would those amendments be A-okay.

For this line of infrastructure thinking, I too say “Not anymore!”

These different positions are usefully captured in https://doi.org/10.1093/secdia/xhaf001

The necessity of moving “repair” to the center of decisionmaking under urgency and lack of clarity

“Make a decision” is what policy analysis is supposed to be all about. Gather the information, choose the evaluative criteria, and then decide and make a recommendation for possible implementation and afterwards evaluation of actual impacts, if any. Of course, we were taught it’s more complex and less hydraulic than that. But still the objective was that really-existing deliberation led to a decision followed by some kind of execution (with delays or changes along the way).

The complexification comes from the necessary center-staging of the “balancing test” that is: the weighing of the information in light of the economic, technical and political feasibility criteria for deciding the case at hand. Weighing the pros and cons, the push and pulls, and those hard-to-determine costs and benefits or risks-and-returns can end up feeling like the last resort over and within a longer process. Having to balance is what you do when the evaluative criteria selected–efficiency, equity, feasibility, whatever–do not clearly lead to a recommendation.

In this way and now more broadly, “decide” can feel like not just last-minute, but also a “last ditch effort” in the face of urgency but lack of clarity. When so, it’s rather odd that the next steps, “implement, operate and evaluate” rarely make explicit mention of the chief consequence of making a decision under urgency but lack of clarity while undertaking the balancing, namely: the need for repair afterwards. As Isaiah Berlin put it, this “promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium. . .is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair.” Last-resort decisionmaking continues well after the “decide” step, as new information comes in and subsequent responses are crafted. To call the latter “adaptation” or “muddling through” misses, literally, the ongoing repair needed for the infrastructures and processes undergirding ongoing decisionmaking.

This means that an often under-acknowledged feature of the “decide” cycle are the organizational/institutional efforts to normalize last-ditch efforts under conditions that feel last-resort.

Courts are institutional niches in which to make real-time decisions, including those for which there is no clear precedent or existing legal norm (Duncan Kennedy 2024). Centralized control rooms in critical infrastructure turn out also to be an unique organization formation to balance competing system and local demands is under pressures of real-time (Roe and Schulman 2008, 2016). (In narrative analytical terms, such formats are meta-narratives that accommodate, at least in real time, conflicting/uncertain storylines.) These and other institutionalized formations merit, I believe, as much attention as currently given to extraordinary powers granted to executives during emergencies. Both mechanisms necessitate “repairs” afterwards, but of a very different nature.

To see how, consider recent developments with the US Supreme court. A growing concern has been its expanding “shadow docket.” “Emergency applications,” writes the New York Times‘s Adam Kushner,

require a snap decision about whether a policy can go ahead or must wait while lower judges argue over its legality. Critics call this the “shadow docket,” and the court usually rules on the urgent cases within weeks. Trump has won almost all 18 of these petitions. And unlike normal rulings, justices often don’t explain their rationale.

What is of interest here isn’t so much the shadow docket itself as it is how some Justices see what they are doing in deciding this way. Kushner elaborates:

None of these emergency decisions are final. In each, lawyers can fight the policy in lower courts. Perhaps the Supreme Court will eventually decide that the government can’t deport migrants from around the world to Sudan or unmake a federal agency without the say-so of Congress. But by then, critics of the shadow docket say, the work will already be done.

The justices themselves have battled over the propriety of emergency rulings. In a 2021 dissent, Elana Kagan rued a midnight ruling that effectively overturned Roe v. Wade in Texas. A month later, Samuel Alito returned fire in a speech:

“The catchy and sinister term ‘shadow docket’ has been used to portray the court as having been captured by a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways. … You can’t expect the E.M.T.s and the emergency rooms to do the same thing that a team of physicians and nurses will do when they are handling a matter when time is not of the essence in the same way.”

(accessed online at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/briefing/a-supreme-court-mystery.html

The problem is Alito’s analogy. Our early Federalists also worried about systemwide emergencies, and the accommodation they made was that, yes, presidential emergency powers may be needed in extraordinary times (think of Lincoln during the Civil War). But these would not serve as precedent for governance thereafter (Fatovic 2009). Or in the case of the shadow docket, the final legal determination comes later after lower court deliberations.

Yes, there are doctors in the emergency room, but the point here is that the justices are not incident management teams in emergencies, and physicians the rest of the time. Career physicians and career emergency staff are different professions requiring different skills and orientations, at least if you take the management literatures seriously.

The court is not a control room, and this is best seen when it comes to urgencies and their respective balancing tests. Repairs undertaken to restore activities back to the prevailing normal–back into the current legal system and adjudication processes–look very different from repairs that end up leading to a new normal and legal precedents.

Other sources

Berlin, I. (1998). “The Pursuit of the Ideal.” in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, p. 16. (For those who associate “repair” with “maintenance”, see p. 15 where Berlin focuses on the need to “maintain” this precarious equlibrium).

Fatovic, C. (2009). Outside the Law: Emergency and Executive Power. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kennedy, D. (2024). “The reception of Jacques Derrida in American Critical Legal Studies.” Accessed online at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6009714

Roe, E. and P.R. Schulman (2008) High Reliability Management, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

—————————————– (2016). Reliability and Risk, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

Thinking infrastructurally about “balancing costs and benefits, pros and cons, push and pull, risks and returns”: the decisive role of unique institutional/organizational formations (updated)

“Make a decision” is what policy analysis is supposed to be all about. Gather the information, choose the evaluative criteria, and then decide and make a recommendation for possible implementation and afterwards evaluation of actual impacts, if any. Of course, we were taught it’s more complex and less hydraulic than that. But still the objective was that really-existing deliberation led to decision followed by some kind of execution (with delays or changes along the way).

The complexification comes the the necessary center-staging of the “balancing test” that is: the weighing of the information in light of the economic, technical and political feasibility criteria for deciding the case at hand. Weighing the pros and cons, the push and pulls, and those hard-to-determine costs and benefits or risks-and-returns can end up feeling like the last resort in a longer process. Having to balance is what you do when the evaluative criteria selected–efficiency, equity, feasibility, whatever–do not clearly lead to a recommendation.

In this way, “decide” can feel like a last ditch effort in the face of urgency but lack of clarity. It’s rather odd then that the next steps, “implement, operate and evaluate” rarely make explicit mention of the chief consequence of making a decision under urgency but lack of clarity while undertaking the balancing, namely: the need for repair afterwards. As Isaiah Berlin put it, this “promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium. . .is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair.” Last-resort decisionmaking continues well after the “decide” step, as new information comes in and subsequent responses are crafted. To all the latter “adaptation” or “muddling through” misses, literally, the ongoing repair needed for the infrastructures and processes undergirding ongoing decisionmaking.

This means that an often under-acknowledged feature of the “decide” cycle are the organizational/institutional efforts to normalize last-ditch efforts under conditions that feel last-resort. Courts are institutional niches in which to make real-time decisions, including those for which there are no clear precedent or existing legal norm (Duncan Kennedy 2024). Centralized control rooms in critical infrastructure turn out also to be an unique organization formation to balance competing system and local demand is under pressures of real-time (Roe and Schulman 2008, 2016). (In narrative analytical terms, such formats are meta-narratives that accommodate, at least in real time, conflicting/uncertain storylines.) These and other institutionanalized formations merit, I believe, as much attention as currently given to extraordinary powers granted to executives during emergencies. Both mechanisms necessitate “repairs” afterwards, but of a very different nature.

require a snap decision about whether a policy can go ahead or must wait while lower judges argue over its legality. Critics call this the “shadow docket,” and the court usually rules on the urgent cases within weeks. Trump has won almost all 18 of these petitions. And unlike normal rulings, justices often don’t explain their rationale.

What is of interest here isn’t so much the shadow docket itself as it is how some Justices see what they are doing in deciding this way. Kushner elaborates:

None of these emergency decisions are final. In each, lawyers can fight the policy in lower courts. Perhaps the Supreme Court will eventually decide that the government can’t deport migrants from around the world to Sudan or unmake a federal agency without the say-so of Congress. But by then, critics of the shadow docket say, the work will already be done.

The justices themselves have battled over the propriety of emergency rulings. In a 2021 dissent, Elana Kagan rued a midnight ruling that effectively overturned Roe v. Wade in Texas. A month later, Samuel Alito returned fire in a speech:

“The catchy and sinister term ‘shadow docket’ has been used to portray the court as having been captured by a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways. … You can’t expect the E.M.T.s and the emergency rooms to do the same thing that a team of physicians and nurses will do when they are handling a matter when time is not of the essence in the same way.”

(accessed online at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/briefing/a-supreme-court-mystery.html

The court is not a control room, and this is best seen when it comes to emergencies and their respective balancing and last ditch efforts. Repairs undertakento restore activities back to the prevailing normal–the current legal system and adjusication–look very different than repairs that end up leading to a new normal and legal precedents.

Other sources

Berlin, I. (2013). “The Pursuit of the Ideal.” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity 2nd edition. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Fatovic, C. (2009). Outside the Law: Emergency and Executive Power. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kennedy, D. (2024). “The reception of Jacques Derrida in American Critical Legal Studies.” Accessed online at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6009714

Roe, E. and P.R. Schulman (2008) High Reliability Management, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

—————————————– (2016). Reliability and Risk, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

When frustrations move center stage in analyzing pastoralist relations [updated Major Read]

It’s common to think of frustration as distinctly personal and individual–at least until I get to the point of explaining why you and others are cause the frustrations. At that point, frustrations aren’t just interpersonal; the type of relationship we have with each other may well not exist without the velcro of frustration. As the psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, and others underscore, you know you’re connected precisely because it’s frustrating (e.g., Phillips 2012).

Take a random walk through the pastoralist literature and you will find explicit references to: frustrated pastoralists and communities (Nori 2022, passim); frustrated politicians in pastoralist areas (Allouche et al 2025, p.16); security forces frustrated by pastoralists (Casola 2022, p. 25); pastoralists frustrated by security forces (Scott-Villiers et al 2025, p. 29); pastoralists frustrated with researchers (Bell et al 2025, p.10/17), and frustrated researchers in pastoralist areas (Semplici et al 2024, p. 13). There are also frustrated younger men in pastoralist Kenya and their frustrated elders (Muneri 2024, passim; Hazama 2023, p. 267), along with frustrated—well, you get the picture.

Pastoralists are frustrated, researchers are frustrated, NGO staff are frustrated, and so too government officials. To repeat, that is how they know they’re connected: They frustrate others and others frustrate them. They wouldn’t be in these relationships if they weren’t frustrated.

So what? Now, here is where things get interesting from a pastoralist development perspective!

To start with, frustration highlights what’s missing in notions of “resilience in the face of uncertainty.” Handling their joint frustrations is what pastoralists, NGO staff, researchers, and government officials are to do between bouncing back and bouncing forward.

This is why it’s such a big issue to determine just with whom pastoralists are in fact interacting. Are they actually frustrated with this really-existing government official or that actually-existing NGO staff person? Or is it that the others are more a nuisance for them, if that? Is the researcher actually frustrated with the pastoralists s/he is studying and, if so, in what ways is that frustration keeping their interactions going? Answers to such questions problematize currently popular binaries like caring/not caring and not only notions of caring and private self/public role.

The follow-on analytic step then is to look at other major pastoralist binaries and see to what extent, if any, frustration relationships problematize them as well. The reader is already familiar with the debunking of any hard and fast line between nature/nurture and ecosystems/humans, so no need to repeat the familiar criticisms here. What does need highlighting, I believe, is the critics’ own use of another very popular binary, that of justice/injustice, as if there were in fact just systems which can or should correct for the equally well-known injustices pastoralists undergo and have undergone.

The twofold obstacle to any such conclusion is that (1) all manner of injustices are incurred without specific reference to principles or norms of justice and, anyway (2) those principles and norms prove contradictory, inconsistent or ambiguous when it comes to specific contexts (Douglass 2025). This is both an empirical and theoretical argument most recently associated with the political philosopher, Judith Shklar:

What sort of problem is injustice? One way of thinking about it is as an ethical problem. If not the first virtue of social institutions, justice is one of the most important moral values that should guide our reflections on politics. Injustice negates (or is a departure from) justice and is therefore a problem. Understood this way, there is a strong case for maintaining that we require principles of justice to evaluate cases of injustice: we can only identify the nature and scale of injustices with reference to some prior idea of justice. As should now be evident, this is not Shklar’s approach to theorizing injustice. She instead starts from our experiences of injustice and explores the political problems to which they give rise. The sense of injustice that we all experience should be understood in reference to the plural, competing, and ever-changing expectations that exist within any society, which cannot be formalized into determinate principles of justice. As this sense of injustice is a deep and inescapable feature of all social life, there is a political imperative to find ways of living together that can mitigate it as effectively as possible without (at the extreme) descending into cycles of violent revenge. To understand the problem of injustice in this way is to treat it as a political problem, first and foremost, rather than as an ethical one.

Such a sense of injustice repeatedly appears in the pastoralist literature (e.g., Krätli and Toulmin 2020, p. 68). That there is injustice across many pastoralist areas and that the frustrating challenge is a political one in preventing or coping with ensuing cycles of violence are neatly captured by many pastoralist observers, including Nori (2022; see also Benjaminsen and Ba 2021):

Political leaders, mafia-like organisations, and insurgent groups have successfully manipulated ethnic identities, political asymmetries, and local grievances to mobilise support for their activities. These provide weapons, salaries and opportunities to seize power at the local level, and with these the promise of redressing the many injustices faced by pastoralists and thereby transforming the local political economy. Cases include Islamic State and al-Qaeda in the Sahelo-Saharan fringes, Boko Haram in the Lake Chad region, Al-Shabaab in the Somali ecosystem, and other organisations operating across SSA drylands and beyond, where local communities are drawn into a ‘war economy’ dominated by politicians, smugglers commanders, and fighters whose interests lie in generating new forms of power, protection and profit. . .

In other words, it should not be surprising when existing local justice systems are commended for providing some everyday order and stability (e.g., Scott-Villiers 2025, p.35).

Why? Because even weak systems demonstrate the frustrating–really, frustrating–importance of giving injustice and grievances their due, whatever the global justice systems appealed to (see also Douglass 2025; on local and global justice systems and their tensions, start with Elster 1992).

Sources

Allouche, J., C.Y. Yao, K.S. Amédée 2025. “Rethinking ‘Farmer-Herder’ Conflicts in Ivorian Internal Frontier.” African Affairs 123/493: 449–467 (access online at https://academic.oup.com/afraf/article/123/493/449/7951617)

Bell, A. R., O. S. Rakotonarivo, W. Zhang, C. De Petris, A. Kipchumba, R. S. Meinzen-Dick. 2025. “Understanding pastoralist adaptations to drought via games and choice experiments: field testing among Borana communities.” Ecology and Society 30(1) (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-15836-300125)

Benjaminsen, T.A., B. Ba 2021. “Fulani-Dogon Killings in Mali: Farmer-herder conflicts as insurgency and counterinsurgency.” African Security (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19392)

Douglass, R. 2025. “Who Needs a Theory of Justice? Judith Shklar and the Politics of Injustice.” American Political Science Review: 1–12 (accessed online at http://cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/who-needs-a-theory-of-justice-judith-shklar-and-the-politics-of-injustice/5B25A4AF90526DAE217F93E87765E074)

Elster, J. 1992. Local Justice: How Institutions Allocate Scarce Goods and Necessary Burdens, Russell Sage Foundation: New York NY

Hazama, I. 2023. “Man-Animal Social Relationship as Source of Resilience,” Chapter 9 in Reconsidering Resilience in African Pastoralism: Toward a Relational and Contextual Approach, Eds. S. Konaka, G. Semplici and P. Little, Kyoto University Press and Trans Pacific Press, Japan

Krätli S., C. Toulmin 2020. Farmer–Herder Conflict in Sub-saharan Africa? IIED, Briefing. International Institute for Environment and Development, London (accessed online at http://pubs.iied. org/17753IIED)

Muneri, E.W. 2024. Intersectional Subjectivities, Embodied Experiences, and Everyday Responses among the Maasai Pastoralists Amidst Environmental Changes: Insights from the Mara in Kenya, PhD dissertation, Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex (accessed online at https://sussex.figshare.com › ndownloader › files)

Nori, M. 2022. Assessing the Policy Frame in Pastoral Areas of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Research Paper No. RSC 2022/03, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Italy (accessed online at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4071572 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4071572)

Phillips, A. 2012. Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York NY.

Scott-Villiers, P., A. Scott-Villiers, and the team from Action for Social and Economic Progress, Somalia 2025. Navigating Violence and Negotiating Order in the Somalia–Kenya Borderlands. IDS Working Paper 618, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies (accessed online at https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/articles/report/Navigating_Violence_and_Negotiating_Order_in_the_Somalia_Kenya_Borderlands/28715012?file=53375021)

Semplici, G., L.J, Haider, R. Unks, T.S. Mohamed, G. Simula, P. Tsering (Huadancairang), N. Maru, L. Pappagallo, M. Taye 2024. “Relational resiliences: reflections from pastoralism across the world.” Ecosystems and People, 20(1) (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2024.2396928)

West, S., L.J. Haider, S. Stålhammar & S. Woroniecki 2020. “A relational turn for sustainability science? Relational thinking, leverage points and transformations.” Ecosystems and People, 16:1, 304-325 (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26395916.2020.1814417)

The policy relevance of poetry and opera for climate, war, the long run, violence, power and these times (newly added and updated)

1. A policy analyst’s prose poem for these times and in phrases I wish were mine

“true as a wet stone’s shine” (Sally Festing); the whole vivarium; time to bed in; to run into the sand; always playing aide-de-camp; oppresses the eye; socio-technical quotient far outstrips its political quotient; cratered bromides; pockmarked and punched through by carve-outs and concessions; beggardly cheeseparing; we get a peak beneath the waves; seeking some sort of no-miracles argument; waiting-for-the-general-strike strategy; more in the spirit of fatalism than apologia; criticism as shit on the sleeve; right up there with Lysenkoism as proletarian science; the sundial that marks the outside sunny hours only; so true to its date and so false to its subject; the critic’s preternaturally strong powers of abstraction;

something as ever-present as outer space; a role that knits you to those outside; what is happening here is purely gestural, and deeply destructive; usefully polemical but it cannot be our resting place; only happiest with the work he’s defaced; a shake-up and a dumb-down, like a pink toilet seat hanging around one’s neck; about as useful as snow polo in Saint-Moritz; fraught as when Bob Dylan or Miles Davis went electric; jumping in with berserk ideas before disappearing; the welfare state replaced by the save-yourself-if-you-can mentality of the-only-thing-between-you-and-death-is-you; when the juice is no longer worth the squeeze; on the edge of the burn pit; “What an interesting person you probably are” (Barry Humphries); The $upreme ¢ourt; there are lettuces with better political instincts;

some are so good at describing the water we’re drowning in; as close to Romance as Rudolph Nureyev was to arc welding; akin to Nestlé commercializing water and selling it back to locals; not sunshine and lollipops, but a mix of cream and lemon with high notes of piss, sauerkraut and room-temperature ranch dressing; as tea dust is to tea leaves; a touch more panic-room chic, shall we?; category-five haplessness is a throughline of his work; as heavy as cold dumplings in stew; Heaney said that Robert Frost inhabited the world at body heat; “Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?”; what a sham(e); in today’s omnipresent binary of Oppressor/Oppressed; that chance is vanishingly small; Well no actually, I was immensely irritated, bored witless and occasionally moved to laughter; stutters and stalls, this current clusterfuck of crises; self-important things were always better in the past; to know them in silhouette only; please colour me sceptical;

grandiose proclamations followed by appalled second looks; a bit like the corpse having to drive the hearse; too close a contact with men who couldn’t even write a Valentine; Xenophanes: “If triangles were alive, they would worship triangles”; So thick the confusion,/Even the cowards were brave. [Archilochis translated by Davenport]; humankind is declined in the plural; just as late 19^thcanine veterinarians derided their precursors, 18^th century dog doctors; suggestive yes, but persuasive?; a clinic in close reading; it was the early 2000s and having a blog was like having a guitar in the 1960s; plenty of holes open up in the fly screen that separates manifesto from religion; even the subtitles are better than the actor; this surely must be the nail in the coffin of Regietheater!; the point of view is generally transatlantic and aimed at re-evaluation; sofa realism; dilemmatic

2. Climate emergency parsed through a poem by Jorie Graham

–I liken one of our complexity challenges to that of reading Hardy’s “Convergence of the Twain” as if it were still part of the news (it had been written less than two weeks after the sinking of the Titanic).

So too the challenge of reading the first sequence of poems in Jorie Graham’s Fast (2017, Ecco HarperCollinsPublishers). The 17 pages are extraordinary, not just because of pulse driving her lines, but also for what she evokes. In her unfamiliar words, “we are in systemcide”.

–To read the sequence—“Ashes,” “Honeycomb,” “Deep Water Trawling,” and five others—is to experience all manner of starts—“I spent a lifetime entering”—and conjoined ends (“I say too early too late”) with nary a middle in between (“Quick. You must make up your/answer as you made up your//question.”)

Because hers is no single story, she sees no need to explain or explicate. By not narrativizing the systemcide into the architecture of beginning, middle and end, she prefers, I think, evoking the experience of now-time as end-time:

action unfolded in no temporality--->anticipation floods us but we/never were able--->not for one instant--->to inhabit time…

She achieves the elision with long dashes or —>; also series of nouns without commas between; and questions-as-assertions no longer needing question marks (“I know you can/see the purchases, but who is it is purchasing me—>can you please track that…”). Enjambment and lines sliced off by wide spaces also remind us things are not running.

–Her lines push and pull across the small bridges of those dashes and arrows. To read this way is to feel, for me, what French poet and essayist, Paul Valery, described in a 1939 lecture:

Each word, each one of the words that allow us to cross the space of a thought so quickly, and follow the impetus of an idea which rates its own expression, seems like one of those light boards thrown across a ditch or over a mountain crevasse to support the passage of a man in quick motion. But may he pass lightly, without stopping—and especially may he not loiter to dance on the thin board to try its resistance! The frail bridge at once breaks or falls, and all goes down into the depths.

The swiftness with which I cross her bridges is my experience of the rush of crisis. I even feel pulled forward to phrases and lines that I haven’t read yet. Since this is my experience of systems going wrong, it doesn’t matter to me whether Graham is a catastrophizer or not. She takes the certainties and makes something still new.

–I disagree about the crisis—for me, it has middles with more the mess of contingencies and aftermath than beginnings and ends—but that in no way diminishes or circumscribes my sense she’s right when it comes to systemcide: “You have to make it not become/waiting…”

3. Global Climate Sprawl

You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet. . .It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.

I suggest that Global Climate Change isn’t just a bad mess; it’s a spectacularly, can’t-keep-our-eyes-off-it, awful mess of getting it wrong, again and again. To my mind, GCC is a hot mess–both senses of the term–now sprawled all over place and time. It is inextricably, remorselessly part and parcel of “living way too expansively, generously.”

GCC’s the demonstration of a stunningly profligate human nature. You see the sheer sprawl of it all in the epigraph, Philip Roth’s rant from American Pastoral. So too the elder statesman in T.S. Eliot’s eponymous play admits,

The many many mistakes I have made
My whole life through, mistake upon mistake,
The mistaken attempts to correct mistakes
By methods which proved to be equally mistaken.

That missing comma between “many many” demonstrates the excess: After a point, we no longer can pause, with words and thoughts rushing ahead. (That the wildly different Philip Roth and T.S. Eliot are together on this point indicates the very real mess it is.)

That earlier word, sprawl, takes us to a more magnanimous view of what is going on, as in Les Murray’s “The Quality of Sprawl”:

Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.
Sprawl is doing your farming by aeroplane, roughly,
or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home…

This extravagance and profligacy–the waste–are not ornery contrarianism. For poet, Robert Frost, “waste is another name for generosity of not always being intent on our own advantage”. If I had my druthers, rename it, “GCS:” Global Climate Sprawl.

4. Power is where it belongs in opera

The last link below is to a very accomplished production of the opera, Il Giustino, by Antonio Vivaldi. There’s lots of stuff about this power of this opera, e.g. from online sources:

Il Giustino relates the appearance of the goddess Fortune to the peasant Giustino, his rise to leadership of the Byzantine army and the defeat of a Scythian army under Vitaliano, and the jealousy of the emperor Anastasio, who suspects Giustino of having designs on his wife Arianna and on the throne itself. misunderstandings straightened out for a peasant to be proclaimed emperor? https://operavision.eu/performance/il-giustino

Love, eroticism, jealousy and intrigue, war and violence, lust for power, tests of courage and great visions: Antonio Vivaldi’s »Il Giustino« offers an action-packed and emotionally charged stage spectacle about the young farmer Giustino’s rise to the apex of Roman politics. https://www.staatsoper-berlin.de/en/veranstaltungen/il-giustino.11043/

As the opera is long, those who can afford 20 minutes to get a sense of what’s on store try from 1:08.20 minutes – 1:28.16 minutes at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cur90vb_5ko&list=RDcur90vb_5ko&start_radio=1 (for those who seek serviceable English subtitles, go to Settings, then Auto-Generate, and click on “English”)

5. War

–I finish reading the Collected Critical Writings of Geoffrey Hill, which discussed a poet I don’t remember reading before, Ivor Gurney. Which in turn sends me to his poems, which leads me to his “War Books” from World War I and the following lines:

What did they expect of our toil and extreme
Hunger - the perfect drawing of a heart's dream?
Did they look for a book of wrought art's perfection,
Who promised no reading, nor praise, nor publication?
Out of the heart's sickness the spirit wrote
For delight, or to escape hunger, or of war's worst anger,
When the guns died to silence and men would gather sense
Somehow together, and find this was life indeed….

The lines, “What did they expect of our toil and extreme/Hunger—the perfect drawing of a heart’s dream?”, reminded me of an anecdote from John Ashbery, the poet, in an essay of his:

Among Chuang-tzu’s many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. ‘I need another five years,’ said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.

It’s as if Chuang-tzu’s decade—his form of hunger—did indeed produce the perfect drawing. Gurney’s next two lines, “Did they look for a book of wrought art’s perfection,/Who promised no reading, no praise, nor publication?” reminds me, however, of very different story, seemingly making the opposite point (I quote from Peter Jones’ Reading Virgil: Aeneid I and II):

Cicero said that, if anyone asked him what god is or what he is like, he would take the Greek poet Simonides as his authority. Simonides was asked by Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, the same question, and requested a day to think about it. Next day Hiero demanded the answer, and Simonides begged two more days. Still no answer. Continuing to double up the days, Simonides was eventually asked by Hiero what the matter was. He replied, ‘The longer I think about the question, the more obscure than answer seems to be.’

I think Hiero’s question was perfect in its own right by virtue of being unquestionably unanswerable. In the case of Chuang-tzu, what can be more perfect than the image that emerges, infallibly and unstoppably, from a single stroke? In the case of Simonides, what can be more insurmountable than the perfect question without answer?

–Yet here is Gurney providing the same answer to each question. War ensures the unstoppable and insurmountable are never perfect opposites—war, rather, patches them together as living: Somehow together, and find this too was life.

Ashbery records poet, David Schubert, saying of the great Robert Frost: “Frost once said to me that – a poet – his arms can go out – like this – or in to himself; in either case he will cover a good deal of the world.”

6. An intertextual long run

I’m first asking you to look and listen to one of my favorites, a short video clip of Anna Caterina Antonacci and Andreas Scholl singing the duet, “I embrace you,” from a Handel opera (the English translation can be found at the end of the clip’s Comments):

Antonacci’s performance will resonate for some with the final scene in Sunset Boulevard, where Gloria Swanson, as the actress Norma Desmond, walks down the staircase toward the camera. But intertextuality–that two-way semi-permeability between genres–is also at work. Antonacci brings the opera diva into Swanson’s actress as much as the reverse, and to hell with anachronism and over-the-top.

–Let’s now bring semi-permeable intertextuality closer to public policy and management. Zakia Salime (2022) provides a rich case study of refusal and resistance by Moroccan villagers to nearby silver mining–in her case, parsed through the lens of what she calls a counter-archive:

My purpose is to show how this embodied refusal. . .was productive of a lived counter-archive that documented, recorded and narrated the story of silver mining through the lens of lived experience. . . .Oral poetry (timnadin), short films, petitions, letters and photographs of detainees disrupted the official story of mining ‘as development’ in state officials’ accounts, with a collection of rebellious activities that exposed the devastation of chemical waste, the diversion of underground water, and the resulting dry collective landholdings. Audio-visual material and documents are still available on the movement’s Moroccan Facebook page, on YouTube and circulating on social media platforms. The [village] water protectors performed refusal and produced it as a living record that assembled bodies, poetic testimonials, objects and documents
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/dech.12726

What, though, when the status quo is itself a counter-archive? Think of all the negative tweets, billions and billions and billions of them. Think of all negative comments on politics, dollars and jerks in the Wall Street Journal or Washington Post. That is, think of these status quo repositories as a counter-archive of “status-quo critique and dissent.”

–So what? Consider now the status quo as archives and counter-archives across multiple media that can be thought of as semi-permeable and in two-way traffic over time and space.

This raises an interesting possibility: a new kind of long-run that is temporally long because it is presently intertextual, indefinitely forwards and back and across different genres. As in: “the varieties of revolution do not know the secrets of the futures, but proceed as the varieties of capitalism do, exploiting every opening that presents itself”–to paraphrase political philosopher, Georges Sorel–who, importantly for the point here, could not know all secrets of the past either.

7. Quoting our way to answering, “What happens next?”

Yes, it’s a radical critique that tells truth to power, yes it is a manifesto for change now; yes, it’s certain, straightforward and unwavering.

But, like all policy narratives with beginnings, middles and ends, the big question remains: What happens next? Without provisional answers, endings are always immanent. “The thing is that you can always go on, even when you have the most terrific ending,” in the words of Nobel poet, Joseph Brodsky.

What to do? One answer is in Lucretius:

quin etiam refert nostris versibus ipsis
cum quibus et quali sint ordine quaeque locata;
. . .verum positura discrepitant res.
(Indeed in my own verses it is a matter of some moment what is placed next to what, and in what order;…truly the place in which each will be positioned determines the meaning.)
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura

That is, an answer to “What happens next?” is to juxtapose disparate quotes in order to extend the endings we have. An example follows.

Large proportions of the Chinese collection are perhaps copies in the eyes of those collectors and dealers, who believe that authentic African art has become largely extinct due to diminishing numbers of active traditional carvers and ritual practices. However, the ideological structure and colonial history of authenticity loses its effects and meanings in China, where anything produced and brought back from Africa is deemed to be “authentically African” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925089

But when. . .researching shanzhai art made in Dafen village, located in Shenzhen, Southern China, and home to hundreds of painter-workers who make reproductions in every thinkable style and period, I was struck by the diversity of the artworks and their makers. The cheerfulness with which artworks were altered was liberating, for example, the ‘real’ van Gogh was considered too gloomy by customers, so the painters made a brighter version (see Image 1).

In another instance, I witnessed the face of Mona Lisa being replaced by one’s daughter to make it fit the household. When I brought an artwork home, the gallery called me later to ask if it matched my interior. Otherwise, I could change it. Such practices do turn conventional notions about art topsy-turvy. And shanzhai does not only concern art, it extends to phones, houses, cities, etc. As Lena Scheen (2019: 216) observes,

‘What makes shanzhai truly “unique” is precisely that it is not unique; that it refuses to pretend its uniqueness, its authenticity, its newness. A shanzhai resists the newness dogma dominating Euro-American cultures. Instead, it screams in our faces: “yes, I’m a copy, but I’m better and I’m proud of it”.’ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13675494251371663

So what?

Any realistic attempt of ecological restoration with cloned bucardo [the Pyrenees ibex] would have to rely on hybridisation with other subspecies at some point; the genetic material from one individual could not be used to recreate a population on its own. Juan hypothesised: “we would have had to try to cross-breed in captivity, but you never know what could be possible, with new tools like CRISPR developing… and those [genome editing] technologies that come in the future, well, we don’t know, but maybe we could introduce some genetic diversity. This highlights a fundamental flaw in cloning as a means of preserving ‘pure’ bucardo—not only are ‘bucardo’ clones born with the mitochondrial DNA of domestic goats, but the hypothetical clone would also be subjected to further hybridisation. This begs the question, could such an animal ever be considered an authentic bucardo?” https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tran.12478

8. Colonial violence, domestic violence: an example of how genre, juxtaposition and intertext matter.

1. “The Canto of the Colonial Soldier” (sung in English with French subtitles). From the opera, Shell Shock, by Nicholas Lens (libretto by Nick Cave) from 3.25 minutes to 10.00 minutes in the following link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3bGhqROG8E&list=RDF3bGhqROG8E&start_radio=1

2. “IT” (Scene XI) from the opera, Innocence, by Kaija Saariaho (multilingual libretto by Aleksi Barrière of the original Finnish libretto by Sofi Oksanen) from 44.25 minutes to 49.33 minutes in the following link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZz2bxnAQfs&lc=Ugzut1S6c6UsP2ED_vx4AaABAg

This particular scene is about a mass school killing, sung by the students and in different languages. You will want to read the English translation before watching the clip.

Saariaho stipulates that the Shooter should not appear on stage at any time, while the Colonial Soldier is the first shooter to be heard in Lens’s work.

English translation of Scene XI, “IT” (from https://www.wisemusicclassical.com/work/58414/Innocence–Kaija-Saariaho/; sorry for the clumsy cut and paste below)