Case studies Flashcards
Haiti gangs
- Colonial past. Slaves uprise against their owners and demand liberty and independence. France agrees if they repay them. (21Bln dollars worse)
- In 2021 the president Moïse was assassinated, leading to a radical increase in the already present gangs. They’ve caused terror, displacing more than 700,000 people and leaving no elected government official in office.
-Themes: sovereignty, violence and non-violence, human rights, international intervention
China soft and economic power
China pledged $1.4 trillion dollars in Africa in infrastructure. In exchange, they received favourable access to natural resources in Africa.
22 countries in the EU signed a letter condemning China’s treatrnt of Uighur muslims. The letter, however, was not signed by any country in the Balkans because of infrastruture projects reliant on China’s investment, which probably ties the countries economically and poltically
China also uses other soft power tools, like the spreading of their culture all over the world.
Russia- Ukraine
Crimea belonged to Russia originially in the 1950s, until it was given to Ukraine by Khrushchev during USSR. Putin annexed it in 2014, with 60% of russian’s agreeing to it. In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine after it said it wanted to join NATO.
Themes: Sovereignty, autonomy, hard power, nation state
USA hard power
2014 USA military intervention in iraq against ISIL. First, they supplied the Iraqi Kurds with weapons, and also gave humanitarian (food, water medicine) aid to civilians escaping, which counts as soft power. But then the USA decided to start firing airstrikes to ISIL. They were followed by 9 other countries. in 2015, ISIL had lost 25% of its territory, and by 2017 they had none left.
Grameen bank
A bank that converts deposits from the village into loans for the more needy. It targets the poorest of the poor, and especially women, who receive 95% of the bank’s loans.
Parkland High School massacre
2018 Parkland school shooting is the school shooting which has taken the most lives in all of US history, killing 17 people (14 of whom were students) and leaving 17 injured. The surviving students rallied, lobbied, and protested for gun rights to change. In only 2018, 69 new gun laws were passed to restrict gun use and allowance: an extraordinary and unique merit.
Venezuela Maduro vs Guadió
In 2017, the opposition-held legislative body of the National Assembly was stripped of its power by Nicolás Maduro.
Guaidó, the National Assembly’s president, began to lobby against Maduro and called his government illegitimate. Going of article 233 of the Venezuelan Constitution, Guaidó said he would become interim president for as long as free and fair elections were not held. In 2018 he sweared himself in as the president of Venezuela, and received support from many Latin American countries, but most of all from the US. Maduro, seeing the US’ flagrant support, said he was cutting all political ties with the country and that they were to remove their
Asian tsunami crisis
After the Asian tsunami, there was an important and very clear push to use the shock of the natural disaster to install policies like water and electricity privatisation, labour market flexibiliastion, and the displacement of the poor on the coasts as to build hotels. A ‘re-engineering of society’ in the interest of coorporations.
