One of the perennial questions in society is how we should deal with difference. In particular, the issue of religious difference has vexed societies around the globe: this is true not just for our present times, but also for ancient civilisations such as the Roman Empire. In its heyday, the Roman world spanned Europe, the Middle East and North Africa and inevitably it included people of various faiths and convictions, notably Jews and Christians. Often when we think of Roman persecution of the latter group, we think of the systematic targeting of Christians as a religious minority. But with new advances in scholarship, a much more complex picture is emerging of the interactions between Romans and Christians in the ancient world.
In the landmark 50th episode of The Provocateur, I talk to James Corke-Webster, lecturer in Roman history at King’s College London, about the persecution of Christians in the ancient world. We discuss how James came to be interested in the subject, the history of scholarship on the persecution of Christians, how James argues for a more ‘bottom-up’ approach, the documentary evidence for persecution from both the Christian and the Roman sides, the various punishments that were meted out to Christians and the differences between the reality of persecution and the memory of it. We also discuss the significance of James’ work for later Roman history and even the present day.
You can listen to the podcast here:
Further Reading:
Barnes, Timothy D. (1968) “Legislation Against the Christians”, JRS 58: 32–50.
Corke-Webster, J. (2017) “Trouble in Pontus: The Pliny-Trajan Correspondence on the Christians Reconsidered”, TAPA 147.2, 371-411.
de Ste Croix, G. E. M. (1963) “Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted?”, Past & Present 26.1, 6–38.
Moss, C. (2013) The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom. San Francisco: HarperOne.
Rives, J. (1999) “The Decree of Decius and the Religion of Empire”, JRS 89: 135–54.
Shaw, B. (2015) “The Myth of the Neronian Persecution”, JRS 105: 73–100.
We continue our month-long Canadian miniseries, in honour of Canada 150, with a critical assessment of one of the most important dynamics in the country’s history: the relationship between the indigenous and European peoples of present-day Canada, which remains a source of ongoing injustices. Though orthodox Canadian history might stress the nation’s relative youth – being traditionally created in 1867 – the story of Canada arguably begins centuries before, when humans first migrated into North America. Contact with European explorers in the 18th and 19th centuries led almost inevitably to interbreeding between indigenous and European people, which in turn resulted in the category of “Métis”. Yet the apparent simplicity of its definition belies a host of anxieties around race, assimilation, integration and Canadian identity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as Canada engaged in a process of nation-building.
On today’s episode of The Provocateur we are joined by Jennifer Hayter, who is currently completing a PhD in History at the University of Toronto, to discuss the history of the relationship between the Métis and the Canadian state. We cover the origins of the term “Métis” as a category; the rise of Métis nationalism in the late 19th century (especially the role of Louis Riel); the significance of the Métis in Manitoba and British Columbia; and the continuing ramifications for Métis politics today.
Ens, G., and J. Sawchuk (2016) From New Peoples to New Nations: Aspects of Métis History and Identity from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
St-Onge, N., C. Podruchny and B. Macdougall (eds.) (2012) Contours of a People: Metis Family, Mobility, and History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Ray, A. J. (2011) An Illustrated History of Canada’s Native People: I Have Lived Here Since the World Began. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
While prejudice on the basis of sexual orientation is still widespread throughout the world, in recent decades laws have been enacted in various countries banning so-called conversion therapy: (typically) psychological attempts to change individuals’ sexual orientation from homosexual or bisexual to exclusively heterosexual. Advances in neuroscience in the not-too-distant future could mean that conversion therapy could be delivered in a ‘high-tech’ manner, for example by administering a drug that could rewire the neurochemical signals in our brains.
This possibility brings with it a raft of ethical issues and today on The Provocateur I talk to Brian Earp, Research Fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University, to broach these issues. We discuss the possible harms of conversion therapy and whether neuroenhancement-based conversion therapy in particular produces any distinctive harms, explore arguments in favour of the practice and touch on some policy implications.
You can listen to part one of the podcast here:
Part two is here:
Note: In the broadcast I mention a second episode with Brian (discussing female and male circumcision), but unfortunately this has been postponed to next month due to scheduling issues. Watch this space!
Gupta, K. (2012) ‘Protecting Sexual Diversity: Rethinking the Use of Neurotechnological Interventions to Alter Sexuality’, AJOB Neuroscience 3(3), pp. 24-28.
Levy, J. T. (2005) ‘Sexual orientation, exit and refuge’, in Eisenberg, A. and J. Spinner-Halev (eds.) Minorities within Minorities: Equality, Rights and Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Okin, S. M. (1999) ‘Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?’ in Cohen, J. et al. (eds.) Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sandel, M. (2007) The Case Against Perfection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Shidlo, A. et al. (eds.) (2001) Sexual Conversion Therapy: Ethical, Clinical and Research Perspectives. New York, London and Oxford: The Haworth Medical Press.
Immigration seems to be on the minds of many liberal governments in a post-Brexit and post-Trump world. The European Union is still grappling with the consequences of the Mediterranean refugee crisis; France is riven between adhering to laicité on the one hand and respecting the wishes of Muslim minorities on the other; Australia is facing its own refugee dilemma, particularly in the light of the abuses documented at the Australia-run detention centre in Papua New Guinea; and of course anxieties abound in the United States regarding the status of Mexican immigrants. How liberal democracies should respond to the (perceived) threat of immigration is a question that has vexed moral and political philosophers in recent decades, in response to a planet increasingly united by globalisation and yet also increasingly fractured by the realities of globalisation.
This week on The Provocateur, I talk about immigration with Benjamin Boudou, who is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and editor-in-chief of Raisons politiques, the premier political theory journal in France. We explore his current research which aims to reinvigorate the concept of hospitality in political theory, specifically applying it to the contexts of immigration and frontiers. We also discuss briefly the current situations in Britain and France, as well as how to resolve the divide between analytic and continental approaches to political philosophy.
You can listen to the podcast here:
Further Reading:
Benhabib, S. (2004) The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carens, J. (2013) The Ethics of Immigration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Derrida, J. (2000) Of Hospitality. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Fine, S. and L. Ypi (eds.) (2016) Migration in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Membership. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goodin, R. (2007) ‘Enfranchising all affected interests and its alternatives’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 35, pp. 40-68.
Kukathas, C. (2012) ‘Why open borders?’ Ethical Perspectives 19(4), pp. 649-675.
Miller, D. (2016) Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Amid all the fallout from Donald Trump’s highly controversial restrictions on immigrants from several majority Muslim countries, another significant announcement from the White House has largely escaped media attention: the decision to restart construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline. This proposal triggered a wave of protests in the latter half of 2016, particularly around the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Campaigners argued that the pipeline represented a threat to the sovereignty of the indigenous peoples living on the reservation, particularly in terms of the environmental hazards that such a pipeline could unleash. However, what is often missing from the popular conversation on Aboriginal sovereignty movements is an understanding of the way in which the state has constructed a certain conception of citizenship that enables indigenous peoples to value their sovereignty over arguably more meaningful goods, such as socioeconomic opportunities.
In today’s episode of The Provocateur, I talk to Benjamin Studebaker, a doctoral candidate in politics at the University of Cambridge, about the relationship between indigenous peoples, the state and citizenship. We develop some of the themes from his blog post discussing the issue of Native American sovereignty and link them to broader issues to do with the ways in which states legitimate themselves by allowing different citizens to want different values and the resultant implications for indigenous policy when these values conflict. Ben has also kindly provided some outline notes, which I reproduce below.
You can listen to the podcast here:
Outline Notes:
I. Many different views of citizenship—of what it is that citizens share in common that makes them citizens (liberalism, republicanism, civic nationalism, ethnic nationalism, identitarianism, pluralism vs. Pluralism). All of these views tend to presume that people have things that they want to get out of citizenship and they build states for these purposes—people use the state to get power and use that power to construct a kind of citizenship which reflects their values and beliefs.
II. But people are not free in this way—their identity and beliefs are not individualistically chosen, they are instead acquired through interaction with material and social conditions. Who is ultimately responsible for those conditions? The sovereign entity—the state.
III. States need to legitimate themselves to secure stability. They will be recognized as legitimate when citizens want the things that states provide. So successful states will tend to create citizens whose desires and expectations match the state’s capabilities.
IV. In cases of inequality, states must be pluralist to some degree—they must create different kinds of citizens whose desires and expectations can be met in different and unequal ways. Pluralism also has other adaptive advantages—if all citizens want the same thing, it is easier to satisfy them, but to fail one citizen is to fail all of them, which means that when states do fail the failure is total and often fatal. In a pluralist society, states can satisfy enough people enough of the time by constantly cobbling together different coalitions of satisfied groups. However, this pluralism allows some groups to be persistently neglected by the state—especially anti-pluralists.
V. With respect to indigenous people, the state attempts to pacify them by socializing them to want what they get. So if Native Americans are going to live on separate reservations with some level of autonomy (but under grossly unequal socioeconomic conditions), they must be made to value the kinds of goods they can have—cultural purity and autonomy, not material prosperity. But this autonomy and culture are mirages—the state created them to see these constructs as valuable and then supplied them with conditions under which they can be realized. In the meantime, it creates other citizens with entirely different values which it enables them to actualize under entirely different conditions.
Further Reading:
Beiner, R. (ed.) (1994) Theorizing Citizenship. New York: SUNY Press.
Lukes, S. (1974) Power: A Radical View. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Parfit, D. (2011) On What Matters, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rawls, J. (1993) Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Strawson, G. (2011) Freedom and Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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