Critical Debates

Part 1 Afropolitan Comfort and the Danish Corona Flag

Dr. Lisa Ann Richey is a Professor in the Department of Management, Society and Communication at the Copenhagen Business School.

My first memory of the Corona virus, before we became politicized enough to refer to it as COVID-19, or the “new” Corona virus—or for some special politicians, the “Wuhan” virus—was in Tanzania. Enjoying the evening breeze from the Indian ocean in the public area of our workshop hotel, I sat with a couple of our research team members catching up on life via apps on the smartphone. I came across a small shitstorm on my social media about our Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. Technically speaking, she is not ‘my’ Prime Minister as my citizenship application was denied last year on the grounds of having spent too much time living outside of the country in South Africa, Italy and the US during the past 20 years. The “Wuhan virus” bleach-your-lungs guy, is actually the current head of the nation where I vote.

Yet, our Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was in the media adamantly refusing to issue a public apology for a Danish cartoon that had been published on January 27th by Jyllands-Posten, a second-rate, nationally distributed newspaper, infamous for publishing the 2005 “Muhammed cartoons” which led to international violence, boycotts and around 200 deaths. The latest cartoon was a drawing of the Chinese flag with its five gold stars replaced by five virions of Corona. China’s embassy accused the cartoonist of insulting China and demanded an apology. The Danish Prime Minister refused and her response is on record as saying ‘we have freedom of expression in Denmark – also to draw.’

Most politicians and many Danes supported the cartoonist, attributing the outrage of many Chinese as ‘cultural difference.’ The newspaper editor defended that the publication was not ‘poking fun of the situation’ stating: ‘We cannot apologise for something we don’t think is wrong. We have no intention of being demeaning or to mock, nor do we think that the drawing does. As far as I can see, this here is about different forms of cultural understanding.’ When the Corona flag was published, 100 deaths from the virus had been documented in the Chinese city of Wuhan and ‘cultural’ understandings of right and wrong ways to portray the virus, to call its name, to recognize its symptoms, to document its death rates, to protect citizens within closed borders were just beginning.

But it was only January, and our international research team starting a five-year project on how people outside of the formal humanitarian sector respond to crises in Tanzania, had no idea the ways that this Corona virus would come to affect us. We still don’t. We live quite specifically in Copenhagen, Dar es Salaam and London. But many of us are a bit of an Afropolitan/Cosmopolitan mish-mash by parentage— Chagga/Meru, British/Dane, American/Italian, Kenyan/Tanzanian and we have lived across various countries in Africa, Europe and Asia for work, studies, or by the accident of birth. We are all employed by the state in university jobs. For all of us, these are good jobs. We are comfortable. But, now, we are uncomfortable.

We are in different stages of our careers—from doctoral students to full professors—and these days, as the global pandemic settles over all of us in different and forcibly separate parts of the world, we feel differently the burdens of different responsibilities. One of our team wrote to me: ‘I work like hell while managing a family who is also sick and tired of being locked up… I’m trying to manage 200 staff members’ teaching, supervision and examination responsibilities, plus their externally funded research projects, their problems with spouses, kids and dogs… I want my life back…’

Another of us had to travel upcountry to Kilimanjaro to look after her aging mother who lives alone on a farm. I imagine her weighing the risks of the transport, the confused messages from the government about whether anyone should travel, or even leave their house, of whether the handful of cases that had been officially reported in Tanzania were exaggerated hyperbole or grossly under-reported with those of your own mother, and getting on the bus. I would have done the same.

But I am getting ahead of the story, back in January when we were planning how to study earthquakes and floods, refugee camps and their communities and perhaps locusts, we had no possible imagination of the new crisis that would consume us. We held our workshops, discussed the academic literature, planned the plans, drafted the MOUs, enjoyed our barbecue and good conversations and parted ways. Since January in Dar es Salaam, our team’s intellectual energy has become professional, intellectual, political and highly personal about whether to hoard supplies or wear medical masks, how much hand washing with which kind of water could be enough, how would people help each other when the most helpful thing they were told to do was to stay apart?

My flight went from Dar es Salaam to Istanbul. When I arrived in the crowded airport, something felt a little different to me, but I couldn’t quite figure it out. As I neared the gate for my connecting flight to Venice, I noticed that about half of the passengers were wearing medical masks. Thinking about our Danish Corona-flag incident, I remembered to check my cultural bias as I noticed the masks around me. Many appeared Asian and I know it is good hygiene to wear masks when in crowded public places, so I thought it mostly a sign of politeness. Yet, many were also Italians, headed on the plane with me. Not checking my cultural bias so effectively when considering a culture that I now also claim as my own, I remember thinking, ‘hysterical, over-reacting Italians.’

Disembarking the plane, I entered the airport and was met by a person in lay-medical uniform who measured my fever without touching me. It was Valentine’s Day and I had dinner reservations at our favorite restaurant in Venice to get to. But that story will continue. In the meanwhile, my Danish Prime Minister has been getting glowing headlines over her management of the pandemic after the flag. She’s featured in a story in The Guardian entitled, ‘Why Do Female Leaders Seem to Be More Successful at Managing the Coronavirus Crisis?’ After praising her online singing, the article concludes:‘Frederiksen’s no-punches-pulled speeches and clear instructions to the nation have been widely praised.’

By Stefano Ponte, Lisa Ann Richey, and Maha Rafi Atal

Next Wednesday, Bruce Gilley of Portland State University will be giving a lecture to the AfD parliamentary group in Berlin on ‘The balance of German colonialism. Why the Germans do not have to apologize for the colonial period and certainly do not have to pay for it!’. Gilley became an overnight celebrity in right-wing circles after the publication in of his 2017 article ‘The Case for Colonialism,’ , which infamously argued that many ‘poor’ countries would be better off today if colonial systems of government were reinstated. That same year, Gilley resigned from the leading professional association of American political scientists in protest of the prominence given to feminist and postcolonial research at its annual conference. Gilley couched his critique in the language of academic standards, arguing that the longstanding norm of ideas earning their place on merit had been subverted by “identity politics.”

In fact, as we argued earlier this year, it is Gilley himself who has subverted these norms, as his 2017 article was published without passing peer-review, after an editorial process skewed to pursue “clickbait” at the expense of scholarly rigor. Gilley’s 2017 article appeared in Third World Quarterly, a journal historically committed to anti-colonial politics, and two of us were among the half of the journal’s board members who resigned over its publication. With the far-right AfD explicitly citing the 2017 article as the inspiration for Gilley’s lecture, it is worth reviewing how a low-quality publication became a keystone in far right politics, and considering the lessons for editors and publishers today. To that end, we excerpt in part our analysis of the case, co-authored by resigned board members, Stefano Ponte, Lisa Ann Richey, Ilan Kapoor and David Simon:

“While the controversy around the article, which was ultimately retracted, has been well covered elsewhere, what is less well known is that the Editor-in-Chief was the sole owner of this journal (and now owns it jointly with his daughter). Although the academic publisher, Taylor & Francis, publishes TWQ, the editor derives a healthy profit from it.

…

This unique financial arrangement influenced the decision to publish. Prior to publication, no board member had ever seen the Gilley article, and when the article appeared, we as board members began contacting the editor, wondering whether the publication was a hoax, a mistake, or an exercise in irony. In the ensuing board debate over how to respond to the controversy, we discovered that the article had initially been rejected by two guest editors of a then-forthcoming special issue on imperialism, with the editor deciding nonetheless to send it out for peer review as a standalone paper instead. When one of the peer reviewers rejected the paper, while the other called for “major revisions,” the editor nevertheless decided unilaterally to publish the paper. In short, the article did not pass the peer-review process, but was published anyway for its ability to spark political debate, rather than for its scholarly merit. As a result, criticisms which ought to have been addressed during peer-review, including flaws in its cost-benefit analysis and a lack of citations to existing literature were instead raised only in the public controversy following its publication.

It was only during this controversy that we and other board members became aware of the unique financial status of the journal as a single-owner, for-profit enterprise. This revelation threw into relief past unsuccessful efforts to encourage the editor to make the journal more accountable and transparent by involving the board in editorial and policy decisions. Moreover, throughout the controversy over the article, the editor remained unresponsive to our queries as board members and to the wider public outcry for a response. Even after the article was retracted, citing reported threats of violence to the editor and author (which – like threats to the leaders of online petitions against the article – we unequivocally condemn), the editor did not share information on the threats and any associated police investigation with the board.

All of this suggests that, as the sole owner of a profit-seeking journal, the editor (as much as the corporate publisher) had every incentive to publish a controversial article, even one that flouts scholarly standards or the journal’s own mandate. Indeed, during the backstage negotiations, the editor admitted that his intention in publishing the piece was to provoke debate. Clickbait and controversy, after all, translate into readership.

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Two years on, despite assurances from the publisher to appoint new leadership, the editor continues to own and operate the journal as before, even as this financial arrangement is concealed from readers, authors and peer reviewers.”

Gilley’s forthcoming address to the far-right AfD party underscores the significance of such clickbait. The 2017 article received over 16,000 views in the few months it was available online, making it the 4th most popular since the journal began recording such metrics. Even after it was retracted, the controversy it generated increased Gilley’s notoriety, making him an attractive speaker for groups like AfD. Indeed, the party’s announcement of his lecture specifically references the 2017 article as an inspiration for his talk. Journal editors must therefore consider not only how commercially driven altimetric scores, key to publishers’ profitability, can skew or displace the requirements of peer review, but also how courting controversy can be a deliberate tool of far-right mobilization.

This danger is often concealed by claims of defending “free speech” and “academic freedom.” Indeed, as we noted in our earlier account, a publisher’s mailing list was used to distribute an email titled “Third World Quarterly Solidarity Letter” which opened with the author stating that he was “writing to you as members of the editorial teams of the leading journals in Politics, Political Theory and International Relations to ask you sign a letter of solidarity with the journal Third World Quarterly and its editor-in-chief.” Some academics signed this letter in support of TWQ “in defense of the vital principles of freedom of speech and academic freedom.” In a wider environment of debates over social justice and “free speech,” and with the reality of the subverted peer review concealed from public view, editor and publisher were able to present their position as one of defending academic freedom and their critics as policing speech, when in fact the opposite was true.

As a result, a journal with a storied history of academic rigor and anti-colonial politics has enabled an academic to position himself as a spokesperson for far-right politics on an international stage. Such inversions of academic process and norms not only pose a threat to academic legitimacy, but have real-world political consequences, which editors and publishers have yet to apprehend.