Non-State Actors

By Péter MARTON In the last two weeks there has been much commentary about the revocation or cancelling of Bill Browder's "visa" (rather his Electronic System of Travel Authorisation permit, or ESTA) by the United States, after Russia had issued an Interpol arrest warrant against him, a measure that could have significantly hindered the activities of a major critic of Russia's Vladimir Putin. Browder (pictured) now has his ESTA back, but it may be interesting to ask the question of exactly how and why it was taken from him even for the short time it was. Or seemed to have been... Browder, originally a US, later (since about 30 years now) a British citizen, set up Hermitage Capital Management, an investment fund, back in the 1990s, and acquired shares in many Russian companies, planting seed capital as well as gaining a foothold in strategically important firms. Shares in Gazprom were eventually in Hermitage's portfolio too. So Browder was in on a lot o...

By Péter MARTON All that concern about Facebook's impact on democracy in the wake of the 2016 US presidential elections (mainly, along with some other developments elsewhere) has now apparently caused the company to react . So speculate some. This is a picture of me hearing about this. Trying to figure out an alternative to setting up sophisticated filters, to try to weed out fake news and other kinds of crap from the Newsfeed, it seems they came up with the idea to turn the Newsfeed into... just Feed. Because that filtering shit is hard. To remain: friend feed + junk feed. "The experiment, which began 19 October and is still ongoing, involves limiting the core element of Facebook’s social network to only personal posts and paid adverts. So-called public posts, such as those from media organisation Facebook pages, are being moved to a separate “explore” feed timeline." The declared aim of this is to see if people want personal posts and posts from pag...

By Péter MARTON Have you heard of the Life Esidimeni healthcare scandal before? In a nutshell: There is pressure now on the managers of several South African NGOs to account for the deaths of psychiatric patients in their care after as many as 75 patients died in the facilities of five of these organisations between March 23 and December 19, 2016, in Gauteng Province (population: 12.2 million). A total of 141 deaths (including at hospitals) are being investigated. So who is responsible for these deaths? South African Health Ombudsman Dr. Malegapuru Makgoba named five NGOs "the most dangerous" related to the cases concerned. These are Precious Angels, CCRC/Siyadabinga/Anchor, Mosego/Takalani, Tshepong, and Hephzibah (see page 1 of this government report for the list and more). These and 22 other NGOs took over mental patients from Life Esidimeni, the healthcare contractor that provided services up to 2015 for the Department of Health in Gauteng province. The Depart...

By Péter MARTON It is more than two years since the Panama Papers , a massive dump of 11.5 million documents related to offshore financial transactions with the involvement of Panamanian corporate services provider Mossack Fonseca, have been leaked and published. A large number of public officials, politicians and their various associates and family members have been implicated in the affair. It may be interesting to draw a balance at this point. The number of senior officials who resigned so far in connection with the Panama Papers scandal: 2 They include Iceland's Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, after protests gave him an additional push, and a Minister of Industry in Spain, José Manuel Soria . (Please enlighten me if I am not aware of additional cases that may count here.) The number of journalists killed investigating the implications of the Panama Papers: 1 That is Daphne Caruana Galizia, Maltese journalist, murdered by a car bomb this week . (P...

By Péter MARTON I am really no expert of the US militia movement but for an academic roundtable discussion I have to prepare a briefing about paramilitary-like groups in Hungary (as much as there are any that are active as well as, strictly speaking, paramilitary in nature, these days -- this is rather difficult to assess...). So I was interested to learn more of what similarities or differences one may observe between the two paramilitary scenes, and I was happy to come across a fresh video report from Vice News (related to this article ) about the III%er (Three Percenter*) movement. It offers some insight into the life of an associate group in Georgia, led by Chris Hill ("General Holy War"). I still have my homework to do -- only a couple of quick thoughts follow. The tendency of the far right to fracture is on display even in (and related to) this short video about a single group in Georgia. Their leader conceives of political identity in terms of a set of poli...

By Péter MARTON 1. " What Facebook did to American democracy " -- and not only to American democracy of course. A few days old but worth your time, at The Atlantic . 2. The BBC's summary (by Middle East correspondent Jim Muir) of the Islamic State's story so far, a timely a look back, but with a future to ponder. It may also be interesting to explore the connections between the two subjects as there may be many. If social media facilitates the coming to power of populists, if it rewards socially polarising media and communication strategies and policies, if it helps the spread of "fake news" as well as semi-informed and biased opinions, it can provide opportunities to various actors, and it can also contribute to creating and sustaining reservoirs of hatred that can feed violent movements. On the other hand, it is ironic that whereas back in the 1970s developing countries were demanding "information sovereignty" as part of a "New Wo...

By Péter MARTON Times journalist Dipesh Gadher recounts Twitter-based conversations with Sally Jones, a British convert (and mother of two) who joined ISIS and was killed in a drone strike in June in the environs of Raqqa, in Syria, as reported last week (see photo ). Sally Jones' influences included punk rock, modelling, and drugs, followed by the strong sentiment of being pissed off about politics in that predictably US-foreign-policy-centric, pseudo-intellectual sense of the term, subsequently encountering Islam, and beginning to radicalise, heeding the call of ISIS recruiters. I will react to one statement attributed by Gadher to Jones in the article referred above. “I can’t help but be militant when all they do is kill us for being Muslim :( . . . You know they killed 1,220,550 innocent Muslims in the illegal Iraq war . . . the US and UK government it’s that wot did it for me. It’s them that’s the terrorists, not us.” As noted by Gadher too, that figure...

By Péter MARTON Emily Tamkin offers a really good overview here (FP, 10/10/2017) of the recent hateful discourse about George Soros (the imaginary), as well as the record of George Soros (the real person) and his open society movement over the last decades, with special regard to Central/Eastern Europe. I will not reproduce that overview here to introduce in detail the hysteria surrounding Soros and how his distorted larger-than-life image is used by governments in several countries these days to blame everything from feminism and immigration to unfavourable demographics, economic problems and international sanctions on him. I assume this is common knowledge. I will highlight just one paragraph from Tamkin's article: "In the ’90s, the idea that Open Society and Soros held some political influence, albeit indirectly, was not strictly a figment of rulers’ imagination. Those given funding were local elites, sometimes opposed to those in power, and often what...

By Péter MARTON The Google Doodle provided me with some instant inspiration for my scholarly work this morning. It is the late war and foreign affairs correspondent Clare Hollingworth's 106th birthday today. Sadly, she is not around to celebrate it, having passed away at the remarkable age of 105 this January. Among the achievements of her long career most prominently mentioned by people remembering her is her supposed discovery of Nazi Germany's force build-up along the Polish frontier. Time for some myth-busting! Back in January, writing her obituary, newspapers were happy to cite an anecdotal version of the story, copying details of the legendary reconnaissance feat from each other.  Some of these details may come originally from a biography by Patrick Garrett ("Of Fortunes and War"), as referenced and quoted here : "Driving alongside a valley, where a hessian screen that blocked the view had been pitched alongside the road, suddenly there wa...

Hello, Welcome to Non-State Actors , a blog related to a course I'm teaching at a public university in Budapest, Hungary. Making a living killing time, feeding my interest in the subject. You will find here files on non-state actors' (media, corporations, non-governmental organisations, violent non-state actors etc.) involvement in political developments around the world. Posts are best referred to as "files," organised around noteworthy "cases" as I am not planning on closing them. They will be updated if I come across new information related to a case. In the comment section, feel free to point out such information if I fail to find it myself. The selection of cases is not intended to be comprehensive. In the comment section, feel free to point out other noteworthy cases pretty much anywhere (under any post) where it may seem logical to you, bearing in mind the general rules of avoiding trolling. Have a nice day, Péter Marton (blog author) P.S. ...