• The genocide case Israel faces is more about politics than the law
    https://www.economist.com/international/2024/01/17/the-genocide-case-israel-faces-is-more-about-politics-than-the-law


    getty images

    Since its creation in 1946 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has heard an average of fewer than three cases a year. Many are obscure, such as a dispute over pulp mills in Uruguay. The trial that began on January 11th, though, was one of the highest drama, when it heard arguments from South Africa that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
    Palestinians were elated by the sight of Israel in the dock after decades of impunity for its conduct in the occupied territories. Crowds gathered to watch it broadcast in squares in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the West Bank.

    A full trial would take years to conclude. In the meantime South Africa has asked the court for “provisional measures”, one of which is that it orders Israel to stop fighting in Gaza. The burden of proof for an injunction is low: “South Africa just needs to show that its claims are plausible,” says Adil Haque of Rutgers Law School. Judges must now decide whether to demand that Israel end its longest and deadliest war against the Palestinians since 1948.
    As a political gambit, South Africa’s case is already a success. Yet as a legal strategy it is risky. Some of Israel’s actions in Gaza since October 7th could plausibly be described as war crimes. But in seeking to label them genocide, a uniquely horrific crime, it risks making the debate about the label rather than the actions themselves.
    In politics, genocide has become a byword for the worst human suffering imaginable. But legally it is a tightly defined concept, and hard to prove. This is because it entails not just particular acts, such as killing civilians or causing them “serious bodily or mental harm”, it also requires that they be done with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”.
    To prove intent, South Africa cited Israeli ministers, lawmakers, army officers and soldiers: the Knesset member who spoke of “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth”; the troops who later chanted “may Gaza be erased”. It sought to show that these statements were followed by rank-and-file soldiers. Israel argued that these were “random quotes that are not in conformity with government policy”.
    Parts of South Africa’s presentation were sloppy: its lawyers referred to a speech in which Mr Netanyahu invoked the biblical story of Amalek, a nation that persecuted the Israelites, yet in seeking to explain how the allusion was genocidal they cited the wrong biblical passage. Their filing then quoted Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defence minister, saying on October 10th that “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” That sounds genocidal. But in Mr Gallant’s actual comments there is an additional sentence in the middle: “Hamas will no longer be.” The correct quote, and the rest of the clip, make clear that he is referring to Hamas, not to Palestinians.

    Still, it is impossible to deny that some prominent Israelis have said things that could incite genocide, which is also an offence under the UN convention, to which Israel is a signatory. Though they have suffered no legal or political consequences for doing so, it would be hard to prove that their incitement amounts to state intent.
    A second issue is proving Israel has killed Palestinians because of their nationality. South Africa’s lawyers claim that Israel’s use of 2,000lb (907kg) bombs, the largest in its arsenal, in densely populated places like Jabalia, in northern Gaza, is evidence of genocide. Using such large bombs could be a war crime, unless Israel can show it had no other way to strike a vital military target. But it is not a genocidal act unless South Africa can prove that Israel dropped those bombs specifically to kill lots of Palestinians. Thus far, it has failed to do so. The same goes for the restrictions Israel has imposed on aid to Gaza. “Israel could argue that it used starvation as a weapon of war to make people suffer,” says Mr Haque. “That would be a war crime, but it’s not genocide.”
    To call these arguments distasteful would be an understatement. The South African filing describes a litany of horrors committed against Palestinians in Gaza. Whichever way the ICJ rules, they will still be horrors. By pressing the charge of genocide, South Africa has created a situation in which a ruling in Israel’s favour could be seen as absolution for its conduct.
    Yet even if it is absolved of genocide, Israel should still be scrutinised for other possible violations. Start with two of the core principles of international law: distinction and proportionality. The former requires armies to distinguish between civilian and military targets. The latter demands they not inflict excessive harm on civilians in relation to military utility. With northern Gaza now a wasteland, and thousands of civilians dead, it is hard to trust that Israel has adhered to those principles. Israeli officials concede that in this war the army has approved strikes that are both deadlier for civilians and achieve smaller military gains than in previous conflicts in Gaza. Some Western officials think Israel has crossed a legal line with its new calculus of proportionality.
    Other questions of law deserve scrutiny as well. One is the destruction of Gaza’s medical facilities. There is strong evidence that Hamas has used hospitals for military purposes, which is itself a war crime. Under international law, hospitals can lose their protection if used for “acts harmful to the enemy”. But they do not become valid targets indefinitely. That Hamas militants might have used Shifa hospital in October does not necessarily justify an Israeli raid there in November. In many cases Israel has not offered compelling proof that its attacks on hospitals were justified.
    Another question is over the appalling humanitarian conditions in Gaza, where the UN says there is a risk of imminent famine. Israel told the ICJ that it has not limited deliveries of food to Gaza, which is true in theory but not in practice. It has largely barred such deliveries via its own territory, which is how most supplies entered Gaza before the war, and it imposes long and unpredictable inspections on aid entering from Egypt.

    Investigating such cases, however, will not be the job of the ICJ. That task would fall to the International Criminal Court (ICC), the other big court in The Hague, which claims jurisdiction over both the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7th and the war in Gaza that followed because Palestine is a signatory to its founding treaty. But such investigations will be sluggish.
    For now, that leaves the genocide case at the ICJ and the question of whether to impose any of the provisional measures requested by South Africa. Because the ICJ settles disputes between un member-states, and Hamas is not one, judges are in the uncomfortable position of being asked to order Israel to implement a unilateral ceasefire with no corresponding obligation on Hamas to halt its genocidal attacks.
    Even if it were to issue such an order, it would have no means to enforce its judgments, which governments sometimes ignore. Israel has made clear that it will do just that. “We will continue this war until the end,” Mr Netanyahu has said. “No one will stop us, not even The Hague.”
    Still, a ruling against Israel could have far-reaching consequences. It would certainly make the politics of supporting Israel’s war more complicated for its allies. There could also be legal implications. In America the so-called “Leahy law” bars the government from providing military aid to foreign forces that commit human-rights abuses. If the ICJ were to find that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide, some Democrats would no doubt try to invoke this law. It is unlikely that such a view would find majority support in a country that is both supportive of Israel and hostile to international courts. But President Joe Biden’s administration could still find itself in the uncomfortable position of appearing to much of the world to be excusing a crime it has long sought to end.

  • The pandemic’s shadow harvest - Will the economic and psychological costs of covid-19 increase suicides? | International | The Economist
    https://www.economist.com/international/2020/10/05/will-the-economic-and-psychological-costs-of-covid-19-increase-suicides

    It is too early to say, but the signs are ominous

    WHEN AMERICA’S Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) carried out a survey this summer, it found that one in ten of the 5,400 respondents had seriously considered suicide in the previous month—about twice as many who had thought of taking their lives in 2018. For young adults, aged 18 to 24, the proportion was an astonishing one in four.

    The survey, published in August, was one of a growing number of warnings about the toll that the pandemic is taking on the mental health of people. For legions, the coronavirus has upended or outright eliminated work, schooling and religious services. On top of that, lockdowns and other types of social distancing have aggravated loneliness and depression for many.

    But are people acting on suicidal thoughts? It is too early to be sure. Almost all countries publish suicide statistics with a lag of a year or two; and in recent years, suicide has been declining in most, with America a notable exception. Information from police, hospitals, coroners, courts and others must be collected and carefully studied, in part because some families report events selectively, or untruthfully, in the hope that a loved one’s probable suicide will be ruled a natural or accidental death. A comprehensive picture of suicide in the time of covid-19 has therefore yet to emerge. But experts have reasons to fear the worst.

  • The global arms trade is booming. Buyers are spoiled for choice - Buyers’ market
    https://www.economist.com/international/2018/08/18/the-global-arms-trade-is-booming-buyers-are-spoiled-for-choice

    The numbers show that the global commerce in conventional weapons is still dominated by the United States. But America feels strangely nervous about maintaining that role, and this year it has adopted a more aggressive sales posture. Under a policy proclaimed in April and mapped out in more detail last month, American diplomats have been told to promote weapons sales more actively and speed up procedures for approving them.

    #commerce #armes faux #diplomates vrais #marchands_de_la_mort #etats_unis

  • Can research quality be measured quantitatively?

    In this article I reflect on ways in which the neoliberal university and its administrative counterpart, #new_public_management (NPM), affect academic publishing activity. One characteristic feature of NPM is the urge to use simple numerical indicators of research output as a tool to allocate funding and, in practice if not in theory, as a means of assessing research quality. This ranges from the use of journal impact factors (IF) and ranking of journals to publication points to determine what types of work in publishing is counted as meritorious for funding allocation. I argue that it is a fallacy to attempt to assess quality of scholarship through quantitative measures of publication output. I base my arguments on my experiences of editing a Norwegian geographical journal over a period of 16 years, along with my experiences as a scholar working for many years within the Norwegian university system.

    https://fennia.journal.fi/forthcoming/article/66602/27160
    https://fennia.journal.fi/forthcoming/view/index
    #qualité #recherche #quantitativisme #université #édition_scientifique #publications_scientifiques #indicateurs #indicateurs_numériques #impact_factor #impact-factor #ranking

    • How global university rankings are changing higher education

      EARLIER this month Peking University played host to perhaps the grandest global gathering ever of the higher-education business. Senior figures from the world’s most famous universities—Harvard and Yale, Oxford and Cambridge among them—enjoyed or endured a two-hour opening ceremony followed by a packed programme of mandatory cultural events interspersed with speeches lauding “Xi Jinping thought”. The party was thrown to celebrate Peking University’s 120th birthday—and, less explicitly, China’s success in a race that started 20 years ago.

      In May 1998 Jiang Zemin, China’s president at the time, announced Project 985, named for the year and the month. Its purpose was to create world-class universities. Nian Cai Liu, a professor of polymeric materials science and engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, got swept up in this initiative. “I asked myself many questions, including: what is the definition of and criteria for a world-class university? What are the positions of top Chinese universities?” Once he started benchmarking them against foreign ones, he found that “governments, universities and stakeholders from all around the world” were interested. So, in 2003, he produced the first ranking of 500 leading global institutions. Nobody, least of all the modest Professor Liu, expected the Shanghai rankings to be so popular. “Indeed, it was a real surprise.”

      People are suckers for league tables, be they of wealth, beauty, fame—or institutions of higher education. University rankings do not just feed humanity’s competitive urges. They are also an important source of consumer intelligence about a good on which people spend huge amounts of time and money, and about which precious little other information is available. Hence the existence of national league tables, such as US News & World Report’s ranking of American universities. But the creation of global league tables—there are now around 20, with Shanghai, the Times Higher Education (THE) and QS the most important—took the competition to a new level. It set not just universities, but governments, against each other.

      When the Shanghai rankings were first published, the “knowledge economy” was emerging into the global consciousness. Governments realised that great universities were no longer just sources of cultural pride and finishing schools for the children of the well-off, but the engines of future prosperity—generators of human capital, of ideas and of innovative companies.

      The rankings focused the minds of governments, particularly in countries that did badly. Every government needed a few higher-educational stars; any government that failed to create them had failed its people and lost an important global race. Europe’s poor performance was particularly galling for Germany, home of the modern research university. The government responded swiftly, announcing in 2005 an Exzellenzinitiative to channel money to institutions that might become world-class universities, and has so far spent over €4.6bn ($5.5bn) on it.

      Propelled by a combination of national pride and economic pragmatism, the idea spread swiftly that this was a global competition in which all self-respecting countries should take part. Thirty-one rich and middle-income countries have announced an excellence initiative of some sort. India, where world rankings were once regarded with post-colonial disdain, is the latest to join the race: in 2016 the finance minister announced that 20 institutions would aim to become world-class universities. The most generously funded initiatives are in France, China, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. The most unrealistic targets are Nigeria’s, to get at least two universities in the world’s top 200, and Russia’s, to get five in the world’s top 100, both by 2020.

      The competition to rise up the rankings has had several effects. Below the very highest rankings, still dominated by America and western Europe—America has three of the THE’s top five slots and Britain two this year—the balance of power is shifting (see chart). The rise of China is the most obvious manifestation. It has 45 universities in the Shanghai top 500 and is now the only country other than Britain or America to have two universities in the THE’s top 30. Japan is doing poorly: its highest-ranked institution, the University of Tokyo, comes in at 48 in the THE’s table. Elsewhere, Latin America and eastern Europe have lagged behind.

      The rankings race has also increased the emphasis on research. Highly cited papers provide an easily available measure of success, and, lacking any other reliable metric, that is what the league tables are based on. None of the rankings includes teaching quality, which is hard to measure and compare. Shanghai’s is purely about research; THE and QS incorporate other measures, such as “reputation”. But since the league tables themselves are one of its main determinants, reputation is not an obviously independent variable.

      Hard times

      The research boom is excellent news for humanity, which will eventually reap the benefits, and for scientific researchers. But the social sciences and humanities are not faring so well. They tend to be at a disadvantage in rankings because there are fewer soft-science or humanities journals, so hard-science papers get more citations. Shanghai makes no allowance for that, and Professor Liu admits that his ranking tends to reinforce the dominance of hard science. Phil Baty, who edits the THE’s rankings, says they do take the hard sciences’ higher citation rates into account, scoring papers by the standards of the relevant discipline.

      The hard sciences have benefited from the bounty flowing from the “excellence initiatives”. According to a study of these programmes by Jamil Salmi, author of “The Challenge of Establishing World-Class Universities”, all the programmes except Taiwan’s focused on research rather than teaching, and most of them favoured STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). This is no doubt one of the reasons why the numbers of scientific papers produced globally nearly doubled between 2003 and 2016.

      The rankings may be contributing to a deterioration in teaching. The quality of the research academics produce has little bearing on the quality of their teaching. Indeed, academics who are passionate about their research may be less inclined to spend their energies on students, and so there may be an inverse relationship. Since students suffer when teaching quality declines, they might be expected to push back against this. But Ellen Hazelkorn, author of “Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education”, argues that students “are buying prestige in the labour market”. This means “they want to go to the highest-status university possible”—and the league tables are the only available measure of status. So students, too, in effect encourage universities to spend their money on research rather than teaching.

      The result, says Simon Marginson, Oxford University’s incoming professor of higher education, is “the distribution of teaching further down the academic hierarchy”, which fosters the growth of an “academic precariat”. These PhD students and non-tenured academics do the teaching that the star professors, hired for their research abilities, shun as a chore. The British government is trying to press universities to improve teaching, by creating a “teaching-excellence framework”; but the rating is made up of a student-satisfaction survey, dropout rates and alumni earnings—interesting, but not really a measure of teaching quality. Nevertheless, says Professor Marginson, “everybody recognises this as a problem, and everybody is watching what Britain is doing.”

      A third concern is that competition for rankings encourages stratification within university systems, which in turn exacerbates social inequality. “Excellence initiatives” funnel money to top universities, whose students, even if admission is highly competitive, tend to be the children of the well-off. “Those at the top get more government resources and those at the bottom get least,” points out Ms Hazelkorn. That’s true even in Britain, which, despite not having an excellence initiative, favours top universities through the allocation of research money. According to a study of over 120 universities by Alison Wolf of King’s College London and Andrew Jenkins of University College London, the Russell Group, a self-selected elite of 24 universities, get nearly half of the funding for the entire sector, and increased their share from 44.7% in 2001-02 to 49.1% in 2013-14.

      The rankings race draws other complaints. Some universities have hired “rankings managers”, which critics argue is not a good use of resources. Saudi Arabian universities have been accused of giving highly cited academics lucrative part-time contracts and requiring them to use their Saudi affiliation when publishing.

      Intellectual citizens of nowhere

      Notwithstanding its downsides, the rankings race has encouraged a benign trend with far-reaching implications: internationalisation. The top level of academia, particularly in the sciences, is perhaps the world’s most international community, as Professor Marginson’s work shows. Whereas around 4% of first-degree students in the OECD study abroad, a quarter of PhD students do. Research is getting more global: 22% of science and engineering papers were internationally co-authored in 2016, up from 16% in 2003. The rankings, which give marks for international co-authorship, encourage this trend. That is one reason why Japan, whose universities are as insular as its culture, lags. As research grows—in 2000-14 the annual number of PhDs awarded rose by half in America, doubled in Britain and quintupled in China—so does the size and importance of this multinational network.

      Researchers work together across borders on borderless problems—from climate change to artificial intelligence. They gather at conferences, spend time in each other’s universities and spread knowledge and scholarship across the world. Forced to publish in English, they share at least one language. They befriend each other, marry each other and support each other, politically as well as intellectually. Last year, for instance, when Cambridge University Press blocked online access to hundreds of articles on sensitive subjects, including the Tiananmen Square massacre, at the request of the Chinese government, it faced international protests, and an American academic launched a petition which was signed by over 1,500 academics around the world. CUP backed down.

      The rankings race is thus marked by a happy irony. Driven in part by nationalistic urges, it has fostered the growth of a community that knows no borders. Critics are right that governments and universities obsess too much about rankings. Yet the world benefits from the growth of this productive, international body of scholars.


      https://www.economist.com/international/2018/05/19/how-global-university-rankings-are-changing-higher-education?frsc=dg%7Ce

      #Chine #classement_de_Shanghai #compétition #classement #ranking #QS #Times_Higher_Education #THE #excellence #Exzellenzinitiative #Allemagne #Inde #France #Singapour #Taïwan #Corée_du_Sud #Nigeria #Russie #USA #Etats-Unis #Angleterre #UK #recherche #publications #publications_scientifiques #enseignement #réputation #sciences_sociales #sciences_dures #précarité #précarisation #travail #inégalités #anglais #langue #internationalisation #globalisation #mondialisation

      La fin est très en phase avec le journal qui a publié cet article, hélas :

      Critics are right that governments and universities obsess too much about rankings. Yet the world benefits from the growth of this productive, international body of scholars.

      La première version de cet article a été apparemment corrigée :

      Correction (May 22nd, 2018): An earlier version of this piece suggested that non-English data and books are not included in the rankings. This is incorrect. The article has been amended to remove that assertion.

      –-> mais en fait, en réalité, il n’aurait pas dû l’être. Pour avoir expérimenté moi-même une fois le #H-index sur ma liste de publications, je peux vous dire qu’aucun article en d’autres langues que l’anglais avait été retenu dans l’index. Et même pas tous les articles en anglais que j’ai publiés...

  • Nous poursuivons - dans visionscarto.net - la publication des archives.

    Pour cette fournée, nous proposons quelques cartes et graphiques, simples et conventionnels mais assez parlant, sur la question de l’#éducation, l’#enseignement supérieur, de la production du savoir, de la #mobilité des étudiants, du financement de la #recherche. Certains docs sont ancien (plus de dix ans) d’autres plus récents, mais ça donne quand même une idée des tendances, et c’est une base de travail et de départ pour produire — un peu plus tard — la mise à jours et les compléments.

    Avec une petite synthèse d’un projet de recherche sur la production du savoir mené il y a dix ans par Rigas Arvanitis, Denis Eckert et Laurent Jégou.

    Je vous laisse découvrir les distributions spatiales...

    Les 500 universités les plus importantes au monde
    https://visionscarto.net/les-500-universites-les-plus-importantes

    Nombre d’articles scientifiques publiés dans le monde, 1988-2008
    https://visionscarto.net/articles-scientifiques-dans-le-monde

    Nombre d’articles scientifiques publiés en chine, 1988-2008
    https://visionscarto.net/articles-scientifiques-en-chine

    Proportion des femmes dans la recherche, 2007-2009
    https://visionscarto.net/proportion-des-femmes-parmi-dans-la-recherche

    Pays d’origine des étudiant·es en mobilité vers la France et répartition entre étudiantes et étudiants
    https://visionscarto.net/pays-d-origine-des-etudiants-en-mobilite

    Part du financement privé et public dans l’enseignement supérieur en 2008
    https://visionscarto.net/repartition-financements-enseignement-superieur

    Étudiant·es en mobilité entrante et sortante dans le monde, 2014
    https://visionscarto.net/etudiants-en-mobilite-entrante-et-sortante

    Pays d’origine des étudiant·es choisissant la France
    https://visionscarto.net/etudiants-choisissant-la-france

    On a beaucoup, beaucoup de documents qui dorment tranquillement à l’ombre de nos disques durs, aussi de nos étagères pour ce qui n’est pas numérisé. Archives géographiques, historiques, brouillons, méthodo, etc... Il y a de quoi faire, et on aimerait pourvoir tout rendre public tout de suite, hélas chacun de nous n’a que deux mains et dix doigts, et peu de temps avant, entre et après le « vrai » travail. Et il faut encore trier, préparer, archiver. Mais petit à petit, ça vient.

    Université #connaissance #recherche