Key International Concepts

Haider Ali
AD – Education Department
Politics
 What politics advocate?
 The term `politics‟, is derived from the Greek word `Polis‟, which
means the city state. According to Greek Philosophers, Politics was a
subject which dealt with all the activities and affairs of the city state
 Therefore, Politics is the system through which people make,
preserve and amend the general rules under which they live.
 We disagree about how we should live. Who should get what? How
should power and other resources be distributed? Should society be
based on cooperation or conflict? We also disagree about how such
matters should be resolved. How should collective decisions be made?
Who should have a say? How much influence should each person
have?
Poverty
 Poverty is the state of not having enough material possessions or income to meet a
person's basic needs.
 But what counts as a basic need?
 Provision of food, shelter, medical, educational facilities and respected standard of living
are the basic needs
 Why Poverty Exists?
 Vital Resources are not in abundance, they are always limited.
 Uneven distribution of resources.
 Relative and absolute poverty : Both these concepts can mean very different…….
 Poverty

 The crucial point about poverty in the developed world is that it is avoidable.
 But how society looks at poverty determines what political action must be done
 Socialist and liberal views on Poverty
 From a socialist perspective, poverty is not tolerable and cannot be justified. poverty is a
structural feature of capitalism and a natural consequence of its operation.
 The classical liberal view also sees poverty as structural, but it shares little else with the
socialist analysis. For them distribution of resources are determined by market forces.
Individuals compete, there are always winners and losers he resulting pattern of wealth is a
reflection of the talent and skill of individuals
Gulf Between Rich and Poor:
 THE WORLD’S RICHEST 1% HAVE MORE THAN TWICE AS MUCH WEALTH AS 6.9 BILLION PEOPLE
 It is estimated that over 80 percent of the world’s population live on less than 10 dollars a day
 The poorest 40 percent account for about 5 percent of global income, while the richest 20 percent account
for 75 percent of the global income
 More than 780 million people live in extreme poverty on less than $1.90 per person per day
 Of approximately two billion children who live in the developing world:
 One-third do not have adequate shelter
 One fifth do not have access to safe water
 One-seventh have no access to health services
 Each year over 10 million children under the age of five die of malnutrition and preventable diseases
 In Pakistan, 39.7% people live below the poverty line
 This situation of vast wealth on one side and abject poverty on the other is both morally abhorrent and politically
unstable
 The SDGs: “colorful posters and bland reports.”

 Millennium Development Goals

Goal 1 Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
 Sustainable Development Goals
Goal 1 End poverty in all its forms everywhere
Goal 2 End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable
agriculture
 IMF and Multilateral Institutions
 Are they doing enough? Double standards, mixed motives
Crime
 Crime is the violation of laws, represents disruption of social order and is a clear challenge to
the state’s authority
 Central purpose of the state is to establish institutions that maintain social order
 A criminal act is one whose commission is offensive or harmful to society and punishable under the
law

 The apparatus for dealing with criminal activity:

Institution of Police and Judicial System to prosecute and Punish the wrong doers
 “If he who breaks the law is not punished, he who obeys it is cheated”
 Political success is gauged by measurable reduction in crime rate, yet extensions of police powers
have to take account of popular concerns that civil liberties are being eroded
 Crime as an activity
 Public perception of crime is largely determined by television and other media, which tend to focus
on sensational and extraordinary stories.
 Generally, only incidents that come to the notice of the police are investigated and recorded, so
many (potential) crimes are not picked up in statistical reviews
 On the other hand, A different view of Crime:
 Factors that influence criminal activity are: Socio-economic conditions, rate of unemployment,
poverty, societal coherence, value systems, cultural view of crime
 “Poverty is the mother of crime”.
 Are all crimes retain same severity? A critical outlook:
 Oscar Wilde, wrote in 1891 Society is “infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of
punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.”
Should punishment should fit the crime?

 Retribution: ‘An eye for an eye’

Gives the victims of crime, or society as a whole, a sense of satisfaction knowing a criminal received the
punishment. A feeling of avengement.
 Deterrence : “Reduce the likelihood of crime by learning the punishment another person”
 Rehabilitation: ’Prevent future crime by altering a criminal’s behavior’
Educational and vocational programs, treatment center placement, and mental health counseling
 Incapacitation: “removing a person from society”
 Restoration: Offender to make direct amends to the victim of their crime, as well as the
community where the crime occurred
In conclusion

 Punishment expresses society’s disgust or outrage at a particular act,

but when retribution is stripped down to little more than an urge for
vengeance, it scarcely appears adequate as a justification for
punishment
 The purpose of punishment should be to deter the crime and
criminal activity, to rehabilitate the criminal back in society. All
criminal activities are not directly the result of deviant behavior.
Some of them are directly influenced due to socio-economic
systems in which individuals are brought up.
Security
 Security in the most general sense as ‘freedom from threats, fear and dangers‘ or the
absence of threats
 As security depends on being and feeling protected from harm, creating a secure environment has
always been recognized as one of the primary purposes of the well-ordered state
 In modern sense, anything that endangers our mental and physical well-being, including threats to
our health, way of life, material prosperity comes under the sphere of security. Thus War,
poverty and disease are among the many threats, natural and humanly created, that may endanger
our security
Types of Security:
 National security and deterrence: (Traditional view of security)
Protect the nation-state and its territorial integrity from threats which are beyond its borders
Assume international system as anarchic
 Security
International system are composed of independent states that are autonomous, pursue their own self-
interest, sovereign and so do not recognize any higher authority
Outcome resulted from such unrestrained interaction between states is conflict, the task of the
security analyst is to look at means and mechanisms by which the risk of war can be minimized
Fear and insecurity may be more likely than aggression to cause conflict, even where there are no
aggressive intentions on either side
 In 20th century, Important model of deterrence was collective Security which is based on Cooperation
among states
 The diversification of threat: scope of security studies has broadened rapidly after cold war era
 Globalization has turned the world into a small village through its revolutionary communication and
connectedness, which made national borders both porous and fuzzy, so the line between internal
and external threats became ever more blurred.
Dimensions of security changed in this multi-polar world order

 International Terrorism and financing threats

 Regional Conflicts and rise of Civil war threats: Refugee influx
 Economic threats due to money laundering, lack of transparency and financial irregularities and
corruption
 Cyber-warfare threats
 Human Trafficking
 Environmental Threats
 Propagation of extremist ideas are threat to national security
 Pandemics, Pollution and Food security
 Economic inequality between Global South and Global North
 Extreme Poverty and the depletion of scarce resources
These all are now considered in the dimension of Security. Now states indulge at multiple fronts to keep its
citizens safe from diversified threats
Political Violence
 Political violence is the use of force by a group with a political purpose or motivation.
 Politics presupposes violence. Violence, or the threat of it, is one of
the principal concerns that motivates people to form societies in
which government is entrusted to a central authority—the state
 Actors engage in Political violence could be governments, rebels, militias, ethnic groups, active
political organizations, and civilians
 If states are involved then political violence includes the denial of full citizenship; lack of political
representation; wrongful imprisonment, detention, and enslavement; forced eviction from homes and
homelands; and statelessness
 The principal difference that distinguishes political violence from other forms of violence is that,
from the perspective of the perpetrator, the former is always legitimate.
 There is truth in the cliché that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
Political Violence
 A justly constituted society should provide legal channels through which its members can voice
their dissent
 And if opportunities aren’t provided different outcomes could result in:
1. Nonviolent protest, in particular “civil disobedience,” Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King
2. Recourse to violent means by perpetrators If there demands and goals aren’t entertained
Types of Political violence
 Civil War: conflict over political control of a state or territory within state
 Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing: Social discord may escalate into massacres and state-sponsored
murder to create racial homogeneity”
 Terrorism: Politically motivated and usually carried out by sub-state actors or groups united by
some common concern or ideology
 Guerrilla warfare: Irregular warfare in which small groups of combatants use military to fight a
larger and less-mobile traditional military.
 Political Violence
 Insurgency: Armed rebellion against authority when those taking part in the rebellion are not
recognized as opponents and rather their aspirations are curbed
 Revolution: the overthrow or renunciation of one government or ruler and the substitution by
another form of government or ruler
 Rioting: Civil disorder commonly characterized by a group in a violent public disturbance
against authority, property, or people
Welfare: From Cradle to Grave
 Only the truly blessed get through life without ever needing
the support of others. Unemployment; family breakdown,
violence and abuse; illness and disability of body or mind;
delinquency and drug addiction; old age: almost everyone, at
some time or another, is unable to cope on their own with the
problems that life throws at them. What, then, could be more
benign than the picture of the state as safety net, to catch us
when we fall into difficulty or hardship?
 Welfare

 Welfare State means providing Social and Economic security by the state to its citizens state which
are based upon the principles of equal opportunity, equitable distribution of wealth, and public
responsibility for citizens unable to avail themselves of the minimal provisions for a good
 For becoming a welfare state, we need investment in a huge infrastructure development, and vast
array of benefits such unemployment and sickness pay, pensions, free healthcare and subsidized
housing
 Consent to taxation and redistribution of wealth on large scale which will ensure the allocation of
resources
 Supporting arguments for the establishment of welfare State:
 as an essential corrective to the unjust and socially divisive effects of market forces
 Safeguard against the injustice and exploitation from unrestrained capitalism.
Welfare

 Arguments against the establishment of welfare State:

 Interferes with the operation of the market, introducing inefficiencies,
 Stifling initiatives
 Removing incentives to work
 A dependency culture
 Rise of Welfare States in the historical Perspective

 During the industrial revolution in the 19th century, appalling conditions of overcrowding, filth and
epidemic disease made Victorian enlightened thinkers to lay the foundations for philanthropic and
welfare services
 Post-world war two, there was sharp increase in the welfare states when social democratic parties came
in power
 England and Sweden became the first modern social welfare countries
 In the 70’s and 80’s there was a re-shift towards minimal state due to increased oil prices, fiscal deficits,
recession and a perceived culture of dependency
 Types of Welfare State
Liberal welfare states:
 Respond to market and labor force imperatives. Many benefits, such as health
insurance and pensions, are linked with employment. Means testing is used to
determine eligibility for state services, and relatively modest cash and voucher
benefits are provided for those deemed eligible
Conservative/corporatist welfare states:
 Rely on state provision of services, rather than on market or private provision.
These states often manifest normative ideals of a nuclear family characterized by
a male breadwinner and a woman who tends to the family.
Social democratic welfare states:
 Promote a vision of the state as the guarantor of social rights. These states
promote equality of benefits at high levels as a way of minimizing the effects of
social class and income. Welfare benefits are used to equalize the ability of all
citizens, regardless of income, to participate in the political community.
A look back at how social welfare programs reduce
poverty
Racism
 The belief that different races possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities,
especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another.
 Origin of Racial Discrimination:
 Growth of European colonialism in the 17th century, and in particular to the emergence of
slavery and the slave trade (what had been driven by economic necessity nurtured a habit
of mind)
 at first largely intuitive and barely conceptualized (Non-Europeans are unequal in terms of
qualities such as mental capacity and moral worth)
 waves of discriminatory legislation
 Identifying the supposed racial divisions of the human species and justified differential
social and political treatment on these basis
Corruption
 ‘Abuse of entrusted power for private gain’
 For almost as long as humans have organized themselves socially into political hierarchies, there
have been questions over the proper use of power and the role of virtue in public ife; the temptation
to abuse one’s status and position of power to enrich oneself has always existed, so the conditions for
corruption to thrive have always been Present
 While no country is immune, its impact is most acutely felt in developing countries, where political
institutions are typically more vulnerable and official procedures and safeguards less robust.
 Corruption is opportunistic springing up wherever conditions allow regardless of countries status
 Types of Corruption:
 Political Corruption
 Economic Corruption
 Social Corruption
 Corruption

 Cost of Corruption:
 political apathy and distrust of government
 lose faith in the political institutions
 Economic loss and inefficiency
 Poverty and inequality
 Personal loss, intimidation and inconvenience
 Public and private sector dys-functionality
 Failures in infrastructure
 Rigged economic and political systems
 Impunity and partial justice