By Agustín Fuentes

Despite what Trump’s Executive Orders imply, and what many in the public are being led to believe, there are no easy or universal biological “rules” about sex in sports. But there are two things everyone should know. First, the contention that anyone assigned male at birth is always going to be better at sports than anyone assigned female at birth is simply not true. Second, for most people in most situations, a slight difference in athletic capacity rarely matters.

True, in elite sports issues of gender, sex, training, access, and equity, can be quite important. But most people who play sports are not elite athletes, and most sporting events—from pick-up games to school competitions to community leagues—are not at the level where a slight difference in one individual’s performance capacity is going to make or break the outcome or seriously impact the experiences of everyone playing. If government entities, and the public writ large, are genuinely interested in an accurate and comprehensive understanding of the relations between sex categories, biological variation, and sporting ability, then a basic understanding of the actual range of variation in sports related biology is and how it maps across everyone is the place to focus.

The current focus on “sex” in sports by the Trump administration is less about biology and more about ideology, and a politics of exclusion and control.

Everyone knows that humans come in a diversity of shapes and sizes. However, when discussing biological “differences,” most people frame the discussion in terms of “average” individuals as compared to others. But to approach human biology scientifically, and effectively, one must consider the entire range of variation, not just the average of any given category. For example, while, on average, males are eight percent taller than females, most individuals are not average. Males and females (and those who don’t fit neatly into these two categories) show a vast range of variation with substantial overlap. So, without knowing where any individual falls in that variation one cannot make a blanket statement about their abilities.

If you drew a random set of 50 individuals (25 males and 25 females) and lined them up by height the result would not be all males on one side and all females on the other. Rather, there’d (usually) be a majority of males in the taller half and a majority of females in the shorter half. But across the entire line up, the individuals would be mixed. To say that males are, on average, larger than females does not mean that every male is larger than every female. It simply projects that the averages in size between females and males, as categories, are separated by that percentage.

It’s not just height in this pattern of overlap either. In a recent NHANES USA dataset (publicly accessible on the CDC website, but was taken down for a while during February 2025), non-pregnant females over 20 weighed between 110 and 263 lbs. and males over 20 between 136 and 287 lbs. As such, much of the variation— that space between 136-263 pounds—is an overlapping mix of those classified as females and males. The actual distribution of variation and patterns in human biology is complicated and not cleanly divided into two kinds of person. Yes, there are usually some key bodily differences between a man and a woman of the same height and weight. But what those differences are, how they developed, and what they mean for the ability to play any given sport are neither ubiquitous nor consistent across people.

Consider biological variation relative to the capacities for sports across kids and adults. During the pre-adolescence stage, humans vary a lot but overlap extensively—in height, leg length, body weight, fat content, muscle mass and strength. By the later teens and adulthood, average differences between males and females are more pronounced in upper-body than lower-body muscles. Interestingly, while both males and females can increase muscle size and strength with targeted training, increases in upper-body, but not lower-body, strength are relatively more substantial for young adult females than for young adult males, (likely due to the starting point differences). In addition, older adult females can often increase relative lower-body strength more than older adult males.

Previous and ongoing physical activity and training impacts muscle development and performance in children and adults, so, some but not all of the variation in muscle performance may be reduced, or increased, via gendered norms and behaviors favoring enhanced or reduced physical exercise/activity. There is abundant evidence that, for boys, there is more focus on, and participation in, activities related to muscle development and training (like sports) than there is for girls and women. This cultural influence on bodies occurs even in elite athletes where women are often coached and trained to minimize, rather than maximize, bodily bulking up–appearing feminine is weighed against performance goals both because of cultural norms (a sense of the “right” body for women) and the importance of looking feminine to get endorsement deals. So, in practice, we currently have no wholly accurate means by which to assess the total range of sports abilities across the range of bodies among most people because society shapes those classified as boys and girls differently in youth and as adults.

Clearly, certain body size/shapes and strength patterns are specific prerequisites in some sports, especially at elite levels. But at those levels, the vast majority of people, regardless of sex or gender classification, could not make the cut. For most people, exactly where they fall in the wide range of variation in bodies and training (top half, lower half, middle, extreme ends, etc.) may be more relevant than their classified sex or gender in potential performance in any given sport. In fact, for children, most gendered divisions in sports do not come from biological necessity, they are cultural decisions, usually based on assumptions about limitations in girls’ abilities. And in some cases, the same is true for adults.

The current focus on “sex” in sports by the Trump administration is less about biology and more about ideology, and a politics of exclusion and control. Of course, men and women are not the same and variation in reproductive biology shapes important aspects of human bodies and lives. And, across humanity there are a diverse range of gender/sex experiences. The bottom line is that different bodies and different life experiences can influence one’s performance in any given sport. The distribution of human biological variation as it relates to sport abilities, and everything else, is neither simple nor cleanly divided between the categories of female and male, boy or girl, or man and woman. As such, any serious interest and engagement with human bodies, gender, and sex diversity in most sports contexts must focus less on the acrimonious, and deceiving, framing of “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female” and more on the actual data about human diversity.

It’s well-known that being active and social— both facilitated by sports— relates to positive health outcomes for children and adults. Now more than ever we need increased access to health and well-being. It’s time to shift our attention away from a focus on only elite athletics and flawed, harmful, ideological declarations and put societal time and energy into work to improve access for all to engage in sports as they wish and as best they can.

Agustín Fuentes (Princeton University) is an anthropologist whose research focuses on the biosocial, delving into the entanglement of biological systems with the social and cultural lives of humans, our ancestors, and a few of the other animals with whom humanity shares close relations.

By Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp

In November 2015, during his first Presidential campaign, Trump provoked widespread criticism by publicly mocking disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski. His shocking contempt foreshadowed a deeply cruel ableism characterizing his second term in which Trump has attacked all forms of human difference.

This was immediately evident when shadow-president and unelected slasher-in-chief Elon Musk darkened the websites of CDC, NIH, FHA/HUD, and BLS. Under President Trump’s freeze on federal financial support for any agency suspected of supporting DEIA or unproven and “trumped up” charges of waste, fraud and abuse, Musk threw vast segments of the US population into chaos, turmoil, and terror. Despite multiple court cases winning injunctions against these illegal actions, the Trump administration has routinely failed to obey temporary restraining orders: the data removed has rarely been restored. Those seeking such information on a government website are likely to receive the message: “The Page you are Looking for was not Found.”  In short, the consequences of mass budget cuts and the removal of crucial data on which life-affirming/threatening policy decisions are made have become horrifically clear.

Disabled people, their families, allies, and service providers are particularly affected by these attacks. Crucial statistics for education, employment, housing, transport, health and healthcare are disappearing with reckless abandon, along with life-sustaining payments often administered through state Medicaid programs, currently in the cross-hairs of this irrational budget-slashing strategy. Were President Trump to succeed in abolishing the Department of Education, where would disabled students with Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) (or 504 accommodations) find the supports they need to get a “free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment” as mandated by law? Should the Bureau of Labor Statistics be enjoined from collecting unemployment data, how will the already-perilous workforce struggles of disabled people be recognized? Most importantly, the GOP’s threatened cuts to Medicaid to enable and sustain tax benefits for the billionaire class will be a disaster for the millions of disabled people who rely on these modest but crucial benefits to survive.

Data removal is the first step in disguising the human impact of such cuts. Shockingly, this moment resonates with an earlier eugenic period in American history when disabled children were routinely removed from families to institutions and adults with disabilities were banned from urban streets by the “ugly laws,” rendering them invisible in public space. As the authors of Disability Worlds and two of four co-editors of the collection How to be Disabled in a Pandemic, we are deeply alarmed by this frightening ableist destruction of hard-won legal protections and funding for disabled people across the lifespan, threatening to disenfranchise them once again.

Furthermore, with the destruction of data, it will be nearly impossible to quantitatively track the draconian effects of policy reversals. The deletion of baseline and subsequent measurements effectively “disappears” disabled people from the public eye, subjecting them to further marginalization and thrusting them into what disability activist/scholars term “inaccessible futures.”  Dramatic and often heart-rending scenes of desperate disabled citizens and their supporters on nightly news and social media are springing up like mushrooms. But without statistical evidence on which policy depends, these powerful first-person accounts are doomed to erasure, as right-wing media censorship creates other forms of disappearance.

Virtually every Trumpian cut to federal data, policy experts, and personnel has ableist implications: the loss of monitoring housing discrimination by HUD, the increasing toxic environmental consequences resulting from the destruction of the EPA and NOAA. Of equal concern is the cutting of significant NIH research leading to treatment of a wide range of debilitating conditions, and potential kneecapping of the FDA’s oversight of drug safety.

Public outrage against these ableist actions is focused on the threatened cuts to continued funding of the Department of Education and Medicaid that affect a wide range of disabled Americans. For example, the February slashing of $900 million from the budget of the Institute for Educational Sciences, the Department of Education’s research arm, will erase an enormous amount of data regarding America’s school-age population. This includes the 7.5 million disabled students – roughly 15% of the US student population — whose lives have been enhanced by access to public education since the 1975 passage of the IDEA.

Trump has directed his pick for education secretary, the remarkably unqualified former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon, to dismantle the Department of Education.  Federal funds would be redistributed to states without oversight, almost certainly threatening services to students with disabilities.

Additionally, in late February, the House approved a budget cut of $880 billion in Medicaid services over the next decade, an amount that would destroy the nation’s disability services. As disability historian Michael Rembis commented, “For many people, Medicaid is literally their lifeline. It’s what sustains them. People who depend on these services to live wouldn’t have the medical equipment, the prescriptions, the healthcare, or the daily supports they need if these programs were limited, let alone cut. Thousands of people would die.” Given the alarming increase in the speed of data deletion and distortion, the deaths that Rembis predicts are likely to be invisible to most.

Yet there are reasons for hope despite the current cruel chaos. Activist librarians and data scientists have been racing to counter data erasure. Organizers of the Data Rescue Project are coordinating the rescuing of US federal data. The Free Government Information group is saving government data for scientific use before they disappear while other data activists are filing lawsuits. Another group, STAT has been downloading all available files from data.cdc.gov since Trump took office; their archives are available publicly. The Internet Archive continues its crucial role in preserving statistics and reports from each administration, ensuring ongoing public access to vital government publications and data. In late February, CNN provided an easy guide for citizens to use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and a new site, Disability Statistics, was launched for, by, and about disabled people. For the 25 percent of Americans with disabling impairments and their many supporters and allies, this data rescue resistance ensures that they will not be rendered invisible again.

Faye Ginsburg is David Kriser Professor of anthropology, director of the NYU Center for Media, Culture & History, and founding co-chair with Mara Mills of the NYU Center for Disability Studies.  

Rayna Rapp is Professor Emerita of anthropology at New York University, specializing in gender and health; the politics of reproduction; and disability.

Together they co-authored  Disability Worlds (2024), and co-edited How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (2025) with Mara Mills and Harris Kornstein.

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By Carolyn Rouse

When Mamie Till Mobley chose an open casket for the funeral of her lynched son Emmett Till, the images of Till’s mutilated body sparked outrage and some would argue, galvanized the Civil Rights Movement. A closed casket in 1955 might have sown doubt about the extent of the adolescent boy’s torture. Without Jet Magazine’s photographic evidence, the narrative might have been highjacked to place blame on the victim. Sixty-five years later, horror generated by the unedited and uncut video of the murder of George Floyd had the same power to mobilize resistance. In both cases, the evidence of racist, systemic, anti-black violence was undeniable.

The potential of data to transform the world is why Trump signed an executive order to purge certain health data from federal websites including the CDC and the NIH. For an autocrat, these data threaten his power because they expose inequities linked to racist discretion in policing, medicine, and education. They also highlight the links between the reproduction of inequalities and generational wealth, nepotism, red lining, and the historical theft of land by the state. For a man who has contributed to and benefitted from structural racism, but who wants to be seen as a self-made business genius, these histories and data undermine his legitimacy.

In many ways, the statistical data he’s trying to hide is more of an inconvenience than a real threat to his power grab. As a petty autocrat, this is largely about ego. We know this because in 2019 he used a black Sharpie to alter the NOAA hurricane forecast to align with the false information he gave the public. While Trump sells lies and merchandise to shore up his base (which he treats more like a “consumer base” than a political base), he siphons taxpayer funds as people fight over the remains of a political project that began in the 1960s to expand diversity, equity, and inclusion. People will die because of his greed fueled, mean-spirited governance, and without data the cruelty unleashed will go uncounted, unrecognized, hidden.

This data purge hit home because I have spent three decades studying racial health disparities. As a graduate student in the 1990s, I worked on anthropologist Cheryl Mattingly’s Maternal Child Health grant “Crossing Cultural Borders.” For that work I followed black families in and out of pediatric occupational and physical therapy clinics. For treatment to be elective, practitioners and families needed to find meaning in what they were doing to develop the best long-term care. In the early aughts, I worked with sickle cell disease patients who were often presumed to be malingering or drug seeking and therefore, denied pain treatment. Now I am studying contributors to high rates of morbidity and mortality in a predominantly white rural community to compare it with my prior research on racial health disparities.

While I am a qualitative ethnographer, I have spent countless hours in the statistical data trying to interpret a single racial health disparity using CDC, NIH, and other national or state health data. Mostly I am trying to understand what a health difference means in relationship to other contextual data. There are so many variables that, in general, the causes are far more complex and nuanced than race alone.

Recently, for example, I was swimming in health data to make sense of differentials in suicide rates by race, ethnicity and region. While I know the racial and ethnic categories used in statistical research are insufficient, and sometimes beside the point, I take the data as one of many realities that need to be addressed to make substantive social change. I throw all the information I can at trying to understand health disparities because, as Autumn Womack wrote in her book, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, my research “emerges at the nexus of aspiration for recognition and refusal to be circumscribed within the production of racial data.”

I had no idea how attached I was to this data until I was speaking with Jax, my primary interlocutor from this community. I had avoided checking websites because something told me I might not be ready for Trump’s data purge, but Jax gave me the courage. So, I clicked on a CDC website that once had data on racism in healthcare, and the data was gone. In an instant I began crying.

As terrible as the statistical data purge is, let’s remember that the most galvanizing civil rights moments in the last 65 years – Emmitt Till and George Floyd – were inspired by stories not numbers. Cultural anthropologists tell stories for a reason. The statistical data help to understand the scale, but ethnographies have the potential to change minds by contextualizing people’s struggles. Black life has always spilled beyond the statistical data, something W.E.B Du Bois understood when he tried to make sense of the “Negro Problem” in his Atlanta University Studies. His research went much further than social surveys. He tried to represent black life in a novel, data visualizations, statistics, and ethnographic stories.

The loss of federal data showing the scope and scale of the problem is a real loss even for those, like me, who do not valorize quantitative over qualitative data. With that loss anthropologists must fight back by pushing their ethnographic research out in any available formats. The stories of LGBTQ+ folks and women hurt by anti-choice legislation need to get out. The experiences of those struggling with environmental racism, racist policing, ableist discrimination, genocide, civil war, and ethnocide need to see the light of day in a variety of genres, from analytical writing to poetry. And I encourage every healthcare institution to resist by collecting and publishing their own demographic data. We need to create a site for pooled data that the government cannot touch.

We still live in a world where disparities in sentencing, education, housing, income, wealth, and health still exist based upon people’s immutable characteristics. The elimination of data on racism and racial differences will not make the problems go away any more than the Dickey Amendment (1996) restricting federal funding for gun violence research curbed gun violence.

Instead, the response across the country has been to teach children to duck and cover if they hear gun shots in their school. Like the gun violence data, the latest purge will conceal from the public increases in morbidity and mortality. People will die from unfunded vaccine rollouts, clinics refusing services to pregnant women in distress, and untreated chronic illnesses. The majority of these victims will be black, brown, indigenous, LGBQ+, and poor. Without data and stories, their deaths will go unrecognized, which was the plan all along.

Carolyn Rouse is professor in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her work explores the use of evidence to make particular claims about race and social inequality.

By Kathryn Clancy

In 2014 I was planning to return to Poland to conduct fieldwork, after not having been there much since 2005. I had received my first National Science Foundation grant, primarily focused on the study of endometrial function. Since I was collecting urine to analyze hormones and other biomarkers, I wanted to take the chance to explore the embodiment of certain gender roles and attitudes. How might one’s lived experiences as a mother, a worker, a farmer, leave traces on the body in terms of stress hormones or ovarian physiology?

I discussed a plan to do this work with the Polish director of the field site. She told me this type of work was impossible, even dangerous. She sent me an article about how the Polish Catholic church had begun to level considerable attacks against anything to do with gender. We went on to conduct our physiological research, but did not attempt the additional work on gender roles.

The church’s obsession with gender – and with protecting children “from gender,” as though the concept itself is a bogeyman – just happened to emerge as a number of controversies were souring the public on the church itself. Gender is sexualizing, was the claim. Gender would teach children about things they should not know about, like gay or trans people. The anti-gender movement was an obvious ploy to draw attention to an imagined act of immorality in order to hide the many real acts, from pedophilia to fraud, for which the Polish Catholic church was responsible.

Right wing politicians in Poland were glad to create a similar foe in their desire to stem the tide of modernization. An “anti-gender” movement has been fruitful for those who tie gender ideology not only to LGBTQ+ people but to women working outside of the home, declining birthrates, and abortion.

So it goes now, in the United States, under Trump and Musk. As of this writing Trump has signed four executive orders relating to gender, making four at once laughable (as a scientist) and disgusting (as a moral person living in the world) claims. First, the protecting women order claims there are only two sexes; second, that being trans was inconsistent with the physical readiness needed for military service, though it was not an outright ban on trans people serving; third, he banned gender-affirming care for those under nineteen; and fourth, he banned trans people from participating in girls’ and women’s sports.

These orders are bizarre propaganda documents that attempt to negate decades of research into sex, gender, gender-affirming care, and mental health. There are many well-established truths they attempt to erase. There are more than two sexes, maybe many more depending on the level of analysis you are using to build out your categories. They are a different phenomenon from gender, of which there are also more than two, and which do not align with sex for all people. Being trans has nothing to do with one’s mental or physical capacities, and certainly not as it relates to military service. Gender-affirming care saves lives, reduces anxiety and depression, and involves medical care as necessary as asthma inhalers or blood pressure medication.

Defining sex by gamete size (also called germ cell, these are the reproductive cells that fuse to create an embryo), the definition that the Trump administration thinks is so clever because they think, it being less alterable than some other sex-related characteristics, they can hang all their binary desires on it – only reveals the insignificance of their imagination and intelligence. A recent clarification of the much-mocked sex definitions in the original “Defending Women” Executive Order is just as embarrassing a misstep. The guidance states that “rare disorders of sexual development do not constitute a third sex because these disorders do not lead to the production of a third gamete.” Does this leave people with variation in sexual development without a sexual category at all? What’s more, as many journalists and scholars have shown, there exists no reliable test that can confirm the gametes a person “should” produce, no matter whether their lack of gamete production is due to age, medical treatment, variation in sexual development, or illness.

If I seem annoyed to have to tell these basic truths it’s because I am. Exploring and understanding variation in genitalia, gonads, chromosomes, hormones, gametes, developmental pathways, and more allows us to engage with one element of the seemingly unlimited ways humans can show up in the world. That’s what science is supposed to be about. But Trump and Musk, and the cowardly politicians closing rank around them, will tell any lie to fit whatever narrative serves their interest.

It’s not just that Trump’s definitions defy scientific credulity. It’s that they are part of a project intended to control girls, women, trans and nonbinary people, intersex people, and deny us everything we have shown we can be. Their assertions are unoriginal – boring, even. They are coming for trans people just like the Nazis did. Just like the right wing turn in Poland after they joined the EU. Just like Putin, and Orban, and any other number of mediocre power-hungry men.

It must be difficult to see all the capaciousness that comes with being queer – all the potential, the joy – and compare it to your own small life, one increasingly defined by a toxic, rigid definition of masculinity that requires aggression, cruelty, and isolation. At the same time, you have to work to be left behind in these moments – to see the possibilities of queer futures as excluding you rather than enjoying all it has to offer in terms of how we understand what it means to be a person, a family, a community.

When it comes to Trump and Musk we can fantasize about a forever regime, which allows them to continue to peddle misinformation and hatred, or we can fantasize about its end, which we can help bring about. In 2023, Poland’s Law & Justice party was voted out of power, following years of activist efforts and multiple women’s strikes. Regimes end, and the work to end them start well before the next election cycle. How will we as anthropologists, engaged with a global and local understanding of sex, confront and resist these changes, and show up for each other, in the coming months and years?

Kathryn Clancy is a biological anthropologist who specializes in reproductive health. She is a professor at the University of Illinois.

By Gregory Warner

I had this flashback this week – talking to friends in Ukraine and Goma and Kenya and Kabul about the impact of this USAID freeze — that I thought: this feels like 2008. Right now we look back in 2008 as this huge recession but at the time I remember it started with small signs. A friend in real estate mentioning houses sitting on the market longer than usual. Hiring freezes at mortgage companies. More moving trucks on the road. Then foreclosure signs on lawns. Then the stock market drops, mass layoffs, extended unemployment. And what I’ve been trying to figure out is not just who is affected by this freeze now (millions of people), but where is this a message to? And what happens down the road, if USAID pulls out of everywhere, all at once, immediately? (If Congress and the courts allow this executive order to hold.)

Which is how I ended up on the phone with Lydia Wanja.

Lydia is a farmer, and she’s not the typical poster child for foreign aid. Despite being born with only one working arm—due to an obstetrician’s mistake her mother couldn’t afford to fix— she’s always possessed a “winners never quit” attitude about life, refusing charity and the comforts of self-pity. She put herself through teacher’s college, and when school jobs were scarce, she built a farming business, growing basil, avocados, and medicinal herbs. She was able to hire dozens of employees, many of them young mothers, so she applied for and received a matching grant from USAID to build a daycare center where her employees could breastfeed their babies on a break.

That was this fall. Then she realized what she needed to scale up her business was install an industrial dryer to preserve her crops. USAID offered her funding to install a solar-powered model and said the money would be in her account by February. Which is when she did something that all of us are warned not to do, unless we really, really, really, really trust the lender….

She wrote a post-dated check.

But the harvest was coming. She wanted to start using this thing. And besides, USAID’s promises were backed by America. What could go wrong? She gave a postdated check of almost $10,000 to the supplier and the drier was installed.

And then came Trump’s executive order. A freeze all USAID activities.

The guy she gave that check to is calling her every day now. Where’s my money, he’s saying. She’s terrified if he tries to cash that check, she doesn’t have the money in her account, he can sue her. She’ll be dragged off to prison, lose the farm, everything she built, all because she believed in America’s word.

“Just give us time,” she told me. She doesn’t even begrudge America for wanting to cut off foreign aid, just requests to do it slower in a way that doesn’t destroy everything she’s built up over the years. “Just give us six months, or a year. Let us adjust ourselves to go a different way.”

Let us adjust ourselves, she says. You don’t want to pay for a Kenyan farmer to have a solar drier anymore? You don’t want to pay for people’s HIV medication and school fees and domestic violence clinics and poll watchers and everything else that USAID spends billions of dollars on around the world?

That’s ok, Lydia says. Just give us time to adjust ourselves.

But this administration allows for no adjustment. no grace period. This isn’t about winding down aid. It’s about speed. Sudden, chaotic, indiscriminate speed.

I joined my friends on the Reflector podcast today to talk about all the ways that aid scholars have lambasted aid over the years. Despite the lives it saves, the poor it feeds, the diseases it monitors, the education it funds, there is a moral hazard as well. Listeners of Rough Translation might remember that in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I reported how American money earmarked for survivors of sexual violence forced local women into an impossible choice, to have to lie about being raped just to receive a bag of food. Like Sarah Chayes, my former colleague at NPR, I saw the way billions of dollars of USAID funding in Afghanistan went into the pockets of warlords and corrupt cops. Living in Nairobi as NPR’s East Africa correspondent, I kept a ready copy of Bill Easterly’s, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, as well as Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo, who wrote: “The notion that aid can alleviate systemic poverty, and has done so, is a myth. Millions in Africa are poorer today because of aid; misery and poverty have not ended but have increased.”

And yet, the people who critiqued aid assumed that changes would be incremental. That the transition would be managed. Dambisa Moyo suggested a five year plan to wean the world off assistance.

What happened instead is something else entirely.

In Kabul, underground girls’ schools—secret classrooms defying Taliban restrictions—have shut down because USAID was paying their teachers’ salaries. In Ukraine, independent Russian-language media outlets countering Kremlin propaganda are scrambling to stay online. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, humanitarian groups providing emergency shelter and aid to displaced civilians are closing their doors. And in Kenya, Lydia Wanju is staring at her solar dryer, wondering if this piece of expensive equipment, meant to be a step toward prosperity, will instead be the thing that ruins her.

The speed isn’t an accident. It sends its own message—one that echoes Biden’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan, where those who risked their lives to help American troops were abandoned overnight, left to face the prisons and blades of the Taliban.

USAID was always about messaging. From its inception under Kennedy, it was designed to send a signal about American power and generosity, a counterweight to Soviet influence. For decades, it told the world: We are here. We are stable. We are reliable.

Now, the message is different. To the world it says:

The whims of one president can supercede the promises of a nation.

To Vladimir Putin of Russia, Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Xi Jinping of China, it says:

We’re not going to push democracy among your neighbors. We won’t fund opposition media, or poll watchers, or anti-disinformation campaigns, or human rights activists. We’ll stay out of your way.

No wonder Putin seems so eager to sit down with Trump.

America has become a post-dated check. A promise for the future. Only now, the promise isn’t for aid, but for silence.

A Peabody award winner and Yale Poynter Fellow in Journalism, Gregory Warner is host of Rough Transition (formerly NPR’s Rough Translation).

The objective – to effectively explain your thesis in a language appropriate to a non-specialist audience, and in just 180 seconds! A daunting task but, as part of this year’s 2024 3-Minute Thesis competition, our members did just that, with clear and concise presentations on a number of complex issues ranging from the future of Agroforestry, to cycles of harm and resistance regarding incarcerated women, to the theological disparities that exist between Baptists in Texas.

The grand prize ($400) went to Thomas Long for “’Our Lord is Not Woke’: Fracture, Politicisation and Texas Baptists.” First runner up ($200) went to Yuliya Gluhova for “Learning About “These Days”: Menstruation Education and Communication in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan.” The second runner up ($100) went to Aiko Dzikowski for “Japanese American Princess: A Linguistic Anthropological Approach to Cultural Diplomacy and Pageantry Within the Nikkei Community.”

Judges for the Three Minute Thesis competition, sponsored by the National Institute of Social Sciences, hailed from top media outlets including NPR and Science Magazine.

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has revised its Policy on Sexual Harassment and Sexual Assault in an effort to better establish guidelines for appropriate behavior for its members and issue a call for continuing awareness and education, as well as institutional and culture change.

“As a scholarly and professional association, AAA has zero tolerance for sexual harassment in academic, professional, fieldwork, conferences, or any other settings where our members are at work,” said Whitney Battle-Baptiste, AAA president. “Any behavior that contributes to a hostile work climate or constitutes an unwanted sexual advance is a serious violation of professional responsibilities, and should be regarded and treated as such by all members of our profession.”

The revisions include updated language for inclusivity throughout the guidelines. Other updates include a recommendation to shift AAA’s resource allocation for ombuds services to a professional contract for year-round services, and instead allocate the volunteer role to senior scholars willing to be available on call for immediate questions during meetings. The recommendations also include providing by-stander training for panel chairs on how to handle disrespectful interactions in sessions, and that all AAA journals have a clear policy on Sexual Harassment and Sexual Assault (SHSA), building on the AAA’s general policy.

Carla Jones and Rachel Hall-Clifford, the Gender Equity Seats on the AAA Members’ Programmatic, Advisory, and Advocacy Committee (now the Anthropology Advocacy Council – AAC), convened a series of listening sessions to elicit feedback on the 2018 AAA sexual harassment and sexual assault policy and ideas for potential revisions and additional actions. The listening sessions included AAA section leaders, AAA staff, gender equity scholars and key stakeholders, and an open session at the 2022 AAA Annual Meeting.

Framed as an intervention rooted in feminist theory, the guidelines acknowledge that while professional associations may not be adjudicating bodies, they do have the ability to define professional misconduct. AAA’s SHSA Policy exists in tandem with AAA’s Principles of Professional Responsibility, which is intended to cover all professional behavior of AAA members, staff, volunteers, contractors, exhibitors, and sponsors. Additionally, the Policy applies to any non-member who participates in a AAA program or activity, as well as all settings where anthropologists conduct professional business.

The Policy also affirms AAA’s commitment to provide additional education and to cultivate awareness on how to achieve cultural and institutional changes to address this issue. This includes all professional interactions within the research community, in academic and professional institutions, and with members of the public.

By Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

You don’t need to kill people with conventional weapons, or even right away, to try to destroy them as a group. This has been painfully obvious over the past nine months of Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. It is something that projects like what the Costs of War and anthropologists of the environment and of infrastructure in militarized contexts have argued. It is reflected in the recent issuing of arrest warrants for Israeli government officials by the International Criminal Court. And it appears in indictments by that court and by the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of starving civilians and depriving them of medical care and dignity. Less obvious for those focused on the carnage or concerned with whether or not Israel’s violence in Gaza since October legally constitutes a genocide are what the material conditions of Gaza’s infrastructures can teach us about Israel/Palestine writ large. This essay is an attempt to compile information about the status of Gaza’s infrastructures that is scattered, undigested, and already out-of-date across piecemeal sources, as is often the case in war because the people gathering it are also the people being killed. And through compilation it proposes a way to think about the piles and piles of rubble. The lessons here are not new; but in times of genocide, the truth bears repeating.

Israel has destroyed every type of physical infrastructure serving Palestinian life in Gaza. A March report published by the EU, World Bank, and UN estimated that the damages wrought on Gaza in the first four months of the war amounted to $18.5 billion as a result of 60-70 percent of all infrastructures being damaged or destroyed. In June the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) estimated that “the destruction of buildings, roads, and other infrastructure has generated over 39 million tons of debris, some of which is contaminated with unexploded ordnance, asbestos, and other hazardous substances.” The report added that “human remains are buried in this vast quantity of building debris.” In July UNRWA estimated that it will take 15 years to clear the rubble. And a UN Conference on Trade and Development estimates that it could take up to 70 years to restore GDP levels in Gaza to their 2022 levels, which were themselves direly low. Israel has constricted Gaza’s economy since at least 1991 when it blockaded the territory after 24 years of occupation.

But while the scale and rapidity of Gaza’s destruction is shocking and unprecedented, not only in Palestinian history but in recent global history, the logic that guides this destruction extends across the territories that Israel controls—in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Israel—as do the outcomes of these policies. Three logics that are most evident in Israeli policies toward the infrastructures that serve Palestinians are: 1) preventing Palestinian control over land, 2) destruction, and 3) the production of dependence. The currently deteriorating state of Gaza’s physical infrastructures allows us to see all three logics at play, as well as how they interact to generate outcomes that affect livability for Palestinians and therefore their ability to live as Palestinians where they are. But we cannot forget that these logics and outcomes have been at play since at least the Nakba of 1948.

THE STATE OF GAZA’S INFRASTRUCTURE

Let’s start with Gaza’s infrastructure today. Gaza’s infrastructure is in a state of flux. One component of that state is, of course, destruction and deprivation. No electricity flows to Gaza’s electric grid. On October 7th Israel shut off the ten power lines that once sent 120 megawatts to the grid. On October 11th Gaza’s only power plant ran out of fuel. As of January, Israel had destroyed 61.5 percent of Gaza’s power grid. Before the Fall of 2023 Palestinians in Gaza had developed a relatively extensive system of solar systems, especially on rooftops. Over 50 percent of businesses and homes in Gaza used solar energy in March 2023, though solar systems also required some energy from the grid. Israel has destroyed many of Gaza’s solar systems, especially by bombing buildings. Electricity shortages severely impair what few hospital operations are still possible (all of Gaza’s hospitals have been either damaged or destroyed) and water and sanitation systems. Shortages make food preservation and preparation difficult, and they increase the likelihood of diseases and infections. The use of firewood and other forms of burning for food preparation as an alternative to electricity increases the risk of respiratory illnesses.

As of January, Israel had already damaged or destroyed two thirds of Gaza’s water infrastructures and assets. These include desalination plants in northern and central Gaza, 162 water wells, and two of the three connections with Mekorot, Israel’s water company. Israel had destroyed half of the six wastewater treatment plants in Gaza, including a German-funded treatment plant that had opened in April 2023. As of April, there was one shower per 3,600 people and one toilet per 850 people for over one million Palestinians crammed into Rafah, with humanitarian agencies warning that the humanitarian standard is one toilet for 20 people. Sewage-contaminated water has led to diarrhea, which has already affected one third of children under the age of five as of Spring 2024. Diarrhea accelerates dehydration and malnutrition. Diarrhea also increases the need for facilities like toilets and showers. Their absence increases the spread of bacteria that cause diarrhea and generates indignities for those experiencing it.

Israel has destroyed or damaged the infrastructures that provide Palestinians in Gaza with food, including most bakeries and food shops, farmland, over half of tree crops and greenhouses. Recent Israeli bombings of farmland, already heavily contaminated by Israel’s “herbicidal warfare” in Gaza since 2014, is now also contaminated by explosive weapons. What olive groves remained could not be harvested during the Fall harvesting season because of constant Israeli bombardment. Greenhouses left standing became inaccessible for the same reason. Destroying food infrastructures increases food price inflation. It has rendered most of the population dependent on humanitarian food aid, it has led to widespread famine, and it has made it difficult for the well over 85,000 injured Palestinians to heal from their injuries.

Imagine trying to heal from an amputation with mice crawling in your tent. Over 1.7 million of Gaza’s Palestinians now live not only in temporary shelters (at least three quarters of housing stock has been damaged or destroyed), but also amidst heaps of waste. Israel has destroyed at least five of Gaza’s six disposal facilities as well as its medical waste treatment facilities and the administrative building, maintenance workshop, and storage rooms of the Joint Service Council for Solid Waste management. Israel has also destroyed the containers that hold garbage and the vehicles that move it. Waste pileups have been exacerbated by fuel shortages, the fact that Israel has made it unsafe for Palestinians to move through space, as well as the killing, injuring, and displacement of staff. The lack of solid waste infrastructures has increased rates of disease and infection, inviting animals and insects into proximity with people. And it pollutes Gaza’s air, water, and soil. Waste burning has become one way for Palestinians to mitigate waste pileups that choke their air and fill the last remaining spaces in which they can live. This too heightens the likelihood of respiratory illnesses as it releases airborne dioxins. You have broken ribs from your bombed house falling on top of you and the smoke makes you cough despite your best efforts not to.

The destruction of Gaza’s infrastructures paves the way for visions of new construction as well as new construction itself. By January Israel had destroyed or damaged two thirds of all roads and 92 percent of primary roads along with numerous vehicles, impeding mobility, access to relief aid and services, and family reunification. Meanwhile Israel constructs roads for its own purposes. Between October and March, it completed construction of a road bisecting northern Gaza east to west. The new road has been nicknamed the “Netzarim Corridor” after the Jewish-only Netzarim settlement, which was removed from Gaza in 2005, and has been given the official highway number “749” to integrate it into the national Israeli highway system. Construction of the militarized road brought destruction of at least 750 Palestinian buildings, including a university, for 500 yards on either side of it, and allows Israeli troops to be deployed throughout Gaza quickly and easily.

The road meets the newly constructed unloading point for an American floating pier whose construction caused the destruction of another 250 buildings. Destruction seemed to necessitate construction of the pier, which ostensibly brings aid into Gaza while the U.S. government funds the Israeli military assaults that make the aid necessary. Israel has constructed the so-called “Netzarim Base” at the same pier where, at night, bright white flood lights are visible for miles around. Israel has built two more roads in the south, one for access to Khan Younis and the other for access to Rafah. New Israeli roads in Gaza allow Israel greater control (and Palestinians less control) over the territory and assert Israel’s plans for a long-term presence there. In bisecting the strip into northern and southern parts, Highway 749 obstructs not only the flow of essential aid to those remaining and living under conditions of famine in the north, but also the return north of over 75 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza who have been displaced south of Wadi Gaza since October.

Destruction of housing infrastructures has weaponized homes, exposing Palestinians to the elements, eliminating privacy and dignity, and increasing the risk of disease and infection. As of May, 179,000 of 470,000 housing units were left standing in Gaza. Destruction has followed Palestinians to their temporary shelters, including UN schools, hospitals, and tents. Israel had destroyed 50 UNRWA shelters set up for up to 1.9 million displaced people as of May and the world witnessed the horrific Rafah “tent massacre” that killed over 40 people under burning tarps that same month. Even intact tents are hazardous shelters. Heavy rains flood them, forcing people to sleep in the mud or standing water. The hot summer sun turns tents into ovens, making it hard to breathe.

Clearing Gaza’s housing has prompted various non-Palestinian actors into real estate speculation and plans to replace the Palestinians of Gaza with Jews. Discussions around the “reconstruction” and “rebuilding” of Gaza have been underway in Israel, North America, the UAE, and Europe. American and European donors have been meeting to discuss remaking Gaza as a commercial hub. Harey Zahav, a notorious real estate developer of West Bank settlements, circulated an ad on social media in December 2023 that read “A house on the beach is not a dream!” accompanied by an image of beach house blueprints overlaying a cleared road in front of bombed out Gaza buildings. High profile real estate events advertising Palestinian land parcels for Jews have taken place in New York, New Jersey, and Baltimore, including the “Great Israeli Real Estate Event” in New Jersey in March 2024. Jared Kusnher, Donald Trump’s son in law, made a public statement in February calling Gaza’s waterfront property “very valuable.”

THREE LOGICS FOR A ONE STATE REALITY

While the tactics, intensities, scales, and rates of infrastructural destruction, and flux, are unprecedented in Gaza, their logics and outcomes extend across Israeli policies that have organized Palestinian life since at least 1948, when the Israeli state was established through the expulsion of 700,000-800,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands. Those Palestinians who managed not to be displaced to neighboring Arab countries now live in what several scholars have called a “one state reality” – Israel structures most aspects of their lives whether they live in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, or what many in Israel, which has never officially declared its borders, treat as “Israel proper.”

One logic organizing Palestinians’ experiences across this “one state reality” is the prevention of Palestinians’ control over land. And without control over land, control over infrastructure is impossible. Israeli policies preventing Palestinian control over land extend across judicial and other modes of governance and have included the Jewish Nation-State Law (Israel), the Israel Lands Law (Israel), the Absentee Property Law (Israel), the creation of Areas A, B, and C through the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s (West Bank), the construction of Jewish-only settlements (throughout), the construction and policing of the Apartheid Wall (West Bank, Israel), the construction of separate road systems for Israelis and Palestinians and the policing of Palestinian movement on roads (throughout), pollution of agricultural lands (throughout), construction of military bases and green zones (West Bank, Gaza), the establishment and expansion of permit systems for individual movement and for infrastructure construction (throughout), violence and the threat of violence (throughout), use of toxic chemicals to create unusable areas of land (Gaza), and establishment of military watchtowers (Gaza, West Bank).

Another organizing logic we see most clearly from Gaza’s infrastructures today is of course outright destruction. This is not new. Israel demolishes, and has demolished, Palestinian infrastructures throughout the territories it controls for as long as it has been making itself into a state. The most well-documented type of destruction is home demolition. Zionist forces depopulated and destroyed 500 villages between 1947 and 1948, which amounted to about 52,000 homes. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) estimates that before October 2023, Israel had demolished another 56,500 homes in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem since occupying them in 1967. This number excluded the thousands of homes that Israel had bombed during the wars it has been waging on Gaza since its siege of 2006. Israel makes it difficult to gather statistics on the number of homes it has demolished inside the Green Line (in “Israel proper”) since the Nakba began, but ICAHD estimates that additional thousands of Palestinian homes have been demolished there as well. In 2020 alone, and with a deadly pandemic raging, home demolitions spiked in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, leaving 1000 Palestinians unhoused, according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. Israel also prevents the maintenance and rehabilitation of infrastructures, such as wastewater treatment plants and sewage networks. This leads to them operating under capacity or becoming defunct. Israel pollutes or allows the pollution of farmland and grazing areas, including by settlers who weaponize pollution in order to harass and expel Palestinian communities. Even in times of supposed “peace,” in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, Israel periodically bombs, bulldozes, or fills with liquid cement Palestinian infrastructures such as homes, mosques, and cisterns holding water for drinking, washing, and irrigation. The bombings we have been witnessing in Gaza and the West Bank in the past year are one instance of a practice that is three quarters of a century old.

A third logic that prevails across Israeli-controlled territories is the production of Palestinian dependence not only, but also, in relation to infrastructure. Policies that promote Palestinian dependency (and obstruct self-determination) include suppression of Palestinian economic life and what Harvard economist Sara Roy has called “de-development.” Palestinians across Israel-controlled territories live in an “occupied economy” that lacks its own currency and is almost entirely reliant on foreign aid. To build any capital-intensive, large-scale infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza, for example, Palestinians must accept the terms and conditions imposed by foreign donors who determine everything from the types of infrastructures that Palestinians can attempt to construct, budgets, locations, and the purpose of the infrastructure. When water and sanitation infrastructures, solid waste disposal facilities, electric grids, roads, and housing, have relied upon foreign donor funding, that funding has come not only with technical requirements determined by those funders (e.g. a landfill must be built instead of an incinerator), but also overtly political requirements. The latter have included that infrastructures serving Palestinians must comply with Israeli visions for the future of the territories it controls (e.g. a Palestinian landfill must accept settler trash so as to support settlements’ sustainability) as well as the incoherent and insulting requirement that Palestinians who receive international funding reject their own political parties, which the U.S. and European Union have dubbed “terrorist groups.” The Palestinian Authority and local Palestinian NGOs periodically reject the latter requirement, even when rejection has come at the expense of funding for critical projects.

By depriving Palestinians of infrastructures, Israeli policies have forced Palestinian communities to purchase many services from the Israeli state and private companies. For example, Palestinians across the territories, including in Gaza, must purchase a large proportion of their water from Mekorot, Israel’s national water company. The electricity that powers most operations for Palestinians’ everyday needs comes from the Israeli Electricity Company. That is why Israel could turn off its entire electricity supply to Gaza with the proverbial flip of a switch on October 7th. Israeli restrictions on Palestinian industries and agriculture locally have made Palestinians dependent on imports from abroad and from Israel to the West Bank and Gaza. This has made nonviolent forms of protest like boycotts of Israeli goods especially difficult for those most affected by Israel’s occupation and has produced a perverse kind of aura around Israeli commodities. Israeli restrictions on healthcare infrastructures, including on pharmaceuticals, building materials, and waste removal systems in the West Bank and Gaza similarly put those Palestinians lucky enough to be able to obtain Israeli permits to cross into “Israel proper” in the position to seek healthcare for serious medical conditions from within the Israeli medical system.

UNLIVING and PREEMPTING PALESTINE

Taking Gaza’s infrastructures as a lens through which to look at Israel/Palestine writ large shows us that Israel is preempting Palestinian life in Palestine by making Palestine, as Palestine, less and less livable. What are the more fine-grained outcomes of the three logics that extend across the “one state reality” in which Palestinians live and that result in Palestine’s unlivability?

Gaza has made expulsion the most obvious outcome. Expulsion can be rapid as 150,000 people being displaced in a few days, as has repeatedly occurred in Gaza, or it can be slower and less visible to outside observers. Such was the case during the period during which I lived and conducted fieldwork in the West Bank, the ten years that immediately followed the end of the spectacular Israeli violence and destruction that had characterized the second intifada, or uprising, (2000-2006). During that decade Israel collaborated with the U.S. and European governments to install a neoliberal Palestinian Authority leadership in the West Bank (failing to do the same in Gaza, where the elected Hamas government remained in power). The Fatah-led PA that was installed in the West Bank promised to serve their shared interests by maintaining the status quo. (In July 2024 it came to light that the U.S., Israel, and the United Arab Emirates were working to do something similar by installing exiled former Fatah leader and multimillionaire Mohammed Dahlan to administer post-war Gaza). West Bank Palestinian cities became “bubbles,” taking on the superficial appearance of normalcy in part through a spate of capital-intensive infrastructure and housing projects. Palestine scholars called attention to these moves to normalize settler colonial occupation while Palestine fell out of world headlines. Meanwhile Israeli controls, military attacks, settler violence and land expropriations made life in villages less and less bearable. Palestinians continued to be displaced among other things from rural areas to cities. As they have been compelled to do for decades, many rural West Bank Palestinians migrated to other countries for work while others had little choice but to become working renters in increasingly compressed Palestinian cities where debt-based life and economic strangulation intensified.

The prevention of control over land, destruction, and dependence that we see in Israeli impediments to infrastructures supporting Palestinian life risk forms of social erasure and fragmentation as communities are geographically dispersed and impoverished. People experience the everyday of deprivation in the form of tremendous time, energy, and resource expenditures to navigate problems like inadequate water supply, food, electricity, and transport options as their energies, resources, and time are forcibly re-oriented away from things that reach beyond the bare necessities of survival. That Palestinians are among the most highly educated groups in the Middle East and that Palestine is a center of cultural and knowledge production is a testament to generations having committed themselves to expending whatever effort it takes to reject being forced to focus solely on the reproduction of the means of survival.

Just as hard to see for people outside of Palestine is the fact that Palestinians’ lack of control over land, the destruction of their infrastructures, and their forced dependence on Israel and international donors have meant that they have rarely had the opportunity to choose the infrastructures that will serve them. When large-scale infrastructures are built—such as the sanitary landfills I researched or Gulf-funded housing projects like the first planned Palestinian city called Rawabi on which anthropologist Kareem Rabie wrote an ethnography—they are not the material embodiments of a free, democratic, and self-determined polity. They are its opposite. Denial of self-determination in the building (and maintenance) of infrastructures obstructs the building and maintenance of a lasting commons.

Palestinians’ impoverishment through destruction, dependency, and prevention of control over land contributes to the racialization and dehumanization we have witnessed at astonishing scales in Israel but also in North America and Europe, where mainstream media and politicians value Palestinian life below the life of a Jew. We know from decades of work by scholars in the social sciences and the humanities, including by anthropologists, that when communities are associated with decrepit, collapsed, or deficient infrastructures those lucky enough not to experience such infrastructural neglect criminalize those same communities and blame them for their misfortune. The people, institutions, and modes of governance that cause that lack in the first place fade into the background. The “broken windows theory” that emerged in the 1980s promoted brutal police violence against communities of color living in de- and under-resourced American cities is one case in point. Four decades later, anthropologist Marisa Solomon draws from her work on neighborhoods of still-gentrifying Brooklyn and Virginia to argue that “gentrification makes trash a discursive and material index of degeneration, mobilizing projects to ‘clean’ and ‘better’ neighborhoods and people.” All we need to understand Israel/Palestine here is to replace “gentrification” with “settler colonialism” and add “trashed infrastructures” —that is, rubble— to the trash that both results from, and encourages, violent intervention. Logics that devalue Palestinian life equate Palestinians with the rubble around them. In doing so they fuel visions of the Jewish replacement of Palestinians across Israeli-controlled territories as its own kind of “cleanup.” Gaza since October 2023 is only the most recent and most obvious example of how lands where Palestinians have forged their lives become targets for replacement.

As Palestinian life is impeded and curtailed through the destruction and preemption of infrastructures, outcomes further include the production, perpetuation, and intensification of inequalities between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. This is one of the origins of the apartheid analogy for understanding Israel/Palestine. But depriving Palestinians of infrastructures also creates and intensifies inequalities among Palestinian communities that experience differences in provisioning in different areas and for people occupying different class positions. This version of the “divide and conquer” tactics that have long been available to empires, colonial powers, and modern states has generated painful divisions among Palestinian communities both within Israel/Palestine and among Palestinians in the shatat (i.e. Palestinians living in the Diaspora or in exile since the Nakba).

Yet Palestinians, both in Israel/Palestine and in the shatat, have continually fought to highlight and overcome the forms of discrimination that could divide them. The most recent efforts swelled with the Unity Intifada (also known as the third Palestinian uprising or the Dignity and Hope Intifada) that was triggered by Israel’s attempts in 2021 to expel several Jerusalem families and Israel’s subsequent launch of an 11-day assault on Gaza. That assault killed hundreds of Palestinians, injured thousands, and caused widespread destruction of infrastructures. It also saw one of the greatest mobilizations of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship that had occurred in decades. That Unity Intifada is being charged with new energy through the global solidarity that caught fire after October and that many of us have experienced firsthand on our campuses. And it is that intifada’s consciousness of the longer durée and the broader geographical reach of U.S.-backed Israeli policy that we must bring to our efforts to support the building of (the infrastructures) of a just future for all

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is an associate professor of Anthropology at Bard College

Congratulations to the 20 AAA members selected for this year’s “Write to Change the World” OpEd Project! The finalists include members with diverse backgrounds, a representation of the four subfields, and geographically located across a broad spectrum of the United States. Their expertise covered a range of topical issues, including the Indian fashion industry, matchmaking and online dating in Japan, and yes, even the global social lives of a cocktail – the Singapore Sling.

The OpEd Project’s mission is to increase the range of voices and quality of ideas we hear in the world. Their one-day workshops are based on time-tested models of transformational learning. Participants explore the source of credibility, the patterns and elements of persuasion, the difference between being “right” and being effective, and how to think bigger about what they know and have a greater impact in the world. They emerge with concrete results and access to a national network of journalist mentors for individual follow-up.
The 20 members selected for this round of AAA-sponsored attendance are:

Fethi Keles
Sayema Khatun
Jason Scott
Matt Artz
Erika Alpert
Joshua Babcock
Sarah Richardson
Lissa Caldwell
Sisi Yang
Morag Kersel
Grace Cooper
Joshua Brown
Amanda Bressack
Veronica Sousa
Bethel Albe
Ellen Badone
Matthew Webb
Tashi Ghale
Triston Brown
Sam Victor

Chip Colwell, Maria Vesperi, Paul Stoller, Bharat Venkat, Laura Wangsness Willemsen, Robin Valenzuela, Martha Lincoln, Alex Hinton, Kate Graber, and Tara Schwegler have all agreed to share the wisdom accrued through their own public writing experiences by serving as mentors to this year’s cohort of participants.

The overarching idea is to publish our anthropological scholarship and expertise so that our leaders and the public get the information and ideas they need to make the best decisions. Op-eds aren’t the only answer, but they’re a great start to an increased public awareness of the important contributions made by our field.

Keep an eye out for their op-eds- coming soon to a publication near you!

By Richard Ashby Wilson

On May 20^th, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, announced he is applying for arrest warrants for three leaders of Hamas (Al-Masri, Haniyeh, Sinwar), Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, and Defense Minister Gallant. Gallant and Netanyahu are charged with three war crimes, including starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, and four crimes against humanity including intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population and extermination. Hamas leaders Al-Masri, Haniyeh, Sinwar are charged with six war crimes, including murder and taking hostages, and five crimes against humanity, including rape, torture, and extermination.

The selection of political and military leaders with “command responsibility” rather than the material perpetrators is consistent with the ICC Statute which indicates that only the “most responsible” should be charged for mass crimes. That heads of state do not enjoy immunity for mass atrocities is now well-established in international law and was confirmed in the trials of Slobodan Milošević of Serbia, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, and Charles Taylor of Liberia.

The charges are cautiously and narrowly drawn, as there is prima facie evidence that Hamas operatives took hostages, and that Israeli forces indiscriminately attacked a civilian population. The indictments do not contain charges of genocide or incitement to genocide which are harder to prove because they require evidence of the specific intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. Of course, these could be added later.

The initial line of defense we can expect is that the defendants had no choice but to respond with violence to unreasonable provocation. This “necessity defense” is flawed for a number of reasons. First, criminal courts see it as an admission of guilt rather than a claim of innocence, as the possible mitigating circumstances of the crimes are only relevant at the sentencing stage. Second, international law has upheld a distinction for centuries between the reasons for going to war (ius ad bellum) and the conduct of war (ius in bello). Therefore, participants in a just war may still commit unjust and criminal acts, as the United States and Allies did in the Second World War when they firebombed civilian centers in Germany and Japan.

The most immediate consequence of the application for arrest warrants is that the charges will be reviewed by the Pre-Trial Chamber of the ICC which must decide in the next few weeks if there is sufficient evidence to proceed. If arrest warrants are issued, the defendants will be highly circumscribed in their travel because the 124 countries that are signatories to the ICC Statute are bound by treaty to arrest the defendants and extradite them to the ICC in The Hague. Norway was the first state party in Europe to declare publicly that they will comply with their statutory obligation to arrest and extradite the five defendants.

Then there are a number of possible but as yet unknowable consequences. The indictments may prompt the defendants, knowing they are under heightened legal scrutiny, to act in a more restrained manner in the conflict. On the downside, the charges may hamper peace negotiations and humanitarian relief efforts as they did when President Al-Bashir of Sudan was charged in 2006 by the ICC prosecutor with genocide in Darfur. Powerful allies of Israel such as the United States may seek to have the charges against Netanyahu and Gallant delayed by a year at the UN Security Council, although this resolution would need unanimity among the Security Council’s Permanent 5. Political and military leaders in countries that supplied weapons to Hamas or Israel, when it was foreseeable that they would be used as part of a widespread attack on a civilian population, could be indicted for aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity, a precedent established in 2012 in the Perisić case at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Whatever happens next, the ICC indictments creates the possibility of some measure of accountability for the wanton slaughter of civilians in the Israel/Hamas conflict. Truth-telling is a form of accountability, and victims have an inalienable right to an investigation of the acts that harmed them and their relatives. Courts authorize truths, and if there is a trial, the record will constitute the official account of the 2023-24 conflict.

Accountability for political and military leaders who authorized mass killings is fundamental for building democratic and representative institutions after a conflict. Although this seems far away, acknowledging mass crimes and providing legal remedy is also the basis for any repair and reconciliation between the parties and peaceful co-existence in the future. And, as anthropologists of law and human rights have been saying for decades, the process is just as important as the outcome.

Richard Ashby Wilson is a professor of anthropology and law at the University of Connecticut School of Law