Cruelty and Global Politics

This special issue of Global Studies Quarterly focuses on the topic of cruelty and global politics, including cruelty's connections with, and as a manifestation of, global injustice and inequality. We put out this call motivated first and foremost by our contemporary social and political setting, where cruelty seems to be ubiquitous, exemplified by racism, xenophobia, and willful indifference. One might point to the populist turn of the 2010s and 2020s as the moment when cruelty became fashionable. However, as essayist Adam Serwer noted in his now famous thesis from 2018, since elaborated in a 2022 book, “The Cruelty is the Point,” cruelty has been a feature of group solidarity and behavior throughout history. This suggests, as Serwer asserts, that “Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit” (Serwer 2018). Indeed, philosophers have wrestled with cruelty for some time. One of the most sustained treatments, by Richard Rorty in his 1989 book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, harvested insights from novelists such as Vladimir Nabokov and George Orwell. Their work, Rorty argued, “is socially useful” in that it helps “us attend to the springs of cruelty in ourselves, as well as to the fact of its occurrence in areas where we had not noticed it” (1989, 95). If cruelty is more fundamental to human existence, then it may be a core feature of global politics that necessitates a rethinking of our theories, perspectives, methods, and even vocational pursuits. It means a refashioning of what we assume drives individuals, groups, states or any international actors in global politics. We know of no systematic treatment of cruelty in global politics so far, and this special issue collectively explores cruelty and its manifestations and roles within global politics. Owing to our journal's inaugural editorial plea that “‘Global’ necessitates an all hands on deck approach, a requirement for scholars to think big about the world and to approach it with a combination of humility and courage,” we invited manuscripts for this special issue that involved a wide variety of approaches, methods, and perspectives. This included how cruelty can be studied and understood historically, legally, politically, economically, institutionally, and in spaces from the global, to the international, regional, national and local. We received 61 abstracts for this special issue call, that quantity matched by high quality across the proposals, reflecting a strong interest in understanding cruelty in global politics. The proposals investigated many aspects of global cruelty, such as historical origins of cruelty, global politics of cruelty, global politics of justice and inequality, cruelty, indifference and health, strategic use of cruelty in conflict, global racial inequality, global economic inequality, global diffusion of justice movements, global gender inequality and injustice, and social movements for global justice and equality. The result, after several stages of peer review of proposals, and then manuscripts, is 14 articles published in this issue that reflect this diversity of interests and approaches, and a large step towards accounting for cruelty in International Relations going forward. Several articles take on cruelty of global economic injustice. In his contribution, Ore Koren identifies pathways linking political violence and cruelty with lower socioeconomic activity at the local level. He finds that violence disturbs socioeconomic activity in multiple ways, including by hurting businesses and laborers, scaring away tourists, and decreasing local investment. Bryan Early and Dursun Peksen introduce a new Freedom from Misery (FFM) Index to capture the disparate, adverse effects of sanctions on socioeconomic and political conditions within target states. They find that U.S. sanctions, particularly those inflicting major costs on targeted economies and those imposed for human rights reasons, inflict extensive cruelty on their targets’ populations. Monika Thakur draws on research from Nigeria, Jordan and Myanmar to understand the normalization of cruel, everyday forms of structural violence in the Global South through the theoretical lens of necropolitics. Stanley Dubinsky and Harvey Starr apply insights from linguistics to document ways in which the oppression of language use on the part of a dominant language/ethnic group is instrumentalized as a tool to inflict gratuitous societal pain and punishment upon non-dominant ethnolinguistic groups and their individual members. They illustrate their analysis with contemporary cases of the Uyghur minority in China, the Kurdish minority in Turkey, and the Hungarian minority in Slovakia. Sebastian Glassner, Pauline Augsten and Jenni Rall theorize that silencing of past atrocity is its own form of cruelty by taking on a deep investigation of Germany's silence regarding the colonial genocides of the Herero and Nama in today's Namibia. A number of articles in the special issue focus on the cruelty of migration. Tazreena Sajjad explores how the European Union legitimizes violence in its border regime and reconciles it with its core identity as a normative superpower that bases its legitimacy, at least in part, as a defender of human rights. Borders and asylum are also the focus of Claudia Aradau and Lucrezia Canzutti, who interrogate the asylum regime in the United Kingdom and the way it is situated within global topographies of cruelty, shaped by technologies of cruelty and the deactivation of empathy. Similarly, Catherine Goetze investigates the cruelty of US asylum family separation policy under the Trump administration through the lens of contested sovereignty to understand which types of sovereignty enable cruelty against migrants and refugees at which points in time. Marta Bashovski uses the background of Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker program to explain how immigration policies often produce depoliticized justifications for systemic racialized exploitation. Jonathan Austin explores how digital media have transformed how knowledge of violence is produced, circulates, and affects those who witness it. His article demonstrates how this visibility of cruelty affectively fractures our ontological security, undermines societal solidarity, and amplifies polarization. Susan Jackson and Renee Marlin-Bennett also focus on the digital. They examine the activities of cruel memes—practices of creating, commenting on, reinforcing, sharing, remixing, and otherwise endorsing digital cruelty—as micro-scale hostile engagements in global politics. Yuna Han and Olivia Nantermoz look at the notions of cruelty embedded in international law by examining the different relationships between liberal logics and cruelty, and how they manifest themselves in two different processes of international criminalization that underpin the concepts of the crime of genocide and the crime against humanity. Using the empirical case of Colombia, Samuel Ritholtz explores the ontology of cruelty in civil war and introduces a new theoretical framework that reveals both the physical and ontological impacts of violence on civilian populations. Deborah Barros Leal Farias, Guilherme Casarões and David Magalhaes examine the relationship between cruelty, populism and public health by focusing on Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro's cruel indifference in the face of the covid-19 pandemic. We hope that as a collective endeavor, this special issue enables scholars and practitioners to grapple with cruelty in global politics, reflecting on ways that cruelty implicates not only the predominant assumptions made about international relations but also how urgently the topics explored must be addressed. We also hope that the insights of this special issue will necessitate, finally and more hopefully, rethinking of how cruelty can be confronted, challenged, resisted, and overcome.