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Review article, the past, the present, and the future: a bibliometric analysis of failed/fragile/collapsed state research during 1990–2020.

• Department of Political Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

The “failed/fragile/collapsed state” refers to state authority's complete or partial collapse, such as Somalia and Bosnia. According to Fragile States Index 2020 annual report, approximately 116 countries among 178 countries were in warning or alerting state quo, which hurts three-quarters of the world's population. A systematic scientometric interpretation of failed/fragile/collapsed state analysis would be helpful but is presently absent in the academic community. This review makes three donations by evaluating the 2,417 articles published in the Web of Science (WoS) Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) Collection between 1990 and 2020. First, it provides a unique prospect in failed/fragile/collapsed state studies through a detailed, systematic, and objective analysis. Second, the author has quantitatively tracked the progression of failed/fragile/collapsed state studies from 1990 to 2020. Finally, the author associated evolutionary trajectory analysis with future research directions, offering new pathways for failed/fragile/collapsed state studies. It also helps novice “failed/fragile/collapsed state” researchers and veteran scholars identify future research trends.

Introduction

The “failed/fragile/collapsed state” refers to state authority's complete or partial collapse, such as Somalia and Bosnia ( King and Zeng, 2001 ). According to Fragile States Index 2020 annual report delivered by the Fund for Peace ( Messner de Latour, 2020 ), ~116 countries among 178 countries are in warning or alerting state quo, which hurts three-quarters of the world's population.

A growing number of studies on failed/fragile/collapsed states have been published, as seen in the following Figure 4 . Some reviews have summed up these studies. Firstly, Brooks (2005) sought to challenge a global order and policy theoretical hypothesis, contending that the remaining state-based international framework failed to promote adequate responses to nation failure. Secondly, Di John (2010) provided a crucial analysis of later research that had sought to interpret what a “failed state” is and revealed why such states emerged. Thirdly, Nay (2013) disputed that the analytical underpinning of the state “fragility” and “failure” and concluded that the theories of “failed and fragile states” are deceptive, shallow, as well as policy-aligned tags that are volatile. Finally, Ferreira (2017) reviewed existing approaches to operationalize the failed/fragile/collapsed state concept.

In short, previous reviews sparked arguments and offered a foundational understanding of the field of failed/fragile/collapsed state studies since many years ago. However, recent years' rapid growth of failed/fragile/collapsed state studies means a thorough review of this academic field is more meaningful than decades before.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned current reviews focused only on a few articles published in political or economic. To the deepest of the author's understanding, no reviews have utilized the bibliometrics approach to scrutinize this domain's advancements comprehensively. As a result, we need a systematic and complete explanation of the academic development pathways, status quos, and future study directions. This review would systematically and technologically analyze the co-authorship structures among different nations, institutes, journals, and scholars, the hotspots, and the roadmap for future failed/fragile/collapsed state studies.

Second, the author has quantitatively tracked the progression of failed/fragile/collapsed state studies from 1990 to 2020. Specifically, this article shows how the frontiers of failed/fragile/collapsed state research shift yearly and gives readers a fast understanding of the academic structure of the substantially increasing group of failed/fragile/collapsed state research. Based on the 2417 samples of failed/fragile/collapsed state studies, this article blends landscape and timeline visualization to systematically examine failed/fragile/collapsed state literature.

Finally, the author associated evolutionary trajectory analysis with future research directions, offering new pathways for failed/fragile/collapsed state studies. In particular, the author has identified four possible research trends in failed/fragile/collapsed state studies:

• The definitions of the “failed state” and “fragile state” as well as measurement approaches of state failure.

• Systematically factors attribute to the state failure or state fragility from micro and macro levels.

• Multiple negative changes or catastrophic consequences that unequivocally triggered by state failure or state collapse; and

• Proposals encourage good governance and resist further conflicts and war within failed/fragile/collapsed states.

For each of the primary research trends proposed, the author recommends some scientific inquiries. In summary, this review catalyzes future failed/fragile/collapsed state studies by presenting academics with a comprehensive interpretation of the scientific groups, academic structure, hotspots, and future evolutions in the failed/fragile/collapsed state research domain.

Theoretical Concepts

Failed state.

Although the term “failed state” was created during the 1990s, there is still no precise definition because of various research views after the Cold War. However, there still have been many mainstream classifications.

According to Longley (2020) , the term “failed state” has no widely accepted meaning due to its subjective existence. Like “grace,” “fragility” is in the beholder's feeling. Suppose a state cannot enforce its principles steadily or present its inhabitants with essential profits and benefits. In that case, it is generally deemed “failed.” Revolution, rampant crime, ineffective and inflexible bureaucracies, nepotism, legislative incapacity, and military involvement in politics are common reasons for a state's failure/fragility/collapse.

Professors Bøås and Jennings both have criticized the term's ambiguity, claiming that heightened confusion in the wake of the September 11 attack, as the consequence of the war on terrorism, developed countries, in particular, regard “failed states” as a danger to international peace ( Bøås and Jennings, 2005 ). However, such a viewpoint is too political and founded on a misconception of the state's genuine essence of failure. Otherwise, they suggest that a better vital question to consider is not whether the state fell but “To whom the state fails and how.”

Fragile State

The “fragile state” is an academic topic that has become fashionable in the mid-90s since the September 11 terrorist attacks and has gained more momentum. Many policymakers and scholars conclude that the root of the contemporary conflict is within states rather than between them ( Rapoport, 2001 ; Ahmad, 2002 ; Esses et al., 2002 ; Kellner, 2002 ; McInnes, 2003 ; Skitka et al., 2004 ; Murphy, 2005 ). Low-capacity and low-income countries in the developing world are projected to face acute risks to the economies of their western neighbors ( Patrick, 2011 ). According to this logic, fragile states need economic development to offer security and essential goods to their people, lowering susceptibility and increasing resilience to inner and foreign challenges ( Patrick, 2011 ). Fragile states, in this sense, share much of the same problems with failed states but on a much smaller scale. Their fragility foreshadows what would happen if their administrative procedures were not improved ( François and Sud, 2006 ).

A fragile state has untrustworthy governments. According to Tyagi, fragile states are challenging to identify since they do not collect detailed crime and education statistics ( Tyagi, 2012 ). Fragile states are primarily described as:

1) Conflict/post-conflict/crisis/war or political change circumstances with dynamics.

2) The status of the government is deteriorating.

3) The fact that domestic GDP growth is slow.

4) Long-term diplomatic or economic instability situations or deadlocks.

Fragile states are more vulnerable to crises in one or more sub-systems ( Kornprobst, 2002 ). It is a country prone to internal and external disturbances as well as domestic and foreign disputes ( Jackson and Rosberg, 1982 ). To allow policymakers to act correspondingly, fragile countries are measured in terms of their vulnerability, fragility, and risk ( Call, 2011 ).

State Collapse

The breakdown, failure, or collapse of a state is called “state collapse,” which is the total breakdown of a sovereign regime ( Milliken and Krause, 2002 ). The increase of the state's disintegration after the Cold War—the dissolution of the regime and severe disturbance of justice and order in those separates of the world—is directly linked to the disturbance about a nation-state's destiny ( Dragović-Soso and Cohen, 2008 ). State collapse is also seen as the ultimate type of state decline: “in countries where authority and domestic order have practically vanished, the dramatics of the decline of state authority are identified ( Schachter, 1998 ).” Michael Reisman adds, “The collapsed state created more challenges than any other phenomenon about the prospect of the nation-state” ( Reisman, 1997 ).

Software Selection and Literature Search Method

Software selection.

Although many software programs facilitate bibliometric analysis ( Muñoz et al., 2020 ), many of them do not aid researchers in following the suggested workflow ( Muñoz et al., 2020 ). Among them, VOSviewer ( van Eck and Waltman, 2010 ), CiteSpace ( Chen, 2006 ), Carrot2 ( Osiński and Weiss, 2005 ), and Biblioshiny are the most useful tools.

Van Eck and Waltman created VOSviewer, a free Java tool for evaluating and displaying citation networks in the scientific collection. VOSviewer can construct and visualize bibliometric networks ( van Eck and Waltman, 2013 ). The operation interface of VOSviewer 1.6.16 can be seen in Figure S1 in the Supplementary Material .

CiteSpace is a free Java program to view and analyze scientific literature patterns and trends ( Chen, 2006 ). CiteSpace was used to list leading nations, institutes, specific journals, and scholars ( Chen and Song, 2019 ; Chen et al., 2019 ). The structures created by The operation interface of CiteSpace 5.7.R4 can be seen in Figure S2 in the Supplementary Material .

Carrot2 is a free-source research results clustering engine ( Stefanowski and Weiss, 2003 ). It is also created in Java and presented under the BSD license ( Stefanowski and Weiss, 2003 ). The operation interface of Carrot2 4.3.1 can be observed in Figure S3 in the Supplementary Material .

Biblioshiny is an R language software serving quantitative analysis in scientometric and bibliometrics ( Pritchard, 1969 ). The author utilizes Biblioshiny to display the top 5 journals' annual occurrence growth. The operation interface of Biblioshiny 3.1 can be seen in Figure S4 in the Supplementary Material .

The academic literature provides crucial details about scientific knowledge ( Chen and Song, 2019 ). Citation-based exploration has also been adopted to systematically analyze the academic domain's evolutionary trends and intellectual framework. Figure 1 details this review's workflow.

Figure 1 . The flowchart of this review (by Google Draw).

Literature Search Methodology

The author adopted the data collection procedures of Chen (2017) . First, the author compiled a selection of query words based on a thorough scan of current review papers. Then, running a search query to examine whether the applied words from the WoS SSCI dataset could be found. The author compiled a list of candidate phrases utilizing text processing analysis to evaluate the pilot query effects.

The author replicated the above procedures several times until the search query had obtained and verified a reasonably convergent result. The ultimate detail of terms in this research is displayed in Table 1 . The year 1990 was chosen as the starting time (After the drastic changes in Eastern Europe). The deadline is 2020/12/31 (The full-year nearest to the beginning of this research). The documents' “abstract,” “title,” “keyword plus,” and “author keywords” were all included in the WoS Core Collection's “TS” (Topic).

Table 1 . Search queries for SSCI articles of failed/fragile/collapsed state research.

As an unfortunate byproduct of collecting enough related literature as necessary, noise does not influence the ultimate results. This data collection approach coincides with the spirit of Chen et al. (2019) . As shown in Table 1 , since choosing “English” as the language as well as “Article” or “Review” as the form of publication for my research on failed/fragile/collapsed states, the author received 1,760 articles for “failed/fragile/collapsed state” research, 324 papers for “failed/fragile/collapsing nation” research, 365 papers for “failed/fragile/collapsing country” research and 2,417 papers for the consolidated strings of studies. The author has included 38,835 secondary documents cited by the 2,417 articles.

Discipline Co-occurrence Analysis

Figure 2 depicts a CiteSpace display with annotations. It compares and contrasts the citing and cited map data. On the left is shown its referencing network diagram, which includes 10,330 referring journals. Blondel's clustering method identified the groupings in various colors ( Blondel et al., 2008 ). On the right is shown its referenced graph, which includes 10,253 cited journals. CiteSpace's overall setup includes two kinds of styles: curves and arcs. In the arc style, a referral link is shown as a metaphorical arc. A citation link is represented as a smooth curve that travels from the originating journal to the citation's destination journal in the arc style. This arc style is meant to make the presentation of a large number of reference links easier to understand. In this failed state/fragile state/collapsed state research domain, dual–map overlay evaluations allowed tracing the conceptual basis of exceptionally fruitful and frequently cited articles. Figure 3 depicts the results.

Figure 2 . The CiteSpace 5.7.R4 interface.

Figure 3 . The journal–based dual–map of the Resource Curses, Dutch Diseases, and Conflict Resources–related papers on the global scientific mapping (by CiteSpace 5.7.R4).

The viewing of dual–map overlays was conducted using CiteSpace ( Chen, 2006 ). Carley and his collaborators developed a journal–based dual–map overlay ( Carley et al., 2017 ). It allowed displaying the publications in a particular data collection on the journal map of the global research domains. This review followed the articles in those journals' reference lists, overlaid them on another journal overlay graph, and connected the two graphs. Labeled ovals signify clusters of periodicals commonly referenced and cited.

Figure 3 's upper section simplifies more details by focusing on referenced article clusters. This was done by modifying the thickness of the lines according to the density of citations, using the z–record of citation connections ( Kim et al., 2016 ). Figure 3 reveals that failed state/fragile state/collapsed state-related publications are primarily distributed in the “economy, economic, and political” groups of journals. The cited articles, which can be considered the scientific domain's conceptual foundation, are mainly contained in the journal group “economy, economic, and political.” Figure 3 (lower half) depicts the major journal classes and their relationships, with the z–score used to scale the line thicknesses.

It can be illustrated that all the referring groups have cited articles from the “economics, economic, and political” or “psychology, education, and health” journal areas. It means that the academic foundation of the failed state/fragile state/collapsed state-related science remains relatively narrowly centered across particular scientific sub-domains.

The Yearly Distribution

From 1990 to 2020, Figure 4 illustrates the results of failed/fragile/collapsed state/nation/country research records (May 13, 2021). It can be divided into three steps. Stage I (1990–2001), the annual articles rarely exceeded 22. There were a few exceptions in 1996 and 2000, mainly due to “failed/fragile/collapsed state” literature rather than the other two strings of literature. In Stage II (2002–2013), following the September 11 attacks, the number steadily raised from 6 articles in 1991 to 59 in 2002. Stage III (2014–present) has seen a significant rise in related studies, with 169 papers published in a single year in 2014 and 204 in 2020.

Figure 4 . The annual distribution of three strings of articles from 1990 to 2020 (as of May 13, 2021).

Although it is tempting to believe that research on failed/fragile/collapsed state/nation/country research domain has grown in popularity, this shift can be recognized in the light of broader scholarly publication trends. It is unclear if the improved failed/fragile/collapsed state/nation/country research–related study outputs reflect this domain's increased academic importance if these phenomena are a function of increased relevance in political economy or sociology, or whether trends result from internal academic dynamics.

Country Distribution and Regional Cooperation

The betweenness centrality measure of Freeman et al. (1979) identifies possible paradigm transition crucial moments across time. A node's centrality is a graph-theoretical attribute that measures how important the position of a node is in a net. Table S1 in the Supplementary Material shows that the United States and the UK played critical roles in the international cooperation network.

The number of papers, Australia, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, France, and China, was ranked 3rd to 10th, as shown in Figure 5 . However, Table S1 in the Supplementary Material shows that despite having the ninth-most publications, Sweden has a small betweenness centrality (0.05), advising that Sweden has not established close cooperation structures with diverse countries despite its many articles. France was ranked 8th in many articles, and it had the 5th highest betweenness centrality score, indicating that French intellectuals collaborated with academics from other countries more closely. Another phenomenon that cannot be ignored is that the US, Australia, the UK links are unsurprising given more significant academic trends. European and American nations played more critical positions in failed/fragile/collapsed state research's academic output and international cooperation.

Figure 5 . Different countries with publications.

In order to focus on the most critical clusters and filter out redundant information, the authors have intentionally limited the number of nodes when operating VOSviewer to as many as possible in the range of 20-40. Using VOSviewer, and the “minimal number of articles for a country” was set to 10. Thus, the network of Figure S5 in the Supplementary Material contains 37 of the total 117 countries/districts. By utilizing VOSviewer, for the number of documents, the USA ranked 1st and the UK ranked 2nd. Using CiteSpace, the results of countries with citation explosions are illustrated in Figure S6 in the Supplementary Material .

Citation explosion indicates a very active field of study, as seen in Figure S6 by CiteSpace. Citation explosions identify an explosive event that may span many years or just one year. A citation explosion shows that a certain publication is linked to increased citations. Kleinberg's technique identifies explosions in CiteSpace ( Chen, 2006 ). The citation explosions of Israel last the most extended years, lasting 16 years (1993–2009), while the USA's exploration has the most explorations score (18.48).

The evolution of research on “failed/fragile/collapsed state” from the 1990s to lately 2000s relied mainly on scholars from the United States. England and Canada. Sweden has been rapidly strengthening in later periods, and its explosions are yet underway.

Institutes' Distribution and International Cooperation

Once the “minimum number of institute papers” is set to 15 using VOSviewer, the author gains the institute's co-authorship framework. Of the 1,695 institutes, 25 meet the thresholds. Table S2 and Figure S7 in the Supplementary Material show that the remaining 25 institutes are divided into 10 clusters by VOSviewer. The University of Oxford has the most (38) documents, and Stanford has the most significant citation numbers (3,657). The rest of the top five institutions of publications are Columbia University (36), Harvard University (33), the University of London (30), and the University of Birmingham (24). The top five institutes of citation numbers are Stanford University (3,657), Columbia University (2,107), Harvard University (1,213), University of Oxford (942), and University of Manchester (899). All of them came from either the United States or the United Kingdom. Each of the top 25 academic institutions is from countries in Europe and North America. The West still dominates this research field.

By detecting the institutes with occurrence exploration using CiteSpace, the author can determine which institutes are picking up fast in this field. As illustrated in Figure S8 in the Supplementary Material , the explosions of Harvard University and University Nashville have relatively more considerable intensity (6.65 and 4.69). In contrast, Columbia University and Harvard University have the most prolonged duration (5 and 7 years). The frequency can be found in Table S3 in the Supplementary Material .

It is helpful to discuss how very productive academics shape the reputation of their institutes. As shown in Table 2 , Tables S4 , S5 and Figure S9 in the Supplementary Material using CiteSpace, the total citation numbers of James D. Fearon and David D. Laitinare are 3,342, which were half of the UK and much higher than Germany. James D. Fearon and David D. Laitinare can rank 3rd among countries regarding the total citation numbers. This phenomenon is similar for prominent institutions; for example, Stanford University can rank third of the total citation numbers, rivaling most countries. Productive academics shape the reputation of their institutes and vice versa.

Table 2 . Citation number by countries using CiteSpace 5.7.R4.

The Distribution and International Cooperation Between Scholars

The author uses VOSviewer to explore how authors collaborate for failed/fragile/collapsed state research. Only 30 of the 4,355 contributors match the requirements. They are represented in the ultimate networks in Figure S10 in the Supplementary Material since the “minimum number of citations for an author” is 120 and the “minimum number of documents for an author” is 2. As shown in Table S8 in the Supplementary Material , we can see that James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin are the researchers with the most (3,342) citation numbers and in the remarkable focus of the graph. James D. Fearon is a fellow at Stanford University's School of Humanities and Sciences, lecturer of political science, and a senior fellow for International Studies. His research focuses mainly on armed conflict and political disorder. Fearon's research activities include local and ethnic war, tribal disturbance, the politics of industrial outcome, and democratic accountability ( James Fearon, 2021 ). David D. Laitin is also a political science professor at Stanford University. It can be seen that Egbert Sondorp, the researcher with the most (7) publications, is a professor at the Royal tropical institute in the Netherlands. His academic interests are mainly in health in fragile and conflict-affected areas.

Using CiteSpace to examine the top 50% of publications with the most citations each year from 1990 to 2020, the author detects no authors with citation explorations, which gives information that no specific article is linked with a roaring of citations. Collaboration among researchers is critical to advancing an academic field ( Li et al., 2017 ). Figure S10 in the Supplementary Material reveals a network of academics with coordination.

Cited Journals' Distribution

The author obtains the journal co-citation network via CiteSpace, as shown in Figure S11 in the Supplementary Material . The years per slice is 1. The selection criteria are top 30%, and the maximum number of selected items per slice is 100. Minimum spanning tree as well as the merged pruning network was the method. Larger nodes in Figure S11 in the Supplementary Material reflect higher citation occurrences. As shown in Table 3 and Tables S6 , S7 in the Supplementary Material , the citation frequency of the journal from the American Political Science Review was 412. International Organization had a citation frequency of 340, and Third World Quarterly had a citation frequency of 339. With a citation frequency of 329, World Politics was classified fourth, accompanied by International Security (327), Journal of Peace Research (311), World Development (294), and Journal of Conflict Resolution (290). The academic subjects of failed/fragile/collapsed state research are primarily from politics and economics, based on the category details.

Table 3 . The cited journals with frequency (by CiteSpace 5.7.R4).

Using CiteSpace, we can see that the top 20 journals in terms of betweenness centrality score were almost all from politics and economics ( Table 3 ), mainly including Theory International Politics (1.22), World Politics (1.04), American Political Science Review (0.82), and International Organization (0.82), confirmed the critical role of these journals in failed/fragile/collapsed state research. However, regarding exploration scores, Foreign Affairs was first with an exploration score of 33.63 in 2002–2011, followed by Thesis with an exploration score of 25.68 in 2018–2020. Other scientific journals with high exploration scores include World Politics, International Security, and American Political Science Review. It means that failed/fragile/collapsed state research is prevalent in politics, economics, sociology and has mushroomed in recent years.

Journals Annual Occurrence Growth

This part was carried out using Biblioshiny, an R package for co-citation and bibliometric analysis ( Muñoz et al., 2020 ). R is an ecological system, so all functionalities are available to users in an inclusive environment. Compared to most free software (e.g., CiteSpace and VOSviewer), Biblioshiny does not focus only on the data visualization but also on the correctness and statistical completeness of the results ( Muñoz et al., 2020 ).

Figure S12 in the Supplementary Material illustrates the top 5 journals' annual occurrence growth by Biblioshiny. The author applies the loess smoothing procedure. The smooth line is displayed using locally weighted smoothing and regression test—loess smoothing assists in the apprehension of treads over the year ( Nasir et al., 2020 ). After 1998, annual occurrences of Third World Quarterly, which is the principal origin of failed/fragile/collapsed state research literature, have expanded considerably. From 2013 until now, there has been a downward tendency of annual occurrences in Third World Quarterly, Journal of Peace Research, Development and Chance. From 2013 onwards, World Development, Journal of Conflict Resolution has a steady rise trend. Scientists and directors can examine these journals during pandemics since they may have a valuable understanding of the socio-economic effects. When regressing through ten years, most of the journals have no apparent loess smoothing.

The Intellectual Framework of Failed/Fragile/Collapsed State Research

Landscape view by citespace.

The creation of a fresh scientific field must draw on the conceptual basis of diverse related disciplines. Academic journal papers reflect the groundbreaking of special domains, and some publications in those papers serve as a scientific foundation for them ( Li et al., 2017 ). The structure of co-citation evaluation is a dynamic approach to reliably characterize and visualize the academic foundation's function ( Zhu et al., 2019 ). The author, therefore, accepted a co-citation structure evaluation to investigate the academic framework of failed/fragile/collapsed state research. CiteSpace was used to investigate the connections between cited sources that make up the failed/fragile/collapsed state field's intellectual foundation. The following picture of the landscape is based on articles from 1990 to 2020 ( Figure S13 in the Supplementary Material ). The selection criteria are g-index, and the scale factor k = 25, creating a structure of references cited yearly. The labeling source was “Title,” and the clustering process was performed using the log-likelihood rate approach. Aiming to increase the co-citation network's clarity, the author chose pathfinder and pruning sliced networks, which retain the essential connections ( Wang et al., 2018 ). The network's modularity score is 0.3406 and cannot be regarded as highly, suggesting that failed/fragile/collapsed state research items are not fully occupied in cluster co-citations ( Chen et al., 2019 ). The structure has a high median silhouette score of 0.9249, meaning that each cluster's publication is remarkably persistent for quality ( Li et al., 2017 ). All important cluster scores over 0.7 are reasonable, explaining that the failed/fragile/collapsed state science mapping is high-quality cluster analysis. Each node's size represents the citation frequency obtained from the related references.

Timeline View by CiteSpace

As shown in Figure 6 , CiteSpace was used again to provide a timeline view structure of co-citations to examine the primary literature on the evolution point to reflect each cluster's development trajectory and status quo ( Figure 6 ). The author chose the g-index as the selection criterion (scale factor k = 25). The author chose pathfinder and pruning sliced networks, which retain the essential connections ( Wang et al., 2018 ).

Figure 6 . The co-citation network of timeline view (by CiteSpace 5.7.R4).

Because of the length limitations of this research, the author focused on clusters 0–3; which were the top four major clusters. The Carrot2 tool was used to explore them further.

Leading Clusters Explanations

The author applied the Carrot2 tool to explore each cluster further, employing the treemap methods to obtain more insight. First, the author used CiteSpace to get all clusters and save the cluster information in Carrot2 format by CiteSpace. Then the author uploaded the cluster information to the Carrot2 website to get the treemap by Carrot2, as we can see in Figures 7 – 10 .

Figure 7 . Keywords in Cluster 0 (by Carrot2 4.3.1).

Cluster 0: State Fragility

Cluster 0 displays the largest cluster, involving 51 references whose mean published year is 2009. Cluster 0 has a silhouette score of 0.831, proving that this cluster is very consistent. Given that cluster 0 is the vast cluster, its theme is comparatively dispersed. Table S9 in the Supplementary Material shows more details. Carrot2 can process vital concepts derived from cited articles' titles, keywords, as well as abstracts using an algorithm method.

The first is the keywords. As is shown in Figure 7 , Figure S14 , and Table S9 in the Supplementary Material , the basic concepts of cluster 0 show significant discoveries connecting failed states (45), state failure (38) as well as state capacity (35), as seen in Figure 7 's foam tree visualization. More details can be found in Table S9 in the Supplementary Material . Concepts like “state-building,” “political power,” “the rule of law,” “developing world,” for example, highlight this cluster's primary focus.

The second is the most frequent references. The frequency with which key references are cited shows these studies' relative relevance and contributions to failed/fragile/collapsed state research. As a result, recognizing this significant progress will help future researchers grasp the critical studies in failed/fragile/collapsed states ( Li et al., 2017 ). Report about conflict, security, and development published by World Bank is the most cited reference in cluster 0 ( World Bank, 2011 ). Ghani and Lockhart created a new research paradigm for failed/fragile/collapsed state studies, which is the second most cited reference ( Ghani and Lockhart, 2009 ). The third most referenced article by Hagmann and Hoehne is on the multiple state-building processes and kinds of statehood that have arisen within Somalia ( Hagmann and Hoehne, 2009 ).

The third is the vital literature from previous years. The timeline view depicts three stages of cluster 0's evolution ( Figure S14 in the Supplementary Material ). The first period was from 2005 to 2009. The first reference in cluster 0 provides an approach to the most contentious issues around globalization—scientific research, neoliberalism, governance—from the perspective of the “anthropological” problems ( Hannerz, 2006 ). The first citation exploration during the first period is the article that provided relief in crisis times and built capacity in developing states to accelerate their advancement ( Patrick, 2007 ). Rice and Patrick presented the Developing World's Index of State Weakness, which includes all 141 developing countries in four critical spheres: social welfare, security, political, and economic ( Rice and Patrick, 2008 ). It is the second citation exploration during the first period. The second period was from 2010 to 2011. As the author has previously described, the enormous citation exploration among all clusters appeared. The third period was from 2012 to 2014. The most cited publication was published by Grävingholt et al. (2012) , with no evidence of a citation exploration during this period. The following paragraph reviews some other high-frequency articles worth noticing.

More specifically, Taylor and Botea (2008) explained diversity in nation efficiency among the developing world's most war-prone countries. They discovered that the Vietnam war helped state-building. In comparison, the war in Afghanistan has been state-damaging. Goldstone et al. (2010) studied political uncertainty in states worldwide and built up a model that identified states that encountered instability. Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) convincingly proved that human-made political and economic systems determine economic prosperity (or scarcity of it). The distinctions between the Koreas are owed to the government that made these utterly different institutional paths. Paris (2010) distinguished between reasonable and unjustified critiques, calling for a more unified debate about the liberal peacebuilding's flaws and prospects.

Cluster 1: Successful Intervention

As shown in Figure 8 , Table S10 , and Figure S15 in the Supplementary Material , the second-largest cluster is cluster 1, comprising 27 publications over 9 years from 2010 to 2019. The author used Carrot 2 once more to in-depth analyse cluster 1.

Figure 8 . Keywords in Cluster 1 (by Carrot2 4.3.1).

The first is the keywords. According to the foam tree imagery, cluster 1's basic concepts include “developing world,” “aid effectiveness,” “civil war,” “failed states,” “service provision,” as well as “public health.”

The second is the most frequent references. Figure S15 in the Supplementary Material presents that this cluster is uneventful in citation frequency and exploration importance, despite high-profile references. The half-life metric shows how long it would take for half of the existing publications to become obsolete. The half-life of classic publications is greater than other forms of publications ( Burton and Kebler, 1960 ).

The third is the vital literature from previous years. Both Menkhaus (2014) and Grävingholt et al. (2015) have a half-life score of 4.5, suggesting that these two classic studies contribute actively to cluster 1 study assessment. Menkhaus (2014) alleged that some remarkable successes had appeared at the local level in Somalia, both with formal and informal authority structures. Fragile statehood, according to Grävingholt et al. (2015) , is described as failures in one or several of the state's core capabilities: governance, efficiency, and authority. The following paragraph discusses some other high-frequency articles worth noticing. Why poor states are recommended to diminish administrative autonomy while high-income entities are asked to reinforce it was analyzed by Fukuyama (2013) . Gisselquist (2014) paid specific consideration to the character of foreign aiding, providing unique traction on concept progress on state-building. Lee et al. (2014) discovered an extraordinarily limited manifest in a steady relation between statehood and supply distribution. Pettersson and Wallensteen (2015) confirmed that although the peace negotiations expansion been part of a constructive tendency since 2011, several peace processes remained weak by the end of 2014.

Cluster 2: Peace Research

The first is the keywords. As seen in Figure 9 , Figure S16 and Table S11 in the Supplementary Material , the third-largest cluster was cluster 2, comprising 68 references over 9 years from 2008 to 2017. Cluster 2 had a silhouette value of 0.913. Carrot2 was used once more to delve further into cluster 2. According to the foam tree visualization, cluster 2's key principles include “state failure,” “national security,” “growing,” “security forces,” “security governance,” “citizens,” “foreign aid, militias,” “risk assessment,” and “the Democratic Republic of Congo”. Figure S16 shows that this cluster was considerable in citation frequency and explorations importance with high-profile references.

Figure 9 . Keywords in Cluster 2 (by Carrot2 4.3.1).

The second is the vital literature from previous years. Hendrix (2010) determines and addresses key theoretical and assessment issues supported by measures of state competence in investigations of civil conflict. He proposed three factors to describe state capacity: the first, rational validity, which encompasses administrative competence; the second, rentier-autocraticness; and the last, neo-patrimoniality ( Hendrix, 2010 ). From Syria to Sudan, authorities maintain tacit links with militias that utilize terrorism against opposing groups and communities ( Carey et al., 2015 ). According to Carey et al. (2015) , certain regimes may dodge responsibility for violence and repression by delegating violence to these informal state–militia formations. Cohen and Nordås (2015) discover that governments use sexual violence as a supplement to militia-based violence. Militias that have recruited youngsters are also linked to greater rates of sexual violence, according to the researchers. According to Coggins (2015) , most failed, and failing nations are not prone to terrorism. Those at war or undergoing governmental collapse are substantially more prone to experience and cause fear among the “most unsuccessful” regimes.

More specifically, the number of institutions in the organization, the level of centralization among these institutions, and the division of power across them are all considered by Bakke et al. (2012) to be three essential characteristics of fragmentation. Chandler (2012) suggested that human security can be conceptually analyzed in terms of post-intervention. Clunan and Harold (2010) investigate whether and how “ungoverned areas” contribute to global instability, considering the many locations where state authority is challenged. They proposed that the most important ambition of all state-construction is to establish a justifiable state by the people it governs. Lake (2016) discusses the crucial dilemma between validity and loyalty that all international state-building efforts face, such as the well-known success stories of West Germany and Japan after 1945. Kreutz (2010) gives fresh intelligence on the break and end dates of armed conflicts, as well as the methods of ending them. His findings showed that following government triumphs or the deployment of peacekeepers, intrastate wars are less likely to repeat. Waal (2009) looked at how unstable African nations functioned politically and economically. He argued that the leaders in these countries use the lens of a ‘political marketplace' to obtain the highest reward for loyalty within patrimonial systems, including Sudan and the DR Congo. Horizontal imbalances between politically significant ethnic groups and governments, according to Cederman et al. (2011) , may increase ethnonationalist conflict. They also discovered that in countries with extreme inequality, both affluent and poor groups fight more often.

Cluster 3: Failed State

As seen in Figure 10 , Figure S17 , and Table S12 in the Supplementary Material , the fourth largest cluster was cluster 3, comprising 62 references over 7 years from 2000 to 2007. Cluster 3 had a silhouette value of 0.934. Carrot2 was used once more to delve further into cluster 3.

Figure 10 . Keywords in Cluster 3 (by Carrot2 4.3.1).

The first is the keywords. According to the foam tree visualization, cluster 3's key principles include “Cold War,” “nation-building,” “terrorist groups,” “long war,” “state capacity,” “global order,” “territorial integrity,” “conflict prevention,” “international legal,” “security council,” and “global order”. Figure S17 in Supplementary Material shows that this cluster was considerable in citation frequency and explorations importance with high-profile references.

The second is the vital literature from previous years. More specifically, Fearon and Laitin (2004) argued that, ironically, the Bush administration had undertaken state-building projects. They stated that the world was evolving in such a manner that the most excellent security dangers and difficulties now stem from the repercussions of political turmoil, humiliation, and misrule in the third world, rather than from superpower security rivalries such as China and Russia ( Fearon and Laitin, 2004 ). Rotberg (2004) proposes a novel theory that defines and categorizes situations on a spectrum ranging from weak to failed to collapsed. Depth case studies of countries that have collapsed and dissolved are used to demonstrate the state failure paradigm (Somalia, Sierra Leone, the DR Congo, Sudan), states that are dangerously weak (Tajikistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia), and states that are safe although weak (Tajikistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Colombia,). Over 10 million people have died in failed governments' civil conflicts since 1990, and hundreds of millions more have been deprived of basic rights ( Rotberg, 2010 ). Terrorism has only exacerbated failing governments. Rotberg (2010) looked at how and why states degrade, as well as what may be done to prevent them from collapsing. According to political, social, and economic factors, he defined and classified strong, weak, failing, and collapsed nation-states ( Rotberg, 2010 ). Better domestic government in poorly governed, failing, and occupied polities, according to Krasner (2004) , would need the transcendence of recognized standards, including the development of shared sovereignty in unique regions.

More precisely, Piazza revealed that the severity of state failures in the Middle East equals the intensity of terrorist attacks, providing an empirical basis for the link between state failure and terrorism ( Piazza, 2007 ). According to Rotberg, there are many revealing signposts along the path to state collapse ( Rotberg, 2002 ). On the economic front, living conditions steadily deteriorate as elites reward favored families, clans, or small groups with cash benefits. Leaders and their cronies violate democratic norms on the political level. On a personal level, damaging actions made by individuals have nearly invariably resulted in state failure. President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, for example.

The likelihood of effective US-led state-building in the Arab World and beyond, according to Berger and Weber (2006) , is the most restricted they have ever been. The terrorist acts on September 11, 2001, according to Hagel (2004) , were harbingers of a turning moment in US history. Ismail (2016) developed a theoretical foundation for the study of state fragility phenomenon by applying the contract method of state theory, which emphasizes structural circumstances as the fundamental cause of state failure and state fragility. He claimed that the failure of certain post-colonial civilizations is because of their inherent social fragility. According to Li (2005) , democratic engagement in a country minimizes transnational terrorist events. Additional explanatory factors need to be found, according to Newman (2007) , since weak or failing nations may offer an enabling environment for particular sorts of terrorist organizations to operate.

Finally, the danger of terrorism, which has flared up in Indonesia and Africa, has brought failed nations to a new level of urgency and significance ( Rotberg, 2004 ). Failure used to be purely humanitarian, with more minor consequences for peace and security ( Rotberg, 2004 ). Nowadays, scholars are more concerned about the relationship between failed states and the international system.

Roadmap for Future Failed/Fragile/Collapsed States Research

The author identifies four under-explored topics in failed/fragile/collapsed state studies based on the thorough evaluation of failed/fragile/collapsed state studies offered in the preceding sections. The author also proposed some appropriate challenges for future research on each of the topics, as noted below:

Q1. How does foreign aid help failed/fragile/collapsed states and promote economic growth? What conditions are foreign aid not helpful to the failed/fragile/collapsed states' recovery and humanization disaster alleviation?

Q2. How will international intervention play its positive role in helping failed/fragile/collapsed states start-up their economy and minimize civil conflicts triggered by guerrilla and rebels? How can the potential adverse effects of international intervention play in failed/fragile/collapsed states be effectively avoided?

Second, a failed/fragile/collapsed state is not an island but is firmly anchored in the international societies and neighboring countries' nets. The best explanation for why nation-states failed can be in the basic system of the international environment that causes it. Although Jörgensen et al. (2011) emphasized the multi-level embodiment of failed/fragile/collapsed states, only some case studies looked at the multi-level international elements' effect on states' fragilities. There is limited experimental research, to the best of our understanding, which comprehensively examines the embodiment of failed/fragile/collapsed states at the macro, meso, and micro levels simultaneously. The international systems, neighboring countries' environmental backgrounds, social and political, and institutional factors can influence state failure or fragility. Given that failed/fragile/collapsed states are embedded in external nations, institutes, and racial backgrounds that can constrain and enable state fragility ( Siqueira, 2014 ), future research should develop a coordinated research structure to illustrate how state fragility is rooted in the macro, meso, and micro environment holistically. Some issues that need consideration include:

Q3. What role does failed/fragile/collapsed states play in the macro, meso, and microenvironment? What are the geological effects of the ethical and communal background of states' fragilities?

Finally, recent studies have concentrated on the consequences of the United States' emergence as a “failed state” during the Trump administration for his catastrophic way to respond to Covid-19 ( Nowroozpoor et al., 2020 ), West-Europe's welfare burden states ( Meuleman and Delespaul, 2020 ), PRC (People's Republic of China) as an authoritarian state with ironically high legitimacy ( Nathan, 2017 ). It is controversial that these countries be defined as failed states or due to scholars' habit of being prudent and pessimistic in academic thinking. The author calls for further research to focus on some more in-depth country studies on how they recovered from failure or collapsing status, for example, Rwanda's economic miracle after the genocide ( Zorbas, 2004 ), Uganda's successful AIDS eradication case after the topple of Amin autocracy ( Parkhurst, 2001 ). Interesting questions include:

Q4. To what degree do racial or economic considerations interact for circumstantial dynamics that contribute to state collapse or fragility?

Q5. How do developed and developing countries vary in the configurations resulting in state failure/fragility?

Q6. What factors prompt some fragile states to recover from failure and pick up economic growth and racial reconciliation?

Q7. What are the challenges other fragile/failed states face when they launch economic and democracy recovery programs? What are their strategies for conquering these challenges?

Limitations

There are some limitations to this review.

First, it is a pity that this review only includes the 2,417 SSCI documents, and this may trigger imbalances since the 38,835 secondary documents cited by these SSCI papers are much more numerous than the primary documents. Another shortcoming is that the 38,835 secondary documents cited are not included in the proposed analyses above. The research depends on the search strategy defined in Results Section. Utilizing different search phrases, searching by keywords, abstract, and title, or searching through a dataset rather than the WoS database will affect the number of articles identified and, as a result, the performance. Despite being one of the most extensive significant abstracts and citation collections of peer-reviewed papers, the WoS Core Collection is not without flaws; it may not include all studies. As a result, other databases, particularly the growing number of preprints accessible on Google Scholar and Scopus, might have contributed additional insights not accessible in this research domain. However, since the emphasis of this research was on detecting the fundamental structure rather than counting citations or co-citations, this problem was mitigated. This article's findings are still crucial to understanding the landscape and evolution of fragile/failed/collapsed states studies among political science, economics, and political economics.

Second, another limitation and criticism of this review relate to the method, which includes articles and reviews. Some criticisms need to be prioritized, which relates to the methodology for building the corpus and the inclusion of reviews in addition to articles ( McMahan and McFarland, 2021 ). It would be helpful to try coupling analysis of articles only. Including reviews in order to carry out a new review is controversial in academic circles. First, papers cited by review articles may experience a significant drop in future citations, as McMahan and McFarland (2021) suggested. They looked at the impact of review articles on the publications they referred to and discovered that works cited in formal review articles lose a significant number of future citations. Rather than the individual publications referenced in the review, the review is often cited. In brief, reviews are a sort of creative destruction in that they establish a cohesive sub-domain based on a set of exemplars and reduce the impact of non-exemplars in the future ( McMahan and McFarland, 2021 ). Although, it seems to be a convention in bibliometric analysis to analyze articles and reviews together ( Deng et al., 2020 ; Yang et al., 2020 ; Ye N. et al., 2020 ; Ye P. et al., 2020 ; Yeung and Mozos, 2020 ; Yu et al., 2020 ; Zhai et al., 2020 ). My review is not exempt, which uses a joint analysis of articles and reviews, but it should not be overlooked that the analysis might be more scientific and rational if the reviews had been removed from the search query.

Ultimately, the restriction on English-language documents and the paper type restriction on articles or reviews may lead to research blind spots. It is debatable if citations should be used as a substitute for the importance of scientific contributions ( Garfield, 1979 ; Fong and Wilhite, 2017 ). In scientometric analyzes, citation indices, including the cumulative number of citations, are often criticized for calculating influence and recognizing trends. Since citations take years to gain, relying on multiple citations can reduce specific important patterns, particularly in more recent research.

Conclusions

This bibliometric review of failed/fragile/collapsed states research helps practitioners understand this field and provides necessary implications. Based on the bibliometric analysis using science mapping approaches, this review's contribution is based on a not pre-selected and better objective examination of the basic framework as well as the progression of failed/fragile/collapsed state studies. Previous studies in this domain have specialized in a single topic or strong-influential journals in a specialized field while overlooking trends as well as fundamental studies from new journals and disciplines. This bibliometric analysis concentrated on thousands of reference statistics other than a limited total of papers pre-chosen by the analyst. It is statistics-based and less bias-oriented than previous analyzes. Reviews may influence the future direction of study in an emerging research topic by combining the results into a cohesive narrative. The distinctive discursive tendency of reviews, which focuses on novices' clarity of synthesis from a perspective wholly engaged in current academia, suggests that they might play a generative role in research output creation ( McMahan and McFarland, 2021 ).

This bibliometric analysis makes three donations. First, this review provides a unique prospect in failed/fragile/collapsed state studies through a detailed, methodical, and objective analysis. The initial qualitative reviews have traditionally relied on personal judgment, whereas only a few quantitative review studies have focused solely on statistical evidence. This review enhances earlier articles by doing co-citation and co-occurrence structure analysis and envisioning them through a detailed, precise mechanism.

For starters, due to government mismanagement and corruption, failed/fragile/collapsed states often have difficulty securing funding from self-enriching bureaucracies' hands ( Khan, 2015 ). Although some scholars have challenged the efficacy of foreign humanitarian aid in improving government performance in developing countries, especially failed/fragile/collapsed states ( Waheed, 2014 ). Exploring the boundary conditions of foreign humanitarian aid's positive effects in helping failed/fragile/collapsed states may become increasingly relevant in the future, and more research on the negative impact of foreign humanitarian aid on failed/fragile/collapsed states is called for. Research into the trends and internal processes that contribute to this negative impact and how to mitigate it may have practical suggestions for politics, principally in the least developed countries, who wish to rebuild their failed/fragile/collapsing motherland and reduce humanitarian disasters by encouraging their countries to develop economies. The following are some of the provocative questions.

Secondly, current research has focused primarily on the failure/fragility states' political and economic consequences, with little attention paid to their interdependencies. Understanding their dynamic interaction could be crucial in understanding how failed/fragile/collapsed states emerge. It is possible there is not only one “ideal model” for complicated failed/fragile/collapsed states. As long as the failed/fragile/collapsed states and the environment “match,” different failed/fragile/collapsed states will emerge by circumstances in different situations. To solve this challenge, future studies could look at different combinations of cross-cultural social considerations and supporting external factors at the local, provincial, and country level. Rather than pursuing once-in-a-lifetime strategies, policymakers and economists can seek context-unique solutions. The following questions were given to us.

Finally, the results show articles in political and economic journals are the most referred to in this field, barring new competence from other subjects from entering the fragile/failed/collapsed state studies. As a result, fragile/failed/collapsed state research journals can broaden their scope and incorporate expertise from multiple disciplines.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frma.2022.720882/full#supplementary-material

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Keywords: data analysis, bibliometric review, science mapping, emerging trends, political economy, failed/fragile/collapsed state research, academic structure

Citation: Wong CS (2022) The Past, the Present, and the Future: A Bibliometric Analysis of Failed/Fragile/Collapsed State Research During 1990–2020. Front. Res. Metr. Anal. 7:720882. doi: 10.3389/frma.2022.720882

Received: 05 June 2021; Accepted: 14 January 2022; Published: 04 February 2022.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2022 Wong. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Chi Swian Wong, mg1906009@smail.nju.edu.cn

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Why Do “Failed States” Exist?

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Maurício Vieira, Why Do “Failed States” Exist?, International Studies Review , Volume 22, Issue 3, September 2020, Pages 723–724, https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viaa022

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The concept of a “failed state” presents theoretical and empirical problems due to definitional complexity and the insufficient precision given to identifying a failed state. Moreover, the political ramifications of the term threaten countries labeled this way. Such propositions guide The Ideology of Failed States , an in-depth investigation into the role that labels play in the relationship between states and institutions. In this book, Woodward criticizes international institutions and the interventionist model of “failed states” they employ for sustaining the existing ideology surrounding the term. Her analysis of social reality—a reflection of why and how names matter in the international system—centers on the notion that the “failed state” concept is not only controversial but also needs to be deconstructed constantly. This entails understanding how failed states are framed, considering three core aspects: what ideology governs failed states, what sustains that ideology, and why intervention rooted in that ideology fails.

The central argument of the book—that “failed state” is not merely a simple label but rather an ideology—builds on Appleby (1978), who considers ideology to be the process of establishing a set of beliefs and perceptions with regard to a specific reality. Woodward argues that “failed state” works as an ideology because institutions, motivated by their beliefs and perceptions, apply their institutional policy agendas to countries that receive the “failed state” label due to a “need to accomplish their own organization mandates and goals” (7–8). At the same time, international institutions provide shared meaning and enable social action around it, making ideology a co-constitutive practice among different actors and levels. It is worth noting, however, that ideology does not function as a granted, determined, positivist assumption but rather is something constructed constantly through the engagement of local, national, and international actors as they address and (re)solve their issues of concern.

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An illusion of the epoch: Critiquing the ideology of ‘failed states’

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• Published: 04 October 2012
• Volume 49 , pages 568–590, ( 2012 )

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• Alison J Ayers 1  

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Since the 1990s, the notion of the ‘failed state’ has become a core organising concept in international, security and development idiom and practice. Although initially developed by policy networks, the proliferation of academic literature on ‘failed states’ accepts largely uncritically the accounts of foreign-policy makers, taking the notion of state failure entirely as given, as an unproblematic descriptive and analytical term. This article rejects such accounts, arguing that the concept of the ‘failed state’ remains essentially contested and under-theorised. In particular, the term immediately embodies a set of assumptions that obfuscate any serious understanding of the causes of social conflict and crisis. The article interrogates the concept of the ‘failed state’, the assumptions from which the thesis of ‘state failure’ is derived, its ideological character and integral relation to the history and current order of imperialism. The article does not refute the prevalence of social crises; rather, it contends that the notion of the ‘failed state’ is descriptively weak and analytically inadequate in furthering an understanding of the causes and conditions of such crises. Moving beyond critique, the article outlines a more adequate methodological, theoretical and substantive approach to analysis and explanation of social crises, centring on the structures and practices of imperialism.

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Introduction

Conclusion: New Developmentalism in the Twenty-First Century—Perspectives from the Global East and South

This is not to suggest that important differences do not exist between the various conditions classified by the ‘failed states’ literature. But, as Branwen Gruffydd Jones has argued, ‘the entire array can be treated as part of one overall discourse, defined not by the definitional particulars but by the more general approach to conceptual and substantive analysis’ (2004).

For stringent critiques of the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of statist perspectives, see Selwyn (2009) , Burnham (2002) , Cammack (1989) , Radice (2008) and Fine (2006) .

As Shahar Hameiri has detailed, state failure is commonly defined in terms of state capacity, but as ‘capacity is conceived in technical and “objective” terms, the political nature of projects of state construction (and reconstruction) is masked’ (2007; emphasis added).

Thus, as Mamdani (1999) notes, a key problem within the now commonplace thesis in Africanist political science that the state is ‘collapsing’ in more and more African countries is that it proceeds by making analogies and, in the process, overlooks what is different about the state in Africa, particularly the type of state created under colonialism.

The ‘failed states’ thesis rearticulates therefore a commonplace story of immaturity (cf. Kipling's infamous verse ‘… Your new-caught sullen peoples, Half-devil and Half-child’). The story of immaturity is integral to what Edward Said termed the epistemology of imperialism: ‘an assemblage of images and notions in terms of which the idea and destiny it prescribes are articulated and authorized’ ( Serequeberhan, 2010 ).

A detailed critique of Westphalia and its fetishistic hold on international relations is beyond the scope of the current article. Hitchcock (2008) provides an important critique of many of the myths of Westphalia, arguing inter alia that the ‘failed state actually begins with the concept of state sovereignty read to be ratified by the Peace of Westphalia’; this model of international order ‘was definitively a European solution to a European problem, namely, the Holy Roman Empire as a failed or failing state’. The Peace is considered to set the terms for sovereignty, non-intervention and legal equality between states, but key participants ‘assumed sovereignty and felt no particular urge to sanctify it for the benefit of others in either treaty [Munster and Osnabruck]’. Indeed, it ‘has not escaped historical commentators that the Peace of Westphalia sought to both inhibit and preserve the beneficence of imperialism’ – a contradiction that, for the imperial powers, remains ‘deliciously fertile’ (pp. 73–74).

The original report (2001) of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty was concerned primarily with reconceptualising ‘humanitarian intervention’ (following the Kosovo crisis), and many influential protagonists have portrayed R2P as a means of ‘legalising’ humanitarian intervention. Key R2P advocates have sought (largely unsuccessfully) to sever this association.

That the United States (together with other major Western powers) have failed to adhere to either international law or their own constitutional principles has been well documented, for example, in Chomsky (2000) , Chomsky (2006) and Blum (2005) . For discussion of the rhetoric of ‘we/they’ and ‘us/them’, see Saul (2008 , pp. 100, 111–113).

Burke's otherwise insightful critique claims that the attempts to embed a new internationalist norm have ‘potentially revolutionary consequences’ (‘Against the New Internationalism’, p. 76); similarly Martin Wolf, in ‘We Cannot Ignore Failing States’, argues that ‘What is being demanded here is revolutionary: a reconsideration of the basis of the world's political order’ ( The Financial Times , 8 June 2004).

This presumption underpins the manifold calls for a ‘new imperialism’ (see above); more generally, it informs the extensive literature on ‘global governance’.

Anghie traces this ‘dynamic of difference’ and its consequences through distinct historical periods including the sixteenth-century work of Francisco de Vitoria and legal issues surrounding Spanish relations with native ‘Indians’; the nineteenth-century positivist theories of sovereignty; the Mandate System of the League of Nations; the post-war system's undermining of the non-European state's sovereignty over its own natural resources; the Bretton Woods institutions’ ‘good governance’ project; and the Bush administration's ‘war on terror’.

This ‘power to rule’ ( Fieldhouse, 1999 , p. 71) is embodied variously in regimes of governance and authority, military power, finance, property, socialisation, knowledge and so on.

For accounts of different modalities of informal imperialism, cf. Magdoff (2003) and Tully (2006) .

Historical antecedents were also evident in the establishment of ‘nation-states’ in Latin America in the wake of anti-colonial struggles against Spanish and Portuguese rule.

The role of the state within capitalism has been the subject of extensive analysis; for discussion, see the Cambridge Review of International Affairs , 20 (4), 2007 edition on global capitalism and the states system.

Such claims are commonplace within the mainstream literature on globalisation, for example, Omae (1999) and Held and McGrew (1998) ; similar claims are also asserted in some critical literature, such as the deterritorialised global sovereignty of Hardt and Negri (2000) . Others, such as Robinson (2004) , argue that the transnational state apparatus is transcending the nation-state system as the organising principle of capitalism; for critique, see Anievas (2008) .

As Wood argues, capitalism's peculiar separation of the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’ embodies a political domain or space fragmented along territorial lines, heightening the non-direct correspondence between the two necessarily related ‘moments’ of class exploitation: the appropriation of surplus labour and the coercive power that enforces it.

Wood's original quote, ‘All capitalist families today are unhappy, and all for the same fundamental reasons, but each is unhappy in its own way’, is adapted from Anna Karenina , in which Leo Tolstoy argues ‘Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’.

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Acknowledgements

Very many thanks to Siba N. Grovogui, Branwen Gruffydd Jones, Jasmin Mujanovic, Alfredo Saad-Filho and Julian Saurin for the many thought-provoking conversations, and for insightful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this work. Thanks are also due to Rachel Elfenbein for her invaluable research assistance and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Simon Fraser University for a 2010 SSHRC-SFU Institutional Grant that supported this research. The usual disclaimers apply.

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Joseph Redman

The british stalinists and the moscow trials, (march 1958).

From Labour Review , Vol. 3 No. 2 , March–April 1958, pp. 44–53. Joseph Redman was a pseudonym of Brian Pearce. Transcribed by Ted Crawford. Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL) .

‘Foreigners little realize how vital it was for Stalin in 1936, 1937 and 1938 to be able to declare that the British, American, French, German, Polish, Bulgarian and Chinese communists unanimously supported the liquidation of the “Trotskyite, fascist mad dogs and wreckers” ...’ – W.G. Krivitsky, I Was Stalin’s Agent (1939), p. 79.

‘These apologists for Stalin will one day regret their hasty zeal, for truth, breaking a path through every obstacle, will carry away many reputations.’ – L.D. Trotsky, Les Crimes de Staline (1937), p. 62.

TWENTY years ago there took place the trial of Bukharin and twenty others, the third and largest of a series of three historic State trials in the Soviet Union. Like the fraction of the iceberg that shows above the water’s surface, these trials were the publicly-paraded fraction of a vast mass of repressions carried out in 1936-38 by Yagoda and Yezhov under the supreme direction of Stalin. It is not the purpose of this article to examine the trials themselves or to discuss their causes and consequences for the Soviet Union and the international working-class movement. Its purpose is merely to recall how the leaders and spokesmen of the Stalinist organization in Britain reacted to the trials and what some of the effects of their reaction were in the British working-class movement, so that lessons may be learned regarding the political character of the organization and the individuals concerned.  

The First Trial

The first of the three great ‘public’ trials took place in August 1936. Immediately upon the publication of the indictment, the DW came out with an editorial (August 17) accepting the guilt of the accused men: ‘The revelations ... will fill all decent citizens with loathing and hatred ... Crowning infamy of all is the evidence showing how they were linked up with the Nazi Secret Police .. .’ This instantaneous and whole-hearted endorsement of whatever Stalin’s policemen chose to allege at any given moment was to prove characteristic of the British Stalinist reaction to each of the successive trials.

The prototype of another statement which was in re-appear regularly throughout this period figured in the DW ’s editorial of August 22: ‘The extent and organization of the plot, with its cold-blooded killings of the leaders of the international working class, has shocked the Labour and socialist movement of the world.’ In reality, of course, the effect of trial was to compromise the Soviet Union in the eyes of many workers and to play into the hands of the most Right-wing sections. Accordingly, a third ‘keynote’ had to be sounded right from the beginning, with the headline in the DW of August 24 to the report that the International Federation of Trade Unions had asked the Soviet authorities to allow a foreign lawyer to defend the accused: Citrine Sides with Traitors . On the other hand, any expression of approval for the trial by a bourgeois newspaper or other ‘source’ was to be eagerly seized upon and publicized during these years, and already in this issue we find The Observer quoted, in a special ‘box’, as saying: ‘It is futile to think the trial was staged and the charges trumped up.’ [1]

With the minimum of delay the implications of the trials for current politics began to be drawn, especially with regard to Spain. The DW leader of August 25 affirmed that ‘Trotsky ... whose agents are trying to betray the Spanish Republic by advancing provocative “Left” slogans ... is the very spearpoint of counter-revolution’, and next day J.R. Campbell had an article comparing Zinoviev to Franco. At the same time, a programme of rewriting of the history of the Bolshevik Party and the October Revolution was launched with an article by Ralph Fox in the DW of August 28, entitled Trotsky Was No Great General , followed by another on September 1: He Was Always a Base Double-Crosser . [2] A Communist Party pamphlet The Moscow Trial , by W.G. Shepherd, carried the retrospective smear campaign further, telling readers that in October 1917 ‘the organization leadership was not, as is sometimes supposed, in [Trotsky’s] hands ... He was a bad organizer.’ The main point of this pamphlet, however, was squarely to identify ‘Trotskyists’ with police agents.

Shepherd based himself in his defence of the trial upon the declarations of D.N. Pritt, KC, (‘None can challenge either Mr Pritt’s integrity or his competence to understand the significance of court procedure and the value of evidence’), and indeed the importance of these cannot be exaggerated in assessing how this trial and its successors were ‘sold’ to the Left in Britain.

Mr Pritt made two principal contributions to the propaganda for the August 1936 trial. He wrote the preface to the pamphlet The Moscow Trial, 1936 , a report of the proceedings published by the Anglo-Russian Parliamentary Committee (secretary, W.P. Coates). This report omitted from the testimony of Holtzman, one of the accused, his reference to a meeting in a non-existent ‘Hotel Bristol’ in Copenhagen, a slip in the ‘libretto’ which had been widely remarked upon. (Compare p. 49 of this pamphlet with p. 100 of the English version of the Report of Court Proceedings. Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre , published in Moscow, 1936.) ‘Once again’, wrote Pritt, ‘the more faint-hearted socialists are beset with doubt and anxieties’, but ‘once again we can feel confident that when the smoke has rolled away from the battlefield of controversy it will be realized that the charge was true, the confessions correct, and the prosecution fairly conducted ... But in order that public opinion shall reach this verdict ... it must be properly informed of the facts; and it is here that this little book will be of such value.’ Pritt also wrote a pamphlet of his own, The Zinoviev Trial , in which he dealt with the suspicion some sceptics had expressed that the confessions might not be entirely spontaneous – might, indeed, be influenced by torture or intimidation of some sort. The abjectness of the confessions was ‘sufficiently explained when one bears in mind the very great differences in form and style that naturally exist between one race and another ... In conversations I have held in Soviet prisons with accused persons awaiting trial on substantial charges, I have not infrequently been struck by the readiness with which they have stated to me in the presence of warders that they are guilty and cannot complain if they are punished.’ And anyway, after all, accused persons often plead guilty when they see ‘the evidence against them is overwhelming’. True, no evidence was actually produced at the trial other than the confessions of the accused; but ‘it is no part of the duty of the judicial authorities to publish reports showing exactly how they have conducted preliminary investigations of which the persons who are at once most interested and best informed, viz., the accused, make no complaint.’ Actually, ‘one can well imagine that the Soviet Government, so far as concerns the point of view of properly informing foreign criticism, would much have preferred that all or most of the accused should have pleaded Not Guilty and contested the case. The full strength of the case would then have been seen and appraised ...’

What strikes one most forcibly in re-reading today the literature of the first trial is the complete silence of the British Stalinists about some of the most contradictory and question-begging of its features. Not only the famous Hotel Bristol – the even more famous Café Bristol was not ‘discovered’ until February 1937 – but many other, less ‘technical’, points were passed over. Molotov was conspicuously missing from the list of the ‘leaders of party and State’ whom Zinoviev and Co. were accused of plotting to murder – and from the ceremonial list of these leaders included by Vyshinsky in his closing speech – though he was the nominal head of the Soviet Government at the time. (Alexander Orlov, a former NKVD officer, tells us in his book The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes (1954), p. 81, that the dictator, who wished to frighten Molotov a little, personally struck out his name from the list of ‘intended victims of the conspiracy’!) [3] Nor did they refer back later on, when Kossior and Postyshev were put away as ‘Ukrainian bourgeois-nationalists’, to their presence among the leaders whose deaths had allegedly been demanded by Rudolf Hess, through Trotsky. Nobody questioned the consistency of accusing Trotsky of being a fascist while stating (Smirnov’s last plea, Report of Court Proceedings , pp. 171–2) that he regarded the Soviet Union as ‘a fascist State’. Nobody suggested that it was somewhat premature of N. Lurye to get himself sent into Russia by the Gestapo in April 1932 ( ibid. , pp. 102–3); or that Trotsky had shown curious tactlessness in choosing five Jews – Olberg, Berman-Yurin, David and the two Luryes [4] – to collaborate with the Gestapo. That Holtzman testified to meeting Trotsky’s son Sedov in Copenhagen whereas Olberg said Sedov had not managed to get there ( ibid. pp.87, 100) excited no surprise. Above all, the complete unconcern of the Prosecutor about these and other contradictions and oddities in the confessions, which he made no attempt to sort out, was matched by a corresponding unconcern among the British Stalinists. [5] Like Vyshinsky, too, they gave no sign of finding it suspicious that the treasonable intrigues of these Trotskyites’, dating from 1931, had been carried on exclusively with Germany, no role having been played, apparently, by Britain, France, Poland or Italy. (As Trotsky observed, there ‘terrorists’ might make an attempt on Stalin’s life, but never on Litvinov’s diplomacy.)

Jack Cohen, in those days responsible for the political education of communist students, contributed to the party monthly Discussion for September 1936 a piece on Heroes of Fascism and Counter-Revolution in which he asserted that in 1933 Trotsky had issued a call for ‘terroristic acts to “remove” the party leaders’, in an article in the Weltbühne which actually speaks not of terrorism but of a workers’ revolution against the bureaucracy. (Neither Cohen nor any of the other Stalinists ever quoted, of course, from Trotsky’s numerous writings condemning terrorism as useless and harmful, as ‘bureaucratism turned inside-out’, such as The Kirov Assassination [1935].) Pat Sloan, of the Friends of the Soviet Union (now British-Soviet Friendship Society), wrote in the New Statesman of September 5: ‘I do not see what was unconvincing in the Moscow trial.’ [6] Walter Holmes, in his Worker’s Notebook in the DW of September 4, told of a conversation with ‘members of the Labour Party’ who reassured him: ‘What are you worrying about? ... Everybody in our party has got enough sense to know they ought to be shot.’ Reg Bishop, however, admitted in Inprecorr of September 5 that Labour was not quite so solidly convinced on this point: ‘The Labour Daily Herald vies in venom and spite with the Daily Mail ... It is pathetic to see men like Brailsford and Tom Johnston failing to see through the tricks prepared for them by Trotsky to cover up his tracks.’ Douglas Garman, in the New Statesman of September 12, demanded: ‘If ... they were innocent, why should they have confessed at all?’ (The editor replied: ‘We say that confessions without independent corroborative evidence are not convincing.’) [7] Ivor Montagu, in Left Book News for October, pooh-poohed suggestions that torture, whether physical or moral, or promises of pardon in return for perjury, could have anything to do with the confessions, and gave some historical background in which he quoted Lenin’s criticisms of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, while saying nothing of his criticisms of Stalin. R. Page Arnot, in the Labour Monthly for October, wrote: ‘Trotskyism is now revealed as an ancillary of fascism ... The ILP is in great danger of falling into the hands of Trotskyists and becoming a wing of fascism. Let the members of the ILP look to it.’ Pat Sloan, again, in the October number of Russia Today specially devoted to the trial, had a new explanation for the confessions: ‘These were men who, in their desire for publicity, had never refused an opportunity to speak to a large audience.’ From the same inspired pen came an argument, in Controversy of December, worthy of the confidence men of South Sea Bubble days: ‘The Soviet Government does not intend to broadcast to the whole world all the evidence of activities of Hitler’s agents it could broadcast.’ (Though well-informed about the secret archives of the Soviet intelligence service, Sloan was, at this stage, a bit shaky on the topography of Denmark’s capital: ‘Anyway, are we sure there’s no Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen? The denial, I believe, comes only from Norway.’)

Towards the end of 1936 and beginning of 1937 there were two trials in Germany of real Trotskyites for real subversive activity. In Danzig, Jakubowski and nine others were given severe hard-labour sentences for issuing leaflets declaring that ‘the defence of the Soviet Union remains an unconditional duty for the proletariat’, and in Hamburg a group of fifteen, which included a Vienna Schutzbund member and a worker who had fought in the 1923 uprising, suffered similarly for similar activity. There were no confessions and there was plenty of material evidence. No report of these cases appeared in the DW or other Stalinist publications. It is curious that Nazi propaganda in this period alleged that in spite of appearances the Fourth International was a secret agency of the Third, operating on the basis of a division of labour. Accounts of a conference (at Breda) between representatives of the two Internationals were spread by Goebbels, just as Stalin told the world of Trotsky’s talks with Hess. [8]  

The Second Trial

Already during the period of the first trial, as we have seen, King Street’s concern for ‘working-class unity’ was subordinated to the paramount need to attack anybody and everybody in the Labour movement who expressed doubt regarding the justice of the verdict. This became still clearer when the second trial was launched, in January 1937. The DW of January 25 carried the headline: The Herald Defends Spies and Assassins , and a leader Enemies of the Working Class , which declared: ‘It is for the working class of Britain to deal with those who in this country constitute themselves the defenders of the Trotskyites and thereby assist fascism and strike a blow at socialism all over the world.’ On January 29 the paper attacked the New Leader for ‘playing into the hands of the enemy’ because it had called for an independent inquiry into the trial such as Pritt and others had organized in connexion with the Reichstag Fire trial in 1933. Arnot was the DW ’s reporter at the second trial: he assured readers that the only pressure which had been brought to bear on the prisoners was ‘the pressure of facts’ (January 27).

The campaign to justify Stalin’s purges and to make the utmost political capital out of them was raised to a higher level and put on a more organized basis than hitherto by John Gollan, in his address to the enlarged meeting of the national council of the Young Communist League held on January 30–31. The historical ‘rewrite’ adumbrated by Ralph Fox was undertaken more thoroughly and at some length by Gollan. The address was published as a. duplicated document under the title The Development of Trotskyism from Menshevism to Alliance with Fascism and Counter-Revolution . Gollan showed how Lenin’s chief assistant in building the Red Army was not Trotsky but Stalin, how Trotsky had advocated that industrialization be carried out ‘at the expense of the peasant masses’ (saved by Stalin) etc. etc. This remarkable assemblage of half-truths and untruths concluded with a list of ‘the real Bolshevik Old Guard’, in which figure the names Rudzutak, Bubnov, Chubar, Kossior and Postyshev, all shot or imprisoned by Stalin shortly afterwards. Harry Pollitt went one better than this in his list of ‘the real Old Guard’ who ‘are still at their posts’, by including the name of ... Yezhov, whom hardly anybody – probably not Pollitt himself – had even heard of until his sudden elevation in September 1936 to be head of the NKVD following Yagoda’s fall! This exploit occurred in a pamphlet called The Truth About Trotskyism , published at the end of January. Another gem from the same source is Pollitt’s comment on the confessions of the accused: ‘The evidence produced in the Moscow trial is not confessions in the ordinary sense but statements signed in the way depositions are signed in any British court ...’ [9] The main point of the pamphlet, made in a contribution by R.P. Dutt, was to show that it was ‘essential to ... destroy the Trotskyist propaganda and influence which is seeking to win a foothold within the Labour movement, since these attempts represent in fact the channel of fascist penetration into the Labour movement’. In addition to the Gollan address and the Pollitt-Dutt pamphlet the DW brought out a special supplement on the trial in its issue of February 1 (‘Keep It Always’), in which, after the ritual statement ‘everywhere in the British Labour movement the scrupulous fairness of the trial, the overwhelming guilt of the accused, and the justness of the sentences is recognized’, readers were urged to send protests to the Daily Herald regarding its sceptical attitude thereto. A statement by the central committee of the Communist Party published in this issue emphasized that ‘the lead given by the Soviet Union ... requires to be energetically followed up throughout the whole Labour movement, and above all in Great Britain ...’

From this time onward one can say without exaggeration that the fight against ‘Trotskyism’ became one of the main preoccupations of the Communist Party, diverting the energies and confusing the minds of its members and disrupting the working-class movement more and more. [10] R.F. Andrews (Andrew Rothstein) now came well to the fore, as might be expected, with a series of articles in the DW . ‘The criminals have received their well-merited sentences ... Millions of people have had their eyes opened to the inner essence of Trotskyism’ (February 5); ‘Trotsky ... a malignant, avowed and still dangerous criminal’ (February 9); ‘ Herald – Shameful Blot on Labour’, i.e., for doubting the justice of the verdict (February 15). [11] A mere pamphlet such as Pritt had devoted to the Zinoviev trial was now realized to be inadequate and a whole book, Soviet Justice and the Trial of Radek (1937), was published, the work of a fresh legal talent, Dudley Collard, though not without an introduction by Pritt (‘The impression gained from Mr Collard’s description will, I think, enable many who were puzzled by the first trial not merely to convince themselves on the genuineness of the second, but also to derive from that a conviction of the genuineness of the first’). This pathetic effort contains such propositions as (p.52): ‘I have read some statement to the effect that no aeroplanes flew from Germany to Norway in December 1935. It seems hard to believe that this is so ...’ Here the reference is to the statement issued by the Oslo airport authorities that no foreign aeroplanes landed there in December 1935, contrary to Pyatakov’s confession that he had landed there on his way to visit Trotsky. (Attempts were later made to explain that perhaps Pyatakov’s memory was at fault and his aeroplane had actually landed on a frozen fiord; but, alas, this version was incompatible with the accused man’s account of his journey by car from the aeroplane to Trotsky’s dwelling.) After a display of quite extraordinary gullibility, Collard came to the conclusion (p. 79) that ‘the court was more merciful than I would have been!’ That was sufficient to ensure his book the maximum boost treatment throughout the Stalinist movement. William Gallacher, reviewing Collard in the DW of March 19, wrote: ‘Here one sees the Soviet legal system as it really is, the most advanced, the most humane in the world ... It is a book which once read must make any normal human being resolve that never again under any circumstances will he have truck with Trotsky, his followers or any of his works.’ Harking back to one of the mysteries of the first trial, the DW gave a sizable bit of its valuable space in the issue of February 26 to a plan of the Grand Hotel, Copenhagen, allegedly showing that one could enter a café said to be called the Café Bristol through this hotel – though how Holtzman could have proposed to ‘put up’ at this café still remained unexplained! [12] The egregious Arnot, in an article on The Trotskyist Trial in the Labour Monthly for March, quoted Lenin on MacDonald to show how workers’ leaders can degenerate (but did not quote Lenin on Stalin!), took a swipe at Emrys Hughes (‘a middle-class Philistine’) for an article in Forward critical of the trials, and opened up with all guns against the Manchester Guardian . Principled political criticism of the Liberals was ‘out’ in this epoch of Popular-Frontery, but here was something more important. The Guardian had stated that, in the course of the waves of repression sweeping over the Soviet Union in the wake of the second trial, ‘the Polish communists ... have suffered heavy casualties under the Stalinist persecution’. As is now admitted, almost the entire leadership of the Polish Communist Party was in fact liquidated by the NKVD in this period, and the party itself dissolved. This was the buffoonery that Arnot wrote at the time: ‘They have not “suffered heavy casualities”; there is no “Stalinist persecution” ... At one time the Trotskyists complained that the condemnation of their errors was a sign of anti-Semitism. Now, apparently, the condemnation of their crimes is to be presented as “the assault on the Polish Virgin” ...’

At this time the Stalinists were putting forth determined efforts to capture the Labour League of Youth, for which they published a paper called Advance . The March issue of this journal carried an article, We Have Our Wreckers, Too! by Ted Willis, later to win fame as author of The Blue Lamp , but then the leading Stalinist youth-worker. ‘The recent trial and sentences on the Terrorists in Moscow were of particular interest to the members of the League of Youth for an obvious reason. That being the fact that, for the last year we have been blessed (is that the right word?) with a tiny group of people in the League who style themselves Trotskyists ... Turn them lock, stock and barrel out of the Labour movement!’ Fittingly, at the same time as Ted Willis was making his debut in this field, John Strachey, then the top Stalinist publicist in this country, was telling readers of Left News that he believed that

The psychological student of the future will look back on the long-drawn-out incredulity of British public opinion over the Moscow trials of 1936 and 1937 as one of the strangest and most interesting psychological phenomena of the present time. For it will be clear to such a student that there were no rational grounds for disbelief. The fact is that there is no answer to the simple question: ‘If these men were innocent, why did they confess?’ ... Before the inexorable, extremely prolonged, though gentle, cross-examination of the Soviet investigators, their last convictions broke down.

Major contributions to the fight against Trotskyism now came thick and fast. Stalin’s speech at the February-March plenum of the central committee of the Soviet Communist Party, setting out his thesis that the further the Soviet Union progressed the more intense became the class struggle and the greater was the need for security work, was published in full in the DW (‘Especially in Britain do we require to pay heed to his words regarding the danger of the rotten theory that because the Trotskyists are few we can afford to pay little attention to them ... This is a report to be carefully read and studied, not once but many times’ – March 31). At the second National Congress for Peace and Friendship with the USSR, Pritt soothed the anxieties of those who had doubts about the course of justice under Stalin. ‘I do happen to know that, when you are arrested in the USSR ... there are very elaborate rules of criminal procedure to see that your case will be proceeded with promptly and to ensure that there shall be no delay in having it put forward’ (Congress Report, p. 51). In Left News for April, Ivor Montagu reviewed, under the heading The Guilty the official report of the second trial, together with Collard’s book. A feature of this article was its misquotation from The Revolution Betrayed , designed to show that Trotsky prophesied the defeat of the Soviet Union in war with Nazi Germany. (Montagu gives: ‘Defeat will be fatal to the leading circles of the USSR and to the social bases of the country.’ Trotsky actually wrote ‘would’, not ‘will’, and made plain in the following paragraph that he considered the defeat of Germany more probable:

Notwithstanding all its contradictions, the Soviet regime in the matter of stability still has immense advantages over the regimes of its probable enemies. The very possibility of a rule by the Nazis over the German people was created by the unbearable tenseness of social antagonisms in Germany. These antagonisms have not been removed and not even weakened, but only suppressed by the lid of fascism. A war will bring them to the surface. Hitler has far less chances than had Wilhelm II of carrying a war to victory. Only a timely revolution, by saving Germany from war, could save her from a new defeat. ( The Revolution Betrayed , chapter viii , section 5)

Montagu also referred to Trotsky as ‘perhaps the star contributor to the Hearst Press on Soviet affairs’. In fact, Trotsky always refused even to receive a representative of the Hearst Press, and anything they published over his name was lifted’, often with distortions, from other papers. (Lenin had had occasion in July 1917 to remark regarding a similar slander by the Menshevik Montagus of those days: ‘They have stooped to such a ridiculous thing as blaming the Pravda for the fact that its dispatches to the socialist papers of Sweden and other countries ... have been reprinted by the German papers, often garbled! ... As if the reprinting or the vicious distortions can be blamed on the authors!’)

In Challenge of May 27 Gollan asserted ‘the absolute necessity ... of once and for all ridding the youth movement of all Trotskyist elements as a pre-condition for unity’, thus subordinating the urgent need for workers’ unity to the requirements of the NKVD.  

Between the Second and Third Trials

The case of the Generals – a sort of intermezzo between the second and third trials – gave the British Stalinists fresh occasion to display their ‘loyalty’ and quarrel with other sections of the working-class movement on its account. This was a secret trial, without confessions, but no matter: the first announcement of the case was greeted by the DW with a leader stating that ‘thanks to the unrelaxing vigilance of the Soviet intelligence service, a further shattering blow has been given to the criminal war-making elements who seek to undermine and destroy the Socialist Fatherland of the international working class’ (June 12). On June 14 the paper announced: Red Army Traitors Executed . The leading article affirmed, as usual, that ‘the workers of Britain will rejoice’, but nevertheless Pollitt, in a special statement published in the same issue, had to rebuke the Herald for getting ‘so hot and bothered’ about this trial. In a statement congratulating the Soviet Government on the executions, published in the DW of June 16, the central committee welcomed, on behalf of the British workers, ‘the wiping out of the bureaucratic degenerates associated with fascism ...’ Arnot proclaimed ( DW , June 18) his conviction of the reliability of the official account of the crimes of Tukhachevsky, Gamarnik, Eidemann and the others: ‘That it is a true story no reasonable man can doubt.’ Montagu added his stone next day ( A Blow at Fascism ) and called for heightened vigilance against ‘such agents in the working class movement elsewhere and working to the same end’. Pat Sloan’s Russia Today (July) hastened to identify itself with the executioners: ‘No true friend of the Soviet Union ... can feel other than a sense of satisfaction that the activities of spies, diversionists and wreckers in the Soviet Army have been given an abrupt quietus ... All talk about the personal struggle of the “dictator” Stalin is rubbish.’ Dutt pitched into Brailsford for his doubts ( On Which Side? , DW , June 21) [13] and Jack Gaster denounced the ‘slanders’ of the Herald at a Hyde Park meeting ( DW , June 22).

About the middle of 1937 it began to be known in the West that a truly gigantic, unprecedentedly sweeping wave of arrests was engulfing many who hitherto had been regarded as secure and loyal pillars of the Stalin regime. This put the British Stalinists in a quandary. When Mezhlauk, for instance, was appointed to succeed Ordzhonikidze as Commissar for Heavy Industry, he was headlined in the DW of February 27 as an Old Soldier of the Revolution . When he was arrested a few months later they could thus hardly dispose of him in the traditional way as ‘never an Old Bolshevik’. So they ignored the arrest, and dealt similarly with the many similar cases that now poured out of the tape-machines. A photograph of Marshal Yegorov appeared in the DW of July 14; when he was arrested shortly afterwards, nothing was said. A photograph of Marshal Bluecher was published in the issue of February 25, actually after his arrest! (At the same time, the wretched Daily Herald came in for another pasting in the DW of October 8 for having published a report of the murder by NKVD agents in Switzerland of Ignace Reiss, an NKVD man who had tried to break with Stalin.)

Perhaps the most revealing instance of the methods of the British Stalinists in dealing with the arrests which they knew about but dared not admit to their dupes is provided by the case of the Lost Editor. When the Soviet official History of the Civil War , Vol.I, was first announced as a forthcoming publication, in the DW of March 11, the list of editors, headed by Stalin and Gorky, included the names of Gamarnik and Bubnov. General Gamarnik having allegedly committed suicide as an exposed accomplice of Tukhachevsky ( Entangled with Enemies of USSR, Took Own Life – DW , June 2), his name had of course disappeared from the advertisement of the book published in Russia Today of November 1937. But though Bubnov had been arrested as an enemy of the people in time for his name to be removed from the title-page of the book before it reached the shops, it was still to be seen on the fly-leaf! When Rothstein reviewed this work in Russia Today of February 1938 he cannily listed the editors as ‘Joseph Stalin, Maxim Gorky and others’. The arrest of Bubnov was a particularly hard blow for the British Stalinists, since they had made special use of his name as that of an Old Bolshevik still in favour. Perhaps resentment at his inconsiderateness in getting arrested was the reason why the DW did not report his return to Moscow in 1956, as an old, broken man, after nearly twenty years in prison. [14]

Particularly worthy of being rescued from oblivion, among the achievements of ‘working-class journalism’ in this period, is an article in the DW of August 20 by Ben Francis, the paper’s Moscow correspondent, in praise of the wonderful work being done by Zakovsky, in charge of security in Leningrad. Around this time, as Khrushchev described in his famous ‘secret speech’ ( Manchester Guardian pamphlet version, The Dethronement of Stalin [1956], p. 15), Zakovsky was having prisoners brought before him after torture in order to offer them their lives in return for their agreement to make a false confession (‘You, yourself’, said Zakovsky, ‘will not need to invent anything. The NKVD will prepare for you a ready outline ... You will have to study it carefully and remember well all questions and answers which the court might ask’).

An example of the contempt into which the trials were bringing both the Soviet authorities and the British Stalinists is provided by the article by ‘Y.Y.’ (Robert Lynd) in the New Statesman of June 26. On the ascription of all shortcoming in Soviet industry to Soviet sabotage, he wrote that, apparently, ‘wherever there is a screw loose in Russia it was Trotsky who loosened it’, and he summed up the King Street theory of the trials thus: ‘Stalin can do no wrong. He will give these men a fair trial, but, as a matter of fact, they would not be put on their trial at all unless it were certain that they were guilty. Therefore, even without knowing the evidence, we know that they are guilty.’ [15] Desperate in their concern to keep the other point of view from their dupes, the Stalinist editors of Left Review refused to publish an advertisement of The Case of Leon Trotsky , being the report of the examination of Trotsky, regarding the statements affecting him made in the trials, carried out by the Commission of Inquiry headed by John Dewey. This was revealed in a letter in the New Statesman of November 6 from the publisher, Mr Frederick Warburg. Replying for Left Review in the next issue of the New Statesman , Randall Swingler explained that ‘there is a line at which criticism ends and destructive attacks begin, and we regret that this line separates us both from Dr Goebbels and from Leon Trotsky’. [16] This spot of publicity compelled the publication of a review of the book in the DW of November 17, in which J.R. Campbell claimed that it gave ‘added confirmation to the Moscow trials, which showed Trotsky as a political degenerate, an ally of fascism, a vile maniacal enemy of socialism and peace’. A letter from Charles van Gelderen pointing out some glaring inaccuracies in Campbell’s article was refused publication in the DW ; it appeared, however, in the (London) Militant for December.

The political consequences of all this pernicious nonsense were well summed up in an article by H.J. Laski in the New York Nation for November 20:

There is no doubt but the mass executions in the Soviet Union in the last two years have greatly injured the prestige of Russia with the rank and file of the Labour Party. They do not understand them, and they feel that those who accept them without discussion are not satisfactory allies. I do not comment on this view; I merely record it. In my judgment. the executions undoubtedly cost the supporters of the United Front something like half a million votes in the Bournemouth Conference.

The year 1938, which opened with the final disappearance of the slogan: ‘Workers of all lands, unite!’ from the masthead of the DW , was to see even further feats of genuine sabotage of workers’ unity by the Stalinists under the banner of anti-Trotskyism. Communist speakers refused to appear on the same platform with ILP speakers at ‘Aid Spain’ meetings. All remnants of shame and caution were cast aside in this truly maniacal campaign. Thus, in Discussion of January, Pat Sloan wrote: ‘Masses and leaders are united; the people adore “our Stalin”. Stalin respects the masses as no other political leader of today respects the masses ...’ In Controversy of the same month the same propagandist declared himself unfamiliar with and unready to accept as genuine Stalin’s statement of November 6, 1918, on Trotsky’s role in the October Revolution (Stalin, The October Revolution , published in the Marxist-Leninist Library by Lawrence and Wishart in 1936, p.30), which had been mentioned by a contributor, and proceeded to withdraw from the battle on the grounds that ‘it is impossible to continue a controversy with someone as unscrupulous ... Trotskyism ... is incompatible with historical truth’. [17] Dutt, in the DW of January 21, quoted some remarks of Lenin’s about Bukharin (also, incidentally, Dzerzhinsky and other ‘Left Communists’ who died in the odour of Stalinist sanctity) as though they referred to Trotsky. R. Osborn (Reuben Osbert, the psychiatrist) brought out a book, The Psychology of Reaction (1938), in which he tried to identify fascism and ‘Trotskyism’ psychologically (‘A knowledge of the psychology of fascist leaders is at the same time a knowledge of the psychology of the Trotskyists’) and this was reviewed enthusiastically by John Strachey in Left News for February. (Strachey offered as his own view that ‘Trotskyists’ were recruited mainly from ‘insufficiently sensitive’, ‘inhuman’ types).  

The Third Trial

Now came the third and last of the great ‘public’ trials – the Trial of the Twenty-One, bigger and more fantastic than any of the foregoing, with Bukharin, Rykov, Rakovsky and Krestinsky in the leading roles. The British Stalinists (who had made extensive use of the writings of Bukharin and Rykov in the anti-Trotskyist campaign of 1925-28, presenting them as great Marxist thinkers and statesmen) did not flinch. [18] The DW leader of March 2 declared: ‘Soviet justice will prove itself once again as the unsleeping sword on behalf of the working class and the peoples of the world against their enemies.’ Eden having been replaced by Halifax, British agents now found their place in the legend alongside the German ones, and R. Page Arnot, in his dispatches from the Moscow court-room, solemnly explained how Rakovsky had been in British pay since 1924 and Trotsky since 1926. As before – Stalin still retaining confidence in the Franco-Soviet Pact – it appeared that none of the accused had had any contact with France, even in the years when French imperialism was heading the anti-Soviet forces in the world. Even so far back, it seemed, the cunning ‘Trotskyists’ had foreseen what the pattern of diplomacy would be at the time of their trial.

Furthermore, Trotsky had been a German spy since 1921; though why he should wish to link up with an impoverished and defeated State such as Germany was then, or why, indeed, being at the height of his authority in Russia at that time, he should have troubled to make such connexions at all, was never explained. The British Stalinists knew their place better than even as much as to comment on these oddities. (Arnot confined his observations to such safe remarks as: ‘Vyshinsky ... is always a credit to his calling’) [19] As before, however, certain ill-conditioned elements in the Labour movement gave trouble. The DW had to devote a leading article on March 7 to – Brailsford Again . (‘They did not confess of their own accord. They held out to the last until they realized the Soviet authorities had complete proof of all their crimes, and then admitted only what could not be denied.’) The central committee of the party published in the DW of March 8 its routine, required declaration kicking the accused (‘Every weak, corrupt or ambitious traitor to Socialism’), denouncing ‘the fascist agent Trotsky’ and expressing ‘full confidence’ in Yezhov, ‘our Bolshevik comrade’. William Wainwright, in Challenge of March 10, really went to town on the trial: ‘This is more than a trial. It is a fight between the forces of war and the forces of peace.’ After the ritual bit of historical untruth (Trotsky ‘was not one of the leaders of the rising. Stalin was’), Wainwright went on to allege that the accused wanted to let the fascists into Russia. ‘Just as Franco did in Spain ... Let us be glad that this trial has taken place, that these men will be sentenced ... Let us in our youth organizations clean out those ... who support those whose crime is against the people.’

The DW leader of March 11, dealing with the ILP’s appeal to Moscow not to execute the convicted men, was entitled: ‘Degenerates Appeal for Degenerates’. In Inprecorr of March 12, Reg Bishop welcomed the publication in certain bourgeois papers of articles accepting the genuineness of the tria1 [20] , while at the same time deploring that at the most recent meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party a resolution had been moved condemning it. The resolution was defeated, true; ‘but it is a deplorable thing that it should even have been mooted in a responsible Labour gathering’. The New Statesman ’s attitude had been unsatisfactory, too; but then, that was ‘mainly read by intellectuals’. Albert Inkpin, secretary of the World Committee of Friends of the Soviet Union, had a letter in the March 12 issue of the offending weekly, telling the editor that ‘all fascists and reactionaries’ would applaud his doubts about the trial. (Replying, the editor declared that it was rather the picture of nearly all the founders of the Soviet State being spies and wreckers that was likely to give pleasure to the enemies of the USSR. Besides, if the New Statesman had ventured to suggest such a thing, not so very long before, the FSU would certainly have jumped on them. ‘What Soviet hero dare we praise today? Who is tomorrow’s carrion?’)

Harry Pollitt himself, in the DW of March 12, told the world that ‘the trials in Moscow represent a new triumph in the history of progress’, the article being illustrated by a photograph of Stalin with Yezhov, that Old Bolshevik shortly to be dismissed and die in obscurity. Forces from the cultural field also joined in the battle on this occasion. Jack Lindsay put a letter into Tribune of March 18 affirming that ‘surely the strangest thing about the Moscow trials is the way that critics find them “psychologically” puzzling ... That is the one thing they are not ... The cleavage between the men who trusted the powers of the masses, and the men who trusted only their own “cleverness” had to come. And naturally persons with “individualistic” minds can’t understand! Naturally they get scared and see themselves in the dock.’ So there! Sean O’Casey contributed a lamentable article in the DW of March 25 ( The Sword of the Soviet ) containing such statements as: ‘The opposition to and envy of Lenin and Stalin by Trotsky was evident before even the Revolution of 1917 began.’ (O’Casey cannot but have known how little cause Trotsky had to ‘envy’ Stalin before 1917 and would have been hard put to it to show how such envy made itself ‘evident’!).

Rather unkindly, in view of the efforts of Messrs Lindsay and O’Casey, Russia Today for April dismissed the victims as ‘almost all middle-class intellectuals’. The same issue carried an article by Kath Taylor describing the anger of Russian workers at the revelations of sabotage made in the ‘Bukharin’ trial. Now they realized, she wrote, why ‘they waited hours long in the food queues only to find the food almost unfit to eat when they got it home ... Now we knew why our wages had been held up, and the reasons for many other things that had made life so hard at the most difficult moments.’ [21]

Let us conclude our quotations with one from John Strachey, who wrote in the DW , appropriately enough on April 1, that ‘no one who really reads the evidence, either of the former trials or of this one, can doubt that these things happened’, and assessed the conviction of the wretched victims as ‘the greatest anti-fascist victory which we have yet recorded.’

1. This was the issue with the editorial headed: Shoot the Reptiles! Commenting on it, the New Statesman of August 29 remarked prophetically: ‘Those who shoot them today may be themselves shot as reptiles at the next turn of the wheel.’ (This was to be the fate of Yagoda, head of the NKVD at the time of the first trial, shot in 1938.) It was presumably by an oversight that the DW never quoted the verses which graced the August 29 issue of the Paris White Guard paper Vozrozhdenye following the announcement of the executions after the first trial.

2. Fox did not live – he was killed in Spain a few months later – to reflect on the fate of two of the persons whom he named in this article as examples of how there were still plenty of Old Bolsheviks around and loyal to Stalin: ‘Bubnov, Stasova and Krestinsky continue to hold important and honourable places in the leadership of the Soviet State.’

3. As soon as Molotov had made up his quarrel with Stalin, defendants began confessing to plots against him so far back as 1934 (Muralov, Shestov, Arnold, in the trial of January 1937) of which nothing had been said in the confessions of August 1936. Trotsky commented: ‘The conclusions are absolutely clear: the defendants had as little freedom in their choice of “victims” as in all other respects.’

4. It was Moisei Lurye, incidentally, writing under the pseudonym ‘Alexander Emel’, who wrote in Inprecorr (German edition), November 15, 1932, that ‘in Pilsudski’s Poland Trotsky enjoys the particular sympathy of the political police’. Cf. J. Klugmann: ‘The secret police of the Polish dictatorship were specially educated in Trotskyism ... ( From Trotsky to Tito [1951], p. 82)

5. Contrast the earnest efforts of Christian apologists to reconcile the contradictions and differences between the various Gospels. Anyone approaching the study of the August 1936 trial for the first time is recommended to notice the following points. Ter-Vaganian stated that the terrorist group was formed in autumn 1931 and Zinoviev that it began in summer 1932, while Mrachkovsky made it date from the end of 1932. In November 1932 Kamenev and Zinoviev had been banished to the East and were not allowed back until the middle of 1933. Smirnov was in prison from the beginning of 1933 onwards, so could hardly have participated effectively in the plot to kill Kirov (December 1934). Berman-Yurin dated the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in September 1934 (it took place in July–August 1935), and explained that a plot to kill Stalin at a Comintern executive meeting failed because David, the assassin-designate, was unable to get a pass to enter the hall, whereas David said the plot failed because Stalin did not attend the meeting. A number of persons whose alleged testimony was quoted in the indictment or in court (Radin, Schmidt, Karev, Matorin etc.) were never produced either as witnesses or as accused at this or any later trial. Trotsky’s appeal (to the central executive committee!) in his Open Letter of March 1932 to ‘put Stalin out of the way’ ( Report of Court Proceedings , p. 127) was actually an appeal to them to ‘at last put into effect the final urgent advice by Lenin, to “remove Stalin”,’ i.e., a reference to the document known as Lenin’s Testament , as may be seen from the Bulletin of the Opposition in which this Open Letter quite openly appeared.

6. Contrast the sceptical mood of many Soviet citizens reflected in the story which was current in Moscow during the trial: Alexei Tolstoy, upon being arrested and examined, had confessed that he was the author of Hamlet ...

7. The example of Galileo, who ‘confessed’ and repudiated his own discoveries under the mere threat of torture, seems never to have been discussed in Stalinist writing on the trials; nor that of the numerous ‘witches’ who, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, went to their deaths confessing to having had communication with the Devil; nor even that of the Duke of Northumberland who in 1553 confessed to Catholicism even on the very scaffold, in the delusive hope of a pardon from Queen Mary. Krivitsky ( op. cit. p. 212) remarks that ‘the real wonder is that, despite their broken condition and the monstrous forms of pressure exerted by the Ogpu on Stalin’s political opponents, so few did confess. For every one of the 54 prisoners who figured in the three “treason trials”, at least 100 were shot without being broken down.’

8. At the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal the Soviet representatives conspicuously refrained from asking Hess about his alleged anti-Soviet negotiations with Trotsky. In March 1946 a number of prominent British people, including H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Julian Symons and Frank Horrabin, signed an appeal to the Tribunal asking that Trotsky’s widow be allowed to interrogate Hess in order to clear her husband’s name, or that at least the Allied experts examining Gestapo records make a statement showing to what extent they had found confirmation of the story told in the Moscow trials. No action was taken on these requests, and to this day no evidence of Nazi-Trotskyite’ negotiations has been published.

9. Pollitt also wrote in this pamphlet: ‘The bold Trotsky, eh? Wants an international court of inquiry. His tools are left to face it out. Why doesn’t he face it with them? Why doesn’t he go to Moscow?’ Neither here nor anywhere else in Stalinist publications was it ever revealed that Trotsky repeatedly demanded that the Soviet Government bring extradition proceedings against him – which would have necessitated their making a case in a Norwegian or Mexican court.

10 . Anti-Trotskyism eventually became for a time the chief activity of J.R. Campbell, as is reflected in Phil Bolsover’s article, in the DW of April 2, 1938, The Man behind the Answers , describing Campbell at work preparing his Answers to Questions feature: ‘And if you see sometimes a grim, but not unhappy, gleam behind those horn-rimmed spectacles that are lifted occasionally to survey the busy room, you’ll know it’s ten to one that Johnnie Campbell is dealing with some Trotskyist or other. One of his sharper joys is to take an artistic delight in dissecting the sophistries, the half-truths, the complete falsehoods of the breed; laying bare the poverty of their creed for all to see. “Give him a Trotskyist and he’ll be happy for hours”, someone once said.’

11. Around this time died Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Commissar for Heavy Industry. Under the headline Stalin bears Coffin of “Bolshevism’s Fiery Knight” , the DW of February 22 reported the funeral: ‘As Stalin stood with his hands sorrowfully crossed, a wave of the people’s love and loyalty swept towards him. Beside him stood Zinaida Ordzhonikidze, Sergo’s wife ...’ An article about the dead man which appeared next day was headed: Health Shattered by Trotskyist Wrecking . On August 12 a leader headed Foul Lies denounced the Herald for carrying a story that Ordzhonikidze had killed himself and that his brothers has been arrested. (‘All Labour men and women [should now]> protest .against the anti-Soviet line of this most scurrilous rag in the newspaper world.’) Russia Today for September, under the heading Another Daily Herald Slander , declared that ‘we are able to state definitely there is not a word of truth in this assertion’. In his secret speech of February 25, 1956 ( The Dethronement of Stalin [1956], p. 27) Khrushchev said: ‘Stalin allowed the liquidation of Ordzhonikidze’s brother and brought Ordzhonikidze himself to such a state that he was forced to shoot himself.’ When Khrushchev and Bulganin came to Britain in the warship Ordzhonikidze , Walter Holmes published in his Worker’s Notebook ( DW , April 16, 1956) a note on the man after whom the ship was named: ‘Ordzhonikidze died in 1937, when many of his assistants were being arrested on charges of spying, sabotage etc. There were rumours that he had been driven to suicide ... It has now been established that Sergo Ordzhonikidze was suspicious of Beria’s political position. After the death of Ordzhonikidze, Beria and his fellow-conspirators continued cruelly to revenge themselves on his family ...’

12 . The extreme concern shown to shore up Holtzman’s evidence is explained by two facts – his was the only statement giving anything like precise details of time and place, and it furnished the basis for all the rest of the story. Concentration on the place where Holtzman allegedly went also served to divert attention from the fact that the person – Sedov – whom he had allegedly met there had been able to prove conclusively, by means of his student’s attendance card and other documents, that he was taking an examination in another city at the time!

13. Returning to the attack on June 8, Dutt wrote with characteristic scorn of ‘liberal intellectual waverers who are incapable of facing the hard realities of the fight against fascism’.

14. Even nearer the bone than the Bubnov case was that of Rose Cohen, a British Communist Party member since 1921, one-time office-manager of the Labour Research Department and member of the Party’s colonial bureau, wife of Petrovsky-Bennett, the Comintern’s nuncio in Britain. While working in Moscow on the staff of Moscow Daily News she was arrested as a spy and never heard of again. An earlier (and unluckier) Edith Bone, her case was never mentioned in the Stalinist press. For details, see Fight and Militant (London) of June 1938 and subsequently.

15. William Rust was perhaps the most honest of the British Stalinists in the matter of admitting that there was nothing whatever to go on beyond the confessions. In his review, in the DW of March 1, 1937, of the verbatim report of the second trial, he wrote: ‘Of the treason and the actual negotiations with the fascist governments there is, of course, no documentary proof ...’ Desperate for ‘documentary proof’ of some sort, the DW of November 10 published a block showing. side by side, the symbol used by a ‘Trotskyist’ publishing firm in Antwerp – a lightning-flash across a globe – and the Mosleyite ‘flash-in-the-pan’. The caption supplied read: ‘Similarity with a significance.’ (During the second world war the five-pointed star was used as an emblem in various ways by the Soviet, American, Indian and Japanese armies).

16. J.R. Campbell defended in the DW of April 11, 1938, that paper’s refusal of advertisements for ‘Trotskyite’ publications: ‘It would be senseless for the Daily Worker to give a free advertisement to opposition political tendencies.’ With this may be compared Walter Holmes’s Worker’s Notebook of November 27, 1936, in which he reproduced a letter from Mr Warburg telling how the Observer had refused an advertisement for John Langdon-Davies’s book Behind the Spanish Barricades , and commented: ‘We agree with Messrs. Secker and Warburg about the grave character of this censorship of advertisements.’

17. Sloan came back to the pages of Controversy in the March issue to denounce Stalin’s words as ‘an unscrupulous misquotation by Trotsky’, to defend the Communist Party’s refusal to allow republication of John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook The World (‘It is a little naïve. I think, to ask communists to popularize an inaccurate account of the internal affairs in Bolshevik leadership in 1917’). and to declare regarding the victims of the trials: ‘It is a good thing they have been shot. Further, if there were more of them, then more of them should have been shot.’

18. J.R. Campbell, closely associated in his time with the Bukharin-Rykov trend, wrote firmly in the DW of March 17, after the executions: ‘It is enemies of socialism and peace who have perished. We should not mourn.’ Lawrence and Wishart brought out a book about the trial – The Plot Against the Soviet Union and World Peace – by B.N. Ponomarev, in which this Soviet authority made it plain that one of the chief criteria for people’s political reliability was ‘their attitude towards ... the struggle against Trotskyism’ (p. 186). (Ponomarev is a member of the central committee of the Soviet Communist Party, working with Suslov in the department concerned with relations with other Communist Parties, and in this capacity recently received. e.g., a delegation from the Australian Communist Party, according to Pravda of January 5, 1958.)

19. One really might have expected some comment on the statement made through Rakovsky that Trotsky had put the British imperialists up to the Arcos raid in 1927, arranging through ‘a certain Meller or Mueller ... the discovery of specially fabricated provocative documents’ ( DW , March 7). After all, the line of the Communist Party had always been that the Arcos raid had produced nothing to justify the charges made against the Soviet agencies in this country. No mention of Rakovsky’s statement at his trial is made in the detailed account of the Arcos Raid in the History of Anglo-Soviet Relations by W.P. and Zelda Coates published by Lawrence and Wishart in 1944. Yet in their book From Tsardom to the Stalin Constitution (1938) Mr and Mrs Coates had declared their belief in the genuineness of the confessions ... In his dispatch printed in the DW of March 9, Arnot quoted without comment an alleged statement by Trotsky in 1918: ‘Stalin – Lenin’s closest assistant – must be destroyed’. It would indeed have been hard for Arnot to comment acceptably, for in 1923 he had written for the Labour Research Department a short history of The Russian Revolution , in which he showed how far Stalin was from being ‘Lenin’s closest assistant’ in 1918, and who in fact occupied that position! Much was made, by Arnot and others, in connexion with all three trials, of the alleged fact that some of the accused had at one time or another been Mensheviks, but no mention appeared of Vyshinsky’s having been a Menshevik down to 1920.

20. All through the period 1936–38 Walter Holmes had kept up a running fire in his Worker’s Notebook in the DW of quotations from bourgeois papers directed against the ‘Trotskyists’. Perhaps his best bag was one from the Times of Malaya which he published on August 7, 1937, reporting the formation of a bloc between Monarchists and Trotskyists’.

21. Compare eyewitness Fitzroy Maclean’s account of the trial in his Eastern Approaches (1949). Zelensky, former chairman of Gosplan, “confessed’ to having put powdered glass and nails into the butter and to having destroyed truckloads of eggs. ‘At this startling revelation a grunt of rage and horror rose from the audience. Now they knew what was the matter with the butter, and why there were never any eggs. Deliberate sabotage was somehow a much more satisfactory solution than carelessness or inefficiency. Besides. Zelensky had admitted that he had been in contact with a sinister foreigner, a politician, a member of the British Labour Party, a certain Mr A.V. Alexander, who had encouraged him in his fell designs. No wonder that he had put ground glass in the butter. And nails! What a warning, too, to have nothing to do with foreigners, even though they masqueraded as socialists.’ Doubtless taking his cue from the inclusion of A.V. Alexander in the dramatis personae of the ‘Bukharin’ trial. Arnot went even further in attacking fellow-socialists in his Labour Monthly article of May 1938 than he had ventured to do previously: he now wrote of ‘H.N. Brailsford and ILP leaders, whose position as dupes of Trotsky or agents of Trotsky is still to be examined.’

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Last updated: 24 February 2020

The Latest | Netanyahu says Israel will decide how to respond as Iran warns against retaliation

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would decide whether and how to respond to Iran’s major air assault earlier this week , brushing off calls for restraint from close allies.

Israel has vowed to respond to Iran’s unprecedented attack, leaving the region bracing for further escalation after months of fighting in Gaza . Israel’s allies have been urging Israel to hold back on any response to the attack that could spiral.

The diplomatic pressure came as Iran’s president warned that even the “tiniest” invasion of its territory would bring a “massive and harsh” response.

Over the weekend, Iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel after an apparent Israeli strike killed two Iranian generals . Israel and Iran have waged a long shadow war, but the strike was Iran’s first direct military attack on Israel. Israel says it and its partners intercepted nearly all the missiles and drones.

Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi warned Israel against any retaliation as he addressed an annual army parade , which was moved from its usual route and not broadcast live on state TV — possibly to avoid being targeted. In remarks carried by Iran’s official IRNA news agency, Raisi said the weekend attack was limited, and that if Iran had wanted to carry out a bigger attack, “nothing would remain from the Zionist regime.”

Regional tensions have increased since the start of the latest Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7, when Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two militant groups backed by Iran, carried out a cross-border attack that killed 1,200 people in Israel and kidnapped 250 others. Israel responded with an offensive in Gaza that has caused widespread devastation and killed more than 33,800 people, according to local health officials .

— Netanyahu brushes off calls for restraint as Iran warns against retaliation

— Lebanon says Israeli agents likely killed Hezbollah-linked currency exchanger

— EU leaders vow to impose tougher sanctions against Iran

— The G7 eyes targeted sanctions on Iran and a message of restraint

— US House’s Ukraine, Israel aid package gains Biden’s support. What’s inside the package ?

Here is the latest:

U.S. AND 47 OTHER COUNTRIES CONDEMN IRANIAN ATTACK ON ISRAEL

UNITED NATIONS – The United States and 47 other countries issued a statement unequivocally condemning attacks on Israel by Iran “and its militant partners.”

The statement issued Wednesday night calls their “dangerous and destabilizing actions” an escalation “that poses a grave threat to international peace and security.”

The Iranian attack on Saturday marked the first time Tehran has launched a direct military assault on Israel. Israeli authorities said Iran lunched more than 300 drones and missiles, 99% of which were intercepted by air defenses in tandem with the U.S., Britain, France and Jordan.

The attack took place less than two weeks after a suspected Israeli strike in Syria killed two Iranian generals in an Iranian consulate building in Damascus.

The 48 mainly Western countries also condemned the fact that the ballistic and cruise missiles and attack drones “violated the airspace of several regional states, putting at risk the lives of innocent people in those countries, and appeared to traverse airspace near the holy sites in Jerusalem.”

The countries also condemned Iran’s seizure of a Portuguese-flagged commercial ship near the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday and called for the immediate release of the ship and its crew.

“We welcome the efforts to avert a further immediate escalation of violence in the region following the successful coordinated efforts to defend against Iran’s attack,” the statement said. “We call on all regional parties to take steps to avert further escalation of the situation.”

UNRWA HEAD SAYS ISRAEL IS TRYING TO END ITS OPERATIONS IN GAZA

UNITED NATIONS – The head of the U.N. agency helping Palestinian refugees is accusing Israel of trying to end its operations in Gaza and the West Bank.

Philippe Lazzarini is urging the U.N. Security Council to safeguard his agency's critical role as the relief agency for Palestinians.

Lazzarini told the council Wednesday that Israel has banned the agency from delivering aid to Gaza. International experts have warned that faminine is imminent in the northern part of the territory.

Since the war began, Lazzarini said, 178 personnel from the agency known as UNRWA have been killed. More than 160 of the agency’s premises, which were mostly used to shelter Palestinians, have been damaged or destroyed, killing more than 400 people.

“We demand an independent investigation and accountability for the blatant disregard for the protected status of humanitarian workers, operations, and facilities under international law,” UNRWA’s commissioner general said.

Israel has alleged that 12 of UNRWA’s thousands of workers participated in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the war. Lazzarini pledged to implement recommendations and strengthen safeguards to ensure UNRWA’s neutrality.

QATAR SAYS IT'S RETHINKING ITS MEDIATOR ROLE

DOHA, Qatar — Qatar’s prime minister said Wednesday the country is reevaluating its role as a mediator between Israel and Hamas.

Qatar has been a key intermediary throughout the war in Gaza. It, along with the U.S. and Egypt, was instrumental in helping negotiate a brief halt to the fighting in November that led to the release of dozens of hostages.

Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdurrahman Al Thani said there had been an “abuse” of Qatar’s mediation for “narrow political interests.”

He did not name one side in his remarks. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has criticized Qatar and recently threatened to shutter Qatar-owned broadcaster Al Jazeera.

Top Hamas leaders live in exile in Qatar, which is seen as one of the only parties with influence over the militant group.

Al Thani said there were “limits” to the role of mediator and “to the ability to which we can contribute to these negotiations in a constructive manner.”

Mediators have been trying to push Hamas and Israel toward a cease-fire deal, but the sides remain far apart on key terms.

UN SECRETARY-GENERAL URGES `MAXIMUM RESTRAINT'

UNITED NATIONS — U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is reiterating his call for “maximum restraint” between Israel and Iran.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters Wednesday that rhetoric in the Middle East is becoming “increasingly dangerous.” Dujarric said the world and the region “cannot afford another open conflict.”

The comments follow the Israeli prime minister’s vow to respond to Tehran’s first direct attack against his country and the Iranian’s president’s warning of a massive response if Israel does.

UN SECURITY COUNCIL TO VOTE ON PALESTINIAN STATE

UNITED NATIONS – The U.N. Security Council is scheduled to vote this week on a resolution that would give a green light for a Palestinian state to join the United Nations as a full member, a move opposed by the United States.

The vote was scheduled for Friday afternoon. But Arab nations are pressing for a vote Thursday, when the council is holding a ministerial meeting on the Palestinian Authority’s request for full U.N. membership.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas delivered the application in 2011. That bid failed because the Palestinians did not get the required minimum support of nine of the Security Council’s 15 members.

In early April, after years of failed on-and-off peace talks, the Palestinians turned to the United Nations again to fulfill their dream of an independent state, sending a letter to the Security Council that was supported by 140 countries.

The United States, Israel’s closest ally, had promised to veto any resolution endorsing Palestinian membership.

U.S. deputy ambassador Robert Wood reiterated the longstanding position last week: “The issue of full Palestinian membership is a decision that should be negotiated between Israel and the Palestinians.”

Israel says such steps are an attempt to sidestep the negotiating process. Israel’s current right-wing government is dominated by hard-liners who oppose Palestinian statehood.

ISRAEL'S AIR FORCE REVIEWS ITS DEFENSE OF IRAN'S ATTACK

SDEROT, Israel -- An Israeli military official says the air force is preparing for future attacks from Iran.

The official said Wednesday that the air force has been reviewing its successful defense against Iran’s missile attack over the weekend as it makes adjustments for potential additional fighting.

Israel has promised to respond against Iran, raising the possibility of a full-blown war, with Lebanon’s well-armed Hezbollah militant group almost certainly joining the fold.

Hezbollah, which has been locked in daily tit-for-tat fighting with Israel through the six-month Gaza war , is believed to have well over 100,000 rockets and missiles in its arsenal. Combined with Iran’s weapons, that could pose a major test for Israel’s air defense systems.

“We are preparing ourselves for the next time, debriefing the mission and seeing how could we prepare ourselves for the for the next attack,” said Brig. Gen. Doron Gavish, the former commander of Israel’s air defense who is now serving in reserves. He spoke to reporters at a military base in southern Israel.

Iran says its strike was a response to an alleged Israeli airstrike that killed two Iranian generals in Syria on April 1.

Israel says 99% of the more than 300 missiles and drones that Iran lauched were intercepted. It was assisted a coalition of international partners and the fact that Iran telegraphed its attack ahead of time.

ISRAEL SAYS IT ARRESTED AND KILLED MILITANTS IN BEIT HANOUN

JERUSALEM — The Israeli military said Wednesday that it arrested and killed militants in an operation in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun over the past week.

The announcement comes after Palestinians said troops conducted raids there and forced displaced people to leave their shelters.

The military said it was a “focused operation” meant to remove militants from a civilian area. It did not say how many people were killed or arrested.

It said it targeted two facilities used as schools after intelligence pointed to militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The military said forces told civilians to leave the building before raiding it.

Palestinians had reported heavy bombardment of Beit Hanoun. Witnesses said many people had been interrogated and some adults were detained and taken to unknown locations.

Palestinians have said the forces have left the town. The military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the operation was over.

It was the latest in a series of Israeli raids in northern Gaza.

14 WOUNDED IN HEZBOLLAH ATTACK ON NORTHERN ISRAEL

JERUSALEM — A drone and rocket attack by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah on a border town in Israel’s north wounded 14 soldiers, Israel’s military says.

Wednesday’s strike hit a community center in the town of Arab al-Aramshe where soldiers were sleeping, the military said. Six soldiers were seriously wounded, two were moderately wounded and six were lightly wounded.

Hezbollah has said it targeted a military facility on the border to avenge the killing of a number of its fighters, including a commander, in Israeli strikes the previous day.

The Israeli military said its fighter jets responded by striking the areas from where the projectiles were fired, without elaborating on the location. It also said its fighters struck other Hezbollah military compounds in Naqoura and Yarine in south Lebanon.

Israel’s rescue service Magen David Adom said earlier that at least 13 people were wounded, without disclosing their identities.

Hezbollah, which is sponsored by Iran, has exchanged fire with Israeli forces on a near-daily basis since the start of the war in Gaza.

ITALY WOULD CONTRIBUTE TO ANY UN PEACEKEEPING IN GAZA

Italy’s foreign minister says Rome would be willing to contribute troops to any possible U.N. peacekeeping force for Gaza, even though no such proposal is currently on the table and Israel has rejected the idea.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani suggested a U.N. force under Arab command could help provide security if Israel and the Palestinians make headway on an eventual two-state solution. He said the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon could be the model.

“If there is the solution and for a short time we need the presence of the United Nations under Arab control, we are ready for sending Italian soldiers,” Tajani said ahead of a Group of Seven foreign ministers meeting in Capri.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled out a foreign peacekeeping force in Gaza after the war, saying only Israel is capable of keeping the territory demilitarized.

GERMANY STANDS IN 'FULL SOLIDARITY' WITH ISRAEL

TEL AVIV, Israel — German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Wednesday expressed her country’s full solidarity with Israel in the face of Iran’s attack on the weekend.

She vowed consequences for Iran and said the European Union was working on imposing on further sanctions.

“We will not tolerate this. We stand in full solidarity with Israel,” she told reporters. “Iran and its proxies such as Hezbollah or the Houthis must not be allowed to add fuel to the fire.”

Baerbock called on Israel to exercise restraint in its reaction to Iran’s attack in order to avoid a further escalation of the conflict.

“Everyone must now act prudently and responsibly. I’m not talking about giving in. I’m talking about prudent restraint, which is nothing less than strength,” the German minister said. “Because Israel has already shown strength with its defensive victory at the weekend.”

The minister also called for the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza and demanded more humanitarian aid for Gaza’s civilian population.

ARROW 3 MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM USED SUCCESSFULLY, MAKER SAYS

JERUSALEM — The Arrow 3 missile defense system, designed to intercept long-range ballistic missiles, was deployed successfully against a missile salvo for the first time over the weekend to repel the Iranian attack on Israel, the system’s maker said Wednesday.

Speaking to The Associated Press, Boaz Levy, chief executive of state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries, the primary builder of the Arrow system, said that the system has been “operational for decades,” but was used Saturday “for the very first time against ballistic missiles in a salvo scenario,” intercepting high-flying munitions inside and outside the atmosphere.

Of about 300 drones and missiles launched by Iran into Israeli airspace Saturday night, the military says that 99% were intercepted by Israel’s multilayered air defense system, wounding only one person — a young girl.

“There is no hermetic seal. no system can give you an hermetic seal. But we did succeed to have 99% of success,” said Levy.

The Arrow’s success Saturday night in defending Israel is likely to please Germany, which recently signed a contract with Israel and the United States to procure Arrow 3. When operational, the system could protect much of Europe from long-range ballistic missiles.

UK FOREIGN SECRETARY DAVID CAMERON IN ISRAEL FOR MEETINGS

JERUSALEM — U.K. Foreign Secretary David Cameron says “it’s clear the Israelis are making a decision to act” against Iran, but he hopes it will do so “in a way that is smart as well as tough and also does as little as possible to escalate this conflict.”

Cameron landed in Israel on Wednesday for meetings with senior Israeli and Palestinian officials.

He said his main aim was to “focus back the eyes of the world back on the hostage situation” and urged Hamas to agree to a temporary cease-fire agreement.

Cameron told broadcasters that “the real need is to refocus back on Hamas, back on the hostages, back on getting the aid in, back on getting a pause in the conflict in Gaza.”

Cameron is due to travel from the Middle East to a meeting of Group of Seven foreign ministers in Italy. He said he wanted the group of wealthy industrialized nations to “show a united front” and impose coordinated sanctions on Iran in response to its “malign activity” in the region.

“They need to be given a clear and unequivocal message by the G7 and I hope that will happen at the weekend,” Cameron said.

RIGHTS GROUP SAYS ISRAELI FORCES JOINED OR FAILED TO STOP SETTLER ATTACKS ON PALESTINIANS

JERUSALEM — Human Rights Watch says Israeli forces either took part in or failed to stop settler attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank that displaced hundreds of people from several Bedouin communities last fall.

Settler violence surged after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that triggered the war in Gaza, leading to the complete uprooting of at least seven Palestinian Bedouin communities and displacement from several others, according to the New York-based rights group.

Settlers launched another wave of attacks late last week after a 14-year-old Israeli boy was killed in what Israeli authorities say was a militant attack. The United Nations’ human rights office on Tuesday called on Israeli security forces to “immediately end their active participation in and support for settler attacks on Palestinians.”

The Human Rights Watch report released Wednesday focused on the earlier rash of violence. The rights group says Israeli settlers assaulted Palestinians, stole their belongings and livestock and threatened to kill them if they did not leave permanently. The settlers also destroyed homes and schools.

The military didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press.

IRAN THREATENS 'MASSIVE' RESPONSE IF ISRAEL LAUNCHES 'TINIEST INVASION'

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s president has warned that the “tiniest invasion” by Israel would bring a “massive and harsh” response, as the region braces for potential Israeli retaliation after Iran’s attack over the weekend.

President Ebrahim Raisi spoke Wednesday at an annual army parade that was relocated to a barracks north of the capital, Tehran, from its usual venue on a highway in the city’s southern outskirts. Iranian authorities gave no explanation for its relocation, and state TV did not broadcast it live, as it has in previous years.

Iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel over the weekend in response to an apparent Israeli strike on Iran’s embassy compound in Syria on April 1 that killed 12 people, including two Iranian generals.

Israel, with help from the United States, the United Kingdom, neighboring Jordan and other nations, successfully intercepted nearly all the missiles and drones.

Israel has vowed to respond, without saying when or how, while its allies have urged all sides to avoid further escalation.

Raisi said Saturday’s attack was a limited one, and that if Iran had wanted to carry out a bigger attack, “nothing would remain from the Zionist regime.” His remarks were carried by the official IRNA news agency.

UN APPEALS FOR $2.8 BILLION TO PROVIDE AID TO 3 MILLION PALESTINIANS

UNITED NATIONS – The United Nations is appealing for $2.8 billion to provide desperately needed aid to 3 million Palestinians, stressing that tackling looming famine in war-torn Gaza doesn’t only require food but sanitation, water and health facilities.

Andrea De Domenico, the head of the U.N. humanitarian office for Gaza and the West Bank, told reporters Tuesday that “massive operations” are required to restore those services and meet minimum standards — and this can’t be done during military operations.

He pointed to the destruction of hospitals, water and sanitation facilities, homes, roads and schools, adding that “there is not a single university that is standing in Gaza.” De Domenico said there are signs of Israel’s “good intention” to get humanitarian aid into Gaza, but the U.N. keeps pushing because it’s not enough. He pointed to Israeli denials and delays on U.N. requests for aid convoys to enter Gaza.

The U.N. humanitarian official called for a complete change of focus to recognize that preventing famine goes beyond providing flour for bread or pita and to recognize that “water, sanitation and health are fundamental to curb famine.”

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Acclaimed Artist and Performer Represents Spirit of the Times in Race-Related Dissertation

• Arts-and-Culture

Edward W. Hardy's research includes analyzing his own original compositions inspired by the African American Experience

April 18, 2024 | By Brenda Gillen

Most doctoral students meet their professors when they arrive on campus. But Edward W. Hardy and Professor of Violin Jubal Fulks met at a Vermont summer music festival when Hardy was a teen. Their strong connection has lasted through the years, and now, Hardy is completing the University of Northern Colorado's Music D.A. program, Music Performance Concentration , under Fulks' tutelage.

Fulks, who performs on both modern and baroque violins, has taught at festivals in Iowa, California and Vermont. He joined UNC's College of Performing and Visual Arts' School of Music as a faculty member in 2013 and spends summers as faculty of the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival in Burlington, Vermont.

Hardy earned a bachelor's degree from the State University of New York at Purchase College and a master's degree from Queens College. Before auditioning for UNC's doctoral program early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Hardy built a career as a critically acclaimed Black and Puerto Rican composer, music director, violinist and violist.

Hardy's dissertation, titled "A Compendium of Three Musical Works Inspired by the African American Experience: Recordings, Commentary, and Pedagogical Observations," focused on his original compositions.

"The most challenging aspect of my research has been analyzing African American music within the framework of European theory and determining the appropriate level of disclosure and tone in which to convey my perspective on the music's impact on the human condition," Hardy said.

Hardy described his compositions as reflecting on America's pre-civil rights oppression, celebrating the Harlem Renaissance and exploring the landscape of other political, social and economic experiences. Works of Billie Holiday and Margaret Walker provided inspiration.

"This research can serve as a tool for violinists seeking modern techniques that bridge classical to popular music, composers in search of original compositions responding to current times, and storytellers seeking an understanding of how music can be composed using literature as a structure. I hope scholars, educators and performers are left with a spark of inspiration to create and perform works that reflect their heritages," Hardy said.

Initially intending to compose a musical as a capstone project, Hardy shifted focus in the face of U.S. race-related challenges.

"I came to believe that creating a meaningful and impactful dissertation, authored by a minority musician, would be a more productive pursuit and serve as tangible evidence that anything is possible," Hardy said. "Dr. Fulks instilled in me the confidence that incorporating my own works into a dissertation was not only feasible but also significant. They not only highlight my accomplishments, but also encapsulate the spirit of current times."

Weekly conversations between Hardy and Fulks cover a wide range of topics, Hardy said, tying back to the music they create and its impact on them and their communities. Fulks said mentoring happens in their discussions, and they even delve into personal areas.

"We are similar in that we both come from humble backgrounds, entered this field of classical music and feel a little bit like outsiders. But at the same time, we've made wonderful connections and a home for ourselves in the field," Fulks said.

He noted that, in addition to performing, Hardy composes his own pieces, which was typical of late 19th- and early 20th-century performers.

"These days, there seems to be a real separation between performers and composers. Eddie is a well-rounded, remarkable musician who can do different musical styles, arrangements and composing," Fulks said. "I think getting the word out about his compositions is part of the motivation behind presenting it as research. In addition to completing his program in three years, I am not aware of any student who has done more performing than he has in these past few years. He's a stellar example of a young man who is embarking on a wonderful career," he said.

Throughout his studies, Hardy was the Beethoven in the Rockies Concert Series' first digital marketing director and artistic advisor. A collaboration with UNC faculty led to the co-founding of the Northern Colorado Center for Arts Entrepreneurship, where Hardy was senior director of operations and artist entrepreneur in residence. These experiences leveraged Hardy's prior role as New York City's Omnipresent Music Festival founder and artistic director.

Hardy recently performed at UNC's Southard Music Competition Winners Concert, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has an upcoming chamber music performance with Sho Kuon at Carnegie Hall this Spring.

"I feel fortunate to have studied under exceptional and inspirational UNC faculty members who provided invaluable support and guidance throughout my academic journey," Hardy said.

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Congratulations to Dr. Anu Ahmed on the successful defense of her dissertation, Situating Selves: ‘Self Illness’ (Nafsani Bali) and Living Ethical “Modern” Lives in Contemporary Male Maldives

• April 17, 2024

Congratulations to Dr. Anu Ahmed on the successful defense of her dissertation, “Situating Selves: ‘Self Illness’ ( Nafsani Bali ) and Living Ethical “Modern” Lives in Contemporary Male Maldives”!

Congratulations Dr. Ahmed!

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