Analyze

The Formosa Monitor Alliance (MFA) is run by a coalition of Taiwanese NGOs, including Covenants Watch, Taiwan Association for Human Rights, Environmental Rights Foundation, and Environmental Jurists Association. The MFA has posted news articles, short interviews with local priests and legal analyses, with introductions to relevant laws such as the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights (UNGPs). 

Self-description of the group on social media:「監督台塑越鋼聯盟」由長期聲援台塑越鋼受害者的團體們組成，旨在為台塑越鋼汙染案的受害者爭取賠償、倡議環境正義，並監督政府及企業履行其人權義務。

This text builds from earlier conceptions of the term “land dispossession” and “land grab”. As defined by the 2011 International Land Coalition, land grabbing specifically refers to large scale land acquisitions that are “ in violation of human rights, without prior consent of the preexisting land users, and with no consideration of social and environmental impacts”. Characterization of land grabs and their resulting harms most commonly considers the effect of physical displacement and harms within the articulated “grabbed” area (Nyantakyi-Frimpong, 2017;Ogwand, 2018;  huaserman, 2018). Li and Pan seek to expand the frame of analysis for land grabs beyond the site of grabbed land to consider the full extent of harms associated with land grabs both geographically (via pollution spillover to areas outside of “grabbed land”) and temporally (via latent “expulsion by pollution). 

 “While the villagers are not passive victims and have adopted various resistance strategies, the space for them to struggle and achieve success is confined and shaped by the existing power asymmetry in which local villagers, capital and local government are embedded.”  (Li and Pan, 2021, p 418). 

“...this framing of land dispossession is problematic in two aspects. Firstly, it obscures an invisible form of land dispossession in which people still maintain control of their land but its use value is damaged by pollution. This kind of indirect land dispossession could lead to expulsion, not due to the direct loss of control over land but by it being rendered useless by pollution.” Li and Pan, 2021, p 409). 

 This text employs a case study approach to characterize how villagers in a village in China have been displaced “in-place” as a result of new industrial activities within the area  (all specific details have been hidden within the publication, wherein the names of villager groups and the site of study itself is referenced only by coded letters). The scale of analysis primarily centers at the village level, though analysis of the case study itself extends towards the country level specifically when analysis of state actors are involved. 

Authors Hua Li and Lu Pan are scholars from China. Li is  affiliated with the College of Humanities and Law at Taiyuan University of Technology, wherein her research focuses specifically on water politics, environmental justice, and rural development and agrarian change. Pan is affiliated with the College of Humanities and Development at China Agricultural University. Her research interests include marginalized communities, rural development, and agrarian change.

The authors, Andrew Lakoff and Stephen Collier both study anthropology. They have written several papers together focusing on the social and cultural types of knowledge concerning health and medicine. Lakoff works at the University of Southern California and Collier is the Director of Anthropology for the New School.

The authors argue that while recent changes in health security have led to a modern knowledge base and understanding of health threats these new systems are still forming and adapting as the health problems faced change.

The main argument is supported primarily through policy changes that show a changing approach to public health safety in the government and private organizations, with specific examples such as changes to the US government funding for biodefense research in the early twenty-first century. The paper also includes examples of changing scientific knowledge during the later twentieth century, referencing studies and reports that highlight the changing opinions of the scientific community. Finally, the authors divide the paper into several sections each outlining a specific type of problem and the practices devised as a solution, this format clarifies the main argument and aids the reader in understanding the authors views.

“There is no such thing as being “too secure.” Living with risk, by contrast, acknowledges a more complex calculus. It requires new forms of political and ethical reasoning that take into account questions that are often only implicit in discussions of biosecurity interventions.” (Lakoff 28)

“On the one hand, they examine the different political and normative frameworks through which the problem of biosecurity is approached: national defense, public health, and humanitarianism, for example. On the other hand, they examine the styles of reasoning through which uncertain threats to health are transformed into risks that can be known and acted upon” (Lakoff 12)

“These initiatives build on a growing perception among diverse actors—life scientists and public health officials, policymakers and security analysts—that new biological threats challenge existing ways of understanding and managing collective health and security. From the vantage point of such actors, the global scale of these threats crosses and confounds the boundaries of existing regulatory jurisdictions. Moreover, their pathogenicity and mutability pushes the limits of current technical capacities to detect and treat disease” (Lakoff 8)

The primary method of supporting the main argument is a series of historical examples including policies such as those created by the World Health Organization, outbreaks including AIDS, and previous attempts to provide health security such as the Smallpox Caccination Program. The use of these examples highlights the changing nature of health problems and how that effects the type health security. Specific dates and data from the examples is included, which allows for a more detailed analysis to support the main argument.