Författare: Gemma Ware Host The Conversation Weekly Podcast The Conversa

 Zimbabwe is on the cusp of abolishing the death penalty after its Death Penalty Abolition Bill was approved by the Senate on December 12. The bill is now sitting on the desk of Zimbabwe’s president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, a known opponent of the death penalty, waiting for his assent. Once it does, it will become the 127th country in the world to abolish the death penalty, and the 27th on the African continent.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to two experts on the death penalty who explain how Zimbabwe got here and what abolition means for both the country, and the continent.

The death penalty was brought to Zimbabwe by colonisation in the 1880s, first by Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa company and then, from 1923 as a self-governing British colony. According to Carolyn Hoyle, director of the Death Penalty Research Unit at the University of Oxford, before then people were generally not sentenced to death. She explains:

 ”The traditional idea in the region … Ubuntu which focuses on peace and reparation typically guided responses to serious crime. And there was also this idea of compensation for murder … that the offender’s community would transfer property, maybe a goat, sometimes actually, slightly concerningly, a woman, to the victim’s community.“

But with British colonial rule came the statue of capital punishment, by hanging. After 1965, when Ian Smith’s minority white government declared a Unilateral Declaration of Independence over Rhodesia and a 15-year civil war ensued, the number of death sentences rose from 28 in 1965 to 71 in 1968. After Robert Mugabe became prime minister of an independent Zimbabwe in 1980, the number of executions began to decline significantly.  

The last man to be hanged was a convicted murderer, Mandlenkosi Masina, in July 2005. Since then it has become a de-facto abolitionist country.

The route to abolition

In 2017, Parvais Jabbar, who runs an NGO called the Death Penalty Project as well as being visiting professor of practice alongside Hoyle at the University of Oxford, commissioned research to find out the level of support for the death penalty in Zimbabwe. They found that 61% of 1,200 people surveyed supported the death penalty, but that of those in support, 80% agreed that ”if the government were to decide to abolish the death penalty, we would accept that”.

In subsequent research in 2019, Hoyle also found a high level of support among political, religious and civil society leaders, for abolition. Mnangagwa, who became president in 2017 after Mugabe’s death, has also long been a vocal opponent of the death penalty. In 1965, he was convicted of sabotage during the fight for independence and sentenced to death. He avoided being hung because he was deemed too young, but he spent ten years in prison and the experience shaped his views on capital punishment.

 Just before the outbreak of COVID-19, there had been some debates in parliament about the death penalty, but any progress towards abolition took a back seat during the pandemic. Then in September 2023, Jabbar and Hoyle were invited to Harare to meet with their local partners, a charity called Veritas Zimbabwe, and other politicians sympathetic to the issue. A private members’ bill was brought forward by an opposition MP called  Edwin Mushoriwa. The cabinet then approved the bill in February 2024, and after making its way through various parliamentary stages, the senate finally approved the bill in December.

Once Zimbabwe does abolish the death penalty, it will join Ghana, Zambia and the Central African Republic in doing so in recent years.

Jabbar says this reflects a growing African-centric approach to abolition, rather than one that’s influenced by the west. He also sees it as being a reckoning with colonial-era laws that remain on the statute books.

“ So many of these jurisdictions would say, we never had the death penalty until colonial rule. We used to deal with it in a different way. So I think they are rejecting it as a sort of colonial-era punishment and trying to find something different.”

Listen to the The Conversation Weekly podcast to hear the full interview with Hoyle and Jabbar.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via e-mail. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily e-mail here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…

Surveys suggest that in many western democracies, political trust is at rock bottom. Scandals, corruption, faltering economies, conspiracy theories and swirling disinformation are all playing their part. But is it really such a bad thing for people living in a democracy to distrust their government?

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly, we talk to political scientist Grant Duncan about why he  thinks a certain level of distrust and scepticism of powerful politicians is actually healthy for democracy. And about how populists, like Donald Trump, manage to use people’s distrust in political elites to their advantage.

Grant Duncan says most people don’t grow up thinking “Do I trust the government?” unless they’re asked by a pollster. And yet when things go wrong, he says, “we have good reason to stop and ask about promises kept or not kept”.

Duncan, who is from New Zealand, is currently a visiting scholar in politics at City St George’s, University of London in the UK. His research focuses on the problems with political trust and how to get better governments. He argues that in democracies, people are not supposed to trust their government.

 ”Democratic constitutions are built on the premise that you can’t trust anyone with power. That’s why we have separation of powers, why we have periodic elections, a free press, people monitoring constantly what’s going on, because we trust no one in a democracy with political power.“

Populists fill the gaps

Duncan says, for example, that there would have been no United States of America without the American colonists’ deep distrust of the government of King George III in England. Yet, he admits there is a paradox at the heart of democratic systems, which rely on trust to function. If you vote in a representative system, you’re ”placing a huge amount of trust in a very small number of people who will pass laws and governments and make decisions on our behalf”, he says.

Duncan believes Donald Trump’s re-election as US president directly reflects the mood of political distrust in the country. Trump, alongside other populists from both the left and the right around the world, has exploited this paradox around representative government which means a small elite are entrusted with a lot of power.

“  Often what happens is that a large section of society feel that changes are going on around them that they don’t understand, they don’t like, they haven’t approved. And it only takes one smart leader to think, I can make political capital out of this by getting up on the hustings and saying, ‘I speak to you, the real people the forgotten people … I speak for you’.”

Getting better leaders

There are ways to improve the trust that people have in their democracies, and while it’s not just about blaming the government, Duncan believes those who wield power bear the much greater responsibility:

“If politicians and senior public servants are worried about how to rebuild public trust, the first thing they need to do is take a look in the mirror, because we need trustworthy leaders. We don’t want misconduct and scandals.”

Alongside that comes actually competently delivering public services, and ensuring people’s safety and security. And having leaders, who are conscious of their limitations, and transparent about the challenges they’re facing, particularly in the face of technological developments like artificial intelligence. Charismatic leaders aren’t going to come along and fix the problems for us, he says.

 ”I think we get too entranced by charisma and on the other hand maybe too angry about leaders who don’t meet our expectations. So we need a kind of dedication to the task of government because so much is going to change and we need to remember that political trust is not a thing that gets broken and rebuilt like a machine. It’s a human phenomenon that we all share in.“

Listen to the full episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast to hear Grant Duncan talk about his reserach on political trust.

Newsclips in this episode from CBS News, ABC News (Australia) and PBS Newshour, Sky News.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware, Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via e-mail. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily e-mail here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…

It was a story that pulled at the heartstrings. In 2018, an orca called Tahlequah was seen dragging the corpse of her newborn baby calf for 17 days, over 1,000 miles along the coast of North America. Eventually, Talequah let the baby go (happily, she’s had another baby since), but her behaviour left behind lots of questions among scientists about grief in animals.

Other animal behaviour suggests a complex relationship with death. A mother chimpanzee was observed cleaning the teeth of her dead son. And some elephant calves have also been found buried in ways that suggest grief and mourning.

In this week’s episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Susana Monsó, a philosopher who researches animal ethics and animal minds, about the different ways animals understand death.

Since starting her research on animals and death, one of Monsó’s favourite animals has been the opposum. These cute, furry marsupials play dead when they feel threatened, as she explains.

“She adopts the bodily and facial expression of a corpse. Her bodily functions are reduced. Her breathing and heart rate drop. Her body temperature drops. She opens her mouth and her tongue hangs out and adopts this bluish hue and she expels this putrid smell and liquid from her anal glands, and she stops responding to the world.”

Monsó, who is an associate professor of philosophy at the National Distance Education University in Madrid, Spain, found the opposum’s behaviour so fascinating that the animal became the protagonist of her new book, Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death.

An opposum playing dead.
Johnruble/Wikimedia Commons

She says that an opposum’s death display, which is aimed at convincing a predator that it’s dead to give it a chance to escape, must have had an evolutionary advantage. But, for playing dead to work, Monsó says, the predator really needs to believe it.

“The opossum shows us how her predators think of death, what they think a corpse looks like and smells like and feels. That’s why she succeeds in deceiving them, and this makes it more likely for her to pass on her genes.”

But some animals seem to react to death in ways that appear to be counterproductive. Monsó gives the example of a chimpanzee in a zoo in Valencia that was seen holding onto her baby’s corpse for seven months, and to the orca Tahlequah.

“It seems like very maladaptive in a lot of respects … why are these mothers spending so much energy on these babies who are dead, they’re not contributing to passing on their genes.”

While there may be a number of factors involved, Monsó says one of the biggest is maternal grief and the bond between mother and baby.

“These are animals that have extended periods of maternal care and a high level of dependency on the part of the baby. And so evolution needs to have provided the mothers with very strong motivations to take care of the babies because otherwise the babies are not going to make it to maturity.”

Monsó points to what she calls the minimal concept of death: one animal understanding that a dead animal is both no longer functioning as it would when it was alive, and that this is an irreversible situation. She says that some animals may also understand that death can happen to individuals who are now alive, but that this will depend on an animal’s experience and its intelligence.

Listen to the full episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast to hear Monsó talk more about her research, and the debates about anthropomorphism that emerge relating to research into animals and death.

Newsclips in this episode from CBS News and The Star.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood and Mend Mariwany. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via e-mail. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily e-mail here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…

Amazon workers in 20 countries are expected to strike or protest on Black Friday, pushing the company to respect their rights and commit to more action on the climate. The protests are coordinated by the Make Amazon Pay campaign, run by a global umbrella body of trade unions and workers’ rights groups.

Amazon is known for its resistance to unions. In this week’s episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we tell the story of what happened at one warehouse in Coventry in the UK when its workers tried to gain official recognition for the GMB union, one of the country’s biggest labour unions. The ballot was narrowly defeated by a margin of 28 votes, with 50.5% voting against forcing recognition.

We talk to sociologist Tom Vickers, who spent weeks observing workers’ efforts to unionise at Coventry as part of a research secondment with the GMB. And we find out why some companies, many of them American, are so doggedly anti-union, and the tactics they use to persuade workers not to form one.

In January 2023, around 300 workers at the Amazon warehouse in Coventry went on their first official strike. The three-day strike followed months of disgruntlement at a proposed pay rise of 50 pence per hour.

Tom Vickers is an associate professor of sociology at Nottingham Trent University in the UK where he’s director of the Work Futures Research Group, a new institute co-funded by the university and the GMB Union. Since January 2024, Vickers has conducted in-depth interviews with 11 leaders among the Amazon workers and four GMB organisers. He’s also observed nine strike pickets and six mass strike meetings, and had informal conversations with around 200 workers. He says:

“I don’t think I’ve ever been on such joyful pickets, because just the sense of relief … People are normally under that kind of regimented labour regime inside the warehouse and it’s like: ‘Oh, now we’re just outside and we can actually associate freely with each other and move how we like.’”

Under UK law, anyone can join a union even if it’s not officially recognised by their workplace.

A vote for recognition

After the January strike and others that followed, Amazon workers continued to push for improved pay and conditions until they ultimately won a vote on whether to force Amazon to officially recognise the GMB union at the warehouse. Vickers explained what this would mean:

“It would require Amazon to engage with the union in negotiation over pay and over holidays. And it would also normally include some kind of presence and access for the union within the warehouse.”

From his observations of the union activism in the lead up to the ballot, Vickers said it was difficult for worker leaders at the warehouse, whose time is strictly monitored in a regimented work environment, to make the case to their colleagues to join the union, and vote in favour of its official recognition. This contrasted to Amazon’s own efforts to persuade workers to vote against, which Vickers says played to workers’ fears over their job security.

“I think the central point of Amazon’s campaign was saying that to stay without recognition is to stay with what you already know, and that’s safe. To recognise the union is bringing all this uncertainty and who knows what could happen.”

Despite the failure to force union recognition in the ballot, in early September 2024 Amazon UK increased its minimum pay for staff by 9.8% to between £13.50 and £14.50 an hour, depending on the location.

The Conversation approached Amazon for comment on the allegations about its anti-union practices and treatment of workers raised in this episode. The company did not respond.

Economics, control and ideology

Amazon is not the only American corporation that opposes unionisation. In the US, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a federal agency, has accused Amazon, Starbucks and the grocer Trader Joe’s of retaliating against staff for union organising.

In response, all three companies have joined a challenge led by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to the constitutionality of the NLRB in federal court. The case could eventually make it up to the US Supreme Court.

So why are these companies, many of them American, so concertedly anti-union? John Logan, a professor of labour and employment studies at San Francisco State University in the US, says it’s a combination of three factors:

“Economics, the obsession with unilateral control of the workplace that’s especially strong in the United States, and this sort of ideological belief that unions are bad for business and only companies that deserve them will get a union.”

However, Logan is optimistic about the future of union organising in the US, mainly because of the engagement of young people in new and different ways. He pointed to the success of union organising of workers at Starbucks and Trader Joe’s.

“Young people are energised, enthusiastic, optimistic and attracted to labour issues in a way that’s never been true in my lifetime in the 25 years I’ve been studying unions in the US.”

Listen to the full episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast to hear the full story. The episode also includes an introduction from Sarah Reid, business and economy editor at The Conversation UK.

Newsclips in this episode from Channel 4 News, Bloomberg Television, GB News,
ITV News and
The Independent.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced and written by Katie Flood and Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via e-mail. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily e-mail here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…