In this episode Tanja Müller talks to Lisa Ann Richey about her career and her recent book, Batman Saves the Congo: How Celebrities Disrupt the Politics of Development.
Lisa Ann Richey is Professor of Globalisation and Development Studies at the Department of Management, Society and Communication Copenhagen Business School. Her research looks at values and international politics of humanitarianism.
More about Lisa Ann Richey
Tanja Müller is Professor of Political Sociology at the Global Development Institute. Tanja has recently completed a research project on the potential role of the business sector in refugee integration andhumanitarian response. She is currently the Principal Investigator of an ESRC-funded project on transnational lived citizenship and political belonging in the Horn of Africa. She is also developing a new cooperation with Prof Adriana Kemp from Tel Aviv University on inscribing mobile lives into urban peripheries.
More about Tanja Müller
Find out more about the Global Development Institute:
Intro music Anna Banana by Eaters
In this episode Tanja Müller talks to Lisa Ann Richey about her career and her recent book, Batman Saves the Congo: How Celebrities Disrupt the Politics of Development.
Lisa Ann Richey is Professor of Globalisation and Development Studies at the Department of Management, Society and Communication Copenhagen Business School. Her research looks at values and international politics of humanitarianism.
More about Lisa Ann Richey
Tanja Müller is Professor of Political Sociology at the Global Development Institute. Tanja has recently completed a research project on the potential role of the business sector in refugee integration andhumanitarian response. She is currently the Principal Investigator of an ESRC-funded project on transnational lived citizenship and political belonging in the Horn of Africa. She is also developing a new cooperation with Prof Adriana Kemp from Tel Aviv University on inscribing mobile lives into urban peripheries.
More about Tanja Müller
Find out more about the Global Development Institute:
Intro music Anna Banana by Eaters
Prof Tanja Muller Okay. Well, hello everybody. We are sitting here at the University of Manchester in the Arthur Lewis building, on campus, where the Global Development Institute is based. I'm Professor Tanja Muller. I'm a professor in political sociology here at the Global Development Institute. And I'm here with my guest today, Professor Lisa Ann Richey from the Copenhagen Business School, in the Department of Management Society and Communications. And well, it's a great pleasure to have you here, Lisa. You braved the train strikes to be with us. You came from London today, didn't you?
Prof Lisa Ann Richey I did. I did. I got here in spite of the train strikes and I found a beautiful sunny Manchester. So thank you for that. Yeah, we don't get that very much at home in Copenhagen this time of the year.
Prof Tanja Muller So I heard, but Manchester is actually more sunny, I think it's climate change, than it used to be. It's not raining all the time. So Lisa, let's talk about your work a little bit. I mean, one of the key themes of your work is sort of celebrities as new actors, or maybe not so new actors, in development. And you have a long history of working on that. And some people would think 'It's a bit of an odd topic, to think about celebrities in development'. So what made you actually, what made you study that topic? How did you become interested in studying sort of celebrity humanitarianism, the role of celebrities in development, all those related issues? You want to tell us a little bit about that?
Prof Lisa Ann Richey Well, do you want the real story or the sanitised version?
Prof Tanja Muller Let's start with the sanitised first and then us the real, or the other way around [laughter].
Prof Lisa Ann Richey Absolutely, so the sanitised version er... is of course that what I was very interested in is elite leadership and these, you know, unelected leaders. Who's setting the agenda in terms of global development? And so I was almost dragged kicking and screaming into the study of celebrity. It's not something, I still don't think it's something that I know a lot about in general. I do know a lot about celebrity humanitarianism because I've had the good fortune to work with a lot of colleagues on the celebrity humanitarianism and North-South relations network, of which you yourself are also part of, with other really good scholars. Yeah, good scholars from here back in the old days....
Prof Tanja Muller Back in the old days, yes.
Prof Lisa Ann Richey You know, just when we were all really starting to understand that we needed to take seriously what otherwise seemed like potentially a frivolous topic. You know, the non-sanitised version is, to be honest with you, all of my previous work had been on global health, reproductive health and rights, politics of antiretrovirals, and I spent just too much time sitting in African health clinics. And so after I had been a year in South Africa, in the health clinic in Western Cape in Langa. Every single day, really listening to the stories of people and how they were managing their lives, living on antiretrovirals. Then I came back from that year of fieldwork and research sabbatical, and I went back to my job in Copenhagen, and that's when Bono first announced Product Red. And so that for me Tanja was just, I was so enraged. I was just, I was so emotional and intellectually enraged that he came out and said, 'You know, two pills, 20p a day, take them at breakfast and at dinner, and you can save the lives of millions of dying of Africans'. And I just had been so close to people and understood so much more about how it takes much more than just two pills a day. And in the beginning, you know, I was just frustrated and then I just had to put my frustration into a productive channel, which became my research agenda. And I got more and more interested and I recognised that that was really a bit of a tip of the iceberg for me in terms of understanding what really is now, you know, really what we see in the SDGs. These emphasis on partnerships, new actors and alliances have become the actors and alliances.
And when, you know, scholars like you and I started talking about these a decade and a half ago, at that point, the debate was, well are they new? Or they acting in new ways? And you know, we did some nice scholarship, including, you know, including a book with lots of different contributors, understanding the ways in which they act differently, in the ways in which they really are reproducing similar hierarchies to old bilateral, multilateral actors in development. But today, in many ways I think you know we, what we used to think of as the exception is becoming more and more the rule. So my focus isn't so much specifically just on celebrities, but on the partnership element.
Prof Tanja Muller Yeah. So you're not one of those people studying celebrities because you also have a secret crush on them. I remember....
Prof Lisa Ann Richey I have a secret crush on all the celebrities, absolutely [laughter]. You know, I mean, you know, listen, I will be honest with you. It's been very interesting to have the excuse; when I first started doing this research, one of my kids literally was like, "Hey mom, does that mean we're going to get a TV now?". And I was like "Absolutely not. Don't ask me that as if somehow we're going to get a TV just because Mom's trying to write a book on celebrities". Needless to say, I now have a couple of books and we also have a TV. So I guess that was one of those proverbial win-wins.
Prof Tanja Muller Well, I do remember some of the events we jointly attended. That both of us, were sometimes irritated by people who seem much more interested in the lives of the celebrity and what great people they were, rather than in those underlining issues that you've just mentioned.
Prof Lisa Ann Richey Absolutely. And, you know, you and I both know, you know, if we had, you know, a Kroner, a Euro or a Dollar for every single time someone says, 'But do they really care?'. And, you know, we were usually on the same side of this. But that kind of emotional concern, that kind of privileging always of white people's feelings, really, really derails what are really the important questions in development and humanitarianism, which is how accountable are they? What kinds of institutions do they work with? What kinds of people do they claim to represent and on what grounds? Whether or not they really care? First of all, how would we know? And second of all, who cares? Probably they do care, just like everybody does care about development issues and humanitarian crises. But whether or not their care actually has any useful impact is a whole other issue.
Prof Tanja Muller No, that's true. And of course a lot of them actually use a lot of their fame and engagement to, for example, don't pay taxes in the countries where they reside; so depriving [the] system of social protection of its resources, etc., etc.. So there are a lot of contentious issues.
Prof Lisa Ann Richey Absolutely. Because, you know, the system's not sexy, but the celebrity is.
Prof Tanja Muller Absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, your latest book has the sexy title, Batman Saves the Congo. So how did this come about? I mean, how did...
Prof Lisa Ann Richey The title.
Prof Tanja Muller The title come about, yeah?
Prof Lisa Ann Richey Okay, well the title actually came about....It was literally titled by my son, because I was talking so much about this project that I was doing together with my collaborator. I also want to emphasise I'm the second author on this book. Alexandra Budabin, who is a researcher at University of Bolzano in Italy, is the first author. And Alex and I had been working on Batman for a number of years, and we wrote a few articles together, because he was one of the comparative celebrities that we were interested in when we were working on the network of celebrity and North-South relations. And in the beginning, you know, it was interesting because Alex brought him to me and the case and some of the facts about the early days, about how Eastern Congo Initiative worked. And he seemed to be an exception. He seemed to be our black swan, our good celebrity. He was doing things in a really different, more accountable, more transparent way. And most importantly, for me, he wasn't trying to sell me anything. And I was very surprised because every other celebrity partnership always involves a partnership with a corporation. And eventually, on one side or another, the actual, you know, advertising, push and promotion of particular products. And so I was very interested that in the beginning, he wasn't doing that. And I'll talk a little more about that in my talk today here, about the history of how they as an institution changed their strategies. But we talked a lot about, you know, whether this was the case. And so then we decided we would actually keep working together and work on a book. And we talked about it so much. I was complaining so much about this white saviourism, and finally my son was like, "Oh yeah, Batman. You should call your book Batman Saves the Congo".
Prof Tanja Muller Okay. Right.
Prof Lisa Ann Richey And suddenly I thought, you know, this is quite remarkable. Because one of the things we were writing about when he came up with this funny suggestion, which was, you know, kind of as a pre-teen and I think he didn't think we would ever take him seriously, as we were working on this historical chapter where we actually trace back the narratives about saving Congo. And of course, Batman is definitely not the first one to come up with this, you know, with this kind of white saviourism. And what was really fascinating was going through the history. You know, and the history linked to colonialism; the history linked to exploitation and imperialism; the history linked to missionaries who would, you know, publicise and send pictures to justify their own fundraising in very similar ways that we see today to celebrity organisations. So Batman saves the Congo kind of stuck and we were surprised a little bit that the publisher let us do that because we were like, "Oh, do you think we'll get in trouble?".
Prof Tanja Muller Okay, right. So the publisher had no objections?
Prof Lisa Ann Richey So far we haven't had any problems with it. So we, knock on wood, hopefully after this podcast goes global, we won't have have any lawyers on our tracks. But yeah, so I think that we do something a little bit different with that than probably the Batman franchise would be too concerned about.
Prof Tanja Muller I mean, the book is in its subtitle How those actors [celebrities] disrupt development, in a way. But. But do they? I mean, you said at the beginning, you know, and I remember actually Alex giving talks at one of those events we had in Copenhagen. And at the time she, I think it was the phase when she was still very impressed, and I found it quite troubling at the time. So many years back. So I was really wondering how sort of the narrative evolved in terms of like the disruption, or does Batman do things differently? Or is it even possible to do things differently? Are the structures not set up in a way that even if you had good intentions, it would be almost impossible? I mean, what's the...
Prof Lisa Ann Richey Yeah Tanja, you know. You know, that before I became professor of globalisation, I was professor of international development. And you know that all the time I was really, really thinking about what does this case, what does it really teach us, us as scholars of development? To be honest with you, I mean, that's what I'm really interested in. Because this notion of disruption, of course, you know, comes out of the whole Silicon Valley ethos in California with, you know, the idea that, you know, old institutions, like of course, traditional aid institutions, really need to be disrupted to be more efficient.
Prof Tanja Muller Mmm yeah abolutely, yeah.
Prof Lisa Ann Richey And all this kind of effective altruism. But this really limits us with this telos that somehow disruption is always a good thing. We're always going to go into something better. And so the disruptive elements that we see in terms of the example that we have of the celebrity strategic partnerships between Ben Affleck, Eastern Congo Initiative and a variety of government NGO and business partnerships, is really the disruption about not having the perception of donor-recipient. Instead having business and provider and consumers. And so the idea is that not only are consumers the ones who are supporters of the initiative or supporters of Affleck, but the Congolese themselves are perceived as being consumers. And this has been a really interesting thing to understand. That in the language of people who work with the organisation, they actually believe that this is a good you know, this is a good way. This is something somehow that's less colonial, that's more you know, that's more egalitarian in its perceptions. But I'm looking for, there's a quote we have in the book actually, which is one of my respondents, who talked about this particularly, which was quite amazing to me because basically he said, you know, "Isn't it better that we think about them, you know, as consumers?" But the people that they're considering to be consumers are people who literally can't spend 15p a day to buy the water that they're now being sold by Ben Affleck's organisation. And so what it has basically done is just emphasise the neoliberal notion of privatised development, right? Taken out the role of the state. Taken out the legitimate demands for your rightful share. And instead made people consumers of things like basic water and sanitation. So I think that that's the most, you know, significant disruptive element.
Prof Lisa Ann Richey I don't think it really disrupts our notions of development. And this is actually one of the things that, I have a section that I wrote in the conclusion and as you say, you know, we are different sort of different sides of the scholarship. Alex comes from a work on activism and social movements in political science; and I come from the politics of development. And so sometimes you can see that in the book. It's fun having two authors. But this notion for me was, I was like what kind of politics is the politics of development anyway? And for me, the politics of development really has a very, you know, a very contentious history. And, of course, that's been one of the most interesting thing that's happened in scholarship on development, is that we take that history and we you know, we take it by the horns and we try to wrestle with it. We try to understand it, and we try to figure out, okay, so then what? I mean, sure. We know development has this history from 1492, really right. You know, decolonisation discourses have really made it important for us to think about yeah, the history between exploitation and development, between empire and development, you know, between racism and development. And I think those are really important issues. But sometimes I think that what we see now is this notion about development as an aspirational brand. And this is not just because I sit in the business school.
Prof Tanja Muller No, no, absolutely. And it's yeah. I mean even people like, you know, Amartya Sen, would at the end of the day subscribe to that. And a lot of people that I know are always seen as on the good side of things and not accused of being of colonial mindsets. But that's, of course, always questionable where this whole idea comes from that...
Prof Lisa Ann Richey Yeah. But I think it's a you know, what I write here in the in the book is basically "...that the trajectory from underdeveloped to developed is a dangerous single story that we Westerners right, white, non-poor, heteronormative folks, tell about ourselves." It's a story we tell about us. A lot like [00:14:34]militia or Iraqis [0.5s] notion of post humanitarianism. This notion about, you know, it's really not about us, it's about them, which is about us. And it's something which is useful to consider is development is an aspirational brand of a better, clearer, less troubled version of ourselves as individuals and nations. But we have to constantly police this brand. We have to constantly police this border to make it coherent. And surely we do need to disrupt that politics. Surely we do need a disruption of development. I mean, I have no doubt about that. And I think that there you know, as long as I've studied development, there have always been critical scholars disrupted at the same time.
But what we saw in this particular study, and what I see more and more with the study of partnerships, so we can talk a bit more about that with the SDGs, but it's instead of seeing a disruption about this usual business of development, we instead see the perpetuation as development as a business, right? And that business seems to be absolutely no longer questioned as, not just a driver, an actor or a collaborator, but the ones who need to be looked to to set the agenda. And I really wonder how that space has been taken or who's abdicated that space? And where are all of the activists? And where are all you know, where are the people who are saying, you know not in any way to defend sort of traditional development because, you know, this is one of the things we always talk about in these kind of contentious things, development scholars - we love to laugh at Batman, but actually we need to turn back the lens on ourselves and look at what we do as development humanitarianism, in our scholarship and in our advocacy and in our policy work. And, you know, how can we make that address, you know, the real questions and dilemmas that this brings up.
Prof Tanja Muller One of the things that's quite coming up more and more is this sort of co-production of things, and then also to borrow things from the global south for the global north. So sort of reverse development. I mean, it's a quite fashionable thing that happens a lot. And here in Manchester, we have an initiative of poor women saving groups who actually structure themselves in the same way as saving groups in the Global South, with some of our colleagues work before, etc., etc.. So, I mean disruption I think...I mean, I think that's also part of a disruption. Even though it might not change the narrative itself and it might not change the story in itself, but that there is this trajectory from something called underdeveloped or less developed or whatever you want to call it, and towards developed. So in that sense, I suppose one could see an initiative like Ben Affleck's, something maybe trying to do that in a different way. In the way business may work. And I'm aware you have with Stefano [Ponte], you've worked on a different sort of example on coffee trains I think, where things worked, seemed to have worked, really maybe in a better way, were disruptive to stay in the terminology. Maybe you want to say a few words about that. I found that was very interesting.
Prof Lisa Ann Richey Yeah. Thank you. Actually, I'm going to talk a little bit more about that today in my talk because I thought, yeah, I think it might be more interesting for some colleagues here to expand on some of those details. Also, because academically, as social scientists, it was one of the few examples where we able to actually get a really good case comparison. Where, you know, in the world of social science possibilities, we managed to hold most of the variables consistent and actually only change whether or not, you know, your initiative had a celebrity collaborator and all the kinds of of power and input with companies like Starbucks that they could actually convene.
Prof Lisa Ann Richey So this was some work that we did together, it was sort of adjacent to the work I was doing with Alex Biudabin. Stefano Ponte and I published a piece in the journal World Development looking at Starbucks, because Starbucks became one of the collaborative partners with the Eastern Congo Initiative, Ben Affleck's organisation. And they did work in Eastern Congo, in the Kivu's, and Stefano has experience, extensive experience, doing research on coffee and particularly coffee in Eastern Africa. And we wanted to actually find out more about the impact that it actually had on farmers. Because this is one thing which absolutely reasonably many of these new actors and alliances pieces have been critiqued for is, you know, the fact that we really don't get a good sense about what their actual impacts are. You know, we can talk about the difficulty of finding out the actual impact of any discrete development or humanitarian initiative. But overall, this is absolutely the case. And part of it has to do with, of course, you know, the need for fieldwork. The need for actually going there. This is not something which, you know, you can just Skype in to coffee collectives and say, 'Well, how is it going these days with that collaboration?'.
Prof Lisa Ann Richey This collaboration was fascinating. And I won't tell too many of the details. If anybody is really interested, they can listen to the talk, because I will I'll put up the numbers and things like that because we actually did the work. And I want to emphasise that one of the things that's really important. Sometimes that it seems to be easy to make the kinds of arguments that you make without actually going and doing local level fieldwork. And I just don't think that that has the same value. I mean, for me, it was really, really important to know how it was that these celebrity strategic partnerships did or didn't actually bring in, you know, what we imagined, really, which is more resources, right? We imagine that in the very least, they're going to be able to pay their way out of the problem of development, right. They're going to be able to take local problems and they're going to be able to fix them with enough money and enough expertise, etc., etc.. And so we had an interesting example where we got to compare two cooperatives, actually, which were basically under the same, exactly the same kinds of terms in terms of revitalising the Eastern Congo coffee sector. One which had the initiative, which was sponsored by the Eastern Congo Initiative called Kahawa Bora, Better Coffee in Kiswahili, and the other, which was run by a more traditional European NGO called Rikolto. And so we actually, we had a collaborator that we knew from previous work, who went and did interviews for us with farmers, with cooperatives, with their leadership, but also with local traders to find out some of the details also about the kind of production that they were able.
Prof Tanja Muller Yeah...
Prof Lisa Ann Richey The kind of payment structures which were really important to farmers. And, you know, the one thing which was also helpful is, I mean it's not a situation where say, 'Oh, you know, Ben Affleck's organisation did nothing for farmers'. Of course they did. You know, farmers were paid. They were paid by Starbucks; a fair price. And they were paid, you know, according to an agreed upon time schedule, which was, of course, a value. But they were not prepared for how they were going to compete in the coffee market when, and if, Starbucks stops buying from them. Starbucks committed to, you know, a particular buying contract, which is perfectly reasonable. Which is how they also operate. But this is not long term and it can't be. And so in terms of actually supporting these farmers, you really have to make sure that they can have the possibility of selling to other buyers, that they can be prepared to do that. And in spite of the fact that they had so many more resources, this project had a lot of problems on the ground from the beginning, but it was too big to fail. And the reason it was too big to fail was because it had celebrities like Ben Affleck. It had interested investors, right. People like Buffett. They had Starbucks. And so, USAID, which was one of their main partners, normally on a project that went as badly as this, they would basically have pulled the plug or certainly not, you know, not have continued financing them. But in this case, they basically put in more support and more resources. They changed the collaborating partners just to make it work. Did it work? Sure. In terms of the cost benefit, about how much money they had to invest to make it work versus what the farmers got. I mean, the comparative case shows a very clear story to us. That it doesn't give you good value for money. But what it did do is it gave very good value for Starbucks; who got access to what they they very much needed, which is a very good quality, you know, high level coffee that they needed to have for their own particular specialty markets. And so it was a very you know, it was very good for developing business. Maybe not so good for developing development.
Prof Tanja Muller Yeah. No. Interesting. But to come to an end, I think it would be interesting if you could just also outline the things you're currently working on, or what you think you would be working on in the near future. Now that the book tour, I think, comes to an end, almost. I think you probably are.
Prof Lisa Ann Richey Yeah. Okay. So what am I working on now? Okay, so I'm going to pull out the next manuscript. I'm working on the next book.
Prof Tanja Muller Okay.
Prof Lisa Ann Richey Slowly I would say. Um, but I have a research project, which Batman Saves the Congo was also part of, and I know that you've been very supportive of the work of myself and also our colleagues, called "Commodifying Compassion: implications of turning people and humanitarian causes into marketable things". And so I'd like to write a book out of that, looking at the comparisons that we have, because we have three different countries Denmark, the U.S. and Italy, and the ways in which these kinds of initiatives where we're getting these partnerships basically linking together corporations, celebrities most of the time, and various causes, humanitarian and development. So I want to look at that. And I'm particularly interested in this next piece I'm writing. It is called "Why Does Capitalism Feel So Right?" I'm interested in how these ethical imaginaries get created and how this feelgood effect actually is something where we're able to profit from the possibility that there are other people for us to help. So...
Prof Tanja Muller That's a great title, 'Why does capitalism feel right?' I like that.
Prof Lisa Ann Richey I hope so. So that's what I'm working on and I'm talking about that with some people, including yourself, Tanja, you'll be subjected to this asking if you'll help me to to give some comments on this work. And my collaborators have doing a lot of really interesting pieces as well. So if anybody is interested, you can always find out about what everybody does, we have everything up on our website commodifying compassion. And we usually have free versions up there as well. So hopefully somebody might want to read some of it.
Prof Tanja Muller Well super. That was really great. Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts with you on the book and on your other work and on your future. And thanks for coming to Manchester on this sunny day. And on a train strike day. And yeah, so we look forward to have you with us again anytime in the future. Thanks again.
Prof Lisa Ann Richey Thank you so much.