Performative Policy: Inaction veiled as ‘change’ 

Yesterday, in the Daily Campus article “A Hierarchy for Crimes: Why the UN’s latest resolution is UNprofessional,” a fellow writer sought to explain the moral hypocrisy in declaring one inhumane tragedy as greater than the other and the systematic obscurity in their call for reparations. While I mostly agree with that argument, my main concern is the performativity of the United Nations’ declaration — it doesn’t meaningfully do anything. Instead, it dovetails into a broader tradition of political gestures designed to sate public sentiment without producing anything of substance — it’s a delusion of progress.  

This declaration isn’t even entirely new. It bears similarities to the UN’s Durban Declaration and Programme of Action in 2001 which also recognized the transatlantic slave trade and the lasting colonial legacy as crimes against humanity. In 2008, the U.S. House Resolution 194 cited “a genuine apology is an important and necessary first step in the process of racial reconciliation.” While I agree, in part, no genuine and substantive policy has been derived from this declaration — nothing has happened! 

This isn’t limited to a U.S. context. The Paris Agreement calls for emission reductions that each country can set by itself with no penalty for failing to meet them. The agreement aims to reduce projected global temperatures to 1.5°C above pre-Industrial levels; we are not on track. Up north, the 2008 Canadian Residential School apology recognized the abusive and societally corrosive immorality of their forced assimilation policy, but no complete steps were taken to reduce its lasting legacies and dysfunctions. A recognition of wrongdoing and injustice is necessary and well-intentioned but means nothing without actual ensuing change.  

Recently and historically in the U.S., the War Powers Resolution is considered ineffective and a political prevarication of unchecked executive power. It seems to further codify and corroborate congressional authority on war under Section 8 of Article I of the Constitution, but U.S. presidents have ignored it or falsely and self-servingly reinterpreted it. Some have argued drone strikes, cyberattacks, or “limited” operations do not qualify the 60-day requirement of the resolution. Formalist etiquette and a sociogovernmental apparatus reduce enforcement. 

This ethos exists beyond government and reveals a commercial culture in which public relations are ever-changing and morally capricious to favor public sentiment over a genuine ethical stance — a culture which prioritizes profitability over possibility. That is, the possibility of progress. We can think back to the oh-so world-changing efforts by some companies to post black squares during the Black Lives Matter movement without addressing labor discrimination or the Greenwashing declarations by some firms to become net-zero by X date without any latent advance or transparency. This culture can and has ingrained a defeatist mindset in the American public in which many politicians feel more a representative of self-interest than people, eroding the perception of democratic agency and integrity.

 Symbolic actions lack legitimacy and are gross substitutions of humanitarian reform. However, many have argued recognition to be a precondition for material reparation by broadening the Overton window. I agree: symbolic recognition can be substantive and can construct moral consensus but not when met with stagnation — where the urgency impetus that drives reform dissipates. 25 years later, we still lack a binding mechanism for the DDPA; we still fall short of the aggregate goals of the Paris Agreement and Congress still fails to significantly restrict executive wartime action. Allowing such a culture structurally incentivizes inhumanity and tragedy.  

We must call out this performativity and be more cautious as to not mistake such declarations and legislation as action. Binding mechanisms must be integrated into the Paris Agreement, UN declaration and others alike to avoid a moral hazard problem. Progress cannot become a simulacrum.