Feeling so emotional: why we rage about religion on Facebook

Debates about religion trigger strong emotional feelings especially on social media.
Florian Prischl/flickr, CC BY-NC

On Christmas Day, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg used his website to tell the world that he was not an atheist any more. In this way, the billionaire used Facebook to express his feelings about religion, like many social media users before him.

My research shows how debates about religion on social networks bring out passionate emotions in users. I found that conservative Christians who discuss contentious issues about religion on Facebook debates often do so in emotionally charged ways.

It seems that simply being religious may sometimes trigger particular emotions and reactions to the topic of religion. But it is not only devoutly religious media users who get pulled into debating religion online or feel very strongly about it: hardcore atheists may also harbour strong emotions about religion, or rather, anti-religion. Discussing topics of faith can strike very close to home for those who strongly identify as either religious or anti-religious.

As a whole, Facebook users who passionately discuss religion online seem to be triggered by their own identity (as religious or non-religious) and an emotional involvement with the theme of religion.

Religion is increasingly viewed as highly politicised, not least due to the way that it is frequently covered in the news. Numerous studies have shown that news stories with emotional cues tend to both gain audience attention and prolong audience engagement.

It may therefore come as no surprise that online debates about religion are packed with emotional cues that evoke strong reactions from those who participate in them. This sets the stage for passionate online debates.

But is the emotional involvement necessarily intrinsic to religion?

Religion is one of the main triggers of emotional interactions online.
Joe Shlabotnik/Flickr, CC BY

Performing conflict

Of course, emotional conflicts are not new, and social media is not the only thing that makes emotions fly high and low.

Studies of the way media audiences may shape conflicts are still relatively scarce. But by taking several of the existing studies and comparing them with my own ethnographic study of a Norwegian Facebook group whose members wish to promote the visibility of Christianity in the public sphere, it is possible to discern a number of similarities in how media users “perform conflict” in emotive ways.

Across several types of conflicts in Northern Europe, media users respond in unmistakably similar ways: by claiming to be the silent majority; by making moral and normative claims about right and wrong; and resorting to blame-and-shame tactics. Even the same type of vocabulary is in circulation across many issues.

The emotionally charged way that media users engage with a variety of conflicts points to very similar mechanisms that serve to amplify and multiply conflicts, for instance, through scapegoating.

Typically, media users are highly expressive of anger, which they direct at the perceived enemy, that is, whoever is deemed responsible for an intolerable state of affairs. The anger is often set off by trigger themes and emotional cues, and leads to escalation of the conflict itself.

Triggering emotions

In Europe, religion is a common trigger theme, but so are immigration and climate change. These issues all seem to consistently fire up the public, and are more likely to induce spiralling arguments and the escalation of conflicts.

Emotional cues are particular words or phrases that serve to heighten emotional involvement. For instance, calling politicians “dictators” or stating that one’s opponents’ are “in pact with the devil” or calling them “imbeciles” can heighten the emotional stakes in a debate.

Media users regularly vent their anger in charged emotional ways.
gfkDSGN/pixabay

One of my most intriguing findings was the discovery that media users employ very similar terminology to attract attention from other debaters and to incite further involvement in the debate.

Employing emotionally charged phrasing, such as calling the unwanted status quo “a tumour”, “toxic disease”, or “poison” are suitable phrases to get other social media users’ blood pressure soaring. Near identical terminology that describes a problem as “disease” and those responsible as part of “a dictatorship” or “the likes of North Korea”, is surprisingly common across all the cases of mediatized conflict I compared.

Media users also responded in very similar ways to thematically different conflicts. The one thing that all of these conflicts had in common though, was that they dealt with trigger themes. Trigger themes have the power to ignite feelings, at times explosive ones.

Raging against the machine

Not only is there an omnipresence of emotion in many online debates about religion and other contentious themes, but the presence of anger is pretty striking too. Those who rage against the machine tend to scapegoat a variety of groups, such as politicians, immigrants or Muslims.

Scholars Asimina Michaeliou and Hans-Jörg Trenz use the term “enraged fan” to describe the angriest of the angry, the ones who are livid about nearly everything. But there are other shades of angry.

In the Norwegian Facebook group, depending on who is raging - the anger is directed at politicians, all religions, Islam or Muslims, secularism, atheism and at times simply the daftness of co-debaters. Put together, all this rage leaves a pretty obvious footprint on the online discussions in the Facebook group.

Still, I believe there is a danger in focusing too much on anger. In my reading, anger may be the emotion that is most clearly expressed, but more complex emotions may well lie at the heart of the enraged utterances.

Bad religion?

Online conflicts with inherent trigger themes, such as those that tug at core religious and identity issues, tend to evoke emotional responses, which, in turn, inspire social media users to perform the conflict in ways that multiply the dispute or disputes.

My study concludes that there needs to be a trigger theme for social media users to perform in particular ways, but that the trigger theme need not be religion.

Trigger themes appear to be an integral part of the dynamics of online conflicts and inspire a heightened state of emotion among audiences, regardless of the topic. In fact, media users appear to react to conflicts in remarkably similar emotionally charged ways, whatever the subject of debate. Religion is just another trigger for the emotions we express online.

This article has been co-published with Religion going Public

Mona Abdel-Fadil, Post-Doctoral Researcher, University of Oslo

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Alien animals and plants are on the rise in Africa, exacting a growing toll

The larger grain borer beetle attacks crops like maize and cassava, threatening food security.
Shutterstock

This article is the first in a series The Conversation Africa is running on invasive species.

Let’s say you’re travelling from Uganda to South Africa for business. You finally arrive at your hotel after a long day and decide to change before dinner. You unlock and unzip your luggage, but there’s something in your bag that you didn’t pack. As you reach for a clean shirt, a moth flies out. Did that come with you all the way from Uganda? It’ll be fine, right? Surely, something so small won’t cause any harm.

Species are intentionally or accidentally transported by humans between continents to regions where they are not native. With the help of humans or by natural means like flight, these alien species can also spread within continents.

Their spread within continents can be rapid, affecting both the ecology as well as societies and the economy. Unfortunately, it’s really challenging to prevent species from spreading. Given the vast amount of people and goods that are transported between and around continents they can easily be moved across oceans as well as between countries.

The spread of alien species within Africa is increasing. Since 2000 more alien insect pests of eucalyptus trees have spread to other African countries from South Africa, than have been introduced to these African countries from other continents. To manage the spread of these alien species countries need to co-operate, communicate and share information and skills..

The spread of alien species

Many alien plants and animals have been introduced to Africa from other regions and then have spread from country to country, often having devastating effects.

Take the larger grain borer beetle, (Prostephanus truncatus) which is thought to have arrived on the continent in imported grain from Mexico and central America. The beetle was introduced to Tanzania before 1984, Togo before 1981 and Guinea before 1987. It then spread across the continent and within 20 years could be found further south in South Africa.

The beetle attacks crops such as maize and cassava, threatening food security and the livelihoods of the poor. Infestations often destroy maize that’s been stored by farmers, forcing them to buy maize as well as lose income they could have earned from selling any excess.

But alien species don’t just arrive from abroad. Many that are native to parts of Africa have also spread to countries on the continent where they are not native.

An example is the fish commonly known as the Mozambique tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus) which is native to rivers on the east coast of southern Africa. Fishermen have transported the Mozambique tilapia to other areas and it is now found in river systems in southern and western South Africa and Namibia.

The Mozambique tilapia is a popular species for fishing but it can pose a threat to native fish and has been responsible for the disappearance of native species in some regions.

The spread of alien species within Africa is by no means a new thing. For instance, the bur clover (Medicago polymorpha), a plant from northern Africa, might have been accidentally transported by humans to South Africa as early as 760 AD.

A high and increasing threat

Recently a number of alien species have spread extremely rapidly across the continent, posing a particularly high threat to food security and livelihoods.

The fall armyworm, native to the Americas, was first recorded in west and central Africa in early 2016 and then in South Africa in January 2017.
Shutterstock

One is a caterpillar known as the fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda). The species, native to the Americas, was first recorded in west and central Africa in early 2016 and then in South Africa in January 2017.

The moths of the armyworm are strong fliers and the species may have spread through flight to South Africa from other African countries. Although the species attacks a wide range of crops, it poses a particularly serious threat to grain farmers. It is extremely difficult to manage.

Another example is a wasp known as the bluegum chalcid (Leptocybe invasa), which is native to Australia. In 2000 it was detected in Israel and shortly afterwards it was reported in Uganda and Kenya. From there it spread rapidly to many African countries including Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Tanzania and was finally detected in South Africa in 2007. The insect probably reached Israel on live plant material and spread into Africa the same way, or was carried by people travelling between countries.

The wasp causes swelling or growths on eucalyptus trees, which can lead to decreased growth and tree death. As eucalyptus trees are an important source of income and fuel, this species could have an impact on the livelihoods of locals in these countries.

Preventing the introduction and spread

Once a species is introduced to one African country it’s highly likely it will spread to others on the continent because borders checks are weak.

The introduction and spread of species could be reduced if countries introduced biosecurity systems. These are used extensively in countries like Australia and New Zealand and involve using technology to check for alien species when people and goods enter a country. In Australia this involves inspecting goods, vehicles and luggage before they enter the country.

But even these systems aren’t a guarantee that species won’t spread. African countries would need to work together and share information and skills. This would also allow countries to prepare for the arrival of species, and to draw up plans to reduce their impact.

This is a tall order. But as a country’s defence against alien species introductions is only as strong as that of its neighbours, such action would benefit all of the countries involved.

Katelyn Faulkner, Postdoctoral research fellow, University of Pretoria; Brett Hurley, Senior Lecturer Zoology and Entomology, University of Pretoria, and Mark Robertson, Associate Professor Zoology & Entomology, University of Pretoria

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Results from the first global brain wave measurement show power, not money, is the new religion

‘Man at the crossroads’
Diego Rivera/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

Modern societies are usually defined as relatively unreligious, dominated by money and power rather than belief in gods. This idea marks them out as modern when compared to traditional societies as well as highlighting the many issues of modernity including capitalism, growth, overproduction and climate change.

But why are we so sure that secularisation and the dominance of politics and economics are in the DNA of modern societies? Our answer to this question defines and confine our problem-solving ability.

A recent article in the journal Futures shows that most strategic management tools and models of the future have a strong bias towards politics, economics and science, thus systematically neglecting religion, law, art, or education.

Given this bias is unconscious and unjustified, we risk constantly looking at solutions to wrong problems.

Monitoring cultural memory

In a May 2017 study published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change, we investigated the idea of secularised, politicised, and economy-focused modern societies.

We undertook big data research on the digital database created by the Google Books project, which has scanned and digitised over 25 million of the estimated 130 million books ever published worldwide.

To systematically screen this huge collection of text, we used the Google Books Ngram Viewer, a free online graphing tool that charts annual word counts as found in the Google Books project. The Ngram Viewer comes with an intuitive interface where users can enter keywords, choose the sample period, define the desired language area, and modulate the shape of the graphical output.

One of our challenges was to find the right keywords. For this, we used an open source tool by Jan Berkel.

The result was a list of the 10,000 most frequently used words and strings in books published between 1800 and 2000. This period covers a considerable proportion of the era commonly referred to as modernity and is regarded as reliable data by Google.

We repeated the procedure until we had compiled one list each for English, Spanish, Russian, French, German, and Italian. We then screened the word frequency lists for terms that make unambiguous and distinct keywords. Money or God make good examples of such keywords, whereas we omitted terms such as tax or constitution as they refer to both politics and economy or law.

Finally, we entered stacks of the five most frequent religious, political, economic, and other pertinent keywords to run comparative analyses of word frequency time-series plots as displayed by the Google Ngram Viewer.

The figure below shows word frequencies of combined religious, political, economic, scientific, and mass media-related keywords in the English-language Google Books corpus between 1800 and 2000.

Since we analysed a considerable proportion of humanity’s collective memory between 1800 and 2000, and since the outcomes of our research resemble classical electroencephalography (EEG) recordings (see figure), we also linked our research into the global brain discourse.

The basic idea here is that the worldwide network of information and communication technology acts as the global brain of planet earth. In this sense, our electroencephalographic big data internet research is the first example of a global brain wave measurement, which was heralded by Peter Russell in his 1982 book The Global Brain.

Secularisation, much politics, and no capitalism

Looking at the global brain wave recordings (figure below), we find that our method performs well in capturing the expected decline of religion (orange line), which, by the way, is less significant in Spanish and Italian.

The chart for English language shows notable interactions between the two world wars and the significance of politics (blue line), and we find similar interactions in other areas, too.

In the Russian segment, the importance of politics is considerably increased during the (post-) October Revolution period and even more dramatically so in the context of the second world war.

Word frequencies of combined religious (orange), political (blue), economic (purple), scientific (red), and mass media-related keywords (green) in the English-language Google Books corpus between 1800 and 2000.
Authors Google Books Ngram Viewer query, Author provided

In the French case, the years around the first world war see a steep rise in the importance of politics, whereas the interaction during the second world war is much more moderate. The German data follow a similar pattern as the French, but exhibit the dramatic rise of politics in the post-second world war era, peaking at around 1970.

The rise of the importance of the mass media corresponds to the timeline of the information age (green line). What we do not see, however, is the dominant position of economy (purple line) in modern societies. There is a short period between 1910 and 1950 where economy was second to a much stronger politics.

This image of a war economy is the closest approximation to a capitalist situation to be found in the English segment, in which the economy is outperformed by science (red line) soon after the second world war and by mass media in the 1990s, ranking fourth at the end of the sample period.

There’s no sign of the golden age of capitalism in the 19th century either, as narratives of the Industrial Revolution would lead us to believe.

The charts for the other languages also do not support the idea of modern societies as being capitalist or otherwise dominated by the economy. The only exception is the French segment, where economy has been second again to a much stronger politics since the end of the second world war.

Economy ranks third in the Russian segment only from the late 1950s to the 1990s and in the German segment not before the 1970s, and well below par in the Spanish and Italian segments.

New god of modern societies

Our big data research hence suggests that modern societies are heavily politicised; most investigated societies are clearly secularized, with reservations applying to the societies where Spanish and Italian are spoken; and that science plays a remarkable role, ranking second in the English-, Russian-, and German-language areas in the second half of the 20th century.

None of the investigated societies is dominated by the economy, with the minor reservation discussed above applying only to French. Even this finding reflects only the idea of capitalism as an economy-based political ideology, not the idea of the primacy of the economy.

The major finding of our research is that political power rather than economics has dethroned religious faith as the dominant guiding principle between 1800 and 2000.

Our data definitely suggests that, despite all contradicting ideologies or habits of mind, the economy is of only moderate importance to modern societies. This implies that, in the future, we may wish to think twice before we continue to label our societies as money-driven, economy-biased, or simply capitalist.

One major shortcoming of our research is that it focused only on books. But this focus is adequate as the ideas of capitalism and the primacy of economy have been developed precisely in the books we investigated.

The idea that the definitions of modern societies as capitalist or economy-dominated are probably rooted in misconceptions rather than modern scientific worldviews may be counter-intuitive or even shocking for both capitalists and anti-capitalists.

But once we take it seriously, it clearly expands our vision of realistic alternatives to capitalism, including alternatives for degrowth, post-growth, or other forms of growth.

Acknowledgement: Our research was first presented at 2016 City University of Hong Kong Workshop on Computational Approaches to Big Data in the Social Sciences and Humanities. I am grateful to Jonathan Zhu and the entire team of the Web Mining Lab at the CityU Department of Media and Communication for the invitation to Hong Kong as well as for valuable feedback.

Steffen Roth, Professor of Strategic Management, Sup de Co La Rochelle

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Brazil's biggest problem isn't corruption — it's murder

Somewhere between outraged and perplexed, Brazilians have been bombarded with news about their political underworld, covering everything from graft scandals and political intrigues to, on June 10, a narrow Supreme Court vote to save Michel Temer’s presidency.

Recently, the Brazilian version of the Netflix series House of Cards even tweeted that it’s “hard to compete” with the country’s realpolitik.

But rampant public corruption is not the only threat to Brazil’s democracy. It’s not even the most dangerous one.

Social panic

Brazil is one of the world’s murder capitals, with 60,000 homicides every year in a population of almost 208 million. Fully 10% of all people killed globally each year are Brazilians.

As demonstrated during recent bloody prison uprisings and police strikes in Espirito Santo and Rio de Janeiro, the authorities seem incapable of dealing with the problem.

There have been some successful public safety initiatives over the past decade. Police reforms and anti-violence initiatives in Rio de Janeiro and Pernambuco managed to reduce homicide rates by up to 50%, but only temporarily. In these places, too, murder is on the rise.

Almost 50 million Brazilians aged 16 or older – nearly a third of the adult population – know someone who has been murdered, according to research conducted for Instinto de Vida (Life Instinct), an Open Society Foundations-funded campaign shedding light on Latin America’s homicide problem.

Almost 5 million have been injured by firearms and some 15 million know someone who was killed by the police, one of the world’s deadliest forces.

In Rio de Janeiro’s poor favelas, frequent military-style police operations and extrajudicial police killings of alleged gang members are common. Locals live in daily panic.

The social hysteria caused by Brazil’s homicide crisis, combined with growing disillusionment with politics, is giving rise a markedly undemocratic strain of politics.

Today, public officials regularly invoke sexist, racist and xenophobic discourses to justify punitive policies that criminalise huge swaths of society, from gang members to drug users and ethnic minorities.

Like Donald Trump, France’s Marine Le Pen and Holland’s Geert Wilders, who all use the threat of terrorism to stoke fear and intolerance, Brazilian leaders, too, have determined that imposing order is more important than building a stronger society. Only here, fear is fuelled by unceasing violence and the clear incapacity of public security institutions to address the problem.

According to a survey by the Getúlio Vargas Foundation, 36% of the Brazilian population feels satisfied with the police; only 25% say they trust them. This distrust exacerbates perceptions of danger.

Brazil’s authoritarian personality

At this juncture, Brazilians might seek out leaders who reject violence and impunity. Instead, they seem inclined to dismantle the post-dictatorship-era rule of law heralded by the 1988 Constitution, signed after democracy was restored.

According to unpublished national survey by the NGO Brazilian Forum on Public Safety, which interviewed 2,087 people across the nation, 69% of Brazilians aged 16 or older agree that “what this country needs, above all, before laws or political plans, is some brave leaders, tireless and dedicated in whom the people can deposit their faith”.

Fans of German philosophy may recognise that sentence; it’s a translation of a question from Theodor Adorno’s 1950 classic study on the authoritarian personality. In it, Adorno sought to understand how Nazism had attracted so many Germans in the early 20th century, concluding that periods of crisis are fertile for the advance of authoritarianism.

Looking at Adorno’s study alongside the Brazilian Forum’s results makes for dire forecasts about Brazil’s democratic future.

Bolsonaro, centre, openly longs for dictatorship.

The national desire for authoritarian leadership is personified by Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain from Rio de Janeiro state who is expected to run for president in 2018. Bolsonaro, who openly calls for a return to military rule in Brazil, draws large crowds to gymnasiums and schools across the country with speeches that denounce the “human rights agenda”. He has 4.35 million Facebook followers.

Police officers – the same force that, in theory, should be guardians of the law – are quite taken with him. For cops, who confront Brazil’s dangerously out-of-hand criminality every day, it seems becoming hardline on law and order is starting to sound pretty good.

A corrosive process

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a country where evangelical Christianity is exploding in popularity, the study found that 64% of respondents also believe that “we should all have absolute faith in a supernatural power, whose decisions we must abide by.”

As religiosity infiltrates Brazil’s politics, faith is becoming something of a new order, creating a complex symbiosis between state and religion that organically influences public opinion and policy-making.

When people believe that “the policeman is a warrior of God who must impose order and protect the good people” – an opinion held by 53% of Brazilians – it justifies two damaging behaviours. First, it condones widespread police brutality, and, second it allows for tolerance of local rule by criminal organisations (because if you can overpower the agents of God, then you can definitely impose your will on the population).

Infusing public order with private morality to justify authoritarianism is both more subtle and powerful than than the more classic nostalgia for military rule when times get tough.



Brazilians fought hard to regain civil and human rights after two decades of a bloody military dictatorship. Now, 30 years later, paralysed by crime and violence, they’re again flirting with authoritarianism and intolerance.

In this corrosive process, organised crime has doubled down, corruption has multiplied, and instability and danger have warped the nation’s politics. To save its democracy, Brazil urgently needs to find a new solution for public safety. Otherwise, fear, crime and homicide will win.

This article was co-authored by Samira Bueno, PhD candidate at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation and executive director of the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety.

Renato Sérgio de Lima, Professor and researcher, Centre for Applied Legal Research , Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration (EBAPE/FGV)

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Dispute over war ship in the South China Sea is a return to 'business as usual' for US and China

The South China Sea is a volatile place – or rather, its politics are.

China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan have been fighting over this azure stretch of the Pacific for more than a century. But tensions increased markedly in recent years as China, claiming the South China Sea as its own, has built on and militarised some 250 islands off the coasts of Vietnam, the Philippines and Taiwan.

Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, along with an arbitration tribunal, are now challenging the legitimacy of China’s presence there.

Meanwhile, the United States continues to insist that the sea remain under international control. Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping were supposed to discuss the situation during their first meeting at Mar-a-Lago on April 5 2017. But the launch of 59 Tomahawks in Syria and growing tensions on the Korean peninsula completely overshadowed the maritime issue.

Two months after that meeting, the US triggered a classic confrontational cycle in the South China Sea. On May 24, the guided-missile destroyer USS Dewey passed through the contested waters and sailed close to Mischief Reef, in the Spratly archipelago.

The island, controlled by China, has become a symbol of the country’s assertiveness since it was occupied in 1995.

The operation was the first military maritime exercise in eight months and the first of Trump’s presidency. Under the Obama administration, starting in 2015, American patrols in the South China Sea were regular practice.

The Chinese Nine-Dash Line and the scramble for the South China Sea.
www.southchinsea.org

Freedom of navigation

The South China Sea Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPS) is a US military program, open to regional allies (such as Australia, Japan and the Philippines), in which the US leads maritime exercises in the area. FONOPS is aimed at reiterating the inalienable principle of freedom of navigation in international waters laid out in the United Nations Conventions on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

China disputes this application of the UN declaration and perceives FONOPS as essentially a unilateral American endeavour. The Department of State asserts that the US can and will exercise its freedom of navigation on worldwide, without interference by any other country.

War ships, it has affirmed, should enjoy the same freedom as any other vessel, meaning free access to both exclusive economic zones (EEZ) and territorial seas without permission from the relevant coastal state.

China, which has also been in bilateral talks on the South China Sea with the Phillipines since early this year, has a different interpretation. For Beijing, military vessels cannot enter a coastal state’s territorial seas without official permission.

It also claims that military ships in EEZ territorial waters are unlawful and suspicious, and only non-military vessels enjoy the right to passage.

The clash of unilaterality is clear, and both countries are firm in their stances. For the US, ensuring the freedom of navigation throughout Asia-Pacific region is a national prerogative and a matter of vital importance. As such, China – specifically, its military activities on some of the disputed South China Sea islands – is clearly its main obstacle.

A confrontation appears unavoidable, but, for now, interactions have cleverly been kept on a safe track, as no US allies have joined in the FONOPS exercises.


FONOPS is often misinterpreted as a challenge to China’s claims in the South China Sea. In fact, the freedom of navigation operations are not explicitly aimed at questioning Chinese sovereignty in the South China Sea.

Why it’s important for Trump’s administration

Still, the US has a clear interest in preserving its role as a regional hegemon, and FONOPS could be seen as a provocation of Beijing and its divergent maritime stance.

During his first months in office, President Trump was accused of neglecting the South China Sea dispute and undervaluing the maritime routes encompassed in the Chinese Nine-Dash line. As the New York Times has reported, the Pentagon has on two occasions turned down requests by the US Pacific Command to conduct operations in the disputed waters, in February and April.

This has worried some US allies in the region, and may have encouraged others to start developing a more independent foreign policy.

Trump’s cabinet has given every sign that it will continue the South China Sea policy developed under the Obama administration. On February 4 2017, Secretary of State James Mattis reiterated the importance of the South China Sea on the American agenda. Several months later, Admiral Harry Harris assured that the FONOPS in the South China Sea were planned as usual.

Timing is key in the waltz between Washington and Beijing. The US needs China’s support in facing a growing number of global challenges, from terrorism to North Korea. And with Trump already pushing China on trade, evidently his weapon of choice for addressing the nations’ multifaceted bilateral relationship, the administration may have seen a strategic reason for waiting to pressure Beijing on the South China Sea.

By relaunching operations in the region in May, the US reassured its Asian allies about its continued presence there. China was able to underline its different approach and criticise the US for jeopardising regional peace, thus bringing this FONOPS cycle to a close.

Beijing is well aware that such operations will continue, of course, just as Washington knows how China will respond. Ultimately, FONOPS is a geopolitical balancing act: it does not pose a direct threat to the status quo, which is favourable to China. But it asserts the US’ hegemonic role in the Asia Pacific.

Though competition between the two world powers will continue, it seems unlikely to escalate in the near future. Reciprocal accusation of undermining regional stability are, in the end, business as usual.

Alessandro Uras, Teaching Fellow in Southeast Asian Studies, University of Cagliari

This article was originally published on The Conversation.