This new edition of Global Politics is certain to engage and stretch students. Edkins and
Zefuss clearly know how to grab students’ attention and to inspire them to think and
then rethink. Every chapter here, I’m wagering, will spark wonderful classroom
discussions. Global Politics is smart, lively and gritty.
Cynthia Enloe, author of Seriously! Investigating Crashes
and Crises as If Women Mattered.
If you thought the first edition was amazing, wait until you read this! Global Politics
2.0 is the most intellectually rewarding textbook in the field to-date. The revolutionary
question-based approach now challenges, provokes, and inspires across an even wider
range of issues in contemporary political life. This version of Edkins and Zehfuss, with
its unrivalled line-up of world-leading scholars, sets the bar even higher—it is a must-
read for students and lecturers alike.
Nick Vaughan-Williams, Reader in International Security,
University of Warwick, UK.
Unlike the majority of IR manuals, this book does not try to domesticate the ways we
learn and teach global politics. Instead of spoon-feeding students with theories and
concepts, it invites students to think about the international by focusing on the very
questions that drive them to study world politics. I wish a manual like this had been
available back when I was an undergraduate student.
Erica Simone A. Resende, Rio de Janeiro
State University, Brazil.
This engaging text treats readers as intelligent adults, inviting them to apply their own
observations and experiences to the issues it addresses. Long case examples illustrating
concepts like nationalism (China), and democracy (Argentina) let readers see how the
moving parts of theories operate in practice. The chapter on the financial crisis is
accessible, incorporates several tiny case examples from Iceland to Occupy, and carefully
distinguishes among the contributions of states and other actors to what is happening.
No text covers everything but what is examined here invites readers to continue their
investigations, and provides tools to do just that.
Mary Ann Tetreault, Distinguished Professor Emerita,
Trinity University, San Antonio TX.
In my twelve years of teaching introduction-level courses in Globalization and IR, I
have never seen a textbook come close to ‘Global Politics’. The book brings an
unprecedented degree of attention to the challenge of balancing theoretical rigor with
facility of access. Many books will recite ‘the theories’ but none will get your students
to think so deeply about the questions of our time. Power, subjectivity, sovereignty,
security, neoliberalism, it’s all here. This new edition adds fresh and relevant material
addressing the Internet, global revolt, and the everyday politics of the ongoing financial
crisis.
Nicholas Kiersey, Assistant Professor in Political Science,
Ohio University, USA.
Global Politics: A New Introduction makes international politics and theorising accessible
and intelligible for students. It gives equal weight to theoretical approaches and case
studies, and the centrality of questions as a basis for inquiry is both engaging and unique.
Christine Agius, Lecturer in Politics, Swinburne
University of Technology, Australia.
Global Politics offers students analysis of the most pressing issues of today: climate
change, migration, economic upheaval, resistance, inequality, and conflict – while also
placing contemporary global politics in the context of histories of colonialism,
nationalism, capitalism and statehood. It is an invaluable resource in helping students
think through complex concepts in new and accessible ways, giving them illustrative
examples about foundational topics in global politics, from democracy, ethics and human
rights, to political economy, and war and peace. Moving beyond conventional stories
about the nature of international relations, Global Politics captures the richness of the
study and practice of international affairs today.
Alison Howell, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science,
Rutgers University (Newark), USA.
GLOBAL
POLITICS
A NEW INTRODUCTION
The second edition of Global Politics: A New Introduction continues to provide a
completely original way of teaching and learning about world politics. The book
engages directly with the issues in global politics that students are most interested in,
helping them to understand the key questions and theories and also to develop a critical
and inquiring perspective.
Completely revised and updated throughout, the second edition also offers additional
chapters on key issues such as environmental politics, nationalism, the internet,
democratization, colonialism, the financial crisis, political violence and human rights.
Global Politics :
• examines the most significant issues in global politics – from war, peacebuilding,
terrorism, security, violence, nationalism and authority to poverty, development,
postcolonialism, human rights, gender, inequality, ethnicity and what we can do
to change the world;
• offers chapters written to a common structure which is ideal for teaching and
learning and features a key question, an illustrative example, general responses and
broader issues;
• integrates theory and practice throughout the text, by presenting theoretical ideas
and concepts in conjunction with a global range of historical and contemporary
case studies.
Drawing on theoretical perspectives from a broad range of disciplines including
international relations, political theory, postcolonial studies, sociology, geography,
peace studies and development, this innovative textbook is essential reading for all
students of global politics and international relations.
Jenny Edkins is Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, UK.
Maja Zehfuss is Professor of International Politics and Associate Dean for Postgraduate
Research in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Manchester, UK.
There is a Companion Website at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/ containing
substantial additional material and resources for instructors and students.
Features include:
• About the book: More information about the book, editors, contributors and
the table of contents.
• Sample chapters: Several complete chapters fully downloadable as PDFs.
• Useful weblinks: Related websites suggested by contributors and organised by
chapter.
• Maps and tables: Fully downloadable maps and tables used within the book.
Organised by chapter and ideal for use with PowerPoint slides.
• Interactive library: A library of additional audio-visual material online suggested
by the Publisher and organised by chapter. Updated regularly.
• Journal articles for further reading: Links to further articles by the
contributors on related issues.
• Audio files: Downloadable audio files of interviews by the book’s editors with
several of the contributors exploring the challenges and issues raised by the text.
http://www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
GLOBAL
POLITICS
A NEW INTRODUCTION
Second edition
Edited by
Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss
Contents
Notes on contributors xvii
Teaching with Global Politics: A New Introduction xxiii
1 Introduction 1
Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss
THE QUESTION
What does this introduction to global politics do? 1
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
How do we use illustrative examples? 4
GENERAL RESPONSES
What sorts of responses might there be? 11
BROADER ISSUES
What assumptions do we start from? 13
CONCLUSION 17
2 How do we begin to think about the world? 20
Véronique Pin-Fat
THE QUESTION
Thinking and language 20
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
Thinking about torture: the ticking bomb scenario 22
GENERAL RESPONSES
Thinking about ethics: two responses 27
BROADER ISSUES
Thinking about thinking 31
CONCLUSION 37
3 What happens if we don’t take nature for granted? 39
Simon Dalby
THE QUESTION
From environment to biosphere 39
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
Climate change 42
GENERAL RESPONSES
How do we frame the issue in terms of global politics? 49
BROADER ISSUES
Challenging carboniferous capitalism 52
CONCLUSION 56
4 Can we save the planet? 61
Carl Death
THE QUESTION
Environmental politics and sustainable development 61
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
The World Summit in 2002 65
GENERAL RESPONSES
Existing analyses of global environmental governance 74
BROADER ISSUES
Post-ecologism and eco-governmentality 77
CONCLUSION 81
5 Who do we think we are? 85
Annick T. R. Wibben
THE QUESTION
Narratives and politics 85
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
The US feminist movement 89
GENERAL RESPONSES
How can we conceptualize identity? 95
BROADER ISSUES
Do we need to identify with a group? 101
CONCLUSION 104
6 How do religious beliefs affect politics? 108
Peter Mandaville
THE QUESTION
The role of religion today 108
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
Islamic states and movements 112
GENERAL RESPONSES
Do religion and politics mix? 121
viii CONTENTS
BROADER ISSUES
Culture, fundamentalism and religious identities 125
CONCLUSION 129
7 Why do we obey? 132
Jenny Edkins
THE QUESTION
Obedience, resistance and force 132
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
The revolutions of 1989 135
GENERAL RESPONSES
Authority and legitimacy 141
BROADER ISSUES
Thinking about power 146
CONCLUSION 151
8 How do we find out what’s going on in the world? 154
Debbie Lisle
THE QUESTION
The mediation of information 154
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
Media bias: news representations of war 157
GENERAL RESPONSES
The media, power and democracy 163
BROADER ISSUES
How to read the media 169
CONCLUSION 173
9 How does the way we use the Internet make a difference? 176
M. I. Franklin
THE QUESTION
What is the Internet? 176
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
The Arab Spring and Internet governance 180
GENERAL RESPONSES
Regulation, censorship and rights 185
BROADER ISSUES
Internet futures 191
CONCLUSION 196
CONTENTS ix
10 Why is people’s movement restricted? 200
Roxanne Lynn Doty
THE QUESTION
Border crossings 200
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
The US–Mexico border and the immigration crisis 203
GENERAL RESPONSES
Ideas of states and citizenship 209
BROADER ISSUES
Cultural racism 213
CONCLUSION 216
11 Why is the world divided territorially? 220
Stuart Elden
THE QUESTION
Forms of political and geographical organisation 220
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
The development of the European territorial state 226
GENERAL RESPONSES
The emergence of territory 231
BROADER ISSUES
Techniques and the future of the territorial state 237
CONCLUSION 241
12 How do people come to identify with nations? 245
Elena Barabantseva
THE QUESTION
National affiliations 245
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
The margins of the Chinese nation 246
GENERAL RESPONSES
Nationalism studies 255
BROADER ISSUES
Transnationalism and hybridity 259
CONCLUSION 265
13 Does the nation-state work? 269
Michael J. Shapiro
THE QUESTION
States, nations and allegiance 269
x CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
Worlds of unease within the nation-state 272
GENERAL RESPONSES
Stories of coherent nationhood 276
BROADER ISSUES
An alternative political imaginary 280
CONCLUSION 285
14 Is democracy a good idea? 289
Lucy Taylor
THE QUESTION
Democracy 289
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
Democracy in Argentina 293
GENERAL RESPONSES
Elections and equality 299
BROADER ISSUES
Whose democracy? 305
CONCLUSION 310
15 Do colonialism and slavery belong to the past? 314
Kate Manzo
THE QUESTION
Slavery: abolition and continuation 314
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
Colonialism and capitalist development in Ivory Coast 318
GENERAL RESPONSES
The effects of adjustment: deproletarianisation and
modern slavery 324
BROADER ISSUES
Is today’s world postcolonial or neo-colonial? 329
CONCLUSION 334
16 How does colonialism work? 338
Sankaran Krishna
THE QUESTION
Colonialism and underdevelopment 338
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
India and Britain 340
GENERAL RESPONSES
What is modern colonialism? 350
CONTENTS xi
BROADER ISSUES
The psychology of colonialism 354
CONCLUSION 358
17 How is the world organized economically? 363
V. Spike Peterson
THE QUESTION
From local markets to global political economy 363
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
Formal and informal work 367
GENERAL RESPONSES
Explaining the politics of economics 371
BROADER ISSUES
The hidden costs of neoliberalism 377
CONCLUSION 381
18 Is the financial crisis part of everyday life? 385
Matt Davies
THE QUESTION
Politics and everyday life 385
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
Finance and the financial crisis 386
GENERAL RESPONSES
The politics of the financial crisis 391
BROADER ISSUES
Re-politicizing finance, re-politicizing everyday life 396
CONCLUSION 401
19 Why are some people better off than others? 405
Paul Cammack
THE QUESTION
Sources of inequality 405
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
Inequality in the age of neoliberal reform 408
GENERAL RESPONSES
Liberal and developmental perspectives on inequality 416
BROADER ISSUES
Historical materialism and the expansion of the global
working class 420
CONCLUSION 425
xii CONTENTS
20 How can we end poverty? 429
Mustapha Kamal Pasha
THE QUESTION
The global poor and campaigns to end poverty 429
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
Modernization and microfinance in South Asia 432
GENERAL RESPONSES
The neoliberal project and the export of an ideology 437
BROADER ISSUES
Alternative visions of modernity 442
CONCLUSION 447
21 Why do some people think they know what is good
for others? 450
Naeem Inayatullah
THE QUESTION
Giving and receiving 450
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
God’s purpose: early Christian incursions 452
GENERAL RESPONSES
History’s progress: contemporary interventions 461
BROADER ISSUES
Diagnosing the need for exclusive knowledge 466
CONCLUSION 469
22 Why does politics turn to violence? 472
Joanna Bourke
THE QUESTION
Mass killing as a cultural phenomenon 472
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
Killing in wartime 476
GENERAL RESPONSES
Belligerent states 483
BROADER ISSUES
Language and memory 487
CONCLUSION 492
23 What counts as violence? 496
Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede
THE QUESTION
What is violence? 496
CONTENTS xiii
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
Violence and targeting in the war on terror 498
GENERAL RESPONSES
The relationship between violence and power 508
BROADER ISSUES
Visible and invisible violence 512
CONCLUSION 515
24 What makes the world dangerous? 519
Michael Dillon
THE QUESTION
Living dangerously? 519
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
Network-centric warfare 521
GENERAL RESPONSES
Thinking in terms of strategy and security 527
BROADER ISSUES
Unknown unknowns 531
CONCLUSION 535
25 What can we do to stop people harming others? 539
Anne Orford
THE QUESTION
Intervening for humanity? 539
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
Saving Timor-Leste 542
GENERAL RESPONSES
Law and the exceptional 550
BROADER ISSUES
Legality, legitimacy and the politics of intervention 554
CONCLUSION 560
26 Can we move beyond conflict? 564
Roland Bleiker
THE QUESTION
Dealing with seemingly intractable conflicts 564
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
The conflict in Korea 566
GENERAL RESPONSES
Confrontation and engagement: two approaches to conflict 575
xiv CONTENTS
BROADER ISSUES
Dealing with antagonism 581
CONCLUSION 585
27 Who has rights? 590
Giorgio Shani
THE QUESTION
Whose rights? 590
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
The French headscarf ban 592
GENERAL RESPONSES
Human rights and universality 598
BROADER ISSUES
Bare life, human rights and sovereign power 603
CONCLUSION 607
28 Conclusion: What can we do to change the world? 610
Maja Zehfuss
THE QUESTION
Changing what’s wrong with the world 610
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
The Iraq War 613
GENERAL RESPONSES
No right way forward 616
BROADER ISSUES
Change and complicity 620
CONCLUSION 626
List of figures 629
List of boxes 637
Acknowledgements and permissions 640
Index of names 657
General index 667
CONTENTS xv
Page Intentionally Left Blank
Contributors
Louise Amoore is Professor and Deputy Head of Department in Geography at Durham
University. Her current research interests include the techniques and technologies
through which security decisions are made. She has been working on the risk-based
projections of subjects that become risk indicators for security interventions – recently
completing a four-year ESRC/NWO project ‘Data Wars’ with Marieke de Goede. She
is the author of Globalisation Contested: An International Political Economy of Work
(Manchester University Press 2002), the editor of The Global Resistance Reader
(Routledge 2005) and the co-editor, with Marieke de Goede, of Risk and the War on
Terror (Routledge 2008). Her new book The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security
beyond Probability, is to be published by Duke University Press in 2013.
Elena Barabantseva is a Lecturer in Chinese International Relations at the University
of Manchester. Her recent research has been informed by a scholarly curiosity in what
the historical and current processes of human mobility and cultural diversity reveal about
nation-state, international order, sovereignty, citizenship and identity. She is the author
of Overseas Chinese, Ethnic Minorities and Nationalism: De-Centering China (Routledge
2010), co-editor (with Claire Sutherland) of Citizenship and Diaspora (Routledge 2011)
and co-editor (with William A. Callahan) of and contributor to China Orders the World:
Normative Soft Power and Foreign Policy (Woodrow Wilson Center Press with Johns
Hopkins University Press 2012). She is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Roland Bleiker is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland.
From 1986 to 1988 he worked in the Korean Demilitarized Zone as Chief of Office
of the Swiss Delegation to the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission. His most
recent books are Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation (University of
Minnesota Press 2005/2008), Aesthetics and World Politics (Palgrave 2009/2012) and,
as co-editor, Mediating Across Difference: Pacific and Asian Approaches to Security and
Conflict (University of Hawai’i Press 2010). Bleiker is currently working on a
collaborative project that examines how images – and the emotions they generate –
shape responses to humanitarian crises.
Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. She
has published books on Irish history, gender and ‘the body’, the history of psychological
thought, modern warfare, the emotions, sexual violence and the human/animal divide.
Her most recent books are Fear: A Cultural History (Virago 2005), Rape: A History
from the 1860s to the Present (Virago 2007) and What It Means To Be Human (Virago
2011). Her books have been translated into Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish,
Catalan, Russian, Greek, Finnish and Turkish. An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-
Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (Granta 1999) won the Fraenkel Prize in
Contemporary History for 1998 and the Wolfson History Prize for 2000.
Paul Cammack is Professor of Global Political Economy in the Department of Asian
and International Studies at City University Hong Kong. His work explores the
governance of global capitalism from a classical Marxist perspective, with particular
reference to the relationship between states, international institutions, and the logic of
global capital. The recent focus of his research and teaching is on the G20, and the
politics of social protection. He is author of Capitalism and Democracy in the Third
World (Continuum 1997) and most recently of articles in Antipode, Third World
Quarterly and the Journal of Contemporary Asia.
Simon Dalby is CIGI Chair in the Political Economy of Climate Change at the Balsillie
School of International Affairs, Waterloo, Ontario. He was formerly Professor of
Geography, Environmental Studies and Political Economy at Carleton University in
Ottawa. He is coeditor of Rethinking Geopolitics (Routledge 1998), The Geopolitics
Reader (Routledge 1998, 2006), the journal Geopolitics, and author of Creating the
Second Cold War (Pinter and Guilford 1990), Environmental Security (University of
Minnesota Press 2002) and Security and Environmental Change (Polity 2009).
Matt Davies is Lecturer in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle
University. He has also held positions in the Political Science Department, of
Pennsylvania State University–Erie, York University (Toronto), and Wabash College,
Crawfordsville, Indiana. He teaches on international political economy, the politics of
culture, and the politics of Latin America. His books include Poverty and the Production
of World Politics: Unprotected Workers in the Global Political Economy (with Magnus
Ryner, 2006) and International Political Economy and Mass Communication in Chile:
National Intellectuals and Transnational Hegemony (1999).
Carl Death is Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at the University of
Manchester. He is the author of Governing Sustainable Development: Partnerships,
Protests and Power at the World Summit (London: Routledge, 2010). His research is
located at the intersection of African politics and development (particularly post-
apartheid South Africa), environmental politics and sustainable development discourse,
and Foucauldian governmentality analysis. He has focused particularly upon the
constitutive role of dissent, protest and resistance, and as such his research has drawn
upon social movement theory. He explores these issues through case studies, most
notably the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development.
Michael Dillon is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Lancaster. He has
published widely in international politics and security as well as in cultural and political
theory. He is the author of Politics of Security (Routledge 1996), co-author of The Liberal
Way of War (Routledge 2008), co-editor of Foucault on Politics, Security and War
(Palgrave Macmillan 2008) and author of Deconstructing International Politics (2012).
He is working on Biopolitics of Security in the 21stt Century for Routledge. He also
co-edits the Journal of Cultural Research.
xviii CONTRIBUTORS
Roxanne Lynn Doty is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at
Arizona State University. She is the author of Imperial Encounters: The Politics of
Representation in North-South Relations (University of Minnesota Press 1996) and Anti-
Immigrantism in Western Democracies: Statecraft, Desire, and the Politics of Exclusion
(Routledge 2003). Her most recent book, The Law into Their Own Hands: Immigration
and the Politics of Exceptionalism, was published by University of Arizona Press in 2009.
Her current research interests include critical international relations theory, various
border issues, identity, and the politics of academic writing.
Jenny Edkins is Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, and has
also taught at the University of Manchester and the Open University. Her publications
include Missing: Persons and Politics (Cornell University Press 2011), Trauma and the
Memory of Politics (Cambridge University Press 2003) and Whose Hunger? Concepts of
Famine, Practices of Aid (University of Minnesota Press 2000, 2008). She is co-editor
(with Nick Vaughan-Williams) of the Routledge book series Interventions, and co-
organiser of the Gregynog Ideas Lab Summer School in PostInternational Politics.
Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of
Warwick and the editor of the journal Society and Space (Environment and Plan-
ning D). He is the author of five books, including Terror and Territory: The Spatial
Extent of Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press 2009) and The Birth of Territory
(University of Chicago Press 2013). He is currently working on projects on Shakespeare,
Foucault and concepts of the world. He blogs at www.progressivegeographies.com.
M. I. Franklin is Reader in Global Media and Transnational Communications at
Goldsmiths. Previous books include Postcolonial Politics, the Internet, and Everyday Life:
Pacific Traversals Online (Routledge 2004), Resounding International Relations: On
Music, Culture and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan 2005), and Understanding Research:
Coping with the Quantitative–Qualitative Divide (Routledge 2012). Her latest book is
Digital Dilemmas: Power, Resistance and the Internet (Oxford University Press 2013).
A former Chair of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the International
Studies Association, she is currently Co-Chair of the Internet Rights and Principles
Coalition at the UN Internet Governance Forum.
Marieke de Goede is Professor of Politics at the University of Amsterdam, where she
co-directs the MSc programme ‘The European Union in a Global Order’. She is
currently conducting a research project called European Security Culture that examines
and assesses anticipatory and preemptive security measures in Europe and their political
implications. She is author of Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist
Monies (University of Minnesota Press 2012) and co-editor, with Louise Amoore,
of Risk and the War on Terror (Routledge 2008). De Goede is associate editor of
the journal Security Dialogue and a member of the Peace and Security committee
of the Dutch Advisory Council on International Affairs (AIV) that advises the Dutch
government.
Naeem Inayatullah is Professor of Politics at Ithaca College. He is co-author (with
David Blaney) of International Relations and the Problem of Difference (Routledge 2004)
and Savage Economics (Routledge 2010). He is co-editor (with Robin Riley) of
Interrogating Imperialism (Palgrave 2006) and editor of Autobiographical International
CONTRIBUTORS xix
http://www.progressivegeographies.com
Relations (Routledge 2011). He was the President of the Global Development section
of the International Studies Association 2007–08.
Sankaran Krishna is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University
of Hawai’i in Manoa and his work so far has centred on nationalism, ethnic identity
and conflict, identity politics, and postcolonial studies, located primarily around India
and Sri Lanka. He teaches courses on critical comparative politics; nation/ethnicity and
insecurity; states, citizens and subjects; the material economies of globalization; and
global and Asia-Pacific politics. He is author of Globalization and Postcolonialism:
Hegemony and Resistance in the 21st Century (Rowman and Littlefield 2009) and
Postcolonial Insecurities: India, Sri Lanka and the Question of Nationhood (University
of Minnesota Press 1999).
Debbie Lisle is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics and Cultural Studies in the
School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast.
She is the author of The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing (Cambridge
University Press 2006) and has also written on contemporary art, graffiti, museums,
war films, tourism and travel. In general, her research explores how global politics is
represented in the cultural realm, and how audiences come to understand certain
accepted ‘truths’ about their world. Her current research re-imagines the relationship
between tourism and war by demonstrating how both practices are intimately connected.
Peter Mandaville is Associate Professor of Government and Politics and Director of
the Ali Vural Ak Center for Islamic Studies at George Mason University and a
Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. He is the
author of Global Political Islam (Routledge 2007) and Transnational Muslim Politics:
Reimagining the Umma (Routledge 2001), as well as co-editor of the volumes The Zen
of International Relations (Palgrave 2001), Meaning and International Relations
(Routledge 2003), Globalizing Religions (Sage 2008) and Politics from Afar:
Transnational Diasporas and Networks (Columbia University Press 2012). Much of his
recent work has focused on the comparative study of religious authority and social
movements in the Muslim world. He has also served in government as a member of
the US Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff (2011–12).
Kate Manzo is Senior Lecturer in International Development in the School of
Geography, Politics and Sociology at the University of Newcastle. She is author of
Domination, Resistance and Social Change in South Africa: The Local Effects of Global
Power (Praeger 1992) and Creating Boundaries: The Politics of Race and Nation (Lynne
Rienner 1996). Her current research interests include Africa in the politics of
development, images of Africa in western media, and the iconography of climate
change.
Anne Orford is the Michael D. Kirby Professor of International Law and an Australian
Research Council Future Fellow at Melbourne Law School. Her publications include
International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge University Press
2011), the edited collection International Law and Its Others (Cambridge University
Press 2006) and Reading Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge University Press
2003). She has held visiting positions at the universities of Gothenburg, Lund, New
York University, and Paris 1 (Panthéon Sorbonne), and was awarded the degree of
xx CONTRIBUTORS
Doctor of Laws honoris causa by Lund University in 2012 and by the University of
Gothenburg in 2012. Her current research explores the development of population
control, humanitarian aid, and market-oriented agrarian reform as transnational
responses to the food insecurity from the era of formal empire through to the twenty-
first century.
Mustapha Kamal Pasha is Professor in the Department of International Politics at
Aberystwyth University, UK. He specializes in International Relations theory, Political
Economy, Human Security and Contemporary Islam. Currently, he is Vice President
of the International Studies Association. Professor Pasha is the author/editor of several
books, including recent articles in International Politics; Critical Review of International
Social and Political Philosophy; Global Society; Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science; Journal of Developing Societies; Alternatives; and Millennium:
Journal of International Studies. He also serves on the editorial boards of Globalizations,
International Political Sociology, Critical Asian Studies, Asian Ethnicity, and Critical
Studies on Security. Currently, he is completing a book on the confluence of Islam and
International Relations.
V. Spike Peterson is Professor of International Relations in the School of Government
and Public Policy at the University of Arizona, with courtesy appointments in the
Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and Institute for LGBT Studies. She is
the author of A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive,
Productive, and Virtual Economies (Routledge 2003), co-author of Global Gender Issues
in the New Millennium (with Anne S. Runyan, Westview Press 2010) and editor of
Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory (Lynne Rienner
1992). She has held Visiting Research Fellowships at Australian National University,
University of Bristol, University of Göteborg and the London School of Economics.
Her current research focuses on informalization, global householding, and global
insecurities.
Véronique Pin-Fat is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at The University
of Manchester. She received a Teaching Excellence Award from the University of
Manchester in 2012 and was awarded the Bernard Crick Main Prize for Outstanding
Teaching by the Political Studies Association in 2006. She has a particular interest
in the relationship between language, ethics and global politics. She is the author of
Universality, Ethics and International Relations: A Grammatical Reading (Routledge
2010), is co-editor with Jenny Edkins and Michael J. Shapiro of Sovereign Lives: Power
in Global Politics (Routledge 2004) and with Jenny Edkins and Nalini Persram of
Sovereignty and Subjectivity (Lynne Rienner 1999).
Giorgio Shani is Senior Associate Professor of International Development and
Peacebuilding in the Department of Politics and International Relations at International
Christian University, Tokyo. He is the author of Sikh Nationalism and Identity in a
Global Age (Routledge 2007) and co-editor of Protecting Human Security in a Post 9/11
World (Palgrave 2007). His main research interests focus on reconceptualising ‘identity’
and ‘security’ in a ‘post-western’ world. He served as Chair of the Global Development
Section of the International Studies Association in 2010–11 and is currently writing a
book on Religion, Identity and Human Security.
CONTRIBUTORS xxi
xxii CONTRIBUTORS
Michael J. Shapiro is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i. He is
the author of numerous books, including Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of
War (University of Minnesota Press 1997), Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance
and the Indigenous Subject (Routledge 2004), Deforming American Political Thought:
Ethnicity, Facticity, and Genre (University Press of Kentucky 2006), Cinematic
Geopolitics (Routledge 2009), The Time of the City: Politics, Philosophy and Genre
(Routledge 2010), The New Violent Cartography, co-edited with Sam Opondo
(Routledge 2012), and Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn
(Routledge 2012).
Lucy Taylor teaches and researches at the Department of International Politics,
Aberystwyth University. She works on Latin American politics – especially Argentina.
She is currently exploring decolonial political strategies, inspired by the work of
contemporary Latin American approaches to understanding world politics, especially
the theoretical insights of Walter Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado Torres. Her work
focuses on two aspects. First, she has opened a new approach to decolonizing
International Relations by rethinking the USA from Latin America. Second, she explores
the challenges and ambiguities of decolonizing Latin America’s most Europeanized
country, Argentina. Lucy is President of the Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS)
and a co-editor of the Bulletin of Latin American Research.
Annick T. R. Wibben is Associate Professor of Politics and International Studies at
the University of San Francisco. She teaches international politics and specialises in
critical security studies, international theory and feminist international relations. She is
the author of Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach (Routledge 2011) and
coordinates the Feminist Security Studies Network. Her current research project
examines security narratives involving women in the US military. She has a keen interest
in issues of methodology, representation and writing, which she also explores in her
work on (feminist) pedagogy.
Maja Zehfuss is Professor of International Politics and Associate Dean for Postgraduate
Research in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Manchester. She is the author
of Constructivism in International Relations: The Politics of Reality (Cambridge
University Press 2002) and Wounds of Memory: Politics of War in Germany (Cambridge
University Press 2007). Her current research examines the politics of ethics in the context
of war. She is a member of the National Academy of Teaching.
FIGURE 0.1
‘Tiger Foood’. Calvin and Hobbes. Image ID: 16449. http://www.amureprints.com/img1/Calvin/1989/ch891110.gif
Teaching with Global Politics:
A New Introduction
Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss
This textbook offers a different way of teaching global politics. Many of us have become
dissatisfied with traditional introductions, which seem to fall into two camps – either
starting with various ‘theoretical approaches’, or introducing global politics as a series
of ‘issues’, or indeed offering some combination of the two. Beginning with contending
approaches, while radical and inspiring when first introduced in the late 1980s, has
become well-worn and somewhat formulaic. Beginning with issues as an alternative can
be equally frustrating. Although this new book includes both approaches and issues, it
does not prioritise either. Instead, it begins with questions.
People come to the study of world politics with a series of questions about how to
conceptualise the world and their place within it, motivated often by a desire for change.
To give an example, many of these questions concern how we live in a world where so
many people are brought together in such proximity. Who are ‘we’ anyway? Are we
individuals, first and foremost, or social beings? What forms of identity do we adopt
and why? What happens when things go wrong and we end up with wars and conflicts
or severe economic inequalities?
The approach that this book presents takes questions like these as its starting point.
It uses them to draw out the concrete historical and geographical locations within which
the questions are situated, examine the challenge and complexity of response, and
emphasise the need to think carefully about the broader assumptions or theoretical
BOX 1 AIM OF THE BOOK
Rather than asking students to set their questions aside whilst they study ‘theory’ or ‘issues’, the book
tackles the questions people bring with them head on.
As we say in the introduction and explore again in the concluding chapter, this textbook, unlike
Calvin’s maths textbook in the cartoon below, doesn’t give answers – magic or otherwise – to be learned
and taken on faith. In our view, the questions that the various chapters pose can be addressed in different
ways and from different perspectives, and there are no final answers to be had: only more questions. As
we say at the end of the conclusion, the questions remain intractable, there for each new generation –
from the generation of students of ‘68 to that of the occupy movement and beyond – to formulate and
tackle anew.
Moreover, we would stress, following Jacques Rancière, that we all – students and professors alike –
approach the questions as people of equal intelligence. As two people intrigued by many of the same
puzzles that students bring to the study of international politics, our goal in this book is to treat their
questions as important, show that other people agree and trace how some people have thought about
them.
FIGURE 0.2
The Sorbonne University, Paris, occupied by students, 14 May 1968. Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos
xxiv TEACHING WITH GLOBAL POLITICS: A NEW INTRODUCTION
Chapters have four
sections: the question;
illustrative example;
general responses;
broader issues.
Marginal comments
are a feature of the book.
They explain concepts,
make links from one
chapter to another,
and raise questions to
think about. Other
pedagogical features
include boxes, images,
maps and cartoons.
For a list of the thinkers
and other people
covered see the index
of names.
The text is suitable for
introductory courses, but
also works well at a
higher level.
TEACHING WITH GLOBAL POLITICS: A NEW INTRODUCTION xxv
approaches that underlie the questions we ask as well as the responses we give.
Each chapter thus follows the same structure, with sections examining the question, an
example, what responses there might be and broader issues raised. Taking students’
questions seriously in this way fosters engagement, empowers and inspires students, and
provides a sound basis for further study.
The book employs a number of pedagogical tools to do its job. Although the book
tackles profound questions, it addresses these in a clear and accessible way. The language
used is straightforward; any terms that might be difficult are carefully explained,
sometimes in brackets, sometimes in marginal comments. Because the different
questions that the book examines are intertwined, there are links from chapter to chapter.
Throughout the book, more information about particular thinkers, detailed explanations
of issues referred to, and background about historical events is given in boxes that appear
alongside the main discussion. The numerous illustrations aid understanding as well as
emphasising the actual people and places involved in global politics. Cartoons provide
pointed reflections and humorous asides.
In its illustrative examples, the book covers many parts of the world and is wide
in its historical scope. A range of different issues and events are covered, and thinkers
who have addressed global questions in a variety of ways discussed. An index of
names lists thinkers and other people mentioned in the course of the text for ease of
reference, alongside a general index that includes places, events and concepts, issues
and topics, ideologies and theories introduced and indicates where each is covered in
the book.
There are many different ways of approaching the design of a course in global
politics that uses this book – either the whole book or a selection of chapters. Some
people have used the book with an existing course that approaches the subject through
theoretical approaches or issues. The range of material presented in the book – much
extended in this second edition – makes it possible to select material to fit an existing
framework. However, many more people have taken the opportunity to teach and design
courses in the entirely new way that the book proposes – focusing on questions – with
all the advantages this allows.
The book is designed with newcomers to the field in mind, whether first- or second-
year undergraduates, or, indeed, graduate students. It is equally suitable for private
study. The text does not assume any previous knowledge, and carefully explains new
concepts and events as and when they are encountered. It works well as the text for an
introductory course, and in our experience those who have not encountered the area
before find the style and approach both accessible and intellectually challenging. The
book is accessible in the way it is presented, but it does not shy away from the difficult
and complex questions of global politics. We have found that our students appreciate
this approach and enjoy tackling the challenges that the difficult questions of
contemporary political life pose to us all.
The chapters can be read in any order – we have grouped them in a certain way,
but they can be read in a different order too. Each chapter stands on its own and does
not assume knowledge of concepts explained in earlier chapters, though there will often
be cross-references in the marginal comments to places in the book where additional
discussion of concepts, places, events, or writers appear. And each chapter is written by
FIGURE 0.3
‘A religion’. Calvin and Hobbes Image ID: 8643. http://www.amureprints.com/img1/Calvin/1991/ch910306.gif
The second edition
includes eight
completely new chapters
examining recent events
and covering even more
areas of the world.
a different author, giving the reader a series of distinct views, approaches and styles –
within the overall framework of four sections in each chapter. We would suggest that
it would be useful to read the introduction first, though, since it sets out in more detail
the framework and ethos of the book and discusses reading strategies; and the concluding
chapter draws out some important issues related to the book as a whole.
SECOND EDITION
For the second edition, all the chapters have been updated and eight new chapters have
been added. A variety of new questions are asked concerning, for example, saving the
planet, how the internet is being used, how people come to identify with nations, the
idea of democracy, and what human rights mean. We examine recent events such as
the global financial crisis and the Arab Spring, and look in more detail at how colonialism
works and what counts as violence. New examples used in the chapters range from drone
attacks and financial targeting in Pakistan, through grassroots democracy in Argentina,
the headscarf ban in France, and social movements and environmentalism in South Africa
to the protests of the occupy movement.
As editors, we learnt a lot about global politics in putting the first edition of this
book together. What is more, we really enjoyed reading the chapters, and seeing what
this new way of approaching the subject made possible. We hoped that Global Politics:
A New Introduction would enable students to think through the intriguing questions
that they had, and we hoped that it would be enjoyable to teach with. All the feedback
that we have had from the first edition suggests that this has been the case: the book
has been widely adopted and positively received, and we hope that this second edition
will prove as popular.
xxvi TEACHING WITH GLOBAL POLITICS: A NEW INTRODUCTION
FIGURE 0.4
Map of the world: Global Politics covers so many countries that highlighting them all on this map would have been difficult.
http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/ProjMAz/Img/Z1/mp2_Winkel3-s75
TEACHING WITH GLOBAL POLITICS: A NEW INTRODUCTION xxvii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Putting together the first edition was only possible because of the support and
enthusiasm of numerous people all along the way, from first concept to finished book.
First of all the many anonymous reviewers who looked at the proposal and responded
with enthusiasm and support – sometimes qualified support, but support nonetheless
– and the smaller group who read the initial manuscript in its entirety or in part and
gave us detailed feedback. As well as this formal seal of approval, the excitement of
numerous colleagues whom we bored with accounts of what we were up to sustained
us along the way. The biggest thanks are of course owed to our initial band of
contributors, who agreed readily to our requests for contributions, and put up with
good grace with a pair of very intrusive editors and the demand for numerous revisions,
expansions and explanations. That they remained nothing short of enthusiastic
throughout all this was more than we were entitled to hope for. We were overwhelmed
by the quality of the chapters – their content and their style – which in all cases not
only met but exceeded our expectations of what we knew at the start was a very high-
calibre bunch of authors. We would also like to thank our students: the initial idea for
the book would not have taken shape without them, their engagement and disengage –
ment during the courses we have taught provided the inspiration for a new approach.
Their detailed input in terms of identifying questions that they brought to the study of
global politics provided the basis for the design of the book. Finally, the project would
never have seen the light of day without the energetic support of the team at Routledge.
Craig Fowlie believed in the project from the start, and this made us think that maybe
we had a concept worth pursuing. Moira Taylor was unstinting in her support and hard
work through all the difficulties along the way. Finally, although in the end his name
is not in our list of authors, thanks are due to Rob Walker for his insistence at the
beginning that we pursue our idea. He told us we should write it ourselves – I hope
he will agree with us that had we done so, the end product would have been nothing
like as strong as what we ended up with.
For the second edition we were able to call on another amazing group of authors
for the eight additional chapters. We are obliged to them for their willingness to write
for the book, and their tolerance when they discovered just what persistent and
demanding editors we were. Once more the outstanding quality of the writing they
produced has delighted us, and their work has vastly expanded the scope and reach of
the book. Our original authors are due our thanks too, for the goodwill with which
they approached the task of revising and updating their chapters. Craig Fowlie’s team
at Routledge, and in particular Nicola Parkin, who has taken charge of seeing the project
through, have been unflagging in their enthusiasm. In the preparation of the second
edition we have benefited again from formal and informal feedback from readers of the
first edition, and from the comments of people who have used the book in their teaching.
We are especially grateful to the many colleagues who have been generous enough to
tell us how much they enjoy teaching with the book: it has been wonderful to know
that the volume has been received as such a significant contribution to enabling a way
of teaching that many were already moving towards. Particular mention needs to be
made of Naeem Inayatullah’s inspirational pedagogy, which one of us has been honoured
to be able to observe at close quarters, and for his engagement with the project: his
input has been invaluable. We are very grateful.
Eight new chapters and the complete revision of every existing chapter has been
hard work, but again each time we have re-read the manuscript our enthusiasm has
been redoubled. We noticed with the first edition that it seemed to be ahead of events
in many ways – Obama had not been adopted as presidential candidate when we went
to press with his image in the book – and it will be interesting to see whether the second
is prescient too. Certainly, for us this new edition is both a reaffirmation of our initial
approach and a chance to ask new questions and to highlight new illustrative examples.
Thank you all.
xxviii TEACHING WITH GLOBAL POLITICS: A NEW INTRODUCTION
THE QUESTION
WHAT DOES THIS INTRODUCTION TO GLOBAL
POLITICS DO?
This is a textbook, but it is more than that. It is a guide for students to the questions
about world politics that puzzle all of us. There are no easy answers to be had, and
none of the chapters pretend that there are. There are only difficult and challenging
questions – that lead to more difficult and more challenging questions. We think this
is because the difficulties of global politics reflect the difficulties of ‘life, the universe
and everything’. This makes this book in some sense a sort of hitch-hiker’s guide. We
don’t give you answers, not even Douglas Adams’ (1979) answer – you will need to
read his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (if you haven’t already) if you want to know
his answer – but we do try to give you a guide to how other people have formulated
questions and how they have attempted to respond to them. Many textbooks behave
as if the ‘great minds’ have come up with the answers: they haven’t. The questions remain
open and intractable, there for each new generation to formulate and tackle for
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss
■ The question
WHAT DOES THIS INTRODUCTION TO GLOBAL
POLITICS DO?
■ Illustrative example
HOW DO WE USE ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES?
■ General responses
WHAT SORTS OF RESPONSES MIGHT THERE BE?
■ Broader issues
WHAT ASSUMPTIONS DO WE START FROM?
■ CONCLUSION
FIGURE 1.1
Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent and Mos Def
as Ford Prefect in Touchstone Pictures’ The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Ronald Grant
Archive
The way we plan to use
comments in the
margins of the textbook
is explained here.
2 JENNY EDKINS AND MAJA ZEHFUSS
themselves. This section of the introduction explores what questions we address, and
discusses how the approach this book takes relates to that taken by other textbooks of
world politics or international relations.
So, instead of starting from the sorts of explanations of global politics that ‘great
minds’ have given (as those textbooks do that start from ‘theories’) or starting from
some problem in global politics (as those textbooks do that start from ‘issues’), in this
book we start with questions. As we have been teaching global politics, our students
have asked us very intriguing questions. Often we have found that our students’
curiosity is motivated by the same sorts of questions that stimulate our own interest in
global politics. In this book we have tried to put together a set of these questions. Each
chapter starts by introducing its main question. So this book tackles twenty-seven main
questions. But often when we start thinking about one particular question we realise
that it raises a number of other questions. Each chapter therefore focuses on one main
question – the one you see in the chapter heading – but it will also discuss related
questions and make reference to other chapters and their questions. We sometimes use
a feature called ‘marginal comments’ to alert you to how the discussion in one chapter
links to the question or explanation in another. Let us briefly explain what we mean by
questions being related in this way.
FIGURE 1.2
‘Like all of us, he asked
many different questions
throughout his life.’
Artist: Richard Jolley.
CartoonStock ref.:
rjo0698. www.Cartoon
Stock.com
INTRODUCTION 3
You might, for example, wonder why people can’t freely decide where they want
to live (Chapter 10). Some of you may indeed have encountered this problem when
you applied to a university: you may have wished to go to a university that is not in the
state of which you are a citizen and this might have set off a series of problems. You
may have had to apply for a visa and pay higher tuition fees, and you may at the same
time be ineligible for (some of the) available scholarships and find it difficult to acquire
the right paperwork to be able to get a part-time job. Your citizenship has a material
impact on how you can live your life.
So, in some way, you know the answer to the question: people can’t move freely
because states can decide who may and may not legally live within their borders. But
how is it that states have this right? And why is the world divided into states in the first
place? (Chapter 11). As you think about this you may notice that we often talk of this
division in terms of ‘nation-states’. But how and why have nations and states come to
be related in this way? Does our allegiance to a particular nation overlap with our relation
to a state? (Chapters 12 and 13). You have now started thinking about how we think
about our identity. So now you need to figure out who we think we are (Chapter 5)
and how we even begin to think about the world. For example, in determining how
we behave towards others (say, whether we should give them financial assistance), does
it matter whether these others belong to the same or another community? (Chapter 2).
Or whether we think they are risky or dangerous? (Chapter 23). If how we think about
the world has an impact, then what about particular ways of conceptualising the world
and our place within it, such as religious beliefs. How do they affect politics? (Chapter
6). And how do we come to believe what we believe in the first place? In order to
understand that, perhaps we need to know how we find out what’s going on in the
world (Chapter 8). And, come to think of it, did we start in the best place to think
about global politics? We started with you: as good a place as any, you may think. But
is there not more to the globe than the people that live on it? As we increasingly worry
about climate change, we might wonder whether there is not more to existence than
human concerns (Chapter 3).
So, you see, many of our questions are connected with each other. We invariably
start with a particular question or concern, and often we may not even realise that it is
http://www.CartoonStock.com
http://www.CartoonStock.com
related to global politics. But as we pursue ways of thinking about and responding to the
question we find that new questions are raised, often questions that concern global issues.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
HOW DO WE USE ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES?
What you will find in this book are a lot of fascinating, and at times moving, accounts
of what is going on or has gone on in particular places at specific historical points in global
history. Sometimes these stories will be large-scale histories and at other times they
will recount the experiences of maybe one person and their life. You will get to know a
lot about many different places: this section of the introduction will map some of them
for you.
When we just explained why questions are often related to each other, we did not
have space to say very much about why we are asking the question or who might be
affected by it. We briefly showed you how you yourself might have been affected by
citizenship regulations, but we did not go into any detail. In each of the chapters,
however, the authors tell you at some length about a particular context in which the
question they examine has arisen. We call this an illustrative example. It’s an example
because for each question there will be many other cases that one could look at in relation
to the question and, of course, another case may highlight different issues. But the
example chosen will illustrate what issues arise when we explore the question in a
particular context. It will show you why the question is important, who is affected by
it and what is at stake in responding to it one way or another. You will, of course, have
4 JENNY EDKINS AND MAJA ZEHFUSS
The book contains many
illustrative examples.
We tell you here what we
mean by that, and why
we think they are
important.
FIGURE 1.3
Tahrir Square, Cairo,
during 8 February 2011,
at the height of the
protests in Egypt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/File:Tahrir_Square
_during_8_February_
2011
INTRODUCTION 5
realised that in order to cross a border legally you need the right documentation. And
you probably know that many people in different regions of the world attempt to enter
countries illegally and often they risk their lives in the process. But by looking at the
particular example of the US–Mexico border, the author of Chapter 10, Roxanne Doty,
is able to show how the US border enforcement policies of the 1990s led to a sharp
increase of deaths along the border and how these policies were linked to larger
developments in economics and security.
BOX 1.1 THE THIRD WORLD
The term ‘third world’ was first coined in 1952. At that time, during the Cold War, the world seemed to be
made up of three groups of countries: the ‘modern’, liberal, industrialised countries of the ‘West’ (US, UK
and other European states, Japan, Australia, Canada and so on), the communist states of the USSR or
Soviet Union, and the ‘underdeveloped’ or non-industrialised states: states in Africa, Asia, South America.
These groups were seen as making up the first, second and third ‘worlds’, respectively. The term ‘third
world’ was problematic, not only because this picture of the world was oversimplified from the start and
became increasingly so as countries in Asia for example began to industrialise rapidly, and later when the
communist regimes of the Soviet Union collapsed, but also because of the implicit hierarchy of ‘first’,
‘second’ and ‘third’. Alternative terminologies have been suggested: ‘developing world’, ‘emerging
countries’ or the division North–South, for example, but none of these are satisfactory either and the term
‘third world’ remains in common use.
FIGURE 1.4
The three ‘worlds’. Public domain
What counts as a ‘global’
issue is not obvious, and
people will have different
views on this. And the
terms people use are
different too: some
people talk of ‘global
politics’, as this book
does, and others of
‘world politics’. The
traditional term is
‘international politics’ or
‘international relations’
but we don’t use either
of these traditional terms
here, since they seem to
limit global politics to
relations between states
or nations.
6 JENNY EDKINS AND MAJA ZEHFUSS
For many people the question of which country they are authorised to live in is
one of life and death. We think it is important to acknowledge this when we ask why
people cannot simply choose where they wish to live. This is also the case with the other
questions explored in the book. When we ask what we can do to stop people harming
others, we need to understand why people are harming each other in the first place
(Chapter 25). The precise circumstances matter. And when we do decide that we want
to do something, say to work for the overthrow of a regime we find oppressive, as people
in Egypt did in 2011, or to get people not to waste resources, we need to think about
how exactly we intend to go about it. Do we march and demonstrate or do we work
through non-governmental organisations (NGOs) (Chapter 4)? How do we actually
organise our activism (Chapter 9)? What you will come across in the chapters of this
book is a series of detailed accounts, sometimes heart-rending, of things that have
happened or are happening in particular places at particular times. This means that as
you read the book, you will learn quite a bit about different places across the globe,
the places where ‘global politics’ happen. We’ll try to map some of these places in this
section of the introduction.
Some chapters explore phenomena that are obviously global in scope, such as
climate change (Chapter 3), but they might still affect people in different places
differently. This is important in order to understand the politics: those people who are
in danger of losing their livelihoods and homes because of the impact of hurricanes, for
example, are likely to think that climate change is a very pressing issue, whereas people
living in areas not so affected might not want to assign resources to avoiding
environmental change. Similarly, while there is global inequality across the globe and
within each country, what this means, and what it means to be poor, depends on where
you live. Chapter 19 examines developed countries in Europe, North America and Japan,
but also developing and emerging countries such as Brazil, Russia, India and China.
You will also learn about many other places and how they relate to each other,
creating what we call global politics and responding to it. Asia, for example, is prominent
in this book. Chapter 12 looks at Chinese identity and how the Chinese state regards
so-called Overseas Chinese. Chapter 16 examines how colonialism worked in India. We
have already noted that Chapter 19 gives you information about inequality in Japan,
India and China. Chapter 20 examines responses to poverty in South Asia, Bangladesh
in particular, and Chapter 23 looks at the Afghanistan–Pakistan border and the impact
of the way it is thought of as a risky place. Chapter 26 takes you to a different part of
Asia, North and South Korea, and looks at the difficult relations between these two
countries and how they relate to wider issues in global politics, especially the Cold War.
Chapter 25 looks at East Timor’s development and recent attempts to constrain
violence there. Like in many other cases, the question of independence for East Timor
cannot be understood in separation from other countries or regions and their involve –
ment, such as, in this case, Portugal, Indonesia and Australia. Nor can the question of
colonialism in India be understood without a discussion of how Britain benefited
economically. Similarly, Chapter 6 focuses on Islamic states in the Middle East, but it
also discusses countries located in Asia and, of course, Africa. Chapter 4 examines the
debate about sustainability that took place at the Earth Summit in South Africa: a
powerful illustration of how a global event impacts on and is affected by its local context.
Chapter 15 focuses on an African country, Ivory Coast, and its role in the cocoa trade.
When we think about a
question in general
terms, things can seem
simpler than they are:
the complexity of a
question, and the way
it is difficult to come
to an abstract all-
encompassing answer,
often only becomes
apparent when we
examine a case in detail,
which is one of the
reasons for using
illustrative examples in
the book.
INTRODUCTION 7
This, again, only makes sense if we also look at the history of colonisation by France
and the way in which the global economy impacts upon Ivory Coast. Chapter 14
examines what democracy might mean by looking closely at Argentina, but once more
the colonial legacy and the links with other parts of the world are important.
It will come as no surprise to you that the United States often comes into the story
of these examples. In a number of the chapters there is a clear focus on the United
States (Chapters 5, 10, 13, 21, 24), but many of the others also make reference to this
country. Europe is also significant. Chapter 11 focuses on Europe and in particular the
state as we now understand it, Chapter 27 examines the headscarf ban in France, and
Chapter 7 looks at the end of the Cold War in Europe, but many other chapters tell
you something about Europe or particular European states.
So our ‘illustrative examples’ allow us to take you on something of a tour around
the globe and let you learn something about places that you might not know that much
about yet. But there is another reason why we examine such particular examples. In the
last section, we showed you that often, when we try to respond to one question, we
come across a lot of other questions. So, when we ask why people cannot simply choose
where to live, we may say that this is because states can decide who may live within
their borders. But this really is only a partial answer: we don’t yet know why it is that
states may do that. In other words, there are often many other things that we need to
know in order to think through particular questions. Sometimes we actually don’t really
appreciate quite what it is we need to know unless we think a bit more about why we
are actually asking the question, what it means for particular people, for example. In
other words, the devil is often in the detail. Let us explain this in relation to a particular
example.
Why are there wars?
To illustrate how looking at the detail of what happens at particular points in time in
specific places helps, this section of the introduction will do just that with respect to
the question ‘Why are there wars?’ This is certainly a question that has intrigued and
vexed many thinkers. You have probably asked yourself this very question at one point
or another. Most likely you were prompted by a particular war. So you may have
wondered, for example, about why a group of other countries led by the United States
intervened militarily in Iraq in 2003. You may have seen pictures of the destruction
caused on television or read about the deaths of service personnel and Iraqi civilians in
the press. You may even know people who were involved in this war in some way, and
you may have been concerned for their lives. So you would be asking the question ‘Why
are there wars?’ very much with a sense of dissatisfaction in mind. What you really are
asking might very well be: Why are there wars when they cause such destruction and
misery, when they kill people? This is, incidentally, why you have quite possibly not
asked yourself in the same sort of way why there is peace, for example. Intuitively, we
would prefer peace over war. If there are wars nevertheless, we would like to have an
explanation for that. We don’t seem to require an explanation for peace – or peace, say,
in Sweden – in the same way.
At least part of the reason why we want an explanation for war is that wars involve
deliberate and significant destruction. Using military force means intentionally
destroying things. Ideally, the destruction is aimed at and limited to military targets,
that is, basically, enemy combatants and those things that enable them to act as
combatants, such as, most obviously, their weaponry. Often other things and people
get destroyed, too, however. If this was not the aim of the action that brought about
the destruction, then this is called ‘collateral damage’ and is not illegal under inter –
national law, unless it is excessive. Nevertheless people are killed.
You probably don’t much like the idea of killing people and, if so, you are likely
to think that war is not such a good idea. But it’s not that simple. First, sometimes
people claim that, while wars do kill people, particular wars kill fewer people than the
alternative. So, if Saddam Hussein’s Iraq really had possessed weapons of mass destruc –
tion and had used them, many more deaths might have ensued. The argument therefore
is that we must go to war in order to avoid deaths. But of course you can immediately
see that this is a really problematic claim: you have to make all kinds of assumptions
about what might happen in order to argue this. And as the case of Iraq shows, one
can very easily be wrong about such things. Second, if you are really against war because
war kills people, you should probably also be against cars. A total of 3,180 people
were killed on the United Kingdom’s roads, for example, in the 12 months ending in
March 2006 (Wilkins 2006). That means almost nine people died as a result of road
traffic accidents every day. This is a considerable number of deaths, and people certainly
cam paign to reduce the number of these deaths, but there is not the widespread condem –
nation of cars (as a cause of death) that there is of wars.
Bombing of German cities in the Second World War
In order to think through why this might be the case it is helpful to think about a
particular example. We could look at the war in Iraq, but we actually want to examine
something different, an aspect of the larger set of events that is called the Second World
War. You probably already know something about this war. You will be aware that the
Allies won. When we say ‘the Allies’, we generally mean the United States, the Soviet
Union, the United Kingdom and France, although it really is all a bit more complicated.
Germany and Japan surrendered to the Allies in May and August 1945 respectively.
This ‘world’ war was fought in a large number of places across the planet, but we want
to only look at one aspect of it: the bombing of German cities.
From 1940 onwards Britain’s Royal Air Force bombed 131 towns and cities across
Germany, some of them repeatedly (Sebald 2004: 3). From 1943 the United States Army
Air Force was also involved in what was then called the combined strategic bombing
offensive. It is often said that there was a significant difference between how the US
and the UK went about the bombing. The US is said to have been involved in ‘counter –
force’ targeting (that is, they aimed to attack militarily relevant sites only) whereas the
UK engaged in ‘countervalue’ targeting (that is, they deliberately targeted cities and
the people who lived within them). One strategy was meant to disable the Germans from
continuing the war by taking away from them the means for conducting the war, the
other to demoralise the population such that they would overthrow the government
or in some other way give up the fight. Another way to put this is to say that the US
was involved in ‘precision’ bombing of particular, militarily valuable targets whereas
the UK was involved in what is variously called ‘area bombing’, ‘carpet bombing’ or
8 JENNY EDKINS AND MAJA ZEHFUSS
Chapter 28 engages
further with the
dilemmas that arise in
considering war as a
response to perceived
wrong in the world.
Chapter 23 examines
how things we often
think of as non-violent
– financial regulation
designed to prevent
people financing
terrorism, for example
– also kill people, if not
perhaps as obviously.
For more on the
Second World War
see Chapter 22.
INTRODUCTION 9
‘obliteration bombing’. Of course, things were not that straightforward: there was
considerable debate in both countries throughout the war about bombing strategies,
and as a result approaches to bombing changed over time. And it was the Americans
who actually built a replica of Berlin in the Utah desert in order to figure out how to
destroy the city by setting off a fire storm through the bombing (Davis 2002).
The precise extent of the destruction caused by these operations is difficult to
measure precisely, but it was certainly considerable. A. C. Grayling notes that ‘485,000
dwellings were completely destroyed and 415,000 severely damaged’ (Grayling 2007:
103) and this constituted 20 per cent of Germany’s housing stock at the time. W. G.
Sebald uses slightly different figures. He speaks of 3.5 million homes destroyed and
7.5 million civilians rendered homeless. There were 31.1 cubic metres of rubble per
inhabitant in Cologne and 42.8 in Dresden (Sebald 2004: 3).
We know that hundreds of thousands of people died in these raids, though there
is no precise figure that is agreed. According to the US Strategic Bombing Survey of
September 1945, 305,000 German civilians were killed by bombs and another 780,000
injured (Grayling 2007: 104). A figure of about 600,000 civilian deaths is also often
cited. One of the problems in determining the death toll is that human remains could
often not be recovered, in particular where bombing had led to a fire storm. There is
a bit more clarity about the airmen who were killed. 55,000 members of RAF Bomber
Command died – that is an astonishing 44 per cent of them, according to Jörg Friedrich
(2002) – and 7,700 aircraft were lost (Grayling 2007: 104).
The bombing of Dresden is particularly infamous. This is in part because it
happened so late in the war, on 13 February 1945, but also because the destruction
caused was particularly devastating. Dresden, like Hamburg in 1943, was one of the
cities where the bombing set off a fire storm. A variety of bombs was used on cities.
Some were designed to create a shock wave that would reduce buildings to rubble or,
at a greater distance, break windows and strip roofs. A much bigger effect could,
however, be achieved by using incendiary bombs. These would start a fire, sometimes
using phosphor which could not be put out with water. Other bombs, involving a timed
FIGURE 1.5
Dresden, 1945:
Cremation on Altmarkt.
Photo: Library of
Congress. Digital
ref.: 3b40632
10 JENNY EDKINS AND MAJA ZEHFUSS
delay mechanism, would stop firecrews from putting out the blazes. Eventually, the fire
would start to create a wind that would fan the flames even more. The heat would
become unbearable. The fire in Dresden was such that later waves of bombers had to
fly at a higher altitude. No markers could be made out any more and in at least one
instance an order was given to simply bomb ‘the middle of the fires’ (Taylor 2005:
320). The fires were visible for about 100 miles (Taylor 2005: 325).
In fire storms many died not from blasts, but from asphyxiation. They died because
they stayed in the air raid shelters. In some shelters in Dresden, several thousand people
were killed by lack of oxygen, smoke poisoning and carbon monoxide poisoning
(Taylor 2005: 329). Others were buried alive underneath buildings that had collapsed
(Taylor 2005: 330). Those who left the shelters had to contend with new waves of
attack, time-delayed bombs that would continue to go off and, of course, the fire. The
fire in Dresden was strong enough to suck people towards its core. They also had to
attempt to escape the ‘tornadoes of burning sparks and debris’. In the city centre, many
were simply burnt to death (Taylor 2005: 331–2).
Frederick Taylor cites at length from a letter by one survivor, Hans Schröter, to a
woman whose parents’ deaths he had seen:
We had got through both raids and thought we would now survive. This unfor –
tunately was not to be the case. The door of the basement of No. 38 [Marienstrasse]
was buried under rubble, so the only option was the emergency exit to No. 40 and
42. When we got through to No. 40, flames were already pouring down the steps,
so that to save our lives we had to act with the utmost haste. [. . .] To push through
the exit required enormous courage, and many could not summon it – including,
perhaps, your beloved parents. They may have thought we’ll be all right in the
basement, but they had not reckoned with the oxygen shortage. As I emerged,
I saw my wife and son standing by the security post on the parterre of No. 42.
[. . .] When we got back [after two minutes], however, my loved ones had
disappeared. I checked every shelter and basement on the street. Nowhere were
they to be seen, everything wreathed in flame, no entry possible. Unable to find
my family, I summoned my last instincts for survival, got as far as the Bismarck
Memorial.
(2005: 336)
The following day Schröter returned to his home.
The sight that greeted my eyes was appalling. . . Everywhere charred corpses. I
quickly headed home, hoping to find my loved ones alive, but unfortunately this
was not so. They lay on the street in front of No. 38, as peacefully as if they were
asleep. What I went through at that point you can easily imagine. Now I had to
find out if my parents-in-law or other friends could be rescued from our basement
alive. [. . .] As we opened up the emergency exit from No. 38, the heat that came
out was so intense that we could not go down there. [. . .] The basement of No.
42 was full of bodies. I counted about fifty. Eulitz was among them. I could not
see your parents, as everyone was piled on top of each other.
(Taylor 2005: 337)
You might like to look
at Chapter 8, where the
author discusses her
emotional response to a
film about war.
This is related to the idea
of ‘just war’ discussed in
Chapter 21.
Is there a difference
between deaths in war
and deaths in a car
crash? Could this be why
we might think
differently about ending
war than ending road
accidents? Or is there no
difference? Chapter 22
discusses killing in war;
Chapter 23 discusses
violence more broadly.
INTRODUCTION 11
GENERAL RESPONSES
WHAT SORTS OF RESPONSES MIGHT THERE BE?
Reading these harrowing accounts, you may well be at a loss to know quite how to
respond. No response seems adequate in view of the horrors described here. We find
ourselves engaged and moved by such accounts in a way quite different from the way
we might engage with an ‘academic’ argument. We wonder whether our emotional
response is acceptable, or whether we are required to put this aside and take a
dispassionate view – though whether or to what extent we may find that possible is
questionable. Just for the sake of argument, let’s differentiate between two sorts of
responses as we think about this. On the one hand, you may think that it is extremely
important to engage with what happened to individual people in this war, and with the
horrific effects that the bombing had on people’s lives, and deaths. These effects are
likely to produce strong emotions in those who read about them. You may be appalled,
for example, that people were burnt alive. You are prompted to imagine yourself or
your family members in a similar situation, and think about how you would feel and
react. You may then feel a strong desire to do something about it – a responsibility, if
you like, to prevent others from having to suffer in this appalling way.
On the other hand, you may think that these individual stories and hardships have
to be put into some sort of context, and that thinking about them in that way is equally,
or even more, central. You may consider that, whilst clearly you would not wish such
suffering on anyone, there are other important issues to be considered here, and that
we could lose sight of these if we were to allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by an
emotional response. Some people want to respond in what they consider to be more
rational, objective or abstract terms. Some might want to say that we should weigh up
the pros and cons of the bombing campaigns which led to such horrendous suffering,
rather than simply react to the suffering itself. The bombing of German cities was part
of the Allies’ larger fight against the Third Reich. It is often said to have been a response
to the bombing of cities by the Nazis, in particular the bombing of Rotterdam in May
1940. The Second World War is often represented as a necessary or even ‘good’ war.
Note that what is meant here is the war fought by the Allies, even if that is often not
mentioned. People often assume that ‘we’ all look at this war from the perspective of
the Allies, the victors. It was a good war because the Third Reich was such an appalling
political system. Many people, it is argued, were saved from the murderous policies of
the Third Reich by the victory of the Allies, and the death of several hundred thousand
German civilians is not such a large price to pay in this context.
Does it matter that this way of waging war killed many civilians? Does it matter
how people died? Is there something particular about how people die in war? Usually
we don’t look at deaths in detail. But if we want to understand why there are wars, do
we not need to grasp what wars are in this sort of way? Arguably, war is, precisely, about
killing people (Bourke 1999). Some people might say that getting too involved with
the deaths and their gruesomeness detracts from thinking about the ‘real’ issues. What
they usually mean by this is that we need to focus on the need to fight the Third Reich.
But now we are already talking about how people think about war, how they
respond to the question of why there are wars. Responses to questions are what we
look at in the second section of each chapter.
There are a number of
ways of responding to
questions. In this section
we examine what we
mean by ‘responses’
and what different types
of responses there might
be. We identify three:
an emotional response,
an academic response
and a policy/activist
response.
12 JENNY EDKINS AND MAJA ZEHFUSS
Each chapter begins by discussing detailed, grounded historical practices, such as
the example that we set out in the last section, one situation within which the chapter
question might have arisen. We have shown now how examining a particular example
can affect how you might think about a question, what you might think is important,
and can make it difficult to know how to respond.
In the section called ‘General responses’, each of the chapters therefore looks at
how people have responded in general to the question at issue. When we say ‘respond
to a question’, there seem to be three senses in which we might do this. First, there is
an emotional response; second, looking for an answer to the question; and third, doing
something about it or taking some action in response to the question. We have
discussed the emotional response, and criticisms that could be made against it, just now.
We might also think through the question, in the way in which scholars do, for example,
looking for an answer. We mentioned earlier that some textbooks seem to suggest that
the ‘great minds’ have come up with the answer to your questions, and this is the sort
of thing that we will be exploring in this part of the chapters. You already know that
we don’t really believe that there are such answers that we can turn to. But it’s still
important to engage with such attempts at answers. Doing so not least helps us
understand better why we might not be satisfied by such answers.
There is another way in which we might think about responses: we might look to
act in response to the question by doing something about it. So, if we were to further
explore the question of why there are wars, we could examine groups that have opposed
war and try to understand how they have aimed to overcome the problem. Of course,
these two senses of response – the academic and the activist response – are not separate.
How you aim to get rid of war is likely to be informed by the way in which you think
about the question of why there are wars. But some of our chapters stress one sense of
‘responding’ to the question, whilst others focus on another. Whichever way they
interpret responses, these chapters always give you a range of different responses to think
about and compare.
Let’s first look at ways of thinking through the question as a form of response.
One thing you will notice is that some of the ways of responding to different ques-
tions are actually similar to each other. Some ways of thinking – or what will be called
pictures of the world in Chapter 2 – have a lot to say about a whole range of issues in
global politics. A number of the chapters examine Marxism as a response to the chapter
question (Chapters 8, 15, 17, 19 and, briefly, 11). Marxism takes economics to be
fundamental to understanding politics, and so it’s no surprise that the chapters that
focus on obviously economic issues use this way of thinking about the world. But, of
course, the point is that economics also matters when we might not notice it right away,
for example when we try to understand the media (Chapter 8). A number of the
responses explored in the different chapters highlight the significance of the history of
colonisation and its effects in the present (Chapters 3, 15, 16 and 21), which is related
to this way of thinking. Liberalism or neoliberalism also holds that economics is really
important, but, as you will see, it has a rather different idea about how the economy
‘works’ and therefore a very different idea of how we should respond to particular
questions (Chapters 17, 19 and 20). You will also notice that ‘pluralism’ (Chapter 8)
is very similar to liberalism.
Is it possible to
manage without making
assumptions? Is it
possible to identify what
our assumptions are?
INTRODUCTION 13
Other ways of thinking start in a different place. One important question in politics
is often who you are or, put differently, what group you belong to. Chapter 5 examines
different ways of thinking about this important issue of identity: it makes a difference
whether we think identity is static or dynamic. Chapter 2 looks at different ways of
conceptualising what we should do in the world and, again, this is related to who we
think we are. The chapter compares and contrasts the cosmopolitanism of Charles Beitz
and the communitarianism of Michael Walzer. The latter sees the community we belong
to as significant in responding to the question, whereas the former sees individuals as
the subjects of global politics. Chapter 12 examines how notions of national identity
are produced and thought about, and Chapter 13 looks at a different set of thinkers
and ways of thinking that tell us about why we might feel allegiance to a community,
such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Chapter 27 shows
how our identity as human beings can be seen as part of particular ways of thinking.
Some chapters think of responses more in terms of actions in response to the
question at issue. Chapter 10, for example, examines ways in which citizenship has been
organised by states and the problems this creates. Chapter 21, which examines why some
people think they know what is good for others, looks at two contemporary expressions
of this attitude: the Euston Manifesto and the idea of benevolent imperialism. When
there is conflict in the world, we often want to know how to move beyond it. Chapter
26 examines two different responses to this problem: confrontation or engagement.
But these two senses of ‘response’ are not as separate as they may appear. The
examination of indigenous perspectives in Chapter 3, for example, represents not only
a completely different way of thinking our place in the world, a different cosmology, if
you will, but this directly implies a different way of relating to the natural world, that
is, a different way of acting. Similarly, the idea that politics and religion are best kept
separate, called secularism, has practical implications: politics is in many states organised
in accordance with this belief (Chapters 6, 7 and 27). The potential tensions this
separation produces are brought out clearly in Chapter 27. Different conceptions of
the law favour different ways of responding to political problems (Chapter 25). Ideas
about geopolitics or strategy (Chapters 3, 11, 22 and 24) also have an effect on how
we think it is appropriate or profitable to act in the world. This interconnection is shown
very clearly in Chapter 24. Changes in technology may in turn affect how we think and
act (Chapters 9, 11, 18 and 24).
BROADER ISSUES
WHAT ASSUMPTIONS DO WE START FROM?
Looking at the general responses that people have come up with to the questions
that our chapters address often leads to broader questions, questions that might need
to be thought about before we can even begin to think about the particular question
at issue in the chapter. Sometimes, the responses we examine will already have assumed
certain answers to these broader questions. In other words, they will have taken certain
things for granted, without even examining or thinking about them. This is often not
deliberate. Sometimes it is very difficult to identify what has been taken for granted,
precisely because it is ‘taken for granted’ and so widely assumed to be the case that it
is not subject to question. We don’t even see that we have made certain assumptions
before we start. It seems to be ‘common sense’: there seems to be no alternative way
to think about it.
However, if we want to delve more into how we might respond to the questions
that concern us, we need to try to identify some of the assumptions that ground our
usual ways of thinking. Knowing (or, rather, trying to think about) what assumptions
we start from is standard practice in much academic and scholarly reflection. If we don’t
do this, we may end up with answers to our questions that are limited in ways we can’t
recognise, and that don’t enable us to think beyond (or even be aware of) the constraints
that ‘common sense’ imposes, or come up with useful ways of addressing our concerns.
Robert Cox (1981) has characterised two ways of thinking about global politics. One
he calls ‘problem-solving theory’; the other he calls ‘critical theory’. Problem-solving
thinking works within the assumptions of what counts as common sense at a particular
point in time. It looks at the problem, or in our case the question, on its own terms,
and seeks an answer within the same frame work or set of assumptions that raised the
question in the first place. Critical thinking seeks to question the problem itself, and the
common sense it takes for granted. Our thinking is conditioned by social, cultural and
ideological influences, and critical theory seeks to uncover this conditioning. A critical
approach would seek to ask why a particular issue had been put forward as a problem
to be solved in the first place: what were the common sense assumptions hidden behind
thinking of that as a problem? Such an approach would also ask who would benefit from
the problem being solved, if we were to solve it on the terms in which it is posed. In
general, Cox argues, problem-solving theory works to reinforce what is called the status
quo – it keeps in place accepted ways of thinking and the structures of political and
economic power that go along with those ways of thinking. As he famously said ‘Theory
is always for someone and for some purpose’ (Cox 1981: 128); his argument was that
in order to think critically we had to make sure we examined the power relations in
which our thinking was inevitably embedded. Critical thinking, in other words, ‘stands
apart from the prevailing order and asks how that order came about’ (Cox 1981: 129)
because, if we do want to change anything, we first have to understand the world as it
is. Many of the chapters of this book attempt to think in this critical type of way when
examining the general responses that have been given to the questions they address;
often the general responses will have been in problem-solving mode, and thinking
beyond this approach reveals the broader issues at stake.
Identifying the assumptions within which our thinking might be working is much
more difficult and challenging than it might seem. However, it is also very rewarding:
once we pinpoint our hidden assumptions, we open up the possibility of different ways
of thinking about the world. These different ways of thinking are not, of course, ways
that avoid making assumptions, but they are based on different assumptions. And, since
theory and practice are not as separate as they seem, as we will discuss in a minute, this
also opens up the possibility of doing things differently. It doesn’t mean that we can
change the world overnight, of course not, but it does open up ways of thinking about
how we might work for the change we want, a question that we look at in more detail
in the concluding chapter of the book. Perhaps just as importantly, it enables us to see
how what we do has been constrained by the common sense within which we have
been thinking.
14 JENNY EDKINS AND MAJA ZEHFUSS
Scholars sometimes
distinguish between
Robert Cox’s ‘critical
theory’ and the ideas of
the Frankfurt School
(people like Jürgen
Habermas and Theodor
Adorno), which are often
called ‘Critical Theory’ in
capital letters.
Chapter 28 further
discusses the idea of
change and the sorts of
assumptions that are
behind it.
INTRODUCTION 15
It is very important to ask how the common sense that limits our thinking is
produced. Antonio Gramsci argues that ‘in all periods there co-exist many systems and
currents’ of thought, which are first born and then spread or diffused in society; in this
process of diffusion ‘they fracture along certain lines and in certain directions’ (1971:
327). We need to examine how these processes work. But these ways in which accepted
ways of thinking are produced and circulated is not something that can be thought of
as separate from academic enquiry itself. As students of global politics we are not outside
common sense: it influences us too. We all have what Gramsci called a ‘spontaneous
philosophy’, contained in language, common sense, and the collections of beliefs,
religious or otherwise, that we hold (1971: 323). There is not just one common sense:
common sense is a product of history and circumstance. We are each, Gramsci says, the
‘product of the historical process to date which has deposited in [us] an infinity of traces,
without leaving an inventory’ (1971: 324).
Our task, then, if we want to think critically, is to make such an inventory, or, in
other words, to attempt to figure out what those influences might be that have made
us think and act the way we do. The job is to track down our assumptions, and to
acknowledge what is unquestioned or taken for granted in our ways of thinking.
Common sense needs to be replaced by criticism, or what we might call critical theory,
in the sense that Cox used this term, as we discussed just now.
There is one further point that needs to be made about our ways of thinking – or
what Gramsci calls our ‘philosophies’ and what we might here want to call, in our
terminology, our ‘theories’. Let’s look at what Gramsci (writing at a time when it was
common sense to assume that the pronoun ‘he’ could unproblem atically be taken to
refer to ‘he or she’, and ‘man’ to encompass ‘woman’) says in one of his Prison Notebooks:
Philosophy in general does not in fact exist. Various philosophies or conceptions
of the world exist, and one always makes a choice between them. How is this choice
made? Is it merely an intellectual event or is it something more complex? . . . Which
BOX 1.2 ANTONIO GRAMSCI
Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937)
was imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy
between 1927 and 1935, and he wrote his most famous
works during that period. As a result of these
circumstances, they are written in the form of
fragmentary notes, avoiding the use of words such as
‘Marx’ and ‘class’ (a key concept in Marxist thought as
Chapter 14 explains). Gramsci’s years in prison led to
a complete breakdown of his already far from robust
health. His thirty-three prison notebooks were
smuggled out of his clinic room to safety by his sister-
in-law Tatiana Schucht when he died in April 1937.
FIGURE 1.6
Antonio Gramsci
How we think about the
world and the impact
this has is discussed in
more detail in Chapter 2.
Do you think that the
authors of the chapters
in this book are
authorised in this way? Is
education a way of giving
people authority?
16 JENNY EDKINS AND MAJA ZEHFUSS
. . . would be the real conception of the world: that logically affirmed as an
intellectual choice? Or that which emerges from the real activity of each man, which
is implicit in his mode of action? And since all action is political, can one not say
that the real philosophy of each man is contained in its entirety in his political action?
(Gramsci 1971: 326)
The important point that he is making here is that the way people choose to think about
and explain the world is, after all, part of ‘the world’ and influences what happens. It
cannot be separated from other things people do.
These two things, ‘theory’ and ‘practice’, if you like, are often kept separate by
people who think about global politics. However, one of our starting points in this book
is that the distinctions that are often made between the detailed, historical study of events
and things people do in the world and the more general explanations that are put forward
to help us account for these things we observe – the distinction between practice and
theory, as it is often called – is in many senses artificial, as Gramsci argues.
Gramsci is by no means the only writer to have tackled the question of what role
common sense or our conceptions of the world play in our thinking and our politics.
Michel Foucault, whose work you will come across in Chapters 4, 5, 7, 11, 23 and
24, has also examined the intimate relation between theory and practice, or, in his
terminology, knowledge and power (Foucault 1980). He argues that at any particu-
lar period in history there is a particular ‘regime of truth’ in place that validates what
should count as true. Certain people are authorised to determine what is true, and there
are specific ways of assessing truth. In the modern era, in the western world, it is
predominately the scientific method that is assumed to be capable of guaranteeing truth.
What we call knowledge for Foucault is not something that is independent but rather
something that is always tied up with power structures. He offers us what he calls a
toolbox which we can use to prise open these systems of truth and if we like destabilise
them: demonstrate their contingent, historical character, or in other words the way in
which they are not universally true or valid. His genealogical method uses a combination
of detailed historical excavations and localised, specific knowledges. Ludwig Wittgenstein
too has looked closely at the role language plays in limiting our thought. His work is
explained in Chapter 2, so we won’t say much about it here. Wittgenstein talks in terms
of language games and pictures. He argues that when we think we are explaining the
world we are only tracing again and again a picture of the world that frames our ideas
of it. We are always operating within what he calls a ‘language game’ or a certain
‘grammar’.
We have seen here a number of different ways of thinking about how we might
look at the relation between thinking about the world and doing things in the world,
and we have found several different views on how to approach this. Gramsci, Foucault
and Wittgenstein differ in the terminology they use and in the specific arguments they
put forward, but they would all agree that direct access to ‘the world’ is not possible:
we always think about the world and the questions of global politics starting from within
a particular ‘common sense’ (Gramsci), ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault), or ‘language game’
(Wittgenstein).
Of course there is another group of views entirely, which we haven’t discussed here.
There are people who argue that there is no problem at all – or less strongly, no real
Do you think an
objective view of the
world – sometimes also
called ‘scientific’ – is
possible? How would
you find out whether
your answer to this
question was right or
wrong?
INTRODUCTION 17
problem – in separating theory and practice. For these people, it is possible to have an
independent, neutral position (or one that is more or less independent or neutral) from
which an objective view of the world can be formulated. Truth can be found, and our
job as academics, for these people, is precisely to be seekers after truth. This is called a
‘correspondence theory of truth’, and it is discussed in Chapter 2.
CONCLUSION
The question of whether there is any possibility of objective knowledge of the world is
one of the broader questions that many of the other chapters in this book raise, too.
In our view the diversity of accounts and explanations of events in global politics
demonstrates that there is no neutral view to be had. Different accounts of cosmology
and what the world is, different common senses and different philosophies, lead to
different approaches. And different political starting points are linked with different
explanations. We would ask that you bear in mind as you read through this book that,
while in the ‘general responses’ section they examine existing ways of approaching the
question, what the authors of the various chapters give are their own arguments and
their own interpretations. They are not in a position to give an unbiased, neutral view:
no one is, as far as we are concerned. Try to think of them as individuals – check them
out in the list of contributors to see where they come from, and refer to them by name
when you are discussing their chapters.
In view of everything we have discussed in this introduction, we would encourage
you, as you read the chapters, to practise a way of reading that is open and generous
at the same time as being critical. As scholars we are accustomed to focus on critique,
and moreover, apt to forget that any critique, like the writing we are critiquing, is the
expression of a particular position: it comes from somewhere, it is not purely objective.
There is no neutral, objective point for critique, any more than there is for writing.
Naeem Inayatullah of Ithaca College in New York State (author of Chapter 21) offers
some thoughts on ways of reading. He notes that writers write because they have a
need to say something. Of course, in writing chapters of this textbook, the authors have
very generously responded to invitations from us as the editors of the book. But what
they choose to write and how can still be seen as reflecting a need to say something.
When we read, Inayatullah suggests, a first step might be to ask ‘What needs does the
writer bring and how does the text reveal or conceal those needs?’ However, he points
out that already we have a problem:
You might ask, as I did, ‘Hey, I have my own needs; what do I care about the
needs of the author?’ The author expresses a need in the writing, but we as readers
bring our own needs to the text. The problem is that the two needs mostly likely
differ; what the author has to offer might not be what you or I need. So what do
we do about this problem?
(Inayatullah 2008)
There are two common ways of reading that he thinks are unproductive. The first
is to focus ‘almost exclusively on the authority of the text and the author’ (Inayatullah
2008). You try to learn what the text says – you summarise it in your notes, ready to
regurgitate in class, in essays or in exams. This is a way of learning that we are all used
to – and indeed, on some occasions, like taking the ‘theory’ part of a driving test for
example, it produces good results.
The second way of reading focuses just on the reader’s own needs. You go through
the text gutting it for the things that you are looking for – for things you can use for
a particular purpose: an essay, for example. You skim read, looking at the headings,
reading the odd word here or there, and assuming that you can guess what lies in
between. But this is counterproductive too. You are so focused on your own needs that
‘a sense of impatience with the text disallows a fruitful engagement . . . Because the
response is not based on a careful or generous reading, it often misses the point and
the spirit of the text’ (Inayatullah 2008).
Inayatullah suggests that what we should aim for is a balance between these two
approaches. He recommends that we try to be conscious of our own needs as we
approach the text, but then ‘suspend those needs, bracket them, and place them in the
background’ because ‘to read the text with care and generosity we have to do our best
to accept the author’s assumptions’ (Inayatullah 2008). Once we have read the text in
this way, which is not easy, we should then un-bracket our own needs and be as critical
as we possibly can be, whilst giving praise where praise is due. Finally, we should think
about what the author’s response to our criticisms might be.
It is crucial in all this to remember that the authors of what you are reading are
not so very different from you: they are people who look around them and think about
what they see; they explore what other people think, like you do, and they make their
own judgements, just like you do. They are not some super-human breed of extra –
ordinary intelligence (nor devious beings of great duplicity). They have thought carefully
about what they are writing about and about how to write it. They probably have reasons
for doing things you consider stupid – leaving out things you think should be there,
for example – though they may not have: they may just have made a mistake. They
make every effort to present to you arguments that they disagree with, and they indicate
where those arguments can be found. We would encourage you to follow this up in
the further reading that is given so that you can form your own views. And sometimes
they make their own feelings about the material clear, and try to persuade you of their
view. We encourage you to listen to their views carefully but then to form your own
views and judgements about each of the chapters – and each of the questions in the
book. You may well come to different conclusions. As we said at the start of this intro –
ductory chapter, there are no answers: the questions remain open and intractable, there
for each new generation of scholars to formulate and tackle for themselves.
FURTHER READING
Cox, Robert W. (1981) ‘Social forces, states and world orders’, Millennium: Journal of
International Studies 10, 2: 126–55.
This article sets out the difference between ‘critical theory’ and ‘problem-solving theory’ in
thinking about global politics, and why this is important.
Donald, James and Stuart Hall (1986) Politics and Ideology, Milton Keynes: Open University Press;
Beechey, Veronica and James Donald (1985) Subjectivity and Social Relations, Milton
Keynes: Open University Press.
18 JENNY EDKINS AND MAJA ZEHFUSS
If you want to follow up on the relationship between politics and the way we think, these
two readers extend the discussion in interesting ways.
Hall, Stuart (1996) ‘Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity’, in David Morley and
Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London:
Routledge.
In this chapter, Stuart Hall gives a very clear explanation of the main features of Gramsci’s
work and its contemporary importance.
Hollis, Martin and Steve Smith (1991) Explaining and Understanding International Relations,
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hollis and Smith make a distinction between ‘explaining’ and ‘understanding’, which is similar
to the distinction between critical and problem-solving theories discussed here.
Rancière, Jacques (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation.
Translated by Kristin Ross, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
This short text explores ways of teaching and argues that the master who explicates produces
learning that stultifies.
REFERENCES
Adams, Douglas (1979) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, London: Pan Books.
Bourke, Joanna (1999) An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Combat in Twentieth-Century
Warfare, London: Granta.
Cox, Robert W. (1981) ‘Social forces, states and world orders’, Millennium: Journal of
International Studies 10, 2: 126–55.
Davis, Mike (2002) Dead Cities, New York: The New Press.
Foucault, Michel (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977,
trans. Colin Gordon, Brighton: Harvester Press.
Friedrich, Jörg (2002) Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940–1945, Munich: Propyläen
Verlag.
Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Grayling, A. C. (2007) Among the Dead Cities: Is the Targeting of Civilians in War Ever Justified?
London: Bloomsbury.
Inayatullah, Naeem (2008) Classes: Reading, Writing and Grading, Homepage: http://www.
ithaca.edu/naeem/reading.shtml.
Sebald, W. G. (2004) On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell, London: Penguin.
Taylor, Frederick (2005) Dresden: Tuesday 13 February 1945, London: Bloomsbury.
Wilkins, Lucy (2006) ‘Are Britain’s roads getting safer?’, BBC News Online, 17 August,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5256506.stm.
INTRODUCTION 19
For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
http://www.ithaca.edu/naeem/reading.shtml
http://www.ithaca.edu/naeem/reading.shtml
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5256506.stm
http://www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
CHAPTER 2
How do we begin to think about
the world?
Véronique Pin-Fat
■ The question
THINKING AND LANGUAGE
■ Illustrative example
THINKING ABOUT TORTURE: THE TICKING BOMB
SCENARIO
■ General responses
THINKING ABOUT ETHICS: TWO RESPONSES
■ Broader issues
THINKING ABOUT THINKING
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
THINKING AND LANGUAGE
How we think about the world matters in very important ways. It impacts on what we
do from day to day, for a start. For example, if, as a student, you have a poor opinion
of a particular lecturer at your university or college – if you have decided that he or she
is boring or difficult to follow – you will be less likely to attend the lecture, unless of
course you think there are strong conventions in place to compel you to go. If you
think of the world as a dangerous place, this may impact on how you travel to the lecture:
you may avoid public transport, for example, and decide to walk, because of the
possibility of a terrorist attack. Such an attack may be statistically very unlikely, but the
way you picture the world will affect how you interpret such ‘evidence’ and how you
behave. Other students may see travelling on the bus or the train as a way of making a
political statement, a way of ‘defying’ those who want to prevent life going on as usual.
This chapter explores the notion that how we think about the world affects how
we live in it. It is of course not just a matter of how we live in it on our own, but how
The significance of being
treated as ‘human’ and
the problem of who gets
to count as such is
explored in Chapter 27.
These broad questions
are examined in the
context of thinking about
danger in Section 3 of
Chapter 24.
HOW DO WE BEGIN TO THINK ABOUT THE WORLD? 21
we live in it with others. You encounter lots of people in your life from the moment
you wake up to the moment you go to bed. Some of them may be close to you and
you may even love them. Some you don’t know so well, but may see regularly like
students and lecturers. Some you’ve never met but have heard or read about, like people
all over the globe who appear in the news. And, of course, there may be some people
you just do not like, find ‘weird’, or plain annoying. Either way, we don’t live in the
world on our own and somehow need to find ways of accommodating each other.
Living in the world with other people is the realm of politics and ethics. Broadly
speaking ethics is about how we should live with other people in the world and politics
is about what kinds of living and ways of thinking about who we are are made possible.
So, for example, should someone whom you regard as ‘weird’ be treated any differently
to someone you love? Furthermore, what counts as ‘weird’? What does that tell us about
‘normal’? Are people whose lives are different to ours, perhaps because they live in a
different country to us or practice a different religion, ‘weird’? Ethics and politics looks
at both how we should regard and accommodate each other and what kinds of things
make it possible to, for example, treat each other with respect and those which don’t.
That I might view you as ‘weird’ or even ‘inhuman’ (politics) may very much dictate
how I then treat you (ethics). When we examine more closely how we think about the
world, it turns out that ethics and politics are inseparable.
Is thinking about the world something that just happens in our heads? Perhaps,
but our thinking about the world must in some way be public, or accessible to others.
We formulate and communicate ideas and thoughts by means of language. Language
is public. It consists of shared rules and vocabularies, for example. Language seems a
strong candidate for giving us access to how we think about the world and, as such,
the relationship of language to the world is a central theme of this chapter.
The thoughts we have about the world reveal a number of things: the types of things
that we believe are in the world, the kinds of people that we think we live amongst,
what we think is important, what we think is possible, and even how we believe we
should think about the world. These thoughts are all attempts to make sense of the
world and our place in it. So, the questions that we are going to look at here are:
1 How do we begin to think about the world and make sense of it?
2 Does the world exist independently of any thoughts we might have about it?
3 Is the way we think about the world simply a representation of what it is?
This may seem a bit abstract, but let’s look more closely now at the effects that our
thinking has in the world.
Some people regard thinking and language as something that is separate from the
world. They see the world as carrying on independently of what we think. According
to this way of thinking, we produce various representations of the world, but the world
continues regardless of our thoughts about it. However, as I mentioned above, what
we are going to explore in this chapter is how what we think about the world actually
impacts on the world: it changes the world and our relations with the people in it. We
also examine how, if we ignore the impact our ways of thinking have on the world, we
can find ourselves complicit in what happens in ways we might not wish to be. In other
words, this chapter suggests that if we don’t sometimes pause to think about how we
Can you think of other
scenarios that you have
come across? What is it
that makes something a
scenario? It might be
helpful to think about
this question as you read
this section.
22 VÉRONIQUE PIN-FAT
think about the world we might find ourselves accepting and endorsing practices we
might find immoral, wrong or unjust.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
THINKING ABOUT TORTURE: THE TICKING BOMB
SCENARIO
We will begin by looking at an example of thinking. The form of thinking we will
examine is the one most often used to think about torture. It is called ‘the ticking
bomb scenario’. Although we will be engaging with thinking about torture here, it is
important to be clear that this does not necessarily mean we are engaging with the
practices of torture and their justification or otherwise. In fact, as we shall see, sometimes
our thinking about torture avoids engaging with it in important ways.
Torture obviously affects people’s bodies and lives; it causes great physical suffering
and pain and has profoundly negative emotional and psychological effects. Elaine Scarry,
in her book The Body in Pain (1985), goes as far as to say that torture in a sense destroys,
or in her words ‘unmakes’, the world: it destroys ideas of the world and our place in it
that have been painstakingly put together. Some governments have condoned torture
and created official policies around its use. The particular way of thinking about torture
that I want to examine – the ticking bomb scenario – has been an important part of
recent debates. Examining the use of the ticking bomb scenario to think about torture,
and the practical implications of that way of thinking, provides an example of how ways
of thinking about the world have very real effects.
An absolute prohibition against torture is embodied in a convention to which many
states have agreed, the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel,
Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. In the Convention Against Torture
(CAT) (1984), torture is prohibited because it violates ‘the inherent dignity of the
human person’ (Preamble). Torture is defined as:
any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally
inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person
information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has
committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him
or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such
pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or
acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It
does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to
lawful sanctions.
(Article 1)
The Convention continues: ‘No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a
state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency,
may be invoked as a justification of torture’ (Article 2, section 2). The Convention
Against Torture, therefore, prohibits any circumstances being used as a justification for
torture. However, the argument has been made that there are circumstances when
A scenario can mean an
imagined or hypothetical
sequence of events; the
word also refers to the
outline of the plot of a
play or film.
When we buy into a
scenario, we no longer
have to worry about
things that the scenario
already tells us are one
way rather than another
– we put them to one
side.
HOW DO WE BEGIN TO THINK ABOUT THE WORLD? 23
torture can be justified. This argument often begins with the positing of a particular
scenario. Here is how the scenario goes:
Imagine this: There is a time-bomb planted in the centre of a large city somewhere in
the United States or a European capital, in Washington, Paris, London, or Berlin,
for example. It is armed, ticking and counting its way down towards detonation. You
have the person who planted it in custody. He won’t talk. Hundreds, if not thousands,
will die if the information on the whereabouts of the bomb is not revealed. Should you
torture the person that you are holding in custody in order to find out where the bomb
is and stop it from exploding?
This hypothetical situation is called the ticking bomb scenario. The scenario is often
used as a starting point in thinking about whether torture can ever be justifiable. It is
used to test the limits of the absolute prohibition against torture: the idea that we
shouldn’t use torture under any circumstances. The ticking bomb scenario challenges
this prohibition by asking whether it can be displaced or disregarded in exceptional
circumstances, even though the Convention Against Torture prohibits this explicitly as
we have seen. Often, the answer that the scenario leads to is that it can. Let us examine
how allowing an exception to the prohibition of torture comes about through the
thinking that lies behind the scenario.
How does a hypothetical scenario like the ticking bomb function to justify torture
in practice? It does so by providing only the kind of information we need to conclude
that we might be justified in torturing the person we have in custody.
Using this hypothetical scenario gives us certainty about a number of things:
• We are certain that the person we have in custody is the person who planted the
bomb and not someone who is lying about having planted it or an innocent person.
• We are certain that we know that the bomb has been planted in a large city and
that it will kill lots of people rather than just one or two.
• We are certain that the bomb will go off, that is to say, we are confident that it
won’t just fizzle, splutter and fail to detonate.
• We are certain that if we torture the person in custody he or she will tell us the
true location of the bomb and not lie.
• We are certain that it is possible to torture the person for the short period of time
that the bomb is ticking and not a moment longer (weeks, months, years) in order
to extract the information on the location of the bomb.
• We are also very confident that when we do torture that person, our torture methods
won’t kill him or her before he or she tells us where the bomb is planted.
• We assume then, that we (or our agents) are trained, effective torturers with a
practical knowledge of torture techniques. We are certain that our torture methods
work; torture will make the person in custody tell us where the bomb is and
therefore, allow us to find it, disarm it, and save many valuable lives.
• We also know that saving lives is an appropriate justification.
The scenario is neat and tidy. It has been constructed very carefully to eliminate
many difficult issues. This isn’t deliberate deception particularly. Rather it is a function
BOX 2.1 TORTURE AFTER 9/11
The debate about possible justifications for the use of torture came to the fore, especially in the United
States, after 11 September 2001 when the US president George W. Bush declared and pursued a ‘war on
terror’. During this ‘war’ the United States has detained people in prisons outside its own territory
including Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the US airbase in Bagram, Afghanistan and most (in)famously the US
naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
It was not until May 2004 that accounts and images of US military personnel torturing detainees in
Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq, burst into public view although there had been secret US military investigations
into allegations of torture, and reports of its use from organisations such as the International Committee
of the Red Cross.
In particular, the Bush administration’s use of Guantánamo as the central prison for ‘unlawful enemy
combatants’ became subject to global condemnation because of its violation of the Geneva Conventions
and the use of torture ‘lite’; so-called ‘harsh interrogation techniques’. Such was the negative symbolism of
Guantánamo that two days after his inauguration President Obama signed executive orders to close the
detention camp, stopping the Bush administration’s use of the military commissions system for
prosecuting detainees and ending the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret interrogation programme.
However, in March 2011 President Obama permitted military trials to resume, albeit with revamped
procedures, and has all but admitted his failure to close the camp wherein 172 ‘high risk’ detainees remain.
Unfortunately, allegations and the evidence for the use of torture extend further than the prisons with
the use of extraordinary rendition or ‘torture by proxy’. This policy is one where ‘hundreds of people have
been unlawfully transferred by the USA and its allies to countries such as Syria, Jordan and Egypt . . .
[where] they risk enforced disappearance, torture and other ill-treatment’ (Amnesty International 2007: 9).
Evidence of the extent of the practice controversially entered the public domain through posts of secret
and confidential American diplomatic cables on the website Wikileaks in November 2010.
FIGURE 2.1
Iraqi Graffiti mural depicting prisoner abuse on wall in Sadr City,
Baghdad. Photo: Ali Jasim/Reuters
FIGURE 2.2
Guantánamo Bay: A detainee is escorted for
interrogation in 2002. Photo: Andres Leighton/AP
24 VÉRONIQUE PIN-FAT
You will often find that
people simply assume
that saving lives is a
good thing. But we don’t
always act to save
everyone’s lives. In fact,
we routinely endanger
some people’s lives, and
not always in order to
save others. Soldiers and
enemy civilians are only
the most obvious cases
here; arguably, the global
economy also relies on
putting some lives at
immediate risk.
Rationality came to
be seen as incredibly
important in the period
called the Enlighten –
ment, but it was also a
quality attributed to
men in particular. See
Chapters 5 and 6.
HOW DO WE BEGIN TO THINK ABOUT THE WORLD? 25
of the hypothetical scenario. It deliberately eliminates specific aspects of a situation in
order to focus solely on the core issue: whether the prohibition against torture is
absolute. By abstracting the core issue in this way, the idea is that we can ‘test’ the
limits of the prohibition.
The scenario works by providing compelling reasons for torture being justified
under certain circumstances. However, it is a scenario set up in such a way that we already
know that torturing the detainee is justifiable. Since the scenario tells us that saving
lives is good and torture saves lives, it must be the case that torture can be justifiable.
The scenario is a purely theoretical construct and deliberately so. In order to construct
a hypothetical scenario such as this, one must believe that theory (thinking about the
world) and practice (doing things in the world) can be separated. A separation is made
and assumed to be possible.
When we read the ticking bomb scenario more closely, we notice that it does two
other things, as well as separating theory and practice.
First, the scenario suggests that we need to employ our rationality and come to
conclusions based on either certainty or, at a minimum, reasonable belief. There are
certain things we need to know before we can make a decision and we need to balance
them up rationally. Often what we are balancing are competing values. In the case of
the ticking bomb it is the value of the strict prohibition of torture versus the value of
saving a significant number of lives. As we have seen, the scenario suggests that
abstraction is helpful. The ticking bomb scenario is deliberately and consciously designed
to reduce the problem of torture to only two competing values and to compel us to
choose which value is more significant. It is, necessarily, a simplification. But, in the
view of those using this scenario, simplification can help us determine more accurately
what we should do.
Second, although the scenario suggests that all human life has value – not only the
lives that are at risk from the bomb’s explosion, but also that of the person we have in
custody – it is clear that ‘we’ are not the person who planted the bomb, nor are ‘we’
associated with them. The scenario is not constructed from the point of view of the
person who is in custody. There is no mention of what justifications he or she may have,
or what reasons there may be, for planting the bomb. Of course, this does not mean
that there are any justifications, but the scenario does not explore whether there are
any reasons for planting the bomb or not. For example, the ticking bomb scenario is
not one where a person plants a bomb that threatens hundreds of lives in order to prevent
others from taking hundreds of other, different, lives. The scenario is completely silent
about the purported bomber’s motivations other than the desire to kill people with the
explosion of the device. This means that ‘we’ are the potential (albeit righteously reluc –
tant yet well trained) torturers in the scenario. Furthermore, ‘we’, as potential torturers,
feel more akin to those whose lives are at risk from the bomb than to the person we
have in custody. Whoever he or she is, it seems that they are not ‘us’. Whoever ‘we’
are, we are not in Kabul, Addis Ababa, or Shanghai, for example as the scenario, interest –
ingly, always imagines that the bomb is planted in an advanced industrialised country.
As an abstraction then, the ticking bomb scenario shows much more than might
be supposed at first glance about the way of thinking about the world that it involves.
When we look at what the scenario leaves out, what it does not allow us to consider
explicitly, we find that it ignores the question of how far our feelings and responsibilities
FIGURE 2.3
‘I found out what makes him tick. . .’
Artist: Mike Baldwin. CartoonStock
ref.: mba0459. www.CartoonStock.com
A scenario could be said
to be similar to a
theoretical explanation,
in that theories tend to
leave things out, and to
be abstract.
26 VÉRONIQUE PIN-FAT
may stretch: should or do they include others who are not part of what ‘we’ think of
as ‘us’? Perhaps our obligations are limited to those who belong with us in a particular
community or perhaps they stretch beyond nationality and extend to the whole of
humanity.
In practice, things are more complicated than the abstract scenario. The situation
may not be one of choosing between the value of one life (the person in custody) and
that of many others (the potential victims of the bomb). We cannot always be sure that
we have the right person in custody. We are often uncertain. This implies that we may
have to torture others as well, since they might equally know where the bomb is planted.
We are more likely to be dealing with several (or even hundreds of) possible ‘knowers’
that would need to be tortured to reveal the location of the bomb versus hundreds of
lives to save. Indeed, it is precisely the kind of logic employed in the ticking bomb
scenario that leads to large numbers of people being detained in the ‘war on terror’:
they may be ‘knowers’. In practice, the logic of the ticking bomb scenario provides a
justification for detaining people in great numbers. If so, the neatness of the scenario
begins to break down, and with it its strict separation of theory and practice. The scenario
no longer refers to an exception that applies to only one life (the bomber’s) but begins
to implicate many others.
The prohibition of torture, as set out in the Convention Against Torture (United
Nations 1984), does not treat torture as an act that is perpetrated on only one individual
either. The Convention Against Torture’s references to ‘a public official or other person
acting in an official capacity’ (Article 1) as perpetrators of torture make it clear that the
Convention is concerned with prohibiting the institution alisation and widespread
political use of torture by states. The Convention Against Torture and the abundant
evidence of torture being used globally show that, in practice, torture implicates
many, many lives. In global politics then, what is at stake in the practices of torture is
not a question of the justifiability of an isolated incidence of the action of one person
http://www.CartoonStock.com
The work of different
thinkers is often grouped
into different schools of
thought, perspectives or
approaches. While
sometimes useful,
‘boxing’ people like this
risks oversimplifying
complicated questions.
HOW DO WE BEGIN TO THINK ABOUT THE WORLD? 27
(the torturer) on only one other (the person in custody). It is, more accurately, the
actions of many (‘us’) on many (‘them’).
Our short study of the ticking bomb scenario has served as a way of introducing
questions about a way of thinking about the world: one that employs an abstract
rationality and separates thinking about the world, or theorising, from the world itself,
or practice, and one that ducks the question of whether our obligations are limited to
people who share the same community with us or whether they extend to the whole
of humanity. We have seen that this way of looking at the world can provide a
justification for actions that in practice can lead to the torturing of many people, not
just one.
GENERAL RESPONSES
THINKING ABOUT ETHICS: TWO RESPONSES
The ticking bomb scenario implies that the decisions that we have to make about
whether or not to use torture should be thought of as moral decisions. They are decisions
about what we ought to do or what we should do. Very often, moral decisions are seen
to be the result of applying some kind of rule governing our treatment of others and
understanding exactly how the rule should apply. For example, the ticking bomb
scenario rationally examined the limits of applying the rule ‘torture is an absolute moral
prohibition’ and found that the rule was not absolute after all. We noted at the start of
the chapter that, roughly speaking, ethics is about how we should live with other people
in the world. Thinking about ethics means broadly thinking about moral rules and how
they govern the ways in which we treat each other. Often such rules are phrased in
terms of moral duties, moral obligations and/or moral responsibilities. When we come
to explore how people have thought about the question of ethics in global politics,
straight away we encounter discussions about the rules that should govern our duties
and obligations and how far they should stretch: whether our duties and obligations
should extend only to those within the political community or state in which we find
ourselves, or whether they should extend to the whole of humanity. This question of
how far our moral obligations extend is traditionally captured by the debate between
cosmopolitans and communitarians. We have already encountered hidden aspects of
this debate in our exploration of the ticking bomb scenario when it was noted that
whoever the bomber is the bomber isn’t one of ‘us’. If the bomber’s nationality seems
to make a moral difference, or indeed none, to your conclusions about the ticking bomb
scenario then the cosmopolitan–communitarian debate is deeply relevant. This is
because the debate thinks through the moral implications of whether ‘we’ are best
understood as members of the whole of humanity (cosmopolitanism) or as members
of specific political communities (communitarianism).
Charles Beitz and Michael Walzer, from the cosmopolitan and communitarian
traditions respectively, have sustained answers to how far our ethical obligations extend
in global politics. I will look at the work of each thinker in turn. In order to begin to
understand and unravel the implications of each set of answers, I will focus on the
pictures or representations they use. I will say more about what we mean by pictures
or representations in the next section, but for the time being it is sufficient to note that
For other views of what
the state, or what is
sometimes called the
nation-state, is as a
form of political
community, and how it
is held together, see
Chapters 11, 12 and 13.
Of course, what counts
as human and what
doesn’t is historically
and culturally
changeable. See
Chapters 5, 21 and 27.
28 VÉRONIQUE PIN-FAT
thinking about the pictures they use is helpful in highlighting the way in which each
answer is their attempt to provide an accurate and true representation of the realities
of global politics.
• First, a focus on pictures of reason will serve to reveal traditional, differing, views
on what an academic study of global politics is supposed to focus on as most relevant
to ethics and how we should think about it.
• Second, pictures of the subject tell us what or who, supposedly, ‘we’ are and more
particularly, what it is about ‘us’ as moral subjects that provides us with moral value
or character. This is vitally important because such pictures not only tell us who or
what has the highest moral value in global politics, but the moral subject towards
which we are primarily ethically responsible in practice.
• Third, pictures of ethico-political space tell us where the possibility of ethical action
in global politics is believed to take place. They seek to depict what the ‘world’ of
global political reality is ‘really’ like and its hostility, or otherwise, to the
accommodation of ethics in practice.
Communitarianism: Michael Walzer
In the work of Michael Walzer we find a communitarian set of answers to questions of
ethics in global politics. Communitarians focus on the state as a moral subject in global
politics. As Walzer’s picture of ethico-political space will reveal, the moral value of the
state lies in its political community.
To understand the moral significance of the community we first need to examine
Walzer’s picture of the subject. According to Walzer, being human is about being
complex: creating meaning and culture which ‘we’ both reflect and are reflected in
(Walzer 1994: 85). Human beings have equal moral value because they are all culture-
and meaning-producing creatures. Each subject participates in their own community.
Globally, there is a vast plurality of differing social and cultural meanings because whilst
‘we’ all produce meanings and culture, ‘we’ do not all produce the same ones. Is it
possible to talk of a common humanity since there will be differing opinions about
what ‘humanity’ might mean? Yes, says Walzer, although ‘our common humanity
will never make us members of a single universal tribe. What members of the human
race have in common is particularism (that is, attachment to particular groups over
humanity as a whole): we participate, all of us, in thick cultures that are our own’ (Walzer
1994: 83).
For Walzer being human is about creating meanings and therefore different
cultures; unsurprisingly his picture of reason is a picture of shared understandings, which
are radically particularistic. In contrast to the cosmopolitan thinker, Beitz, whose view
we examine below, for Walzer reason is not separate from its social, historical and cultural
contexts. What is rational depends on what those of us who share the same under –
standings mean by it. Applying this to ethics, Walzer’s position is one that emphasises
that standards of rightness and wrongness, justice and injustice, etc., depend on
particular socio-cultural practices.
Having prepared the ground, we can now better appreciate Walzer’s picture of ethico-
political space. In the final analysis, he produces an international ethics that centres on
The state’s claim to
territorial integrity and
political sovereignty is
discussed in Chapter 11.
Changing attitudes to
intervention are the
subject of Chapter 25.
Chapter 13 examines
ways of conceptualising
the political community
by looking at a number
of novels. One of the
charac ters is a com –
mitted cosmopolitan.
states as the moral subjects (Walzer 1977). States, he argues, have moral value because
they contain a political community. The community is the expression of a common life
that its members have produced, sustained and participated in as meaning-producing
human beings. A state, for Walzer, consists of a political community and its government
(Walzer 1985 [1980]: 220, 235). The political community has rights to territorial
integrity and sovereignty and these rights belong to the state through the consent of
its members. Through consent, members form a metaphorical ‘contract’ with the state
that it should protect the common life which they have shaped over a long period
of time.
For Walzer, upholding the state rights of territorial integrity and sovereignty
should form the basis of an international morality. However, only legitimate states’ rights
should be respected. He says that states are only legitimate if there is a fit between the
government and community such that the former represents the peoples’ political
life in accordance with their own traditions and specific way of life. The problem, of
course, is how can we judge fit when ‘our’ opinions about being governed according
to ‘our’ traditions will be so different from others? For example, ‘we’ might think that
only democratic forms of governance provide a fit and hence, provide legitimacy to
governments. Well aware of this, Walzer says that in the majority of instances states
should presume that other states are legitimate, and should not intervene in their affairs.
Nevertheless, there may be very rare occasions when the principle of non-intervention
can be overridden. For Walzer, these would be when the absence of fit is radically
apparent, as in the case of either a struggle for national liberation, a civil war, or the
massacre, enslavement or expulsion of a mass of people.
What does this add up to? It adds up to an approach to international ethics which
says that, for the most part, we should leave states alone to live the historical and
culturally specific lives they have created for themselves. We can’t expect to understand
other ways of living from our own specific perspectives and so not only do we have no
right to intervene but we lack the capacity to understand the situation objectively. In
short nationality and citizenship, as forms of belonging to political community, make
a moral difference because they mark a difference in interpretations and understandings
of the world.
Cosmopolitanism: Charles Beitz
The second answer to ethics in global politics is a cosmopolitan one, found in the work
of Charles Beitz. In contrast to Walzer, Beitz considers individuals who are rational,
free and equal to be the moral subject of global politics.
Beitz applies John Rawls’ theory of justice to international politics (Beitz 1999
[1979]; Rawls 1971). He seeks to find out which principles of justice would be chosen
to create a perfectly just world order (an ‘ideal theory’). But how would such a
principle, where ‘social and economic inequalities are to be arranged . . . to the greatest
benefit of the least advantaged’, be chosen? To think about this, Beitz uses a hypothetical
scenario called the global original position. He sees using this scenario as a purely
theoretical exercise of moral reasoning – like the ticking bomb scenario – and one that
is impartial. It requires that we suspend any bias and put to one side being a particular
self with particular interests: according to his picture of reason, this is possible. In the
HOW DO WE BEGIN TO THINK ABOUT THE WORLD? 29
30 VÉRONIQUE PIN-FAT
scenario, state representatives would not know their nationality or whether their state
had large natural resources, but they would know that resources are unevenly distributed
globally and each state needs adequate resources for there to be a successful and just
global society. Consequently, Beitz argues, the parties would rationally choose a global
principle that redistributed natural resources justly, because no state representative would
want to find that they had few or no natural resources.
For Beitz’s cosmopolitan ethics to work, he needs to argue that principles of justice
can apply to the non-ideal environment of global politics. Why? It all has to do with
Rawls. Rawls thinks his principles can only be applied to domestic societies as
‘cooperative ventures for mutual advantage’ (Rawls 1971: 4). Beitz disagrees and argues
that international politics is sufficiently similar to domestic politics to count as a
cooperative scheme, even though international institutions and practices may not be
genuinely cooperative. Beitz’s point is that there is enough transnational activity – trade,
international investment, aid and communications – to mean that burdens and/or
benefits are produced which need to be justly distributed. Beitz offers us a picture of
ethico-political space, then, that emphasises the similarity between domestic and
international politics. Because of their similarity the principles of justice discovered by
ideal theory and the hypothetical scenario apply.
But who are ‘we’ according to Beitz? For whom are global burdens and benefits
to be redistributed in the name of justice? Beitz’s answer is the individual: persons who
have rights and interests. Beitz rejects the view that non-person based interests are
appropriate or relevant from the moral point of view. According to his picture of the
subject it is persons, rather than states, nations or communities who should benefit. This
is the badge of a cosmopolitan position. Furthermore, Beitz believes that persons have
a natural duty to create and sustain just institutions. In other words, the principles of
justice (which ideal theory locates using the hypothetical scenario of the global original
position) can become part of the non-ideal world because it is a natural duty of moral
subjects to secure justice and because the international context is sufficiently like the
domestic to make acting on such a duty appropriate and realistic.
BOX 2.2 JOHN RAWLS
John Rawls (1921–2002) is widely regarded as the late twentieth-century’s
greatest liberal political philosopher. His major intellectual preoccupation
was to defend the notion that civil and political rights are inviolable and
that such rights were the first duty of a liberal state. His most important
book, A Theory of Justice, was first published in 1971. In it he explores the
contours of a just society with the argument that ‘Each person possesses
an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a
whole cannot override. Therefore, in a just society the rights secured by
justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social
interests.’
FIGURE 2.4 John Rawls.
Photo: Jane Reed, University
of Harvard
The problem of the
distribution of benefits
across the globe is
certainly a major issue
in global politics today.
See Chapter 19.
HOW DO WE BEGIN TO THINK ABOUT THE WORLD? 31
For the cosmopolitan then, international ethics is understood from an impartial
perspective that any human being can take simply because they are a rational human
being. Unlike Walzer, Beitz is arguing that we can understand other cultures and make
moral judgements without worrying about mistranslation or misunderstand ing. For
Beitz, the important thing is to base our moral judgements and therefore, our
international ethics on ideal principles of justice. As such, what morally matters the most
is not our nationality nor our citizenship but rather, our humanity.
We summarise Walzer and Beitz’s different pictures in Figure 2.5.
FIGURE 2.5
Table summary of Walzer and Beitz
Walzer (Communitarian) Beitz (Cosmopolitan)
Reason Reason cannot overcome Reason transcends our
interests, biases and interests and biases
socio-cultural meanings
The subject The state or the political The individual (as a
community is the moral member of humanity)
subject is the moral subject
Ethico-political space Ethics takes place within Ethical responsibility
states; those outside are extends to every person
not our primary moral regardless of where they
concern live
BROADER ISSUES
THINKING ABOUT THINKING
Surveying the way two thinkers in global politics approach ethics gave us two sets of
pictures of reason, the subject and ethico-political space. Importantly, both approaches
share the impulse to picture. Regardless of the content of the pictures, each approach
believes that theirs is an accurate and true representation of the reality of reason, the
subject and ethico-political space.
Attempts to describe global political reality are forms of representation, or what I
have called pictures. The assumption is that the truth or falsity of a picture or repre –
sentation depends on how accurately it corresponds with reality. This depends on
postulating what we call a word–object relation. The meaning of a word depends on it
naming or accurately representing the corresponding object that exists independently
in reality. So, for example, ‘political community’ refers to a common way of life; and
so on. In this way of thinking, all the things referred to exist outside language and act
as the foundation of the world. They exist in a reality that is independent of any thoughts
or words we might have about it. Our words simply refer to the foundation or essence
of such things as political community and principles of justice. This is what picturing
32 VÉRONIQUE PIN-FAT
Holding a mirror up
to reality and checking
whether the image
accurately reflects
reality is another way
of thinking of this:
Chapter 24.
assumes. It is called a correspondence theory of truth. When a picture accurately portrays
reality, or when our words name the correct ‘thing’ or object, then the picture is true.
The picture is false if it is inaccurate.
But what happens if you begin to wonder about the whole endeavour of picturing
and the pictures themselves? What happens if we shift our attention towards pictures
as the problem rather than the answer to ethics? If we did make such a shift we would
be involved in something different: another approach. This different approach questions
whether pictures can fully capture reality at all. In other words, it questions how and
where we draw the lines around what we think reality is and what impact these lines
have on people’s lives and the ways in which they are able and unable to live them with
each other.
Pictures, framing and language games
Before we return to looking at torture and ticking time bombs as an example of how
pictures impact on people’s lives and our treatment of each other, we first need to ask
why pictures might be problematic. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that
when we provide answers they tend to be of the kind ‘This is how things are.’ However,
as Wittgenstein says:
one thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again,
and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it. A picture
held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and
language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
(Wittgenstein 1958: §§114–15)
Wittgenstein implies that pictures are part of the practice of language that he calls
language games. Rather than picturing reality as though reality were outside our
language, pictures constitute or create reality. This does not mean that there is no
BOX 2.3 LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) is one of the most influential philosophers
of the twentieth century. His major intellectual preoccupation was with the
relationship between language and the world and how our
misunderstandings of it lead to philosophical problems. In his lifetime he
published only one work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) perhaps
most famous for its phrase ‘Whereof one cannot speak one must remain
silent.’ His later philosophy was posthumously published as Philosophical
Investigations (1958). His influence remains important outside philosophy,
including in thinking about global politics.
FIGURE 2.6
Ludwig Wittgenstein. von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives, University of Helsinki
You may have come
across references to
‘regimes of truth’,
‘ideologies’, ‘theoretical
approaches’: these often
mean the same thing, or
something very similar,
to what is called
‘language games’ here.
external reality. But it does mean that we are wholly dependent upon language to make
sense of and understand the world we live in. And if this is so, then language tells us
what to think about the world or what we call reality. The importance of this cannot
be overstated. It means that how we think about the world is regulated by our language
games or practices. In turn, if our thoughts are regulated by language, it means that
our thoughts are practices: ways of being in the world. This is why pictures, as snapshots
of what we think about things and people in the world, affect the world we live in. For
example, naming a person who plants a ticking bomb a ‘terrorist’ or a ‘freedom fighter’
matters beyond the choice of mere vocabulary. Using the term ‘freedom fighter’ seems
to suggest that the person may have a justifiable reason for their actions, whereas
‘terrorist’ does not. Another way of putting this important point would be to say that
our language games constitute the limits of possibility: they tell us what it is possible
to do and how it is possible to exist and act in the world.
In summary, thinking about language games emphasises how language makes a
difference to how we live and act in the world with others. Pictures tell us what we
think ‘reality’ is and therefore regulate how we act and live in it. Elaborating this further
we can say that pictures are practices of telling us what shall count as ‘true’, ‘false’,
‘humanity’, ‘political community’: any ‘thing’ (object) or any ‘body’ (subject). There –
fore, the pictures that relate to ethics are a set of practices that tell us what ethics is.
Making pictures the problem rather than the answer makes the job of asking how we
think about the world and ethics in global politics very different. Thinking about the
world becomes a questioning of how thinking or picturing regulates the ways in which
we act and the impact this has on people’s lives.
Let’s now return to thinking about torture and the ticking bomb scenario in order
to illustrate the shift towards an approach that sees pictures of reason, the subject and
ethico-political space as the problem, not the answer.
Pictures of reason, the subject and ethico-political space
The ticking bomb scenario is the practice of a specific kind of picture of reason: a
particular idea of what we think ‘thinking about’ the world requires. In this case, we
will see that Charles Beitz and the United States administration of George W. Bush
deployed the same picture of reason as that underlying the ticking bomb scenario. There
is a good chance that you are familiar with this picture. It is often associated with
liberalism.
The ticking bomb scenario operates with a picture of reason as abstraction. It
operates in three steps. Step one presents us with a dilemma; whether the value of the
life of the bomber can be overridden in order to save other lives. However, this dilemma
is not generated by the scenario. It is what the scenario is about and why it has been
constructed. Having constructed it for this purpose, step two requires imagining or
thinking hypothetically of anything that might be an exception to an absolute prohibition
against torture. Obviously, the candidate for an exception is a ticking bomb. The scenario
is asking us whether we think that a ticking bomb really is an exception. Once we’ve
decided that, then step three in this picture of reason is to find ‘real world’ cases or
practices where the justifications for torture appear. The shape of this picture of reason
is one where there is a clear separation between theory and practice. How we are to act
HOW DO WE BEGIN TO THINK ABOUT THE WORLD? 33
Chapter 28 takes up the
issue of language and
our relation to what we
call reality in a slightly
different way.
Liberalism is a pervasive
ideology. Many of the
chapters mention it, in
particular those that
explore the global
political economy.
in the world is first determined by theory as the exercise of reason in the abstract. The
next issue is then to apply theory to the world. These steps are also how Beitz generates
his principles of justice. He identifies the issue, provides a hypothetical scenario (the
global original position) and from that deduces global principles of justice that should
be applied to the world.
How can we engage with this picture of reason differently? One way is to trace the
effects of this picture rather than engage with its ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’. There are many
effects, but we can highlight an important one here. Separating theory and practice
means just that: separating them. This then raises the obvious problem of how the two
can be reunited, if at all, as the practice of theory. But more importantly, we might
want to think about whether theory and practice can be separated in the first place.
One way we could do this would be by asking what kind of people are included in this
picture of reason. The scenario is not interested in, nor does it include, actual cases of
torture: who was tortured, how, why and by whom. The only people that are in the
picture are people using abstracted reasoning. They don’t have feelings of guilt,
humiliation, fear, enjoyment, or confusion nor do they feel pain or scream for example.
The scenario also does not include any politics; why the ‘bomber’ might have planted
the bomb, why he planted it where he did, who has captured him, who has labelled
him as a ‘terrorist’ and why, etc. The scenario is deliberately designed to strip away all
this information and ask us to make decisions in the absence of the much messier,
complicated fabric of global politics.
This section has been arguing that pictures are practices even if, as in this case, they
are conceived as purely theoretical. Examining the ticking bomb scenario’s picture of
reason as the problem involves exploring the possibility that, through its separation of
theory and practice, it may be a practice that sanitises torture through its lack of reference
to any specific people or political context. Arguably, this has the effect of making torture
seem more rational, more palatable and less objectionable. If so, the creation of a scenario
that allows for the possibility that torture is justified may well be implicated in the actual
practice of torture. This would mean that the strict separation of theory and practice
that the scenario depends on for making torture justifiable might not be possible in the
first place.
An example of this would be the Final Report of the Independent Panel To Review
[US] Department of Defense Detention Operations, which was published in August
2004 as a response to accounts of the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq,
by US military personnel in late 2003. The Report was commissioned by the then US
secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, to provide independent advice on the abuse of
detainees. The Report stated that ‘For the US, most cases for permitting harsh treatment
of detainees on moral grounds begin with variants of the “ticking time bomb” scenario’
(Schlesinger et al. 2004: Appendix H, 2). Why does this matter? The point is that
the Report clearly accepted that the ticking bomb scenario justifies torture and that this
was the position shared by the Bush administration. Therefore, the picture of reason
that underlies the ticking bomb scenario was part of a set of shared practices employed
by the administration. Given this, for the US and the Report, the issue then became
how ‘harsh treatment’ can be used, by whom and under which circumstances, but no
longer whether it should be used. Indeed, what consequently emerged was a distinction
between torture ‘lite’ and torture – the former being a justified form which is,
34 VÉRONIQUE PIN-FAT
So those talking about
torture in this way are in
some sense responsible
for the actual torture that
takes place: their talk has
made that torture
possible.
HOW DO WE BEGIN TO THINK ABOUT THE WORLD? 35
When we talk about
other forms of violence –
war for example – we
also tend to talk as if
there were no actual
bodies involved. See
Chapters 1 and 22.
purportedly, moderate and restrained (Wolfendale 2009). Bearing this in mind, we must
ask whether the ticking bomb scenario is complicit in the use of torture because the
use or practice of its picture of reason makes torture possible. Moreover, once thinking
along these lines is made permissible it makes possible any further distinctions we might
want to make about ‘lite’ forms of it and current debates on whether waterboarding,
for example, is a form of torture or not. This is a very long way away from the original
position of the CAT which says that there are no circumstances under which torture
may be justified. I suggest it’s the abstract thinking of the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario which
leads us to these practices so horribly quickly.
Pictures of reason are also related to pictures of the subject. In the bomb scenario,
it is clear that subjects are meant to come to their decisions rationally and this is what
matters most. Our alternative approach would ask what kind of subject this is: what
does it include and exclude? It is fascinating that the ticking bomb scenario does not
mention pain, as pain is, perhaps, what we most associate torture with. The subjects in
the scenario (the torturer and the tortured) are pictured as disembodied. That is to say,
that they are viewed as people with reason but with no body that can feel pain. Nor are
they pictured as having emotions. Not only does the bomber in the scenario not scream,
he does not cry, he has no relationships of love and he holds no beliefs in his heart
rather than his head. It is very difficult to explore how far our bodies and emotions
matter in global politics and ethics, but the point is, we can ask whether this picture of
the subject that excludes them seems to miss something important about being human.
In so far as this picture of the subject is a practice, it has the effect of excluding emotions
and embodiment from consideration. This is, furthermore, a political act since it is telling
us what matters most about being human. So, for example, if the tortured bomber begins
begging for the torture to stop should we listen to him? Or should we only listen if he
FIGURE 2.7
Samrong Military
Hospital, Cambodia.
Photo: Olivier Pin-Fat
is presenting us with rational reasons to stop? Is compassion, for example, irrelevant to
global politics and ethics?
Apart from this picture of the subject as disembodied, without emotions and
without emotional ties to others, the subject is neither social nor political. Again this
is a picture most associated with liberalism and is also shared by Beitz. In the ticking
bomb scenario the bomber and the potential torturer do not belong to any specified
society or culture, have no specified citizenship, no specified notions of belonging or
identity, and no political reasons for acting. In section 3, we traced how this is a picture
of the subject that Beitz employs and we saw Walzer’s objections to it. However, instead
of asking which thinker has the ‘true’ picture, what we need to do using our alternative
approach is trace the effects of the practice of each picture. As we have seen in the ticking
bomb scenario, the picture of the subject is employed in a way that contributes to the
separation of theory and practice by abstracting people from the context within which
they are living and acting. Consequently, the ticking bomb scenario does not ask whether
there might be any justifications for the bomber planting the bomb.
This leads us nicely into thinking about the relationship between pictures of reason
and the subject and the picture of ethico-political space. Where does ethics or politics
take place? Ironically, the pictures of reason and the subject in the ticking bomb scenario
do not explicitly suggest a particular place because of their commitment to the absence
of a specific society and a disembodied subject. Place lies in the background as a hidden
assumption. However, it is clear from the practice of these pictures that the scenario is
supposed to apply to the United States or a state much like it. The clues are in the
setting up of the scenario. The bomb is planted in Washington, Paris or London for
example. There are two things to notice about this. One, the potential victims of the
bomb will be people living in the US or an advanced industrialised state. Two, therefore,
the potential torturers will be the US or a liberal democratic, advanced industrialised
state. This is the ethico-political space within which the ticking bomb scenario is set.
We could see this as a problem and we could ask what happens to the scenario if it is
set elsewhere. What if, for example, a ticking bomb is planted somewhere in Afghanistan
and the bomber is a US soldier being held by the Taliban? Does this make a difference
to how we would come to a decision about the justifiability of torture? And, if you feel
that it does, why does it? Would you want to make a distinction between the Taliban
practising torture ‘lite’ and torture? Regardless of your answers, in the ticking bomb
scenario we have a picture of ethico-political space as one occupied by states; more
specifically, liberal democratic states.
We might want to ask whether it is only liberal democratic states that can justifiably
use torture. Moreover, we can go further by asking whether the spaces within which
ethics and politics take place in global politics must be territorial spaces like states, nations
or political communities. Perhaps ethics is all around us and is unavoidable. We live in
a world of pictures, where what we think about the world matters. If, as this chapter
has suggested, pictures are the problem, then ethico-political space, and the need and
occasion to think about the problem of picturing, is everywhere: it is in the state, at
home, in the lecture theatre, in this textbook, in abstract thoughts and hypothetical
scenarios. If we fail to be aware of how we think about the world and its effects, we
may find ourselves blindly complicit in a variety of practices, like torture. It should make
us pause to think about how we think about the world.
36 VÉRONIQUE PIN-FAT
CONCLUSION
This chapter has traced how and why what we think about the world matters. It began
by posing questions about how the way we think about the world impacts on our
treatment of others. In order to highlight how thinking affects the world, the chapter
examined the abstracted way of thinking deployed by the ticking bomb scenario. The
chapter showed that thinking about thinking very quickly led us to questions of ethics
in global politics. Not only was the ethics of torture implicated but also the much broader
question of whether our moral obligations extend primarily to ‘us’ as fellow citizens or
‘us’ as the whole of humanity. This apparent choice between an international ethic based
on communities or on humanity was identified as the cosmopolitan–communitarian
debate; a debate which provides well-established answers to what pictures of reason,
the subject and ethico-political space consist of. Finally, the chapter examined a different
approach: a way of thinking that sees pictures as the problem, not the answer, a way of
thinking that can be seen as an ethico-political endeavour in itself. In the final analysis,
the chapter is a plea for us, whoever ‘we’ may be, to be mindful of how we live in the
world and our ethico-political relations with others.
FURTHER READING
Brecher, Bob (2007) Torture and the ticking bomb, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Fierke, K. M. (2002) ‘Links Across the Abyss: Language and Logic in International Relations’,
International Studies Quarterly 46, 3: 331–54.
An introduction to the relevance of Wittgenstein for global politics.
Greenberg, Karen J. (ed.) (2006) The Torture Debate in America, New York: Cambridge
University Press.
A detailed survey of aspects of the torture debate in the US.
Pin-Fat, Véronique (2010) Universality, Ethics and International Relations: A Grammatical
Reading, Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Walzer, Michael (2004) Arguing About War, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.
A more recent meditation on war and intervention.
WEBSITES
Amnesty International, http://www.amnesty.org
A human rights non-governmental organisation that monitors human rights around the
world.
United Nations, Committee Against Torture, part of the Office of the High Commissioner for
Human Rights, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cat/
This Committee is responsible for monitoring the prevention of torture.
Wikileaks, wikileaks.org
This site includes collections of leaked official documents, for example The Guantanamo Files,
Iraq War Logs and Afghanistan War Logs.
HOW DO WE BEGIN TO THINK ABOUT THE WORLD? 37
http://www.amnesty.org
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cat/
www.wikileaks.org
38 VÉRONIQUE PIN-FAT
REFERENCES
Amnesty International (2007) Report 2007: The State of the World’s Human Rights, London:
Amnesty International.
Beitz, Charles (1999 [1979]) Political Theory and International Relations, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Rawls, John (1971) A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Scarry, Elaine (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schlesinger, James R., Harold Brown, Tillie K. Fowler and Charles A. Homer (2004) Final Report
of the Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations, August.
United Nations (1984) Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading
Treatment or Punishment, December.
Walzer, Michael (1977) Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations,
London: Allen Lane.
––––(1985 [1980]) ‘The Moral Standing of States: A Response to Four Critics’, in Charles R.
Beitz, Michael Cohen, Thomas Scanlon and A. John Simmons (eds) International Ethics,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
––––(1994) Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by C. K. Ogden, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
––––(1958) Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe
and Rush Rhees, 3rd edn, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wolfendale, Jessica (2009) ‘The Myth of Torture “Lite”’, Ethics and International Affairs 23,
1: 47–61.
For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
http://www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
CHAPTER 3
What happens if we don’t take
nature for granted?
Simon Dalby
■ The question
FROM ENVIRONMENT TO BIOSPHERE
■ Illustrative example
CLIMATE CHANGE
■ General responses
HOW DO WE FRAME THE ISSUE IN TERMS OF GLOBAL
POLITICS?
■ Broader issues
CHALLENGING CARBONIFEROUS CAPITALISM
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
FROM ENVIRONMENT TO BIOSPHERE
We are part of a complicated biosphere: a thin layer of air, soil, ocean and life
surrounding a small planet (Smil 2003). The food we eat, the water, and other things,
we drink, the clothes we wear, the buildings we live in, the cars we drive, and yes, the
sewage we flush away each day, are all essential to human life, and as such, matters that
concern how we organise our lives and how we interact with each other. In other words
they are very much a matter of politics even if they are frequently not
thought about in quite this way.
Environment is technically a word that means what surrounds
something else. Originally the word ‘environs’ usually meant the area
around a town. Updated in the twentieth century it came to mean what
surrounds humanity, the outside factors of air, land and water that provide
the context for human living. Environmental discussion from the 1960s
onwards focused in part on the human disruptions of parts of this
The changing use
of terms such as
‘environment’ and
‘nature’ reflects changing
language games, as
discussed in Chapter 2.
Chapter 4 uses the rather
different term ‘ecology’.
40 SIMON DALBY
environment. Oil spills and smoke, pesticide poisonings and chemical contamination
combined with discussions of urban congestion and suburban sprawl to suggest that
humanity was doing damage to the environment, and wasting resources in the process
too (Ward and Dubos 1972). This concern about wasting, or running out of, key
minerals, fuel supplies and even food added to the worries about pollution. Conservation
of resources linked up with the pollution discussions in this discourse of environment
which arrived on the political scene as a series of protest movements in developed
countries in the late 1960s and 1970s (Sandbach 1980). Governments responded in
various ways and most states now have environment departments; environmental
movements became a new and powerful international political force (Wapner 1996).
But while environmental thinking is understood to be essential to discussing the
future intelligently, it is now complemented by a growing realisation of the need to
think much more carefully about the whole biosphere. But when we try to do that,
when we try to think about the planet as a whole, and start with the natural systems
within which humanity exists, big important questions about how we got here and what
kind of a planetary home we are making for future generations quickly get raised. In
all the discussions about biodiversity, mad cows, genetically modified crops, ethical
consumption, and above all climate change, how society is organised does get discussed,
but frequently in terms of the appropriate role for experts and government regulations.
But the categories we use in this discussion, and the term ‘environment’ itself, frequently
FIGURE 3.1
‘Human Watch:
conference’.
Artist: Patrick Hickey.
CartoonStock
ref.: phin28.
www.CartoonStock.com
See Chapter 4 for further
discussion of the
political movements and
parties that have arisen
around this issue.
Is future human well-
being the most
important thing?
http://www.CartoonStock.com
WHAT IF WE DON’T TAKE NATURE FOR GRANTED? 41
don’t help in either describing our present predicament or in trying to work out how
to proceed in parti cular circumstances. Mostly this is because in these present
circumstances the distinctions between town and country, city and rural areas, are
making less and less sense. Seeing environment as separate – a question of nature outside
cities, a matter of rural affairs or a distant concern – has gradually given way to
understandings, however vague and imprecise, that we all live in a single interconnected
biosphere.
In the last few years this recognition has led to intense discussions about how we
should understand our place in the world. The sheer scale of human activity means that
we have effectively become a force of nature, changing the planet to such an extent
that geologists are discussing what is now widely called a new period in earth’s history,
the Anthropocene (Steffen et al. 2007, Kolbert 2011). The implications of this are
profound for thinking about world politics, because although we have been slow to
realise it, humanity has taken its fate into its own hands. Indeed some of the earth system
scientists who are thinking through how interconnected things are in the biosphere have
suggested that we are living through a second Copernican revolution, one where once
again our understanding of our place in the universe is being changed profoundly
(Schellnhuber et al. 2005). Now we understand ourselves as nature, as part of the
biosphere that we are rapidly changing. We aren’t on earth; we literally are earth.
Humanity is deciding what kind of a planet future generations will live in, and
changing it in ways that are similar to some of the massive extinction events of the ancient
BOX 3.1 GROWTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT
In the early 1970s some thinkers revived concerns usually linked to the name of Thomas Malthus that
resources would run out, stopping economic growth. In the much discussed report on the Limits to
Growth early computer projections about when resources would run out were coupled to pessimistic
concerns about pollution and the eventual collapse of industrial society was forecast (Meadows et al.
1974). The arguments about the limits to growth in the 1970s suggested that the planet was running out
of essential resources so development would have to come to a halt one way or another. It also suggested
that pollution would be a major cause of societal collapse. All of which suggested that economic growth
couldn’t go on indefinitely on a small planet. Vehement criticisms came from many who argued that the
poor would be denied the benefits promised by economic development.
Thus to make environmental concerns palatable, discussions focused on a strategy to overcome the
deleterious aspects of economic growth in terms of sustainable development. Designed to promote
economic activity that would not deny future generations the necessities for their livelihood, sustainable
development was the key theme in the widely cited final report of the World Commission on Environment
and Development (1987) headed by Gro Harlem Brundtland, Our Common Future. The suggestion in its
pages, that development had to continue to add to human wealth so as to deal with problems of poverty
and all the social and health ills that came with it without destroying the global environment, became the
core of the discussion about development and environment in the United Nations and provided the
background for the huge Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Sustainable development continues to
be the framework for United Nations discussions of the future goals for humanity.
The Anthropocene is a
new geological epoch,
where ‘humans have
become a force of nature
reshaping the planet on
a geological scale’
(Economist, 26 May
2011).
Copernicus argued that
the earth was not the
centre of the universe,
with the sun moving
round it, as had
previously been thought.
Do we still think ‘man’
is the centre of the
universe, or is the planet
as a whole indifferent to
human survival?
FIGURE 3.2
CO2 concentrations from
the Mauna Loa
Observatory, Hawaii.
Global Monitoring
Division, Earth System
Research Laboratory,
National Oceanic and
Atmospheric
Administration
42 SIMON DALBY
geological past. We are making decisions about which life forms will exist in the future;
literally playing God. Nature is no longer ‘out there’, the given context for the human
drama. We are remaking nature, and in the process making decisions about what kind
of world future human generations will live in. We can no longer take nature for granted.
This is profoundly political, a matter of world politics quite literally.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
CLIMATE CHANGE
The recognition that human actions are inadvertently causing huge changes to the planet
has been emphasised recently by the discussion of climate change. Climate change is a
complicated process, but one that is now partly driven by human actions. The complexity
arises because the atmospheric system and its links to both land and ocean involve
numerous flows of energy and matter that vary with seasons and from place to place.
Human actions change the land fairly directly, and so may cause direct effects; a black
asphalt car park radiates heat on a sunny day very differently from the hayfield that it
replaced. But by far the greatest change that humanity is introducing into the climate
system is the addition of carbon dioxide, methane and other so called greenhouse gasses
that trap heat within the atmosphere.
Over long geological time scales of the past, forests and other life forms have
absorbed carbon dioxide from the air. Some of them, when they died, have been covered
with silt and buried. There over millions of years various chemical processes underground
have turned the organic matter into coal, petroleum and natural gas. In the last few
centuries humanity has been rapidly reversing this long term trend. Now by literally
turning rocks into air, for that is what we are doing every time we burn coal to make
electricity, drive a car or use fossil fuels in countless other ways, we are changing the
People often assume
that culture is ‘made’
but nature is ‘given’:
our impact on the
environment suggests
that it is much more
complicated than that.
Changes during
industrialisation and the
rise of capitalism are
discussed in Chapter 17.
The impact of these
changes in India are
discussed in Chapter 16.
FIGURE 3.3
Traffic congestion
WHAT IF WE DON’T TAKE NATURE FOR GRANTED? 43
makeup of the atmosphere and in the process changing the systems that drive the
biosphere’s climate and creating a new set of circumstances for humanity (Flannery
2006). Environment is no longer something ‘out there’, separate from humanity, but
something we are increasingly remaking by our actions.
Capitalism and industrialisation
Climate change is especially important in any discussion of global politics both because
it has global ramifications and because its causes stem from how we collectively organise
our contemporary urban society. While coal and to a very small degree petroleum have
been used by people for thousands of years, it is only since the beginning of what is
called the Industrial Revolution late in the eighteenth century that using them has begun
to have a noticeable effect on the earth’s atmosphere. Once the steam engine was put
in motion, first in railway engines, then as the power system for steamships, the global
economy rapidly became connected: ‘Suddenly the price of wheat in Liverpool and the
rainfall in Madras were variables in the same vast equation of human survival’ (Davis
2001: 12). The substitution of fossil fuels for labour both dramatically changed the
structure of British, and subsequently other, societies and simultaneously set in motion
the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
This whole process of what Lewis Mumford (1934) once called carboniferous
capitalism – because the coal that powered industrial society came from the carbon-
iferous period in geological history – was accelerated dramatically when petroleum was
refined and oils and gases started being used for lighting, heating and then, crucially,
in the internal combustion engines used to power cars and lorries. When one adds in
the energy used in road, parking lot and bridge construction, a very substantial part
of the energy used in contemporary society is directly related to automobiles and their
44 SIMON DALBY
infrastructure. Cars have become status symbols, recreational toys, temporary offices,
and much more than transportation in our lives. They are frequently advertised as
instruments of the domination of nature and of freedom to go anywhere without
consequences (Paterson 2007). They have become symbols of modernity.
But much more than just cars are involved in the use of carbon fuels. Power
generating stations using coal are a substantial source of carbon emissions; at least part
of the electricity used to power the computer used to write this chapter came from coal
powered generation; very little came from solar or wind power. Many of the items of
everyday life are made of plastics and petroleum, including the keyboard on which this
chapter was typed. The container ship and the trucks that brought it round the world
from the factory to my office were also powered by fossil fuels and have implications
for far distant ecologies (Dauvergne 2008). These things are simply part of our everyday
world, and the consequences of these modes of life have, until recently, rarely been
considered as a matter of world politics.
Accelerating change and unpredictable effects
Climate has been relatively stable for the last 10,000 years or so since the end of the
last ice age. There have been some dramatic short term disruptions, as when the Krakatoa
BOX 3.2 CLIMATE CHANGE CONTROVERSY
In the last few years the public discussion about climate change has been noteworthy for its rancour, and
a very noisy and visible group of pundits and think tank experts who have persistently disputed the
findings of climate science, attempting to ridicule the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, and reduce public confidence in other scientists who are raising the alarm about accelerating
climate change.
Much of the controversy is driven by political concerns in the United States in particular to constrain
the role of government in regulating businesses, and the oil industry in particular. Many of the books
denying the reality of climate change can be directly connected to a network of conservative foundations
and think tanks (Jacques et al. 2008). Part of the problem has been repeated media practices of providing
‘balance’ to a story by interviewing one or two scientists who dispute some aspects of climate science and
suggesting that these views are equally important as those of the vast majority of scientists that are doing
the science and have no doubts that the planet is warming and that human disruptions of many natural
systems are the cause (Boykoff 2011).
Further difficulties come when media accounts simplify complicated scientific issues, arguing that
science should provide certainties that it simply can’t do (Hulme 2009). Holding science up against such
unrealistic expectations frequently allows claims to be made that there is a debate about whether climate
change is real. This despite the fact that the vast majority of scientists actually doing the research, rather
than those making comments in the media, have been tracking the changes in environmental systems for
decades. What is much less clear is how the changes already set in motion will play out in coming
decades, and with what impacts on particular people in vulnerable places, like low lying cities close to
shore. But this is very different from claiming that change isn’t happening.
WHAT IF WE DON’T TAKE NATURE FOR GRANTED? 45
BOX 3.3 GREENHOUSE GASES
Carbon dioxide is a relatively large molecule among atmospheric gases, and large molecules trap
infrared radiation, keeping the heat that would otherwise escape back into space in the atmosphere.
Methane is an even more potent greenhouse gas; human activities have so far caused nearly a doubling of
methane in the atmosphere, but it stays in the atmosphere a much shorter time than carbon dioxide.
The CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) that are the cause of so much worry about ozone layer depletion are also
very potent greenhouse gases. (The international agreement in the late 1980s to phase out the production
of CFCs will also in the long run help reduce the amount of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere
(Soroos 1997).) Water vapour too is sometimes a powerful greenhouse gas. Cloudy nights in temperate
climate zones are usually less likely to have frost than clear ones. But in daytime when those clouds
reflect sunlight back into space they act to cool the surface. This makes water a very difficult gas to work
into predictions of climate change. Other ironies of atmospheric change include the fact that while
aeroplanes flying high in the atmosphere are pouring carbon dioxide into the air they are also emitting
other polluting gases, or aerosols, that act to reflect sunlight and cool the earth’s surface, which
counteracts the warming of the carbon dioxide. This strange fact was confirmed by measurements over
the United States in the few days after 11 September 2001 when air traffic was grounded. Likewise air
pollution in Asia from fires and inefficient engine combustion is both a local health hazard and probably
reducing the warming from the sun by its shading effects when it reflects sunlight, but ironically heating
the air when the soot absorbs heat.
volcano in Indonesia blew its top in 1883 and put huge quantities of material into the
atmosphere which dimmed the sunlight for a couple of years (Winchester 2003). But
mostly over this period of the planet’s existence, climate has stayed within a fairly narrow
range close to what we became familiar with before the 1980s. While some societies,
perhaps most notably the Maya civilisa tion in the Americas, have possibly collapsed due
to environmental change, this stable set of circumstances allowed for the emergence of
agricultural societies and the beginnings of human civilisations (Diamond 2005). Now
numerous indica tions of climate change are becoming obvious, not only to scientists
and those who use satellites and weather stations to monitor change, but also to bird –
watchers who pay attention to bird migrations, gardeners and farmers who have to plant
and harvest according to the seasons, not to mention the people who plan such things
as winter snow removal budgets in many cities of the Northern Hemisphere.
The processes changing the atmosphere, the phenomena of global warming, are
fairly simple to outline. Increased burning of fossil fuels puts more carbon dioxide (CO2)
into the atmosphere. Plants and oceans can’t absorb all this increased volume of gas so
it starts to accumulate. Prior to the Industrial Revolution carbon dioxide was fairly stable
at about 270 parts per million in the atmosphere. Now it’s getting close to 400 parts
per million and forecasts for the rest of this century suggest that it might get as high
as 500 parts per million or close to double its pre-industrial levels. Because we know
from the geological record that global climate varies very closely in line with CO2
concentrations and there is no record in the last half a million years of CO2 anywhere
FIGURE 3.4
Image of smokestacks
producing hurricanes
from An Inconvenient
Truth. Lawrence Bender
Productions.
Poster courtesy
The Kobal Collection
46 SIMON DALBY
close to existing levels, there is great concern in the scientific community about what
the future holds for the biosphere and for humanity (Flannery 2006).
While the details of how these changes in the atmosphere play out in the biosphere
are complicated, some general trends are clear and some are very worrisome. Not least
what worries scientists is that many of the likely responses to increased atmospheric
temperatures will be neither gradual nor predictable. Feedback loops are already
beginning to accelerate trends that speed up heating. Neither will changes be evenly
spread geographically. Already it is clear that heating is having dramatic effects in the
polar regions of the planet. Ice and snow reflect a lot of sunlight because they are white.
Where ice and snow melt, and either ground or ocean is exposed, more sunlight is
absorbed as heat because of the darker colour. This warms the area, encouraging further
melting. While sea ice melting doesn’t affect the level of oceans, both warming of the
ocean water, and melting of ice on land, does raise sea levels.
FIGURE 3.5
Demonstration on
climate change, London
November 2006.
Photo: Dave Walsh,
Greenpeace
WHAT IF WE DON’T TAKE NATURE FOR GRANTED? 47
One other possible effect of climate change is the increased severity of large storms.
The 2005 hurricane season in the Caribbean, and the fact that hurricane Katrina devas –
tated Louisiana and, due to a failure of the dyke system round New Orleans, flooded
that city, focused attention on the vulnerability of populations to storms (Dalby 2009).
In 2011 hurricane Irene moved north in the United States, and while it weakened and
missed New York, it too caused extensive flooding damage. Hurricanes, or typhoons
as they are called in the Pacific, are fed by warm ocean water, and as the oceans warm,
it is likely but far from certain that more severe storms will occur (Shepherd and Knutson
2007). It might transpire that more frequent less severe storms happen, but the real
danger comes with the possibility of bigger and more severe storms. Not least this is
because so many people now live in harm’s way. Many poor people have no choice but
to live on marginal land in coastal areas, river valleys and hillsides vulnerable to flooding
or landslides. If extreme weather events become more frequent people in these areas
and in large low lying delta areas may be especially vulnerable. New Orleans will not
be the last coastal city to suffer the consequences of storms and rising sea levels.
Although that said, it is also worth pausing to consider the simple fact that emer –
gency measures, if taken in time, do frequently save lives and reduce the damage to
property. The example of the Cuban system, where a complicated and flexible system
of neighbourhood and community responsibility, and an effective shelter programme,
works to protect people from the impacts of hurricanes that regularly hit the island,
shows that much can be done to reduce vulnerabilities if appropriate preparations are
made (Sims and Vogelmann 2002). And yet in numerous countries there has been a
reluctance to tackle these issues. Activists attending the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro
in 1992 sketched out some basic principles for acting as though we collectively live in
a vulnerable biosphere, principles that subsequently became the ‘Earth Charter’, the
BOX 3.4 THE UN AND THE ENVIRONMENT
The Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972 marked
the first attempt by the United Nations to discuss global environmental matters
in a comprehensive manner (Ward and Dubos 1972). While the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP) was established in the 1970s to deal with
environmental matters, it was not a major United Nations priority in the years
that followed. Nonetheless in the 1980s UNEP was involved in the discussions
about the global atmosphere, stratospheric ozone depletion and the
establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the
scientific body that evaluates and summarises climate change science for
governments.
The early IPCC (see http://www.ipcc.ch/index.html) technical reports fed into
the deliberations at the huge Earth Summit, the United Nations Conference on
Environment and Development (UNCED), which was held in Rio de Janeiro in
1992 (Chatterjee and Finger 1994). Among the agreements that came from this
conference attended by most of the heads of state on the planet was the
Framework Agreement on Climate Change (Soroos 1997). This in turn produced
the much more talked about Kyoto Protocol late in the 1990s, an agreement that
entered into force on 16 February 2005 when Russia finally became part of the
agreement. This protocol, and the numerous elaborations and modifications
worked out at subsequent conferences of the parties, has become the key focal
point of international efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
But most of this remains a matter of regulating emissions, and frequently of
intense arguments about how to allocate responsibilities, quotas and
measurements. Neither the Kyoto Protocol nor the Framework Convention is a
forum for planning global sustainable development or ensuring the rapid spread
of technological innovations such as photo-voltaic cells, solar water heaters or
green building designs. It remains mostly focused on environment, rather than on
building a sustainable economy, although discussions of such programmes as
clean development mechanisms at least suggest the possibility of the United
Nations playing a more active role in building a green economy. The real test for
the United Nations system and its ability to shape the future will be what comes
after the Kyoto agreement when additional states are incorporated into more
extensive climate change arrangements. But as exemplified by the weak
agreement in Durban in December 2011, where states agreed to negotiate by 2015
a binding treaty that would take effect only in 2020, these institutions are at least
so far, failing to come up with comprehensive enforceable rules to govern fossil
fuel use and to ensure that ecosystems can effectively adapt to their new
circumstances in the Anthropocene.
48 SIMON DALBY
http://www.ipcc.ch/index.html
Attempts to act on
environmental concerns
are often not helped by
the way the world is
divided into territorial
units called states.
See Chapter 11.
Processes of imperialism
and colonial conquest
are discussed in
Chapters 15, 16 and 21.
Accounts by people
whose ancestors were
displaced by the changes
in the United States are
interesting. See Chapter
13 where the writings of
Sherman Alexie are
discussed.
WHAT IF WE DON’T TAKE NATURE FOR GRANTED? 49
closest thing there is to an international manifesto for sustainable living. While the
government delegations did enact some international agreements in Rio, notably the
framework convention on climate change, progress on dealing with greenhouse gas
emissions has been slow in most states.
GENERAL RESPONSES
HOW DO WE FRAME THE ISSUE IN TERMS OF
GLOBAL POLITICS?
But how are we to understand all this politically? What modes of thinking might we
invoke to think through these new circumstances? In this section three different ways
of thinking about this issue, drawing from environmental history, indigenous perspec –
tives and geopolitics, address the question of whether human-centric, or perhaps more
precisely modern urban human perspectives are all that are required. Looking back into
history we can see how the current ecological circumstances came about and come to
understand in what senses our climate change predicament is really new. Looking outside
Western thinking to the some times very different views from indigenous peoples who
were conquered by modern societies provides an interesting contrast with modern
understandings of environment. Finally, by looking at where fuels come from and the
consequences of the waste products from their combustion, we can see where the
problem lies and how power at the largest scale matters.
Environmental history
The crux of recent environmental history is captured in the title of one of the key texts
in the field, Alfred Crosby’s (1986) Ecological Imperialism, where matters of imperialism
are linked directly to the ecological consequences of European conquest. Although it
is frequently not thought of in these terms, the history of imperialism is all about
changing landscapes and ecologies. Much of this is not done deliberately, but the
introduction of horses and cattle in the Americas, not to mention rabbits to Australia,
has dramatically altered the environments of these continents. In addition, growing
wheat and other crops, as well as clearing large forests to make agricultural fields, involves
a complete change of the plants and animals in areas where colonisation occurs.
Looking to the huge changes wrought on the landscapes of North America, in
particular in the nineteenth century, as what quickly started to look like an American
empire spread rapidly across the continent, suggests clearly that what we now take for
granted as ‘the environment’ is much more of an artificial con struction than a natural
entity. Widespread slaughter of the buffalo herds, the eradication of many bird species,
and the clearing of forests for cultivation of crops changed the ecology of the continent
fundamentally. On the western frontier, beyond the area easily farmed, the ‘wild west’
became ranching country, the buffalo replaced by roaming cattle overseen by the ever-
present ‘cowboy’. This part of ecological imperialism has become part of popular
American, and now global, culture where the Western has generated a genre of movies
and books. The wilderness was enclosed, farmed, and above all rendered tame and safe
for European settlement while Chicago grew into a city of stockyards and the centre
of the meat industry (Cronon 1991).
See Chapter 11 for
a discussion of
territoriality.
For a discussion of the
place of religion in global
politics, see Chapter 6.
50 SIMON DALBY
But this expansion of human control over environments, and the conversion of
wilderness into tamed landscape, is a larger part of the human experience as agriculture
has gradually eliminated or pushed hunter-gatherer peoples into marginal areas. It has
been followed by the emergence of an urban civilisation, one that has expanded
dramatically in the last century to appropriate minerals, fuel, and land from the distant
corners of the planet to supply essential materials to the cities (Dauvergne 2008). The
human species, this colonising medium-sized mammal, has expanded its range to
the whole planet, and the consequences are so dramatic that we are now shaping the
evolution of the biosphere in new ways. The total scale of this transformation has led
to discussions of the novelty of this situation; to borrow the phrasing from another major
book (McNeill 2000) in the field of environmental history, there now is Something New
Under the Sun.
Indigenous perspectives
In the process not only have animals and plants, trees, fish and birds been displaced and
frequently simply annihilated, but indigenous cultures have also perished. Much of the
expansion of European power, and its appropriation of land and resources through direct
colonisation in the Americas and Australia, was done at the expense of the indigenous
cultures that were there before Europeans encountered them. Indigenous perspectives
on history make this clear. Many cowboy movies are about fighting ‘Indians’ in the
wild west, a theme that reflects the fact that the native societies were caught up in the
conquest and frequently fought back in the face of invasion. The cavalry didn’t always
get there in time.
One of the key assumptions in the conquest of the Americas was that the land
Europeans were entering was ‘empty’, at least in the sense that it wasn’t being farmed
and used ‘productively’. If native peoples were using the land they weren’t doing so in
ways that the European conquerors thought were significant, so the removal of the
natives wasn’t seen as a problem. The legal doctrine of terra nullius literally specified
the land as empty. Civilisation was about dominance and control over land and
resources; the benefits of civilisation came only with the adoption of these modes of
controlling the environment. The fact that indigenous peoples frequently had compli –
cated and sophisticated understandings of their local ecosystems, and that they often
harvested animals in ways that ensured their reproduction in the long term, was rarely
understood by settlers.
Native cosmologies in North America, and frequently in the case of indigenous
peoples elsewhere, do not start with the assumptions of a humanity apart from nature.
Living within ecosystems, native peoples frequently don’t make that fundamental separa –
tion between people and everything else (LaDuke 1999). What ‘modern’ societies might
designate as native religion, but what might be much better understood as an integral
part of local cultures, frequently requires some notion of respect for the animals one
captures and kills to eat. This is not a picture of an environment external to humanity
to dominate and control, an external entity to mine and exploit for resources and
com modities; it is seen as a place to inhabit, a home that provides the necessities of
life and will continue to do so if cared for appropriately. Thus long term consequences,
Is the easy distinction
between humans and
other species a particular
feature of modern
thinking?
FIGURE 3.6
Oil refinery. Lonely
Planet Images
WHAT IF WE DON’T TAKE NATURE FOR GRANTED? 51
and the possibilities of ecological renewal, are integral to the political considerations of
native cultures.
The connections between life and land are ignored by modern modes of thinking
that reduce fecund ecologies to resources, and land to a commodity that should be
exploited for short term commercial gain. None of this is to take a romantic view of
traditional societies. The assumption that native societies and environments were a
paradise prior to the disruptions of colonisation is neither historically accurate nor
politically helpful, but the dramatic contrast in cosmologies is useful in thinking about
the assumptions of an external nature that can be managed in present circumstances.
Native cosmologies challenge the separation of nature and society that modernity is
based upon.
Geopolitics
Looked at in the largest scale, that of geopolitics and power at the global scale, the
pattern of resource exploitation and disruption of local ways of living continues as ever
larger appropriations of resources are made to feed and fuel consumption in the
metropoles. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of petroleum, the substance
There are many views
as to what gives rise to
violence as a method
of action to solve
problems. See Chapter
22. Chapter 23 discusses
the different forms
violence can take.
To what extent does
capitalist economics
rely on growth? Is
sustainable growth a
contradiction in terms?
The related notion of
sustainable development
is discussed in
Chapter 4.
52 SIMON DALBY
that is at the heart of the problem of climate change, and a matter once again of
geopolitics (Klare 2009). Because it is used so widely in contemporary society, petroleum
has become an essential commodity. Some of the oil wells in current use are in remote
places where indigenous peoples live. These peoples have been involved in numerous
struggles against the environmental despoliation caused by wells and pipelines, and
also in attempts to gain some of the financial benefits of oil extraction. The pattern of
colonisa tion and the displacement of indigenous peoples, and the story of their
resistance, continues (Gedicks 2001).
Many of the oil production facilities on the planet are far from where the petroleum
is refined and used. In the Persian Gulf region a struggle to control the oil trade has
plunged local states and Western powers into conflict repeatedly. Violence comes with
oil. It is valuable enough to fight over. Given its importance for the global economy,
those who would control that economy are tied into struggles to control both the
supplies directly and the profits that can be made from selling the products. American
efforts in particular to control the petroleum supplies in the Gulf are tied directly into
rivalries with Iran and formerly with Iraq (Bacevich 2005). But this is not a simple matter
of the American government doing the bidding of the oil companies to protect their
supplies. It’s a much more complicated situation than that, not least because oil
company profits go up when supplies are tight and prices rise.
Here the most obvious contradictions in the global politics of our times become
very evident. The violence involved in trying to control the petroleum trade is in fact
a violence to perpetuate the production of a substance that is a direct threat to the
stability of the planet’s climate. Thus America is at war in the Middle East in part to
protect an unsustainable global society; it is fighting to maintain a way of life that is
imperilling all our futures. In part it is doing so out of sheer inertia: things have long
been done this way so they continue to be done this way. In part it is also a belief in
technology and the power of the internal combustion engine and a globalised economy
to provide wealth that ensures that the overall lot of humanity continues to improve.
It’s a mode of existence that simply doesn’t think that environment matters that much.
It perpetuates the assumption that environment is an externality to the important matters
of human society, to the provision of commodities and status in particular.
BROADER ISSUES
CHALLENGING CARBONIFEROUS CAPITALISM
We now have to think about environment, social change and geopolitics simul tan-
eously to try to see how political economy links all of them together, tying the fate of
marginalised people into the economic and security priorities of political elites in the
metropoles. But we also need to think about arguments that challenge the continued
operation of carboniferous capitalism and about how social change might happen if
environment and the consequences of imperial geopolitics for indigenous peoples
were taken into account. We can no longer operate on the assumption that there is a
separation between us and the planet; there is no external nature that we can manipulate
without having to deal with the consequences. The changing composition of the air
makes this fact unavoidable. There is no distant place we can safely put our waste,
Development strategies
have a range of serious
consequences for the
people subject to them.
See also Chapters 15
and 20.
Mike Davies’ study of
what he calls Late
Victorian Holocausts is
discussed in Chapter 16.
Some people might
see carbon offsetting
as an example of neo-
colonialism. See
Chapter 15.
WHAT IF WE DON’T TAKE NATURE FOR GRANTED? 53
pollution or sewage. Neither can we ignore the consequences of our modes of
consumption for the lives of marginalised people growing the crops we use or struggling
with the disruptions caused by mines, oil wells and pipelines in many places (Sachs and
Santarius 2007). Struggles over nature are human struggles.
Despite the growing recognition of this as the appropriate starting point, and all
the discussions about the Kyoto protocol and subsequent climate change negotiations
over the last decade, the growth in the use of fossil fuels has continued apace. Asian
economies are booming and the large economies of India and China in particular
seem determined to catch up with Western models of urban carboniferous capitalism
(Worldwatch Institute 2006). Car ownership is rising rapidly; national pride is linked
to the existence of national car production facilities in many states in Asia in particular.
This economic growth is based on petroleum fuels, following on from American, Japan –
ese and European practice rather than innovating with new fuels. Oil is still king. This
is not surprising for developing economies where playing catch-up is the dominant mode
of economic activity, but as oil becomes increasingly scarce and supplies are potentially
dis rupted by instabilities and wars in the Middle East, the wisdom of such a develop –
ment strategy seems highly doubtful. If climate change is taken seriously this is doubly
so.
While environmental change isn’t new in the human experience, as environmental
historians have made clear, the potential for rapid shifts in climate makes numerous
people vulnerable now in ways that are perhaps similar to the late nineteenth century
when famine swept through parts of the European empires, in part because of the
economic disruptions caused by the globalisation of the grain trade and the effects this
had on regional agriculture (Davis 2001). If all this happens while hurricanes and
droughts become more severe, there is a potential for major human disasters. Beyond
that the most worrisome dimension of environmental change is the potential for a
dramatic flip in the climate system that radically changes the whole arrangement of
climate zones (Alley 2004). While no one expects a series of changes on the scale of
the plot of the 2004 Hollywood disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, the possibility
of a very nasty climate surprise is of great concern, especially because there is little
evidence that, at least at the moment, international political institutions could deal effec –
tively with such an event.
In particular this is suggested by the pattern of thinking that appears in much of
the negotiating about climate change, not least by the frequent assumption that
Northern consumers can sink their carbon emissions in plantations in poor countries.
Rather than dealing directly with reducing consumption, part of the strategy has been
to export the pollution and plant trees where labour and land are relatively cheap in
other states (Lohmann 2006). All of which reminds historians of the story of colonial
plantations designed to supply commodities for markets in the metropoles. Poor
peoples are once again displaced to grow tree crops that are at best a temporary way of
soaking up some of the carbon emissions, but a way that gets Northern consumers off
the hook for the moment and allows them to claim to be carbon neutral. This postpones
dealing with the industrial and transportation systems that continue to turn rocks into
air so we can all enjoy having cool toys, big and small. The costs are displaced on to
poor people in the South and onto our grandchildren who will bear the brunt of what
disruptions today’s fuel use sets in motion in the future. Environmental justice for whom?
FIGURE 3.7
‘There is nobody else’.
Artist: Stan Eales.
CartoonStock
ref.: sea0186.
www.CartoonStock.com
BOX 3.5 CARBON OFFSETS AND TRADING
If too many greenhouse gases are being produced by economic activities, is it
possible to get them out of the air? If so, why not deal with the problem of
greenhouse gases by offsetting production against activities that reduce gas
production and remove gases from the atmosphere? If tropical trees grow
quickly, and in the process absorb carbon from the atmosphere, then why not
invest in plantations that can soak up emissions, and offset the use of fossil
fuels against tree growth? This argument is the basis of a growing social
movement and investment market in carbon offsets, as well as a part of the
larger international markets for carbon dioxide credit trading designed to
reduce the growth of greenhouse gases. In so far as it provides a constituency
in business groups to promote action on climate change, and facilitates social
movements who wish to offset consumer lifestyles and make them carbon
neutral, carbon offsets may by useful.
But critics are quick to point out various flaws in offset thinking (Lohmann
2006; Monbiot 2006). Most obviously if industries are offsetting their
emissions they may not have the same incentives to reduce greenhouse gases,
which is what really needs to be done. If consumers offset their emissions, and
hence stop feeling guilty about the ecological consequences of what they are
doing, rather than changing how they live to actually reduce their emissions,
then offsets aren’t helpful. If quick growing but ecologically inappropriate
trees, like the eucalyptus that needs lots of water, are grown they may badly
affect water supplies and other aspects of the environment. Badly designed
programmes of plantation farming may aggravate the problems faced by
marginal farmers or indigenous peoples on whose lands the plantations are
grown. Plantation agriculture was key to colonial development; calling the
forests carbon offset trees and having local governments administer the
forests doesn’t change this old pattern.
54 SIMON DALBY
http://www.CartoonStock.com
The World Summit on
Sustainable Develop –
ment took place in
South Africa in 2002;
see Chapter 4.
Al Gore was US vice
president from 1993 to
2001. He was later noted
for his campaign to
promote environmental
awareness, in particular
his documentary film An
Inconvenient Truth, which
won him both an Oscar
and a share of the Nobel
Peace Prize in 2007.
Liberals believe that
there is an informal
mechanism that
determines what is
produced and so on
– what Adam Smith
called the ‘invisible
hand’. See Chapter 17.
WHAT IF WE DON’T TAKE NATURE FOR GRANTED? 55
Recently these questions of offsets and justice have been made even more pressing
by the strategies of states and corporations to buy up land in Southern countries to
provide food and in some cases plantation type agriculture to make biofuels, supposedly
a more ecologically friendly way of getting fuels than using petroleum products. This
strategy of what is now called ‘land-grabbing’ continues the practice of displacing
marginal peoples, but does it frequently in terms justified by various ‘green’ or devel –
opment arguments (Matondi et al. 2011). This may be a form of development that
sustains Northern consumers, but at the cost of further disruptions to Southern peoples,
in Africa in particular. This is part of a larger pattern of the spread of the economic
logic known as neo-liberalism that has become a mode of governance in many places
in the absence of effective state regulation or clear development strategies focused on
making livelihoods sustainable. But, as critics have recently forcefully argued, it is pre –
cisely these economic forces that make people especially vulnerable in the face of climate
change in the global South (Parenti 2011).
The political and economic arguments against tackling environmental change have
usually asserted that change is simply too expensive. Only recently have economists and
politicians begun to take seriously the opposite and altogether more compelling
argument, that it will be a lot cheaper to act now to reduce the dangers, rather than
paying potentially huge costs later. As the Stern Report on climate change, the British
government document that investigates in detail the costs of climate change, put it: ‘we
have never seen a market failure like this’ (United Kingdom Treasury Department 2006).
Which brings the discussion back to politics, and who should do what to deal with the
‘failure’ of the existing mode of organising human affairs to consider the consequences
of our modes of life for the future, or for marginalised native peoples struggling to adapt
to the influx of modernity on their lands and cultures. In Al Gore’s (2006) words we
now simply have to deal with the Inconvenient Truth of climate change; but how to do
so remains very difficult.
There is currently no mechanism in human affairs to decide on what should be
produced, or how and where to ensure that catastrophe is avoided. Global agreements
on everything from ozone depletion through bans on the trade of endangered species
to climate change are attempts to rectify this gap. But mostly they look to limit damage
rather than change modes of living so as not to do damage in the first place. The focus
is frequently on regulations and legislation driven by environmental groups, and in some
states the presence of a green political party, to force business to stop emissions of
pollution (Lipschutz 2004; Clapp and Dauvergne 2011). Many of these regulations are
highly technical matters worked out by experts in the industries being regulated.
Reducing politics to such technical negotiations suggests that what matters are fine
details about chemical formulas, trading quotas and industrial standards. The big
questions about what kind of a society is best, how we might live together and what
needs to be done to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our children and those in distant
places too, are frequently squeezed out of discussion. But the sheer scale of human
induced change means that these questions keep coming back; the politics of climate
change are now simply unavoidable (Boykoff 2009).
These questions have not been ignored by the business community or by regulators
in Europe in particular, where numerous initiatives have been taken to try to use market
mechanisms to change economies so that they use less fossil fuel. To do so the policy
BOX 3.6 THE STERN REPORT
The Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change was released by the British government’s
Treasury Department in October 2006. In the 700-page report Sir Nicholas Stern makes the case that
spending money now to head off the worst effects of climate change is much more sensible than waiting
to deal with the consequences later. Whatever the finer points of the economic discussion, his case is
simple and direct. If nothing is done the economic disruptions caused by climate change will be dramatic
and painful to future generations. Relatively modest intelligent investments now can head off future
economic disruptions and are hence good public policy designed to benefit economies in the future.
Even if these investments slow economic growth slightly now, Stern argued, they are well worth it in terms
of avoiding future losses. The Stern Report is noteworthy because it clearly focuses on the costs of doing
nothing, whereas most of the economic arguments about climate change suggest that it is economically
rational to do little or nothing because the costs of trying to change economic systems will be very
considerable. By reversing this logic Stern has had a fairly immediate political effect on the larger debate
about how to think about the future of the global environment. What the Stern Report also suggests
clearly is that policy needs to deal with both adapting to climate change, some of which is already
inevitable, and mitigating some of its worst effects by taking actions now to slow down the rate of increase
of greenhouse gases concentrations in the air. Mitigation is needed not just to buy time for humans and
their economies to adapt, but crucially to give natural ecosystems the time they need to adapt to the
coming changes. In the words of the United Nations Development Programme (2007: vi) ‘While we
pursue adaptation we must start to reduce emissions and take other steps at mitigation so that the
irreversible changes already underway are not further amplified over the next few decades. If mitigation
does not start in earnest right now, the cost of adaptation twenty or thirty years from now will become
prohibitive for the poorest countries.’
has been to put a price on carbon, cap the overall amount of fuel that various sectors
of industry and business can use and regulate the overall use of carbon based fuels.
Issuing carbon use permits, and allowing businesses to trade those that they don’t use,
should in theory encourage efficiency improvements, and allow efficient businesses to
make extra money by selling their carbon credits on a market for such things. This
‘climate capitalism’ has begun to change how businesses in Europe in particular do things
(Newell and Paterson 2010). There have been numerous attempts at extending these
arrangements to the global scale, and while getting the pricing of carbon wrong in some
cases hasn’t generated the kind of fuel use reductions that advocates might have hoped
for, clearly new forms of climate governance are emerging from these initiatives, ones
that pose profound questions about politics in terms of where the sources of authority
for making these kinds of decisions and regulations lie.
CONCLUSION
Facing major changes in the circumstances of human existence, which is what the climate
change discussion is all about, demands that different questions be posed, and the big
56 SIMON DALBY
FIGURE 3.8
‘Welcome to the
Anthropocene’.
Cover illustration of
The Economist Magazine
on 26 May 2011.
http://www.economist.com/
node/18744401
WHAT IF WE DON’T TAKE NATURE FOR GRANTED? 57
issues of how to live collectively in a changing biosphere are discussed much more
carefully. We clearly need institutions that arrange matters so that we produce the things
we actually need to live well without completely disrupting natural cycles in the bio –
sphere. Our existing political institu tions have so far mostly failed to grapple effectively
with the new circumstances of human existence. Native cosmologies, and their insist-
ence that we are all part of the cycles of life, might have many lessons to teach about
how we reconsider those institutions and think about how to live well within a small,
vulnerable biosphere. Ecological science too shows us that we are part of the environ –
ment, not the masters of it. It’s not out there in the wild spaces distant from civilised
cities; it’s part of the systems of life that we have dramatically changed by our industries
and our profligate use of energy and materials.
Climate change challenges many of the modern assump tions about politics. The
whole modern mode of thinking, of managing an external environment to maximise
the pro duction of things, rather than human wellbeing, has shaped public administration
and regulation in national and inter national discussions. Assuming that a stable nature
will always be there for us is no longer a sensible assumption for political discussion.
Science has now made it abundantly clear that we are living in a biosphere that our
actions are reshaping, and that now we need to rethink these modern assumptions if
http://www.economist.com/node/18744401
http://www.economist.com/node/18744401
we are to shape the Anthropocene in ways that ensure human civilisation continues.
Environment is no longer just a matter of pollution and resource constraints, parks and
conservation. It is now a much more important matter, which enters directly into any
discussion of how we should live. New institutions and new ways of making decisions
about what we make, and hence what kind of world we produce for future generations,
need a whole lot more attention from politicians and scholars.
But we can learn from history as well as from science. The indigenous focus on
living within one’s surroundings, inhabiting rather than controlling, is one valuable
lesson. Another lesson is that distinctions between rural nature and urban civilisation
are no longer useful when it comes to thinking about politics or public administration.
A focus on the flows of material and energy in the biosphere becomes necessary; looking
at the connections between things and people makes political responsibility for one’s
actions unavoidable in the Anthropocene. In short, starting from natural systems and
thinking about the interconnections between our actions and distant places where the
energy and commodities we use come from, rather than thinking from the viewpoint
of modern consumers disconnected from the rest of the world where nature is taken
for granted, makes life more complicated but in turn gives us a very useful perspective
on global politics.
FURTHER READING
The best popular explanation of the science of global warming is probably Tim
Flannery’s (2006) The Weather Makers. Vaclav Smil’s (2003) guide to The Earth’s
Biosphere is precisely what its title suggests and useful for the rest of the science that
matters in discussing environmental politics. An overview of the current state of the
world’s natural environments and how all this relates to development is in the United
Nations Environment Programme report Geo5 Global Environmental Outlook:
Environment for Development, released in 2012. The Anthropocene has been discussed
widely in the media in 2011, notably in the March 2011 issue of the National
Geographic, and the ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’ cover story of The Economist,
26 May 2011. Mike Hulme’s book Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Cambridge
University Press 2009) is the essential guide to why climate change has become so
controversial.
Wolfgang Sachs and Tilman Santarius’ (2007) book on a Fair Future, is excellent
on the principles of thinking ecologically while seeing the interconnections between
the South and North. Peter Dauvergne traces the global implications of consumption
in his Shadows of Consumption (2008). The larger scholarly discussion of environment
and global political economy is in Jennifer Clapp and Peter Dauvergne’s (2011) Paths
to a Green World, while journalist Christian Parenti discusses the convergence of neo-
liberalism and climate change in his Tropic of Chaos (2011). Peter Newell and Matthew
Paterson’s Climate Capitalism (2010) traces some of the complex new governance
mechanisms of the emerging carbon economy. My own book Security and
Environmental Change (2009) spells out the need for innovative thinking about politics
and security in particular in the Anthropocene.
58 SIMON DALBY
WEBSITES
The rapidly changing science of global change is summarised by the International
Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP) at http://www.igbp.kva.se/. The 2007 Nobel
prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can be found at
http://www.ipcc.ch/. The United Nations Environment Programme’s Global Environ –
mental Outlook programme is online at http://www.unep.org/geo/. Real Climate,
at http://www.realclimate.org/, is where scientists keep the general public up to date
with the science of climate change.
Background information on the writing of the text of the Earth Charter, and details
about current campaigns based on it, including material related to the 2012 Rio de
Janeiro conference, can be found at http://www.earthcharter.org/. The World Watch
Institute at http://www.worldwatch.org/ publishes numerous well-researched articles
and reports on many environmental matters including climate change. Greenpeace
International’s climate campaign is at http://www.greenpeace.org/international/
campaigns/climate-change. The World Wildlife Fund publishes periodic useful sum –
maries of the state of the world’s ecosystems in its Living Planet Reports available at
wwf.panda.org/.
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http://www.dhf.uu.se/publications.html
http://www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
CHAPTER 4
Can we save the planet?
Carl Death
■ The question
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS AND SUSTAINABLE
DEVELOPMENT
■ Illustrative example
THE WORLD SUMMIT IN 2002
■ General responses
EXISTING ANALYSES OF ENVIRONMENTAL
GOVERNANCE
■ Broader issues
POST-ECOLOGISM AND ECO-GOVERNMENTALITY
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS AND SUSTAINABLE
DEVELOPMENT
A whole range of environmental issues – including global climate change, stresses on
food and water supplies, urban hazards and pollution, the loss of biodiversity and the
degradation of fragile ecosystems – seem to be increasing in scale and intensity. For
some, these issues seem to threaten the survival of the planet itself, or at least the survival
of many species, including our own. In many countries such concerns have become
prominent political issues. In Europe, there have been Green political parties in
government (Die Grünen in Germany), green members of legislative assemblies (Green
Party MP Caroline Lucas was elected for Brighton Pavilion in the 2010 UK general
election), and in North America there are government bodies tasked with protecting
the environment (such as the Environmental Protection Authority in the USA).
62 CARL DEATH
Green parties are often
identified with
environmentalism, but
they also have particular
(and sometimes largely
shared) approaches to
economic policy and
social issues.
Asking ‘can we save the
planet’ raises many
questions about whether
we are still thinking in
human terms – both in
terms of the ‘we’ doing
the saving, and what we
are saving the planet for:
our species, our society,
all animal and plant
species, or the lump of
rock itself? See also
Chapter 3.
In some other countries such issues are raised by relatively small numbers of dedicated
environmental activists or grassroots community groups. Whatever the relative profile
of environmental issues in different political contexts, however, it is hard to disagree
with the observation that what might be called a ‘global environmental movement’ has
become increasingly prominent. This chapter explores the politics and history of
environmental movements and activists, each of which have asked themselves and their
societies some version of a fundamental question: Can we save the planet?
In popular culture and mythology in many different societies saving the planet is
a task for heroes. A popular American cartoon series in the early 1990s, Captain Planet
and the Planeteers, epitomised this desire for an ecological hero. Five young ‘Planeteers’
were summoned from across the world by the spirit of Gaia (the spirit of the Earth),
who was threatened by human pollution. These young activists could call upon Captain
Planet when the crisis threatened to overwhelm them, and in every episode he would
eventually prevail against the eco-villains.
Putting all of our faith in an imaginary cartoon hero is probably not the best way
to save the planet, however, this chapter explores how a range of movements,
organisations and individuals have taken action themselves. In it I will reflect on their
actions and some of the debates these actions have raised, rather than try to tell you
how to save the world. Indirectly, this might provide some ideas to help you develop
your own answer to the chapter’s question. Indeed, this has been one of the big hopes
of the environmental movement over the past 50 years: that by encouraging more and
more people to think about environmental issues, and raising awareness of environmental
problems, perhaps we will be able to save our world. In a later section I question whether
awareness-raising is enough to save the planet.
As even a brief history of the environmental movement shows, such social
movements often begin as marginal, fringe, or radical alternatives, posing a fundamental
challenge to society and its values. As movements grow and become more successful,
they often become more professional, more mainstream, and have more impact. But
this can sometimes mean that they become less radical.
FIGURE 4.1
Green Party MP Caroline Lucas was elected to
Brighton Pavilion in the 2010 UK general election.
Photo: Corbis
Chapter 28 explores
in more detail why
changing things can
be tricky.
Several chapters look at
other social movements,
such as feminism
(Chapter 5), religious
movements (Chapter 6),
civil disobedience
(Chapter 7), nationalism
(Chapter 12), pro-
democracy movements
(Chapter 14), and how
to change the world
(Chapter 28).
CAN WE SAVE THE PLANET? 63
BOX 4.1 THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT
The environmental movement is quite a misleading term. There is no one
environmental movement. Rather there are a whole range of groups, movements,
organisations and institutions that have campaigned on environmental issues,
with very different ideas about how to save the planet.
One version of the story of modern environmentalism is that it arose as part
of the counter-cultural youth movements of the 1960s in the USA and Western
Europe, alongside feminism and the peace movement. At the height of flower-
power culture and anti-Vietnam war protests in the USA, some 20 million
Americans took part in massive rallies across the country for the first ‘Earth Day’
on 22 April 1970. This was regarded by many as the birth of the modern
environmental movement, and has continued to colour perceptions of
environmentalism. Indeed, the perception of environmentalists as white, middle-
class ‘hippies’ continues to hold some sway nearly half a century later. This is
despite the existence of many grassroots environmental movements in working-
class communities, communities of colour, and the rest of the world outside
North America and Europe.
Environmental movements in North America and Europe were strongly
influenced by books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1964), which observed how
pesticide use was damaging bird populations. In the 1970s the idea of
environmental limits – both limited natural resources and the limited capacity of
ecosystems to absorb pollution – became widespread, reflected in the report of
the Club of Rome, a global think-tank whose members are concerned with the
future of humanity and the planet, called Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1974).
Environmental disasters served to add credence to environmentalist warnings.
As awareness of climate change became more widespread in the 2000s the
environmental or green movement could be said to be stronger and larger than
ever before.
This chapter explores the question of whether we can save the planet, as well as
reflecting on the political consequences of our efforts to do so. My central point is that
we need to be wary of uncritically accepting calls to put aside our differences and unite
to save the planet. Rather, we need to ask what sort of planet we are trying to save, and
what consequences our actions might have for future generations, people in different
parts of the world, the weakest and least resilient, and on other species. And who are
the ‘we’ that are tasked with deciding on these changes? The illustrative example focuses
on the 2002 UN World Summit on Sustainable Development, which was held in
Johannesburg, South Africa. Attempts to save the planet are found at different levels
of global politics: international organisations and institutions like the United Nations
and its programmes; transnational organisations and movements such as global NGOs,
NGO-networks, and transnational social movements; and local grassroots environmental
movements, which exist almost everywhere in the world in some form or another.
Activity at all these three levels can be seen in relation to this mega-summit.
BOX 4.2 TIMELINE OF MODERN ENVIRONMENTALISM
April 1961 The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) founded in Switzerland,
growing rapidly to become one of the first global environmental
organisations.
March 1967 The Torrey Canyon super-tanker runs aground off the coast of
Cornwall (UK), carrying a load of 120,000 tonnes of crude oil.
May 1969 Friends of the Earth founded in the USA.
April 1970 First Earth Day.
December 1970 US Environmental Protection Authority established over
concerns about pollution.
September 1971 Greenpeace founded when activists set sail from Vancouver to
Amchitka Island in Alaska to bear witness against US nuclear
tests. The tests were halted the following year.
June 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE)
attended by 113 governments.
March 1979 Central core meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power
plant in Pennsylvania (USA).
1983–1987 World Commission on Environment and Development (called
the Brundtland Commission after its chair, Gro Harlem
Brundtland) holds hearings; its report popularised the concept
of sustainable development.
December 1984 Gas explosion at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal
(India) causes at least 3,387 deaths from gas leaks and injures
hundreds of thousands.
April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in the Ukraine (then part of the
Soviet Union) leads to the evacuation of 350,400 people and
the spread of radiation across Europe.
December 1988 International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) established by
the International Meteorological Organisation and the UN
Environment Programme to review and assess scientific
research on climate change.
June 1992 Rio Earth Summit (UNCED) in Brazil attended by 172
governments and almost 20,000 people.
August 2002 Rio+10 World Summit on Sustainable Development held in
Johannesburg (South Africa), and attended by over 190
countries and 22,000 participants.
April–July 2010 Oil leaks from the BP Deepwater Horizon platform into the Gulf
of Mexico for three months before it can be stopped.
March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan following an
earthquake and tsunami.
64 CARL DEATH
FIGURE 4.2
South African president Thabo Mbeki signing the Political Declaration at the end of the summit negotiations,
4 September 2002. http://www.iisd.ca/2002/wssd/photoindex.html
There is another account
of the environmental
movement in Chapter 3.
Questions of develop –
ment, economics and
poverty are discussed in
Chapters 15, 17, 19 and
20.
CAN WE SAVE THE PLANET? 65
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
THE WORLD SUMMIT IN 2002
Between 26 August and 4 September 2002 representatives of over 190 countries, 100
world leaders and over 22,000 other participants met in Johannesburg, South Africa,
‘in the interests of all humanity and our common planet’ (South African president Thabo
Mbeki in UN 2002b: 155). The Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable
Development was one of the largest political meetings ever held, and it was intended
to reinvigorate the global commitment to sustainable development. For many of the
world leaders, diplomats, media reporters, NGOs and ordinary people who attended,
it was a moment for heroes to step forward, to save the planet at the summit or pinnacle
of global politics.
The 2002 Summit must be understood in the context of a longer history of global
governance and UN conferences on environment and development, including Stock –
holm and Rio. The 2002 Johannesburg Summit was intended to review progress made
in the 10 years since the 1992 Rio Conference on Environment and Development
(UNCED), and identify new areas for action. Its focus was supposed to be on imple –
mentation, as it was felt that ecological and developmental problems were well-known
and increasingly monitored and measured. What was needed was action. The Johannes –
burg Summit was supposed to promote solutions – to speed up efforts to save the world.
So what did the Johannesburg Summit achieve? Did it live up to its billing as an
opportunity for political heroes to chart a path for sustainable development that would
avoid crashing spaceship Earth into an environmental disaster?
http://www.iisd.ca/2002/wssd/photoindex.html
BOX 4.3 SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
At the Stockholm Conference in 1972 debates centred on the apparently conflicting priorities of economic
development and the protection of the environment. Whilst environmental activists from Europe and
North America were trying to protect and conserve ecosystems, politicians from developing countries
refused to accept environmental limits to their development. ‘Poverty is the worst form of pollution’,
Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi famously told the conference (in Dresner 2002: 28).
The idea of sustainable development was an attempt to break out of this apparent conflict between
environmental limits and development. Its most famous expression was in the Brundtland Report, which
defined sustainable development as ‘development which meets the needs of the present, without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (World Commission on
Environment and Development 1987: 43). It recognised that ‘overriding priority’ should be given to the
needs of the world’s poor, whilst also suggesting that there were environmental limits on the ability of
technology and social organisation to meet current and future needs. This synthesis of environmental
limits and development priorities was further enshrined in the Rio Conference in 1992 at which 8,000
delegates agreed on 27 principles for sustainable development, a road map for achieving sustainable
development known as Agenda 21, two legally binding international conventions on biodiversity and
climate change, and a declaration on forests (Adams 2009: 86–9).
For some commentators sustainable development has become ‘the dominant global discourse of
ecological concern’ (Dryzek 2005: 145), whilst for others it is a vague statement of ideals that amount to
little more than ‘polite meaningless words’ (Middleton and O’Keefe 2001: 31). In any case it has proved
one of the most long-lasting and influential slogans or aspirations for the environmental movement.
66 CARL DEATH
Inter-governmental negotiated outcomes and bilateral partnerships
The verdict, as one might expect, was mixed. Few believed the Summit had fulfilled
the pre-conference hype of the people of the world coming together to solve environ –
ment and development problems, but then, as many pointed out, such expectations
were unrealistic anyway. The Johannesburg Summit was never about saving the planet
in a heroic manner, but instead was intended to review progress and promote further
action. On this score some participants were cautiously optimistic about some of the
Summit outcomes, including an aspirational Johannesburg Declaration, a detailed Plan
of Implementation, and an array of what were known as type-II partnerships (Chasek
and Sherman 2004). Whereas the Declaration and Plan of Implementation were
multilaterally negot iated texts agreed between state representatives (known in UN-speak
as type-I outcomes), the partnerships were bilaterally agreed public-private partnerships
between states, international organisations, private sector actors, NGOs, local govern –
ments and a whole range of other people, that were designed to achieve sustainable
development in specific, concrete projects on-the-ground. As they were recognised by
the official UN conference, but not negotiated by the government delegates, they were
known as type-II outcomes.
The announcement of 251 such partnerships in Johannesburg, and the creation of
an online database which continues to record and informally monitor the partnerships,
If large global summits
do not achieve much in
terms of commitments
for change, do you think
they serve some other
purpose?
CAN WE SAVE THE PLANET? 67
was regarded by conference-watchers as a major success for the USA and its allies (Japan,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand). They had sought to encourage a shift away from
state-centric approaches to sustainable development, instead looking to the private sector
and civil society – a term referring to non-state and (usually) non-profit groups and
organisations like NGOs, community groups, and faith-based organisations. The promi –
nence of the partnerships was seen as a vindication for those who had argued strongly
that the world did not need countless new international legal agreements and treaties,
targets and timeframes, but rather needed to harness the energy and vitality of the private
sector and civil society to implement a multitude of specific projects.
This view of the Johannesburg Summit – as a signal of a new style of conference
and a new flexibility in global governance – was summed up by the post-conference
state ment of Jonathan Lash from the World Resources Institute, a prominent environ –
mental NGO:
This Summit will be remembered not for the treaties, the commitments, or the
declarations it produced, but for the first stirrings of a new way of governing the
global commons – the beginnings of a shift from the stiff formal waltz of traditional
diplomacy to the jazzier dance of improvisational solution-oriented partnerships
that may include non-government organisa tions, willing governments and other
stakeholders.
(World Resources Institute 2002)
Examples of the sorts of projects listed as type-II partnerships include the ‘Com –
munity Water Initiative’, a $1.2 million project run by UNDP and other NGOs such
as WaterAid together with a range of governmental agencies to improve community
access and control over water resources; the ‘Congo Basin Forest Partnership’, a $230
million project to promote cooperation between all the partners in the sustainable
management of the conflict-ridden Congo Forest; and the ‘Renewable Energy and
Energy Efficiency Partnership’, which aims to accelerate a global market for renew-
able energy and energy efficiency, and as of July 2009 had supported 145 projects
with a total investment of over €11 million (leveraging an extra €54 million through
co-financing). The online database, run by the UN Commission for Sustainable
Develop ment, currently lists 348 partner ships (see http://webapps01.un.org/dsd/
partnerships/public/welcome.do).
Others have been less optimistic about the new partnerships and their potential to
save the planet. Many onlookers and activists believed the partnerships were included
as a last minute face-saver when it became clear the summit would fail to agree on new
international legal agreements and specific, binding treaties, targets and timeframes
(Gutman 2003: 23). Many participants in Johannesburg – including the European
Commission, the governments of South Africa and Denmark, and large NGOs like WWF
– had demanded concrete commitments on issues like water and sanitation, corporate
accountability, renewable energy, biodiversity, environmental health, chemicals, and the
relationship between trade and environmental protection. Despite a few exceptions, these
commitments were not forthcoming (Death 2010: 66–7).
Indeed, in the Summit aftermath many people questioned to what degree such
mega-conferences were at all useful. They seemed to be just weeks of hot air from
How accountable are
large transnational
NGOs to their
supporters? Where does
most of their funding
come from: individual
supporters’ donations,
or governments?
68 CARL DEATH
politicians and bureaucrats, which had little effect on real-life environmental or develop –
ment problems. In the words of UK International Development Secretary Clare Short,
‘we do not need more big multilateral agenda-setting conferences, we need a real period
of intensive implementation’ (in Lean 2002). In fact, many pointed out that such
meetings might actually do more harm than good, considering the environmental costs
of flying thousands of people to South Africa for two weeks. Others doubted the com –
mitment of highly polluting transnational corporations and representatives of states
like the USA (which in 2002 was at war in Afghanistan and on the verge of invading
Iraq) to genuinely reform their behaviour and save the planet through non-binding
partnerships.
Post-Johannesburg there was certainly an identifiable feeling of summit-fatigue. The
enthusiasm that had marked the 1992 Rio Earth Summit had all but ebbed away, and
in the cold light of Johannesburg it was clear that few environmental problems had
improved since 1992, and many had worsened. In 2004 a UN report pronounced that
‘the era of global conferences is largely over’ (in Death 2010: 4).
Despite this fatigue, such summits have not gone away. Indeed, in June 2012 the
UN held the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development in Brazil. These meetings
are simply too important for politicians who need to show they are doing something
about environmental problems and who are tempted to try to play the role of planetary
hero. They are also important for the development of a network of transnational
environmental NGOs, and for grassroots movements.
Transnational NGO networks in Johannesburg
As environmentalism has moved from a fringe, radical, counter-cultural move ment
towards the centre of political debate and the peaks of summit governance, the visibility
and prominence of large transnational NGOs has similarly increased. As Peter Willetts
notes, ‘NGOs have changed from being peripheral advisors of secondary status in the
diplomatic system to being high status participants at the centre of policy-making’ (2000:
193). Large international summits such as Rio in 1992 and Johannesburg in 2002 have
played a crucial role in this transition (Chatterjee and Finger 1994; Wapner 2003).
Summits are important events for big environmental NGOs like WWF and
Greenpeace for many different reasons. They provide a place to meet, exchange ideas,
network, and promote their own ideas and projects. In Johannesburg in 2002 the
Global Peoples’ Forum was held in a massive exhibition hall where civil society groups
had stalls, talks, and meetings. There was also a venue for water activists (called
the Water Dome), a cultural and exhibition centre (called the Ubuntu Village), an
Environment Centre at Nedcor Bank, as well as more radical gatherings at the Peoples’
Earth Summit, the South–South Biopiracy Summit and environmental justice groups
who met at Shaft 17, an old mine-turned conference centre. The Johannesburg Summit
was there fore a ‘summit of many summits’, and extended far beyond the official
negotiations (Chasek and Sherman 2004: 117).
More than simply a meeting place for fellow activists, however, the proliferation of
global summits since Rio in 1992 has become something of a reason for existence for
many transnational NGOs. NGO campaigns are often organised around the time-
tables of conferences like Johannesburg, and being seen and heard at such meetings
FIGURE 4.3
Greenpeace activists
who scaled the Koeberg
Nuclear Power Plant
near Cape Town, during
the World Summit
on Sustainable Develop –
ment in August 2002.
http://www.greenpeace.
org/africa/en/News/
news/Nukes-not-the-
answer-zuma/
demonstrates to their supporters and funders that they are hard at work. Many NGOs
have also found themselves being co-opted onto governmental delegations because of
their expert knowledge of specific issues, particularly by smaller states who often lack
the resources or capacity to send a large team of experienced diplomats to every set of
international negotiations. This presents both opportunities and dangers to NGOs, who
can gain considerable power and influence through such access, but can face the danger
of having their independence and legitimacy eroded.
The conduct of Greenpeace in Johannesburg in 2002 is an excellent example of
the delicate balance between insider-access and outsider-credibility. Greenpeace have
portrayed themselves since their creation in 1971 as a radical group of environmental
crusaders, campaigning against governments and corporations who threaten the natural
environment. Their campaigns against whaling and nuclear power have provided
particularly vivid images of the David-against-Goliath struggles of committed environ –
mentalists placing their own lives at risk to halt industrial whaling in the Pacific or nuclear
tests in the Arctic – real-life Captain Planets.
Despite this heroic image, Greenpeace is a modern NGO with a thoroughly
professional structure. It lobbies governments and corporations, and employs scientists,
researchers, brand-managers and administrators as well as tree-climbing activists. In 2010
it received donations from 2.8 million individuals, giving a worldwide income of over
€200 million (Greenpeace 2010).
This dual identity was illustrated by two incidents at the 2002 World Summit on
Sustainable Development. The first was just prior to the opening of the Summit when
Greenpeace activists hung a banner saying ‘Nukes out of Africa’ from the roof of the
Koeberg Nuclear Power Plant near Cape Town. This was a carefully calculated act
to gain attention in the global media, and it reinforced Greenpeace’s traditional
CAN WE SAVE THE PLANET? 69
70 CARL DEATH
The relationship between
environmental problems
and the carboniferous
capitalism that these big
corporations arguably
represent is discussed
in Chapter 3, and the
problems of capitalism
in general are discussed
in Chapters 17 and 19.
brand as heroic activists willing to risk danger to bear witness against environmental
threats.
The second incident was more down-to-earth (literally and metaphorically). On
28 August Greenpeace held a joint press conference with the business lobby group, the
World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Despite the historic
hostility between environmentalists and the big multinational corporations the WBCSD
represents, which include Shell, BP, Toyota, Eskom, Unilever, EXXON, Coca-Cola and
Dow Chemicals, the two organisations used the conference to emphasise their shared
views on the need for action on environmental issues. According to Björn Stigson,
president of the WBCSD, ‘this is a good example of where the need to save the planet
is so important it transcends any other differences we may have’ (in Brown 2002). They
later clarified, however, that the meeting ‘in no way should be seen as business endors-
ing the Kyoto principles’ on climate change (in Rutherford 2003: 149). Such incidents
show that Greenpeace is willing to make tactical alliances and forge cooperative
partnerships, as well as headline-grabbing protests, and shows the degree to which the
organisation has grown and changed in the last 40 years.
Grassroots environmental movements in Johannesburg
Although it was the government delegates and the big transnational NGOs that were
most high-profile in 2002, the Johannesburg Summit also illustrates some of the polit-
ical issues and divisions that affect local, community-based grassroots movements who
campaign on environmental and development issues. It is such groups who are the bed –
rock of modern environmentalism. As Doyle and McEachern point out, it is important
to remember that ‘environmentalism, in all its forms, was born in environmental
movements’ (2008: 84).
FIGURE 4.4
Social movement
protestors march from
Alexandra township to
the World Summit
on Sustainable Develop –
ment to protest against
unsustainable develop –
ment. 31 August 2002.
http://www.iisd.ca/2002
/wssd/31photos.html
http://www.iisd.ca/2002/wssd/31photos.html
http://www.iisd.ca/2002/wssd/31photos.html
From a grassroots perspective the 2002 Summit was fractious and confrontational,
and came at a particularly tense time for South African politics. The so-called miracle
transition from the racist apartheid state to the ‘Rainbow Nation’ of a democratic South
Africa was almost a decade old, and whilst much progress had been made on a whole
range of issues such as democracy, racial reconciliation and human rights, there was
increasing frustration with continuing high levels of poverty and inequality. In 2002
groups like the Landless Peoples Movement were highlighting the lack of progress
on land redistribution and rural dispossession, whilst the Anti-Privatisation Forum was
campaigning against neo-liberal government economic policies which meant that
poor urban communities were having their electricity supplies cut off, water supplies
restricted, and were being evicted from their houses (Bond 2002). Local environmental
NGOs like Earthlife Africa and GroundWork were drawing attention to South Africa’s
very high rates of greenhouse gas emissions per person, resulting from the country’s
reliance on coal-fired energy, as well as heavily polluted local environments in residential
areas like South Durban which were still primarily occupied by poorer Black and Indian
communities (McDonald 2002).
Many of these tensions came to a head during the civil society preparations for the
Johannesburg Summit. Fears that the governing African National Congress (ANC) was
attempting to take control over civil society participation in the Summit resulted in a
breakaway movement which decided to march against the ANC and the World Summit,
proclaiming slogans like ‘Our world is not for sale!’ and declaring their opposition
to ‘the hoax of the W$$D’ (Death 2010: 121). Delegates arriving in South Africa were
therefore faced with the surprising image of over 20,000 protestors marching from the
township of Alexandra to the conference venue in the well-off suburb of Sandton,
apparently in opposition to the official UN summit and its promise to ‘reinvigorate the
global commitment to sustainable development’ (UN 2000: 1). The marchers declared
that:
Alexandra represents a microcosm of everything that is wrong with the W$$D.
The massive unemployment, lack of essential services, housing evictions, water and
electricity cut-offs, environmental degradation, and generalised poverty that is
present-day Alexandra sits cheek-by-jowl with the hideous wealth and extravagance
of Sandton where the W$$D is taking place. While the fat cat bureaucrats and
politicians will be hiding themselves away in luxurious Sandton and spewing out
meaningless rhetoric and resolutions about the poor and sustainable development,
the people of nearby Alexandra continue to live in dire poverty and to wage a daily
struggle for survival. The tragic irony could not be more apparent.
(in Death 2010: 131)
Whilst the mass march on Saturday 31 August was peaceful, other protests during
the Johannesburg Summit were not. Riot police clashed with activists on a number of
occasions, sometimes using firearms, and a total of 196 people were arrested. All were
subsequently released without charge, leading to allegations that the South African
government was criminalising political protest and undermining civil liberties in order
to ensure a smooth, successful and peaceful international conference (Duncan 2003).
CAN WE SAVE THE PLANET? 71
Poverty is not the same
as inequality. Chapter 19
discusses inequality and
Chapter 20 poverty.
BOX 4.4 SOUTH AFRICA: FROM APARTHEID TO RAINBOW NATION
For many South Africans the 2002 Summit was a national coming-of-age ceremony. Ten years previously
South Africa had not even been represented at the Rio Conference, whereas in 2002 it was the proud host
of the international community. This transition was made possible by the ending of apartheid in 1994.
Apartheid was a system of legal racial segregation enforced by the National Party government
between 1948 and 1994, and which led to South Africa’s increasing international isolation. Under
apartheid (an Afrikaans word meaning ‘apartness’) the rights of the majority non-white inhabitants of
South Africa were severely restricted, and the black population (almost 75 per cent of the country) was
confined to ten homelands or ‘Bantustans’, comprising only 13 per cent of the land. This was ostensibly to
pursue ‘separate development’, but was designed to protect and entrench minority white rule. Racial
segregation in South Africa had begun in colonial times, but following the general election of 1948 new
Independent Black Homelands
Non-Independent Black Homelands
Bophuthatswana, Transkel,
Ciskei, Venda
Pietersburg
PretoriaMahkeng
Orange
Free
State
Lebowakgoma
Giyuni
Johannesburg
Sowela
Phuthaditjhaba
Bloemfontein
Ladysmith
Pietermaritzburg
Ulundi
Vryheld
Durban
Umlazi
Umtata
Bisho
East London
Port Elizabeth
Cape Town
0
0 200 Km
200 miles
Thohoyandou
Venda
Natal
N
Transkel
Cape Province
Ciskei
Transvaal
Natal
Lebowa
Kwazulu
Qwagwa
Kanqwana
Gazankulu
Kwandebela
Province boundaries
Provinces
Areas of political violence
(from mid-1960s)
NAMIBIA
BOTSWANA
MOZAMBIQUE
SWAZILAND
LESOTHO
S O U T H A F R I C A
INDIAN
OCEAN
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
ZIMBABWE
South Africa Under Apartheid
B o
p h
u t h
a t s
w a n
a
FIGURE 4.5
South Africa under apartheid. http://finalproject2009ec.wikispaces.com/file/view/HMOF7–27-c.gif/75456821/508×409/
HMOF7–27-c.gif
72 CARL DEATH
legislation classified inhabitants into distinct racial groups (‘black’, ‘white’, ‘coloured’ and ‘Indian’).
Residential areas were segregated, sometimes by means of forced removals. Under so-called ‘petty
apartheid’, marriages between whites and other racial groups were banned, utilities and beaches were
segregated, separate education and medical systems were created, and land and business ownership were
restricted.
Apartheid was met with significant internal resistance and violence, in which Nelson Mandela and the
African National Congress (ANC) became central. Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years and became the
symbol of the anti-apartheid movement, but trade unions, the churches, civic movements and the
Communist Party were also extremely important. The apartheid state responded with brutality, massacring
schoolchildren as well as assassinating activists, and seeking to destabilise neighbouring states in
Southern Africa.
Internal protests and external pressure eventually combined to force National Party politicians to the
negotiating table, and in 1990 President Frederik Willem de Klerk unbanned the ANC and freed Nelson
Mandela. After tense years of negotiations, multi-racial democratic elections were held in 1994, which
were won resoundingly by the ANC. As the country’s first black president, Mandela reassured whites that
South Africa belonged to all those who lived in it, and leading anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond
Tutu proclaimed the country a ‘rainbow nation’, reflecting its many different cultures, ethnicities and
languages.
FIGURE 4.6
Outgoing South African president F. W. De Klerk
and Nelson Mandela in 1994.
http://www.blackpast.org/files/blackpast_images/
Mandela_and_deKlerk_0
CAN WE SAVE THE PLANET? 73
Hosting the UN Summit therefore brought to the foreground many of the tensions
in contemporary South Africa: between the state and the social movements, between
environmental activists and social justice activists, between the local and the global, and
between neo-liberalism and sustainable development. Perhaps one of the most important
things highlighted by these protests is that beneath the slogans of ‘saving the planet’
and ‘implementing sustainable development’ – with which few people could really
disagree – there are considerable political differences over who is going to save what,
how, and at what cost.
GENERAL RESPONSES
EXISTING ANALYSES OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL
GOVERNANCE
To think about these issues we need to move beyond straightforward calls to save the
planet, and ask serious questions about the power relationships, values and consequences
of global environmental governance. This section considers some of the most prominent
ways of looking at environmental politics, and the differences between them, with a
particular focus on how they represent the role of global environmental governance
and/or environmental movements in saving the planet.
Tragedy of the commons
A typical explanation of global environmental problems might run as follows:
environmental resources, such as the atmosphere or the oceans, are common global
goods from which everyone benefits but no one directly owns. Everyone thus seeks to
maximise their own benefits from the shared resources and tries to avoid the costs of
protecting them. This leads, so the argument goes, to what is known as the ‘tragedy
of the commons’ (Dryzek 2005: 29). Much scholarship has focused on ways to resolve
this apparent tragedy – to save the planet, if you like – and for those referred to as
liberal institutionalists, the solution is to build systems of cooperative global govern –
ance. They are concerned with how best to design international institutions in order to
encourage states to cooperate and protect their shared environment. Summits like Rio
and Johannesburg are seen as important steps in this process, indeed they are often seen
as benchmarks for gauging the character of world environmental affairs (Wapner 2003:
1). The work of Peter Haas is a good example of this approach, and in an influential
article he argued that such summits are part and parcel of a ‘broader process of multi –
lateral governance and may contribute to stronger and more effective environ mental
governance by states’ (2002: 74).
On the other hand, scholars from what is called the realist tradition tend to be
more sceptical about our potential to overcome this underlying tragedy, particularly
where valuable natural resources are at stake and when states claim a sovereign right to
develop and grow their economy. Conferences and institutions, to these scholars, are
sites of struggle for power politics and competing national interests. Everyone is trying
to get an outcome that benefits their own state or nation – a result that is in their state’s
interest – and the one who is the most powerful is the one who wins, in this view.
74 CARL DEATH
Asking about how
particular representations
work – what ways of
thinking they make
possible – is like asking
what pictures of the world
do – how pictures frame
the world and limit what
we can say or do, as
discussed in Chapter 2.
The views of scholars
referred to as liberal
institutionalists are
discussed in Chapter 19.
The term encapsulates
an approach that is
essentially liberal or
neo-liberal, in that it
starts with the rational
individual and the free
market, but also includes
a belief in the value of
international
institutions.
There is more about the
views of scholars from
this so-called realist
tradition in Chapter 24.
Bear in mind that putting
scholars into boxes in
this way – categorising
them as liberal
institutionalists or
realists – is rarely a
neutral exercise and is
generally an over –
simplification of people’s
views.
CAN WE SAVE THE PLANET? 75
Typically, British ex-diplomat Tony Brenton argues that ultimately state interests will
take precedence over international agreements, shared institutions, and non-state actors,
and that the ‘centres of decision [will] remain in national capitals’ (1994: 8). Robert
Putnam argues that these are ‘two-level games’ where diplomats and politicians have
to keep in mind the demands of both opposing negotiators and their own domestic
audiences (1988). From this perspective saving the planet is only possible when the
most powerful states – or key actors within them – realise it is in their interest to ensure
it. This may come only when their very survival is at stake.
A similar scepticism, and attention to the power relations at work in summits and
conferences, is evident in the work of scholars in the critical and Marxist traditions. In
this account, summits like Rio and Johannesburg usually end up only entrenching
dominant political and economic interests, rather than actually helping to save the planet
(Chatterjee and Finger 1994; Paterson 2000: 2). Patrick Bond concluded that the
BOX 4.5 TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS
The idea of the tragedy of the commons was put forward in a 1968 article by
Garrett Hardin. He explained it as follows:
The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to
all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as
possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably
satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep
the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the
land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the
long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the
inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.
(Hardin 1968)
What happens then is that people still increase the number of cattle they keep on
the commons, and it becomes overgrazed. Each cattle owner is acting in their
own interest – as a rational actor, according to Hardin’s idea of rationality – but
the outcome is tragic.
Garrett Hardin was an American ecologist
who was very concerned with the question
of overpopulation. He also put forward
the idea of lifeboat ethics – the argument
that any lifeboat has a limited carrying
capacity, and to exceed that – to try to
help everyone – will mean the lifeboat
sinking with all on board.
FIGURE 4.7
Garrett Hardin. Photo: Vic Cox
Game theory is the
study of how people –
assumed to be rational
actors – maximise their
own well-being or profit
in their dealings with
others, or in other words
in a game where there
are other players.
Some of the basics of
a Marxist position are
summarised in
Chapter 19.
Industrial capitalism is
called ‘carboniferous
capitalism’ in Chapter 3.
Does the author of that
chapter take a Marxist or
critical approach? Is it
worth trying to put
writers into boxes in this
way?
76 CARL DEATH
Johannesburg Summit in 2002 ‘will be remembered, at best, as just another site for
UN blahblah, and at worst, as the amplification of corporate control over both nature
and everyday life’ (2002: 382). From this perspective any realistic chance to save the
planet will depend on the overthrow or significant reform of industrial capitalism, and
perhaps a political, economic and social revolution.
A green revolution?
What emerges from these approaches is some degree of pessimism about our potential
to save the planet. Only the most optimistic liberal institutionalists would claim that
existing governance structures, international institutions, and diplomatic efforts are doing
enough to solve environmental problems. This was echoed by diplomats in Johannes –
burg in 2002:
The global environment continues to suffer. Loss of biodiversity continues, fish
stocks continue to be depleted, desertification claims more and more fertile land,
the adverse effects of climate change are already evident, natural disasters are more
frequent and more devastating, and developing countries more vulnerable, and air,
water and marine pollution continue to rob millions of a decent life.
(UN 2002a: 13)
If business-as-normal is failing to save the planet, then something drastic is clearly
needed. For this, many environmental activists argue, we need to return to the radical
challenge posed by the environmentalism of the 1960s and 1970s.
For this reason many scholars of environmental politics have focused their atten –
tion on understanding and explaining the successes and failures of environmental social
movements, rather than state actors. Paul Wapner argues that the role of environ-
mental movements in ‘disseminating an ecological consciousness’ and pushing broader
cultural change is far more significant than the action of states and international
institutions (1995: 320–2). Timothy Doyle and Brian Doherty divide contemporary
environ mentalism into emancipatory and governance movements; the former work ‘to
increase the power resources of the poor and environmentally degraded’, and the latter
‘seek to globalise environmentalism through disciplining the local into a carefully
constructed and restricted version of the global’ (2006: 883 and 891). Strengthening
and linking up emancipatory social movements is required if we are to save the planet,
according to Doyle and Doherty, whereas they suggest that many large transnational
environmental groups – particularly conservation groups like WWF – have actually
become too wealthy, too professionalised, and too comfortable within the existing
system of power relations.
Such a commitment to local movements, grassroots struggles and community
organisations has long been a feature of both the environmental movement and much
scholarship on environmentalism. Environmental justice movements in the USA, for
example, have sought to strengthen the capacity of local communities to have a say over
the location and management of environmental hazards. Community-based natural
resource management schemes operate on the premise that strengthening local
involvement in conservation initiatives and biodiversity management will achieve both
For people in the Marxist
tradition, attempts to
work for reform of the
capitalist system – to
improve wages or
working conditions for
example, or to provide
welfare – merely reduce
the chances of
revolutionary change,
and delay or impede the
desired overthrow of the
system.
CAN WE SAVE THE PLANET? 77
environmental and development goals. For many activist-academics like Vandana Shiva,
‘the reversal of ecological decline involves strengthening local rights’ (1993: 155).
BROADER ISSUES
POST-ECOLOGISM AND ECO-GOVERNMENTALITY
What many of these differences in responses seem to lead to, politically, is quite an
old debate between reformists and revolutionaries. The former believe we can save the
planet through reforming existing institutions (they include liberal institutionalists,
most diplomats and politicians, and many of those within NGOs that participate in
negotiations at conferences like Rio and Johannesburg), whereas the latter think some
kind of revolution is necessary (they include many radical environmentalists and thinkers
in the Marxist tradition). This split is perhaps best illustrated by the well-known
divisions within the German Green Party (Die Grünen), a party historically committed
to participative democracy and pacifism as well as its ecological principles, which
traditionally had seen itself as a grassroots ‘movement-party’ very different to more
mainstream political parties (Doyle and McEachern 2008: 174–77). During the 1980s
and 1990s there were increasingly bitter splits within the party between factions known
as the Realos and the Fundis. The Realos felt that deals should be made with other
political parties to get into power, and that adopting modern, professional, hierarchical
structures was the best way of achieving their environmental goals. The Fundis, on the
other hand, felt that adhering to their principles was paramount, and that playing the
same political games as other parties would fundamentally compromise those radical
principles.
Eventually the Realos won out, and Die Grünen entered coalition government with
the Social Democratic Party in 1998. The more radical pacifist wings of the party were
dismayed to see green ministers sanctioning the March 1999 bombing of Serbia and
the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. The sight of once-outsider movements and
activists entering mainstream politics, lobbying at intergovern mental conferences, and
holding joint press conferences with big business has led to considerable soul searching
within the green movement and a broader sense of activist disillusionment.
Some academics have labelled such developments a symptom of an era of ‘post-
ecologism’ and ‘a politics of unsustainability’ (Blühdorn and Welsh 2007). They argue
that ‘the historically radical and transformative elements of environ mental movements
and eco-political thought [have been] blunted through main stream ing’ (Blühdorn and
Welsh 2007: 185). In effect, they argue, environmentalism has become too successful
– it has made everyone aware of the importance of environ mentalism – but it has had
little or no observable effect on actual environmental issues. Species are still becoming
extinct, climate change is accelerating, populations and economies are growing. Aware –
ness has been raised, and we are all nominally environmentalists now – but we still all
live unsustainable lives.
How can we explain this apparent paradox of increasing environmentalism but
worsening environmental quality? Ingolfur Blühdorn argues that people join environ –
mental movements, campaigns and protests not because they think they will succeed,
but because that makes them feel better about themselves. In fact, according to
78 CARL DEATH
Blühdorn, environmental activism ‘can hardly be described as goal-oriented strategic
action, but at best as the collective processing of helplessness’ (2006: 27). This is a
sobering thought, and initially seems quite pessimistic about our potential to save the
world.
One of the ways to read this argument about post-ecologism, however, is that
environmental activism is at least as much about saving ourselves as it is about saving
the planet. Or, to put it differently, that the way in which we think about ourselves and
our own identity and subjectivity is just as important for environmental activism as how
we think about nature and the planet. As Captain Planet always reminded the Planeteers,
and through them the youth of the world: ‘the power is you!’
In exploring these final thoughts about government of the self and government of
the environment, I want to turn to the literature on green or eco-govern mentality, which
draws on the work of Michel Foucault and applies it to the study of environmental
politics.
The political thought of Michel Foucault is discussed in other chapters, but this
section uses one of his ideas in particular: that of governmentality. Governmentality
refers to rationalities or mentalities of government, and it is characterised by the study
of how contemporary society works as much or more through multiple and fragmented
networks of power and knowledge than through the centralised power of states or the
law (Foucault 2007; Rose 1999). Instead of simply being told what we can or cannot
do, we internalise certain norms, standards, and forms of conduct. This can be seen
quite clearly in the case of environmentalism: in many societies all sorts of techniques
are used to persuade us to recycle, or use public transport, or buy green products, or
measure our carbon emissions. Matthew Paterson and Johannes Stripple have shown
how initiatives like carbon footprinting (measuring your individual carbon dioxide
emissions), offsetting (paying for projects to conserve carbon emissions elsewhere, such
FIGURE 4.8
The German Green Party
unveiling a campaigning
slogan in 2009.
http://www.wiwo.de/poli
tik-weltwirtschaft/die-
gruenen-entdecken-die-
finanzkrise-403309/
Michel Foucault’s view
of power and resistance
is discussed in Chapter
7. See also Chapters 1, 5,
11, 23 and 25.
The question of why
we obey is discussed in
Chapter 7.
CAN WE SAVE THE PLANET? 79
as planting trees, to offset a flight or purchase), dieting, rationing and personal
allowances (different ways of trying to get individuals to restrict their carbon emissions)
have been promoted in various different ways, with various effects (2010). All sorts of
social institutions – from schools, to businesses, to political parties, social organisations
and NGOs, as well as the state – are involved in promoting sustainable lifestyles.
Applying an eco-governmentality perspective to questions of environmental politics
implies that rather than trying to immediately tackle really big questions of principle,
such as reform versus revolution, or environment versus develop ment, we should begin
by looking at the specific, concrete practices and tech nologies that already surround us.
Of particular importance are the consequences of the ways in which people have gone
about trying to save the planet. Carbon offsetting, for example, might be one way to
try and save the planet from climate change, but it also risks putting the responsibility
primarily on individual consumers, rather than our elected representatives; it implies
that a flight can somehow be equalled out by a donation to a tree farm, perhaps
discouraging more radical changes to our lifestyles; and it risks creating the impression
that some countries (typically the less well-off and less powerful) exist as carbon reserves
for balancing out the carboniferous capitalism of the Western world. Similarly, seeing
environmental issues through the lens of Hardin’s tragedy of the commons suggests
that humans are always competitive, solely or primarily interested in maximising their
wealth, and are unable to compromise or work together.
A governmentality approach is designed to shine a spotlight on the political
implications of particular rationalities of government – ways of trying to govern the
actions of others – and to make explicit some of the assumptions, values, and effects
that often get obscured by the urgency of trying to save the planet. Who, for example,
is being tasked with being heroic saviours of the planet? Is it scientists and engineers?
Or international bureaucrats working for the UN? Politicians and the political elites?
FIGURE 4.9
‘Environment policy’.
Artist: Fran.
CartoonStock
ref.: forn880.
www.CartoonStock.com
http://www.CartoonStock.com
BOX 4.6 MITCHELL DEAN’S ANALYTICS OF GOVERNMENT
Mitchell Dean has developed Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality into an analytical framework for
studying mentalities or rationalities of rule, meaning any calculated or rationalised direction of human
conduct (1999: 2). He focuses our attention on the fields of visibility created, the forms of knowledge
produced, the techniques and technologies employed, and the forms of subjectivity performed.
Fields of visibility. All forms of government, according to Dean, employ certain pictures, diagrams,
images or maps of what is to be governed. In the global governance of climate change, for example, the
planetary carbon dioxide cycle is pictured as a suitable field for political interventions.
Forms of knowledge. All forms of government rely upon particular scientific or legitimate ways of
discovering the truth. Foucault was particularly interested in how the eighteenth-century state relied upon
the growing science of statistics to know more about economies and populations (Foucault 2007). In a
similar way the government of climate change is only possible through the disciplines of environmental
economics, biodiversity management, hydrology, agricultural science and so on.
Techniques and technologies. Government happens on the ground in concrete and specific ways,
through the countless instruments and policies of planners, social workers, professionals and
practitioners. Environmental governance relies upon a profusion of indicators produced by states,
development institutions and NGOs to measure and manage carbon dioxide levels, species conservation,
clean water and sanitation, energy consumption, and so on.
Production of subjectivities. Similarly, all forms of government imagine and produce particular types of
individual or organisation. Modern environmentalism has sought to produce environmentally responsible
citizens who recycle, walk or cycle to work or take public transport, and who measure their carbon
footprint and offset their flights (Paterson and Stripple 2010). On the other hand, environmental activists
who march against runway expansions or climb power plants are criminalised and portrayed as
irresponsible.
Whilst this quite schematic way of studying and comparing various governmentalities is not the only
way to use Foucault’s work, it has been quite productive in the study of environmental governance. For a
survey of some literature using this approach see Death (2010: 55–7) and Okereke et al. (2009: 71–2).
CEOs in the private sector? Or unelected self-nominated grassroots activists and NGOs?
If they are to work together in partnership, who sets the rules and monitors the power
relationships? What forms of knowledge – science, economic efficiency, diplomatic
realpolitik, social justice – are to be the criteria for how we judge their efforts?
One of the criticisms of some of the Foucauldian-inspired literature on govern –
mentality, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, was that it seemed to direct attention to
forms of governance, power and control, rather than forms of resistance and dissent. It
is certainly true to say that many of the key studies of governmentality (Dean 1999;
Rose 1999) pay little attention to social movements or activists. Similarly, there was
little focus in the early eco-governmentality research on the sorts of environmental
movements and grassroots activists that had inspired modern environmentalism in the
first place (Darier 1996; Goldman 2001; Luke 1995). Some concluded from this that
governmentality scholars were pessimistic about the ability of environmental movements
and activists to change or save the world.
80 CARL DEATH
The possibility that the
more we try to protect
ourselves, the more
dangers we create, is one
explored in Chapter 25.
CAN WE SAVE THE PLANET? 81
However, Foucault’s own work was interested in forms of resistance and dissent.
Indeed he devoted a lot of attention to the existence of what he called counter-conducts
– ‘struggle[s] against the processes implemented for conducting others’ (Foucault 2007:
201) – and he stressed the close relationship between power and freedom. Modern
environmental governance is simultaneously about the govern ment of the self and others,
rather than domination or control from afar. In this vein more recent research has sought
to use some of Foucault’s work to study social movements and environmental activism,
showing how environ mental movements have advanced alternative ways of framing
environ mental problems, new types of knowledge, and new ways of being responsible
environ mental sub jects (Barry 2001; Death 2010). For example, environmental cam –
paigners in South Africa have framed environmental issues as the result of over-affluent
consumer lifestyles and global injustice, rather than the tragedy of the commons. Com –
munity groups in Durban have collected their own air samples, contesting the industrial
control of scientific monitoring, and have linked up with similar campaigns in the USA,
Ireland, Nigeria and elsewhere, providing a different image of responsible environmental
citizenship from the consumer who buys green products and recycles (Barnett and Scott
2007; Death 2010). Whilst such movements are not free of power relations, their
existence does mean there is more flexibility and responsiveness within contemporary
forms of environmental governance than some more pessimistic analyses suggest.
An eco-governmentality perspective is not designed to provide easy answers to the
question ‘Can we save the planet?’ Neither does it produce clear-cut principles for
deciding whether particular governmental rationalities are good or bad. Rather it is
intended to draw attention to some of the political opportunities, consequences and
dangers produced, often indirectly, by the forms of governance adopted in the name
of saving the planet. What is clear, however, is that dealing with environmental problems
will require at least as much attention on ourselves, and the creation of new forms of
sustainable and responsible individual subjects, as it will on the political and economic
structures that have produced global environ mental degradation.
CONCLUSION
If you wanted a definitive answer or clear set of instructions for how to save the planet
you will by now be rather disappointed with this chapter. But hopefully it has managed
to provide some ideas about how other people – often very committed and dedicated
activists, academics and politicians – have tried to protect the environment in a variety
of often quite heroic ways. Whether through large global conferences, or big trans –
national NGOs conducting high-profile campaigns, or local groups trying to protect a
specific site or improve environ mental conditions for their community, many people
have devoted a lot of their time and energy, and made substantial personal sacrifices,
in the name of the environment.
From a longer term perspective, humanity has proved very resilient and highly
adaptable over the past few thousand years, and we have created complex societies and
economies unlike anything else on the planet. It is true that these have had many negative
environmental and social consequences. Foucault noted that ‘modern man is an animal
whose politics places his existence as a living being in question’ (1998: 143). But our
politics also gives us the potential to change the way societies and economies are
When people talk of
saving the planet they
actually seem to mean
saving biodiversity or
even the conditions for
maintaining human
existence exactly as it is.
It is not clear that any of
the global environmental
problems – such as
climate change – actually
threaten the planet very
much at all.
82 CARL DEATH
organised. So, can we save the planet? The planet will almost certainly outlast us.
However, as a species we have the capacity to do both wonderful and terrible things.
The really important question is perhaps not whether the planet will survive, or whether
we can conserve things as they are now, but rather: What sort of changes will we produce,
and what sorts of effects will this have on future generations, on people in different
parts of the world, on the weakest and least resilient, and on other species? And who
are the ‘we’ that are tasked with deciding on these changes?
FURTHER READING
Adger, W. Neil and Andrew Jordan (eds) (2009) Governing Sustainability, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
A wide-ranging collection of essays by leading authorities on environmental governance, from
both critical and more problem-solving perspectives. It begins with the assertion that the
crisis of sustainability is primarily a crisis of governance.
Darier, Eric (ed.) (1999) Discourses of the Environment, Oxford: Blackwell.
A provocative and stimulating range of essays exploring the links between Michel Foucault’s
work and environmental politics, including eco-governmentality, bio-politics and population,
gender and sexuality, nature, ethics and art.
Kütting, Gabriela (ed.) (2011) Global Environmental Politics: Concepts, Theories and Case Studies,
Abingdon: Routledge.
An excellent introduction to key thinkers and actors, as well as case studies including forests,
water, biodiversity and climate change, by a range of expert scholars.
Kütting, Gabriela and Ronnie Lipschutz (eds) (2009) Environmental Governance: Power and
Knowledge in a Local-Global World, Abingdon: Routledge.
More critical research essays on environmental power relations in a range of contexts,
including ecovillages, grassroots movements and global ecosystem monitoring.
Wissenburg, Marcel and Yoram Levy (eds) (2004) Liberal Democracy and Environ mentalism: The
End of Environmentalism? London: Routledge.
This collection poses the important and difficult question of whether environmentalists have
any reason to carry on their struggles. Environmental concerns have been thoroughly
‘mainstreamed’ and integrated into liberal politics, so do we still need environmentalists?
WEBSITES
A range of environmental social movements, activists and grassroots movements can
be found at:
http://www.ecoequity.org/
CAN WE SAVE THE PLANET? 83
International institutions and UN bodies working on environmental issues can be
found at:
http://www.unep.org/
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/index.shtml
http://www.uncsd2012.org/rio20/
http://unfccc.int/2860.php
http://www.ipcc.ch/
http://www.iied.org/
http://www.iisd.org/
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http://www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
CHAPTER 5
Who do we think we are?
Annick T. R. Wibben
■ The question
NARRATIVES AND POLITICS
■ Illustrative example
THE US FEMINIST MOVEMENT
■ General responses
HOW CAN WE CONCEPTUALIZE IDENTITY?
■ Broader issues
DO WE NEED TO IDENTIFY WITH A GROUP?
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
NARRATIVES AND POLITICS
Our idea of who we think we are is often based on something called identity: national,
ethnic, racial, gender, class, sexual or religious identity are among the categories that
are used in discussions. To think about the question of identity, we need to do two
things: (a) begin to see how we are always already subjected to identity politics, and
(b) examine what some of the implications of being identified (or identifying) with a
particular group can be in global politics.
Once we have come to understand why identity is such an important concept, we
can take a closer look at how identity politics play out in the particular case of the
women’s movement in the United States and what the experiences of this movement
can teach us about identity politics in other settings. Identity politics is inspired by the
interests of, and intended to benefit, a particular group with a shared identity. It has
been a key form of political activism, though one that is much criticized as we shall
discover shortly.
We tell stories about who
we are, and these stories
are closely related to the
pictures we form of the
world: see Chapter 2.
The way our stories
relate to belonging to a
nation (or national
identity) is discussed in
Chapter 13.
China’s view of people of
Chinese ancestry living
outside China is
discussed in Chapter 12.
Chapter 10 discusses
Mexican immigration to
the US in some detail.
Of course, identities
are often not mutually
exclusive. Many people
consider themselves to
belong to two groups
that others may consider
to be separate.
This is visible in the
proliferation of
hyphenated identities,
such as Mexican-
American.
86 ANNICK T. R. WIBBEN
As soon as a baby is born, people begin to identify this new person in various ways.
Besides assuming the baby’s ethnicity or nationality, this very often means identifying
the baby’s gender. Today, with the advent of new technologies, many people will seek
to find out whether they are having a girl or a boy even before birth. The consequences
of this early identification range from ‘getting ready’ by selecting a name and painting
a nursery in the ‘right’ colour, to selective abortions in countries like India (where a
preference for males is common) or China (where the preference for males is coupled
with a one-birth policy). Thus, from an early age, before birth even, identity politics
matter.
Narrative theorists have pointed out that we are all homo fabulans – storytellers.
Narratives are ‘the primary way by which human experience is made meaningful’
(Polkinghorne 1988: 1). Through narratives we make sense of the world, produce
meaning, articulate intentions, and legitimize actions. While our lives begin with us being
subject to the stories of our parents and others around us, we soon begin to tell our
own stories about who we are and where we belong. As we grow, and as the stories of
who we are change over time, we might be disappointed when we realize that how our
family or community sees us does not match how we identify ourselves.
As we enter new life situations the process of identification continues: We might
be confronted with racism for the first time and begin to rethink our identity in terms
of race (Winddance Twine’s classic on ‘Brown-skinned White Girls’ (1996) discusses
the case of girls who in college become identified as Black). We might realize that having
children can mean not ever reaching a leadership position in the workplace. We might
find that our religious heritage or nationality limits our movement, as in the case of
Palestinians living under occupation in Gaza and the West Bank or of Mexican
immigrants to the US. Our image of ourselves and what others see in us (and how they
expect us to act) is always unfinished. And – there are always multiple stories of who
we are intersecting at any one time. Most of these are beyond our control and many
times they offer conflicting accounts.
As we identify ourselves through these stories, we draw on various markers of
identity that have been passed down to us through the stories we were told. In this
ongoing process we are constantly comparing our experiences with those of the rest of
the group that we identify with. We discover a shared tradition, a feeling of belonging
when our experiences match the standards of identification. We devise new stories, and
challenge or reject those that others tell (about us or themselves), when they do not
match our experience.
The markers of identity that are emphasized in these stories – whether they be
national, ethnic, racial, gender, class, sexual or religious in kind – always signal the
belonging to a particular group. In other words, they identify us as a member of a
particular group and not of another in the same category (accordingly, when applied
strictly as in the case of fundamentalist movements, one cannot be Hindu and Muslim
at the same time and most countries in the world will still only allow their citizens to
hold one passport). That is, at the same time as they place us inside this particular group,
they also place us outside another group.
What is more, by identifying certain traits of belonging to this particular group,
they also tell us who the Other is. We cannot understand what it means to be inside,
BOX 5.1 THE BREAK-UP OF YUGOSLAVIA
During the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, ethnic and national identities were harnessed in an intense
struggle over power and resources. For several decades, while the state known as Yugoslavia existed, the
identities that were soon to become a source of intense and bloody conflict were fluid and not politically
significant. Yugoslavs lived together in broad-based communities. During the early 1990s, at the end of
the Cold War, different groups within Yugoslavia began to signal their belonging to a particular group
(e.g. Serb). While doing so, they placed themselves outside another group (e.g. Bosnian) and began to
also distinguish other traits that were reasons for being considered other (e.g. being Muslim in the case
Serbia and Montenegro have asserted the formation of a joint independent state, but this entity has not been formally recognized as a state by
the United States.
Macedonia has proclaimed independent statehood, but has not been formally recognized as a state by the United States.
Slovenia
Croatia
Hungary
Austria
Former Yugoslavia
Romania
S e r b i a
Macedona
Greece
Albania
MontengroItaly BulgariaKosovo
(autonomous
province)
A d r i a t i c
S e a
LJUBLJANA
ZAGREB
SARAJEVO
Belgrade
Albanian
Bulgarian
Croat
Hungarian
Macedonian
Montenegrin
Muslim
Serb
Slovak
Slovene
No majority present
Based on opstina data from 1991 census
0 100 Kilometers
0 100 Miles
aYugoslavs are those persons who listed
themselves as such in the 1981 census.
They are dispersed across the country.
Hungarian, 1.9 Other, 3.9
Serb, 36.3Montenegrin, 2.5
Yugoslav, 5.4a
Albanian, 7.7
Slovene, 7.8
Muslim, 8.9 Croat, 19.7
Macedonian, 5.9
Vojvodina
(autonomous
province
Bosnia and
Hercegovina
FIGURE 5.1
Former Yugoslavia, based on 1991 census
WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE? 87
of many Bosnians). For many young Yugoslavs in particular this was the first time that their religion and
heritage came to matter, since they had led a largely secular lifestyle before then.
As the politics of identity intensified, every Yugoslav had to identify with one of the emerging groups:
Albanians, Bosnians, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs and Slovenes. The leaders of these
different groups began to claim a right to national self-determination (asking for the international
community to recognize their group as independent). Some of them, especially Serbs but also Croats,
began to ‘purify’ the regions that they identified as belonging to their group. This meant that those who
were seen as others were subjected to increasing oppression and even armed violence (see Campbell
1998).
Whether woman or man, being identified as other (e.g. Bosnian) could lead to being held in
concentration camps where rape, hard labour and random execution were common. What is more, age
mattered too: In Srebrenica a large number of refugees had gathered under protection of the United
Nations. In July 1995 the Serb military, in their efforts to ‘cleanse’ the area seen as belonging to Serbia,
attacked the safe zone. While they allowed women and children to leave, men of fighting age were
massacred. Three markers of identity – gender, age and nationality – came to matter greatly for these
men (see Carpenter 2003).
What it might mean to
question notions of the
human as used in the
term ‘human rights’ is
discussed in Chapter 27.
The impact of
colonialism on the
identity of both the
colonizer and the
colonized is discussed
in Chapter 16.
Chapter 6 examines the
example of Islam as a
source of identification.
without at the same time identifying who or what is outside. Without this ‘constitutive
outside’, something seen as fundamentally different, identity would no longer be
meaningful. Even the broad identifier ‘human’ relies on the juxtaposition with the ‘non –
human’ (e.g. animals, plants or rocks). The latter tell us what it means to be ‘human’
(e.g. not an animal, not a plant, not a rock). As such, at its base, members of a group
may have little more in common than not being ‘them’.
In addition to marking this boundary, those on the inside are privileged over those
on the outside in a number of ways: They can decide what it means to belong and
consequently who does not. They often enforce purity inside with the threat of being
outside, thus marking what is outside as inferior to those traits identified with the group
(e.g. heterosexuality might be considered the norm and people with other sexual
orientations will not only be excluded but considered deviant, sinful, or appalling in
some other way). This holds true whether the group is in a hegemonic or a subjugated
position (whether they are the group in charge or not). In a hegemonic position,
however, the in-group has easy access to resources (economic, military, and cultural)
as well as control thereof. Important institutions (e.g. the education system) will be
shaped to conform to their needs and to transmit their values. Thus, ‘although the
boundaries are ideological, they involve material (biological, legal, social) practices and
therefore have material origins and effects’ (Yuval-Davis 1994: 410). At its extremes,
being identified (or identifying) with one or another group could mean the difference
between life and death.
We have seen that identity is an important concept because it is fundamental to
the way we think of ourselves today: it gives us a sense of belonging and it is the marker
of our tradition, history and heritage. Identity politics are comforting as they promise
security and meaning: ‘Stability lies in part in clearly defined sex roles, family life and
religious orientation’ (Moghadam 1994: 19).
88 ANNICK T. R. WIBBEN
FIGURE 5.2
Women’s liberation
march.
http://college.cengage.
com/history/primary_
sources/us/womens_
liberation_march.htm
WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE? 89
We have also noted that identity politics is also a boundary politics that prescribes
what is accepted and expected for members of the in-group, the ‘good’ people. As such,
identification takes place by identifying against others, not just excluding but oppressing
them and the traits associated with them. The result is that being identified (or
identifying) with a particular group is always potentially dangerous.
How can we draw strength from identifying with a group and at the same time
curtail the violence it so often entails? The next section looks at a specific example of
identity politics – the case of the feminist movement in the United States in the second
half of the twentieth century. By looking at the history of the movement and the
challenges it has faced, we will be able to better understand the complexities of identity
and how we may address identities in conflict without recourse to violence.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
THE US FEMINIST MOVEMENT
Feminist identity politics rely on the idea that some groups are oppressed because they
are identified in a particular way: being identified as women, with the associated traits
of femininity, leads women to have a shared experience of oppression. Some feminists
have argued that this experience that all women share, and which is fundamentally
different from that of all men, should be the basis for feminist politics. Feminists who
90 ANNICK T. R. WIBBEN
For other forms of
activism see Chapters 4
(environmentalism) and
14 (grassroots politics);
contemporary activism is
discussed in Chapters 9
(the Arab Spring), 18 and
28 (the Occupy
Movement).
began thinking along these lines in the 1960s are called second-wave feminists (first
wave feminism refers to feminist activism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century, in particular that of the suffragettes who were fighting for a woman’s right to
vote and to hold public office). Most second-wave feminists, inspired by liberal political
thought, sought to overcome oppression by working to achieve equality between women
and men. Therefore they are also referred to as liberal or equality feminists.
Emergence of feminist activism
Feminist activism and scholarly activity emerged in many locations and was inspired by
a broad range of oppressive circumstances and disciplines (e.g. history, literature,
philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, sociology) and oppressive circumstances. The work
of these women (and some men) produced some important insights that challenged
the foundations of the social and political order as well as what is today considered
worthwhile knowledge.
Asking the basic question, ‘Where are the women?’ feminists found that often no
one had looked for them before.
Much of the knowledge that had been collected in massive volumes on library
shelves, that was being taught in schools and universities, and that was being used to
make important policy decisions, was based on the experiences of men. Even knowledge
about women-centred processes like pregnancy, birthing, childrearing and other activities
that involved women’s bodies or activities largely assigned to women, was dominated
by men.
FIGURE 5.3
‘I heard they spent all day arguing.’
Artist: John Morris. CartoonStock
ref.: jmo1622. www.CartoonStock.com
http://www.CartoonStock.com
WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE? 91
Feminists decided that the bias of science and policy could only be corrected by
gathering knowledge about women. They argued that these new insights, based on
women’s experiences, would transform ways of thinking and cultural categories. A very
important and innovative approach to examining and chal lenging patriarchy (structures
of male domination) was feminist consciousness-raising. The premise of this approach
was that ‘through discussion women would begin to see what they had once been
convinced were personal problems are actually political problems’ (Kauffmann 1990:
28). Indeed, when women began to share their experiences in partnerships, friendships,
the workforce, or the marketplace, they discovered systematic patterns of male
domination in all of these areas.
This pervasiveness of patriarchy led feminists to question the entire setup of the
private/public dichotomy and the assumptions underlying some of the primary
categories of political thought. Jean Bethke Elshtain, in Public Man, Private Woman
(1981), did a re-reading of canonical texts and rethinking of classic political concepts
from a feminist perspective. Another effort focused on recovering women’s writing (cf.
Spender 1983) to see what historical trends could be uncovered and to develop a broader
appreciation of women’s experiences.
In addition, some women began to write about their experiences of oppression due
to their identification as women. Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (2001 [1963]) was
one of the most influential books of this type.
BOX 5.2 CAROL GILLIGAN
Carol Gilligan, a feminist psychologist, wrote a well-known book called In a
Different Voice (1982). In it she examines theories of childhood development to
find that ‘The disparity between women’s experience and the representation of
human development, noted throughout the psychological literature, has
generally been seen to signify a problem in women’s development’ (Gilligan
1982: 1–2).
Her studies, however, led her to suggest that it is not that girls are failing
to develop properly, but rather that the models used to assess development
are based solely on the experiences of men. Reviewing studies of play, for
example, she instead suggests that girls develop differently because they have
a different value system. They tend to give preference to the continuation of
relationships over the setting and following of rules.
These types of observations led Gilligan to develop an ethics of care as an
alternative moral framework, also for politics. While her work has been
criticized by many feminists for essentializing women’s voices and experiences
– saying that she makes a virtue out of qualities that are the result of subordination – her work continues
to resonate with many women. Joan Tronto, in Moral Boundaries (1993), Fiona Robinson, in Globalizing
Care (1999) and Virginia Held, in The Ethics of Care (2006), have thought more about some of the
implications of Gilligan’s approach for global politics.
FIGURE 5.4
Carol Gilligan, Photo: Nancy
Palmieri
Traditionally, women
and their concerns were
seen to belong to the
private sphere, whereas
politics took place in the
public sphere, to which
only men were admitted.
FIGURE 5.5
Betty Friedan
The problem that
speaking for a group
implies that the group
shares experiences is
not, of course, unique to
the women’s movement,
but rather an issue that
all movements have to
deal with.
FIGURE 5.6
bell hooks
92 ANNICK T. R. WIBBEN
Published in the early 1960s, many credit it with jumpstarting second-wave
feminism. Friedan began writing the book after she attended her college reunion where
she gave a questionnaire to 200 of her fellow female classmates asking them about their
life expectations and experiences. The survey confirmed that many women were unhappy
and did not know why – Friedan began calling this ‘the problem which has no name’.
She eloquently linked the symptoms to an idealized image of femininity – the ‘feminine
mystique’ – which encourages women to confine themselves to the narrow roles of
housewife and mother, forsaking education and career aspirations in the process. Her
book is still an eye-opening read for many women, but its concerns and suggestions
reveal her white, middle-class experience.
María C. Lugones and Elizabeth V. Spelman, while not addressing Friedan’s work
directly, worry about the consequences of extrapolating from specific women’s
experiences to arrive at an account of the woman’s voice. They worry that changes
perceived as making life better for some women might not at all be liberating for women:
whose lives would be better if they could spend more time at home, whose identity
is inseparable from their religious beliefs and cultural practices [. . .], who have ties
to men – whether erotic or not – such that to have them severed in the name of
some vision of what is ‘better’ is, at that time and for those women, absurd.
(1983: 579)
While the situation might still seem oppressive, and even be oppressive, they argue that
feminist theory should aim to be ‘respectful, illuminating, and empowering’ (1983: 580)
to women in particular settings rather than true or false in an abstract sense. Feminisms
should always remain contextual.
This exchange reveals a major problem with second-wave feminism: Many of the
women who were part of the movement at the time assumed that their experiences were
the same as those of all women. They assumed that the oppression they experienced
was the same as that experienced by all women. They imagined their avenues for
empowerment, such as equality with men, would free all women from oppression.
Or maybe, they did not think about their bias because their identity as white, middle-
class women had not been challenged.
bell hooks (she never writes her name with capitals) suggests that the very idea that
the feminist movement aims for equality between women and men should raise a number
of questions. ‘Since men are not equals in white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal class
structures, which men do you want to be equal to?’ (hooks 1984: 18). She argues that
this very question reveals the bias in liberal, second-wave feminism. Marginalized and
poor women, especially if they are not white, immediately recognize that this definition
of feminism is flawed since the men in their communities are not in a powerful position.
Being like them would not entail an end to oppression. Therefore, liberal (equality)
feminism is revealed to be part of the problem, rather than the solution. The framing
of the problem as one of equality with men illustrates an unwillingness of white, middle-
class feminists to examine their own privilege and their complicity in the structures of
oppression.
BOX 5.3 PRIVILEGE
Let us take a moment to examine privilege. Privilege is a structure of unearned assets that we take for
granted and that are considered ‘normal’. Peggy McIntosh, in ‘White Privilege and Male Privilege’ (1993
[1988]) argued that the privilege of some is always premised on the denial of advantages to others, but we
are rarely encouraged to see this – after all few of us want to consider ourselves oppressors.
If we think about it, however, most of us will be able to identify some form of privilege we enjoy: white
privilege, class privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege and more. Being privileged means that
society reflects your worldview and that what you do goes uncensored. Think about it: As you go about
your daily life, do people ever restrain your behaviour? When you turn on the media, do you hear about or
see people with your lifestyle, your ethnicity, or your sexual orientation? Are your religious holidays and
customs celebrated by the majority of people in your country? Do you ever limit your movement for fear
of being attacked violently because of your gender, race or sexual orientation? Has someone questioned
your affection for your partner or described your interaction with your children as unnatural? How many
times have you been oblivious to the needs, language, and customs of others without being affected by
this ignorance?
Unacknowledged privilege is dangerous both personally and politically because it means that we are
oppressors without even realizing it. These unearned assets are valued in ways that provide advantages
within particular social structures to some – and not others – but it can be hard to see this. ‘Whites are
taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative and average, and also ideal, so that when we
work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow “them” to be more like “us”’(McIntosh 1993
[1988]: 32). If we want to change structures of domination, we have to first challenge our complicity in
their perpetuation by addressing privilege.
WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE? 93
Intensification of identity politics
The famous feminist slogan – ‘the personal is political’ – which is central to feminist
consciousness-raising in second-wave feminism, takes on new meaning as Black, Chicana
(that is, Mexican-American), Lesbian and Third World feminists begin to demand that
their experiences and their voices be taken seriously:
We want to express to all women – especially to white middle-class women – the
experiences which divide us as feminists; we want to examine incidents of
intolerance, prejudice and denial of difference within the feminist movement.
We intend to explore the causes and sources of, and solutions to these divisions.
We want to create a definition that expands what ‘feminist’ means to us.
(Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa 1983 [1979]: xxiii)
As this excerpt from This Bridge Called My Back (1983 [1979]) shows, feminists can
no longer assume that there is an experience that all women share and which can
therefore be the basis of the women’s movement.
A phase of intensified politics around identity, what Kauffmann has called the anti-
politics of identity (1990), begins. Rather than basing political action on supposedly
FIGURE 5.7
This Bridge Called My
Back. Book cover
The complexities of
identities produced as a
result of colonialism are
discussed in Chapter 16.
shared identities, identity itself becomes the subject of politics and the focus of
examination. Consequently, various previously accepted elements of our life-stories
become sites of political contestation. We might develop new ways of thinking and being,
transform cultural categories to match new ideas, or even develop separate cultural
programmes for each specific subcategory of identity. Hyphenated identities like ‘black-
lesbian-radical-feminist’ or ‘white-working-class-eco-feminist’ are adopted to specify the
belonging to a particular group.
An increasing number of feminists consequently begin to focus their attention on
identity itself, even though many of the initial criticisms by Black, Chicana, Lesbian and
Third World feminists of second-wave feminism specifically pointed to the material
consequences of identity politics. This shift is evoked not just by the political critiques
outlined above, but also by a philosophical shift that will be outlined in more detail in
the next section. Suffice it to say that gender and sex came to be seen as socially
constructed. This means, they are no longer thought to have a base in nature, anatomy
or anthropological essence, but are seen to be constructed in a process of social, cultural
and political struggles. This conceptual development allows us to examine the processes
involved in identity formation more closely and to recognize the power struggles
involved in identifying different markers and creating group hierarchies. It also alerts
us to the fact that identity shifts both contextually (e.g. the same person might be
identified as Ashanti in Ghana, Ghanaian in Africa, African in Europe) and over time
(e.g. as we discover our sexuality, we might realize that we differ from the heterosexual
norm).
Notwithstanding these advantages, the move toward examining identity without
reference to the social, economic and political order within which it is embedded proved
problematic for feminism for a number of reasons. First, the specificity that is sought
by an ever-increasing number of hyphenations creates the illusion that people indeed
possess a single, fixed identity (rather than one that is continually in flux). What is more,
it also suggests that this identity can be captured if only we can dissect all its details
(rather than accepting that it is impossible to portray all the facets of a person). An
increasing fragmentation and a new wave of exclusions ensues as the sub-groupings
become smaller and smaller. The focus on personal experience swiftly becomes an inward
focus away from the commonalities that consciousness-raising sought to discover.
Instead, (trendy) subcultures and a politics of lifestyle evolve which closely resemble
the logic of the marketplace. The outcome is a culture of political correctness and a
focus on personal conduct, rather than revolutionary change. Identity politics in this
vein are anti-politics (Kauffmann 1990), since the focus is on what people wear, eat,
and say (individually) rather than what they are doing politically (as a social movement).
Says Carmen Vasquez,
We can’t even agree on what a ‘Feminist’ is, never mind what she would believe
in and how she defines the principles that constitute honour among us. In key with
the American capitalist obsession for individualism and anything goes as long as it
gets you what you want, feminism in America has come to mean anything you like,
honey. There are as many definitions of Feminism as there are feminists, some of
my sisters say with a chuckle. I don’t think it’s funny.
(quoted in hooks 1984: 17)
94 ANNICK T. R. WIBBEN
The focus on
individualism and the
market in the context of
modernization in South
Asia also leads to the
diversion of collective
struggle for change:
Chapter 20.
WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE? 95
Vasquez does not think it is funny because these practices lose sight of commonalities
that, arguably, form the basis for collective struggles such as that of the women’s
movement. Preoccupied with their own micro-politics, this type of feminist identity
politics neglects to analyse shared oppression and thus to build a basis for solidarity. As
it assumes that a person’s racial, religious, sexual or class identity and that person’s polit –
ical views are one and the same, it repeats the flaws of second-wave feminism: Where
second-wave feminism unproblematically spoke for all women – these feminists no longer
speak for anyone (but themselves). Either way, the structures of (male) oppression remain
unchallenged. When feminists no longer communicate across the diverse groupings that
make up the women’s movement, they stop engaging in a shared political process.
When seeking a unified feminist project, no homogeneous group of women can
be assumed. To form a movement that accommodates all women, feminists need to
engage in a politics of identity that examines privilege. When occupying a position of
privilege, it is necessary to acknowledge one’s complicity in upholding the structures
of oppression (sexism, racism, homophobia, etc.). Only then can feminist and other
activists strategically inhabit whatever privileged status they may enjoy to change the
status quo.
This requires a reform of consciousness-raising as a feminist strategy. Whereas in
the past, ‘consciousness-raising techniques assume[d] as a basis for political action a
reality that has to be discovered and then changed’, Nira Yuval-Davis suggests thinking
of it as ‘a reality that is being created and re-created when practiced and discussed’ (1994:
414). Consciousness-raising can no longer be a simple uncovering of experience but
has to become a way to challenge representation and to confront privilege and power.
Two separate questions need to be asked here: (1) ‘How our identities are represented
in and through the culture and assigned particular categories’ and (2) ‘Who or what
politically represents us, speaks and acts on our behalf ’ (Brundt quoted in Yuval-Davis
1994: 415).
GENERAL RESPONSES
HOW CAN WE CONCEPTUALIZE IDENTITY?
The previous section examined the case of feminist struggles with identity politics in
the United States. It is fair to say those struggles mirror as well as intersect with a wider
debate about identity and questions of belonging. For example, while both sex and
gender used to be seen as natural, we now think of them as broadly socially constructed.
The same holds true for the way we understand identity more generally. This is a very
recent phenomenon, however, since it was only during the twentieth century that
scholars began to think in these terms. This section looks at these different ways of
thinking about identity and the markers used to signify it – e.g. nation, ethnicity, race,
gender, class, sex or religion – and what some of their limitations are.
Biology and natural history
Before discussing different ways of thinking (theories) that offer competing explanations
today, it is important to examine their historical precursors. Understanding how ideas
96 ANNICK T. R. WIBBEN
Chapters 12 and 13
explore how nations are
made and Chapters 10
and 14 explore the
significance of race in
other contexts.
have developed over time helps to imagine them changing again. Take the example of
female and male identity: Until quite recently, they used to be thought of as determined
by biology and now are seen as socially constructed. However, the whole field of biology
only developed about 200 years ago, so how did people think of this difference before
then? What about other markers of identity, such as race or nation?
Biology developed out of a larger field of study called natural history. During the
eighteenth century and beyond, natural history encompassed all descriptive aspects of
the study of nature, including humans.
When describing what was later called race, for example, scholars of natural history
included everything ‘from the morphology of the skin, to the discussion of sexual desire,
to music and poetry’ (Appiah and Gutman 1996: 49). A person was perceived to possess
an essence of some sort that gave rise to all of these traits. Only during the nineteenth
century did fields like anatomy, physiology, anthro pology, sociology and biology
develop. With the emergence of these fields new concepts and frameworks were
pioneered which broadened the horizons of scholars and lay people alike.
The work of Charles Darwin (1809–82) introduced new ways of thinking about
inheritance and natural selection as well as new categories like species and race. Darwin
used the term race to refer to animals and plants as well as to people. The increasing
FIGURE 5.8
The depiction of supposed essences, as imagined in natural history.
From S. Wells, New Physiognomy or Signs of Character . . . , New York, 1871
acceptance of Darwin’s theories gave scientific support to the idea that different kinds
of human groupings – races – could be clearly distinguished. The traits associated
with different races would become the subject of studies, called race science or raciology
(Gilroy 2000). From the association of facial features (e.g. nose, lips, shape of the
eyes) to assumptions about intelligence and sexual inclination, we find raciology pro –
duced material that has been used time and time again to justify discriminatory policies
at home and abroad. What is more, entire ideologies like orientalism (that is, the
inevitably prejudiced representation of Eastern cultures and peoples by outsiders) and
anti-semitism are based on raciology.
Static and dynamic approaches to identity
Whereas identity used to be thought of as having its roots in nature or some sort of
spiritual or anthropological essence, most scholars today subscribe to some form of the
WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE? 97
Orientalism is explained
in Chapter 6.
BOX 5.4 HUTU AND TUTSI IN RWANDA
Through colonialism many of these European ideas spread throughout the world and with them
assumptions about the superiority of European races. The Hamitic myth and its role in the 1994 genocide
in Rwanda is a case in point. The Hamitic myth, whose origins can be traced to the Bible, originally
provided justification for the enslavement of people of African descent. It was re-evaluated after the
discovery of the achievements of ancient Egypt and from then on used to describe those peoples who
appeared most ‘European-like’ in appearance and achievement.
During the colonization of Africa, the Tutsi of Rwanda were identified as Hamitic and therefore
preferable to the Hutu, who were not considered worthy of cultural redemption. While these ideas were
first introduced by German colonizers, the subsequent Belgian colonial administration perfected the idea
of two distinct races by issuing identity cards which indicated racial belonging (in 1935). Prior to
colonization the distinction between Tutsi and Hutu seems to have largely been one of caste (with the
Tutsi being cattle keepers and the Hutu farmers, though movement between the two groups was common
and the distinction largely associated with the type of work undertaken). What is more, they spoke the
same language, shared similar customs and frequently intermarried.
The colonial authorities expanded existing hierarchies by using the Tutsi as a proxy government for
Rwanda. The Belgians also supported the expansion of Tutsi power by providing the Tutsi with better
education (with the help of Catholic missionaries). When the Tutsi demanded greater decision-making
power and even independence, in 1959, the Belgians reversed the hierarchy and thereafter supported Hutu
demands. Meanwhile, based on the same Hamitic myth used to justify colonial violence, anti-Tutsi
propaganda like the Hutu Manifesto began to proclaim that if the Tutsi were indeed foreign invaders with
European ancestry, the country should rightfully be governed by Hutu.
After achieving independence in 1961 and being governed by the Hutu majority, rumours of plots by
Tutsis to resubjugate the Hutus marred Rwandan politics and were used to justify supposedly preventive
killings of thousands of Tutsi. The erstwhile culmination of this ‘Hutu power’ movement was the 1994
Rwandan genocide, during which approximately 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed in a period
of 100 days (see Gourevitch 1998 and Mamdani 2001).
In the static approach we
exist as individuals first,
and then adopt or
choose an identity; in
this thinking, individuals
‘have’ an identity, as if it
were something we
could possess. This is
often seen as common
sense.
For the dynamic
approach we don’t ‘exist’
as individuals first – our
coming into being as
subjects already carries
with it an identity or
identities. This is more
difficult to explain.
98 ANNICK T. R. WIBBEN
idea that identity is socially constructed. As noted above, this implies that identities are
seen to be constructed in a process of social, cultural and political struggle, rather than
given by nature. That being said, there are some important differences in the manifold
approaches to identity that are bundled under this label.
A stark contrast exists between those approaches that have a static conception of
identity and those that take a dynamic approach to subjectivity. The static perspective
presumes the existence of an individual and asks questions about that person’s identity,
whether this be their race, sexuality, gender, class, or some other marker of significance.
Like someone taking or drawing a picture, it captures a particular point in time. The
competing approach, what might be termed the dynamic perspective, does not assume
subjectivity prior to its identification with these markers. The emphasis of this approach
is on the processes through which we become identified and how they change (us) over
time. To concretize these distinctions, we will discuss each perspective in turn.
R. W. Connell, in his book Masculinities (1995), provides some examples of ways
of thinking about gender that follow the static perspective. A very common approach
associated with this perspective is positivism (an approach based on the view that the
scholar can take up a position outside the world that is being studied). Here the focus
is on what we can observe in relation to a particular marker of identity – the way women
or men actually are, for example. John Gray’s self-help book Men Are from Mars – Women
Are from Venus (2002) uses this type of approach to list characteristics that statistically
seem to be more common to either gender’s relationship behaviour. The picture that is
painted as a result can only provide broad brushstrokes and, while claiming to be
universal, will actually be quite specific and directly match only few people’s experience.
A main criticism of this approach is that it is very conservative (in the sense of
traditionalist) – it can only ever observe the current status quo and it does not lend
itself well to imagining alternative options. What is more, often the variation among
one group (e.g. in the relationship behaviour of different women) is greater than the
differences that exist between different groups (that is, between the behaviours of women
and men). As such, this approach easily becomes self-referential – it describes what it
observes and then observes what it has previously described. In the case of Men Are
from Mars – Women Are from Venus the author observes how women or men are more
likely to behave and then writes a book about it. When people read the (self-help) book,
they begin to behave according to these ideas and their actions then seem to support
the initial observation. However, they could just as well be a consequence of having
read the book.
Another way of thinking that matches the static perspective is a normative approach.
While it is often contrasted with positivism because it may explicitly challenge the status
quo, a normative approach is similar: from a position assumed to be outside the world
that is being analysed, it describes how things ought to be (rather than how they are,
as the positivist approach does) and then observes whether individuals comply with the
norm. Yet, strong normative ideals often mean that few actually ever reach them.
For example, while a norm for masculinity is that everyone be as tough as a cowboy
in a John Wayne film, we might find that many men never dream of riding a horse and
‘roughing it’. What is more, some men might match the depiction of cowboys in
Brokeback Mountain (a film that chronicles the complex 20-year love story of two
cowboys) and not the heterosexual norm often associated with masculinity. This raises
BOX 5.5 JACQUES LACAN
Psychoanalysis, a field that arose at the end of the nineteenth century as
a result of the work of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), is concerned with
the role of the unconscious. Regarding the question of identity, the work
of Jacques Lacan (1901–81) in particular is of interest. Lacan, himself
trained in psychoanalysis, reviewed many of Freud’s original ideas
proposing that the unconscious should be understood as structured
like language. Doing so, he linked psychoanalysis and semiotics
(the study of signs).
Lacan introduced the idea of the ‘mirror stage’, which describes the
formation of the conscious self via the process of identification.
Simplified, for Lacan the act of identifying with one’s own image in the mirror provides the illusion of
wholeness. Yet, he also argues, the act creates a fundamental misunderstanding: The image is always
partial. There is always a lack that we seek to compensate to become whole again. Or, conversely, there is
an excess which cannot be captured no matter how hard we try to examine all details of who we are. An
important element of the Lacanian mirror stage is also the caregiver (Lacan refers to the mother), who
represents the Other to whom the child turns for recognition and who provides the first experience of
being a subject – an I. (For a discussion of the relevance of Lacanian and other psychoanalytically inspired
approaches for global politics, see Edkins 1999.)
FIGURE 5.9
Jacques Lacan. Photo:
www.ildiogene.it/Ency/Pages/
Immagini/Lacan
What sort of a subject
is at the heart of our
thinking is also
discussed in Chapter 28.
WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE? 99
some questions: How normative (widespread) is the norm? Can the description of some
normative behaviour or appearance help us understand multiple masculine identities?
Or is there just one norm and do men who do not meet the standards of heterosexuality
or toughness become less manly?
To reiterate, what makes both of these approaches static approaches is that they
rely on the observation of characteristics of already known entities (e.g. female and male
individuals). That is, they list the characteristics that supposedly identify a person after
having already decided that a certain sample of them belongs to one group (e.g. Asian
Americans) and not to another (e.g. Native Americans). What is more, neither approach
leaves much room for variations within the group, such as feminine men or masculine
women. There is little or no room for greyscales here (e.g. what happens to people of
mixed descent, that is, both Asian American and Native American?). As such, the world
easily becomes black and white.
The dynamic approaches discussed here agree that a main mistake of static accounts
of identity is that they assume a cohesive, fixed subject that can be identified (a subject
which we can know). They suggest instead that subjectivity is always already a product
of discourses – national, ethnic, racial, gender, class, sexual or religious – that circulate
at any given time and place (some are local, some regional, and some global which
also means they can be quite different and then conflict with each other). From this
perspective the possibilities for who we can be are not up to the individual, but set out
in advance and also limited by society. Identification (the creation of subjectivity), then,
takes place in the process of articulating the relationship between subjects and discourses
http://www.ildiogene.it/Ency/Pages/
Jacques Derrida was
particularly interested
in thinking through
the impact of such
dichotomies. Some of
his ideas are discussed
in Chapter 28.
BOX 5.6 JUDITH BUTLER AND PERFORMATIVITY
An influential application of psychoanalytical and other insights is Judith Butler’s
conception of identity as performance. She first introduced it in her book Gender
Trouble and has refined it since. Her main argument is that ‘gender is always a
doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed’
and therefore that ‘identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions”
that are said to be its results’ (1990: 33). In other words, by acting out what
signifies being a certain kind of person, e.g. a white woman, one’s subjectivity as a
white woman is constituted and one is identified as such.
Butler uses the example of drag queens to make her point, arguing that drag
performance enacts the way in which any (gender) identity is assumed. In his
performance the drag queen also denaturalizes femininity by exaggerating its
elements and by disturbing its coherence, since the performed gender does not
match the expected behaviour for a man.
It is important to note that Butler does not consider gender performance a choice. Rather, drawing on
the work of Michel Foucault (1926–84), she argues that the performance is disciplined by regulative
discourses of gender. This means that we are made to conform and our performance is constrained by the
repetition of certain expected standards of behaviour (norms), which consequently appear to constitute a
core of identity.
FIGURE 5.10
Judith Butler.
Photo: Berkeley
University
Chapter 28 also explores
the issue that we always
confront language as
already existing.
100 ANNICK T. R. WIBBEN
– between ourselves and the principles, expectations, and constraints of society. This
means that who we are is always a matter of becoming rather than one of being: We
should thus ask how we have become identified and who we can become, rather than
who we are or have been.
Since these are the types of questions thinkers espousing dynamic approaches are
interested in, they examine the processes through which the body is identified (or
inscribed) to become a recognizable subject in a particular location (e.g. of a nation, a
class, or a religious group). In addition, drawing on psychoanalytical insights, they
consider difference a key to the development of identity – without an other that cannot
be subsumed, there would be no distinctness to ourselves. This is also exemplified in
many languages, e.g. in the dichotomies that are so prevalent in Western thought: weak/
strong, female/male, black/white. It is possible to analyse this difference through a
semiotic approach that contrasts the meanings assigned to different markers (or signifiers)
in a particular symbolic structure.
The dynamic conception of identity, particularly its constitutive relation to difference
and its argument that subjects do not pre-exist discourse, has been criticized for lacking
a conception of agency. Seyla Benhabib notes, ‘if these agents retain capacities for
resistance, resignification or for “subverting gender codes” in Butler’s language, from
where do they derive?’ (1994). If who we are is determined by discourses that predate
our existence, how can change occur that moves beyond these structures? We will look
at some possible answers to this question in the next section when we turn again to
looking at identity politics in a broader context.
When you are identified
by someone else as
‘a student’, for example,
do you feel that the
category fits you
perfectly? Or do you
sometimes feel that
you are more than just
a student, and, at the
same time, less than
what a student is
supposed to be?
WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE? 101
Notwithstanding the discussion of these two approaches as though they are entirely
separate frameworks, it should be noted that not all discussions of identity can be neatly
separated this way. The distinction is useful, however, to tease out some broader
conceptual issues that help us understand the variety of approaches: A main difference
between the two approaches discussed here concerns their assumptions about what type
of knowledge is possible (epistemology). Whereas the static approach believes that it is
possible to clearly identify various markers that make up a person’s identity, the dynamic
approach is less certain about this possibility and sees different markers as together
constituting, through processes of identification, a subject.
In addition, the two approaches conceptualize agency differently: The static
approach often considers the possibility of multiple identities also suggesting the option
of a choice between them (or at least of emphasizing different markers). Scholars
associated with the dynamic approach, on the contrary, tend to spend considerable time
focusing on identity politics as a disciplinary tool that limits who we can become. How
these differences matter when we answer the question that guides this chapter is the
topic we will turn to now.
BROADER ISSUES
DO WE NEED TO IDENTIFY WITH A GROUP?
So far we have discussed why we need to pay attention to identity at all, how identity
politics have played out historically in the US feminist movement, and how identity has
been conceptualized. What we have yet to address is the question posed at the outset
of the chapter: If our identity is often linked to group identification, do we need to
identify with a group? Thinking this through raises other questions.
To begin, whenever someone uses the term ‘we’ it is a good idea to ask who ‘we’
includes. In this case, who is the ‘we’ that is asked to identify with a group? The answer
to the question whether ‘we’ have to identify with a group might depend on our position
of privilege, for example. Few white people ever have discussions about how their
whiteness affects their ability to go about their daily lives, get an education, or to be
treated equally before the law. Black people who live in countries where they are not
the majority, however, need to teach their children from an early age how to navigate
everyday racism for their own survival. Thus, while they might not want to identify as
Black so as not to be subject to the effects of racism, considering that they are always
already identified as such, they might decide to claim a Black identity. Doing so can
provide them with a support network and avenues to challenge discriminatory policies
as a group – but it can also lock them into another cycle of identity politics.
We might further ask – and the formulation of this question depends on our
theoretical orientation – whether it is even up to us to identify with a group or whether
others identify us. The static approaches discussed in the previous section would con –
tend that it is up to us to choose our identity (within limits) and that we are also identified
by those around us according to the markers of each identity category. The dynamic
approaches would likely argue that the question itself reveals a misunder standing of the
processes of identification. Instead of us being able to identify with a group, who we
can be is limited by the parameters of belonging to a particular group and is constantly
BOX 5.7 BLACK POWER
The Black Power movement
exemplifies this conundrum of
identity politics: In an effort to reverse
the script of racism, being Negro is
reconstructed as being Black. This
requires a refusal to assimilate to
white norms of behaviour and the
building of ‘complex traditions of
politics, ethics, identity and culture’
(Gilroy 2000: 12). The goal is to be
respected as a black person, not
despite being a black person.
Over time this movement has
‘gone far beyond merely affording
protection and reversed the polarities
of insult, brutality and contempt,
which are unexpectedly turned into
important sources of solidarity, joy,
and collective strength’ (Gilroy
2000: 12).
Yet, like all identity politics this
one too requires ‘that there be some
script that go with being [Black], there
will be expectations to be met;
demands will be made’ (Appiah and
Gutman 1996: 99). The question that
arises is whether one tyranny is being
replaced by another that still leaves
too little room to diverge from the
norm (it is just a different norm now).
What is more, we might wonder, as
Black-lesbian-feminist Audre Lorde
famously did, whether the master’s
tools will ever dismantle the master’s house. While rejecting all things associated with Whiteness might be
a source of strength and even a necessary step in challenging racial hierarchies, ultimately it is only when
the idea of race itself is abandoned that real change has occurred. However, as long as groups on either
side of the divide hold onto the notion (usually those that benefit from its existence in some manner), this
is unlikely.
FIGURE 5.11
The Black Power salute in the 1968 Summer Olympics: Tommie Smith
(centre) and John Carlos (right) salute while silver medallist Peter Norman
(left) wears an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge to show his support
for the two Americans. Photo: AP/PA Photos
102 ANNICK T. R. WIBBEN
BOX 5.8 PATRICIA HILL COLLINS: INTERSECTIONALITY
Patricia Hill Collins, pioneer of Black Feminist Thought, writes in the preface to the
second edition of her book (2000 [1990]) about the importance of combining the
work of revisioning individual black women’s consciousness with challenges to
larger structures of oppression and injustice. Failure to do so will only replace one
form of domination with another. To do away with all forms of domination, she
specifically locates her thinking in relation to other projects that share a concern
for social justice and urges activists to recognize similarities among these varied
projects. To this end, she further develops the idea of intersectionality to
conceptualize the complexities of multiple and conflicting identities.
Intersectionality ‘refers to particular forms of intersecting oppressions, for
example, intersections of race and gender, or of sexuality and nation’. Collins
further notes that thinking about identity in terms of intersectionality ‘reminds us
that oppression cannot be reduced to one fundamental type, and that they work
together in producing injustice’ (2000 [1990]: 18). She gives the example of African American women who
are subject to three interdependent dimensions of oppression:
• Economic, which describes the exploitation of Black women’s labour, initially under slavery and in
service occupations since;
• Political, which refers to the routine denial of rights and privileges accorded to white male citizens,
such as voting, holding public office, getting a good education, and being treated fairly in the justice
system; and
• Ideological, which covers both controlling images and certain qualities attached to Black women
(2000 [1990]: 4–5).
The dimensions of oppression are interdependent and can be located in a matrix of domination.
Collins argues that ‘regardless of the particular intersections involved, structural, disciplinary, hegemonic
and interpersonal domains of power reappear across quite different forms of oppression’ (2000 [1990]:
18). What they have in common, just like the intersections highlighted with regard to African American
women’s oppression, is that they constitute a highly effective system of social control to keep people in
their assigned, subordinate place.
FIGURE 5.12
Patricia Hill Collins.
Photo: University of
Maryland, College Park
WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE? 103
in flux. Processes of identification are ambivalent from the start and there is no point at
which a unified subject is possible: ‘There is always “too much” or “too little” – an
overdetermination or a lack, but never a proper fit, a totality’ (Hall 1996: 3).
This conceptualization also suggests a response to the criticism that agency is
impossible in a framework that stresses the constitutive role of discourse. Since identity
never properly fits and is constantly challenged due to encounters with other people
and varying discourses that increasingly circulate globally, there are continuous rup-
tures where identities can be negotiated. Where identity is already under revision, there
is also room for agency. Besides, challenges arise in the name of anticipated or actual
suffering – ‘visions of what is better are always informed by our perception of what is
bad about our present situation’ (Lugones and Spelman 1983: 579).
Finally, the question suggests that we have to identify with one group. Yet, none of
us are only Asian or only Christian or only woman. Can we have multiple identities? What
happens when they conflict? Does being a member of many oppressed groups (e.g. being
Chicana and lesbian) imply that the oppression adds up? Or multiplies? What if one is
part of both an oppressing (e.g. male) and an oppressed (e.g. working-class) group?
Again, the way the questions are asked reveals some of the underlying assump tions
behind them. For example, when people talk of having multiple identities, they often
try to signal that identities need to be viewed in context and that some of them might
be strategically more useful for the particular social, cultural and political struggle for
hegemony (that is, the dominance of one group over other groups). All the while, such
language also seems to suggest a maximum of autonomy – as though one has a closet
full of identities that may be worn as one chooses. Most scholars will agree that such a
conception, one that entirely disregards any structural limitations, is unhelpful and
inaccurate. Instead, we are always already part of and contributing to particular structures.
Adopting Collins’ framework of intersectionality to think of varied dimensions of
identity, and the oppressive effects of identity politics, limits the ever-present tendency
to think of identity in overly individualistic terms. When asking questions about
domination and oppression, we always also have to look at the structures that facilitate
and perpetuate them. We might then find that discourses of identity both enable and
limit who we might become, how we have been represented, and how we might repre –
sent ourselves (Hall 1996). Our task is to recognize them as temporary resting points,
to see in them the workings of power (and struggles for hegemony), and to challenge
their effects.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter we have begun to develop some tools to understand different conceptions
of identity and the complex consequences of identity politics. Yet, much of what this
chapter focuses on relates to the negative, indeed deadly, effects of identity politics, and
one might wonder: Why not do away with the concept once and for all? The simple
answer is that it gives us a sense of belonging and a sense of direction. This might explain
why greater attention is paid to identity as people become increasingly mobile and as
ideas circulate ever widely in this globalized world such that we may now talk of an
‘explosion of usage’ (Hall 1996: 1).
What is more, it is particularly those approaches that question the idea of an
essential, primary, and cohesive identity that have proliferated in recent years. What they
suggest is that the way we have thought about identity, with a core self that may be
adjusted slightly but remains largely stable through time and space, is no longer
adequate. Yet, while these approaches are ‘no longer serviceable – “good to think with”
– in their originary and unreconstructed form’ (Hall 1996: 1), they are still needed due
to the centrality of questions of agency and politics. As Stuart Hall summarizes, it is
‘an idea which cannot be thought in the old way, but without which certain key
questions cannot be thought at all’ (1996: 2).
Thus, even if we cannot agree on how identity should be conceptualized, which
markers should triumph, or even whether the preoccupation with identity is only a
104 ANNICK T. R. WIBBEN
symptom of late modernity – we can maybe ask better questions about the occurrence
of identity politics and its material effects. And – we can begin to recognize how our
own privilege oppresses others, but also how it gives us the power to promote change.
Who do we think we are, indeed?
FURTHER READING
Campbell, David (1998) National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
A detailed analysis of the identity politics at play during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.
In 1999, the book received a prize for being the best English-language publication on the
topic.
Collins, Patricia Hill (2000 [1990]) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the
Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
For students who want to learn more about the intersections of gender and race (but also
other forms of oppression), this is a ‘must read’. It also provides some of the best ideas out
there for moving beyond identity politics and toward justice.
Gourevitch, Phillip (1998) We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our
Families: Stories from Rwanda, London: Picador.
Probably the best account of the Rwandan genocide, based on a series of interviews with
Rwandans between 1995 and 1998. Not for the faint-hearted.
Hudson, Valerie M. and Andrea den Boer (2004) Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s
Surplus Male Population, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Examines how global security might be affected by the preference for males in many Asian
societies and thus offers a great case study of the importance of identity politics today.
Kaldor, Mary (2006) New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, 2ndedn, Cambridge:
Polity Press.
A major work for those who want to understand the role of identity politics in today’s wars.
Kaldor locates the difference between old and new wars in the latter’s distinctive war
economies, their genocidal tendencies and the use of identity politics as a means to political
power.
Ryan, Barbara (ed.) (2001) Identity Politics in the Women’s Movement, New York: New York
University Press.
This collection has most classic and recent statements on feminist identity politics (in the
US) and offers a great overview for students interested in the subject.
Wibben, Annick T. R. (2011) Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach, London:
Routledge.
Presents a feminist reading of security studies, suggesting that identity politics and security
politics implicate each other. It also suggests ways to learn to listen to each others’ stories
of who we are as a way forward.
WEBSITES
American Anthropological Association, RACE: Are We So Different?, http://www.understanding
race.org/home.html
An extensive website (and exhibition) that examines race through multiple lenses.
BBC World Service, Yugoslavia History File, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/
map/yugoslavia/
A timeline with a series of maps and historical information on Yugoslavia (1900–2003).
WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE? 105
Deutsch, Barry, The Male Privilege Checklist: An Unabashed Imitation of an Article by Peggy
McIntosh, http://www.amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/
A checklist and links to further privilege discussions.
Heyes, Crissida (2002) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: ‘Identity Politics’, http://plato.
stanford.edu/entries/identity-politics/
Part of the extensive online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, this entry on identity politics
explores many of the issues raised in this chapter from a philosophical perspective (in
reference to many different markers of identity) and provides additional links.
Human Rights Watch (1999) Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, http://www.
hrw.org/reports/1999/rwanda/
A detailed report on the genocide in Rwanda, with an update on the tenth anniversary in
2004.
Korenman, Joan, Women of Color Websites, http://research.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/
links_wc.html
A regularly updated list of women of colour resource websites.
SSRC, Is Race ‘Real’?, http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/
This forum, organized by the Social Science Research Council, discusses recent controversies
surrounding race after recent advances in genetics.
The World Wide Web Virtual Library, History: Yugoslavia (1918–1995), http://vlib.iue.it/
history/europe/yugoslavia.html
An extensive website useful for further research on historical information (also has some
maps).
REFERENCES
Appiah, K. Anthony and Amy Gutman (1996) Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Benhabib, Seyla (1994) ‘From Identity Politics to Social Feminism: A Plea for the Nineties’,
Philosophy of Education Yearbook 1994.
Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and The Subversion of Identity, London:
Routledge.
Campbell, David (1998) National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Carpenter, Charli (2003) ‘Women and Children First: Gender Norms and Humanitarian
Evacuation in the Balkans, 1991–1995’, International Organization 57, 4: 661–94.
Collins, Patricia Hill (2000 [1990]) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the
Politics of Empowerment, Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Connell, R. W. (1995) Masculinities, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Edkins, Jenny (1999) Poststructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back
In, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Elshtain, Jean Bethke (1981) Public Man, Private Woman, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Friedan, Betty (2001 [1963]) The Feminine Mystique, New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Gilligan, Carol (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gilroy, Paul (2000) Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Gourevitch, Phillip (1998) We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our
Families: Stories from Rwanda, London: Picador.
Gray, John (2002) Men Are from Mars – Women Are from Venus, London: HarperCollins.
106 ANNICK T. R. WIBBEN
Hall, Stuart (1996) ‘Introduction: Who Needs “Identity”?’, in Hall, Stuart and du Gay, Paul (eds)
Questions of Cultural Identity, London: Sage Publications.
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WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE? 107
For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
http://www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
CHAPTER 6
How do religious beliefs affect
politics?
Peter Mandaville
■ The question
THE ROLE OF RELIGION TODAY
■ Illustrative example
ISLAMIC STATES AND MOVEMENTS
■ General responses
DO RELIGION AND POLITICS MIX?
■ Broader issues
CULTURE, FUNDAMENTALISM AND RELIGIOUS
IDENTITIES
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
THE ROLE OF RELIGION TODAY
What do we mean when we talk about religion? Scholars have struggled and argued for
many years about how to define religion. Some emphasize the idea that religion is
concerned primarily with conceptions of God, divinity, and the meaning and order of
human existence. Others have tended to emphasize the way religion serves to draw
distinctions between sacred (that is, transcendent or other-worldly) forms of space and
belief and more mundane, or profane domains of ‘worldly’ human endeavour. Some
definitions, such as that of anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973), focus on the symbolic
power of religion and its ability to influence how people understand their place in the
world and also to impart meaning to the actions they undertake. Other scholars have
pointed out that the idea of religion as a distinct category or sphere of human activity
reflects a specifically Western worldview and historical tradition. Talal Asad (1993) points
out that in other cultural traditions it is not so easy to make a firm separation between
religion and other spheres of life such as politics, culture, society, and economics.
The question of
secularism and the
headscarf ban in
France are topics of
Chapter 27.
Often whether we hold
religious beliefs or not
is central to our picture
of the world, to use the
terminology from
Chapter 2.
BOX 6.1 DEFINITIONS OF RELIGION
Thinkers from different fields and disciplines have put forward varying
definitions of religion. For anthropologist Clifford Geertz, religion is
‘(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and
long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of
a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an
aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic’
(Geertz 1973).
For theologian George Lindbeck, religion is ‘a kind of cultural and/or linguistic
framework or medium that . . . makes possible the description of realities, the
formulation of beliefs, and the experiencing of inner attitudes, feelings, and
sentiments’ (Lindbeck 1984).
Marxist writers such as Louis Althusser tend to emphasize the idea that
religion functions as a form of ‘false consciousness’ which socializes us into
accepting as normal certain historically and materially contingent relations of
social power (Althusser 2001).
So where do we see religion at work in global politics today? Many people if
asked this question right now might think first and foremost of the Islamic world.
Particularly since the events of 11 September 2001 – when hijackers associated with
the terrorist group Al-Qaeda flew airliners into several targets in New York City and
Washington DC – and subsequent attacks such as the London bombings of 7 July
2005, Islam has been a major subject of discussion. Much of this debate has been
around questions of terrorism and support for violence. The United States, for
example, declared militant Islamic extremism to be the major target of its new ‘war
on terror’. Considerable attention has also been paid to Islamic movements in other
countries that have used violence in the pursuit of their political goals, such as
HAMAS in the Palestinian territories and Hizbullah in Lebanon. Other examples
Chapters 2, 23 and 26
have more on the ‘war
on terror’.
HOW DO RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AFFECT POLITICS? 109
This point will be important later when we discuss the meaning and nature of secularism,
the belief that the state and morals should be independent of religion. Secularism, as
we will see, is a vitally important concept because it leads us to ask questions about
whether religion and politics are in fact separate categories and, if so, what the
appropriate relationship between them should be. Religion and secularism are also
implicated in important ways in broader debates about what it means to be ‘modern’.
For now, however, let us assume that when we are talking about religion we are
referring to individuals and groups who base their identities and ethics at least in part
on a tradition and set of beliefs about the creation of the world and the order within
it that locates the source of this creation and order outside purely human or natural
agency.
110 PETER MANDAVILLE
where Islam or ‘Islamic’ groups have been seen to play a role in world politics include
the period when Afghanistan was under the rule of a highly conservative movement
known as the Taliban. Well before the United States accused and eventually overthrew
their regime for supporting terrorism, the Taliban had attracted widespread criticism
from the world community for violating human rights and for their harsh treatment of
women. Finally, countries such as Iran, which regard themselves as Islamic states, are
seen by some as a challenge when they assert that they are subject to divine authority.
Within Europe, a number of recent incidents such as the Danish Cartoon Affair have
fuelled debates about whether ‘religious’ Muslims and ‘secular’ Europeans can co-exist.
Most recently, the phenomenal rise of Islamic political parties in elections following the
revolutions that swept through parts of the Arab world in 2011 have prompted new
questions about what happens when religion and politics mix.
BOX 6.2 THE DANISH CARTOON AFFAIR
In September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten published a series of
cartoon depictions of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam. Most famous among
them was an image depicting the turban on Muhammad’s head as a bomb.
Several months after the publication of the cartoons, protests broke out in a
number of Muslim countries almost simultaneously (an interesting globalization
story in itself, involving the Internet, satellite TV, and transnational activist
networks). Angered by what they perceived as an attack on the Prophet and an
insult to Islam at a time when global tensions were high in the aftermath of the 11
September 2001 attacks and the US invasion of Iraq, rioters attacked Danish
embassies and several countries initiated an embargo on Danish goods. In
Europe the Danish Cartoon Affair prompted a debate about how to strike a
balance between freedom of speech and respect for cultural difference. It also
further fuelled an ongoing debate about whether the values of Europe’s rapidly
growing Muslim community were compatible with Western norms.
Despite the current tendency to focus on the Islamic world, there are many other
examples where religion seems to play a role in global politics. A number of recent
conflicts have had strong religious dimensions. Think for example of Northern Ireland
where the divisions between the two conflicting sides broke down along the Protestant
and Catholic denominations of Christianity. For more than 20 years, Sri Lanka saw a
civil war pitting Hindus and Buddhists against each other. In the former Yugoslavia,
much of the bloodshed in the 1990s was explained in terms of ethnic rivalries between
Catholic and Orthodox Christians as much as between Christians and Muslims. While
many of the participants in these conflicts did not define their actions and motivations
by direct reference to religion, the religious factor was important because it allowed the
leadership of certain parties to raise the stakes by appealing to a greater cause. Religion
is also present in world politics in ways far less dramatic and violent. For example, millions
Understanding these
conflicts requires
exploring the politics of
identity: see Chapter 5.
The situation in
Northern Ireland was
long considered an
intractable conflict but is
now more stable: see
Chapter 26.
Whether people who
subscribe to
fundamentally different
values can live together
and how has vexed many
thinkers across the
centuries. What do you
think?
HOW DO RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AFFECT POLITICS? 111
of Catholics around the world recognize the spiritual authority of the pope as the final
arbiter, globally, of matters relating to church doctrine. We can also see today the role
of various religious groups in seeking to build new bases of mass popular support, such
as the recent upsurge in conversions to Pentecostal Christianity in Africa. The strength
of the Christian Evangelical movement in the United States has been a major factor in
the political success of that country’s Republican party in recent years. The United States
represents a very interesting case in which church and state are formally separated, but
where religion features very heavily in political discourse. This has led some, such as
the political theorist William Connolly (2005), to see in the United States a new form
of theocracy (that is, government by religion) premised on affinities between belief in
God and absolute faith in market capitalism. Religious institutions can sometimes also
form alliances of the sort traditionally seen in global politics. For example, at the United
Nations International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, the Vatican
(the authority of the Catholic pope) sought to make common cause with a number of
conservative Muslim states in opposing birth control and abortion. Globalization has
also promoted the emergence of ‘New Religious Movements’ that combine aspects of
various faith traditions while addressing concerns relating to environmentalism, social
justice, and the search for meaning and spirituality in a complex world (Clarke 2006).
Some of these groups, such as the Falung Gong movement in China, seek to challenge
the political status quo.
FIGURE 6.1
‘Do you believe in God?’
Artist: Bryan Bartholomew. CartoonStock ref.: bbrn51 www.CartoonStock.com
Chapter 21 examines the
approach of Christian
thinking to the question
of the treatment of
conquered peoples.
For more on capitalism
see Chapters 17 and 19.
http://www.CartoonStock.com
The emergence of the
state in Europe is traced
in Chapter 11, and the
formation and
dissolution of empires in
Chapter 16.
On the significance of
territory see Chapter 11.
112 PETER MANDAVILLE
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
ISLAMIC STATES AND MOVEMENTS
Much of the discussion about religion in global politics today focuses on the Muslim
world. This is not only because of the events of 11 September 2001 or the Danish
Cartoon episode mentioned above. Even for some time before these events, it was not
uncommon to find claims being made that Islam was problematic because in its belief
system religion and politics could not be separated – meaning that the Muslim world
was resistant to secularism and modernization (see below). Those advancing such ideas
– many of whom are scholars associated with the Orientalist worldview discussed below
– seemed to assume that Islam was something quite static and unchanging: a rigid set
of beliefs impervious to change or progress. When we look at the evolving relationship
between religion and politics throughout Islamic history, however, quite a different
perspective emerges. We find not only that Islam has been remarkably dynamic and
diverse as a belief system, but also that the motivations and patterns of political
behaviour displayed by Muslims are wholly amenable to explanation through
conventional themes and theories of political analysis.
History of the Islamic world
From humble beginnings in the western part of present day Saudi Arabia, the religion
of Islam expanded rapidly in the second half of the seventh century and soon
encompassed most of the Middle East, Persia, and North Africa. In subsequent eras,
Islam spread further east to South Asia and eventually to the furthest southeastern
reaches of the Asian continent into present day Malaysia and Indonesia. Various Islamic
dynasties rose and fell during the Middle Ages, and at their height these empires
represented the apex of human civilization, science and learning.
The most important Muslim power in the early modern period was the Ottoman
Empire (ca. 1300–1922). The Ottomans were the first Muslim rulers to interact with
European powers after the formation of the modern state system in the seventeenth
century, and were well integrated into the structures and processes of global politics.
In the late nineteenth century an anti-colonial movement known as Pan-Islam emerged.
The Pan-Islamists argued that Muslims were facing a similar condition of imperial
bondage at the hands of European colonial powers. Their solution was to encourage
the political unity of Muslims, invoking the centuries-old religious idea of the umma –
an Arabic term that refers to the world community of Muslim believers. The leaders of
this movement did not advocate returning to a conservative, literalist interpretation of
Islam, but rather emphasized the compatibility of Islam with modernity and science.
For them, the imperative was to reform Islam.
The Ottoman Empire found itself on the losing side of World War I and was
dissolved in its aftermath, with Britain and France gaining control of many of the
territories that had previously been under its control (such as Syria, Lebanon, Palestine,
Iraq and Egypt). This war also effectively marked the beginning of the end for the various
European empires, with some of them fragmenting into various new nation-states. In
the Anatolian peninsula, heartland of the former Ottoman lands, a new country, the
Turkish Republic, was founded in 1922 by Mustapha Kemal. ‘Kemalism’ – the ideology
FIGURE 6.2
Distribution of Muslim
population by country
and territory (only
countries with more than
one million Muslims are
shown). Pew Research
Center’s Forum on
Religion & Public Life,
‘Mapping the Global
Muslim Population’,
October 2009.
For an examination of the
implications of secularism
as enshrined in the
French Constitution see
Chapter 27.
deriving from the major project of sweeping political, economic, and cultural reform
he initiated – emphasized the ideals of Europeanization and secularism as the proper
way to ‘be modern’. To this day, Turkey enforces a strict separation between religion
and state; this is embodied in laws and policies that restrict the public role of religion
more strongly than in many countries we usually think of as secular (not concerned
with religion), such as France, the UK or the USA.
After World War II, many of the former Ottoman territories under British and
French control became independent states. Many of these were led by governments
that embraced various models of national secular politics – chief among them Egypt
under Gamal Abdel Nasser (r. 1952–71) who became the iconic leader of a regional
Arab Nationalist movement. This secular-nationalist model had quickly trumped the
emerging project of Pan-Islamism early in the twentieth century, and as the modernizing
drive of these new governments proceeded in countries such as Egypt, some sectors of
Egyptian society began to feel that the country risked becoming corrupted by foreign
ideologies.
Islamism: Islamic political movements
The early postcolonial period in the Middle East saw the consolidation of a political
ideology, commonly referred to as Islamism, that rejected the national-secular model
in the name of a vision of social order deriving from the direct application of Islam to
HOW DO RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AFFECT POLITICS? 113
the governance of modern states. In its totalizing, systematic approach, Islamism was
no different from other contemporary ideological counterparts such as socialism or
capitalist democracy. Islamism hence needs to be understood as expressing a distinctly
modernist approach to politics. Its supporters, known as Islamists – who were generally
highly educated members of the Muslim world’s new middle classes (doctors, engineers,
etc.) – saw in Islamism a way to embrace new institutions and technologies without
having to abandon their values and beliefs – in other words, it was a way to be modern
without having to become Western.
The most important social movement embodying this new vision of political Islam
was founded in Egypt by a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna. In 1928 he established
a group known as the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood sought to ensure a
continued role for religion in society and saw itself as an antidote to the Westernizing
and secularizing tendencies of the political elite. Many Islamist leaders also argued that
the doctrine of modern nationalism was incompatible with the teachings of Islam and
the ideal of the umma. While not a political party, the Brotherhood became implicated
in the evolving political landscape of Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s. Branches were
established throughout the Arab world, and similar groups founded in Pakistan (the
Jama’at-i Islami) and Turkey (the Refah Party). With its enormous popularity and rapid
inroads into the country’s new educated and middle classes, Nasser began to see the
Muslim Brotherhood as a political threat. Banned and driven underground from the
1950s, the movement became radicalized. This phase of its existence is commonly
associated with its chief thinker at the time, Sayyid Qutb. Qutb – whose ideas became
very influential on successive generations of radical Islamists (including groups such as
Al-Qaeda) – had become convinced, like a number of his contemporary Third World
activists, that it had become impossible to work within the existing political system to
ensure a political role for Islam. Revolutionary politics and armed struggle (jihad – from
the Arabic word for ‘strive’), in Qutb’s teaching, were required to achieve social change
in the Muslim world.
Qutb’s views appealed only to a fringe minority in the Muslim world and, in the
successive generation, to only a small fraction of Islamists. His views on jihad, for
example, were generally regarded as a highly unorthodox departure from traditional
understandings that emphasized the defensive nature of jihad. In other Muslim-majority
countries during this period, Islamist parties had evolved into opposition movements.
Banned from formal politics in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood instead began to build
a strong base of social support at the neighbourhood and municipal levels, establishing
social service and charity networks, and gaining control of all leading professional
associations and syndicates.
While these may seem to be highly localized developments, an important part of
what allowed the Islamists to build up this kind of support within Egypt’s civil societal
spaces was what we refer to today as globalization. As Anwar Al Sadat (president
of Egypt 1970–81) opened up Egypt’s economy to world markets and the country
undertook neoliberal economic reforms at the behest of institutions such as the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), the scale of state welfare and employment provision
was scaled back significantly. This created ‘gaps’ in the provision of basic services that
the Islamists were able to fill, gaining widespread support and popular legitimacy in the
process.
114 PETER MANDAVILLE
Other social movements
are discussed in
Chapters 4, 14 and 18.
Globalization and its
effects are discussed in
Chapter 17.
HOW DO RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AFFECT POLITICS? 115
Development and
modernization in states
in South Asia according
to principles of Western
modernity conflicts with
ideas of Islamic
modernity: Chapter 20.
Islamic states
In 1979, Iran experienced an ‘Islamic revolution’ led by religious scholars (chief among
them the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini) but carried out by a combination of religious and
secular social forces, including socialists and urban merchants. In its aftermath, the radical
wing of the clergy purged all non-religious political elites to establish a new Islamic
Republic of Iran and impose a conservative and literalist interpretation of Islamic law
(shari’ah) on a largely unsuspecting population. Iran thus joined the ranks of the world’s
‘Islamic states’, alongside two other countries, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Saudi Arabia
was founded between the two world wars as a theocratic monarchy (that is, one governed
by religious leaders) based on a political alliance between a princely family (the Sa’ud)
and a religious establishment seeking to purvey an indigenous form of Islam – highly
austere and puritanical – known as Wahhabism. With the discovery of vast oil wealth
under its deserts, Saudi Arabia was catapulted to a position of geopolitical prominence,
establishing a close alliance with the United States that has endured for many years.
The second Islamic state already in existence was Pakistan, established in 1947 at the
time of the post-colonial partition of India. Initially established as a homeland for the
Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, the exact nature and meaning of Pakistan’s status
as an Islamic state has constituted a chief source of political debate in the country for
decades. For some, Pakistan was an Islamic state in the same sense in which Israel is a
Jewish state – that is, as a national homeland for the members of a given religion rather
FIGURE 6.3
Ayatollah Khomeini
returns from exile
on 1 February 1979.
Photo: AP Photos
The Cold War and its
geopolitics are explained
in Chapter 26.
FIGURE 6.4
Women demonstrate: At Ramallah’s
Al Manara plaza, two schoolgirls take
part in a solidarity demonstration of
Palestinian women – the wives, mothers
and sisters of many killed in the first days
of the uprising. Photo: Ingeborg Moa
116 PETER MANDAVILLE
than a state whose political and legal systems are derived directly from religion. Others
in Pakistan argued that the government of Pakistan should be actively working to extend
the remit of shari’ah to all sectors of society.
Radical Islamist groups
The 1980s saw a significant increase in the global visibility of political Islam – the
ideology of Islamism and its adherents, known as Islamists – as it became increasingly
entwined with Cold War geopolitics. Several events and movements formed during
this decade help us understand the contemporary interface between Islam and global
politics. After the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, a number of volunteer
fighters from the Arab world travelled to Afghanistan to assist in repelling what they
interpreted as an atheist incursion into Muslim territories. These ‘Arab-Afghans’ were
important insofar as their experience during these years (1980–88) helped to crystallize
the ideological and geopolitical vision that would later define Al-Qaeda. Among this
group of supporters from the Middle East was Usama Bin Laden, a member of the
wealthiest commercial family in Saudi Arabia, who had renounced his family’s business
in the name of what he saw as a larger struggle against new forms of global, imperial
atheism (disbelief in the existence of God). The eventual withdrawal of Soviet forces
from Afghanistan was interpreted by Bin Laden as a victory and as evidence of Islam’s
ability to triumph over the world’s superpowers (at that time the USSR and the USA).
Why politics turns to
violence is discussed in
Chapter 22.
On the media in general,
see Chapter 8, and on
the uses of the Internet,
Chapter 9.
HOW DO RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AFFECT POLITICS? 117
Out of this experience was hence born Bin Laden’s vision, Al-Qaeda: an effort to
globalize the Afghan experience.
Two other important Islamist groups active today were also established during
this period. Although Hizbullah in Lebanon and HAMAS (an acronym for Harakat
al-Muqawwama al-Islamiyya – the Islamic Resistance Movement; the word also means
‘zeal’ in Arabic) in the Palestinian territories have been linked to Al-Qaeda in
contemporary discussions because of their militant tactics, such direct connections are
inaccurate and mask the fact that Al-Qaeda and groups such as Hizbullah and HAMAS
are motivated by and pursuing distinct political agendas. Chief among these differences
is the fact that HAMAS and Hizbullah are primarily movements of religious nationalism.
Hizbullah was established in the wake of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 with
an Islamist agenda limited to Lebanon. Likewise HAMAS, which emerged in the context
of the first Palestinian intifada (uprising, or ‘shaking off ’) in the late 1980s, has always
defined its political agenda in terms of Palestinian national liberation from Israeli
occupation and, subsequently, the establishment of an Islamic state in its territories.
While their political aims may be geared towards nationalist aspirations, both of
these groups have received significant support from neighbouring states and various
transnational fundraising networks. Hizbullah, for example, has strong ties to Iran and
Syria, while HAMAS – as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood – has been able to tap
into that group’s funding infrastructure in addition to receiving direct support from
various states in the Middle East. In recent years, the nature and role of both
organizations has become increasingly ambiguous. Hizbullah and HAMAS both have
at least three dimensions to their activities:
1 They provide basic social services such as education and healthcare to the
disenfranchised (that is, those deprived of the rights of citizenship) populations of
Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, ensuring strong measures of grassroots
support.
2 They have political bodies that compete in parliamentary elections alongside other
parties. Hizbullah has enjoyed strong representation in the Lebanese legislature
since the end of the civil war and HAMAS gained control of the Palestinian
Authority in 2006.
3 They maintain armed wings that permit them to employ violence when they find
it expedient to do so.
While not globally organized like Al-Qaeda, both HAMAS and Hizbullah factor
heavily in the global politics surrounding the Israel/Palestine conflict and Lebanon.
Hizbullah, for example, taps into the media infrastructure of contemporary globaliza –
tion via its own satellite television station Al-Manar (‘The Beacon’).
Thus, Al-Qaeda – for many, the group that most readily springs to mind today
when speaking of Islam and global politics – needs to be situated within a diverse and
multi-faceted ecology of world political Islam. Al-Qaeda was established in Afghanistan
by Arab-Afghan fighters following the decision by the Soviet Union to withdraw its
troops after a failed occupation effort. Emboldened by this seeming victory, Al-Qaeda
sought to export the Afghan model to other countries in which Muslims were
understood to be fighting foreign invasions or resisting imposed secularism. The move
BOX 6.3 SUNNI AND SHI’ITE ISLAM
The instability and violence experienced by Iraq in the years following the US invasion of 2003, much of
which occurred along sectarian lines, prompted discussion about the difference between two major
branches of Islam. The distinction between Sunnis and Shi’ites goes back to the time of the death of the
Prophet Muhammad and a debate over who should succeed him as the leader of the Muslim community.
One group argued that leadership should stay within the Prophet’s family and rallied around the candidacy
of Ali (hence Shi’i or ‘Partisans’ of Ali), Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law. Others favoured choosing a
leader from among the Prophet’s longest-serving and most trusted companions, and their view prevailed.
A distinctive Shi’ite political identity, however, did not emerge until several decades later when Ali’s family
was killed by the army of a rival noble clan seeking to consolidate its ruling position. In the ensuing
centuries, Shi’ites developed their own parallel institutions and schools of religious law. Indeed, in its
conventional usage the term Sunni refers to the orthodox schools of religious jurisprudence. As Shi’ites
faced persecution over the ensuing centuries, their identity came to be defined in part in terms of
dispossession and disenfranchisement. That said, Shi’ite leaders eventually established a number of
important empires, notably the Fatimids in Egypt (910–1171) and the Safavids in Persia (1501–1736). There
are different denominations within Shi’ism, the largest group being the ‘Twelvers’ – so named because
they recognize a line of twelve leaders in the imamate, a religio-political institution unique to Shi’ite Islam.
Shi’ites today constitute approximately 10–15 per cent of the world’s Muslim population, or 130–195
million. Over half are found in two countries, Iran (90 per cent of the population) and Iraq (around 60 per
cent of the population). Some analysts see potential for increased sectarian tensions between Sunnis and
Shi’ites in the wake of the political upheavals sweeping much of the Middle East (Nasr 2007).
Al-Qaeda is sometimes
seen as an entirely new
terrorist threat because it
is a network, but
contemporary Western
warfare also revolves
around the idea of
network: see Chapter 24.
to establish the group also represented a major shift away from the worldview of earlier
radical Islamists such as Qutb and the groups he inspired. For them, the goal was to
successfully attack and supplant the ‘near enemy’, that is the leaders of secular-national
regimes in the Middle East and other Muslim majority countries who were perceived
as the proxies of Western powers. Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda’s new emphasis on the ‘far
enemy’, inspired by the Afghan experience, emphasized instead the idea of directly
attacking what they understood to be the source of global imperialism and atheism –
namely, the United States. Al-Qaeda’s goals are the liberation of Muslim territories from
occupying infidel forces and the making of a world that is ‘safe for Islam’ – a world in
which a social political order based on shari’ah can be realized. Some within this camp
understand this to mean the re-establishment of centralized political authority in the
Muslim world via a new Caliphate, an institution that had existed since the seventh
century but had been abolished by Kemal at the end of the Ottoman Empire.
Al-Qaeda today is better thought of as a discourse of resistance whose material reality
is found in a transnational coordinating network highly skilled in forging temporary
operational ties with local/regional movements or individuals in order to engage in
violent activism. Far from representing a knee-jerk reaction to globalization, Al-Qaeda
appropriates the logistical and communicative infrastructures of globalization to pursue
the fulfilment of a narrative, a ‘story’, internalized by its leadership, about the necessity
118 PETER MANDAVILLE
The use of various forms
of ‘counter-terrorist’
violence in the
Afghanistan–Pakistan
region is discussed in
Chapter 23.
HOW DO RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AFFECT POLITICS? 119
and inevitability of Islam’s triumph over the infidel (unbelieving) forces of world power
– particularly the United States and its allies in Europe and elsewhere. Al-Qaeda as a
radical Islamist group is quite unorthodox even within the wider jihadist movement,
many of whose members did not agree with Bin Laden’s decision to carry out the
September 2001 attacks. While Al-Qaeda’s model of global Islamic politics has attracted
only a few thousand of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims as actual members, some in the
Muslim world are drawn to Bin Laden as a symbol of anti-Americanism (even while
they usually disagree with the methods he employed). Many today question the future
of Al-Qaeda as a terrorist organization, particularly in the wake of Bin Laden’s death
at the hands of the US military in 2011. Much of the current activity associated with
Islamic radicalism is to be found in settings such as Somalia, Yemen and Nigeria, far
divorced from Al-Qaeda’s purported headquarters in South Asia. And even where the
Al-Qaeda name continues to be used by some groups, it is not always clear that they
have much direct connection with what remains of Al-Qaeda’s core leadership.
In the wake of the attacks of 11 September 2001 (and subsequent bombings in
Europe and elsewhere attributed to Al-Qaeda and its affiliates), we have seen Muslim
identity around the world being increasingly regarded as a political question – particularly
among Muslim populations in Europe and North America. This has meant that debates
around Islam and Muslims have come to take on wider significance beyond the question
of terrorism and violence, reinvigorating discussions of whether ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’
are compatible in cultural or civilizational terms. We have seen aspects of this in events
such as the 2006 Danish Cartoon Affair and the controversy surrounding the pope’s
speech later that same year, in which the head of the Catholic church seemed to imply
that Islam was violent by nature and Muslims incapable of exercising reason.
Moderate Islamic politics
While much of the public debate and discussion of Islam is focused on Al-Qaeda and
the minority of extremist groups in the Muslim world, there are a number of other
important trends to recognize. Some scholars have claimed that the global jihad
movement has essentially failed and become re-domesticated (Gerges 2005), while
others argue that the Islamist movement as a whole has become so thoroughly integrated
into the norms and structures of global modernity as to represent the onset of ‘post-
Islamism’ (Roy 2004). Other analysts see in this something more akin to the
normalization of Islamist politics, meaning that we are beginning to see signs that the
old, rather constraining model of the Muslim Brotherhood no longer holds sway. Certain
observers suggest that the inclusion of Islamist parties in the political systems of
countries such as Jordan, Yemen, and Kuwait has had a moderating effect on the Islamist
movement (Schwedler 2006). This trend toward Muslim Democracy, as it has been
termed (Nasr 2005), can be seen in the victory of ‘semi’-Islamist parties such as the
Justice and Develop ment Party in Turkey (commonly known by its Turkish acronym
AKP). This is a new form of conservative politics comparable to the Christian Democratic
parties of Europe in which religion functions primarily as a reference point for public
morality rather than a direct source of legislation. In other words, these are Islamically-
based political parties which accept the legitimacy of the formally secular state and which
are willing to work pragmatically alongside other parties (secular liberals, socialists, etc.)
120 PETER MANDAVILLE
These uprisings, which
are often known as the
Arab Spring, are
discussed in Chapter 9.
to pursue shared goals. It is too early to know whether or not such a trend is taking
hold, but it is certainly noteworthy that ‘new Islamists’ (Baker 2006) of this sort have
sprung up in countries as diverse as Morocco, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and
Indonesia in recent years.
In 2011, a set of popular uprisings across North Africa and elsewhere in the Arab
world led to the downfall of several longstanding regimes, including those of the
presidents of Tunisia and Egypt. These two countries are particularly noteworthy
because of the intensity of the efforts undertaken by their previous governments to
regulate and suppress religious forces aspiring to enter politics. In both countries, long
oppressed Islamist movements – En-Nahda in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt – achieved great success at the ballot box in subsequent elections. In some settings,
ultraconservative Islamic groups known as Salafis entered politics for the first time and
enjoyed similar success. For some, this development represented evidence that Islamist
parties had, by and large, become moderate and mainstream political forces ready and
willing to accept the rules of democracy. Other observers – not to mention religious
minorities and advocates of secularism in some of these countries – questioned whether
the Islamists’ conceptions of democracy and rights were compatible with universalist
FIGURE 6.5
A general view of the first Egyptian parliament session after the revolution that ousted former president Hosni Mubarak in Cairo,
23 January 2012. Asmaa Waguih/Reuters. http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/23/10216029-egypt-parliament-opens-
for-the-first-time-following-the-fall-of-mubarak
understandings of, for example, international human rights. For their own part, these
groups quickly began to struggle under the pressure of converting themselves from
opposition movements into governing officials responsible for solving complex social
and economic problems in their respective societies – all the while still trying to preserve
some relationship to a religious framework.
So as we can see, it is impossible to provide a single, overall characterization of the
role of Islam in global politics. As a community of faith encompassing over a billion
people and spanning multiple continents, Islam is itself highly diverse, and so are the
ways in which it impacts and interacts with global politics. Multiple streams of Muslim
politics are clearly recognizable today, and one cannot easily determine which of them
predominates. Indeed, in many cases the ebb and flow of various trends is a function
of the prevailing global political climate. What has become clear, however, is that an
overview of recent history of political Islam helps to lay bare a set of presumptions about
both the relationship between religion and politics (i.e. the question of whether they
should be kept separate in a properly ‘modern’ world), and also the extent to which
religion helps us to understand the supposed motivation of political players.
GENERAL RESPONSES
DO RELIGION AND POLITICS MIX?
The idea of the interface or mixing of religion and politics being problematic and
potentially dangerous is a byproduct of the rise of secularism, often regarded as one of
the hallmarks of modern society. But where did the assumptions and expectations
associated with secularism come from, and how have they come to play such an
important role in mediating our understanding of how (and whether) religion matters
in politics? There is an almost total absence of references to religion in books about
global politics prior to the 1990s. It is as if scholars were blind to religion as a force in
global affairs, or did not find it to be helpful in explaining international politics.
Secularism
In formal political terms, secularism refers to the idea of a separation between the
institutions of church and state. Its origins are to be found in the rise of European
modernity and the establishment of the sovereign state. Aspects of the discourse on
secularism are, however, to be found throughout the historical record and within the
core texts of world religions such as Christianity and Islam. In the Christian tradition,
for example, the famous passage of the Bible about rendering ‘unto God what is God’s
and unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar’ is generally regarded as acknowledging
a categorical distinction between worldly, political power and the transcendental, other-
worldly mandate of religious authority. In the Islamic tradition, while there is no formal
theological division between religion and politics, Islamic history is replete with the rise
and fall of empires whose day-to-day affairs seemed to reflect a similar distinction in the
minds of rulers.
The modern history of secularism is associated with two important developments
in European intellectual and political history: the philosophical Enlightenment, and the
birth of modern political sovereignty.
HOW DO RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AFFECT POLITICS? 121
For a discussion of
human rights and the
French headscarf ban,
see Chapter 27.
For a discussion of how
the separation between
religion and politics has
played out historically in
France, see Chapter 27.
122 PETER MANDAVILLE
This ‘rational, thinking
subject’ is modelled on
what is considered to be
male, and therefore
women and supposedly
feminine qualities have
often been considered
less significant or even
entirely excluded. See
Chapters 5 and 17.
The Enlightenment was associated with a shift in how people thought about the
origins and status of knowledge. Where truth was previously understood to derive from
religion and faith, the Enlightenment – and modernity more generally – entailed a shift
to the idea that truth and knowledge could be determined through the effort of human
reason. Furthermore, the human condition was no longer seen as subject to divine
providence. Rather, human beings were now understood to possess the capacity to
change the world around them. One aspect of secularism, then, is a shift away from
relying on religious belief to provide knowledge and understanding of the world, and
the rise of a belief in the ability of the autonomous, rational, thinking subject to
comprehend the world and to change it for the better.
BOX 6.4 KEY ENLIGHTENMENT THINKERS
Voltaire (1694–1778): a leading French critic of organized religion who
emphasized the power of human reason and agency in shaping society.
David Hume (1711–76): a Scottish philosopher who argued that knowledge and
understanding of the world is something that derives from the human senses –
an approach known as empiricism – rather than from divine sources.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804): one of the leading German philosophers of the
Enlightenment whose work remains highly influential today. Kant exhorted people
to ‘dare to know’. He used the Latin phrase for this: sapere aude.
John Locke (1632–1704): an English thinker whose ideas on liberty, the individual,
and property were central to the development of political modernism.
Adam Smith (1723–90): a Scottish economist and moral philosopher generally
regarded as the leading theorist – in his book The Wealth of Nations – of modern
capitalism.
This new orientation gave rise to the attitudes and methods that underpin the
modern natural sciences, many of which were later reproduced in an effort to create
social science. Eventually, some scholars began to associate the advent of modernity
with an evolutionary model of human development. According to this model, societies
that have undergone modernization are further along in terms of developmental
progress than those societies characterized by the persistence of traditional beliefs and
practices, such as religion (Lerner 1958). Modernization is generally understood as a
process whereby societies ‘evolve’ according to the trajectory of the Western political
econ omy from about the sixteenth century – meaning that they adopt capitalism,
industrialization, and, increasingly today, also political liberalism and democracy.
The political-institutional understanding of secularism is associated with the
emergence of modern sovereign states in Europe, a development commonly dated to
The use of statistics to
analyse and explain the
social world is one such
phenomenon: see
Chapter 19 for some of
the problems with this.
the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. After the Wars of Religion in the preceding century,
it was agreed among rulers that religion should be kept separate from matters of state.
This was to ensure that the legitimacy of the sovereign would remain free from attempts
by church authorities to interfere in politics, and produced a situation in which many
found themselves subject to official state religions. The rise of liberalism in political
thought – in large measure a reaction against this idea – soon produced the form of
government known as republicanism. In a modern republic, the location of sovereignty
and the responsibility to govern are understood to shift from being the preserve of
monarchs to being the right of the peoples so governed – hence res (‘concern’) publicus
(‘of the people’). In the republican model, public affairs are to be regulated by the rule
of law, popularly legislated, rather than by the whim of monarchs or the faith-based
‘irrationality’ of religion. As part of this shift away from official religions of state, religion
came to be seen as a private matter – that is, a sphere of activity belonging to the realm
of the individual and whatever voluntary associations might arise between consenting
individuals outside the influence and determination of the state. But we should also
note that the supposedly ‘secular’ character of a given society does not always tell the
whole story. Religion is a powerful social force and even many countries that formally
practice secularism still bear strong traces of religion in their legal and ethical systems.
One clear example of this can be seen in the laws that govern modern warfare.
Contemporary notions of ‘just war’ in the West, for example, are strongly informed by
early Christian discussions of morality and armed conflict.
In recent years, a number of interventions by scholars coupled with political events
in the world have led to a reconsideration of some of the conventional thinking about
secularism and place of religion in the world today. Some sociologists of religion for
whom a general trend towards greater secularization in the modern world was once
taken for granted have since backed off from that position (Berger 1999). Others have
argued that in fact we are seeing a greater public role for religion around the world
(Casanova 1994), with some connecting this to an increased search for meaning and
purpose in a highly complex, globalizing world (Laidi 1998). Some, such as William
Connolly (1999), warn of the dangers associated with excluding religious sources of
morality from public debate. Scholars of non-Western societies have also been critical
of the secularization thesis, but in a different way. For them, it is not so much that the
supposed trend towards secularism has been reversed, but that it was never an appropriate
account of the world in the first place. Writers such as Talal Asad (1993) have argued
that the very idea of religion and politics as wholly distinct and separate spheres is itself
a Eurocentric proposition, reflecting the particular experience of modernity as it evolved
in Europe and North America. For him, it is therefore inappropriate to try and apply
this schema as a universal explanation of the relationship of religion and politics. Several
Indian political theorists have argued along similar lines that the notion of secularism
is inappropriate for understanding the relationship between religious communities and
national society in that country (Chatterjee 1998; Nandy 1995).
Religion in the social sciences
One well-known social science account of international affairs is Samuel Huntington’s
‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis, in which ‘civilizational’ blocs pursue security and interests
HOW DO RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AFFECT POLITICS? 123
The emergence of states
in Europe is traced in
Chapter 11, which also
explains the Peace of
Westphalia. Chapter 7
discusses secular forms
of authority. Chapter 27
explores the implications
of the inscription of a
particular form of
secularism known as
laicité in the French
Constitution.
Liberalism and
republicanism are
different ‘pictures’ of
political space in the
sense explained in
Chapter 2.
Being confined to the
private realm means to
be excluded from the
public sphere where
decisions are made
about who gets which
resources. This is why
feminists have
challenged the boundary
between private and
public. See Chapter 5.
These early Christian
discussions are covered
in Chapter 21.
For a discussion of
British colonialism in
India see Chapter 16.
BOX 6.5 HUNTINGTON’S ‘CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS’
Samuel Huntington’s thesis first appeared in the influential policy journal Foreign Affairs in 1993, and
several years later in book form as The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1998).
Huntington’s book was about the role of culture and religion in world politics. He argues that in the post-
Cold War world, cultural blocs – which he labels ‘civilizations’ – will become the major protagonists of
global affairs. ‘The fault lines of civilizations’, he says, ‘will be the battle lines of the future’. In
Huntington’s view, each civilization expresses a unique worldview and set of values. As contact between
these cultural or symbolic systems intensifies in the face of global pressure to integrate economies,
political communities, and cultures, the incompatibility of different civilizations leads to increased tension
and eventually actual conflict between them. What are the civilizations he is talking about? For
Huntington, many of the divisions between civilizations are religious in nature. His Western civilization is
largely composed of the Protestant and Catholic Christian majority nations (except Latin America, a sort of
Western sub-civilization according to Huntington). Others in his list include the Muslim world, the
Orthodox Christian world, the Hindu world, and the Buddhist world. To these can be added three others,
the Sinic world (covering China and areas of Southeast Asia), Japanese civilization and also Sub-Saharan
Africa, whose status Huntington leaves unclear.
Huntington paints a
picture of the world that
seems to provide an easy
explanation for recent
terrorism and the
responses to it. But, as
Chapter 2 shows, such
pictures do not simply
enable us to see what is
already there: they make
the world we see. They
also make invisible what
does not fit into the
picture.
defined in terms of cultural values. Huntington also provides us with a rigid under –
standing of culture with little space to account for the considerable diversity and nuance
that exists within and between his civilizations.
Claims about civilizations and religions as the new primary blocs in world
politics have been subject to considerable critique (Hall and Jackson 2007; Huntington
1996) in recent years. Likewise the popularity of Huntington’s thesis has ebbed and
flowed, with the attacks of 11 September 2001 seeming for some to give credence to
the idea of a civilizational struggle between Islam and the West. Numerous criticisms
have been levelled against Huntington’s thesis. His concept of civilization is so large
and heavily abstracted that it is difficult to map it on to any kind of social reality – in
other words, it is difficult to think of civilization in terms of lived experience. The blocs
that Huntington identifies as civilizations are, in some cases, so enormously diverse
that it becomes nearly impossible to treat them analytically as a single cultural unit.
Further more, Huntington’s thesis operates with a very static and stultifying concep-
tion of culture. In order to make the argument about civilizational difference as a source
of conflict, he is forced to reduce highly complex and fluid belief systems to rather
stagnant and essentialized ideal types that, again, bear little resemblance to social reality.
It is difficult to see the dynamic and intersubjective qualities that define culture in
Huntington’s reified (that is, in a way that makes the abstract concept appear real)
civilizations. In terms of our discussion so far, Huntington’s argument is important
to examine critically because of the way in which it ends up having to reduce com-
plex, multifaceted human subjects to their religious identities in order to maintain its
own logic.
124 PETER MANDAVILLE
Muslim peoples were often represented as exotic, overly-sensualized, lazy or violent as
opposed to rational, orderly, and hard-working – all characteristics, supposedly, of
Western modernity. Said argues that this is something more than just subjective bias,
however. He suggests that this system of cultural representation, which he terms
Orientalism, was a core component of the exercise of colonial power. In other words,
Said argued that one of the ways in which the West constituted its own identity and
legitimized its dominance was to construct the non-Western world – the object of its
imperial geopolitics – as its absolute other. This helped to justify and naturalize the
hierarchies of power between various (culturally-defined) world regions, and eventually
to institutionalize the European sovereign state model as a global system.
For Said, culture is not simply one factor in understanding global politics, but a
core terrain upon which it plays out: global politics, on this reading, is culture. Some
scholars have argued that Said overstates his case and ignores reciprocal processes of
Western objectification and representation by non-Western peoples (Buruma and
Margalit 2004), while others suggest that Said’s theory continues to hold some merit
in terms of understanding the underlying logic not only of Huntington’s neo-Orientalist
vision, but also central thrust of US foreign policy in the aftermath of the Cold War
(Ó Tuathail 1996).
Writers such as Tariq Ali have engaged this issue through the theme of funda –
mentalism. The term is important for us to consider since it is generally associated with
religion, and particularly with Islam. A term that originally came into usage to describe
certain forms of American Christianity in the nineteenth century, ‘fundamentalism’
emerged as a common designation of danger in reference to various Islamist movements
from the 1980s. Some critics have dis missed its utility simply because it does not provide
any analytical value (Pieterse 1994). They argue that by emphasizing one’s adherence
to the ‘fundamentals’ of a given religion does not tell us much about the nature and
behaviours associ ated with a given religious identity. For example, one might easily
follow the fundamental beliefs of Islam and never even consider becoming involved with
political movements or violent groups. Ali’s (2003) intervention in this debate is
interesting because he seeks to decouple the term fundamentalism from an exclusively
religious connotation and to associate it instead with any form of thought or ideology
that is uncompromising in its worldview and which represents itself as the sole source
of truth or the only solution to global problems. Viewed in this way it becomes possible
to recognize today the existence in global politics of various kinds of fundamentalism,
some of which are not religious in nature. For example, some times the assumptions
and practices associated with the neoliberal economic policies that underpin organiza –
tions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization take
on the aura of ‘religion’ when, in the absence of no strong proof of their remedy, global
policymakers place considerable faith in these approaches as a route to salvation from
global poverty.
Ali’s depiction of fundamentalism takes a different direction, however. He tries to
show that in the wake of the attacks of 11 September 2001, there emerged a curious
form of parallel fundamentalism that can been seen through a comparison of the
discourses and worldviews contained in the rhetoric of US president George W. Bush
and the statements of Al-Qaeda leader Usama Bin Laden. Each of these global political
actors represented themselves as the guardians and purveyors of absolute moralities. Bin
126 PETER MANDAVILLE
These colonial
hierarchies of power
continue to have
significant effects: see
Chapters 15, 16 and 20.
There is evidence that
neoliberal economic
policies have changed
the way we view poverty
but are unable to end
poverty as they claim to.
See Chapter 20.
HOW DO RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AFFECT POLITICS? 127
It is interesting to
compare the discussion
of the role of ‘language
games’ in Chapter 2
with the discussion of
‘ideology’ here.
Laden promised to work to establish a world system based on Islamic law, while the
subsequent policy choices of the Bush administration seemed to suggest that it was
driven by a worldview (commonly described as neo-conservative) that sought to remake
the world in its image. In this sense, the 2003 war with Iraq can be interpreted as an
effort by the United States to transplant its own model of good governance (liberal
democratic, capitalist) to the heart of the Middle East. This way Bush and Bin Laden
both revealed themselves to be pursuing projects of absolute and universalizing morality
– much in the vein of religion even where religion was not explicitly invoked. Neo –
conservatism is an example of ideology – that is, a template of meaning making with a
singular horizon that allows people to understand the world in ways that lead to certain,
unavoidable conclusions about what must be done in response to the circumstances of
the world. Ideology not only mediates how we perceive the world around us, but also
prescribes all-encompassing solutions for dealing with the world it hands us (Eagleton
1991). It hence becomes possible to draw strong parallels between religion and
ideology, rather than treating religion as something entirely unique. Many, however,
would reject this comparison on the grounds that religion deals with a fundamentally
different and foundational order of questions about the very condition, sources and
meaning of existence.
This debate is all the more important to bear in mind due to the tendency on
the part of some analysts of global politics to privilege religious affiliations as if they
are forms of identity that trump all others. We see this in commonplace practices such
as the use of the term ‘Muslim world’ or when writers refer to large categories such as
‘Muslims in Europe’. While such terminology is often merely trying to be descriptive,
FIGURE 6.7
President Bush dressed as Bin Laden
on the cover of Tariq Ali’s The Clash of
Fundamentalisms. Verso
For a discussion of other
sorts of identity and the
complications involved
in thinking about identity
see Chapters 5, 12 and
13, and, for another
discussion of religious
identity, Chapter 27.
See Chapter 13 for a
picture of the 2006 Paris
riots and a discussion of
how they related to the
question of the nation;
see Chapter 27 for a
discussions of Muslims
in France.
Do you consider that
your political worldview
is informed by religion?
128 PETER MANDAVILLE
it becomes problematic when it begins to ascribe behaviours to religion – that is, when
we begin to make assumptions that because a country happens to be part of something
called the Muslim world, or because someone happens to be Muslim, then they will
necessarily think or act in a certain way. This is, in essence, a point about the danger
of projecting religiousness onto people who hold multiple identities and whose
considerations and decisions as regards their political behaviour cannot be reduced to
religion. For example, it can be argued that in many cases the views and motivations
of people in the so-called Muslim world can just as easily, if not more accurately, be
understood in relation to the problems and concerns of Third World or developing
world identities – that is, in relation to issues of global inequality in socioeconomic terms,
and politically in terms of the asymmetry of power between countries in the global North
and the global South. Further complicating the analysis is the fact that even where
religious language is deployed to mobilize political identity, the root causes of the
antagonism underpinning these claims are sometimes better found in other domains
(e.g. the political disenfranchisement of a minority group). Projecting religious identities
onto large groups can even mask the true sources of political discontent in some cases.
For example, during the Paris riots of 2006, it was not uncommon to find the
participants in these riots being described as ‘Muslim protesters’ even though none of
their claims was couched in terms of Islam. It would have been more accurate in that
case to approach the issue in terms of the mobilized discontent of unemployed
immigrants.
Also of great importance is the need to recognize the inevitability of great diversity
within the various traditions of world religion. Christianity, Judaism and Islam all con-
tain within them multiple currents, denominations, and sects, and all of them vary
considerably depending on where in geographical and cultural terms they are practised.
In the Muslim world there is certainly a highly visible yet numerically very small radical
fringe prepared to use violence to subvert the current world order. There are many more
Muslims, global public opinion surveys suggest (Pew 2005), committed to an inter –
pretation of Islam that is in harmony with values of tolerance, pluralism and democracy.
A majority of the world’s Muslims are not affiliated with any kind of political movement
nor understand their religion as a system of beliefs that requires that one behave
politically in any particular way. This fact strengthens the point made above about the
need to look beyond religion to understand the political identities and worldviews of
peoples that we often too easily categorize in terms of their religion.
Finally, we need to resist the idea that religious identities or political claims framed
in terms of religion are somehow beyond the comprehension of what we otherwise
regard as political reason. Conflicting parties in Sri Lanka’s armed dispute whose
primary desires can be understood in relation to social stability and personal security,
for example, may appeal to aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism that emphasize peace.
In countries such as Turkey and Indonesia, parties whose political platform is defined
in terms of eliminating government corruption, will often speak of Islam as the source
of their public morality without having any interest in setting up Islamic states.
Furthermore, we can even see evidence today of religious and secular parties forming
coalitions in support of shared goals. For example, within the broad Global Justice and
‘alter-mondialisation’ movements today, one can find socialists, environmentalists, and
religious parties of various denominations trying to achieve social justice (a key value
Some forms of
environmentalism are
interesting here because
they do not place the
human at the centre:
see Chapters 3 and 4.
HOW DO RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AFFECT POLITICS? 129
in Islam and certain interpretations of Christianity) and preserve the planet. While their
languages may differ – e.g. ‘Mother Earth’ vs. the human relationship with the planet
as a sacred covenant – all of these people are committed to a common vision of partici –
pation and co-operation in world affairs. Viewing religion in this regard allows us to
identify it as just one among many similar ideational sources at play in global politics.
Rather than viewing and treating religion as a space of exception in global politics – as
a unique force beyond reason and comprehension – we are better off treating it as one
of many terrains and languages through which the global political is engaged. Islam,
for example, needs always to be understood in relation to Muslims – that is, to the people
who profess its belief and interpret its meaning in terms of their life experience and
circumstances. Only by contextualizing religion in this way, in terms of lived experience,
can we understand how and where it intersects with the global political.
CONCLUSION
The question of religion in global politics is nothing if not highly complex. In addressing
the framing question with which we opened the discussion, ‘Does religion matter in
global politics?’ it would seem that we need to answer this in the affirmative, but with
certain very important qualifications. More specifically, three points bear drawing out
by way of summary and conclusion: (1) the importance of understanding when and
how to grant importance to religion in seeking to understand global politics – in other
words, recognizing that religion is present in a given global political situation does not
mean that that situation should be read exclusively or even primarily in terms of religion;
(2) the importance of recognizing the presence of enormous diversity within world
religions and the dangers entailed in treating them as monoliths; and (3) the fact that
religious identities and world political claims framed in terms of religion are not
necessarily categorically distinct or unconnected from other kinds of political and
ideological claims. Indeed, as several examples today can show, these sorts of claims are
often motivated by a desire on the part of both the ‘religious’ and the ‘non-religious’
to achieve similar goals even where the languages they use may differ.
FURTHER READING
Haynes, Jeff (1998) Religion in Global Politics, Harlow: Longman.
A survey of key religious trends in all major world regions with an emphasis on the dynamic
and increasingly interdependent relationship between them.
Jenkins, Phil (2006) The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South, New
York: Oxford University Press.
An analysis of the phenomenal growth of Pentecostal Christianity in Africa and other parts
of the developing world in recent years.
Juergensmeyer, Mark (1994) The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular
State, Berkeley: University of California Press; (2003) Terror in the Mind of God: The Global
Rise of Religious Violence, Berkeley: University of California Press; and (2006) The Oxford
Handbook of Global Religions, New York: Oxford University Press.
A leading sociologist reflects on the relationship between religion, conflict and nation-states
in the global era across a broad range of faith traditions.
Kurtz, Lester (2006) Gods in the Global Village, 2nd edn, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Examines the impact of globalization on how people understand the role of religion and the
structure of its organization.
Mandaville, Peter (2007) Global Political Islam, London: Routledge.
A broad overview of the history and evolution of Muslim politics with a particular focus on
the interface between globalization and political Islam.
WEBSITES
BeliefNet, http://www.beliefnet.com
The leading website on global religions.
Islam Online, http://www.islamonline.net
A portal for Muslim issues and information. The site closely associated with Yusuf al-Qaradawi,
a leading Islamic scholar-jurist with a global audience. Represents the perspective of
mainstream conservative Islamic orthodoxy.
Muslim Wakeup! http://www.muslimwakeup.com
A self-described ‘progressive’ Muslim site, featuring articles dealing with various social issues
such as the relationship between Islam and feminism. An interesting contrast to Islam Online.
The ISIM Review, http://www.isim.nl
A forum courtesy of the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World in the
Netherlands, this publication frequently features short articles on the Muslim world with a
strong global politics focus.
IslamiCity, http://www.islamicity.com
One of the major Islamic portal websites, with a variety of articles on contemporary Muslim
issues; search engines for Islamic textual sources; and information on Muslim media and local
services (mainly in the USA).
REFERENCES
Ali, Tariq (2003) The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity, London: Verso.
Althusser, Louis (2001) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, new edn, New York: Monthly
Review Press.
Asad, Talal (1993) Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and
Islam, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Baker, Raymond (2006) Islam Without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Berger, Peter (ed.) (1999) The Desecularization of the World: The Resurgence of Religion in World
Politics, Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Buruma, Ian and Avishai Margalit (2004) Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies,
London: Penguin.
Casanova, Jose (1994) Public Religions in the Modern World, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chatterjee, Partha (1998) ‘Secularism and Toleration’, in Rajeev Bhargav (ed.), Secularism and
Its Critics, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Clarke, Peter (2006) New Religious Movement in Global Perspective: A Study of Religious Change
in the Modern World, London: Routledge.
Connolly, William E. (1999) Why I Am Not a Secularist, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
––––(2005) ‘The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine’, Political Theory 33, 6: 869–86.
Darby, Philip (1998) The Fiction of Imperialism: Reading Between International Relations and
Postcolonialism, London: Cassell.
130 PETER MANDAVILLE
http://www.beliefnet.com
http://www.islamonline.net
http://www.muslimwakeup.com
http://www.isim.nl
http://www.islamicity.com
HOW DO RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AFFECT POLITICS? 131
Der Derian, James and Michael Shapiro (eds) (1989) International/Intertextual Relations:
Postmodern Readings of World Politics, Lexington, MA: Lexington Press.
Doty, Roxanne Lynn (1996) Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North–South
Relations, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Eagleton, Terry (1991) Ideology: An Introduction, London: Verso.
Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Culture, New York: Basic Books.
Gerges, Fawaz (2005) The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Hall, Martin and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson (eds) (2007) Civilizational Identity: The Production
and Reproduction of ‘Civilizations’ in International Relations, New York: Palgrave.
Huntington, Samuel (ed.) (1996) The Clash of Civilizations? The Debate, New York: Council on
Foreign Relations.
––––(1998) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Laidi, Zaki (1998) A World Without Meaning: The Crisis of Meaning in International Politics,
London: Routledge.
Lerner, Daniel (1958) The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, Glencoe,
IL: The Free Press.
Lindbeck, George (1984) The Nature of Doctrine, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
Nandy, Ashis (1995) ‘An Anti-Secularist Manifesto’, India International Quarterly 22, 1: 35–64.
Nasr, Vali (2005) ‘The Rise of Muslim Democracy’, Journal of Democracy 16, 2: 13–27.
––––(2007) The Shia Revival, New York: W. W. Norton.
Ó Tuathail, Geraóid (1996) Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Pew Global Attitudes Project (2005) Islamic Extremism: Common Concern for Muslim and Western
Publics, Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
Pieterse, Jan Nederveen (1994) ‘Fundamentalism Discourses: Enemy Images’, Women Against
Fundamentalism Journal, 5: 2–6.
Roy, Olivier (2004) Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books.
Schwedler, Jillian (2006) Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
http://www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
THE QUESTION
OBEDIENCE, RESISTANCE AND FORCE
On the whole we seem to be fairly obedient creatures. We go from day to day doing
mostly – not always, of course – what is expected of us. We usually respect conventions
about property and ownership, we are polite and well-mannered to our friends as a
general rule, and we tend to do as we are told – by our boss, the traffic warden, the
doctor, the tax inspector and so on. Why do we obey people like this? Is it because we
have to? Well, clearly we risk losing our job or falling foul of the law if we don’t. But
do we make this calculation every time, or do we just do what is expected because that
is easiest? Or are we obeying some internal voice – our conscience – or, if we are religious,
the precepts of our faith?
What happens if we disagree with the way things are organised – if, for example,
it has been decided that the government is going to build new nuclear power plants,
and that part of the money we pay in taxes will go towards this? If we disagree with
this decision, what do we do? Most of us accept that the government is entitled to make
such decisions, even if we think they are doing something very unwise, even criminal,
CHAPTER 7
Why do we obey?
Jenny Edkins
■ The question
OBEDIENCE, RESISTANCE AND FORCE
■ Illustrative example
THE REVOLUTIONS OF 1989
■ General responses
AUTHORITY AND LEGITIMACY
■ Broader issues
THINKING ABOUT POWER
■ CONCLUSION
WHY DO WE OBEY? 133
Chapter 28 discusses
some of the problems
with the idea of changing
the world.
Ways in which people
organise to campaign for
change are discussed in
many of the chapters of
this book – for example
Chapters 4 (environ –
mental movements), 5
(feminism); 6 (religious
movements); 9 (web
campaigns); 10
(immigration protests);
14 (direct democracy
movements).
and we do nothing: we pay our taxes and let them get on with it. Some of us maybe
don’t: we organise a demonstration, we challenge the decision, we withhold our taxes.
We are disobedient, usually in a non-violent sort of way, called ‘civil disobedience’ –
we disobey, but we are civil about it. And usually, of course, our action makes no
difference: the decision we disagree with doesn’t change.
Of course, if we live in a democracy, we get the chance every so often to express
our disagreement with the decisions of a particular government by voting them out of
office. This really does not give us much of a voice in what goes on, but if we want to
be more involved, we have various routes open to us. We could stand for election
ourselves, become a political activist and help formulate party policy, lobby the
government, perhaps through joining or working for a cam paigning organisation. To
take any of these routes, we would have to follow a series of conventions and jump a
number of hurdles, all of which rely on us doing what’s expected in a particular context.
At this point it is beginning to seem as though the whole of social and political existence
involves ‘doing what’s expected’. Even if we decide that the whole system of government
that we live under is so appalling that we should work to change it, we still have to
organise politically – even revolutions can demand some obedience along the way,
although ultimately major dis-obedience, even violent disobedience, may be what is
planned.
In many respects, it is good to be able to do what is expected – to know what that
is without giving it too much thought, and to just do it. Fairly automatic obedience
can be much easier than trying to work out what on earth we are supposed to do in a
totally unfamiliar or chaotic situation. It is good to have a framework of conventions
FIGURE 7.1
‘I am going to close my eyes’. Artist: Aaron Bacall.
CartoonStock ref.: aba0400. www.CartoonStock.com
http://www.CartoonStock.com
134 JENNY EDKINS
Milgram’s experiment is
discussed in Chapter 22.
Does this experiment
show that there is
something called
‘human nature’? If we
believe that it does, do
the answers to political
questions in fact lie in
psychology? Or not?
Chapter 27 discusses
the notion of ‘human’
implied in human rights.
and rules in place, even though some of them may not be ideal, and for there to be
someone else, in a leadership position, who is responsible for dealing with any crises
that may come along. We know where we are and who we are in such a case. When we
come across a situation where there is nothing to guide us – when a major accident
happens, when our life changes suddenly – we can find ourselves having to completely
rethink what to do, from scratch.
What happens when we are asked to do something that we really think we shouldn’t
be doing – if we are asked to injure someone, for example. This isn’t something that
seems to happen under normal circumstances to most of us, but if, as we have seen, we
are generally obedient creatures, we might want to think about what would happen if,
for example, someone whose authority we respected, or someone who was in a position
to enforce their authority, told us that it was necessary for us to injure someone. A
famous experiment by Stanley Milgram seems to show that people in general are willing
to cause fairly severe injuries to others if told to do so by someone in a position of
authority – in Milgram’s case, someone wearing a white coat. There are of course many
examples where people are ordered to do something that normally they might consider
they shouldn’t do: soldiers who kill in combat, for example. There are cases that perhaps
seem less extreme too, for example when civilians in Nazi Germany carried on with
mundane administrative tasks even though they knew or suspected that what they were
doing was part of the bureaucracy of killing (Baumann 1991; Lanzmann 1995).
BOX 7.1 HUMAN NATURE
Quite often in debates about global politics someone will claim that it all comes down to human nature: in
other words that what we think will happen in a particular situation depends on what we think that
humans are, essentially, quite apart from any social, political or cultural context. Those that claim this
often suggest that we should look to psychology to provide the answer: for example, to experiments like
the Milgram experiment, which seems to tell us that people are quite happy to obey an authority figure,
whatever that figure asks them to do.
However, there are many people who would question the idea that there is something called human
nature. They would point to the problems with the way using the idea of the essential nature of something
acts as a trump card: it halts the argument. And it is almost impossible to prove or disprove. If someone
acts in a way that seems contrary to an essential human nature their action can be discounted as an
exception, or as caused by some intervening factor. And vice versa.
Another problem with the idea of human nature is that it assumes that we know what a human being
is – we know who counts as human and who doesn’t. However, this distinction is more problematic (and
political) than it appears at first glance. Philosophers over the ages have tried to specify what
distinguishes human beings from animals, for example, but there is no agreement to be found. And who
counts as human changes over time. There was a time when women were not considered fully human.
The difficulties become apparent when we think of contemporary limit cases – the foetus, for example, or
a person who shows no evidence of brain activity. At what point does someone become or cease to be a
human being?
How do those in authority enforce their demand that we obey? How do they make
us obey if we don’t want to? Usually, they persuade us that we should, first of all: if we
are tempted to drink and drive, then they show us advertisements designed to bring
home the damage we might do as a result, or impose a fine if they catch us. But if
persuasion doesn’t work, we move to the next stage: they will forcibly stop us from
driving, ultimately by confining us behind prison bars. ‘They’, the agents of the
government, are entitled to use force, in the form of the armed forces or the police, to
guarantee obedience. Of course, this is not a carte blanche: when the Ohio National
Guard shot dead four student demon strators and injured others during an anti-Vietnam
War protest at Kent State University in 1970, this was widely regarded as an unreason –
able, and hence illegitimate, use of force by the state government. And in the Arab
Spring in 2011, the actions of governments in North Africa and the Middle East who
used force against their own citizens who were demonstrating for change were widely
condemned.
Although shooting fellow citizens who are demonstrating peacefully is not
something we would expect our armed forces to do, the fact that it could happen, and
does occasionally, must be at the back of our minds when considering any action that
challenges the government. If we are seriously intending to overthrow a government,
then we need to think of the possibility that the government will use force to resist this
challenge to its authority. Indeed, often a challenge to the government that seeks to
replace it with another political order will take the form of an armed rebellion, in
anticipation of the armed response.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
THE REVOLUTIONS OF 1989
To understand more about the questions of authority and obedience that we’ve raised,
let’s look at some instances where a political order was challenged, people were
disobedient, and authority, at least temporarily, collapsed. It may seem strange to
examine examples where people do not obey in order to address the question ‘Why do
we obey?’, but sometimes, indeed quite often, looking at cases when something doesn’t
happen can help us understand what is going on when it does. We will not be looking
here at violent revolutions, where guerrillas or insurgents (as armed resistance
movements against the authorities tend to be called) confronted the armed forces of
the state. Instead we focus on examples where the government was taken on or defied
by its own unarmed citizens. What happens when a number of people stand up and
refuse to obey? We will be exploring in some detail what people who were involved in
one way or another in events of this type thought and did. Although the most well-
known recent example is the Arab Spring, the successful outcomes of the demonstrations
in some cases, and the violent repression that they provoked in others, are too recent
to enable us to make a judgement, or to examine closely and in detail what happened.
Another very recent example where civil disobedience and protest took new and
interesting forms is the global Occupy movement. Both Occupy and the Arab Spring
draw on older ideas of the occupation of public space with tents and the assembling or
movement of large numbers of people, ideas which we will see in action in the two
cases we examine below.
WHY DO WE OBEY? 135
The events of the Arab
Spring are discussed in
Chapter 9 and the
Occupy movement in
Chapters 18 and 28.
What exactly we mean
by the state is discussed
further in Chapter 11.
A lot of thinking about
politics forgets that the
state is not a ‘black box’
but made up of various
different people and
organisations.
Chinese politics is
discussed in Chapter 12.
136 JENNY EDKINS
We will talk particularly about examples of acts of disobedience, performed in some
cases by an individual person, and in others by large gatherings of people. In each case
we need to think about why and to what extent these acts of disobedience succeeded,
and whether, ultimately, they failed. Theda Skopol’s work on social revolutions is
interesting here (Skocpol 1979). She argues that although revolutions are often directed
against the authority and power of the state, what happens in the end is not the reduction
of state power but actually the reverse: its reinforcement. A different set of rulers, with
perhaps different ideological commitments, take over the running of the state apparatus
after a revolution, but the state itself, as an institution, is strengthened rather than
weakened.
A number of events that could be described – indeed were described – as revolutions,
took place in 1989, in different parts of the world, and with apparently vastly different
outcomes. The 1989 democracy movement in China came to an abrupt end on 3 June
1989, when the armed forces of the state violently dispersed demonstrators who had
camped in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing. Their demands had been expressed
through peaceful demonstrations throughout the city, where it seemed that students
and workers – indeed the entire population of Beijing – had turned out in support.
Some of the communist party leaders were also in support of the movement, but not
those at the head of the then party leadership. Hunger strikes by students encamped
on the square itself took place, and they constructed a huge ‘goddess of democracy’
from white plaster. There were attempts at negotiation, and calls for the students to
return to their universities. After a lengthy period of demonstrations and many weeks
of hunger strike, it became clear that the hard-line voices within the communist
leadership had won out and that the order had been given for troops to enter the city
and suppress the demonstrations. Despite this, for some time things continued as before:
the troops of the ‘People’s Army’ were persuaded by demonstrators who spoke to them
face-to-face to turn back, and not to fire on their fellow citizens. However, in the end,
on the night of 3 June 1989, the tanks moved into Tiananmen Square.
These events in China were watched around the world, as were the events of the
Arab Spring. Scenes of buses carrying flag waving and cheering supporters, small tents
crowded into Tiananmen Square in which the hunger strikers lay, the square itself –
vast, but looking more like a city within a city than the huge and daunting empty space
of ceremonial and power that it was supposed to be – all these images were broadcast
worldwide. Images of the violence in the square on the night of 3 June were also shown
worldwide: students fleeing before the advancing soldiers, the injured being rushed away
by friends, the tanks crushing everything in their path.
A very famous image from that time is the photograph of one man standing in
front of a column of tanks advancing down Chang’an Avenue a few days later, on 4
June. This picture shows a lone person, carrying nothing but what looks like a shopping
bag and a jacket and wearing a white shirt, who places himself in the roadway precisely
in the path of an advancing column of tanks. People around the world watching the
video images of this saw the tank-driver’s several attempts to drive around the man,
first to the right and then to the left – thwarted by the man determinedly repositioning
himself in front of the tank, time and time again, eventually so close to it that the tank
could not get around at all. The tank stopped – and the demonstrator climbed up onto
the tank to speak to the driver or get inside the tank, before climbing down. The tank
FIGURE 7.2
Tiananmen Square,
Beijing, China, 1989.
Photo: Stuart Franklin,
Magnum
For more about what the
Cold War involved, see
Chapter 26.
WHY DO WE OBEY? 137
then started up its engine again, and the whole incident repeated itself, before the tank
once more came to a stop. Finally, the man disappeared, two other men hustling or
helping him away, depending on how you see it – we don’t know the outcome, and
we don’t know who the man was, or whether he is still alive (Thomas 2006).
This image of how one man, apparently fearless, could stop the advancing might
of the state, embodied in the tank, was and remains, an iconic image. Later that year
came the revolutions of 1989 in what was at that time called Eastern Europe. These
upheavals formed part of the end of the Cold War and the eventual collapse of the Soviet
Union. The people involved in the protests demanding change in Eastern Europe had
seen what had happened in China. Although in East Germany, for example, the state
had limited information to that according with the official Chinese line, people had
been able to pick up broadcasts from West Germany (Prins 1990: 211). They knew
what was at stake: the tanks could arrive. On 17 June 1953 Soviet tanks had been sent
in as part of the violent suppression of strikes and demonstrations in Berlin which left
at least fifty people dead. And in 1968 Soviet tanks had rolled into Czechoslovakia in
response to the reform movement known as the Prague Spring. It could well happen
again. Communist leaders, too, those who could call in the tanks, had seen what this
had led to in China: a period of destabilisation.
In East Germany that autumn, the situation was confused. There had been a series
of major street demonstrations calling for change, in Leipzig, where the numbers of
138 JENNY EDKINS
people demonstrating rose from 50,000 on 9 October 1989 to 100,000 on the 16th,
150,000 on the 23rd and 300,000 on the 30th, and in East Berlin, where 500,000
people marched on 4 November (Prins 1990: 81, 227–8). Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev had made statements to the effect that he would not intervene in the changes
going on in the various states that at that time formed part of the Soviet bloc. The
communist leadership in East Germany had changed – Erich Honecker had given
way, to be replaced by Egon Krenz. In countries all around East Germany, in
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland, as well as in places such as Ukraine
and Estonia which at that time were part of the Soviet Union itself, similar unrest was
being expressed. By the beginning of November it had become clear to the party
leadership that changes would have to be made to travel restrictions on East German
citizens – by then large numbers of East Germans had been leaving the country for the
West via the newly-opened borders to the West, first in Hungary and later in
Czechoslovakia – 50,000 had left between 3 and 8 November via the latter route (Prins
1990: 81, 228).
BOX 7.2 THE BERLIN WALL
At the end of the Second World War
in 1945, Germany was divided, for
administrative purposes, between
the four allied powers: Britain,
France, the US and the Soviet
Union (the USSR, or Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics). The
sector allocated to the USSR became
East Germany, or the Deutsche
Demokratische Republik (DDR)
and the remaining three sectors
West Germany, the Federal Republic
of Germany. The former capital city
of Germany, Berlin, situated in the
Soviet zone, was also divided, and in
1961 a wall was constructed around
West Berlin, to prevent citizens from
the communist zone crossing to the
West. The wall embodied in concrete
the ‘Iron Curtain’ that divided West
and East during the Cold War.
0 20 Kilometers
0 20 Miles
EAST GERMANY
West
Berlin
East
Berlin
0 20 Kilometers
0 20 Miles
Soviet zone
French zone
British zone
American zone
FRANCE
SWITZ.
Frankfurt
Hanover
Hamburg
Paris
Berlin
Bonn
ITALY.
AUSTRIA
YUGOSLAVIA
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
POLAND
BELG.
LUX.
NETH.
DENMARK
N o r t h
S e a B
a l
t i
c
Berlin W
all
FIGURE 7.3
Berlin and the division of Germany at the end of the Second World War
Then, on 9 November at a press conference at about seven in the evening, the
government Press Officer Günter Schabowski made a statement about new travel
regulations that were to be established, permitting East Germans to travel to the West
with appropriate visa documentation. Questioned repeatedly by the press as to when
these new regulations were to come into effect, Schabowski eventually replied ‘immed –
iately’: he had not been fully briefed – this was not the intention. To those listening to
his announcement, the implications were unclear.
One of those who heard the announcement over the radio was Harald Jäger, on
duty that evening at Bornholmer Strasse, one of the checkpoints between East and West
Berlin, in his role as deputy director of the Passport Control Unit (PKA). This is his
account of what happened as he was having dinner:
I heard Schabowski’s words that we had come to an arrangement whereby citizens
of the GDR were permitted to travel to West Berlin or the FRG without any
preconditions. In response to a question from a journalist when this would be valid
the gist of Schabowski’s response was: immediately. Upon this wording my dinner
got stuck in my throat. I said: What is all this? What sort of intellectual diarrhoea
is this? I left my dinner and immediately went into the pre-(passport) control area
for leaving the country at Bornholmer Strasse in order to ring Colonel Ziegenhorn.
Colonel Ziegenhorn was our superior at the time and director of the operational
headquarters of the Main Division VI [Passport Control and Search] of the Ministry
for State Security. The gist of Colonel Ziegenhorn’s response was: ‘Have you also
heard the television broadcast of Schabowski’. I said: ‘Yes. What should we do?’.
Colonel Ziegenhorn said: ‘Wait for now. There is no possibility of leaving the
country under these conditions. Continue to monitor the situation at Bornholmer
Strasse and call me regularly about the developing situation.’
(Chronik der Mauer: no date a)
Within about half an hour, there were a large number of people – Jäger estimates around
a hundred – at the checkpoint. They had heard Schabowski’s statement, like Jäger, and
were demanding to go through to the West. Over the next minutes and hours the crowd
swelled from a few hundred to many thousands, as more people arrived to find out
what was going on and to demand to be let through. Many ordinary East Berliners had
heard the radio but decided at first that it was a meaningless announcement and carried
on with what they were doing. Later, however, the mood changed, and people made
their way to the checkpoints. This was an extremely risky thing to do: ‘no East German
without a visa on his passport – vetted by the secret police, the Stasi, and rarely granted
– ventured near any of the city’s checkpoints . . . It was a criminal offence – “unwarranted
intrusion into a border area”’ (Hilton 2001: 325), and there was a shoot-to-kill policy
for anyone trying to climb the Wall. Many people had died in the attempt since it was
built.
At Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint, Jäger called his superior again, several times,
and eventually the colonel agreed that they should let a small number of people through,
to ease the pressure. Those who were most pushy were to be let past, and their passports
stamped on the photograph, such that they were effectively disbarred from returning.
As well as the most ‘provocative’, others were to be let through as well, so that the
WHY DO WE OBEY? 139
FIGURE 7.4
Berlin/Checkpoint
Bornholmer Strasse,
10 November 1989.
http://bobbysworld.
tumblr.com/post/238267
267 http://www.chronik
derwende.de/bilder/
704_Der_Tag_9_11_
1989
crowd would not have the impression that to get through all that was needed was for
them to be particularly aggressive. This was ‘the bureaucracy of madness’, but passport
huts were opened and at around 9.20 p.m. the first people began to filter through,
some with their passports stamped over the photo, some not (Hilton 2001: 331).
This action did not solve the problem for Jäger, but exacerbated it:
The pressure increased even more. The citizens of the GDR now saw that we were
letting some persons leave the country. The reason for this was not clear to them.
They assumed that it would now start, that they would be permitted to leave. We
had to continue to prevent them because we had the order to only let some persons
leave the country and not all of them. The pressure continued to increase and the
number of people at the checkpoint Bornholmer Strasse also continued to increase.
(Chronik der Mauer: no date b).
It became clear to Jäger that something had to give. His guards were looking to him
for solutions, but he was getting no help from his superiors. The crowd was waving
and chanting; there was a risk, he thought, that people could panic and have been
crushed, or that one of the guards might panic and fire a shot, despite the instructions
they had not to use their pistols (Hilton 2001: 341–2). Jäger made up his mind:
When I saw what could develop, that our members of staff had been driven into
a corner and that the demand by the citizens of the GDR became stronger and
stronger, I decided to open everything and to immediately stop passport controls.
(Chronik der Mauer: no date c).
He was taking a great risk. ‘Normally, you’d expect something to happen to you. I had
refused to carry out – well, implement – the orders’ (Hilton 2001: 343).
140 JENNY EDKINS
WHY DO WE OBEY? 141
But although he didn’t know it, Jäger was not alone. A similar situation was repeated
at other checkpoints around the city: the pressure of ordinary East Berliners who had
decided to test out the meaning of the announcement that evening for themselves,
confused border guards without instructions as to what to do, and a general air of
excitement and anticipation.
Once news that the Wall had been opened spread, people from all over Germany
– and indeed from further afield – travelled to Berlin to see for themselves. Andreas
Ramos, a Dane, writes of his visit:
I stood with several East German guards, their rifles slung over their shoulders. I
asked them if they had bullets in those things. They grinned and said no. From
some houses, someone had set up loudspeakers and played Beethoven’s ninth
symphony: Alle Menschen werden Bruder. All people become brothers. On top of
every building were thousands of people. Berlin was out of control. There was no
more government, neither in East nor in West. The police and the army were
helpless. The soldiers themselves were overwhelmed by the event. They were part
of the crowd. Their uniforms meant nothing. The Wall was down.
(Ramos 1995–2007)
GENERAL RESPONSES
AUTHORITY AND LEGITIMACY
There are a number of writers who have looked at how we should think about
revolutions. We have already mentioned Theda Skocpol; others include, for example,
Ted Gurr (1970), Charles Tilly (1993) and John Dunn (1989). You might be interested
in following up this strand of the literature, but what we want to do here is not look
at how people have thought about revolutions but rather examine a number of
approaches to the question of social and political authority and community. The
question that interests us in this chapter is ‘Why do we obey?’ and we want to turn now
to focus not on revolutions but on the times in between, when we all do as we are told,
or seem to.
Two thinkers who have explored the question of why we generally seem to obey
sources of social and political authority, though in different ways, are Max Weber and
Emile Durkheim. These two writers were part of the wave of intellectual effort that
produced the disciplines of social and political theory and, more specifically, sociology,
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. One of the inspirations behind this
work was the notion that religious sources of authority – the belief in something or
someone outside human society, something that transcends human experience, rather
than something inside or immanent to it – were no longer what was most significant.
As anthropologist Talal Asad puts it, in this period ‘religion was considered to be an
early human condition from which modern law, science and politics emerged and
became detached’ (Asad 1993: 27). Before the eighteenth century, religious sources of
authority were deemed to provide the answers. A transcendent being or god was
regarded as the source not only of creation but of the ethical rules and standards that
For a discussion of
the rise of secularism
and the European
Enlightenment, and
the contrast between
the religious and the
secular, see Chapter 6.
Chapter 27 shows
how the inscription of
secularism in the French
Constitution has
practical political
implications.
Note here the link
between sources of
authority (what we obey,
or what authorises what
we do), and ideas of
truth (how we know, or
what authorises
knowledge).
For more on historical
materialism see
Chapter 19.
Could Weber’s work on
the rise of capitalism
be seen as Eurocentric
or imperialist? See the
discussion in Chapter 16
of the relation between
Europe’s industrial –
isation and the
impoverishment of the
Indian subcontinent.
142 JENNY EDKINS
we were to aspire to. Most often, punishment for disobedience to the commands of a
deity was not to come in this life, but in the next. Rewards for obedience would come
in heaven, not on earth. These religious views began to lose their hold with the rise of
discourses of secularisation in Europe. The source of authority came to be seen as being
in the individual person, or in the social and political order which individuals subscribed
to. This led to the urgent need for accounts of those non-transcendent forms of
authority: if what or whom we obeyed was not a transcendent godhead, what or who
was it, and how were we to think through what was going on here? The social and
political sciences both attempted to provide an answer and, in doing so, reinforced the
move from religion to secularism that seemed to be taking place. The source of
authority was relocated from a transcendent source to a source in the individual or in
the society or the political order (Mavelli 2008). We return to this point when we discuss
Hobbes and the English Civil War in the final part of this section.
Alongside, and part of, the driving force of the discourse of secularism was the
notion that the social sciences ought to be able to explain the social world in much
the same way as the physical sciences had succeeded (as it seemed then) in explaining
the natural world. In other words, it should be possible to discover the laws of social
behaviour, just as scientists had discovered the laws of nature – like gravity, thermo-
dynamics and so on. If we weren’t to explain the natural world as God’s creation but
as the result of scientific laws, perhaps we should be able to explain the social world in
the same way. However, although some later sociologists who draw on this work do
see Weber and Durkheim as having striven for ‘scientific’ laws of society, or in other
words, for generalisations that would enable us to predict and control social affairs, it
is perhaps best to think of them rather differently.
For Max Weber, the social world was a complicated affair. Although he was
interested in the questions raised by Marx, concerning the interrelation of ‘all
institutional orders making up a social structure’ (Gerth and Mills 2007: 49), he wanted
to contest the Marxist view that in the end history could be accounted for by economic
factors, as in historical materialism, which he saw as a monocausal account (Gerth and
Mills 2007: 47). For Weber an account that tried to simplify everything down to a single
over-riding cause would be misleading: in social life what happened had a multiplicity
of causes. He was interested in how social structures of power worked through
bureaucracy and discipline, for example, and how social differentiation in terms of
economic class and social status were inter-related. He studied social structures and
religion in India and in China where very different forms of differentiation – by caste,
or by education – arose. He was fascinated by the way that capitalist industrialisation
had happened in Europe but not in China or India. Perhaps his most famous book
is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930) where he traces how
the development of Calvinist religious practices of duty in a calling contributed to the
conditions of possibility for the growth of capitalism in Europe. Of course, once
capitalism had taken root and material goods had ‘gained an increasing and finally
inexorable power’ over people’s lives, it continued even when the practices associated
with it had long ceased to have any religious meaning. As Weber so poignantly puts it
‘the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about our lives like the ghost of dead religious
beliefs’ (Weber 1930: 182). In putting forward this argument, it was not his aim ‘to
substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal
For more on Max Weber,
in particular his ideas
about the state, see
Chapter 11.
WHY DO WE OBEY? 143
interpretation of culture and of history’ (Weber 1930: 183) but rather to point to
another possible starting point for further investigation, investigation which would
always have to focus on the specifics of particular historical conjunctures.
One of the reasons that Weber has been misread as attempting a simple causal
analysis might be his use – as an analytical tool – of what he called constructed or ideal
‘types’ (Gerth and Mills 2007: 294). These ‘types’ are an aid to thinking, and are
consciously ahistorical: any real-life historical situation will, Weber insists, be much more
complex. In his discussion of forms of authority he uses this method. He identifies three
‘types’ of authority:
All ruling powers, profane and religious, political and apolitical, may be considered
as variations of, or approximations to, certain pure types. These types are constructed
by searching for the basis of legitimacy, which the ruling power claims. Our
modern ‘associations’ are of the type of ‘legal’ authority. . . . The past has known
other bases for authority, bases which, incidentally, extend as survivals into the
present . . . ‘charismatic authority’ [and] ‘traditional authority’.
(Gerth and Mills 2007: 294–6)
In the modern form of legal-rational authority, ‘the legitimacy of the power-holder to
give commands rests upon rules that are rationally established by enactment, by
agreement, or by imposition’ (Gerth and Mills 2007: 294). This rests in turn on a
constitution. Orders are based on these impersonal rules, not on the authority of the
person giving the orders as a person. A hierarchical organisation of officials who wield
power and the separation of public and private spheres go along with this form of
authority. The other two ‘types’ of authority are different. The first of these, charismatic
authority, is a form of rule to which those who obey submit because of ‘their belief in
the extraordinary quality of a specific person’ (Gerth and Mills 2007: 295). Charismatic
authority is legitimised through heroic feats, victories, miracles and the like, and
disappears if these magical powers appear to vanish. The second, traditional authority,
is based upon a belief in ‘what actually, allegedly, or presumably has always existed’
(Gerth and Mills 2007: 296). The most familiar types of traditional authority are the
rule of father or husband over the household, the lord or master over the serf, the prince
over officials, nobles, and vassals, and the sovereign prince over subjects. In particular
historical situations, these last two forms of authority exist alongside each other, and
both remain significant, even under legal-rational systems of authority.
What is important here is that we have an analysis that sees power or authority as
possessed by a specific and identifiable few in any society who can command the
obedience of others. They are obeyed because their authority or power to command
is deemed legitimate – because of either its legal-rational, charismatic or traditional
basis.
For Emile Durkheim, the social realm is not just a collection of individuals, but
something more, something unique and quite distinct: ‘Society is a reality sui generis;
it has its own characteristics’ (Durkheim 1995: 15). This leads to certain implications:
Precisely because society has its own specific nature that is different from our nature
as individuals, it pursues ends that are also specifically its own; but because it can
achieve those ends only by working through us, it categorically demands our
cooperation. Society requires us to make ourselves its servants . . . It subjects us to
all sorts of restraints, privations and sacrifices without which social life would be
impossible. And so, at every instant, we must submit to rules of action and thought
that we have neither made nor wanted and that sometimes are contrary to our
inclinations and our most basic instincts.
(Durkheim 1995: 209)
We obey these rules, not just because of any superior physical force that compels us to
do so, says Durkheim, but because of the moral authority that society has: ‘we defer to
society’s orders not simply because it is equipped to overcome our resistance but, first
and foremost, because it is the object of genuine respect’ (Durkheim 1995: 209). Indeed
‘a society is to its members what a god is to its faithful’ (Durkheim 1995: 208). In
ordinary circumstances, the weight of the general view or shared convictions has
enormous force; when people come together in a large gathering this is amplified and
things happen and emotions are aroused that each person as an individual would be
incapable of, and that all look back on afterwards with surprise (Durkheim 1995: 212).
In revolutionary periods it is because of such heightened interaction and what that
generates that ‘people live differently and more intensely than in normal times’
144 JENNY EDKINS
BOX 7.3 THE REFORMATION IN EUROPE
The Reformation is located in what historians call the ‘early-modern’ period in Europe which runs from the
late fifteenth to early eighteenth centuries (MacCulloch 2004). It took place in Western Christendom – an
area ‘almost equivalent to what would become “Europe”’ (Collinson 2003: 1). According to The Cambridge
Modern History, written in 1903,
the Reformation of the sixteenth century had its birth and growth in a union of spiritual and secular
forces such as the world has seldom seen at any other period of its history. On the secular side, the
times were full of new movements, intellectual and moral, political, social, and economic; and
spiritual forces were everywhere at work, which aimed at making religion the birthright and
possession of the common man – whether king, noble, burgher, artisan, or peasant – as well as of the
ecclesiastic, a possession which should directly promote a worthy life within the family and the State.
These religious impulses had all a peculiar democratic element and were able to impregnate with
passion and, for a time, to fuse together the secular forces of the period. Hence their importance
historically.
(Ward et al. 1903)
One of the best known figures is Martin Luther, born on 10 November 1483, at Eisleben. His Ninety-Five
Theses, nailed to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg at noon on All Saint’s Day, 1 November 1517,
were a forthright critique of the practice of the Sale of Indulgences – for the forgiveness of sins – by the
Catholic Church. His case was not just that this had become a corrupt practice, but that the Church could
not in this way stand between the believer and their God. Forgiveness came from God alone, and could
not be bought or sold.
WHY DO WE OBEY? 145
What is the relationship
between power and
authority? Are they
the same thing? Why
do we talk of obedience
to authority, but
capitulation or resistance
to power?
(Durkheim 1995: 213). We depend on society in the way that we might depend on a
religious figure, and we do what society expects us to because of that dependence.
So far then, we have looked at the way two leading figures in the new discipline of
sociology – located specifically in the turn to secularism in Europe – thought about
questions of power, authority and obedience. There is one further response to these
questions that I want to examine, before we turn to what some of the broader questions
these responses lead to might be. I want to examine the thought of Thomas Hobbes
(1588–1679). His work was not part of the nineteenth-century movement towards a
social science at all; he was a seventeenth-century political philosopher, concerned to
rethink forms of authority in the absence of a divinity. Living in England at the time
of the English Civil War, one of Hobbes’ priorities was to find some arguments for
stability and peace, rather than the chaos and instability into which the country had
sunk. The Civil War had lasted from 1642 to 1651 and the questions at stake concerned
whether the monarch should rule alone by divine right or only with the consent and
under the authority of parliament – or indeed, whether parliament could rule without
a sovereign.
On the one hand, the authority of the pope as head of the Catholic Church had
been challenged. In England the Reformation set in train a series of struggles that led
FIGURE 7.5
Title page from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651).
http://cache.eb.com/eb/image?id=99235&rendTypeld=4
We tend to talk about the
state as if it were a
person – we talk about
what Britain or India
does, for example, which
makes it easy to talk of a
state ‘having power’ too.
Why might that be
unhelpful?
This argument that
people might be more
complex than is allowed
in this notion of the
sovereign individual is
also explored in
Chapter 13.
146 JENNY EDKINS
eventually to the developing view that religion should be regarded as a private affair, a
matter for individual conscience, not an affair of state: different religious practices could
be tolerated within one political community. The modern sovereign individual,
conceived of as a separate, self-contained and self-accountable entity, was emerging.
On the other hand, the authority of the monarch or sovereign was still seen as coming
from God, and how this could be otherwise was yet to be thought through. Hobbes’
contribution to the debates of his time did not please the royalists: he argued for a strong
central authority, sovereign or commonwealth, to avoid the chaos of a war ‘of every
man against every man’ (Hobbes 1651), but sovereign power or sovereignty – the
supreme authority of the sovereign – came not from the divine right of kings but from
the people, who, as sovereign individuals combining together, entered into a social
contract to ensure their peace and security. In other words, sovereignty for Hobbes
came not from above but from below, not from outside this world but from within it.
According to Hobbes, when individuals combine and enter into a social contract,
their individual power or authority is added together to form a power greater than any
of them (Hindess 1996: 24). He calls this the Leviathan: a giant man, made up of the
bodies of small individual men and carrying a sceptre and a sword, as the famous
illustration on his title page shows. This quantitative view of power – as something that
can be added up – forms the basis of many understandings of power in social and political
life. Power is seen as something that ‘determines the capacity of actors to realize their
will or to secure their interests’ (Hindess 1996: 26). Alongside the capacity to act is
the right to act: the question of the perceived legitimacy of the one who possesses power
to exercise it. This of course, as we have seen, was the question that exercised Weber.
BROADER ISSUES
THINKING ABOUT POWER
To think of power in this simple, quantitative way, as some mysterious entity or substance
that we can’t see but that can be possessed and exercised, and which means that someone
gets to do what they want to do, doesn’t really help us very much. We can talk about
how much power a particular person (or state) has, but when someone we think of as
powerful – as having lots of power – doesn’t get to do what they want, then we simply
admit that maybe they had less power than we thought. In other words, this conception
of power leads to some very circular arguments. On the one hand, people with power
can do things, so we can tell who is powerful by looking at what people do. But on the
other hand, those who look as though they do pretty much what they want we describe
as powerful. This doesn’t get us very far.
Even if we think of power like this though, there seems to be no way of telling in
advance, who will turn out to have been the most ‘powerful’ in any particular situation.
Nor, indeed is there any obvious way of knowing for certain who has got what they
wanted: people are too complicated in terms of motivations and desires for that. And
people tend not to behave all the time as the sovereign individuals they are deemed to
be in modern liberal economic and political theory in any case: they may be more
concerned to do what they think others want them to do than to satisfy their own wishes
and desires.
For a discussion of
Foucault’s notion of
governmentality, see
Chapter 4.
WHY DO WE OBEY? 147
A different way of thinking about questions of power, authority and obedience is
found in the work of French political thinker Michel Foucault. He poses a basic challenge
to the ways of thinking about power that we have encountered so far, ways of thinking
that see a clear dividing line between those that have power or authority and those that
obey, and thus see power as fundamentally repressive. In the thinking we have examined,
power in someone else’s hands is something that prevents us from doing what we want
to do. Foucault finds this way of thinking curious:
In defining the effects of power as repression, one adopts a purely juridical
conception of power, one identifies power with a law that says no, power is taken
above all as carrying the force of a prohibition. Now I believe that this is a wholly
negative, narrow, skeletal conception of power, one which has been curiously
widespread. If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything
but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes
power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only
weigh on us as a force which says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it
induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered
as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more
than a negative instance whose function is repression.
(Foucault 1980: 119)
In fact, Foucault argues, it is best not to talk of ‘power’ at all, but of ‘power relations’.
In all social interaction, relations of power are involved. When two people talk over coffee,
when a group meets for a lecture in a university setting, when we take a walk along the
beach or when we chat over the internet, in all these social relations, relations of power
are involved. In some cases it might seem that power relations are all one way – for
example, that your lecturer gets to do what they want, despite disruptive students such
as those shown in the cartoon at the start of this chapter. And some people these days,
influenced by Foucault’s work in some way but not fully taking on board what he meant,
talk continually of ‘power relations’ as if that meant the relations that people who ‘have’
power can exert over those that don’t. In the student–supervisor relationship, when they
say there are ‘power relations’ involved, in a dark tone of voice, these people tend to
mean that one side is more power-full than the other. That is not what Foucault meant.
Foucault wanted to draw our attention to the way in which in any social relations
there is a tension or a negotiation going on which traverses what is happening. Power,
for Foucault, means nothing unless there is resistance. And in all social relations or
interactions there are interactions of power and resistance. I will suggest the walk on
the beach, perhaps, and when we get there, you might suggest which way we should
go. Although you might have preferred a climb up the hillside to the beach in the first
place, or I might have wanted to walk inland whereas you fancied taking a walk round
the headland, we agreed on what to do and we do it. If we went our separate ways
instead, we would no longer have enjoyed each other’s company – which, presumably,
we both wanted to do. There is clearly difference and deference – distinctions of age
or gender, familiarity with the terrain, willingness to be led or to lead – which will come
into play. And the interaction as we take our walk on the beach will reinforce or perhaps
dislodge those differences. In other words, when we get back to the car, things will
have changed: we won’t be quite the people we were when we set out. Our relationship
may be different; we may be different. This I think is something of what Foucault means
when he says that power is a productive network that runs through all interaction, which
‘traverses and produces things’, ‘induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces
discourse’ – and by ‘discourse’, he doesn’t just mean the conversation we enjoyed on
our walk.
What has all this talk of walks on the beach to do with the serious business of politics,
authority and obedience? The point I think is that we can take this talk too seriously –
by which I mean, we can believe too much in the fiction of an authority that we have
to obey. It is useful to have such a fiction; as we have said before, it simplifies daily life.
It also gives us something to believe in – some power above ourselves, something that
will survive us, or that in the meantime, enables us to make sense of our lives. If we
follow Foucault’s suggestion and cut off the king’s head, then there are other ways of
thinking about politics.
Of course in the English Civil War, the king’s head was literally cut off. What
Foucault means here is somewhat different. He means that we should stop thinking in
terms of some larger legitimate central authority or source of rules, which we just then
have to work out how to obey. We need instead to rethink politics without the
sovereign. To return to our walk – maybe our walk on the beach was not particularly
significant in the grand scheme of things, but what of one man’s walk along Chang’an
Avenue in Beijing, or the walk thousands took to the checkpoint at Bornholmer Strasse?
These were in many senses just walks too, with similar debates about whether to go,
when to go, where to go and so on: in all these instances, what we are looking at is
forms of social interrelations. Maybe the notion of power relations that Foucault is asking
us to consider is more help here than notions of centralised, validated authority. Maybe
that authority is constituted through numerous interactions and power relations. Maybe
it doesn’t have some sort of independent, separate existence before those interactions.
Certainly, as we have seen, it is vulnerable to challenge by individuals or groups who
are not what we could call ‘powerful’.
Slavoj Žižek writes in 1993:
The most sublime image that emerged in the political upheavals of the last years
. . . was undoubtedly the unique picture from the violent overthrow of Ceauşescu
in Romania [in December 1989]: the rebels waving the national flag with the red
star, the Communist symbol, cut out, so that instead of the symbol standing for
the organising principle of the national life, there was nothing but a hole in its
centre.
(1993: 1)
The communist authorities had been overthrown, but nothing had yet been put in place
instead. Where there is no organising principle, nothing to tell us to obey, this makes
a certain lack or gap in the social order visible. Žižek argues that the social order is
always incomplete in this way, but that this incompleteness is generally hidden from
sight by the symbol that we put at the centre of things (God, communism, the
sovereign, the nation, the people). We think we are obeying an authority of some sort,
one that has the force to make us comply, but what we are following is a symbol – and
148 JENNY EDKINS
For further discus –
sions of Slavoj Žižek
and his Lacanian
approach, see
Chapters 5 and 23.
WHY DO WE OBEY? 149
we need a symbol like this to conceal the emptiness, the meaninglessness, at the heart
of social life.
Foucault complains that we still think of politics in terms of centralised power and
the legitimation of particular forms of authority. We need, he says, to cut off the king’s
head – and here he means the head of the Leviathan as well. Foucauldian conceptions
of power point to the need to ‘think about politics in the absence of its defining
constitutive fiction’ (Hindess 1996: 158). This fiction is not just sovereignty, but the
notion of political community – or ‘society’ in the Durkheimian sense.
When the revolutionaries of Eastern Europe cut the communist symbol from the
centre of the flag, they did not just cut out sovereign power – the communist rule that
had been overthrown – they highlighted the notion of what Žižek calls ‘tarrying with
the negative’: the possibility of not replacing that sovereign with anything at all, not
even with what we call, vaguely, political community, but rather tarrying with, or
remaining in, a state of the absence of rule. Is there not perhaps always a certain absence
or incompleteness to any social order or form of authority? Is it not always in some
sense little more than a fiction?
FIGURE 7.6
The hole in the Romanian Flag, 1989. Andrei Codrescu,
The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return
and Revolution. William Morrow & Co., 1991
The fence between
Mexico and the US
discussed in Chapter 10
might be a similar
example.
Chapters 5, 16, 21 and 27
discuss these types of
exclusions.
150 JENNY EDKINS
Taking this sort of approach would lead us to think of relations as what we should
be studying – relations of power in the Foucauldian sense among them of course – and
how those relations produce the entities at their nodal points as well as the hub
(community, society, etc.) that the relations appear to centre around. Note that we do
not need to say social relations, or limit ourselves to relations between people. Bruno
Latour is interested in exploring the role of things in the interrelationships that he
studies. Things – materialities – he says, should be seen as part of the collectives we
study – ‘collective’ being the word he chooses to replace the word ‘society’ (Latour
2005: 25). Think of the role of the Wall in the example we discussed in this chapter.
Do materialities like these not form a vital part of the relations we want to think about?
Doesn’t limiting politics to people or human beings (however blatantly obvious and
unquestionable it may seem to do so) already concede that the type of community or
relation we are thinking of is one defined by exclusion – the exclusion of whatever, at
that particular moment of history, counts as non-human, or imperfectly human: women,
non-Whites, children and the poor are or were at one time regarded as insufficiently
human to vote, and thus excluded from the political community, for example. Though
it might seem ridiculous to take this as far as questioning the distinction between the
animate and the inanimate, there is some sense in which all our distinctions are insecure
and open to change.
In their study of Paris, Latour and photographer Emilie Hermant explore the
networks of interactions that produce the city of Paris – the work of individuals and
agencies that designate the streets with the names that then appear on the maps that
visitors use to make their way around the city and on the walls of the buildings that
line those streets, for example, or the way that the fabric of the city is continually built
and rebuilt, and its changes and famous inhabitants charted in wall plaques and signs,
by a network of engineers, surveyors and stone-masons (Latour and Hermant 1998).
The body of the city, like a human body, ‘resembles’, according to Latour, ‘a jet of water
that maintains its shape through the swift movement of countless tiny drops, each adding
its minute contribution to the slightly trembling form’ (Latour and Hermant 1998: Plan
52). Both the body and the built fabric of the city can be rebuilt, stone by stone or cell
by cell, and can remain the same and yet different. Stop the movement and there is
nothing: ‘a gurgling at the bottom of a greenish basin; a corpse; a crum bling ruin’
(Latour and Hermant 1998: Plan 52). Latour argues that political bodies like the French
state or the municipal council of Paris are similar, and neither more nor less durable.
At the end of their study, they return to the question of power. They argue that
the networks that frame life occupy only a tiny space:
The word ‘power’ changes meaning. It no longer denotes states of unquestionable
things. . . . There is indeed power; that is, force, virtualities, empowerment, a dis –
persed plasma just waiting to take shape. . . . Yes, the power is invisible, but like the
virtual, like the plasma, like the perpetual transformations of buildings and bodies.
(Latour and Hermant 1998: Plan 53)
The power of the sovereign or the king or the state is no more fixed than is a human
body or a building: like these, it is always in the process of transformation, always being
rebuilt. Relations of power and their intricate movements are what matter, in other
words, not the power-full and the power-less.
WHY DO WE OBEY? 151
CONCLUSION
We have taken a journey in this chapter, a walk even, beginning with the question of
why we obey, how we might think about what makes forms of power and authority in
‘society’ work, and what it might mean to disobey. We examined moments when it
seemed that the authority of well established and repressive systems of government might
be being challenged – in one case the challenge seemed to fail, whereas in the other it
seemed, for a moment at least to succeed. We have not of course examined what
happened next in East Germany or the rest of what was the Eastern European Com –
munist bloc. Some commentators might argue that the hope for new possibilities – talk
of a ‘third way’ between communism and capitalism, for example, was widespread in
1989 – did not materialise. After all, the former communist states became in short order
obedient parts of the capitalist world. And, finally, we explored some other ways of
thinking about the workings of relations – through notions of power relations and
networks – in what we used to call social life.
FURTHER READING
Foucault, Michel (2000) ‘The Subject and Power’, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed.
Paul Rabinow, New York: The New Press.
This short piece by Foucault, which first appeared in 1982, gives a good account of how he
sees his work on power, including why we should study the ‘subject’ and how one should
analyse power relations.
Hindess, Barry (1996) Discourses of Power: from Hobbes to Foucault, Oxford: Blackwell.
Useful discussion of power that distinguishes power as capacity and power as right, and
contains chapters on notions of power in critical theory and John Locke, as well as Hobbes
and Foucault.
Latour, Bruno (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Elaborates on Actor-Network-Theory and how it differs from other approaches to sociology;
the website ‘Paris: the invisible city’ (listed below) does the same job in a different format.
Weber, Max (1930) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons, London:
Unwin.
A fascinating and classic account of the relation between the particular rationalism underlying
industrial capitalism in the West and the ethics of certain Protestant sects.
WEBSITES
The Berlin Wall/Berliner Mauer 1961–1989, Senate Chancellery, Governing Mayor of Berlin,
http://www.berlin.de/mauer/oeffnung/index.en.html
Gives full details, with maps, of remaining sections of the Wall, memorial sites and former
border crossing points, as well as a section on the opening and fall of the Wall.
Chronik der Mauer (in German) Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Deutschlandradio, and
Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam e.V., http://www.chronik-der-
mauer.de/index.php
Gives a day-by day account of events with links to video clips and broadcasts.
http://www.berlin.de/mauer/oeffhung/index.en.html
http://www.chronik-dermauer.de/index.php
http://www.chronik-dermauer.de/index.php
152 JENNY EDKINS
Foucault on Bachelard (in French), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAwWwQZ_3FQ
A gem of a clip (2 min) of Foucault talking about the problem of obediently following
prescribed reading lists or sticking to canonical texts.
Latour, Bruno and Emilie Hermant (1998) Paris: Invisible City. Available online at
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/virtual/EN/index.html
In this online essay, Latour introduces Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) through a study of
‘Paris’ accompanied by Hermant’s photographs.
Lutteroth, Jule (2004) ‘Wir kommen jetzt öfter’, 9 November, Spiegel Online, http://
www.spiegel.de/panorama/zeitgeschichte/0,1518,326184,00.html
Thomas, Antony (2006) Tiananmen Square: The Tank Man, Cutting Edge Documentary, 90
mins. PBS Frontline, 11 April 2006, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/
tankman/ or at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4727787930108202470
Documentary about the man who stood in front of the tank, and the surrounding events
during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and since.
REFERENCES
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Islam, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bauman, Zygmunt (1991) Modernity and the Holocaust, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Chronik der Mauer (no date a) http://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/index.php/de/Media/
VideoPopup/day/9/field/audio_video/id/14521/month/November/oldAction/Detail/
oldModule/Chronical/year/1989.
Chronik der Mauer (no date b) http://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/index.php/de/
Media/VideoPopup/day/9/field/audio_video/id/14524/month/November/oldAction/
Detail/oldModule/Chronical/year/1989.
Chronik der Mauer (no date c) http://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/index.php/de/Media/
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oldModule/Chronical/year/1989.
Collinson, Patrick (2003) The Reformation, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Dunn, John (1989) Modern Revolutions: An Introduction to the Analysis of a Political Phenomenon,
2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Durkheim, Emile (1995) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. K. E. Fields, New York:
The Free Press.
Foucault, Michel (1980) ‘Truth and Power’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other
Writings 1972–1977 by Michel Foucault, ed. Colin Gordon, Brighton: Harvester; also
published as Michel Foucault (2000) ‘Truth and Power’, Essential Works of Foucault
1954–1984, ed. P. Rabinow, New York: The New Press.
Gerth, H. H. and C. Wright Mills (2007) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, London:
Routledge.
Gurr, Ted R. (1970) Why Men Rebel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hilton, Christopher (2001) The Wall: The People’s Story, Stroud: Sutton Publishing.
Hindess, Barry (1996) Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault, Oxford: Blackwell.
Hobbes, Thomas (1651) Leviathan. Available in several editions, and online at, for example,
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-contents.html.
Lanzmann, Claude (1995) Shoah: The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film, New York:
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Latour, Bruno (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Latour, Bruno and Emilie Hermant (1998) Paris: Invisible City, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/
virtual/EN/index.html.
WHY DO WE OBEY? 153
MacCulloch, Diarmaid (2004) Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700, London:
Penguin.
Mavelli, Luca (2008) ‘Beyond Secularism: Immanence and Transcendence in the Political Thought
of William E. Connolly’, in Alan Finlayson and Samuel Chambers (eds), Becoming Plural:
The Political Thought of William E. Connolly, London: Routledge.
Mommsen, Wolfgang J. (1990) Max Weber and German Politics 1890–1920, trans. M. S.
Steinberg, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Prins, Gwyn (ed.) (1990) Spring in Winter: The 1989 Revolutions, Manchester: Manchester
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Ramos, Andreas (1995–2007) A Personal Account of The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The 11th and
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Skocpol, Theda (1979) States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia
and China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thomas, Antony (2006) Tiananmen Square: The Tank Man, Cutting Edge Documentary,
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tankman/.
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Unwin.
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Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
http://www.andreas.com/berlin.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/
http://www.questia.com/reader/
http://www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
THE QUESTION
THE MEDIATION OF INFORMATION
All of our questions about global politics – about war, famine, migration, protest,
violence – assume that we already know what counts as a significant world event. It is
as if we are all-knowing and God-like creatures – swirling around the heavens looking
down on all sorts of important and fascinating activities. Much as we would like such
omniscient powers, the reality is that we are all stuck here on earth, each
of us rooted to a particular time and place, and each of us armed only with
specific and partial knowledge about the world. So before we answer the
question of finding out what’s going on in the world, we have to recognize
our own ‘situated-ness’; that is, how our own particular time and place
shapes the way we come to know the world. Recognizing our specific
position means that nobody has first-hand access to activities and events
going on outside of their specific and immediate context. That information
must be gathered, constructed and sent to us through various forms of
CHAPTER 8
How do we find out what’s going
on in the world?
Debbie Lisle
■ The question
THE MEDIATION OF INFORMATION
■ Illustrative example
MEDIA BIAS: NEWS REPRESENTATIONS OF WAR
■ General responses
THE MEDIA, POWER AND DEMOCRACY
■ Broader issues
HOW TO READ THE MEDIA
■ CONCLUSION
Though we may think
we have exclusive
knowledge that we
should convey to others:
see Chapter 21.
Chapter 5 shows how we
are situated before even
being born.
technology (for example, television screens, internet connections, radio frequencies,
mobile phones), and we must have the appropriate equipment and skills to receive and
understand this information. This chapter explores this process of communication – how
information from one context is delivered to another context – by looking at how global
politics is shaped, constructed, represented and disseminated by mass media institutions
and interpreted by mass audiences. In short, it looks at what happens to information
as it moves through the media.
Some form of media – some technology of representation – is necessary in any form
of communication. As Neil Postman argues, we couldn’t know anything in the world
without different forms of media to convey information:
The information, the content, or, if you will, the ‘stuff ’ that makes up ‘the news
of the day’ did not exist – could not exist – in a world that lacked the media to
give it expression. I do not mean things like fires, wars, murders and love affairs
HOW DO WE FIND OUT WHAT’S GOING ON? 155
The importance of
language games and
pictures of the world is
discussed in Chapter 2.
BOX 8.1 NEIL POSTMAN
Postman was one of the pioneers of media and communication studies, and wrote a very important book
entitled Amusing Ourselves To Death (1987). He was interested in how television, as a specific technology
of communication, shapes the information we receive. Postman argues that American television privileges
image over content, and therefore feeds the audience ‘dumbed-down’ entertainment rather than rational
political argument. As an example, Postman offers the following:
it is implausible to imagine that anyone like our twenty-seventh President, the multi-chinned, three-
hundred pound William Howard Taft, could be put forward as a presidential candidate in today’s
world. The shape of a man’s body is largely irrelevant to the shape of his ideas when he is addressing
a public in writing or on the radio, or, for that matter, in smoke signals. But it is quite relevant on
television. The grossness of a three-hundred-pound image, even a talking one, would overwhelm any
logical or spiritual subtleties conveyed by speech . . . You cannot do political philosophy on television.
Its form works against the content.
(1987: 7)
Simply put, a fat person – no matter how persuasive their views – would never be elected president
because he or she would not look good on television. Postman’s argument is that we have allowed
television to set the agenda for political debate, and because television favours image-friendly sound-bites,
we ignore many sane and viable political ideas that may not be easily conveyed through such an image-
conscious medium. For Postman, the form that this information passes through (that is, television) is
shaping the content of political debate (that is, it only allows those arguments that can be made quickly by
beautiful people relying on images and sound-bites). He contrasts the current situation of television with
nineteenth-century public meetings when large audiences regularly gathered to listen to political debates
that lasted up to 7 hours (1987: 45–50). Can you imagine that? Seven hours! Postman argues that
television has shrunk our attention spans so much that we can barely focus on political issues for 7
minutes, let alone 7 hours.
Of course global politics
is about many things as
well as these, as the
various chapters in the
textbook show.
The way we access
information has changed
over recent years.
Chapter 9 discusses how
the way we use the
internet makes a
difference.
The importance of the
stories we tell about
who we are – our identity
– is discussed in
Chapter 5, and the
political implications of
ways whole regions of
the world are repre –
sented in Chapter 23.
156 DEBBIE LISLE
did not, ever and always, happen in places all over the world. I mean that lacking
a technology to advertise them, people could not attend to them, could not include
them, in their daily business.
(1987: 7–8)
When Postman’s argument is applied to the study of global politics, we see that
the objects, issues and events we usually study (for example, wars, revolutions, invasions,
treaties) do not even exist without the media – without the technologies of
communication – to express them. So while it is certainly important to study objects,
issues and events in global politics – the ‘stuff ’ that makes up ‘the news of the day’ –
it is also important to study the process by which that information is gathered, shaped,
disseminated and received. Indeed, most of us do not form our opinions about global
politics by going directly to Baghdad, or Kabul, or the Pentagon (the US Department
of Defense). But we do form our opinions based on what we receive about these events
from various media sources like television programmes, webpages, newspaper articles
and Twitter feeds. Moreover, even those people who do travel directly to war zones –
diplomats, soldiers, journalists, experts – form their opinions and create solutions based
on information they receive from the media. Another way to say this is that all objects,
issues and events in global politics are mediated. That is, we know about them, and
formulate our opinions on them, by consuming and interpreting media representations
(Debrix and Weber, 2003). Surely, then, it is important to explore how our opinions
about global politics – about whether it was right to intervene in Iraq, about whether
human rights should be universal, about the extent of American dominance – are shaped
and influenced by the mass media.
In this chapter, we will be exploring the process of mediation in two registers. First,
we will look at the news media which gathers and delivers information in an immediate
and direct manner. This incorporates the journalists, cameramen/women and
photojournalists who are ‘on the ground’ at specific events and whose information and
images are delivered to mass audiences through, for example, television news channels,
newspapers, radio stations, webpages and blogs. In the study of global politics, this is
what most people think of when questions of the media arise. But there is a second and
very important register that reflects on the ‘news of the day’ after the fact, and shapes
it into a more coherent, convincing and long-lasting narrative. Here, I’m referring to
films, documentaries, novels and television series that take the central issues of global
politics (war, for example) as their subject matter. It is very important to address these
reconstructed narratives of global politics for they often turn complex news stories with
multiple viewpoints into a single, sanitized narrative that appears inevitable, natural and
difficult to contest. Indeed, there is a great deal to think about regarding the differences
between immediate representations of global politics (like television news) and belated
reconstructions of those events (like war films). Which is more powerful, and why? Which
is more moving, and why?
It is tempting to understand the process of media communication through a
relatively simple ‘transmission model’; that is, an unambiguous message is transmitted
from a sender through the media to a receiver (Fiske, 1990: 6–23). However, this view
is problematic because it assumes the media are a neutral conduit for relaying information
when in fact all media expressions are inevitably biased; that is, they ‘lean towards a
Established pictures
of the world tend to
privilege Western
approaches (see
Chapters 16 and 20),
assume a neo-liberal
approach to economics
(Chapters 19 and 20)
and conceal women’s
perspectives (Chapters 5
and 17), for example.
Do the findings of the
2011–12 public enquiry
under the chairmanship
of Lord Justice Leveson
in the UK, investigating
alleged links between the
news media, the police
and politicians, throw
any idea of the media as
a watchdog into doubt?
HOW DO WE FIND OUT WHAT’S GOING ON? 157
particular view of a given issue (Burton, 1997: 226). Such a simplified model ignores
the situated-ness of those people constructing media stories and the fact that their partial
view of the world shapes the choice of issues and events to cover and the manner in
which those choices are editorialized. More importantly, categorizing the media as a
neutral vehicle for information delivery assumes that journalists and media producers
have direct access to some clear, unmediated truth that they can faithfully record and
transmit to audiences. But nobody – not even the most rigorous news reporter – enjoys
such a privileged and omniscient access to reality. As Chapter 2 explained, that access
is inevitably partial and biased not just because of our situated-ness, but also because
we operate with already established pictures of the world which privilege some issues,
groups and policies and exclude others. This goes for elite media producers just as
much as it goes for millions of audience members. This problem of bias is especially
important when it comes to the news media which purports to be simply conveying
information in a neutral manner rather than actively constructing it according to an
overarching agenda. In this sense, the news media are always pursuing an impossible
goal: they strive for a neutral and objective reporting of events, knowing that such
accuracy can never be achieved. Bias is not something the media can escape: there is
no possibility of representing the world in a way that doesn’t also advocate a particular
– and necessarily biased – picture of the world. Once we recognize our own situated-
ness, discount the neutrality of the media and acknowledge that all information is
mediated, noble journalistic goals such as ‘the pursuit of truth’ become very complicated
indeed.
With these insights about situated-ness and bias in mind, how do we even begin
to answer the question of finding out what’s going on in the world? This chapter offers
three ways to begin. First, it explores the fundamental issue of bias with respect to news
media representations of war and tracks the contradictory role of the news media as
either a watchdog on government or a mouthpiece for its policies. Second, the chapter
pulls back from these specific examples to examine wider questions about the media’s
role in democratic society. Does the media offer a genuine plurality of viewpoints, or
does it pretend to do so while actually offering us a singular viewpoint that protects
elite power? And finally, this chapter uses a reconstructed media representation – a
popular Hollywood war film – to explore the different ways audience members interpret
stories of war. By delivering the ‘truth’ about war through an unashamed mobilization
of our emotions (for example, pride, empathy, fear), reconstructed mediations of war
often have a much longer-lasting and widespread impact on audiences.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
MEDIA BIAS: NEWS REPRESENTATIONS OF WAR
In the UK, the media are understood as the ‘Fourth Estate’; that is, the news media
pride themselves on their independence from power, and their ability to advocate public
interest by acting as a watchdog on the government. This ability to act as a check and
balance on the government may be quite uncontentious in the normal course of events,
but is seriously tested during times of war when the government puts pressure on the
media to support its pro-war stance and help to mobilize public support in their readers,
Even though the patriotic
newsreels did not show
this, World War II was
extremely violent: see
Chapter 22.
viewers and listeners. In other words, the government wants to discourage the watchdog
tendencies of the media during times of war so their decisions will be supported rather
than questioned and critiqued. One way governments curb the intrusion of the media
is by protecting and classifying information in the name of national security – in effect,
they practise a form of official censorship. When the media fail to question such efforts
by the government, a rather cosy pro-war consensus is established between government
policy, media stories and public opinion. In this mode, the media do not act as a
watchdog, but rather as a mouthpiece for the government. It is as if the government
is willing to tolerate the pesky watchdog antics of the media during the normal course
of events, but when we go to war the media must get in line, stop asking difficult
questions and uncritically advocate the government’s decisions.
These two positions are never as clear-cut as I suggest, and it is therefore helpful
to think of the government and media in a constant tug-of-war: the government wants
the news media to act as a mouthpiece to generate public consensus, and the news media
want to act more like a watchdog by holding the government to account. Neither ever
completely succeeds, and as these three examples illustrate, using reductive categories
of ‘watchdog’ and ‘mouthpiece’ invokes a problematic causal relationship between the
news media and public opinion (that is, the idea that the news media can single-handedly
influence and change what we think) that effaces the way new media technologies shape
the story.
The Vietnam War (1960–75)
This war has come to be understood as the most important lesson for any modern
government trying to control the media during times of war. The historical context of
the war is important: it was taking place at the same time as the mass media were
developing with unprecedented speed in the Western world. Radio was still popular,
but television was quickly becoming the medium of choice; indeed, Vietnam is often
referred to as the first television war. As well, this was the era when photojournal-
ism flourished, and many photographers such as Tim Page, Larry Burrows and
Don McCullin became famous when their picture essays were published in broadsheet
newspapers and Sunday supplements.
The Vietnam War is significant because Western journalists, photographers and
cameramen had unprecedented access to the battlefield and tried to cover all aspects of
the war. This proliferation of stories, photographs and newsreel coverage meant that
Western audiences were confronted with increasingly graphic images of conflict every
morning in their newspapers and every night on the television news. These graphic media
stories were very different from the patriotic newsreels people remembered seeing at
the cinema during World War II, and gradually audiences began to turn against the
war. One of the most famous images that galvanized anti-war sentiment across the world
was taken by Nick Ut in 1972. It shows a young girl named Phan Thi Kim Phuc running
down the street fleeing a Napalm attack. Her clothes have been burned off, and her
face conveys both shock and terror. It was images like this that prompted media theorist
Marshall McLuhan to state that ‘Television brought the brutality of the war into the
comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America – not on
the battlefields of Vietnam’ (1975).
158 DEBBIE LISLE
BOX 8.2 DON MCCULLIN, WAR PHOTOGRAPHER
Don McCullin started his photography career on the
streets of North London, but became famous for
covering conflicts in Cyprus, Beirut and Vietnam.
This image of a shell-shocked US Marine was taken in
Vietnam during the Battle for Hue City in 1968. Like
many photographers, McCullin started out by wanting
to get close to the action: ‘I don’t believe you can see
what’s beyond the edge unless you put your head over
it; I’ve many times been right up to the precipice, not
even a foot or an inch away. That’s the only place to be
if you’re going to see and show what suffering really
means’ (Bannon and Eastman House, 2003: 677). But
after years of covering war-zones, McCullin became
depressed about the morally ambiguous position of the
war photographer: if you are a witness to such suffering,
shouldn’t you try and help instead of standing back and
taking pictures? McCullin himself has done both – he
has helped wounded soldiers, but he has also taken
pictures where he could have intervened. This tricky
position made McCullin seriously question the morality
of his chosen profession, and he spent much of the
1990s taking pictures of the tranquil Somerset
landscape. Recently, however, he has returned to
photography by documenting the conflict in Syria, but
also wider social issues such as AIDS in Africa.
FIGURE 8.1
Portrait of a shell-shocked marine, Hue, Vietnam,
1968. Photo: Don McCullin
HOW DO WE FIND OUT WHAT’S GOING ON? 159
This assertion – that media images caused Western audiences to turn against the
war – assumes that the media started off in mouthpiece mode writing stories that
generally aligned with military policy, but switched to watchdog mode as the prolonged
horrors of the war became apparent (it is usually claimed that the My Lai massacre in
1968 in which American forces killed hundreds of innocent Vietnamese was the decisive
turning point). Although media scholars have refuted this simplified claim by detailing
a much more complex relationship between media images, public opinion and
government policy during the Vietnam War (showing, for example how the Western
media followed the political elite in Washington), ‘the media lost us Vietnam’ remains
the dominant narrative of the war (Hallin, 1986; Williams, 1993). That simplified con –
sensus taught the American government and military two valuable lessons: (a) never
allow the media unrestricted access to the battlefield; and (b) always practise news
management by controlling the stories that are given to the media, and by extension,
to the public.
160 DEBBIE LISLE
The Gulf War (1990–91)
By the time the Gulf War started in 1990, the American government and military had
fully taken on board the simplified narrative that the media had lost them the Vietnam
War. It created a new body – the Department of Defense News Media Pool (DoDNMP)
– that was put in place to effectively control and manage the news media’s access to the
battlefield. Structurally, this involved organizing reporters into official pools with
military escorts, giving official news briefings about military operations, restricting the
travel and movement of journalists, and subjecting all copy written by journalists to a
‘formal security review’ (Tumber and Palmer, 2004: 3). Unsurprisingly, this situation
was very unpopular with the news media who argued that they could not do their jobs
properly – as watchdogs – if they were not given direct access to the battlefield. As war
correspondent P. J. O’Rourke explained at the time:
You may wonder what the job of being a Gulf War journalist is like. Well, we spend
all day broadcasting on the radio and TV telling people back home what’s happening
over here. And we learn what’s happening over here by spending all day monitoring
the radio and TV broadcasts from back home. You may also wonder how any actual
information ever gets into this loop. If you find out, please call.
(1992: 196)
What is important to remember about the Gulf War is that the over-riding relationship
between the media and the government was consensual. Either because the media were
successfully managed – and even censored – by the military’s news management prac –
tices, or because they reflected a general public support for the military intervention,
the Western media generally supported this war.
FIGURE 8.2
Napalm attack.
Photo: Nick Ut/AP
But it is also important to remember that the changing media–military relationship
in the Gulf War was developing in a new and different context. If Vietnam was the first
television war, then this was the first information war where, for the first time, news
was broadcast 24/7 all around the globe. This meant that news was conveyed in real-
time on channels like CNN, and people could watch live footage of scud missiles being
launched, bombs exploding, and troops firing weapons. Journalists, reporters, military
press officers, editors and news producers were forced to adapt to a completely
transformed news cycle in which they responded to ‘live-feed’ images without the usual
context or background – and they did this around the clock. Such intense media
saturation during the Gulf War intensified the idea that the news media can determine
how governments respond to international crises. Indeed, throughout the 1990s people
identified the ‘CNN effect’ in which the military no longer works in a pre-emptive mode
(that is, controlling and censoring reporters during war), but now works in a reactive
mode where it is forced to respond – sometimes militarily – to issues raised by the media.
The Iraq War (2003)
By the time the decision to invade Iraq was taken, the world was still recovering from
one of the biggest media events in history: the attack on the Twin Towers on 11
September 2001. The intense media scrutiny that surrounded this event carried over
into the reporting of the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Once again,
the US military sought to re-establish its control over the media – this time by
implementing a system of embedding more than 600 US and international reporters
who lived, worked and travelled with selected military units.
By offering ‘a first-hand, up-close view of combat missions’, the military used the
strategy of embedding to get the media back ‘on side’ after the contentious relationship
that had developed between the two institutions during the 1990s (Pfau et al., 2004:
75). But the strategy of embedded journalism actually allowed the military to exercise
a new and more subtle form of information management. For example, all embedded
journalists had to sign a lengthy contract which restricted what they were allowed to
HOW DO WE FIND OUT WHAT’S GOING ON? 161
BOX 8.3 THE CNN EFFECT
Piers Robinson defines the ‘CNN effect’ as ‘the ability of real-time communications technology, via the
news media, to provoke major responses from domestic audiences and political elites to both global and
national events’ (2002: 2). Certainly there are significant historical examples of media images shaping and
even provoking public and government action, for example, television images of the Ethiopian famine in
1984 mobilized millions to donate money and put pressure on their governments to send aid (Philo,
1993). After the Gulf War however, the media seemed to have more power to shape foreign policy
decisions about interventions in Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo and Rwanda. The CNN effect continues to be
debated by media analysts, military press officers and governments, especially the extent to which the
news media can cause or provoke a policy response, and whether the media only speeds up foreign policy
actions that were already in preparation.
11 September 2001, was
followed by what was
called the war on terror,
and the Iraq war was part
of that: see Chapters 2
and 26.
This active use of Web
2.0 technology has
developed much further
since then and has
played a significant role
in posting information
about events – and
especially the impact of
violence on people –
within the so-called Arab
Spring: see Chapter 9.
For more on what
happened at Abu Ghraib
and how this became
possible see Chapter 2.
The use of new media
in the Arab Spring, and
questions concerning
the governance and
control of these new
technologies, are
discussed in Chapter 9.
162 DEBBIE LISLE
report (for example, nothing on future operations, no photographs of prisoners of war)
and prevented them from carrying private mobile phones or satellite telephones, or
travelling in their own vehicles (Tumber and Palmer, 2004: 16). Such strategies of
information control seriously compromised the media’s ability to act as a watchdog
because each reporter effectively became a member of the military troop. Journalists
bonded with soldiers (often using ‘we’ in their stories) and were entirely dependent on
the military for transport, food and security. As a result, even the most experienced
journalist became, in effect, a propaganda tool for the government (McLane, 2004:
82–3).
One of the things that distinguished the Iraq War from previous conflicts was the
increasing use of internet news sources and blogs. For those fed up with the spin
emanating from Western news agencies and looking for war coverage not compromised
by embedded reporting or vetted by the Pentagon, it was possible to access news from
independent media sites such as the Independent Media Centre (www.indymedia.org),
or from Arab media sources such as Al Jazeera (http://english.aljazeera.net/News).
Moreover, many people were taking control of this medium in an active way by posting
ideas, images and commentary on web pages and blogs. Indeed, the Iraq war ushered
in the era of the ‘warblog’ where established journalists (for example, Arianna Huffington
on www.Huffingtonpost.com/theblog), soldiers stationed in Iraq (for example,
‘My War: Killing Time in Iraq’ at http://cbftw.blogspot.com) and concerned citizens
offered personal interpretations and generated web-based discussion about the war. One
of the most popular warblogs during the conflict – ‘Where is Raed?’ (http://dear_raed.
blogspot.com/) – was run by Salam Pax, an ordinary Iraqi citizen who uploaded reports
about daily life in a war zone. It was on these websites and warblogs that the information
war charted a new course. The gathering and dissemination of news was no longer the
province of established media institutions: the birth of citizen journalism meant that
anyone with internet access and computer skills could contribute to the unfolding story.
The power and reach of the internet for disseminating news became undeniable when
infamous images from the war – digital photographs of American soldiers torturing Iraqis
at the Abu Ghraib prison, video clips of Al Qaeda beheading one of its kidnap victims,
and mobile phone shots of Saddam Hussein being hanged – were circulated globally
and discussed widely. This is not to suggest that the internet is always truthful or
accurate, but it is to recognize that during the Iraq War, the internet became a crucial
forum where ordinary people could access both official and alternative news sources,
participate in online discussions about the war, disseminate controversial links and images
and actively shape this news story.
As James Der Derian (2001) has argued, we can no longer understand the operation
of modern war without examining its virtual character – how military organizations,
diplomats and statesmen are making use of computer technology and virtual networks
in order to better mobilize for combat. Equally, we need to pay careful attention to the
increasing use of social media in political struggles, conflicts and revolutions. As
academic and media commentator David Campbell argues regarding the political unrest
in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011, claims that Twitter and Facebook caused
the revolutions are misplaced and grossly oversimplified (Campbell, 2011). Certainly
social networking is an important part of the new media landscape, but it is – like the
telegraph and telephone before it – simply a technology of communication, and the
http://www.indymedia.org
http://english.aljazeera.net/News
http://www.Huffingtonpost.com/theblog
http://cbftw.blogspot.com
http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/
http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/
BOX 8.4 JAMES DER DERIAN’S MIMENET
James Der Derian argues that we can no longer think of society as a simple military-industrial complex in
which the government, business elites and the military run things in a cosy triad. Contemporary society
must now be understood as a military–industrial–media–entertainment–network – or MIMENET – in which
technologies such as computer simulations have erased the line between the virtual world and the real
world. He explains, for example, how Hollywood has joined forces with the military to produce computer
generated ‘simulation-based training environments’ in order to make combat more real for soldiers in
training. Why practise killing ‘fake’ enemies when you can kill very realistic computer-generated ones?
Such simulations are also shaping the thoroughly digitized battlefield as soldiers now rely on computer
technologies to transform foreign territory into fully functional 3-D images that help them effectively track,
expose and target their enemies. Der Derian is concerned with how all this computer technology
effectively sanitizes the consequences of war: what happens when enemies are reduced to pixels on a
screen – when war is effectively reduced to a video game? He argues that we are living in an age of
‘virtuous war’ where violence is executed ‘from a distance – with no or minimal casualties’ (Der Derian,
2001: xv). This distance radically changes the soldier’s moral proximity to the enemy who has now become
thoroughly dehumanized and digitized. As Der Derian argues, ‘virtuous war has an unsurpassed power to
commute death, to keep it out of sight, out of mind. Herein lies its most morally dubious danger. In
simulated preparations and virtual executions of war, there is a high risk that one learns how to kill but not
to take responsibility for it’ (Der Derian, 2001: xvi).
HOW DO WE FIND OUT WHAT’S GOING ON? 163
real questions we need to be asking are about who uses and controls it, how its bias
operates, and whose interests it is serving.
These examples of the changing relationships between the news media/military/
government/public during war are instructive, for they show us how information is
transformed during the process of communication. Whether it is the government trying
to control journalists’ access to the battlefield, reporters trying to reveal the military’s
less palatable actions to audiences back home or audiences putting forward their own
version of events, it is clear that nobody remains neutral in their efforts to use and abuse
information during war. With the never-ending struggle between the media as either
watchdog or mouthpiece, audiences must try to distinguish between truth, fact, spin,
propaganda, rhetoric and analysis. No wonder that millions of us have taken matters
into our own hands by tweeting, posting and blogging our own views about global
politics!
GENERAL RESPONSES
THE MEDIA, POWER AND DEMOCRACY
These two primary roles of the media in society (as either watchdog or mouthpiece)
are explained, analysed and developed by two contrasting schools of thought. It seems
there is no way to resolve the contradictory position of the media in society: it will always
be both watchdog and mouthpiece. At the heart of this debate is a fundamental
Media that promote
different views arguably
don’t offer a simple
choice, as we are not
necessarily aware of the
‘picture’ of the world
which informs what we
can see and think: see
Chapter 2.
For a discussion of
power and authority see
Chapter 7.
Chapter 19 looks at
inequality within the
United States.
HOW DO WE FIND OUT WHAT’S GOING ON? 165
For pluralists, such balanced accusations demonstrate that the media is getting it
right: they should always keep the government on their toes, no matter what ideological
principles that government espouses.
Along with the protection of free speech, the reduction of government interference
in the media, and an increase in people’s access to information, pluralists advocate the
principle of consumer choice. For example, if a newspaper, news channel or webpage
is too right-wing for you, then you can choose a more left-wing broadsheet, television
station or policy blog. Pluralists always emphasize the range of media products available
to the consumer – from small circulation newspapers like Socialist Worker to broadsheets
like the New York Times. Pluralists accept that each different media outlet presents a
partial and slanted view of the world, but argue that it is the consumer who ultimately
decides which partial view prevails and becomes accepted by the mainstream. In this
approach, a basic symmetry exists between media outlets and their audiences. If a
marginalized viewpoint is unpopular, it is squeezed out and becomes commercially
unviable. As O’Sullivan argues, such a variety of media outlets ‘act as a barometer of
changing tastes and preferences. Diverse audience interests are reflected in a diversity
of media choice. If there is a demand, media corporations will respond’ (O’Sullivan et
al., 2003: 146). In this sense, pluralism is founded on the notion of consensus: there
is a consensus on the predominant social values in society, which is reflected in
mainstream and popular media.
Critical perspective
Those who approach the media from a critical perspective start from the assumption
that we live in a hierarchical society where power is concentrated in the hands of only
a few people at the top. This does not just mean those in government, but also those
who control wealth (business leaders), and those who control information (media
leaders). The basic assumption of a critical approach is that the media will work to secure
the interests of this elite group. In effect, they operate as a mouthpiece for elite power
by encouraging the idea that the hierarchical structure of society is beneficial for
everyone (including those at the bottom), and discouraging the fact that the elite benefits
disproportionately from such a social structure. For critical scholars, the elite uses the
media as a tool of persuasion: they try and convince everyone that the hierarchical
structure of society is serving everyone’s interests, not just their own.
This does not mean that the media completely relinquishes its role as a watchdog.
Indeed, the critical approach argues that the media are perfectly capable of attacking
the occupants of political office; that is, whatever party and group of politicians happens
to be in power at any particular time. However, this watchdog role is very limited. While
the media are able to critique politicians, they are not able to critique the foundations
and structures of political power itself. This is how the media works in tandem with
elite power: it offers superficial critiques of particular parties and policies (for example,
‘George Bush’s foreign policy agenda is flawed’), but it never goes so far as to question
the foundations of the system itself (for example, ‘if we live in an egalitarian society,
how come so many families still live in poverty?’). And this is why the hierarchical and
unequal structure of the system – a structure which, remember, serves to protect the
dominant position of the elite – continues to persist. Critical scholars argue that the
War on Journalism provides a compelling argument about how News Corporation
manipulated news content – especially about the War on Terror (www.outfoxed.org).
When this kind of cosy relationship between elite groups is established, citizens are
discouraged and actively prevented from asking difficult or subversive questions. Graphic
artist Micah Wright’s re-working of World War II iconography to comment on the
American news media’s complicity with Bush’s interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan
after 2001 (see his ‘Propaganda Re-Mix Project’ at http://homepage.mac.com/
leperous/PhotoAlbum1.html) provides a useful reminder of what happens when the
media act as an uncritical mouthpiece for government interests.
The power of the audience
While the pluralist vs. critical debate does analyse the media’s wider role in society, it
doesn’t pay enough attention to the power of the audience. Pluralists assume that
audiences interpret media products according to the same dominant values of consensus,
whereas critical scholars believe that audiences are so pacified by media products that
they have become too stupid to identify how the media reproduces elite power. Cultural
theorist Stuart Hall (1993) offers a compelling alternative to this debate in his
encoding/decoding model which foregrounds the power of the audience.
Hall argues that any media message is made up of codes, or signs. During the
process of communication, media producers arrange these codes so that they convey a
preferred meaning, which is then sent through media channels and delivered to
audiences. But Hall makes two important developments here. First, he suggests that all
media texts are polysemic; that is, each document – a television show, a photograph, a
blog – contains a number of possible interpretations. What happens in the process of
communication is that all these different interpretations are gathered up and squashed
into a preferred meaning that serves elite political agendas. Second, he suggests that
there is no guarantee that the preferred meaning encoded into a media text will be read
in the intended way by its consumers. Certainly many people will ‘get the message’,
but many people will not – and some will deliberately refuse it. For Hall, this is because
the audience can never be seen as a homogeneous group of passive citizens. When
consuming the media, each audience member will take up a different position depending
on their own context.
People who watch and read the media uncritically are in the dominant–hegemonic
position: they decode and accept the preferred meaning because it accords with their
own political values. People in this position do not question the motives or agendas
behind a media product, but simply enjoy it as an innocent leisure practice. People who
watch and read the media with some critical awareness are in the negotiated position:
that is, they accept the basic message of a programme or story, but they may differ or
disagree on certain specific points. These critical moments can arise when the reader
has more personal knowledge or experience than is being expressed. So, for example,
you may read a newspaper story about why Britain is being ‘swamped’ by refugees and
asylum seekers, and while you may agree that this is a growing political issue, you may
disagree with the racist overtones of the story. In this case, you may have written an
essay on this subject for one of your classes, and you may have discovered a number of
alternative reasons why refugees and asylum seekers are now a permanent feature in
HOW DO WE FIND OUT WHAT’S GOING ON? 167
In a similar way to Stuart
Hall, Jacques Rancière
foregrounds what he
calls the emancipated
spectator. See Chapter 18
for a discussion of
Rancière’s work.
You may in fact wonder
why people cannot
simply choose where
they wish to live: see
Chapter 10.
http://www.outfoxed.org
http://homepage.mac.com/leperous/PhotoAlbuml.html
http://homepage.mac.com/leperous/PhotoAlbuml.html
BOX 8.5 STUART HALL
Stuart Hall is one of the most prominent cultural studies
theorists of our time. His work analyses how cultural and
media products are part of a struggle between elites who
want to secure their hegemonic (or dominant) position in
society, and those who want to stop them. The media, of
course, is central to this struggle; indeed, this
‘representational arena’ is where the struggle for
hegemony takes place. For example, the media bolsters
the elite’s position when it constructs ‘moral panics’,
reproduces stereotypes and scapegoats non-mainstream
identities, but it also challenges that elite position when it
gives voice to marginalized groups and individuals (Hall
et al., 1978; Hall and Jefferson, 1993). For Hall, much depends on the audience,
who may read cultural and media products in a passive and uncritical manner, or
may actively construct alternative and oppositional meanings. While Hall’s work
is indebted to Marxism – indeed, he claims to always be ‘within shouting distance
of Marx’ – he remains uncomfortable with how some Marxists privilege the
category of class and neglect our complex identity negotiations of race, gender
and sexuality. Much of his later work examines how these negotiations play
themselves out in the ‘circuit of culture’ where representations are produced,
disseminated and consumed (Hall, 1997: 15–63; Du Gay et al., 1997). For
example, newspaper representations of black British athletes reveal a much wider
struggle over multiculturalism and national identity in Britain (Hall, 1997:
223–34). When these athletes are winning races, newspapers emphasize their
British qualities – but when they are losing races (or worse, when they are failing
drug tests), newspapers accentuate their identities as black men and women.
Central to all of Hall’s work is the idea that hegemonic elites intervene in the
‘circuit of culture’ to produce and stabilize dominant meanings. The job of any
critical reader is to identify, analyse and resist those moments of domination by
offering independent, critical and alternative readings.
FIGURE 8.5
Stuart Hall.
Photo: Stuart Hall
Media Consumers:
• Dominant-Hegemonic
• Negotiated
• Oppositional
Media Producers
PREFERRED
MEANING
E
nc
od
ing Decoding
FIGURE 8.6
A simple formulation
of Hall’s model of
encoding/decoding.
Stuart Hall
168 DEBBIE LISLE
Is it a bad thing that all
media information
advances someone’s
agenda? Is it a bad thing
if they pretend not to
have an ‘agenda’?
HOW DO WE FIND OUT WHAT’S GOING ON? 169
global politics. Hall argues that most audience members adopt this negotiated position
with respect to the media. Finally, people who watch and read the media with a critical
eye are in the oppositional position: they understand perfectly well what the preferred
meaning of the story is, but they deliberately reject it and draw on alternative values.
This last position is important for Hall, for it suggests that audiences are not the passive
and duped creatures that some critical approaches would have us believe. Rather,
audiences have the capacity to resist the preferred meanings in any media text, and
therefore question any consensus that might develop between the media and the powers-
that-be.
While Hall’s model does simplify the process of media communication, its
importance lies in the way it foregrounds the power of the audience and highlights
critical reading strategies. It is only by identifying the dominant agendas being
encouraged by the media – especially in the area of global politics – that we can chal-
lenge those moments when dominant agendas masquerade as ‘the truth’ in order to
squeeze out more uncomfortable or unpalatable, diverse and complex accounts of global
events.
BROADER ISSUES
HOW TO READ THE MEDIA
While Hall’s model provides a useful account of audience power, it assumes that our
responses to media representations are always rational, judicious and measured. This is,
of course, seldom the case: we react to media representations instantaneously and
emotionally. Think of the way avid sports fans watch their favourite teams compete live
on television: they shout at their own players to do better (and they swear at the
opposition for being terrible); they scream and whoop and jump and go crazy when
victory is assured; they are outraged when ‘unjust’ refereeing decisions are awarded;
and they sometimes weep with depression when their beloved team loses. It is almost
as if they believe that if they shout loud enough at the television their favourite player
will listen to their tactical suggestion (crafted carefully from the sofa), or the referee
will reverse a penalty decision. This is not rational behaviour by any means. But it is
one example of how all audience members – including you and me – become
emotionally engaged in media representations. When media producers are trying to
convince us of something – the rightness of a policy, the hilarity of a pratfall, the guilt
of a prisoner, the trauma of a victim, the joy of a victory, the pain of a death – they
don’t do it by appealing to our rational natures. They do it by appealing to our emotions.
And it works: we giggle, we scoff, we roll our eyes, we bury our head in our hands, we
laugh out loud, we raise our eyebrows, we look away when it gets scary, we shout and
cheer, and sometimes we cry.
The news media accounts of war that we have examined pride themselves on
documenting the truth, evidence and proof about global politics. But if all media
representations advocate a particular agenda (that is, they are biased), then it follows
that media producers will use clever editing tricks, powerful imagery and moralizing
rhetoric to get their point across. These efforts are intended to bypass our critical
and intellectual faculties, inject themselves straight into our emotional conscience, and
create an intended effect (for example, supporting a war or opposing it). The institutional
conventions, norms and practices of news production dictate that such emotional appeals
are subtle, nuanced and not immediately apparent; indeed, the Glasgow Media Group
has done excellent work over the years carefully showing us how these techniques are
employed. However, to clearly illustrate the work of emotion in media representations
of war, it is useful to examine a belated reconstruction of a battle, whose truth claims
(for example, ‘This is how it really was’) are produced through the emotional registers
of sentimentality melodrama and nostalgia. Film director Stephen Spielberg is a genius
at securing consensus over historical truth claims by appealing to the audience’s
emotions. With that in mind, let’s critically analyse his 1998 war film Saving Private
Ryan through Hall’s decoding model in order to identify a multiplicity of rational
audience responses, but also to explore the work of emotion in audience interpretation.
The film depicts the famous Allied D-Day landings in Northern France during
World War II. It follows a group of soldiers who have been assigned a special task: to
locate and retrieve a Private Ryan, whose three brothers have been killed in action, and
who is to be returned home to his mother. The preferred meaning of the film, encoded
by Spielberg, is about the courage, bravery and heroism of ordinary American soldiers
during World War II. Those who enacted a dominant–hegemonic reading of the film
were swept away by Spielberg’s narrative – not just the awesome and ‘realistic’ visuals
of the opening D-Day landing scenes, but also by the touching moments of male
camaraderie as a disparate group of soldiers banded together for a humanitarian mission.
Viewers in this position were deeply moved by Spielberg’s graphic depiction of the
horrors of war and the many sacrifices made by American soldiers in the name of
freedom. As one veteran of the D-Day landings explained, ‘Spielberg has given us what
we used to call an optimistic tragedy. We come away sobered but feeling better about
the strength of our democracy’ (Metcalf, 1999: 46). Those who enacted a negotiated
reading were also moved by the narrative trajectory of the film, but were able to point
out some inconsistencies in Spielberg’s narrative. For example, the film makes it seem
as if the Americans were the only forces involved in the D-Day landings, and ignores
the participation of British, Canadian and other European troops. Indeed, French viewers
reacted badly to the ‘Americentric’ portrayal of war, especially the patriotic flag waving
at the beginning and end of the film (Hedetoft, 2000: 278–97). Those who enacted
an oppositional reading of the film took issue with Spielberg’s claim that the horrific
and detailed opening landing sequence constituted an anti-war statement – the idea
being that after seeing such horrors on screen, nobody would ever support war again.
As World War II veteran Howard Zinn explains, the film does nothing but glorify and
romanticize the myth of combat: ‘I disliked the film intensely, indeed, was angry at it.
Because I did not want the suffering of men in war to be used, yes, exploited, in such
a way as to revive what should be buried along with all those bodies in Arlington
cemetery – the glory of military heroism’ (1998: 138). For critics like Zinn, Saving
Private Ryan’s failure to live up to its anti-war credentials by critiquing the military
establishment meant that it worked like all seductive Hollywood war films – as a
recruitment tool for the military.
This example is particularly interesting because it demonstrates how two veterans
of World War II – men who actually fought on the European battlefields – derived
totally different meanings from the same film. This brings up the question of whether
170 DEBBIE LISLE
The Glasgow Media
Group has produced
path-breaking and
controversial empirical
analyses of bias in the
UK news media,
beginning with studies of
bias against unions in
the 1970s.
How we should
remember wars is itself a
significant question: see
Chapter 22.
HOW DO WE FIND OUT WHAT’S GOING ON? 171
we know something better if we are there, experiencing an event first hand. But by the
time both Metcalf and Zinn watched Saving Private Ryan in 1998, their ‘first hand’
experience of World War II had been filtered, refracted and shaped by over 50 years of
media and cinematic representations of that event. Indeed, these representations helped
them transform the incoherent, traumatic and terrifying experiences of battle into a clear
and concise narrative of ‘what happened’. For Metcalf – and for many people who live
in Allied countries (including Steven Spielberg) – World War II is seen as a noble, heroic
and just battle against an evil enemy. Indeed, this is the preferred meaning of the
film. But Zinn rejects this message and takes a more oppositional stance: no war – not
even World War II – is ever worth the sacrifice and loss of innocent life, and all patriotic
and uncritical commemorations of such events should be resisted. Here we have two
radically different interpretations of World War II – there is not just disagreement over
‘what happened’, but also disagreement over the meaning of such an event, and how
that meaning is represented in a film like Saving Private Ryan. The problem, here, is
that negotiated and oppositional readings require an analytical ability to indentify the
preferred meaning and develop some form of logical counter-argument to it. Such
readings ignore the ability of cinematic reconstructions to seduce viewers emotionally
into a particular point of view that masquerades as a singular truth. While the dominant–
hegemonic position might be frowned upon because it renders audience members
passive, at least it acknowledges the way viewers are emotionally drawn into a film, and
the pleasure they get from engaging at that level.
I remember being entirely moved by this film the first time I saw it on its release
in 1998. I was pinned to my seat for the initial D-Day landing scene, I fell half in love
with the wise but tough Captain Miller (played by Tom Hanks), I hated the Germans
– especially the traitorous prisoner of war, I was full of admiration for a military that
wanted to protect Mrs Ryan’s only remaining son, and I wept buckets at the film’s final
FIGURE 8.7
Tom Hanks, Matt
Damon and Ed Burns in
Saving Private Ryan
(1998). Dir. Stephen
Spielberg. Dreamworks
SKG, Paramount
Pictures and Amblin
Entertainment. Ronald
Grant Archive
Can you think of a film
you’ve seen recently that
has appealed to you
emotionally in these
sorts of ways?
The emotions set off by
witnessing others’
suffering raise questions:
What can we do to stop
people harming others?
And what issues arise
when we believe that we
know what is good for
them? See Chapters 25
and 21.
172 DEBBIE LISLE
rendering of heroic sacrifice. But I was very perplexed at this response: why was I so
moved by this film? I wasn’t alive during World War II, and I didn’t personally know
anyone who fought during that war. This was a different world to my own. And then
I started thinking about how Saving Private Ryan related to the world I was living in
– a decade in which violence was returning to the global stage with great force, but a
decade in which the moral justifications for violence were, at best, hopelessly complex.
I realized that Saving Private Ryan is much more about conflict in the 1990s than
it is about World War II: it encourages us to remember a ‘good and just’ war in order
to forget the moral complexities of recent interventions (for example Bosnia, Kosovo,
Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq). In fact, my overblown emotional response was precisely
what Spielberg ordered: his nostalgic commemoration created a ‘comfortable surrogate’
for the uncomfortable world I faced every day when I watched the television news or
read the newspaper headlines (Kolker, 2000: 257). This is because stories about
important historical events are directly shaped by the issues of the present rather than
the past. Very simply, it is not some overarching, finally settled and uncontested notion
of ‘the truth’ that dictates how we talk about the past – it is our present concerns and
struggles that shape such discussions.
I was shocked, to say the least, at the way I had been so successfully manipulated
by Spielberg’s story. In every subsequent viewing, I discovered another layer to this
deception: the rather obvious musical score, the cynically timed combat sequences
punctuated by slower narrative elaboration, the faceless German enemy, the stereotypical
troop of ‘characters’ (that is, the wise-ass from the Bronx, the innocent rookie, the
thoughtful doctor), and the unabashed patriotism of the American flag. Every time I
watched it I got angrier at Spielberg’s ability to manipulate the audience. And yet despite
all this ‘rational’ knowledge, I still could not help but be moved, somehow, by the larger
themes of sacrifice, brotherhood and heroism. Going back to Hall’s model, including
this emotional register provides a much more comprehensive account of the negotiated
viewing position most of us adopt when encountering representations of war. We still
need to work out how such representations are manipulating us and trying to convince
us of a dominant political agenda, but we also need to acknowledge how we are moved
when we see images depicting the consequences of war – when people’s cities are
destroyed, when their loved ones are killed, and when their homelands implode in
violence.
My point is not to deny our emotional reactions; indeed, feelings like empathy,
compassion and anger connect people across the world and inspire many common
practices such as charity donations, aid packages, debt relief and humanitarian
interventions. My point is simply that we must look carefully at how direct news media
accounts and belated reconstructions of global politics mobilize both our reason and
our passion in trying to put a particular point across. Too often, emotional appeals mask
the dominant political agendas that are being served by the media. We’ve seen how
Spielberg’s narrative about sacrifice repro duces American patriotism and secures a
consensus for contemporary foreign policy decisions. And while emotional appeals are
more muted in the news media, they still underscore what purports to be a wholly
‘factual’ endeavour (think, for example, of how front line reports are often anchored
with the story of an indivi dual victim of war – a mother, a child, a shopkeeper, a teacher
– so that audiences back home can feel a personal connection to someone in a conflict
It might be worth asking
where the questions
we ask come from.
Are they neutral, or do
they come from who we
think we are, and what
we think is important,
before we start asking
questions?
HOW DO WE FIND OUT WHAT’S GOING ON? 173
far away). By all means, we must maintain the capacity to be moved by powerful media
representations – to be inspired into debate, discussion and action – but we must also
leave ourselves room to experience the pleasures of emotional engagement (for example,
laughter, sadness, shock, catharsis). The point is that we cannot exempt the media from
critical examination. We must call attention to those moments when our emotions are
deliberately manipulated in an effort to encourage a specific political position (e.g. going
to war or not going to war).
CONCLUSION
There is, of course, an easy answer to the question ‘How do we find out what’s going
on in the world?’ Very simply, we ask questions. This is always the first step – be curious
and take an active role in discovering the ins and outs of global politics. But this chapter
has taken a further step by asking us to think about where we direct our questions, about
the forum within which we discover, debate and discuss global politics. And this forum
is undoubtedly the media in its broadest sense – newspapers, television, radio, film,
magazines, blogs, podcasts, Twitter feeds, advertisements, etc. The main point of this
chapter has been to demonstrate that the media is not a neutral space; rather, it plays an
active role in shaping and influencing our opinions about global politics. The influential
role of the media is nowhere more apparent than during times of war: indeed, there are
many examples of the media acting as a mouthpiece for government during war, to
the point of becoming a vehicle for propaganda. In this sense, we cannot leave it up
to the media to provide a balanced view. We, as consumers of the media, need to develop
critical reading skills so we can identify when and how the media tries to manipulate and
shape our views about the world in order to serve a dominant political agenda.
FURTHER READING
Lawrence Grossberg, Ellen Wartella and D. Charles Whitney (1998) Mediamaking: Mass Media
in a Popular Culture, New York: Sage Publications, is the most comprehensive introduction
to the overall relationship between the media and society. It develops a politically sophisticated
account of the media, and provides good examples and illustrations of the main theoretical
concepts.
John Fiske (1990) Introduction to Communication Studies, London: Routledge; and Dennis
McQuail (2005) McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory, London: Sage Publications, both
give a more in-depth look at the theoretical framing of com muni cation. They help to explain
the complicated transfer of information from prod ucers, through the media, to the consumer,
and both books tackle the difficult question of how meaning is generated in this process.
Within the study of global politics, Francois Debrix and Cynthia Weber (eds) (2003) Rituals
of Mediation: International Politics and Social Meaning, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, offer good examples of the contested space between events in global politics and their
mediated representations.
Mark Wheeler (1997) Politics and the Mass Media, Oxford: Blackwell, chapter 1, provides a good
review of the main debates between pluralist and critical (especially Marxist) approaches to
the media, as does Georgia Chondroleou’s (2002) article ‘Studying the Media and Politics
in Britain: A Tale of Two Literatures?’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations
2, 2: 359–73.
Tim Allen and Jean Seaton (1999) The Media of Conflict: War Reporting and Representations of
Ethnic Violence, London and New York: Zed Books; Susan Carruthers (2000) The Media at
War: Communication and Conflict in the Twentieth Century, London: Palgrave; and Andrew
Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin (2010) War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War,
Cambridge: Polity, are good starting points that provide general accounts of the relationship
between the media and war. The work of the Glasgow Media Group provides good in-depth
analysis of bias in war reporting, see especially (1995) Industry, Economy, War and Politics:
Glasgow University Media Reader, Vol. 2, London: Routledge; and (2004) Bad News From
Israel, London: Pluto. There are numerous books recently published about the media’s role
in specific conflicts, especially the ‘war on terror’; see for example Francois Debrix (2007)
Tabloid Terror: War, Culture and Geopolitics, London: Routledge; and Andrew Hoskins and
Ben O’Loughlin (2009) Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News
Discourse, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
WEBSITES
Communication, Culture and Media Studies Infobase, http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/
MUHome/cshtml; also known as ‘Cultsock’. Media Communication Studies site at the
University of Aberystwyth, http://www.aber.ac.uk/media
These two sites provide a comprehensive introduction to the theories, debates and methods
of media studies.
Indymedia, http://www.indymedia.org; a collection of independent media resources. Fairness
and Accuracy in Reporting, http://www.fair.org/index.php; a media watch group.
There are a variety of websites dedicated to independent media reporting of which these two
are among the best.
The War and Media Network, http://www.warandmedia.org; The Global Media Project at The
Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, http://watsoninstitute.
org/globalmedia
Interdisciplinary research into the role of the media during war is developing rapidly, and
these two websites in particular help to navigate, foster and promote this work.
The Iraq War Archive, http://www.iraqwararchive.org
More specifically, a useful website about media coverage of the Iraq war.
David Campbell’s website and blog Photography, Multimedia, Politics, http://www.david-
campbell.org offers in-depth analysis and reflection on the role of visual documents in the
media.
OTHER RESOURCES
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, Documentary by Robert Greenwald (www.
outfoxed.org).
REFERENCES
Bannon, Anthony and George Eastman House (2003) 1000 Photo Icons, Cologne: Taschen.
Burton, Graeme (1997) More than Meets the Eye: An Introduction to Media Studies, 2nd edn,
London: Arnold.
Campbell, David (2011) ‘Thinking Images v.9: Egypt, Revolution and the Internet’, 8 February,
Photography, Multimedia, Politics, available at http://www.david-campbell.org/2011/
02/08/thinking-images-v-9-egypt/ (accessed 19 July 2011).
174 DEBBIE LISLE
HOW DO WE FIND OUT WHAT’S GOING ON? 175
Chomsky, Noam and Edward Herman (2006) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of
the Mass Media, London: Vintage.
Debrix, Francois and Cynthia Weber (eds)(2003) Rituals of Mediation: International Politics and
Social Meaning, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Der Derian, James (2001) Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment
Network, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Du Gay, Paul, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay and Keith Negus (1997) Doing Cultural
Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, London: Sage Publishers and The Open University.
Fiske, John (1990) Introduction to Communication Studies, London: Routledge.
Hall, Stuart (1993) ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader,
London: Routledge.
––––(1997) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, London: Sage
Publishers and The Open University.
Hall, Stuart, Charles Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Robert (1978) Policing the
Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hall, Stuart and Tony Jefferson (eds) (1993) Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in
Post-war Britain, London: Routledge.
Hallin, Daniel C. (1986) The ‘Uncensored War’: The Media and Vietnam, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Hedetoft, Ulf (2000) ‘Contemporary Cinema: Between Cultural Globalization and National
Interpretation’, in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (eds), Cinema and Nation, London:
Routledge.
Kolker, Robert Phillip (2000) A Cinema of Loneliness, 3rd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McLane, Brendan R. (2004) ‘Reporting from the Sandstorm: An Appraisal of Embedding’,
Parameters, 34, 1: 77–88.
McLuhan, Marshall (1975) Montreal Gazette, 16 May.
Metcalf, Roy (1999) ‘So Costly a Sacrifice: Saving Private Ryan’, Social Policy, 29, 4: 44–7.
O’Rourke, P. J. (1992) Give War a Chance, London: Picador.
O’Sullivan, Tim, Brian Dutton and Philip Rayner (2003) Studying the Media: An Introduction,
3rd edn, London: Hodder and Arnold.
Pfau, Michael, Michel Haigh, Mitchell Gettle, Michael Donnelly, Gregory Scott, Dana Warr and
Elaine Wittenberg (2004) ‘Embedding Journalists in Military Combat Units: Impact on Story
Frames and Tone’, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 81, 1: 74–88.
Philo, Greg (1993) ‘From Buerk to Band Aid: The Media and the 1984 Ethiopian Famine’, in
John Eldridge (ed.), Getting the Message: News, Truth and Power, London: Routledge.
Postman, Neil (1987) Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,
London: Methuen.
Robinson, Piers (2002) The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention,
London: Routledge.
Tumber, Howard and Jerry Palmer (2004) Media at War: The Iraq Crisis, London: Sage.
Wheeler, Mark (1997) Politics and the Mass Media, Oxford: Blackwell.
Williams, Kevin (1993) ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel: The Mass Media, Public Opinion
and the Vietnam War’, in John Eldridge (ed.), Getting the Message: News, Truth and Power,
London: Routledge.
Zinn, Howard (1998) ‘Saving Private Ryan’, Social Justice, 25, 3: 138–43.
For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
http://www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
CHAPTER 9
How does the way we use the
Internet make a difference?
M. I. Franklin
■ The question
WHAT IS THE INTERNET?
■ Illustrative example
THE ARAB SPRING AND INTERNET GOVERNANCE
■ General responses
REGULATION, CENSORSHIP AND RIGHTS
■ Broader issues
INTERNET FUTURES
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
WHAT IS THE INTERNET?
The Internet has already made an indelible mark on many facets of human endeavour,
at least in those parts of the world with access to its web-based news and entertainment,
information exchange and networking opportunities, pay-for or ‘free’ consumer products
and services, community and creative spaces. It makes a difference precisely because of
how ubiquitous this supraterritorial computer-mediated network of real-time
communications has become in the Global North. Whilst new users are coming online
at an increasing pace in the Global South, two-thirds of the world’s population are not
yet online. UN agencies and private-sector partners aim to ‘connect the next billion’
under the auspices of the Millennium Development Goals and other UN covenants (IGF
2008; United Nations General Assembly 2000; La Rue 2011). Despite this united front,
How we find out about
the world is the subject
of Chapter 8; of course,
today many of us get
much of our information
about what goes on from
the Internet.
The financial crisis of
2008 is discussed in
Chapter 18.
BOX 9.1 ZAPATISTAS
The Zapistas, or, in full, the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN), are
a group based in Chiapas, a state of Mexico. They are of interest
to scholars and students of global politics because of their very
distinctive style of opposition to the contemporary global order,
and although they are a relatively small group engaged in local
struggles, their ideology and the writings of their leader,
Subcommandante Marcos, have influenced resistance groups
elsewhere, in part due to their Internet presence.
FIGURE 9.1
Subcommandante Marcos on twitter,
http://twitter.com/#!/Sub_Marcos
The Occupy movement
is discussed in Chapters
18 and 28.
HOW DOES THE INTERNET MAKE A DIFFERENCE? 177
however, differences in how individuals, communities, businesses and govern ments use
the Internet, to what ends and on whose terms and conditions raise questions that go
to the heart of social, political and economic life in coming years, as do its misuses and
non-uses.
The predominant uses of the Internet are for news, entertainment and keeping in
touch with friends or work-colleagues, but political and economic applications have also
been intrinsic to its short history. In the 1990s the Internet was used to generate global
awareness of the Zapatista Movement’s cause in Mexico and used to good effect in the
anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s and early 2000s, heralding the arrival of
web-based Indymedia, citizen journalism and the blogosphere’s influence on public
opinion and policy-making. Global financial markets’ refinements of Internet capabilities
were instrumental in the 1980s. The Internet itself was the driving force behind the
dot-com boom and bust – the spectacular rise and fall of IT companies – at the turn
of the twenty-first century and its instantaneous, 24/7 global flows remain indispensable
to the global political economy.
Attention has now turned to the role the new generation of the Internet, known
as Web 2.0, plays in the rapid spread of social unrest in Europe (from student demon –
strations in Athens 2008 to riots in London 2011), in political revolutions in the Middle
East and North Africa (from Egypt to Tunisia to Libya), and in sociopolitical
mobilization elsewhere (from anti-government demonstrations in Teheran and Rangoon
to the Occupy movement in New York and London). The Internet itself is increasingly
a focus for local and international mobilization against the ways governments and
corporations use it against their own citizens and customers, for example, by impeding
access to information online, eroding freedom of expression by censoring or filtering
web-content, compromising people’s privacy through unreasonable personal data
collection and retention, or monitoring online behaviour in ways that undermine human,
civil and economic rights (Jørgensen 2006; La Rue 2011).
http://twitter.com/
BOX 9.2 WHAT IS WEB 2.0?
When we speak of ‘social media’ we are also referring to a particular generation of
commercial products and services that integrate once separate uses into one
package, or platform. Email, web-browser, photo archives, live-chat, and web-links
are now bundled together to make it easier for us to contact friends and family in
real-time, create links to others by ‘friending’ someone, and share information.
Social Networking Sites like the current market-leader Facebook (based in the
USA), RenRen (based in China), and micro-blogging services like Twitter
epitomize this Web 2.0 generation of software applications. Their runaway
success and push to further integrate media, electronics, and Internet uses belies
the fact that Web 2.0 has not replaced what came before. The Internet is
comprised of overlapping layers of software applications and users from different
periods in its short history.
Chapter 11 traces
how these ideas of
territoriality and
sovereignty came into
existence in the first
place.
For a discussion of
imperial expansion see
Chapter 16.
In short, the Internet has become not only a critical means and medium for everyday
life, economic power, and sociopolitical dissent but also integral to the exercise of power:
an object for struggles over its ownership, control, and design (Mueller 2002; Clinton
2010; Nye 2002; Giacomello et al. 2009). States, corporations and civil society groups
are staking their claims on the Internet’s future as an affordable, socially just, profitable
means of communication and information exchange. These conflicting priorities are
putting pressure on traditional decision-making bodies as everyday realities of Internet
use float out of reach of national legislatures and jurisdictions. Classical notions of
national sovereignty and its territorially bounded understandings of accountability,
legality and legitimacy are no longer sufficient. The working principle that the Internet
is, by definition and design, a quintessentially global and open medium that nonetheless
needs to be brought more or less under control is currently hotly contested.
But what do we mean when we talk about the Internet? In practice, this term
encompasses information and communication technologies based on connecting up
computers and telecommunications systems in such a way that they can communicate
with one another by way of systems of interoperating Internet protocols: software codes
govern the way these interoperable systems function (Lessig 2006; Holmes 2007; Cerf
2012). The world-wide web and latest generation of social media that enable us to search
the web, generate our own content, get in touch with others in a few seconds, overlays
the Internet’s underlying ‘network of networks’ architecture (see Mueller 2002). These
all follow the pathways laid out by imperial and post-imperial telecommunications
submarine and satellite connections from the previous century. In this sense critical hubs
and functions of the Internet’s telegeography, like the telegraph and telephone before
it, reside in and fan out from the USA, UK and Western Europe.
Nonetheless, as the latest chapter in this larger history of telecommunications, the
Internet and its uses are no longer the preserve of its Anglo-Euro-American founding
fathers; computer geeks-cum-millionaires, national and regional defence establishments,
state-owned or private corporations. We need to think of the Internet as more than a
178 M. I. FRANKLIN
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What is meant by
modernization, and the
various changes linked
with this term, is
discussed in many
places in this book. See
Chapters 6 and 17, for
example.
It has been argued that
the US, China and
Europe are developing
very different Internets
with different deep
architectures (Goldsmith
and Wu 2006: 184).
Security and financial
organizations already
operate their own private
networks.
180 M. I. FRANKLIN
tool or piece of engineering that has made local–global connections and instantaneous
communications around the world not only possible but fashionable. Like its precedents,
the Internet is embedded in the modernization narrative of the rise of the modern
nation-state and empire. As such the Internet – its constituent parts and as a whole –
is also a sociocultural artefact, a historically located form of material and symbolic –
‘hard’ and ‘soft’ – power that engenders repression, expression, and opposition (Haraway
1990; Nye 2002; Holmes 2007). Moreover there is currently more than one Internet
in use, if not in the planning stages. Here too corporate and state actors have over –
lapping and conflicting plans for the future (Giacomello et al. 2009; Deibert and
Rohozinski 2010; Goldsmith and Wu 2006).
The Internet has also become indispensable in making war and peace, embedded
in power hierarchies, a focal point for terrorist and counter-terrorist communica tion
and activities, a lightning rod for political movements and social revolution. For ordinary
users, the benefits of having access to the web outweigh the risks: ‘transparency is good’,
being overly concerned about being tracked online is ‘old school’. But what if this
entitlement of life in the developed world was no longer a given? What if a whole
network, say that of a country, neighbourhood, or institution came under a sustained
cyber-attack by an external agent, infecting a website, accessing encrypted communi –
cations of government agencies, our bank accounts? To whom are these transgressors
answerable if they are working outside a national jurisdiction? Are there limits to
transparency, freedom of information, and free speech in cyberspace in light of new
security dilemmas in digital settings? If so, is there one rule for ordinary users and one
for governments or corporations in cyberspace?
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
THE ARAB SPRING AND INTERNET GOVERNANCE
To unpack these questions this section focuses on an illustrative example of distinct but
interconnected domains of action in which different ideas about Internet uses are a
central concern. The first is power struggles through the Internet: struggles taking place
via the web. The second is power struggles over the Internet: struggles contesting
ownership and control of its critical resources, services, transmission, and design.
Various responses common to both these domains provide some focal points for further
exploring how the ways we – and others – use the Internet make a difference in the
following section.
The revolution has been ‘Tweeted’: struggles using the Internet
The Internet, in particular the latest generation of social media, was deployed in political
uprisings and the overturning of authoritarian governments in North Africa and the
Middle East in the spring of 2011. Because of the way mobile phones, instant messaging
and micro-blogging services can send messages and images quickly over the web, and
the way these are then picked up by mainstream news media, the success and global
media coverage of these uprisings went hand in hand. These power struggles on the
streets and transmitted through the Internet in Tunisia and Egypt that toppled the Ben
BOX 9.3 THE ARAB SPRING
In December 2010 a man set himself on fire on the
street in Tunisia in protest, and that event sparked a
series of protests and movements that spread across
the Middle East and North Africa. Revolutions in
Tunisia, Egypt and Libya led to the ousting of
authoritarian regimes that had been in place for
decades, and violent repression by forces loyal to the
state took place in Bahrain, Syria, and elsewhere.
The revolutionary movements were notable for their
occupation of public spaces, such as Tahrir Square in
Cairo, and for the involvement of young people across
the region. These protests inspired the Occupy
movement in the US, Europe and elsewhere. For an
interactive timeline of events, see http://www.
guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/mar/22/
middle-east-protest-interactive-timeline.
FIGURE 9.3
Arab Spring – Yemen: a girl raises her hand with her
fingers painted with flags of Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia
and Libya as she marches during a demonstration to
demand the ousting of Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah
Saleh in the southern city of Taiz, 22 June 2011. Photo:
Khaled Abdullah/Reuters. http://www.takepart.com/
photos/year-end-arab-spring
FIGURE 9.4
Map of Middle East and North Africa, http://familysecuritymatters.org/imgLib/20110220_MidEastMap6
IRAN
SAUDI ARABIA
YEMEN
TURKEY
UKRAINE
RUSSIA
KAZAKHSTAN
IRAQ
SYRIA
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TUNISIA ISRAEL
NIGERMALI CHAD
EGYPT
Ethopia
Eritrea
Somalia
Djibouti
Bahrain
Qatarn
Turkmenistan
Uzbekistan
A
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SUDAN
LEBANON
Jo
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182 M. I. FRANKLIN
Traditional methods of
controlling the media in
wartime are discussed in
Chapter 8.
Ali and Mubarak regimes respectively were the crest of a wave of uprisings known as
the Arab Spring. Whilst the causes for uprisings and uses of the Internet differ from
place to place (e.g. the way events unfolded and were conveyed to the world in Libya
differed from those in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the Gaza Strip, and Yemen in the same
period), these events and their precursors in Iran and Burma, the Green and Saffron
movements respectively, have come to represent how the Internet, social media, and
revolution work together. Like previous partnerships between grassroots uses of media
to mobilize and challenge incumbent powers, this wave of ‘Facebook’ or ‘Twitter’
revolutions shows powerful uses of these technologies by citizens to overthrow repressive
governments.
Television viewers and Internet users in the West, whether unconnected to the
events or friends and family of the protesters, were treated to unedited, live streamed
coverage of events shot from the hip by participants. Professional bloggers and others,
dubbed ‘citizen journalists’ edited and re-circulated or retweeted these images around
the world, through personal and group-based social networks. And all in the space of
seconds, minutes, and hours. In stark contrast to conventional media coverage – when
in war the first victim is the truth as media images and messages are tightly controlled
by incumbents – these images spilled out and generated momentum before news and
security services could edit them for wider consumption.
The unremitting flow of tweets and mobile phone footage not only conveyed a
more compelling sense of what was going on; this surfeit of images and analyses from
non-professionals overwhelmed news-desks. Using a mobile phone to record events was
no longer for private purposes. The whole world, watching online, could witness the
events too. Immediately, journalists’ use of images without verifying the source raised
criticism of non-impartiality, created openings for disinformation if not a distortion of
the size and significance of the events flying across the web.
FIGURE 9.5
Protestors use mobile
phones in Tunisia.
Photo: Fred Dufour/
AFP/Getty Images
More importantly, countermanding applications, or use of the same media by
authorities, played their role in complicating the legitimacy of the media. Incumbents
immediately swung into action to stem the tide. In 2011 during the height of the
Egyptian uprisings and occupation of central Cairo, the beleaguered Mubarak govern –
ment, in partnership with Vodafone, cut off telecommunications, depriving demon –
strators in Tahrir Square from using their mobile phones and Twitter services in
particular. Overnight this revolution could no longer be tweeted. The response from
media and civil rights activists in the West was swift. Vodafone was widely condemned
for its collusion with the Mubarak regime, and protesters’ access to services was
restored, though Vodafone’s standing in some quarters was compromised. This incident
encapsulates the tensions between different uses of the same technology for different
ends; here the former authoritarian regime and a transnational corporation were seen
to join forces against the will of the Egyptian people. In a previous case – a less successful
revolution in terms of regime change – violent clashes between anti-government
protesters and Iranian government forces in 2009 were widely disseminated by mobile
phones, on YouTube, via Twitter and on Iranian-based and Western blogs. These
messages and media uses were systematically countered by an array of government-
backed systems to filter, redirect and censor the content generated by dissidents
(Sreberny and Khiabany 2010). These struggles unfurled not only in the streets but
also in cyberspace.
The stakes have been raised, and not only on the ground, where it takes more than
a Twitter account or black-out of a mobile phone image to make or break a revolution.
Governments around the world have mobilized to protect but also monitor citizens for
any number of reasons. Control of media messages in periods of civil unrest and war
has been the concern of governments throughout history, intensifying with the arrival
of television and now the Internet. Moves to control or repress undesirable uses of the
Internet have exercised regulators, autocrats and political representatives since it took
off; examples include EU member-states collaborating to counter online pornography
flows, and the UK government’s attempt to curtail the use of mobile phones after the
2011 London riots.
More worryingly for (new) media watchers in some quarters is the way global
corporate actors are making unilateral decisions that effectively restrict access and
unmitigated uses of the Internet in parts of the world where users have little say. Internet
service providers Yahoo! and Google have also come under fire for complying with the
Chinese authorities’ request for personal data and preventing access to offending
websites respectively (Franklin 2010; Goldsmith and Wu 2006). In early 2012, Twitter
announced that it was now company policy to remove tweets from users on the
instructions of countries not happy with what their tweeting citizens are saying. This
action would be taken on a case by case basis and Twitter would make it clear that the
tweet has been censored. The company was accused of bowing to pressure from
repressive regimes in areas with potentially huge market-share, but calls to boycott the
service received mixed responses from local dissidents and activists. The high-profile
Chinese artist and government critic Ai Weiwei was cited as tweeting ‘If Twitter starts
censoring. I’ll stop tweeting.’ At the same time, activists in parts of the Arab world
noted the importance of uses of Twitter during the demonstrations that eventually
overturned the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes; during the height of the protests, the
HOW DOES THE INTERNET MAKE A DIFFERENCE? 183
The use of media in
war, and how it has
developed over time, is
the subject of Chapter 8.
Twitter, the market-
leader in ‘micro-
blogging’ services,
describes itself as
‘a real-time information
network’ containing
‘small bursts of
information’ called
tweets; limited to 140
characters, users use
the hash symbol to mark
keywords – and for other
purposes: see http://
www.newyorker.com/
online/blogs/susanorlean
/2010/06/hash.html.
‘No single actor controls
every single hub of
cyberspace’ (Giacomello
et al. 2009: 206).
184 M. I. FRANKLIN
majority of hash tags were in Arabic. What counts for these users is that in these
circumstances ‘Twitter . . . proved to be one of the most activist-friendly of social
networks’ (El Dahshan 2012).
Large Internet service providers are aware of these contradictory claims on their
services. In the case of Twitter, the company insisted that it would only take down posts,
on request, within any specific country’s jurisdiction. It would keep the offending tweets
accessible to the rest of the world, notify the user, and send withheld tweets to the
‘Chilling Effects’ website, maintained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. From a
legal and commercial perspective, companies hosting user-generated content find
themselves offending repressive regimes, users and a range of media watchers simul –
taneously. The bottom-line is that non-compliance with a government request to take
down content carries the threat of services being blocked anyway. Being seen to ‘do
evil’ (Google’s informal company slogan is ‘don’t do evil’) by onlookers and paying
customers damages the corporate brand. For those who argue that states ultimately hold
the reins over how the Internet can or should be used, this is a powerful argument for
their case.
As with Vodafone in Egypt and Google in China, states do not act alone either.
When sued in France for hosting a sale of Nazi memorabilia, Yahoo! eventually blocked
the sale even though as a US-based company they were not liable under French law.
Internet companies already have or are developing the means to control content at
certain times and in certain places: Google bans content in China but it also filters
searches in Germany and France; Facebook can restrict access to content based on who
is viewing and whether the content is legal in a particular country.
However, for every service that is blocked locally – or on a national level – on the
web, an alternative route is found by users themselves or through a range of services
providing proxies and other ways of masking a tweet, online posting or text message.
Internet governance: struggles for control of the Internet
These recent waves of social and political struggles, transmitted through the Internet’s
social media services despite attempts to block their global spread, highlight ongoing
struggles over control of the Internet. In the wake of these events, a series of policy-
priorities have been put on the UN agenda about whether access to the Internet is a
means to an end, that of combating global poverty, injustice and socioeconomic
inequality, or an end in itself, a development goal.
According to the United Nations General Assembly and participating agencies, the
Internet is both in effect, in that the uses to which it can be put and the conditions of
those uses require a fresh approach. State-centred and piecemeal solutions to harnessing
information and communications technologies for the purposes of development had to
be replaced. To this end, the UN General Assembly set up a series of ‘high-level summits’
in 2003 in order to ‘build a global consensus’ on the best way to govern the Internet
(United Nations General Assembly 2000; WSIS Civil Society Caucus 2003, 2005). The
Internet Governance Forum is the latest in UN consultations about the policy impli –
cations of media and communications at an international level. The first meetings in
the 1970s were hosted by UNESCO (MacBride 1980; Jørgensen 2006), the second
set of meetings, the World Summit on the Information Society (2003–2005), was hosted
The function of summits
as part of global
governance is discussed
in the context of another
World Summit – on
sustainable development
– in Chapter 4.
HOW DOES THE INTERNET MAKE A DIFFERENCE? 185
by the International Telecommunications Union. The Internet Governance Forum as
an autonomous organization, began in 2006. What sets the WSIS and IGF consultations
apart is the way they are premised on a ‘multistakeholder participatory model’ that
includes representatives from civil society, corporate and government sectors.
Whilst to its critics largely a talk-shop, and to its supporters an indispensable advocacy
platform in a longer reformist project, the objective of the UN Internet Governance
Forum is to bring these three sectors of society to the table in order to discuss often
controversial issues around how the Internet functions, is accessed, financed, and moni –
tored as a supraterritorial means of communication. Rights-based discourses framing the
Internet as a sociocultural artefact and global public good challenge, in the politest
possible way, commercial strategies and foreign policy objectives; official declarations of
principles and plans of action are compiled alongside civil society declarations, insider
and outsider actions, workshops, and plenary sessions.
The World Summit on the Information Society began with great hopes on the part
of civil society participants in Geneva in 2003. Expectations and ambitions had been
markedly tempered by the last summit in 2005 in Tunis and establishment of the
Internet Governance Forum the following year. Given the events that unfolded barely
5 years later in this city, the rumblings of political dissent and alternative summits held
in central Tunis by disgruntled civil society participants allied to Tunisian women’s rights
and human rights activists in pre-Twitter days take on an even larger significance with
the benefit of hindsight.
Whilst not yet in the headlines of the global media, the imprisonment and
harassment of Tunisian citizens accessing the web in ways deemed unacceptable by the
government at the time paved the way in many respects for a series of concerted
mobilizations by coalitions within subsequent UN Internet Govern ance Forum meetings
around the Internet and human rights, and a wave of international struggles against
attempts to curtail the open and global premises of Internet use by repressive regimes
and comparable legislative measures in the USA, the EU, Australasia and South America.
But have the agenda-points and arcane discussions that characterize these UN-
brokered consultations on the Internet and society at the highest political level had any
bearing on events on the ground in the Arab Spring? Protesters and their opponents
have used the Internet and other media without recourse to the slow grinding of well-
oiled diplomatic and institution building wheels. By the same token, these events have
directly influenced if not coloured these meetings: the World Summit on the Information
Society meetings in Tunisia were constantly dealing with government intervention and
human rights issues; the 2009 Internet Governance Forum meeting in Sharm El-Sheikh
took place in the last year of the Mubarak regime; and China’s objection to any global
agenda-setting about the Internet’s underlying functionality was patently clear in official
and unofficial actions.
GENERAL RESPONSES
REGULATION, CENSORSHIP AND RIGHTS
When considering the Internet’s influence on politics, culture and society, responses
range from the highly specialized techno-legal point (technical standards for instance),
to the normative and sociocultural (digital rights, gender or race inclusion). In political
terms responses take the form of organized advocacy, direct action online and off,
legislation, behind the screens lobbying and commercial strategies. This section looks
at three interconnected responses to the growth of Internet use: attempts to regulate
the digital commons; tracking, monitoring and censoring content use; and the
development of a charter of human rights and principles for the Internet.
Regulating the digital commons
In late 2011 and early 2012, a broad US-based and international mobilization gathered
momentum around two bills put forward to the US Congress: the Protect IP Act
(Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual
Property Act, or PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA. Activism online and
on the ground contributed to these two bills being withdrawn, although many com –
mentators believe this was a respite only. Prior to these events, international mobilization
had already been focusing on the latest in a long line of international trade agreements:
the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, ACTA. Currently signed by many Organ –
isation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) members yet opposed
vehemently by grassroots groups and NGOs within signatory countries, this agreement
is seen as the precursor of the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act. All three
initiatives target applications that emerge from the Internet’s capabilities to help create
and disseminate knowledge, products, and services outside intellectual property and
copyright regimes.
The main bone of contention is that these moves, made in the name of protecting
copyright, create a precedent for government-directed forms of Internet censorship.
Protesters see Western governments in partnership with corporate interests producing
a situation whereby freedom of information and freedom of expression are sacrificed.
More to the point, the techniques and technologies put in place to track and prosecute
transgressors under these laws could then be put to use by repressive regimes.
The Internet to date has been the home for interlocking peer-to-peer or P2P
networks that facilitate exchanges of music, films and other cultural products, which
some call piracy. And the existence of non-proprietary (that is, where use is not
restricted by trademark, patent or copyright laws) software constitutes a formidable
counter-cultural impetus against attempts by vested interests to regulate in punitive,
non-transparent ways. The success of P2P networks and free and open-source software
advocates in carving a niche in the user-habits of successive generations of digital natives
has been a bone of contention for the largely American music and film companies and
software manufacturers since the early years of the web. These alternative communities
and their open-access, lateral ethos continue to flourish despite concerted attempts to
isolate, locate and then prosecute transgressors. One reason is that, if successful, the
‘imple mentation of these blunt policy instruments will require more and more public-
funded surveillance and censorship’ of the Internet and its corollary media and com –
munications devices and networks (Abraham 2012).
The online actions and offline lobbying focused on a seemingly neutral response
to a seemingly technical and legal problem: use of the Internet to bypass having to pay
for something. But the use of the Internet by economies in the Global South to generate
186 M. I. FRANKLIN
For another discussion
of the implication of
regulation and its
absence see Chapter 17
on the ‘informal’
economy.
For more on the OECD
see Chapter 23.
For discussions of the
global economy and its
impact in the Global
South, see Chapters 15,
17 and 20.
HOW DOES THE INTERNET MAKE A DIFFERENCE? 187
income by developing viable alternatives to pricey Western goods and services is a
broader question (Abraham 2012).
Filtering and censorship
The ability to navigate the web in a relatively open way is possible because the Internet’s
transmission infrastructure and accompanying protocols are not encrypted. We can
traverse the web with relative impunity on an everyday level. But these practices,
and the digital footprint we leave when opening a web-page, doing a Google search,
or registering for a service, leaves traces that others can follow if they choose to do so
(Latour 2007). Conversely, agencies such as schools, libraries and universities, and
parents for that matter, have an interest in keeping material considered harmful or
inappro priate from younger or vulnerable users. Increasingly sophisticated filtering
software blocks access or censors content called up by a user, from sexually explicit or
exploitative images of children to politically or religiously sensitive material. Since the
1990s, it has been possible to block web access and content. In addition, web activities
FIGURE 9.6
From poster for Cet obscur objet du désir, Luis Buñuel,
http://www.movieposterdb.com/poster/23a329c7
Has the media always
involved censorship or
bias? See Chapter 8.
http://www.movieposterdb.com/poster/23a329c7
FIGURE 9.7
‘Cyberpolice!’ By Chappatte, www.globalcartoons.com http://www.globecartoon.com/
Contact.html email: Chappatte@globecartoons.com
of users can be monitored for reasons of state and for market research. Facebook or
Google users take as a given that their searches and activities generate advertising revenue
and produce targeted advertising based on their digital footprints.
Debates about accountability, legality and redress rage over these seemingly benign
forms of filtering and monitoring. However, the stakes have risen markedly in recent
years, both as technologies become smarter and in the light of less benevolent applica –
tions of these same tools. One innovation, called Deep Packet Inspection, lies at the
intersection of these responses to over-zealous forms of Internet control and wider
questions about who the Internet is ultimately for. Deep Packet Inspection is a much
more subtle form of control precisely because it is deep within the transmission
infrastructure; once deployed users are not even aware that it is affecting what they access
and what they eventually see. This application basically performs a form of triage on
the substance of the traffic being carried by the service provider; the undesired content
or that which a provider wants to charge the user for is then ordered accordingly.
Desirable, that is, paid for or politically correct content, gets the green light. The rest
has to wait. Whilst this sifting process is automated and performed in seconds, it amounts
to censorship by other means. It effectively undercuts the intrinsic neutrality of Internet
transmission, the essential condition of the Internet as a global open medium.
Whilst commercial interests and efficiency arguments make a strong case for Deep
Packet Inspection as Internet uses grow and capacity comes under pressure, opponents
note that Western-owned filtering tools are complicit in their use by repressive
governments: the Syrian authorities, Gaddafi’s Libya and Chinese government all make
or have made use of Euro-American expertise and tools to filter and block Internet traffic
(Deibert 2008; Holmes 2007). For example, freedom of expression watchers note that
188 M. I. FRANKLIN
http://www.globalcartoons.com
http://www.globecartoon.com/
Note that human rights
and their value are
contested, as Chapter 27
points out.
HOW DOES THE INTERNET MAKE A DIFFERENCE? 189
the Boeing-owned tool, Echelon, was deployed by the Mubarak regime to track
protester messages; other Deep Packet Inspection tools were used in Ben-Ali’s Tunisia,
and by the military junta in Burma.
Human Rights and Principles for the Internet
At recent intergovernmental forums setting Internet governance agendas, a number of
NGO-led initiatives came together to advocate putting human rights right at the centre
of deliberations. Approaching access and the conditions of Internet use as a right rather
than a privilege shifts the terms of debate away from market-based or state-centric
problem solving.
At the UN Internet Governance Forum meeting in Hyderabad in 2008, a loose
coalition of NGOs, grassroots groups, government representatives, private sector
companies and academic participants set to work under the auspices of what is called
the Internet Rights and Principles (IRP) Coalition on the process of drafting an
overarching charter of human rights and principles for the online environment.
Participants consulted online, through email and listserv, web-based, and social media
facilitated discussions and drafting, and offline, in related meetings around the world.
The aim was to bring the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other civil,
social, and economic rights covenants into the digital era. After a year of drafting,
‘collabowriting’ and consultations, the first version of the Charter of Internet Rights
and Principles for the Internet was launched in 2011.
Emerging out of the UN Internet Governance Forum meetings, with roots in the
preceding World Summit on the Information Society meetings, these initiatives also
reach further back, to calls for a New World Information and Communications Order
in the 1970s (MacBride 1980). In those pre-Internet days freedom of expression and
free press advocates had a comparable role to the digital activists today. Whilst many
onlookers, governments, legal practitioners, and members of the international human
rights community have been circumspect in their assessment of the point of this
exercise, the IRP Charter has managed to bring a number of issues into one frame.
These discussions were taking place as the Arab Spring uprisings were gathering
momentum and the safety of Tunisian and Egyptian bloggers, Tweeters and old school
activists was in the spotlight. The IRP Charter makes visible all these contradictory forces.
Those drafting, commenting, and disseminating the eventual Charter represented the
range of stakes in the future of the Internet in so far as their particular affiliation, political
ideology and technical expertise allowed. The IRP Coalition is in short a child of the
Internet era, even though the document on which the Charter is based is one of
the foundation documents of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights.
All participating parties in the Charter drafting and launch concur that the Internet
is as much a product of its times as it is a driver of change. The Internet in this respect
is not only the point of this thought experiment but also the means by which the Charter
project emerged. Participants consider the future of the Internet as a ‘people-centred
medium’ to be a matter of concern and a reason to mobilize around, as others use it
to reach into our inner lives or suppress and control populations. Whilst differing
intensely on the implications of considering the Internet in rights-based terms, coalition
BOX 9.4 TEN PUNCHY PRINCIPLES
Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet
1 Universality: All humans are born free and equal in dignity and rights, which must be respected,
protected and fulfilled in the online environment.
2 Accessibility: Everyone has an equal right to access and use a secure and open Internet.
3 Neutrality: Everyone must have uniform access to the Internet’s content, free from prioritization,
discrimination, censorship, filtering or traffic control.
4 Rights: The Internet is a space for the promotion, protection and fulfillment of human rights.
Everyone has the duty to respect the rights of all others in the online environment.
5 Expression: Everyone has the right to hold and express opinions, and to seek, receive, and impart
information on the Internet without arbitrary interference or surveillance. Everyone has the right to
communicate anonymously online.
6 Life, liberty and security: The rights to life, liberty, and security must be respected, protected and
fulfilled online. These rights must not be infringed upon, or used to infringe other rights, in the online
environment.
7 Privacy: Everyone has the right to privacy online free from surveillance, including the right to control
how their personal data is collected, used, disclosed, retained and disposed.
8 Diversity: Cultural and linguistic diversity on the Internet must be promoted, and technical and policy
innovation should be encouraged to facilitate diversity of expression.
9 Standards and regulation: The Internet’s architecture shall be based on open standards that facilitate
interoperability and inclusion of all for all.
10 Governance: Rights must form the legal and normative foundations upon which the Internet operates
and is governed. . . . in a transparent and multilateral manner, based on principles of openness,
inclusive participation and accountability as prescribed by law.
(IRP Coalition 2011; see CGR.br 2009)
190 M. I. FRANKLIN
members also concurred that it is now the medium of choice for people to meet,
organize, do business, make mischief, generate community. As the Charter’s ‘About
the Charter’ web-page points out:
This Charter interprets and explains universal human rights standards in a new
context – the Internet. The Charter re-emphasizes that human rights apply online
as they do offline. . . . The Charter also identifies Internet policy principles which
are necessary to fulfil human rights in the Internet age – to support and expand
the capacity of the Internet as a medium for civil, political, economic, social and
cultural development.
(IRP Coalition 2011)
As individual governments incorporate rights to access the Internet into their
constitutions or debate national digital rights bills, the terms and conditions of these
HOW DOES THE INTERNET MAKE A DIFFERENCE? 191
moves remain problematic. Whilst the use of the Internet to undermine or enhance
existing human rights has entered national, regional and international policy-making
debates, questions about a rights-based as opposed to a problem-solving approach
remain contentious. In the meantime as debates about the pros and cons of the Internet
as a right gain traction in the blogosphere and online media outlets (Cerf 2012; Bernal
2012; Jørgensen 2006), the United Nations Human Rights Council has embraced the
principle underlying the IRP Charter (La Rue 2011).
BROADER ISSUES
INTERNET FUTURES
The Internet is all about interconnectedness, a particular understanding of com –
munications no longer premised on face-to-face or physical proximity. We use the
Internet to connect with others in non-embodied, supraterritorial, instan taneous and
multiplex interrelationships which operate in ways that see computer programs, machines
and humans intimately connected. Changes in the way we use these technologies are
co-defined by ways in which they use us. These ‘couplings’ between humans and
machines (Haraway 1990; Franklin 2009) are where Internet politics and the politics
of the Internet cut right across conventional frameworks and objects of analysis and
action, such as the a priori distinction between mind and body; modernist cartographic
conquests of space, time, and territory; organic understandings of embodiment; and
experience around power hierarchies of gender, race and class.
The jury is still out as to whether all the changes the Internet is bringing are a good
or bad thing, and whether it really marks a break in the history of humankind, as
significant as the invention of the wheel or the printing press. It facilitates multilateral
connections across time-zones and geographical borders and has gained a leading role
in longstanding narratives of progress and development through science and technology,
and their contestation.
Several broader issues emerge from this selective account.
Futures and pasts
First there are historical issues. As a telecommunications architecture, information
resource and way to communicate, the Internet has been up and running for about 40
years. It is only in the last 25 years that it took off in popular terms around the world.
Since 2004, with the development of commercial services that combine once separate
uses such as email, instant messaging, web-pages and blogs into one package, social
media uses of the Internet – or Web 2.0 – have changed the way Internet users see and
experience their world. Together with the integration of powerful tools that navigate
and search the web for us, this generation of social media affects the way the Internet
now looks and feels, co-creating the sort of material we access online. User-generated
content, peer-to-peer networking, and speedy ways to locate information from anywhere
now characterize the Internet as we know it.
This relatively short history – the modern printing press dates from the mid-fifteenth
century, the telephone from the late nineteenth century – is also one that is still being
written. In this chapter we are not talking about a set of media and technologies past.
We are looking at something that is still under construction, in constant flux and with
noticeably faster waves of innovation and obsolescence. By the time this book goes to
print a number of the events and tools mentioned may well already be yesterday’s news,
and back catalogue.
For activists and advocacy networks working towards a variety of social justice
goals the Internet has become an indispensable tool for mobilization, networking and
fund-raising. More than that however, it has become an advocacy goal in itself as these
groups start forming alliances with others advocating a more socially-embedded, human
rights based approach to the design and policy priorities of all aspects of the current
and future Internet architecture, both as a global overarching information infrastructure
and a local, culturally specific one.
These platforms and their various political and social contours are challenging
the local–national–international matrix by which scholars have studied global politics.
They organize trans-locally across various borders and are taking up successive
generations of new media without dispensing with face-to-face or local understandings
of socio political organization and mobilization. The Internet represents both costs and
opportunities in terms of national and multilateral authority and accountability. Those
with the money, resources and time make full use of all that today’s Internet media has
to offer; they employ micro-blogging, blogs, websites, and standard email formats to
further their cause. Corporations, governments, and activists are becoming increasingly
cyber-savvy. In this sense the Internet is not just a network of things, it is also a cultural
practice, part of, not outside, the media and society.
Rethinking world order in a digital age
As user-generated content straddles parochial, personal and global domains of action
and reflection, jurisdiction over the practices and content of online users at home and
abroad does too. The Internet, however defined, is not a single determinant of these
effects. This technology of technologies comprises more than one way of being online;
successive generations of software systems overlay one another.
When considering the broader implications of how we use the Internet we need
to beware of reiterating instrumentalist or determinist understandings of the interplay
between politics, society and technology (Benjamin 1973; Haraway 1990). The Internet
is more than one thing in material terms, and it means more than one thing in cultural
and symbolic terms. Its systems and ways of doing things are the outcome of accident
and design, investment and luck, state intervention and market forces. As noted by
Donna Haraway in the late 1980s, we get the Internet we deserve in so far as it is a
critical factor in:
an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created
by industrial capitalism: we are living through a movement from an organic,
industrial society to a polymorphous, information system . . . from the comfortable
old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks . . . called the informatics
of domination.
(Haraway 1990: 203)
192 M. I. FRANKLIN
Various forms of
activism are discussed
in this book: environ –
mentalism (Chapter 4);
feminist movements
(Chapter 5); religious
movements (Chapter 6);
grassroots democracy
(Chapter 14); anti-
capitalist movements
(Chapter 18); and anti-
war movements
(Chapter 28), for
example.
For a discussion of
technology and the
division of the world into
territorial states see
Chapter 11.
HOW DOES THE INTERNET MAKE A DIFFERENCE? 193
The Internet is also a vision of the future based on struggles over its development to
date in the parts of the world from which it has emerged. Hence the Internet represents
a resolutely hi-tech, Western understanding of the world. Yet as non-Western parts of
the world come online, non-Western users in the Internet’s heartlands leave their digital
footprint in cyberspace as well, and emerging powers (India, China and Brazil for
instance) take a proactive stance to rolling out Internet access on their own terms, we
can see competing visions of the future Internet coming into force.
Who ‘we’ are influences how we use the Internet
The way different actors use the Internet – spontaneously or more strategically – makes
a difference to the sorts of stakes they have in its future. States have always been active
on the web, using the Internet if not in projects of E-Government or E-Commerce
then to roll out a variety of cyber-security programs that target not only citizens
but also potential terrorist threats. By some accounts, states have always controlled
the Internet and should continue to do so (Goldsmith and Wu 2006; Giacomello
et al. 2009); Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Digital Diplomacy is a US foreign
policy position paper on the matter (Clinton 2010). It is also hard to overlook the
formative role played by the US military defence establishment in financing the Internet’s
core architecture, from its prototype, the ARPAnet, to ownership and control of its
underlying functionality, the domain name system (Mueller 2002). In short, the
BOX 9.5 DONNA HARAWAY
In the late 1980s, the radical biologist, feminist and social
activist Donna Haraway published her Cyborg Manifesto
(1990), an essay in which she presented an alternative vision
of future ‘fruitful couplings’ between humans and machines
that would transcend conventional, embodied experiences
and power hierarchies along gender, race, and class lines of
privilege and exclusion. The essay’s combination of futurist
thinking, feminist science fiction, and Marxian critique came
as neoliberal thinking and its accompanying belief in market-
based globalization reached a peak in the 1980s. Haraway
notes that the promises of liberation, permissiveness, and
freedom offered by technological progress come with a price
if they are taken on board uncritically by ordinary people and
policy-makers. Like other thinkers before and since, Haraway notes that human beings and society have
been increasingly dependent on automated machines and systems for centuries (see Franklin 2009;
Holmes 2007; Latour 2007). Haraway’s work has set the benchmark in the way disciplines as disparate as
primatology, feminism, biotechnology and computing regard the intersection of power relations around
gender, race and class.
FIGURE 9.8
Donna Haraway with Cayenne, 2006.
Photograph by Rusten Hogness.
Wikipedia commons: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
File:Donna_Haraway_and_Cayenne
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
www.Donna_Haraway_and_Cayenne
194 M. I. FRANKLIN
For more on the role of
corporations in the
global economy, see
Chapters 15, 16 and 17,
for example.
architecture, freely available and pay-for products and services that make up the Internet
have always had a double life, useful for both civil and military purposes (Holmes 2007;
Deibert 2008).
Corporations are intrinsic to the form and substance of today’s Internet. Once small
start-up companies in people’s garages have become powerful transnational corporations
who own and control much of what we do online: Microsoft, Google, Wikipedia,
Facebook and Amazon. These large corporations and smaller commercially oriented
users see the Internet as an indispensable part of their daily business; indeed their business
is made from our downloads, the advertising revenue generated by our web-searches,
and the merchandising that can be generated by the integration of online and offline
public relations and advertising.
At the same time, however, civilian uses and applications in the USA and elsewhere
played a major role in the development of the web as a social, egalitarian and open-
ended space to communicate and exchange ideas. Part of the West-Coast counterculture
in the USA during its early years, much of its later applications and architectural
development have emerged from software designers and computer engineers looking
to connect up people and places with compatible and easy-to-use systems and applica –
tions. More affordable and adaptable operating systems now run and facilitate user-
generated and institutional uses of the Internet in parts of Western Europe and the
Global South such as India.
Pitted against this free and open-source ethos is a more commercial one that now
dominates our desktops, smart-phones and operating systems. The Internet we use is
currently owned and controlled by powerful corporations: Microsoft, Apple, Google,
Wikipedia, Amazon, Facebook, Skype and Twitter. The Google generation and the next
FIGURE 9.9
Selçuk, Le Monde
diplomatique (2010).
selcuk.demirel
@wanadoo.fr
generation of digital natives still have relatively unimpeded access to a variety of
commercial and non-commercial uses of the Internet. But for how long?
I will end this section by way of one final example; one whose outcome stems from
and affects how we use the Internet: the privacy policies of Internet service providers
who effectively use the Internet on our behalf.
Public privacy matters
Visible on the right-hand side of millions of screens, the following phrase announced
a change in Google’s privacy policy effective from 1 March 2012:
We’re changing our privacy policy and terms. This stuff matters.
(Google Banner 2012)
HOW DOES THE INTERNET MAKE A DIFFERENCE? 195
BOX 9.6 WHAT IF THE INTERNET GROUND TO A HALT?
Imagine if the Internet ground to a complete halt across the world, denying access to the world’s
population currently able to access the web. What would happen to our social life, the way we work, what
we do in our free time? How would local councils, government departments, banks, and stock markets
operate? At the institutional level, how would the United Nations, universities, schools, libraries,
hospitals, transnational corporations, small and medium-sized businesses function?
What if we were to discover that the content of our messages to friends, family, or work colleagues
were being monitored without our knowledge? What if our personal data was being used by a social
networking site not just for market research but to generate advertising revenue without our consent?
What if we were imprisoned or threatened with deportation for sedition or participation in activities
deemed illegal in another country? What if we found out that the Internet we use is a far more limited one
in terms of the sort of things we can do online than the one other people use abroad? What if those
products and services we currently use became illegal (music downloads), no longer fully accessible
(YouTube), or too expensive (subscriptions to our social network service)?
If we experienced an injustice online where could we turn for help or redress? If this agent is a
corporation, for example, a computer game manufacturer or social networking site, we may then discover
that on ticking the terms and conditions of use we actually gave tacit permission for our personal data,
our digital footprint to be tracked for market research purposes; it is up to us to activate our privacy
settings ourselves. Even if this (ad-tracking and filtering harmful content) watchful eye is benign then what
sorts of watchdogs are in place to ensure that these practices are within the law? What if it were not so
benign, say our own government? Who do we turn to then? Stronger still, what if unwittingly we bring
ourselves and others under scrutiny, in danger of being denied access, being prosecuted or even
deported?
Finally, what if we were to decide that we no longer wanted to use the Internet, to decide to un-
subscribe ourselves – pull our photos and postings off the web? Who do we contact, under whose
jurisdiction does our life online and our profile/s fall anyway? Do we own the rights to our own photos?
How do we track down those tagged photos out there on the web – should we try? Do we have a right to
forget and be forgotten? Is non-connectedness an option?
‘Beware: your digital
imagination leaves
traces’ (Latour, 2007).
‘The computer is not
only a machine or tool:
it is also a medium that
determines how we
perceive just as much as
what we perceive’
(Deuber-Mankowsky
2008: 993).
196 M. I. FRANKLIN
On clicking the ‘find out more’ link, at the end of the presentation of what was or was
not changing to the way this corporation tracks, stacks, and stores data based on millions
of people’s individual web-searching activities, the reader would come upon the
following legal stipulation:
Notice of change: 1 March 2012 is when the new Privacy Policy and Google Terms
of Service will come into effect. If you choose to keep using Google once the change
occurs, you will be doing so under the new Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
(Google Banner 2012, emphasis added)
Many media and Internet rights activists and advocacy groups in the Global South as
well as Washington DC regard the ability that Internet service providers, in this case
the world’s largest one, have to dictate the terms of use troubling. The implications of
Google’s decision to integrate millions of people’s personal data for personal privacy
and corporate accountability in the future is a contentious point. For considering how
the way we use the Internet and how those uses are governed, overtly and covertly,
with or without our active or tacit consent, the issue for many is that ‘we cannot depend
on the private sector alone to defend our constitutional rights. . . . Private intermediaries
only bother with defending freedom of expression when it undermines their business
interests’ (Abraham 2012).
CONCLUSION
We take the Internet so much for granted nowadays that we overlook how socioculturally
embedded it is in everyday life for the 30 per cent of the world that still currently controls
its strategic infrastructure. We overlook how new users are mainly in the Global South
or emerging economies in Brazil, India and China. Even without considering how these
more recent users might use the Internet in ways other than those we are used to, the
way in which the Internet mediates and co-constitutes contemporary political life
cannot be grasped in an instrumental way of thinking about technology and society.
How we use the Internet and the way these uses impact on the Internet’s past and
future functioning emerge from contradictory impulses, including spon taneous practices,
long-term research and development investment strategies, and conscious deployments
that are always contestable even if they are presented as self-explanatory to everyday
users.
The Internet, however defined, and as it morphs into the succeeding generation
from the Web 2.0 of the social media we all have come to rely on or resent in varying
measures, has already made a difference, based on the way we and others have been
using it, or not. As this chapter has shown, when we gauge the difference Internet use
makes, vantage points and the politics of access matter. A person in the US, whether
an activist, lobbyist or congress-person, accesses and uses their Internet in different ways
from those doing so from a European, Chinese or Indian vantage point. Digital and
embodied activists, terrorists, digerati and those who want to log-off and unplug for
ever, all have different stakes in the battle shaping up over who gets to set the agenda
for how the Internet will be used, and on whose terms it will be used in the future.
HOW DOES THE INTERNET MAKE A DIFFERENCE? 197
FURTHER READING
Internet studies is a broad and multidisciplinary literature and one that is booming. It is also one
where the products and services covered have a short shelf-life. To get a sense of this fast-moving
terrain, the following books provide key anchor points in disciplinary and historical terms: Neil
Spiller’s Cyber_Reader (2002) provides access to landmark texts from precursor and contemporary
thinkers. The Social Media Reader edited by Michael Mandiberg (2012) brings us into the Web
2.0 era. The Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics edited by Andrew Chadwick and Phillip
Howard (2009) provides a good entry for mainstream approaches in politics. Jørgensen (2006)
engages with human rights activism related to UN consultations, whilst Napoli and Aslama (2010)
cover a range issues at the intersection of policy-making, political activism and media advocacy in
the USA. Lessig (2006) and Mueller (2002) are landmark texts dealing with the inner workings
of the Internet behind the screen. Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1990) and Brian Holmes’
essay, ‘Future Map’ (2007) are radical interventions on alternative ways of thinking about the
interconnection of information and communications technologies, culture and society.
WEBSITES
The list of useful websites below covers intergovernmental organizations, advocacy and activist
networks active in the crisscrossing domains of Internet and media policy-making, direct action,
and alternative media and information.
Intergovernmental, activist, advocacy networks
International Telecommunications Union – World Summit on the Information Society:
http://www.itu.int/wsis/index.html
Internet Governance Forum: http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/
Association For Progressive Communications (APC): http://www.apc.org/en/projects/Internet-
rights-are-human-rights
Avaaz: http://www.avaaz.org/en/index.php
Accessnow: https://www.accessnow.org/
Global Voices: http://globalvoicesonline.org/
Anonymous: http://anonnews.org/; http://twitter.com/anonymousirc
Chilling Effects: http://chillingeffects.org/
Blogs
Whilst the first three bloggers are all US-based, they have been regularly monitoring and
commenting on the Internet’s use, misuse, and changing contours of its institutional and
infrastructural landscapes for some time. The last three are NGOs with a comparably long-standing
and clear view of the issues at stake from a Global South perspective.
Internet Governance Project: http://blog.Internetgovernance.org/
Rebecca MacKinnon: RConversation at http://rconversation.blogs.com/
Douglas Rushkoff: Homepage and Blog: http://www.rushkoff.com/
IT4Change: http://www.itforchange.net/
Centre for Internet and Society: http://cis-india.org/
Association for Progressive Communications – Women’s Networking Support Program (APC-
WNSP): http://www.apcwomen.org/
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HOW DOES THE INTERNET MAKE A DIFFERENCE? 199
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CHAPTER 10
Why is people’s movement
restricted?
Roxanne Lynn Doty
■ The question
BORDER CROSSINGS
■ Illustrative example
THE US–MEXICO BORDER AND THE IMMIGRATION
CRISIS
■ General responses
IDEAS OF STATES AND CITIZENSHIP
■ Broader issues
CULTURAL RACISM
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
BORDER CROSSINGS
On 22 February 2006 US Border Patrol agents found the body of the first undocu –
mented border crosser to die in Cochise County, Arizona for that year (Arizona Daily
Star 2006). The man’s name was Antonio Dominguez Callejas, from Vera Cruz,
Mexico. He was 47 years old and had died of exposure and dehydration approximately
35 hours before he was found. Antonio’s death was just one of over 400 undocumented
border crossers who would die in 2006 and one of the 3,600–4,000 who have died in
the past 10–12 years (Rubio-Goldsmith et al. 2006; US Government Accounting Office
2006). Approximately 20 per cent of these deaths have been women and children. The
situation on the US–Mexico border is not unique. According to the United Nations
Economic and Social Council, over 3,000 migrants died between 1997 and 2000
attempting to reach Europe, most of these while attempting to cross the Straits of
Gibraltar (United Nations Economic and Social Council E/CN.4/2002/NGO/45).
These deaths painfully illustrate that while it is undoubtedly true that advances in
Changes in the global
political economy are
discussed in Chapter 17.
The term ‘globalization’
is a contested one.
Some people argue that
changes are exaggerated;
others see globalization
as a key change in the
contemporary world.
Of course, we need to
ask why national borders
exist in the first place.
Why is the world
divided in this way?
See Chapter 11.
WHY IS PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT RESTRICTED? 201
transportation and communication have facilitated the relatively easy movement of some
people across the globe, some movements entail unspeakable tragedy.
Globalization has been accompanied by increasing numbers of people moving across
borders for various reasons. Many forms of border crossing are wholeheartedly welcomed
by governments. For example, almost all governments encourage and actively seek to
promote the movement of peoples across their borders in the form of international
tourism, which is the world’s largest export earner as well as one of the most important
sources of employment. In many countries it is the number one industry. In January
2007, the secretary-general of the World Tourism Organization reported that world
tourism had entered a historically new phase of growth which began in 2004. In 2005,
there were 800 million international arrivals. In 2006 international arrivals surpassed
840 million, representing over 20 per cent growth in the span of 3 years (United Nations
World Tourism Organization 2007). Another form of movement across borders that
is increasing and that is encouraged by governments involves education. In 2004,
approximately 2 million students were enrolled in institutes of higher education outside
their country or origin (Freeman 2006; Thorn 2005). Indeed the movement of people
across borders for the purpose of higher education is not only encouraged by
governments, but has also become part of the global marketplace, with the World Trade
Organization taking it on as an area of concern (Altbach 2001).
Other forms of movement across borders such as international business travel,
overseas employment, and some types of immigration are also welcomed and facilitated
by governments. Economically motivated migration is described by immigration scholars
in terms of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. The lack of job opportunities, low wages, and
poverty ‘push’ people to leave a country. They are ‘pulled’ to those places where employ –
ment opportunities exist and/or where they can earn higher salaries (Isbister 1996: 95–8;
Hollifield 2000). As the world continues to become increasingly inter connected in
numerous ways, so too does the movement of people across borders accelerate. A couple
of examples illustrate this. In the United States, the number of persons granted
permanent legal residency in 1986 was 601,708 (Migration Policy Institute 2004). By
the year 2006 this figure was 1,266,264 (Migration Policy Institute 2007). The inflow
of people from other countries to the United Kingdom for 1991 was 53,900. By 2006
this number had increased to 143,205 (Migration Policy Institute 2007). Clearly these
various realms of movement are part and parcel of the phenomenon of globalization.
However, not all movement is welcomed and often encounters strong and at times ugly
opposition. This is most obviously the case when it comes to the movement of peoples
who, for various reasons, do not have the proper authorization. Many human beings
who have crossed sovereign, national borders without the proper documentation have
met with a similar fate to Antonio. Those who do make it often encounter intense,
passionate, and sometimes violent opposition in most of the Western industrialized
countries. Almost all Western industrialized countries have enacted increasingly
restrictive immigration policies over the past decade. This has been the case especially
when it comes to unskilled immigrants.
Why is this the case? Why is it that some can move relatively freely across borders,
but many others face often insurmountable hurdles? Why are people free to move within
national borders, but not across them? At one level there are obvious answers to these
questions. People can generally move freely within national borders if they are citizens
European
African (slaves)
Indian
Chinese
Japanese Majority of population descended from immigrants
FIGURE 10.1
Map of world migration
routes since 1700.
After A. Getis (1991)
Introduction to
Geography, 3rd edn,
Dubuque: W.C. Brown
Publishers
Struggles over what
constitutes Chinese
national identity and
citizenship are discussed
in Chapter 12, and
identity in general in
Chapter 5.
Chapter 13 examines
another aspect of
citizenship: the life
stories of those who are
exiled from their ‘home’
and those who are
uneasy in their allegiance
to the nation-state in
which they live. Chapter
12 explores how China
treats people of Chinese
ancestry now living
outside China.
202 ROXANNE LYNN DOTY
or if they are in the country legally. People can move freely across national borders if
they have legal authorization to do so. However, these simple, straightforward answers
are not entirely adequate to this extraordinarily complex issue. Both citizenship and
legality are complex concepts and practices. The ways in which citizenship has been
granted as well as the ways in which it has been denied have been linked to social and
political phenomena that involve power and struggles over meaning and identity. The
same is true for the realm of legality and illegality. For example, it is important to
remember that at various times in the history of the United States some practices were
legal that would be considered totally unacceptable today, e.g. the enslavement of
African-Americans, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and the denial of voting
rights to Native Americans and women. Those practices created severe constraints on
what citizenship could mean and who could possess it. If the human beings who fell
into these categories attempted to exercise the rights that were granted to others it was
considered illegal. However, laws change as a result of peoples’ fights for rights. Both
citizenship and legality are dynamic rather than static. They are undergoing continual
change. So, pointing to citizenship and legality as reasons why people’s movements are
restricted provides us with only partial answers. We still must ask why movement should
be restricted based on these two things. The term ‘illegal’ conveys a black and white
world in which those who cross without the proper authorization are considered
criminals regardless of the circumstances that led them to cross. If we are satisfied with
citizenship and legality as reasons why people’s movements are restricted, our analysis
stops and we go no further. We do not explore the meaning of these concepts
themselves and the contexts within which they become significant. We do not examine
the powerful forces underlying official policies that pertain to citizenship or the right
The UN secretary general
Ban Ki-moon has
suggested that the free
migration of peoples
should be welcomed as a
way to tackle problems
such as poverty
(Guardian (London), 10
July 2007).
FIGURE 10.2
Aerial photo-map of US–Mexico border. Public domain. USGS
WHY IS PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT RESTRICTED? 203
to move across borders legally. We do not ask why they should be accepted as valid
reasons for immigration policy.
To understand why people cross borders and why movements are often restricted
it is important to explore the contradictory forces that are at work in the world. If we
dig deeper we may rethink our preconceptions about citizenship and legality. A more
in-depth, critical exploration is essential if we are to understand why, despite the absence
of citizenship and the absence of proper authorization, people still move across borders
in very large numbers and often at very great risk. A more in-depth analysis is also
important if we are to begin to explore the possibilities for change in how we think of
borders. In light of the immense consequences restrictions on free movement have for
human beings and the society they create, it is necessary for us to engage in a more
critical examination as to why and how peoples’ movement is restricted and what the
outcomes of such restrictions have been.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
THE US–MEXICO BORDER AND THE IMMIGRATION CRISIS
La linea, as the line separating Mexico from the United States is sometimes referred
to, extends 1,951 miles (3,141 km) from the Pacific Ocean in the west to Brownsville,
204 ROXANNE LYNN DOTY
Texas and Matamoros, Tamaulipas in the east. It is the longest contiguous border
(shared physical boundary) in the world between a first world country and a third world
country. It is also the most frequently crossed international border in the world. This
border over which many peoples’ movement is restricted is a place where, in the words
of one writer, ‘the Third World grates against the first and bleeds’ (Anzaldua 1987).
While there are many unique aspects of the current US immigration crises revolving
around this particular border, it speaks to and exemplifies the more general phenomenon
that the entire world is experiencing. The movement of peoples across national borders
without authorization is truly a global phenomenon. This section presents the
background to the contemporary issue of undocumented immigration from Mexico into
the United States, detailing the border enforcement policies of the 1990s that gave rise
to skyrocketing numbers of deaths of migrants as they attempted to cross through
dangerous terrain. It also discusses the consequences in terms of the increased use of
human smugglers, the efforts of citizen border patrol groups who have taken it upon
themselves to guard the US–Mexico border, the formation of migrant rights groups
and an anti-immigrant movement. This section concludes with a review of policies that
have been proposed and some that have been adopted.
The contemporary immigration crisis can be traced to several events far removed
from the US–Mexico border. In 1993 New York’s World Trade Center was bombed
by suspected unauthorized immigrants. In the same year two Central Intelligence
Agency employees in Virginia were assassinated by an unauthorized immigrant from
Pakistan. These two events as well as the economic recession that persisted in the United
States at the time, helped to fuel anti-immigrant sentiment (Nevins 2002). They also
M
EXICO
MEXICO CITY
UNITED STATES
CENTRAL
AMERICA SOUTH
AMERICA
Gulf of
Mexico
Pacific
Ocean
Atlantic
Ocean
FIGURE 10.3
Map showing US and
Mexico in context
Chapter 18 talks about
what it means to think in
terms of the idea of
‘crisis’.
contributed to the framing of undocumented immigration as a national security issue.
Against this background, in the early morning hours of 6 June 1993 a ship carrying
286 human beings without authorization to enter the United States ran aground on
Rockaway Beach in Queens, New York. The name of the ship was the Golden Venture
and the unauthorized passengers were from China, mostly from the province of Fujan.
Ninety of the passengers had boarded that ship in February off the coast of Thailand.
Another 200 boarded in March off Mombasa, Kenya, having been stranded there for
a year after the other smuggling ship they were on, Najd II, broke down. Ten passengers
drowned and the others were immediately detained by the US Immigration and
Naturalization Service (INS) and jailed. While this had little to do with the southern
border of the United States it brought the issue of undocumented immigration to the
forefront of national attention. It also contributed to notions of the US being ‘invaded’
by ‘illegal aliens’.
Border control strategies
Around the same time, Silvestre Reyes, then border patrol chief in El Paso, Texas,
launched a border operation called Operation Blockade, later renamed Operation Hold
the Line because the first name was considered offensive. On 19 September 1993 he
deployed 400 agents and their vehicles in a highly visible show of force along a 20-mile
section of border between El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. This marked a
departure from the previous strategy of pursuit and apprehension after the border had
been crossed. Almost immediately apprehensions fell dramatically. Reyes and Operation
Hold the Line thus received a great deal of favourable national publicity.
Based on the ‘success’ of Operation Hold the Line, in 1994 the US Immigration
and Naturalization Service, in consultation with the US Defense Department’s Center
for Low Intensity Conflict, developed a new comprehensive border strategy, ‘prevention
through deterrence’. This became and continues to be the official border enforcement
strategy of the United States (US Government Accounting Office 2001). The logic of
this strategy was to deter migrants from crossing in the more populated areas. Operation
Hold the Line in El Paso, Texas was joined by Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego,
California. The strategy initially targeted these two border areas because at the time
they accounted for approximately two thirds of all undocumented entries into the United
States. Operation Gatekeeper entailed the installation of high-intensity floodlights to
illuminate the border day and night as well as eight-foot steel fencing along 14 miles
of the border beginning at the Pacific Ocean. Border Patrol agents were stationed every
few hundred feet behind this wall (Dunn 1996; Andreas 2000; Nevins 2002).
As had been the case in El Paso, this strategy drastically reduced the number of
undocumented crossings and the San Diego area went from being the busiest port on
the entire border to a relatively quiet area. ‘Prevention through deterrence’ was deemed
a success and these two operations were joined by Operation Safeguard in Nogales,
Arizona in 1995. This operation was extended to the cities of Douglas and Naco in
1999. Attention was also heavily focused on deterrence with the passage of the ‘Illegal
Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act’ in 1996. Funds were authorized
for the construction of additional layers of fencing in San Diego, for the purchase of
new military technology, and for the hiring of 1,000 border patrol agents a year through
WHY IS PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT RESTRICTED? 205
Why might people find
the name ‘Operation
Blockade’ offensive? Is
the changed name any
better? Why?
What do the names
‘Operation Gatekeeper’
and ‘Operation
Safeguard’ suggest?
the year 2001. In 1997 Operation Rio Grande, was put into effect in South East Texas,
60 additional miles of fencing were added to Gatekeeper and 10 additional miles to Hold
the Line. The overall effect of these border enforcement policies has been to push
migrants to increasingly remote and dangerous crossing routes and to engage the services
of human smugglers or coyotes. While crossings decreased in certain areas the overall
numbers of undocumented border crossers continued to rise. The ‘Binational Migration
Institute’ (BMI) at the University of Arizona in Tucson recently reported that the ‘funnel
effect’ created by the US border policies of ‘prevention through deterrence’ is the
‘primary structural cause of death of thousands of North American, Central American,
and South American unauthorized men, women, and children who have died while
trying to enter the US’ (Rubio-Goldsmith et al. 2006).
Interestingly, and important to note especially in terms of locating this issue in the
context of globalization, is the fact that the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) was being negotiated during the same period of time that the new border
enforcement strategies were being put into place. Significantly NAFTA sought to
promote the free movement of goods and capital, but not people. Virtually no attention
was given to the movement of people for jobs or any other reasons. Efforts to increase
border enforcement intensified around the time that NAFTA took effect in 1994.
Operation Gatekeeper and the other border operations can be seen as efforts to appease
those who held the view that NAFTA would increase immigration. It contained
no provisions for labour and thus ignored any effects it would have on workers. More
recently there has been a sharp drop in reported undocumented border crossings.
According to the Pew Hispanic Center, a Washington-based research group, the
number of migrants entering the United States without legal authorization during the
206 ROXANNE LYNN DOTY
FIGURE 10.4
Martin Margas Posadas,
18, from Puebla, Mexico,
right, and another man
wait in the US Border
Patrol holding cell in
Campo near California’s
border with Mexico.
Photo: Marc Campos,
Inland Valley Daily
Bulletin staff
photographer
WHY IS PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT RESTRICTED? 207
period 2007–9 was about 300,000 which was down significantly from the 850,000 who
entered during the 2000–5 time period. The economic recession in the United States
is the major reason for this decline and some experts expect the downward trend to
end once the economy rebounds (Tran 2010).
Anti-immigration legislation
The contemporary immigration crisis in the United States has met with various pro –
posals, bills, and new laws especially at the local level of cities and towns. The state of
Arizona passed Proposition 200 in November 2004, which denies undocu mented
migrants access to jobs, healthcare, and legal protection. This was a catalyst for a rash
of nationwide measures. As of August 2006 more than half of the states in the United
States had passed anti-immigrant measures. The city of Hazelton, Pennsylvania passed
one of the nation’s harshest laws, approving $1,000 fines for landlords who rent to
undocumented migrants. In August 2006 landlords in Valley Park, Missouri began
evicting tenants who were not in the United States with the proper documents. In
September 2006, US Immigration and Customs Enforce (ICE) agents fanned across
three counties in the state of Georgia in raids targeting undocumented migrants. Citizens
and non-citizens alike were rounded up because of physical appearance. These are just
a few of the many examples of local responses to undocumented migration. At the
national level, in December 2005 the US House of Representatives passed House Bill
4437, ‘Border Protec tion, Anti-Terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of
2005’, commonly referred to as the Sensenbrenner Bill after its sponsor Representative
James Sensenbrenner. This bill is considered by migrant rights groups and many others
BOX 10.1 NORTH AMERICAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT (NAFTA)
NAFTA is a trade agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico. NAFTA eliminated all non-
tariff trade barriers to agricultural trade between the US and Mexico. Many other tariffs were also
eliminated immediately, with others being phased out over a 5–15-year period. Some experts argued that
NAFTA would lead to more economic development in Mexico and thus reduce the incentive for
undocumented migration to the US. Others said it would increase migration. Both of these seemingly
opposed viewpoints were supported by The US Commission for the Study of International Migration and
Cooperative Economic Development in 1990. This commission argued that free trade and economic
integration was the best long term remedy for unwanted immigration, but that in the short to medium
term immigration would likely increase. This has been referred to as the ‘migration hump’ (Martin 2003).
NAFTA was expected to displace millions of Mexican corn farmers (Martin 1993). In an important sense,
NAFTA exemplifies the more general contradiction of a world characterized on the one hand by the
increased desirability and ease of movement across borders for commodities, services, and some people;
and on the other hand by severe restrictions placed on others who are nonetheless compelled to move
across those very same borders.
The European Union is
an example of an area of
free movement of goods
like NAFTA, though in
the EU movement across
internal borders between
states is normally free for
people as well. In the EU
too there has been
concern about the effect
of the ensuing internal
labour migration.
FIGURE 10.5
Day of the Dead,
2 November 2004,
Anapra, Mexico.
Mass celebrated at the
border in memory of
undocumented migrants
who died while crossing
the US–Mexico border.
AP/PA Photos
208 ROXANNE LYNN DOTY
to be one of the most draconian in recent history. It would require all employers to use
an electronic data base to verify an employee’s eligibility to be in the US, authorizes a
high-tech fence along sections of the US border, and makes it a criminal offence to
come to the aid of migrants in distress. Many humanitarian, religious and medical
workers would immediately become criminals. The House bill would have also required
immediate detention and deportation of any undocumented person. In response to this
bill, the US Senate introduced a compromise bill that proposed a guest worker
programme and created paths to citizenship for some of the estimated 12 million
undocumented migrants who currently live and work in the United States. National
level immigration legislation is currently stalled, but continues to be one of the country’s
most important and divisive issues. As a consequence of the lack of federal immigration
legislation, states have begun to pass laws at the local level. On 23 April 2010 Arizona
governor Jan Brewer signed SB1070, the Safe Neighborhoods, Immi gration, and Law
Enforcement Act. The law creates several new misdemeanours, including working or
seeking to work without legal status. During any stop, police must ask about one’s
immigration status if their suspicions are aroused. While the law prohibits racial profilng,
what constitutes reasonable suspicion of illegal status is not clear (Aguila 2010; Provine
2010). SB1070 caught the attention of local politicians throughout the United States
who expressed interest in similar legislation. In June 2011 the state of Alabama passed
HB56, which required publicly funded schools to check students’ immigration status
and criminalized giving an undocumented migrant a ride. The state of Georgia has taken
steps in the same direction (Hogue 2011).
In many parts of the
world there is no right to
citizenship of a country
as a result of birth within
its borders alone; often
one’s parents’ citizen –
ship counts too.
There are other ways the
world could be ordered.
For a discussion of how
the world of sovereign
states with territorial
borders came into being
and is sustained, see
Chapter 11.
WHY IS PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT RESTRICTED? 209
Another proposed piece of legislation that seeks to reinforce a different kind of
border is the current effort in the United States to deny birthright citizenship to babies
born to undocumented parents. Almost every anti-immigrant organization as well as
some policy makers are in favour of revoking this long standing right that is guaranteed
in the 14th amendment to the US Constitution. House Bill 698, which was sponsored
by 49 members of the US House of Representatives in 2006, would have eliminated
this right. The Bill was defeated in December 2006 but it is predicted that it will continue
to resurface.
Vigilante groups
Some individuals and groups have responded to unauthorized immigration into the
United States by taking it upon themselves to engage in the unofficial and unauthorized,
though not necessarily illegal, patrolling of the US–Mexico border regions. This
phenomenon received much national and international attention with the April 2005
Minuteman Project in southeastern Arizona. By the autumn of 2005 over forty other
anti-immigrant border vigilante groups had formed in the United States. These groups
not only engage in the physical patrolling of the border, but also often hold rallies at
day labour sites where migrant workers gather waiting for work, and at state capitals
and Mexican consulates. Despite these responses people continue to cross without the
proper documents and border crossing continues to be a dangerous undertaking. Every
year with the approach of spring and summer, as the temperatures begin to rise in the
Southwestern United States another season of death begins.
GENERAL RESPONSES
IDEAS OF STATES AND CITIZENSHIP
US immigration laws and border enforcement strategies implicitly and explicitly make
many assumptions about nations, states, territorial borders, citizenship, and identity that
underlie efforts to restrict the movement of peoples. The assumptions that make US
border policies possible are mirrored in academic literature that describes a world where
the insides of societies are clearly distinguished from the outside. Such a view presents
a world that is neatly divided into nation-states separated legally by sovereign territorial
borders that are mutually recognized and respected by other states. People living within
states’ sovereign territorial borders share certain legal, political, social, and cultural marks
of identity whose ultimate expression is that of citizenship. On such a view, even though
there is much movement across borders, ultimately there exists a link that is impossible
to disentangle between the sovereign legal territorial state and its inhabitants, its
citizens. These are ‘givens’, and if they seem to be under threat they must be protected.
The nation consisting of citizens who share a national identity is generally assumed to
be naturally connected to the state.
Such a view is also inherent in other concepts such as sovereignty, national identity
and national security. These concepts which we draw upon to understand the world
and which inform policy makers contain within them the notion of a unitary identity
for both individuals and collectives. Such an understanding of the world is also ingrained
in our ways of being and acting in the world. When it comes to unauthorized movements
of people, this view presumes that it is natural for the world to be disturbed by people
who move across sovereign borders without authorization because some people belong
in some places and other people belong in other places. Given sufficient money, enough
border patrol agents, military troops, high enough walls, sophisticated enough
technology and the political will of leaders, territorial borders can be fortified and
secured. The safety and sanctity of the citizen can thus be ensured. The world can be
restored to its ‘natural’ state.
The way of thinking described above is very powerful today. One of the reasons
for this may be the fact that it contains a certain commonsensical element. On first
glance, it may seem to us simply an accurate description of ‘how the world is’. Our lives
contain many things that contribute to this sense of ‘naturalness’, e.g. flags, national
anthems, passports, and so on. However, if we pause to critically reflect upon the
situations described above, we come away with a much different picture that suggests
the ‘givens’ that we begin with are outdated. We can ask if the ‘givens’ contained in
conventional ideas are sustainable, and at what cost. A great deal of effort is required
to maintain the ‘truth’ of idealized pictures of the world and the conventional view of
states, nations, citizens, and identity is increasingly one that does not match the way
the world actually is. When such idealized views are called into question by what is
happening on the ground, in peoples’ everyday lives, and when conventional ideas seem
to be becoming unravelled, these efforts generally intensify. We see this happening today
in the United States with calls to ‘close our borders’ and ‘protect our sovereignty’ on
the part of segments of the general populace. We also see it in the various laws and
proposals dealing with undocumented immigration discussed above. We must ask
though, what is sacrificed in such efforts to sustain these ideas and categories that may
no longer suit the world? Crossing borders without the proper documentation obviously
entails many sacrifices that stem from restrictive policies that prevent migrants from
obtaining the proper documentation; leaving home and family, paying huge sums of
money to smugglers, and often paying with their lives. We also need to ask what society
as a whole sacrifices when restrictive immigration laws are put into place and when laws
aimed at those who already live here without the proper documents are enacted. Further,
we need to question the very meaning of society and the values and ideals that have
generally been associated with it. We need to rethink our understanding of citizenship
and the identities it encompasses and those that it excludes.
Currently, about 12 million undocumented immigrants reside in the United States,
although we should remember that it is very difficult to obtain a completely accurate
count simply because these people are undocumented. The most widely used method
of calculating the undocumented population in the United States is referred to as the
‘residual method’. This method estimates the unauthorized population by subtracting
the legally resident foreign population from the total number of foreign-born counted
in a census (Migration Policy Institute 2004). Some have been here most of their lives,
some arrived yesterday. Some live next door to ‘us’ and send their children to ‘our’
schools, and pay taxes to ‘our’ government. Some even fight in ‘our’ wars. Some live
in shacks in the canyons and hills around ‘our’ most upscale housing developments.
Some own their own businesses. Others are ‘day labourers’ who stand on street corners
waiting for work. ‘They’ reflect the diversity that defines what the United States is today.
210 ROXANNE LYNN DOTY
The problems with this
view of the nation-state
and citizens sharing a
national identity are
discussed in Chapter 13.
Many of the inhabitants
of a nation-state do not
identify with it in any
straightforward way.
Chapter 12 examines
how we come to think in
terms of nations in the
first place.
The way idealized
pictures of the world
help us begin to think
about the world is
discussed in Chapter 2,
and the question of
common sense in
Chapter 1.
WHY IS PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT RESTRICTED? 211
Still, none of ‘them’ have very many rights because their identities are primarily defined
by the absence of citizenship. This privileged status is currently out of reach for most
of these people. They are therefore subject to arrest and deportation at any time. In
the United States the number of undocumented migrants detained jumped to 28,000
during fiscal year 2007, up from 19,700 the previous year (Arizona Republic 2007).
Undocumented migrants are held in city and county jails as well as detention facilities
all over the country, some of which are privately run. Whole families are often
detained. An example is the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Detention Center in
Taylor, Texas which is owned and operated by the privately run Corrections Corporation
of America. This centre, which was opened in May 2006, has come under fire from civil
liberties and immigrant rights groups who accuse it of being run like a prison (Rutland
2007). The Center has now been converted into a women’s detention facility.
Immigration raids at work and other places are also on the increase. It is not uncommon
for routine traffic stops to result in deportation for those who are undocumented.
In March 2007, three high school students in the Phoenix, Arizona area were deported
to Mexico after being stopped for drag racing. An honours student in the justice studies
FIGURE 10.6
Los Angeles immigration demonstration, 25 March 2006.
Photo: Lucas Jackson, Reuters
For more on how we
imagine what it means
to be a citizen and
why this matters see
Chapter 14.
212 ROXANNE LYNN DOTY
programme at Arizona State University who has lived in the United States since he was
a toddler faced deportation proceedings after being stopped in March 2007 for making
an improper right turn (Nanez 2007).
Such a situation makes a statement about the limitations of citizenship as it is
currently understood. Citizenship, as a legal category and a category of identity that is
attached to a piece of geographical territory is extremely problematic today. Globaliza –
tion presents challenges to this concept and raises serious questions as to whether the
conventional concept of the citizen in political and legal practices which function to
exclude and deny rights to those who are not citizens can ultimately survive. The human
beings who contribute to society, but live in fear because of their undocu mented status,
make a silent statement about the limitations of current understandings of ‘the citizen’.
Recently, this contestation has taken a more visible and openly articulated form, as
illustrated in the massive migrant rights demonstrations that took place throughout the
US in the spring of 2006.
Citizenship has always contained an exclusionary element. Inherent in the concept
of citizenship is the notion of an insider, which necessarily implies an outsider. For
example, for Aristotle, one of the most influential of the ancient Greek philosophers,
women, foreigners, and slaves were outsiders.
What has been touted as ‘universal’ citizenship in the United States has, at various
moments in history, excluded women, African-Americans and others. It currently
excludes millions of people who are physically present inside US territory, but are
officially deemed outsiders. This situation has led many to call for immigration reform
that grants ‘amnesty’ to some undocumented migrants who have lived in the United
States for various lengths of time. Anti-immigrant activists and policy-makers have been
quite vocal in opposing any pathway to future citizenship for any migrants who are in
the United States without authorization. Granting legal status and the opportunity for
citizenship to unauthorized migrants is not a new idea. The Immigration Reform and
Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) created a process whereby more than 2.7 million authorized
migrants gained lawful permanent residence in the United States (Papademetriou
2005). France undertook a similar policy in 1966 with ‘regularization’, which allowed
migrants who had entered without authorization or overstayed their visas to receive
legal working papers (Freeman 1979). More recently, in 2005, Spain launched a
programme that granted ‘amnesty’ to undocumented migrants who had entered the
country prior to August 2005, had a job contract, and no criminal record (BBC News
2005).
As the above examples show, it is possible to find instances in which unauthorized
immigrants have been granted the opportunity for citizenship. Still, such programmes
generally encounter widespread opposition. Currently, in the United States such
opposition has prevented any policy solutions. To understand such opposition it is useful
to examine some of the issues raised by citizenship itself. While the notion of citizen-
ship is extremely complex in itself, we need to probe even further. The following section
discusses the issues of race and culture that have historically been linked in various ways
to citizenship.
Identity can take many
forms, and national
identity is only one of
them. Chapter 5
discusses the process of
identification in general,
and gender and
racialized identities in
particular; Chapter 14
also looks at race,
Chapter 6 examines
religion, and Chapter 21
the distinction between
‘civilized’ and
‘barbarian’.
BOX 10.2 RACE AND CULTURE
Balibar and Wallerstein (1991) have observed that national identity and citizenship have a long history of
being linked with racial categories of identity, and racial identity has often been linked to culture. Race and
culture are impossible to define in a ‘scientific’ way that would permit one to proclaim with certainty that
current immigration policies in the United States are racist or that anti-immigrant positions are racist. Like
the concept of identity discussed below, race and culture are not static phenomena. It is notoriously
difficult to say with absolute certainty what elements make up a culture. Ironically this is one of the
reasons this term is so powerful. Vagueness and ambiguity are often what make concepts powerful. For
example, political leaders use the term ‘national interest’ quite frequently and never say with any degree of
precision what it means exactly. Nonetheless, it often functions to arouse much passion and support
amongst the populace. Similarly, when political leaders and scholars express the concern that
immigration, and especially undocumented immigration, poses a threat to a nation’s culture they very
rarely say precisely what they mean. Furthermore, when one begins to examine the things they could
possibly mean, we are often left with very little that is concrete. Some thinkers have suggested that culture
can function as a smokescreen for race. Biological notions of race have been thoroughly debunked and yet
race as a category of identity lingers, and it retains quite a bit of power despite the illusiveness of what it
‘is’. Culture is equally slippery. While some markers of culture, such as language, seem relatively
straightforward, it remains a notoriously ‘slippery’ and contested concept.
WHY IS PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT RESTRICTED? 213
BROADER ISSUES
CULTURAL RACISM
‘The border’ is a multifaceted phenomenon, and while there are many forces at work
today that seem to make borders increasingly irrelevant and that facilitate the movement
of people, there are also numerous attempts to prevent such movement. The territorial
line that slices through the ocean, mountains, desert, rivers, and canyons of the United
States is an aspect of a much larger phenomenon that artificially divides human beings
from one another. There are many borders in the world that create a self and an other,
a subject who belongs and one who does not, a subject who can be called ‘citizen’ and
one whose very existence in a particular place is deemed illegal. The movement of peoples
without the proper authorization is a ‘site’ where many manifestations of various
understandings of borders come together and where issues of identity and belonging
are brought to the fore. The ways in which a society responds to the human beings
who enter its sovereign territory without proper authorization says much about how it
conceives of itself and ‘others’. It also says much about how the issue of identity intersects
with notions of justice, fairness and equality. Particularly pertinent to identity within
the context of the movement of peoples are the issues of race and culture. Race and
culture often do not enter debates over people’s movements in an obvious way. Race
and culture are both extremely complex and slippery concepts whose meanings have
been intertwined.
Chapters 5 and 14 also
explore the issue of race.
See Chapter 5 for a
discussion of early
biological views of
difference.
How is this different
from or similar to the
ways in which China
manages its population?
See Chapter 12.
For more on how such
discourses of danger
work and affect politics
see Chapter 24.
WHY IS PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT RESTRICTED? 215
As part of the general 1924 restrictions, the Oriental Exclusion Act banned all immi –
gration from Asia (Reimers 1992). Such blatant forms of racism are easy to recognize.
In contemporary times, thinking of race as a fixed, genetic marker (phenotype) has been
thoroughly debunked. Studies indicate that there really is no such thing as race in any
biological, genetic sense.
Today, it is a great deal more difficult to justify political and social practices that
are blatantly racist. Still, it would be a gross and dangerous mistake to claim that racism
no longer exists. If this is the case, then perhaps the term race is not only linked to
one’s skin colour or any other biological or genetic indicator. Even in earlier times, the
concept of race extended beyond blood or genetics and was often linked to other factors
such as nationality, tradition, geography and culture (Doty 2003). All of these factors
have come into play in constructing identities for peoples. What this suggests then, is
that it is possible to have a kind of racism that draws upon something other than skin
colour. This is what the concept of cultural racism, or what some have referred to as
neo-racism, is meant to convey (Barker 1981; Balibar and Wallerstein 1991; Doty 2003;
Taguieff 1990). Neo-racism suggests that it is natural for antagonisms [hostilities] to
develop between members of a bounded community, i.e. a nation, and ‘outsiders’
(Barker 1981: 21).
The notion of cultural racism has been applied to immigration issues in Britain and
Europe, and is also a useful way to understand at least a portion of the immigration
‘crisis’ in the United States today. This is clear in popular notions that immigrants,
especially those from Mexico, pose a threat to the cultural integrity of the United States,
to ‘our way of life’ and to the very definition of who ‘we’ are. Over the past 10 years
or so we have witnessed a proliferation of writings that expound upon the presumed
dangers that immigrants pose to the cultural integrity of the United States. These range
from extremist internet blogs to highly respected academics. Samuel Huntington’s
Foreign Policy article ‘The Hispanic Challenge’ (2004a) and his subsequent book,
Who Are We? (2004b) are highly controversial and much criticized but they resonate
with other popular publications. The most recent of these is Pat Buchanan’s State
of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America (2006). These are all
examples of precisely what the term neo-racism is meant to capture. They create the
notion of ‘others’ whose ‘assimilability’ is questionable and who therefore threaten ‘our’
very existence. This way of thinking about peoples and cultures and borders provides
a simplified and dangerous way of interpreting the consequences of the movement of
human beings, with or without the proper authorization. This is not to suggest that
the ‘old-fashioned’ racism does not still exist. A recent study of traffic stops in the state
of Arizona, found that Highway Patrol officers were more than twice as likely to search
vehicles driven by Hispanics and Blacks than those operated by Anglos (Wagner 2007).
The recent racial profiling lawsuit against Arizona’s sheriff Joe Arpaio, in which his office
is charged with basing traffic stops to ask for immigration status on race, also attests to
the continuance of ‘old-fashioned’ racism (Billeaud 2011).
These questions about
democracy and human
rights are also taken up
in Chapters 14 and 27.
216 ROXANNE LYNN DOTY
CONCLUSION
The immigration ‘crisis’ in the United States today raises questions that are pertinent
to most other advanced industrialized democracies which have experienced and continue
to experience immigration from countries deemed ‘third world’ and who find themselves
with a substantial number of human beings who have arrived without the proper legal
documents. The European Union is often cited as an example of a case in which freedom
of movement has triumphed over sovereign national borders. When the provisions of
the Schengen Agreement came into force in 1995, travellers between member states
were no longer required to show passports (Gelatt 2005). However, the existence of
the Euro pean Union has not eliminated undocumented migration, and freedom of
movement is only granted to citizens of member states. It has not eliminated exclusionary
practices (Balibar 2004). In an important sense the question raised by Samuel
Huntington, i.e. Who Are We? is a pertinent one, but not necessarily in the sense in
which he poses it. Constructing categories of human beings who are defined in large
part by their lack of documents raises important questions about the values that have
traditionally been attached to ‘us’. The restriction of peoples’ free movement raises
important questions about what values such as democracy and human rights can mean
in an age of globalization when borders mean very little and very much at the same
time.
In our contemporary world borders are easy and difficult to cross at the same time.
Exclusion is increasing and decreasing at the same time. From a critical perspective there
are very few satisfactory responses to the question of why people’s movement is
restricted. Restrictive legislation on the part of the United States as well as many
European countries has for the most part failed in terms of reducing immigration. Efforts
to limit and/or prevent people from moving across sovereign territorial borders without
the proper documentation have given rise to numerous other problems such as the
increase in human smuggling, deaths of migrants in their dangerous journeys, and an
underground world of human beings who live amongst us but do not enjoy the same
privileges as citizens.
FURTHER READING
Andreas, Peter (2000) Border Games: Policing the US–Mexico Divide, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Useful for background to recent US policies pertaining its southern border.
Balibar, Etienne (2004) We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship,
Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
This book reflects upon the ways of understanding what citizenship means and this may be
changing due in part to migration.
Brian Barry, and Robert E. Goodin (eds) (1992) Free Movement: Ethical Issues in the Transnational
Migration of People and Money, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
This book presents several essays addressing the movement of goods, services and people
across borders and the ethical questions raised by these movements.
Brubaker, Rogers (ed.) (1989) Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North
America, Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Addresses the issue of citizenship in the context of immigration.
WHY IS PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT RESTRICTED? 217
Cornelius, Wayne, Philip Martin and James F. Hollifield (eds) (1994) Controlling Immigration:
A Global Perspective, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Good general overview of immigration from a global perspective.
Massey, Douglas S., Jorge Durand and Nolan J. Malone (2002) Beyond Smoke and Mirrors:
Mexican Migration in an Era of Economic Integration, New York: Russell Sage.
Essays on Mexican migration into the United States.
Massey, Douglas S., Joaquin Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouci, J. Edward Taylor and Adela
Pellegrino (2005) Worlds in Motion: Understanding Immigration at the End of the
Millennium, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Good general overview of contemporary immigration issues from a global perspective.
Reimers, David M. (1998) Unwelcome Strangers: American Identity and the Turn Against
Immigration, New York: Columbia University Press.
History of anti-immigrant groups and activities in the United States.
Sassen, Saskia (1996) Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Focuses on governance in an age of globalization in which immigration is a major issue.
WEBSITES
Congressional Research Service (CRS) (http://www.opencrs.com) is the public policy research
arm of the US Congress. It issues about 3,000 briefs, reports and issue papers per year,
including papers on immigration issues.
Immigration Policy Center (IPC) (http://www.ailf.org/ipc) is part of The American Immigration
Law Foundation (AILF) was established in 1987 as a tax-exempt, not-for-profit educational,
charitable organization. The Foundation is dedicated to increasing public understanding of
immigration law and policy and the value of immigration to American society, and to
advancing fundamental fairness and due process under the law for immigrants.
Migration Policy Institute (MPI) (http://www.migrationinformation.org): MPI is an independent
non-partisan, non-profit think tank in Washington DC that provides analysis, development
and evaluation of immigration policies at the local, national and international levels. It was
founded in 2001 by Demetrios G. Papademetriou and Kathleen Newland, and grew out of
the International Migration Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace (http://www.carnegieendowment.org/).
The Southern Poverty Law Center (http://www.splcenter.org) was founded in 1971 as a small
civil rights law firm. Today, SPLC is internationally known for its tolerance education
programmes, its legal victories against white supremacists and its tracking of hate groups.
Located in Montgomery, Alabama – the birthplace of the US Civil Rights Movement – the
Southern Poverty Law Center was founded by Morris Dees and Joe Levin, two local lawyers
who shared a commitment to racial equality. Its first president was Julian Bond. This
organization publishes news items and reports on hate groups, including border vigilantes.
More information about the European Union (EU) can be found on the website Europa: The
European Union at a Glance: http://europa.eu/abc/index_en.htm. The reasons why
the EU was founded are detailed and the history of its most recent expansions is charted.
The rules for the movement of workers are given on another part of this site: http://ec.
europa.eu/youreurope/nav/en/citizens/index.html#.
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WHY IS PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT RESTRICTED? 219
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For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
THE QUESTION
FORMS OF POLITICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL ORGANISATION
If we look at an atlas, we find that it often begins with two maps of the world. One of
these is physical, the other political. The first shows relief, depicting mountain ranges
and plains, significant rivers, land masses and oceans. The second shows the same land
and water, but this time the earth is brightly coloured, divided up and with clear lines
separating out states from each other, and capital or other major cities marked as signs
of human impact. We find the same divide when we move to maps of the continents
later in the atlas.
The physical maps show a world that has barely changed in human history,
although our knowledge of it certainly has. The political maps though bear almost no
relation to the situation a few hundred years ago, let alone a few thousand. Territorial
changes were common until the 1940s, many new states emerged from the process of
CHAPTER 11
Why is the world divided
territorially?
Stuart Elden
■ The question
FORMS OF POLITICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL
ORGANISATION
■ Illustrative example
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE EUROPEAN TERRITORIAL
STATE
■ General responses
THE EMERGENCE OF TERRITORY
■ Broader issues
TECHNIQUES AND THE FUTURE OF THE TERRITORIAL
STATE
■ CONCLUSION
WHY IS THE WORLD DIVIDED TERRITORIALLY? 221
Although this division of
the world into states is
accepted as the norm, it
does create problems in
terms of tackling
important issues, such
as climate change: see
Chapter 3. This division
also means that not
everyone is authorised to
live where they choose,
creating many serious
difficulties: see Chapter
10. And it is arguably
being challenged by the
spread of the internet
(Chapter 9) and a
globalised economy and
global financial
institutions (Chapters 17
and 18).
decolonisation after World War II, and certain areas – notably eastern Europe and central
Asia – will have dramatically changed in the lifetime of readers of this book. The final
settlement of some areas remains an issue today.
Taking this kind of perspective shows us that the division of the world into separate
territorial units, called states, is both artificial and arbitrary. Today it is generally
accepted as the norm for political and geographical organisation. Yet this has not always
been the case. Looking at older maps shows a very different perspective. Until relatively
recently, large parts of the world were either unknown entirely (such as desert, mountain
or polar regions), unknown to people in other parts, or known to them only in the
vaguest of ways. Land masses and key rivers appeared on maps of the world drawn in
Europe, but the inland areas of islands or continents were largely undiscovered by
Europeans and unmapped by them.
Maps of Europe in the Middle Ages show a jumble of political allegiances, with
different rulers having control over a patchwork of land (Figure 11.1). Take a map of
the situation in the fourteenth century, for instance.
There are lands owned by the Church in Rome, lands within the Kingdom of France
that owe allegiance to German princes, and the reverse. England has areas of strategic
control on the continent, while the houses of Austria and Luxembourg have power far
beyond their nominal location. The rulers of contemporary cities or regions such as
Naples or Burgundy control vast swathes of land. Focusing in on a smaller area would
show more complications. And, as noted above, at this time large parts of the rest of
the world were either unknown in whole or part to European cartographers.
Much later, Africa’s land was divided by European powers in the late nineteenth
century into ‘spheres of influence’, which only later evolved into definite control on the
ground (Figure 11.2).
The division of the world into territorial units called states reflects a particular
relation to space. Yet, just as not all human communities have been the same as modern
states, so too with their relation to the land they inhabit. Hunter-gatherer communities
have a very different relation to space than those societies that cultivate land and
domesticate animals. They tend not to have fixed dwellings and may move with the
seasons in search of water and food. A recent legal case may help to illustrate this.
The modern state of Botswana includes large parts of the Kalahari desert (Figure
11.3). The indigenous San or Basarwa people of this area, often known as the ‘Bushmen’,
are looked at as one of the oldest peoples in the world. The Central Kalahari Game
Reserve in Botswana was created by the British as colonisers in 1961 to allow them to
remain in their ancestral lands. On independence in 1966 the government of Botswana
proposed that they move into new settlements outside of this area, in which hospitals
and other social services were provided. One of the reasons given was for the protection
of the wildlife in the Reserve. The discovery of diamonds in the 1980s meant that this
movement took on a new urgency for the government, despite the resistance of the
San people. In 2002 this eviction was facilitated by violence, the refusal of hunting
licences and the ceasing of food rations. In late 2006 a Botswana court ruled that the
eviction was illegal and that the people could return.
In this example we can see the clash between a modern state and its territorial claims,
including the desire to exploit its natural resources, and a different understanding
of space of a nomadic people who live from and on the land, rather than cultivate it
The history of
colonialism in India is
discussed in Chapter 16;
colonialism continues to
have an impact in a
range of ways: see also
Chapters 15, 20 and 21.
This idea that we must
protect the environment
is one that has
historically emerged and
changed: see Chapters 3
and 4.
(see Townsend 2004). Even looking at the geometric boundaries of the Reserve and
the western border of the state imposed over a physical and human landscape shows
two very different spatial logics.
Standard definitions of territory suggest that it is an area of space under the control
or jurisdiction of a group of people, which might be a state, but which might potentially
be other types of political organisation. Jean Gottmann notes that
Although its Latin root, terra, means ‘land or ‘earth’, the word territory conveys
the notion of an area around a place; it connotes an organisation with an element
of centrality, which ought to be the authority exercising sovereignty over the people
occupying or using that place and the space around it.
(1973: 5)
222 STUART ELDEN
FIGURE 11.1
Map of Central Europe in 1360. From Atlas to Freeman’s Historical Geography, edited by J. B. Bury, Longmans Green and Co.
Third Edition 1903
The desire to exploit
natural resources is
often a source of conflict:
see Chapter 3.
WHY IS THE WORLD DIVIDED TERRITORIALLY? 223
FIGURE 11.2
Map of Africa in 1892. From A School Atlas of English History, edited by Samuel Rawson Gardiner, London: Longmans,
Green, and Co., 1892
The geographer David Storey suggests that
The term ‘territory’ is most usually used in reference to the area of land claimed
by a country. However territories exist at a variety of spatial scales from the global
down to the local. Territory refers to a portion of geographic space which is claimed
or occupied by a person or group of persons or by an institution. It is, thus, an
area of ‘bounded space’.
(2001: 1)
The claim that a territory is a bounded space leads to the idea of a state as what the
sociologist Anthony Giddens called ‘a bordered power container’ (1985; see Taylor
1994, 1995). The notion of a bounded space is important not just as one of the key
ways in which territories are defined, but because it brings us to the notion of a boundary
or border.
224 STUART ELDEN
The relation between the state and its territory is therefore crucial to understanding
both terms. The German sociologist Max Weber famously declared that ‘a state is that
human community which (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate
physical violence within a certain territory, this “territory” being another of the defining
characteristics of the state’ (1994: 310–11).
Weber therefore stresses four key things: community; legitimacy; violence; and
territory. The state is a particularly human grouping, within a discrete area, and within
that area it makes a claim to complete control. He is suggesting that this type of political
rule is inherently tied to a particular place, and the people within it. The state is able
to command absolute authority within that discrete area, without the involvement of
other forces – be they other states or political groupings. Its authority is absolute because
it is both undivided (no other body has that power) and unlimited (the state can do
what it wants, without reference to other bodies). Other political groups, such as private
armies or rebel forces, or independence movements are, by their nature, illegitimate,
that is, without moral or legal justification. This is the notion of sovereignty – the power
to command and rule, which is rendered legitimate through a claim to authority. The
international political system, such as that set out in the United Nations Charter, largely
Tsau
Ghanzi
Central Kalahari
Game Preserve
Gemsbok
National Park
Gweta
Serowe
Kang
Tshane
K a l a h a r i
D e s e r t
Kanye
Molepolole
Mamuno
Maun
Z A M B I A
A N G O L A
N A M I B I A
S O U T H A F R I C A
B O T S W A N A
0 100 200 mi
2001000 km
Victoria
Falls
Zambezi
Lake
Kariba
Okavango
Omatako
Limpopo
Lake
Ngami
Molopo
20° E 24° E 28° E
Lake Xau
Nxai Pan
National Park
OrapaRakops
Chobe
National Park
Z I M B A B W EOkavango
Delta
Lobatse
Letlhakeng
Jwaneng
Sehithwa
Serule
Mahalapye
Palapye
Hwange
National Park
Selebi
Phikwe
Mosetse
Francistown
Nata
Mochudi
Machaneng
GABOROME
Tshabong
Shakawe
FIGURE 11.3
Map of Botswana and
Central Kalahari Game
Reserve
For more on Weber’s
work on power and
authority see Chapter 7.
WHY IS THE WORLD DIVIDED TERRITORIALLY? 225
subscribes to this view of the relation between politics and place. States are held to have
exclusive internal sovereignty (jurisdiction within their own borders) and equal external
sovereignty. Equal external sovereignty, or equal jurisdiction, means that no state should
be a puppet of another, and that there should be no hierarchy of states. In practice
there are many instances where this is clearly not the case, but these assumptions function
as an important legal and political fiction that structures the world and helps to maintain
the international order. Today, though, international agreements increasingly do put
limitations on state sovereignty, including on actions that impact on the environment,
the use of nuclear power and treatment of refugees.
Why, then, is the world divided territorially? Why are borders drawn where they
are? Has the world always been divided in this kind of way? Why do some rivers and
mountain ranges form borders, yet others do not? Why do some lines of division take
on such importance, while other lines drawn on maps or on the ground do not? Contrast,
for example, the difference between the heavily militarised line of control between India
and Pakistan in the mountains of Kashmir, with the largely uncontrolled border region
between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Why have the borders of Germany, for example,
moved so dramatically over the twentieth century? Why are the borders in Africa drawn
in such a way, with so many straight lines cutting through the landscape? Why, with
the notable exception of Antarctica, where territorial claims are suspended, is almost
every piece of land on the planet under the control of a single state, which claims
exclusive rights to what happens in this area? This is not to say that there are no disputed
territories – examples would include Kashmir, the ‘occupied territories’ of the Palestinian
West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and many others in the Middle East – but rather that
the norm is that they are ‘owned’ by a state. Why, increasingly, are the oceans being
similarly divided? Why should geographical location dictate citizenship, rights and
BOX 11.1 MAX WEBER
Max Weber (1864–1920) was a German
historian and political economist. He is seen
as one of the founders of sociology, and is
known for his writings on the city, religion
and the historical development of the state.
He was involved in the negotiations for the
Treaty of Versailles (1919) and helped to draft
Germany’s Weimar Constitution which came
into force in 1919. His most famous works are
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(1958, written 1904–5), Economy and Society
(1968, written 1914) and the essay ‘Politics
as a Vocation’, from which the quotation in
this chapter is taken.
FIGURE 11.4
Max Weber. Deutsches
Historisches Museum, Berlin. Ref.
F52/2693
For some of these
agreements regarding
the environment see
Chapter 3, and
concerning the internet,
Chapter 9.
For more on the complex
relationship between
citizenship, geography
and rights see Chapters
10, 12 and 27.
Chapter 25 examines in
detail whether we are
able to stop people from
being harmed and in
particular the case of
East Timor.
Chapter 25 also talks
about what it means to
look to the ‘international
community’ for answers.
The polis and political
thought related to it has
had a lasting impact on
the political imagination:
see Chapters 5, 10 and
27.
226 STUART ELDEN
responsibilities? The place where you are born, or where your parents are from,
determines many of the conditions that will affect the rest of your life.
Although some people are able to change where they live, taking on citizenship of
or permanent residence in another state, this is not an option for many people.
Questions of immigration and the status of refugees show the close relation between
geography and rights. Many indigenous peoples find themselves excluded from their
historical lands, either entirely, or because modern borders cut across them. Many states
treat those who live within their territory in terrible ways, but what possibility do these
people have to leave; and what rights or responsibilities do regional or international
organisations have to protect them? This question has been especially raised in the last
few years with the examples of Rwanda, East Timor, Kosovo and Sudan, but the
international community does not yet seem to have come up with a satisfactory answer.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE EUROPEAN TERRITORIAL STATE
In order to get some sense of how territory emerged, and why this model of ordering
political space spread across the world, I will outline the history of the European state,
with an emphasis on its geographical aspects. This allows us to see how not all political
organisations have the same relation to space.
Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages
The ancient Greek city-state, known as a polis, was one of the earliest forms of political
unit in Europe. It dominated Greek political culture between the eighth and third
centuries before the common era (the period before the birth of Jesus Christ) and is
discussed in writers such as the philosophers Plato and Aristotle and the historians
Thucydides and Herodotus. Although it had an urban centre, this human community
spread into the neighbouring countryside and cultivated land in this region. It thus had
a centralised source of power, and a broader extent where it reached out to neighbouring
land. Although there were wars between poleis, there was often lots of unclaimed land
between them. Unlike modern states they did not take over all of the land in the broader
region, and some rural shrines, for example were shared between neighbours. We
therefore have a model of political rule that is strongly centralised, with power being
less strong as we move away from the centre.
Rome began as something similar to a Greek city-state, but as it waged wars against
its neighbours in the region it began to accumulate more and more land. By the time
the republic fell and it became an empire, it had expanded further and further away
from the Italian peninsula. Roman political geography is complicated, with different
parts of the empire ruled in different ways, either through allegiance, paying tribute
(goods, slaves or money) or incorporation into Roman systems (see Nicolet 1991).
Rome did not recognise other political units as being on the same level as itself – unlike
the way neighbouring states do today. Land was, effectively, part of the Roman Empire,
or it could become so at some point in the future. This is the idea of terra nullius –
empty or no-man’s land. This meant that they did not accord other groups the same
The idea of terra nullius
was also used by the
European conquerors in
relation to the American
continent: Chapter 3.
For more about the
growth and contraction
of empires, see
Chapter 16.
For more on how the
relationship between
religion and politics is
understood and
organised see Chapters
6, 7 and 27.
Chapter 6 tells you more
about the Reformation
and Martin Luther in
particular.
WHY IS THE WORLD DIVIDED TERRITORIALLY? 227
rights of possession that they gave themselves, something that European powers later
used to justify colonisation of large parts of the rest of the world. While Rome
sometimes built walls or barriers, such as Hadrian’s Wall in northern England or the
fortifications on the Rhine River in modern day Germany, these were more for defensive
purposes than to mark the final borders of Roman expansion. Land both sides of
Hadrian’s Wall was cultivated, for example, and another wall was built further north
(the Antonine Wall) as Rome expanded its reach. At this time the idea of a frontier –
as an area of land between different political rulers – predominated over a boundary as
a single line of control. While today a boundary is, nominally, a line with zero width
between two political units such as states, at this time the idea of a frontier as a zone,
or something having width, was much more common. What is important about this is
that a frontier zone will usually have people living in it, as well as resources within it.
A border can be either a line or a zone, but today most are lines, even though there is
a lot of discussion of border regions looking at areas across these lines.
With the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century of the
common era, Europe became a much more jumbled and complicated political unit.
Various kings, tribes and other political groupings, including the church, had power
over land. This was often at a very small scale, and there were frequent invasions and
transfers of authority. Large parts of Western Europe were unified under the Carolingian
Empire, and the king of the Franks, Charlemagne, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor
by the Pope on Christmas Day, 800. Three centuries after the fall of the Western Roman
Empire, therefore, an attempt was made to re-establish it as the Holy Roman Empire.
Despite the French author Voltaire’s joke that this was neither holy, Roman nor an
empire, this was a way for the Church in Rome to exercise political power across much
of Europe for several hundred years.
Religious wars and the rise of the state
With the fractures in religion around the Reformation – a period of conflict over the
trajectory of the Catholic Church, particularly over corruption and the power of the
priesthood – there arose a particular kind of political problem. If the prince or king
of a region within the Empire converted to Calvinism or Lutherism, which religion
would be dominant in their lands? Would it be the religion of the local ruler or that of
the Church in Rome? This caused a great deal of conflict in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, leading to various agreements between the units within the empire.
The two most famous are the Diet of Augsburg in 1555, which laid down the principle
of cuius regio, eius religio – to whom the rule, or region, his religion – and the Treaties
of Westphalia in 1648. Augsburg’s settlement, which allowed for Lutheran princes or
free cities to have this as the official religion, was effectively extended to Calvinists
in 1648.
While Westphalia brought to an end most of the fighting in the Thirty Years War,
France and Spain continued fighting until the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659. This is
in some senses even more important, as it led to a joint commission for setting the exact
border between Spain and France, and can be said to have created the first modern
boundary from what had previously been more of a frontier (see Sahlins 1989).
Note that the
presumption against
non-interference is
ignored in various ways.
Chapters 15 and 20
highlight the interference
of global financial
institutions in the
domestic policies of
‘developing’ states and
Chapter 21 examines why
some people sometimes
think it’s good to
interfere in other states.
Chapter 12 examines
how nations have to be
made and Chapter 13
how such constructions
are always challenged by
alternative stories of
community.
The situation in North
and South Korea is
examined in Chapter 26
and the end of the
division between East
and West Germany is
explored in Chapter 7.
There were of course
also non-European
empires: see Chapters
12, 16 and 21.
WHY IS THE WORLD DIVIDED TERRITORIALLY? 229
From this period on, the state model began to become the standard form of political
organisation in Europe. This was not entirely a result of the Peace of Westphalia, since
many states – such as England, France and Sweden – existed before this time. The
emergence of city-states in northern Italy during the Renaissance is also important, as
they began to develop more modern forms of political rule, developing from classical
ideas (see Larkins 2010). Equally, many of the features of the modern system of states
– such as equal sovereignty, and the presumption against non-interference in domestic
affairs – clearly did not become norms until much later. Yet around this time states or
individual rulers began to pay much more attention to the importance of clearly
demarcating where their rule extended to.
It is worth noting that the state predates the nation. The nation is often taken to
have developed in the late eighteenth century. The development of the nation, and ideas
of national identity and nationalism, is a similarly contested and historical develop-
ment. Today people often talk about the nation-state. This is problematic for at least
two reasons. First, it assumes that the two are the same thing, when one is a grouping
of people and the other a political unit. The borders of each can coincide, but most
states include people of different nationalities, and at times the same nationality has
been found in more than one state, such as North and South Korea today, or East and
West Germany in the late twentieth century. Second, a straightforward equation of the
nation with the state generally fails to note the historical and contingent development
of each term.
Imperialism and empire
The European model for dividing states was gradually spread across the world between
the fifteenth and twentieth centuries (see Badie 2000). These European empires differed
from many earlier empires, such as the Roman Empire, in their spatial extent. Whereas
the Roman Empire had expanded contiguously – that is, to land immediately bordering
its existing possessions – European empires occupied land at a distance. Other parts of
the world became the location for inter-European rivalries. These included French and
English competition in North America, and Spanish/Portuguese claims for different
parts of the world. Later these took on a particularly concentrated form in the late
nineteenth century with the ‘scramble for Africa’. This was a process by which European
powers carved up Africa for their own purposes.
Thus the Western European model of territorial division between states was
exported to much of the rest of the world. Initially this was as colonial possessions, but
as these places gained independence they largely inherited the boundaries of colonial
division. In South America, for instance, the division between Spanish and Portuguese
possessions, and internal divisions between parts of the Spanish Empire became the
boundaries of the newly independent states. This became known as the doctrine of uti
possidetis, a Latin phrase meaning that what you will have is ‘what you possess’. In 1964
the Organisation of African Unity passed a motion that suggested that this should be
the principle of decolonisation for that continent too. While this had the benefit of
preventing a territorial free-for-all, it has meant that the largely arbitrary boundaries of
Africa remain, creating many ongoing problems (see Lalonde 2002).
Extremely mixed. German and Hungarian all around,
Serbian mainly in west and centre of the area, Romanian
at its east, with pockets of Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech,
Slovakian, Ukrainian and small local ethnic groups
Frontier of the Habsburg Empire, 1914
International frontiers, 1914
German
Hungarian
Czech
Polish
Slovak
Ukrainian
Romanian
Serbian
Croatian
Bosnian Muslim
Slovenian
Italian
Ladin
Friulian
Linz
Vienna
Prague
Budapest
R O M
A
N
I
A
S E R B
I A
M
O
N
TE
N
EG
R
A
D
R
I
A
T
I C
S
E
A
I T A
L
Y
G
E
R
M
A
N
R
E
I C
H
S W I T Z E R L A N D
R
U
S
S
I A
N
E
M
P
I R
E
FIGURE 11.6
Map of ethnic
distribution of the
Habsburg Empire, 1914.
http://www.historyon
maps.com/BWSamples/
HabsburgEthnic.html
230 STUART ELDEN
Within Europe the break-up of empires has led to the emergence of a number of
new states. After the First World War the defeated powers of Germany, Austria-
Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were either broken up or had territory removed as
part of a punitive settlement. In the various treaties of the Peace of Paris, which included
the Treaty of Versailles, the victorious powers sought to rebuild the map of Europe.
Germany lost territory to many of its neighbours including Belgium and Poland. The
Habsburg Empire was fragmented into a number of smaller states, including Austria,
Hungary and a number of states in central Europe and the Balkans.
To avoid lots of small states, some rather artificial ones were created such as
Czechoslovakia, which included Czechs and Slovaks, and Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia meant
the federation of the Southern Slavs, and was effectively a line drawn around a large
number of different peoples – Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Montenegrins and
Macedonians. From the Ottoman Empire modern Turkey was created – still a multi-
ethnic state – and a number of new states in the near and Middle East. Many of the
world’s most insuperable territorial problems – such as Iraq and Israel/Palestine – date
from this time.
At the end of the Cold War many of these states fragmented into smaller entities.
Some of these were along broadly nationalist lines, though there is much debate as to
whether these pre-existed the division or were in some way produced by that process.
Self-determination – the idea that a group of people in a discrete area should be able to
govern themselves – again became very popular. Earlier uses of this ideal, such as those
that shaped the Peace of Paris, had been tempered by recognition of considerations
For a description of how
the British state came
into being as an
amalgamation of
different national groups
over a period of several
hundred years, and how
Ireland seceded from the
UK in the 1920s, see
Chapter 16.
Yugoslavia broke apart in
the 1990s amidst violent
conflict. For more on this
and a map of the region
see Chapter 5. This
break-up involved a
particular kind of identity
politics, as discussed in
the same chapter.
NATO’s Kosovo
operation and its legality
were controversial: see
Chapter 25.
WHY IS THE WORLD DIVIDED TERRITORIALLY? 231
concerning the viability of new states. Equally, as can be seen from the map above, it is
rare for national groups to neatly fit into discrete geographical areas, with the situation
on the ground often far more complicated, with a mosaic of different identities. In
addition, some people do not identify in this way. The compromise that the international
community fell upon was that republics within federal states could become independent
states. This meant that Czechoslovakia was able to split into the Czech Republic and
Slovakia in a largely peaceful way. This is known as the Velvet Divorce, a reference to
the Velvet Revolution in 1989 which had overthrown communist rule without much
bloodshed. The Soviet Union similarly broke up along republic lines – its full title was
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) – into fifteen separate states. This led
to independence for the European states of Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Baltic
States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the states of the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia
and Azerbaijan) as well as a number of new states in Central Asia such as Uzbekistan
and Kazakhstan. Many of these states, especially those in Central Asia, had no experience
of independence before and were often unable to deal with some of its implications. In
addition, many of the republics’ boundaries were poorly specified.
The break-up of Yugoslavia is extremely complicated, but again largely occurred
along the lines of the former republic of that federal state. Bosnia did not work on this
basis, since its multi-ethnic nature and the interests of its neighbours led to prolonged
civil war, and the forcible movement or destruction of populations, known as ‘ethnic
cleansing’. These problems were solved to some extent by a complicated cartography
of division and incorporation at the Dayton conference of 1995. Yet this did not end
the problems in Yugoslavia, with Kosovo, an autonomous province of Serbia, seeking
independence. NATO went to war in 1999, ostensibly to protect the civilian population
of Kosovo from Serbia. While the aerial bombardment produced the desired outcome
of a Serbian withdrawal, it also produced problems of a different nature. This was the
status of Kosovo itself, which caused much discussion concerning its future either within
Yugoslavia or Serbia, as an international protectorate, or as an independent state. While
Russia objected because of its support from Serbia, even states that supported Kosovo’s
declaration of independence in 2008 feared it would create a precedent for other states
to break up. The republics within the Yugoslav federation, or those within the Soviet
Union (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), were able to gain recognition for their
independence and take on the boundaries of internal division. Kosovo, though, was a
province within a republic, and so was not of the same constitutional standing. Among
other examples, this is the same kind of distinction that Chechnya has within Russia or
Abkhazia within Georgia. These complications will be returned to below.
GENERAL RESPONSES
THE EMERGENCE OF TERRITORY
There are many explanations for the emergence of territory as a particular way of ordering
the relation between political rule and space.
Some writers use the idea of territoriality to understand territory. These accounts
suggest that human relations to space can be understood through modes of behaviour.
Some valuable studies have been made of ‘human territoriality’, looking at how humans,
both individually and collectively, encounter, work and change the spaces around them.
Some of this work begins from a biological perspective, deriving insights from compar-
ing human behaviour to that of animals (see Malmberg 1980). While this way of
approaching the topic can produce some valuable insights, its problem is that human
social organisation has changed more rapidly than our biological drives, and so a
biological approach is of limited historical use.
Some work on territoriality does not suggest such a purely biological approach,
but incorporates a more social angle (Sack 1986). For Sack territoriality is a geo-political
strategy, not a basic vital instinct. Territory is a social construct – produced through
interaction and struggle – and therefore thoroughly permeated by social relations. To
analyse the territory as a mere container of social action is to miss a vital part of the
picture. Sack’s analysis, as well as that of a number of other writers, incorporates elements
of a range of approaches to understanding territory.
Political-economic approach
Some accounts see territory as a form of property. Marxist accounts particularly suggest
that developments in economics are important. In The German Ideology, Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels suggest that antiquity is tied to the city-state and its ‘little territory’,
and the Middle Ages to the country (1970: 45). Though the economic system of the
Middle Ages, feudalism, thus put a great deal of focus on land, it was only with capitalism
and the emergence of the modern state that there was a real emphasis on people and
land as significant taxable assets. To have land under a system of centralised control,
and to remove overlapping jurisdiction, became an imperative. This was tied to the
emerging focus on the importance of private property, the growth of new towns and
cities and a shift of power toward the middle classes with increased industrialisation.
This led to a stress on the importance of national markets rather than local ones, and
a widespread centralisation of the state, and therefore a control of its land, as territory.
One of the best examples of this argument is found in the work of the Marxist
theorist Perry Anderson, particularly in his books Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism
and Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974a, 1974b). Anderson offers a broad analysis
of the material forces shaping the development of successive historical periods,
suggesting that this is a Marxist account. However his account goes broader than the
merely economic.
The typical medium of inter-feudal rivalry, by contrast, was military and its structure
was always potentially the zero-sum conflict of the battlefield, by which fixed
quantities of ground were won or lost. For land is a natural monopoly: it cannot
be indefinitely extended, only redivided. The categorical object of noble rule was
territory, regardless of the community inhabiting it. Land as such, not language,
defined the natural perimeters of its power.
(Anderson 1974b: 31)
This is a complicated series of claims. Anderson is suggesting that feudal power
structures revolved around possession of land, often fought over. If one feudal lord
gained land, another would have lost it. Land is a scarce resource, and cannot be
232 STUART ELDEN
Chapter 5 notes such
biological perspectives in
relation to the way we
think about gender and
race.
Chapter 19 introduces
Marx and Engels’s work.
Chapter 17 shows the
impact of industrial –
isation upon people and
their work situation.
WHY IS THE WORLD DIVIDED TERRITORIALLY? 233
Some people might
claim that territory is
now much less central to
thinking about security:
see Chapter 24.
Foucault’s work is also
discussed in Chapters 4,
7 and 23.
produced, only redistributed. Given that political control revolved around possession
of land, people were much less important. Changes in economic structures produced
a different social structure.
Political-strategic approach
Hinted at in Anderson’s quotation above, and more explicitly stressed in other accounts,
is that territory emerges as important for more strategic reasons. States wanted to ensure
that their land was practically manageable, and so were concerned with issues around
security. France, for example, following the Treaty of the Pyrenees, began a process of
mapping and surveying its land, moving towards what it called its ‘natural frontiers’.
These were the Alps and the Pyrenees, the English Channel, the Atlantic and
Mediterranean, and the Rhine River. This gives rise to the roughly hexagonal shape of
modern France. To ensure this, France exchanged some land to the northeast to even
up its boundary with the Netherlands, and employed technical specialists to map and
reinforce its borders more generally. The unification of Germany and Italy in the
nineteenth century shows a national project that included the bringing together of
disparate political entities in a unified territory.
These accounts stress the importance of power relations in understanding control
of space, either explicitly, as in some work by and influenced by Michel Foucault,
or through other terms such as ‘sovereignty’ or ‘authority’. Weber’s analysis of the
historical development of the state would fit in this category. The sociologist Michael
Mann has provided a very detailed account from this broad perspective (1986, 1993),
BOX 11.3 MICHEL FOUCAULT
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French historian and
philosopher. His studies of madness, medicine, punishment and
sexuality have had a significant impact in a range of disciplines.
His work on power and its relation to knowledge has been
particularly important. Foucault argues that power flows
throughout society rather than from a central source, and that it
is best analysed through a series of relations. Power is exercised,
which means we should study how it is used, rather than
nominal possession of power. Especially in his later works he is
interested in how power can be creative, rather than simply
repressive, and how both forms of power are important in
understanding the modern human subject. His most influential
work for those interested in politics is Discipline and Punish
(1976), but the ongoing publication of his lecture courses, such
as Society Must Be Defended (2003, from 1975–76) and Security,
Territory, Population (2007, from 1977–78) are beginning to
have an important impact.
FIGURE 11.7
Paris. 1973. Demonstration in support of
immigrant workers. In the foreground: the
French philosopher Michel Foucault.
Photo: Gilles Peress. Magnum
Chapter 25 examines
in more detail how
sovereignty is significant
in the context of conflict
and possible resolutions.
See Chapter 10 for a map
of migration flows.
234 STUART ELDEN
stressing the changing dynamics of power and in particular military and strategic
interests in the development of the state, though, like Anderson he only tangentially
discusses territory.
The political-economic and political-strategic models for understanding territory
have much merit, and it is undoubtedly the case that there were a number of interlinked
changes that impacted on political rule over space. Both types of analysis are vital to
understanding how territory emerged as an organising category (see Elden 2010; 2013).
However, elements of both ways of understanding territory can be found in earlier
political systems. The first, of land as a form of property, can be found in ancient Greek
texts such as Plato’s Laws, and was clearly a crucial factor throughout the Middle Ages.
The Domesday Book, from 1086, was a survey of the lands in England for the
knowledge of William the Conqueror, who had invaded 20 years before. The second
is closer to a sense of land as terrain, and in this sense can be found in any number of
ancient texts such as Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War or Julius Caesar’s
accounts of the Gallic War or the Civil War. Some aspects of the particularity of modern
understandings of territory are discussed in the Broader Issues section.
Changing importance of the territorial state
Thinking territorially is a powerful way of operating, for among other things it enables
states to claim exclusive internal jurisdiction – the right to do anything they want
within their boundaries. States are unlikely to give up this control without a struggle.
Nonethe less, several challenges to this way of working have occurred over the last few
decades.
One of these is the rise of supra-national organisations, such as the European Union.
This is taking over key aspects of the role of states, such as making laws and monetary
policy, and the rejected European Constitution pushed for moves toward a common
defence and foreign policy. With the weakening of internal borders to allow the free
movement of goods and people, the European Union has challenged a number of the
territorial aspects of the states which have joined as members (see J. Anderson 1996;
Bialasiewicz et al. 2005).
Globalisation has also challenged the idea of self-contained territorial states, with
suggestions that flows of information, goods and energy around the world now
transcend state boundaries. This has led some to suggest that globalisation can be
understood as deterritorialisation or supra-territorialisation. Deterritorialisation means
that territory is no longer fixed, and supra-territorialisation that spaces of interaction
can no longer be contained with the borders of states (see Scholte 2005).
The movement of people around the world, and in particular wide-scale economic
migration, has also produced a series of challenges to the exclusive territorial power of
the state. Andrew Linklater has suggested that these broad processes require us to rethink
notions of identity, national ties, rights and belonging. This will open up ‘new forms
of political community which sever the links between sovereignty, territory, citizenship
and nationalism’ (Linklater 1998: 213). Yet while in the 1990s a series of suggestions
were made about the decreasing power and importance of state borders, a number of
more recent changes, notably following the attacks of 11 September 2001, have
produced a movement in the opposite direction. The building of the security wall in
BOX 11.4 THE EUROPEAN UNION
The basis for the EU was set up in the aftermath of the Second World War to bring peace, stability and
prosperity to Europe. From the Schuman Declaration and the six-nation Common Market of the 1950s the
EU has grown and after its 2007 enlargement includes twenty-seven countries. The three main decision-
making bodies in the EU are: the Parliament, the Council of Ministers of the EU, and the European
Commission. Its annual budget is over €120 billion [$190 billion] in fields like regional and social
development, agriculture, research and energy. Citizenship of the EU brings with it a series of fundamental
and political rights, including the right to travel, live and work anywhere in the EU. Countries of the EU
work closely together on trade issues and development policy, and the EU is developing a common
foreign and defence policy.
(From Pascal Fontaine (2006), ‘Europe in 12 Lessons’,
http://europa.eu/abc/12lessons/index_en.htm)
FIGURE 11.8
Member states of the European Union 2007
FRANCE
UNITED
KINGDOM
NETHERLANDS
BELGIUM
POLAND
SWEDEN
FINLAND
GERMANY
DENMARK
ESTONIA
LATVIA
CZECH
REPUBLIC
SLOVAKIA
LUXEMBOURG
HUNGARY
ROMANIA
BULGARIA
SLOVENIA
ITALY
MALTA
CYPRUS
GREECE
LITHUANIA
(E.)
(W.)
IRELAND
Year of Joining
1957
1973
1981
1986
1990
1995
2004
2007
SPAIN
P
O
R
T
U
G
A
L
500 Km
500 miles
AUSTRIA
WHY IS THE WORLD DIVIDED TERRITORIALLY? 235
http://europa.eu/abc/12lessons/index_en.htm
The environment and the
challenges it poses are
discussed in Chapters 3
and 4.
The international
interventions in East
Timor and Kosovo are
further discussed in
Chapter 25. Aspects of
the case of Libya remain
controversial. Was there
a civil war in any case
before the intervention?
Was regime change the
aim?
North Korea and the
invasion of Iraq are both
discussed in Chapter 26.
236 STUART ELDEN
the Palestinian occupied territories by Israel and the reinforcing of the USA’s borders,
especially with Mexico, are two of the most obvious examples of this trend.
Other challenges, notably those of an environmental nature, produce problems and
require solutions that transcend the territorial nation-state. Pollution, infectious diseases
such as HIV/AIDS, SARS and avian flu, nuclear proliferation, poverty and global climate
change all show the limitations of individual countries trying to resolve problems, and
have led to a number of supranational and therefore supraterritorial initiatives. For many
analysts, these show the broader context we need to understand contemporary politics
within.
The involvement of the international community in the internal affairs of states has
developed over the post-Cold War era. As well as the debate over the war in Iraq, there
have been a number of other instances. International intervention, albeit belatedly, in
Bosnia and later in Kosovo was framed as protecting civilian populations. US assistant
secretary of state Richard Holbrooke famously described the former as ‘bombing for
peace’. In the latter case it effectively gave autonomy to Kosovo from Serbia, leading to
its later recognition as an independent state. International intervention was not forth-
coming in Rwanda in 1994, when the two main ethnic groups in the country were
massacring each other. In East Timor, international intervention helped to protect that
country’s claim for independence from Indonesia. Most recently, the war in Libya was
begun with the aim of protecting civilian populations, though regime change was clearly
the goal of Western powers. Similar issues are currently being discussed in relation to Syria.
All of these can be seen as limitations to the ability of a state to do as it chooses
within its own boundaries (see Yamashita 2004; McQueen 2005). In the context of the
‘global war on terror’ this logic of intervention has been extended to states that allow
terrorist groups to operate from within their territory, and those that pursue weapons
of mass destruction. The first was used to justify the bombing of Afghanistan and the
overthrow of the Taliban, as well as attacks on Lebanon and Somalia by America’s allies;
the second was the primary reason advanced for the invasion of Iraq and the deposing
of Saddam Hussein, and the ongoing tensions over North Korea and Iran.
In international law, the idea of territorial integrity requires both the preservation
of existing boundaries and the sovereignty of states within them (see Elden 2009). If
the second, territorial sovereignty, is held to be contingent – that is, dependent on
particular behaviour – can the first, territorial preservation, remain unchallenged? Why
should a state be limited by what it can do within its boundaries but those boundaries
not be open to question? The length of the US occupation of Iraq was, in large part,
to maintain it as a unified state when it descended into sectarian civil war. The
uncomfortable situation of Kosovo, whose independence is recognised by some but by
no means all states, demonstrates the problems of creating precedent. Will the
independence of South Sudan be a model for changes to boundaries within Africa?
Russia’s war with separatists in Chechnya, and China’s conquest of neighbouring lands
like Tibet and its independence movements in Xinjiang province (also known as East
Turkistan) help to explain why some powerful countries are wary of further opening
up this question. Yet Russia fought the 2008 war in Georgia on the basis of separatism
for Russian-speaking people in the republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
It is therefore clear that the question of territorial division is at the very heart of
contemporary debates about global politics. It is interesting to consider what specific
The development of new
forms of technology
often has an impact on
how our lives are
organised and how we
relate to the world: see
Chapters 8, 9, 17, 18 and
24. It is debatable,
though, which comes
first: a new technology or
a change in social and
political conditions.
WHY IS THE WORLD DIVIDED TERRITORIALLY? 237
types of space and place are implied by political practice, which of course extends to scales
below that of nation-states and the world as a whole. Contemporary political changes,
particularly in relation to globalisation, are producing profound changes in the
constitution of the state, but the developments in terms of political geography, namely
territory, are much less certain. Territorial issues, especially when thought through the
notion of territoriality, can say much about the spatial organisation of regions, towns,
rural development and other forms of the relation between people and place.
BROADER ISSUES
TECHNIQUES AND THE FUTURE OF THE TERRITORIAL
STATE
States have not always existed, and territorial division is neither fixed nor the only way
in which humans have encountered and organised space. One thing that is significantly
different in the period when territory, at least in its modern sense, emerged was the
availability of a number of techniques. The mapping and control of territory is, in large
part, dependent on them. The emergence of certain techniques, dependent in part on
changes in scientific and philosophical ways of viewing the world, shows that this is a
historical development.
They include advances in geometry, such as the coordinate or analytic geometry
pioneered by René Descartes (a form of geometry that uses algebra, coordinates and
equations); developments in cartography and land surveying; and improvements in the
accurate measurement of time through more advanced clocks. Knowing the exact time
both in your current location and at another known point was essential to getting
an accurate measurement of longitude. This is because the sun circles the earth in
24 hours and there are 360 degrees of longitude. Therefore 1 hour time difference from
your starting point is 15º; 4 minutes is 1º. In order to accurately measure distances,
and especially to know where ships were at sea, this was of enormous importance.
Latitude is easier to measure, as it can be obtained from the angle of the sun or known
stars to the horizon, though this too requires a certain calculative ability and the right
instruments. Only with these kinds of facilities could modern boundaries be established
as more than a line staked out on the ground. For mountainous regions, for deserts or
tundra, or particularly for the abstract division of unknown places in the colonised world,
such techniques were crucial.
Just as Mann stresses the development of certain military techniques, so too does
the geographer Edward Soja suggest the importance of cartographic ones alongside
purely economic factors:
Conventional Western perspectives on spatial organisation are powerfully shaped
by the concept of property, in which pieces of territory are viewed as ‘commodities’
capable of being bought, sold, or exchanged at the market place. Space is viewed
as being subdivided into components whose bound aries are ‘objectively’ determined
through the mathematical and astro nomic ally based techniques of surveying and
cartography.
(Soja 1971: 9)
238 STUART ELDEN
BOX 11.5 GEOMETRIC TERRITORIAL DIVISION
Examples of these kinds of geometric territorial division include
• The western boundary between the USA and Canada, which runs along the 49th parallel of latitude.
Compare this to the eastern boundary between the states, established much earlier between colonial
possessions of the British.
• The surveying of the Mason–Dixon line in the 1760s, which was to settle a boundary dispute between
Maryland and Pennsylvania when they were both British colonies. The line runs at approximately 39°
43′ 20′′.
• The rectangular land survey of the lands of the United States west of the Mississippi in the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leading to the geometric shape of many of the western states.
There is a town called Four Corners which is the only place in the USA where four states (Utah, New
Mexico, Arizona and Colorado) meet at a single point.
• The straight line boundaries of the states within Australia.
• The division of Africa between colonial powers at the 1884–85 Berlin Congress.
• Some of the borders in the Middle East and in the Arabian peninsula, many of which were set after
the break up of the Ottoman Empire following the First World War.
One of the key techniques is in the practice of actually making boundaries, and the
process of taking this from the map to the land. In political geography there is usually
a three-stage process of boundary making outlined
• Allocation, which sets the general shape, making use of straight lines, coordinates
of latitude/longitude, and depiction on a map.
• Delimitation, which involves the selection of specific boundary sites on the ground.
• Demarcation, where the boundary is marked by pillars, cleared vistas, fences, etc.
(Jones 1945).
It is clear that the first stage, and even elements of the second, can be done without
any detailed knowledge of the land itself, whereas the third necessarily requires presence
on the ground. Many colonial boundaries were only allocated or loosely delimited,
leading to many subsequent problems. Today, maintenance and management of
previously demarcated boundaries and the effective demarcation of those that were
merely allocated or delimited is an ongoing concern. Poorly maintained borders often
lead to conflict, such as the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea in 1998–2000.
Recognising this historical aspect of territorial division is important, because it allows
us to see that the modern way of ordering the world is not the only possible system. It
allows us to escape what the geographer John Agnew has called the territorial trap.
Agnew suggests that this is a threefold assumption: that modern state sovereignty is a
given that requires clearly bounded territories; that there is a necessary opposition
between foreign and domestic affairs; and that the territorial state is the geographical
This attitude towards
colonial borders was
due to a range of
reasons, including a lack
of interest; technical
difficulties were often
overcome when
resources were at stake.
‘container’ of modern society (1994). Similarly, for Gottmann, it is all too easy to
uncritically assume the modern, or legal sense of territory as a ‘portion of geographical
space under the jurisdiction of certain people’ (1973: 5).
The kinds of techniques that allowed states to map and control their own territory
and to abstractly divide up other places are not isolated. Rather they are part of a much
wider range of developments in the natural and human sciences around that time. This
was a historical period that included the Renaissance, literally a rebirth of interest in the
literature, science and politics of classical Greece and Rome. Many modern inventions
emerged at this time, and scientists, writers and philosophers discussed a whole range
of ideas. The beginning of modern political theory in writers such as Niccolò Machiavelli,
Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, modern philosophy (René Descartes, John Locke,
Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz), and modern science (Galileo, Isaac Newton)
are all closely related. There is a concentration on reason – both in terms of abstract
science and thought, but also in terms of political practice. The emergence of a number
of mathematical and calculative techniques, such as land surveying, triangulation and
geometry, are closely linked to state practices, with many of the sponsors of cartographers
being states or other rulers. In addition, the development of political arithmetic, which
later became known as statistics – literally the knowledge of states – began at this time
(Elden 2007).
Recent innovations in technology have led to developments in how boundaries
are discussed at peace conferences and put into practice on the ground. Some of the
more technologically inspired methods were used at the Dayton peace conference to
set the boundaries of Bosnia. These included digitised maps that could be redrawn
and calculated far more quickly than by hand, allowing the cartographers to work at
the same speed as the negotiations; statistical analyses that would quickly compute what
percentage of territory different political groups would get depending on the placing
WHY IS THE WORLD DIVIDED TERRITORIALLY? 239
49th parallel
Mason-
Dixon line
Four corners
Mississippi River
FIGURE 11.9
Map of mainland USA
Chapters 7 and 13
note Thomas Hobbes’s
influence, too.
Chapter 6 explains how
this concentration on
reason is related to the
Enlightenment.
Statistics are extremely
important to how we
understand and govern
the world: see especially
Chapter 19. See also the
discussion of govern –
mentality in Chapter 4.
Technologies of
communication are
discussed in Chapters 8
and 9.
240 STUART ELDEN
of lines; and visualisations. These last were perhaps the most stunning innovation,
allowing the negotiations to see the terrain they were dividing as if they were flying
over it (Johnson 1999). For political leaders unable to read maps, such as Slobodan
Milosevic, these were a powerful technique. Since Dayton, techniques have further
evolved, and GIS (Geographical Information Systems) software is extensively used in
boundary making, as it has been for the Ethiopia–Eritrea border, maritime boundaries,
and as a tool of the discussions in the Israel/Palestine ‘peace process’.
The emergence of a particular model of the state and its control of territory
emerged, this chapter has argued, at a particular historical juncture and in a specific
geographical context. This was then spread to most other parts of the world through
colonisation. Recognising that the territorial state is a historical development shows both
that it has not always existed, and that there is no essential reason why it always should.
This leads to the question of whether this particular model of the state will endure, and
whether territory is as important in the twenty-first century as it has been for the past
few centuries.
Some writers suggest that globalisation is productive of new ways of understanding
space, suggesting that new techniques have emerged. Manuel Castells, for example, has
suggested that we have moved from a ‘space of places’ to a ‘space of flows’ (Castells
1989; 1996: 405–59). His suggestion is that location is no longer as important as it
once was, but connection, through networks, has superseded it.
Our societies are constructed around flows: flows of capital, flows of information,
flows of technology, flows of organizational interactions, flows of images, sounds
and symbols. Flows are not just one element of social organization: they are the
expression of the processes dominating our economic, political, and symbolic life.
. . . Thus, I propose the idea that there is a new spatial form characteristic of social
practices that dominate and shape the network society: the space of flows. The space
of flows is the material organization of time-sharing social practices that work
through flows. By flows I understand purposeful, repetitive, programmable
sequences of exchange and interaction between physically disjointed positions held
by social actors.
(Castells 1996: 412)
There is undoubtedly much to be said in favour of this analysis. New forms of tech –
nology, particularly in terms of communication and the passage of information, have
transformed social relations. In this interlinked and interdependent world we are now
often supposed to be closer – in a sense of our concern and interaction – to people
many miles away than to our nearest neighbours. Proximity is not the same as distance.
And yet, attachment to particular places, and willingness to fight, die and kill for land
and the placing of boundaries continues.
Discussion of supraterritorialisation or deterritorialisation ultimately requires a
more detailed analysis of territory itself, in order that we can see what we are supposedly
moving beyond. Given these changes, surely the stress should be on understanding the
remaking of spatial relations (reterritorialisation) in this new configuration of power,
rather than simply assuming their superseding (see Elden 2005; Sassen 2006). In
addition, while the techniques deployed today in terms of control of territory and its
WHY IS THE WORLD DIVIDED TERRITORIALLY? 241
division are different in degree from those of several centuries before, they still rest on
essentially the same calculative understanding of space. The network society is still a
connection of mathematically determined locations. In these terms globalisation is an
extension of the idea of territory as calculative space to the world, the globe, as a whole.
Just as territory is not simply land or terrain, the globe is more than merely the earth.
It is a geometric and political category, increasingly owned, distributed, mapped,
calculated, bordered, and ordered or controlled.
CONCLUSION
This chapter has attempted to show how the modern territorial division of the world
is both contingent in its specifics and in its general ordering. The relation between
territorial issues and contemporary politics works in a number of ways, from issues
concerning national identity, war, globalisation and rights. The history of the concept
of territory helps us to understand how some of these issues came to be decided in the
way that they are. Yet while there are numerous territorial disputes current in the world,
and widespread debate about the relation between territory and sovereignty in the era
of ‘globalisation’, there seem to be no generally agreed principles for changing the way
in which the world is divided territorially.
FURTHER READING
There is extensive literature on topics relating to territory, especially the state, and on specific
territorial issues, but relatively little on the idea of territory itself. Storey (2001, 2011) and Delaney
(2005) provide accessible introductions to the topic, along with a range of examples, as does
Malcolm Anderson (1996) although this is now a little out-of-date. Jones (2007) is good on the
British case, and Jönsson et al. (2000) provide some useful historical detail in the European context,
which Badie (2000) and some of the chapters in Cowen and Gilbert (2008) usefully expand.
Ruggie (1993) and Taylor (1994 and 1995) provide a survey of work in the field, continued and
supplemented by Paasi (2003) and the two chapters on ‘Territory’ in Agnew and Duncan (2011).
Jones (1945) is still unparalled as a technical guide; and Anderson (2003) is useful for information.
Huth and Allee (2002) is rather technical, but the appendices are very useful. Kolers (2009) takes
a liberal theory of justice and applies it to territorial issues, especially in Israel/Palestine, but the
conceptual understanding of territory is limited. Black (1997) and Pickles (2004) are very readable
and provide lots of good examples of the relation between politics and cartography. Soja (1971)
and Gottmann’s accounts (1973) are still useful, and, for the most comprehensive analysis of
territory from the perspective of territoriality, see Sack (1986).
WEBSITES
Borderbase, http://www.nicolette.dk/borderbase/index.php
Site with lots of information. Choose a country at top left to see a map and often a photo
of its borders.
Borders and Territory, http://www.paulhensel.org/territory.html
Site maintained by Paul R. Hensel, University of North Texas, with a large range of useful
information, particularly concerning territorial claims.
Centre for International Borders Research, http://www.qub.ac.uk/cibr/
Research centre at Queen’s University, Belfast.
http://www.nicolette.dk/borderbase/index.php
http://www.paulhensel.org/territory.html
http://www.qub.ac.uk/cibr/
CIA World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
Information on boundaries and territorial disputes.
Exploring Geopolitics, http://www.exploringgeopolitics.org/
Interviews with academics on a range of topics, including territory and boundaries.
Google Earth, http://earth.google.com/
Not always accurate, but lots of fun.
International Boundaries Research Unit (IBRU), http://www.dur.ac.uk/ibru/
Research Centre based at Durham University. Website contains lots of information on
boundaries, including a news archive, links and newsletters. Many of IBRU’s publications
are available for free download.
International Crisis Group, http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm
NGO which provides regular reports and updates on geopolitical issues, including those with
a boundary or territorial element.
Nijmegen Centre for Border Research, http://www.ru.nl/ncbr/
Go to the ‘Border Portal’ for a list of relevant literature and links.
Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/index.html
An excellent collection of contemporary and historical maps housed at the University of Texas
at Austin.
REFERENCES
Agnew, John (1994) ‘The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International
Relations Theory’, Review of International Political Economy 1, 1: 53–80. Reprinted in John
Agnew and Stuart Corbridge (1995) Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and International
Political Economy, London: Routledge.
Agnew, John and James Agnew Duncan (eds) (2011) The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Human
Geography, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Anderson, Ewan (2003) International Boundaries: Geopolitical Atlas, Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn.
Anderson, James (1996) ‘The Shifting Stage of Politics: New Medieval and Postmodern
Territorialities?’ Society and Space 14, 2: 133–53.
Anderson, Malcolm (1996) Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World, Oxford:
Polity.
Anderson, Perry (1974a) Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, London: NLB.
––––(1974b) Lineages of the Absolutist State, London: NLB.
Badie, Bertrand (2000) The Imported State: The Westernization of the Political Order, translated
by Claudia Royal, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bialasiewicz, Luiza, Stuart Elden and Joe Painter (2005) ‘The Constitution of EU Territory’,
Comparative European Politics 3, 3: 333–63.
Black, Jeremy (1997) Maps and Politics, London: Reaktion.
Castells, Manuel (1989) The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring
and the Urban-Regional Process, Oxford: Blackwell.
––––(1996) The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture,
Oxford: Blackwell.
Cowen, Deborah and Emily Gilbert (eds) (2008) War, Citizenship, Territory, New York: Routledge.
Delaney, David (2005) Territory: A Short Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell.
Elden, Stuart (2005) ‘Missing the Point: Globalisation, Deterritorialisation and the Space of the
World’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, 1: 8–19.
––––(2007) ‘Governmentality, Calculation, Territory’, Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 25, 3: 562–80.
242 STUART ELDEN
––––(2009) Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
––––(2010) ‘Land, Terrain, Territory’, Progress in Human Geography 34, 6: 799–817.
––––(2013) The Birth of Territory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, Michel (1976) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan,
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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244 STUART ELDEN
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http://www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
CHAPTER 12
How do people come to identify
with nations?
Elena Barabantseva
■ The question
NATIONAL AFFILIATIONS
■ Illustrative example
THE MARGINS OF THE CHINESE NATION
■ General responses
NATIONALISM STUDIES
■ Broader issues
TRANSNATIONALISM AND HYBRIDITY
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
NATIONAL AFFILIATIONS
When we are asked where we are from, we rarely have second thoughts about our
national affiliations. We readily come to identify ourselves as English, Irish, Algerian,
Kurdish, German or perhaps highlight our mixed background as Turkish-German,
American-Chinese, and so forth. What is it that prompts us to associate with a particular
national community? What factors drive and influence this identification process?
The question of how we come to identify with a nation is central to politics. Ethnic
and national differences and particularly their mobilization for political ends have been
at the core of many violent conflicts and political campaigns in distant and
recent history. We recurrently see the destructive power of ethnic tensions
in the world, be it on the streets of Sarajevo during the Bosnian war’s
deliberate bombings of the central market in 1994 or of Bradford during
the ethnic riots between Asian and white residents in July 2001. The
markers of distinction, such as language, religion, or descent lie at the crux
of identity politics and ethnic conflicts, yet it is not obvious why in certain
Chapter 5 discusses
identity politics, and
mentions violent conflict
in the former Yugoslavia;
Chapter 13 discusses
instances when markers
of national identity do
not work.
Chapter 11 discusses
territorial boundaries
and why they arose.
Chapter 13 focuses also
on such marginal groups
within the nation, and
also examines stories
of exile.
246 ELENA BARABANTSEVA
situations these markers create boundaries of separation and spark conflicts and in other
cases they do not.
The nation is, to say the least, a concept fraught with tensions. For some it is the
product of natural and objective allegiances, and for others it is a modern construct
attributed to the growth of modern technology and ideologies. Although it is common
in political discourse to refer to a nation-state as a basic unit of analysis, it is useful for
the purposes of analysis to keep the nation distinct from the state, as the majority of
states present themselves as multiethnic or multinational. The discursive practices
of nationalism serve to maintain, sustain, and normalize the socio-cultural boundaries
of the society. Politicians often resort to national sentiments to achieve political ends,
such as independence, greater autonomy, or anti-immigration legislation. Even if most
of us have not witnessed violent forms of nationalism, we certainly have come across
or even taken part in its everyday expressions. Hoisting a national flag, celebration of
national holidays, supporting a national team during international sport events, singing
the national anthem, and voting in televised competitions like the annual Eurovision
Song Contest are all examples of moments when people express their national loyalties.
I suggest in this chapter that how we come to identify with nations is most
prominently expressed in marginal spaces, boundaries or limits of what is assumed to
be a national community. At their margins concepts, like a nation, become frayed,
revealing the complexity of assumptions that at the centre appear a seamless whole.
Examining the relational position of marginal groups in nationalist discourses offers a
perspective highlighting the contested and complex nature of the nation. The analysis
of how marginal groups figure in the dominant national narratives sheds light on how
the nation takes shape against the backdrop of human diversity found within and outside
of its assumed boundaries. The focus on the margins also illuminates where and how
the lines of inclusion and exclusion in the national project are drawn.
The marginal spaces of the nation could take different expressions depending on
which of the analytical categories are considered. In this chapter I consider the role of
ethnic factors and territoriality in constructing a nation. Marginality here denotes the
position of groups on territorial and cultural edges of what is assumed to be the national
core. Although the margins of any nation would be worth analysing, the chapter takes
a closer look at the configurations of the Chinese nation.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
THE MARGINS OF THE CHINESE NATION
To have a better idea of how Chinese rulers have viewed and treated people at its ethnic
and territorial margins, we should briefly dwell on the history of Chinese rulers’
interactions with both culturally different people and so-called overseas Chinese –
Chinese people living outside their place of birth or origin in China.
From empire to nation
Since the first unified Chinese state (221 BCE) Chinese emperors referred to their
domains as the central state (zhongguo) and distinguished between people who inhabited
MONGO
LIA
G o b i
D e s
e r t
MAN
CHU
RIA
Fuzh
ou
Taiw
an
Luzo
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Guan
gzhou
Chong
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Cheng
du
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n
Nanj
ing
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ou
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n
Tian
jin
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shi
(Bei
jing)
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zhou
(Hain
an)
Sout
h
Chin
a
Sea
Kaife
ng
Xi-an
Hami
KOREA
A
N
N
A
M
EAST TURKESTAN
(military administration
1759)
TIBET
ZUNGHARIA
(military administration
1757)
S i b e
r i
a
130º 140º120º110º100º90º80º70º60º
60º
50º
40º
30º
20º
H
i
m
a l a y a s
MING AND MANCHU QING IMPERIAL BORDERS
Area under Ming dynasty Rebuilding of the Great Wall in:
Manchu vassal state
Additional area under Manchu
dynasty in 1760
14th century
15th–16th centuries
16th century
FIGURE 12.1
Imperial China: Ming and Manchu dynasties. http://warandgame.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/chin2
HOW DO PEOPLE IDENTIFY WITH NATIONS? 247
the central state’s territories and those who lived outside them. The core of Chinese
civilization lay within the central state, while the populations outside it were barbarians.
The Empire significantly enlarged when the nomadic Manchus overthrew the Ming
dynasty in 1644 and expanded the expanses of the Empire through the conquest of
Xinjiang, southwest China, Tibet, Mongolia, and Taiwan. The Manchu court had to
tackle the dual problem of establishing their legitimate authority in the Empire and
guaranteeing the unity of the growing multiethnic political entity. They popularized
the idea that ‘the Center and the Outer are one family’ to emphasize the universalism
and multiethnic character of their empire (Zhao 2006: 6–7; Leibold 2007: 10–11). The
Qing Empire. The stripes of red, yellow, blue, white and black on the five-colour national
flag symbolized the ‘harmonious cohabitation of five ethnic tribes’ (wuzu gonghe) in
one single nation.
In a parallel development, Sun Yatsen and his followers resorted to the discourse
of common descent and culture to encourage overseas Chinese to contribute to the
cause of the Chinese Republic. Although banned for a long time during the dynastic
rule, overseas migration was popular among Chinese in the coastal areas, and by the
mid-nineteenth century hundreds of thousands of overseas Chinese became wealthy
merchants in Southeast Asia. Late-Qing officials and the leaders of Republican China
realized the potential significance of overseas Chinese for the Chinese nation-building
project, and they made extensive efforts to raise contributions and investments from
overseas Chinese for development projects in China. The term huaqiao (Chinese
sojourner) became a popular term to refer to overseas Chinese. This term was intended
to appeal to the national sentiments of overseas Chinese in the hope that they would
invest their wealth and energy into modernizing the Chinese Republic. It emphasized
overseas Chinese’s symbolic ‘biological’ attachment to a ‘native home’ and played to
the common ancestral and cultural roots of all Chinese:
Whoever is a descendant of the Yellow Emperor, no matter whether resident
in the Chinese mainland or in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan or another part of
the world, proudly recognizes that the dragon is the symbol of China, that China
is the land of the dragon and the Chinese people are the descendants of the
dragon.
(Zhang Ke quoted in Sautman 1997: 82)
HOW DO PEOPLE IDENTIFY WITH NATIONS? 249
BOX 12.2 CHINESE CIVIL WAR AND COMMUNIST REVOLUTION
The Chinese Civil War was a series of wars resulting from the
struggle for power between the KMT and the CCP, who both
fought for the control of China. The conflict sparked off in
1927 and lasted until 1949. The crucial turning point in the
civil war was the CCP Red Army’s Long March (1934–35)
during which Mao Zedong confirmed his role as leader of the
Chinese communists, and gained popularity and support in
western and northern China. Despite major ideological and
strategic disagreements, the KMT and the CCP tried to jointly
fight against the Japanese aggression during the 1937–1945
Sino–Japanese war. However, the cooperation between the
two parties was not successful. The civil war went on until the
communist victory on the Chinese mainland in 1949, leading
to the division of China into the People’s Republic of China
(PRC) governed by the CCP, and the Republic of China
established by the KMT in Taiwan.
FIGURE 12.3
Chinese Civil War: South Park philosophy.
http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs42/i/2010/290/d/b/
south_park_chinese_civil_war_by_southpark
philosopher-d1yynjd
http://fco4.deviantart.net/fs42/i/2010/290/d/b/
The jus sanguinis
principle is the principle
that a child’s citizenship
or nationality is the same
as that of its parents, as
opposed to the jus soli
principle, where a child’s
nationality is that of the
territory on which they
are born.
250 ELENA BARABANTSEVA
An adoption of the jus sanguinis principle confirmed in the Nationality Law of 1909
granted citizenship to all Chinese overseas, and allowed a ‘dual citizenship’ for Chinese
nationals living in other countries. This constructed a new sense of Chinese national
identity that narrowly focused on common race descending from a mythological
ancestor, the Yellow Emperor. Thus, for China’s republican leaders Chinese culture,
nation, and race became coterminous. These early-twentieth century nationalist dis –
courses highlight the power and centrality, as well as the ambiguity, of the ideas of
common blood and descent in determining the limits of the Chinese nation.
Chinese communist nationalism
When the Chinese communists came into power in 1949, they extensively used
nationalist rhetoric and were preoccupied with socialist nation-building, but their
nationalist discourse was of a different kind. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP)
analysis of China’s national situation and its formulation of the national question were
influenced by the interpretation of the ‘class struggle’ and ‘peasant revolution’.
Communists believed that national distinctions and borders will come to an end as a
result of successful class struggle: ‘First the dying out of classes, then the state, finally
the nation – that is true of the whole world’ (Mao Zedong quoted in Fei Xiaotong
1981: 85). Instead of the ‘nation’, the CCP’s discourse centered on the concept of ‘the
People’ (renmin) which characterized the CCP’s categorization of who belonged and
who was excluded from the Chinese revolutionary stock:
We must first be clear on what is meant by ‘the people’ and what is meant by the
‘enemy’. The concept of the ‘people’ varies in content in different countries and
in different periods of history in a given country . . . At the present stage, the period
of building socialism, the classes, strata and social groups which favour, support
and work for the cause of socialist construction all come within the category of the
people, while the social forces and groups which resist the socialist revolution and
are hostile to or sabotage socialist construction are all enemies of the people.
(Mao Zedong 1957)
The formulation of new socialist style nation-building produced a new notion of
‘the people’ which was made ideologically contingent on the category of class and
encompassed only the revolutionary masses while dismissing the rest of the population
as enemies or non-people. The notion of ‘the people’ was at the heart of the United
Front of revolutionary struggle, another key term in communist China. The United
Front was built around the focal role of the CCP, and Mao Zedong frequently men –
tioned overseas Chinese and ethnic minorities among other United Front participants
as the central forces in the revolutionary struggle. For example, in Mao’s declaration at
the First Plenary Session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference,
overseas Chinese and ethnic minorities were among the representatives of the ‘will of
the people’ (Mao Zedong 1949). In its designation of who belonged to the overseas
Chinese, the CCP used the jus sanguinis principle assuming a common bond among
all Chinese in China and abroad. The only criterion which was supposed to make this
group homogeneous was to be patriotic towards the New (communist) China.
BOX 12.3 MAO ZEDONG AND COMMUNISM IN CHINA
The establishment of Communist China in 1949 was predicated on the idea of
building a class-free society. After the communist victory, the new government
initiated a series of socio-economic reforms and campaigns aimed at achieving
this goal and radically transforming Chinese society in accordance with the
teachings of Mao Zedong. One of such campaigns, the Great Leap Forward
(1958–1961), aimed at the fast transformation of Chinese agrarian society into an
industrial communist country. The government’s blind diversion of resources into
the production of steel and iron resulted in China’s worst famine of the twentieth
century. Another infamous socio-political movement, the Cultural Revolution,
lasted for a decade from 1966 to 1976. One of its main goals was to combat the
‘four olds’ of China: old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas. As a result
of the Cultural Revolution, an uncountable number of cultural relics was
destroyed and numerous people tortured and killed by Red Guards, the young
revolutionary followers of Mao. After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the new
leader of the CCP, Deng Xiaoping, initiated a series of pro-market economic
reforms and the opening of the country to outside investments. Although there
were continuous calls for similar reforms in the political sphere, the CCP
reinstated its unshakeable one-party rule over the country during the mass
crackdown of the student-led pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square
in 1989.
FIGURE 12.4
Mao Zedong announcing the foundation of the PRC in 1949.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/images/cpc2011/attachement/
jpg/site1/20110701/002170196e1c0f775a2112 ; http://www.china
daily.com.cn/china/cpc2011/2011–07/01/content_12814296.htm
HOW DO PEOPLE IDENTIFY WITH NATIONS? 251
Joseph Stalin was leader
of the USSR until his
death in 1953. His role in
the Second World War is
discussed in Chapter 22.
Hui (Chinese Muslim)
Han (Chinese)
Ürümqi
Yinchuan
Lanzhou
Lhasa
Uninhabited
Chinese
line of
control
Indian claim
Uninhabited
Xi’an
Chengdu
Chongqing
Kunming
Nanning
Guangzhou
T’ai-pei
Shanghai
Shenyang
Harbin
Hohhot
Beijing
Wuhan
Tai
Tibeto-Burman
Miao-Yao
Mongolian
Tungusic
0 500 Kilometers
0 500 Miles
SINO-TIBETAN
China: Ethnolingistic Groups
Tajik
SINO-TIBETAN
Mon-Khmer
AUSTROASIATIC
Indonesian
MALAY-POLYNESIAN
Turkic
ALTAIC
KOREAN
FIGURE 12.5
Ethnolinguistic map of China 1983. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/Ethnolinguistic_map_of_China_
1983 /640px-Ethnolinguistic_map_of_China_1983
252 ELENA BARABANTSEVA
According to the Chinese leaders, ‘all patriots belong to one big family’ (Zhou Enlai
quoted in Lien Kuan 1978: 15).
The first national census after the establishment of the PRC in 1953 included
information on ethnic minorities and listed some 11.7 million overseas Chinese as part
of the Chinese population (Cressey 1955: 388). While ties of blood were used as a
defining criterion for overseas Chinese, the implementation of the 1954 national
minority identification project (minzu shibie) was aimed at identifying ethnic groups in
China and followed Chinese interpretations of the nation defined by Joseph Stalin in
the Soviet Union. Language, territory, economy, and psychological mindset became
How is this different
from or similar to the
idea of the ‘melting pot’
in the United States?
HOW DO PEOPLE IDENTIFY WITH NATIONS? 253
the markers of distinct ethnicity within the PRC. Throughout the identification project,
China’s ethnic minorities were identified and categorized into fixed ethnic groups with
special needs and characteristics. Special ministry-level institutions – the Overseas
Chinese Affairs Department and the Ethnic Affairs Commission – were established with
the intention of formulating and implementing government policies towards overseas
Chinese and identified ethnic groups. While the categorization into ethnic groups (56
by 1979) brought to light the diversity of Chinese society, policies towards overseas
Chinese, on the other hand, relied on the assumption of the centrality of blood ties in
how the Chinese state saw its people identify with it. By the mid-1950s, the Chinese
communist leadership realized that they were failing to solicit contributions from the
overseas Chinese, and that they faced the danger of upsetting their amicable relations
with Southeast Asian states. These states were suspicious of the connections the overseas
Chinese in their countries had to communist China. At this point, the PRC took the
step of withdrawing the right to dual nationality, which has been prohibited in China
up to the present day.
Post-Mao nation-building
Since the start of the economic reforms and opening-up of China to the rest of the
world in 1978, economic development has overwhelmingly been presented in Chinese
official discourse as a solution to China’s national problems, an all-encompassing answer
to the problems of regional and social inequality, ethnic cohesion, cultural development
and potential ethnic strife. Overseas Chinese and ethnic minorities remain central in
this nation-building discourse. Ethnic minor ities have been presented as in need of
economic development, while China’s majority Han population, and particularly
successful overseas Han Chinese, have been increasingly seen as an extension of the
Chinese nation united under the goal of ‘rejuvenating the nation’. After the period of
isolation from the rest of the world during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution
(1966–76), China has re-established and reinforced its links with overseas Chinese
(Zhuang 2001; Thunø 2001; Xiang 2003). In recent years scholars have observed a
growing ‘re-Sinicization’ of overseas Chinese communities worldwide, which is
attributed to the active role of the Chinese state in promoting its presence among
overseas Chinese (Ong 2006; Liu 2010). The Chinese government’s network of institu –
tions for overseas Chinese is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world,
working with what one Chinese scholar described as ‘the previous three generations
and the coming three generations’ (Cheng 2007: 47).
In contrast to the way overseas Chinese are viewed and treated as an extension of
the Chinese territorial nation, the role of ethnic minorities during the reform period has
been to enable China to be presented as a multiethnic, diverse and ‘colourful’ society.
The post-Mao era in China was marked by a ‘cultural fever’ (wenhua re): a valorizing of
ethnic minority cultures, which suddenly flourished after years of suppression during the
Cultural Revolution. Ethnic minorities have become an impera tive feature in national
holiday celebrations, such as the annual spring festival TV gala, and other nationally
important events such as the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics (Leibold 2008).
The ethnically diverse and harmonious image of the Chinese state is a preferred portrait
projected to the outside world through global celebrations. However, certain ethnic
FIGURE 12.6
Children representing all of China’s ethnic groups, dressed in regional costume, march with the national flag at the Beijing Olympics.
Almost immediately after the Olympics opening ceremony it emerged that most of the children who took part in the event were of the
Han nationality. Photo: AFP. http://olympics.scmp.com/Article.aspx?id=2672§ion=latestnews
254 ELENA BARABANTSEVA
groups in China are widely perceived as troublemakers, violent, and untrustworthy. This
in particular concerns Uyghurs and Tibetans, but also affects other groups like Huis and
Mongols. Uyghurs and Tibetans have been targets of the ‘three evils’ campaign against
‘separatism, terrorism and religious extremism’ since the mid-1990s, but in particular
after 9/11 and recent ethnic clashes in Tibet in 2008, Xinjiang in 2009, and Mongolia
in 2011. These developments have affected most representatives of these groups,
irrespective of their political views. For example, the whole of Xinjiang was cut off from
the internet after the clashes in Xinjiang, and Uyghurs travelling outside of the region
could not make use of internet cafes. They were seen as a potential threat and a source
of danger simply because of their ethnic group affiliation and religion.
Contemporary official formulations of the Chinese nation echo the interpretations
put forward by the nationalist government in the early twentieth century and the Maoist
government in the mid-twentieth century. The Chinese nation is framed around the
image of an active Han majority and passive ethnic minorities, who have to be led to
achieve better living standards. Ethnic minorities are on the receiving end of develop –
ment practices, and the possibility of a perspective of equality or an appreciation of
diversity as a constituent quality of the Chinese national project is inhibited. The current
national discourses are rooted in the history of Chinese imperial rulers’ encounter with
ethnic difference, long prior to China’s encounter with Western modernity in the
nineteenth century.
The statuses of ethnic minorities and overseas Chinese in the Chinese nation
reflect the long process of negotiating what constitutes China and who the Chinese
What does it mean to
think that there is such a
thing as ‘human nature’?
See the box on this in
Chapter 7. Chapter 5
questions the way there
was once thought to be a
‘male’ nature and a
‘female’ nature. Is
thinking that there is a
‘human’ nature very
different?
HOW DO PEOPLE IDENTIFY WITH NATIONS? 255
people are. The binary opposition of the Han versus China’s ethnic minorities lies at
the core of how the Chinese nation has been formulated by the state. The juxtapositions
between the Han and ethnic minorities, advanced and backward, civilized and barbarian,
modern and traditional, have characterized the dynamics of Chinese national identity.
The Chinese nation could perhaps be seen as taking shape somewhere in-between, at
the meeting points, often coincidental ones, of these dialogical processes. The
dichotomous relationship between the Han Chinese and China’s ethnic minorities does
not mean that processes bringing these groups together are mutually exclusive and run
in opposition to each other. The dialogical aspect of this relationship stresses that the
role of these groups is complementary and equally influential in how Chinese identity
takes shape.
GENERAL RESPONSES
NATIONALISM STUDIES
China’s engagement with populations within and outside its immediate territorial
boundaries suggests that the study of nationalism and how people come to identify with
particular nations cannot be restricted to examining the processes within the state. Yet,
the vast majority of nationalism studies takes the state as a reference point for the study
of nationalism. Explaining the link between state, as a territorial political unit, and nation,
as an ethno-cultural collectivity of people, has been the main focus of analysis in
nationalism studies. The two dominant approaches to the study of nationalism and
nations in this respect are primordialist and modernist accounts of nations.
Primordialism
The primordialist perspective emphasizes the importance of objective factors in the
formation of ethnic groups, such as language, common ancestry, religion, and so forth.
The main representatives of this view are Geertz (1963), Horowitz (1985), Van den
Berghe (1987), Smith (1996), Hastings (1997) and Hutchinson (2000). Differing in
their research methodologies and foci, these scholars share three elements in their
interpretations of the nation. First, they agree that the organization of an ethnic group
is driven by the idea of common descent and common cultural features of the com –
munity. That is, an ethnic group comes into being where a group of people share blood
allegiances, kinship and cultural attributes. Second, these factors, on which ethnic ties
are premised, are rooted in the nature of human beings. In other words, ethnic identity
is seen as a fundamental sentiment because of its psychological significance for a human
being. Third, primordial ties become more significant through recurrent reference to
them in symbolic and cultural attributes of the community: myths, traditions, and
heritage. Although the primordial perspective is well equipped to explain the persistence
and power of ethnic categories in the contemporary world, it does not take into account
the fluid and variable character of ethnicity. It emphasizes the natural origins of national
belonging rather than seeing it as being a result of social interaction.
According to the primordialist reading of a nation, a nation-state is a product of a
historical process whereby ethnicities turn into political units, and where the ethnic
256 ELENA BARABANTSEVA
These so-called
‘solidarity networks’ are
what Shapiro calls
‘centripetal forces’ in
Chapter 13. The focus
in Chapter 13 is on the
‘centrifugal’ forces which
tend to pull a nation
apart.
allegiances and cultural origins of nations are the central and most durable axes of
alignment within a nation-state. In his study of the origins of nations, Anthony
Smith (1983, 1996) refers to the ethnie (pre-modern ethnic community) as a human
organ ization which characterizes much of the world even today. Although rejecting
the idea of the continuous character of ethnicity, Smith contends that it remains a socio-
cultural ‘model’ for human organization and communication, which grants ‘an under –
lying sense of historical and cultural community’ (Smith 1996: 111). Smith argues that
objective cultural material is a basis for the construction of ethnicity, which is then re –
invented in the process of nation-making in order to foster the creation and main-
tenance of solidarity networks underpinning the nation-state. As a result, for Smith
nations are influenced and partly constructed by objective elements, which stem from
the historical roots, myths, symbols, memories, and values which originate in pre-modern
ethnies.
It is problematic for primordialism to take into account historical-political factors
influencing the evolving character of nation-building processes. By treating proto-nations
or ethnies as objective communities, the primordial perspective ignores the power
relations shaping the emergence, maintenance, and persistence of ethnicities and nations.
Seeing the emergence of nation-states as a natural process, primordialism underplays
the role of power in shaping the nation-building process. Furthermore, the assumption
of ethnicities being predetermined and fixed presupposes a certain degree of pessimism
FIGURE 12.7
‘We can’t stay here, and your
father has connections in
China.’ Artist: Feggo.
CartoonStock ref.: fgan136.
www.CartoonStock.com
http://www.CartoonStock.com
as to the future of multiethnic states: ‘clearly, multiethnic states face a problem of
legitimacy that is incommensurable with that of nation-state’ (Van den Berghe 1987:
75). For primordialists, ethnic conflict is an endemic and unavoidable characteristic of
multiethnic societies, which not only puts the nation-building process under question,
but also destabilizes and challenges the state’s cohesion.
Modernism
The modernist perspective links the emergence of nations to the modern period in
history, which is associated with the changes brought about by industrialization and
modernization (Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; Anderson 1991; Breuilly 1996).
These approaches locate the emergence of a nation within the framework of modern
state. The two most influential studies which stress this link are those by Ernest Gellner
(1964, 1983) and Benedict Anderson (1991). Gellner attributes the beginning of
nation-building to a variety of factors associated with the period of modernization and
establishes that the pre-existence of common culture is not vital for initiating the process
of nation-building. For Gellner ‘nation al ism is not awakening of nations to self-
consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist’ (Gellner 1964: 169). Gellner
underscores the distinctive feature of nationalism as a theory of political legitimacy in
guaranteeing a correspondence of political and cultural principles within the boundaries
of a political community (Gellner 1983: 1). The change in the mode of production and
transformation of communication prompts a need for a culturally homogeneous
community of centrally-educated people. Gellner binds nationalism to states, arguing
that only taken-for-granted politically and morally centralized units can provide a
necessary though not a sufficient environment for nationalism. Hence, nationalism in
Gellner’s account is limited to already existent states and is largely a state-driven
phenomenon aimed at exercising moral legitimacy over the members of a political
community which finds its expression in the promotion of nationalism, because nations
and states ‘were destined for each other; . . . either without the other is incomplete,
and constitutes a tragedy’ (1983: 6). A standardized culture shared by all members and
promoted by means of education plays a crucial role in this process. Controlled by the
state, the spread of culture is closely linked to power, which is concentrated in the hands
of the state elite.
For Anderson (1991), capitalism with its growing print technology, paralleled by
the growing usage of vernacular languages, precipitated the creation of a prototype of
a modern nation. He argues that only under the conditions of print-capitalism and
growing usage of vernacular languages can people be mobilized in their ethnic and
national self-identification into a nation, which he terms as a form of ‘imagined political
community’. Print-capitalism as a co-process provides grounds for people to think about
themselves, and to relate to others in profoundly new ways (Anderson 1991: 36).
Perception of a nation as a horizontal brotherhood conceals its internal disparities and
inequalities. The fear of oblivion and an ability to control ‘homogeneous, empty time’
transform the perception of community as a social landscape with past and future, and
reinforces popular imagination of an attachment to a territorially fixed, immutable, and
eternal community which becomes a defining element of nationalism. In contrast to
Gellner, who points to the essentially ‘fabricated’ character of a nation, Anderson
HOW DO PEOPLE IDENTIFY WITH NATIONS? 257
Chapter 11 discusses the
formation of the
territorial state in a
similar way: as part of a
process of moderniza –
tion beginning in
Western Europe and
spreading to the rest of
the world. How does this
account square with the
account of the rise of the
Chinese nation-state
given in this chapter?
How does this argument
about print technology
link with other argu –
ments about technology
– for example, the role of
technology in delineating
territorial boundaries in
Chapter 11 or the idea
that the technology of
Web 2.0 has created
different ways to connect
politically, as discussed
in Chapter 9? Is tech –
nology autonomous?
Primordialist Modernist
Origins of nations
Character of nations
The role of national territory
Archaic, deeply rooted in
human evolution
Objective and natural,
attributable to common
language, religion, descent,
or other similar factors
Essential
Modern, with the emergence
of capitalism and printed
technologies
Political, formulated and
manipulated by the political
and intellectual elite for
political ends
Essential
FIGURE 12.8
Table of accounts of
nationalism
The rise of notions of
bounded territory is
discussed in Chapter 11.
attributes its emergence to imagination based on certain pre-existing cultural grounds
which gained their significance in people’s minds with the changes brought about by
print-capitalism.
Modernist interpretations of the idea of a nation, including Gellner’s and
Anderson’s, often underscore the political character of nationalism. They emphasize the
status position of those who articulate nationalism, arguing that nationalism is one
of the manifestations of the exercise of state power (Breuilly 1996; Brown 2000;
Hobsbawm 1990). By reinforcing ‘populist consciousness’ among its subjects by
different means of communication and mass-education in a standardized language, poli –
tical elites take the lead in the creation and transformation of ethnic identities in a
culturally diverse society into a unified community under legitimate control or a ruling
leadership. The leading role of intellectuals in mobilizing a community around a unified
‘high culture’ for modelling and advancing a strong, bureaucratic, and centralized state
is also recognized in this literature (Gellner 1983; Anderson 1991; Greenfeld 1992).
Those who underline a political role for nationalism tend to promote the nation-state
as the most important model for political community, and a basic political unit in modern
societies. In fact, Hobsbawm (1990: 9–10), one of the prominent proponents of the
modernist interpretation of nationalism, argues that a nation ‘is a social entity only insofar
as it relates to a certain kind of modern territorial state, the “nation-state”’.
Both primordialist and modernist accounts of the origins of nations, maintain that
territorial boundedness of a political community is one of the essential preconditions
for the formation and successful functioning of the state as a nation-state. They stipulate
that common territory is a crucial marker of a people’s unity and group identity, and
it contributes to the perception of a group as something naturally bounded by shared
beliefs and myths and a common destiny (Anderson 1991: 2). These scholars underline
how common territory promotes a sense of group distinctiveness and separateness, and
draws a defined inner/outer borderline between the members of the political community
and outsiders that raises crucial questions concerning nationality and citizenship,
exclusion and inclusion and the goals of the state (Anderson 1991: 19; Hastings 1997:
30). Even when territory does not play a crucial role in defining a nation, they argue,
most nationalist ideas are played out around the idea of their own ‘physical space’ where
they can ‘act out their dreams and fulfil aspiration’ (Smith 1983: 19; Oomen 1994:
45). The authors adhering to this point of view assert that territory plays the role of an
258 ELENA BARABANTSEVA
For more on the
territorial trap see
Chapter 11.
HOW DO PEOPLE IDENTIFY WITH NATIONS? 259
historical home, a ‘homeland’, which is endowed with the romantic and poetic role of
a ‘nation cradle’, and is also a driving force of progress and the destiny of a nation:
‘[T]he external frontiers’ of the state have to become ‘internal frontiers’ or – which
amounts to the same thing – external frontiers have to be imagined constantly as
a projection and protection of an internal collective personality, which each of us
carries within ourselves and enables us to inhabit the space of the state as a place
where we have always been – and always will be – ‘at home’.
(Balibar 1991: 95)
Thus, in both approaches clear territorial boundaries are a primary condition for a
cultural community to develop nationalism and a must for formulating national identity.
A ‘territorial trap’, identified by John Agnew as a common way of thinking about
international politics, has been characteristic of nationalism studies too (Agnew 1994).
The equation of nations with states, or what other scholars have called the ‘methodo –
logical nationalism’ of nationalism studies, has restricted discussions on important
contemporary phenomena, including increased and accelerated human mobility,
hybridization of human identities, and the profound effects of digital technologies. A
close link between population and state territory in the academic discussions on
nationalism has reified the widely held perception of a state’s unified and homogeneous
national population. How the significance of territoriality changes with time, and how
it influences the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in the particular historical and
political context of the nation, is not illuminated in this body of literature. While national
boundaries of exclusion and inclusion are constantly redrawn, the role of territoriality
in erecting national distinctions is more ambiguous, with different meanings at different
points in history.
BROADER ISSUES
TRANSNATIONALISM AND HYBRIDITY
Primordial and modernist approaches to nationalism, albeit differently, emphasize the
importance of territorial and ethnic factors in the construction of the nation. These
studies do not highlight how the contours of the nation might be influenced by the
ongoing effects of globalization and state practices exceeding state territorial limits.
Yet the scope and content of a national project does not always correspond with the
territorial confines of the state. A fast growing body of literature points to the multi –
farious character of nationalism, which can be subnational, national, transnational, or
virtual in nature. When the focus is on the nation-state or a particular ethnic group as
a main source of nationalism, the role of territory is presumed and taken for granted.
This focus does not take into account how territoriality intersects with other markers
of identity, such as class, race, religion, language, gender, or sub-national ethnicity in
delineating where the limits of national identity are to be drawn. For example, primordial
and modernist accounts of nationalism stress the relevance of population as a whole
and focus on the people who are already to be found within the physical boundaries of
the state. They pay far less attention to how nation-building is affected by the processes
of emigration from the state’s territory, or to the way that people can have multiple
The existence of multiple
allegiances within the
nation-state is discussed
in depth in Chapter 13;
Chapter 10 examines the
status of immigrant
communities. Chapter 14
looks at minority groups
in Argentina.
6,000,000
Sources: WSJ Research, The Shao Centre at Ohio University, CIA World Factbook
3,000,000
1,000,000
500,000
200,000
As China’s Qing Empire went into economic and social decline during the 19th century, many citizens left the country,
inadvertently helping China establish a global presence. This map shows where these overseas Chinese are today.The Chinese Diaspora
FIGURE 12.9
Chinese Diaspora map. http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_leoGYAeiH44/TEyjGz_oTNI/AAAAAAAAKro/biY4v5nWB0A/s640/chinese+
diaspora ; http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704682604575369390660095122.html#articleTabs%3D
interactive%26project%3DCHINAMAP_1007
260 ELENA BARABANTSEVA
national allegiances. The issues of immigration and the status of migrant communities
in the host societies have traditionally been seen as the platform for analysing the
questions of national identity. Yet, the position of the state towards outgoing migrants
and migrant communities abroad, or diasporas as they are often referred to in scholarly
literature, is significantly less studied. The focus on state territory as a primary source
and scope of nation-building in primordial and modernist studies does not capture how
national identity takes shape in between domestic and international realms. Nor does
it stress that national territory itself is a product of particular historical developments,
and should not be seen as fixed and immutable.
Transnational politics of the state
This chapter’s illustrative example shows the pertinence of transnational aspects in
Chinese nation-building through the Chinese state’s links to overseas Chinese. This issue
relates to the effects of transnationalism on nation-building as a state-driven process.
The term transnationalism was introduced in the early 1990s by a group of American
anthropologists to characterize the emergence of new social spaces produced by migrant
communities through their links to their country of origin and their host society. Cross-
border solidarities of transnational migrants have been portrayed in this scholarship as
a challenge to national projects of states (Glick Schiller et al. 1992: 1) and sometimes
as an alternative to the project of building and sustaining nation-states (Appadurai 1997;
The mobility of capital –
the ready movement of
money as opposed to
people – is important.
See Chapters 15 and 17
for example.
HOW DO PEOPLE IDENTIFY WITH NATIONS? 261
Guarnizo and Smith 1998; Meyer and Geschiere 1999). The prevalent argument
expressed across this literature holds that transnational subjects participate in practices
which benefit from the processes associated with the phenomenon of globalization –
flexible production, consumption, mobility, etc. – while escaping the attachment to a
particular territory and the hierarchical structures and processes dictated by the state.
Migrants are presented as those who act beyond state control, shift social bases and
subjectivities, and question the meaning of national citizenship. Arjun Appadurai, for
example, introduced the concept of ‘global ethnoscapes’ to refer to the transnational
identities which are transformed and shaped by the transnational spaces they enter
(Appadurai 1990). These transnational identities in the view of Appadurai shattered ‘the
monopoly of autonomous nation-state’ (Appadurai 1997: 10). Yet, the state as an
important factor conditioning and even benefiting from transnational processes falls out
of this analysis.
The increasing effects of global mobility and fluidity do not leave the structure of
the state unaffected. Although the deterritorialized patterns of production, consumption,
and identity politics restrain a totalizing hegemony of the state – the state no longer
seems quite so all-powerful – they are not necessarily eroding the power of the state in
drawing the contours of the nation associated with it. In the conditions of increased
human mobility, the state does not relax its powers over the imaginaries of its trans –
national subjects, but extends its control over them. Chinese nation-building processes
taking place outside the boundaries of the state through overseas Chinese policies, as
discussed above, are an example of such transnational practices.
Territory is not necessarily an obsolete feature in nationalist discourses, but we need
to stress the complex interplay between territorial and non-territorial factors in shaping
the nation. For example, our illustrative case on the Chinese state’s engagement with
overseas Chinese and ethnically diverse people in China shows how the Chinese
leadership has been equally preoccupied with incorporating ethnic minorities and
reaching out to overseas Chinese in its nation-building efforts. This suggests that the
Chinese state’s formulation of who belongs to the Chinese nation is not strictly dictated
by where China’s territorial borders lie. Nation-building practices often extend far
beyond national territory, as the next section shows.
China in Africa and novel nation-building
In recent years China’s aid and development projects overseas, in particular in Africa,
have attracted a lot of public and scholarly attention. While Western commentators have
been preoccupied with assessing the role of China’s involvement abroad, the Chinese
state has been formulating new interpretations of China’s long and positive engagement
with Africa. In this regard it is interesting to note how the figure of Muslim Chinese
Admiral Zheng He and his travels around the world during the Ming Dynasty
(1368–1644) are now used in Chinese official discourse as a ‘proof’ of China’s long
engagement with and presence in Africa. Since the early 2000s a considerable amount
of ‘scientific work’ by Chinese scholars established a long Chinese presence in Africa.
According to one scholarly account, during one of the expeditions to Africa led by
Admiral Zheng a trade vessel sank and survivors settled in Kenya and married local
Kenyan women. In 2005, Chinese scholars ‘confirmed’ one Kenyan girl’s Chinese
For more on how the
imaginary of race
and citizenship often
intertwine see
Chapter 10.
FIGURE 12.10
Overseas Chinese youth learn Chinese calligraphy during the Chinese Root Seeking Tour Summer Camp
in Hangzhou, capital of east China’s Zhejiang Province, July 19, 2012. (Xinhua/Li Zhong)
262 ELENA BARABANTSEVA
ancestry and granted her a scholarship to study in China (Kahn 2005). The new
‘discoveries’ of China’s long engagement with Africa have been used by the Chinese
state as evidence of normality and as a historical precedent for China’s re-emergence as
a major economic and development actor on the continent, and of the long presence
of Chinese people there. China’s active economic and development engagements with
Africa thus have translated into a novel nation-building project disturbing the
geopolitical, cultural, and racial boundaries of the Chinese nation.
As I argued earlier in this chapter, the official formulations of the Chinese nation
have hinged on racial assumptions claiming that all Chinese, including overseas
Chinese, are descendants of the Yellow Emperor, the progenitor of all Chinese. Would
the Kenyan girl of Chinese ancestry be considered an overseas Chinese, and therefore
part of the Chinese nation? There is no clear answer to this question, but probably not
since her Chinese ancestry goes beyond ‘three generations’. Since the start of China’s
economic reforms in 1978 the official usage of the overseas Chinese concept (huaqiao
huaren) has expanded to encompass not only all those who emigrated from China a
long time ago, but also new migrants, and Chinese students studying abroad. In July
2010 Chinese vice-president Xi Jinping in his address to the participants of the sixth
‘Root-seeking’ tour, which brought together 6,000 overseas Chinese participants
from fifty-one countries, underlined that young people taking part in this event were
brought together by their common ‘sense of closeness’, and that because ‘their blood
is Chinese’ they would be ‘willing to carry on the Chinese culture that has lasted
thousands of years’ (People’s Daily Online, 2010). The open use of racial arguments in
FIGURE 12.11
Lou Jing. Bi
yueping/Imaginechina
HOW DO PEOPLE IDENTIFY WITH NATIONS? 263
outlining who belongs to the Chinese nation by one of China’s top politicians calls into
question the alleged multiethnic character of the Chinese state supposedly encompassing
fifty-six ethnic groups.
The other side of China’s engagement with Africa is a growing number of Africans
in China. According to some estimates there are anywhere between 20,000 and 100,000
African traders and entrepreneurs, mostly Nigerians, in Guangzhou, which is sometimes
called a ‘chocolate city’. In 2008, the issue of mixed-race Chinese was caught in the
national and global limelight, when Lou Jing, a Shanghaiese, made it to the last thirty
in the Chinese version of Pop Idol. She is a child of a black father and a Chinese mother.
Following her success on the TV show, there was a lot of heated discussion and soul-
searching on the Chinese internet about what it meant to be half-black half-Chinese.
It is likely that with the growing role of China in the world, and its attractiveness as a
destination for work, study, property investment, travel, and life in general, the number
of mixed marriages will go up, and the boundaries of Chinese identity will be further
questioned and destabilized. The dominant state narrative of the Chinese presence in
Africa re-writes the history of Chinese migration to suit its national and development
agenda. The question which remains open is how the Chinese state might reconcile its
often racist interpretations of the Chinese national boundaries with the accelerated
diversification and problematization of Chinese identities within and outside its national
boundaries. With the hybridization of Chinese identities due to China’s globalization
and complex migration dynamics, the boundaries of the Chinese nation are increasingly
in flux, and the ambiguities and limits of the Chinese nation will be pushed further.
264 ELENA BARABANTSEVA
Hyphenated identities
are also discussed in
Chapter 5.
Contemporary discussions on how people come to identify with nations need to
account for increasing levels of diversity within societies across the globe. While
immigration was until recently seen as a phenomenon characteristic of Western societies,
the levels of human mobility and diversity are changing most countries. In these
circumstances it will be increasingly difficult to assign one category of national belonging
to one person. Hyphenated ethnic affiliations along the lines of African-Chinese,
Russian-Japanese, Morrocan-French, Turkish-German, Chinese-Italian, African-
Caribbean-English are becoming increasingly widespread. But how often do we think
of ourselves in national terms? Does the Kenyan girl identify herself as Kenyan and
Chinese since the Chinese state recognized that some Chinese blood runs through
her body?
Postcolonial cultural theorist Homi Bhabha proposes that national identities, like
other kinds of identity, are daily ‘performed’, reflecting our subjective perceptions of
national past, present, and future. For Bhabha we can speak of the nation only as a
fragmented and hybridized construct, temporally inscribed through a series of
performative acts (Bhabha 1990: 160). In other words, we come to articulate our
national belonging at particular moments when we are prompted to do so by the
circumstances we find ourselves in. Most frequently it happens when we apply for a
national passport or visa to visit another country, are suddenly stopped at the port of
entry for additional questioning or security check, have to fill in a census form and decide
what category of ethnicity we would ascribe ourselves to, have to pick a national team
to support during international competitions, or when somebody else, like the Chinese
scholars in the case of the Kenyan girl, tells us that we fall under a particular national
category. These moments of encounter trigger how we come to identify with nations.
BOX 12.4 HOMI BHABHA AND
HYBRIDITY
Homi Bhabha (born 1949) is an influential post-
colonial scholar, whose writings have been
concerned with examining the legacies of
imperialism and colonialism in the contemporary
world. His work on hybridity is particularly influential
and has found wide application beyond cultural
studies, including in the studies of politics. By
hybridity he refers to new cultural forms taking
shape as a result of interaction and flow of different
cultures. The notion of hybridity questions the
hierarchical relationship and immutability of
cultures presupposed in colonial relations. Hybridity
challenges once powerful essentialist
understandings of culture and identity.
FIGURE 12.12
Homi Bhabha. Photo:
Stephanie Mitchell, Harvard
University
Homi Bhabha’s work
is also discussed in
Chapter 16.
Through this recurrent reminding of the need to belong to a particular nation, national
identity is routinized as ‘a form of life’ (Ozkirimli 2000: 195). Although traditionally
nationalism was understood as bound to the territorial confines of the state, with the
expanding effects of globalization forcing the economic, social and political dimensions
of life to escape the constraints of time and space, the meaning of nation and territory
has been undergoing an uninterrupted transformation.
Therefore, rather than understanding how people come to identify with nations
through drawing clear-cut distinctions between domestic/international, inside/outside,
us/them, we might find it more productive to examine how national identities take
shape at the meeting points of these distinctions, or ‘in the boundaries in-between
nations and peoples’ (Bhabha 1990: 4). Rather than asking what nation we belong to,
we might find it more helpful to ask how we become subjects of a particular nation.
Michel Foucault’s concept of subjectification is very relevant in this regard. Subjectifi –
cation defines how we become subjects with particular identities through either the
exertion of control and dependence or through identity and conscience (Foucault 2002:
331). It refers to a complex interaction between people and their surroundings shaping
individual identity. In this sense subjectification corresponds to the idea of an individual
as a product of both dialogical and self-reflective processes where the indi vidual’s
production of meaning intersects with the influences of power. Subjectification helps
to capture, for example, how certain people relate to the Chinese nation though the
de-territorialized identity politics of the state. It also highlights the way that the nation
cannot be perceived as a conglomeration of people sharing common history, language,
beliefs, customs, and living on the same territory, but rather how particular markers of
distinction are employed by the sovereign power to construct the illusion of a common
people and a common national identity.
CONCLUSION
We have considered the ways in which people come to identify with nations by looking
at how nationalist discourses in China address questions of cultural difference and
common origins. While traditional approaches to nationalism emphasize unity, cohesive –
ness, and the commonality of the people within a particular territory brought together
under the rubric of the nation, I proposed that we should consider nationalist discourses
at the conceptual margins of the nation to appreciate how these discourses work and
what they include and exclude. It is in these marginal spaces that the problematic,
contested, contingent, and ambivalent nature of the nation is most appar ent. Chinese
nation-building policies towards overseas Chinese and ethnic minor ities illustrate how
nationalism is not delimited by the territorial sovereign boundaries of the state, but works
in conjunction with other non-territorial markers of distinction, such as race. The process
of subjectification of the fragmented body of ‘relevant people’ is an alternative way of
thinking about how people come to identify with nations. When we consider the
dynamics of the state-led nationalist project, which expands state sovereignty to include
people far away from its territory, the role of state territoriality as a primary feature of
a nationalist project becomes more ambiguous.
HOW DO PEOPLE IDENTIFY WITH NATIONS? 265
FURTHER READING
Barabantseva, Elena (2010) Overseas Chinese, Ethnic Minorities, and Nationalism: De-Centering
China, London: Routledge.
On the role of overseas Chinese and ethnic minorities in Chinese state nationalism.
Bhabha, Homi (1990) Nation and Narration, London: Routledge.
A postcolonial critique of nationalism studies.
Callahan, William A. (2010) China: the Pessoptimist Nation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
On the interplay of security/identity dynamics in Chinese nationalism.
Callahan, William A. and Barabantseva, Elena (eds) (2012) China Orders the World: Normative
Soft Power and Foreign Policy, Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and the Johns
Hopkins University Press.
On how Chinese traditional ideas inform contemporary discourses and policies.
Dikötter, Frank (1992) The Discourse of Race in Modern China, London: C. Hurst & Co.
On the history of racial discourses in China.
Duara, Prasenjit (2009) The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-formation, Abingdon:
Routledge.
Stresses the interplay of global and regional factors in Chinese nation-building.
Gladney, Dru C. (2004) Dislocating China: Reflections on Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern
Subjects, London: Hurst and Company.
On the complex character of Chinese nationalism.
Shirk, Susan (2007) China: Fragile Superpower, New York: Oxford University Press.
On the fragility of China’s rise.
WEBSITES
H-Nationalism: http://www.h-net.org/~national/
An academic forum on nationalism, including reviews of recent publications on nationalism.
http://www.ethnic-china.com/index.htm
Chinese scholars’ resource on Chinese ethnic minority cultures.
Ohio University Library database on overseas Chinese resources: http://www.library.ohiou.
edu/subjects/shao/main.html.
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CHAPTER 13
Does the nation-state work?
Michael J. Shapiro
■ The question
STATES, NATIONS AND ALLEGIANCE
■ Illustrative example
WORLDS OF UNEASE WITHIN THE NATION-STATE
■ General responses
STORIES OF COHERENT NATIONHOOD
■ Broader issues
AN ALTERNATIVE POLITICAL IMAGINARY
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
STATES, NATIONS AND ALLEGIANCE
Modern political thinking tends to be absorbed in, if not wholly exhausted by, two
closely interrelated historical trajectories. One is the process of state formation, the other
that of nation-building. As a result, modern political discourse is usually understood
on the basis of the geopolitical world of nation-states.
With respect to the state part of the hyphenated term ‘nation-state’, scholars have
focused on the process by which states were formed by monopolizing violence within
a bounded territory. As a variety of historical accounts have put it, the monopolizing
of violence required disarming diverse sub-state affiliated group ings, asserting fiscal
control over the population, and establishing recruit ment procedures for armies and
bureaucracies. All of these moves were aimed at securing territorial boundaries and
centralizing and governmentally controlling all aspects of the population, in order to
become a separately governed entity with centralized control. As a result, states are
understood primarily as territorial entities with exclusive, coercively and legally supported
sovereignty.
The way identities have
been thought about is
also discussed in
Chapter 5. The question
of identity politics is
examined there in
relation to the feminist
movement. Certain ways
of thinking of gender and
sexuality play a role in
nation-building as we
see in this Chapter. The
process of producing a
national identity is
examined in more detail
in Chapter 12.
The emergence of the
state as the seemingly
obvious form of political
organization and its
relation with territory
and sovereignty is
discussed in Chapter 11,
and Chapter 12 looks at
how China employs
centripetal force to
produce a nation.
An ethnoscape is a
landscape of diverse
ethnic subjects, usually
binational.
The significance of
homeworkers and the
feminization of labour in
the contemporary global
economy is discussed in
Chapter 17. Spivak’s
work is discussed again
in Chapter 27.
270 MICHAEL J. SHAPIRO
In contrast, the nation part of the hyphenated expression takes on its meaning with
respect to time inasmuch as nations are understood as peoples who belong to a shared
cultural community with a historical trajectory. As a result citizen-subjects receive what
Jürgen Habermas calls a ‘double coding’. They have both territorial and historical
identities. But it is controversial as to how the second coding, the one involving historical
time, is to be understood. To avoid the assumption that members of a nation-state derive
their coherence on the basis of a myth of a ‘prepolitical fact of a quasi-natural people’,
Habermas (1998) suggests that the communal attachment of nation-state members
should be regarded as civic rather than organic, i.e. based on political and legal entitle –
ment rather than hereditary belonging. However, contrary to Habermas’ attempt to
avoid naturalistic identity politics, the state’s legitimation of its control over a population
frequently involves the pseudo histories, which Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger
have famously referred to as the ‘invention of tradition’ (1992).
At the level of the individual citizen-subject, such inventions operate as a basis for
allegiance. As I have noted elsewhere, that allegiance is best understood as allegiance
to a story:
Given the complex sets of forces that have been responsible both for assembling
as a ‘people’ those groupings identified as ‘nations’ and the am big uities and
contentiousness associated with the ways that such assemblages claim territories,
their primary national stories must bear considerable weight. Indeed, there are
nothing other than commitments to stories for a national people to give themselves
a historical trajectory that testifies to their collective coherence.
(Shapiro 1999: 47)
The weight that the stories must bear takes on its significance in the face of competing
allegiances which apply especially to those who reside in a single nation-state but
understand their self-fashioning and hence loci of allegiance as either split or as existing
elsewhere. While the nation-state deploys various forms of cultural governance to apply
centripetal force to national coherence – ceremonies, national holidays, national museum
displays, and so on – other genres or forms reflect the centrifugal forces that apply to
those who exist in different imaginaries or different identity narratives.
For example, the Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears film Sammy and Rosie Get
Laid (1987) provides an exemplary moment of difference from national allegiance in
the UK. At one point in the film, Sammy, a Pakistani immigrant, says to his wife Rosie,
a native Englishwoman, ‘We are not British, we’re Londoners.’ And the film as a whole
chal lenges traditional geopolitical presumptions. London, like most cosmopolitan
cities, contains an ethnoscape with the kinds of differing experiences and thus multiple
allegiances that disrupt the traditional statist political discourse. As Gayatri Spivak puts
it in her reading of the film, London contains a variety of types who constitute a
‘challenge to the idea of the nation’ – for example the ‘homeworker’ exists along with
other ‘super exploited women in export processing zones’ and thus represents a
perspective on connections with nationhood that conflict with that of the traditionally
scripted citizen-subject (Spivak 1993: 252).
FIGURE 13.1
Congress adopting the
Declaration of
Independence by John
Trumbull (1756–1843).
US engraving after John
Trumbull’s 1816 version
painted for the US
Capitol Building
Rotunda. The Art
Archive. ref.: AA401943
Questions of gender,
race and sexuality arise
in Chapters 5, 10, 14 and
17 particularly. The
modern nation-state
relies on a particular
picture of the family.
DOES THE NATION-STATE WORK? 271
Heeding Spivak’s example, I want to identify one such homeworker (who ultimately
became a writer), Jamaica Kincaid. She is a naturalized American who provides an
alternative perspective to the mythology of the nation-building project of the US
‘Founding fathers’. A descendant of the coerced labour force in the Caribbean (she is
from Antigua), where slaves with no control over the conditions or pace of the work
produced both cotton and sugar, the latter a product that by the mid-seventeenth
century (and for one and one half centuries thereafter) was ‘by far the most valuable
product exported from the Americas’ (Eltis 2002: 40), Kincaid became a writer after
initially arriving in the US as a servant (an au pair). Now someone with divided national
and cultural experiences, she is one who has, in her terms, her ‘feet . . . in two worlds’
(2000: 123). Given her heritage of coerced labour and her experience as a bonded
servant, Kincaid has a different basis for perception of the American founding experience
from those who unambivalently celebrate the creation of America’s founding documents.
For example, while looking at the famous portrait in Philadelphia’s Liberty Hall of the
signers of the Declaration of Independence, Kincaid ponders the occupational
infrastructure of their studied ease and suggests we imagine those not in the picture,
those whose labour has assisted in the enactment of the European thought-world in
America’s founding:
FIGURE 13.2
Pierre Bourdieu
Memories and counter-
memories – alternative
ways of remembering –
arise in Chapters 22 and
26 where memories of
violent conflict are
discussed.
272 MICHAEL J. SHAPIRO
America begins with the Declaration of Independence . . . but who really needs
this document. . . . There is a painting in Philadelphia of the men who signed it.
These men looked relaxed; they are enjoying the activity of thinking, the luxury of
it. They have time to examine this thing called their conscience and to act on it
. . . some keep their hair in an unkempt style (Jefferson, Washington), and others
keep their hair well groomed (Franklin), their clothes pressed . . .
(1997: 70)
She continues with a speculation about those who have worked to prepare the men for
the occasion:
the people who made their beds and made their clothes nicely pressed and their
hair well groomed or in a state of studied dishevelment.
Kincaid shares her ambivalent allegiance with other writers who have articulated their
unease in their nation-state loci of residence.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
WORLDS OF UNEASE WITHIN THE NATION-STATE
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu pointed to the difficulty of thinking outside of the
reasons of state that promote national allegiance with his remark, ‘To endeavour to think
the state is to take the risk of taking over (or being taken over by) a thought of the
state’ (1998: 35). He recommends a method of hyperbolic doubt, which he attributes
to Thomas Bernhard’s novel Alte Meister Komödie (1985). Bourdieu’s notion of the
‘genesis and structure of social space’ in which creativity is possible is useful because it
implies, at a minimum, that we should look at how a writer who resists or at least
complicates nation-state allegiance is socially situated. Bourdieu provides a path to the
resistance of state-dominated political thinking by displacing the biographical causation
model associated with mainstream literary analysis with attention to the spatio-
temporality of the field within which a writer either recycles or challenges the dominant
orders of intelligibility. However, if instead of seeing the existing social order as a
hierarchical system of social ‘fractions’, as Bourdieu does, we view it as a fractal field, a
historically produced amalgam or blend of diverse life worlds that have been assembled
by a history of state directed ‘nation-building’ and its forms of political economy, we
can identify counter-hegemonic personae whose writing challenges the myth of national
coherence.
Specifically, much of the politics of contemporary writing reflects the counter-
memories of those groups that have been territorially displaced by a history of political
economy that is associated with the formation of the European-oriented model of
political order. Global and local economic management by powerful states is responsible
for depositing the diverse bodies that inhabit the social fields within the modern nation-
state. For example, in the US case, many African American, Native American and exiled
writers do not (as Bourdieu would have us believe) select from existing idioms within
the hierarchy of available styles that have congealed within state-dominated social orders.
The state’s way of
thinking here could
perhaps be described,
in the terms used in
Chapter 2, as its picture
of political space.
FIGURE 13.3
Michelle Cliff
The familiar ‘language
games’ in the terms
used in Chapter 2.
DOES THE NATION-STATE WORK? 273
Rather, their writing expresses profound ambivalence toward the literary field within
which their work is deployed, precisely because of the tendency of that field to be
complicit with the state’s presumption (its primary mode of ‘thought’) that it governs
a unitary and coherent national culture.
The examples of structures of feeling and identity commitments that are in tension
with national allegiance are legion, but given the space available, I look at three cases,
reviewing briefly some of the writing of Toni Morrison, an African American, Sherman
Alexie, a Native American, and Michelle Cliff, a diasporic Jamaican. All of their texts
constitute modes of thought generated from outside the spaces authorized by the
conventional nation-building narrative, within which every individual is an
undifferentiated sovereign citizen-subject and the social order is merely an ahistorical
class structure.
Michelle Cliff
I begin with Michelle Cliff because her observation on languages, expressed by one of
her fictional characters, serves to characterize the agenda for writers who recognize the
traps lurking in familiar systems of intelligibility. The narrator in her novel Free Enterprise
reflects on the historical role of each language’s participation in the imperial domination
of her homeland. ‘English’, she says, ‘was the tongue of commerce’ . . . ‘Spanish was
the language of categories’, by which she means the creation of a biopolitical matrix of
economically and politically ineligible, miscegenated (mixed) blood types, and Latin
was the language of Christian spiritual hegemony. ‘Against these tongues’, she adds
‘African of every stripe collided’ (1993: 7).
Although Cliff writes in English, because of her diasporic experience, which leaves
her outside of ordinary national attachments, she sees the nation-state as an ontological
as well as a territorial actor (one concerned as much with identity coherence as with
territorial control) and, accordingly, she sees nation-state governance as symbolic as well
as territorial. For example, her novel No Telephone to Heaven (1987) focuses on
transnational lives that constitute or produce oppositional imaginaries (alternative ways
of imagining the emergence and existence of the life world) opposed to those of
conventional national subjects. The diasporic perspective in the novel is realized both
geopolitically and linguistically – geopolitically by the back and forth movement of her
main character, Kitty Savage, between the US and Jamaica (as well as back and forth
from England) and linguistically in the collision of idioms, standard English and
Jamaican patois, and in the anti-narrative structure, a set of dissociated narrative
fragments.
It is important to note the form as well as the content of Cliff ’s writing. She uses
the genre or form of the novel, which in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
displaced other narrative forms in the third world. Although, as Franco Moretti has
pointed out, the nineteenth-century novel often functioned as a nation-building
genre, especially in the case of the historical novel; subsequently Cliff and many
other third world writers have made the novel a site of resistance to the national and
global imaginaries of the ‘first world’. Yet Cliff shows a profound ambivalence toward
writing in general because she recognizes the difficulty of extracting a thought from
the outside whilst working within languages that encode structures of domination or
274 MICHAEL J. SHAPIRO
If the language we speak
contains structures of
domination we inhabit in
coded form, then
sometimes the only way
out is to refuse to speak
altogether: to pretend to
be aphasic as a form of
resistance. In her book
This Sex Which Is Not
One, feminist Luce
Irigaray says that faced
with the patriarchy
embedded in language,
‘Women among
themselves begin by
laughing.’ (1985: 163)
The encounters of
colonizers with those
they colonized are
discussed in Chapters 16
and 21.
control over others. As she has noted, her primary linguistic imaginary is silence, a
form of resistant aphasia, which she sees as the ultimate location for one who would
wholly resist the colonizing forces within language. Cliff ’s political inflection of
silence is manifested in her No Telephone to Heaven when her character, Kitty Savage,
is described as breaking her silence when she discovers a shop with Jamaican foods
in New York. Ultimately, although Cliff ’s ‘attempt to bound off a space of silence via
the symptom of aphasia’ (Aguiar 2001: 70) is never consummated – Cliff continues to
write – it reflects her suspicion that however hybrid and resistant her cacophony of voices
and assemblage of narrative fragments in her novels are to the dominant idioms and
historical memories of the state, she can never be wholly present to herself as a resisting
body in her writing.
Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie shares Michelle Cliff ’s ambivalence toward writing and also embodies
the split consciousness of one who exists in two different life worlds. For Alexie, the
con temporary Indian presence in the US, which occupies his attention, is both geo –
graphically and ethnologically ambiguous. Accordingly, his main character, Low Man
Smith in his story, ‘Indian Country’ (2000), is a writer and doubtless his literary stand
in. Low Man describes himself in one of the story’s conversations as one who is ‘not
supposed to be anywhere’. Moreover, Low Man’s Indianness, along with that of other
Native American characters in the story, is highly diluted. He is a ‘Spokane’, but he
speaks and understands no tribal languages, was born and raised in Seattle, and has visited
his own reservation only six times.
The ‘Indian country’ for which Alexie’s story provides a fragmentary mapping has
resonances with a prophetic remark by the Oglala, Black Elk roughly 70 years earlier.
Noting what was left of his Indian country after a century in which the political economy
of Euroamerica pushed a white cultural nation westward, he remarked, ‘[t]hey have
made little islands for us . . . and always, these islands are becoming smaller’ (Neihardt
1932: 12). Similarly, if viewed pictorially, the ‘Indian country’ that emerges in Alexie’s
literary landscape would have to be a few faintly visible colour flecks on a map of the
US’s western states. And, tellingly, the precarious and obscure visibility of that country
is reinforced throughout the story’s dialogues by continual challenges to traditional
Indian practices of intelligibility. For example, when Low Man asks an older Indian,
Raymond, if he is an elder, Raymond shifts to a non-Indian idiom: ‘elder than some,
not as elder as others’, he replies. Given his awareness of the ways in which Native
American sense-making is always already colonized by a Euroamerican idiom, Alexie
has his alter ego Low Man Smith articulate a profound ambivalence toward being
immersed in the US literary field. Low Man refers to the chain bookstores that carry
his books as ‘colonial clipper ships’, and in the process of moving about an urban venue
in search of a non-chain bookstore, he tries to divest himself of his laptop, first trying
to trade it in a Seven Eleven store and then handing it to a clerk in a Barnes & Noble
chain bookstore, pretending he found it.
FIGURE 13.4
Sherman Alexie.
Photo: Jérôme de
Perlinghi/Corbis
Toni Morrison
Finally, Toni Morrison articulates the same ambivalence toward her participation in US
literary culture as Cliff and Alexie. She makes her political challenge to literary culture
explicit by referring to the paradox inherent in her participation as a novelist in a culture
of literacy. She admits that she ‘participates in the public sphere constituted by print
literacy [but] . . . her fiction strains to constitute itself as anti-literature and to address
a type of racial community that she herself recognizes to be unavailable to the novelist’
(Dubey 1999: 188). Morrison’s audience or constituency takes on its coherence as a
transnational black culture of great diversity, forged as much through structures of
exclusion and episodes of displacement as through practices of solidarity. And much
of the cultural imaginary that forms the implied readership of her novels is preliterate.
Yet, like Cliff and Alexie, Morrison continues to write. And, most significantly, her novel
Paradise (1999), which addresses itself to a historical episode of racial exclusion,
effectively enacts the critical posture that Bourdieu has identified as the antidote to ‘state
thinking’, the necessity of creating a ‘rupture’ that challenges the state’s ‘symbolic
violence’, its mobilization of and control over the mental structures that make its
institutions appear ‘natural ’. The conceptual strategy or ‘tool for rupture’ is, according
to Bourdieu, ‘the reconstruction of genesis’, which brings ‘back into view the conflicts
and confrontations of the early beginnings and therefore all the discarded possibilities’.
The ‘genesis’ to which Morrison’s novel is addressed is the ideology and story of
American exceptionalism that fuelled a major aspect of the Euroamerican nationhood
project. Initially, the religious, patriarchal leaders of the early New England settlers strove
to inculcate the presumption that America was to be a new Jerusalem, ‘a site specifically
favoured by God – perhaps the very place that he had chosen to initiate the millennial
Kingdom of Christ’ (Kammen 1997: 175). Subsequently, from the early nineteenth
century on, a secularized or non-religious version of American exceptionalism has
held sway among many American historians who have been vehicles of ‘the assumption
that the United States, unlike European nations, has a covenant that makes Americans
a chosen people who have escaped from the terror of historical change to live in timeless
harmony with nature’ (Noble 1968: ix).
The idea of the covenant and the imperatives that flow from it – the need to resist
change and the need to maintain the purity of the lineage that is charged with the special
mission – produce the woeful consequences described at the beginning and end of
Morrison’s novel. The novel suggests that at best the exceptionalist narrative stifles
politics and at worst it leads to violence. In addition to the closure of the political, the
other consequence (violence) provides the chilling opening to the novel, whose first
line is, ‘[t]hey kill the white girl first’. Thereafter, an understanding of this opening
event requires that the reader follow a complex and shifting narrative that eventually
explains a deadly attack by a group of men from a covenanted, all-black community in
Oklahoma on the women in a nearby convent that has served as a women’s shelter.
The attackers are from Ruby, a small western all-black community in which the
older members situate themselves in a historical narrative that celebrates the perseverance
of their ancestors in the face of rejection and their subsequent redemption through
adherence to the codes of a special mission. Descended from former slaves, the town’s
ancestors left discrimination in the late nineteenth-century American South only to be
DOES THE NATION-STATE WORK? 275
Race and its perceived
significance for
community are also
discussed in Chapters 5,
10 and 14.
FIGURE 13.5
Toni Morrison.
Photo by Kate Kunz from
cover of Paradise,
publisher Alfred A.
Knopf, New York, 1998
The role of religion in
America today is briefly
discussed in Chapter 6.
Chapter 21 discusses
how we might think
about the way in which
those with ‘exclusive
knowledge’ attempt to
enlighten others, a
version of the
‘exceptionalism’ or
‘special mission’
mentioned here.
276 MICHAEL J. SHAPIRO
denied entry into both white and black communities in Oklahoma, which, as Morrison
had learned, had twenty-six all-black towns at the turn of the twentieth century
(Hitchens 1998: 450). The Rubyites’ special mission, an African American version of
American exception alism, is engendered by their rejections, to which they refer in their
narrative as the ‘disallowing’. Having walked from Mississippi to Oklahoma, attracted
by an advertisement about an all-black town, they discovered that their blackness was
a threat to the lighter-skinned ‘Negroes’ who shunned them: ‘The sign of racial purity
they had taken for granted had become a stain’ (Morrison 1999: 194).
Coping with the shock of a rejection (which they had expected only from whites),
they founded their own all-black community of Haven in Oklahoma and subsequently
moved even farther into western Oklahoma to found Ruby, which they regarded as
the fulfilment of their ancestors’ intention to construct an Eden, a paradise on earth
run by a group of racially pure blacks. The town chronicler, Patricia, summarizes the
‘8-rock’s’ (descendants from the original founders) model for maintaining purity:
‘Unadulterated and unadulteried 8-rock blood held its magic as long as it resided in
Ruby. That was their recipe. That was their deal. For immortality’ (Morrison 1999:
217). But while ‘Ruby’ (‘who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above
Rubies’, Proverbs xxxxi 10) contains signs of paradise – for example the soil seems
almost miraculously fertile, so that while Haven had only barren muddy ground, Ruby
has flourishing gardens – it also turns out to be a stiflingly conservative, patriarchal
and even misogynist community. And rather than turning inward to confront divisive
issues, when the younger Ruby generation departs from the original covenant, the
patriarchs of Ruby displace their problems on a nearby community functioning with
a different covenant. The assault with which the novel begins is on a shelter for
women, whose inhabitants have had connections with some of the town’s men. The
shelter is in a former convent (in a mansion that had once served as a ‘cathouse’) outside
the town.
Morrison’s novel enacts Bourdieu’s suggestion about the necessity of creating a
rupture by returning to the founding myths that sustain violence, actual or symbolic.
While identifying a racially fractured America, she contests both the Puritan reading
of American exceptionalism and the African American attempt to simulate that excep –
tionalism while accepting it as a dogma and thus attempting to preserve or freeze the
meanings generated in founding acts. In accord with Bourdieu’s methodological
injunction, she subjects founding myths (of both Euro and African America) to
hyperbolic doubt.
GENERAL RESPONSES
STORIES OF COHERENT NATIONHOOD
Nation-building
In contrast to the writers I treat in the preceding section, much of the history of artistic
production has been complicit with the cultural governance policies of states seeking
to fashion a coherent and unitary national culture. For example, the development of
French Grand Opera during the nineteenth century was structured to invite the people
The French headscarf
ban, discussed in
Chapter 27, is an
example of an attempt
to produce a unitary
national secularism.
FIGURE 13.6
Paris Opera, architect Charles Garnier, 1857–1874. Photo by Flickr member Peter Rivera, Creative
Commons attribution 2.0 generic. http://0.tqn.com/d/architecture/1/0/G/y/Paris-Opera-House
For more on these
scholars’ work on
nation-building see
Chapter 12. For Tilly’s
work on violence see
Chapter 23.
Chapter 8 has a
discussion of the
importance of media
representations in the
context of war.
DOES THE NATION-STATE WORK? 277
into the nation, various national theatre initiatives were similarly aimed at the fashioning
of national culture, and without state prompting, the nineteenth-century historical novels
– for example those of Sir Walter Scott – articulated a geographical dynamic that reflects
a process of the cultural integration necessary for the state to claim a coherent cultural
nation. His novels typically involve a process of border attenuation.
This nation-building orientation of the arts, especially in the nineteenth century,
has been echoed by the dominant approaches to nationalism in the twentieth. The best
known scholars of nationalism – Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, Anthony Giddens,
Charles Tilly and countless others have emphasized the centripetal forces of national
allegiance, primarily by focusing on mainstream media and state-run agencies and
institutions. In particular, Benedict Anderson’s well known mantra that nations, as
‘imagined communities’ (1991), became objects of widespread symbolic allegiance
through the operation of mediating genres (for example newspapers) is widely accepted
by practitioners of comparative politics and international studies.
Traditional theorists of nationalism focus on two very different kinds of issues. The
first and perhaps most pervasive in the literatures is the problem of allegiance, where
‘nationalism’ becomes a problem of the process through which citizens become
identified with their nation-state. To treat that problem theorists turn to various media.
In Anderson’s case (1991), the primary medium is the daily newspaper. Other thinkers
have looked at the roles of national cultural institutions, for example, national theatres
(Kruger 1992), music (Attali 1985), landscape painting (Bermingham 1986; Miller
1993; Daniels 1993), film (Burgoyne 1997; Hjort and MacKenzie 2000) and novels
(Moretti 1998). In the case of each medium, idioms are adduced by the theorist to
In what way is the social
contract ‘mythic’? How
has the idea that it is a
real contract become
part of our common
sense? What does that
do to the way we think
about politics?
For a discussion of
Hobbes’ claims about
authority and the
sovereign see Chapter 7.
FIGURE 13.8
Youths in Paris suburb,
Le Blanc Mesnil, 3
November 2005.
Photo: AP/PA Photos
DOES THE NATION-STATE WORK? 279
treating the resistances of those groups who are ‘ungrammatical’ within the primary
discourses of the nation-state (Shapiro 2004). A focus on national allegiance tends to
render invisible those peoples who have not been clearly welcomed into the nation.
The mythic social contract
However misleading the assumptions of the scholarly writers who focus on the dynamics
of national allegiance may be, at least their conclusions are based on analyses of concrete
institutions – for example the history of the press in the case of Anderson, and the
monopolization of coercion in the case of Giddens and Tilly. The dominant trend in
political theory has been less attentive to actual historically developing institutions and
mediating agencies. Drawing on approaches to the social contract emerging from the
political theory canon, especially from the writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a nation-friendly model of the social order has held centre stage
in the social sciences. It has been assumed that a unitary social order has developed on
the basis of an implicit contract by which each citizen agrees to forego coercive means
in return for the protection offered by centralized coercion.
Thinkers who have told this mythic story base it on a model of egoism. They argue
that the primary urge is toward a self-interestedness that would naturally provoke a ‘war
of all against all’ (Hobbes 1981). What induces the social contract for Hobbes is a
rational approach to one’s interests, based on the recognition that only a strong
centralized state can offer one protection against the predatory designs of others. Locke
offers a similar view – that everyone is inclined to want to have complete autonomy
over their persons and possessions. Rationality prevails and they effectively agree to give
up the right to punish transgressions against their person and property to a centralized
In Chapter 10 you can
find more on flows of
immigrants.
Jacques Rancière’s work,
and his ideas of politics
and the distribution of
the sensible, are
discussed in some detail
in Chapter 18.
280 MICHAEL J. SHAPIRO
state. And among thinkers of the social contract, Rousseau is another who assumed that
the ‘natural’ state is one in which everyone provides for their own self-preservation and
would rather resist any form of collective mastery but is forced to recognize that it is
necessary to yield to certain collective conventions.
We thus have, famously, three versions of a mythic social contract that the thinkers
presume to be the basis of the collective coherence that became the condition of
possibility for the control necessary to govern the modern nation-state. If we heed the
dynamic situation of most social orders, created as the flows of immigrant and refugee
bodies that introduce ideational and practical schisms, the idea of a social contract
becomes increasingly unwarranted.
Nevertheless, it is an idea that persists. While everywhere one can witness the absence
of an operating social contract, evident for example in the periodic riots in the
immigrant-filled suburbs of Paris, the banlieue parisienne, in the clan antagonisms in
various African countries, in the immiseration and exclusion of los Indios in various Latin
American countries, and in the ‘prison industrial complex’ disproportionately targeted
at (what are constructed as) ‘ethnic minorities’ in the US, the existence of a coherent
and consensual society remains the legitimating alibi for most political theorists.
BROADER ISSUES
AN ALTERNATIVE POLITICAL IMAGINARY
In order to provide a counter-model to the mythic consensuality that has been the basis
of the presumption that states contain a unitary and coherent national society, we need
an alternative image of the political. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière, writing
on the politics of aesthetics, sees a politically acute version of aesthetics as a window
into the existence of many worlds, each of which is lived differently (2004).
In order to pursue this insight and suggest an alternative political imaginary from
the mainstream social contract notion, I turn here to a piece of literature, Milan
Kundera’s novel Ignorance (2002), which is based on the ambiguous national experience
of exiles who share Kundera’s own experience.
The novel begins with an alienating remark delivered to Irena, a Czech ex-patriot
living in Paris, by her friend, Sylvie: ‘What are you still doing here?’ When Irena asks
in response, ‘Where should I be?’, Sylvie’s rejoinder is ‘home’. It is 1991, and Sylvie
has the expectation that Irena, despite having lived in Paris for 20 years, still thinks of
Czechoslovakia as home and will want to return to participate as a citizen in the new
independence, after the dissolution of the former Soviet bloc (Kundera 2002: 3). The
intermittently contentious dialogue continues briefly until Irena breaks off into a book-
and film-influenced fantasy about emotional returns.
Irena’s silent meditation about emotional returns triggers Kundera’s break from
his characters to a richly annotated philosophical discussion of nostalgia, with references
to a range of fictional and actual émigrés who either returned or resisted returning (for
example Odysseus who returned to Ithaca and Schoenberg who did not return to
Austria, respectively). Apart from the specifics of the particular fictional and historical
characters he treats, Kundera constructs a global cartog raphy. The novel provides a
mapping not only of the post-Soviet geopolitical world but also of the way geopolitics
Chapter 26 explains
more about Nietzsche.
DOES THE NATION-STATE WORK? 281
and passion are linked. To assess the thinking that the mapping enacts, we are in need
of a philosophical perspective that can address the overlay of passion on political
territoriality that frames Kundera’s narrative.
Many of Kundera’s philosophico-literary excursions in his novels are inspired
by Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, most famously his The Unbearable Lightness of
Being (1984), which shares Nietzsche’s sentiment that the possibility of an eternal return
renders Being heavy. The thought of an eternal return gives ‘to acts and events the
moral import they would lack in a godless universe wherein every act or event occurred
only once’ (White 1990: 66). Ever since that novel, Kundera has pondered the prob-
lem of moral and emotional weight as he has connected Nietzsche’s version of a
mythological return with the problem of the émigré’s actual or potential return.
Because for Kundera, emotional and moral registers are intimately connected, it is not
surprising that toward the end of his meditation on nostalgia in Ignorance, he refers to
the way Homer sets out a ‘moral hierarchy of emotions’, which provides the basis for
Odysseus’ abandonment of Calypso, whose ‘tears’ are represented as less worthy than
‘Penelope’s pain’ (2002: 9). From Kundera’s Nietzschean perspective, moral hierarchies
are oppressive. Hence we are able to understand the demoralized Odysseus, who suffers
from the terrible bargain he has made by giving up an intense passion for the weaker
emotion of nostalgia and the self-applied pressure from his expected responsibilities as
a husband and patriarch. He has become the forlorn Odysseus, the Ulysses so well
described in Tennyson’s famous poem (1842), the Ulysses who laments:
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
Most significantly, for what Kundera sees this lending to his story of contemporary
émigrés and returnees, Odysseus discovers that while ‘for twenty years he thought
about nothing but his return . . . the very essence of his life, its centre, its treasure, lay
outside Ithaca’, and, further, while he had enjoyed a receptive audience while in exile
(for example ‘the dazzled Phaeacians’ who listened to his adventures ‘for four long
books’), in Ithaca, ‘he was one of their own, so it never occurred to anyone to say,
“tell us”’ (Kundera 2002: 34–35).
Similarly, when Irena returns to Prague, her old acquaintances show little interest
in her 20 years of life outside Prague. It was one thing for her former friends to ignore
the French wine she brought and instead persist in drinking beer but quite another to
ignore her words: ‘They can drink beer if they insist, that doesn’t faze her; what matters
to her is choosing the topic of conversation herself and being heard’ (Kundera 2002:
37). Inasmuch as the identity of an individual, like the collective identity of a nation,
requires recognition, the inattentiveness of her Prague acquaintances to Irena’s Paris
life deprives her of confidence in the identity narrative she has adopted.
On the other side of the self–other relationship to identity, what the women’s
disinterest in Irena’s other life reflects is their unwillingness to extend sympathy across
national boundaries. When we consider the identity issue at stake in Irena’s encounter
with her former acquaintances, we have to appreciate the politics of the history–memory
disjuncture that Kundera is addressing through the fates of his characters.
282 MICHAEL J. SHAPIRO
Chapter 22 shows how
memories affect politics
and make wars possible.
‘History’, as Pierre Nora points out, is produced by the way ‘our hopelessly
forgetful modern societies, propelled by change, organize their past’ (Nora 1989: 8).
In the process of that organizing, memory tends to be eradicated: ‘Memory and history,
far from being synonymous appear now to be in fundamental opposition.’ While
memory is ‘a perpetually active phenomenon’ reflective of the sense-making of people
coping with their life worlds, ‘history is the reconstruction, always problematic and
incomplete, of what is no longer’ (Nora 1989: 8).
Nora’s distinction is effectively enacted in Kundera’s narrative of the experience of
Ignorance’s émigrés. While others try to impose a geopolitical allegiance on them,
predicated on the way the former compatriots want to organize history, the émigrés try
to maintain an intimacy with their memories, their lived temporalities. To the extent
that the novel lends its characters an ethico-political outcome, it is the achievement of
a refusal to give in to the identities, resident in an imposed history, which are thrown
at them by their non-listening families, friends and acquaintances.
BOX 13.1 GILLES DELEUZE AND
FELIX GUATTARI
Deleuze and Guattari collaborated on two
volumes of a study of what they called
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The second
volume (1987) provides a radical challenge to
identity politics in general and to the codes
within which state allegiance is promoted.
For them, the state is a ‘machine of capture’.
In response to such capture, they elaborate
what they call ‘lines of flight’, ways of eluding
state capture.
FIGURE 13.9
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
Photo courtesy of Charles J. Stivale
Hence, applying Nora’s distinction to the historical moment of Kundera’s novel,
‘history’ imposes allegiance, while memory, the ‘perpetually active phenomenon’ that
ties people to an ‘eternal present’ is the condition of possibility for intimacy. To put it
another way (in the language of the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari), ‘history’
involves the imposition of officially inscribed molar codes, the collective identity spaces
tied to the macropolitical world of states, while memory is what contains the molecular
level, the multiple layers of individual micropolitical potential for becoming, experiencing
and associating (1987).
To be allied to the codes associated with history, which are geopolitically oriented
temporalities that Irena’s friends and husband impose on her, Irena must ignore her
life. As Deleuze puts it, ‘the sensuous signs of memory are signs of life’ (2000: 65).
Thus when Irena sees Josef in Prague (she recalls him from a brief romantic liaison),
her memory of a sensuous past is activated, and, crucially, she is encouraged to think.
As Deleuze notes, for Proust ‘truth depends on an encounter with something that forces
us to think’. And here that thinking helps Irena to distance herself from the expectations
of others and allow intimacy (with herself as well as with an other) to trump geopolitical
allegiance. Intimacy challenges what Lauren Berlant refers to as ‘the normative practices,
fantasies, institutions and ideologies that organize people’s worlds’ (2000: 2).
Irena’s experience of a return is similar to that of the man she encounters
romantically in Prague. Josef is an émigré living in Denmark, whose wife, now dead,
had urged him to visit his old homeland, once the Soviets had departed (‘“Not going
would be unnatural of you, unjustifiable, even foul,” she said’ – Kundera 2002: 139).
When Josef visits his former friend N in Prague, whom he had not seen for 20 years,
N and his wife ask nothing about his Danish life:
There was a long silence and Josef expected questions: If Denmark really is your
home, what’s your life like there? And with whom? Tell about it! Tell us! Describe
your house! Who’s your wife? Are you happy? Tell us! Tell us! But neither N nor
his wife asked any such question.
(Kundera 2002: 159)
Before following Irena and Josef, who meet and have an affair during their brief return,
we need to appreciate Kundera’s approach to the politics of the identity struggle they
undergo.
Kundera’s attachment to Nietzschean philosophy, which he deployed in his The
Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) notwithstanding, I want to discuss his Ignorance
with reference to David Hume’s philosophical inquiries into the passions. While his The
Unbearable Lightness of Being thinks in a Nietzschean way, Kundera’s Ignorance thinks
in a Humean way. The overlay of passions on the novel’s literary geography complicates
mappings that focus exclusively on national allegiances and summons the Humean
argument that passions direct ideas.
To capture the kind of network that Kundera’s novel proposes, we can extrapolate
from an insight that Gilles Deleuze derives from his reading of Hume on human nature.
In contrast with much of the political theory canon (often drawn, for example, from
the writings of John Locke) in which the social bond within the socio-political order
is ascribed to a contract between ruler and the ruled, Hume’s philosophy offers ‘a radical
change in the practical way the problem of society is posed’ (2005: 46). Given the
Humean insistence that it is ‘affective circumstances’ that guide people’s ideas (because
the ‘principles of passion’ control ideational inclinations), association within the social
domain becomes a matter of modes of partiality (Deleuze 2005: 45). Accordingly,
the problem of the social is to be understood not through the concept of the contract,
which implies that the main political problem is one of translating egotism into sociality,
but in terms of partialities, which makes the problem one of how to stretch the passions
into commitments that extend beyond them, how, as Deleuze puts it, ‘to pass from a
“limited sympathy” to an “extended generosity”’ (2005: 46), for as Hume insists, ‘the
qualities of the mind are selfishness and limited generosity’ (Hume 1978: 494). To the
extent that the extended generosity that justice represents is to develop, ‘it takes its rise
DOES THE NATION-STATE WORK? 283
Such broader issues
about our changing
allegiances are also
considered in Chapters
11 and 12. Chapter 16
considers the similar
complexities of the
identities and allegiances
of colonizer and
colonized.
284 MICHAEL J. SHAPIRO
from human conventions’, that are necessitated by the ‘confin’d generosity of men, along
with the scanty provision nature has made for his wants’ (Hume 1978: 494–95).
The extrapolation I want to apply to Kundera’s narrative locates the problem in a
global rather than merely social space. In this expanded spatial context, the issue becomes
not one of a person’s moderating her/his partialities in relationships with the consociates
of a national society but with potential consociates within alternative national spaces.
Hume did contemplate the problem of extending sympathy across national boun-
daries, noting that ‘we sympathize more with persons contiguous to us, than with
persons remote from us. . . . With our countrymen, than with strangers . . .’ (1978: 581).
However, to appreciate Kundera’s overlay of sensibilities on the dynamic mapping that
exiles have created, we have to recognize a complication that Hume’s notion of
‘selfishness’ fails adequately to register.
The self-consciousness required to be selfish – to be in touch with one’s passions
– is difficult to achieve in a world in which others impose regulative ideals with respect
to what those passions are supposed to be. The disruption to Irena’s hard-won sense
of self as a French citizen with a French ‘structure of feeling’ is a result not of the newly
won Czech independence, which would not by itself have summoned an ambivalence,
but of having to deal not only with a French friend who pressures her to reassume
a former feeling and its attendant national commitment but also of pressure from a
husband of Swedish origin who, ironically, has no such feeling for his ‘native’ country.
Her husband, Gustaf, a committed cosmopolitan, argues that although he has no
nostalgia for his country of birth, she should have some for hers. Similarly, Josef must
BOX 13.2 DAVID HUME
David Hume (1711–76) is recalled as a
philosopher, historian and economist and is
best known for his affiliation with British
empiricism. However Hume’s version of
empiricism is a radical version. Rather than
basing his empiricism on a simple and direct
relationship between sensations and
intelligibility, Hume analysed the principles of
human nature – the passions and associations
– that create the conditions of possibility for a
relationship between what is sensible and what
is intelligible. In so doing, Hume initiated what
would later be the Kantian revolution in
philosophy and its post-Kantian revisions,
which directed attention away from things (the
object world) and to the conditions (formal
and historical) of the subject.
FIGURE 13.10
David Hume, by and published by
David Martin, after portrait by Allan
Ramsay, 1766, National Portrait
Gallery
Chapter 2 has more
to say about cosmo –
politanism.
DOES THE NATION-STATE WORK? 285
deal with his wife’s expectation about how he should feel and behave and, subsequently,
the censorious feelings of his brother and sister-in-law, who had remained during the
Soviet occupation. Certainly there are those who possess what Pico Ayer calls ‘a global
soul’ (2000) or, who, like Salman Rushdie, detest the ‘narrowly defined cultural
frontiers’ implied in the very idea of a ‘homeland’ (1991: 19). But however passionate
cosmopolitans may be about their attachments to multi-cultural urban settings and their
commitment to resist narrow geopolitical allegiance, the emotionally charged
cartography they define looms less large, in terms of both space and affective intensity,
than the one defined by exiles.
CONCLUSION
I began by noting that while the hyphenated term, nation-state, has been the primary
referent of modern political discourse, the focus it attracts leaves many political subjects
in the shadows. It is possible to provide a counter-history – based on particular counter-
memories – to the nation-state oriented story of political modernity. Because the state
sovereignty story, which is the dominant within academic approaches, fails to register
much of the experiences of both citizen subjects and those without recognized polit-
ical qualification, I turn primarily to literatures in which those subjects’ experiences
are articulated. Two dimensions of that turn are important. First, the personae whose
writings are selected are drawn from those whose movements inscribe an experiential
story that challenges the narratives within which the nation-state version of political
subjectivity is developed. Second, the form of the writing, which among other things
registers the identity ambiguities of the authors and their characters, provides a contrast
with the certainties manifested in the identity discourses of the nation-state.
In order to locate the personae who challenge the nation-state story of political
modernity, one must focus on the process by which bodies enter the national societies
that have been mythically represented as formed by a consensual social contract. For
example, émigrés whose territorial statuses have arisen from coercive forces rather than
relatively free choices have different political narratives to offer. In particular, as I point
out in my treatment of Milan Kundera’s novel Ignorance, the struggle of exiles to achieve
self-mastery in the face of conflicting identity pressures provides an exemplary counter-
memory to the abstract narratives of entrenched or immobile citizen-subjects with
unambiguous national allegiances. To place their stories within a socio-political frame,
one must abandon the social contract version of national societies and turn to a version
that can register the situations in which territorial allegiances are in flux, ambiguated,
and productive of changing sentiments toward self and other.
To recover the centrifugal political forces that undermine the mythologies of nation-
state consolidation, one needs to contrast the academic and artistic texts that serve to
reinscribe and/or consolidate nation-state political imaginaries with those writing
events that provide challenges and alternatives, that counter the totalizing story of
political modernity and that have exposed as an illusion the conceit that the nation-
state is unproblematically consolidated.
FURTHER READING
Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel Wallerstein (1991) Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities,
London: Verso.
This collection provides a critical approach to racism, which, influenced by the writings of
the philosopher Louis Althusser and the historian Fernand Braudel, locates the phenomenon
not merely in attitudes but in social relations and structures.
Bhabha, Homi (ed.) (1990) Nation and Narration, New York: Routledge.
This collection on nations and nationalism applies literary tropes in order to show how nations
generate paradoxical allegiances through the narratives within which they locate themselves.
Campbell, David (1998) National Deconstruction, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
This study of the violence in Bosnia refigures and extends Jacques Derrida’s concept of
deconstruction, turning literary tropes into political and ethical critique.
Corrigan, Philip and Derek Sayer (1985) The Great Arch, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
This investigation of English state formation locates the emergence of national allegiance
within a long historical trajectory.
Edkins, Jenny, Véronique Pin-Fat and Michael J. Shapiro (eds) (2004) Sovereign Lives, New York:
Routledge.
This collection treats the geo- and biopolitical aspects of sovereignty at the level of the lives
impacted by sovereign prerogatives and practices.
Giddens, Anthony (1983) The Nation State and Violence, Cambridge: Basil Blackwell.
This is a sociological treatment of the articulation between the development of the nation-
state and the violence of its self-creation.
Lloyd, David and Paul Thomas (1998) Culture and the State, New York: Routledge.
This is a neglected but excellent treatment of the cultural governance perspectives and
practices that have accompanied state formation.
Shapiro, Michael J. (1994) Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject,
New York: Routledge.
This investigation of cultural governance and the neglect of the indigenous subject in the
discourses of the social sciences on nation-building applies aesthetic theory, as it is articulated
in film, music and landscape painting.
Tilly, Charles (1990) Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1990, Cambridge, MA: Basil
Blackwell.
Tilly provides a historical narrative of the role of coercion in state formation.
Walker, R. B. J. and Saul H. Mendlovitz (eds) (1990) Contending Sovereignties, Boulder, CO:
Lynne Rienner.
This collection provides critical, interdisciplinary approaches to sovereignty.
REFERENCES
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Michelle Cliff ’, Literature and Psychology 47, 1–2: 94–108.
Alexie, Sherman (2000) ‘Indian Country’, The New Yorker, March 13.
Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of
Nationalism, London: Verso.
Attali, Jacques (1985) Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Ayer, Pico (2000) The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, New York:
Vintage Books.
286 MICHAEL J. SHAPIRO
Berlant, Lauren (2000) ‘Intimacy: A Special Issue’, in Lauren Berlant (ed.) Intimacy, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Bermingham, Ann (1986) Landscape and Ideology, Berkeley: University of California Press.
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in Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Burgoyne, Robert (1997) Film Nation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Chatterjee, Partha (1993) The Nation and its Fragments, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Cliff, Michelle (1987) No Telephone to Heaven, New York: Dutton.
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Daniels, Stephen (1993) Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England
and the United States, New York: Polity.
Deleuze, Gilles (2000) Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard, Minneapolis: University of
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Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Habermas, Jürgen (1998) ‘The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty
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Nora, Pierre (1989) ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations 26:
7–24.
Rancière, Jacques (1999) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans Julie Rose, Minneapolis:
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Rushdie, Salman (1991) Imaginary Homelands, London: Granta.
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288 MICHAEL J. SHAPIRO
Shapiro, Michael J. (1999) ‘Narrating the Nation, Unwelcoming the Stranger’, in Michael J.
Shapiro, Cinematic Political Thought: Narrating Race, Nation and Gender, New York: New
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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1993) Outside in the Teaching Machine, New York: Routledge.
Tilly, Charles (ed.) (1996) Citizenship, Identity and Social History, New York: Cambridge
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White, Alan (1990) Within Nietzsche’s Labyrinth, New York: Routledge.
For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
http://www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
CHAPTER 14
Is democracy a good idea?
Lucy Taylor
■ The question
DEMOCRACY
■ Illustrative example
DEMOCRACY IN ARGENTINA
■ General responses
ELECTIONS AND EQUALITY
■ Broader issues
WHOSE DEMOCRACY?
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
DEMOCRACY
I am sure that for most of you this seems to be a crazy question – of course democracy
is a good idea! Democracy stands for freedom, equality, fairness and holding political
leaders to account, doesn’t it? Well, you’re right, it does, and these ideals are upheld
as central aspirations by ordinary people right across the world who struggle against
authoritarianism or dictatorships, violence and powerlessness. My aim in this chapter is
not to argue against democracy either, but rather to invite you to think a little more
deeply and critically about what lies behind the idea ‘democracy’. What kind of political
system do we see in our mind’s eye when we say ‘democracy’? Who do we imagine to
be a citizen? Which countries do we think can teach the world about democracy and
which ones need to learn? As you can tell already, there are a lot of questions to ask
and I can’t provide answers for them all. However, learning to ask deeper or different
questions of the world is the purpose of studying in the university and elsewhere, and
of this book. In this spirit, I hope by the end of this chapter to convince you not to be
an anti-democrat but to be a critical democrat.
290 LUCY TAYLOR
These global institutions
are discussed in many
places in the book, but
see particularly Chapter
25 (United Nations), and
Chapters 15 and 19
(World Bank and IMF).
Chapter 27 covers the
relationship between
human rights and
democracy.
The terms ‘agent’ and
‘subject’ are used very
differently in different
chapters of the book.
Sometimes the word
‘subject’ indicates
something positive, as in
Chapter 18 for example.
So, approach these
terms with care.
Not only is democracy a very common political system across the globe, it is the
system which is most emphatically encouraged by a whole range of international
institutions (such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary
Fund (IMF)), key countries (the USA, European countries, Brazil, India) and many
international NGOs (such as Transparency International, Amnesty International, Oxfam)
(Grugel 2002). Official world opinion is very much in favour of democracy, which it
sees as being not only an effective way to govern but a virtuous way to govern (Crick
2002; Held 2006). That is, the label ‘democracy’ is underpinned by what people call
a normative claim (an ethical or moral claim). This notion of moral goodness is closely
connected to the idea that democracy is the political system which best defends human
rights – in which individual humans are most likely to be treated with equality, respect
and care by the state.
Many ordinary people concur with this idea that democracy is a morally better way
to be governed. The words on the banners in Tahrir Square, Egypt or on the placards
outside Aung San Suu Kyi’s house in Burma, or indeed on the Plazas of Buenos Aires
were: Liberty! Human Rights! Justice! Freedom! Equality! Elections Now! Here,
ordinary people are expressing their desire to be treated with fairness, respect, equality
and care by those who make decisions about society (Grugel 2002). They assert the
power of people in society to have a say in their country’s future – and their own. For
many people, democracy is not just about a series of elections, institutions and rules, it
is a way of life based on mutual respect and the capacity to be a political agent (not a
powerless subject). This democratic idealism is a potent political force – but to what
FIGURE 14.1
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton (left) holds hands with Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San
Suu Kyi as they meet at Suu Kyi’s house in Yangon, 2 December 2011. Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun.
http://static.lifeislocal.com.au/multimedia/images/full/1580389
extent can the liberal democracy advocated by the USA and the World Bank really
channel those ideals? Are there other models for a democratic society? Looking behind
the glossy assumptions of liberal democracy, and thinking about different perspectives
on democracy is one of the key aims of this chapter.
We are going to explore democracy through the example of Argentina. I am not
going to explain the institutional set up there – the electoral system, the relationship
between president, congress and the judiciary, the Constitution, etc. There are plenty
of excellent books which explore these issues more generally and others which explore
Argentina’s political institutions (O’Toole 2007; Foweraker et al. 2003). Rather, I want
to focus on two aspects. First, I will show through the example of Argentina some of
the ways in which electoral democracy is embedded in society – its inequalities, norms
and cultural expectations. Second, I want to illustrate the importance of democratic
dynamics outside the electoral sphere, and particularly in social movements and
community organizations. I will draw on three examples in order to make my points.
These are: Peronism (a study of populism and emotion in politics), the Mothers of the
IS DEMOCRACY A GOOD IDEA? 291
The role of social
movements or grass –
roots organizing is
discussed in many other
places in the book, for
example Chapter 4
(environmental
movements); Chapters
18 and 28 (the Occupy
movement); and Chapter
9 (the Arab Spring).
United States of America
Guatemala
El Salvador
Honduras
Nicaragua
Costa Rica
Panama
Colombia
Ecuador
The Caribbean
Brazil
Peru
Bolivia
Paraguay
C
hi
le
Uruguay
Argentina
Venezuela
Mexico
FIGURE 14.2
Latin America. http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/images/maps/latin-america_continent_en
BOX 14.1 DEMOCRACY IN LATIN AMERICA TIMELINE
1492 Colonialism: Conquest of the Americas, native peoples subjected to slavery and violent
oppression; population also decimated by disease. Native peoples rebel repeatedly.
Africans abducted and forcibly transported to work in all aspects of the economy, including
plantations. Europeans (mostly men at first) arrive to hunt for gold, settle land and work in
the colonial bureaucracy.
1810–1820 Nation-building: Wars of independence, borders established and constitutions devised
setting out the relationship between central and provincial government, the balance of
power between presidency, congress and judiciary, and the mechanisms for election of
political leaderships. Limited franchise (eligibility to vote), military involvement in politics,
the importance of popular acclaim.
1850s–1900 Limited inclusion: Liberals and conservatives. Political battles between modernizing, urban-
looking liberals inspired by European models and traditional, rural elites who aimed to
conserve power and peonage. Slavery abolished in Brazil 1888.
1900s–1930s Inclusion: Economic development, urbanization, industrialization, European migration.
Development of socialist, communist and anarchist politics plus trade unionism, anti-
poverty movements and early feminism. Mexican Revolution (1910); rebellions in
Nicaragua (1932); communist military uprising in Brazil (1930); socialist government in
Chile (1932); pro-indigenous socialism in Peru.
1930s–1940s Backlash: Violent suppression of popular movements; military governments and
dictatorships in Central America.
1940s–1950s Populism: Accommodation of popular demands and expansion of the nation-state.
Economic boom, rapid urbanization. Getúlio Vargas as president in Brazil; Hugo Banzer in
Bolivia; Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in Guatemala.
1960s–1970s Rise of communism and socialism: Cuban Revolution 1959; Colombia 1965 Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC)); rise
of Salvador Allende Gossens in Chile; rebellions in Central America (Nicaragua, El
Salvador, Guatemala).
1965–1975 Military dictatorships: Some new (Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Peru) some old (Anastasio
Somoza Debayle in Nicaragua, Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay). Democracy suspended,
human rights violated.
1983–1990 Democratization: Return to civilian rule and electoral politics, human rights issues.
Alternation of power via political parties, anti-corruption drives.
1992–today Indigenous social movements protest against 500 years of colonial oppression.
292 LUCY TAYLOR
The question of the
division of the world into
territorial entities is
discussed in Chapter 11,
and the question of
national identities, and
the problems with this
idea, in Chapters 12
and 13.
Questions of race and
gender are discussed in
Chapter 5 and racialized
exclusion in Chapter 10.
The way in which
racialized exclusion is
rooted in the experience
of colonialism in India is
discussed in Chapter 16.
IS DEMOCRACY A GOOD IDEA? 293
Plaza de Mayo (exploring the role of social movements and the issue of human rights)
and the crisis of representation in 2001 (examining the rejection of representative
democracy and grassroots organizing).
I will look at some of the general responses to the question of democracy in the
second section of the chapter, which examines and questions the way elections are seen
as central and equality assumed. I will then go on to ask deeper, broader questions about
the nature of ‘actually existing’ democracy, asking where the idea came from in time
(history) and space (geography) and what impact the history of thinking about
democracy has on the way that we study democracies today. I will end by returning to
the question of democracy’s ‘goodness’, setting out some ways to start thinking
differently that might help you to ask more critical questions of the democracies which
you study.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
DEMOCRACY IN ARGENTINA
The story of institutional democracy in Latin America falls into two stages. Following
independence in the 1810s and 1820s, the nineteenth century was characterized
by processes of nation-building which involved wars to demarcate territory, the estab –
lishment of political institutions and the generation of national identities (Vanden
and Prevost 2002). This was a struggle about how power was to be organized. The
twentieth century was then characterized by political conflict over popular inclusion and
socio-economic equality – a struggle over who could wield power, and whether popular
or elite interests would be served (Hellinger 2011). For most of the period, democracy
was understood through class politics but from the 1970s feminist demands also
challenged the concentration of power in male hands, and from the 1990s indigenous
and Afro-Latin American demands began to contest dynamics of racialized discrimin –
ation and exclusion. This struggle for inclusion, which sometimes took the form of armed
rebellion, has met with significant resistance, and the history of most countries is
peppered with uprisings, military dictatorships, violence and intense suffering. The
democracies which rule the continent today, incomplete and troubled as they are, are
nevertheless a source of pride for most Latin Americans and have certainly been hard
won (Hellinger 2011).
The story of democracy in Argentina during the twentieth century is similarly
tumultuous, alternating between periods of repression and exclusion – there were no
fewer than five military coups, in 1930, 1943, 1955, 1966, 1976 – and periods of
elections (Rock 1985). Since 1943, electoral politics has pivoted around the Peronist
party, the vehicle for the political ambitions of Juan Perón and, of course, his wife Evita
(Lewis 2001; Romero 2002). Even when the Peronist party was barred from electoral
politics, between 1955 and 1962 and between 1963 and 1972, and Perón was exiled
in Spain from 1955 to 1973, Peronism continued to dictate the terms of political life
through its vast and highly organized trade union movement which disrupted the efforts
of its opposition, the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR), to govern effectively. The activities
of a youthful revolutionary Peronist group, the Montoneros, in the 1960s and 1970s,
and the implosion of the last elected Peronist government from 1973, led the military
FIGURE 14.3
Juan and Evita Perón,
shown in 1950
(Associated Press).
http://isurvived.org/
Pictures_iSurvived-
2/Peron_Juan-Evita_
BIG-FLIP.GIF#
to intervene decisively in 1976, determined to eradicate the Peronist menace which had,
as they saw it, plagued Argentina since 1943 (Romero 2002).
This last military government was extremely repressive and violent, and banned all
political organizations and parties, dissolved Congress, stripped the universities and
stacked the judiciary with supporters. For the military, democracy had brought political
chaos, economic incompetence and a loosening of social morals. For them, the armed
forces were the only agency capable of defending la patria (the motherland). The return
to democracy in 1983 was precipitated by the military’s loss of the Falklands/Malvinas
War in 1982, but was framed by the issue of human rights violations, a perspective which
brought a strong moral agenda to democratization, urging in the words of The National
Commission on the Disappeared (CONADEP) human rights report that ‘never again’
would democracy be usurped in Argentina (Lewis 2001).
Following this brief context, I now want to focus on three elements of Argentine
democracy which help me to illustrate key aspects of democracy as it is lived out and
practised. These are: Peronist populism; human rights and the Madres de la Plaza de
Mayo; and the 2001 crisis of representation and radical alternative forms of democracy.
These will help to demonstrate the importance of the social realm for politics, both as
a political context and as an alternative arena for political activism.
How Peronism works: populism
Peronism is a political movement named after Juan Perón, and sure enough the figure
of Perón and his wife Evita remain the ideological and emotional centre of the party.
The party is a clear example of populism. This is a form of government that combines
electoral democracy – and democratic rhetoric – with a cult of personality (Levitsky
2003).
294 LUCY TAYLOR
Chapter 7 discusses
Max Weber’s notion of
charismatic authority.
Compare Max Weber’s
idea of charismatic
authority as opposed to
legal-rational authority,
which is discussed in
Chapter 7.
What would it take to
challenge gender roles?
Gender roles in the
global economy are
discussed in Chapter 17
and feminist politics in
Chapter 5.
IS DEMOCRACY A GOOD IDEA? 295
Up until the 1940s, Argentina’s large working class had been vociferous and
demanding but, influenced by a strong anarchist movement, it focused on denouncing
the ‘fat-cat’ elite (the ‘oligarchy’) and demanding wage rises, rather than mobilizing
for state power. Perón captured this constituency in the 1940s (James 2000). Using
his charismatic personality, he made them feel important and strong. He lauded the
working class as the true creators of Argentine wealth and denounced the idle upper
classes who lived from the workers’ sweat even while they looked down their noses at
the working man. Once in power in 1943, Perón also won people’s support by improv –
ing their lives (James 2000). He supported higher wages for workers, invested heavily
in housing, hospitals and schools, and built holiday resorts for the working class.
The relationship between Perón and the masses was developed especially via Evita,
who was an equally charismatic speaker. Eva Perón came from a humble background
herself and used her position of power to berate the bone-idle oligarchs in speeches to
millions of workers who felt that she understood their pain – she could represent them
because she was them (Fraser and Navarro 1996). As a woman, Eva Perón also repre –
sented a model for female political action, one which gave women a central place in
politics, but which confirmed traditional gender roles. Juan Perón portrayed himself as
a super-human leader with the vision and understanding to take Argentina to its rightful
position in the global elite (Auyero 2000; James 2000). This built a masculine image
in which a macho capacity to get things done was matched with fatherly wisdom. Evita,
the dutiful wife, declared her unconditional support for him and urged the subordinated
working class to trust in Perón as she did. She pledged, like the mother of the people,
to work tirelessly and selflessly to help the poor and unfortunate in Argen tina. Indeed
she championed the building of orphanages, shelters for single mothers and housing
projects, and she distributed thousands of sewing machines and toys, furniture, houses
and money to the poor who flocked to see her (Fraser and Navarro 1996). By playing
up to these idealized gender roles, Juan and Eva Perón legitimized their powerfulness
and won the hearts of the people, as well as appealing to their rational interests by raising
wages and building houses.
Perón democratized Argentina in two ways: first, he gave ordinary people a sense of
inclusion and importance in the country; second, he distributed national wealth more
evenly, raising people’s standard of living. Politically, however, his legacy is more ambig –
uous. On the one hand he drew thousands of ordinary people into political activity through
rallies and local-level party organization. He took seriously their concerns and dreams,
and made them his priority. He also gave women the right to vote in 1953 and presented
an appealing model of female activism, which drew thousands of women into party politics.
On the other hand, the relationship between Juan Perón and the masses under charismatic
populism was characterized more by a beneficent, fatherly authori tarianism than
democratic equality. Perón asserted that he knew best what the workers needed, he would
provide for them, and all he asked for in return was loyalty. What’s more important, the
workers agreed, worshipping Juan Perón and especially Evita. More over, Evita Perón’s
model of female political action confined women’s activism to supportive tasks at the
grassroots – supporting male candidates by organizing events or leafleting – and did not
translate into a feminist politics. Indeed it served to confirm unequal gender roles, not
challenge them. Thus, while Peronist policies were socially demo cratizing, the political
relationship was based on a willing subordination and inequality.
FIGURE 14.4
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. http://wikis.lib.ncsu.edu/images/b/bf/MothersofPdM ;
http://wikis.lib.ncsu.edu/index.php/Las_Madres_de_la_Plaza_de_Mayo_and_Other_Reactions
Do the Madres confirm
or challenge gender
roles?
Madres de la Plaza de Mayo: social movements and human rights
The military dictatorship of 1976–83 was one of the most brutal in Latin America,
ordering the abduction, murder and disappearance of around 30,000 people whom it
understood to be enemies of the Argentine nation. The climate of fear was so intense
that very few spoke out against the dictatorship, but the most vocal of those were the
human rights groups, especially the Madres [Mothers] de la Plaza de Mayo (Fisher 1989).
The Madres are the mothers of the young people who were ‘disappeared’ by the
military government. They met, and indeed continue to meet, once a week in Buenos
Aires’ central square to walk around its central obelisk in quiet condemnation of the
military government. They also mobilized Argentine and international opinion against
human rights abuses and the military dictatorship (Bosco 2006). They captured the
world’s attention by protesting during the 1978 World Cup and took their international
campaigns to the UN. Indeed, their plight helped to establish human rights at the centre
of the global agenda and they remain an influential force, both in Argentina and the
world. They have an unassailable position of political power, backed by the moral
strength of their identity as mothers, the unspeakable suffering of their children, and
their status as defenders of democracy in Argentina.
296 LUCY TAYLOR
Social movements – a
term used by scholars
who study organizations
which people form to
take political action –
are important in
environmental politics:
see Chapter 4.
The term ‘civil society’ is
used to refer to a part of
society that is separate
from ‘the state’ or
explicitly ‘political’
organizations. Is this
idea of ‘civil society’ as
watchdog similar to the
idea in Chapter 8 of ‘the
media’ as watchdog? Is it
a pluralist view? What
criticisms might be
raised here? Is the media
part of civil society?
Does it make sense to
think of state and civil
society as separate?
IS DEMOCRACY A GOOD IDEA? 297
The Madres’ campaign is linked to the mother/child relationship and draws on
idealized notions of motherhood, known as Marianismo, which is inspired by the Virgin
Mary’s example. This was a powerful moral tool in their armoury and a vital contribution
to the new democracy in Argentina (Navarro 2001). The Madres argued for the moral
strength of democracy by anchoring it in their demand for the right to life, for truth
about what happened to their children and justice: that the rule of law be applied to
the perpetrators of state crimes, those who organized the disappearances. That is, they
set a tone for understanding democracy to be not only a series of elections and institu –
tional mechanisms, but a ‘good’ society – a moral way of life based on equality and
respect.
Their second significant contribution was to reveal the capacity of social
organizations – groups of ordinary people – to change political life. While political parties
were banned and repressed, social movements – especially the human rights movement
– were the beacon around which ordinary people could mobilize, take to the streets
and demand the return to democracy (Eckstein 2001). Paradoxically, the banning of
political parties actually freed up space to allow people to imagine and enact different
ways of organizing, pressing for demands and creating solutions to problems. It was
no coincidence that the feminist movement, indigenous groups, community organ –
izations, and early gay and environmental movements all contributed to the anti-military
campaigns in Argentina and across Latin America. In doing so, they brought new issues
and concerns to a political agenda that had been dominated by class politics, as well as
fresh ways of organizing and new political actors. Social movements politicized ordinary
people at the grassroots of politics, giving them a sense of political agency – a sense
that they could do things politically – training them in political skills such as organization,
public speaking, publicity and negotiation, as well as generating new approaches to
understanding the world. The social movements therefore helped to democratize the
political agenda of the new democracies, opening up the realm of formal politics to
encompass women’s equality, indigenous thinking, green issues and gay rights (Hellinger
2011). In turn, many of these social organizations framed their campaigns in terms of
human rights, a move which deepened and widened the human rights campaigns
themselves.
The Madres themselves were women, mostly housewives, with little political
experience, but they became the emblems and leaders of the anti-military movement.
Once democratization occurred, their insistence that truth and justice be served pushed
the Argentine government to open prosecutions against the junta leaders, urging the
newly elected president Alfonsín to not go back on his word that justice for human
rights would be a priority. This was their third major contribution to democracy: holding
the government and their representatives to account (Navarro 2001). In doing so, they
established the idea and practice that civil society organizations had a vital ‘watchdog’
role to play in democracy, an idea that is now well established in Argentina and across
the region.
The example of the Madres allows us to see that democratic action is not just the
preserve of political parties. Democracy is also served in myriad ways by the development
of social movements. These groups of ordinary people acting as political agents in the
social realm can introduce new ideas, broaden the range of voices heard and hold
politicians to account, not via elections but through on-going protest.
Periods of so-called
financial crisis, and
terms such as inflation
and credit boom, are
discussed in Chapter 18.
298 LUCY TAYLOR
2001: the crisis of representation
The period following the transition to democracy since 1983 has seen plenty of ups
and downs in Argentina’s democratic fortunes, but none has shaken the country so much
as the social explosions of 2001–2. Thousands of people took to the streets of the cities
in protest about the political elites who had led them since 1983 through periods of
hyper-inflation in 1988, a paper-thin, credit-backed boom from 1991 to 1998, and then
crashing impoverishment which saw the middle classes enveloped by a rising tide of
poverty (López Levy 2004).
The key slogan to emerge on the protest banners was ‘que se vayan todos! [get rid
of them all!]’. People felt deceived by their politicians and cut off from the political
debate, unable to raise their concerns and horrified by a political class who seemed
indifferent to their struggles and concerned only with lining their own pockets (Levitsky
and Murillo 2005). The importance of this assessment was not whether it was true,
but that people perceived politicians to be distant, uncaring and self-serving. While
everything has since gone back to normal, it is important to remember that this was a
crisis in which the established systems of capitalism and representative, liberal democracy
very nearly imploded. This was not only because Argentina’s currency was in free fall
and three presidents were rejected in one week, but also because ordinary people found
new ways to ‘do’ the economy, to ‘do’ politics, to ‘do’ democracy.
People created new ways to exchange goods and labour. At first this took the form
of bartering – swapping clothes for surplus food grown in the garden, or plumbing skills
for computer work. As time went on, and especially once the government froze people’s
bank accounts, communities began to invent their own currencies, which could be used
to trade in local shops (López Levy 2004). Another very common response to the lack
of work was for employees to simply take over businesses that had been abandoned in
the crisis to reopen them as cooperatives. In this way, everything from a large ceramics
factory to medical clinics, a sugar refinery and a Buenos Aires hotel were taken over as
workers’ cooperatives (Sitrin 2006). Such economic initiatives involved significant
democratization too. It was common in the workplaces and communities to develop
large, open discussions that used direct democratic decision-making procedures. People
would cram into a community centre or factory floor and debate long and hard about
how to organize their initiative, who should be the leader, how the money should be
divided, how the work should be organized, etc. The same kind of mechanisms were
developed in the many soup kitchens, neighbourhood assemblies, media collectives and
unemployed workers’ movements in which people of all sorts got together to organize
themselves (Sitrin 2006; López Levy 2004). While these organizations were far from
ideally democratic – they featured power struggles, discrimination, political party take-
overs and apathy – they did offer a significant alternative to institutionalized liberal
democracy and shook up – at least for the time – politicians’ complacency about their
role in democracy and decision-making.
The crisis of democracy in 2001 reveals several key points about democracy in
Argentina. First, even though the political and economic system seemed to be imploding,
there was no hint that the military would step in to restore order, as it had done so
many times previously. This signified that the military had been definitively stripped of
their political role, and that, while the political class was vilified and loathed, democracy
Chapter 18 argues the
opposite, namely that
when we identify
something as a crisis
we are likely to call in
‘experts’ to sort it out.
Why do you think the
idea of crisis could
generate such different
responses in different
contexts? Or are they
less different than it
seems?
Is this what British prime
minister David Cameron
meant when he talked
about the ‘Big Society’
in the 2010 UK General
Election?
IS DEMOCRACY A GOOD IDEA? 299
as an ideal remained strong. This tendency – loving democracy, hating politicians – is
a consistent trend in post-transition public opinion polling across the continent, as well
as in Argentina. Second, moments of systemic crisis, when the deep structures of daily
life suddenly become unstable, can create conditions in which ordinary people generate
creative solutions to everyday problems. The state seemed about to fall to pieces, the
economy to be crumbling before their eyes, so people found new ways – and enacted
them – of sustaining their lives. More than that, the way in which people organized
their communities afresh, by-passing the network of state institutions altogether, was
not only effective but also explicitly and fiercely democratic. The open meetings
practised direct democracy, while the cooperative businesses were run by collectives.
This direct democracy was very hard work, not only because it took a lot of time and
thinking, but because people had to unlearn and reinvent the way that their society
worked. It was not surprising, then, that, when the state regained control and capitalism
was reasserted through the free-flow of money, people returned to the familiar way of
life. While a pessimist might see this as a defeat for alternative forms of democracy, this
episode in Argentine history indicates that democracy as a way of life is highly prized
in Argentina and that different ways to do democracy are not only imaginable but
workable too.
GENERAL RESPONSES
ELECTIONS AND EQUALITY
I have approached this discussion of democracy in Argentina by focusing on the
relationship between citizens and decision-makers. This perspective takes seriously the
impact of ordinary people’s political activism and is interested in alternatives to the
conventional institutions and processes of representative democracy. My approach
contrasts to approaches that study its most obvious mechanisms and actors. Textbooks
start with the public face and legal structure of democracy, analysing constitutions, how
elections are organized, and the relationship between the president, the executive
(government), the parliamentarians (usually Congress and Senate) and the judiciary
(courts and judges) (see Held 2006; Inglehart 2009; O’Toole 2007). The way that
these rules of the game are configured significantly influences how it is played, so
comparing the systems is important when deciding which is the most fair.
However, these kinds of approaches look at objective factors – they deal with legal
statutes and the database of votes cast – without worrying about some of the assumptions
that are built into their approach to democracy. Two of the most common assumptions
are: that representative democracy is primarily a question of voting for representatives
following rational deliberation – so social movements and emotions are largely irrelevant;
that all citizens are basically equal – so social inequalities make no difference to your
ability to act politically. As you can see, these assumptions are powerful because they
appeal to our common sense of what democracy is about: choosing leaders, based on
the equality of all. Let’s take them one at a time in this section, which examines the
general responses to the question of democracy. In the next section, on broader issues
raised by this question, I tackle another, more deeply buried assumption: that the best
democracies are to be found in the West – so countries elsewhere should take note of
how things are done there and apply the lessons learned.
Democracy is primarily about elections following rational reflection
Elections are a very important part of organizing a representative liberal democ racy,
but as we have seen from our analysis of democracy in Argentina, there are much broader
ways to think about democratic political practice. Moreover, the electorate is swayed
not only by logical interest maximization – working out by a process of logical rational
reasoning how to get the best deal – but also emotional appeals.
As we have seen, social movements, such as the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, have
been pivotal in Argentine democratic life. Similarly, the new forms of community and
workplace organizing in the wake of the crisis of 2001 demonstrate that democratic
politics can take place not only at the national level and through political parties but
also at the community level and through direct democratic debate. Without the Madres,
the transition to democracy in Argentina would have been far less certain and the military
would have been in a far more powerful position, able to compromise the new
democracy (Bosco 2006). A crucial role for social organizations is to hold governments,
both democratic and authori tarian, to account on behalf of the wider society. In that
sense, the Madres exercised their democratic rights by condemning the military regime
– even when elections were cancelled and political parties were banned – through social
mobilization at home and campaigns in the international realm.
It is through social organizations, moreover, that ideas about democracy have been
expanded to include serious consideration of new rights such as those of women or
native peoples. Such claims build on the idea that democracy is a way of life, not just
a way to make decisions. The Madres understood democracy in the broad sense to be
an ethical way of living which involved respect for others, equality and fairness. The
grassroots democracy initiatives of 2001 went further. They argued that an idea of
representative democracy based just on voting was the problem, not the solution. They
pointed to the lack of accountability between elections and the enormous gulf between
politicians and those they supposedly served, which allowed them to be corrupt and to
act without the agreement of the people. Moreover, when they began organizing for
local currencies or workplace cooperatives, questions of democracy, transparency and
accountability were absolutely central to their endeavours (Sitrin 2006). How they made
the decisions was just as important as what they were. In that sense they too were
profoundly interested in creating institutions and mechanisms that were fair and
promoted equality, and their aspirations have a lot in common with scholars who want
to create the best electoral system. However, those involved in the cooperatives and
community groups went beyond rules to try to democratize the workplace and its
practices, the community and its bonds, as well as the personal relationships that knit
these political sites together.
The Peronist party sought to gain power through elections, so of course voting is
highly relevant. However, I showed how the votes cast were motivated not only by the
rational deduction that a vote for Perón meant higher wages and a welfare state. It was
also motivated by powerful emotions – the sense of belonging in one’s political entity,
the sense of affinity with Evita, the sense of belief in the father-figure of Juan Perón
(Fraser and Navarro 1996). It is about feeling happy with the gendered model of society
being portrayed – a model which makes sense with the daily relationships between man
and wife embedded in the cultural norms of a Catholic country.
300 LUCY TAYLOR
How do you feel about a
notion of democracy that
is limited to casting your
vote every few years?
Do you think someone
in Egypt who had waited
35 years before casting
their vote in the
presidential elections of
2012 (see Chapter 6)
would feel differently?
IS DEMOCRACY A GOOD IDEA? 301
Peronism has always relied on distributing state goods (like jobs, food or medicines)
downwards to its supporters who in return continue to support the party. This is known
as clientelism or patronage politics. People’s support for the party is in some ways rational
(they value privileged access to medicine, for example) but Javier Auyero’s study of a
poor community – Villa 21 in Buenos Aires Province – demonstrates that feelings of
affection, trust, dependency, gratitude and a sincere desire to help can infuse this goods-
for-votes transaction (Auyero 2000). It is through social bonds that votes come, rather
BOX 14.2 HOW POLITICS WORKS AT THE PERONIST GRASSROOTS
The following are quotes drawn from a fascinating study of clientelism (a system of relations of mutual
obligation between client and patron, where the patron is very much in charge) amongst political activists
and their clients who receive material benefits – mostly food, medicine and jobs – from their patrons.
Clientelism: Children’s day . . . is celebrated every year on the first Sunday in August. This year
Councilwoman Matilde [a Peronist municipal representative] and her followers are organizing three
different public gatherings. . . . Adolfo came in the municipal station wagon together with . . . Patón.
Patón is a public employee [who] . . . usually drives the truck that brings drinking water to the Fifth
Road on a daily basis . . . they unload milk bottles, bags full of toys, and two brand new bicycles.
The milk comes from Plan Vida [a government programme]. It is not supposed to be used for political
purposes . . . yet preparing hot chocolate for the children of Paraíso on ‘their day’ is a ‘good cause’
– as Matilde tells me – noble enough to divert public resources to political use. It is 2.00 p.m. when
we return to Matilde’s house after an exhausting day. I am just about to leave when she tells me
‘You see? After what you just saw . . . votes will come. I don’t have to go and look for them . . . votes
will come anyway’
(Auyero 2000: 80–82)
Emotion: the political activists. ‘My passion is the people’ Matilde told me on a hot afternoon . . .
‘I take care of them as if they were my own children’ . . . Both [Matilde and Susana] were precocious
children: early in their lives they were extirpating ‘lice from the hair of the poor’. Both have been
Peronists since birth. Both have known the mayor since birth. Both wear a wristwatch adorned with
the image of Eva Perón.
(Auyero 2000: 120)
Emotion: the recipients of favours. Rosa points out what an ‘excellent person’ Juancito Pisuti [another
local Party worker] is: ‘The way he takes care of people, he is an exceptional human being . . . he
suffers . . . he has a solution for everyone . . . he willingly advises everyone. Many people ask him
for money . . . and he gives them his own money. . . . He is keen to serve. He likes to help people’
(p. 164). . . . ‘I always show up at Matilde’s UB [grassroots party office] out of gratitude or because of
our friendship, they always call me and I go’ Adela says. Her daughter got her a job as a public
employee with the municipality through Matilde. Her husband got his as a garbage collector with the
municipality through a letter of recommendation from Angel, Matilde’s husband.
(Auyero 2000: 152)
FIGURE 14.5
Children pass a community centre painted with images of Eva and Juan Domingo Perón, in Buenos Aires. Photo: Victor R. Caivano/
Associated Press. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/argentina-heading-to-polls/2011/10/21/gIQAAyGd3L_gallery.html#photo=6
It can be argued that
the emphasis on
equality produces a
neglect of difference:
see Chapter 27.
than rational calculation. The party’s grassroots offices (called Unidades Básicas) play
just as much of a social role as a political one, hosting mother and toddler groups,
pensioners’ lunches and weekend barbecue parties as well as party meetings. These are
all activities that happen between elections and do not have an explicit political message.
However, they do have a significant political impact, building support, trust, political
belonging and obligation.
The social realm is absolutely vital for understanding why people vote Peronist,
then, and for exploring the quality of democracy. It helps us to see the role of emotions
as well as interests and to reveal the way that inequality works through the political
system. Those scholars who focus on elections have the benefit of working with an
element which seems to fulfil the democratic desire for equality – every vote counts the
same as others. However, because democracy is more than voting – and because politics
is unavoidably embedded in the social realm – this ideal of equality falls apart as soon
as we step out of the voting booth. The next key point discusses this.
All citizens are equal
One of the reasons why the idea of democracy carries such moral power is because it
aspires to treat all citizens equally. It is this radical principle which underpins a rule of
law which applies equally to everyone, a political principle which states that anyone can
be president, and that everyone’s vote has the same power. However, equality in practice
very seldom lives up to its ideal on paper.
302 LUCY TAYLOR
BOX 14.3 GENDER TENSIONS IN THE DIRECT DEMOCRACY
Two informants discuss the dynamics of gender discrimination in direct democratic scenarios.
‘Most of the popular kitchens were started by a few women who did everything. Eventually they
brought their husbands in to work, since the men were at home all day not doing anything. You know
what happened though? As soon as the men showed a little interest in what was happening in the
popular kitchens, the women instantly shut their mouths and let the men take charge. So we have a
lot of work to do to break with all of this. . . . In some meetings there are more women than men, but
it’s always the men who speak more. . . . There are compañeros [comrades] who’ve fought next to you
on the streets for years, but sometimes they’ll tell you to go wash the dishes. It’s typical. It’s a joke.’
(Sitrin 2006: 211)
‘The issue of machismo is deeply embedded in everything, and that makes it hard to deal with . . . We
never discussed it before, but now we’ve entered a time when we’re talking about a lot of things that
used to be taboo. I think that one of the things that happens is that we prioritize, and machismo is
low on the list.’
(Sitrin 2006: 214)
IS DEMOCRACY A GOOD IDEA? 303
Unsurprisingly, then, Argentine democracy’s record on equality is mixed. On the
one hand, significant advances towards formal equality have been made. The political
franchise was extended to women in 1953, for example, and all citizens over 18 years
of age may vote and stand for election. However, Argentine politics, in common with
the vast majority across the globe, is dominated by powerful men, often from political
dynasties, who are usually white and upper-middle class (Levitsky and Murillo 2005).
The party of the working class – Peronism – has built its identity around their political
inclusion and key concerns like shorter working hours, higher wages, better hospitals.
However, while poorer people have become integrated within the party system at the
local level, the higher up the party hierarchy one goes, the more likely it is that repre –
sentatives will be drawn from the elite. Moreover, while women play an integral role at
the party’s grassroots, they become increasingly scarce the higher up the ladder one
ascends. This is partly because the example of Evita solidified women’s role as partici –
pating yet subordinate political actors in relation to the natural strength of their men.
Peronists who are both working-class and women therefore experience two dimen sions
of discrimination – class and gender – which combine to contain their political activism
to the fascinating, but much less powerful, grassroots politics.
One of the issues that emerged in the community and workplace organizations that
sprang up during the crisis of 2001 was the way that some people’s voices were not
heard in the direct democracy discussions that took place on the factory floors or at
community centres. Those who were lower status tended to speak less or their ideas
were more likely to be ignored. Gender hierarchies not only allow men to take control
of the democratic arena; many women defer to them because they associate politics and
authority with masculinity. These social inequalities – embedded in families, partnerships,
304 LUCY TAYLOR
Questions of race are
also considered in
Chapter 5 in relation to
feminist identity politics,
and Chapter 10 in
relation to immigration
and citizenship.
The exclusion of people
of African descent from
China’s national story is
examined in Chapter 12.
For more on how
colonialism produced
and continues to
produce such exclusions
see Chapter 16.
communities – can significantly compromise the equality of voice, and therefore of action
and ideas, which are essential to an ideal democratic scenario.
A third dynamic of exclusion that we have yet to touch on is race. Race is complex
in Argentina because a reality of racial diversity is hidden behind a myth of whiteness
(Andrews 2004). That is, Argentina portrays itself to the outside world and, importantly,
to itself, as being a European outpost in Latin America. When we look at the country’s
tourist websites we see images of tango and mountains and football, maybe wine and
polo and a capital city that looks like Paris or New York. We do not imagine Argentina
to have African roots, and we do not associate it with indigenous people.
Contrary to established images, Argentina is actually home to a significant number
of indigenous people (Ray 2007; Gordillo and Hirsch 2008). It also has a consider-
able Afro-Argentine community, most of whom are descendants of slaves brought to
Argen tina in the eighteenth century, and who accounted for a third of Argentina’s
population in 1800 (Andrews 2004). However, nineteenth-century elites promoted
the idea of Argentina as a European place. They encouraged mass immigration from
Europe, especially Spain, Italy and Jews escaping the pogroms of Russia and Eastern
Europe, and wrote out indigenous and Afro-Argentines from their nation’s story. This
myth of whiteness has a palpable effect because it makes people with non-European
heritage invisible in the image and practices of the state and on the political stage.
FIGURE 14.6
Afro-Cultural Movement protesters march to the beats of candombé drumming, a quintessential Afro-
Argentine musical form. Many supporters of Afro-Argentine culture these days appear to be white,
although some of them self-identify as Afro-descendants. (Anil Mundra/GlobalPost.) http://www.global
post.com/dispatch/argentina/090810/afro-argentines-assert-identity-culture?page=4
This is why we haven’t touched on race before – because it has been invisible to the
democratic scene of discussion and struggle. Peronism does not recognize race as an
issue for democ racy and race was invisible to the original human rights campaigns.
Moreover, the revival of indigenous organizing prior to and during the crisis of 2001
was understood to address different issues, concerning the right to land and environ –
mental degrad ation, rather than the crisis of capitalism or liberal democracy. In
Argentina, race cannot be imagined as an issue for democracy, because it is politically
invisible. This is exactly why it is a serious problem for democratic equality because race
is made invisible, and a society cannot confront or discuss racism if racial difference
doesn’t appear to exist.
The absence of explicitly Afro-Argentine or indigenous Argentine politicians in
Argentina’s parliament should cause us to ask how racial discrimination works through
the political system. Is it because there are statutes that preclude black participation, as
there were in South Africa during apartheid, for example? No, on paper the rules do
not discriminate against the poor, against women or against indigenous people or Afro-
Argentines. However, those rules are enacted by people operating in a society that is
infused and structured by dynamics of class, gender and race discrimination. Discrimina –
tion means that the de facto exercise of power in a democracy is systematically skewed
against certain sorts of people. Combating that discrimination requires not only that
we have fair and equal legislation, then, but also that we look at how ideas such as sexism
and racism work through society. For me, democratization is not just about living under
an elected government that enacts a non-discriminatory rule of law. It means attempting
to create a democratic society in which the principles of equality and fairness are enacted
not only through the law but also in our human relationships.
BROADER ISSUES
WHOSE DEMOCRACY?
Here I want to explore a key assumption buried deep within conventional under –
standings of democracy – that the best democracies are in the West. To do so, I will
ask where democracy came from and what implications this has for its expansion across
the globe. Again, my aim is not to say that actually-existing democracy is a bad thing,
but rather that democracy comes from a certain place in history (time) and geography
(space). It is not surprising, therefore, that polities (political entities) with different
histories or located in different places might think about or implement democracy
differently (Shapiro and Hacker-Cordón 1999).
Most analyses of democracy start with an assessment of political systems in the USA,
the UK and other European countries. It is through these cases that students are
introduced to parliamentary versus presidential systems, and the importance of the rule
of law, separation of powers and elections for democracy. Because students learn about
Britain, France and the USA first, and because we already assume that these places are
the heartland of democracy, this generates the idea that Western democracies are what
is normal. It is against the yard-stick of Western democratic experience that non-Western
countries are typically measured. This creates two difficulties.
First, if we take political model ‘W’ as our starting point for assessing how
democratic political models are, then model ‘non-W’ is always going to fall short.
IS DEMOCRACY A GOOD IDEA? 305
Chapter 27 makes a
similar argument about
how a particular notion
of human rights comes
from a certain place and
time.
The distinction between
Western and non-
Western is a binary
opposition. The
exclusion of the
non-West is necessary to
produce the idea of the
West, and the binary is
not neutral: one of the
pair (Western) is valued
more highly than the
other. There is a
hierarchy involved.
Other examples of
binary oppositions are
discussed in other
chapters, for example,
man/woman (Chapter
5); rich/poor (Chapter
20); donor/recipient
(Chapter 21).
FIGURE 14.7
In 2010 demonstrations against austerity measures and calling for democracy were taking place in
Greece, the so-called home of European democracy. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_AkJIk-OYfMQ/
TNj4z_6LyBI/AAAAAAAABEE/Lz0lPYn5fDU/s400/mn-greece18_ph_0499569781 ; http://marxist
update.blogspot.com/2010/11/reclaiming-europe-that-gave-birth-to.html
306 LUCY TAYLOR
That is, non-Western polities are systematically disadvantaged by this approach because
being ‘non-W’ is already automatically not-as-good-as-‘W’ and it is defined as lacking
something. Second, this comparison is not value neutral, that is, the label ‘democratic’
has a silent tag ‘good’ attached to it, and the label ‘non-democratic’ is silently tagged
with the word ‘bad’. We say that ‘democracy’ is not just a descriptive word but is infused
with normative content (norms are moral rules). The danger of starting with Western
models as our way of judging democracies is that countries that are not Western are set
up to fail at the task of democracy by a skewed way of thinking. Moreover, they are
judged harshly for it. It becomes logical and clear, then, which countries are understood
to be more advanced, and which need to learn democratic lessons, and from whom.
One of the reasons why this has come about is because democracy as it appears in
textbooks has been devised and written about by scholars in the West – especially Europe
and the USA. It is almost always traced to the Greek city states and their use of direct
democratic methods – open discussion and voting in the market square – to make
decisions about the community (see Crick 2002). This example is certainly inspirational,
but why focus on Ancient Greece? Is this because every other political community at
This form of capitalism
has been termed print
capitalism; see
Chapter 18.
For more on the
particular example of
the British East India
Company see
Chapter 16.
The intellectual debates
that took place at the
time about whether the
Spaniards arriving in
Latin America in the
sixteenth century had the
right to rule over the
indigenous people that
lived there are discussed
in Chapter 21.
The supposed link
between biological
appearance and
personality or other
characteristics is
examined in Chapter 5.
Race is further explored
in Chapter 10.
IS DEMOCRACY A GOOD IDEA? 307
the time was living under violent despotism? Is there no democratic inspiration that
could be drawn from Amazonia? Or China? Or Mecca?
There are many complex reasons why it is a European model for a fair and equal
society that has emerged as the foundation stone of what we might call ‘actually existing
democracy’ today. One of the most important is that the academic world developed in
such a way during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Western universities
came to dominate the production of philosophical and political ideas, right up until the
present time (Mignolo 2005). This was caused not only by the explosion of Renaissance
ideas followed by the intellectual revolutions of the Reformation and Enlightenment
but also by the rapid expansion of capitalism which provided the money to found
universities and fund scholars, students and the printing, and purchase, of books. This
capitalism was driven not only by the agrarian and industrial revolutions inside countries
but also by the pursuit of international economic opportunities driven by colonial
exploitation and imperial trade.
The conquest of the Americas, the setting up of trading companies reaching into
the East, the development of the transatlantic slave trade and the eventual colonization
of Africa, Australasia and the East Indies generated extraordinary riches, which fuelled
European development. More than that, colonialism brought Europe into contact with
very different kinds of societies. This provoked people who were trying to make sense
of the world – philosophers and political thinkers – to generate a wealth of new ideas,
as conventional thinking was shaken up by their encounter with the unknown and, to
their eyes, the strange (Mignolo 2005). For example, it was after reflecting on the Euro –
pean encounter with Native Americans that Hobbes began to understand the nature
and desirability of the state in which he lived, famously characterizing the Native
American ‘state of nature’ as ‘nasty, brutish and short’.
This encounter between colonizer and colonized was, moreover, unequal. The
colonizer took power and asserted his dominance over the colonized territories and
peoples. This military and political conquest over others seemed to confirm the
superiority of the colonizer. It was a short step to go from a reality of superior force to
a supposed superiority of intellect, of culture, of ideas and ways of living. This generated
an extreme confidence amongst Europeans, and their descendants in the colonies, who
came to see the world and its peoples as a resource that they, equipped with their superior
technology, spirituality and organization, could justifiably exploit.
This global patterning of superiority and inferiority was colour-coded. The racialized
hierarchies separated out white Europeans from Africans or indigenous peoples, using
visual markers on people’s bodies – skin colour, hair, eye shape, etc. – as a way to make
assumptions about people (Mignolo 2005). These assumptions linked biological facts
(black/white skin) to assumptions about intelligence, people’s capacity for moral
thought and the value of their cultural philosophies (their world-view) and practices
(how they organized their societies). In this way, global hierarchies between peoples
which emerged alongside colonialism were explained not by history or the force of arms
but in terms of inherent, naturalized, biological differences.
Although colonialism seems to be over and racist ideas are no longer permissible,
the global hierarchies that were established during the colonial period continue to
influence our thinking about who is more advanced than whom, and who should do
the teaching, and who the learning. It is this certainty that the West has got it right
The export of European
ideas of human rights via
the UN is discussed in
Chapter 27, and of
neo-liberal economics
and a good governance
agenda via the World
Bank in Chapters 15, 17
and 20.
The coining of the term
‘Third World’ is
discussed in Chapter 1.
Compare the way in
which human rights are
institutionalized in a
particular form – a form
that derives from
Western images of what
it might mean to be
human – but then that
form is exported to
the rest of the world:
it is universalized
(Chapter 27).
Do liberal assumptions
even make sense for
everyone in so-called
Western countries such
as Europe or the USA?
308 LUCY TAYLOR
which motivates the desire to export Western models of democracy and capitalism,
particularly through Western-dominated agencies such as the United Nations or the
World Bank (Grugel 2002). The UN has promoted its vision of democracy through
its system of Human Rights Resolutions, which seek to define the rights of disadvantaged
groups such as women, children and indigenous people. The World Bank furthers its
democratic priorities by linking favourable economic treatment on global credit and
loans to good governance and anti-corruption initiatives, both of which focus on the
institutions of democracy. We should not judge the World Bank’s concern with public
trans parency too hastily – after all, those who suffer most from high-level corruption
are ordinary people. However, its assumption that corruption is a problem in Africa or
Latin America, but not in the USA or UK, perpetuates a portrayal of Third World
countries as being not only badly run (untrustworthy) and less democratic (morally bad)
but also inferior. Importantly, these hierarchies not only serve to maintain Third World
countries in a low global position, but also serve to keep First World countries in a high
global position from where they can continue to set the agenda and form the rules.
Let me return now to think about the way that ‘actually existing democracy’ is
configured. We saw how contemporary democracy emerged from the cradle of European
thinking and its emerging political systems. This means that when we say ‘democracy’,
actually we are often saying ‘liberal democracy’ (Shapiro and Hacker-Cordón 1999).
Liberal democracy is culturally particular to the history (time) of Europe (space). It has
been devised by people – mostly white, European men from privileged backgrounds –
who have had certain sorts of experiences and lived in certain sorts of societies with
certain sorts of religions, ideas about men and women, notions of race and colonial
power relationships.
I do not mean that we should ignore what they have to say – indeed what they say
isn’t the problem. The problem is that Western academia, which arguably dominates
global thinking, tends to universalize what they say. That is, they hold up a particular
understanding of democracy and say that it is universal. In this way, ideas and suggestions
that came out of a liberal and Western experience of democracy are applied to all kinds
of societies with different cultural beliefs, different priorities, and historical experiences.
Can liberal assumptions make sense for a black woman in Uganda, or a Muslim in
Pakistan, or a shaman in Amazonia?
Let’s think about a few problems that universalizing liberal democracy might cause.
First, if non-liberal political communities try to enact ideas which were developed by
other people first, and in a very different society, then they are: (a) trying to impose
alien ideas which are going to be difficult to reproduce, given that people elsewhere are
different; and, (b) drawn into playing catch up all the time. In this way they are set up
to fail because; as we saw earlier, the yardstick of success against which they are meas –
ured was devised by those who invented the system in the first place (and is always being
refined – just out of their reach). Second, it means that different interpretations of the
same ideal, such as equality or freedom, are seen as inferior, and different ways of
imagining or enacting social relationships are lost. For example, one of liberalism’s key
ideas is that people are primarily individuals, and that freedom means the freedom to
do what one wants without impinging on the same freedom for others. However,
communitarian ways of looking at freedom, such as Confucianism or Native American
understandings, see freedom as deriving from the well-being of the community. Third,
Buddhist, Sikh and
Hindu ideas of
community and freedom
are in many ways similar,
as discussed in Chapter
27, and Christian beliefs
could sit uncomfortably
alongside the secular
liberal idea of
individualism. Muslim
thinking about the
connection between
religion and politics is
discussed in Chapter 6.
FIGURE 14.8
The president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, with indigenous priests during a ritual at the pyramid of Akapana. Efe Agencia.
http://www.eforobolivia.org/blog.php/?p=1473
IS DEMOCRACY A GOOD IDEA? 309
there are some things which liberal approaches hardly recognize but that are a top
priority for non-liberal polities. For example, Western democratic models typically reject
the idea that religious teachings are compatible with institutional democracy: religion
and politics should be kept separate. However, many Muslim societies see this
connection as natural, and see moral teachings as contributing towards building a good,
equal and fair society or a good rule of law.
In Latin America, indigenous peoples have mounted the biggest challenge to the
operation of Europeanized liberal democracy (Hellinger 2011). They begin by pointing
out that the basic foundations of countries – the constitutions, the language, the religion,
the party systems – were devised by the white settler elites who traced their ancestry to
Europe. The political systems of these countries were designed by and for the dominant
– the colonizer – and indeed settlers and their descendants have exclusively occupied the
presidency and dominated political decision-making. For indigenous peoples, then,
democracy has not meant freedom, equality and political agency but exclusion and
inequality (Gordillo and Hirsch 2008). In the last 20 years or so indigenous organ izations
have begun to challenge the assumptions and practices of liberal democracy. The first
indigenous person to hold high office after 500 years of European rule is Evo Morales
from the Aymara ethnic group, who attained the Bolivian presidency in 2005. While many
http://www.eforobolivia.org/blog.php/?p=1473
310 LUCY TAYLOR
indigenous people argue that he has not gone far enough, Morales has devolved signifi –
cant power to the ayllu or traditional community councils and has often promoted the
native view that places the environment (Pachamama, mother earth) at the centre of
human society and political thinking (Hellinger 2011). In this way, Morales is not only
changing the institutional set up of Bolivia’s democracy, he is also attempting to change
its moral compass by situating policy making within a different set of cultural norms. That
is, he is altering not only the structures of democracy but its underlying philosophy.
However, even though these changes better reflect the outlook of the indigenous
population, which accounts for 65 per cent of the population, the settler minority, which
has ruled Bolivia until now, claims that Morales is jeopard izing Bolivia’s democracy
precisely because his reform interprets democracy from a non-liberal perspective.
Not all contributions to rethinking democracy are so fundamental, and Latin Amer –
icans have also found ways to enhance democracy within the liberal worldview. Ideas
that have taken off in Latin America – and have spread across the world – include creating
parliamentary quotas for women. Begun in Argentina in 1994, this institutional mechan –
ism places the country high in the world rankings for gender equality in parliament,
especially in comparison to the UK and USA. Another initiative from Latin America,
begun in Brazil in 1989, is participatory budgeting (Hellinger 2011). Here, ordinary
people in a community get together to decide how to spend their community’s budget
for the year through debate, deliberation and voting. Latin Americans value democracy
as an ideal very highly. Perhaps it was (and is) the very experience of inequality, violence
and injustice which makes Latin Americans such strong advocates of democracy’s ideals
like freedom of speech and thought, fair-dealing from the state, peaceful social
relationships or equality. In my view, if we imagine that people who have lived through
violent authoritarianism have nothing to contribute to devising better, fairer political
systems, then we are overlooking a resource of experience and ideas that could enrich
democracy for all. Moreover, imagining that liberalism is the only way to enact
democracy restricts our understanding of democracy’s ideals and limits our political
imagination and the possibility of generating fairer ways of organizing society.
CONCLUSION
Is democracy a good idea, then? In the end, for me, the answer to the question is yes.
I think that democracy seeks to enact political ideals that I find crucial and that are
shared by a wide range of cultures and societies. However, I think that we need to
democratize our understanding of democracy.
I have argued that one of the key problems with what we call democracy is the way
that it has been hitched to the political systems of powerful countries, wrapped up
in a moral lesson about the way that societies ought to be. This way of thinking links a
descriptive term to a hidden value judgement (democracy = good, non-democracy = bad).
These value judgements are all the more powerful because they are naturalized and
invisible. One of the things that we can do when we are thinking about democracy, then, is
to make these value judgements visible and problematize them. This helps to unsettle our
easy assumptions and urges us to look afresh at the situation. We might ask ourselves:
what is undemocratic about the UK or the UN? What is democratic about Cuba or
the Arab League? That doesn’t mean that we have to turn around and reject liberal
Indigenous thinking
about the environment is
discussed in Chapter 3.
Chapter 6 shows this
generation of loyalties in
relation to religious
movement.
IS DEMOCRACY A GOOD IDEA? 311
democracy or embrace one-party states – far from it. What it might do, though, is reveal
different priorities. We might not agree with the Cuban government that free access to
healthcare is more important than political pluralism, but stopping to consider the options
might make us think again about the importance of health in a very poor society.
Another important issue to emerge, especially from the illustrative example of
Argentina, is the importance of the social realm. The discussion of Peronism showed
how important the social realm was for the generation of political loyalties, obligations
and emotional attachments. In addition, the subtle yet effective working of discrim –
ination within a supposedly democratic context was revealed. One of the things that we
can ask, then, is not only how fair and equal are the democracy’s rules but also, how
democratic are the political relationships that happen below, around and alongside these
mechanisms? In order to do this, we need to anchor our analysis of democracy in real
places, taking into consideration the historical, economic and cultural context in which
the ideals of equality, fairness and freedom are understood. This means not only asking
‘How does democracy work in the everyday world?’ but also recognizing that ‘freedom’
in one place might have very different meanings than ‘freedom’ in another.
More than that, though, the Argentine case revealed that it is the social realm that
has been the cradle of democracy, not the formal political realm. It was social mobiliza –
tion that pushed for the return to democracy and developed the human rights agenda.
It was social organizations that brought new issues – gender, race – and new voices to
the political agenda, and developed new ways of doing democracy or imagining the
economy. If we want to look for ways to broaden or deepen democracy, then, we should look
to the social realm and imagine democracy as not just a way to choose decision-makers but
a way of life.
I have tried to demonstrate that the answer to the question ‘Is democracy a good
idea?’ is not straightforward – indeed that it is a highly politicized question. There is
no one way to be democratic, and in my view a plurality of ideas, voices and cultural
understandings can enrich all our democracies, even those that are longest established.
For me, asking deeper and different questions about the way in which we organize our
lives, our democracies, and our global relationships is a vital task for all students and
scholars, and promoting democracy in thought is a vital task for us all.
FURTHER READING
If you want to do some reading on democracy and its different variations, then David Held’s
Models of Democracy (2006) is a great place to start – it is clear and demonstrates the different
ways that Western political philosophy theorizes democracy. However, like very many other
democratic theorists, Held writes from a Western-centric perspective. To raise some critical ideas,
have a look at Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón’s edited collection Democracy’s Values
(1999) as well as Jean Grugel’s book Democratization (2002) which places a key emphasis on
social movements and citizen participation. David Potter, David Goldblatt, Margaret Kiloh and
and Paul Lewis’ edited textbook Democratization (1997) offers insights on democracy from around
the world. If you are interested in exploring contemporary democracy in Latin America, have a
look at Hellinger’s new textbook Comparative Politics of Latin America (2011) – a comprehensive
and accessible text which reads Latin American politics through the struggle for democracy.
Another excellent textbook is Vanden and Prevost’s Politics of Latin America: the Power Game
which has very useful country case-study chapters. Finally, if you are interested in Argentine politics,
then there are two good histories by Lewis (2001) and Romero (2002). For a riveting insight
into Evita Perón, see Fraser and Navarro’s biography (1996), while López Levy’s short yet fact-
filled and inspiring book We Are Millions (2004) charts the events of the 2001 crisis. The Mothers
of the Plaza de Mayo have attracted a lot of academic attention over the years, but Navarro’s
chapter (2001) is an insightful analysis of their politicization of motherhood. Little as yet has
been written (in English) about indigenous or Afro-Argentine experience. However, Gordillo and
Hirsch’s journal article (2008) is a useful overview of indigenous exclusion in Argentina and
introduces a special issue of the journal on Native Argentines; and Andrews’ book Afro-Latin
America (2004) draws often and particularly on the Argentine experience.
WEBSITES
http://www.buenosairesherald.com/
Buenos Aires Herald: this daily newspaper has been publishing in English since 1876 and is
a fantastic resource for news, politics, economy, sport, etc. The major Spanish language
newspapers are La Nación (http://www.lanacion.com.ar/) and Clarín (http://www.
clarin.com/).
Evita Perón Foundation: a very pro-Evita website but nevertheless filled with fascinating
photos, histories and insights.
http://www.iwgia.org/regions/latin-america/argentina
IWGIA, International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs: founded in 1968 by academics,
this is an international human rights organization which supports indigenous peoples’
struggle for human rights, self-determination, right to territory, control of land and resources,
cultural integrity, and the right to development.
http://www.quotaproject.org/
International IDEA Quota Project: electoral gender quotas, which are widespread in Latin
America and were developed first in Argentina in 1994, are the focus of this project. Check
out which countries have the most women parliamentarians and which the least – you might
be surprised! How do you think the UK or USA fare?
http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/argentina/
LANIC (Latin American Network Information Center): a fantastic portal for sources of
information on Latin American politics, culture economy, etc. Some links are in Spanish.
http://www.latinobarometro.org/latino/latinobarometro.jsp
Latinobarómetro: an ongoing and highly respected public opinion survey which involves some
19,000 interviews in eighteen Latin American countries. It is particularly focused on issues
of democracy and grew out of the democratization process in Chile. A fantastic resource,
some of which is free.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/
This on-line news magazine presents news analysis, debates and blogs about the world. It
aims to be serious, but accessible and original, and publishes thought-provoking pieces by
journalists, academics and experts on the topic of democracy.
WOLA (Washington Office on Latin America): an organization that promotes human rights,
democracy, and social justice by working with partners in Latin America and the Caribbean
to shape policies in the United States and abroad: includes reports, podcasts and interviews
with Latin American pro-democracy activists.
REFERENCES
Andrews, George Reid (2004) Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
312 LUCY TAYLOR
IS DEMOCRACY A GOOD IDEA? 313
Auyero, Javier (2000) Poor People’s Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bosco, Fernando J. (2006) ‘The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Three Decades of Human Rights’
Activism: Embeddedness, Emotions, and Social Movements’, Annals of the Association of
American Geographers, 96, 2: 342–65.
Crick, Bernard (2002) Democracy: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Eckstein, Susan (2001) Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Fisher, Jo (1989) Mothers of the Disappeared, London: South End Press.
Foweraker, Joe, Landman, Todd and Harvey, Neil (2003) Governing Latin America, Oxford:
Polity Press.
Fraser, Nicholas and Navarro, Marysa (1996) Evita: The Real Life of Eva Perón, New York: W.
W. Norton.
Gordillo, Gastón and Hirsch, Silvia (2008) ‘Indigenous Struggles and Contested Identities in
Argentina Histories of Invisibilization and Reemergence’, Journal of Latin American and
Caribbean Anthropology, 8, 3: 4–30.
Grugel, Jean (2002) Democratization: a Critical Introduction, Houndmills: Palgrave Press.
Held, David (2006) Models of Democracy, Oxford: Polity Press.
Hellinger, Daniel (2011) Comparative Politics of Latin America: Democracy at Last?, New York:
Routledge.
Inglehart, Ronald (2009) Democratization, Oxford: Open University Press.
James, Daniel (2000) Doña Maria’s Story: Life, History, Memory and Political Identity, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Levitsky, Steven (2003) Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism
in Comparative Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levitsky Steven and Murillo, María Victoria (2005) Argentine Democracy: The Politics of
Institutional Weakness, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press.
Lewis, Daniel K. (2001) The History of Argentina, Houndmills: Palgrave Press.
López Levy, Marcela (2004) We Are Millions: Neo-liberalism and New Forms of Political Action
in Argentina, London: Latin America Bureau.
O’Toole, Gavin (2007) Politics Latin America, Harlow: Pearson.
Mignolo, Walter (2005) The Idea of Latin America, Oxford: Blackwell.
Navarro, Marysa (2001) ‘The Personal Is Political: Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo’, in Susan
Eckstein (ed.) Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Potter, David, Goldblatt, David, Kiloh, Margaret and Lewis, Paul (1997) Democratization, Polity.
Ray, Leslie (2007) Language of the Land: The Mapuche in Argentina and Chile, Copenhagen:
IWGIA.
Rock, David (1985) Argentina, 1516–1987: From Spanish Colonization to the Falklands War and
Alfonsín, London: I. B. Tauris.
Romero, Luis Alberto (2002) A History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century, Pennsylvania: Penn
State Press.
Shapiro, Ian and Hacker-Cordón, Casiano (1999) Democracy’s Values, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Sitrin, Marina (2006) Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina, Edinburgh: A. K. Press.
Vanden, Harry and Prevost, Gary (2002) Politics of Latin America: The Power Game, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
http://www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
Chapter 15
Do colonialism and slavery belong
to the past?
Kate Manzo
■ The question
SLAVERY: ABOLITION AND CONTINUATION
■ Illustrative example
COLONIALISM AND CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT IN
IVORY COAST
■ General responses
THE EFFECTS OF ADJUSTMENT:
DEPROLETARIANISATION AND MODERN SLAVERY
■ Broader issues
IS TODAY’S WORLD POSTCOLONIAL OR NEO-
COLONIAL?
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
SLAVERY: ABOLITION AND CONTINUATION
To what extent does the global politics of development remain influenced by colonial
practices and power relations? Colonialism has been defined as ‘the direct political
control of a people by a foreign state’ (Bernstein et al. 1992: 168), as ‘the control by
one group over another inhabiting a separate territory’ (De Alva 1995: 262), and as
‘an empire that was developed for settlement by individual communities or for
commercial purposes’ (Young 2001: 16). Colonialism therefore implies some degree
of foreign command and political control, whether or not settlers are
present. Two significant aspects of the colonialism of old were slavery in
Africa and the establishment of a global trading network controlled by
European powers and their various agents. The official worldwide demise
How colonialism works
in practice is explained in
Chapter 16.
UNITED STATES
NE
W
EN
GL
AN
D
BRAZIL
A T L A N T I C
WEST INDIES
PUERTO
RICO
M
O
R
O
C
C
O
S L A V E S
CO
LO
NI
AL
PR
OD
UC
TS
M
A
N
U
FA
C
TU
R
ED
G
O
OD
S
ANGOLA
SLAVE
COAST
GOLD
COA
ST
Timbuktu
SPAIN
PORTUGAL
BRITAIN
Liverpool
Bristol London
La Havre
FRANCE
New York
Bermuda
SU
RIN
AM
DE
ME
RA
RA
Barbados
St Lucia
Trinidad
Antigua
St. Vincent
Bahama
Islands
New
Orleans
Annapolis
Jamaica
SPANISH AMERICA
GULF OF GUINEA
CUBA
Kingston
FIGURE 15.1
The global trade in slaves. http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/distance_arc/images/triangular ;
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/distance_arc/locke/locke-slavery-lec.html
DOES COLONIALISM BELONG TO THE PAST? 315
of both these aspects is signalled rhetorically by two key concepts, namely abolition and
national development. But the reality behind the rhetoric in contemporary West Africa
suggests that today’s world is not postcolonial in any meaningful sense.
Considering slavery first, the British Parliament’s ratification of the Act for the
Abolition of the Slave Trade in March 1807 marked the beginning of the end of
the transatlantic trade in slaves from Africa to the British colonies. Some years were to
pass before official recognition that – in the words of then home secretary Sir Robert
Peel – ‘the abominations of the slave system could not be tolerated much longer’ (Peel
1833: 1). The Slavery Abolition Act of May 1833 brought an immediate end to the
legal principle of property in man but it did not (as Peel himself noted in an article in
The Times) immediately eliminate slave labour. In an effort to reconcile the competing
interests of slaveholders and abolitionists, the Act made provision for the slave’s eventual
For a discussion of the
relation between law and
politics see Chapter 25.
emancipation ‘in the course of 12 years by the purchase of his freedom from the fruits
of his own exertions’ (Peel 1833: 2). In the meantime, all existing slaves were required
to register as ‘apprenticed labourers’ and continue to work for their masters.
Subsequent international conventions are a sure sign of the partial success of
such early abolitionist measures. The League of Nations’ Slavery Convention of 1926;
the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and the Rome
Final Act of 1998 represent notable efforts to both define slavery and eradicate it. More
recently, human rights campaigners and organisations (such as Anti-Slavery Inter –
national) have taken the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade as an
opportunity to raise awareness of all forms of slavery, both historical and contemporary.
These ongoing movements for change demonstrate the need to think in terms of
abolitionism as a process rather than abolition as a finished achievement. Furthermore,
they show that the major legacy of abolitionism is not the elimination of slavery but
the illegality of the principle of ‘property in man’. Slavery is now illegal everywhere
because ‘freedom from slavery has been defined in international law as a fundamental
human right’ (Bales and Robbins 2001: 18).
The most obvious consequences of the international outlawing of slavery are
concealment and official denial. In his classic analysis of the ‘new’ or modern version
of slavery that is defined by its very illegality, Bales (1999: 8) notes that ‘even when
shown photographs and affidavits, nations’ officials deny its existence’. Slavery is often
redefined as something else, such as ‘indentured labour’ or (even more benign) as ‘child
fostering’. The inevitable outcome of all this is uncertainty over numbers and conceptual
confusion. For example, whereas Anti-Slavery International (2007) puts the number of
contemporary slaves in the world at 12 million, the ‘best estimate’ of Bales (1999: 8)
is 27 million – a figure considerably lower, he suggests, ‘than the estimates put forward
by some activists, who give a range as high as 200 million’.
The current global context of secrecy, denial, uncertainty and confusion compels
the question of what the concept of slavery means if not legal ownership of human beings
or ‘property in man.’ A useful starting point is the book Disposable People, which defines
slavery as ‘the total control of one person by another for the purpose of economic
exploitation’ (Bales 1999: 6). In this and other writings, Bales consistently argues that
while slavery has changed in form over time it has clearly not disappeared. Its defining
characteristics – and the keys to understanding such contemporary forms of the
phenomenon as debt bondage and enforced prostitution – are still violence, control
and economic exploitation (Bales and Robbins 2001).
As useful as it is in distinguishing the ‘old’ from the ‘new’ slavery, Bales’ work does
not highlight key distinctions between slavery as a type of forced labour and trafficking
(by agents, recruiters and transporters) as a means to that end (Manzo 2005). Nor does
Bales address the differences between slavery and other forms of labour exploitation.
Varying systems of production and labour regimes clearly co-exist now, just as they did
in the colonies of old. If all forms of violence, control and economic exploitation
are labelled as slavery then the millions of illegal and badly-paid migrant workers in the
world necessarily belong in that category. They don’t, however, if we maintain a defini –
tion of slavery as unpaid forced labour. This definition is a useful synthesis of insights
drawn from two bodies of work. One is Marxist theory, notably its important distinction
316 KATE MANZO
See the discussion of
forms of labour in the
global political economy
in Chapter 17.
FIGURE 15.2
Children in a police vehicle after being apprehended at the border on their way out of Nigeria to the
Republic of Benin. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images. http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-
images/Environment/Pix/columnists/2010/12/3/1291380806013/MDG-International-Day-for-007 ;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters+technology/apple
DOES COLONIALISM BELONG TO THE PAST? 317
between slavery as a mode of labour exploitation typified by unpaid work and
proletarianisation as a system of labour exploitation typified by wage labour. The other
is theories of slavery, which generally emphasise forced labour (through violence and
coercion) as the basis of the master–slave relationship.
Even if slavery is defined relatively narrowly as unpaid forced labour, it is still possible
to find evidence of its existence. A case in point is the former French colony of Côte
d’Ivoire (known also by its English name of Ivory Coast). Thanks to the efforts of
investigative journalism in Britain and the United States, the West African country found
itself at the turn of the twenty-first century (along with multinational corporations such
as Cadbury and Mars) at the centre of the so-called chocolate slavery debate.
There may be millions of slaves globally, but it was the widespread references to
15,000 trafficked children from Mali working without payment on Ivorian cocoa farms
that helped turn a regional African phenomenon into a matter of international concern.
Chapter 19 examines the
expansion of the global
proletariat.
Migration across borders
can be forced, like child
trafficking, or voluntary.
For a discussion of
movements of people
across the US–Mexico
border see Chapter 10.
That is because the enslavement of trafficked children (who are defined in international
law as persons under the age of 18 years) constitutes a triple abuse of international human
rights conventions and protocols. Violated along with the fundamental human right to
freedom from enslavement are the human right to freedom from trafficking and the
child’s right to freedom from labour.
In West Africa as elsewhere, legal enforcement of prohibition is the other side of
the coin of official ignorance and denial of contemporary slavery. Chronicles of the
experiences of emancipated young people exist thanks to the efforts of the Malian
government (among others) to liberate and repatriate child slaves. The oral testimonies
of those typically enticed away with false promises and then held in place by violence
and threats will not settle the question of exact numbers. But these stories of entrapment
into unpaid forced labour are nonetheless important in offering compelling evidence
that slavery (as I’ve defined it) actually exists in Ivory Coast.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
COLONIALISM AND CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT IN
IVORY COAST
Child slavery in Ivory Coast is best understood in a wider context – in relation to the
effects of global capitalist development on the West African region.
The story of modern slavery in Ivory Coast (which became a colony of France in
1893) must begin in the early twentieth century – with an understanding of what Amin
(1973) calls the outward-directed economic development of French West Africa. That
term captures in shorthand the three key features of the colonial political economy that
still epitomise the region today:
1 an economic growth pattern marked by heavy dependence on the export of a
handful of primary products;
2 a forced labour system for the production of agricultural commodities; and last but
not least,
3 a global supply chain controlled all the way along by colonial companies, traders,
intermediaries and middlemen.
Colonial production and unequal exchange
The name Ivory Coast derives from a profitable international trade in ivory during the
seventeenth century. That trade was virtually over by the beginning of the subsequent
century, however, thanks to the resulting decimation of the elephant population. It
therefore wasn’t until after the subsequent push inland in the mid-nineteenth century
that France began to establish a firm foothold in the West African colony.
Here as elsewhere, the driving force behind colonial settlement was the desire for
economic exploitation, notably the promise of fertile environments for cash crop
production (i.e. production of agricultural commodities for sale rather than consumption
or use). By the early twentieth century, the principal cash crops in the southern forest
zones of Ivory Coast were coffee and cocoa, whereas in the northern savannas the main
cash crop was cotton.
318 KATE MANZO
For a detailed discussion
of the economic impact
of colonialism on
India, and indeed on
Britain, and a discussion
of various forms of
colonialism, see
Chapter 16.
DOES COLONIALISM BELONG TO THE PAST? 319
Cotton was already in production for sale to local artisans before the arrival of
colonial powers (Bassett 2001). However, the intervention of the French Textile Devel –
op ment Company (Compagnie Française de Developpement des Textiles – CFDT)
marked the onset of a classically colonial pattern of unequal and uneven exchange. A
raw material of relatively low value produced in the colonies was exchanged for finished
manufactures (in this case textile goods) produced in the metropolis. Furthermore, the
entire international supply chain was controlled by an integrated network of colonial
operators:
The terms on which this cotton was exchanged reflected the manner in which
production was organised: the private company [i.e. CFDT] responsible for cotton
production in the colonies was a subsidiary of the sole metropolitan buyer of French
West African cotton. At the same time, the sale of manufactured textile goods to
the colonies was the responsibility of large trading companies affiliated to the
metropolitan textile industry. These companies enjoyed exclusive rights to the
French West African market, protected by trade restrictions debarring all but French
textile products.
(Campbell 1975: 37)
International boundary
Province boundary
National capital
Province capital
0 100 200
0 100 200
Miles
Km
Rivers
Cote d’Ivoire
COTE D’IVOIRE
Gulf of Guinea
GHANA
MALI
BURKINA
FASO
SIERRA
LEONE
GUINEA
LIBERIA
Yamoussoukro
Abidjan
Bouaka
Korhaga
Man
This map is subject to the boundaries found at
www.smartraveller.gov.au/zwiki/images/regions/maps/jpeg/Ivory_Coast FIGURE 15.3
Map of Côte d’Ivoire
As in neighbouring Ghana under the British, the basic structure of colonial
cultivation in Ivory Coast was the plantation economy. From 1912 (when cocoa
became a cash crop) until the end of World War II, production by Africans was doubly
enforced. Those with access to land were compelled to cultivate cocoa by colonial
authorities while, at the same time, French planters were guaranteed a steady supply of
workers via a system of labour conscription.
The French abolition of the forced labour system in 1945 marked the onset of
a series of changes. That system was abolished thanks to the collective efforts of the
20,000 indigenous planters who came together in 1944 to form the African Agricultural
Union.
Post-independence economic development
Ivory Coast was one of many African states to achieve formal political independence in
1960. According to Amin (1973: 50), the abolition of forced labour was a catalyst for
the plantation-based agricultural development to follow. Agriculture was not the only
aspect of post-independence development, however. Infrastructure (roads, railways and
ports) and import substitution industrialisation (i.e. the government policy of replacing
imports with domestically-produced goods) to support the development of national
manufacturing (such as textile mills and food-processing plants) were also central to
the new government’s strategy for national development. But with formal political power
in the hands of the landed plantation-based class, post-independence development not
surprisingly entailed a focus on agricultural growth (Campbell 1975: 37).
Ivorian economic growth was successfully achieved in the first decade after
independence via policies of agricultural expansion and diversification. Production
rose for all crops – everything from domestically-consumed yams, plantains and manioc
to the exported commodities of coffee, cocoa, bananas and pineapples. Another
320 KATE MANZO
Compare this to the
changes in Indian
manufacturing under
British rule described in
the next chapter.
BOX 15.1 FELIX HOUPHOUET-BOIGNY
Among those leading the fight for the abolition of forced
labour and the rights of African planters was Felix
Houphouet-Boigny. A qualified physician from a wealthy
family of planters, Houphouet-Boigny held political posts
in French ministries prior to Ivorian independence. An
ardent anti-communist, he was commonly known in the
West as the ‘Sage of Africa’ or the ‘Grand Old Man of
Africa’. He was the country’s president from
independence in 1960 until his death in 1993.
FIGURE 15.4
Felix Houphouet-Boigny.
Courtesy of Célestin
Mbenti Nkoudou
DOES COLONIALISM BELONG TO THE PAST? 321
significant earner was wood, exports of which ‘rose from a 1950 figure of 90,000 tons
to 1,250,000 tons in 1965’ (Amin 1973: 52).
Despite (or indeed because of) such changes, economic development remained
outward-directed. Increases in food production failed to achieve self-sufficiency. The
food deficit actually worsened, leading to greater dependence on grain and rice
imports (Amin 1973: 52). Added to that, the development of Ivory Coast was still based
mainly on agricultural exports, with expansion and diversification relying heavily on
external factors of production in the form of foreign investment, imported technology,
and an inflow of immigrant labour from the West African region (Amin 1973: 44; Crook
1990: 651).
Last but not least, the guiding official principle of cooperation with France in all
fields only cemented the pre-existing power of French companies, managers, advisers
and traders. To return to the cotton example, those who had once produced and
marketed raw cotton continue to do so: ‘the large export-import houses affiliated with
French industry maintained sole access to the Ivorian market by virtue of a quota system,
in force until February 1969, which required special licenses for any textile products
from sources other than France’ (Campbell 1975: 38). In sum, the entire supply chain
of unequal and uneven exchange remained immediately after independence in the hands
of the same controlling interests as before.
The politics of last resort: development crises and structural
adjustment
Before turning to the specific factors responsible for the appearance of modern slavery
in Ivory Coast, it’s necessary to consider the internal benefits of outward-directed
economic development. Which domestic forces within Ivory Coast, in other words,
might have profited from the pattern of development described in the previous section?
At least until 1981, when the first crisis of development became impossible to ignore,
the internal benefits to growth went disproportionately to ‘the original power elite’ in
control of the Ivorian state (Crook 1990: 651). It wasn’t only that a development model
founded on agricultural growth was bound to generate capital for landowners. It was
also that the wealth generated from state-led industrial development, i.e. the combination
of import-substitution policy and direct public investment in domestic manufacturing,
enabled the new ruling elite to consolidate its political position. The key institutions, in
this regard, were not only the government and civil service but also an expanding
machinery of economic administration and control, notably the agricultural extension
agency, the Ministry of Agriculture and the crop-marketing board (Crook 1990).
The Ivorian economy grew at an average rate of 7.2 per cent a year from inde –
pendence in 1960 to 1981 (Ridler 1993: 301). For the Houphouet-Boigny regime,
those decades of spectacular economic growth no doubt served the dual purpose
of political and economic stability. But the limits of the Ivorian economic ‘miracle’ were
already apparent to some well before the combined effects of a series of pressures ‘finally
delivered Côte d’Ivoire into the hands of the international bailiffs or, as they are quaintly
called in development jargon, the “donor community”’ (Crook 1990: 649).
Samir Amin argued in the early 1970s that the writing was already on the wall for
an economic development model based on three limiting factors. One was the dual
It is interesting to read
this account of economic
development alongside
the account of changes
in the global political
economy in Chapter 17.
See also discussions of
global inequality and
poverty in Chapters 19
and 20.
What does the use of the
term ‘crisis’ do? Often it
signals or legitimises the
use of emergency
measures, decided not
democratically but by
so-called experts. This is
discussed in Chapter 18.
Note that economic
growth does not
necessarily improve
everyone’s wealth: see
Chapters 19 and 20.
dependence of export-oriented agriculture on paid foreign labour (for production) and
foreign markets for cash crops. A second was the dependence of import-substitution
industries on domestic consumption – the growth of which was severely limited
by restrictions in income. And last but not least – most damaging of all – was the method
of financing development through foreign capital and investment. Thanks to high rates
of investment return (a pattern of capital repatriation reminiscent of the colonial
period), Ivory Coast had already passed ‘from the stage of development, characterised
by a net inflow of foreign capital, to that of exploitation, characterised by a reversal in
the balance of flows and an increasing preponderance of re-exported profits’ (Amin
1973: 56).
The subsequent crisis of development has been blamed in part on political
interference in markets, notably the channelling of payments to farmers for cash crops
through the Caisse de stabilisation or crop marketing board (see Crook 1990: 659; also
Ridler 1993: 302). As implied by its French name, the basic purpose of the Caisse was
price stabilisation. Instead of exposing traders and farmers to free market forces, the
Ivorian government operated a national system of guaranteed purchase and fixed
producer prices. This system was a double-edged sword, for while it safeguarded
livelihoods in periods of slump, it paid sub-market prices in periods of boom. The system
was thus paradoxical for farmers and traders, as it benefited them most when market
prices were low. The government, on the other hand, clearly benefited from the ‘good
years’, when ‘important elements of the nation’s budget for expansion and investment
were funded by the Caisse surpluses’ (Crook 1990: 659).
What finally brought matters to a head was not development policy as such but a
series of external ‘shocks’. The most damaging single factor was the international drop
in commodity prices that followed the short-lived boom of the mid-1970s. Despite the
efforts to diversify agriculture, Ivory Coast still depended for the bulk of its export
earnings on cocoa and coffee. The loss of foreign exchange earnings meant that terms
322 KATE MANZO
Note that this argument
shows a liberal mindset:
according to liberal
thought if only markets
operated freely,
development would
automatically occur.
See Chapter 20.
1.70
1.50
1.30
Industrial
revolution/
steam power
Rise of electric
power and
communications
WWI
War of
1812
Post
Civil War
Illiquidity/
contradiction of
money and
credit
Great depression
Vietnam and
Cold War
Rise of the
service economy
in the OECD
Post WWII
1.10
0.90
0.70
0.50
18
01
18
08
18
15
18
22
18
29
18
36
18
43
18
50
18
57
18
64
18
71
18
78
18
85
18
92
18
99
19
06
19
13
19
20
19
27
19
34
19
41
19
48
19
55
19
62
19
69
19
76
19
83
19
90
19
97
20
04
US Commodity Price Index adjusted for CPI
FIGURE 15.5
US Commodity Price
Index adjusted for
consumer price inflation.
Mineweb.com. With
permission
www.inflation.Mineweb.com
www.inflation.Mineweb.com
DOES COLONIALISM BELONG TO THE PAST? 323
of trade inevitably declined, i.e. Ivory Coast was forced to pay relatively more for imports
thanks to the declining value of its exports.
Matters were only made worse by the wider context in which commodity prices
dropped. They fell at a time of continued foreign borrowing to sustain public
expenditures; of decline in the value of the US dollar (the currency in which commercial
loans were denominated); and of rising prices for imported oil. The cumulative effect
was a dramatic increase in national indebtedness. By 1981, Ivory Coast’s external debt
was ten times higher than it had been only three years earlier, ‘and debt-service costs
had increased even faster’ (Ridler 1993: 303).
That combination of factors explains why the Ivory Coast government initially
turned (like so many in Africa) to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for financial
assistance.
The first structural adjustment programme (SAP) for Ivory Coast was introduced
in 1981 and updated periodically throughout the decade. The changes demanded were
a ‘one size fits all’ programme of currency devaluation, liberalisation of prices and interest
rates, fiscal restraint and austerity (i.e. cuts in state expenditure), and trade liberalisation
(Ridler 1993: 303).
As with so many African countries, negative economic growth and an increasingly
unsustainable debt burden were for Ivory Coast the dark at the end of the adjustment
tunnel. The Ivorian government has been doubly blamed for the new ‘manifestly
impossible austerity programme’ demanded by the IMF and World Bank in February
1990 (Crook 1990: 669). The regime of Houphouet-Boigny has been faulted, first
of all, for maintaining an agricultural policy of cocoa expansion – apparently with
World Bank support – until April 1988 (Crook 1990: 662–3). In this way it failed
to foresee the consequences of further declines in international commodity prices.
BOX 15.2 STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT
The term ‘structural adjustment’ is shorthand for ‘the process by which the IMF
and the World Bank base their lending to underdeveloped economies on certain
conditions, pre-determined by these institutions’ (Milward 2000: 25). Sometimes
known as the ‘Bretton Woods twins’ or International Financial Institutions (IFIs),
the IMF and World Bank are the product of formal negotiations that took place at
Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA, in 1944. The aim of the Bretton Woods
conference, which was orchestrated by Britain and the United States, was to
initiate a post-war international economic order based on fiscal discipline,
exchange rate stability, free markets, and growth in international trade. The
empowerment of the IFIs to oversee and manage this new order was a key
consequence of Bretton Woods. All adjustment programmes reflect this
background, and what I have elsewhere called ‘the twin pillars of the neo-liberal
(essentially capitalist) development agenda, namely market-based economic
arrangements and minimalist states’ (Manzo 2003: 438).
Once seemingly confined
to the ‘third world’, talk
of financial crises and
austerity programmes
spread to other parts of
the world – for example,
to Europe in 2012. See
Chapter 18.
Again, compare this
account of economic
development to the
changes in the global
political economy
described in Chapter 17.
Some Islamic
movements also acquire
‘credit with the public’
through the provision of
services: see Chapter 6.
Compare this to India,
where colonisation
went hand in hand
with industrialisation
in Britain and de-
industrialisation in India.
Chapter 16 discusses
how the economy in the
metropole and the
colony are interlinked –
to the benefit of the
colonisers.
324 KATE MANZO
Second, the regime in power failed to fully implement its SAPs – refusing, for example,
to cut the salaries of public sector employees as demanded by fiscal austerity (Ridler
1993: 304–5).
And yet, even its critics acknowledge the limited room for manoeuvre of a state
such as Ivory Coast, where ‘the survival of a regime often depends on the degree to
which lenders restrain their demands’ (Crook 1990: 650). Throughout post-
independence Africa, political legitimacy has depended on economic performance and
delivery. An obvious factor in this regard has been high rates of growth, which have
helped to paper over the contradictions of outward-oriented development. Contra –
dictions are more easily exposed in periods of downturn and reversal – which are
inevitable for cash crop exporters in particular. Thanks to the price volatility of inter –
national commodities, declining terms of trade can be unpredictably sudden and sharp.
This happened to Ivory Coast, for example, between 1985 and 1990 when the world
prices of cocoa more than halved (Ridler 1993: 304).
Equally significant is the state’s capacity to regulate and administer the national
economy. As argued by Mbembe (2001: 76), the post-independence African state’s
‘credit with the public’ stems from a combination of financial means, administrative
power, and distribution of goods. In this light, the determination of the Ivorian govern –
ment to keep the cocoa trade going and maintain a large civil service makes political
sense. Enabling farmers to be paid (through the Caisse) while guaranteeing public sector
employment was perceived as key to the legitimacy of ‘Houphouet and his cronies’
(Crook 1990: 669).
What changes were attributable to the heightened influence of the IMF in
Ivory Coast in the 1990s? The basic argument of the next section is that structural
adjustment has been responsible for a redistribution of benefits. Far from undermining
existing patterns of inequality, however, structural adjustment has only made matters
worse.
GENERAL RESPONSES
THE EFFECTS OF ADJUSTMENT: DEPROLETARIANISATION
AND MODERN SLAVERY
Colonial political economy was typified by cash crop dependence, enforced produc-
tion of cash crops, and supply chain control. It is against each of these criteria that the
effects of structural adjustment – and its redistribution of benefits – are therefore to be
assessed.
Cash crop dependence has only intensified under the IMF’s generalised framework
of export promotion and market-led growth. Following the death of Houphouet-Boigny
in 1993 and his replacement by his constitutional successor, National Assembly presi-
dent Henri Konan Bedie, the Ivorian government entered into a concessional loan
agreement through the IMF’s Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF) for low
income countries. In return for a low interest loan of 0.5 per cent (to be repaid over
5–10 years), the ‘international bailiffs’ demanded a standard policy package of currency
devaluation, cuts in government spending, and (most tellingly) the liberalisation of
banking and trade.
This insistence on the
free market is informed
by neo-liberal ideas: see
Chapter 20.
Who else might have
benefited from these
policies of structural
adjustment, if not
the agricultural
producers nor the
government?
DOES COLONIALISM BELONG TO THE PAST? 325
In regard to export agriculture, specifically, the donor community echoed the
old ‘apologists for colonialism’ who argued that African farmers would derive positive
benefits from the opportunity to produce coffee, cocoa and palm oil (Rodney 1982:
154). Contemporary donors insisted that a flourishing free market would benefit
Ivorian farmers by freeing them from government interference and allowing them access
to the true price of their commodities on the world market.
The Bedie government responded by capitulating to the long-standing demand for
devaluation of the Ivorian Franc. The national currency was devalued by 50 per cent
in 1994 at the same time as export taxes were eliminated. These measures have been
thanked for a subsequent economic comeback marked by a jump in growth rates and
a drop in inflation. But fortuitous timing was equally significant. The donor-mandated
reforms coincided with improved international prices for cocoa and coffee.
The combined effect of externally-imposed policies and world market forces was
an immediate explosion of cocoa production (up 44 per cent from 1994 to 1996) and
Ivory Coast’s movement to the top of the ranks of world cocoa producers. The country
now accounts for 40 per cent of global supply.
So who or what might have benefited, at this stage, from structural adjustment?
Certainly not Ivory Coast’s forest zone – the historical site of cocoa production. The
country’s protected tropical forests have become increasingly vulnerable to illegal
logging and cocoa expansion. As for the Ivorian government, structural adjustment
initially was a double-edged sword. While it brought the traditional benefits of growth
(as described earlier) it also undermined state capacity for economic administration and
control at a delicate time of political transition. In this context, the Bedie government
trod the familiar African path described by Mbembe (2001: 76). It became increasingly
repressive and reliant on control of the forces of coercion to try to stifle dissent.
Farmers and planters would have to be the clear beneficiaries of a programme of
reforms designed to limit state power and expose them more fully to world market
forces – but only as long as the price of their commodities remains high and (equally
importantly) buyers pay producers the true market rate.
Unfortunately for agricultural producers, basic economic logic of supply and
demand dictates that prices must inevitably fall. Cocoa (like other exportable cash crops)
‘is characterised by boom and bust cycle – as global production/supply rise, price of
cocoa beans fall and vice versa’ (International Labor Rights Fund, undated: 4).
An apt illustration of the consequences of ‘boom and bust’ economics (i.e. a period
of economic expansion followed inevitably by a period of recession) is what happened
when world cocoa prices plummeted in 1999. Ivorian farmers were particularly hard
hit because the drop coincided with the final abandonment of the Caisse system of
guaranteed prices. Ivorian cocoa production is labour-intensive and historically reliant
on workers from the West African region. With the donor-enforced completion of the
process of trade liberalisation, both the migrant workforce and the 70 per cent of the
Ivorian population engaged in agricultural activity were therefore negatively exposed
to the full force of structural adjustment.
In response to increased rural poverty and government repression, military forces
under the leadership of General Guei overthrew the Bedie administration on 24
December 1999 and replaced it with the so-called National Council for Public Salva-
tion (Country Watch, undated: 4). After a disputed election in October 2000, General
Guei was replaced as president by Laurent Gbagbo. Following an unsuccessful coup
attempt by Guei’s supporters in 2002, army rebels seized control of the northern regions
of the country and plunged Ivory Coast into civil war. France (the former colonial power)
soon dispatched military forces to the country to police a dividing line between the
north and the south. The French military was still there nine years later – along with
reinforcements from the United Nations (UN) – as the international community (in
the guise of France, the UN and the African Union) attempted to broker a power-sharing
agreement and presidential elections. Another disputed election in December 2010
sparked fresh violence when Gbagbo refused to cede power to rival candidate Alassane
Ouattara – himself a former deputy managing director of the IMF. Gbagbo was finally
removed from power following his arrest in April 2011 by a combination of Ouattara’s
forces, UN peacekeepers and French troops (Talbot 2004; Rice and Watt 2011). After
his subsequent inauguration as president, Ouattara wasted little time in predicting a rise
in national cocoa output – up to 50 per cent of the world’s total (Charbonneau and
Bases 2011).
The Marxist concept of deproletarianisation helps explain why, in a neo-liberal
context of shrinking state capacity, trade liberalisation and associated political unrest,
Ivorian farmers ‘have been pushed to use their own children or those supplied by
traffickers’ in efforts to sustain rural livelihoods (International Labour Rights Fund,
undated: 6). At the root of this concept is the proletarian – a person who survives
by selling their labour power and working for wages. The corresponding term prole –
tarianisation has been mentioned already. Unlike slavery – which was defined earlier as
unpaid forced labour – proletarianisation refers to a crucial aspect of capitalist develop –
ment, namely the process whereby large numbers of people who once owned the means
to produce goods and services for sale become employed solely as wage labourers.
Deproletarianisation is shorthand for a Marxist view of regression or reversal,
whereby forced labour is reintroduced as a method of worker discipline and a way to
cut costs under capitalism.
The deproletarianisation thesis calls into question the standard explanation for the
rise of modern slavery that’s offered by Bales (1999: 12–13). There the emphasis is on
two key contributing factors within a wider context of economic globalisation and
population growth. One is socio-economic modernisation. The other is labour supply
– the basic notion being that a ready availability of willing young workers necessarily
drives labour costs down.
The problem with the ‘over-supply’ thesis is that it doesn’t really explain why
slaveholders should need to drive labour costs down beyond the point of paying a
pittance to paying nothing at all. Deproletarianisation helps to answer that question,
even if it is a framework for understanding all forms of agrarian forced labour and not
an explanation for modern slavery per se.
The underlying premise is that agricultural producers will protect their economic
interests by switching labour regimes for the same reasons that Britain switched from
‘informal empire’ to formal colonialism. Producers of commodities will resort to forced
labour when they must and not simply because they can.
The value of that suggestion is twofold. On the one hand, it would seem to make
logical sense given the global illegality of slavery (and attendant risk of prosecution)
discussed in the introduction. Even if the outlawing of slavery doesn’t eradicate the
326 KATE MANZO
How does ‘deprole –
tarian isation’ compare
with the ‘informalisation’
of labour discussed in
Chapter 17 and the
expansion of the global
proletariat discussed in
Chapter 19?
DOES COLONIALISM BELONG TO THE PAST? 327
So was it the large
corporations who
benefited? How is
this linked back to
colonialism?
practice it still alters the calculus of slaveholders, turning what was once an accepted
convention and best possible option into a final resort.
On the other hand, deproletarianisation reflects the actual behaviour of Ivorian
farmers. Modern slavery in Ivory Coast is more of a variable than a constant, ebbing
and flowing with changes in commodity prices. Farmers, furthermore, have readily
turned to more conventional methods of protecting their livelihoods. They took to the
streets in 2004, for example, in protest at the changes introduced since the abolition
of the Caisse and the abandonment of the system of minimum pricing. Uncertain of
market prices and distrustful of the trio of semi-private agencies set up after 2000
to oversee the cocoa trade, growers complained of their diminished capacity to withstand
economic shock. They argued that the sliding levy scale introduced to compensate for
heavy losses in global markets offered far less protection than the old guaranteed
minimum price (BBC News 2004: 1).
To connect deproletarianisation to structural adjustment in this way is not to excuse
the behaviour of slaveholders. The point is to demonstrate the political consequences
of neo-liberal development. The argument thus far clearly reinforces the conventional
message sent by human rights activists (such as the International Labour Rights Fund)
that structural adjustment hits hardest at the poor.
It is necessary to conclude now by considering the other side of the neo-liberal
coin. If farmers and planters are only the winners in theory of neo-liberal development,
then who or what are the beneficiaries in practice?
That question returns the analysis to the issue of supply chain control. In Britain’s
‘informal empire’, free trade agreements were a means to protect dominant commercial
interests while exploiting relatively weak states. They were thus implicitly hierarchical,
in both an economic and political sense. At the top (as the following quote from Rodney
implies) were the ‘white colonialists’ who exercised political control and profited most
economically from the status quo; at the bottom was the economically exploited and
politically disempowered African peasantry.
Current global food chains are remarkably similar to the colonial division of labour,
as the following exposition of coffee markets demonstrates.
BOX 15.3 COLONIALISM’S DIVISION OF LABOUR
A peasant growing a cash crop or collecting produce had his labour exploited
by a long chain of individuals, starting with local businessmen. Sometimes,
those local businessmen were Europeans. Very rarely were they Africans, and
more usually they were a minority group brought in from outside and serving
as intermediaries between the white colonialists and the exploited African
peasant . . . The share of profits which went to middlemen was insignificant
in comparison to those profits reaped by big European business interests
and by the European governments themselves.
(Rodney 1982: 154–5)
Roaster
instant coffee
manufacturer
International
trader
Retailer
supermarket
Roasted/instant
coffee
Green coffee
Dry cherry or
parchment
Restaurant
café
Curing plant
huller
Domestic trader
co-operative
farmer group
agent
Smallholder Estate
Exporter
Broker
Consumer
Marketing
board
Consuming
countries
Producing
countries
FIGURE 15.6
General structure of the global coffee-marketing chain. Stefano Ponte (2002) ‘The “Latte Revolution”?
Regulation, Markets and Consumption in the Global Coffee Chain’, World Development, 30, 7: 1099–1122
328 KATE MANZO
With regard to Ivorian cocoa, next in line to individual farmers and co-operatives are
the farmgate buyers and exporters, who are now (thanks to trade liberalisation) in a better
position to haggle with farmers over prices. These ‘local’ businessmen and companies (the
largest of which are actually subsidiaries of foreign corporations) have been accused of
short-changing producers by ‘buying their beans cheaply and selling at big profits in the
rising market’ (Cowell 2002: 1; see also Global Witness 2007: 18). As the London-based
International Cocoa Organisation (ICA) noted in a 2000 report, ‘Ivory Coast’s mostly
illiterate farmers are ill-equipped to negotiate with [the] hard-bargaining commodity
buyers’ who systematically underpay (quoted in Cowell 2002: 2). For farmers then, the
consequence of the abandonment of fixed prices is only the privatisation of their
exploitation and not (as promised) their payment at true market rates.
Further along the supply chain are London-based brokerage firms such as Armajaro,
a company headed by the trader Anthony Ward (the man nicknamed ‘Chocolate Finger’
Are you eating a bar of
chocolate as you read
this? Which company
made it? Do they tell you
where they source their
cocoa from?
As consumers, we are all
implicated, then, in child
slavery. What should we
do about it? Is consumer
action enough?
DOES COLONIALISM BELONG TO THE PAST? 329
by business associates). Serving as brokers between African exporters and Western cocoa
processors, these companies stand to make fortunes in commodities futures markets from
speculative buying and selling.
Beyond the brokers are the cocoa grinders and processors who buy raw beans to
turn into semi-finished products such as cocoa powder and butter. This group suffers
from commodity price rises if they cannot pass on the rising costs to their own buyers.
These, in turn, are food companies in general and chocolate and confectionary
manufacturers in particular (Cowell 2002: 4).
Dominant brand-owners such as Cadbury and Mars are the ‘big business interests’
that arguably dominate the entire cocoa supply chain (Tiffen 2002). Their relative
commercial dominance, rather than proximity to any actual slaves, placed them at the
centre of the ‘chocolate slavery debate’ mentioned earlier. But the multinationals are
not the end of the chain. Beyond them are two other links. One is the retail outlets
that may squeeze manufacturers by refusing to countenance price increases on the
finished products they sell (Cowell 2002: 4). The other is assorted consumers like us,
who contribute directly to global demand. Furthermore, if cocoa is indeed a ‘conflict
resource’ that has ‘contributed to funding armed conflict’ (Global Witness 2007: 3)
then consumers of chocolate containing cocoa from the Ivory Coast have helped
indirectly to sustain situations of ‘divided leadership and associated human rights
abuses’ (Furman 2010: 2).
Overseeing the whole commodity chain are the new agents of ‘informal empire’ –
the IMF and World Bank and, arguably, the World Trade Organization. From their
command centres in Washington DC, this ‘unholy trinity’ of multilateral institutions
governs a world economy ‘that their neoliberal ideology insists is best left institutionally
ungoverned’ (Peet 2003: 23). This inherent contradiction exposes the triumvirate to
powerful dissent and may well undermine it eventually. No empire lasts forever, not
even the most powerful.
In the meantime, all three institutions are sustained by a combination of institutional
learning and powerful support. They ‘have learned that a little spin and some confessions
of partial failure . . . excuse many abuses in the exercise of power’ (Peet 2003: 24). Even
more importantly, the ‘unholy trinity’ represents a conglomerate of economic and
political interests. At its economic heart are the major beneficiaries of neo-liberalism –
multinational corporations in general and, according to Peet (2003: 202), investment
banking in particular. At its political heart are the governments of the leading capitalist
countries. Counted among their ranks are the former colonial powers. They (like France
in the Ivory Coast) may still turn to military means to protect their vital interests – but
only when informal strategies fall short of the mark or misfire.
BROADER ISSUES
IS TODAY’S WORLD POSTCOLONIAL OR NEO-COLONIAL?
Answers to questions are never simply a matter of either common sense or empirical
fact. They inevitably depend on two inter-related factors. One is meaning – the issue
of how key concepts in the question are understood and defined in their own terms as
well as differentiated from other similar concepts. The second is perspective – how those
same key concepts are interpreted from within a particular theoretical framework.
Concepts and theory together determine intellectual focus and approach – the ways in
which arguments are presented and evidence marshalled.
With the above points in mind, this final section, which raises the larger question
of whether today’s world is postcolonial or neo-colonial, begins with a critical
interrogation of the meaning of the key concepts ‘postcolonial’, ‘colonial’ and ‘neo-
colonial’.
Postcolonialism
The fundamental issue with the term ‘postcolonial’ is whether the post in the term signals
after. The perspective from which this issue is considered is ‘postcolonial theory’ – a
term that is itself open to interpretation thanks to the diversity of self-consciously
postcolonial scholarship. Postcolonialism is best seen as a ‘site of critical inquiry’ (Slater
1998: 655) or a set of shared ideas rather than a single theory or unified body of thought
(Abrahamsen 2003: 191).
Postcolonial theory, first of all, refuses to treat ‘postcolonial’ as a synonym for
‘European decolonisation’. The world can only be considered ‘postcolonial’ if we assume
that historic patterns of economic control and command necessarily ended with formal
330 KATE MANZO
Think about the notion
of pictures of the world
presented in Chapter 2.
Are the concepts we use
and the perspective we
adopt part of our picture
of the world?
BOX 15.4 DEFINITIONS OF POSTCOLONIALISM
The postcolonial does not privilege the colonial. It is concerned with colonial
history only to the extent that that history has determined the configurations
and power structures of the present.
(Young 2001: 4)
Postcolonial theory involves discussion about experiences of various kinds:
migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, representation, difference, race,
gender and place (among others).
(Power 2003: 123)
The post-colonial . . . can be defined in relation to a period of time that is
marked by the power of the colonizing process.
(Slater 1998: 653)
Colonialism, as conventionally defined in terms of formal settlement and
control of other people’s land and goods, is in the main over, but many of its
structures and relations of power are still in place.
(Abrahamsen 2003: 195)
Postcoloniality . . . is a salutary reminder of the persistent ‘neo-colonial’
relations within the ‘new’ world order and the multi-national division of
labour.
(Bhabha 1994: 6)
DOES COLONIALISM BELONG TO THE PAST? 331
colonial rule. Patterns of continuity amid change mean that international power relations
have moved beyond colonialism in some ways while remaining thoroughly colonial in
others. There is thus still some utility (despite the criticisms levelled against it) in the
Marxist concept of neo-colonialism considered later in this section.
Second, postcolonial theory is fundamentally concerned with topical issues and
themes and not with colonial history per se. It is interested in contemporary mani –
festations of historic aspects of European colonialism, such as slavery in Africa. As the
discussion so far has argued, while slavery per se is an institution defined by unpaid
forced labour, the defining feature of modern slavery is the shift in the master–slave
relation from the legal ownership that obtained in the colonial era to illegal control.
The trafficking of children from countries like Mali to work on cocoa plantations in the
Ivory Coast exposes the covert character of modern slavery while situating its patterns
of economic domination, violence and resistance in global economic context. This focus
consciously integrates the economic concerns of traditional Marxism with the politics
of international human rights, thus offering an example of what Young (2001: 7) calls
‘postcolonial cultural critique’.
In explaining slavery’s persistence, the issue once again is continuity amid change;
specifically, the issue of how child enslavement can exist (if not positively flourish) in a
world of international human rights law, formal decolonisation and capitalist
development. The answer suggested here embeds the problematic of modern slavery
firmly within the workings of the world economy as well as the frameworks and
strategies designed to promote capitalist development. Attention to two key processes,
namely deproletarianisation and structural adjustment, shows how the fundamentally
uneven and hierarchical character of colonial power relations remains invested in
contemporary theories and practices of development.
Colonialism
Before we return to the question of whether today’s world is postcolonial in any
meaningful sense, or more properly neo-colonial, we need to ask what colonialism
entailed. As David Slater has noted, there are crucial distinctions between the Iberian
colonisation of Latin America by Spain and Portugal, on the one hand, and the pan-
European colonisation of Africa and Asia on the other (Slater 1998: 653). Both
colonisation and decolonisation began and ended much sooner in the American
continent than they did in the other two. All of Latin America except for Cuba and
Puerto Rico were formally independent by 1825, whereas the process of Asian
decolonisation only began with the independence of India from Britain in 1947. At
that time, the only two African countries not under colonial rule were Ethiopia and
Liberia. The decolonisation of Libya in 1951 marked the onset of decolonisation in
North Africa while the trailblazer in sub-Saharan Africa was Sudan in 1956.
So, it is safe to say (as scholars generally do) that European decolonisation has largely
run its course. But by the same token, it would be dangerous to assume that all aspects
of colonialism have reached an unequivocal end, for two reasons. First, the geography
of independence remains spatially uneven. Many islands as opposed to continents in
the world (such as French Martinique and the Dutch Antilles) continue to fly European
flags and are effectively still colonies. Meanwhile, as Young (2001: 3) points out, more
Early colonisation in the
Americas is discussed
in Chapter 21 and
contemporary politics
in Argentina are the
subject of Chapter 14.
The colonial period with
its enduring effects in
India is explained in
Chapter 16.
recent invasions (such as that of Tibet by China and Kashmir by India) signal the arrival
of a new generation of colonial rulers.
Second, there was always more to colonialism than what Potter (1992) calls its
‘international political dimension’, i.e. the direct control and formal political rule of a
subject population by a foreign power. On the one hand, colonialism in practice was
arguably marked by six other features, namely:
• bureaucratic elitism and authoritarianism;
• statism (i.e. comprehensive political control of the economy);
• use of ‘traditional’ authority figures;
• use of force;
• technological advantage; and a
• hegemonic ideology designed to legitimate and perpetuate the existing regime.
(Potter 1992)
According to Potter (1992: 219), it was only the international political dimension of
colonial rule that was ‘snapped at independence’.
On the other hand, colonialism needs to be understood in relation to motives as
well as features. As the Ivory Coast case demonstrates, European colonialism was driven
by economic as well as territorial interests in land. For Britain at least in the mid-Victorian
period (roughly the 1850s to the 1870s or slightly later), ‘informal empire’ was the
preferred means of extending supremacy. ‘Refusals to annex are no proof of reluctance
to control’, as Gallagher and Robinson (1953: 3) have memorably said. But Victorian
policy makers viewed annexation only as a method of ‘last resort’ to secure British
interests. Formal political rule was not considered as long as commercial penetration,
political influence and economic command could be achieved by other means. First
among these were free trade agreements and treaties of friendship ‘made with or imposed
upon a weaker state’ (Gallagher and Robinson 1953: 11–12).
Young (2001: 19) suggests that different motivations (for commercial exploitation
and settlement) gave rise to ‘two distinct kinds of colonies’ within European empires
– ‘the settled and the exploited, the white and the black, which would be treated very
differently’. Colonies varied as well in terms of their systems of production and labour
regimes. Bernstein et al. (1992: 186) identify four broad types of colonial labour regime,
namely: forced labour (of which slavery is a notorious exemplar); semi-proletarianisation;
petty commodity production; and proletarianisation. Slavery was only ever a feature of
plantation economies or ‘colonies of domination’ (Young 2001: 23). It did not typify
colonialism per se.
What did come to typify all European colonies was their insertion into trade on
the world market. Whether it was the primary motivation for it or not, the establishment
of a global trading network controlled by European powers and their various agents
was a significant aspect of the colonialism of old.
Neo-colonialism
The conviction that nothing much has changed in the world economic order since
independence, in that patterns of economic power and unequal exchange remain more
332 KATE MANZO
There is a discussion of
the European territorial
state and its imperial
expansion in Chapter 11.
Different forms of
colonialism are
discussed in Chapter 16.
DOES COLONIALISM BELONG TO THE PAST? 333
or less exactly as they were, is at the heart of the neo-Marxist concept of neo-
colonialism. A term first coined by Kwame Nkrumah – ‘the man who had
been able to transform the politics of Ghana and pressurise the British into
leaving without a single shot being fired’ (Young 2001: 45) – is most
obviously neo-Marxist in the sense that the framework of analysis was inspired
by the writings of Russian Marxist Vladimir Lenin. The title of Nkrumah’s
1965 book – Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism – is a clear echo
of Lenin’s earlier analysis of colonialism as a system of economic exploitation
in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Nkrumah 1965; Lenin
1939).
Nkrumah’s basic argument was that a resource-rich country such as
Ghana could not develop autonomously thanks to its insertion within an
international division of labour centred on capitalist exploitation and external
control of markets. This analysis not only inspired a more general neo-Marxist
framework for the analysis of under development in West Africa (see Amin
1973). It also played well among many other leaders of newly-independent
states – especially those elsewhere in Africa confronted with the same ‘harsh
reality’ of economic dependence on exports of primary commodities (Young
2001: 45).
The charge that those same new rulers were metaphorically in bed with
the enemy and thus part of the problem was captured in the development
of underdevelopment thesis of Andre Gunder Frank, which emphasised the
BOX 15.5 DEFINITIONS OF NEO-COLONIALISM
Following World War II decolonization quickly accelerated and colonialism
shifted in meaning once more as the Left – now fully committed to the use of
‘colonialism’ to describe an economically or politically dependent condition –
rechristened the predicament of the newly liberated but economically
devastated nations as ‘neocolonialism’.
(De Alva 1995: 267)
The imposition of the international division of labour under formal
colonialism had the indirect effect of laying the foundations for the continued
economic control and domination over colonial resources even in the
absence of direct political overlordship and administration.
(Hoogvelt 1997: 30)
Neocolonialism denotes a continuing economic hegemony that means that
the postcolonial state remains in a situation of dependence on its former
masters, and that the former masters continue to act in a colonialist manner
toward formerly colonized states.
(Young 2001: 45)
FIGURE 15.7
Kwame Nkrumah
In other words, is it really
helpful to try to decide
whether one approach or
the other is ‘better’?
How would we ever be
able to decide this once
and for all? And in any
case, aren’t there many
different approaches
subsumed under each of
these labels?
complicity of the post-independence ruling class or ‘comprador bourgeoisie’ with the
interests of international capital (see Frank 1967). Frank’s analysis of capitalism and
underdevelopment in Latin America exposed the internal benefits as well as costs of
outward-directed development while enfolding the problem of underdevelopment
within a broader analysis and critique of the expansion of capitalism into a world system.
As Slater (1998) points out, a degree of intellectual mud-slinging can give the
impression that neo-colonialism and postcolonialism are incompatible terms. The
former stands accused of over-emphasising the continuity of colonialism and the power
of the West while the latter has been charged with a seeming ‘avoidance of political
economy and in particular class politics, and more pointedly an implicit acceptance of
global capitalism’ (Slater 1998: 655). This whole debate raises much bigger and
troubling questions (which have been explored in more depth elsewhere) about the
utility of simple binary distinctions between postcolonial theory and area studies
(Abrahamsen 2003) and between culture and political economy (Manzo 2005).
Suffice it to say here that the field of postcolonial studies is expansive enough to
embrace a variety of theoretical persuasions. The concept of neo-colonialism (like other
Marxist concepts) is not foreign to postcolonial theory. There is no necessary contra –
diction in terms between neo-colonialism and postcolonialism and, more generally,
between neo-Marxist thought and postcolonial theory. Their common frame of reference
is the contemporary effects of colonial power relations over time.
CONCLUSION
The end of formal colonial rule has not ended historic patterns of economic control
and exploitation any more than the abolition of slavery has eradicated enslavement.
Slavery – like colonialism itself – persists despite its official demise. While both have
changed in form they are sustained in a variety of ways by economic and political
interests.
Although the geographic focus of the chapter is Africa (West Africa in particular),
the issues raised are global in scope and broader in character. It is necessary to think
about the wider relationship between capitalism and slavery; the uneven and unequal
consequences of development in theory and practice; and the prospects of meaningful
change.
A general lesson to draw from this analysis is that neither colonialism nor slavery
is antithetical to capitalist development. Capitalism may well benefit more in theory from
the invisible hand of the free market than from mechanisms of force (be it forced labour
regimes or the enforced subjugation of formal political rule). But as the history of Ivory
Coast’s agricultural commodities trade demonstrates, capitalism in practice has always
relied for its trans-national expansion on unequal relations of power. Inequalities may
be inherent in the international division of labour and global supply chain. But labour
exploitation and unequal exchange are not naturally occurring phenomena. They are
political outcomes and the effects of global relations of power involving states and,
increasingly, the agents of ‘informal empire’. As such, they are always (like colonialism
and slavery) subject to change.
334 KATE MANZO
FIGURE 15.9
Andre Gunder Frank.
http://wsarch.ucr.edu/
archive/gunder97cd.
html
http://wsarch.ucr.edu/archive/gundergycd.html
http://wsarch.ucr.edu/archive/gundergycd.html
http://wsarch.ucr.edu/archive/gundergycd.html
DOES COLONIALISM BELONG TO THE PAST? 335
FURTHER READING
Archer, Leonie (ed.) (1988) Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour, London and New York:
Routledge.
An edited overview of theories of slavery.
Coote, Belinda (1996) The Trade Trap: Poverty and the Global Commodity Markets, Oxford:
Oxfam.
A critical analysis for Oxfam of the relationship between poverty and global commodity
markets.
Laycock, Henry (1999) ‘Exploitation via Labour Power in Marx’, The Journal of Ethics 3, 2:
121–31.
An exploration of the Marxist distinction between slavery and other forms of labour
exploitation.
Manzo, Kate (2005a) ‘Modern Slavery, Global Capitalism and Deproletarianisation in West Africa’,
Review of African Political Economy 32, 106: 521–34.
An exploration of the relationship between capitalism and modern slavery in Africa, using
Ivory Coast as a case study.
Memmi, Albert (2006) Decolonisation and the Decolonised, Minneapolis and London: University
of Minnesota Press.
A portrait of the contemporary situation of formerly colonised areas and peoples.
Mohan, Giles, Ed Brown, Bob Milward and Alfred B. Zack-Williams (2000) Structural
Adjustment: Theory, Practice and Impacts, London and New York: Routledge.
A detailed exploration of all aspects of structural adjustment, including consideration of
alternatives.
Mshomba, Richard E. (2000) Africa in the Global Economy, Boulder, CO and London: Lynne
Rienner.
An exploration of how Africa has been affected by trade-related policies and agreements,
including international commodity agreements.
WEBSITES
Anti-Slavery International, http://www.antislavery.org
The world’s oldest international rights organisation.
Free the Slaves, http://www.freetheslaves.net
A non-profit organisation dedicated to ending slavery worldwide.
Stop Chocolate Slavery, http://vision.ucsd.edu/~kbranson/stopchocolateslavery
A website dedicated to raising awareness of slavery and other labour abuses in the production
of chocolate.
World Rain Forest Movement, http://www.wrm.org.uy
Some useful information on the environmental consequences of commodity production.
REFERENCES
Abrahamsen, Rita (2003) ‘African Studies and the Postcolonial Challenge’, African Affairs 102,
407: 189–210.
Amin, Samir (1973) Neo-colonialism in West Africa, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Anti-Slavery International (2007) ‘About 1807–2007’, http://www.antislavery.org/2007/
about.html (accessed 12/03/2007).
Bales, Kevin (1999) Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, Berkeley, Los Angeles
and London: University of California Press.
Bales, Kevin and Peter T. Robbins (2001) ‘“No One Shall Be Held in Slavery or Servitude”:
A Critical Analysis of International Slavery Agreements and Concepts of Slavery’, Human
Rights Review 2, 2: 18–45.
Bassett, Thomas J. (2001) Peasant Cotton Revolution in West Africa: Côte d’Ivoire, 1880–1995,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
BBC News (2004) ‘Cocoa Delays Hitting Ivory Coast’, 1 October: 1–2, http://news.bbc.co.uk/
1/hi/business/3706952.stm (accessed 03/04/07).
Bernstein, Henry, Hazel Johnson and Alan Thomas (1992) ‘Labour Regimes and Social Change
under Colonialism’, in Tim Allen and Alan Thomas (eds) Poverty and Development in the
1990s, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Bernstein, Henry, Tom Hewitt and Alan Thomas (1992) ‘Capitalism and the Expansion of
Europe’, in Tim Allen and Alan Thomas (eds) Poverty and Development in the 1990s, Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge.
Campbell, Bonnie (1975) ‘Neo-colonialism, Economic Dependence and Political Change: A Case
Study of Cotton and Textile Production in the Ivory Coast 1960 to 1970’, Review of African
Political Economy 2, 2: 36–53.
Charbonneau, Louis and Daniel Bases (2011) ‘Ivory Coast May Produce Half of World Cocoa’,
Reuters, 25 September: 1–2, http://af.reuters.com/article/investingNews/idAFJOE780
02B20110925?sp=true.
Country Watch (undated) ‘Overview – (Côte d’Ivoire) Ivory Coast’, http://countrywatch.
altavista.com (accessed 29/03/07).
Cowell, Alan (2002) ‘War Inflates Cocoa Prices but Leaves Africans Poor’, New York Times,
30 October, http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/develop/africa/2002/1030cocoa.htm
(accessed 25/03/03).
Crook, Richard C. (1990) ‘Politics, the Cocoa Crisis, and Administration in Côte d’Ivoire’, The
Journal of Modern African Studies 28, 4: 649–69.
De Alva, Jorge K. (1995) ‘The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience: A Recon –
sideration of “Colonialism”, “Postcolonialism”, and “Mestizaje”’, in Gyan Prakash (ed.) After
Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Frank, Andre G. (1967) Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies
of Chile and Brazil, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Furman, Katherine (2010) ‘Conflict Chocolate: Your Role in Côte d’Ivoire’s War’, 02 September,
http://www.consultancyafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content%view=article&id.
Gallagher, John and Ronald Robinson (1953) ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, The Economic
History Review 6, 1: 1–15.
Global Witness (2007) Hot Chocolate: How Cocoa Fuelled the Conflict in Côte d’Ivoire, June,
http://www.globalwitness.org.
Hoogvelt, Ankie (1997) Globalisation and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of
Development, London: Macmillan.
International Labor Rights Fund (undated) ‘The World Bank and IMF Policies in Côte d’Ivoire:
Impact on Child Labor in the Cocoa Industry’, http://www.laborrights.org/projects/
childlab/WBIMFcocoa .
Lenin, Vladimir I. (1939) Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. A Popular Outline, New
York: International Publishers.
Manzo, Kate (2003) ‘Africa in the Rise of Rights-based Development’, Geoforum 34, 4: 437–56.
––––(2005) ‘Exploiting West Africa’s Children: Trafficking, Slavery and Uneven Development’,
Area 37, 4: 393–401.
Mbembe, Achille (2001) On the Postcolony, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press.
336 KATE MANZO
DOES COLONIALISM BELONG TO THE PAST? 337
Milward, Bob (2000) ‘What Is Structural Adjustment?’, in Giles Mohan, Ed Brown, Bob Milward
and Alfred B. Zack-Williams (eds) Structural Adjustment: Theory, Practice and Impacts,
London and New York: Routledge.
Nkrumah, Kwame (1965) Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, London: Heinemann.
Peel, Sir Robert (1833) ‘Abolition of Slavery in the British Colonies’, The Times, 14 May, http://
dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/terrace/adw03/peel/economic/abolition.htm (accessed
12/03/2007).
Peet, Richard (2003) Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank and WTO, London: Zed Books.
Ponte, Stefano (2002) ‘The “Latte Revolution”? Regulation, Markets and Consumption in the
Global Coffee Chain’, World Development 30, 7: 1099–1122.
Potter, David (1992) ‘Colonial Rule’, in Tim Allen and Alan Thomas (eds) Poverty and
Development in the 1990s, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Power, Marcus (2003) Rethinking Development Geographies, London and New York: Routledge.
Rice, Xan and Nicholas Watt (2011) ‘Ivory Coast’s Laurent Gbagbo Arrested – Four Months
On’, Guardian, 11 April: 1–2, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/11/ivory-
coast-former-leader-arrested.
Ridler, Neil B. (1993) ‘Fixed Exchange Rates and Structural Adjustment Programmes: Côte
d’Ivoire’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 31, 2: 301–8.
Rodney, Walter (1982) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Washington, DC: Howard University
Press.
Slater, David (1998) ‘Post-colonial Questions for Global Times’, Review of International Political
Economy 5, 4: 647–78.
Talbot, Chris (2004) ‘Ivory Coast: Two Years of French and United Nations Occupation’, World
Socialist Web Site, 14 August: 1–4, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/aug2004/ivry-
al4.shtml.
Tiffen, Pauline (2002) ‘A Chocolate-coated Case for Alternative International Business Models’,
Development in Practice 12, 3/4: 383–97.
Young, Robert (2001) Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell.
For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
CHAPTER 16
How does colonialism work?
Sankaran Krishna
■ The question
COLONIALISM AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT
■ Illustrative example
INDIA AND BRITAIN
■ General responses
WHAT IS MODERN COLONIALISM?
■ Broader issues
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF COLONIALISM
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
COLONIALISM AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT
How is it that in 1492 what were then called the East Indies were lands of such fabled
wealth and riches that they could lure Christopher Columbus and his intrepid crew to
embark on a dangerous and uncertain voyage to find them, and yet, by 1992, the same
Indies – now known as South and Southeast Asia – could be synonymous with poverty
and squalor? How did they go in just five centuries – the blink of an eye in terms of
human time on this planet – from spaces of wealth and desire in the western imagination
to a benighted third world? Why, when historical evidence shows various parts and
regions of the known world were relatively equal in terms of standards of living for a
long period of time, do we today inhabit a planet sharply bifurcated in
terms of the quality of life?
There are many answers proffered to such questions. One common
answer is that Western Europe experienced certain startling developments
from about the mid-fifteenth century in science, astronomy, the reform
of religion, commerce, industry, and an efflorescence of intellectual and
Columbus thought a
shorter and safer route
to the East Indies was to
be found by sailing
westward.
artistic achievement that enabled it to progress rapidly in comparison to other parts of
the world. Terms and concepts such as the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment,
scientific and industrial revolutions are seen as signposts on a journey towards modernity
that Europe uniquely undertook earlier than all others and an explanation for its success
and their failure. A second answer, albeit one less commonly expressed aloud today, is
that lighter-skinned races are more intelligent and hard-working than peoples with darker
skins: the division of the world in terms of a largely white, developed, and affluent first
world and a poor, dark, and underdeveloped third world is said to be a consequence
of this fact. A third common explanation is that richer countries seem to have milder
climates and more abundant natural resources while poorer countries seem to have very
hot and arid climates along with barren lands. Yet another explanation offered is that
for whatever reason people in western countries have smaller families and consequently
there’s more for everyone to share whereas there are just too many people in third world
countries fighting over scarce resources making each of them poorer.
This chapter focuses on the history and impact of colonialism as the main reason
for the contemporary divide between first and third worlds – and suggests that many
of the proposed explanations are underlain by this more fundamental cause. In the
sections that follow, we look at an illustrative example to understand how colonialism
HOW DOES COLONIALISM WORK? 339
For more about ideas
of Renaissance,
Reforma tion and
Enlightenment see
Chapters 6, 7, 11 and 17.
Racism is discussed in
Chapters 5, 12 and 14.
BOX 16.1 COLONIZER AND COLONIZED
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the
taking it away from those who have a different
complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is
not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.
What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back
of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an
unselfish belief in the idea – something you set up, and
bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.
(Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness)
At least six generations of the
Third World have learnt to view
[colonialism] as a prerequisite for
their liberation. This colonialism
colonizes minds in addition to
bodies and it releases forces within the colonized societies to alter their cultural
priorities once and for all. In the process, it helps generalize the concept of the
modern West from a geographical and temporal entity to a psychological
category. The West is now everywhere, within the West and outside; in structures
and in minds.
(Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy)
FIGURE 16.2
Ashis Nandy.
http://westheavens.
net/en/ashis-nandy/
FIGURE 16.1
Joseph Conrad. Photograph: Alvin Langdon
Coburn/George Eastman House/Getty Images.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/05/
saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview25
340 SANKARAN KRISHNA
works – that of British India. To consider general responses we first define what we
mean by colonialism, modern colonialism and its different forms. To examine broader
issues raised, we look at the psychological aspects of how colonialism works. Colonialism,
far from being over and in the past, continues to hold us and our futures in its thrall
to this day.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
INDIA AND BRITAIN
While a short chapter cannot offer a full picture how colonialism works in different
historical contexts, we may get a better understanding through a detailed study of one
example. For this, we turn to the Indian experience with British colonialism, tracing it
from its beginnings in the seventeenth century with the activities of the British East
India Company.
From its creation in 1600 by a charter of Queen Elizabeth I of England, the British
East India Company strove for the right to trade with India. In 1614, the company
sent a representative, Sir Thomas Roe, to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, father of Shah
Jahan who built the Taj Mahal. Sir Thomas appeared as a supplicant at the court of the
great Moghul, entreating him for the right to trade with India along the western
coastline. At this point, the Mughal Empire was at its zenith and its sovereignty extended
over nearly the entire subcontinent. Over subsequent decades, the East India Company
expanded its toe-hold on the western coastline of India into a series of warehouses or
factories in the southern and eastern parts of India as well. It primarily bought cheap
in India – cotton textiles, silks, spices, ivory, handicrafts, and other exotic goods – and
sold dear in Europe.
The East India Company’s monopoly over the lucrative trade with India made it
a growing power within England. Yet it was kept in restraint for at least two reasons.
First, strange as it may sound to a reader in today’s world, back then there was little
that England produced that found a ready market in India – so the company had to
pay for its purchases with gold and silver. This leak of bullion made its trade less appealing
for many who entertained a mercantilist view of national wealth and power. Under
mercantilism, the power of a state was seen as arising from the amount of gold and
silver retained within its borders, and foreign trade was seen as a zero-sum game. So
every country tried to maximize exports while keeping imports to a minimum. Second,
given the enormous strength of the Mughal Empire, the company had to behave itself
if its right to trade in India were to be renewed periodically.
The Mughal Empire underwent a slow decline from the 1730s on and wars of
succession had further weakened it by the middle of the eighteenth century. As the
power of the imperial throne in Delhi eroded, various princes, nawabs, rajahs, and other
regional satraps asserted their autonomy and were soon embroiled in internecine wars
over tribute and land. The East India Company, which had a well-trained military,
recruited largely from the local populace, to protect its warehouses, agents and trading
routes, as well as to do battle with other European rival companies in India such as the
French and Portuguese, entered into these conflicts and began to play on the rivalries
for its own profit. A major turning point occurred when, in the aftermath of the Battle
For a discussion of
colonialism in Ivory
Coast see Chapter 15.
For a discussion of the
rise and decline of other
empires, see Chapters 11
and 12.
HOW DOES COLONIALISM WORK? 341
FIGURE 16.3
Jahangir investing a courtier with a robe of honour watched by Sir Thomas Roe, English ambassador to
the court of Jahangir at Agra from 1615 to 1618, and others. On paper. Colophon on verso gives
calligrapher’s name, As`af `Ibadallah al-Rahim, and date 23 Ramadan 985/4 December 1577.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Roe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Roe
of Plassey in 1757, the East India Company acquired for itself the right to collect land
revenue – as if it were a domestic political power – in the province of Bengal.
In its opportunist entry into politics, the East India Company was acting neither
on behalf of nor at the behest of the British crown but incrementally and in its own
short-term interests as they evolved. With the Industrial Revolution gaining momentum
back in Britain, the company’s army equipped itself with the latest technologies in
armaments and organized itself along superior lines. Over the next hundred years, from
1757 to 1857, the company became the de facto power over an ever-widening swath
of the Indian subcontinent. It used rivalries as well as instances where there was no clear
heir to the throne to scheme its way to power. Its economic and political clout grew
apace as it filled the vacuum left by the Mughal Empire. The viceroy of Britain’s Indian
colony ruled from Kolkata and outfitted himself with all the regalia and splendour of
an Indian maharajah. He was assisted by an ever-expanding military of local soldiers in
the British Indian army and by a fabled civil service recruited in England that rapidly
became a byword for corruption and excess. Through these decades, the company raj
was frequently wracked by scandal over the fortunes amassed by its officers in India.
The company was especially efficient in its collection of land revenue from the Indian
peasant, and the absence of close oversight from London made it accountable only to
itself. In 1857 East India Company rule in India teetered on the brink of collapse as a
revolt that began within the British Indian army spread through much of northern India.
After months of bitter fighting across the subcontinent, company rule prevailed – but
only just. In the aftermath of the revolt, formal sovereignty was handed over from the
East India Company to Queen Victoria and India now became an official Crown colony.
The nearly two centuries of colonial rule in India from 1757 to 1947 saw the
decisive rise of Britain to the world’s leading industrial and political power, the factory
of the world, and the Empire on which the sun never set – while India spiralled
downwards into underdevelopment. The Indian economy was steadily extraverted – that
is, transformed into a source of raw materials, agricultural commodities and minerals
for the burgeoning factories of Britain, and a market for Britain’s finished industrial
exports. This was most dramatically seen in the textiles sector as India went from being
one of the world’s leading producers and exporters of cotton textiles and finished goods
to being an importer of finished textiles and an exporter of raw cotton. The precise
opposite occurred in Britain where many of the key inventions in the Industrial
Revolution had been in the domain of spinning and weaving. Britain rapidly became a
major exporter of textiles and finished goods while importing raw materials from places
like India.
During the nineteenth century, Britain used its political power to impose free trade
on its colonies: the very same policies that had led the thirteen American colonies to
secede in 1789. Free trade had received a powerful impetus through the writings of
Adam Smith and the idea of comparative advantage as argued by David Ricardo. The
‘imposition of free trade’ (an oxymoron or contradiction in terms if ever there was one)
ensured India could not protect its domestic industries, which were being wiped out
by the onslaught of cheap imports of manufactured goods from Britain. Nor could
Indians establish new factories based on the import of the emerging technologies of
the Industrial Revolution as the restrictions imposed by free trade meant they could
not take advantage of tariffs to protect their nascent industry. The contrast with Japan,
342 SANKARAN KRISHNA
Capitalist
industrialization in
Europe is discussed in
Chapter 17.
See the outline of
Adam Smith’s work in
Chapter 17.
Why might ‘free trade’
be a contradiction in
terms? The impact of
free trade policies in
Ivory Coast are
discussed in Chapter 15.
HOW DOES COLONIALISM WORK? 343
BOX 16.2 BRITAIN
In 1600, when Elizabeth I granted the charter to the East India Company, she was queen of England.
Wales had been annexed to England during the reign of her father Henry VIII, who came from the Welsh
Tudor dynasty. Scotland at that time was a separate kingdom, but on Elizabeth’s death in 1601 her crown
was inherited by James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England, bringing under one ruler the three
kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. Formal union of Scotland and England, and the creation of
the new kingdom of Great Britain, did not take place, however, until the Acts of Union in 1707. It was not
until 1801 that England, Scotland and Ireland were brought together as the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland, through another act of union. In 1921, the major part of Ireland became a separate
state, and the title of the British state changed in 1927 to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland. A series of measures in the twentieth century and since have devolved certain regulatory
and legislative powers back to the various parts of the United Kingdom, but the state remains the same,
under its short title of the UK, or Britain. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are part of the UK
and not, at present, separate states.
FIGURE 16.4
Head office of the East India Company, Leadenhall Street, London, about 1800. Engraving by William Watts. Metropolitan
Toronto Reference Library Board. http://www.creationism.org/books/TaylorInMindsMen/TaylorIMMa01.htm
FIGURE 16.5
Map of India in 1937. British Library. http://portico.bl.uk/reshelp/images/apacfamhist/india2 ; http://portico.bl.uk/reshelp/
images/apacfamhist/large14923.html
which successfully resisted colonialism in the nineteenth century, is arresting here. Japan
protected its infant industries and imported the new technologies, rather than the
products, of industrializing Europe. To many, it is no coincidence that Japan, which
escaped colonialism, was also the only instance of successful economic development in
the non-western world by the early twentieth century.
Fabled manufacturing towns in India like Dacca and Murshidabad went into sharp
decline and the millions employed in the textiles and handicrafts industry were now out
of work. Unlike England, and to some extent the rest of Britain, where those forced
off the land were absorbed by factories emerging in the towns, in India, the displaced
workers, artisans and craftsmen moved in the opposite direction – from towns to villages
344 SANKARAN KRISHNA
Processes of
urbanization and
ruralization worked
differently in different
parts of the British Isles
itself, of course. In
Ireland, for example,
there were parallels to
what happened in India:
the subdivision of rural
holdings meant
unsustainable subsist –
ence agriculture and
widespread famine in the
mid-nineteenth century.
The Occupy movement
(discussed in Chapter
18) aims to reclaim the
notion of the commons.
Contemporary slavery
and its relationship to
colonial practices is
discussed in Chapter 15.
HOW DOES COLONIALISM WORK? 345
– swelling the numbers eking a living off the land. In other words, English urbanization
was paralleled by Indian ruralization. In England, the rapidly declining rural population
energized the invention of technologies to make agriculture more mechanized and high-
yielding. In India, the swelling population in the rural sector meant smaller holdings,
more labour-intensive methods of cultivation and less inclination to innovate and use
technology in agriculture. In England, urbanization and rising affluence eventually made
it logical to have smaller families, whilst in India endemic poverty and ruralization made
it paradoxically rational to hedge your bets on an uncertain future by having more
children. Successful British economic development and Indian underdevelopment were
two sides of the same coin – an interlinked process resulting in affluence on one side
and poverty on the other.
Colonial rule in India, intent as it was on simplifying and increasing the collection
of land revenue, had instituted private property in land. It made land alienable (that is,
it could be bought and sold) and replaced previously existing communal rights of access
to land (a process of destroying the commons that occurred in varying ways with
depressingly similar results in every part of the planet touched by capitalism and/or
colonialism). It was also far more efficient in its collection of ever-increasing amounts of
land revenue, irrespective of the vagaries of weather and yields, to finance a growing
bureaucracy. The East India Company’s increasing military adventurism all across the
subcontinent and elsewhere in the British Empire further contributed to an ever-
increasing demand for revenue from the Indian peasant. For instance, the British used
their Indian army thrice in China between 1829 and 1856, in Persia in 1856, Singapore
and Ethiopia in 1867, Hong Kong in 1868, Afghanistan in 1878, Burma in 1885, Egypt
in 1882, and Uganda and the Sudan in 1896. The costs of all these expansions of empire
were charged to the Indians, as were the entire costs of maintaining the Indian colonial
edifice. Meanwhile, large tracts of land were converted into plantations producing tea,
coffee, indigo (used as a dye for textiles), poppy (for producing opium) and other cash-
crops for export – and labour conditions on the plantations, all owned by Europeans,
were no better than slavery. The result was a mass of impoverished landless and small
peasants on the brink of starvation, above it a narrow elite of absentee landlords, mostly
native, that was the bulwark of colonial rule in the country, and at the apex an alien regime
living in high style and siphoning huge amounts of wealth back to the home country.
The devastation these developments caused across the Indian countryside is not as
well known as it should be. In his Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis outlines the
impact in stunning detail. The collapse of the commons and notions of community due
to the introduction of private property in land, climatic variations in monsoon rains due
to El Niño currents, and the hegemony of ideas such as laissez-faire or free market
economics with its hostility to state intervention, interacted to produce famines on an
unprecedented scale in the second half of the nineteenth century. In India, China,
northern Africa and Brazil mainly, Davis estimates that anywhere between 31 million
and 61 million landless labourers, small farmers and their families died due to starvation.
In India, these were deaths that could have been prevented: the colonial regime con –
tinued to levy high taxes on farmers, continued to export food grains out of the country
rather than move them to areas of deficit, and refused to help by distributing grain
because they considered that would constitute political interference in the domain of
the economy.
BOX 16.3 OPIUM WARS AND THE IMPACT OF COLONIALISM ON CHINA
Ever since the inception of European trade with Asia (following the discovery of the sea-route to India by
the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama in 1498), western powers coveted trading relations with China.
Yet, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Chinese commodities such as tea, porcelain and
silk were much sought after in Europe without there being any comparable demand for European goods in
China. The emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties were hostile towards international trade – they
imposed heavy tariffs on European goods and severely restricted the activities of European merchants to
just four ports along the southeastern flank of their empire. They were also wary of the implications of
powerful trading companies for their own sovereignty. Such trade led to a drain of silver from Europe to
China, something that went against mercantilist tenets. Using arguments drawn from emergent theories
of free trade and Smithian liberalism, the western powers sought to break the Chinese restrictions over
trade through all means legal and illegal.
One crucial way of minimizing the drain of silver on account of the China trade was for trading
companies such as the East India Company to illegally export opium (grown in the Bengal Presidency after
the Battle of Plassey in 1757 gave the Company control over that region) into China. Company vessels
would transport the opium from Indian ports (especially Kolkata) to the southeastern Chinese coastal
cities from where Chinese smugglers would take over. Opium addiction spread across southeastern China
and soon the profits from this trade were reflected in the diminution of the drain of silver from England to
China. By the 1820s opium (now smuggled in to the extent of close to 1,000 tons a year) threatened the
Qing dynasty itself as it was riven by factions, some of whom profited greatly from the profits of the illegal
FIGURE 16.6
Lin Zexu supervising the destruction of 2.6 million tons of opium in 1839 over 26 days (3–29 June 1839)
in the sea off Humen town. Destroy_opium_2 _ (400 × 239 pixels, file size: 17 kb, MIME type:
image/jpeg), Wikipedia commons
346 SANKARAN KRISHNA
drug and others who saw it as the entering wedge of a western plot to destroy Chinese sovereignty. The
First Opium War (1839–42) was fought after the dynamic governor-general of Hunan and Hubei, Lin Zexu,
confiscated a huge cache of the illegal opium and had it destroyed; put a number of Chinese smugglers to
death; and quarantined many British merchants in the port cities. The war ended with the British decisively
winning, forcing the Chinese to cede Hong Kong to them under the Treaty of Nanking for a period of
150 years, and greatly ‘liberalizing’ Chinese trade with the west. These victories were further cemented
after the Second Opium War was fought over similar issues between 1856 and 1860.
While it’s obvious that British inability to penetrate Chinese markets with goods that attracted buyers,
and the consequent drain of silver from Britain, were the main reasons for the Company going to war
with China, such reasons were drowned in the moralistic claims of the superiority of free trade. Drug
addiction was foisted upon the Chinese, and drug production forced upon the regions of Bengal and
Bihar in India – all in the name of liberal economics and the common sense of laissez-faire. Few examples
better illustrate the ways in which ideologies like free trade were used as instruments of colonial
domination and exploitation than the Opium Wars. To the Chinese, the Treaty of Nanking and the cession
of Hong Kong inaugurated what they saw as a hundred years of humiliation – ended only with the victory
of the communists under Mao a century later in 1949, and today completed with China’s rise to world
power status.
FIGURE 16.7
Villagers in Rajputana in 1899. From the book by Mike Davies, Late Victorian Holocausts, Verso.
http://www.fathom.com/course/10701057/139_famine ; http://www.fathom.com/course/
10701057/session3.html
HOW DOES COLONIALISM WORK? 347
348 SANKARAN KRISHNA
Though such famines were routinely portrayed by colonial administrators,
economists and the media as natural disasters or acts of God or nature, such claims are
belied by a simple fact: neither the pre- nor post-colonial history of India show any
evidence of mass deaths due to famines. They were unique to the colonial era. Davis
powerfully connects all these themes together as he notes:
We are not dealing . . . with ‘lands of famine’ becalmed in stagnant back waters of
world history, but with the fate of tropical humanity at the precise moment
(1870–1914) when its labor and products were being dynamically conscripted into
a London-centered world economy. Millions died, not outside the ‘modern world
system’ but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic
and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed,
many were murdered . . . by the theological application of the sacred principles of
Smith, Bentham and Mill . . . Although crop failures and water shortages were of
epic proportions – often the worst in centuries – there were almost always grain
surpluses elsewhere in the nation or empire that could have potentially rescued
drought victims. Absolute scarcity, except perhaps in Ethiopia in 1889, was never
the issue. Standing between life and death instead were new-fangled commodity
markets and price speculation, on one side, and the will of the state . . . on the
other.
(Davis 2002: 9–11)
Even against this macabre background, the Great Bengal famine of 1943–44 stands out
as the definitive instance of the horrors of colonial rule in India. As three million perished
to starvation in eastern India in those two years, Britain continued to export food from
India to sustain her war effort against the Axis powers in the Second World War, and
refused to either move food grains from surplus districts to deficit ones within India or
use the state apparatus for relief. The three million who died during the Bengal famine
represent about half the number of European Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust. The
latter event justly receives an enormous degree of attention in the writing of history.
Yet the Bengal famine is relegated to a forgotten footnote, if mentioned at all. Recent
work by historians demonstrates that the prime minister of Britain at the time, Winston
Churchill, was fully aware of the scale of the Indian famine, was presented with policy
actions to avert or mitigate it, and consciously chose to let it happen (Mukherjee 2011).
Churchill is widely regarded as not merely an inspirational war-time leader for Britain
and the Allies, but celebrated as a statesman for his defence of freedom and democracy
against totalitarianism. From the perspective of Indians then and now, he should have
been tried for genocide and crimes against humanity.
The oft-celebrated achievements of colonial rule turned out to be mixed blessings
to put it mildly. For instance, the railways that knitted colonial India together were,
mile for mile, the most expensive built anywhere in the world. They were over –
whelmingly financed by revenue raised within India and the investors (all in Britain and
the west) were guaranteed a minimum return on their principal, irrespective of costs,
delays, profitability or problems. All the steel, locomotives, carriages, machinery and
raw material were sourced in England rather than locally, as were the engineers and
skilled manpower. They were built to move agricultural goods and raw materials from
FIGURE 16.8
Free India, 20 May 1947. Daily Mail, Leslie Gilbert Illingworth. Gandhi, and a group of protesters, including a US sympathiser, are
holding placards demanding that the British get out of India. All around them are the bodies of those who have died of hunger or civil
war. http://sites.google.com/site/cabinetmissionplan/illingworth-cartoons-on-india-daily-mail-uk-1942–194
the interior of India to the port cities for export, and for the dissemination of English
imports into the interior. The other impetus for the railway was the rapid movement
of troops for the internal security of the colonizers and an expanding frontier. Both
these requirements meant they did a poor job of linking the different parts of India to
each other. In Britain, the construction of the railways had what economists describe
as powerful forward and backward linkages to the rest of the economy: steel mills, coal
mines, technical schools, engineers and craftsmen, upholsterers and carpenters, scientists
and machinists, a whole ensemble of men and skills flourished in its wake. In India, the
railways had no such transformative impact – the forward and backward linkages were
all elsewhere.
The English language is often considered another beneficial colonial legacy and
obviously it was that in many ways. But in a poor and unequal society, learning English
was inevitably monopolized by a narrow elite. Wittingly or otherwise this equation of
education with facility in the language of the conqueror and his culture meant the Indian
elite grew alienated from its own land and people. Education itself came to be reduced
to instrumental and careerist concerns, and a vehicle for the colonization of Indian
minds. Similar patterns ensued on other fronts: the civil service, the Westminster-style
parliamentary system, institutions such as the census, and sundry other inheritances.
HOW DOES COLONIALISM WORK? 349
The Roman Empire is
briefly discussed in
Chapter 11, the Chinese
Empire in Chapter 12 and
Spanish colonialism in
Chapters 14 and 21.
350 SANKARAN KRISHNA
Without being churlish, one could argue that every supposedly beneficial colonial
inheritance had an obverse that deepened India’s divisions and alienated Indians from
each other and themselves.
The cumulative effect of British colonialism in India, which officially ended with
independence and the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan on 14–15
August 1947, was a textbook case of underdevelopment. India had been transformed
from the fabled land of Columbus’ imagination to a society marked by an over-
populated, under-employed and technologically stagnant agrarian sector, little domestic –
ally owned industry (though some enclaves did emerge in the first half of the twentieth
century), one of the lowest per capita incomes, literacy levels and life expectancy in the
world, a large malnourished and physically weak population – one moreover deeply
divided amongst itself on grounds of caste, class, region, language and religion, and an
overall economy that was an appendage to the requirements of Britain rather than
operating for the benefit of its own population. Over the same period, Britain had moved
from a relatively obscure island society on the northwest shoulder of Europe to the
world’s hegemonic power, its greatest empire and the industrial and financial capital of
the world, with one of the highest per capita incomes and standards of living. The two
historical processes – Indian underdevelopment and British ascent – were inextricably
interwoven. While India’s experience with colonialism and underdevelop ment may have
been longer and more saturating than many others, in its essence this model was
replicated with some variations all across the modern third world.
GENERAL RESPONSES
WHAT IS MODERN COLONIALISM?
As with many concepts in global politics, the term colonialism is defined in different
and not always compatible ways by various scholars. For the purpose of this chapter, a
working definition is: Colonialism refers to the combination of economic, social, political,
cultural and other policies by which an external power dominates and exploits the people,
ideas and resources of an area.
From this definition, it is apparent that colonialism has been a part of global
politics for a very long time. For example, we know that at its zenith the ancient Roman
Empire extended as far as the coastline of contemporary France on the west, well into
today’s Britain in the north and to Persia (Iran) on its eastern flank. Other examples –
the Moors (whose ambit extended from Vienna to Spain and flanked the northern and
southern coastlines of the Mediterranean), the Chinese and Indian empires – show a
similar geographical spread. Yet the colonialism that occurred after the discovery of the
New World in 1492 by Christopher Columbus and his band of explorers funded by
Spanish royalty was peculiarly devastating, incredibly thoroughgoing, and cleft the world
in unprecedented and lasting ways. This post-Columbian era, that is, after 1492, will
be referred to as modern colonialism and is the focus of this chapter.
Modern colonialism differs from previous forms of colonialism in many ways. First,
all previous instances of colonial empire were invariably across the same land-mass, even
if they stretched for thousands of miles. Modern colonialism hinged on advances in
seafaring technology – lighter and more reliable ships and navigational techniques –
FIGURE 16.9
Map of the Colonial
Empires 1907.
http://www.probert
encyclopaedia.com/
photolib/maps/Map%20
of%20The%20Colonial
%20Empires%201907.
htm
HOW DOES COLONIALISM WORK? 351
which enabled the conquest of peoples much further away. In terms of time, the very
duration and saturation of modern colonialism often distinguished it from earlier
epochs where colonial settlement ebbed and flowed with the strength of an individual
sovereign in a distant capital ruling largely through local intermediaries. Whereas, prior
to 1492, a relatively small portion of the world could be termed as being under foreign
rule, on the eve of what came to be known as the First World War in 1914 as much as
90 per cent of the world’s territory was under the political and economic control of a
handful of European powers, Japan and the United States. Britain alone ruled as much
as 20 per cent of the world’s territory at this point.
Second, the discovery of the New World, Australia and Oceania unleashed a degree
of intended and unintended violence that was unprecedented. The genocide of
indigenous populations of the Americas, Australia and the Pacific islands; the depopula –
tion of those regions due to diseases against which they had no immunity; and the forced
movement of millions of Africans as slaves to the plantations and mines of the New
World (the first Africans were transported across the Atlantic as early as 1498) and the
enslavement of the surviving indigenes meant colonialism in the post-Columbian era
was of a very different order from any that preceded it. To give two examples of the
impact: the indigenous population of pre-contact Brazil was estimated at about five
million, while today they number only about 330,000 (Young 2001: 1). Similarly, the
native population of the Hawaiian islands, which had been somewhere between 800,000
and 1,000,000 in 1778 when Captain James Cook arrived, had declined to as few as
50,000 a century later (Stannard 1993).
For a discussion of how
capitalism produces
and sustains inequality,
see Chapter 19.
Chapter 20 talks about
the way European forms
of modernity are
presented as the only
ones.
352 SANKARAN KRISHNA
Third, the advent of capitalism as a mode of production and the Industrial
Revolution, both of which began in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries
in Britain and the northwestern shelf of the European continent and spread to other
western countries and the United States in turn, was of enormous consequence.
Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution meant earlier, small or quantitative differences
in technological and agrarian productivity, armaments and economic efficiency between
Europe and the rest of the world now exploded into a qualitative difference that fractured
the planet as a whole. Pre-Columbian forms of colonialism could be charged at best
with xenophobia or ethnocentrism, and violence necessitated by the dictates of conquest.
Modern colonialism, intertwined as it was with that most dynamic and exploitative
system of economic organization – capitalism – justified itself on the basis of a total
racial, economic, cultural, religious and political superiority of the west over the rest of
the world. This notion of an enduring and divinely ordained civilizational destiny for
the west energized and justified genocide, racism, economic exploitation and cultural
contempt on a scale hitherto unseen. Two macro-historical works that depict the inter-
related emergence of capitalism and colonialism on a world scale are Frank (1978) and
Stavrianos (1981).
The fact that modern colonialism was inextricable from capitalism and the Industrial
Revolution meant western ethnocentrism could now parade successfully as universalism.
Europe, and fragments of it in settler colonies such as the United States, arrogated to
itself the right to interpret the world for everyone everywhere and for all time – past,
present and future. In essence, this meant today’s Europe was the ideal tomorrow for
the rest of the world and the future of the planet was for Europe to determine. European
concepts and categories were the means by which everyone everywhere could and did
understand themselves and their likely futures. Eurocentrism is ethnocentrism on the
steroids of capitalism and industrialism (for more on this, see Chakrabarty 2000).
While the histories of British, French, German, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish, Portu –
guese and American (not to mention Russian or Japanese) colonialisms were enormously
diverse in both time and space, one can for reasons of simplicity distinguish between
two main forms: settler colonies and domination or exploitation colonies. The main
examples of settler colonies would be the United States, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe), apartheid South Africa, Algeria and a few others.
These were territories annexed by Euro peans with a view to settling a part of the home
country’s own population there in a permanent fashion. Settler colonies dispossessed
the natives of their lands through extermination of the natives; treaties of dubious
legality; the idea of private property and cultivation as the only proper legal form of
land ownership; economic deprivation; military conquest and forced internment on
reservations; and disease.
The concept of a settler colony radically revises our understanding of the United
States, Canada or Australia. For example, far from being a bastion of freedom,
democracy, individual rights and anti-colonialism, whose founding is dated to 1776 with
the Declaration of Independence penned by Thomas Jefferson, the US, from this
perspective, remains a settler colony whose ongoing history is that of an occupier of
native American land. As historians like Howard Zinn and authors like Toni Morrison
emphasize, the story of the United States properly begins not in 1776 or 1789 at the
conclusion of its ‘family squabble’ (Byrd 2011: 2) with King George’s Britain, but rather
The implications and
continuing impact of
this history in the
contemporary US are
discussed in Chapter 13.
For a discussion of the
continuing impact of
French colonialism
in Côte d’Ivoire, see
Chapter 15.
For more on Latin
America, see Chapter 14.
HOW DOES COLONIALISM WORK? 353
in 1492 with the extermination of the native American and the enslavement of the black
in the new world. By the same logic, the future history of the United States could
conceivably move in the direction of the freedom of its indigenous peoples – the native
Americans – and others, such as the Hawaiians – as they liberate themselves from
colonialism. From this same perspective, Israel would be seen as an example of settler
colonialism inaugurated in 1948 with the dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian
people and the establishment of a Jewish state dominated by those of European descent.
Domination or exploitation colonies are territories that were annexed for trade and
commercial activities but with no intent of settling there permanently. Such colonies
were often no less violent or racist in terms of their treatment of the indigenous
populations. For instance, though Belgium ruled the Congo for barely a few decades,
historians estimate the death toll of Africans during that interlude to exceed eight million
(Hochschild 1999). But for climatic and other reasons these colonies were not regarded
as worthy of long-term settlement for Europeans. The British in South Asia (India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka), Southeast Asia (Burma, Malaysia and Singapore),
East Africa (Kenya, Uganda), the Caribbean (Barbados, Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica) and
the Pacific (Fiji); the Dutch in Indonesia; the French in the Middle East, North Africa
(Algeria) and Southeast Asia (Vietnam); the Belgians in Central Africa (Congo); the
Spanish and the Portuguese in the southern cone of Africa or the Philippines; the
Japanese in Korea and Manchuria; and Germany and Italy in parts of Africa are all
examples of domination colonies.
One provocative way of explaining the difference between settler colonies, such as
the United States and Australia on the one hand, and domination colonies, such as
British India or Dutch Indonesia on the other, would be to say that in the former the
indigenous populations were largely ethnically cleansed by geno cide and the rest forced
onto reservations, leaving the country free for white occupation, while in the latter, since
there were too many of the locals to begin with, colonialism contented itself with
political, economic and cultural domina tion without permanent settlement or mass
emigration.
As with any typology that attempts to capture a complex global history, these
definitions are imperfect. For example, nineteenth-century China was colonized in the
sense that western powers signed a series of treaties with various port cities that enabled
them to establish a colonial pattern of economic and other relations. Yet the Chinese
emperor retained political sovereignty in Beijing into the early decades of the twentieth
century and no one country managed to colonize China in the way India was colonized
by Britain. The length and depth of the colonial experience also varied greatly across
these examples, and our typology does not quite capture other instances such as
colonies that were exclusively plantations or islands that were trading platforms.
The distinction also does not fully capture the Latin American experience, which
was in some ways a combination of settler and exploitation colonialism. It was settler
colonialism in the sense that large numbers of Spanish and Portuguese emigrants
colonized the continent beginning in 1492 and were followed by tens of thousands
of other Europeans in the centuries after that lived there permanently. Millions of
indigenous Latin American Indians were exterminated and the countries were exploited
economically for the benefit of Spain and Portugal. Gradually, these settlers of
European/Iberian origin gained political independence from Spain and Portugal, as the
The way this legacy
affects the various racial
groups in Argentina is
discussed in Chapter 14.
For a discussion of the
dynamic constitution of
identity, see Chapter 5.
354 SANKARAN KRISHNA
thirteen colonies of the United States did from Britain, but, for a variety of reasons, the
comprador elites of Latin America were unable to successfully develop as independent
economies the way the United States did through its more nationalist elite.
Latin America became part of the third world and was a colony as far as its relations
with Europe and the United States were concerned. In this sense, it was an exploitation
colony at the mercy of more powerful western nations. However, the settler colonial
legacy is evident in the fact that, to this day, the political, economic, social and cultural
elite of Latin America are overwhelmingly of Iberian/European ancestry while the bulk
of the population is a mixture of native peoples, black Africans, and other racial groups
such as the Chinese, Japanese and East Indians who were brought there to work on
plantations. To put it crudely, the higher one moves up the class ladder in Latin America,
the whiter the population and the lower one moves down that same ladder, the darker
the people.
BROADER ISSUES
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF COLONIALISM
So far the chapter has concentrated on the economic dimensions of colonialism, and
used India as an illustration. However, the colonial encounter had an impact on the
psyche of both colonizer and colonized: neither came to the encounter already made
or constituted, as it were. Internal colonialism is at least as dangerous as external
colonialism, and colonial ways of thinking have consequences for humanity and our
planet as a whole.
Given the scale of devastation caused by colonialism, it may be counter-intuitive
to suggest colonialism was more damaging to the colonizer than to the colonized. Yet
that radical thought constitutes our point of departure in this section. Colonialism
demanded of the colonizer an immense effort to repress thoughts contrary to the
enterprise of domination. It required unremitting faith in one’s own racial superiority,
masculinity and civilizing mission. Yet the inescapable fact was that it was fellow human
beings who were victims of this violence – and doubt always crept through the defences.
Observers as varied as Joseph Conrad, Mahatma Gandhi, Aime Césaire, Hannah Arendt,
Frantz Fanon, Albert Camus, Ashis Nandy and Martin Luther King Jr have noted that
colonial violence invariably came back to haunt the colonizer and their society in deep
and fundamental ways. Césaire argues that what was distinctive about the Holocaust
and the violence of the Second World War was neither its scale nor barbarity but merely
that Europeans were doing to each other what they had been doing to non-whites in
the colonies for centuries.
Ambivalence and mimicry
The ambivalence at the core of the colonial project can be understood by a foray into
science. An important aspect of western domination and self-confidence arose from its
evident mastery over nature through science and the scientific method (Adas 1990;
Prakash 1999). In India, for example, the British justified their rule at least in part by
their claim to a superior scientific rationality. Their successes were presented to the
BOX 16.4 ‘SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT’, BY GEORGE ORWELL
In his book Burmese Days, George Orwell writes of his time as a
young police officer in an isolated village in colonial Burma. One
day an elephant ran amok, destroying property and trampling a
villager. As the sole possessor of a rifle in the village, and the
embodiment of order, Orwell was expected to shoot the beast. Yet,
this was hardly the right thing to do, as elephants routinely have
such bouts of ‘mast’ and return to normality shortly thereafter.
Here is Orwell’s account:
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had
followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the
least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long
distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces
above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this
bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot.
They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about
to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical
rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And
suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant
after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it;
I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward,
irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped
the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with
his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but
in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I
perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he
destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it
is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives,’ and so in every
crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I
had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has
got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To
come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail
feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my
whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.
(George Orwell, Burmese Days. Available at
http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/887/)
Orwell’s predicament is emblematic of colonialism: it traduces the humanity of the colonizer, brings out
some of the worst qualities of his society, represses his ethical and humane instincts, and alienates him
from his fellow beings – all in the name of doing the right thing.
FIGURE 16.10
George Orwell. Photo: Bettmann/Corbis
HOW DOES COLONIALISM WORK? 355
http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/887/
This idea of the human
being as rational is also
noted in Chapter 6.
Orwell’s insight is that
the ultimate fear of every
colonizer is the fear of
being laughed at or
mocked.
356 SANKARAN KRISHNA
awestruck natives as spectacle: electricity, railways, dams, bridges that spanned giant
rivers, the radio, vaccination and so on. Yet underlying this was a vexing contradiction:
in order for these achievements to be appreciated as science, the native had to be
regarded as a rational, logical and intelligent discerning human being capable of such
genuine comprehension. On the other hand, if the native really could appreciate
western science, then the entire set of beliefs that marked the native out as irremediably
inferior and irrational had to be questioned, and with that the colonial project as a whole.
Colonialism was steeped in an ambivalence that sought recognition of western superiority
in the eyes of the colonized, and yet was incapable of being satisfied by such recognition,
because the native was seen as unreliable, sly and a liar to begin with. This tight triangle
– of wanting to be appreciated by the native for one’s dexterity with science, but being
unable to secure such appreciation because the very structure of colonial rule pre-empted
it – followed by the self-hatred that comes from wanting such appreciation in the first
place – is a recipe for paranoia on the part of the colonizer, and its frequent culmination
in violence is depressingly predictable. The postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha renders
this triangle succinctly:
The frustrated wish ‘I want him to love me,’ turns into its opposite ‘I hate him’
and thence, through projection and exclusion of the first person, ‘He hates me’.
(Bhabha 1994: 100)
Caught in a game impossible to win, the natives develop their own strategies for surviving
colonialism. Amongst them is what Bhabha insightfully analyses as mimicry. The
native’s excessive submissiveness, exaggerated forms of deference and overenthusiastic
appreciation of the colonizer in the course of this mimicry continually threaten to slip
into mockery and parody. It turns menacing to the colonizer as colonial rule had always
hinged on the seriousness with which colonizer and colonized play their respective roles.
Mimicry is a strategy of survival, a weapon of the weak, and is in that sense an ethically
justifiable response by the native to a situation in which one is structurally disadvantaged.
This means the native can be at peace with themselves – unlike the colonizer, to whom
mimicry is a constant reminder of the fragility of their rule despite all their military,
economic, political and cultural superiority.
Hybridity
Colonialism was ultimately an enterprise that sought to render the native and his society
transparent and comprehensible. And on this count, it was always doomed to failure.
Consider the predicament of Alexander Duff, a Christian missionary in nineteenth-
century India. Despite decades of effort, Duff was constantly besieged by doubts about
the efficacy or even the possibility of converting Hindus and others to Christianity.
Translating the gospel into a domestic idiom always seemed to imperil the text and its
intent. For example, when Duff expressed the idea that conversion to Christianity was
a form of rebirth for the native, this was immediately decoded by the latter as a variation
on Hindu ideas of reincarnation. Every idea or concept that Duff could put forward as
Christian found an analogue in the infinite corpus of Indian religions that threatened
to envelop it, alter its meaning and translate it beyond recognition.
An ambivalence of a
different yet similar sort
is discussed in the
account of exile given in
Chapter 13.
HOW DOES COLONIALISM WORK? 357
The very possibility of conversion was derailed by the fact that Duff was not
preaching or inscribing on a ‘tabula rasa’ or blank sheet but on native terrain that was
preoccupied. It was preoccupied in at least two senses of that word: (a) the attention
of the native was elsewhere – he was perhaps instrumentally calculating that appearing
to convert to Christianity might net him some tangible benefits in the here and now;
and (b) his mind was already thoroughly inscribed with the religious beliefs of his own
traditions and every new and incoming idea from Duff could do no more than
commingle with them, but could never replace them.
Colonialism therefore does not produce clones of the colonizer among the
colonized, which would in any case destabilize the identity of the colonizer in
unacceptable ways, nor does it leave the native untouched by its impact. Rather, it
produces a hybrid space that is neither one nor the other (Bhabha 1994). Hybridity
refers to this third space that is not an anodyne synthesis of the ideas and beliefs of the
colonizer and the colonized but is something qualitatively different from either – a
productive and aesthetic space, a new cultural formation replete with all the doubt,
ambivalence, split-selves and alienated beings that comprise the colonial interface.
Neither the culture of the colonizer nor colonized can be spoken of in some pristine
form prior to their engagement with each other, but rather both emerge from it.
Two examples help to illustrate this idea of colonialism as a joint social formation.
The first is the way some of the earliest syllabuses on English literature emerged not at
Oxford or Cambridge, the quintessential English universities, but rather in colonial
universities and schools and in institutions set up to train English civil servants to
represent the country abroad (Viswanathan 1989). Until the advent of modern
colonialism, when Britain was called upon to represent itself as a civilized society with
an ancient lineage, there had been no need to define its literature in terms of a heritage
or canon. It was the colonial encounter that constituted the provocation to define what
it meant to be essentially English: it was colonialism that produced the content of what
it means to be literate in English literature today.
In similar vein, British policy against the practice of widow self-immolation (sati)
in India was an act of British self-fashioning as civilized against Indians as barbaric and
worthy of colonization (Mani 1998). Understandings of the practice of sati emerged
out of interactions between colonial officials and Indian Brahmins or pundits, who now
became the authoritative interpreters of something called Hindu tradition and scripture.
As a result, there occurred a freezing and codification of the practice of sati itself, and
of a diverse and subcontinent-wide set of practices into a unity called ‘Hindu religion’,
which established the hegemony of Brahmins to speak for this Hinduism at all times
and places. We actually know little about sati in pre-colonial times and it may have varied
enormously across the space we now know as India. Once again, it was colonialism that
was producing the content of categories – India, England, Hindu – that are seen
nowadays as concepts or entities that predated colonialism.
What is also striking is that women had hardly any voice in the contentious debate
over sati in colonial India. Instead, they were spoken for by various men: white colonial
officials on a civilizing mission; Hindu priests (all or mostly Brahmin); Indian nationalists
(upper caste and speaking for all of India), each with their own agenda. The widow
becomes a site for the production of English civilization, Hindu tradition, independent
India, and a variety of other projects, but her own voice is left out of the picture. Yet
claims about the indigeneity of sati and its iconic role as a signifier of India become
dubious given that we have little or no ability to recover an Indian past outside the
lenses of colonialism.
Colonialism is best regarded as a joint social formation that produces the identity
and content of both colonizer and colonized, rather than the domination of one already
constituted entity over another. The work of Indian social theorist Ashis Nandy is
especially insightful in this regard. Nandy points out that colonialism often seemed to
be a pact between certain sections of both colonizer and colon ized societies at the
expense of others in them (Nandy 1983). In both societies, colonialism emphasized
hyper-masculine, hetero-normative, and ration alist acquisitive values at the expense of
the feminine, spiritual, queer and subaltern groups. This emphasis was portrayed as
necessary to succeed and modernize in a competitive and social Darwinist world. The
colonized middle classes embarked on modernizing their societies and becoming the
new colonial masters. Decades of so-called independent economic development in
societies such as India and elsewhere in the third world have been extraordinarily violent
in their treatment of indigenous peoples, tribals, the poor and the environment as
postcolonial elites have pursued industrialization, national security and modernity with
all the zealousness of a recent convert.
In speaking of colonialism as something that is no longer a western malady but a
planetary affliction, Nandy’s work dovetails with critics of mega-development and
proponents of sustainable development and deep ecology. He argues that it may be the
so-called defeated subcultures and civilizations of this world that have managed to retain
the values, skills and worldviews necessary for the survival of our planet and species.
These subcultures are not burdened with the Orwellian civilizational responsibility and
have retained a humility that may yet save us. Decolonization is not so much a political
project as it is a slow and multifaceted unlearning of industrial, capitalist modernization
itself (see Krishna 2009).
CONCLUSION
After a brief period during the heyday of decolonization from 1945 to 1970 in which
colonialism was regarded as a sorry chapter in the history of the world, it has now become
fashionable again to express nostalgia for the supposed stability and progress made under
its aegis. The developmental failures, military dictatorships and failed states that litter
Africa are particularly favoured as reasons for a new spell of enlightened western
despotism. The Washington Post’s Sebastian Mallaby and Harvard historian Niall
Ferguson are only two of many distinguished commentators who have explicitly
favoured some western nations agreeing once again to shoulder the white man’s burden
in parts of the benighted third world.
What such misplaced nostalgia forgets, or perhaps never knew, is the incredible
violence and destruction of humans that accompanied colonialism. The amnesia about
the colossal scale of killings is matched today by the relative inattention to the Iraqi and
Afghani war dead in the conflicts since the early 1990s. The first Gulf War in 1992
resulted in the deaths of between 100,000 to 200,000 Iraqi soldiers and civilians. This
was in comparison to the 400 casualties suffered by the US-led Allied forces, mostly on
358 SANKARAN KRISHNA
For more on sustainable
development and its
critics, see Chapter 4.
Why some people think
they know what is good
for others is the subject
of Chapter 21.
Chapter 28 explores the
idea that western lives
are represented as
‘grievable’, whereas
non-Western lives
are not.
HOW DOES COLONIALISM WORK? 359
account of friendly fire. This was not so much a war as a massacre, especially since it is
now evident that many Iraqi soldiers were killed as they were trying to surrender. The
death toll in the second Gulf War initiated by George W. Bush to overthrow the Saddam
regime and establish an enduring set of US military bases in that country has exceeded
110,000.
Even these tens of thousands of deaths pale in comparison with what ensued
during the interregnum between the two Gulf wars, a period when so-called liberal
globalists such as Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in the UK were heads of state.
The embargo on Iraq, enacted with the support of the United Nations, is estimated
BOX 16.5 RESURRECTING EMPIRE
In his recent book of this title, Rashid Khalidi begins a chapter on contemporary
US military intervention into Iraq and the Middle East with three epigraphs: one
from the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798, the second from the British
invasion of Iraq in 1917, and the third from Donald Rumsfeld, US secretary of
defense, during the Second Gulf War of 2003 (Khalidi 2004: 37):
Oh ye Egyptians, they may say to you that I have not made an expedition
hither for any other object than that of abolishing your religion . . . but tell the
slanderers that I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring
your rights from the hands of the oppressors.
(Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexandria, 2 July 1798)
Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or
enemies, but as liberators . . . it is the hope and desire of the British people
and the nations in alliance with them that the Arab race may rise once more
to greatness and renown among the peoples of the earth.
(General F. S. Maude, commander of British forces,
Baghdad, 19 March 1917)
Unlike many armies in the world, you came not to conquer, not to occupy,
but to liberate, and the Iraqi people know this.
(Donald Rumsfeld, US secretary of defense, Baghdad, 29
April 2003)
All three quotes are eerily similar, essentially saying the same thing, namely: the
west is intervening in the Middle East out of benevolence, not out of greed; they
do not covet their riches but are there to help the people of these regions
overcome autocrats; and they will flourish under the benevolent guidance of the
west.
The durability and ethnocentrism of the idea that some people know what is
good for others in these quotes separated by 200 years should tell us that
colonialism and its mindset are alive and well.
Chapter 23 discusses
the impact of attempts
to control terrorist
financing in Pakistan on
relief efforts during the
floods in 2010.
360 SANKARAN KRISHNA
to have caused the deaths of anywhere between half a million and one million Iraqis.
The majority of these preventable deaths were those of infants, affected disproport –
ionately by the absence of drugs and medicines under the embargo. The US repeatedly
used its veto in the UN Security Council whenever any attempt was made to either lift
the embargo or exclude such items as medical supplies. Three successive UN
administrators in charge of the Iraqi embargo resigned, with one of them saying ‘We
are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that.
It is illegal and immoral’ (Mamdani 2004: 192).
As we conclude this chapter on how colonialism works, it would be wise to ask a
simple question: why is it that violent death and destruction on such a scale continue
to occur, and why is it that all too many of us seem to regard these as little more than
aberrations in an otherwise normal world? In some part, the answer to that question
lies in the history of modern colonialism. A legacy of this history has been to render
the mass slaughter of people in places like Iraq and Afghanistan inconsequential. A variety
of explicit and implicit pieties are invoked as we turn our eyes away: it’s a small price
to pay for the maintenance of global order; there are far too many of them for such
deaths to matter in the first place; they would have slaughtered each other in such
numbers whether or not we had intervened because war is all they know; force is the
only language they understand and regrettable though it may be, war is a means of
keeping them in line; and so on. Decades after the official decolonization of much of
the world, it is depressingly evident that colonialism continues to work all too well in
our world. However, it may be wise to remember that modern colonialism was also
resisted at every point – from the very first encounters in the New World until the present
moment. In the struggles for sustainable development, for the rights of the indigenous
peoples all across the world, and in the movements to resist the power of corporate
capitalism, we can discern the anticolonial impulse that has always been the tethered
shadow of domination.
FURTHER READING
Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin (eds) (1982) Introduction to the Sociology of ‘Developing Societies’,
London: Macmillan.
This edited volume contains many of the classic essays that define colonialism,
underdevelopment, imperialism, etc.
Samir Amin (1988) Eurocentrism, London: Zed Books.
A neo-Marxist work that embeds the emergence and rise of Eurocentrism in the history of
capitalism and the rise of Europe to material dominance in the world.
Partha Chatterjee (reissued 1993) Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse? London: Zed Books.
This book demonstrates the degree to which anti-colonial nationalism in third world
countries such as India remained trapped within the narrative of a European idea of
modernization.
Frantz Fanon (1986) Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann, London: Pluto
(Original 1952).
A work that interweaves colonialism and racism, and is a brutally frank depiction on how
both reduce us as human beings.
HOW DOES COLONIALISM WORK? 361
Andre Gunder Frank (1969) Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: A Historical
Survey of Chile and Brazil, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Frank was one of the earliest and most forceful exponents of dependency theory. In this book
he shows how Latin American economies prospered whenever their linkages to the Euro-
American world were severed – and conversely were exploited and under-developed whenever
those linkages were close and strong.
Mohandas Gandhi (1997) Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, Anthony Parel (ed.), Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press (Original 1909).
A brilliant and prescient work that argued that industrial civilization and modernity, far from
being desirable futures, were destroying the world. Many contemporary ideas such as
sustainability are cogently presented by Gandhi in this work.
C. L. R. James (1980) The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution,
London: Allison and Busby (Original 1938).
Centred on the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), James shows how L’Ouverture was in every
way truer to the ideals of the French Revolution than were the French themselves.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1968) On Colonialism, 4th edition, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
For all the brilliance and verve of his analysis of capitalism, Marx was in many ways
unremittingly orientalist and Eurocentric when it came to colonialism. In these essays, Marx
describes British colonialism as the violent and unwitting instrument of history that would
drag ‘backward’ societies such as India and China into the modern, capitalist world and hence
liberate them from oriental despotisms.
Uday Singh Mehta (1999) Liberalism and Empire: A Study in British Thought, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
This nuanced study shows how liberal ideas, far from contradicting imperialism and conquest,
in fact enabled them in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain.
Walter Rodney (1972) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Nairobi: Heinemann.
A Marxist analysis that shows the long-term effects of the slave trade, predatory capitalism
and racism on African poverty and European wealth.
Edward Said (1978) Orientalism, New York: Vintage.
This work demonstrates how European perceptions of the Middle East – and of Islam – are
inseparable from the history of western colonialism in this region. It further demonstrates
the continuing legacy of this mode of thinking in contemporary US and western policy
towards the Middle East.
Mrinalini Sinha (1995) Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’
in the Late Nineteenth Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Analysing imperialism and colonialism as a joint social formation, Sinha argues that much of
what we think of today as quintessentially ‘English’ or ‘Indian’ actually emerged during the
colonial encounter rather than pre-dating it.
Immanuel Wallerstein (1974–1989) The Modern World System, 3 volumes, New York: Academic
Press.
These works consistently and robustly argue that capitalism can be understood only as a world-
systemic or global phenomenon over the longue durée, and that the nation-state distorts or
fractures our understanding in important ways.
WEBSITE
http://ipcs.org.au/
According to their website, the Institute of Postcolonial Studies ‘is an independent
organization located in Melbourne, Australia. It is committed to advancing the recognition
of cultural difference, and encouraging mutual engagement and reconciliation.’
http://ipcs.org.au/
362 SANKARAN KRISHNA
REFERENCES
Adas, Michael (1990) Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western
Dominance, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Bhabha, Homi (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.
Byrd, Jodi (2011) The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Conrad, Joseph (2012) Heart of Darkness, London: Penguin Classics.
Davis, Mike (2002) Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World,
London: Verso.
Frank, Andre Gunder (1978) World Accumulation, 1492–1789, London: Macmillan.
Hochschild, Adam (1999) King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial
Africa, Boston: Mariner Books.
Khalidi, Rashid (2004) Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in
the Middle East, Boston: Beacon Press.
Krishna, Sankaran (2009) Globalization and Postcolonialism: Hegemony and Resistance in the 21st
Century, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Mamdani, Mahmood (2004) Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of
Terror, New York: Doubleday.
Mani, Lata (1998) Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Mukherjee, Madhusree (2011) Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of
India during World War II, New York: Basic Books.
Nandy, Ashis (1983) The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Prakash, Gyan (1999) Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stannard, David (1993) American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, New York: Oxford
University Press.
Stavrianos, L. S. (1981) Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age, New York: William Morrow.
Viswanathan, Gauri (1989) Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Young, Robert (2001) Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell.
For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
http://www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
CHAPTER 17
How is the world organized
economically?
V. Spike Peterson
■ The question
FROM LOCAL MARKETS TO GLOBAL POLITICAL
ECONOMY
■ Illustrative example
FORMAL AND INFORMAL WORK
■ General responses
EXPLAINING THE POLITICS OF ECONOMICS
■ Broader issues
THE HIDDEN COSTS OF NEOLIBERALISM
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
FROM LOCAL MARKETS TO GLOBAL POLITICAL
ECONOMY
We begin with the apparently easy question: What is economics? A simple answer is
that economics is the study of the production and distribution of goods and wealth.
Like most dictionary definitions, this gets us started – but what do the additional words
in the definition mean? They look reasonably familiar: production is about ‘making’
things, distribution is about ‘dividing things up’, and goods are various sorts of things,
usually the kinds we can see or use (plates, watches, trucks). Wealth is a bit trickier: it
may refer to ‘money’ generally, or more specifically to ‘financial investments’ – like stocks
and bonds. Or it may refer to ‘riches’ in the broadest possible sense.
People have been making and exchanging goods for at least several thousand years,
but they did not think about this in terms of the whole world. Indeed, they did not
think about this as ‘economics’. The earliest markets were areas where people came
together to simply exchange one good – primarily food or functional items – for another.
Because transportation was difficult, only goods considered very valuable were worth
carrying long distances. For most of human history then, markets were quite small, goods
were primarily local, and exchanges in the market were simply part of reproducing
everyday life. In other words, exchange activities were embedded in social relations more
generally; like growing food or preparing meals, there was no reason to think about
‘economics’ separately.
As long as belief in and practices of subsistence agriculture prevailed, the scale and
effects of markets were limited. During the Middle Ages in Europe such feudal
conditions involved a complex web of kingdoms and other sites of power. Monarchs
granted noblemen rights to land in return for loyalty and military services. Noblemen
could in turn grant land to those who served them. The vast majority of people, called
peasants, lived on and worked the land owned by others. Reciprocity was the norm:
estate-owners granted access to land-based resources in return for military services and
agricultural labour and products. Goods produced through agriculture and market
activities in towns were important for funding military exploits, but cultural norms and
aristocratic expropriation of wealth made the pursuit of profit for private gain quite
difficult. An additional site of power was the Christian Church, with the pope at its
head; this provided over-arching moral authority and constituted perhaps the most
significant unifying cultural force.
From roughly the fifteenth century, Europeans built upon inventions and develop –
ments elsewhere to move from this decentralized system of agricultural production
to state-centric and technologically enhanced forms of capitalist industrializa tion. The
shift involved profound changes in people’s identities, ways of thinking, and ways
of structuring human behaviour. Centralizing European states promoted capitalist
arrangements that favoured the accumulation of wealth by a minority, whose decision-
making power shaped the choices of and resources available to the majority. Eventually,
capitalist markets extended worldwide. To answer our chapter’s question we must there –
fore familiarize ourselves with this transition. The following highly simplified account
emphasizes changes that are especially important for understanding today’s global
political economy:
• the role of states in creating capitalist markets,
• how technologies matter,
• how work is organized, and
• whose work is valued.
Increasing consolidation of power in nation-states altered loyalties as well as
‘economics’. Church-based authority declined due to religious debates, the development
of rationalist thinking, and a new sense of human control over social and physical forces.
From roughly the sixteenth century, centralized states adopted mercantilist policies
to enhance their wealth through foreign exploration, trade, appropriation, slavery,
plantation economies, and military conquest. Internally, mercantilism promoted positive
trade balances (more exports than imports) and protection of domestic production;
externally, it increased aggressive exploitation of ‘new’ lands and prompted conflicts as
European powers fought over control of markets.
364 V. SPIKE PETERSON
For a map that shows
what Europe looked like
in the Middle Ages see
Chapter 11.
For a discussion of
states and nations and
how we come to think of
them as inextricably
linked into ‘nation-
states’ see Chapters 11
and 12.
Rationalist thinking has
been extremely
important since the
Enlightenment, which is
discussed in Chapter 6.
The decline in the
significance of church-
based authority is also
explored in Chapter 7.
The effects of these
developments on
countries colonized by
European powers are
discussed in Chapters 15
and 16.
HOW IS THE WORLD ORGANIZED ECONOMICALLY? 365
The effects these
changes have had on
the environment are
discussed in Chapter 3.
After the eighteenth century, capitalist industrialization consolidated and extended
European power. As long as animals, humans, wind and flowing water were the only
sources of energy, forms of power and production remained limited. The industrializing
transition to making machines and harnessing steam power had vast consequences. The
power of merchants who traded goods faded in favour of industrial capitalists who
invested in machines and factory production that enabled greater productivity. Lives
and landscapes were forever changed. Labour was increasingly commodified: peasants
were driven off of or drawn from the land by new policies enforced by states; without
access to land, they were compelled to become wage workers (referred to as members
of the proletariat in Chapter 19) – selling their labour power to factory owners – for
survival. Industrial capitalism transformed the scale of production, who produced what
goods, by what means and with what value. The site of ‘work’ shifted away from
households to workshops and factories where it was paid in wages, considered
(economically) ‘productive’ and associated with ‘breadwinning’ men. These profound
changes, and the emergence of liberalism, were a turning point in organizing economic
activities, assigning value, and institutionalizing power (Rupert and Solomon 2006).
Liberalism marked a decisive shift in thinking about reason, rights, individuals and
power-wielding institutions. Its eighteenth-century form rejected arbitrary power in
favour of rights to private property, religious choice, and individual freedom. These rights
were the cornerstone of Europe’s ‘democratic’ ‘revolutions’. At the same time, liberalism
FIGURE 17.1
Textile mill in
Lancashire, England.
Photo: Getty Images
366 V. SPIKE PETERSON
BOX 17.1 ADAM SMITH AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
In the late eighteenth century, Adam Smith produced the first systematic analysis
of ‘political economy’. He wrote about the state’s essential role in managing flows
of goods, facilitating exchange between nations, and ensuring that the state’s
wealth be used for the benefit of its population. He did not separate economics
from politics, nor did he write about the whole ‘world’. He criticized mercantilism
and its promotion of state interference, arguing instead for a liberal ‘free market’
model of laissez faire (‘let it be’) policies. He believed that these would permit the
‘invisible hand’ of the market to operate and enable nations to prosper through
pursuing their comparative advantage. Smith also cultivated a distinction between
public and private and initiated a devaluation of household labour as not
‘productive’.
produced an unstable tension: between freedom expressed in economic terms (through
private property and unconstrained market arrangements) and equality expressed in
socio-political terms (through democratic processes and requisite constraints to ensure
equality of access, opportunity and participation).
Capitalist industrialization generated an unprecedented abundance of goods, but at
considerable costs. It was especially devastating for all who lost access to land-based
subsistence and were forced to earn wages – in typically harsh conditions – as the only
way to survive. Moreover, the expansion of European wealth and power depended on
the disruption of societies far from its shores: colonial practices cost Africa approximately
14 million people to slavery, destroyed India’s flourishing cotton industry in favour of
British exports, forcefully exploited the Chinese market, and directly and indirectly killed
innumerable indigenous peoples of Oceania and the Americas. Early liberalism extended
political equality to propertied males only. European claims to scientific progress and
rational superiority were used to position ‘whites’ at the top of emerging racialized
hierarchies and lent legitimacy to colonizing practices. And in spite of romanticism, the
work of social reproduction in the ‘domestic’ sphere of the household lost value and status
to the masculinized public sphere of politics and ‘real’ (waged) production.
Although they faced various forms of resistance, Europeans continued to consolidate
their cultural, economic, political and military power (Held et al. 1999). They moved
massive resources of raw materials and foodstuffs from non-industrialized areas to
Europe, and ensured – through loans and precluding other options – that developing
countries purchased Europe’s manufactured goods. These processes generated prosperity
in advanced industrialized countries (AICs), where union organizing benefited many
waged workers and political movements secured ‘welfare state’ arrangements. During
the twentieth century, improved transportation networks and new information and
communication technologies extended the reach of capitalist markets, eventually
encompassing the world (Peterson 2003).
FIGURE 17.2
Portrait of Adam Smith.
Photo: Vanderblue
Collection
Slavery persists today:
see Chapter 15.
Colonialism and
developments in India
specifically are discussed
in Chapter 16; develop –
ments in Latin America
are reviewed in
Chapter 14.
Economics is inextricable from power operating in social systems more generally.
This occurs through the interaction of various agents (individuals, corporations, states
and international organizations) exercising various forms of power (purchasing and
investing, job creation and termination, taxation and welfare, trade policies). This short
history reveals both the changing role of markets and how, at every step, capitalist
markets depended on the political power of states. Because economics is inseparable
from power and politics, rather than ‘world economics’ we refer to global political
economy. We now have a ‘picture’ of how the global political economy was created
historically. But how is it organized today?
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
FORMAL AND INFORMAL WORK
When economists and the media talk about ‘economics’ they usually mean formal
(contractual, regulated, legal) exchanges, where wages and salaries are negotiated,
commodified goods and services are exchanged, and some degree of profit-seeking is
assumed. One of the most puzzling and problematic developments in today’s global
political economy is the volume, value, extent, and socio-political significance of
informal work activities (Kudva and Beneria 2006; Peterson 2010a). The latter refers
to work that is not recorded or regulated (hence, informal) and ranges from socially
necessary labour and volunteer activities, where cash is rarely exchanged and regulatory
authorities are absent (e.g. household child and eldercare, domestic labour, community
projects) to secondary, shadow and irregular activities, where some form of enterprise
and payment is expected but legal regulation is either difficult to enforce or intentionally
evaded (e.g. street vending, petty trade, home-based industries, sex work, drug dealing,
arms trading).
Because it occurs ‘outside’ of the formal sector, informal work is rarely ‘counted’
in economic studies or analyses. Yet informal work was the rule prior to industrialization,
and today researchers estimate that informal activities constitute more than one-half of
all economic output, and equal 75 per cent of the gross domestic product of some
countries. If we count work in domestic, caring and reproductive labour, subsistence
agriculture, and the shadow economy, the time spent in informal activities today
exceeds that of formal market exchanges. What are the implications of ignoring this
enormous volume of work?
While size alone suggests that informalization (the process of increasing informal
work) matters, its invisible, irregular and often illegal aspects pose additional chal-
lenges – illustrated starkly by criminal networks and the disorder they con stitute for
the global political economy. We lack adequate analyses of informal ization partly
because how to document and measure it is controversial (Journal of International
Affairs 2000; Bajada and Schneider 2005) and partly because it was of little interest to
economists until neoliberal restructuring spurred its growth. Economists have been
narrowly focused on formal market activities, and also expected informal activities to
wane as industrialization proceeded worldwide (Tabak and Crichlow 2000). In the
context of neoliberal globalization, however, informal activities have continued and even
increased.
HOW IS THE WORLD ORGANIZED ECONOMICALLY? 367
The importance of
‘pictures’ is discussed in
Chapter 2.
Reliable data is a
problem in general for
analysing the global
economy: see Chapter
19.
368 V. SPIKE PETERSON
One source of this growth is flexibilization. Mass production of consumer goods
in the twentieth century involved large and integrated factory work sites where workers
gradually unionized, often gaining relatively secure, well paying jobs with good benefits.
Neoliberal restructuring has transformed these arrangements, and flexibilization is the
buzzword that characterizes the changes: production processes shift to spatially dispersed
networks (the global assembly line; subcontracting; smaller enterprises); increasingly
casualized (non-permanent, part-time) and informalized (unregulated, non-contractual)
jobs; small batch, ‘just in time’ (short-term rather than long-term) production planning;
and avoidance of organized labour (Cerny 1995).
Flexibilization feminizes the workforce: an increasing proportion of jobs require
few skills and the most desirable workers are those who are perceived to be unorganized
(undemanding), docile but reliable, available for part-time and temporary work, and
willing to accept low wages (Beneria 2003; Barker and Feiner 2010). Prevailing stereo –
types depict women as more attractive candidates for these jobs. Prevailing realities are
that women – in spite of decades of activism and legal advances – continue to earn 30–50
per cent less than men worldwide. And in spite of heading almost one-third of the
world’s households, women are still thought of as secondary earners, not primary (that
is, male) breadwinners. This assumption is used to ‘justify’ lower wages for women, as
if their earnings were marginal to family well being and the ‘real’ economy of men’s
work (Chang 2000; Parreñas 2008). Feminization then refers to how flexibilization is
simultaneously a material, embodied transformation of labour markets (more women
workers) and a conceptual characterization of devalorized labour condi tions (poorer pay
and less secure work arrangements).
In general, flexibilization increases the power of management and decreases the
choices available to most workers. The rhetoric of neoliberalism invokes flexibility as
essential for competitive success and as an inherently positive policy. As this rhetoric
becomes common sense it obscures how these policies are in fact politically and
Average Earnings Gender Segmentation
High
Low
Employers
Own Account
Operators
Unpaid Family Workers
Employees of Informal Enterprises
Other Informal Wage Workers
Industrial Outworkers/Homeworkers
Predominantly Men
Men and Women
Predominantly
Women
FIGURE 17.3
Gender segmentation of
the informal economy.
http://web.idrc.ca/es/
ev-83646–201–1-DO_
TOPIC.html
Chapter 5 discusses
feminist activism and the
problems it has
encountered.
The terms ‘liberal
globalism’ in Chapter 19
and ‘neoliberal global –
ization’ in Chapter 20 are
roughly equivalent to the
term ‘neo liberalism’ in
this Chapter.
HOW IS THE WORLD ORGANIZED ECONOMICALLY? 369
economically motivated; they benefit some at the expense of others. In the absence of
regulatory frameworks that protect workers’ rights and generate living wages (adequate
for sustaining households), flexibilization translates into greater insecurity of
employment, income, and benefits for the majority of the world’s workers.
As the subcontracting, homework and casualization of labour associated with flexi –
bil ization become normal, so do the less formal and regulated work conditions of
informalization. Insofar as flexibilization erodes labour’s organizing power, protection of
workers’ rights, and wage expectations, it exacerbates the decline in family income that
pushes more people to generate income in whatever way they can; they often do so by
engaging in informal sector activities. Finally, because flexibilization translates into avoid –
ance of taxes, it exacerbates the declining resources devoted to public welfare provisioning
and spurs participation in informal activities to compensate in part for this loss.
We know then that informalization matters economically. The sheer size of it has
tremendous implications for everyday lives, livelihoods and sites of power (Sassen 1998).
Informalization matters because it undercuts some legitimate businesses and enables
others. Its avoidance of taxes alone decreases public revenues, with far-reaching eco –
nomic effects, especially on the most vulnerable groups. Perhaps most significant
structurally, by avoiding indirect wages and regulation of labour relations and worksite
conditions, informalization enhances the power of capital at the expense of labour. That
is, it places downward pressure on wages more generally, which both decreases employed
labour’s earnings and power and has a disciplining effect on all workers.
Moreover, and inextricably, informalization matters politically. Informalization
poses quandaries of documentation and measurement; policies may be misconceived
and inappropriate if they are based on faulty estimates of national output, income
distribution, or unemployment. Societies lose when informal activities evade tax collec –
tion, decrease public revenues and enable corruption. Recent scandals regarding insider
trading and fraudulent accounting practices reveal how extensive the damage can be.
Similarly, the reduction in tax revenues due to informalization has political effects in
terms of who wins and loses as a consequence of selective public expenditures. Societies
also lose when unregulated work practices pose safety, health, and environmental risks,
when criminal activities thwart collective interests in law and order, and when illicit gains
BOX 17.2 GENDER AND FEMINIZATION
Gender is related to, but more complicated than, the conventional distinction between females and males.
It refers to socially learned identities and ways of thinking and acting that are characterized as masculine
or feminine. For example, ‘reason’ and assertiveness, appearing unemotional and ‘in control’, and being
the ‘breadwinner’ are masculinized (associated with masculine characteristics). In contrast, ‘emotion’ and
‘dependence’, appearing uncertain and submissive, and being the ‘homemaker’ are feminized. The key
pattern to recognize is that, in general and with powerful consequences, qualities associated with
masculinity are valorized over, and at the expense of, those associated with femininity. This translates
economically into devalorized (low status, poorly paid, insecure, etc.) feminized work – whether being
done by males or females.
FIGURE 17.4
Injusticia Global. Artist:
Sergio Langer, El Clarin,
Argentina
Compare the discussion
of contemporary slavery
in Chapter 15.
are used to fund conflicts. Critics of informalization hence argue that avoidance of
regulations is directly and indirectly bad for wages, workers, the environment, and long-
term prospects for societal well-being.
Like flexibilization, some individuals prosper by engaging in entrepreneurial activ-
ities – legal and illegal – made possible by a less regulated environment. This is especially
evident in microenterprises favoured by neoliberals, in developing countries where
informal activities are crucial for income generation, and in clandestine activities that
are increasing worldwide (Friman and Andreas 1999; Naylor 2002). And like
flexibilization, this work is polarized between a small, privileged group able to take
advantage of and prosper from deregulation and flexibilization, and the majority of the
world’s informal workers – women, migrants, and the poor – who participate less out
of choice than necessity due to economic and ideological devalorization (Hoskyns and
Rai 2007; Peterson 2010a). Mainstream accounts emphasize elites and entrepreneurs,
but most flexible and informal workers have few choices about the work that they do.
And they do a great deal of it.
In short, informal activities are growing. They span a wide range of activities and
crucial to their significance is how they blur conventional boundaries separating public
and private, legal and illegal, production and reproduction, national and international.
The majority of informal activities are also feminized – involving devalued identities,
statuses, working conditions and forms of compensation (Chant and Pedwell 2008).
Informalization thus poses fundamental questions about global political economy in
relation to family livelihoods, conditions of employment, what counts as economic
activity, and how activities are valued.
370 V. SPIKE PETERSON
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
C
hi
na
In
di
a
T
ha
ila
nd
Ja
pa
n
B
ol
iv
ia
N
ig
er
ia
A
rg
en
tin
a
U
S
A
Is
ra
el
G
eo
rg
ia
P
er
u
C
an
ad
a
G
er
m
an
y
Ita
ly
Size of informal
Economy
World Average
FIGURE 17.5
Average size of informal
economy around the
world measured as a
percentage of GDP.
http://www.atmmarketpl
ace.com/article/129691/
Another-100-years-of-
cash; also at
http://www.greensheet.c
om/emagazine.php?stor
y_id=745
The imposition of
policies of structural
adjustment in
developing countries
such as Ivory Coast is
part of neoliberalism and
has had a huge impact:
Chapter 15.
HOW IS THE WORLD ORGANIZED ECONOMICALLY? 371
GENERAL RESPONSES
EXPLAINING THE POLITICS OF ECONOMICS
We know that neoliberal globalization is powerfully affecting how life is lived and work
is done throughout the world. We also know that the recent growth in informal activities
was unanticipated and that its effects are economically and politically important. Those
who study global politics debate how and why these changes are occurring, and who
the winners and losers are. What are the most familiar approaches, what do they include,
what do they omit?
The disciplinary separation of economics from politics (and from sociology, anthro –
pology, communications, and psychology) works against understanding the overlapping
and interdependent dimensions of these disciplines. When Adam Smith initiated the
study of political economy in the eighteenth century, he focused on market activities.
He did so because the forces of industrial capitalism were dramatically altering conditions
of social life and posed the most challenging problems. But he understood markets as
inextricable from other social, institutional, and political dynamics. How then did the
study of political economy become fragmented into economics and politics?
After the eighteenth century, forms of social organization based on state-driven
market exchanges were intensified. Western-centric ideologies of progress, nationalism,
secularism, science (as well as Christianity), and liberal capitalism were spread around
the world, with extensive, though not homogeneous, effects. Advanced industrial
countries dominated the world order and cultivated economic development models that
sustained western supremacy. In these countries, mass production, collective bargaining,
and the liberal-capitalist welfare state fostered the growth of a middle class. These
cumulative developments had diverse effects. On the one hand, successful industrializa-
tion was associated with enhanced productivity, a proliferation of goods, greater
consumer pleasures, and new identities. On the other hand, unemployment, harsh work
conditions, and relentless competition meant new miseries, labour migrations, and
increasing disparities between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ within and among nations.
As universities became central to the production of knowledge, studies of social
life fragmented into disciplinary specializations. The study of political economy was
divided into economics and politics, and the lure of scientific methods encouraged those
who identified as economists to narrow and formalize their analyses. By the twentieth
century, neoclassical economics became the pre dominant school of economic theory,
and is subscribed to by most economists who advocate today’s neoliberal re-structuring.
This school presupposes that resources are scarce, human wants are unlimited, and that
rational ordering of preferences determines how individuals and firms optimize their
self-interests. Formal mathematical models and manipulation of statistical data are
preferred methods.
In effect, this orientation focuses on objective phenomena and excludes from
analyses that which is not quantifiable or not valued enough to be counted. Until
recently, the study of global politics tended to marginalize consideration of race,
gender, and even class. Related to this is a tendency to neglect how emotional invest –
ments and social identities – ‘who we are’ – have tremendous importance. They shape
our desires, expecta tions, self-esteem, attitudes, values and how we act – especially toward
‘others’. These subjective factors are difficult to measure but they matter to politics.
Neglect of identities and subjective factors is in turn related to an avoidance of cultural
phenomena, for example, popular music, television pro grammes, videos, films, YouTube,
gaming and other forms of leisure (Best and Paterson 2010). Information and com-
munication technologies expand the global reach of these media and powerfully shape
what information people have access to and what ideological assumptions they then
internalize. In sum, disciplinary boundaries and an emphasis on objective phenomena
shape what we know about global politics, and especially the global political economy.
Liberal and neoliberal approaches
Conventional – and hence the most familiar – accounts of global political economy are
associated with the liberal tradition and its promotion by neoclassical economists of free
market policies (Chwieroth 2010; Peck 2010). Basic assumptions of this position
include: markets are efficient and morally desirable; the unfettered movement of trade
and capital will result in optimal investment flows; countries benefit by emphasizing
their comparative advantage; growth is imperative and will ‘trickle down’ to the benefit
of all; open borders ensure the most efficient and equitable distributions of goods
worldwide. The role of governments is to facilitate the operation of markets but
otherwise not intervene in decision-making.
The policies of neoliberalism clearly emerge from this liberal tradition. The
restructuring they entail is new because it is elevated to the global level. At the same
time, it penetrates to the individual level: as public services and welfare supports decline,
individuals alone are expected to ensure their well-being through smart consumerism
and investing wisely for their retirement. ‘Market fundamentalism’ aptly conveys the
meaning of neoliberalism: to promote the power of market-based decision-makers over
that of public or government-based decision-makers. The over-riding objective of private
372 V. SPIKE PETERSON
Rising inequality is the
subject of Chapter 19.
Chapter 5 discusses who
we think we are, and how
gender and race are
significant. Chapter 14
addressed these same
themes in the context of
politics in Argentina.
The question of how we
know what is going on in
the world and the way
this influences how we
think is the subject of
Chapter 8. Chapter 9
engages with the
changes brought by the
development of
technologies often
referred to as Web 2.0.
Chapter 19 discusses
how the free market in
fact leads to global
inequality.
HOW IS THE WORLD ORGANIZED ECONOMICALLY? 373
and corporate capital (market forces) is to make profits for owners and shareholders.
Unlike governments, the well-being of ordinary workers and citizens is not the primary
concern. In the absence of government regulation, market forces are not accountable
to workers or citizens and tend to undercut collective (democratic) efforts to direct
production processes and determine how society’s goods are distributed. In this sense,
neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization subject workers and citizens to
regulation primarily by market forces, where the motivation is pursuit of profits rather
than provision of public goods. The tension between promoting private gains and
improving public welfare complicates both how we theorize global political economy
and how we evaluate neoliberal capitalism.
If we liken restructuring to a global ‘game’ of neoliberal capitalism, its enthusiasts
fundamentally believe in the game at play. That is, they subscribe to the model of human
nature attributed to the players (atomistic, competitive, and rational individuals or
states), to the expectations that flow from this model when no additional constraints
are imposed (‘each-to-his-own’, winner-takes-all strategies), and to the projected long-
term, system-wide benefits from playing what they understand anyway as the ‘only game
in town’ (‘there is no alternative’). In an important sense, these accounts render
structural hierarchies invisible, either by being depoliticized (as ‘the way things are’ due
FIGURE 17.6
‘Don’t stop believing’.
Artist: Barry Deutsch
The pursuit of profit has
impacts on the environ –
ment, arguably a public
good: Chapter 3.
For a discussion of the
idea that there is
something called
‘human nature’ see
Chapter 7.
The idea that micro –
enterprise has positive
effects is behind the
promotion of
microfinance discussed
in Chapter 20.
Financial crises and their
relation to people’s
everyday lives are the
subject of Chapter 18.
374 V. SPIKE PETERSON
to nature or ineluctable globalization) or marginalized (as perhaps regrettable but
nonetheless subordinated to, or a distraction from, more pressing analytical concerns).
This theoretical perspective dominates in economic analyses and mainstream media.
Because most people hear little other than this account, they tend to believe it is the
only one.
Liberal and neoliberal economists have focused on formal market activities, where
commodified goods and services are exchanged and some degree of profit-seeking is
presupposed. Those who study the global economy have focused on the role of large
corporate firms and advanced industrial economies; both were considered historically
the most successful choices and developmentally the most probable. For example,
modernization theory assumed that ‘the rest would follow the west’ in terms of how
they developed economically. It was assumed that informal activities would be displaced
by industrialization, which involved the expansion of waged labour and increasing forms
of regulation. Little theoretical attention was paid to activities that did not conform to
these assumptions and expectations. As a result, economic theory ignored informal
activities in favour of more familiar market processes that predominated in advanced
industrial economies. From a critical vantage point, this silence reflected a relative lack
of interest in issues of greater importance to poor and developing countries, and of
greater consequence for vulnerable (feminized) populations.
Theoretical reassessment was spurred by growth in informal activities worldwide
and, especially, as a prominent feature of economies in transition from centralized state-
planning regimes toward neoliberal ones. For the most part, informalization that does
not involve criminal activity tends to be interpreted positively by liberal economists. It
is seen as a breeding ground for microenterprise or a creative and flexible response to
inefficient or excessive regulation. Some argue that informally earned income has a
stimulating effect on the formal economy. But there are different reasons for participating
in the informal sector. The tendency to focus on the positive effects of entrepreneurial
activities, undertaken primarily by middle- and upper-income groups, leads to a neglect
of informalization among lower-income groups. The latter participate more for sheer
survival and have too few resources to be engaged in activities that ‘stimulate the
economy’.
At the same time, there are growing networks of organized crime (Naylor 2002).
These engage in illegal activities – drug smuggling, sex trafficking, arms trading – that
are often very lucrative. The implications are especially disturbing when we consider
how semi-clandestine and illegal operations are shaping the conduct of twenty-first-
century militarized conflicts (Ballentine and Sherman 2003). The deleterious effects of
illicit activities have prompted closer attention to informal activities that affect global
finances and geopolitics. But the vast amount of informal work associated with
households and caring labour – which increases during financial crises and wars – remains
invisible in mainstream accounts (Seguino 2010). Also neglected are the effects of
historical and growing inequalities worldwide and how these both reflect and are exacer –
bated by informalization (Tabak and Crichlow 2000; Berik et al. 2009).
Liberal and neoliberal analyses tend to dominate in economic theory, media
accounts, and public consciousness. But there are dissenting voices, too, as some econ –
omists are uncomfortable with how neoliberal restructuring has been imposed, noting
especially its tendency toward destabiliization of social conditions and the larger
See the discussion of
historical materialism in
Chapter 19.
Gramsci’s work is also
discussed in Chapter 1.
BOX 17.3 KARL MARX
Karl Marx (1818–83) is best known for his analysis of the workings of capitalism as
a mode of production, and its exploitation and commodification of workers and
their labour. He argued that changes in the social practices of production, from
slavery through feudalism to capitalism, changed the ways in which we picture the
world. He was an active campaigner and his writings formed the inspiration for
communist and socialist political programmes that placed the well-being of the
collectivity above the rights of private property. He was clear that while ‘the
philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to
change it’ (Theses on Feuerbach, XI; see McLellan 1977).
FIGURE 17.7
Karl Marx
HOW IS THE WORLD ORGANIZED ECONOMICALLY? 375
problems this can create. Given recurring financial crises and corporate accounting
scandals, concerns are also raised regarding deregulation of financial arrangements and
the difficulties of ensuring transparency and accountability (Best 2005).
To stay with the global game metaphor, these players subscribe to the assump tions
and objectives of neoliberalism, but are more attentive to the dangers of applying them
so rapidly and indiscriminately. Responses focus on ‘adjusting’ the implementation of
policies, especially to ameliorate their most deleterious effects. In this sense, the rules
of the game are not fundamentally challenged but the major players are encouraged to
take a longer and broader view, to ease up on the immediately devastating practices so
that the game itself proceeds with less conflict and loss, and fewer crises.
Marxist approaches
The most widely recognized alternative to liberal and neoliberal approaches emerges
from the Marxist tradition. This includes a variety of perspectives and important dis –
tinctions, but what they share are critiques of capitalism (Rupert and Solomon 2006).
The basic argument is that capitalism promotes the concentration of resources and power
in a minority, at the expense of the majority. Marxist global political econ omy attempts
to develop more holistic or structural explanations of how markets, firms, and
governments interact. This approach takes institutions seriously and analyses them in
relation to power differentials. For example, institutions may serve as mech anisms for
establishing and maintaining class-based inequalities, and the state may be dominated
by elites but also have a remedial role in alleviating class hierarchies. Another increasingly
influential variant of Marxism features the insights of Antonio Gramsci. This approach
pays particular attention to issues of culture and illuminates how hegemonic rule occurs
through ideological consent. For example, the ideology of neoliberalism is promoted
through multiple media, which cultivates an acceptance of capitalism as both desirable
and inevitable (‘there is no alternative’).
Marxist-oriented approaches offer critical vantage points and extensive research on
changes in the organization of production, global divisions of labour, accumulation and
regulation dynamics, and class and geopolitical hierarchies. Their emphasis on historical
developments is important for illuminating how systems are made and hence can be
changed. Like liberal economists, they tend to focus on the formal sector but have also
made significant contributions to theorizing informalization.
Marxism is associated with the view that formalization or proletarianization
would replace other forms of labour as capitalism developed. At the same time, Marxists
more indebted to historical materialism have long understood that full proletarian-
ization is a structural contradiction for capitalism. Briefly, they argue that capital
accumulation depends not only on profits gained through formal mechanisms of pro –
duction and exchange but also, and continuously, on accumulation of profits through
non-capitalist, nonwaged, casual, and/or informal economic activities that are not
proletarianized.
A dimension of this thesis is that capital’s pursuit of the highest profit entails
maintaining a surplus (‘reserve army’) of labour that is not currently – or formally –
employed but potentially employable. This surplus both enhances profits through
maintaining downward pressure on wages, and disciplines employed workers through
the threat of being replaced from these reserves. In other words, the availability of surplus
labour compels workers to compete with each other; this competition enhances the
bargaining advantage of employers by decreasing what they need to offer in terms of
wages and benefits. The informal sector constitutes some of this labour surplus and tends
to lower wages. First, avoidance of regulated work conditions avoids a variety of costs
to firms and decreases average labour costs. Second, direct competition from inform –
alized workers tends to decrease the number of higher-paid (formal) workers, and
sometimes decreases how much they are paid. Given these dynamics, the wage contract
underpinning formal work arrangements is only part and not the whole of economic
activities; full proletarianization would undercut the expansionary capitalist pursuit of
only the highest realizable profit rates.
Moreover, Marxist analysts recognize that informalization is not a passing
phenomenon. Rather, it is a structural feature of capitalist relations and plays a role in
the periodic restructuring associated with capitalism’s boom-and-bust cycles. During
economic downturns, informal activities increase as formal employment opportunities
diminish and people struggle to generate whatever income they can in whatever way
possible. Similarly, the apparent newness of informal growth in advanced economies is
due to conceptual selectivity (a focus on industrialized production, formal activities,
etc.) and relegating informal activities to theories of development (focused on poor,
‘third world’ rather than industrialized economies).
In sum, Marxist approaches help us understand informalization as both a structural
feature of capitalism (linking the informal to the formal economy through downward
pressure on wages) and a long-term cyclical process (linking the expansion of informal
activities to accumulation cycles). It broadens our focus to include informal activities
as integral to formal waged production relations and all labour force formation. These
are important advances in thinking about informalization. They remain limited, however,
in two related ways. First, these analysts rarely extend their critique of structural
hierarchies beyond economic indicators. Rather, they focus on class (within nations)
and developed versus developing countries (between nations). Second, they continually
neglect social reproduction, domestic labour, and intra-household dynamics.
376 V. SPIKE PETERSON
Proletarianization means
an increasing number of
workers engaged in and
dependent on waged
labour: see Chapter 15.
Compare the discussion
of deproletarianization in
Chapter 15.
HOW IS THE WORLD ORGANIZED ECONOMICALLY? 377
What does it mean to
think of the global
economy as a ‘game’ in
the first place?
BROADER ISSUES
THE HIDDEN COSTS OF NEOLIBERALISM
We have seen how liberal and neoliberal economists theorize global political economy,
offer limited accounts of informalization, and tend to ignore structural hierarchies.
Analysts drawing on the Marxist tradition expand our knowledge of informal–formal
linkages and improve our understanding of historical patterns and global dynamics. They
also provide illuminating critiques of economic hierarchies.
What continues to be left out of this picture and hence weakens our under standing
of how the world economy is organized? What larger questions remain unexamined?
In particular, who are the actual winners and losers in this game? And what are the
long-term consequences? The puzzle of informalization offers a useful vantage point
for considering these questions, exploring how value is assigned, and revealing the
hidden costs of neoliberalism.
We know that work outside of the formal economy is not diminishing, as expected,
but increasing with globalization and during economic downturns. Increasing
unemployment, flexibilization, and erosion or prohibition of union power have meant
declining real incomes and decreased job security for most workers worldwide.
Deregulation and privatization undercut welfare provision ing, state employment, and
collective supports for family well-being. As economic conditions deteriorate, individuals
and households are thus pushed to engage in informal activities as a strategy for securing
income however they can. The majority of informal workers are women, migrants, and
the urban poor. The income they generate often enables families to survive but rarely
enables them to prosper. For the most part, these vulnerable (feminized) populations
FIGURE 17.8
Informal economic activity. http://wiego.org/wiego/core-programmes/urban-policies
Chapter 19 examines the
‘losers’ of the global
economic ‘game’ in
some detail and Chapter
16 argues that which
countries do well in this
game is rooted in the
history of colonialism
and the exploitation of
other countries that it
entailed.
There is a discussion of
feminist activism, and
of racism, in Chapter 5.
The distinction between
public and private
spheres is also
discussed in that
chapter.
378 V. SPIKE PETERSON
remain excluded from the purported benefits of neoliberalism. In this sense,
informalization takes advantage of, and exacerbates, inequalities based on gender, race
and economic hierarchies. In effect, the majority of the global population loses in the
game of neoliberalism.
A significant component of informalization involves activities undertaken to ensure
social reproduction – the labour that is characterized as women’s work. These activities
are rarely analysed in mainstream accounts because they are not valued or easily
quantified and hence not counted. This neglect is due in part to conceptual habits:
locating men in the public sphere of power and real – that is, paid – work, and women
in the household sphere of emotional maintenance, leisure, and caring – that is, unpaid
– labour. It is also due to institutionalized prac tices: for example, academic disciplines
that study social life as separate (psychological, social, economic, political) spheres of
inquiry. Critics argue, in contrast, that what is regarded as women’s work and informal
activities are crucial for analysing the global political economy.
In short, a more adequate understanding of global politics requires including the
role of informalization, examining who the winners and losers are, and considering the
consequences of excluding so many from neoliberalism’s purported benefits. Analysts
who are most attentive to these issues and combine a variety of theoretical approaches
are feminists – especially those who are critical of colonialism and racism. They provide
the most inclusive accounts of social reproduction, gendered work, and informalization.
Their research is especially rich in providing empirical data and case studies; they enable
us to theorize how work is assigned value; and they variously engage in theorizing
multiple hierarchies.
The gendered division of labour
Feminism has no single meaning and there are many ways of thinking about how
patriarchy operates. Differences shaped by history, culture, location, discip linary interests,
and theoretical orientations generate a wide range of approaches (Peterson and Runyan
2010). In general, feminist economists analyse the relation ship between women’s
reproductive labour, the formal economy, and surplus accumulation. Research includes
adding women’s labour in social reproduction (care of children and elders, housework,
etc.) to existing theoretical models, examin ing gender differences in labour markets and
work conditions, and develop ing policy recommendations. Feminist international
development econ omists concentrate on industrializing countries. They study not only
how social reproduction and informal activities affect women’s empowerment, but also
how gendered values and strategies affect national development more generally.
Feminist economists who identify with Marxism theorize capitalism’s relationship
to women’s work. They argue that bearing, raising, and appropriately socializing future
workers produces labour power (workers) for the formal economy. The economic
benefits of this unpaid labour accrue to employers who are thereby spared the full
costs of producing the labour force. That is, employers do not have to pay for the work
of social reproduction that is necessary for infants to become adults who are avail-
able for work. They argue that economic theory should address how workers themselves
are produced before their labour is made available for either informal or formal
deployment.
BOX 17.4 WORLD-SYSTEMS ANALYSIS
Proposed by Immanuel Wallerstein in the 1970s, world-systems analysis treats the present-day capitalist
global economy as a modern world-system, which, to put it very simply, is made up of countries in the
core (the rich, developed nations of the North), the periphery (so-called underdeveloped countries of the
third world or global South) and the semi-periphery. When the theory was first proposed, the countries of
the Soviet bloc formed the semi-periphery. The idea was that the semi-periphery provided a sort of buffer
zone between the developed and underdeveloped world, and that while countries could move from one
part of the world-system to another, the structure of the world-system was what was important. For more
detail see for example: http://www.sociology.emory.edu/globalization/theories01.html.
Chapter 6 has more to
say about ideology.
HOW IS THE WORLD ORGANIZED ECONOMICALLY? 379
Feminists also expand world systems analyses that focus on households as basic units
of analysis (Smith and Wallerstein 1992). Although households vary, two key points
emerge from this research. One is that informal labour associated with the household
(e.g. subsistence, home-based production) underpins capitalist dynamics and profit-
making, yet is neglected in mainstream economic theory. A second point is that – except
for a small elite – wages alone are inadequate for sustaining households. To survive,
most of the world’s families combine available wage income with informal activities,
public welfare support, and/or self-provisioning (do-it-yourself) labour. Also neglected
is the expansion of ‘global householding’, as individuals increasingly cross national
boundaries as part of sustaining the social and economic reproduction of households
(Douglas 2006; Peterson 2010b).
What links these various observations is a gendered division of labour that was
historically produced, extends worldwide, and assigns women and men different
responsibilities. This division relegates to women the primary role in sustaining family
and household well-being and depoliticizes the socially necessary work that women do
and the disproportionate burden of responsibility placed on them when economic
conditions degenerate. The processes involve gendered identities (breadwinner, home-
maker) and ideologies (masculine work is for cash, feminized work is for love). Here
the empirical studies of structural adjustment policies, flexibilization, and informalization
merge in exposing how women are expected to ‘take up the slack’ when male wage-
earning and public services decline. For many women, this increasingly means working
a ‘triple shift’ – of reproductive labour, informal work, and formal employment.
It is not simply women who suffer the costs of neoliberal globalization. As noted
above, informalized workers and those with the fewest choices about how to survive
include the majority of people – women and men – worldwide. These vulnerable
populations are losers in the game of neoliberal capitalism, and their exclusion from its
purported benefits has implications for all of us.
The costs of exclusions
The game metaphor enables us to see the ‘whole’ world through various lenses. From
the vantage point of liberal and neoliberal economists, growth is the answer and
FIGURE 17.9
‘The wider informal economy.’
http://www.cartoonstock.com/
directory/i/informal_market.asp
unfettered capitalism is the preferred and inevitable way to achieve it. From a similar
starting point, but with increasing attention to global inequalities and the dangers these
pose, more cautious voices are urging reforms. They advocate corrective policies in the
hope of softening the costs of restructuring and dampen ing its most devastating effects.
Less familiar are a number of explicitly critical perspectives. These include a range of
Marxist approaches, some versions of institutionalism, many environmentalists, and a
variety of feminist critiques.
Because they start from different positions, their criticisms are wide-ranging. Differ –
ent players among them argue that neoliberal globalization: increases class inequalities,
enhances the wealth and power of elites, fails to lift the poorest out of poverty, erodes
the gains and prospects of organized labour, worsens un- and underemployment,
displaces subsistence agriculture and local craft production, increases the unpaid work
of women, fuels licit and illicit informal ization, lowers standards in advanced economies,
increases surveillance and discipline of workers, weakens worker demands through the
threat of job losses and capital flight, reduces the state’s capacity – or commitment –
to prioritize domestic welfare, promotes environmental damage and toxic dumping on
poor countries, fuels speculative and volatile financial markets, and poses systemic risks
due to the integration of financial markets.
Corrective and transformative recommendations are equally wide-ranging and
depend on particular issues and the perspective of the critic. In general however, these
‘players’ argue that the problems of the global economy are too deep for cosmetic fixes.
Adjustments to soften the negative effects, or a slower pace to ameliorate damage, may
afford important and even life-saving temporary relief but are simply not enough. The
costs of neoliberalism for most people and the planet are simply too great. Hence, these
players argue variously for different premises, different rules, and even a fundamentally
different game.
380 V. SPIKE PETERSON
Common sense is
discussed in Chapter 1.
What is being suggested
here is that neo –
liberalism is a
‘problem-solving theory’
in the terms discussed in
Chapter 1 and that what
is needed instead is a
critical theory.
For a discussion of
corporations’ control
of and exposure to the
internet see Chapter 9.
HOW IS THE WORLD ORGANIZED ECONOMICALLY? 381
This summary of positions reveals a singularly important factor in shaping one’s
assessment of neoliberalism. That factor is whether and to what extent the rules of the
game and its premises are taken for granted as common sense. This common sense
includes first, believing that ‘there is no alternative’ to capitalism. Adherents argue that
this claim is supported by the historical, cumulative success of capitalist development
and the displacement or collapse of all alternatives. The second and related belief is that
neoliberalism is (ultimately) good for everyone: providing efficiency, creativity, growth,
and even security.
What are the consequences of accepting this ‘common sense’ and the particular
game of capitalism that it perpetuates? In the short term, marginalized popula tions face
daunting challenges: how to secure immediate resources for family survival and well-
being, and how to maintain self-esteem and optimism under stressful conditions and
unpromising futures. In the long term, growing inequal ities drain people’s sense of
inclusion in a global community; increase feelings of frustration, despair and resentment;
reduce the likelihood of people working together for common goals; and undermine
democratic principles, which require inclusiveness (Uvin 2003). In combination, these
conditions increase the impov er ish ment of the majority and the probability of conflicts.
Illuminating the social exclusions of neoliberalism shifts attention to the costs of
perpetuating it as ‘common sense’. Failure to count these costs is due in part to
theoretical biases and disciplinary boundaries, and resistance to critical thinking. It is
also due to the ‘top down’ vantage point of elite decision-makers, western states, and
corporate executives. In spite of advocating ‘global’ processes and democratic ideals,
those who promote neoliberalism pay little heed to voices and viewpoints outside of
rich, powerful states, indeed outside of elite sites of power and authority within those
states. Through their selective lenses the ‘reality’ in developing countries, the ‘discarded
fourth world’, urban ghettos, and overburdened families is rendered invisible and hence
simply not ‘counted’.
CONCLUSION
Inequalities do not originate with neoliberalism, nor do its proponents claim to
intentionally exacerbate them. Even the brief history summarized above reveals long
and entwined histories of colonialism, racism, patriarchy, and economic inequality within
and among nations. These hierarchies of difference were already internalized and
institutionalized and could be used in support of neoliberal objectives, for example, by
devaluing the informal work done by women, the poor and migrants. What distinguishes
contemporary capitalism is its unprecedented global reach, and its ability to shape how
‘all’ of us think. Corporations control most of the world’s media, and their primary
objective is the pursuit of profit for private shareholders. Hence, the dominant media
promote neoliberalism. But the narrow vantage point thereby broadcast to ‘the world’
effectively undermines critical thinking and democratic processes. People who are told
only one story cannot help but believe ‘there is no alternative’. Critical perspectives,
lived realities, and alternative visions are simply ‘not counted’.
FURTHER READING
Bakker, Isabella and Stephen Gill (eds) (2003) Power, Production and Social Reproduction:
Human In/security in the Global Political Economy, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Comprehensive discussion of the importance of social reproduction to economics and
security.
Dickinson, Torry D. and Robert K. Schaeffer (2001) Fast Forward: Work, Gender, and Protest in
a Changing World, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Student-friendly account of global political economy that identifies key patterns and how
people are organizing for better conditions.
Kofman, Eleonore and Gillian Youngs (eds) (2008) Globalization: Theory and Practice, 3rd edn,
London and New York: Continuum.
Interesting and instructive collection providing diverse disciplinary treatments of globaliza-
tion.
Marchand, Marianne H. and Anne Sisson Runyan (eds) (2011) Gender and Global Restructuring:
Sightings, Sites and Resistances, 2nd edn, London: Routledge.
This volume integrates analyses of neoliberal globalization and post-9/11 neo-imperialism.
Miller, Raymond C. (2008) International Political Economy: Contrasting World Views, London:
Routledge.
Accessible overview of the field that combines theoretical perspectives, empirical studies and
comparative policy analysis.
Scholte, Jan Aart (2005) Globalization: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edn, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Especially accessible and comprehensive overview of globalization, including definitions,
history, data, controversies, and policy implications.
WEBSITES
The UC Atlas of Global Inequality, http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/index.php
Explores the interaction between global integration (globalization) and inequality, and
provides maps, graphics and data.
Institute for Policy Studies, http://www.ips-dc.org/
A multi-issue think tank offering a cross-cutting analysis with a historical perspective;
committed to strengthening and linking social movements.
Institute of Development Studies, http://www.ids.ac.uk/ids/
A leading global organization for research, teaching and communications on international
development.
United Nations Development Programme, http://www.undp.org/
The UN’s global development network, an organization advocating for change and facilitating
exchange of knowledge, experience and resources.
United Nations Development Fund for Women, http://www.unifem.org/
The women’s fund at the United Nations, providing financial and technical assistance to
innovative programmes and strategies to foster women’s empowerment and gender
equality.
International Labour Organization, http://www.ilo.org/
UN specialized agency, promoting social justice and labour rights; research reports on
informal and formal work.
382 V. SPIKE PETERSON
http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/index.php
http://www.ips-dc.org/
http://www.ids.ac.uk/ids/
http://www.undp.org/
http://www.unifem.org/
http://www.ilo.org/
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HOW IS THE WORLD ORGANIZED ECONOMICALLY? 383
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384 V. SPIKE PETERSON
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website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
http://www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
CHAPTER 18
Is the financial crisis part of
everyday life?
Matt Davies
■ The question
POLITICS AND EVERYDAY LIFE
■ Illustrative example
FINANCE AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS
■ General responses
THE POLITICS OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS
■ Broader issues
RE-POLITICIZING FINANCE, RE-POLITICIZING
EVERYDAY LIFE
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
POLITICS AND EVERYDAY LIFE
What is everyday life? Every day you get up, eat something, brush your teeth, go to the
toilet, travel to school or work, see friends, work, study, go home, eat some more, spend
time with your partner or maybe watch some television, go to sleep, and then do it all
over again. These are just the ordinary, banal rhythms of your life: rhythms determined
by your body, by the buildings you occupy and the arteries that connect them, and
by the plans and obligations you encounter in the context of these daily activities. You
will probably do these things, or similar things, for the rest of your life
and you probably won’t have to stop and think about them very much.
You might save your thoughts and feelings and plans and hopes for ‘higher’
things. Everyday life is where we live, where we produce our experience,
and also not where we live because it doesn’t really occupy our attention
– except, of course, when it is disrupted.
These sorts of activities
are also mentioned at
the start of Chapter 3,
where it is suggested
that they are part of
the politics of the
environment.
The question of money
and wealth, and how
wealth is measured,
are discussed in
Chapter 19. The meaning
of poverty is examined
in Chapter 20.
This means that there is an important sense in which our
everyday lives exclude politics. Being political presumes that you
are making some kind of claim, a claim for recognition as an equal
subject that disrupts your positioning as unequal, voiceless, not
a subject. How can you make a political claim in the part of your
life that you perform routinely, without being obligated to stop
and think about it?
This ‘unreflected upon’ character of everyday life pre –
occupied Henri Lefebvre, one of the foremost theorists of
everyday life. For Lefebvre, the everyday was precisely what is left
when the ‘higher’ activities of reflection, philosophy, planning
and such are separated out from our daily lives. For example, our
productive lives – our work – become means to satisfy ‘higher’
ends through consumption: people give up parts of their lives for a paycheque because
the money they earn allows them to satisfy their wants and needs. Because these ‘higher’
activities can appear to us as the subjective part of our lives, everyday life comes to appear
as an object from which our capacity for reflection has been abstracted. Indeed, because
everyday life is so important for the reproduction of our social relations and for
sustaining the ‘higher’ activities, it becomes an object for planning and programming.
If we consider the purpose of advertising, for example, to be to produce new needs so
new products can be sold, then we can see how advertisers make plans to intervene in
the organization and practice of everyday life. In one of his more pessimistic descriptions
of this relationship, in the mid-1960s, Lefebvre referred to everyday life in the modern
Western world as having entered a phase he called the ‘bureaucratic society of controlled
consumption’ (Lefebvre 1984 [1968]: 68–109).
At the same time, however, it’s in the performance of these banal rituals that we
enable ourselves to become subjects. This can create the possibility of politics as
something ‘outside’ of our everyday lives, a ‘higher’ activity cultivated by our freedom
to reflect and to think, enabled by the security of the satisfaction of daily rhythms. But
– and this is why the ‘at the same time’ bit matters – we actually have to perform these
rituals for everyday life to take place. They do not just enable ‘higher activities’ for
ourselves or for others, they are the decisions and actions that we take, they are how
we make ourselves subjects on an ongoing basis. So while politics is an exceptional,
disruptive, ‘higher’ activity, it is also, at the same time an unexceptional, banal, everyday
activity. It is this ‘both . . . and . . .’ character that makes the location of global politics
such a complicated matter.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
FINANCE AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS
We can see how this problem comes up by looking a bit more closely at finance and
the financial crisis. How does the financial crisis affect our everyday lives? What is finance?
In the first instance, finance is not the same thing as money. Money does several things
for us: it makes it easy to exchange things in a market because it gives us a standard
measure of values; money is also a store of value, so we get a sense of how wealthy a
386 MATT DAVIES
FIGURE 18.1
Henri Lefebvre. Photo: Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/
Corbis
Chapter 20 discusses
some alternative
schemes for providing
finance: to what extent
are these able to make
a difference to the
underlying issues
addressed here?
This situation – where
finance plays a limited
role – is described when
the author of Chapter 19
describes his experience
as a British citizen born
in the early 1950s.
Consider how tuition
fees for university
education mean that
people are drawn into
a system of loans and
credit.
IS THE FINANCIAL CRISIS PART OF EVERYDAY LIFE? 387
person or a corporation or a nation is by how much money they have; but crucially,
money is also a commodity and as such, it is scarce: there is no guarantee that the right
quantities of money will be in the right places to enable all the necessary exchanges to
take place.
One way of trying to get money to the right places is for someone who owns money
to lend it. This is where finance comes in. In the first place, if you are going to lend
money to someone, you have to believe that they will be able to pay it back. This belief
is called credit; we measure our confidence in someone’s ability to pay by saying how
much credit we are willing to extend to them. In addition to the extending of credit,
finance is also about distributing risk. Someone who needs money but has little credit
is a higher risk but they still need money, so finance puts them together with someone
a little more willing to take the risk that they won’t pay. The speculative lender will
likely be prepared to take this risk because the person with less credit will pay more to
borrow the money than a person with more credit. This points to the third important
quality of finance, the way that money is a commodity: finance is a way that people
make money from money, rather than from producing a ‘real’ good to be exchanged
in the market.
‘Financialization’ refers to the progressive insertion of this logic of finance
(extending credit, distributing risk, and making money from money) into more and
more areas of social and economic life. You can imagine a life where finance plays a
fairly restricted role. If there are no tuition fees for universities and your government
provides you with maintenance grants, then you probably won’t have to borrow money
to pay for your higher education. If your wages increase roughly in correlation with the
productivity of your labour – as they did during the post-Second World War boom
until about 1975 in the United States – then you will probably be able to pay for most
of the items you want to consume out of your earnings, the exceptions being only those
extraordinarily expensive items, like housing, that you might pay for over long periods
of time. You probably don’t have to imagine a life where finance plays a fairly unrestricted
role because that’s the life you live now if you live in the US or the UK: student loans,
car loans, credit cards, mortgages, daily stock market averages reported in the news,
credit scores, online purchasing, pension planning, insurance. The bureaucratic society
of controlled consumption that Henri Lefebvre described in 1967 has asserted itself
with a vengeance as financial calculations regulate more and more areas of our everyday
lives.
This art of calculation is increasingly inserted into everyday life. To manage all of
the financial decisions and actions that affect your life, you have to decide how much
risk you are willing to take on and how you might set out to increase your personal
wealth through beating the average (or paying someone to beat the average for you)
in the returns on your investments. Do you put your savings in the stock market? In
real estate? In gold? How do you manage your credit score and credit history? There
are video clips on YouTube (we examine these in more detail later in the chapter) which
are all intended to be able to communicate explanations of finance with a non-specialist,
everyday, audience. Say It Visually’s (2008) video is for ‘kids and grownups’ literally:
personal finance or ‘financial literacy’ has become a core element in primary and
secondary education.
FIGURE 18.2
‘Do we want to apply for a credit
card . . .’ Artist: A. Bacall. CartoonStock
ref.: aban1188. www.CartoonStock.com
388 MATT DAVIES
Because these are calculations, it is possible to get them wrong: you might lend
money that can’t be repaid, or borrow money you cannot pay back. The art of calcu –
lating credit and risk has become quite arcane and credit rating agencies exert the power
they do because of the technical expertise for making financial calculations at their
disposal. This is part of how financialization is linked to depoliticization. Financializa-
tion leads to a kind of technocracy because it shifts the responsibility for decisions away
from people and to the algorithms and calculations. Furthermore, as these calculations
are proprietary, financialization shifts the accountability for these decisions out of the
public arena where they might be contested and into the private sector, where they are
judged only on the basis of what they are worth in terms of their instrumental
effectiveness.
Thus when someone defaults on their mortgage or when Lehman Brothers goes
bankrupt, we tend not to see these as political acts. They just got their calculations
wrong. But there are political consequences. The free-market system that was supposed
to work without intervention or regulation seized up on the back of the collapse of the
sub-prime bubble and of the major investment houses that were exposed. We called it
a financial crisis because external intervention appeared to be required. And, as we will
see below, the form this intervention took gives us a good look at where the global
politics of the financial crisis was initially located: in equally technocratic institutions
such as central banks, ministries of finance, treasuries, and international financial
institutions involved in global governance, such as the International Monetary Fund.
The policies these agencies prescribed have not varied much over the last 30 years:
austerity, privatization, liberalization. These policies are presented as medicine to ailing
economies. But even as economic experts have devised these policies in accordance with
technically sophisticated analyses, the implementation of these measures has never been
http://www.CartoonStock.com
The impact of the
crisis in Argentina and
how people altered
their everyday lives in
response is described
in Chapter 14, and the
results of structural
adjustment programmes
in Ivory Coast in
Chapter 15.
Has this financial crisis
had an equal impact on
people throughout the
world?
FIGURE 18.3
‘Crisis? What crisis?’ http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQF5Gs_EpFKC3fRD7Dqut6xptf9iK
CwXZs3nMmuMczTH4oWmcbb; http://www.valuewalk.com/2011/12/when-finance-hijacked-our-
economy/financial-crisis-cartoon/#.TwiTpCNlWQk
IS THE FINANCIAL CRISIS PART OF EVERYDAY LIFE? 389
a strictly technical matter. A political excess makes itself evident as austerity disrupts
people’s everyday lives. The current anti-austerity demonstrations in the UK, Greece,
and Spain or the #occupy movements in the USA and elsewhere in 2011 share a common
history with the anti-IMF riots in Africa when structural adjustment pro grammes were
imposed in the 1980s in response to sovereign debts, and with the widespread
demonstrations against cuts in Asia in the 1990s and the uprisings in Argentina in the
2000s. As much as such demonstrations appear to be local in their enactments, they are
also an assertion of a global politics located much closer to everyday life.
This global political excess, the part of life that cannot be reduced to financial
calculation, for example, would be important but rather meagre if it only mattered when
everyday life is disrupted by economic austerity measures or anti-austerity demon –
strations. It is hard to perceive the political in the everyday but as we saw above, the
everyday is also always already political, even as it precludes politics. Financialization
plays a role in creating this distribution of the sensible – the ways that politics is hard
to perceive in everyday rhythms and is located remotely, at the ‘level’ of the international.
You probably already have a pretty good idea of how the financial crisis that began
to unfold in the autumn of 2007 has affected your everyday life. If you are reading this
book as part of a university course, you may have to borrow money to pay for your fees
BOX 18.1 POLITICS AND AESTHETICS: JACQUES RANCIÈRE
Jacques Rancière is a philosopher who has made a signal contribution to
contemporary debates about politics and democracy as well as aesthetics. His
work is very relevant to our discussion because of the ways that he links politics
and aesthetics.
Democracy, for Rancière, is above all a practice of equality. Equality is not the
same as equivalence, it doesn’t mean we’re all the same. What it does mean is
that we are all equally capable of asserting ourselves in the realm of politics.
Politics refers to the moment in which our habits and dispositions are disrupted
and our perceptions change. The ‘way things are’ and are governed is held in
place by what various other political philosophers call politics – this is the art and
science of government – but Rancière refers to this practice of governing with the
related term, ‘police’. You can see the difference if you think of ‘politics’ as the
practices and outcomes of disagreement and disputation, which changes how we
perceive each other and our relations as we recognize each other as equal.
Women’s movements, for example, accomplished a change in people’s
perceptions through their political activities. Even people who disagree with their claims had to be able to
recognize them as political claims if they intended to refute them. We can think of government, policy,
law, and such in terms of how they ‘police’ existing arrangements. One of the intriguing implications of
Rancière’s formulation is that democracy, as a practice of equality, is not so much a kind of politics as it is
the precondition for politics.
How we act and how we think about our acts – how we are subjects – in the context of ‘police’
depends strongly on how we can perceive the world. Aesthetics is not just a theory of beauty or art, then,
but a theoretical account of the organization of our perceptions. This is how aesthetics and politics are
tied together: both involve a partage du sensible, which we can translate variously as the partition,
separation, distribution, and sharing of the world that is available to our senses. Art can change the way we
can see the world by giving us new abilities to perceive it.
FIGURE 18.4
Jacques Rancière.
http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Jacques_Ranci%
C3%A8re; http://en.
wikipedia.org/wiki/File:
Jacques_Ranciere
Of course, as well as
economic crises, we also
think of many other
things as crises: the
environmental crisis
(Chapter 3), and
humanitarian crises
(Chapter 25) are two
examples. What impact
does thinking of these
examples as crises have?
or for housing and maintenance; you might have a credit card (or several) that you use
to buy essentials and other things; you might be casting a nervous eye towards the job
market when you graduate; you may hope someday to be able to take out a mortgage
and buy a home. Each of these depends on access to credit, and credit became much
scarcer as the big investment banks and institutions in Europe and the US either failed
or were bailed out while the financial markets crashed.
But why did we call it a crisis in the first place? ‘Crisis’ suggests (among other things)
an emergency: in medical terms, a crisis is an extreme situation, a particular moment in
which external medical intervention is needed to keep a patient alive. Given the
continuity of financial crises over the last 30 years, you might be forgiven for wondering
why we call them ‘crises’ and not just ‘business as usual’. There is an effect that comes
from thinking about these financial processes in terms of crisis, an effect that tells us
something important about how we think about politics at the global scale. If a crisis
is an emergency that requires intervention by a specialist, such as a skilled surgeon, then
390 MATT DAVIES
Chapter 24 looks at how
identifying certain things
as dangerous can
suspend politics.
IS THE FINANCIAL CRISIS PART OF EVERYDAY LIFE? 391
the input of the patient is really beside the point. Specialists take technical decisions
and the patient’s subjectivity – our sense of self, of being a centre of decision or action
– is put on hold. Financial crises are examples of the way that when we think of politics
at the global scale, or at the level of the international, politics is suspended at the scale
or level of our everyday lives: decisions and actions are taken by technically skilled
specialists who can operate at the international level while our everyday lives are
restricted (‘austerity’) as we wait for the technically skilled experts to fix the problems.
Questioning whether financial crises are ‘crises’ does not demean the very real
suffering of people. Financial crises lead to the suspension of democratic government
by authoritarian rulers, the imposition of economic austerity measures, the privatization
of public assets and shredding of social safety nets, all of which have been prescribed
by economics specialists for economically technical reasons. Raising the question of what
results from thinking of the financial crisis as a crisis, rather, is a means of investigating
the politics behind the organization of how we not only make sense of but also manage
to perceive the things we want to make sense of. Thinking of questions concerning the
economy as technical matters, and of economic problems as requiring technical solutions,
depends not only on how we think about the economy but also on what we can perceive
an economy to be. Disrupting these sensibilities – these perceptions and understandings
– is both aesthetic and political. And this disruption is important if we are to think of
another politics in the face of perpetual financial crisis.
GENERAL RESPONSES
THE POLITICS OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS
So far, the illustrative example in this chapter has examined finance and the financial
crisis as a way of looking at the relation between everyday life and politics. And we’ve
seen that, to the extent that the financial crisis is a technically complex problem beyond
the comprehension of ordinary people in their everyday lives, ‘global politics’ feels like
a remote, ‘higher’ level for the ‘art and science of government’ to take place, while
everyday life appears as the space where unanticipated disruptions to the smooth
operations of finance occurred and not as a space for politics.
In this section I want to examine two kinds of policy and political responses to the
financial crisis – first, how international organizations and governments have responded,
and second how ordinary people and citizens have responded.
A significant amount of the debate on the financial crisis centres on the actions of
large financial institutions, such as savings and investment banks or stock and bond
markets, or on governments, or on international institutions. As the housing market in
the United States turned downward and institutional investors began to see both their
gains and their equity in investments in housing disappear, the global financial system
came under severe pressure. Grossly simplifying a complex sequence of events, when
Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy in September 2008, a number of serious
economic and financial effects were felt right away. The Dow Jones – an index of
aggregated stock market prices in the USA – lost over 4 per cent of its value on the day
Lehman filed for bankruptcy and another 7 per cent two weeks later as investors sought
safer refuges. Lehman’s holdings of mortgage-backed securities were sold, putting
FIGURE 18.5
Women carrying boxes
leave the Lehman
Brothers HQ in 2008.
Photo: Louis Lanzano/
AP/Press Association
Images
further downward pressure on commercial and other real estate. Lehman had loaned
and borrowed a vast amount of investment capital as it brokered hedge funds (invest –
ments that are permitted to use highly aggressive or risky strategies) or borrowed and
loaned on money markets, and these exposures to risky investments included other banks
(such as Wachovia), mortgage financiers (such as Freddie Mac) and other government
chartered corporations (such as Farmer Mac), subsidiary companies, and crucially, as a
transnational corporation, it also exposed investors in Europe, London, Tokyo, Canada,
and so on. The effects of the failure of Lehman put the global financial system at risk
as credit began to disappear because investors feared exposure to failing institutions.
Thus was born the expression ‘too big to fail’. Prior to the current financial crisis,
many economists worried that bailing out failing investments skews the markets because
if you know you won’t lose your money, you don’t need to worry about how much
risk is involved in an investment. Economists call this problem ‘moral hazard’. But the
bankruptcy of Lehman posed another hazard, that of a deflationary spiral where falling
wages, high unemployment, and low interest rates provoke a recession that reinforces
the conditions that brought the recession about in the first place. To return to the idea
that ‘crisis’ could refer to a medical condition, governments and international financial
institutions clearly felt the need to stop the bleeding, and how this should be done was
(and is) the subject of much debate.
Rather than wading into these debates, however, it is interesting to notice how
states, corporations and banks, and international organizations have defined the problem
denoted by ‘financial crisis’ and how this way of seeing the problem has shaped the
kinds of solutions that they consider. It’s not necessarily that economists and government
officials are insensitive to the suffering of other people. However, because they have
392 MATT DAVIES
The way a problem is
framed is very important
in determining how it is
responded to. Certain
framings demand certain
responses.
FIGURE 18.6
Icelanders voting in referendum in Reykjavik, Iceland, on Saturday 6 March 2010, on approving the use
of taxpayers’ money to repay international debts. Photo: AP/Brynjar Gauti. http://media.washtimes.com/
media/image/2010/03/06/ICELAND_FINANCIAL_CRI_Stai_s640x415 ?f36e0f9cc85cad0edd3739c1
d7f3d763895e87a6
IS THE FINANCIAL CRISIS PART OF EVERYDAY LIFE? 393
tended to see the economy as a sphere of circulation, they have tended to see the threat
to the economy in the banks’ inability or unwillingness to provide the credit needed to
keep the circulation of goods, services, and money going. Or they have turned the
financial crisis into a sovereign debt crisis, as responsibility for the financial instability
has been shifted from banks and financial institutions to governments having trouble
making payments on their foreign debts, such as Greece, or with growing fiscal deficits,
such as the UK. Never mind that these deficits have been exacerbated by the recession
and by providing public or state guarantees for private investors in failed banks. The
point is that as the problems of financial crisis are defined in terms of the liquidity needed
for sustaining the circulation of commodities, the solutions focus on the institutions
such as banks and governments that affect that liquidity. Thus the arena for political
disputation is circumscribed by the debates about the effectiveness of these policies.
Other discourses, indeed other voices, simply cannot be heard in these circles.
But this doesn’t mean other voices aren’t speaking and disputing this way of framing
the problems of financial crisis. As our short discussion of the Royal Society for the
Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce’s (RSA) animation of David
Harvey’s explanation in the next section will show even more clearly, disagreement and
disputations that perceive the problems differently can come from unexpected directions.
The actions of people not in these ‘higher’ circles of action and decision, which are
focused on restoring liquidity as a solution to the crisis, appear as efforts to politicize
finance. A few notable examples illustrate this.
FIGURE 18.7
A woman shouts while
taking part in an anti-
austerity rally in Athens’
Syntagma Square,
18 October 2011.
Photo: Reuters.
http://212.31.2.101/n.php
?n=nationwide-strike-
and-demonstrations-
shut-down-greece-
before-austerity-vote-
2011–10–19
In 2010, after the collapse of three major banks in Iceland, the Icelandic Parliament,
known as the Althing, passed a bill that would have provided state-backed guarantees
to the deposit insurance corporation that was supposed to repay depositors who had
savings in these banks. In particular, the retail bank Landsbanki had significant exposure
to UK and Dutch depositors, so there was significant international pressure on Iceland
to bail these banks out. The Althing passed a bill that reflected negotiated compromises
with the UK and Dutch governments, but Iceland’s president refused to sign the bill
into law. Thus the bill went to a referendum. The first referendum to guarantee the
funds for the bailout was held on 6 March 2010, and it was rejected by over 93 per
cent of the voters. A second referendum was held on 9 April 2011, after the Althing
had once again passed a bill that the president refused to sign – this time, the referendum
failed by almost 60 per cent. Though people may have voted against these measures
for diverse reasons, it was clear that using public funds to settle the obligations of failed
private banks was deeply unpopular and rejected when voters were given the chance.
Popular anger at the public bailouts of banks and financial institutions and at the
austerity measures imposed by various governments, often under pressure from the
International Monetary Fund, can also be seen as efforts to politicize financial issues.
Also in 2010 and 2011, often citing as examples the Arab Spring movements in North
Africa and the Middle East, people began protesting and occupying public spaces in
many parts of the world. Though again, the causes underlying these movements and
the demands they make are complex and cannot be reduced to a single issue, they all
tend to make evident popular anger at the ‘need to resume business as usual’ approach
to the financial crisis – that is, ‘restore order’ or ‘police’ the crisis – adopted by their
governments and their banks. Anti-austerity campaigns in Greece have resulted in several
general strikes in the country, making it increasingly difficult for Eurozone bankers and
394 MATT DAVIES
The actions of social
movements in financial
crises are also discussed
in Chapter 14. There is
more about Occupy in
Chapter 28, and the Arab
Spring is discussed in
Chapter 9.
FIGURE 18.8
The Occupy London
Stock Exchange
protesters at St Paul’s.
Photo: Carl Court/
AFP/Getty. http://www.
guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/
oct/19/occupy-london-
st-pauls-protesters-leave
IS THE FINANCIAL CRISIS PART OF EVERYDAY LIFE? 395
heads of state to ignore popular anger at the terms in which the Greek public is expected
to pay for Greece’s debt. Similar protests have also rocked Italy and Portugal. In Spain,
a country that prior to the financial crisis showed remarkably high growth rates and
now shows remarkably high levels of unemployment, the movement for ‘real democracy’
is often referred to as ‘los indignados’ – the indignant people. By October 2011, the
protests that began on Wall Street in New York City under the hashtag #occupy – the
use of social media to mobilize has again been reminiscent of the Arab Spring movements
– had spread not only to other US cities but to cities around the world, again with
complex causes but focused on the perceived injustice of public protection for the wealth,
privilege, and business practices of banks and finance in the face of recession, austerity,
and unemployment for everyone else.
Again, and of course, the ends and the tactics of these political movements are
debatable but it is clear that they are attempting to answer back to the efforts to remove
the discussion of the financial crisis to the boardrooms and summits where the intricacies
of technical disputes about economic policy limit the possibilities for discourse. Indeed,
it is because the protests are debatable, because disagreement takes place amongst
citizens and others demanding an equal voice, that they politicize the issues they address.
The voters in the referenda in Iceland and demonstrators in Greece – and Italy, and
Portugal, and Spain, and Korea, and the UK, and the USA, and Hong Kong, and Chile,
and so on – create a global space that is not removed and insulated from everyday spaces
in workplaces and universities, streets and squares. The people participating in these
acts become specifically political subjects because they assert their voices against their
exclusion from the policies and decisions imposed on them from the global space of
heads of state and bankers, bureaucrats and technocrats.
New media and the
internet are discussed in
Chapter 9.
The discussions in this
part of the chapter will
make more sense if you
watch the YouTube clips
as you go along.
396 MATT DAVIES
However, are such protest movements parts of everyday life? Or do they only occur
as disruptions of, or in response to disrupting everyday life? To answer these questions,
we must return yet again to the original question this chapter set out to address: Has
politics been removed from everyday life?
BROADER ISSUES
RE-POLITICIZING FINANCE, RE-POLITICIZING
EVERYDAY LIFE
Let’s look at some examples of how the organization of our perceptions of the financial
crisis tends to locate the space for politics beyond the spaces of our everyday lives – how
it removes politics from our everyday life. What if you had to prepare a presentation on
the financial crisis without having much background in finance or the international
economy? Where would you start? Perhaps you would start with Wikipedia – as it
happens, Wikipedia does have some good background information about the timelines
of the financial crisis and some of the concepts and arguments that have been made to
try to explain it. But maybe you would prefer to do a presentation that had helpful
visual supports, something interesting to look at. A video hosting service such as
YouTube would be a likely place to look for both explanations and visual representations
of the crisis.
And there is indeed a fair amount of material available on YouTube. A lot of clips
have an authoritative look to them: talking heads in newsrooms or studios or lecture
halls, speaking at length using technical, authoritative language. These films may (or
may not) be informative. Visually, they are usually not very interesting. If you have 82
minutes to spare, you can watch a good example of a ‘talking heads’ (and PowerPoint
presentation) video clip, a film of a panel of Yale University academic staff, titled
‘Understanding the Financial Crisis’ (2009). It was produced by Yale University and it
is available at http://youtu.be/ScMLpqOvyVQ. It had 22,443 views as of 21 October
2011; comments were disabled.
Short, animated clips can be somewhat more accessible and visually interesting. If
you wanted to make a short presentation with good visuals, you might turn to these
instead. We will discuss four short animations here, each produced by an organization
or individual that uses visualizations to explain complex issues like the financial crisis.
Say It Visually’s 2008 video clip, ‘Understanding the Financial Crisis – For Kids and
Grownups’, had 205,357 views and 356 comments as of 9 October 2011. It is available
at http://youtu.be/h4Ns4ltUvfw; see also http://www.sayitvisually.com/.
Also from 2008 was Enspire Learning’s ‘Understanding the Financial Crisis’,
which had 46,940 views and 37 comments as of 9 October 2011. This one is available
at http://youtu.be/gF6LbFDjvW0; again, see also http://www.enspire.com/.
Jonathan Jarvis posted a clip in 2009 titled, ‘The Crisis of Credit Visualized’. It
appears in several different places on YouTube but an early version, part one of the full
clip, had 1,145,448 views and 1,150 comments as of 9 October 2011. See Jonathan
Jarvis (2009a) ‘The Crisis of Credit Visualized’, http://youtu.be/Q0zEXdDO5JU for
Part One of an early version, with these hits and comments. A full version is at
http://youtu.be/bx_LWm6_6tA; see also http://jonathanjarvis.com/.
The importance of
examining narratives or
stories is mentioned in
Chapter 5; Chapter 13
looks at stories told in
novels and Chapter 8 at
media representations
and film.
Marxist or historical
materialist explanations
of capitalism are
examined in Chapters 15,
17 and 19.
IS THE FINANCIAL CRISIS PART OF EVERYDAY LIFE? 397
And in 2010, as part of an ongoing series of animations of talks given at their
institute, the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and
Commerce (The RSA) posted a clip of a talk given by David Harvey on ‘The Crises of
Capitalism’, which had 1,282,640 views and 5,420 comments as of 9 October 2011.
It is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0. See http://www.thersa.
org/ for more on the RSA, and see http://www.cognitivemedia.co.uk/ for information
on the animation studio.
Each of the first three video clips that we will discuss – Say It Visually (2008),
Enspire Learning (2008), and Jarvis (2009a and b) – tells a story that by now may be
familiar. They focus on how credit expanded as investors sought new places to invest
the savings that had accumulated through pension funds, savings, sovereign investment
funds, and the like. They all begin, helpfully, by looking at the obscure financial instru –
ments that were devised to make high risk investments attractive to investors and that
expanded the market for credit, especially in housing and real estate in the United States.
The videos illustrate and explain concepts like ‘credit default swaps’ and ‘collateralized
debt obligations’ and ‘mortgage backed securities’ and show how, as financial capital
swelled the markets for such instruments, intermediaries like banks made credit more
widely available to increasingly high risk borrowers. Each also explains a little bit about
the changing regulatory environment, such as the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of
1934. Glass-Steagall had separated retail banking – the banking ordinary customers use
– from investment banking in the United States with a view to protecting ordinary
depositors’ money from more high risk speculation. In the story that each of these videos
tells, the entrance into the financial system of high-risk borrowers – what Jarvis (2009a)
calls ‘less responsible’ sub-prime borrowers – introduced a new element of risk into the
financial system that increased returns for speculators willing to take on higher risks
while spreading the risk more widely across the system. Thus when the high-risk invest –
ments went bad, such as when people could not make payments on their sub-prime
mortgages, the whole financial system was compromised.
In his clip, David Harvey (2010) takes a different approach. Harvey starts by
acknowledging that what we see are stories about the credit crunch, or as he puts it,
genres of explanations. His account of the crisis is somewhat more sophisticated than
the others, though no less clear, because he summarizes five such types of story and
acknowledges that each has an element of truth to it: so there is a genre of explanation
that looks at ‘human frailty’ or the predatory instincts of investors; one that looks at
institutional failures; one that suggests that everyone has been obsessed with a false
theory, which has made previously unfashionable theorists such as John Maynard
Keynes and Hyman Minsky fashionable again; one that suggests that the crisis has
cultural origins, such as the national character of the Greeks or the US preference for
privately owning homes; and finally one that says that the crisis is the result of policy,
especially too much regulation. Harvey, as a Marxist and a geographer, asks himself
what kind of story he could tell that would be different to these, and he focuses his
explanation on the contradictions that underlie capital accumulation. As with the
previous video clips he simplifies his explanation to keep it short. He notes that where
a company that produces items for the market tries to keep its costs down by keeping
its wage bill down, it then finds a market where consumers have less to spend: consumers
are just workers on the other side of the ledger. One way to solve this problem is to
http://www.thersa.org/
http://www.thersa.org/
http://www.cognitivemedia.co.uk/
provide consumers with credit. Finance, in Harvey’s story, is one way of making sure
that money gets to the place it needs to be to facilitate capital accumulation but it does
so by enriching financiers at the expense of the rest of the economy. For Harvey, crisis,
not stability, is the defining characteristic of capitalism.
We could go into greater detail with these explanations. Each is controversial, both
from a technical, economic theory perspective and from a political perspective – as you
might notice if you read some of the comments under the clips. But one interesting
idea in the video clips is where they locate the dynamics of the system that goes into
crisis. Remember that for Harvey, the crisis results from inherent tendencies in capital-
ism, what he calls ‘internal contradictions of capital accumulation’. For Say It Visually
(2008), Enspire Learning (2008), and Jonathan Jarvis (2009a and b), the financial crisis
stems from some deal going bad, such as a mortgage default, that interrupts the
otherwise smooth flows of money and promises-to-pay that define the economy.
For these explanations, the economy is a sphere of circulation. For circulation to take
place, exchanges must be enabled – for example, by providing credit to a purchaser. In
a market, the things that get exchanged are equivalents, despite whatever might be
different about them. Part of what money does is to measure or express the value of
things in terms that enables them to be exchanged – so many hours of work I do for
which I receive a wage are thus equal to a week’s worth of groceries or a visit to the
pub: x hours = y money = z pints of beer. In the sphere of circulation, differences are
suppressed. In contrast, difference is crucial to the sphere of production: I have a different
set of skills to yours; when we work, we exercise those skills by changing the materials
we work on, adding value to those materials. As workers, we are different and we make
differences in the world by working.
We will return to the difference that difference makes in a moment but our project
here is not to try to find out the ‘correct’ explanation of the financial crisis, it is to try
to think about how these explanations locate politics. If the economy is identified as
the sphere of circulation and in this sphere differences are suppressed, then it is hard
to imagine a place for politics in the economy. Is the politics of the financial crisis
properly conducted at the level of international agreements and banking practices? Is
it a matter of national policy making and regulation? Or is there some way to think
about the politics of the financial crisis in our everyday lives?
While the debates surrounding the meanings of these concepts and the dynamics
that drive the systems do provide clues to this process of locating politics, what is also
striking is the ways in which we imagine these concepts and dynamics locate politics.
To unpack our imagining of the financial crisis will require some visual analysis, too.
The kinds of economic activities that these clips make visible are purchasing,
borrowing and lending. In other words, just as with the ways in which they explain the
financial crisis by identifying the economy with the sphere of circulation, they also present
and make visible the economy as a sphere of circulation. In the Enspire Learning (2008)
clip, people and houses appear as stick figures, with nothing to distinguish one from
the other. Say It Visually (2008) uses figures that are similar to ‘clip art’, figures with
no facial features or other distinguishing characteristics. Just as money and promises to
pay pass effortlessly from side to side, so also are the people completely interchangeable.
Jarvis handles the presentation of the agents of these transactions a little differently, but
no less generically: bankers can be distinguished from borrowers by their hats and rotund
398 MATT DAVIES
The centrality of the
market to how the global
economy works, and its
uneven impact on
everyday lives, is
examined in Chapter 17.
Translating things like
hours of work to money
equivalents is called the
commodification of
labour: people’s capacity
to work is treated as
something that can be
bought and sold. At one
time people themselves
were bought and sold –
slavery is discussed in
Chapter 15.
The analysis of the way
images work – as much
by what they leave out as
by what they show and
how they show it – is an
often neglected area of
political analysis. For
other examples, see the
discussion of John
Trumbull’s painting of
the US Declaration of
Independence in Chapter
13, and of images of war
in Chapter 8.
IS THE FINANCIAL CRISIS PART OF EVERYDAY LIFE? 399
bodies, for example. But the figures that stand in for the family of responsible borrowers
are very similar to the generic figures representing people on road signs or toilet doors:
the woman is distinguished from the man by a skirt, the baby by a nappy. When Jarvis
does introduce some distinguishing characteristics, he refers to the ‘well, less responsible’
borrowers and he alters this road sign family by giving the adults bottles and cigarettes
and replacing the family dog with more babies. Playing on our class prejudices, this clip
places the blame for the failure of the financial system on less generic figures, with whom
well educated middle-class people then no longer identify. The system of perfect
equivalences and exchangeability was soured by irresponsible borrowers – with no further
consideration as to why they did not have sufficient income or why they might fail to
make their payments. The visual field produced in these three animations reinforces the
explanations they give.
With regard to its visual field, Harvey’s video clip again stands in stark contrast to
the approach taken in the other clips. In the first place, the various figures are typically
not generic but specific: you see former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Alan
Greenspan, political commentator Glenn Beck, the former president of Brazil Lula da
Silva, the economists Keynes and Minsky; Greece (represented by an urn and a statue)
is different from Brazil (represented by a man playing a guitar) or the USA (represented
by Uncle Sam).
But, in the second place and even more importantly, consider what is animated in
the animations. The first three clips follow film conventions for movement and action:
people move around, the banks and investors and the toxic assets are animated, words
move into and out of the screen recalling the stock animations of a PowerPoint slide,
giving a dynamic feel to the concepts they represent. The borrowers, the lenders, and
the concepts that explain the crisis make the action in these clips. In contrast, in the
animations produced by Cognitive Media for the RSA, the action presented is an artist’s
hand, drawing on a whiteboard. Throughout Harvey’s talk, the drawings are made to
comment on what he is saying, sometimes humorously, sometimes critically. The
FIGURE 18.9
Jonathan Jarvis clip from
YouTube. http://you
tube/Q0zEXdDO5JU
http://youtube/Q0zEXdDO5JU
http://youtube/Q0zEXdDO5JU
FIGURE 18.10
David Harvey clip from
YouTube. http://www.
youtube.com/
watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0
What do you make of
the use of cartoons in
this textbook? Are they
just light relief, or do
they have a political
purpose?
cartoons stand in a relationship of dialogue with the voice of Harvey as an authority.
They are contesting his explanations, even as they support what he says. And the subject
of this film, the centre for action and decisions, is the artist’s hand itself. Here we have
expanded our explanation from the sphere of circulation to include the sphere of
production – and difference – not by virtue of the particular explanation that Harvey
makes: indeed, even though he emphasizes wage stagnation and the weakness of the
labour movement since the 1970s as motivating the expansion of credit and of the power
of finance, he is still referring to the ability of people to enter into purchases, he is still
explaining the financial crisis in terms of finance and equivalence. Rather, the video
expands the explanation in its visual field, by making the making visible.
What are the political consequences of the theoretical positions and aesthetic choices
made in these clips? The representation of financialization in the films by Say It Visually
(2008), Enspire Learning (2008), and Jonathan Jarvis (2009a and b), is supported by
concepts that take on the air of technical, scientific knowledge to be conveyed to an
uninformed audience. As animations, they do not rely on a ‘reality effect’ to assert their
authority. However, while the drawings and animations do foreground the artificiality
of the representations, they nevertheless rely on generic figures and mimic authoritative
forms of addressing an audience. The economic theories in their explanations point to
technical problems requiring expert solutions; they locate the economy in the sphere
of the circulation of money, goods, and services, in which differences between things
are ignored or suppressed to enable exchange to take place. The aesthetics of these films
– what and how they make perceivable – replicates this erasure of difference and thus
indicates no particular role to play in addressing financial crises on the part of the viewer
they have just informed. Their distribution via YouTube mitigates this somewhat, by
inviting comments and video responses, but the politics they invite seems to be located
400 MATT DAVIES
The significance of
production is explained
further in Chapter 19.
IS THE FINANCIAL CRISIS PART OF EVERYDAY LIFE? 401
elsewhere: in the technical management of the economy of universal equivalence, not
in the narrative or images of authoritative explanations and not in the everyday lives of
consumers, borrowers, or viewers of clips on YouTube.
The theory, the aesthetics, and therefore the politics at work in David Harvey’s
short film are all different. For Harvey’s economic theory, financialization is a political
response to a political and economic problem. Harvey’s explanation of his theory
gestures towards the importance of the sphere of production for the economy but even
more compellingly, the film makes its own production not only evident but also the
very subject of the film. In doing so, the aesthetics also make the possibilities for
contesting, challenging, commenting on, and even laughing at the various figures –
including Harvey himself – involved in producing, explaining, or solving the financial
crisis. In this way, the theoretical, economic, and aesthetic issues addressed in the film
are all treated as political, and politics is located in the here-and-now of watching the
clip. This may partly explain why Harvey’s clip has generated almost five times as many
comments as Jarvis’s, the next most commented clip.
The answer we get looking at David Harvey’s video clip gives us a hint about the
ways that global politics and everyday life might be intertwined. If we ‘get’ the financial
crisis well enough to be able to laugh at, respond to, and answer back to the claims
about the necessary steps for solving the crisis, even if we are mistaken in our replies,
then the politics is part of everyday life – and it produces a kind of global space in that
everyday life.
CONCLUSION
So what is it that disrupts this distribution of the sensible, the distribution of what we
can perceive that locates the global politics of the financial crisis so remotely from our
everyday lives? Certainly, a part of the answer is itself political. People protest. They get
angry, they share different experiences or stories, the safety of their own routines is
broken by austerity and crisis, and they make their anger present by demanding to be
recognized and heard.
But what happens to politics in everyday life itself? If financialization programmes
act in such a way to keep global politics in the boardrooms and negotiating tables,
then where do we see the possibilities for politics in everyday life? We have seen how
financialization and the financial crisis present us with a view of the economy as the
circulation of goods, money, and credit. And we have seen how in order to circulate,
things have to be equivalent: difference disappears in the sphere of circulation. But the
part of the economy that has no part in this view is produc tion. The practice of
production depends on difference as people bring different needs and different skills
to work and as work transforms – makes different – the material we work on. And
as the animation of David Harvey’s talk so eloquently shows, making the making
visible is also political: it brings that excluded part into the conversation as an equally
apt voice.
Money abstracts from our differences and finance formalizes those abstractions.
Everyday life is where we produce and reproduce ourselves and our social relations. This
doesn’t happen abstractly. Everyday life is our bodies – working bodies, parenting bodies,
relaxing bodies – occupying and producing the spaces we live in. Geographers have
shown how these spaces are multi-scalar: they are (simultaneously) intimate, local,
regional, and global. Just as production is the part of the economy that has no part in
the financialized economy, everyday life is the part of global space that has no part
in the globalized economy. If we approach aesthetics as a pathway and practice to make
this part perceivable, we are disrupting this distribution of the sensible and finding the
global politics of everyday life.
FURTHER READING
One of the best, and angriest, introductions to the contemporary financial crisis is Matt Taibbi’s
2010 book Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking
America. Taibbi is a political journalist and contributor to Rolling Stone magazine. Griftopia not
only provides a good description of the events and characters behind the crisis but he also provides
clear and lucid explanations of the obscure and technical terms, such as credit default swaps, that
have kept the discourse about finance technical and obscure, and not everyday.
Susan Strange was one of the earliest figures in international political economy to draw
attention to the particular way the finance exercises power in the global system. See, for example,
Susan Strange (1997/1986) Casino Capitalism. Gerald Epstein (2005) collected a series of
important essays that tried to conceptualize financialization in his book Financialization and the
World Economy.
However, as important as these contributions are as starting points, there is a great deal
of research and theory that has gone much more deeply into the question of finance and financial –
ization that is strongly relevant to understanding the financial crisis as a political moment. There
is too much to present here but the following are some of the best examples and you can find
further references in the bibliographies in these books. Adam Harmes’ (2001) Unseen Power: How
Mutual Funds Threaten the Political and Economic Wealth of Nations shows how financial
instruments regulate policy and political options. Marieke de Goede’s (2005) Virtue, Fortune,
and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance is a groundbreaking theoretical and historical critique of
finance and the forms of power/knowledge that underpin it. The most systematic and penetrating
analysis of finance, international political economy, and everyday life can be found in Paul
Langley’s (2009) The Everyday Life of Global Finance: Saving and Borrowing in Anglo-America.
Finally, a good introduction to money and finance in social context is Costas Lapavitsas’ (2003)
Social Foundations of Markets, Money, and Credit. I have elaborated some of the themes in the
chapter in a recent article titled, ‘The Aesthetics of the Financial Crisis: Work, Culture, and Politics’
(2012). Of course, each of these approaches the issues from different theoretical perspectives and
reading them will give you as much a sense of how deep the arguments go as of how things are
supposed to work.
The analytical framework used in this chapter draws on the contributions of three of the
most important figures in contemporary social and political theory. Henri Lefebvre’s career spanned
the twentieth century and he wrote over sixty books. His Critique of Everyday Life appeared in
three volumes, published first in 1947 (revised in 1958 and appearing in English in 1991), second
in 1962 (2006 in English), and the third volume appeared in 1981 (2008 in English). An overview
of his theoretical work can be found in the collection edited by Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas
and Eleanore Kofman (2003) Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings. Jacques Rancière has also been
extremely prolific. His political philosophy is presented succinctly in (1999) Disagreement: Politics
and Philosophy. A good introduction to his approach to aesthetics is Jacques Rancière (2009)
Aesthetics and its Discontents.
402 MATT DAVIES
WEBSITES
In addition to the websites discussed in the text, these may also be helpful.
An excellent explanation of the financial forces behind the sub-prime crisis appeared on National
Public Radio’s and WBEZ’s radio programme, This American Life. The episode is titled ‘The
Giant Pool of Money’ and it can be heard at http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/355/the-giant-pool-of-money
Debtocracy is a documentary film about the crisis in Greece: http://youtu.be/qKpxPo-lInk
Mark Blyth, a professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, on
what’s wrong with austerity: http://youtu.be/FmsjGys-VqA
The UK newspaper the Guardian published a series of photos of the ‘occupy everywhere’ events
of 18 October 2011: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2011/oct/18/occupy-
movement-protest
Quantitative easing explained: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetarypolicy/Pages/qe/
default.aspx
Steve Keen’s blog Debtwatch is an excellent source of heterodox economic analysis: http://
www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/
REFERENCES
de Goede, Marieke (2005) Virtue, Fortune, and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Elden, Stuart, Elizabeth Lebas and Eleanore Kofman (eds) (2003) Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings,
New York and London: Continuum.
Enspire Learning (2008) ‘Understanding the Financial Crisis’, video, http://youtu.be/
gF6LbFDjvW0.
Epstein, Gerald (ed.) (2005) Financialization and the World Economy, Cheltenham, UK and
Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.
Harmes, Adam (2001) Unseen Power: How Mutual Funds Threaten the Political and Economic
Wealth of Nations, Toronto: Stoddart.
Harvey, David (2010) ‘RSA Animate – Crises of Capitalism’, video, http://youtu.be/
qOP2V_np2c0.
Jarvis, Jonathan (2009a) ‘The Crisis of Credit Visualized – part 1’, video, http://youtu.be/
Q0zEXdDO5JU.
––––(2009b) ‘The Crisis of Credit Visualized – part 2’, video, http://youtu.be/iYhDkZjKBEw.
Langley, Paul (2009) The Everyday Life of Global Finance: Saving and Borrowing in Anglo-America,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lapavitsas, Costas (2003) Social Foundations of Markets, Money, and Credit, London: Routledge.
Lefebvre, Henri (1984 [1968]) Everyday Life in the Modern World, New Brunswick, NJ and
London: Transaction Publishers.
––––(1991 [1958]) Critique of Everyday Life vol. 1, London: Verso.
––––(2006 [1962]) Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 2, London: Verso.
––––(2008 [1981]) Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 3, London: Verso.
Rancière, Jacques (1999) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
––––(2009) Aesthetics and Its Discontents, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Say It Visually (2008) ‘Understanding the Financial Crisis – For Kids and Grownups’, video,
http://youtu.be/h4Ns4ltUvfw.
IS THE FINANCIAL CRISIS PART OF EVERYDAY LIFE? 403
404 MATT DAVIES
Strange, Susan (1997/1986) Casino Capitalism, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Taibbi, Matt (2010) Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is
Breaking America, New York: Random House.
Yale University (2009) ‘Understanding the Financial Crisis: The Stimulus, Bailouts, and other
Solutions’, video, http://youtu.be/ScMLpqOvyVQ.
For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
http://www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
CHAPTER 19
Why are some people better off
than others?
Paul Cammack
■ The question
SOURCES OF INEQUALITY
■ Illustrative example
INEQUALITY IN THE AGE OF NEOLIBERAL REFORM
■ General responses
LIBERAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVES ON
INEQUALITY
■ Broader issues
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND THE EXPANSION OF
THE GLOBAL WORKING CLASS
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
SOURCES OF INEQUALITY
Just by virtue of the fact that you are reading this book, you are likely to be among the
better off people in the world – among those in a better economic or financial position;
or in more advantageous circumstances. For a start, you are not among the estimated
17 per cent of the world’s adult population classified as functionally illiterate (nearly
two thirds of them women, by the way, although this is changing steadily). More than
half the teenagers in the world get to stay on at school after 15 (55 per cent in 2008,
and almost as many girls as boys); but if, as I expect, you have gone on to tertiary
education (college or university), you are in the top 27 per cent, and now marginally
more likely to be female than male (UNESCO 2011: 280, 325; UNESCO Statistical
Database, table 9, accessed 24 January 2012). This doesn’t guarantee that you are in
a better economic or financial position than most, but it makes it very likely, as it puts
you, relatively speaking, in very advantageous circumstances. Around 70 per cent of
students in developed countries go into tertiary education, but only one in five (20 per
cent) in developing countries, so your chance of having a college or university education
is much higher if you grew up in a developed country. But wherever you grow up, your
chance of making it to college or university is always better, the better off financially
you are. And if you did, you’ll be pleased to know that the longer you stay in education,
the more you are likely to earn: in the United States, for example, male and female high
school graduates in full-time work were averaging $43,140 and $32,227 per year
respectively in 2009, while those with bachelor’s degrees or better averaged $92,815
and $62,198 (US Census Bureau 2012, table 703). As you will quickly work out for
yourself, the higher the level of education, the greater the relative disadvantage to women
workers.
A thought experiment
Now, imagine that you could be someone else, and you could choose your gender and
ethnicity, and when and where to live. Assuming you wanted the best chance of being
economically well off, what would you choose?
If you chose now, rather than some time in the past, you would be sensible, for
the richer developed countries at least. In the United States, again, average per capita
GDP (the gross domestic product or total output of the country, measured in constant
dollars, divided by the total population) was just under 60 per cent higher in 2010 than
in 1979 (though, to be precise, it peaked in 2007–8). Second, you would be wise to
choose to be male, as the figures in the previous section show. And if you did choose
to be born in the US, you certainly shouldn’t opt to be Hispanic. If you did, you would
find yourself on the lowest average earnings, at $535 a week – less than if you were black
($611 per week), and much less than if you were white ($765 per week). In fact, you
would do best if you chose to be Asian – the average salary of Asians in the US was
$855 per week in 2010, perhaps because over half had a bachelor’s degree or better,
compared to 30 per cent of the white population, just under 20 per cent of the black
population, and only 14 per cent of the Hispanic population. And over 10 million of
the 14 million classified as Asian in 2009 were immigrants, a reminder that many people
migrate in search of a better living – a poor one still, in the case of many migrants from
Mexico and Central America, a much better one for most of the principally Chinese,
Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese and Korean groups who make up the bulk of the Asian
population (US Census Bureau 2012, tables 10, 229, 648, 681).
Having said all that, if you did choose the US, you would be taking a risk. It is the
richest of the large industrialized nations (the tiny Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, with
a population under 500,000, is the richest state in the world by far), but it also has the
highest and fastest rising income inequality in the rich world (Smeeding 2005: 968).
If you were lucky, you might end up among the top 10 per cent, with an income around
$100,000 a year; if you were very lucky indeed you might be among the one in ten
thousand who take home over $14 million a year. Even this would be twenty times less
than top CEO (Chief Executive Officer), Richard D. Fairbank of Capital One Financial,
who took home $280 million in stock option gains in 2005. But as you can see from
Figure 19.1, your chances of ending up with a high income would not actually have
been good. Although average incomes were among the highest in the world, wealth
406 PAUL CAMMACK
Chapters 5 and 14 also
examine how gender and
race matter to people’s
lives.
Despite this inequality
within the United States
and other rich nations,
many people try to enter
these countries in search
for a better living and
indeed take considerable
risks to do so. Chapter
10 examines the example
of migration from
Mexico to the United
States.
WHY ARE SOME BETTER OFF THAN OTHERS? 407
was actually heavily concentrated among the top 10 per cent of the population, and
extremely concentrated towards the very top – the bottom 90 per cent averaged less
than $29,000 per year. And incomes grew much more quickly for the rich than for the
poor between 1979 and 2000. The poorest 10 per cent saw their incomes grow by only
8 per cent in total over those years, while the richest doubled their income (Smeeding
2005).
In the United States, then, inequality is dramatic, and far worse than it was 40 years
ago. It has created the ‘separate country’ of Richistan, inhabited by just 1 per cent of
the population (Frank 2007). In October 2007, just prior to the impact of the financial
crisis, the US Inland Revenue Service calculated that income distribution had reached
a new post-war peak of inequality in 2005, with the top 1 per cent of the population
receiving 21.2 per cent of income (Ip 2007). This fell back somewhat after the crisis,
but without raising expectations of a reversal in the long-term trend. The following
section looks at the comparative picture, bringing in other rich industrial countries, and
the ‘emerging markets’ of Brazil, Russia, India and China (sometimes referred to as the
‘BRIC’ countries because of their initials). As we shall see, although the US is an extreme
case, the overwhelming majority of the world’s population lives in societies that are
becoming significantly more unequal. The third and fourth sections will explore some
of the different explanations for and attitudes towards this growing global inequality,
and the larger questions it provokes.
Income group Number Average income
All population
Bottom 90%
Top 91–95%
Top 96–99%
Top 99–99.5%
Top 99.5–99.9%
Top 99.9–99.99%
Top 0.01%
Top 100 CEOs
Top 10 CEOs
Top CEO
145,881,000
131,292,900
7,294,050
5,835,240
729,405
583,524
131,293
14,588
100
10
1
$46,806
$28,980
$110,424
$176,925
$370,887
$695,764
$2,316,353
$14,027,614
$34,479,120
$68,955,000
$249,420,000
FIGURE 19.1
Table of US average incomes, 2005. Emmanuel Saez, Updated Tables and Figures for 2005, at
http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/, accessed 29 July 2007
http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/
Chapter 17 examines
some of the implications
of this globalizing
economy, in particular
the phenomenon of
informalization.
Chapter 16 shows
how colonialism
impoverished India.
408 PAUL CAMMACK
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
INEQUALITY IN THE AGE OF NEOLIBERAL REFORM
There is nothing new about inequality between societies and individuals. It is and always
has been a defining feature of global politics. Historically, such things as unequal
ownership of land, rent from property and exploitation of political and military power
have been important means of accumulation of personal and national wealth. In the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries unequal access to education and policies that
favoured urban rather than rural development also contributed to inequality between
individuals and regions. But important as these issues still are, they do not explain
contemporary patterns of inequality.
Changes in the global economy in the late twentieth century
Three changes that took place in the late twentieth century are shaping current patterns
of global inequality. The first is the reversal of the significant post-Second World War
shift towards greater equality in the advanced industrial economies, initiated by neoliberal
reform in the UK and the US from the 1970s onwards. The second is the creation of
a genuinely global capitalist economy over the same period, particularly as a consequence
of the rise of the Asian economies (successively, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, China and India),
and the re-establishment of market economies in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern
Europe after 1989. The third is the concurrent promotion by leading governments and
international institutions of greater openness and competitiveness in the emerging global
capitalist economy. Current sources and patterns of inequality are not the result of
chance, or of some mysterious force called ‘globalization’, but the product of a
deliberate shift in policy, increasingly coordinated on a global scale. By the early years
of the twenty-first century this had created a completely new set of global circumstances.
As a result, the character and dynamics of inequality today are very different than in the
past. The dynamic global expansion of capitalism has raised income levels in some of
the poorest and most populous countries (such as China and India), so that if you
compare average incomes across countries it looks as if global inequality has been
reduced. But it has also made those countries much more unequal internally – so that
the benefits of rising wealth are going disproportionately to a few. It is already possible
to discern the outlines of the new pattern of inequality that will dominate in the future
– the global ascendancy of capital over labour, the universal shift of income from workers
to owners of capital, and the concentration of global income and wealth among a new
class of global capitalists. Global capitalism may in the long run reduce inequalities
between countries, but on present evidence it sharply increases inequalities between
individuals. And increasingly, poverty comes not from exclusion from paid work, but
from labour income inequality (poverty in work) (OECD 2012: ch. 5), especially in
the UK and the US.
A dramatic indication of this is given by the changing share of national income
earned by the top 0.1 per cent of the population – the top one in a thousand in other
words – up to the year 2000: in the US, the UK and Canada from 1913 to 2000, and
for France and Japan from 1885 to 2000 (Figure 19.2). In the first three countries
there was a sharp decline from the early twentieth century to around 1945 – the end
12%
10%
8%
6%
4%
2%
0%
A. Top 0.1 per cent income share in English speaking countries
19
13
19
18
19
23
19
28
19
33
19
38
19
43
19
48
19
53
19
58
19
63
19
68
19
73
19
78
19
83
19
88
19
93
19
98
In
co
m
e
sh
ar
e
12%
10%
8%
6%
4%
2%
0%
B. Top 0.1 per cent income share in France and Japan
18
85
18
90
18
95
19
00
19
05
19
10
19
15
19
20
19
25
19
30
19
35
19
40
19
45
19
50
19
55
19
60
19
65
19
70
19
75
19
80
19
85
19
90
19
95
20
00
In
co
m
e
sh
ar
e
United States United Kingdom Canada
Japan France
FIGURE 19.2
Top 0.1 per cent income shares across countries. Piketty and Saez 2006: Figure 3, p. 203
Note that these graphs
do not tell us who the
top earners are, whether
– for example – this
group is predominantly
white, predominantly
male, predominantly
from a privileged
educational and/or
socio-economic
background.
WHY ARE SOME BETTER OFF THAN OTHERS? 409
of World War II, then a slight recovery, followed by a steady decline through to the
late 1970s. But from the late 1970s onwards the share of income going to this tiny
proportion of the population rose dramatically, back to where it was more than 60 years
earlier (or 80 years ago in the case of the US), and continued to rise sharply. In France
and Japan, too, the share of income going to the top 0.1 per cent of the population
was relatively low and stable between 1945 and 1975. But while the share in France
fell between the two world wars, as in the first three cases, in Japan it didn’t fall at all
until the Second World War. Second, in neither case did the share rise again from the
early 1980s (Piketty and Saez 2006: 203). In the mid-1960s, the top thousandth of
income earners were taking home about 2 per cent of national income in all five cases
– two hundred times more than what an equal share would have been, but still very
roughly a quarter of the share they had enjoyed 50 years earlier. Forty years later, the
very rich in the US had practically gained back all they had lost, with the UK and Canada
following the same path, but no such change had taken place in either France or Japan.
We are looking here only at the changing share of income of a tiny fraction of the
population of just five countries. But the data tell us quite a lot about changing patterns
of income distribution (how income is shared, or distributed, across different groups
of the population) over the last century. First, they suggest that a substantial redistribu –
tion of income (a significant change in the way income was shared across the population)
took place around the time of the Second World War, and was sustained thereafter.
Second, though, it shows that to the extent that this was a global phenomenon
(remember, we are looking only at five of the G7 countries – along with Germany and
Italy, the seven leading developed economies in the world) it was unusual and relatively
short-lived. Third, it suggests at least three different patterns: a Japanese (possibly East
Asian) pattern, with 1939–45 a key turning point, and a stable distribution of income
thereafter, and two ‘Western’ patterns – the first an ‘Anglo-North American’ pattern in
which redistribution after the Second World War is rapidly reversed from the early 1980s,
the second a French (possibly continental European) pattern in which it is not. A focus
on the Nordic countries would reveal a third European pattern, accentuated more
towards relative equality though recently under threat (OECD 2012).
Measuring and comparing inequality
Measuring and comparing inequality in and between countries over time is complicated.
As Box 19.1 explains, it cannot be done without good basic data (national statistics)
and ways of comparing them; and the various ways of doing it have advantages and
disadvantages. Figure 19.3 shows the measures of inequality discussed in Box 19.1 for
ten countries around 2000 and around 2010 – three Scandinavian democracies known
for their relative equality, and the seven leading developed nations known as the G7.
The first column gives average levels of income (in terms of purchasing power), showing
the US and Norway comfortably ahead of the rest. The remaining columns show
different measures of inequality, and suggest that in every case except Norway they
rose between 2000 and 2010. On every measure, the three Scandinavian democracies
are the most equal. They have the lowest Gini coefficient (led by Denmark), and the
poor receive well over half (57 per cent) of the median income (P10/P50), while the
rich receive from around one-and-a-half to one-and-two thirds the median income
410 PAUL CAMMACK
The G7 countries are
Canada, France,
Germany, Italy, Japan,
the UK and the US.
WHY ARE SOME BETTER OFF THAN OTHERS? 411
(P90/P50). In contrast, in the most extreme case among the developed states, that of
the United States, the poor receive only 37 per cent of the median income, while the
rich receive more than twice as much. As a result, the gap between the rich and poor
(P90/P10) is twice as much in the United States as it is in Denmark and Norway, with
the other developed G7 countries in between. So although the average income in the
United States is almost the highest among these countries, if we look at the real incomes
of the poor (P10 real income rank) the poor are better off in Canada, Denmark, Germany
and Norway – as they are in Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzer –
land and Taiwan (Brandolini and Smeeding 2007, fig. 3: 33). The poor in the United
States, in other words, do not even make it into the top ten in global terms. As the
authors point out, this is a consequence of a period of ‘unrelenting increases in income
inequality’ from the 1970s on.
Paralleling the sudden surge in the incomes of the very rich (Figure 19.2 above),
the Gini coefficient in the United States has risen steadily over the last 40 years, from
a situation where it was already the highest in the developed world. The United King –
dom, the original home of the welfare state, and among the more equal of the developed
Income inequality in ten developed countries, 2000 (Japan 1992)–2010
Country
Denmark
Norway
Sweden
France
Germany
Canada
Japan
Italy
UK
US
1
GDP
per
capita
(PPP)
2009
37,720
56,214
37,377
33,674
36,338
37,808
32,418
32,430
35,155
45,989
2
Rank
4
1
5
8
6
3
10
9
7
2
3
Gini
circa
2000
0.225
0.251
0.252
0.278
0.275
0.302
0.315
0.333
0.343
0.370
4
Rank
1
2
3
5
4
6
7
8
9
10
5
Gini
circa
2010
0.248
0.250
0.259
0.293
0.295
0.324
0.329
0.337
0.345
0.378
6
Rank
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
7
Comparing the poor and the rich
P10/P50
(Poor)
0.57
0.57
0.57
0.55
0.54
0.48
0.46
0.45
0.47
0.37
P90/P50
(Rich)
1.55
1.59
1.68
1.88
1.80
1.88
1.92
1.99
2.15
2.12
P90/P10
(Ratio)
2.8
2.8
3.0
3.4
3.4
3.9
4.2
4.5
4.6
5.7
P10 real
income
rank
2
1
6
6
3
3
n.a.
9
8
5
FIGURE 19.3
Income inequality in ten developed countries, 2000 (Japan 1992) –2010. Columns 1–2: UNDP, Human Development Report 2011,
Table 10; Columns 3–6: OECD Stat Database, data extracted 24 January 2012; Column 7: Brandolini and Smeeding 2007, Figures 1
and 3
BOX 19.1 MEASURING AND COMPARING INEQUALITY
Measuring and comparing income
All measures of inequality within and across countries must be treated with
caution. They are the results of very complex procedures, which have been refined
in recent years, but remain fairly crude in many respects. For a start, for any one
individual country it is hard to calculate real personal disposable income – the
ideal common measure of the value of the income attributable to a single
individual. In many countries a proportion of income for many comes from non-
cash sources (such as food grown on family plots); the size of households and
the number of people who depend on a particular income varies widely across the
world; and while there are a wide range of sources of income that might be taken
into account – wages and salaries, income from rent or investments, government
transfers (such as welfare payments) – relatively few countries have good records
of these, particularly for comparisons over extended periods of time. Second, it is
impossible to compare incomes directly between countries. Comparisons based
on exchange rates (usually made by converting local currencies into US dollars at
the current rate of exchange) are very misleading – as anyone who has travelled
knows, a dollar buys a lot more in China or India than in the US (and a lot less in
Switzerland or Japan). This problem is overcome by calculating purchasing power
parity or PPP – turning national currencies not into the equivalent in US dollars at
the current rate of exchange, but into the equivalent in US dollars that you would
need to buy a ‘typical’ basket of goods. This is a much better measure, but it is
still complicated and rather rough and ready, especially as ‘typical’ purchases vary
widely, and particularly between the rich and the poor.
Measuring and comparing income inequality
These difficulties associated with measuring incomes with and across countries
are carried over into measures of inequality within and between countries.
The Gini coefficient
The commonest measure used is the Gini coefficient, which is a cumulative
measure of overall inequality on a scale of 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (perfect
inequality, or all wealth held by one person). On this measure, the lower the
number the greater the equality. You will find varying calculations for each
country, depending on the income sources included, and the degree of sensitivity
of the analysis (i.e. whether it just divides the population into five broad bands
with 20 per cent of the population in each, or say 100 bands, with 1 per cent of the
population in each). The problem with the Gini coefficient is that it doesn’t tell
you how inequality is distributed. A given level of inequality might reflect serious
absolute poverty along with modest prosperity for the rest, or very low levels of
412 PAUL CAMMACK
poverty combined with a small minority of very rich individuals, or extreme
polarization – serious poverty for a minority, extreme wealth for a minority, and
relatively equal incomes in between. These situations would have different
explanations, and would perhaps evoke different responses.
Quintiles and deciles
An alternative method is to divide the total number of incomes into bands of five
(quintiles, each including 20 per cent of the population) or ten (deciles, each
including 10 per cent of the population), and to calculate the share of income
going to each band, and the ratio between different bands. The World Bank uses
quintiles, and we look at some of their measures in the third section below. It is
more illuminating to use deciles, but even this is fairly crude, as we saw in our US
example in the first section – there was a huge variation in income within the top
decile.
Percentiles: P10, P50, P90
Finally, a method based on the same principle uses percentiles (dividing the
population into 100 bands), and compares selected bands. The bands usually
selected are P10 (the tenth percentile, or the top of the bottom 10 per cent), P50
(the fiftieth, or the top of the bottom half), and P90 (the ninetieth, immediately
below the top 10 per cent). The very poor and very rich are excluded, but we can
compare poor (P10), middle (P50) and rich (P90), and the ratios between them.
BOX 19.2 WEALTH AND INEQUALITY IN THE US
The claim that the United States enjoys the world’s highest living standard
must be evaluated alongside the equally valid claim that the United States
enjoys the greatest absolute inequality between the rich and the poor among
developed countries. While the rich in America are truly well off by any
measure of living standards, many poor Americans at the same time have
living standards below those of other nations which are not as rich as the
United States.
(Brandolini and Smeeding 2007: 11)
WHY ARE SOME BETTER OFF THAN OTHERS? 413
Inequality and dynamic growth in Russia, Brazil, China and India
Country
China
India
Brazil
Russia
Total
1
Population
(millions)
(2011)
1,347,600
1,241,500
197
143
2
GDP
per capita
($PPP)
3
Gini
circa
2000–11
0.42
0.37
0.54
0.42
4
Average
annual
growth
of
exports
2000-10
13.5%
15.9%
15.5%
8.2%
5
Share of
World
Exports (%)
6
Share of
Inward
World FDI
(%)
7
Share of
Outward
World FDI
(%)
1990
1.8
0.5
0.9
1.6
4.8
2010
10.4
1.5
1.3
2.6
15.8
1990
1.7
0.1
0.5
–
2.3
2010
8.5
2.0
3.9
3.3
17.7
1990
0.4
–
0.3
–
0.7
2010
5.1
1.1
0.9
3.9
11.0
2000
4,002
2,644
7,194
9,263
2009
6,828
3,296
10,367
18,932
FIGURE 19.4
Inequality and dynamic growth in Russia, Brazil, China, and India. Columns 1–3: UNDP, Human Development Report, 2011; Columns
4–7: UNCTAD, Handbook of Statistics, 2011, Tables 1.1.1, 1.2.1 and (author’s calculation from) 7.2.1
countries in the post-war period, experienced a sharp increase in inequality between
1979 and 1990, the years in which Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. As Figure
19.3 shows, it remained in 2010 the most unequal of the developed European countries
on all measures. For the UK and the US then (though not for Canada, whose overall
level of inequality has not risen in the same way), the data considered here confirm the
impression given by the evolution of the incomes of the very rich – a shift towards much
greater inequality, rapidly from a low base in the case of the UK, and steadily from an
already high base in the case of the US.
Developing and emerging economies
At the same time that the UK and the US have become so much more markedly unequal,
the structure of the global economy as a whole has been changing in the same direc-
tion. Although the developed countries still dominate, newly emerging economies are
taking a steadily growing share of foreign investment and world trade. The so-called
BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), together accounting for approach-
ing 40 per cent of the global population, have been highlighted in recent years
because they have been the favoured new destinations for, and increasingly the source
of, foreign direct investment (UNCTAD 2011: ch. 2). They were only the most prom –
inent examples of a host of emerging economies, concentrated in Asia but also including
Mexico and Argentina in Latin America, and South Africa, by far the most industrialized
economy in Sub-Saharan Africa.
414 PAUL CAMMACK
FIGURE 19.5
Chinese workers labour
on the construction of
the Shanghai World
Financial Centre, 2006.
Photo: AP
WHY ARE SOME BETTER OFF THAN OTHERS? 415
Among all of these China is easily the most significant. As Figure 19.4 shows,
although its impact on global production and trade is as yet limited, its vast reserve of
labour and its growth rate of near enough 10 per cent per year (compared to around
2 per cent for the developed countries as a whole) underpin a massive expansion in
both exports and inward foreign direct investment (FDI) since 1990; and FDI outwards
from China is growing fast, albeit from lower levels. India, almost equally populous, is
only beginning to register on the same indicators, but is projected to advance rapidly.
Brazil, a focus of much attention in the late twentieth century, has actually fallen back
in comparative terms, while Russia, in its emergence since 1990, is representative of a
much larger set of emerging economies in Central Asia, the former Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe. Beyond the interest they have attracted in the global economy, these
four countries have one thing in common – high or rapidly rising inequality. As Brazil’s
exceptionally high Gini coefficient shows, it is among the most unequal societies in the
world. China and Russia (emerging from decades of socialist rule) and India (with its
own post-independence history of broad egalitarianism) share a history of much greater
equality. But since the inauguration of pro-capitalist reforms in China in 1978, and in
Russia in the 1980s, this is changing rapidly, while in India inequality is rising sharply
since neoliberal reforms were launched in the early 1990s – top incomes, for example,
show the same trajectory as in the UK and the US (Banerjee and Piketty 2005). In
none of these cases is increased integration into the global economy reducing inequality.
BOX 19.3 LIBERAL GLOBALISM
A world integrated through the market should be highly beneficial to the vast majority of the world’s
inhabitants. The market is the most powerful institution for raising living standards ever invented:
indeed there are no rivals. But markets need states, just as states need markets. In a proper marriage
between the two, one has contemporary liberal democracy, incomparably the best way to manage a
society. Its blessing needs to be spread more widely. The problem today is not that there is too much
globalization, but that there is far too little. We can do better with the right mix of more liberal
markets and more co-operative global governance.
(Wolf 2004: xvii)
GENERAL RESPONSES
LIBERAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVES ON
INEQUALITY
The information provided above tells us about emerging patterns of inequality, but it
doesn’t tell us why some people are better off than others. We might imagine that the
sharp changes that coincided with the two world wars and the depression were
unintended consequences of those larger events while the more equal distribution
maintained after 1945 was a consequence of conscious policy choice. Policy choices
might also explain rising inequality in the UK, the US, China and Russia under the
impact of subsequent pro-market reform. If so, we would like to know, for example,
why France and Japan share a different pattern, to what extent national cases reflect
regional variations, and whether the trend towards greater inequality is likely to continue
and to spread.
In other words, the information provided so far has identified a research agenda
(questions we would like to be able to answer), but we haven’t found any answers yet.
In order to begin to do so, and to address the broader question of global patterns of
inequality, we need to explore some current approaches to growth and inequality, and
the extent to which they are reflected in the policies promoted by governments and
international institutions around the world. We begin with liberal globalism, the
dominant approach in both academic and policy-making circles, and we contrast it with
the global developmentalism that is its principal interlocutor. The following section will
question the adequacy of either of these approaches.
Liberal globalism
Liberal globalists advocate a world of liberal democratic states integrated through the
market (Box 19.3), on the grounds that ‘growth is good for the poor’ (Dollar and Kraay
2002). For Martin Wolf, associate editor and chief economics commentator of the
London-based Financial Times, governments should support markets in their own
country, and co-operate to make markets work on a global scale – this is not just the
best but the only way to raise living standards around the world.
416 PAUL CAMMACK
BOX 19.4 GLOBAL DEVELOPMENTALISM
The ‘development space’ for diversification and upgrading policies in developing countries is being
shrunk behind the rhetorical commitment to universal liberalization and privatization. The rules being
written into multilateral and bilateral agreements actively prevent developing countries from pursuing
the kinds of industrial and technology policies adopted by the newly developed countries of East Asia,
and by the older developed countries when they were developing, policies aimed at accelerating the
‘internal’ articulation of the economy. . . . All this constitutes a shrinkage not only of development
space, but also of ‘self-determination’ space. It ties the hands of developing country governments
‘forever’ to the North’s interpretation of a market opening agenda (‘you open your markets and remove
restrictions on incoming investment, in return for [promises of] improved access to our markets’).
(Wade 2003: 622)
Chapter 20 looks in
more detail at how and
why the liberal approach
to poverty reduction has
failed.
The European Union is
explained in Chapter 11.
WHY ARE SOME BETTER OFF THAN OTHERS? 417
David Dollar, head of the Macroeconomics and Growth Group in the Research
Department of the World Bank, agrees: the answer to global poverty and inequality is
more integration, not less. Liberal globalists tend to take an optimistic view of the impact
of growth on poverty reduction, and to argue for example that if everyone benefits from
growth it doesn’t matter if the rich benefit most (Wolf 2004: 139), and that increasing
inequality in Russia and China is an inevitable consequence of the abandonment of failed
egalitarian policies (Wolf 2004: 167). Above all, they argue that a degree of inequality
is inevitable, as economic growth depends upon private enterprise, and it is therefore
essential for states to encourage economic activity across borders, and reward
entrepreneurs. As the comments above suggest, liberal globalists are not hostile to the
state. Rather, they are hostile to state intervention that inhibits the market, but strongly
in favour of state support for markets, which they regard as essential at both national
and global levels. Finally, liberal globalists are not unconditional defenders of the rich
countries, or of the status quo. On the contrary, they condemn the protectionism of
the European Union, the United States and Japan, and argue that it is hypocritical for
countries that advocate commitment to liberal principles to refuse to practise it
themselves. So for David Dollar: ‘After all the rhetoric about globalization is stripped
away, many of the practical policy questions come down to whether rich countries are
going to make it easy or difficult for poor communities that want to integrate with the
world economy’ (Dollar 2007: 100). They call, therefore, for more liberal reforms, and
their extension to all countries in the world.
Global developmentalism
Global developmentalists share the commitment of liberal globalists to co-operation
between states and the participation of all states in global markets, but they reject the
liberal approach on the grounds that it overlooks the privileged position of the rich
countries in the global economy as currently constituted, and the tendency for the benefits
of growth to be unequally distributed. So Robert Wade argues that the liberal izing
FIGURE 19.6
Zuccotti Park in Manhattan’s financial district during the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6174/
6224227970_46c9d42acf_b ; http://synccity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/zuccotti-park.html
measures pushed for by the US, the UK and the European Union in relation to global
product and financial markets are shrinking the ‘developmental space’ open to developing
economies.
The enforced liberalization of global markets rules out such things as industrial
development strategies that rely for a period on selective protectionism – the very policies
that brought about successful development not only in contemporary East Asia,
but also in the United States in the past. Linda Weiss similarly argues that ‘the rich
nations as a group . . . have carved out a multilateral order which best suits their current
develop mental trajectory’ (Weiss 2005: 724), and concludes that global rules support
the upgrading of rich country economies while ‘kicking away the ladder’ (cf. Chang
2002) from under developing countries. Global developmentalists reject the idea that
the first requirement of development policy is that it should promote global liberalism;
they place greater stress on the continuing relevance of developmental strategy than on
the prioritization of further liberal integration. They also tend to be more critical of
emerg ing patterns of inequality. Wade, for example, has maintained that Wolf and others
give a misleading account of the potential for liberal reform to address either poverty
or inequality. Dismissing the liberal approach as ‘faith-based social science’ (Wade 2007:
107), he points to the overall drop in global rates of growth since neoliberal policies
were introduced in the 1970s, the extent to which the argument for falling poverty and
418 PAUL CAMMACK
Chapter 15 explains how
international financial
institutions such as the
World Bank came to be
set up, and the impact
their structural
adjustment policies had
in Ivory Coast. Much the
same policies in the
2010s in the wake of the
financial crisis (Chapter
18) have led to protests
like Occupy Wall Street.
FIGURE 19.7
Protestors on a San
Francisco beach.
HumanBannersf.com,
http://www.human
bannersf.com/
WHY ARE SOME BETTER OFF THAN OTHERS? 419
inequality depends upon the case of China (which has not followed liberal policies),
and the widespread evidence (some of it reviewed above) that the benefits of growth
have been very poorly distributed – the principal beneficiaries being the top half of the
population of the rich countries, and China’s middle classes (Wade 2007: 110–11).
Liberalism, developmentalism and the international institutions
International institutions over the last two decades, led by the World Bank, have been
determined proponents of liberal globalism, unfailingly promoting liberal policies
centred on further integration of the global economy. They have argued for greater
openness in the global economy, and at national level they have favoured sound macro –
economic policy and a ‘market-friendly’ orientation on the part of governments. They
have made the alleviation or elimination of poverty their major goal, but insisted
that it is to be achieved by liberal means. While they have maintained the focus on
privatization and reduced state intervention that was prevalent in the early 1990s (and
particularly associated with the IMF), they have tended to place greater emphasis on
institutional reforms that will underpin a liberal order at national and global levels –
the good governance agenda. A liberal policy framework, according to these institutions,
is still the best hope for the poor.
www.Bannersf.com
http://www.humanbannersf.com/
http://www.humanbannersf.com/
The World Bank’s liberal globalism was best captured in the title of its 2005 World
Development Report, A Better Investment Climate for Everyone (World Bank 2004),
which urged all governments around the world to pursue liberal reforms in order to
promote opportunity and entrepreneurship among their citizens. There were two
signifi cant features to this approach. The first was that it embraced many aspects of
domestic policy, in particular in relation to the reform of tax and welfare regimes and
labour markets. In other words, far from concerning themselves with matters of global
regulation and integration, the international institutions became increasingly inter –
ventionist with regard to domestic policy. The World Bank’s Comprehensive Develop –
ment Framework and the HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) and PRSP (Poverty
Reduction Strategy Papers) initiatives developed and jointly operated by the IMF
and the World Bank reflected this heavy emphasis upon domestic policy in developing
countries (Cammack 2002). The second was that over the last two decades inter-
national institutions that were once strongly committed to global developmentalism
embraced the agenda of global liberalism. The UNDP (United Nations Development
Pro gramme), along with UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and
Develop ment) and ECLAC (UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the
Caribbean), once the strongest advocates of state intervention in support of national
develop mentalism, all followed this trend (Cammack 2006).
In all of these cases, the focus has been much more on poverty than on inequality,
and where inequality is recognized as an issue (World Bank 2004: 32), the approach
advocated is the increased access for the poor (whether as workers, consumers or
entrepreneurs) to the principal elements of a liberal global economy – work, credit, and
investment opportunity. In the early years of the twenty-first century there was a
consensus, extending beyond the international organizations considered here to the
European Union and the OECD, that the route to prosperity for developing countries
lay not only in liberal reform, but in domestic economic and social reform. What is
more, this consensus survived the ‘global’ (Atlantic) financial crisis of 2007–8. As was
to be expected, the focus on economic inequality intensified. But in the UK and in the
continental European countries afflicted by indebtedness, governments and international
organizations alike advocated austerity and open markets as the cure. And as the balance
of power shifted towards the emerging economies (prominent in the G20, the larger
grouping of countries including India and China that played an increasingly prominent
global role in the wake of the crisis), they worked increasingly closely with the IMF and
the World Bank, while steering them towards a mix of ‘global developmental liberalism’
(Cammack 2012) and competitive global markets.
BROADER ISSUES
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND THE EXPANSION OF
THE GLOBAL WORKING CLASS
Fifty years ago there was something approaching a global consensus that govern ments
had a duty to act alongside or against market forces in order to address inequality. In
Western Europe, with the UK as a leading example, governments owned and managed
key national industries, and maintained tax regimes that were intended to bring about
420 PAUL CAMMACK
Chapter 20 raises
questions about how we
may understand and
tackle poverty.
For more on the OECD
see Chapter 23.
422 PAUL CAMMACK
Karl Marx is introduced
in Chapter 17.
the first promotes global capitalism and the second gives it a developmental twist, neither
looks critically at the way in which capitalism generates inequality, especially in the forms
in which it is currently pursued around the world.
We can best focus on this question by going back 160 years, to the Manifesto
of the Communist Party written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1847–48, and
more generally to the analysis of capitalist production offered by historical materialism
(Box 19.5).
The starting point for historical materialism is neither the market (as it is for liberal
globalism) nor the developmental state (as it is for global developmentalism), but the
social relations through which the material production on which social life depends take
place; and in this context the relations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in
the capitalist system, or the capital relation. As capitalism comes to dominate, society
is increasingly shaped by the class struggle between the bourgeoisie (owners of the means
of production) on the one hand and the proletariat (the majority forced to sell their
ability to work in order to live) on the other, and Marx and Engels see this as the driving
force behind social change.
The extended analysis of capitalist production that Marx eventually produced
was spread across three volumes of Capital (1976 [1867]) (with a further three left
unwritten), and several thousand further pages of published and unpublished material.
Five key concepts extracted from this immense body of work suggest its relevance to
understanding contemporary patterns of inequality:
1 Primitive (or better, original) accumulation: the process by which the bourgeoisie
and the proletariat are initially constituted through the twin process of the
expropriation (taking property from) of the peasantry and the accumulation of
resources in the hands of a minority.
2 The exploitation of labour: Marx’s claim that the source of profit is the capacity of
the capitalist to pay workers for only a part of the surplus their labour creates, and
to expropriate the rest for themselves.
3 The profit motive: the orientation of the capitalist towards the accumulation of
capital, rather than any broader social purpose.
BOX 19.5 HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
The history of all hitherto-existing society is the history of class struggles. . . .
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal
society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has established new
classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the
old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this
distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole
is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great
classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
(Marx and Engels 1973 [1848]: 67–8)
4 The constant revolution of production: the pressure on capitalists to compete with
each other to reduce the price of production in order sell their goods in the market,
either by obliging workers to accept lower pay or work longer hours, or by
innovation and investment that increases the productivity of the worker.
5 Competition on a global scale: the resulting tendency for the production process
to spill out beyond national borders and operate on a global scale.
Marx and Engels did not predict that capitalism would become global. First, because
its development depended on class struggles within and across numerous different
societies, the outcome of which could not be known in advance; and second because
it was inherently subject to periodic crises, with similarly indeterminate outcomes. But
they did expect that if it became global it would be through an uneven process of
development, the key feature of which would be that the conflict between the
bourgeoisie on the one hand and the proletariat on the other would increasingly shape
political and social change.
Following this logic, we can see the neoliberal revolution as a victory (perhaps
temporary) for capital over labour on a global scale, and we can interpret developments
since the 1970s in the light of it. It is not just a question of opening up of new markets,
as liberal globalists argue, but of the drafting in of millions of individuals into a vast
new workforce – a global proletariat. This enormously enhances the power of capital
by creating new opportunities both for new markets and for new sites of production.
What is more, it obliges capitalist enterprises around the world to compete or go under,
because of the new intensity of competition on a global scale. Governments committed
to continued capitalist development have to respond by maintaining as competitive an
environment as possible. In other words, they are driven by increasingly intense global
competition to create ‘a better climate for investment’ in their own countries. And a
key element of this is the provision of a workforce able to meet the needs of capitalists
– in other words, a workforce available at a competitive price, and equipped to respond
effectively to the rapidly changing needs of domestic and foreign enterprises.
This perspective immediately illuminates features of contemporary global
development noticed by Wade and Dollar respectively. Wade notes that for the OECD
countries (then 30 of the most developed economies in the world, now 34) as a group,
there has been a sharp shift of income from labour (the proletariat) to capital (the
bourgeoisie): the share of labour remuneration in business revenue fell back from a peak
of 72 per cent in 1980 to 64 per cent in the early twenty-first century, while the share
going to capital rose from 28 to 36 per cent. A more recent analysis suggests that
In Western Europe, East Asia, North America and the Middle East and North Africa
(MENA) region, labour shares have either remained stagnant or declined during
the 1980s and 1990s after rising from 1960 to 1980. In Latin America and Sub-
Saharan Africa, negative time trends have persisted through the entire period.
(Jayadev 2007: 5)
Dollar, otherwise upbeat about the prospects for global growth, notes that ‘wage
inequality is rising worldwide’ (Dollar 2007: 74) – in other words, middle and higher
wage earners are tending to move away from low wage earners, with negative
WHY ARE SOME BETTER OFF THAN OTHERS? 423
Chapter 15 argues that in
some cases it is useful to
think in terms of
deproletarianization, that
is, a reversion to forced
labour or slavery where
the workers are not paid
anything at all.
Workers in the informal
economy often have
no protection against
exploitation by
employers at all.
See Chapter 17.
FIGURE 19.9
‘We are the 99%’. Image widely circulated on the
internet, copied from http://www.quickmeme.com/
meme/356ml1/, 25 January 2012
424 PAUL CAMMACK
consequences for the distribution of income among wage earners as a class. Other sources
confirm that this is a powerful contemporary trend (OECD 2007: 12–13).
On this evidence, workers as a whole are losing out to owners of capital, and poor
workers are falling back in relation to a minority of favoured top earners. There are
three related considerations here. First, the expansion of the global proletariat is the
objective both of international organizations and national governments around the
world. The logic of the policies of the World Bank and other international organizations
is to increase as much as possible both the size of the global workforce and its utility
to, or exploitability by capital. This logic is reflected, for example, in the promotion of
active labour market policy in developed and developing countries alike, where the
emphasis is on ensuring that pension and welfare rights do not limit entry to the labour
market, that workers can be ‘hired and fired’ with ease, and that groups under-
represented in the labour market – lone parents, the disabled, and the elderly – are
‘encouraged’, principally by the removal of benefits, to find work. It is reflected, too,
in more ‘progressive’ aspects of World Bank policy, such, for example, as its genuine
commitment to the equal provision of education and work opportunities for girls and
boys – progressive in gender terms, but explained by the broader goal of building a
global proletariat. These policies are promoted with equal enthusiasm by governments
from the UK and the US (principal exponents of welfare-to-work or ‘active labour
market’ policies) to India and China. Second, the combination of globally integrated
markets and the huge labour reserves in the developing world suggests that this is a
fundamental structural feature of the global economy for the foreseeable future:
according to the OECD, 22 million new jobs were created in the BRIC economies in
2000–2005, and there may be as many as 300 million surplus workers in China and
India alone (OECD 2007: 26). Compare this with the total workforce of 358 million
in all the G7 countries put together (OECD 2007, table 1.2: 21), and it is clear that
the expansion of the global proletariat is neither fortuitous nor temporary, but a likely
structural feature of the global economy for the foreseeable future, driven forward
deliberately by the policies of governments and international institutions.
http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/356ml1/
http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/356ml1/
Economic migration is
often seen as a threat to
be countered rather than
something that should
be facilitated: see
Chapter 10.
The Occupy Movement
is discussed in Chapters
18 and 28.
Chapter 18 reflects on
what it means to think of
the global economy in
terms of crises.
WHY ARE SOME BETTER OFF THAN OTHERS? 425
CONCLUSION
The OECD expressed concern in 2007 that despite the consensus among economists
that globalization is a ‘win-win process’, public opinion is largely hostile towards it. Its
attempt to explain this ‘paradox’ confirmed the analysis offered in this chapter. First,
globalization is taking place on an unprecedented scale, in terms of the number of
countries involved, and its extension beyond industry to labour intensive services. As a
result, ‘most firms and workers are directly or indirectly competing in today’s world
economy’. Second, though, ‘economic integration is occurring in the context of wider
earnings inequality and perceptions of job insecurity’ (OECD 2007: 12).
It is no accident, then, that practically every society in the world is becoming more
unequal. Inequality within states is growing faster across the whole of the world at
present than at any time in the past. The global explosion of inequality over the last 30
years or so, and the accumulating evidence of its shameful character and extent have
made it a focus of increasing attention in the present century. It is a key feature, and
perhaps the key feature of global society today. The managers of the global capitalist
economy are well aware that sharply rising global inequality represents a threat to the
system, especially in the wake of a crisis that has revealed the extreme instability and
fragility of the global financial order as much as the shameless greed of its leaders. They
have responded, not surprisingly, by arguing for broadly liberal policies: in 2012 the
OECD addressed the issue of inequality directly, as it had repeatedly since the crisis,
but still advocated the mix outlined above: investment in education, labour market
reforms, and the removal of product market regulations that stifle competition, and of
barriers to mobility across borders for workers (economic migration) – along with the
removal of tax relief for the rich (OECD 2012: ch. 5). The latter point was a clear
indication that it saw the legitimacy of the global capitalist order was under threat, a
point that could hardly be missed as protests, typified by the ‘Occupy Movement’,
gathered pace around the world, and the ‘99 per cent’ mobilized against the 1 per cent
who dominate.
In the contemporary world, the reasons why some people are better off than others
relate increasingly to policy choices within individual countries and across international
organizations that favour not only open markets, but also owners of capital. As we have
seen, domestic polices are strongly influenced and promoted by international institutions
whose principal objective is to increase to the maximum the size of the global workforce
and its availability to domestic and foreign capital alike. It follows that the OECD and
other international institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank are probably right
to suggest that the continuation of the same policies will produce further growth, though
it will be interspersed with periodic crashes and crises. But it is a form of growth that
also tends to generate inequality, because its commitment to competitiveness on a global
scale eventually obliges propertyless workers across the whole of the world to compete
with each other. Set against the optimism of governments and international institutions
today that the benefits of growth will outweigh the costs of inequality is Marx’s
suggestion that ‘the general tendency of capitalist production is not to raise, but to sink
the average standard of wages’ (Marx 1951 [1865]: 405). The material presented here
suggests that the twenty-first century will see an experiment on a global scale in which
these contrasting views will be tested.
FURTHER READING
This chapter has argued that inequality is on a rising trend within practically every country in
the world, and that there is nothing either accidental or inevitable about it. On the contrary,
it is a consequence of the widespread adoption of neoliberal policies in what has become a genuinely
global capitalist economy. Although it was written in 1847–8, the Communist Manifesto (Marx
and Engels 1973) remains an essential starting point. Callinicos (1996), especially chapter 6,
provides an excellent introduction to Marx’s analysis of capitalism. Glyn (2006) explains beautifully,
from a similar perspective, how the global political economy has evolved over the last 40 years.
New sources of contemporary data and debate are appearing all the time. Recent concern about
inequality on the part of international institutions is reflected in OECD (2012), UNDP (2013),
and World Bank (2012), along with their predilection for market-friendly solutions. Reddy and
Pogge (2009) offer an indispensable critique of the data on which poverty figures are based, and
Rodriguez and Jayadev (2010) expand upon the information in Jayadev (2007). Hacker and
Pierson (2010) show conclusively how what they rightly call ‘winner-take-all’ politics in the United
States reflects deliberate policy choices on the part of both leading parties. Arnold and Pickles (2011)
and Hewison and Kalleberg (2013) chart the changing character of the new global work force
through the rise of ‘precarious labour’ in South and Southeast Asia. My own perspective is
developed in Cammack (2012). Along with the websites listed below, you should search regularly
(on Scopus, Web of Science or Google Scholar for example) for more recent work by the various
contributors identified here.
WEBSITES
Centre for Global Development/Inequality, http://www.cgdev.org/section/topics/inequality
Current research on global inequality.
Inequality.org, http://www.demos.org/inequality/
Current research on poverty and inequality in the US.
International Poverty Centre, http://www.undp-povertycentre.org/
A joint UNDP/Brazilian government project with a wide range of publications, notably
Poverty in Focus, and more advanced policy research briefs and working papers.
Joseph Rowntree Foundation, http://www.jrf.org.uk/
Current research on poverty and inequality in the UK.
Politics of Global Competitiveness, http://www.politicsofglobalcompetitiveness.net
Working papers from a Marxist-oriented research group of which the author is a member,
reflecting and extending the arguments presented in this chapter.
UC Atlas of Global Inequality, http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/home.html
Excellent interactive resource, with the capacity to generate global, regional and country maps
on a range of topics related to global inequality and good links to other related sites.
REFERENCES
Arnold, Dennis, and John Pickles (2011) ‘Global Work, Surplus Labor, and the Precarious
Economies of the Border’, Antipode, 43, 5: 1598–1624.
Banerjee, Abhijit and Thomas Piketty (2005) ‘Top Indian Incomes, 1922–2000’, World Bank
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CHAPTER 20
How can we end poverty?
Mustapha Kamal Pasha
■ The question
THE GLOBAL POOR AND CAMPAIGNS TO END
POVERTY
■ Illustrative example
MODERNIZATION AND MICROFINANCE IN
SOUTH ASIA
■ General responses
THE NEOLIBERAL PROJECT AND THE EXPORT OF
AN IDEOLOGY
■ Broader issues
ALTERNATIVE VISIONS OF MODERNITY
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
THE GLOBAL POOR AND CAMPAIGNS TO END POVERTY
Poverty is a durable face of global politics, one that invades our global public space and
imagination with sustained vitality, a face we wish would disappear the moment we see
it. We seem to know the poor even though we have not met them. They are an
abstraction we embrace, a concrete part in ourselves we deny. Poverty is one of the
most visible signs of otherness. It is the face of difference, of those who
are removed from our space and experience, a connection to others not
like us. Poverty consolidates the material divide between us and them, an
ideational divide (that is, a divide in terms of how we understand the
world). Something tells us that the poor are in a way like us, something
we fear the most. Perhaps the anxiety that we could become like them
gives us the inspiration to think about helping them, reaching out to them,
without becoming like them.
Of course, some of ‘us’
are poor too. At least
we live in relative poverty
(as defined in Box 20.2
below) even though
we live on far more in
real terms than many
of the global poor.
See Chapter 19.
FIGURE 20.1
A visualization of global
income distribution.
Photomontage by
Dr. Kurt Källblad,
Malmö, Sweden.
The Challenge of
Inequality, Poverty in
Focus, International
Poverty Centre, June
2007, cover, www.undp.
org/povertycentre
For more detail on
global inequality and
how it is measured
see Chapter 19.
It is interesting to think
about the ways in which
the lifeboat scenario
works like the ticking
bomb scenario
discussed in Chapter 2.
It tells us what the
problem is in such a way
that we have no room
for manoeuvre.
The poor seem to be everywhere, over half of the world’s population according to
United Nations reports (UNDP 2006), but often in far flung places removed from our
everyday lives. Their existence is a distant presence that does not disrupt the functioning
of our modern life. Perhaps, their being makes a particular form of life possible for us.
We have a name for the place of the poor: the Third World, Bangladesh, Haiti, Africa.
The match between the name and the place is not important. It is where poor people
live. Faces of malnourished children, squalor, overcrowded slums and waste contrast
sharply with our world of affluence, conspicuous consumption, technological advance
and the promise of comfort. We are connected to the poor in episodic embrace on the
evening telecast or a YouTube clip. Many feelings and emotions spring to life when we
see the face of poverty – pity, sympathy, sorrow, pain, alienation, superiority, disgust.
In the fast age of digital communication and connectivity (Appadurai 2001), the
end of poverty has become the truly ‘global’ public policy issue of our times, eclipsing
global warming, human trafficking or illegal drugs. It is a campaign with very few sceptics
and critics. A case against helping the poor was widely featured in public consciousness
over three decades ago under the rubric of Lifeboat Ethics. It would be virtually
impossible to endorse views of this nature now, although in terms of actual policy,
lifeboat ethics is not much different from the logic of neoliberalism.
The poor tend to be differentiated based on particular distinctions and classifi cation:
we have ‘extreme poverty’, ‘moderate poverty’, and ‘relative poverty’. On a global scale,
430 MUSTAPHA KAMAL PASHA
http://www.undp.org/povertycentre
http://www.undp.org/povertycentre
BOX 20.1 LIFEBOAT ETHICS
FIGURE 20.2
Structural adjustment. Artist: Kirk Anderson
According to Garrett Hardin,
If we divide the world crudely into rich
nations and poor nations, two thirds of
them are desperately poor, and only one-
third comparatively rich, with the United
States the wealthiest of all. Metaphorically
each rich nation can be seen as a lifeboat
full of comparatively rich people. In the
ocean outside each lifeboat swim the poor
of the world, who would like to get in, or
at least to share some of the wealth.
What should the lifeboat passengers do?
First, we must recognize the limited
capacity of any lifeboat.
(Hardin 1974)
Hardin’s argument is that taking everyone into
the lifeboat would swamp the boat and everyone
would drown – and thus that we cannot or
should not help the poor.
BOX 20.2 CLASSIFICATION OF POVERTY
Extreme poverty means that households cannot meet basic needs for survival. They are chronically
hungry, unable to access health care, lack the amenities of safe drinking water and sanitation, cannot
afford education for some or all the children, and perhaps lack rudimentary shelter – a roof to keep
the rain out of the hut, a chimney to remove the smoke from the cook stove – and basic articles of
clothing, such as shoes. Unlike moderate and relative poverty, extreme poverty occurs only in
developing countries. Moderate poverty generally refers to conditions of life in which basic needs are
met, but just barely. Relative poverty is generally construed as a household income level below a
certain level of average national income. The relatively poor, in high-income countries, lack access to
cultural goods, entertainment, recreation, and to quality health care, education, and other
prerequisites for upward social mobility.
(Sachs 2005: 20)
HOW CAN WE END POVERTY? 431
the dividing line typically runs between north and south, between the advanced
industrial nations and the developing world, but under conditions of global linkage there
may be new lines of material discrimination between prosperity and wretchedness.
Nevertheless, the prevailing view suggests that outside the Western Hemisphere, barring
a few exceptions in Asia and parts of Latin America, vast populations endure poverty
as a regular feature of daily lived reality in their cultural zones.
The recognition of poverty as a social problem has been based on different under –
standings of the factors that cause it. Natural explanations have highlighted geography,
climate or population growth as the principal culprits. Some have spoken of cultural
factors, including the prevalence of discrimination against women, the lack of an
achievement drive or work ethic, even a ‘culture of poverty’ (Banfield 1958) that keeps
poor people trapped in an unchanging stable symbolic world. Others have linked poverty
to unequal economic and social structures, the working of a capitalist economy; others
to ‘entitlement failures’ or a case where people lack rights to resources. ‘Starvation’,
Amartya Sen notes, ‘is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to
eat. It is not a characteristic of there being not enough food to eat’ (Sen 1981). From
the perspective of the poorer regions of the global political economy, the colonial
experience is the major structuring cause of poverty. The working of the current global
economic order continues to replicate colonial governmentality.
However, despite decades of international social policy, awareness campaigns, and
noble intentions, poverty has not disappeared. On the contrary, the greater the effort
to end poverty, the more palpable is the failure of imagined solutions.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
MODERNIZATION AND MICROFINANCE IN SOUTH ASIA
In recent years, many grand schemes have been advanced to remove the blot of
poverty on human conscience. One of the predominant forms that attempts to end
poverty has taken is neoliberal globalization, economic liberalization or market
fundamentalism.
To understand how the neoliberal project works, this section looks at the particular
context of recent experience in South Asia, a region where nearly half of the world’s
poor live.
Modernization and the rise of the middle class
In the initial postcolonial decades in South Asia, the idea of modernization (for an
excellent critique see Banuri 1990) captured the imagination of both state and society.
Top-down development (development enforced by the state on people and often
without their input) was promoted as the panacea to eradicate underdevelopment and
cut poverty down to size. For a variety of reasons, including the failure of the state to
deliver on its promise for sustainable economic growth within a globalizing world
economy and the collapse of the socialist model of planned economics in the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe, the climate drastically shifted to promote market solutions
for what are basically social problems.
432 MUSTAPHA KAMAL PASHA
Chapter 15 shows that
neocolonial structures
still prevail in global
politics and Chapter 16
discusses how
colonialism works.
Neoliberal modern –
ization and the emphasis
on growth can seem to
be helpful in ending
poverty, but this section
argues that it is not.
What reasons are
advanced for this
argument?
HOW CAN WE END POVERTY? 433
The intensification of market relations and a market sensibility in South Asia has
produced massive changes in the material and symbolic universe of populations. What
is remarkable about the recent shift is the relative ease with which national elites have
embraced the neoliberal project. The rise of a new middle class has been heralded as
the singular achievement of countries like India in successfully negotiating globalization.
This phenomenon is said to confirm the old adage that economic growth is the only
cure for poverty, a key plank of anti-welfare thinking. The shift from the state to the
market is accompanied by a culture of competition which is not merely confined to the
business elites but has percolated down to the less well off. A great transformation
appears to be underway in India, and in neighbouring countries.
A direct effect of growing neoliberal consciousness in India, and to comparable
and varied degrees in the adjacent countries, is a rethinking of the discourse on ending
poverty. Economic growth, not redistribution, is now considered the answer. While
economic growth was always regarded as a necessary condition to alleviate poverty, it
was subordinated to a wider commitment to development. The latter took the form of
welfare, attention to a social wage, food subsidies, but also macro-economic targeting
of poor regions for special treatment in the areas of education, infrastructural
C h i n a
Vietnam
Brunei
M a l a y s i a
Singapore
I n d o n e s i a
Philippines
Taiwan
Japan
South
Korea
North
Korea
Sea of
Japan
East
China
Sea
South
China
SeaLaosMyanmar
Thailand
Cambodia
Andaman
Sea
Bay of
Bengal
Sri Lanka
Indian Ocean
Maldives
M o n g o l i a
K a z a k h s t a n
Turkey
Armenia
Georgia
I r a n Afghanistan
Pakistan
I n d i a
Nepal Bhutan
Bangladesh
Uzbekistan
Turkmenistan
TajikistanIraq
UAE
Saudi
Arabia
Oman
Arabian
Sea
Azerbaijan
Kyrgyzstan
FIGURE 20.3
Map of South Asia
(India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka,
the Maldives, Bengal,
Bhutan and Nepal) and
neighbouring regions
434 MUSTAPHA KAMAL PASHA
What we mean by
privilege is discussed
in Chapter 5.
development and emergency relief. In public consciousness, the legitimacy of the state
was interwoven with poverty alleviation.
The present constellation draws many elements from past imaginings and practice.
However, the commitment of national elites to globalization has shifted the centre of
gravity for poverty alleviation schemes. The poor have new uses in the neoliberal vision.
The rise of the new middle classes in India, those with access to global culture and the
means to reproduce its translocal variants, is inconceivable without the swelling ranks
of the poor. The latter, the poor, provide the labouring capacity that enables the rich
to live forms of life more attentive to the compulsions of cultural globalization.
Increasingly, the fate of the poor rests on consolidation of middle-class privilege in an
already polarized and polarizing social universe, similar to the uses of the poor in Western
development experience. The more secure the middle class becomes, the more rigid
the structures of poverty.
The retreat of the state from development, in public consciousness and policy
(Kothari 1993) in favour of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) leaves the question
of growing inequality untouched. A second aspect of the deepening of neoliberal
consciousness is the emergence of a culture of indifference in South Asia, a region known
for its moral economy. The breakdown of the tacit social compact between the rich and
the poor against the tide of a lifeboat ethics leaves the fate of the poor to the voluntary
sector, a relatively powerless social force without the capacity to challenge the market
and the forces of capital behind it.
Finally, the regime of neoliberal globalization extends beyond what is regarded as
a self-defeating moral regard for the poor. India is the destination of global pharma –
ceutical giants testing new drugs on the millions of sickly poor with scant protections
of law or their state. Excluded from the legally barred zones of scientific testing in the
economically developed world, these companies have targeted the poorest populations
of India (and elsewhere), where protections are in short supply and vulnerability high,
in the quest for profits and profitability. The ‘bare life’ of the poor has entered the global
sphere of accumulation in unanticipated ways, not merely providing labouring capacity.
Superfluous humanity no more, but a valuable resource for enhancing global capital,
the poor are a productive resource. This is a sharp break from the uses of the poor in
the moral economy.
BOX 20.3 MORAL ECONOMY
The concept of a ‘moral economy’ is said to have originated with E. P. Thompson. He used it to mean
‘a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of
several parties within the community, which, taken together, can be said to constitute the moral
economy of the poor’.
(Source: James Kelly, University College Cork Multitext Project in Irish
History, http://multitext.ucc.ie/d/Moral_Economy. See also E. P. Thompson
(1971) ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century’,
Past and Present 50, 76–136)
Giorgio Agamben’s term
bare life refers to the
form of life that in
sovereign Western forms
of politics is produced as
distinct from politically
qualified life. Treating a
person as ‘bare life’ is to
disregard their moral or
political standing, and
merely ensure their
survival. The idea of
‘bare life’ is discussed
further in Chapter 27.
436 MUSTAPHA KAMAL PASHA
The success story of the Grameen Bank has been an example in the development
industry, and others elsewhere have tried to emulate the model, including sponsors from
international inter-governmental agencies like the World Bank. Despite its laudable
achievement in helping poor rural women in Bangladesh, a critical assessment presents
a sobering qualification to the glow of the Grameen experience. Less apparent in usual
celebrations of microfinance is the deepening of the incapacity to reverse the status of
the Third World as such by allowing the poor the mere ability to avoid destitution.
Microfinance shifts the focus of attention away from inequality to reducing poverty; it
merely deflects deeper questions about the growing wedge between the very rich and
those who can barely survive.
The effects of such finance on the situation of rural women, for example in
Bangladesh, have also not received closer examination in accounts of the Grameen story.
Microfinance rests on the idea of inculcating habits of competitiveness in local, global
or translocal contexts among the poor without necessarily creating the conditions to
produce alternative futures. The Grameen example suggests that competitiveness, and
therefore neoliberal ideology, plays a significant role in claims about survivability with
respect to poverty alleviation schemes. This implicates the non-governmental sector in
other parts of the Third World, notably Africa. We now have a socialization process of
not mere modernization, but imparting skills to understand the market and embrace
efficiency, productivity, and cost-reduction. More significantly, the retreat of the state
from concerns of development on the promises of empowering civil society and the
voluntary sector in virtually all parts of South Asia in effect reproduces lifeboat ethics.
Only those who can must survive.
BOX 20.4 THE GRAMEEN BANK
Grameen Bank methodology is almost the reverse of the conventional banking methodology.
Conventional banking is based on the principle that the more you have, the more you can get. In
other words, if you have little or nothing, you get nothing. As a result, more than half the population
of the world is deprived of the financial services of the conventional banks. Conventional banking is
based on collateral [property used as security against the loan and forfeited if the loan is not repaid].
Grameen Bank is collateral-free. Grameen Bank starts with the belief that credit should be accepted
as a human right, and builds a system where one who does not possess anything gets the highest
priority in getting a loan. Grameen methodology is not based on assessing the material possessions
of a person; it is based on the potential of a person. Grameen believes that all human beings,
including the poorest, are endowed with endless potential. Conventional banks look at what has
already been acquired by a person. Grameen looks at the potential that is waiting to be unleashed in a
person. Conventional banks are owned by the rich, generally men. Grameen Bank is owned by poor
women. The overarching objective of the conventional banks is to maximize profits. Grameen Bank’s
objective is to bring financial services to the poor, particularly women and the poorest, to help them
fight poverty, stay profitable and financially sound. It is a composite objective, coming out of social
and economic visions.
(Yunus 2007)
Increasing inequality
between rich and poor
is the subject of
Chapter 19.
How would you
summarize the
criticisms made here of
the Grameen Bank?
Do you agree that
despite being seen by
many as a success story,
it is problematic in
these ways?
HOW CAN WE END POVERTY? 437
The G8 means the G7
countries – Canada,
France, Germany, Italy,
Japan, the UK and the
US – plus Russia. The
G7/G8 holds an annual
summit and Russia
was first included in
1997.
GENERAL RESPONSES
THE NEOLIBERAL PROJECT AND THE EXPORT OF
AN IDEOLOGY
Campaigns to end poverty
In recent years, many ambitious projects to change the fate of the poor have been the
staple of highly publicized worldwide campaigns by international development agencies,
governments, global rock stars, movie actors, and non-governmental relief agencies.
At the G8 summit or World Economic Forum (an annual gathering of leaders from
the rich industrialized countries) in 2005, poverty was recognized as a major concern.
This recognition followed the unanimous signing of the United Nations Millennium
Declaration by all 191 UN member states in 2002 to achieve eight Millennium Devel –
op ment Goals. Reduction of poverty was the first such goal, with the aim specifically of
halving extreme poverty between 1990 and 2015 for the proportion of people whose
income is less than a dollar a day and halving between 1990 and 2015 the proportion of
people who suffer from hunger. Hardly a day goes by without public discussion of ending
poverty. From schemes of debt forgiveness, through fair trade, to development aid,
poverty alleviation now has given way to the ‘end of poverty’ discourse. It is no longer
respectable to merely reduce poverty, we have to eliminate it. But from its earliest discovery
as a social problem, endless talk and thinking has been devoted to trying to end poverty.
The neoliberal project has shifted the terrain of poverty alleviation in distinctive
ways by decoupling the question of poverty from redistribution. In this revised
framework of global governance, the embrace of NGOs and celebrities by state managers
and the G8 elites is not coincidental. A voyeuristic culture of celebrity worship has
displaced politics, shifting responsibility away from those with actual authority to a
nebulous global sphere of liberal good heartedness and feel-good solidarity with ‘the
poor’. This sentiment is discernible in recent worldwide campaigns under the Millen –
nium Development Goals umbrella to end poverty. The British Make Poverty History
Movement, the Live8 rock concerts to raise public awareness of global poverty, and the
Johannesburg-based Global Call to Action against Poverty, provide good examples of
the shifting meaning and space of politics. Paradoxically, however, publicity also allows
an occasional probe into uneasy aspects of the workings of the global economy,
including inequality and the gulf between rhetoric and state practice.
FIGURE 20.5
Make Poverty History wristbands.
Photo: Global Call to Action Against Poverty
(GCAP)
BOX 20.5 STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT PROGRAMMES
A key component of neoliberal globalization is a reliance on Structural
Adjustment Programmes, the package of economic measures sponsored by the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to tackle the problem
of poverty and underdevelopment in debt-stricken countries. Typically, these
measures consist of fiscal discipline and the tightening of monetary policy,
combined with an expansion of trade liberalization and privatization of the
domestic economy. Within the neoliberal framework, debt-relief is linked to
Structural Adjustment Programmes: the greater the compliance, the greater the
support from the international donor community. In practice, Structural
Adjustment Programmes have invariably hurt the more vulnerable sections of
society as they reward those who have better capability to profit from
opportunities presented by the market. The poor are on a weaker footing to
compete, and hence more likely to suffer from welfare retrenchment, which is
often the operational effect of Structural Adjustment Programmes.
Chapter 17 also explains
the idea of the market
and where it comes
from. Structural
Adjustment Programmes
and some of these
negative implications for
the poor are further
discussed in Chapter 15.
Austerity programmes
implemented in parts
of Europe in the early
2010s are similar: see
Chapter 18.
The neoliberal solution
The neoliberal project suggests leaving the problem of poverty to the functioning of
the market by removing obstacles to its smooth operation. The market, the argument
goes, is a social institution designed with human ingenuity to assemble people in a
common quest to serve their individual self-interest. Unleashed from the fetters either
of tradition or political authority, the market allows people with varied skills, crafts,
or labours to come together and mutually profit by exchanging what they produce.
The idea is not new. What distinguishes its contemporary version from views expressed
over 200 years ago is the conviction that society comes into being primarily through
exchange and is held together by exchange. Without the market, society does not exist.
This is a fairly radical idea with the obvious implication that non-market sociability is
either ‘primitive’ in relation to our modern present or a serious impediment to economic
advance. Other socially produced institutions – state, family, community, and the cultural
trappings in which these institutions come into being and persist – ought to be sub –
ordinated to the neutrality of the market. Non-market claims must be treated with
circumspection to the degree that they get in the way of the market. The reduction of
society to the market or the market principle redirects social life in pursuit of goals
produced either within the market or induced by its ever-expanding horizons. From
the perspective of this sensibility, the poor are not merely a nuisance or an unintended
consequence of the drive to universalize the market, but those who lack the desire, talent
or aspiration to compete.
The rupture of the market from other societal norms is a notable feature of the
neoliberal project. Once norms intrinsic to the market spread across vast social spaces
with ease and without effective resistance, the question of poverty cannot be thought
of as having solutions that do not arise within the market. Despite the vagaries of the
438 MUSTAPHA KAMAL PASHA
The question of treating
people as rational
subjects arises in the
context of strategic
thinking in Chapter 24.
Chapter 2 looks at
thinking and practice.
A ‘belief system’ is
similar to what was
discussed as a ‘language
game’ there.
HOW CAN WE END POVERTY? 439
recent financial crisis in the rich countries, market-driven growth is seen as the true
engine for eradicating poverty.
In a neoliberal universe, the problem of poverty is basically one of a lack of effective
market-driven capacity. Once that capacity is created, poverty can become a thing of
the past. The enemy for neoliberals is any agency that treats the poor as anything other
than potentially rational maximizers. Empowerment lies in providing resources or skills
to realize the natural trait to maximize.
A second feature of the neoliberal solution to poverty is in the ability of the poor
to effectively negotiate globalization. This suggests building a social world that no longer
takes the local and its cultural boundaries as the zone of meaningful sustenance. To
discard the local in favour of the global is a confirmation of the evolutionary promise
of growth and development.
The neoliberal project is both a belief system and practice that has come to
dominate the management of the global economy. As a belief system, it rests on the
notion that development (which is an indispensable condition to eradicate poverty)
should occur as an unintended feature of the market rather than planning. The prior
assumption that buttresses this notion is that wo/man is primarily a homo economicus,
a calculating animal seeking to satisfy endless private wants through exchange with other
like-minded economic individuals. If governments get out of the way and do not stifle
the natural propensity for each individual to participate in the sphere of exchange (or
the market) in search of self-interest, all can prosper. The market is the ideal institution
to produce wealth, to reward people for their labours, and as a consequence creates
social harmony and prosperity. Neoliberals suggest that the primary needs of human
beings are material, or their materiality takes precedence over other social, cultural or
psychological considerations. If the task of producing wealth is left to the individuals
themselves and governments are expected only to guarantee the social conditions for
the functioning of the market, there is no reason to expect that poverty cannot be
eventually eradicated.
Critiques of the neoliberal project
Critiques of the neoliberal project have been fairly extensive and far-reaching,
questioning both the grounds on which a disembedded economy (Polanyi 1944) can
offer social cohesion or meaning as well as its endeavour to universalize a specific form
of Western development experience to humanity. On the one hand, these critiques
address the limiting vision that informs that project, and on the other, they challenge
its export in the non-Western cultural zones.
Exporting Western individualism
In the first instance, the neoliberal project takes the cultural apparatus of (post)industrial
Western capitalism as a model abstracted from history. The experience of one particular
zone of humanity (northern Europe and later the United States of America) becomes
the universal standard to idealize a success story worthy of global emulation. Absence
of significant likeness to the experience of the West serves as the definitive story of
poverty in the non-West. The heightened indivi dualism captured in notions of economic
440 MUSTAPHA KAMAL PASHA
Problems with the idea
of a sovereign subject in
control of the world are
discussed in Chapters 7
and 28.
rationality, efficiency, or performance as normative values superior to those generated
in alternative societal or cultural arrangements has become global currency.
Embedded social practices appear deficient on this canvas of calculability. The
atomistic proclivities of neoliberal subjectivity stand in sharp contrast to systems of
generalized reciprocity, redistribution and social responsibility. In consuming the
neoliberal project in societal and cultural zones less enamoured by its lure, serious
obstacles appear on the ground. Without a deepened liberal subjectivity, neoliberalism
takes on a coercive character, an imposition by the state to align society to assumed
pressures of globalization. The latter dictate rationalization not merely of the economy,
but of social relations in their entirety.
On a structural reading of the neoliberal project, the latter development is inevitable.
Once human beings are reduced to becoming merely owners of a marketable labouring
capacity, their relation to the social world is radically altered: relations with others,
division between work and leisure, work and procreation all undergo a great
transformation. So long as labouring capacity serves embedded social goals, work and
purpose can appear as meaningful activity. The neoliberal project detaches social
purpose from labouring capacity, assigning the atomistic individual a fictitious sovereign
status. Under these conditions, social meaning takes on the character of individual self-
seeking primarily in consumption. To consume means to realize subjectivity.
Despite the realization that the neoliberal project may not serve either deeper social
purpose or individual selfhood, globalization has facilitated its reach in uncharted zones.
Virtually everywhere, communities, polities, and people, live, work, and think in words
and worlds produced by the expansion of the project, not only the most ardent
proponents in the geographically dispersed zones of economic, political, and cultural
power, but also its alleged detractors. The attraction of neoliberalism lies in its promise
to deliver individual happiness in material goods, tangible and within reach.
Paradoxically, its hold on the imagination is most pervasive not only in the cultural West,
but outside, in the minds of state elites and managers in the non-Western cultural zones,
often inspiring mega-projects with unpleasant social and environmental effects, as we
have seen in the second section of this chapter. Virtually on a global scale, the zealous
commitment to the modernist vision has marginalized real alternatives or radically
reshaped them.
Conceptualizing ‘the poor’
In large measure, the success or failure of ‘end of poverty’ schemes depends upon how
poverty is conceived and operationalized. Is it possible that the visibility of the poor
may in some manner make them invisible? Once we see the poor in particular ways, are
we concealing what is the most important feature of poverty?
Common understandings of poverty stress physical needs and their deprivation as
the essential ingredient of what it means to be poor. Hence, poverty is said to have a
‘vital core’ tied to material sustenance. Human beings on this account are intrinsically
biological beings. The failure to satisfy those needs qualifies them as the poor.
This idea, however, is not as simple as it seems. The poor are not merely those who
lack the means for material sustenance. They are also those whose biological existence
is an object of social policy (Dean 1992). In this sense, the poor become ‘the poor’
only in the process of being classified as such. They have no existence separate from
the classification by those who have the authority to classify them. Outside the sphere
of classification, poverty is not a problem. It may be a problem of destitution (Nandy
2002). Although poverty has existed for centuries, it is only under modern social
conditions that it assumes a particular form of visibility. Modernity engenders particular
forms of classifications and distinctions that allow populations to be divided in specific
ways that are coterminous with readily perceived ‘objective’ indices. These indices are
highly mobile and can be deployed to advance grand claims. For instance, in the global
war on terror, poverty increasingly appears as a matter of security, a cause of terror, a
source of militancy (Belaala 2004; Willet 2005). Once the poor can be recognized within
particular classificatory schemes, they can be linked to danger.
The reduction of life to the satisfaction of physical needs is only one aspect of the
problem of conceptualizing the poor. From the perspective of those regarded as ‘the
poor’ there is also the question of the subjective state of the poor that is not easily
captured in dominant accounting procedures. As Kirsten Hastrup (1993: 727) writes in
the context of hunger, ‘one of the hardest facts of life is that living is so painful to large
numbers of people’. Extending her analysis, sharing the experience of the poor is virtually
impossible if suffering takes only the form of visual and numerical representation.
Suffering is usually experienced in silence, when speech becomes entirely inadequate.
The experience of suffering is severed from the apparatus of meaning-making. Numbers
also have the distinctive ability to sanitize the subjective side of human misery.
In public consciousness, poverty does not produce the same heightened anxieties
reserved for global terrorism and the latter’s potential and real menace to humanity.
However, it is also no longer a peripheral global concern buried in stories of
modernization and progress and the promises of trickle-down growth. The notion that
poverty would eventually disappear with the evolutionary processes of economic
development and modernization is not very popular. Yet, public consciousness and
HOW CAN WE END POVERTY? 441
FIGURE 20.6
Price of poverty:
Pakistani farmers in
Jandala, near Multan,
show the scars left after
operations to remove
their kidneys for cash.
Photo: AP
Compare this idea that
poverty comes to be
problematic by virtue of
its classification to the
discussion in Chapter 24
of how particular events
or people come to be
seen as dangers.
Chapter 19 explains how
statistics are used and
indeed needed in order
to understand and
analyse global inequality.
But do these statistics
allow us to comprehend
the suffering involved?
BOX 20.6 GIORGIO AGAMBEN
Contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that
‘sovereign power’ – the type of authority most commonly associated
with the state – relies on the production of two forms of life as separate
(1998). He calls these ‘politically qualified life’ (the citizen) and ‘bare life’
(the outlaw, the outsider, or the stateless person, for example). He
claims that this separation has now been blurred, and that it no longer
holds. Initially, there were certain places, which Agamben describes as
‘zones of indistinction’, where this blurring could be seen. His first
example is the Nazi concentration camp. Here inhabitants no longer had
any political or legal status and were subject to the whims of the camp
guards. They could be killed without any justification having to be
offered: their deaths did not count as murder. More recently, Agamben
argues, in our culture of administration, management and capitalist
consumerism, we have all potentially become something close to bare
life, with no genuine political voice.
FIGURE 20.7
Giorgio Agamben
Chapter 19 explains how
such statistics work.
conscience do not mean that schemes to end poverty are effective. The gulf between
the two lies, in part, in particular conceptual izations that detach the poor from their
cultural universe or fail to see progress itself as the condition for poverty.
Uncoupling the poor from their cultural universe, and reducing them to data tends
to produce the illusion that mere decreases in numbers would connote a process of
ending poverty. What gets silenced in this conceptualization of poverty is that the aim
of merely securing survival or bare life does serious violence to the poor in the act of
salvaging them.
BROADER ISSUES
ALTERNATIVE VISIONS OF MODERNITY
Dominant conceptions typically take a statistical threshold to define poverty. Behind
that threshold lies a notion of material deficiency or the absence of goods that allow
people to survive. What is missing in these understandings is the indivisibility of cultural
forms of life and the material universe of people. It is not merely a question of survival,
or even culturally ensured form of life, but the ability to be subjects or authors of their
own lives rather than subjects or dramatis personae in an externally created production.
The poor are those that not only lack material capacity to satisfy culturally informed
needs, but the ability to live meaningful lives.
Hence, the notion that the poor are simply those who lack money or property
misrecognizes the centrality of the idea of poverty. While money or property allows
people to pursue goals outside bare survival, unless the idea of self-determination is
brought to bear on the analysis, the poor remain trapped in other people’s worlds as
442 MUSTAPHA KAMAL PASHA
See Chapter 21 for a
discussion of the issues
that arise when people
think that they know
what is good for others.
For Charles Beitz’s
view of global justice,
which revolves around
distribution, see
Chapter 2.
HOW CAN WE END POVERTY? 443
objects. This is not surprising as the neoliberal idea of finding the solution to poverty
in the informal sector (de Soto 2000) and giving entitlement to either a bundle of goods
(Sen 1981) or legally recognized token of owning capital (de Soto 2000) ultimately
takes the poor as the receiving end of policy or ethically inspired aid. The historical link
between foreign aid and religiously inspired charity may not be so remote. In both
instances, the poor are cast as victims, although in some versions of Christian charity,
the poor are singularly blessed with godly favour against the corruptibility of the rich
who cannot enter paradise. Proximity to material goods in the contemporary sense is
framed as a solution to make the poor vanish, but the historical evidence has not been
very promising in this regard.
The lack of the capacity to produce not simply a particular form of cultural life but
the ability to creatively redesign their social and life-worlds, that is, to modify their world,
not simply adapt to it (Freire 1996 [1970]) does more violence than is apparent in
neoliberal imaginaries. On the other hand, the seduction of statistics that rests on the
reducibility of human experience to quantifiable data makes social relations opaque.
Hence, the Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of the extreme
poor appears an achievable and worthy mission. The comforting logic that statistical
decline in the number of the extreme poor justifies international aid as one of the effective
ways to end poverty rationalizes the status quo. Without redesigning the architecture
of global political economy and infusing a redistributive principle at its centre, aid
camouflages the inherent properties of global capitalism, which rests on the stubborn
logic of leaving sizeable populations without the capacity to live meaningful lives. In a
capitalist universe, the prison-house of poverty offers few escape routes unless people
acquire access to the means that allow them to productively enter the world of exchange,
not merely the guarantee of subsistence which some poverty alleviation strategies
promote.
The question of poverty cannot be posed with any meaningful determinacy outside
modernity. No doubt, the poor have had their uses in pre-modern contexts, as moral
brokers in the Manichean world of sin and redemption. Helping the poor may open
up pathways to heaven. Traces of this role can be found in pleas for foreign aid, charity,
and help. Acts of kindness and comfort to the poor have intertwined histories. The moral
worth of humanity has rested on the capacity to extend succour and support to the
needy, those with the least material possessions. Escape from the enticing world of riches
has often been recognized as an essential pathway for spiritual progress and the
experience of the sacred. Those who voluntarily elected to live in poverty demonstrated
their closeness to the deeper wellsprings of life’s mysterious purposes. The poor have
not been without a productive function after all.
Western conception of modernity
With modernity, the poor tend to lose their cultural meaning, assuming the figure of
bare life. Now objects of classification and study, the poor bid farewell to a morally
configured world and enter the zone of politics and political economy. In the first
instance, the poor are serialized, they become objectified as numbers. They no longer
inhabit ethically complex structures of meaning. Within the strict world of modern state
practice, the poor are merely objects with potential risks to the polity. Similarly, political
economy ruptures the poor from a moral economy, pushing them into the world of
labouring. Those outside the modern economy are simply a social problem.
The neoliberal project redesigns the problem of the poor. To alleviate poverty is
to bring the poor into the world of exchange, and failing that, to supply them as matériel
for profit (as the pharmaceutical example suggests). Those who cannot be brought in
can be abandoned. However, the attempt to strip the poor from their moral universe
is a failed enterprise. The ambivalence towards the poor lies precisely in the difficulty
of severing the poor from an ethical world of meaning and judgement. In this context,
the conceptualization of the poor as data serves as a surreptitious attempt to represent
the poor in ethically neutral terms. The poor continue to enjoy a symbolic quality, and
hence they cannot exist outside judgement. Yet, the breach with morality and ethics
can allow vast expenditures of liberal guilt without disturbing the status quo. This would
entail the unwanted question of whether the world in which the poor live is a world
ethically constituted. Poverty alleviation is situated at the fault line of morality and ethics.
In alternative worlds, ethically constituted and culturally embedded, the poor cannot
exist as mere data, objects of policy, or matériel. They are an intrinsic part of a cultural
universe. Embedded economies, that is, economies limited in scope and purpose by
ethical considerations not merely the self-serving impulses, recognize the violence
entailed in severing people from their cultural contexts.
The rapid spread of the neoliberal project globally has curtailed the possibility to
envision alternative worlds. In different cultural zones, with the notable exception of
Latin America, a convergence appears to be building to address the problem of poverty,
relying on market-based solutions. Those zones that apparently reject modernity reveal
a curious mix of delinking the cultural accoutrements of West-centred modernity while
embracing its technical rationality. The story of the Islamic Cultural Zones can be read
on those lines.
Islamic conception of modernity
A distinctive feature of any alternative construction of the poor would entail a modified
understanding of modernity, one that recognizes the need to harness the pursuit of
wealth within a wider framework of cultural and spiritual life. Unlike the hegemonic
narrative of Western modernity which accords accumu lation a privileged status in the
larger scheme of things, an Islamic conception of modernity works with the notion of
overlapping sovereignties in which human purpose and intentionality are embedded in
concentric spiritual and secular pursuits: in family, community, the state, the ummah
(community of believers). Humanity might flourish and both vertical and horizontal
attachments bear moral and ethical content, not swallowed up by the pursuit of
happiness or reasons of state.
An appreciation of a distinctively Islamic conception of modernity (as well as other
non-Western modalities of embeddedness) allows a remapping of the place of the
economy in society. The pursuit of happiness acquires an expansive, non-economistic,
character linking other-worldly awareness with material repro duction. The individual
makes concessions to societal interests and the well-being of the community, not as
residual effects of political economy, but as normative principles for the Good Life.
Embeddedness also means making human dignity the foundation of the social order.
444 MUSTAPHA KAMAL PASHA
For more on Islam
in global politics see
Chapter 6.
HOW CAN WE END POVERTY? 445
A key feature of the modern poor is their disconnection from any notion of dignity.
Material dispossession means redun dancy, unless the poor return to the social order in
the shape of matériel to service the economy.
The notion of overlapping sovereignties is not cartographical, but a recognition of
multiple commitments to tame the insatiable quest for self-aggrandizement and to
prevent state idolatry. An ideal-typical Western conception of sovereignty is a com –
promise between state idolatry and self-interest, the former allowing the latter. Either
the state, or the individual serves as the foundation for the social order. An Islamic social
order shuns these distinctively secular constructions.
Difficulties of adopting alternative visions: Islamic Cultural Zones
Alternative visions to Western modernity, however, confront a social universe deeply
scared by the unstoppable march of neoliberal globalization, but also the deepening of
modernist traits of social organization, thinking, and practice. The colonial legacy has
ensured that the derivative discourses of state practice would outlive the formal end of
colonial rule. Sovereignty follows a modernist script throughout most of the Islamic
Cultural Zones. In turn, the process of cultural disembeddedness shows no signs of
abatement. Other-worldly concerns have moved to new sites of enunciation, as moral
critique of the prevailing social order or as a regressive idiom to avoid objectionable
cultural features of neoliberal globalization. In both instances, the institutional form of
protest and resistance has taken a modernist turn.
Within the shrinking spaces of neoliberalism, however, Islamic civil society has
become the mainstay of solace and support to the poor throughout most of the Islamic
FIGURE 20.8
Islamic banking today
in the Gulf States and in
Malaysia, where Islamic
and ‘conventional’ banks
compete freely.
Photo: AP
The Western conception
of sovereignty and its
history is explained in
Chapter 11.
Chapter 15 shows how
the colonial legacy still
seriously affects people’s
lives in formerly
colonized states.
BOX 20.7 MURABAHA
An instance of an Islamic alternative to microfinance is the concept of murabaha,
originally derived from Islamic jurisprudence, in which it refers simply to a sale
(the exchange of a thing of value by another thing of value with mutual
agreement). In the contemporary context it has become an integral part of
‘interest-free’ Islamic banking. In its original formulation, murabaha is a
transaction which honours transparency: the seller divulges the real cost of the
commodity, then adds some additional amount or a percentage as profit. Strict
rules of compliance that preserve the transparency of the sale must be observed
for a murabaha transaction, including the ascertainment of the actual cost of the
product. The interesting aspect of murabaha lies in the aspiration to disrupt the
autonomy of exchange in favour of a desire to recast the notion of profit and
embed it in an economy of trust. By contrast, microfinance remains ensconced
within a strictly market preserve and the compulsions of opaqueness that
characterize the actual workings of a capitalist economy.
For more on how Islamic
movements are involved
in welfare provision see
Chapter 6.
Cultural Zones. The evacuation of the state from its historic commitment to develop –
ment or welfare is both a cause and effect of a broadening neoliberal governmentality.
Often, the lines between political protest and Islamic variants of social welfare can get
blurred, but from the perspective of the poor with nothing to lose, a rediscovery of
their faith and sustenance are on a single register. Islamic civil society provides a small
semblance of integration in a world falling apart. The promise of an integrated life may
be illusory, but it becomes the proxy for thinking in an alternative medium.
The fate of the poor in the Islamic Cultural Zones, as elsewhere, rests on the fate
of the hegemonic modern project for organizing social and life-worlds. While resistance
to that project may be fragile, disorganized, and sporadic, it is not completely devoid
of capacities to slow down the processes of cultural dispossession. An Islamic vision to
reclaim aspects of humanity acquires greater salience in this context.
Discussions of poverty open up wider queries about the nature of the world order,
relations between hegemonic and subaltern forces, normative questions of redistribution,
and above all, about the neoliberal trajectory of globalization. The poor have generally
avoided the more harmful features of cultural dispossession in the Islamic Cultural
Zones. As the neoliberal project has expanded, Islamic civil society has also grown. Can
this experience provide an alternative model to alleviate poverty, if not ending it?
The inclination to romanticize the poor must be resisted. Equally so, alternatives
themselves must be embedded and sustainable, not mere reactions to more powerful
tendencies. While the visible salience of Islamic civil society as an alternate site to
address poverty can be received with greater openness, the bigger issue of neoliberal
globalization cannot be left out of sight. Attempts to end poverty often fall into the
trap of detaching understanding of the big picture from encouraging symptoms of
change and transformation.
446 MUSTAPHA KAMAL PASHA
FIGURE 20.9
Activists of Workers Women’s Association chant slogans during a rally to mark International Women’s Day, Thursday 8 March 2007,
in Lahore, Pakistan. Thousands of women demonstrated in nationwide rallies on International Women’s Day, demanding freedom,
equal rights and an end to discriminatory laws in this Muslim nation. Photo: K. M. Chaudary, AP
HOW CAN WE END POVERTY? 447
CONCLUSION
Poverty remains a durable feature of international relations. Despite many grand
attempts to end poverty, the poor refuse to disappear from the global scene. The basic
problem lies in neoliberal prescriptions that rest on economism. Some major short –
comings of neoliberal solutions to ending poverty become apparent in South Asia,
including the failings of some innovative schemes like microfinance. The neoliberal
project fails to accord the poor any notion of dignity or personhood. Ending poverty
may not be possible in the foreseeable future, but an appreciation of cultural embedded –
ness in other formulations of modernity can restore the poor some measure of their
self-worth. The quest of ending poverty may be better served if the process to transform
the poor into ‘bare life’ can be averted, if not reversed.
FURTHER READING
Banerjee, Abhijit V. and Esther Duflo (2011) Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way
to Fight Global Poverty. New York: PublicAffairs.
Winner of several awards, this book offers a radical rethinking of the economics of poverty
through numerous empirical examples, including hundreds of randomized control trials to
establish why the poor live different lives despite similar abilities and desires enjoyed by those
who are not poor.
Davies, Matt and Magnus Ryner (eds) (2006) Poverty and the Production of World Politics,
Basingstoke: Palgrave.
An exciting collection relocating poverty within structures of global political economy.
Davis, Mike (2006) Planet of Slums, London: Verso.
A breathtaking account of new forms of poverty produced by runaway urbanization.
Dreze, Jean and Amartya Sen (1989) Hunger and Public Action, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
One of the major statements by two leading economists on the need for rethinking public
policy to eliminate hunger.
Dreze, Jean and Amartya Sen (1991) The Political Economy of Hunger, vols I–III, Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Perhaps the most important studies of hunger and the complexity of understanding it.
Edkins, Jenny (2000) Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
A highly original book on the limits of received conceptions of eradicating famine.
Escobar, Arturo (1994) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
One of the most important post-structuralist critiques of modernization and development.
George, Susan (1976) How the Other Half Dies, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
A classic statement on global inequality and its effects.
Goulet, Denis (1971) The Cruel Choice: A New Concept in the Theory of Development, New York:
Atheneum.
A key ethical critique of conventional theories of development.
Levine, David P. and S. Abu Turab Rizvi (2005) Poverty, Work, and Freedom: Political Economy
and the Moral Order, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
One of the most compelling challenges to mainstream wisdom on poverty.
Mahbub ul Haq (1976) The Poverty Curtain: Choices for the Third World, New York: Columbia
University Press.
One of the classics in the field of development economics and global inequality.
Schumacher, E. F. (1973) Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, London:
Blond and Briggs.
One of the first books on environmentalism and sustainable development.
South Commission (1990) The Challenge to the South: The Report of the South Commission, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
An important report on Third World development from its perspective.
Yunus, Muhammad and Alan Jolis (2010) Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against
World Poverty, US: ReadHowYouWant.com.
This autobiographical account of the founder of Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus, presents
an incisive window into the genealogy of micro-finance and its socio-historical context.
UNDP (2003) Human Development Report 2003: Millennium Development Goals: A Compact
Among Nations to End Human Poverty, http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2003/.
A very useful report on recent thinking on eliminating global poverty.
448 MUSTAPHA KAMAL PASHA
www.ReadHowYouWant.com
http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2003/
HOW CAN WE END POVERTY? 449
REFERENCES
Agamben, Giorgio (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Appadurai, Arjun (2001) Globalization, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Banfield, Edward C. (1958) The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
Banuri, Tariq (1990) ‘Modernization and Its Discontents: A Cultural Perspective on the Theories
of Development’, in Frederique Apffel Marglin and Stephen A. Marglin (eds) Dominating
Knowledge, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Belaala, Selma (2004) ‘Morocco: Slums Breed Jihad’, Le Monde Diplomatique (English Language
Edition), November: 4–5, http://mondediplo.com/2004/11/04/11/04moroccoislamists?
var%20recherche=Belaala.
De Soto, Hernando (2000) The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and
Fails Everywhere Else, New York: Basic Books.
Dean, Mitchell (1992) ‘A Genealogy of the Government of Poverty’, Economy and Society 21, 3:
215–51.
Freire, Paulo (1996 [1970]) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos,
London: Penguin.
Hardin, Garrett (1974) ‘Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor’, Psychology Today
8: 38, 43: 123–26.
Hastrup, Kirsten (1993) ‘Hunger and the Hardness of Facts’, Man, New Series, 28, 4: 717–39.
Kothari, Rajni (1993) Poverty: Human Consciousness and the Amnesia of Development, London:
Zed Books.
Nandy, Ashis (2002) ‘The Beautiful, Expanding Future of Poverty: Popular Economics as a
Psychological Defense’, in Mustapha Kamal Pasha and Craig N. Murphy (eds) International
Relations and the New Inequality, Oxford: Blackwell.
Polanyi, Karl (1944) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time,
Boston: Beacon Press.
Sachs, Jeffrey (2005) The End of Poverty: How We Can Make It Happen in Our Lifetime, Foreword
by Bono, London: Penguin Books.
Sen, Amartya (1981) Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
UNDP (2006) Human Development Report 2006: Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global
Water Crisis, New York: UNDP.
Willet, Susan (2005) ‘New Barbarians at the Gate: Losing the Liberal Peace in Africa’, Review of
African Political Economy 106: 569–94.
Yunus, Muhammad (2007) ‘Is Grameen Bank Different from Conventional Banks?’, June,
http://www.grameen-info.org/bank/GBdifferent.htm.
For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
CHAPTER 21
Why do some people think they
know what is good for others?
Naeem Inayatullah
■ The question
GIVING AND RECEIVING
■ Illustrative example
GOD’S PURPOSE: EARLY CHRISTIAN INCURSIONS
■ General responses
HISTORY’S PROGRESS: CONTEMPORARY
INTERVENTIONS
■ Broader issues
DIAGNOSING THE NEED FOR EXCLUSIVE KNOWLEDGE
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
GIVING AND RECEIVING
Some people think they know what is good for others because they believe they know
something crucial denied to others. For example, a society that believes it has mastered
democracy may notice that other societies have authoritarian and dictatorial political
institutions that leave people without a voice. In offering to help create democratic
procedures, the ‘democratic’ society may wish to increase the freedom of others.
The George W. Bush and Tony Blair administrations used this motive to justify their
occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Or, a society with abundant wealth and food
supplies might notice the beginning of famine in another part of the world. They might
decide to feed those suffering from famine. Policy makers from wealthy societies might
also feel compelled to teach others how to manage their agriculture and reorganize their
economy so as to avert future catastrophes. International aid agencies and the World
Bank offer such lessons to those who undergo periodic famines. Finally, scientists, social
theorists, and policy makers in ‘democratic’ and ‘wealthy’ societies might believe that
Some will of course
always dispute that we
know how to sustain
freedom, reshape nature
or produce great wealth
in the first place. For
example, we may live in a
wealthy country but that
does not necessarily
mean that wealth is
abundant for everyone.
See Chapter 19.
Remember too that
when we think about
ethics and politics we
draw on our pictures of
the world, as discussed
in Chapter 2. You might
like to think about the
pictures of reason, the
subject and political
space entailed in this
discussion here.
WHY DO SOME KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR OTHERS? 451
the absence of proper political and economic institutions result from a larger and deeper
problem with other societies. They may deduce that such societies need a better
understanding of the proper relations between humans and humans, between humans
and nature, and between humans and the larger cosmos – the universe thought of as
an ordered and integrated whole. They may believe that such societies lack the right
kind of order and their thinking as a whole needs to be reorganized. Europeans have
held this posture in their encounters with others for the last 500 years or so. In each
case, those with true knowledge believe that they have a responsibility to share their
knowledge and thereby improve others’ lives.
We can react in two opposite ways to such claims. On one hand, we honour the
belief that providing goods for others is an essential part of human responsibility. If we
know how to sustain freedom; if we know how to reshape nature so that we can produce
great wealth; or if we have learned how to create a social order that produces a vibrant
democratic society with abundant wealth, then we must do our utmost to provide such
goods for others. Not doing so would be selfish, irresponsible, and wasteful. When we
accept the role of doing good for others we assume the indispensable value of our
knowledge, the inherent sincerity of our motives, and the urgency of the recipient’s
need. As donors we assume our virtue and delight in our goodness.
On the other hand, if someone targets us as a recipient of goodness we can become
guarded. Perhaps an example will help us understand this wariness. Often parents
dutifully try to prepare and guide their young towards future employment. They regard
their life experience as a store of knowledge that should help their children replicate
their successes and avoid their mistakes. Despite our parents’ best intentions, however,
we are uneasy and sometimes unwilling recipients of their advice and effort. A part of
us questions the relevance of their experience to our current and future plans. Their
concern for our career may feel like an intrusion. We may wonder if their worry results
from a lack faith in our judgment. When others suggest that they know what is good
for us, we imagine that they are actually pointing to our inadequacy. In response, we
tend to stress our independence and defend our integrity. We may bristle at the donor’s
presumption that we are missing a vital perspective. We may even suspect the donor
hides self-serving motives in the guise of helping.
Our defensiveness may be hasty and reactive but it may also emerge from deeper
issues. How did the donor surmise that the recipient lacks something? Does the
donor know the recipient well enough to formulate the recipient’s lack? Is the donor’s
knowledge as vital and necessary to the recipient as the donor believes? Is the
donor’s duty driven by the desire to reorganize the world according to the donor’s
self-interested and limited vision? Don’t conquerors and imperialists hide their baser
motives by clothing them in the good?
On the one side, if we ignore the needs of others we deny our full humanity. On
the other side, doing good for others can be intrusive, coercive, and detrimental to
others’ sense of autonomy and freedom. We seem split; stuck in the ethical and political
tension between wanting to eradicate ignorance and suspecting that our pursuit of duty
endangers others.
Can we find a way to move beyond the split? We can. Notice that we usually jump
from one posture to the other without experiencing the tension that lies between them.
We skip over the following kinds of questions: Can we act responsibly towards others
without undercutting their autonomy and freedom? Can we offer them democracy,
wealth, and an alternative social order without colonizing them? From the other side
we can ask these questions: how can we receive the ‘gifts’ and knowledge of donors
and nevertheless sustain our political, economic, and cultural identity? What can we
offer in return? Such questions emerge when we acknowledge the plausibility of both
positions – the actual responsibilities of the donor and the legitimate suspicions of the
recipient. When we can feel this tension we can begin to stretch.
Moving past this split requires us to search for the difference between proposing
and imposing. Sincere intentions can still be impositions. The more genuinely I believe
that I am providing you with a necessary good, the less I am likely to worry about how
I provide that good and whether you experience it as an imposition. Proposing the good,
in contrast, requires that donors re-examine their motivation. Donors may need to
motivate their giving not by locating the receiver’s deficiency, but paradoxically, by
grasping their own lack. When parties seek to overcome their own lack by engaging in
cooperative searches for mutual enrichment, then sustainable goods may emerge.
Despite this note of hope, we want to bear in mind that even when humans understand
how to move beyond this split, they mostly do not do so. The problem of producing
the good for others has a long and deep tension that is wrecked with human intransi –
gence. We make a mistake, therefore, if in grasping for a ‘solution’ to this problem we
bypass its complexity and intractability.
To illustrate the concerns of this chapter, I might have turned to contemporary
events. Interventions by institutions such as the United Nations, NATO, the World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and various inter-state alliances provide familiar
examples. Such ready examples, however, are unlikely to help us understand this
problem’s deep historical roots. My illustrations take us instead to the thirteenth and
sixteenth centuries. These mostly unfamiliar times present some advantages: they state
the issues in clear terms, they show how little the problem has changed over 700 years,
and they demonstrate the enormous difficulty of our problem. Our challenge remains
creating mutually enriching forms of interaction that do not diminish either party. We
turn first to Francisco de Vitoria and sixteenth-century Europe.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
GOD’S PURPOSE: EARLY CHRISTIAN INCURSIONS
Spain in the Americas: Francisco de Vitoria’s outrage
Catholics and Protestants were waging religious battles against each other in sixteenth-
century Europe. Simultaneously, in the early part of that century, Spanish conquistadors
were destroying and pillaging the strongest and wealthiest civilizations in the Americas.
Francisco de Vitoria, who was among the most influential political theorists and
theologians in sixteenth-century Catholic Europe, thought deeply about these two vital
issues of the day. On one of these issues his position is clear-cut. He opposed Protes –
tantism. His allegiance was to Catholicism, the emperor, and the pope. On the subject
of Spanish treatment of Indians, he was shocked and embarrassed by the massacre and
452 NAEEM INAYATULLAH
Discussions of
colonialism in
Chapters 15 and 16
and contemporary
interventions in
Chapter 25 are relevant
here. Chapter 14 asks
whether democracy is a
good idea.
The tricky issue of
responsibility towards
others is also discussed
in Chapter 28.
Some of the problems
with interventions by
international institutions
or states acting with
their authorization are
discussed in Chapters 15
and 25.
WHY DO SOME KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR OTHERS? 453
looting of Indians. In a 1534 letter, he writes that merely thinking about the conquis –
tadors ‘freezes the blood’ in his veins (Vitoria 1991: 331). Vitoria tried to curtail Spain’s
invading armies by rejecting their justifications for waging war against the Indians.
However, he was not wholehearted in his defence of Indians because he was perplexed
and troubled by their deficiencies. These include human sacrifice, cannibalism, a low-
level civilization, the absence of Christianity, and violations of God’s natural order. While
Vitoria rebuked the conquistadors he did not believe that the Spaniards should evacuate
Indian territories or abandon the natives. His arguments restrained Spanish violence
while also providing correctives for Indian deficiencies. Vitoria believed he knew what
was good for Indians.
The ‘discovery’ of the Americas posed a problem for all European thinkers. Were
the Indians human? If so, what was their place in the cosmological order (the whole
comprising the natural, the social, and the spiritual order)? The cosmological problem
was also a specific legal concern: was the Spanish conquest and enslavement of Indians
legitimate? Pope Alexander VI’s 1493 bull, Inter Caetera, permitted Spanish and
Portuguese evangelization and territorial acquisition but denied enslavement. In line
with this reasoning, Vitoria rejected the view that the Indians were natural slaves – a
popular position inspired by Greek philosopher Aristotle’s views of slavery (see Chapter
10). Vitoria accepted Indians as human beings capable of understanding God’s laws.
Like most Europeans however, Vitoria, did not fully embrace the Indians’ humanity.
‘Aberrant’ and ‘unnatural’ Indian behaviour indicated that Indians were not sufficiently
human (Pagden 1982: 64). Spanish thinkers found themselves in a paradox: if the
Indians were irrational and thereby considered natural slaves, it becomes difficult to
account for reports of their technological mastery, their cities and imperial political
institutions, and their sophisticated (if satanic) religious practices. Yet, if the Indians
were deemed rational human beings then explaining their human sacrifices, their
BOX 21.1 FRANCISCO DE VITORIA
Francisco de Vitoria (1485–1546) is considered a
canonical figure in international law. He was a
Dominican theologian and founder of the
Salamanca or Spanish school of jurisprudence.
He and his students influenced and restructured
the theological thinking of Europe. He was a
central figure in the debate of the nature of the
Indians in the sixteenth century, especially in his
1539 lectures, De Indis (On the American Indians,
published in 1557, after his death). Charles V,
emperor and king of Spain, was among those
who consulted Vitoria.
FIGURE 21.1
Francisco de Vitoria.
http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/images:Francesco_
vitoria
Spanish imperialism in
South America is also
discussed in the context
of a general discussion
of colonization in
Chapter 16, and
specifically in relation to
Argentina in Chapter 14.
relatively primitive agricultural techniques and arts, and especially their acts of cannibal –
ism became complicated. This was no small matter since the legitimacy of Spanish
intervention in the Americas rested on the appraisal of Indian culture.
When Vitoria evaluates the reasons for the Spanish conquest of America he considers
four oft-cited reasons for depriving the Indians of their rights to self-rule, territorial
control, and property. The Indians are said to forfeit their rights because they are
1 sinners,
2 infidels,
3 mentally subnormal, or
4 intrinsically irrational beings (Vitoria 1991: 233).
He easily dismisses the first two reasons (Vitoria 1991: 240–6). Depriving sinners
of their natural rights is based on the false belief – attributed to anti-Catholic radicals
such as Wycliffe, Hus, and various Lutherans – that authority is based on the ruler’s
purity of faith. Vitoria understood the dangers to the Church if legitimacy of rule is
tied to the quality of a ruler’s faith. First, because no ruler is without sin. And, because
someone can always use the claim of greater piety as a means to overthrow the
established order. Vitoria refused the belief that sinners lost their rights as a result of
their sins. He stood with a long line of thinkers going back hundreds of years who
championed the security of the Christian Church against radical reformers.
Nor can the Indians be infidels, Vitoria argued, because infidelity requires prior
knowledge of the rejected faith. Indians were ignorant of Christianity. And, if they were
originally Christian, as some supposed, then they had degenerated too far from their
Christian beliefs to be accountable for their false ideas.
In considering the Indian’s deficient mental capacity and their lack of rationality,
the third and fourth reasons, Vitoria first weighs the evidence from the Americas
and then resists these claims as well. Although, as we shall see, he retains something of
454 NAEEM INAYATULLAH
FIGURE 21.2
The Mexica (Aztec)
peoples, followers of
Moctezuma, face a
powerful Spanish force
under Hernando Cortés
in the 1519–21
campaigns. Fray Diego
Durán. La Historia
antigua de la Nueva
España, 1585. Manuscript
facsimile, Peter Force
Collection, Library of
Congress
The link between religion
and political authority is
explored in Chapters 7
and 27. Chapter 6
examines this issue in a
contemporary context.
WHY DO SOME KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR OTHERS? 455
their rationale, indicating that his opposition is not steadfast. The Indians, he writes,
‘have judgment like other men’. They ‘have some order in their affairs’. This order is
expressed through ‘properly organized cities, proper marriages, magistrates and over –
lords, laws, industries, and commerce, all of which require the use of reason’. They
‘likewise have a form of religion’ (Vitoria 1991: 250).
On the other side of the ledger allegations of Indian cannibalism and human sacrifice
weigh heavily on Vitoria. He allows the accusation ‘that these barbarians are . . . foolish
and slow-witted’ and further acknowledges their ‘sins against the law of nature’ (Vitoria:
1991: 251, 273). Though he believes that such offences cannot cancel rights, they do
indicate intellectual and social chaos in Indian life (Vitoria 1991: 272–5).
Vitoria finds human sacrifice more comprehensible than cannibalism (Vitoria 1991:
212–17). He acknowledges that sacrifice plays a part in Christianity, as in Abraham’s
willingness to kill his son and, of course, in Christ’s own sacrifice on the cross. Despite
this sympathy, Vitoria condemns Indian practices. He emphasizes the Indians’ confusion
about the proper cosmological order, not the similarities between the two systems of
religion. He believes that Indians fail to apprehend the most important precepts of God’s
order. He concludes that they have a distorted vision of reality and that their mental
capacity is deficient. Their disorder and deficiency are further expressed in various cultural
and technological inadequacies: the Indians possess only a rudimentary knowledge of
agriculture, they lack the ability to work iron and other metals, and they are unlettered.
In the end, Vitoria concludes that the Indians are unable to adequately govern their
own domains. The following passage summarizes Vitoria’s position, though he carefully
distances himself from it by insisting that he offers it only for expository reasons:
these barbarians, though not totally mad, as explained before, are nevertheless
so close to being mad, that they are unsuited to setting up or administrating a
common wealth both legitimate and ordered in human and civil terms. Hence they
have neither appropriate laws nor magistrates fitted to the task. Indeed, they are
FIGURE 21.3
‘Oh let them go.’
Artist: Viv Quillin
It is interesting to think
of the picture of reason
used here. How does it
differ from the picture of
reason employed by the
thinkers about global
ethics explored in
Chapter 2?
Are there some people
we today consider
‘human but inadequately
so’?
Certainty plays a role in
the justifications for
torture explored in
Chapter 2.
Relations between
self and other are an
important part of
global politics and are
discussed in many
chapters in this book.
See particularly Chapters
2 and 5.
456 NAEEM INAYATULLAH
unsuited even to governing their own households; hence their lack of letters, of
arts and crafts (not merely liberal, but even mechan ical), of systematic agriculture,
of manufacture, and of many other things . . . indispensable for human use.
(Vitoria 1991: 290)
For Vitoria, the Indians are human but inadequately so.
Having diagnosed Indian deficiency, Vitoria moves to the cure. Indians are not
permanently foolish or irrational. On the contrary, as human beings they possess
reason. The real problem is that they have not activated their dormant reasoning capacity
(Vitoria 1991: 250). This failure is due to poor teaching. Vitoria assures us that the
fault lies not in their nature, but ‘mainly due to their evil and barbarous education’ for
‘they were so many thousands of years outside the state of salvation’ (Vitoria 1991:
250). Notice that Vitoria shifts the status of Indians from slaves to children. Europeans
thereby change from being lords and masters to becoming parents and teachers.
Vitoria then provides what today we would call his policy recommendation:
It might therefore be argued that for [the Indians’] own benefit the princes of Spain
might take over their administration, and set up urban officers and governors on
their behalf, or even give them new masters, so long as this could be proved in
their interest. . . . and not merely for the profit of the Spaniards.
(Vitoria 1991: 290, 291)
European tutelage will bring enlightenment and order; this is what is good for Indians.
We might sympathize with Vitoria’s struggle to reconcile Indian beliefs and
practices with his own theological convictions. His Christian beliefs convince him that
the Indians are God’s children but these beliefs also require him to prescribe Christian
instruction. In sum, Vitoria reins in the cruelty of the conquistadors, he refuses to make
Indians slaves, and he recommends that the civilized world incorporate the Indians.
If we leave aside the discussion of whether Vitoria is foolish or wise in his beliefs,
we can pursue larger questions: Why is he so confident in his own faith? Why doesn’t
an encounter with the Indians raise doubts for him about his own worldview? Before
we can turn to these questions, I first want to show that Vitoria’s position on the Indians
is part of a larger pattern of Christian relations with non-Christian societies, and more
generally of relations between self and other.
Today, even though contemporary world politics retains much of Vitoria’s overall
vision, we may regard his views on Indians as ethnocentric. Was Vitoria aware that his
worldview was tainted by European and Christian partiality? Unlikely. The deeper source
of his certainty derives from what I call exclusive knowledge.
Christian and infidel: Pope Innocent IV
Sinibaldo Fieschi was a leading canon lawyer before he became Pope Innocent IV
(1243–54). As pope and lawyer, Innocent synthesized judgments about how Christians
should treat non-Christians and he bound these ideas into a legal doctrine. His views
illuminated Church thinking for more than 300 years and directly influenced Vitoria’s
fifteenth-century analysis of Spanish dealings with American Indians (Muldoon 1979:
BOX 21.2 EXCLUSIVE KNOWLEDGE
Exclusive knowledge is the idea that some group, usually ‘our’ group, has unique
and superior knowledge about how the world works. It contains three specific
assumptions:
1 one’s own group has special access to knowledge about the order and the
workings of natural and social life;
2 there is something superior and final about such knowledge; and
3 others’ knowledge claims are inadequate or defective compared to ours.
Later we will discuss how these assumptions work against the great enemy of
exclusive knowledge – doubt.
In which contemporary
debates can you find
similar considerations
and arguments to the
ones we are examining
here?
WHY DO SOME KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR OTHERS? 457
vii–viii, 140–47; Williams 1990: 13, 44). Our examination of
Innocent IV’s claims to exclusive knowledge remains relevant
because we can hear the echoes of his voice in current theory and
policy.
Innocent IV raised the following question: ‘is it licit to
invade the lands that infidels posses, and if it is licit, why is it licit?’
(Muldoon 1979: 191–2). (‘Licit’ means allowed by law.) Inno –
cent was asking if Christians had a right to dispossess non-
believers. By contemporary standards, Innocent’s question is
surprisingly forthright. Nevertheless, despite several hundred
years of work by canonists, he was wading into a disputed area.
At the time, non-believers included Christian schismatics and
heretics, Jews and Muslims living within Christian realms, and
Muslims and Mongols beyond the frontiers of Christendom.
Though he recognized differences between these groups, he
collapsed them into a single category, non-Christian, in order to
create a more uniform response to infidels (Muldoon 1979: 3).
Innocent disallows dispossession of infidels simply because
they are non-believers. He argues that dominium – the basic
faculties and rights necessary to human functioning and self-rule,
including the right to property and the offices of legitimate
authority – rests in the hand of society’s rulers regardless of their
beliefs. While unpossessed or unruled territories are free for the
taking, lands already occupied and ruled are considered the
legitimate possessions of their holders. Innocent IV establishes that all peoples, regardless
of their faith, have the right to property and self-government.
We may be surprised that Innocent allows infidels a right to property given that
he starts from the premise of exclusive knowledge of Christian truths. His generosity
seems all the more astonishing given that, as pope, Innocent considers himself God’s
FIGURE 21.4
Innocent IV. Library of Congress, ref. 3644545r
vicar. As God’s vicar, he can claim universal dominium over the planet. Accepting others’
right of dominium did not mean, however, that Innocent gave up his responsibility for
their souls. He believes that the Church’s responsibility for all human souls requires
Christians to convert non-believers. However strong or weak the papacy’s earthly
political power, Innocent retains the pope’s ultimate spiritual authority over all peoples,
including infidels. He allowed arguments for dispossessing infidels through this belief.
On the assumption that God’s law was evident to all, Innocent argued that infidel
rulers forfeited dominium when they failed to punish their subjects’ violations of natural
law. In this circumstance, the pope could mete out justice by authorizing Christian
military interventions in infidel societies (Muldoon 1979: 10–11). Innocent leaves
unspecified what counts as a violation of natural law, though he mentions sexual
perversion and idolatry as particularly serious violations. Such sins, if left unchecked,
obligate the pope to summon Christian armies for the purposes of righting the natural
order. His armies must withdraw, however, once the mission is concluded.
As long as Christian armies occupy infidel territory why not use them, we may ask,
to convert the infidels to Christianity? Christian doctrine disallowed such force because
meaningful conversion had to be voluntary. Infidel acquiescence to the sword was no
vindication of the true faith. Nevertheless, Innocent recognizes that instructing infidels
on proper worship, if not also manners and customs, requires missionary work. Of
course, Innocent expects that infidels will resist Christian instruction and block
missionary activity. Such resistance, however, amounts to impeding God’s way. It justifies
the suspension of infidel rights to dominium and authorizes Christian invasion. Similarly,
the pope may intervene if infidels persecute Christians living under their rule. He may
even move to create ‘regime change’ by replacing noncompliant infidel rulers (Muldoon
1979: 11–12).
Innocent disallows wars of dispossession but retains the claim of exclusive
knowledge. On the basis of this knowledge, he then argues that certain kinds of inter –
vention in infidel society are just and necessary. Innocent IV uses the same intellectual
apparatus – the same combination of Biblical references, Roman law sources, and
humanist thinking – to establish infidel rights and to legitimate dispossession of infidels.
We may ask if Innocent’s arguments are tied to Christianity’s exclusive knowledge
or are they general principles available to all faiths and cultures? Can other faiths marshal
these claims and proselytize in Christian society? ‘No’ replies Innocent. Christians alone
have the right to proselytize, to convert others, and to intervene militarily for religious
purposes. Christian knowledge excludes and exceeds other perspectives on ultimate
truth. Innocent bluntly and unashamedly tells us why he authorizes Christian missions
while blocking all other proselytizers: because ‘they are in error and we are on the
righteous path’ (Muldoon 1979: 14).
In sum, Innocent IV argues for the rights of infidels to property and self-government
and thereby rejects claims that they can be dispossessed simply because they are not
Christians. However, Innocent’s defence of infidel dominium or, in modern terms, their
‘sovereignty’, is porous. He offers a justification that legitimates both military inter –
vention and political/spiritual regime change. Further, consistent with the claim to
exclusive knowledge, intervention is a distinctly one-way Christian prerogative. Like
Vitoria, Innocent knows what is good for others. He knows that others lack the know –
ledge to which he, as a Christian, has full access. Exclusive knowledge and his duty to
458 NAEEM INAYATULLAH
For a discussion of
sovereignty, see
Chapter 7.
WHY DO SOME KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR OTHERS? 459
retrieve the lost souls of non-believers, obligates him to endorse Christian work done
for the good of others.
By using the examples of Vitoria and Innocent IV, I am not suggesting that either
exclusive knowledge or the belief that one can do good for others is peculiar to
Christianity or to Europe. On the contrary, exclusive knowledge seems a common
characteristic of many cultures. We can appreciate its pervasiveness by examining an
exchange between Christians and Mongols.
Christian and Mongol: the encounter with Güyük Khan
In the summer of 1244, Innocent IV moved the papacy from Rome to Lyons to escape
the excommunicated emperor Frederick II’s attack on Italy. At stake within western
BOX 21.3 THE JUST WAR TRADITION
The ‘just war’ tradition is a way of thinking that is prominent in contemporary
politics and academic discussions. It is concerned, at least in part, with doing
good for others. Vitoria’s work, including his reflections on the legitimacy of the
Spanish intervention in the Americas, is seen to have contributed to the
development of this tradition and of international law (Bellamy 2006).
The just war tradition is concerned with when it is permissible to fight (this is
called ius ad bellum) and how it is permissible to fight (ius in bello). The precise
criteria listed under each heading vary for different just war thinkers. Roughly, the
first category requires that a war is fought only
• with the right sorts of aims in mind, such as upholding the law or re-
establishing peace (right intention);
• for the right sorts of reasons, such as self-defence against aggression
(just cause);
• by the right sorts of political entity, typically now identified as states
(right authority);
• for causes that are significant enough (proportionality of ends);
• and when no other means are available (last resort).
The second category requires that the means used in the war remain proportional
to the particular objectives (that is, for example, that the least destructive weapon
is used to accomplish a particular goal) and that civilians are not targeted (this is
called discrimination or non-combatant immunity).
Just war thinkers see this tradition as limiting the ways in which military
violence can be used (Coates 1997; Walzer 1992) but they have also justified
recent wars. This often takes the form of arguing that we have to do some good
for others (such as liberate Afghans from the Taliban or Iraqis from Saddam
Hussein) and that we can only do so through war (Elshtain 2003; Walzer 2004).
BOX 21.4 GÜYÜK KHAN
Güyük (c. 1206–1248) was the son of Ogedei Khan, and grandson of Genghis
Khan. He reigned from 1246 to 1248 and was the first khagan, or great khan of the
Mongols. Innocent IV hoped to form an alliance with Güyük Khan in order to
defeat the Muslims. Güyük Khan’s correspondence with Innocent IV reveals how
both of them believed the other as the leader of a relatively inferior people.
FIGURE 21.5
Letter of Güyük Khan to
Pope Innocent IV.
http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/G%C3%BCy%C3
%BCk_Khan
Christendom was the power of the pope versus the emperor. Fear of the powerful
Mongols and Muslims multiplied the internal hazards. While both the Muslims and
Mongols posed military threats, the Mongols were less known. Innocent IV sent two
groups of friars to establish contact and to learn more about the Mongols. He wanted
to determine Mongol intentions, ascertain their capabilities, and establish an alliance
with them against the Muslims. He also hoped to convert the Great Khan and his people
to Christianity (Muldoon 1979: 42; Williams 1990: 4). The friars carried two letters
from Innocent IV to Güyük Khan of the Mongols. These letters and the khan’s response
provide us with a sense of the encounter.
Innocent explains the central tenets of the Christian view and openly declares his
responsibility for the khan’s soul:
Wherefore we, though unworthy, having become, by the Lord’s disposition, the
successor of this vicar, do turn our keen attention, before all else is incumbent on
us in virtue of our office, to your salvation and that of other men . . . so that we
may be able, with the help of God’s grace . . . [to] lead those in error into the way
of truth and gain all men for Him.
(Dawson 1955: 74; emphasis added)
Güyük Khan’s response, dated 1246, asks the pertinent question: how does Innocent
know he speaks for God?
Though thou likewise sayest that I should become a trembling . . . Christian,
worship God and be an ascetic, how knowest thou whom God absolves, in truth
to whom he shows mercy? How dost thou know that such words as thou speakest
are with God’s sanction?
(Dawson 1955: 85–6)
How indeed? Güyük poses the question not as way of opening the debate, but instead
to counter-assert his own exclusive intimacy with God: ‘From the rising of the sun to
its setting, all the lands have been made subject to me. Who could do this contrary to
the commands of God?’ (Dawson 1955: 86). His exceptionalism is nearly symmetrical
to Innocent’s:
460 NAEEM INAYATULLAH
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCy%C3%BCk_Khan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCy%C3%BCk_Khan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCy%C3%BCk_Khan
The terms ‘left’ and
‘right’ in politics refer to
a group’s position on a
spectrum that ranges
from socialist,
egalitarian, democratic
policies on the left to
conservative, republican
or libertarian policies on
the right.
WHY DO SOME KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR OTHERS? 461
The eternal God has slain and annihilated these lands and peoples, because they
have neither adhered to Chingis Khan, nor to the Khagan [khan of khans], both
of whom have been sent to make known God’s command . . .
(Dawson 1955: 85)
The pope’s rightful station, therefore, is not as God’s vicar but as Güyük’s subordinate:
Now you should say with a sincere heart: ‘I will submit and serve you’. Thou thyself,
at the head of all the [Christian] princes, come at once to serve and wait upon us.
At that time I shall recognize your submission.
(Dawson 1955: 86)
Does the khan assume that the pope’s submission to him will be good for Innocent
and for Christians? Perhaps only in the sense that it would be good for Christians to
have their lives spared. Regardless, Güyük Khan believes, much like Innocent and Vitoria,
that his knowledge about the world and its workings is absolutely superior. All three
assume a form of exclusive knowledge that permits them to suppose they know what
is good for others.
GENERAL RESPONSES
HISTORY’S PROGRESS: CONTEMPORARY INTERVENTIONS
How have we in the twenty-first century responded to the question of ‘why some
people think they know what is good for others?’ Have we moved away from the
responsibility that comes from believing we have exclusive knowledge? As we shift
from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century, can we assume that such claims to
exclusive knowledge are relegated to the past? No. It is a mistake to believe that we
have moved beyond the powerful pull of exclusive knowledge in contemporary life. Two
examples display the strength of that pull. From the left we examine the Euston
Manifesto and from the right the work of British diplomat Robert Cooper. I have
selected these examples for two reasons. Both argue with bold fervour and with little
regard for upsetting our usual sensibilities. They provide thereby a clarity that helps us
to get to the heart of the issue. Second, juxtaposing the similarities of the left and right
demonstrates that the pull of exclusive knowledge reaches not only across centuries but
also across ideological divides.
Reform of the British left: the Euston Manifesto
The authors of the Euston Manifesto seek to reform the left. Specifically, they wish to
‘draw a line between the forces of the left who remain true to its authentic values’ and
those who have been ‘too flexible’ in the face of the forces of cultural relativ-
ism (that is, in the face of those who claim that truth or values are not universal but
rather differ between cultures). Their supreme belief in modernity is evident in a first
principle: ‘We reject fear of modernity.’ They are for democracy – the liberal pluralist
variety. They ‘decline to make excuses’ for tyranny and they promote universal human
rights for all:
BOX 21.5 EXCLUSIVE KNOWLEDGE AT DIFFERENT POINTS
IN HISTORY
Keep in mind that as we move from the thirteenth and sixteenth century to the
present some things have changed. We can think of this change in two ways.
First, European concern shifts from a social order dominated by religious and
theological matters to a secular worldview. Second, history is seen as produced by
human action rather than being regarded as the result of God’s will.
These shifts nevertheless retain something of the prior vision. History
continues to be seen as moving towards an ever more perfect future. Most
significant, the certainty that we know God’s will shifts to the certainty that the
modern period is the apex of progressive human history. Doubts about whether
history really contains a progressive purpose or whether it has led humans
inevitably towards perfection are hardly taken seriously.
Exclusive knowledge based on Christian beliefs now becomes exclusive
knowledge based on European understanding of secular history. In the shift from
a Christian to a secular European social order, the hold of exclusive knowledge
remains firm across the centuries. Indeed, the attractions of exclusive knowledge
may have become all the more powerful in their secular guise.
For more on the
declaration and human
rights more generally
see Chapter 27.
Just war thinker Michael
Walzer was one of the
signatories of the Euston
Manifesto, but he was
not in favour of the war
against Iraq, which he
argued was unjust.
We hold the fundamental human rights codified in the Universal Declaration to
be precisely universal, and binding on all states and political movements, indeed
on everyone. Violations of these rights are equally to be condemned whoever is
responsible for them and regardless of cultural context.
(Euston Manifesto, undated, emphasis added)
Unlike Vitoria and Innocent, the Euston Manifesto does not spell out how such rights
are derived. But they are universally binding, regardless of their origins. Presumably the
presence of cultural variation means either that some societies have failed to learn the
lessons of modern life or that they have simply rejected what is right and good.
Unlike Vitoria and Innocent, the Manifesto writers show little concern for how
the powerful can use ideals as masks in order to dispossess the less powerful. This non –
chalance comes through forcefully in principle 6, titled ‘Opposing anti-Americanism’.
They ‘reject without qualification the anti-Americanism now infecting so much left-
liberal (and some conservative) thinking’ (Euston Manifesto, undated, emphasis added).
The authors of the Manifesto admit to internal disagreement on one issue – the
military intervention in Iraq. They diverge on the intervention’s justification, its planning
and execution, and the prospects for creating a democracy in Iraq. Nevertheless, they
are unified in their view over the
reactionary, semi-fascist and murderous character of the Baathist regime in Iraq,
and we recognize its overthrow as a liberation of the Iraqi people. We are also united
in the view that, since the day on which this occurred, the proper concern of
462 NAEEM INAYATULLAH
BOX 21.6 EUSTON MANIFESTO
This British-based group dates back to May 2005 after the general election when
more than twenty met at a London pub to discuss how to differentiate their own
left politics from the anti-war movement and the general state of left politics in
the UK. A more formal meeting at a branch of the O’Neill’s Irish-themed pub
chain on London’s Euston Road led to the document’s first draft. The Manifesto
was first published in the New Statesman on 7 April 2006. The first four signers of
the manifesto – Norman Geras, Damian Counsell, Alan Johnson and Shalom
Lappin – are believed to be the primary theorists of the manifesto.
The Euston Manifesto (http://eustonmanifesto.org)
The authors of the
Euston Manifesto might
well strongly disagree
with the interpretation
offered here. We
encourage readers to
visit their site (http://
eustonmanifesto.org)
to formulate their own
impression.
For a detailed account of
how colonialism works
see Chapter 16.
WHY DO SOME KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR OTHERS? 463
genuine liberals and members of the Left should have been the battle to put in
place in Iraq a democratic political order and to rebuild the country’s infrastructure,
to create after decades of the most brutal oppression a life for Iraqis which those
living in democratic countries take for granted – rather than picking through the
rubble of the arguments over intervention.
(Euston Manifesto, undated, emphasis added)
In contrast to Vitoria’s caution about turning Indian life over to Spanish administrators,
these writers express no hesitation in speaking for the Iraqi people and share no
misgivings about delineating Iraqi liberation. They are unconcerned about overturning
the principle of sovereignty. On the contrary, despite their initial differences, they appear
unified in vigorously supporting intervention as a means of promoting modernity in
Iraq and elsewhere. In removing significant doubts and arguments against intervention,
the Euston Manifesto goes well beyond Vitoria and Innocent IV. The authors of the
Euston Manifesto somehow ‘know’ that modernity and liberal democracy is good for
all peoples in all contexts. They ‘know’, therefore, what is good for the Iraqi people
and for all peoples of the Third World.
Benevolent imperialism and the British right: Robert Cooper
If we move from the liberal left to the right, we find in Robert F. Cooper’s ‘The Post-
Modern State’ (2002) a parallel claim about doing good for others. Cooper is a British
diplomat with experience in Kenya and diplomatic posts in Japan, Germany and
Afghanistan. Currently he serves as a counsellor in the European External Action Service,
which serves as a foreign ministry and diplomatic corps of the EU and is a member of
European Council on Foreign Relations – a pan-European think-tank. His arguments
revive imperialism and colonialism. Though Cooper is not well published, his ideas have
attracted the attention of academics and policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Cooper’s use of the term ‘post-modern’ flouts the usual academic convention
wherein ‘postmodern’ is understood to query if not undermine the assumptions and
certainties of modernity. Instead, Cooper treats post-modernity as the last and most
http://eustonmanifesto.org
http://eustonmanifesto.org
http://eustonmanifesto.org
BOX 21.7 IMPERIALISM AND COLONIALISM
There is much debate about the terms colonialism and imperialism. Some use the two terms
interchangeably, others want to differentiate between them. Both refer to forms of domination of one
group of people, or one state, over others, whether economic, military or cultural, or a combination of all
three. Distinctions are sometimes drawn depending on what forms of control are in place. For example, if
settlers from one country establish a base in another, that is usually referred to as a colony. Imperialism
can be distant control, without settlement but including, for example, the extraction of resources and
tribute or taxation. However, this distinction does not avoid overlap: for example, the British Empire, when
British subjects lived in and governed vast tracts of the world – or colonized these areas – was referred to
as both British imperialism and as a colonial period. The period that followed was a period of de-
colonization – or a period where those who had been colonized sought a return of self-determination and
independence. It is useful to remember that various forms of empire predate or exist alongside the
modern European state system – the Ottoman Empire, for example, began in 1300 and was at its height in
1683 – and that in the contemporary world some writers refer to US dominance as ‘imperialism’ or a form
of empire. It is interesting to note that ‘empires’ are sometimes described as ‘civilizations’, and that the
imperial power often sees itself as spreading ‘civilization’ to ‘barbarians’.
FIGURE 21.6
Map of colonial powers, 1914. Peter Mandaville, Global Political Islam (Routledge 2007)
464 NAEEM INAYATULLAH
WHY DO SOME KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR OTHERS? 465
advanced of three civilizational stages: premodern, modern, and post modern. Cooper
holds that the post-modern is the final and full realization of modernity. The European
Union, Canada, and Japan (and with some ambiguity, the US) have overcome their
‘imperial urge’ and reached postmodern statehood (Cooper 2002: 12).
Much like Vitoria’s Indian problem, Cooper’s concern is that premodern states
lack civilization. The less civilized premodern states threaten the emerging postmodern
order by following the ‘laws of the jungle’. His solution to this problem is that the
postmodern state must practice a double standard. Inside their boundaries they can
‘keep the law’ of civilized society but outside they must operate according to the laws
of the jungle:
Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security.
But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern
continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era –
force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who
still live in the nineteenth-century world of ‘every state for itself ’.
(Cooper 2002: 16)
As with Vitoria, Innocent IV, Güyük Khan, and the Manifesto writers, knowledge of
the absolute truth eclipses concern for the claims of others. Instead, Cooper advocates
a return to colonialism and imperialism: ‘The most logical way to deal with chaos [caused
by the less civilized] . . . is colonization’ (Cooper 2002: 17). Civilized states, however,
will find returning to an old-fashioned colonialism contrary to their values. For this
reason, says Cooper, what the world needs is a benevolent imperialism ‘acceptable to
the world of human rights and cosmopolitan values’ (Cooper 2002: 17).
Faced with a world of infidels, of non-believers in modernity, Cooper follows
the tradition of the true believer. He knows that modernity is the highest stage of
civilization. He knows that others do not have it and may not like it. He knows that
non-believers must be forced to accept modernity for their own good and for the good
of all. Nor is Cooper’s an isolated argument. The tone and substance of his presenta-
tion is widespread in our time. We can find it in the work, for example, of Max Boot
(2002), Eliot Cohen (2001), Niall Ferguson (2003), Michael Ignatieff (2003), Robert
Kagan (2002) and Robert D. Kaplan (2003). The ideology of these mostly academic
writers ranges from liberal to conservative, but they all implore the United States to
bear responsibility to do good for others by means of creating a benevolent imperialism.
We can also perceive the theme of benevolent imperialism in the writing and policy
prescriptions of the ‘neo-conservatives’ involved in the Project for the New American
Century (www.newamericancentury.org/) and in the highest levels of the current US
and UK administrations.
In summary: We can recognize two changes from Innocent’s and Vitoria’s time to
ours. First, there is a shift in the features of the knowledge over which there is certainty.
We move from theological convictions about God’s purpose to secularized convictions
about history’s purpose. Second, Cooper and the Euston Manifesto writers show less
concern for the claims of those outside the faith than did Vitoria and Innocent.
Nevertheless, each of the thinkers we have examined assumes exclusive knowledge. They
believe their exclusive knowledge permits them to know what is good for others.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/
What picture of the
subject is being
suggested here?
See Chapter 2.
466 NAEEM INAYATULLAH
BROADER ISSUES
DIAGNOSING THE NEED FOR EXCLUSIVE KNOWLEDGE
Recall the tension and the stretch with which we started. On the one side, we feel
compelled to shoulder the duty of doing good. On the other side we feel our resistance
when we are made good’s recipient. I said that we usually jump from one position to
the other without considering these two positions simultaneously. What might we learn
if we accept the responsibility of doing good for others while also retaining our
suspicions? Let us tentatively accept that all humans, cultures, and societies have some
exclusive knowledge of the world. We may even accept that our desire to share the
benefits of such knowledge need not always contain sinister motivations. For these
reasons, however, we can imagine that others, whom we picture as recipients of our
wisdom, may regard themselves as knowledge givers in their own right. As we envision
giving them our gifts, they envision providing us with their gifts. Likewise, as we resist
their generosity, they resist ours.
So far, we have assumed that we are either donors or receivers. What we have not
done is consider that we are both. Are we not concurrently donors and receivers?
Does not a holistic identity require that we acknowledge ourselves as both ‘giver’ and
‘receiver’?
Vitoria, Innocent, Güyük, the Euston Manifesto, and Cooper split this whole
(Benjamin 1988). They take the whole that is ‘giver and receiver of knowledge’ and
split them into two separate entities. They then apportion the role of ‘giver’ to them –
selves and ‘receiver’ to others. Further, by assuming that they have exclusive knowledge,
they place the ‘giver’ on top as the superior being. The tragic result is that as they
discharge their responsibility for giving to others, they weave into it their need to feel
superior. Superiority turns responsibility towards others into charitable condescension.
The tendency to claim exclusive knowledge comes, I think, from a need to claim such
superiority.
But why do they and we need this sense of superiority? One answer is that we need
this superiority in order to overcome the hidden doubts about the very same exclusive
knowledge we espouse. Consider the proposition that no belief can be held without
doubt. Doubt is belief ’s other and its foundation. Doubt is the dock from which the
ship of belief sails. Doubt and belief are opposites but they also define each other.
Exclusive knowledge – the belief that we have exclusive access to superior knowledge
– goes hand in hand with the anxiety that our belief is common and ordinary. The need
for superiority emerges from the doubt that perhaps we are ordinary or inferior.
Is such doubt impossible to face? Is that why claims to exclusive knowledge are
so pervasive? While we may know people who are able to incorporate the hard kernel
of doubt into their beliefs, nevertheless, as we saw in the examples above, holding beliefs
and doubts together is difficult. Why? In harbouring doubt, we often begin to con –
template exactly what we want to avoid – our own lack (Fink 1993; Žižek 1993). We
avoid that dreaded sense of incompleteness in our knowing and being. In claiming
exclusive knowledge our logical rhythm goes something like this: our lack is the source
of our doubt; that doubt creates within us a sense of insufficiency; to compensate for
that insufficiency we project our superiority both to others and to ourselves; projecting
and sustaining superiority requires us to trumpet our exclusive knowledge; this
WHY DO SOME KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR OTHERS? 467
trumpeting cannot be convincing, especially to ourselves, unless others validate our
claim; therefore we formulate a mission to convert others to our beliefs. Converting
others must not be seen as a way of affirming our superiority but rather as a way of
sharing our unique access to the good.
Just like we split knowledge from doubt, we split donor from receiver. A healthy
self, however, may require a balanced combination of belief and doubt as well as a
sensible mix of giving and receiving knowledge. An insecure self, on the other hand,
holds fast to belief and casts doubt adrift. Similarly, an insecure self valorizes the donor
while diminishing and cutting loose the receiver.
Remarkably, an insecure self ’s offerings may still produce something good. Despite
the taint of superiority, those who believe that they know what is good for others may
nevertheless have something good to give. The Spaniards might have had something
worthy for the Indians, Innocent may have offered something of value to non-Christians,
and contemporary purveyors of regime change and intervention may identify ways to
improve Third World conditions.
If this is true, then why do we find ourselves resisting when others cast us in the
role of good receiver? Why don’t we simply accept the good they offer? We resist because
we sense that the donor needs us to confirm his superiority. Receiving such goods
confirms the donor’s superiority and affirms our inferiority. Accepting this hierarchy is
the real cost of receiving the donor’s ‘gift’ and the crux of the problem (Mauss 2006;
Sahlins 2003). From the receiver’s perspective, the donor’s actions seem far from a
faithfully discharged duty. Instead, they seem like an offence against the integrity, self-
sufficiency, and freedom of the receiver. Receivers resist and rebuke donors as long as
the donor’s motives are tainted by claims of exclusive knowledge. In response, and
compounding the tragedy, donors regard this rejection of their gift as the irrationality
of lesser people. Donors seem incapable of perceiving their need for superiority, nor do
they search for the deeper reasons for the receiver’s rejection. The tragedy plays out in
three parts: the receiver’s rejection of a potential good, the donor’s inability to recognize
that donor motivations are tainted, and the donor’s misunderstanding of the receiver’s
rejection. Is it any wonder then why doing good for others has been so difficult?
Our most difficult and most important step in addressing this difficulty is
recognizing the full scope of the tragedy. Can we do more? Let us return to the question
raised by this chapter’s title: Why do some people think they know what is good for
others? My answer: we emphasize what is good for others in order to avoid the pain of
facing our own lack. If so, what happens if we start facing this lack?
If all of us have some unique knowledge of the world, we also suspect that our
knowledge is incomplete. We can give and we need to receive; we are both donor and
receiver. Recognizing that we are incomplete and that we need others’ goods, we can
change our posture towards giving. Claiming exclusive knowledge can be replaced by
a stance that seeks what we may call knowledge encounters (Bitterli 1993; Geertz 1986;
Greenblatt 1976, 1991; Nandy 1983, 1987; Todorov 1984; Verma 1990). The rhythm
of this sequence might go like this: our lack is the source of our doubt; that doubt
creates within us a sense of insufficiency; to overcome that insufficiency we announce
our need to others and to ourselves; we de-emphasize the good we can offer and instead
highlight our lack and need; and we search for others who present the same posture,
avoiding those projecting missionary values. In sum, we search for opportunities and
Ashis Nandy is
discussed further in
Chapters 16 and 20
and George Orwell in
Chapter 16.
Is it significant that three
of these four people are
women?
468 NAEEM INAYATULLAH
partners that allow mutual sharing. In this way, we can have access to others’ unique
knowledge and they to ours.
I am not suggesting that we can easily realign the world so that everyone participates
in knowledge encounters. Just one ‘exclusive knower’ with a powerful mission can
disrupt a formative society of ‘knowledge encounterers’. Rather, I merely contrast a
logical sequence that produces the tragedy of ‘exclusive knowing’ with a sequence that
might produce ‘knowledge encounters’.
At a particular moment, others may know what is best for us. However, we may
justly reject such knowledge if the donor’s delivery is mixed with condescension. They
might indeed know what is best for us but only we can decide to receive that knowledge
and integrate it into our actions. Thinking in this way allows us to change the question.
We can move from ‘why do some people think they know what is best for others?’ to
‘how can we recognize that we are all a mix of donor and receiver?’ And, to ‘how do
we create social institutions that help us to overcome our incompleteness?’
Are there examples of those who have moved from a posture of ‘exclusive
knowledge’ to that of ‘knowledge encounter’? Todorov discusses the case of Las Casas,
in his Conquest of America (1984), and Ashis Nandy contrasts the examples of Rudyard
Kipling, George Orwell, and Mohandas Gandhi to similar effect in Intimate Enemy
(1983).
Like Vitoria, Las Casas was outraged that the American Indians were being
exterminated. And like Vitoria, he wanted to save the Amerindians from the con –
quistadors in order to convert them to Christianity. Only later in his life did Las Casas
regard the Indians’ religiosity as similar to his own belief in Christianity. He defended
Indian religious practices by appealing to principles he took to be universal – a desire
to worship and serve God. Even ‘offensive’ Indian religious practices became expressions
of principles that underlie all religious practice. In this way, Las Casas moved away from
‘exclusive knowledge’. He was unable, however, to use the religious knowledge of the
Indians to inform and critique Christian conceptions. Had he done so, he would have
moved to a more robust understanding of ‘knowledge encounter’. Nandy’s examples
move us in this direction.
Nandy believes that ‘exclusive knowledge’ victimizes giver and receiver, both
colonizer and colonized. Thus for Nandy, even though Kipling and Orwell support
British imperialism they are also its victims. Both were born in India, influenced by their
early years there, and sent to boarding school in England where they were bullied into
manhood. Kipling’s and Orwell’s responses to colonialism, however, differ somewhat.
Kipling identifies with the colonizer by denying those parts of him that appreciate India.
As an adult writer, he demonstrates precise and intimate knowledge of India but uses
that knowledge to legitimate colonization. Orwell also knows India well. He does not
identify with the bully and thereby does not celebrate India’s victimization. Nor,
however, does he identify with the colonized. Orwell remains a divided figure who denies
the posture of exclusive knowledge but does not quite know what to do with the partial
knowledge offered by his various selves.
Nandy then presents a small but important group – Sister Nivedita, Anne Besant,
Mira Behn, and C. F. Andrews – who are able to transform their critical knowledge
into practical convictions. Andrews finds alternatives within his society’s dominant
knowledge in order to fight alongside others while also fighting for himself. According
WHY DO SOME KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR OTHERS? 469
to Nandy, the most creative response to colonialism, however, comes from the
colonized. Through his strategy of non-violence Gandhi negotiates two traditions of
knowledge: by appealing to the Christian idea of turning the other cheek, he re-presents
Western knowledge in terms the West can accept. This method of resisting colonialism
minimizes the colonist’s strong suit, namely force and domination. Gandhi also reinter –
prets Indian knowledge so that his appeal to non-violence appears authentically Indian.
Andrews and Gandhi encounter and negotiate knowledge that aims to produce cultural
transformation in both the British and the Indians. Gandhi reinterprets knowledge so
that fighting for India’s liberation is simultaneously fighting for Britain’s liberation.
CONCLUSION
Those who believe they have exclusive knowledge also tend to believe they know what
is good for others. Wishing to share their knowledge and its benefits they devise projects
that fulfil their responsibility to others. The problem is that receivers of such missions
tend to resist donor plans. Recipients experience such assistance as an intrusion on their
self-determination and an imposition on their freedom. As important, they suspect that
the donor’s claim of exclusive knowledge taints donor efforts. They believe that the
donor’s ultimate goal is to produce a hierarchy that elevates the donor and diminishes
the receiver. Meanwhile, donors perceive receiver resistance as irrational ingratitude.
For receivers, in turn, donor condescension confirms that donors are threatening their
dignity and equality.
Our challenge is to undo this cycle of mutual incrimination and replace it with a
cycle of mutual enrichment. This becomes possible when we move from a posture of
possessing ‘exclusive knowledge’ to a circumstance where parties who regard themselves
as both donors and receivers negotiate partial knowledge.
FURTHER READING
On ‘splitting’ see Benjamin’s The Bonds of Love (1988). For more on Vitoria, see Pagden’s The
Fall of Natural Man (1982). Muldoon’s Popes, Lawyers and Infidels (1979) provides context for
Innocent IV’s ideas. Dawson’s The Mongol Mission frames the exchange between Innocent IV and
Güyük Khan. Are there examples of those who have moved from a posture of ‘exclusive knowledge’
to that of ‘knowledge negotiating’? Todorov discusses one such case, Las Casas, in his Conquest
of America (1984). And Ashis Nandy contrasts the examples of Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell,
and Mohandas Gandhi to similar effect in Intimate Enemy (1983). On the broader context for
how the idea of ‘doing good for others’ shapes the history and theory of international relations,
see Inayatullah and Blaney’s International Relations and the Problem of Difference (2004).
WEBSITES
The Difference Site: http://www.dif-ferance.org/index2.html
Doing good for others requires we understand how others differ from us. This site is dedicated
to understanding how and why difference is crucial to all aspects of life.
Project for a New American Century: www.newamericancentury.org/
Perhaps the most powerful force on the planet dedicated to doing good for others is this
neo-conservative project. This site presents their arguments and the scope of their ambitions.
http://www.dif-ferance.org/index2.html
http://www.newamericancentury.org/
Charter of the United Nations: http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/index.html
The Charter, like Vitoria and Innocent IV, provides arguments against intervention (chapter
I), and arguments for when it is acceptable to intervene in order to do good (chapters VI
and VII).
Euston Manifesto: http://eustonmanifesto.org
Go to this site if you want clear and concise arguments for intervening in order to promote
the good.
Global Policy Forum Humanitarian Intervention: http://www.globalpolicy.org/
empire/humanint/index.htm
This site provides documents, articles, and speeches on the debate over humanitarian
interventions.
REFERENCES
Bellamy, Alex J. (2006) Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq, Cambridge: Polity.
Benjamin, Jessica (1988) The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of
Domination, New York: Pantheon.
Bitterli, Urs (1993) Cultures in Conflict: Encounters Between European and Non-European
Cultures, 1492–1800, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Boot, Max (2002) Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, New York:
Basic Books.
Coates, A. J. (1997) The Ethics of War, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Cohen, Eliot A. (2001) ‘World War IV’, Wall Street Journal, November 20: A18.
Cooper, Robert F. (2002) ‘The Post-Modern State’, in Mark Leonard (ed.) Re-Ordering the World,
London: Foreign Policy Centre.
Dawson, Christopher (1955) The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan
Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, New York:
Sheed and Ward.
Elshtain, Jean Bethke (2003) Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent
World, New York: Basic Books.
Euston Manifesto (undated) http://eustonmanifesto.org.
Ferguson, Niall (2003) ‘America as Empire, Now and in the Future’, The National Interest 2,
29: 23 July, http://www.inthenationalinterest.com/Articles/Vol2Issue29/Vol2Issue29
Ferguson.html.
Fink, Bruce (1993) The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Geertz, Clifford (1986) ‘The Uses of Diversity’, Michigan Quarterly Review 21, 1: 105–23.
Greenblatt, Stephen J. (1976) ‘Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the
Sixteenth Century’, in Fredi Chiappelli (ed.) First Images of America: The Impact of New
World on the Old, Volume 2, Berkeley: University of California Press.
––––(1991) Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Ignatieff, Michael (2003) ‘The Challenge of American Imperial Power’, Naval War College Review
56, 2: 53–63.
Inayatullah, Naeem and David Blaney (2004) International Relations and the Problem of Difference,
New York: Routledge.
Kagan, Robert (2002) ‘Power and Weakness’, Policy Review June/July: 3–28.
Kaplan, Robert (2003) ‘Supremacy by Stealth: Ten Rules for Managing the World’, Atlantic
Monthly 292, 1: 66–83.
Mauss, Marcel (2006) The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, London:
Routledge.
470 NAEEM INAYATULLAH
WHY DO SOME KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR OTHERS? 471
Muldoon, James (1979) Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels: The Church and the Non-Christian World
1250–1550, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Nandy, Ashis (1983) The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
––––(1987) Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness, Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Pagden, A. R. (1982) The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of
Comparative Ethnology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sahlins, Marshall (2003) Stone Age Economics, London: Routledge.
Todorov, Tzvetan (1984) The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, New York: Harper
and Row.
Verma, Nirmal (1990) ‘India and Europe: Some Observations on Self and Other’, Kavita Asia
1, 1: 114–44.
Vitoria, Francisco de (1991) Political Writings, ed. A. R. Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Walzer, Michael (1992) Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations,
2nd edn, New York: Basic Books.
––––(2004) Arguing about War, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Williams, Robert A. (1990) The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of
Conquest, New York: Oxford University Press.
Žižek, Slavoj (1993) Tarrying with the Negative: Hegel, Kant, and the Critique of Ideology, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
http://www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
THE QUESTION
MASS KILLING AS A CULTURAL PHENOMENON
Mass slaughter at the command of the state was characteristic of the twentieth century.
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, it shows no signs of abating. Now is
the time to remind ourselves that war is not a metaphor for social crisis (the ‘war on
drugs’) or an excuse for apocalyptic fantasies (the ‘war on terror’). War is also much
more than the enactment of international ‘politics by other means’, as the Prussian
military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously put it, through the purposeful destruction
of another nation’s infrastructure. Rather, war is the deliberate infliction of suffering
and death on other people.
Violence is a complex and highly diverse phenomenon, including the corporal
punishment of children, cruelty to animals, boxing, rape, and individual acts of
indiscriminative mass murder. What is labelled ‘violence’ is itself highly normative: it
has changed over time and the definition that becomes dominant is often the one
favoured by powerful institutions and elites. There is also the risk that an act of violence
is seen as a rupture in an otherwise violent-free context: clearly, this ignores the fact
CHAPTER 22
Why does politics turn to
violence?
Joanna Bourke
■ The question
MASS KILLING AS A CULTURAL PHENOMENON
■ Illustrative example
KILLING IN WARTIME
■ General responses
BELLIGERENT STATES
■ Broader issues
LANGUAGE AND MEMORY
■ CONCLUSION
WHY DOES POLITICS TURN TO VIOLENCE? 473
that those processes that enable outbursts have a long, and often deeply embedded
history. Furthermore, to fully understand violence, each type of aggression requires a
different analysis. For the sake of this chapter, then, violence will be defined as state-
legitimated killing in wartime. This is the form of violence that politics regularly ‘turns
to’ with particularly devastating effect.
It is easy to forget that the question, ‘why does politics turn to violence?’ cannot
solely be addressed through explorations of statecraft and political failings. Too often,
military history reads as though combatants were only on the battlefields to die for their
country and its ideologies, rather than to attempt to kill as well. One of the reasons
why politics and military conflict are so interconnected is because human beings seem
remarkably prone to acts of extreme aggression against politically and culturally
designated enemies. It is important, then to explore what enabled (and still enables)
ordinary men, and sometimes women, to kill others in military conflict. This question
becomes even more urgent once we recognise that most of those combatants were not
‘socialised warriors’, steeped in a military ethos indoctrinated through years of study
and service in professional military organisations. Rather, in the major wars of the
twentieth century, most combatants were short-term volunteers or conscripts, more
comfortable on the shop floor or slumped over their office desks than at the rifle range
or on the battlefield. Nevertheless, killing proved remarkably easy.
According to the most conservative estimate, in the last 100 years, 60 million men,
women, and children were gratuitously slaughtered in wars legitimately by the state.
The perpetrators were not obviously evil; they purported to be rational people engaged
in mass killing for particular ends. But their actions cast a pall over that century’s history.
Two forms of politically-authorised slaughter can be distinguished. The first type
involved the large-scale slaughter of service-personnel – an occurrence greatly facilitated
by modernity’s uncompromising application of aircraft, artillery, and explosives. The
second type was the slaughter of civilians. It was only from the 1930s that the slaughter
of non-combatants surpassed that of combatants in wartime. Indeed, from 1939,
civilians were the victims of choice. While only 5 per cent of deaths in the 1914–18 war
BOX 22.1 CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ
Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) is still regarded as a major strategic and
military theorist, and his ideas continue to be both controversial and
influential. His dictum that war is merely an extension of politics by other
means, elaborated in his famous book On War (1976) has had a significant
impact on thinking about war. For a discussion of his reception over the years
since he wrote, see Bassford (1994) and Heuser (2002). Also see the new
edition of On War, published by Folio Books in 2011, including the useful
introductory essays.
FIGURE 22.1
Carl von Clausewitz. Lithograph by Franz Michaelis after a missing
painting by Karl Wilhelm Wach. Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz
Chapter 23 agrees that it
is important to examine
processes that enable
outbreaks of violence. It
looks at what takes place
in the so-called war on
terror – drone attacks on
suspected terrorists and
attempts to control
terrorist financing – and
asks what counts as
violence.
If ordinary men and
women refused to kill
others, would it still be
possible for states to go
to war, or in other words,
for politics to turn to
violence?
Warfare in the
twenty-first century is
discussed in Chapter 24,
and the question of
death in war in Chapters
1 and 28.
474 JOANNA BOURKE
were civilian deaths, 66 per cent of deaths in the 1939–45 war were of civilians. In the
1939–45 war, considerably more civilians than military personnel were killed in Belgium,
China, France, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the Soviet Union,
and Yugoslavia. The Holocaust is the pre-eminent instance of the wanton slaughter of
non-combatants.
Approximately six million Jews were killed, including around two million children.
As Hitler admitted in relation to Poland (where one-third of those killed by the Germans
were children), destruction was ‘our primary task. The aim is not the arrival at a certain
line but the annihilation of living forces.’ He advised his men to ‘Be merciless. Be brutal.
It is necessary to proceed with maximum severity. The war is to be a war of annihilation’
(Lukas 1990: 89). Although the havoc wrought by Hitler’s forces was unprecedented,
the Axis powers (a coalition headed by Germany, Italy, and Japan that opposed the
Allied powers – France, Britain, the USSR, China and the USA – in the Second World
War) were not the only ones who targeted civilians. In the European theatre, one-quarter
of American bombs were dropped on the residential or commercial sectors of German
cities; according to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, this was ‘almost twice
the weight of bombs launched against all manufacturing targets together’ (US Strategic
Bombing Survey 1945: 71). Most of the victims were women. For every 100 male
casualties, there were 181 female casualties in Darmstadt, 160 in Hamburg, 136 in
Kassel, and 122 in Nuremberg. Around one-fifth of those killed were children under
the age of sixteen years and another one-fifth were over the age of 60 (Rumpf 1963:
160–1). In the Asian-Pacific theatre, the American’s unilateral atomic bombing of Japan
specifically targeted cities. Today, 90 per cent of victims of war are civilians. It has
become impossible to understand modern culture without directing ones’ gaze into the
1900
10m
9m
8m
7m
6m
5m
4m
3m
2m
1m
0m 1905
1910
1915
1920
1925
1930
1935
1940
1945
1950
1955
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
1st and 2nd World Wars
Hitler
Soviet Union
Nationalist China
Japanese genocides
Congo and Nigeria
Cambodia and Indonesia
Russian and Chinese Civil Wars
Armenia and Korea
India, Pakistan and Bangladesh
Mexico and Vietnam Communist China
FIGURE 22.2
Wars, massacres and
atrocities of the
twentieth century: year
by year death toll.
Graphic and data:
Matthew White, 1998
For more on the
bombing of German
cities see Chapter 1.
WHY DOES POLITICS TURN TO VIOLENCE? 475
Because it targets
civilians, terrorism is
seen as a particularly
objectionable form of
violence, but many more
civilians are killed in
warfare.
Hannah Arendt spoke of
the ‘banality of evil’ in
her analysis of the trial
of Adolf Eichmann, a
central figure in
organising the Nazi
genocides: see
Chapter 23.
Have a look at the
picture of children
fleeing a napalm attack
in Chapter 8.
abyss of mass murder. Governmentally-authorised killing and gratuitous violence are
no grotesque accidents – they are a cultural phenomenon, deliberately enacted.
What enabled the perpetrators to carry out these gross acts? Evil is not banal. Quite
the contrary: violence has infused even the most subtle social and political nuances of
the country from which it was born. This is why mass killings could take place with
remarkably little psychological trauma for the perpetrators. Afterwards, most perpetrators
denied feeling responsible or guilty. This is true even in cases of atrocity and genocide.
For instance, many Turks continue to deny that the Armenian genocide of 1915 took
place and many Vietnam veterans remain wedded to the defence of ‘it was him or me’
when justifying the slaughter of unarmed women and children. Prisoners accused of
war crimes or crimes against humanity often protest their innocence. This disturbing
fact was noted by visitors to refugee camps set up to harbour Hutus after the 1994
genocidal war in Rwanda. In the words of one journalist who described visiting a refugee
camp in Goma:
Perhaps the most disheartening of all is that most of the Hutus – despite their agony
– still do not recognise that what happened to the Tutsis was a crime of enormous
proportions. There is a state of collective denial by almost everyone you meet in
the camps. People do not see their ordeal as self-imposed but as the fault of the
Tutsis and the RPF [Rwandan Patriotic Front]: ‘We are dying here because of the
Tutsis and the cockroaches of the RPF who want to rule over us’, said one woman,
who was absolutely convinced of the correctness of killing Tutsis.
(Black 1994)
FIGURE 22.3
Colour photograph
showing damage in
Hiroshima in March
1946 (US National
Archives)
‘Collateral damage’ is
still used to describe
killing that goes beyond
what is intended.
Although accounts of the
causes of war, or why
politics turns to violence,
often focus on the sorts
of reasons given in the
next section, this chapter
argues that it is equally
important to look at why
people are willing to
obey orders to kill. Do
you find that argument
convincing?
476 JOANNA BOURKE
History textbooks have also been influential in denying or, at the very least, understating
levels of murderous belligerence. In Japan, for instance, school history textbooks
seriously distort Japan’s role in the war. In the resulting scandal in the early 1980s,
some newspapers drew attention to the way certain phrases had been changed in the
revised textbooks. For instance, the phrase ‘aggression in North China’ had become
‘advance into North China’. A similar trend has been observed in Israeli textbooks.
Indeed, the striking thing about mass killing is that it involves almost unimaginable
levels of complicity. The Turkish attack on the Armenians was planned at the highest
governmental levels, as was the German management of the Holocaust. In Vietnam,
official acceptance of the killing of civilians was encapsulated in such terms as ‘free fire
zones’ and ‘collateral damage’. In Rwanda, the Hutus were fairly confident of the
support of their allies in France, Zaïre, and Egypt. Hutu perpetrators insisted that they
were ‘only obeying orders’ when they killed. For instance, Robert Kajuga – president
of the Interahamwe militia, the group responsible for a large proportion of the murders
– claimed that Hutus acted in self-defence. In his words:
The government authorises us. We go in behind the army. We watch them and
learn. . . . We have to defend our country. The government authorises us to defend
ourselves by taking up clubs, machetes and whatever guns we could find.
(Hilsum 1994)
Atrocious acts are nourished within political, military, and civilian communities; people
from all walks of life proved themselves capable of mass killing.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
KILLING IN WARTIME
Most accounts of killing in wartime highlight the aggression of whoever counts as
enemies: ‘they’ killed ‘us’. There is a vast literature on the violent behaviour of German
and Japanese soldiers during the two world wars in English language writings, for
instance. In contrast, British and American historians have been queasy about dealing
with the way those they call ‘our men’ slaughtered men (uniformed and not), women,
and children of enemy nations. What enabled British and American servicemen in the
years 1914–18 and 1939–45 to kill?
It should not surprise us that their languages of mass killing were drawn from the
everyday clichés of life. In the diaries and letters of British and American combatants
who committed acts of mass killing, there were three excuses that appeared most
frequently: retribution, obedience, and parallel response.
No prisoners
The first excuse was the language of retribution. In the words of Sergeant John Henry
Ewen in Bougainville: ‘Our fellows wont [sic] take prisoners. I’ve seen them kill two
or three now in cold-blood. I took a dim view of it the first time, but when you see
your mates go, well I’d do it myself now’ (Ewen 1944: 60). Or, as a Marine put it:
FIGURE 22.4
Supporting infantry walk
forward up the slope into
the bombardment during
the First World War, the
Battle of Ginchy, 9
September 1916.
Photo: (Lt) Ernest
Brooks. Imperial War
Museum
WHY DOES POLITICS TURN TO VIOLENCE? 477
Nobody wanted to take prisoners to begin with – nobody who had had a buddy
killed, which was almost everybody. And nobody wanted to go somewhere to do
it – leave his living buddies to walk the prisoners back behind the lines. Why take
the risk? When they first started surrendering, we shot as many as we took.
Allied soldiers had to be bribed with promises of ice-cream and time behind the
lines before they could be persuaded to capture more prisoners, as opposed to
immediately slaughtering everyone who tried to surrender.
We were only obeying orders
The second excuse was the language of obedience: ‘We were only obeying orders.’ In
the words of psychologist J. F. Brown writing in 1942, ‘the guilt connected with the
individual’s aggressions in war are projected onto the enemy, and the responsibility for
his aggression onto the officers’ (Brown 1942: 378). The efficacy of ‘obeying orders’ as
a way of minimising emotional conflict and therefore generating the ‘appropriate’
response in combatants (that is, murderous aggression) was widely recognised by mili –
tary instructors who laboriously insisted upon instantaneous obedience to orders so that
each man might be able to ‘sleep like a child and awaken refreshed – to kill and fear not’
US and UK forces have
been accused of abusing
Iraqi prisoners, in
particular at Abu Ghraib
prison (see Chapter 2).
Some of them have
argued at their courts
martial that they were
only following orders.
478 JOANNA BOURKE
(Graham 1919: 3). The unfortunate consequence – that officers would experi ence more
‘collective guilt’ about the war than privates – was only rarely commented upon. By
‘obeying orders’, killing could be re-conceptualised as something other than murder.
Thus, one of the more notorious examples of the dilemma of ‘only obeying orders’
took place at a time when combatants were under order to obey orders: the July 1943
massacre in Biscari when American troops of the 45th Infantry Division’s 180th Infantry
Regiment slaughtered around seventy Italian and German prisoners of war. Captain John
C. Compton was one of the men eventually charged with this war crime, but he based
his defence on the grounds that Lieutenant General George S. Patton had ordered them
to kill prisoners. Evidence was presented, showing that prior to battle, Patton had
addressed the officers in the following way:
When we land against the enemy, don’t forget to hit him and hit him hard. We
will bring the fight home to him. When we meet the enemy, we will kill him. We
will show him no mercy. He has killed thousands of your comrades, and he must
die. If you company officers in leading your men against the enemy find him
shouting at you and, when you get within two-hundred yards of him, and he wishes
to surrender, oh no! That bastard will die! You will kill him. Stick him between
the third and fourth ribs. You will tell your men that. You must have the killer
instinct. Tell them to stick him. He can do no good then. Stick them in the liver.
We will get the name of killers and killers are immortal.
(Weingartner 1989: 37)
The court accepted Captain Compton’s defence and he was acquitted. His co-defendant
was less fortunate. Instead of basing his defence on ‘obeying orders’, he claimed
temporary insanity, tiredness, and stress. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and
was eventually released after six months imprisonment only on condition that he never
spoke about the incident.
What is crucial to understand is that the defence of ‘obeying orders’ is widely
accepted, and not just by serving military personnel in wartime. In particular, this has
been demonstrated in two specific contexts: one, a controlled experiment carried out
by social psychologist Stanley Milgram about how much pain people would be willing
to inflict if ordered to do so by a recognised authority (see Box 22.2) and, two, through
questioning people about what they believed was acceptable in the stress of battle.
Psychologists Herbert C. Kelman and Lee H. Lawrence were impressed by
Milgram’s research, but their investigations into aggression were based on a more
straightforward methodology. They simply asked people how they imagined they
would behave under certain wartime circumstances. To make the question clearer,
they presented their subjects with a hypothetical situation in which soldiers in Vietnam
were asked to shoot all the inhabitants of a village, including old men, women, and
children. Sixty-seven per cent of the respondents said that most people would follow
orders and shoot, while only 19 per cent said that most people would refuse to shoot.
When they were asked ‘What would you do in this situation’, slightly more than
half said that they would shoot and one-third said that they would refuse to shoot. The
researchers were particularly struck by this latter response:
Do psychological
explanations imply that
killing might be part of
human nature? Is human
nature an adequate
explanation? See
Chapter 7.
Chapter 8 discusses war
films and their impact on
how we imagine war.
480 JOANNA BOURKE
Since it was a hypothetical question, it would have been easy enough for respondents
to give themselves the benefit of the doubt and to say that they would refuse to
shoot. But the important point . . . is that for many people it is not at all clear that
this is the socially desirable response.
In other words, a majority of respondents felt that the desirable response was to
follow orders. These respondents were ‘not necessarily admitting to moral weakness;
for many of them, in fact, this response represent[ed] what they would view as their
moral obligation’ (Kelman and Lawrence 1972: 177–212).
It was either him or me
The third rationale for mass killing (parallel response) was even more prevalent than
‘just obeying orders’. If there was one persistent explanation for killing in wartime it
was the notion that ‘it was either him or me’. War was about ‘kill or be killed’. As
sociologist Neil J. Smelser pointed out in his study of the determinants of destructive
behaviour, ‘one of the most profound aspects of evil is that he who does the evil is
typically convinced that evil is about to be done to him’ (Smelser 1971: 17). Repeatedly,
men reiterated that their choice was to slay or be slain. As the dedicated killer Sydney
Lockwood dryly commented after knocking a German’s head off: it ‘was not nice but
one of us had to die that night’ (Lockwood, no date: 10). The sniper, Victor Ricketts,
agreed, admitting that
It’s not too pleasant to have a fellow human in one’s sights, with such clarity as to
be almost able to see the colour of his eyes, and to have the knowledge that in a
matter of seconds, another life has met an untimely end. However, one had to be
callous, after all it was, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
He then added, ‘anyway, it could very well have been in reverse’ (Ricketts, no date:
34). Like the other two rationalisations, this one is also entirely uncon vincing: long-
distance artillery, aerial bombardment, sniping, orders not to take prisoners, and
unequal opponents were the norm, not the exception, in modern warfare.
Of course, men and women in wartime were able to glibly recite these rationalisa –
tions for wartime killing because they are firmly embedded within a political and cultural
milieu infused with martial images and values. Long before any declaration of war,
combat art and literature, battle films, and war games attracted people to the killing
fields. It is not difficult to see the attraction of such representations of war. Everything,
and everyone, appeared as nobler and more exotic than everyday environments and
encounters. Propaganda depicted the glorious flesh of the imagination: the stoic face
of the soldier, the chiselled features of airmen, the muscular bulk of sailors, and the
fertile curves of mothers, creators of life in the midst of terrible carnage. These repre –
sentations of gender at war inspired military fervour. Despite the understandable
emphasis that many historians have placed on the literature of disillusionment arising
out of the ashes of war (see Fussell 1975), the heroic mode has never disappeared. Once
our gaze is turned from a narrow canon represented by writers such as Wilfred Owen,
Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, stock phrases in a glamorous ‘high diction’
Can you imagine killing
in war?
FIGURE 22.6
US Army trainees practise hand-to-hand
combat using pugil sticks during basic
combat training at Fort Jackson, South
Carolina. Photo: Air Force Staff Sgt. Stacy
Pearsall. Courtesy of US Army
WHY DOES POLITICS TURN TO VIOLENCE? 481
(baptisms of fire, transfigured youth, and gallant warriors) emerge as the dominant
grammar of war (Bogacz 1986: 643–68). Although such narra tives might not directly
stimulate enaction, they generate an imaginary arena crowded with murderous potential
and provide a linguistic structure or language within which aggressive behaviour might
legitimately be fantasised.
Indeed, emotional and psychological survival in modern warfare depended upon
combatants being able to justify their actions to their consciences. The difficulties
many combatants experienced in coming to terms with the fact of having killed another
human being led some influential officers – including one of the most influential military
commentators, S. L. A. Marshall, author of Men Against Fire (1947) – to argue that
‘fear of killing’ was actually a more common cause of battle fatigue than ‘fear of
dying’ (Marshall 1947: 78). Men grieved for the men they killed as well as for those
they fought alongside. After all, they not only took souvenirs from their dead
victims, they placed their own symbols (such as photographs or handkerchiefs) on them
(Bourke 1999a).
Eagerness to kill
It could be argued that survival depended upon more than simply ‘making sense’ of
violence or a blunt resilience of imagination – it also relied upon the ability of combatants
to forge some degree of pleasure from the world around them. In the field, many
ordinary service personnel found that they could enjoy acts of extreme violence against
other people. Combatants were often unabashed about their eagerness to kill. Without
the threat of being killed, killing was even more fun. The Australian, William Nagle,
described killing German paratroopers who were trapped inside their planes on Crete.
Although these days
we think of pilots as
distanced from those
they kill, the fighter pilots
being discussed here
were very close to the
enemy fighter pilots they
were aiming at.
Do you think it matters
for these responses that
fighter pilots were largely
men?
482 JOANNA BOURKE
‘Not one man jumped from any of the planes that I fired at’, he observed, admitting
that he
had a feeling of complete exhilaration, full of the hate to kill. I wanted to go on
and on. I used up all twenty-four magazines quickly and the rest of the section
were filling the empty ones as fast as I emptied them. I could have kissed the bren
[light machine gun] with sheer delight but it was too dammed hot to touch.
(Nagle, no date: 7)
Under what circumstances could men like Nagle feel that killing was exciting,
exhilarating even? Clearly the ‘outcome’ was important. In the aftermath of battle, men
were less liable to recall their sense of glee if it was clear that they were on the losing
side. Unquestionably, the ultimate failure to protect one’s comrades placed a powerful
dampener on celebrations and giddy bragging. Even amongst the victors, however,
excitement varied according to the branch of service. Airforce personnel were most liable
to express pleasure in combat. According to one American survey conducted during
the Second World War, three-quarters of combat aircrew expressed a willingness to
perform further combat duty, compared with only two-fifths of combat infantrymen.
The more ‘personal’ the fight, the more combat air crew enjoyed their job. Thus, when
American aerial combat personnel were asked during the Second World War: ‘if you
were doing it over again, do you think you would choose to sign up for combat flying’,
93 per cent of fighter pilots, 91 per cent of pilots of light bombers, 81 per cent of pilots
of medium bombers, and 70 per cent of heavy bomber pilots replied ‘yes’ (Stouffer
1949: 333–35). Roderick Chrisholm flew a night fighter in the Royal Air Force during
the Second World War. On 13 March 1941 he destroyed two enemy aircraft. The
experience, he wrote, could ‘never be equalled’:
For the rest of that night it was impossible to sleep; there was nothing else I could
talk about for days after; there was nothing else I could think about for weeks after.
. . . it was sweet and very intoxicating.
(Chrisholm 1953: 71)
Equally, the Spitfire pilot, Flight-Lieutenant D. M. Crook, described the ‘moments just
before the clash’ as ‘the most gloriously exciting moments of life’. He was ‘absolutely
fascinated’ by the sight of a plane going down and could not pull his eyes away from
the sight. The day after shooting down his first plane, he bragged about it to his wife
(readers are told that ‘she was delighted’) and ‘with considerable pride’ also informed
his family of his success (Crook 1942: 28–31 and 75). The fact that the slaughter of
fellow human beings could elicit feelings of satisfaction and pleasure was the dirty secret
that dared not be uttered if combatants were to settle back to their calm civilian lives,
after the war.
This is not to deny widespread disillusionment in war – simply to note that, by the
time disillusionment came, it was already too late: the slaughter had already begun. Men
who failed to translate their battle experiences into a positive narrative of personal
transformation or rite of passage simply went mad. Time and again, we hear the broken
voices of combatants who could not ‘take it’ any more. These were men whose starkly
For more on
explanations of war that
revolve around states
and their interests see
Chapter 24.
Do you find the state-
based explanations in
this section convincing?
WHY DOES POLITICS TURN TO VIOLENCE? 483
emotional sentences attested to how ‘the sights cannot cannot be explained in writing.
Writing is not my line. No fighting either For them that wants to let them fight Because
I will never like it no no never’, as one stammered from his hospital bed (Unnamed
soldier in Scholes, no date). There are many such accounts, including more poignant
descriptions of fear like the one a private sent to his mother after the Battle of the
Somme, simply saying that ‘It makes my head jump to think about it’ (Hubbard 1916).
The Second World War combatant and poet Shawn O’Leary, put it best in his poem
of 1941 when he wrote:
And I –
I mow and gibber like an ape.
But what can I say, what do? –
There is no saying and no doing
(O’Leary 1941: 20)
Or, as another terrorised private who spent time in a military mental hospital put it, ‘I
admit I am a coward. A bloody, bleeding coward, and I want to be a live Coward than
a dead blasted Hero’ (Bourke 1999b: 32).
GENERAL RESPONSES
BELLIGERENT STATES
In direct contradiction to the thrust of the chapter thus far, wartime violence is
frequently abstracted from the people on the battlefield, centring instead upon the
nation-state. Any analysis of wartime violence must acknowledge that war is not declared
by citizens or soldiers, but by politicians. War only takes place if a nation’s leaders decide
either that there will be significant benefits accruing to victory over a (real or imagined)
rival or if they see themselves (in reality or potentially) as threatened by an already
antagonistic foe.
Of course, this is too simplistic. Experts proffer a vast array of reasons why states
become belligerent. Competing explanations can be illustrated by examining the most
momentous war of the twentieth century: the Second World War. More has been written
about this war than any conflict before or since, yet no one agrees on its origins.
Economics
When examining the European dimension to that war, many historians trace its
origins to 1914–18, implying that there was a ‘Thirty Years War’ of the twentieth
century. In particular, imposing the humiliating Treaty of Versailles on Germany in
1919, which forced it to admit war guilt and stripped the country of territory and forced
it to mortgage its economy with an outlandish reparations bill, set up a marker for
another major conflict. As A. J. P. Taylor famously phrased it in his Origins of the Second
World War, ‘Powers will be Powers’ (Taylor 1974: 278–9). In other words, it was
inevitable that Germany would seek to regain what it regarded as its rightful place in
the world.
Beliefs that the
distinctions between
different ‘races’ were
biological were widely
held at one time: see
Chapter 5.
484 JOANNA BOURKE
There was an economic imperative for war, as well. In Germany, the Treaty of
Versailles had been followed by rampant inflation and then, after a brief breathing space,
by a severe economic depression. By 1938, however, under the Nazis, the economic
outlook in Germany had changed. The economic recovery fuelled the sense of injustice
that had arisen in the aftermath of the First World War. The strength of the German
economy had resulted in a balance of payments crisis caused largely by the need to pay
for the dramatic increase in imports of food and raw material. Industry and rearmament
required ever more resources – and Hitler’s regime was increasingly looking outside
Germany to meet these needs.
Territorial ambitions
Furthermore, defeat in the First World War had failed to remove Germany’s eastward
ambitions. Adolf Hitler successfully played upon this national obsession. In this sense,
Hitler’s policy was fundamentally one of continuity with German politicians prior to
1918 and during the Weimar period of 1919–33. When Hitler came to power in 1933,
National Socialism seemed to hold out the promise of a revived Germanic nation. Hitler
did not invent many of the ideas that led to war. His promotion of the supposed need
for Lebensraum (or ‘living space’) can be traced back to the nineteenth century, and
his racist Social Darwinism was widely accepted in Germany by the early twentieth
century. Finally, although Hitler’s pathological hatred of the Jews is unquestioned (in
his book Mein Kampf, he called them sub-humans, a cancer that had to be removed),
the belief that Jews were responsible for all of Germany’s ills – and particularly its fate
during the First World War – was widely held by many Germans, on the hard and soft
right, and originated in the rise of racial antisemitism.
An evil leader
This emphasis on the ways Hitler epitomised wider concerns within German society in
the 1930s can easily lead to a crude reductionism that employs a very simple equation:
No Hitler, no war. It cannot be disputed that Hitler was a domineering political
personality in Germany. It is difficult to imagine the Third Reich without him. He
possessed a fanatical will and was at the same time an unprincipled opportunist. His
desire to gain Lebensraum for his ‘Aryan race’ in Eastern Europe was wholehearted.
The borders of 1914 were no longer enough, as he wrote in Mein Kampf:
To demand the borders of 1914 is political nonsense of such a degree and
consequence that it appears a crime. . . . The borders of 1914 meant nothing to
the German nation. . . . We National Socialists, by contrast, must without wavering
keep to our foreign policy aim, which is to secure to the German nation the soil
and space to which it is entitled on this earth.
(Remak 1976: 23)
Nor is there disagreement about his willingness to impose his will upon all his sub –
ordinates. When any of his subordinates, like his first foreign minister, Konstantin von
Neurath, seemed reluctant to follow his lead into war, they were replaced.
Chapter 6 has more on
ideologies.
WHY DOES POLITICS TURN TO VIOLENCE? 485
However, it is far too easy to be carried away by this image of the ultimate in human
evil. Indeed, this image of Hitler is largely a construction of Nazi as well as Allied
propaganda. It is misleading to place too much emphasis upon Hitler as a cause of the
war – whether as a personality in his own right or as someone who managed to epitomise
wider and more entrenched national desires and ideologies. Much evidence suggests
that Hitler had no coherent plan. Certainly, he was willing to risk millions of his own
people in the pursuit of a racially ‘pure’, rejuvenated, Greater Germany. But he was
more likely to simply take advantage of things as they happened, rather than working
to a pre-planned strategy. Too much of the explanation for the origins of war has been
placed on Hitler’s lust for domination, and not enough on the expansionist ideology
of Nazism.
Competing political ideologies
However, if focusing on Hitler is a form of reductionism, so too is an excessive
emphasis on ideology. Some historians want to claim that the war grew out of a con-
flict of competing ideologies. Totalitarianism in Germany, Italy, and Japan faced up to
the liberal democracies of Britain, France, and the United States. According to this
argument, the Axis countries – and Germany in particular – failed to develop a strong
liberal-democratic tradition. In other words, the problem was not Hitler but Germany.
Hitler’s antisemitism, virulent nationalism, and anti-socialism were simply more extreme
than those shared by earlier German leaders and ‘ordinary Germans’. This explanation
is also unsatisfactory. The problem with blaming ‘fascism’ is that it fails to differentiate
between the very different forms of this political ideology. Italian fascism was very
distinctive from National Socialism, and neither resemble Japanese totalitarianism.
Strategic concerns
Finally, the origins of the war may also be traced to strategic concerns. War was inevitable
if the territorial ambitions of certain nations were to have any hope of being achieved.
Germany and Italy believed that they had something to gain from war. Hitler’s plan
vastly to expand the amount of land available for exploitation by the Aryan race in
Eastern Europe has already been mentioned. The Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini,
also pursued a foreign policy that was concerned with the supposed need for spazio vitale
(again, ‘living space’) for Italians in North Africa and the Middle East. Mussolini’s
willingness to act upon this need was clearly signalled in October 1935, when Italian
troops from neighbouring Italian Somiland and Eritrea invaded Abyssinia (modern-
day Ethiopia). A year later, Italy and Germany militarily supported General Francisco
Franco, the fascist dictator in Spain. Franco’s victory in 1939 was a major economic as
well as political coup for both powers. Spain’s iron ore, tin, copper, zinc, and mercury
were henceforth at their service. Mussolini also had ambitions to establish Italy as one
of the Great Powers. Thus, when Mussolini signed the Pact of Steel with Hitler in May
1939 (which committed Germany and Italy to support each other with ‘all its military
forces on land, sea, and in the air’), he signalled his desire dramatically to extend Italy’s
‘Roman’ empire.
FIGURE 22.7
Soviet soldiers raise the red flag over the
Reichstag in Berlin on 2 May 1945. AP Photo/
ITAR-TASS, Yevgeny Khaldei
Strategically, the origin of the war was more complex for the Soviet Union. At first,
Joseph Stalin pursued a defensive foreign policy. The Soviet–Nazi Non-Aggression
Pact of August 1939 decreed that Russia would remain neutral should Germany attack
Poland. For Stalin, it was an attempt to protect the Soviet Union from German
aggression. Stalin signed the Pact only after his attempts to find agreement with Britain
and France were rebuffed. The Pact came as a surprise to the other Great Powers. After
all, Hitler regarded the Russians as the ‘scum of the earth’ while Stalin viewed Hitler
as the ‘bloody assassin of the workers’. Whatever Stalin’s long-term plans involved, it
is clear that Hitler always intended the Pact to be a short-term strategy. In the words
of the German ambassador to Italy, Ulrich von Hassell, in his diary of 29 August 1939:
About the Russian pact Hitler said that he was in no wise altering his fundamental
anti-bolshevist policies; one had to use Beelzebub to drive away the devil; all means
were justified in dealing with the Soviets, even such a pact as this. This was a typical
example of his conception of ‘Realpolitik’.
(Schweller 1998: 139)
486 JOANNA BOURKE
Are the explanations of
economic reasons,
territorial ambitions, evil
leaders, competing
political ideologies and
strategic concerns still
used to make sense of
contemporary wars?
Which of these, if any,
persuade you most?
Or are you more
persuaded by the idea
that it is important to
look at other explana –
tions, not abstracted
from what happens on
the ground? Does it
depend which war you
are thinking of?
Chapters 1 and 8 discuss
emotional reactions to
accounts of wartime
deaths.
Chapter 2 argues that
certain ways of using
language can help enable
torture, and Chapter 23
looks at the way the
presentation of the
Afghanistan/Pakistan
border as ‘risky’ makes
forms of violence
possible.
Chapter 24 explores
how technological
developments have
changed warfare.
WHY DOES POLITICS TURN TO VIOLENCE? 487
However, in the short term at least, the Pact proffered a great prize to the Soviet Union.
The Pact had a secret clause dividing Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union.
Stalin clearly understood that the Soviet Union needed to protect itself – and one way
Stalin conceived of doing this was by creating a buffer zone. Until Hitler turned on
him, Stalin also believed that the USSR had something to gain by belligerence.
As this brief summary suggests, therefore, historians and political scientists have
given a number of strategic, economic, and defensive reasons for why political leaders
committed modern nations to war, including national pride, the need for economic
growth, territorial ambitions, bellicose leaders, and warlike ideologies. The relative
weight given to each of these factors depends on the ideological stance of the analyst
as much as any objective reality. The larger question embracing these, though, is straight –
forward: how, not why, is violence made possible by social context?
BROADER ISSUES
LANGUAGE AND MEMORY
Whatever perspective is adopted, wartime killing can never be separated from social
relations more broadly. As we have seen, state authorities initiate processes which lead
to declarations of war. For those doing the fighting, emotions such as fear, rage, and
exhilaration, as well as the belief in the need to ‘obey orders’, were some of the factors
that enabled them to be converted into ‘effective military personnel’ after only
perfunctory military training. We have also addressed to some extent the ways language
has been used to prepare, facilitate, and then rationalise murderous violence in wartime.
Some commentators have taken this point further, observing that, in the face of mass
killing, language itself was perverted. Words no longer served as bridges, but as bombs.
Terror became possible, not through mechanisms of mass organisation but through the
prevention of affiliations, including linguistic ones. Syntax, grammar, and figures of
speech were distorted and ritualised. The distinction between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought
to be’ fractured. With mass killing, language became divorced from experience.
A separation of ‘act’ from ‘idea’ took place.
Language of technology
One example might be found by exploring the way technology not only increased the
distance between perpetrator and victim, thus bringing into play psychological
mechanisms of dehumanisation, but also provided a substitute language with which
death could be spoken about. In 1945, sociologist Edward McDonald admitted as much
when he witnessed that ‘keen discussions’ developed between servicemen about the ‘rival
merits of particular weapons’. These discussions
become so involved with physics and ballistics that the participants neglect to realize
that the weapon is used to facilitate death. A discussion on the most efficient ways
of killing the enemy is not pleasant; however, a technological debate on the range
and characteristics of a certain calibre rifle can be challenging and impersonal.
(McDonald 1945: 445–50)
For more on racism and
its impact on global
politics see Chapters 5,
10, 14 and 16.
488 JOANNA BOURKE
Or, as an American bomb technician admitted in the context of the Vietnam War,
‘I don’t feel like a war criminal. What I was doing is just like screwing fuses into sockets’
(Lifton 1974: 347).
Euphemism
Technological languages were only one aspect of the way language was perverted in
wartimes. Even more frequently, euphemistic languages were used to deny the experience
of meting out death. Thus, for the Turks in 1915, the Armenians were ‘suspects’ who
needed ‘resettlement’. The ‘deportation’ of women, children, and the elderly was neces –
sary for ‘the restoration of order in the war zone by military measures, rendered necessary
by the connivance of the inhabitants with the enemy, treachery and armed support’
(Mazian 1990: 78). In other contexts, killing was re-conceptualised as ‘action’, ‘severe
measures’, ‘reprisal action’, ‘rendering harmless’, ‘evacuating’, or ‘giving special treat –
ment’. ‘Our’ boys fought an honourable war ‘against fascism’ (as opposed to against
other humans, many of whom – children, for instance – had an only tenuous attachment
to fascism). Even the slaughter of prisoners of war or the wounded – illegal according
to military regulation as well as international law – was not ‘really’ a crime. In the words
of one officer commenting on the widespread killing of wounded Japanese, there were
‘many grey areas around the Geneva Convention, I suppose’ (Fraser 1992: 118). In other
words, in the heat of battle, atrocious behaviour easily became an integral part of warfare.
Racist language
In the modern period, the most trenchant language employed in the task of mass
murder was racism. Again, the terrifying application of racist languages occurred long
before any killing machines were mobilised. In his classic War Without Mercy (1986),
historian John W. Dower exposed the extent to which linguistic characterisations of
the enemy as the ultimate racial ‘other’ enabled British and American servicemen to act
with unsur passed violence against their Japanese foe. For many British, American, and
Australian servicemen and women, the Japanese were a brutish population and Allied
troops were engaged in exterminating ‘slant-eyed gophers’ (in Admiral William F.
Halsey’s words) (Cameron 1994: 1). Equally, in Japan, long-standing derogatory caric –
a tures of the enemy had a similar effect (Dower 1986). Anglo-Americans were described
as demons (oni), devils (kichiku), fiends (akki and akuma), and monsters (kaibutsu).
They also expressed virulent hatred of the Chinese. Shirō Azuma, for instance, was a
Japanese soldier who participated in the murders and rapes in Nanjing (China) in 1937.
He recalled:
While the women were fucked, they were considered human, but when we killed
them, they were just pigs. We felt no shame about it. No guilt. If we had, we
couldn’t have done it. When we entered a village, the first thing we’d do was steal
food, then we’d take the women and rape them, and finally we’d kill all the men,
women, and children to make sure they couldn’t slip away and tell the Chinese
troops where we were. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night.
(Schmidt 2000: 87)
Chapter 23 discusses
the war in Afghanistan,
and Chapters 5 and 21
examine how others
sometimes come to be
considered not fully
human.
For more on Abu Ghraib
see Chapter 2.
BOX 22.3 WAR AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY
Maurice Halbwachs in Collective Memory (1980) and Frances Amelia Yates in The
Art of Memory (1966) remind historians that it is crucial to examine the ways in
which war is ‘remembered’ by groups, even nations. As historians Jay Winter and
Emmanuel Sivan insist, memory is the ‘socially-framed property of individuals (or
groups of individuals) coming together to share memories of particular events, of
time past’. Collective memory is ‘the process by which individuals interact socially
to articulate their memories’ (Winter and Sivan 1999: 6).
WHY DOES POLITICS TURN TO VIOLENCE? 489
In every war, it was important to encourage the fiction that the people being killed were
not ‘really’ human. The Turks had a word for the Armenians: ‘dog-food’. Dr Mehmed
Resid, Governor of Diyarbekir in 1915 and nicknamed the ‘Executioner Governor’ in
honour of the numerous tortures and murders he oversaw, said:
Even though I am a physician, I cannot ignore my nationhood. I came into this
world a Turk. . . . Armenian traitors had found a niche for themselves in the bosom
of the fatherland; they were dangerous microbes. Isn’t it the duty of a doctor to
destroy these microbes?
(Dadrian 1986: 175)
Nearly 80 years later, in Rwanda, Tutsis were described as ‘cockroaches’, with the Hutus
simply engaged in ‘bush-clearing’. Hutus were ordered to ‘remove tall weeds’ (adults)
as well as the ‘shoots’ (children). Today, in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, dehuman –
isation is equally important. As Abu Ghraib prisoner, Nori Samir Gunbar Al-Yasseri put
it, the American guards
stripped us naked as a newborn baby. Then they ordered us to hold our penises
and stroke it. . . . They started to take photographs as if it was a porn movie. And
they treated us like animals not humans. . . . No one showed us mercy. Nothing
but cursing and beating. Then they started to write words on our buttocks, which
we didn’t know what it means. After that they left us for the next two days naked
with no clothes, with no mattress, as if we were dogs.
(Danner 2005: 228)
In war, the threshold of the human soars. Large groups of humans are relegated to the
level of beasts.
Collective memories
Finally, the link between politics and murderous violence in wartime is generally swept
under the carpet after the conflict. War does not begin with the declaration of hostilities,
nor does it end with the signing of treaties. In the aftermath of conflict, there is an
BOX 22.4 THE BRONZE SOLDIER
The ‘Bronze Soldier’, a monument depicting ‘a Red Army
fighter lowering his head in honour of comrades who had
fallen during the liberation of Tallinn from Nazi occupation
in 1944’ (Pettai 2007: 947), has proved a controversial ‘site
of memory’. ‘For years, the memorial had served as a
gathering place for mostly Russian Red Army veterans on
9 May (or “Victory Day”, as it was known in the Soviet
Union). For many Estonians, however, the statue was seen
as a hurtful symbol of the Soviet occupation of Estonia and
they wanted it removed’ (Pettai 2007: 947). After serious
protests and counter-protests, ‘two special laws were
passed [which allowed the government] to remove the
monument amid large-scale Russian protests and street
violence’ (Pettai 2007: 947–48) in April 2007. The statue
was moved from its town-centre location to a military
cemetery.
FIGURE 22.8
The ‘Bronze Soldier’, a Soviet soldier inscribed ‘To the
fallen of the Second World War’ in Tallinn, Estonia
Chapter 13 examines
counter-memories: in
this case stories that
challenge dominant
narratives of national
identity.
attempt by political actors on all sides to shape the story of violence to conform to post-
war needs, desires, and fears.
The emphasis on the politics of remembrance is crucial: memory itself is a battlefield.
Once peace was declared, politics needed a public turning away from collective violence,
typically through selective history-making. After all, national identity and honour
depended upon the recitation of selective histories. At times, it required outright denial.
This was never more the case than in the context of the Holocaust. As Heinrich Himmler
vowed in October 1943, the destruction of the Jews was to be ‘an unwritten and never
to be written page of glory in our history’. This was one of the reasons why the Nazis
built most of the camps in isolated areas and when faced with discovery attempted to
hide the evidence by ploughing over Treblinka and destroying the gas chambers at
Auschwitz, for instance.
Blatant denial of violence was a blunt instrument of power, however. More
effectively, social and political elites espoused alternative recitals of the past. Accounts
of Germans who fought in the International Brigades in Spain between 1936 and 1939,
for instance, were employed within East Germany to forge a myth of national identity
that could be distinguished from that of the West. According to the GDR, their state
was portrayed as the heir to the democratic tradition of active resistance as represented
by the Brigade. In contrast, West Germany was the heir to Hitler’s reactionary Condor
490 JOANNA BOURKE
What events in the
past are particularly
important to your
political community?
Is there debate over how
to remember them?
Who gets to decide how
memory is represented
for the community?
Legion. This process of creating a socialist, anti-fascist ‘memory’ of nationhood was
not a benign exercise. After all, it meant sidelining Jewish victims of the Holocaust in
the interest of glorifying the active resistance of the Brigadiers and the valour of Soviet
soldiers and Communist resisters.
In West Germany too, a collective memory of the Second World War was developed
that entailed the creation of a new hierarchy of victims and heroes. Nazi crimes were
created ‘in the name of’ the Germans, as opposed to ‘by’ Germans. War memorials
were built, but sometimes existed alongside Nazi monuments and museums. Nazis who
were released after serving their prison terms portrayed themselves as victims of ‘victors’
justice’. More generally, many Germans promoted an image of themselves as hapless
victims. Instead of focusing on German crimes, emphasis was placed on the expulsion
of 11 million Germans from eastern and central Europe and the many thousands of
German POWs who died in Soviet hands or who remained in captivity well into the
1950s. Political complicity in such denial was high. Thus, in 1949, the West German
Federal Parliament passed legislation that effectively protected from prosecution 800,000
people who had participated in war crimes. Two years later, former civil servants of the
Third Reich who had been barred from state service were readmitted. Politically,
‘forgetfulness’ was pursued. Chillingly, in 1949, nearly 60 per cent of Germans
subscribed to the view that National Socialism had been ‘a good idea badly carried out’
while over 40 per cent still insisted that there was ‘more good than evil in Nazism’.
It was to be some decades before this national script changed.
Other participating countries were even more reluctant to face their past. In Italy,
the fascist past was put to one side and the emphasis placed instead on the role of
Italian partisans in resisting the German occupiers from September 1943. Although
the myth of resistance was particularly strong on the political left, it was also embraced
by the political right (after all, it was King Victor Emmanuel who dismissed Mussolini
and declared war on Germany). Dates were equally important in the Soviet Union,
where memorials were generally dedicated to the 1941–45 period, denying the
Soviet–Nazi Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, the invasion of Finland, and the brutal
occupation of Poland. War memory in the Soviet Union remains masculine, martial,
and Russian, leaving little room for women, Jews, or other nationalities. Similarly,
in Finland, atten tion was focused on the Winter War of 1939–40 rather than the
Continuation War of 1941–44 when the Finns were allies of the Germans. In France,
too, it took many decades before the role of French people in persecuting the Jews
was recognised. In a typical act of denial, a 1956 documentary called Night and Fog,
directed by Alain Resnais, was censored by the French to cut a scene showing French
police collaborating with the deportations of the Jews. In other words, France reinvented
itself: the Vichy regime was cordoned off in a space set unambiguously in the past while
the resistance was elevated into a central place in everyday conceptions of national
identity. It was not until 1994 that a monument to the Jewish victims of Vichy was
built and 16 July became a ‘day of remembrance’. Memory is as much about forgetting
as remembering.
Axis powers and the conquered territories were not the only ones keen to manipulate
the story of war. War crimes and other atrocities carried out by British and American
service-personnel were also written out of the grand narrative of war. In particular, the
debate about the legality and morality of the aerial bombing campaign continues to
WHY DOES POLITICS TURN TO VIOLENCE? 491
Do you agree that war
is a result of specific
cultures, rather than the
product of something
called human nature?
Do you think there is
such a thing as ‘human
nature’? For more on
arguments based on
human nature see
Chapter 7.
492 JOANNA BOURKE
excite furious debate. The mass rapes of French and Japanese women by American,
British, and Australian soldiers during the Second World War are also rarely discussed.
In the words of one American intelligence officer who witnessed the occupation of the
German city of Krefeld:
The behaviour of our troops, I regret to say, was nothing to brag about, particularly
after they came upon cases of cognac and barrels of wine. . . . There is a tendency
among the naïve or the malicious to think that only Russians loot and rape. After
battle, soldiers of every country are pretty much the same, and the warriors of
Democracy were no more virtuous than the troops of Communism were reported
to be.
(Costello 1985: 144)
As this intelligence officer was aware, euphemistic languages (such as ‘warriors of
Democracy’) were just as crucial in the formation of a collective memory as they had
been in enabling men to kill in the first place. We have already noted how professional
historians play a large part in the creation of collective narratives of the past. Greek
goddess Mnemosyne was not only the goddess of memory, but the mother of history
as well. As historian Alon Confino dryly observed: ‘The often-made contention that
the past is constructed not as fact but as myth to serve the interest of a particular
community may still sound radical to some, but it cannot (and should not) stupefy most
historians’ (Confino 1997: 1387). In such a way, historians are complicit in constructing
a collective memory of war that elides or leaves out ‘our’ violence.
In Les formes de l’oubli (1998), French ethnographer Marc Augé reminds us
that ‘forgetting is an integral part of memory itself ’. Memories are ‘shaped by forget-
ting, like the contours of the shore by the sea’ (Augé 1998: 21). However, the
politics of forgetting can be as morally skewed as those of remembering. In 1998, the
former Chilean dictator Pinochet urged that it is ‘best to remain silent and to forget.
It is the only thing to do’ (Observer 1998). When perpetrators of violence call for
the need to ‘forget’, we are right to be wary. As the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert
expressed it,
Do not forget truly it is not in your power
to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn
(Herbert 1977: 79)
CONCLUSION
Should we be pessimistic about a future in which violence is placed outside the realm
of possibility? The frustrations resulting from imbalances of power and perceived
injustices, the bellicose personalities of politicians and other leading state officials,
ideological imperatives, and the territorial ambitions will always be with us. Fantasies
associated with war remain deeply embedded within our society. A substantial majority
of people agree with the statement that ‘human nature being what it is, there will always
be war and conflict’ (Robertson 1980: 55). They are wrong. For long periods of history,
Chapter 26 examines
how we may move
beyond conflict and the
role that memory plays
in this process.
WHY DOES POLITICS TURN TO VIOLENCE? 493
wars have been absent. Some societies are more peace-loving than others. One-half of
the world’s population (that is, women) have been distinctly less keen on battle than
the other half.
The anxiety evoked by uncovering the past is not only inevitable, it is also essential
in the process of reconciliation. The duty to remember remains strong, particularly if a
nation is to move towards a better future. In this way, South Africa’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (for all its faults) has been particularly innovative because
its aim was not ‘forgetting’ but disclosure. Because amnesty for perpetrators of atrocity
was predicated upon that person providing a detailed account of their actions, it
enabled full public acknowledgement of the harms done to individuals and groups within
society. ‘Never Forget’ is the phrase that has reverberated since the Holocaust. It is at
the heart of both individual and collective ways of coming to terms with violent pasts.
In the words of Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz, ‘those who are alive receive a mandate
from those who are dead and silent forever: to preserve the truth about the past’ (Milosz
1991: 281). The choice between forgetfulness and remembrance is ours.
FURTHER READING
Bartov, Omer (1996) Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bartov reflects on the holocaust and modernity.
Bourke, Joanna (1999a) An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth Century
History, London: Granta.
The book gives an overview of the ways in which British, American, and Australian soldiers
experienced combat.
Braudy, Leo (2003) From Chivalry to Terrorism. War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity,
New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Beginning in the Middle Ages and ending with twenty-first-century global terrorism, this
book explores the ways in which European and American cultures have established the military
ethos. Masculinity is at the heart of his explanations.
Dower, John W. (1986) War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, New York: Faber
and Faber.
This is the best book comparing the experiences of American and Japanese servicemen in
combat.
Fussell, Paul (1990) Wartime. Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
This is an analysis of war psychology in the Second World War.
Hughes, Matthew and William J. Philpott (eds) (2006) Modern Military History, London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
This is the clearest textbook-introduction to modern military history.
Keegan, John (2004 [1978]) The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme,
London: Pimlico.
This is the classic study in battle psychology and the changing experience of combat over
time.
Merridale, Catherine (2000) Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia, London: Granta Books.
This is an indispensable study of Russia experiences of war.
Overy, Richard (1999) The Road to War, London: Penguin Books.
This books provides a clear summary of the main arguments about the political and diplomatic
origins of modern war.
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494 JOANNA BOURKE
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http://www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
CHAPTER 23
What counts as violence?
Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede
■ The question
WHAT IS VIOLENCE?
■ Illustrative example
VIOLENCE AND TARGETING IN THE WAR ON TERROR
■ General responses
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VIOLENCE AND POWER
■ Broader issues
VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE VIOLENCE
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
WHAT IS VIOLENCE?
In our daily lives, we often think of violence as an aberration – as the moment when
the usual order of things breaks down, when the political and legal institutions that
protect us recede or fail. When we read media reports of a senseless knife attack in a
city street, for example, the violence appears as a rupture in the recognisable order of
daily life. And yet, we are also aware of violence as an instrument of politics, we know
that sometimes violent acts are carried out in the name of a cause or to achieve a political
objective. When a decision is made to go to war, for example, the case is often made
in terms of political objectives. So, why is it that some acts are considered to be senseless
violence that is beyond comprehension, while others are treated as necessary and
legitimate acts in the pursuit of a better, more secure, more just world?
How do we distinguish between politics and violence, and what are the
political implications of such distinctions? What counts as violence?
Even within the political realm, the distinction between apparently
senseless violence and violence with a political objective persists. Consider,
War and the various
arguments used to
explain why it is
necessary are examined
in Chapter 22.
for example, the testimony that the former UK prime minister Tony Blair presented
before the Iraq Inquiry in January 2010, when he contrasted the acts of terrorism
perpetrated by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) with those witnessed in the events of
11 September 2001:
For those of us who dealt with terrorism from the IRA, and, incidentally, I don’t
want to minimise the impacts of that terrorism; each act of terrorism is wicked and
wrong and to be deplored. But the terrorism that an organisation like the IRA were
engaged in was terrorism directed towards a political purpose, maybe unjustified,
but it was within a certain framework that you could understand. The point about
this act in New York was that, had they been able to kill even more people than
those 3,000 they would have, and so, after that time, my view was that you could
not take risks with this issue at all.
(Tony Blair 2010: 11)
In his testimony, Blair sought to explain why it was that the violence witnessed on
9/11 so changed the world that even the decision on military intervention had to be
made on the basis of new criteria. Though European states had become accustomed
to the acts of terrorism of groups such as the Basque separatist organisation ETA in
Spain, or the IRA in the UK, explained Blair, these were organisations whose violence
was ‘directed towards a political purpose’, acting within a ‘framework that you could
understand’. By contrast, Al-Qaeda is understood to take on a new and networked
organisational form, to substitute violent extremism for political purpose, and to be
beyond the framework of understanding. Faced with such incomprehensible violence,
Blair testified before the Iraq Inquiry, military action could be justified. So, for example,
the hijackers of the aircraft on 9/11 have been called nihilists, whose acts of violence
and wanton destruction are thought to be irreconcilable with political agendas and
beyond the reach of established juridical or ethical codes (Walzer 2004).
The way in which a problem, danger or threat is represented has a real and material
effect on what can be done, and what kind of response can be formulated. When violence
is posed as an intrinsic part of a political campaign, for example, perhaps the cessation
of violence can begin a process of negotiation and accommodation, as happened with
the IRA. If an act of violence is considered to be beyond the scope of political response,
what kinds of state acts and inter ventions become sanctioned? Was Tony Blair correct
to say that new forms of terrorism justify revised thresholds of the legality of war, what
Michael Walzer calls emergency ethics?
To begin to address the question of violence, it is useful to begin by reflecting on
the relation between power and violence. Is violence an expression of power or
powerlessness? What is violence? We think we know it when we see it, but how can it
be defined and demarcated? How can we distinguish and study the differences between
individual and collective violence; what distinguishes political violence from other kinds
of aggression? Are there different types of violence, of which some can be considered
a legitimate continuation of politics, while others are to be considered illegitimate and
nihilist? What is the relationship between politics, power and violence? How can we
distinguish political violence or terrorism, war, violent revolutionary movements or
anticolonial struggles on the one hand, and non-violent protest or resistance, sanctions
and non-military humanitarian intervention on the other?
WHAT COUNTS AS VIOLENCE? 497
The radical Islamist
group Al-Qaeda is
discussed in more depth
in Chapter 6.
A nihilist is someone
who believes life has no
meaning or purpose,
and, because of this,
nihilism is often
associated with
destructiveness, though
this is by no means
necessarily a part of
nihilism.
The effects of how we
think about the world are
the subject of Chapter 2,
which also discusses
Michael Walzer, and the
way in which it is our
thinking that makes the
world appear dangerous
is discussed in
Chapter 24.
498 LOUISE AMOORE AND MARIEKE DE GOEDE
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
VIOLENCE AND TARGETING IN THE WAR ON TERROR
To map out a context for our discussion of the complex question of violence, and the
difficulties of distinguishing between types of violence, we will explore here two
intertwined forms of violence present in one geographical region of our world: the overt
and visible drone attacks on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border; and the much less readily
visible violence of targeting the financial transactions of aid agencies, such that the West
failed to deliver sufficient aid to those affected by the severe flooding in that same region
in 2010.
Drone targeting in Pakistan
In contemporary global politics, the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan
are cast as a particularly dangerous and unruly geographical space (Mohammad 2008;
Elden 2009). This area, frequently also called AfPak, is imagined as a dangerous and
cavernous borderland from which much of the con tem porary terrorist threat emerges
(Mohammad and Sidaway 2010). But AfPak is more than a dangerous territory: it is
BOX 23.1 THE EVENTS OF 11 SEPTEMBER 2001
In the early morning of 11 September 2001, four aircraft were hijacked as they took off from airports in the
eastern United States, loaded with sufficient fuel for flights to the western seaboard and carrying their
usual number of passengers. The hijackers, four or five on each flight, and armed only with paper cutter
knives, took control of the planes, killing the pilots and members of the crew. They turned the planes
around towards cities on the East coast. Two were redirected towards New York, and flown directly into
the twin towers of the World Trade Center, two iconic 100-storey office blocks situated in the financial
district of Lower Manhattan. One was flown to Washington DC and hit the Pentagon, the headquarters of
the US military. The fourth, thought perhaps to have been destined for the US Capitol building or the
White House, was brought down in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, allegedly by passengers on the
plane. This fourth flight had been delayed, and passengers had heard on their mobile phones that other
hijacked planes had by then hit buildings in New York.
The impact of the two planes flown into the towers of the World Trade Center caused massive
fireballs, and cut off means of escape for those trapped in the buildings. Firefighters rushed to help, as
people fell from the upper floors to their deaths. Just over an hour after the initial impact, to the horror of
people watching events unfold from the streets of Manhattan or on their television screens around the
world, both towers collapsed, disappearing into a cloud of dust. Nearly 3,000 people were killed, including
those trying to rescue the office workers; the remains of over 1,000 have not yet been identified. The death
toll was initially thought to be potentially around 40,000, but because the incident happened early in the
morning, many office workers had not yet arrived at their desks, and others managed to evacuate safely.
The events of that day came to be known as 9/11; whether or not they represented a turning point in
global politics is contentious.
‘The West’ is often used
to refer to a group of
mostly Northern
industrialised countries,
suggesting that they
share a culture, have
common political
interests and generally
act together. Of course,
it is not quite so simple,
and Chapter 6 talks more
about this.
WHAT COUNTS AS VIOLENCE? 499
FIGURE 23.1
Afghanistan–Pakistan borderlands: A US Government map from the 1980s now in the public domain showing the
Afghanistan–Pakistan frontier (Durand Line area) and seeming to indicate Pashtun areas. http://independentindian.
com/category/afghanistan/ http://drsubrotoroy.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/afghan1 ?w=780
500 LOUISE AMOORE AND MARIEKE DE GOEDE
Who is doing the
imagining here?
Who is it that casts
these borderlands as
dangerous?
The rise of network
warfare is discussed in
Chapter 24.
considered to be spatially networked to cells and suspect groups in the West, radiating
danger and the threat of violence into the heart of Western societies. ‘From the streets
of Western cities to the mountains of Afghanistan, to the tribal regions of Pakistan,
to the islands of South East Asia, to the Horn of Africa’ is how US president George
W. Bush invoked the networked global imaginary of the terrorist threat (cited in
Elden 2009: 81). Around Christmas 2010 for example, alarmist but unspecified terror
warnings were issued in Germany, where authorities stated that they had concrete
information that signalled a real terrorist threat. These warnings were partly traced to
Indian criminal and fugitive Dawood Ibrahim, who was believed to be hiding in Pakistan.
The threat remained unspecified in terms of timing and possible targets however, and
led mostly to an intensified policing at airports, train stations and at the picturesque
German Christmas markets. What Pakistani novelist Moshin Hamid (2010) calls the
AfPak mindset, then, can be understood to entail a dispersed geo-political network
that connects the Pakistan borderlands with real but unspecified threats in the urban
centres of Europe.
Amid widespread political consensus that the Afghanistan–Pakistan borderlands
represent the spatial origins of future terrorist violence in the West, the US began to
develop its own specific form of response – the targeted killing of militants in the AfPak
region using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or ‘drones’. In the period from 2004
to 2010, the United Nations reports that drone strikes have killed 1,458 militants and
531 civilians. The use of unmanned drones, armed with Hellfire missiles, has increased
dramatically over that time. In fact, since the coming into power of the Obama admin –
istration in the US, the number of these strikes has doubled, with 2010 witnessing over
210 strikes (United Nations 2010). This happened during the same period as the
withdrawal of conventional military forces from Iraq.
For the state to exercise what sociologist Max Weber termed ‘the monopoly of the
legitimate use of physical violence’ (Weber 2004: 33) but to do this not with armies
and troops, but rather with remotely controlled missiles, the future terrorist violence
of northern Pakistan has to be understood in a particular way. An unconventional
violence, one that is beyond prevailing frameworks of political objectives, one might
suggest, could only be met with a non-standard response. Certainly, it is UN special
rapporteur on extrajudicial killing Phillip Alston’s view that the drone strikes stretch
the right of a state to exercise legitimate violence in self-defence. Though ‘there are
indeed circumstances in which targeted killings are permitted in armed conflict situ-
ations when used against combatants or fighters’, concludes Alston’s report, ‘they are
increasingly being used far from any battle zone. This expansive and open-ended inter –
pretation of the right to self-defence goes a long way towards destroying the prohibition
on the use of armed force contained in the UN Charter’ (United Nations 2010). The
representation of a world under threat of violence from a nebulous and networked source
has been a necessary precondition for a violent state response that is arguably beyond
the conventional limits of legitimate force. Put simply, the geographical spaces in which
the US considers it legitimate to intervene with the help of drone strikes is expanding
far beyond officially declared battle zones.
BOX 23.2 UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES (UAVS) OR DRONES
What is an UAV or drone? An UAV is a powered aerial vehicle that does not carry a pilot or crew, but is
controlled remotely by a pilot equipped with a video screen of live images taken from the drone. In
contemporary military operations the UAV is armed with Hellfire missiles.
Are they a new form of warfare? UAVs have been used for military reconnaissance and surveillance for
some 30 years. However, under the Obama administration (and in the context of pressure to withdraw
ground troops from Afghanistan), the number of drone missile strikes on the Afghanistan–Pakistan
borderlands has doubled.
When were drones first used in attacks? The first test of an armed drone was in 2001 by the CIA (Central
Intelligence Agency), when Hellfire missiles were launched from a Predator drone.
When was the drone first used on a real military target? The first deployment was in Yemen in 2002, again
by the CIA. They used it to target a sports utility vehicle in the middle of the desert. It was claimed that the
strike killed an al-Qaeda member, and five of his associates.
Who flies them? In 2010/11 the drones in Afghanistan were controlled from Creech air force base in the
Nevada desert. In the US it is possible to take a course to learn how to control these aircraft, while at the
moment the British stipulate that you must have been a combat pilot to control them.
FIGURE 23.2
A drone. Photo: DoD/Corbis
WHAT COUNTS AS VIOLENCE? 501
How are they controlled? Somewhat like a console games controller, the pilots sit in front of a screen. The
systems have high-resolution cameras and sensors to see things on the ground, as well as heat sensors to
establish the presence of people within buildings and so on.
Who makes the decision to fire the missiles, the drone or the human? The pilot does, although in a lot of
instances they won’t have that much time – the drone will identify a target and ask them whether to shoot:
yes or no? A lot of the time the pilot is vetoing targets rather than finding them.
Are other countries developing these armed drones? Yes, at the moment there are forty-three countries
developing these programmes. It is difficult to put a precise figure on how many countries currently
operate armed drones because there are many other unarmed uses for the drone, such as mapping,
remote sensing, and surveillance. Russia alone has eighteen programmes, while the Chinese have a drone
known as the Invisible Sword.
(Source: Adapted from Channel 4 News, ‘Drones: The Secret War’, screened
22 December 2010, synopsis available at http://www.channel4.com/
news/pakistan-drone-strikes-the-cias-secret-war)
The so-called war on
terror is discussed in
Chapter 26. This term,
which came into use
shortly after 9/11, more
or less fell out of use in
the period after Barack
Obama took office as
US president in 2008.
For more about the
global economy and
neoliberalism, see
Chapters 15, 17 and 19.
Financial targeting in Pakistan
It is not only in the overt and visible violences of targeted killing that the people of the
Afghanistan–Pakistan border find themselves vulnerable to the new interventions of the
continuing war on terror. For a number of years, global financial authorities have
expressed increasing concern over Pakistan’s position in the global fight against money
laundering and terrorism financing. In the context of this global pursuit of dirty
monies, states have to adhere by a set of rules and recommendations developed by the
Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an OECD (Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development) platform erected in 1989 to foster international
cooperation against money laundering.
The FATF has been increasingly important since the attacks of 9/11, because it
became charged with an agenda designed to cut off terrorists’ access to financial
resources and global banking systems. In this context, the FATF released in 2001 eight
Special Recommendations on Terrorist Financing; later, a ninth recom mendation was
added. These recommendations include the criminalisation in national law of the
financing of terrorism; the identification, freezing and confiscation of monies thought
to belong to terrorists or potential terrorists; strict regulation of banks, which have to
check the identities of their clients and examine their transactions for markers of
suspicion; and the prohibition of informal money service providers. The demands that
the FATF places on countries are far-reaching, especially if those countries have an
underdeveloped banking sector that relies partly on informal money transfer networks.
However, countries which do not adhere to these recommendations may receive
criticism and negative evaluations in the regular country reports that the FATF produces.
This may affect a country’s credit rating and access to international capital markets.
In 2009, the FATF reported that they were very ‘concerned about the money
laundering and terrorism financing risks posed by Pakistan’ (FATF 2009). By June 2010,
502 LOUISE AMOORE AND MARIEKE DE GOEDE
BOX 23.3 ORGANISATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND
DEVELOPMENT
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which has its headquarters in
Paris, describes itself as ‘an international organisation helping governments tackle the economic, social
and governance challenges of a globalised economy’ (http://www.oecd.org). Founded in 1961, when
eighteen European countries plus the United States and Canada joined forces to create an organisation
dedicated to global development, it currently comprises thirty-four member countries.
A recent study by Rianne Mahon and Stephen McBride (2009) says that ‘the OECD deserves more
attention than it normally receives. . . . In contrast with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World
Trade Organization (WTO), and the World Bank, the OECD lacks the power to enforce compliance with its
decisions. Yet, it is much less concerned with establishing binding obligations than it is with influencing
the direction of policy, in ways that may in the future become binding on states’. According to Mahon and
McBride, it is a ‘rich nations’ club’ and may propagate values reflecting neoliberalism.
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) was set up as an OECD body by the G7 in 1989 in order to
develop and promote policies against money laundering. FATF issued forty recommendations against
money laundering in 1990, and regularly reviews and evaluates member state progress in implementing
these measures. FATF currently has thirty-six members, but has expanded its geographical scope since it
works with associate members and regional bodies, such as the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force
(CFATF). Although membership is voluntary and its recommendations are not binding, FATF country
reports can be influential and countries work hard to receive good evaluations (Hülsse and Kerwer 2007).
The importance of FATF as an international body increased significantly when after 9/11 it became charged
with developing policies to fight terrorism financing.
BOX 23.4 FATF’S NINE SPECIAL RECOMMENDATIONS ON TERRORIST
FINANCING
1 Ratification and implementations of UN instruments.
2 Criminalising the financing of terrorism and associated money laundering.
3 Freezing and confiscating terrorist assets.
4 Reporting suspicious transactions relating to terrorism.
5 International cooperation.
6 Registering and regulating alternative remittance [payments sent home by migrant workers] and
informal money transfers systems.
7 Regulating wire transfers and ensuring that these contain all sender and receiver information.
8 Regulating non-profit organisations and ensuring that they cannot be misused.
9 Putting in place measures to detect cash couriers and the physical cross-border transportation of
currency.
(FATF 2001)
WHAT COUNTS AS VIOLENCE? 503
http://www.oecd.org
504 LOUISE AMOORE AND MARIEKE DE GOEDE
The total amount of
remittances sent by
migrants in the West to
their countries of origin
annually is now far larger
than all development aid
taken together.
FATF had identified Pakistan as a jurisdiction with ‘strategic deficiencies’ in its anti-
money laundering and anti-terrorism financing regulatory structures. FATF elicited from
Pakistan a ‘high level political commitment’ to cooperate more closely on improv ing
its regulatory efforts in this area, by implementing better the nine recommendations,
and by being more active in identifying, freezing and confiscating the monies thought
to belong to potential terrorists, including a number of suspect charities.
The global community, then, did not only target Pakistani territory militarily
through drone strikes, but also in another way; namely, by demanding banking reform
and changes in national policing practice against suspect monies. Specifically, Pakistani
police action against a number of suspect charities was demanded by the international
community. In short, Pakistan was put under pressure to step up its efforts against alleged
terrorism in a dual way: through the military targeting of the drone strikes, and through
the financial targeting of the FATF.
Twin targetings in Pakistan
At first glance, the military targeting of the drone strikes and the financial targeting of
the FATF seem to be at opposite ends of the violence spectrum in terms of means and
effects. If drone targeting leads to visible violence, death and collateral damage, financial
targeting seems completely different: it works through high-level diplomacy, legal reform
and the proscription or outlawing of certain organisations. Indeed, monetary targeting
is more generally seen as an important, more effective and less violent alternative way
to pursue terrorists than the visibly violent spaces of the war on terror like Guantanamo
Bay, extraordinary rendition and drone strikes. However, if we look a little closer, we
can discern more parallels between drone strikes and financial targeting than we might
see at first glance. It is important to understand that the financial targeting of the FATF
can also have violent (side) effects. In particular, they may have implications for the
ways in which charities are able to operate and their effectiveness in getting the right
aid to the right people at the right time in a case of humanitarian emergency. Let us
discuss in turn the ways in which drone strikes and financial targeting may both have
violent effects, and how they are interwoven in their political logics.
First, it is important to understand the way in which financial sanctions work and
FIGURE 23.3
Reporting suspicions.
http://graphicwitness.
org/ineye/beal.htm
Guantanamo Bay and
extraordinary rendition
are discussed in
Chapter 2.
http://graphicwitness.org/ineye/beal.htm
http://graphicwitness.org/ineye/beal.htm
the effects that they may have. In the first instance, new financial regulation and the
criminalisation of terrorism financing has made the work of humanitarian and aid
charities much more difficult. Charitable organisations have to demonstrate that they
do not work together or otherwise associate with organisations that are suspected of
supporting terrorists. In Pakistan, for example, it has become forbidden to cooperate
with the organisations Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jawad-ud-Dawa, which are accused of
supporting terrorists and of being involved in the planning of attacks such as those in
Mumbai in 2008. Faith-based Muslim organisations, in particular, are now in a situation
in which it is ceaselessly demanded that they demonstrate they are not implicated in
funding what are regarded as dubious local organisations or associating with suspect
entities. In order to give guidance to charities in the global fight against terrorism
financing, the UK Charity Commission, for example, has issued stringent new anti-
terrorism guidelines. These guidelines include the obligation for charities to ‘take all
neces sary steps to ensure that their activities could not reasonably be misinter preted’
and to guard against ‘any association with terrorist or inappropriate political activities’
(Charity Commission UK 2009: 23 and 2).
But these guidelines raise a number of questions concerning the legitimacy of
charitable work. How can one reasonably prevent one’s activities from being mis inter –
preted? How can one avoid being involved in or associated with inappropriate political
activity, and who decides on the appropriateness or otherwise of an organisa tion’s
political or charitable work? In order to navigate these requirements, charities have
to develop a paper trail, in which they account for their charitable decisions, local
employees, investments, accounts, transfers and transactions. Charities have to keep
detailed records of their employees and beneficiaries, which requires, for example, the
collection and storage of local personnel’s CVs, birth certificates and other official
documents, and explaining gaps in their CVs. The levels of scrutiny and record-keeping
demanded under the new guidelines of the UK Charity Commission are, according to
one faith-based charity, ‘very extensive to the point of being unrealistic’. This charity
struggles with comprehending the limits of what needs to be recorded, for example
whether it would include maintaining CV-files and references of support staff such as
cleaners in field offices. This problem is even more acute in territories where formal
paperwork such as birth certificates, diplomas and other records, are badly maintained
or difficult to acquire (Islamic Relief 2009).
These seemingly less violent practices make it more difficult in cases of humani –
tarian emergency to deliver aid on the ground. Charities, especially if Islamic faith-based,
face an impossible terrain of operation and have genuine difficulty doing their work.
This was starkly illustrated through the contradictions that emerged over aid to Pakistani
flood victims in 2010. On the one hand, the UN urgently appealed for help in August
2010 in the face of unprecedented suffering and damage caused by severe floods in
large parts of Pakistan. The UN called the floods a ‘disaster of almost unprecedented
magnitude’, and said that $460 million would be needed to provide food, shelter and
basic medical services to the nearly 15 million people affected (MacFarquhar 2010).
However, these public calls for action and donations obscured the political contestations
over how aid was to be delivered to the people on the ground. One of the key questions
in this respect was formulated in terms of how to prevent ‘militant Muslim groups in
the fragile northwest, where the worst flooding has occurred’ from ‘distributing their
WHAT COUNTS AS VIOLENCE? 505
To what extent do you
think these difficulties
are related to the idea
that certain religious
movements are involved
in politics? See
Chapter 6.
‘More people were
affected by the flooding
than the combined total
of the Boxing Day Indian
Ocean tsunami, 2005
Pakistan earthquake,
Haiti earthquake and
Hurricane Katrina’.
John Barrett, head of the
UK’s Flood Response
Team, DFID Pakistan.
Hizbullah and HAMAS,
which are discussed in
Chapter 6, are other
examples of organisa –
tions commonly labelled
terrorist that provide
basic social services in
their areas.
While Madrassah literally
means any type of
school, in English it is
used to refer to an
Islamic institution.
INDIA
AFGHANISTAN
INDIA
PAKISTAN
PUNJAB
PAKISTAN
BALOCHISTAN
AFGHANISTAN
Moderately affected districts
Severely affected districts
SINDH
Kotri
Barrage
Indus
River
Jacobabad
Sukkur
Barrage
Guddu
Barrage
Taunsa
Barrage
Chasma
Barrage
Kalabagh
Barrage
Islamabad
KHYBER
PAKHTUNKHWA
Kabul
INDIAN
ADMINISTERED
KASHMIR
Mangla
Dam
Tarbela
Dam
Skardu
Besham
PAKISTANI
ADMINISTERED
KASHMIR
Partab
Bridge
FIGURE 23.4
Areas affected by 2010
floods in Pakistan.
http://www.dfid.gov.uk/
Images/pakistan_
affected_areas ;
http://www.dfid.gov.uk/
pakistanfloodsmonitor
2010
own aid and using the crisis to turn traumatized refugees against the government and
the US’ (Christian Science Monitor 2010). In this context, it is important to recognise
that organisations like Jawad-ud-Dawa are not simply terrorist fronts, but illustrate the
complex dividing line between aid, politics and religion in ungoverned territories. In
areas where states largely fail to provide schools, hospitals and security, these
organisations run Madrassahs and provide social support networks. Reportedly,
Jawad-ud-Dawa was one of the first and few organisations to help victims of the 2008
earthquake on the Pakistani-controlled side of Kashmir, where it was ‘welcomed by
people in the area for stepping in where the Pakistani government had failed’ (Filkins
and Mekhennet 2006).
506 LOUISE AMOORE AND MARIEKE DE GOEDE
FIGURE 23.5
Floods in Pakistan in 2010. Photo: Adrees Latif. http://www.treebadger.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Pakistan-Floods ;
http://www.treebadger.co.uk/worst-monsoon-floods-for-80-years-hit-pakistan/
WHAT COUNTS AS VIOLENCE? 507
In this sense, the West’s hesitant reaction to the floods in Pakistan in 2010 lays
bare the profoundly conflicting ways of thinking about areas regarded as sources of
danger in the continuing war on terror. Let us think about what can happen when a
particular place becomes understood as a source of risk and danger, a terrorist threat,
but then also becomes a place at risk of catastrophic flood. The representation of Pakistan
as a place both risky and at risk has important and constraining effects on the response
of the rest of the world. While the UN laments the lack of response in terms of aid
flows, the responders with the infrastructure and capacity to deliver aid on the ground
– charities such as Islamic Relief – are themselves subject to suspicion and time-
consuming regulation that severely restricts their ability to respond effectively. Thus it
is that the media can, on the same pages, lament the relative lack of donations to Pakistani
victims, just as they simultaneously warn against potentially disastrous terrorist attacks
emanating from ‘mountainous’ and ‘cavernous’ Pakistani border areas. The same
international institutions who proudly announce millions to be donated in humanitarian
aid can be, in the name of the war on terrorism financing, at the forefront of attacking
and restricting the channels that are probably most capable of delivering such aid
Chapter 24 talks about
changes in contemporary
ways of waging war that
reflect many of these
ideas; it notes that
present-day military
thinking sees the
enemy not only as not
contained geographic –
ally, but as always in a
state of becoming-
dangerous.
508 LOUISE AMOORE AND MARIEKE DE GOEDE
effectively. The question of the blowback and increased impoverishment in the wake
of these financial targetings is acute (Howell and Lind 2009). As one representative
from British charitable organisation Islamic Relief puts it, if aid is disabled to orphanages
or disaster victims in disputed and fragile territories, ‘Who do they blame for their
predicament? Is the world a safer place?’ (Islamic Relief 2009).
So, it is possible that both drone strikes and financial targeting in the case of
contemporary Pakistan may have violent effects on populations. If the effects of drone
strikes are visible and immediate, those of financial targeting are less immediate and
less visible but equally important if they work to disable vital charitable work and the
provision of welfare and education. There is another reason why drone strikes and
financial targeting may be more similar than it seems at first glance: they both operate
through logics of precision targeting and new ways of governing in the so-called unruly
spaces that have come to typify contem porary warfare. These logics of precision-
targeting support specific interventions inside the sovereign space of another country
without a formal declaration of war (Zehfuss 2011). Now that danger and enmity are
perceived to be no longer contained in clearly demarcated geographical areas, but as
dispersed and distributed from the mountains in Pakistan to Western-based sleeper cells,
risk-based targeted governing becomes the new face of contemporary conflict. The
violences of the drone attacks and financial targeting and freezing are not alternatives
in a world after the war on terror, but are parallels in terms of their objectives as well
as their logic. Both practices offer a dream of side effects-free precision targeting in an
otherwise unruly territory (Valverde and Mopas 2004). Underlying this vision of
painless targeting is an understanding of the Afpak borderlands as unruly territories,
from whence the current global terrorist threat emanates. From this point of view, the
Pakistani floods, however awful from the standpoint of human suffering, have provided
an opportunity to intensify the targeted governing of this dangerous territory. The
less overt and scarcely visible violence of stopping money and blacklisting a country is
making its people more vulnerable to the more overt forms of visible violence manifested
in drone attacks.
GENERAL RESPONSES
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VIOLENCE AND POWER
The example of the twin targeting of drone attacks and financial measures in Pakistan
shows two things that are of more general importance for the study of violence and
modern warfare. First, it shows how difficult it is to distinguish between war and non-
war, combatant and non-combatant, particularly when modern wars are fought not
against clearly locatable and identifiable enemies, but against dispersed enemy networks,
which are intermingled with normal populations and urban environments (Duffield
2007; Kaldor 2007). Second, it shows that it is not always easy to recognise violence:
although we think we know it when we see it, political measures that are pursued through
diplomacy and international dialogue can still have violent implications and effects on
the ground. In this sense, rules, negotiations and political relations may have violent
presuppositions or violent effects.
Chapter 22 asks why
politics turns to violence:
why do soldiers kill, and
why are wars fought?
For more on
Clausewitz’s thinking
on war see Chapter 22.
WHAT COUNTS AS VIOLENCE? 509
Let us try to make sense of these points, and the complex relations between violence
and power more generally, by examining what some of the experts have said about these
issues. There are a number of theorists who have contributed to our understandings of
the form and nature of violence.
War as an instrument of politics
One of the most important thinkers on war in the modern age was Prussian military
theorist Carl von Clausewitz. Although first published in 1832, von Clausewitz’s book
On War (Vom Kriege in the German original) is still today considered to be one of the
most important books on war and military strategy ever written. The book is especially
famous for its argument that war is ‘the mere continuation of politics by other means’
(1873 [1832]: ch. 1, § 24). In other words, war is considered to be a political instru –
ment involving the military engagement of strategic aims otherwise pursued through
political processes and institutions. According to Clausewitz, the form of war needs to
be tailored to the specific political aims that are being pursued, making war ‘a true
chameleon’ (1873 [1832]: ch. 1, § 28). Although celebrated for being a first analysis
of modern war, Clausewitz’s book is also critiqued for offering a rationalisation of
violence. Others have argued that Clausewitz is less relevant for understanding so-called
new wars, because he focuses mainly on inter-state conflicts and his analysis is therefore
less applicable to the geographically dispersed and intra-state conflicts that mark the
early twenty-first century (Kaldor 2010).
Collective violence
The question of violence and violent politics is much broader than the question of war,
especially in modern conflicts where the battlefield is not clearly demarcated or
entrenched, as in our illustrative example (Coward 2009; Graham 2010). This has been
recognised by political theorist Charles Tilly in his 2003 book The Politics of Collective
Violence. Tilly seeks to understand the nature of collective violence, be it looting and
rioting, violent resistance movements, or genocide. Despite the substantial differences
between these phenomena, Tilly argues that they have common characteristics that go
to the heart of the nature of violence as an ‘episodic social interaction’. These shared
characteristics, according to Tilly, are threefold: First, they inflict ‘physical damage on
persons and/or objects’; second, they involve ‘at least two perpetrators’; and third, they
result at least to some extent from ‘coordination among persons who perform the
damaging acts’ (Tilly 2003: 3).
Based on the identification of these elements, Tilly proposes a comprehensive
typology of interpersonal violence, in which the extent of coordination among
perpetrators, coupled with the salience of damage, lead to a distinction of ‘brawls’ from
‘broken negotiations’ from ‘violent rituals’. Tilly’s aim with this typology is to help
students of conflict explain variations in violence and differentiations in violent episodes.
Tilly emphasises the increasingly irregular and differentiated nature of modern warfare,
marked not by clearly demarcated battles between states, but by violent (terrorist)
resistance, civil war and civilian involvement. For Tilly the war on terror is exemplary
of the ‘sea change in the nature of collective violence’ that has taken place during the
second half of the twentieth century. This ‘sea change’ involves the increasing importance
of civil war, the participation of ‘irregular forces’ such as militias and mercenaries, the
increase of the level of attacks on civilian targets, and the relation between violence and
traditional political struggle (Tilly 2002).
Violence as indistinct
Although Tilly emphasises the socially embedded nature of any violence, his typology
still demarcates violence as a very distinct form of social interaction. Put differently,
Tilly suggests that there is a specific logic of violence that is clearly recognisable, and
that connects episodes as widely different as a brawl and genocide. Anthropologist
Paul Richards takes a different view. Richards objects to the notion that violence is a
distinct and different form of social interaction that can be clearly demarcated from other
kinds. In fact, he argues that it is precisely the assumption of the specificity of violence
that leads students of war and violence to ‘take it out of its social context’ (2005: 3).
Instead, Richards argues that war and peace, violence and non-violence are profoundly
inter twined and not even clearly recognisable as distinct social states. He writes: ‘war
is often . . . a state of mind shared among participants [and] “peace” can often be more
violent and dangerous than “war”’ (2005: 5). The agenda fostered by Richards’ prob –
lem atisation of the line demarcating peace from war, is to encourage students and
researchers not to leave the study of violence to security experts. Instead, Richards wants
to foster a research agenda which re-embeds violence into its social contexts, and asks
detailed questions about when, how and why violence manifests itself as a social relation
among other possible manifestations. What we learn from Richards, then, is the
profoundly social nature of violent interaction and the difficulty of clearly locating the
point at which politics becomes violence.
When politics becomes violent
If Richards is right and there is no clear turning point at which violence starts, how
then should we think of the beginnings of war or violent conflict, and how do we
conceptualise the moment at which violence becomes possible? If it sounds a little far-
fetched to understand war – partly – as a state of mind, let’s consider an analysis of the
war that took place in Bosnia at the beginning of the 1990s. In his detailed reading of
how it was possible for this scale of death and destruction to occur unexpectedly in
Europe, David Campbell shows that dehumanisation discourses played a key role. The
violence was rendered possible, in this analysis, when political discourses in Yugoslavia
– at the end of decades of communist rule – started to identify different categories of
citizen on the basis of ethnic and religious divides. Campbell (1998) shows that these
ethnic and religious identities are not eternal or inherent characteristics of population
groups, but are actively appealed, constructed and contested in specific social and
historical contexts. The violent conflicts in Bosnia, then, were based on powerful political
representations that cast particular social groups as inferior, unreliable and other. ‘I
understand now that nothing but “otherness” killed Jews, and it began by naming them,
by reducing them to the other’, as Campbell (1994: 455) quotes Croatian author
Slavenka Drakulic, ‘Then everything became possible. Even the worst atrocities like
concentration camps or the slaughtering of civilians in Croatia or Bosnia.’
510 LOUISE AMOORE AND MARIEKE DE GOEDE
Joanna Bourke’s
argument in Chapter 22
stresses the importance
of examining violence as
a cultural phenomenon.
How similar is her
position to that of
Richards?
What happens to this
question of a turning
point if we challenge the
notion that violence is
fundamentally different
from other types of
social relations?
The way that identifying
with – or being identi-
fied with – a particular
group can lead to
violence is examined in
Chapter 5, and the
violence in the former
Yugoslavia is briefly
discussed. Chapter 22
shows how dehuman –
ising the enemy makes
it possible for soldiers
to kill.
WHAT COUNTS AS VIOLENCE? 511
Understood in this way, particular representational practices and social discourses
are themselves violent. Violence is not defined only through physical force or injury,
but through the power that renders othering possible and that creates the conditions
of possibility for war or torture. Through his work, Campbell encourages students of
violence to analyse the processes of political representation and dehumanisation that
render violence possible and politically acceptable. At the basis of Campbell’s research
agenda is an ethical stance that challenges scholars to remain aware of their own
responsiveness and responsibilities toward the other in their work.
Hannah Arendt has also analysed the complex question of violence. For Arendt,
power is too often equated with force and violence, when in fact it is a completely
different phenomenon, relying on different social processes. Arendt concluded from
her studies that violence is not the continuation of politics (albeit by other means), as
Clausewitz would have it, but the opposite of politics. In other words, violence occurs
when political regimes lose their legitimacy and credibility. Only a regime that has lost
all social support needs brute force to enforce its will. Despite the brutal display of
violence, however, such a regime is politically weak, because it does not succeed in
BOX 23.5 HANNAH ARENDT
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) is one of the most
influential political philosophers of the twentieth
century. She was born in Hanover in Germany in 1906.
Being of Jewish descent, she was forced to flee
Germany in 1933 and moved to Paris. In 1941, after
Paris had been captured by the Nazis, she moved to
New York, where she became closely associated with
the New School for Social Research (now part of the
New School). She was active in various magazines
and aid organisations throughout her life. In New
York, she hosted philosophical discussion and
became a public intellectual. A key theme in Arendt’s
philosophical work concerns the causes, histories and
operating modes of totalitarian regimes. In the Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, she analyses
the histories of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and seeks to explore their governmental logics and
popular appeal. In 1961, Arendt attended the trial of Nazi war criminal Albert Eichmann in Jerusalem, to
report on it for the American magazine The New Yorker. In her reports of this trial, she sketched Eichmann
not as a monstrous war criminal, but as an uninspiring bureaucrat who claimed just to be following
orders. Arendt coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe the technocratic rationality and
bureaucratic procedures with which the evil of the Third Reich was executed. Eichmann became an
example of this banality of evil. However, Arendt’s book was very controversial, especially among some
Jewish communities, where the argument was seen to distract from the horrors of the Nazi regime and
the individual responsibility of the perpetrators.
FIGURE 23.6
Hannah Arendt. Photo: Tyrone Dukes/New York Times
(1972).
Would Arendt’s analysis
provide an account of
the events of the Arab
Spring in 2011 or in Syria
in 2013?
For a discussion of why
we obey, see Chapter 7.
Foucault’s work on
power is discussed
in Chapters 7 and 11,
and his notion of
problematisation in
Chapter 24.
512 LOUISE AMOORE AND MARIEKE DE GOEDE
enforcing its will by law or persuasion. Violence is an expression of powerlessness, rather
than power. She writes: ‘Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules
absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears when power is in jeopardy’ (1970: 155).
There are two key aspects to Arendt’s argument here. First, only a weak power needs
to use a gun or cannon to enforce its will. A strong power, in contrast, would rule
through authority and consensus building. Second, such a turn to violence can ultimately
do nothing other than destroy the very regime that uses it, because it exposes that the
power behind the violence has crumbled. The gun or cannon work only as long as the
state is able to command them. ‘When commands are no longer obeyed, the means of
violence are of no use’, writes Arendt (1970: 148), ‘Everything depends on the power
behind the violence.’
To summarise, this section has examined how different scholars understand the
question of violence. For Clausewitz, violence is a continuation of politics by other
means. Violence, in this understanding, represents the means toward political ends. This
holds true in Tilly’s analysis; Tilly nevertheless draws attention to the radically
transformed global landscape of violence in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,
where intra-state conflict, terrorism and civilian participation have become more
common. As in our illustrative example, the difference between violence and non-
violence, combatant and non-combatant, has become more difficult to draw. However,
rather than reifying violence as a special category of human interaction, authors like
Richards and Campbell alert us to the social, cultural and historical embeddedness of
the conditions of possibility of violence. They urge us to study the political and
discursive developments that render violence acceptable and attractive. For Arendt, on
the other hand, violence occurs when power structures break down, and in fact only
serves to expose the weakness of the regime that deploys it. Thus, Arendt argues that
violence is not the continuation, but the very opposite of power.
BROADER ISSUES
VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE VIOLENCE
As we can see, both in thinking about violence and in the practical issues of how violent
effects are produced, it is not at all easy to draw a clear line between violent and non-
violent action – between violence and politics – nor between the apparently legitimate
monopoly of violence of the state and the illegitimate violences of terrorism or
insurgency. For Michel Foucault, it is not the case that war begins at the point where
politics reaches its limit, but precisely that politics itself is deeply inscribed with the
techniques and violences of war. In his famous 1976 lectures at the Collège de France,
like Arendt turning Clausewitz’s dictum on its head, Foucault argues that ‘politics is
the continuation of war by other means’ (2003: 48). Over the historical period that
saw the ‘state acquire a monopoly on war’, when the practices and institutions of war
existed ‘only as a violent relationship between states’, a new and curious ‘battlefront’
opens up within society (Foucault 2003: 51). The appearance of the institutions, codes
and rules of peace and security does not mean that ‘war has been averted’, for ‘war
continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even in the most regular. In the
smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war’ (Foucault 2003: 50). Even where overt
Butler is well known
for her influential work
on gender and
perform ativity, which is
examined in Chapter 5.
Her work on the
grievability of lives is
discussed further in
Chapter 28.
WHAT COUNTS AS VIOLENCE? 513
and visible warfare appears to be averted, and where the liberal institutions of the rule
of law seem to prevail, Foucault reminds his audience, there is ‘blood dried in the codes’
in which ‘we must hear the rumble of battle’ (2003: 15; see also Lobo-Guerrero 2012;
Neal 2004).
Why might Foucault’s analysis matter for our understanding of problems such as
the intertwined violences of targeted killing and targeted sanctions in the Afghanistan–
Pakistan borderlands? In part, because it draws our attention to the everyday forms of
violence that become the preconditions for bombing and killing. The recognition of
friend from foe, safe from dangerous, us from them, ally from enemy that structures
the power relations of war, understood through Foucault’s approach, is present even
in the smallest cogs of everyday experience. Alongside the visceral violences of the theatre
of war, then, we would need to attend to the more ordinary ways in which the war-like
dividing lines are drawn. How does the entire population of a region become understood
as potentially harbouring terrorists? What kinds of processes of othering have to take
place for the world to target a people, be it militarily or financially?
So, for example, the Foucauldian attention to the presence of violence in ‘the
smallest of cogs’ can be seen in the work of Judith Butler, who has commented on how
lives come to count, or not, as grievable lives whose loss might be registered on the
visible surface of global politics:
The question that preoccupies me in the light of recent global violence is, Who
counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes a life
grievable?
(Butler 2004: 20)
From the photographic images of abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, to the
Guantanamo detainees, Butler is concerned with the forms of violence that are intrinsic
to the way that human subjects are dehumanised, such that multiple other violences
can be acted upon them with impunity (see also Butler 2010). Similarly, and writing
on the act of suicide bombing, the geographer Nigel Thrift extends the act of violence
itself beyond the identification of a clear agent, a perpetrator and a victim, to consider
violence as a set of relations that multiply, change and transform:
I want to blur the edges of violence, by arguing that violence is not just the physical
trauma of bullet penetrating body or fist impacting jaw or knife rending flesh or,
indeed, bomb cutting a swathe through an unsuspecting street. Rather, it is a line
of flight which is expanding its grip through the invention of new kinds of affective
performance.
(Thrift 2007: 276)
In these formulations violence does not end with destruction or death, or even with
the end of a war, but instead it circulates and moves, produces new things, generates
new affects and emotions.
And so, the less immediately visible violences that see war spilling over into the
spaces of everyday life matter greatly to what is possible in global politics, to what can
be said and done, and to what kind of response can be formulated. As we saw in the
514 LOUISE AMOORE AND MARIEKE DE GOEDE
Slavoj Žižek’s work is
also discussed in
Chapter 7.
example of Pakistan, it is not only the visible and overt violence of the drone strikes
that impede the capacity for a response to disaster, but the less visible violence of the
stopping of money and financial blacklisting, that place limits on the world’s response
to suffering.
The philosopher Slavoj Žižek makes a distinction between what he calls the
‘subjective violence’ that appears as the ‘violent perturbation of the normal state of
things’, and a more ‘objective violence’ that is the less visible systemic violence ‘inherent
to the normal state of things’ (2008: 2). What does Žižek mean? For him, what comes
to count as violence in global politics is that which makes a visible tear in the fabric of
daily life – the act of terrorism, the loss of life on the city street – the subjective violence
with its identifiable subjects and human agents, its ‘evil individuals’ (2008: 10). ‘At the
forefront of our minds’, he writes, are ‘the obvious signals of violence, acts of crime
and terror’. However, we should ‘disentangle ourselves’ from these signals, in order to
see better how violence pervades normality itself, and how everyday life contains within
it objective violence. To attend to Žižek’s forms of objective violence, then, we would
BOX 23.6 SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK AND 9/11
Contemporary Slovenian philosopher
Slavoj Žižek has a distinctive
approach to the question of violence,
drawing on the influences of Marx,
Hegel, and the psychoanalytical work
of Jacques Lacan. Combining
philosophical thought with
commentary on popular culture and
cinema, Žižek is interested in how it
is that the world comes to be seen in
a particular way, what is visible, what
is invisible, what it is possible to say,
and what is left unsayable. In the
immediate aftermath of the events of
11 September 2001, Žižek’s essay
‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’ was circulated via the internet. Drawing on a famous line from the
1999 blockbuster film The Matrix, Žižek urged contemporaries to reflect on the political meaning of the
attacks and the way in which this scale of destruction was – oddly – both completely unexpected and
already pre-visioned many times in Hollywood movies and sensational news stories. In the essay, Žižek
cautioned that instantaneous reactions and reprisals would only ‘serve to avoid confronting the true
dimension of what occurred on 11 September’, urging a pause, a time for thinking. For Žižek such thought
must avoid seeking an enemy outside of ourselves, looking instead for how we are implicated in that
which we are against. As he concluded: ‘Therein resides the true lesson of the bombings: the only way to
ensure that it will not happen HERE again is to prevent it going on ANYWHERE ELSE’ (Žižek 2001,
available at http://www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/times/109zizek.htm).
FIGURE 23.7
Slavoj Žižek: Still from the movie Žižek!, directed by Astra Taylor, 71 mins,
USA 2005. http://www.zizekthemovie.com/press/zizek_pointing_full
need to consider how it is that a population becomes designated as ‘risky or dangerous’,
how people come to represent threats to society. Representing a population as risky or
dangerous is violent in itself.
In Kathryn Bigelow’s 2009 film The Hurt Locker a US Army explosive ordnance
disposal team confront the daily violences of the Iraq war. Sergeant First Class Will James
leads his bomb disposal unit into an abandoned warehouse, where they find a body
bomb in the corpse of a young boy. James’ team, Sanborne and Eldridge, wait for him
to detonate the charge on the body, making safe the stored explosives. But, when James
sees the boy’s body, he pauses, looks again more carefully at the face. ‘I know this boy’,
he says, ‘his name is Beckham, he sells DVDs’. For an instant, the lines that separate
the bomb disposal team from the people of Iraq is breached – the body bomber has a
name, a set of relationships with the soldiers to whom he sold DVDs. James changes
his mind – he removes the explosives from the boy’s body, closes his eyes, covers him
with a cloth, and carries him from the building. Sanborne and Eldridge are concerned,
asking ‘do you think it really is the boy? James has been acting a little weird lately’, and
concluding that it could be anyone: ‘they all look the same don’t they’. For them the
distance between them and the boy is not breached, he remains irrevocably other. But
for James, the objective violences of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that made his war possible has
shifted, he is shaken by the encounter.
Bigelow’s film illustrates vividly the ways in which violence is located not only in
the visceral acts of the theatre of war, but also within the very conditions that make it
possible. In fact, for Bigelow’s protagonist James, in the absence of being closed off
from the enemy, and without what Judith Butler calls dehumanisation, his task is no
longer possible. As we have described in this chapter, the different approaches to
understanding violence and politics have quite distinctive effects in terms of what kind
of response can be formulated. Just as the people of the Afghanistan–Pakistan border –
lands find themselves targeted as a risky and dangerous population, so Will James’ team
make clear that their war can only be fought against a distanced and dehumanised enemy.
When contemporary violence is divided so starkly between the smart weaponry of the
automated drone and the terrorism that is somehow beyond comprehension, it is perhaps
more important than ever to consider the close proximity between these forms of
violence.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter we have explored the question of what counts as violence and whether
it is possible to distinguish forms of violence from non-violence or from political vio-
lence. There is, of course, a straightforward response to the question, one that says ‘well,
yes, forms of violence are differentiated everywhere and all of the time’. Just as we
showed in the example of the Iraq Inquiry and the justification for war, the capacity to
dis tinguish a legitimate sphere of legal geopolitical decision from the apparently
incompre hensible acts of terrorist vio lence is an ever present aspect of our world. But
in this chapter we have encour aged you to think about what happens when such
distinctions are made. In the examples we have discussed of the double targeting of the
Afghanistan–Pakistan borderlands – as a site of drone strikes but also as a population
WHAT COUNTS AS VIOLENCE? 515
How certain things or
people come to be seen
as dangerous is
discussed further in
Chapter 24.
It might be interesting to
compare this discussion
with the discussion of
Saving Private Ryan in
Chapter 8.
Attempts to memorialise
those killed in war are
often also seen as
resisting dehumanisa –
tion: see Chapter 28.
whose links to the world’s flows of money and aid are to be monitored – the political
measures of FATF or of military strikes may not be possible without the representation
of a place and a population who pose risks to the rest of the world. In this way, in
response to the question of whether we can distinguish between different types of
violence, we might conclude that there is no natural or pre-given distinction. Instead,
the lines that are drawn in given situations are deeply political – they shape the world
in which we live, having effects on lives and livelihoods, provoking some responses whilst
quietly preventing other action from being taken.
FURTHER READING
American Civil Liberties Union (2009) Blocking Faith, Freezing Charity: Chilling Muslim
Charitable Giving in the ‘War on Terrorism Financing’, New York: ACLU.
This detailed report by the ACLU examines the war on terror’s effects on charitable giving
in the US, and documents the ways in which fundamental freedoms are being undermined
by these developments.
Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede (eds) (2008) Risk and the War on Terror, London:
Routledge.
This edited collection brings together different authors who have examined the way in which
new risk management techniques are used in the wake of 9/11, for example to sort and
classify airport travellers according to scores of ‘riskiness’ in advance of their arrival at the
border. In this way, the book analyses a lesser known face of the war on terror.
Hannah Arendt (1970) On Violence, New York: Harcourt Brace.
Arendt’s discussion of the relationship between power, politics and violence is accessibly
written and thought provoking.
David Campbell (1998) National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia,
Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press.
One of the most detailed studies of the Bosnian war available, this book offers new
perspectives on violence and ethics.
Michel Foucault (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage.
Foucault’s work on the birth of the modern prison is accessibly written and reorients not
just our understanding of crime and punishment, but the ways in which we understand power
more broadly.
Moshin Hamid (2007) The Reluctant Fundamentalist, London: Hamish Hamilton.
This novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and tells the story of a Pakistani student who
studies and works in the US, but who starts to question his world in the wake of 9/11. It
is a wonderful read that leaves the reader to question the intentions of the narrator, the values
of the West, the place of violence and the meaning of fundamentalism.
Achille Mbembe (2003) ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture 15, 1: 11–41.
In this essay Mbembe proposes the notion of necropolitics to refer to the many ways in which
weapons are deployed in order to destroy people and populations, at the same time as peoples
are subjected to conditions of life that are akin to what he calls ‘death worlds’. He offers an
important critique of Foucault’s concept of biopower.
Michael J. Shapiro (2004) ‘The Nation State and Violence’, in Jenny Edkins, Veronique Pin-Fat
and Michael Shapiro (eds) Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, London: Routledge.
One of a compelling collection of essays on the specific forms taken by contemporary
sovereign power, Shapiro’s contribution cites a line from Wim Wenders’ film The End of
Violence: ‘Define violence. You’re making a movie about it. Shouldn’t you know what it is?’
516 LOUISE AMOORE AND MARIEKE DE GOEDE
WEBSITES
http://dronewarsuk.wordpress.com/
Dronewars aims to be a key information resource on the use of drones. The site also has the
transcripts of lectures on the subject, for example by Professor Richard Falk, an international
relations scholar at Princeton for over 40 years.
http://www.fatf-gafi.org/
The website of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) provides background details on why
the tracking of financial transactions has become a key element of counter-terror. Perhaps
most interesting are the pages on ‘high risk’ jurisdictions.
http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/
Available on this site are the full transcripts of the UK’s Chilcot Inquiry on the Iraq war.
This network offers information and campaigns on the ways in which financial regulations
and the pursuit of terrorism financing affects charitable work around the world.
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Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso.
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document/11/0,3343,en_32250379_32236836_43898507_1_1_1_1,00.html.
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518 LOUISE AMOORE AND MARIEKE DE GOEDE
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For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
CHAPTER 24
What makes the world
dangerous?
Michael Dillon
■ The question
LIVING DANGEROUSLY?
■ Illustrative example
NETWORK-CENTRIC WARFARE
■ General responses
THINKING IN TERMS OF STRATEGY AND SECURITY
■ Broader issues
UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
LIVING DANGEROUSLY?
Let’s begin by breaking up this question into its two constituent questions. We can ask:
‘Why are things dangerous?’ But we can also ask: ‘How do things become dangerous?’
Every time you ask a why question you run the danger of ending up lost in a kind
of essentialism. What that means is that you become committed to a process of
regressing backwards to the foundation or origin of things in the hope of finding a
point beyond which you need regress no further. Asking questions of the world in this
way – the world of politics especially – launches you on a kind of quest; the quest to
get to the essence of things. Once you have found the holy grail (of the
essence of things), the quest resolves itself into a mere technical business
of showing how, because the essence of things is essentially like this
(whatever that might be), then life is the way that it is: in this instance
dangerous. Asking why is a time honoured way of proceeding. But I think
there is a better one. The better one is to ask the how question.
This problem is
discussed in Chapter 2.
An example of this type
of thinking is the way
people put things down
to ‘human nature’. See
also Chapters 5 and 7.
In this instance, the how question asks, how does the world become dangerous?
Asking the how question does not mean that you do not address essential questions to
do with the nature of things. You can and you do. But you approach them from a
different direction. Things always become dangerous in specific historical ways. The how
question focuses on how they do so. That is why I think that it is a better way of
proceeding. You start with the specificity of things, first, and this allows you to put
essentialist arguments in their place: which is always a historical place.
In the process of asking and answering the how question in respect of danger, you
will also discover that part of the answer to how things become dangerous is because
people insist on a certain essential commitment to, or express a faith in, the essence of
things. Within every process of becoming dangerous, historically, certain essentialist
beliefs will be operating. But so also will many other local, historical, technical, scientific
matters as well as the accidents of pure contingency; events that have nothing, it seems,
to do with the security and defence policy making that are privileged areas of dealing
with danger in global politics, but nonetheless impact upon them just the same.
This chapter therefore proceeds by foregrounding ‘how’ things become dangerous,
but it also directs attention to the background of essentialist beliefs – known as
ontologies – that are always already also present in all the different ways of construing
the world as a dangerous place and talking about what makes the world a dangerous
place and what ought to be done about it.
One final introductory point is necessary. The chapter takes the transformation of
US strategic policy that occurred during the 1990s and first decade of the new century
as its example. It does so for several reasons. First, this new military strategic discourse
was part of the US response to the end of the Cold War. It transformed military strategic
perceptions of global danger. Second, the example is a good one because it concerns
how a whole new military strategic architecture of perceiving and acting upon danger
was fashioned in the US during the course of the last 20 years. Finally, network-centric
warfare provides a good illustration because while it appeared to be driven by the techno-
scientific transformation known as the information revolution that took place during
the course of the same period, this revolution itself was a vehicle for transforming
essential beliefs about the very nature of material reality. Material reality came to be
described in both informational and biological terms precisely because all life was said
to be, ‘essentially’, a matter of information. Networking not only became a new, or
newly emphasised, technique, it also became an ontology. If you see the world comprised
of networks operating as a network you will see danger differently, and act accordingly.
In providing an interrogation of how we become what we are taught to fear, what
follows reinforces the point by showing how, in the specific instance of network-centric
warfare, the US military was taught to fear dangers in global politics differently so that
it could fight global wars differently. After 9/11 this transformation of security and war
policymaking impacted as much on the civil and domestic structures of the countries
of the entire North Atlantic rim as it did on their global military adventures.
One way or another, whether in fact you begin by asking why or by asking how,
danger goes to the heart of what we essentially think we are, how we are historically
shaped into what we are, and what we want to become. The politics of global danger
is both a politics of truth as well as a politics of identity.
520 MICHAEL DILLON
Chapter 18 shows how
construing the financial
crisis in a particular
way silences other ways
of thinking, Chapter 23
argues that identifying
the Afghanistan–
Pakistan border area as
‘risky’ enables certain
types of violence, and
Chapter 2 discusses the
effect ways of thinking
have on our actions in
the world in broader
terms.
The Cold War is
discussed in Chapter 26.
Other instances where
changes in technology
seemed to be driving
what happens are
discussed in Chapters 9,
11 and 23. But do
changes in technology
come first, or is
technological change
itself the result of social
change?
What happened on
9/11 is described in
Chapter 23.
WHAT MAKES THE WORLD DANGEROUS? 521
When something is
thought of as a problem,
it is ‘problematised’: it
becomes a problem.
The chapter returns
to the notion of
problematisation later.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
NETWORK-CENTRIC WARFARE
In the twenty-first century, those calling for peace in the name of the radical inter –
dependence of humankind find themselves making very similar arguments about the
networked character of our civilisation to those made by new military strategic theorists
in the United States who, after the collapse of the Cold War, invented a new form of
war called network-centric warfare (Cebrowski and Garstka 1998; Alberts et al. 1999).
What they share is recognition of the networked character of our global civilisation and
the ways in which that networking has become central to our economic and social well-
being and to questions of peace and security.
Danger both civil and military is now widely conceived in networked terms. One
good, militarised example of this is the network-centric warfare that came out of the
US led Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) of the 1990s. In the process of summarising
it, I will also say something about contemporary problematisations of networked danger
in terms of terror and the threat posed by other civil contingencies such as social
breakdown or the disruption of critical national infrastructures like power, finance,
information, transportation, water, food and health systems. The information and bio –
logical revolutions problematised danger differently and changed the how as well as the
what of global danger.
Revolution in military affairs
From the 1980s onwards military equipment and military strategic
thinking alike began to respond to the information and communication
revolution that was revolutionising industrial production and social and
cultural life in the western world (Mathews and Treddenick 2001). The
claim was made that the impact of the information and com munication
revolution on military affairs has brought about what was first called a
Military Technical Revolution (MTR), now more popularly referred to
as a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). This RMA referred to two
things: equipment and thinking. The second of these is I think even
more important than the first.
Equipment
Informationalisation of weapon systems
The RMA referred to the very many ways in which the information and communication
revolution has transformed military equipment. In popular terms we have become
familiar with guided missiles, smart bombs that find their own ways to the target, and
the ability to fight 24/7 irrespective of weather and daylight. We now know also that
to light-up the enemy in electronic terms means you can destroy the enemy with near
certainty. Just as weapons were revolutionised through the information revolution, so
also were military communication systems. These are now global and local. They critically
depend upon what the US military calls the global information grid which, with the
FIGURE 24.1
A reflective view of the Blue Force Tracker
(BFT) networking tool. Northrop
Grumman Corp
Chapter 23 talks about
drone warfare.
Note that the suggestion
that you can destroy the
enemy with near
certainty says nothing
about whom else you
might kill in the process.
FIGURE 24.2
Airmen with the 67th
Network Warfare Wing
monitor internet activity to
maintain security of Air
Force computer networks at
Lackland Air Force Base,
Texas. Photo: Master Sgt
Jack Braden Courtesy of US
Air Force
aid of communication satellites, now covers the world with a fine information net or
mesh through which the coordination of large- and small-scale military operations now
depends (Libicki 2000).
We can summarise the impact of the information and communication revolution
on military equipment in terms of what I want to call ‘the informationalisation of
weapon and communication systems’. The counterpart of the informational isation
of weapons has, however, also been ‘the weaponisation of communication and
information’.
Weaponisation of communication and information
Just as information has become critical to the performance of weapon systems and their
allied command, control and communication systems, so also therefore has information
become a new domain of war. Precisely because military and other systems are themselves
so dependent upon information, information itself has become weaponised. Here we
are not simply referring to the traditional use of information for the purposes of political
522 MICHAEL DILLON
What has changed is the
military’s picture of the
world, in the terms used
in Chapter 2.
BOX 24.1 NETWORK-CENTRIC WARFARE
The single most important architect of this transformation of military cognition
was an American, Admiral Arthur Cebrowski. It was Cebrowski who virtually
invented the term network-centric warfare (NCW) in a leading article published
in the 1990s in the United States Naval Institute Proceedings. NCW became the
official military doctrine of the US in 2002. Almost all the basic ideas are
contained in Cebrowski’s essay. Cebrowski then went on to head a new
Pentagon Office of Force Transformation (OFT), tasked with carrying this
revolution in cognition throughout the American military. Championed by the
then secretary of state for defense, Donald Rumsfeld, the RMA suffered a
setback with the political and military reversals of the Iraq War. However much
these may have arrested the ideological fervour with which the RMA and NCW
were subsequently promoted, they have not materially affected the
reorganisation of military training deployment, war-fighting and war-thinking
that was inaugurated through NCW by the RMA.
FIGURE 24.3
Admiral Arthur
Cebrowski
For more on the changes
in communication
technology see
Chapter 9.
WHAT MAKES THE WORLD DANGEROUS? 523
and military propaganda. We are referring instead to the ways in which information
systems themselves are used against other information systems, for example, in that new
form of war called ‘cyberwar’. Informationalising weapons impacted also on the exercise
of military command. To explore this and related changes such as those affecting
operational military concepts and doctrines, as well as the training of military personnel,
we have to move to the second most important feature of the RMA: changes in how
the military think about the world.
Military thinking
In many respects we can say that these changes were concerned with the impact of
information and communication on military equipment. The second and perhaps even
more profound impact of the revolution in information and communications on the
military has been a change not only in equipment but also in cognition. By that I simply
mean that it has changed the military view of the world. It is the job of militaries to
view the world in terms of danger. The question, once more, is to begin by asking, how
do they now view the world in terms of danger? The answer is that they do so
comprehensively now in network terms and, increasingly, also through concepts and
metaphors which they take from the life sciences, such as biology. Here is how.
Network thinking
Network-centric thinking is consciously modelled on fundamental changes that have
taken place in the American and in the global capitalist economy. These draw their
inspiration not simply from the revolution in information and communication tech –
nology, but also from the molecular revolution in biology. What the revolution in
What is a threat to some,
may be an opportunity
to someone else.
Note how the networked
character of information
technology is thought
to have enabled the
protests collectively
known as the Arab
Spring: see Chapter 9.
524 MICHAEL DILLON
information and communication technology shares with the revolution in molecular
biology is a reduction of material reality to ‘code’: information code for ICT (Informa –
tion and Com munications Technology) and genetic code for molecular biology (Dillon
2002 and 2004). Here a convergence of thinking based on the overarching idea of code
fuels new ways of doing business and of construing danger in organic or biological ways.
Network has become a key term of art for both business and the military since it is also
a key term of art in the communication and information as well as in the life sciences.
Traditional geo-political thinking begins with bodies – like states – and then moves
to how relations are transacted between these bodies. Network thinking reverses the
flow. It thinks first in terms of relations and then about how relations shape the nature
of bodies. It therefore emphasises interconnectedness, the means by which
interconnectedness is formed, what travels down the channels of inter connection, the
speed of interconnection and, more generally the new creative opportunities associated
with exploiting interconnectedness.
There is a corresponding emphasis on the dangers that interconnectedness may also
create; metaphors of disease and contagion, and of security in terms of immunity and
resilience, also abound. Danger is seen in viral terms as something that is able to work
on the body because of the ways in which it is also part of the body, whether the body
is seen as the biological body or the corporate, social or military body. Security and war
in the information age thus came to be thought in ways more akin to epidemiology,
the science of pathology and disease management, or of surgical intervention. Threats
arising within the system, in consequence of the very network character of the system,
rather than merely posed from outside the system, came to prominence. Just as the
individual biological body came to be understood in terms of complex adaptive networks
of informational exchange governed in molecular terms by genetic code, then, so also
did the (US) military body increasingly understand itself in terms of complex adaptive
informational exchange networks as well.
Network operations were thereby claimed to deliver the same powerful advantages
to the US military that they produced for American businesses, and global capital more
generally. In network-centric warfare doctrine, information, speed, self-synchronisation
and flexibility were said to be at a premium just as they remain so in the management
ideology of global capitalism.
This elevation of information did not simply open up new enterprises for the military
as it did for business – information warfare and digitised battlespaces for the military,
e-commerce and so on for business. Neither did it mean that information was only a
force multiplier, as the military say, increasing the fire-power and effectiveness of tradi –
tional weapon systems. Information was embraced as the new principle of formation –
the ‘prime mover’ was the expression used by two of the RAND Corporation’s most
prolific information and network-centric warfare theorists (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 1997;
Dillon and Reid 2009). No longer were military formations conceived as rallying around
the flag. They rallied around – they were rallied through – information networks.
The strategic debate
Network-centric warfare became official US military strategic doctrine in May 2000 with
the publication of the Pentagon’s ‘Joint Vision 2020’. Joint Vision 2020 committed
In colloquial terms
‘20/20 vision’ refers to
perfect vision: at 20 feet
from the optician’s chart,
a person is able to read
the lowest line of letters.
The metric equivalent is
6/6 vision
For more on the problem
of imperialism see
Chapters 16 and 21.
The fall of the Soviet
Union meant the end of
the Cold War: see
Chapter 26.
For a discussion of
capitalism in the global
political economy see
Chapter 17.
FIGURE 24.4
Joint Vision 2020 from
http://www.dtic.mil/future
jointwarfare/. Public
domain
WHAT MAKES THE WORLD DANGEROUS? 525
the US to what the document called ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’. Claiming to look
ahead to 2020, the document was clearly also aspiring to a military capable of ‘perfect
vision’ and ‘real-time’ control to achieve what the document called ‘Information
Superiority’ and ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’. Joint Vision 2020 expressed a radically
new military imperial vision. Empires are, however, also built on fear as much as they
are on lust for control. They are about danger as much as they are about power. Even
prior to 9/11 and because of the new military strategic logic that it had adopted, fearing
every virtuality as well as every actuality, US military doctrine came to seek a form of
global control through forces capable of continuous adaptation and transformation
according to changing global threats.
There has been no revolution in military affairs alone. The RMA was the military
face of the revolution in global affairs brought about in particular by the coincidence
of the fall of the Soviet Union and the revolutionary digitalisation of information
and com munication technology. Thus the RMA was only as much an American way
of war, as capitalism is an American way of making a living. Everybody got in on the act.
Not least terrorist networks. For nothing was better designed to send such a powerful,
threatening and radically disruptive message around the world’s political and military
communications networks than the bloody spectacle they engineered on 11 September
2001.
http://www.dtic.mil/futurejointwarfare/
http://www.dtic.mil/futurejointwarfare/
526 MICHAEL DILLON
For a discussion of the
importance of territory
see Chapter 11.
Changing conceptions of the battlespace
Traditional forms of conquest, as well as traditional measures of national capa bility, land
or raw materials, for example, receded in significance under the logics and rationales of
network-centric warfare. They did not disappear. But they became complexly related
with these new discourses of threat, danger and war to form an ever more challenging
global landscape of civil–military power relations.
Network forces are not designed to mobilise, march to the front or conduct mass
frontal assaults or landings. Galvanised by information and intelligence garnered through
the critical global infrastructures of surveillance and communication systems, employing
informationalised weapon systems and weaponised inform ation systems, network forces
are supposed to swarm in combined arms and, together with hired locals, gather and
disperse in different volumes and forma tions, combinations and directions. Consider,
for example, the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. The duration of hostilities threatens
to be just as indeterminate as the new battlespace.
War – the war on terror in particular – thus threatens to become infinite, while
danger is seen in every aspect of our networked world (Reid 2007; Dillon and Reid
2009). It has also become big business since much of the military and security business
that it has created is privately conducted. Danger is of course always big business; all
our most powerful truth telling institutions – churches, states, media and corporations
– claim a part of it and live well off it (Shearer 1998).
FIGURE 24.5
Critical Infrastructures. From ‘Information Technology Research for Critical Infrastructure Protection’,
Shankar Sastry et al., Summary of NSF/OSTP workshop, 19–20 September 2002
Most interesting and disturbing of all, however, is how the question of who or
what is the enemy has been re-problematised. For in a networked world of danger
everyone and everything is potentially dangerous and potentially therefore also the
enemy. Distinguishing friend from enemy becomes a permanent full time occupation
and it is moreover conducted within radical uncertainty of detecting who is friend and
who is foe. Who looks to be friendly now, and who may turn into an enemy at some
future date. From the perspective of network-centric warfare, particularly that practised
now in the war on terror, it is no longer simply a matter of what makes the world
dangerous, it is a matter of everything being in a virtual state of becoming-dangerous
(Dillon 2007).
GENERAL RESPONSES
THINKING IN TERMS OF STRATEGY AND SECURITY
Defence, security and strategic studies
Global questions concerning danger and defence were once the preserve of the
disciplines of security and strategic studies. These told us where danger lay, what things
we should be frightened of, and where the solution to dealing with those fears could
be found. They were able to do this because they once championed a very clear and
relatively unopposed interpretation of global politics. In particular they claimed to
understand political reality and they called themselves Realists (Molloy 2006). There
are, however, different ways of interpreting reality, just as there are different ways of
problematising danger. People inhabit different realities and so they also fear different
things. Problematisations of the real are intimately related to problematisations of
danger. Tell me what you think is real and I will tell you what you fear.
Realists said that the world was inhabited by agents. This agent, or subject, could
be a collective or an individual human entity. It could be you or me or it could be a
state or a nation. It didn’t much matter because the subject was said to operate in more
or less the same rationally self-interested way whether or not it was conceived as an
individual or collective entity. Global politics was said to consist in such rationally self-
interested behaviour. This did not prevent cooperation and collaboration. It simply
meant that such collaboration was said to be goal-centred and self-interested as well.
If it did not work out then resort to war was ultimately legitimate.
At least in international law, this right of states to make war was progressively
restricted in the twentieth century. Massification, industrialisation and nuclearisation of
war had raised the cost of war. Liberal thinking designed to bring war under the rule
of law also became more influential. These developments did not end war. They merely
changed the ways in which states legitimated their resort to war. Consider for example
the odium that still surrounds the way in which US president George W. Bush and
British prime minister Tony Blair resorted to war against Iraq without the sanction of
the United Nations. Note also that lack of international legitimation that they insisted
upon for everyone else did not prevent them from waging war without international
legal sanction themselves.
WHAT MAKES THE WORLD DANGEROUS? 527
People operating within
different language games
inhabit different realities.
See Chapter 2.
For a description of how
this works in liberal
economics and the
thinking of Adam Smith
see Chapter 17.
Since Einstein’s work on
relativity and the ideas of
quantum mechanics,
physicists no longer
think of time and space
in the Newtonian way
they used to. Time does
not run at the same rate
everywhere, for example,
and the world is
ultimately unpredictable:
general laws no longer
apply, and experimental
observations change the
thing they try to observe.
Environmental thinking
sometimes retains this
focus on human futures
and human needs:
Chapter 3.
528 MICHAEL DILLON
Strategy is the study of the way subjects were said to calculate their goal driven
behaviour. It had a lot of affinity with other disciplines like economics, which also
presumed that the world was populated by such rationally calculating subjects. The
strategist’s subject of choice was the state rather than the corporation or firm. What
these and other disciplines also shared was a way of understanding the structure of the
real (ontology) and acquiring knowledge about it (epistemology).
Ontologically, the real, was said to be out there, existing independently of us.
Epistemologically it was also said, however, that the real was comprised of intelligible
laws that were accessible, in addition, to certain scientific ways of accessing them. The
real was in short readable. Realists and strategists were preoccupied with telling us how
to read it, especially where questions of global danger were concerned. This was a
Newtonian universe in which there was one reality governed by one set of laws irrespec –
tive of time and place.
Hence what traditional security and strategic studies taught about the fear, danger
and politics which motivated their so-called rational subject reflected this view of the
world. Note incidentally how anthropocentric (human-centred) these concerns were.
The planet didn’t figure. Neither did other species. They only figure now in as much
as they add additional issues to the strategic agendas of rationally calculating subjects.
The world remains for them a space for rational subjects to use and abuse in pursuit of
their interests. Since the essential nature of state behaviour globally was said to be as
fixed as the laws of motion, the issue for such Realists was reduced to polishing up the
mirror they held to reality so as to get as clear a reflection as they thought possible.
States would be endangered if they forgot or operated in ignorance of the laws reflected
back in this representation of the real.
This view of the real and of the world of global danger associated with it – of goal
driven states pursuing conflicting ambitions up to the point of war if necessary – suffuses
our entire culture because it is based upon a widely shared view of human beings as
more or less rationally calculating subjects. Traditional security studies taught this
modern way of understanding the real and its dangers; such as those of not calculating
your self-interests wisely. In doing so they also claimed to be able to better educate
subjects because these generally seemed to be incompetent at being rational and in need
therefore of such education.
But even as it attained its apogee, this account of the real was being undermined
from within the very establishments which had encouraged and propagated it – the
United States Department of Defense, the US armed forces and their teaching and
training establishments. That challenge came in the form not simply of network-centric
warfare but through the wider philosophy which underpinned this form of warfare. That
philosophy was the philosophy of ‘transformation’ enshrined in the Pentagon’s Office
of Force Transformation (OFT); established in 2001 but broken up in 2006 with the
fall of its patron Donald Rumsfeld.
Part of the venom which surrounds the debate about network-centric warfare, and
which once surrounded Rumsfeld and the OFT, is precisely the fact that network-centric
warriors were propagating a different understanding of the real. They precipitated an
internecine fight about the nature of the real as such. On the one side were the old
geo-political warriors, schooled in Newtonian physics, Realism and the official history
of peoples, states and fear proclaiming universal laws going back to the ancient Greeks
FIGURE 24.6
Donald Rumsfeld as US Defense Secretary.
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
For more on the
problems with the idea
of someone being
sovereign or ‘in charge’
see Chapters 7 and 28.
WHAT MAKES THE WORLD DANGEROUS? 529
and Romans. On the other side were those schooled in cybernetics, information
systems, communications theory and molecular biology. These proclaimed a more bio-
political reality comprised of complex adaptive systems which change their very nature
as they behave in co-evolutionary ways with other systems. On the one hand, then,
were the old geo-politicians for whom someone or some body – a sovereign of some
description – had to be in charge of things. On the other were the newer, let’s call them
bio-philosophers relying on the idea of the evolution and co-evolution of complex
adaptive systems capable of ordering themselves without anyone being in charge, or
being sovereign: capitalism was a prime example.
Critical security thinking
If, however, the world does operate according to simple universal laws irrespective of
time and place, laws that people had to learn and obey, how come people required so
much Realist education to understand this? The answer could not simply be that people
are ignorant and stupid. They have been around for a long time and, if the rules of ‘the
real’ were that simple, word would have got around. A seed of doubt arises here. Perhaps
the world is not merely how Realists describe it. Perhaps the real that the Realists
proclaimed was just that: something that Realists proclaimed. Perhaps the real which
Realists claimed to understand was not only different from the way they understood it,
but perhaps it also required different means of understanding to appreciate what ‘the
real’ was like in ways that the Realists could not understand given their ways of looking
at the world. What was at issue, in other words, was not simply the material nature of
reality but the means of apprehending that reality: truth and knowledge.
However much ‘the real’ stands obdurately outside and independent of us, and it
does, it is not possible to escape the fact that our experience of the world is necessarily
always mediated through the means we have of understanding, interpreting and
communicating our different accounts of what the world is like. Even Realists sometimes
admitted this. Where they refused to do so, their network-centric warfare counterparts
had already sold the pass on them ‘onto logically’ and ‘epistemologically’. By that I mean
network-centric thinking understands the nature of reality (ontology) to be different,
just as it deals with different ways of knowing that reality (epistemology). Realism’s
credentials were undermined from within where they had once been so powerfully
accredited. The game of Realism began to die where it had once been so alive, at the
centre of the US military machine.
If all this was so – and it was – then perhaps the reality which the Realists
proclaimed was not as universal and uniform as they said that it was. If there are different
ways of accessing the real, and of course there are as the examples of physics and biology
indicate, then perhaps there are different experiences of the real as well. And if there
are different experiences of the real then it follows that there are necessarily also different
experiences of danger than those taught us through the (un)truth-telling practices of
the Realists.
Here, then, was the Achilles heel of traditional security and strategic studies. It was
a fundamental weakness which many critical security studies students began to probe
(Booth 2005). There are different schools of critical security studies but they shared at
least these three basic positions.
First they challenged the role which the goal-driven subject played in traditional
strategic and security studies. There the subject was supposed to come pre-formed
unaffected by its terms and conditions of life, just expressing a universal commitment
to goal-driven self-interested behaviour. Critical security studies did not deny that
humans can be self-interested or goal-driven and so on. They did, however, point out
how much this behaviour had to be learnt, how much it was conditioned. In other
words they argued that the goal driven subject did not pre-exist the power relations,
historical conditioning and learnt behaviour that made the subject of security and
strategic studies the subject it was said to be. In other words the ‘Realist’ nation or
state seeking security was very much itself a function or outcome of traditional defence
and security practices (Campbell 1998).
Second, they observed that there was more than one way of accessing the real.
Knowledge is plural, not single. It is itself also a form of critical practice in which
knowledge changes over time.
Third, they maintained that an intimate relation exists between knowledge and
power. Realists too understood that knowledge could be a form of power. But they
denied that their own truth-telling knowledge was a form of power, and appealed to
the idea instead that their knowledge was a disinterested representation of the real.
Critical analysts pointed out that wherever there was knowledge a form of power was
also at work. Michel Foucault coined the term power/knowledge to make this point.
In other words they introduced a note of suspicion into the very idea of disinterested
knowledge because it was perfectly evident that truth-telling practices, better to use the
ambivalent expression (un)truth-telling practices, are one of the single most important
instruments of power. Equally, it was perfectly evident also that that truth-telling
practices represent an enormously powerful force in how we live our lives, and even in
how we imagine life to be. All knowledge is interested: it is invested with perspective.
That does not disqualify it as knowledge. It just teaches us to be more circumspect
about knowledge-claims, and always to ask who makes them, who gains and who loses
in the advance of certain knowledge-claims and so on. We have, in particular, to get
savvy about the power/knowledge games – the truth and un-truth telling practices –
that teach us how to secure ourselves and what we ought to fear.
530 MICHAEL DILLON
For more about Foucault
see Chapters 4, 7, 11 and
23.
Robert Cox also argues
that theories always
imply a perspective: see
Chapter 1.
WHAT MAKES THE WORLD DANGEROUS? 531
There are always power and political implications to the pursuit of knowledge.
Equally, however, there is always some kind of knowledge at stake in the practices of
power and politics as well. Whatever claims are therefore made about the nature of the
real, those claims may be made in the language of truth but they will always cash out
also in the language of politics and power as well. There are different kinds of truths,
different kinds of truth-telling practices and different kinds of truth-tellers.
BROADER ISSUES
UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS
Donald Rumsfeld was appointed US Secretary of State for Defense in January 2001.
The White House announced his resignation immediately after the Republican Party
losses in the Congressional Elections of November 2006. Rumsfeld was the great
political patron of the RMA, proponent of network-centric warfare and ideologue of
the doctrine of transformation. Despite his fall from grace, US military strategic dis –
course and posture had been changed irreversibly in the previous ten years.
Rumsfeld was also widely reviled and parodied for his use of the jargon of network-
centric warfare and of force transformation. Apart from justified political opposition to
the decisions he was making while defense secretary, such as the invasion of Iraq, the
way he expressed himself provoked outrage and laughter because his language expressed
a different understanding of the real. Incidentally it was still spoken on behalf of a
traditional understanding of the real as well; that of US geopolitical imperial interests.
In consequence it contained many contradictions. But contradiction is characteristic of
politics, especially security politics. It is often the fuel that drives it. Seeking security,
BOX 24.2 THE RUMSFELD DOCTRINE
THE UNKNOWN
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
(Donald Rumsfeld, 12 February 2002,
Department of Defense news briefing)
There is more about the
Iraq war in Chapters 8
and 28.
for example, we very often increase the dangers to which we are exposed (consider the
case of the balance of terror struck by the nuclear doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruc –
tion). Contradictions also afford the gap, however, through which critique enters.
Rumsfeld’s reflections, in news briefings especially, spoke of a world of under –
standing that was relatively novel to defence and security specialists; as well as to
America’s and the world’s press corps. It was an understanding of the real that has in
fact, however, been around for a long time. It, too, goes back to the Greeks, but its
teaching had long fallen out of use, especially in the study of international relations and
strategy. It has been resurrected and refurbished (given modern expression) in the new
language of military strategic transformation and change. Rumsfeld’s most notorious
reflections on it, repeated here, had an almost poetic quality, which is why I record
them as a poem.
They nonetheless contain some profound insights, especially about how we
moderns problematise danger. I want to end this chapter by drawing out those insights.
I especially want to draw attention to three closely related points. First, what Rumsfeld’s
‘poetry’ teaches us about the modern reliance upon knowledge to problematise and
deal with danger. Second, what his reflections teach us about the intimate modern
alliance of power and knowledge (power/knowledge) when problematising danger.
Third, what Rumsfeld’s insistence on the significance of ‘unknown unknowns’ teaches
us about how ‘uncertainty’ has drifted back into the very epicentre of our problem –
atisation of fear and danger (Cilliers 1998). It is this in particular which calls into question
knowledge’s capacity to deal with the ‘unknown unknowns’ which now dominate our
global/local landscapes of fear and danger: the unintended consequences, the strategic
surprises, the bolts from the blue, the things perhaps to which the very light of our
techno-scientific knowledge actually blinds us. In short all that ‘shit’ which we are unable
to see but which Forrest Gump in the 1994 movie says happens and with whose often
terrible consequences we are always going to have to deal.
Perfect vision
Recall that the document which authorised network-centric warfare as the military
strategic doctrine of the US Armed Forces was, however, entitled ‘Joint Vision 2020’.
Titles like this should always be taken seriously. Experts spend a lot of time crafting
them, and they always give away more than they intend. The ‘Joint’ in the title
obviously refers to the interdependence of land, sea, air and other forces in the US
military – joint commands, combined operations and so on. But it was also very clearly
meant to invoke connectedness in general – the doctrine of networks as such. Equally,
Joint Vision 2020 was not only looking forward 20 years to the year 2020. Again it
was clearly invoking another idea; that which opticians refer to as 20/20 vision by which
they mean ‘perfect vision’.
Perfect vision is ordinarily associated politically only with hindsight. Only by
looking back, it is said, can we see clearly how things really were. But what network-
centric warriors are clearly also aspiring to is 20/20 vision in two other respects. The
first of these is 20/20 vision in real time so that they can comprehend instantly all that
is going on in the ‘global battlespace’. Second, is 20/20 vision as foresight. They do
not want to be caught out by what is coming down the road, because in the end you
532 MICHAEL DILLON
Mutual Assured
Destruction – or MAD –
was the name given to
the nuclear posture
during the Cold War in
which the United States
threatened to annihilate
the Soviet Union in the
event that it should use
nuclear weapons against
it, even though this
would have meant that
the Soviet Union would
have responded by
annihilating the US in
turn.
WHAT MAKES THE WORLD DANGEROUS? 533
can only fully escape danger and make everything secure if you can pre-empt the nasty
surprises which time itself has in store for us. Think or watch Minority Report, Steven
Spielberg’s 2002 science fiction film set in the year 2054 AD, where crime is virtually
eliminated from Washington DC thanks to an elite law enforcing squad, ‘Precrime’
(Weber 2006).
Ultimately, perfect vision expresses the desire for perfect security. But, perfect
security – an end to danger – requires bringing an end to time. Were it possible, 20/20
vision would do just that. The continuous transformation to which network-centric
warfare appeals is revealed here in its own terms as the primordial organising dream of
political modernity; to bring an end to time here and now in this world through the
perfection of our knowledge as the perfect vision of real time, fully transparent and
communicable, information and foresight. In net war terms this is called ‘shared
situation awareness’.
The more we seek to secure, however, the more danger we seem to bring into the
world. Spielberg explored these and other themes in his film. There is then a profound
paradox at work in this military ideology. It wills the end to the change which the
operation of time itself entails. But an end to time would simul taneously also mean the
end of us; because we are time’s creatures. No time. No us. The will to perfect security
FIGURE 24.7
Still from Steven Spielberg’s science
fiction film Minority Report. 20th
Century Fox/Dreamworks/The
Kobal Collection
534 MICHAEL DILLON
expresses the will to bring an end to ourselves. Fortunately, life is not so easily secured.
The object of security (life) keeps objecting to the ways in which security seeks to secure
it. It escapes being secured, and this introduces a point to which I will return in my
conclusion. Paradoxical as it may sound, in order to survive we may have to become
less obsessed with securing ourselves, recognising that there is more to life, and there –
fore more to politics, than politics of security which continuously also endanger us.
Recall, as well, the emphasis on continuous adaptability, transformation and change
to which the US military now aspires, embracing the idea of co-evolution with the
battlespace in order always to prevail over the enemy, whoever and whatever the enemy
might be. Transformation is a military strategic vision of permanent revolution. A never
ending event. But what this itself threatens is no profound emancipatory change in the
human condition, just permanent revolution of the same, a sameness that escapes time
itself.
And yet Rumsfeld also teaches us a further paradox: that there are unknown
unknowns out there which our knowledge cannot reach and which our 20/20 vision
will never attain. Note the profound shift that this records in the truth-telling practices
of twenty-first-century security. They are founded now in uncertainty. Uncertainty is
no mere ignorance which knowledge will eventually overcome. ‘Unknown unknowns’
have become the basis of its truth-telling practices now. Indeed, everything that we are
now taught by western political, military and police authorities in their war on terror,
especially, teaches us that we do not know when the strike will come, we do not know
where the strike will come, and we cannot estimate how devastating the strike may be.
But they are certain of this uncertainty. Uncertainty or radical contingency – not know –
ing and not being able to know – has paradoxically now, at the very height of our techno-
scientific civilisation and its dream of 20/20 vision, become the very principle of
formation around which military strategic and policing powers of the west revolve in
their response to the dangers which our globally networked world now presents to us.
Being-in-formation
Excuse the awful pun. But here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the modern
vision which Donald Rumsfeld unwittingly poeticised has become one in which every
thing is said to be information and everything is said to be contin uously in-formation.
Things which are continuously undergoing transformation and change are not fixed.
They are always on their way to becoming something else. Our military, political and
economic leaders, and even some of our teachers, insistently tell us that we have to be
skilled at managing our own continuous transformation and change if we are to survive
the dangers of the battlespace or the market place, and the danger ultimately of
becoming outdated. Becoming outdated threatens unemployment, impoverishment,
famine, defeat and despoilation. These days becoming outdated spells death. That is
the fear we now teach ourselves. And yet that fear breeds another.
Becoming-dangerous
If no body, no thing is fixed, if every body is continuously in-formation, then it becomes
difficult to secure any body at all since we can never be quite sure what the body is that
we set out to secure. While our leaders simultaneous enjoin us to embrace transformation
FIGURE 24.8
‘Well . . . at least we don’t
have to worry about anarchy
any more.’ Artist: Ron Cobb,
1968
For more on Foucault’s
thinking see Chapters 4,
7, 11 and 23. Compare
this discussion of
problematisation with
the discussion of
language games in
Chapter 2.
and change, they are simultaneously also terrified by the fact that if we are continuously
in-formation in the ways that they recommend we may also be continuously becoming-
dangerous in ways that simply cannot be anticipated. No body is able to predict in
precisely what ways we are transforming ourselves. Daft as it sounded to the press corps
at the briefing in which he made these statements, this was the fear to which Rumsfeld
was giving expression. It is the fear of all rulers who rule through the prioritisation of
fear and danger. They do not know and cannot know what we are becoming and
therefore they do not know and cannot know what dangers we will present to ourselves
as well as to others. This recalls us back to that other time in American history and that
other president, Franklin Roosevelt. Remember it was Roosevelt who said we had
nothing to fear but fear itself. In another time confronted with other dangers we might
do well to recall those words and reflect on how rule through fear and danger con –
tinuously also endangers itself.
CONCLUSION
A neat way of summarising the points made so far is to say, in the words of Michel
Foucault, that what makes the world dangerous is a matter of problematisation (Foucault
2001). By that Foucault meant the many ways in which a crude state of affairs is
WHAT MAKES THE WORLD DANGEROUS? 535
translated into a specific problem or field of problems – he calls them fields of
intervention – demanding action and calling for certain solutions. We could therefore
say, in answer to the question, that what makes the world dangerous critically depends
upon how danger comes to be problematised in specific ways by the truth-telling
institutions and relations of power which constitute our societies.
Much greater emphasis has, however, been given in the twenty-first century to how
human beings become a danger to themselves (Perrow 1999). Among many other
factors the massification, industrialisation and nuclearisation of warfare, together with
the recognition of environmental catastrophe, drove that point home to many states
and societies during the course of the twentieth century. But there is an argument that
goes beyond the environmentalist argument that we endanger ourselves because we
endanger the environment. An argument is now regularly made instead – or in addition
– that it is the very networked ways in which our civilisation now functions that circulates,
intensifies and precipitates all sorts of new ways in which we endanger ourselves
(Barabasi 2003). To the degree that we have become networked societies (Castells
2000), then what makes the world dangerous for us are the very close-coupled networks
of global-local interchange – illustrated, for example, by the spread of disease and viruses
through food chains and transportation networks as well as by network-centric warfare
– which make our societies the societies that they are. The dangers to which we are
subject come packaged with our forms of life.
FURTHER READING
Reid, Julian (2006) Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity, and the
Defence of Logistical Societies, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
An application of Foucault and other critical theorists, illustrating how biopolitics makes war
on life, explicitly so in the war on terror.
Dillon, Michael and Julian, Reid (2009) The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live,
London: Routledge.
Tracking the relationship between liberalism, biopolitics and war, this book also explains how
the RMA and network-centric warfare arose and how network thinking came to permeate
security thinking throughout liberal states and societies at the beginning of the twenty-first
century.
Dillon, Michael and Luis Lobo-Guerrero (2008) ‘Biopolitics of Security in the Twenty-First
Century: An Introduction’, Review of International Studies 34, 2.
Provides a general introduction to what happens to security technologies when they take life
as their referent object; also touches on the question of what happens to life when it becomes
a security object.
Campbell, David (1998) Writing Security, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
A pioneering work that deftly counteracted the politics of identity and subjectivity that had
dominated international relations and security studies throughout the Cold War period and
beyond.
Dillon, Michael (2008) ‘Underwriting Security’, Security Dialogue 39, 2–3.
Seeks an additional shift in our analytical focus, and empirical field of observation, to the
biopolitics of security, which take ‘life’ rather than identity as their referent object, and
especially to the ways in which the biopoliticisation of security installs ‘risk’ as one of its single
most important devices.
536 MICHAEL DILLON
Castells, Manuel (2000) The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford: Blackwell.
Explains the rise of globally networked societies and forms a background for understanding
the radical interconnectedness of the world today.
Cebrowski, Vice Admiral Arthur and John Garstka (1998) ‘Network Centric Warfare: Its Origin
and Future’, US Naval Institute Proceedings 124, January: 28–35.
The classic account of network-centric thinking and network-centric warfare. Get your minds
around this text and you will understand what is going on, thus equipping yourselves to start
posing other questions about how our contemporary discourses of danger unite military
strategic and other discourses of security.
Foucault, Michel (2001) Fearless Speech, New York: Semiotext(e).
Start your adventure thinking about contemporary problematisations of security with the aid
of Foucault here; specifically the last lecture which explains what problematisation means.
WEBSITES
Official website of the Foucault Society, http://www.foucaultsociety.org/
Rich source further references by Foucault and on Foucault.
Biopolitics of Security Network, http://www.keele.ac.uk/research/lpj/bos/
Website specifically devoted to the application of Foucault to questions of security and war.
Office of the now disbanded US Office of Force Transformation, http://www.oft.osd.mil/
Rich source of material on the relation of transformation to contemporary US military
strategic doctrine.
RAND Corporation website on national security, http://www.rand.org/research_areas/
national_security/
Source of military strategic classics on network-centric warfare, information warfare and the
war on terror. Paradigmatic of contemporary military strategic discourse and the ways in which
it colonises hitherto civil issues.
Home page of the UK Civil Contingencies Secretariat and the strategy of national resilience,
http://www.ukresilience.info/ccs/aims.aspx
Use as a resource to track how security as resilience differs from simple military security and
is disseminated throughout UK civil society.
Home page of the UK Ministry of Defence, http://www.mod.uk/defenceinternet/home
Use as a device to track how the UK mimics US military strategic discourse.
US Department of Defense website, http://www.defenselink.mil/
Use for direct illustration of themes made in the chapter.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I want to record my thanks to Manav Guha. Without him I would not have the
understanding of network-centric warfare which I have, or be as concerned about it as
I am. What I know I have learnt through continuous question and answer with him.
REFERENCES
Alberts, David S., John J. Garstka and Frederick P. Stein (1999) Network Centric Warfare:
Developing and Leveraging Information Superiority, 2nd edn, Washington, DC: US
Department of Defense, Command and Control Research Program (CCRP).
Arquilla, John and David Ronfeldt (1997) ‘Information Power and Grand Strategy: In Athena’s
Camp’, in John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in
the Information Age, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation.
WHAT MAKES THE WORLD DANGEROUS? 537
538 MICHAEL DILLON
Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo (2003) Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What
It Means, London: Penguin Books.
Booth, Ken (2005) Critical Security Studies and World Politics, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Campbell, David (1998) Writing Security, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Castells, Manuel (2000) The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford: Blackwell.
Cebrowski, Arthur and John Garstka (1998) ‘Network Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future’,
US Naval Institute Proceedings 124, January: 28–35.
Cebrowski, Vice Admiral (Retd) Arthur K., Director, Office of Force Transformation (2002)
Prepared Statement for the US House Appropriations Committee, 13 March.
Cilliers, Paul (1998) Complexity and Postmodernism, London: Routledge.
Dalby, Simon (2002) Environmental Security, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Der Derian, James (2001) Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment
Network, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Dillon, Michael (2002) ‘Network Society, Network-Centric Warfare and the State of Emergency’,
Theory, Culture and Society 19, 4: 71–9.
––––(2004) ‘Virtual Security. A New Science of (Dis)order’, Millennium: Journal of International
Studies 32, 3: 531–58.
––––(2007) ‘Governing Terror’, International Political Sociology 1, 1: 7–28.
Dillon, Michael and Julian Reid (2001) ‘Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War’,
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 30 1: 1–26.
––––(2009) The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live, London: Routledge.
Farrell, Theo and Tim Bird (2008) ‘The Transformation of the British Armed Forces’, in Terry
Terriff, Theo Farrell and Frans Osinga (eds) The Dynamics of Military Transformation in
NATO, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Foucault, Michel (1988) ‘Truth and Power’, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. C. Gordon, L. Marshal,
J. Mepham and K. Sober, Power/Knowledge, Brighton: Harvester Press.
––––(2001) Fearless Speech, New York: Semiotext(e).
Libicki, Martin (2000) Who Runs What in the Global Information Grid?, Santa Monica, CA:
RAND.
Mathews, Ron and Jack Treddenick (eds) (2001) Managing the Revolution in Military Affairs,
London: Palgrave.
McLuhan, Marshall (2001) Understanding Media, London: Routledge
Molloy, Sean (2006) The Hidden History of Realism: A Genealogy of Power, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Office of Force Transformation (2004) Elements of Defense Transformation, Washington, DC:
US Department of Defense, http://www.oft.osd.mil/library/library_files/document_383_
ElementsOfTransformation_LR .
Perrow, Charles (1999) Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Reid, Julian (2007) The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity and the
Defence of Logistical Societies, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Rumsfeld, Donald (2002) Department of Defense news briefing, 12 February.
Shapiro, Michael J. (2007) ‘The New Violent Cartography’, Security Dialogue 38, 3: 291–313.
Shearer, David (1998) Private Military Armies, Adelphi Paper 316, London: IISS.
UK Ministry of Defence (2005) Network Enabled Capability, JSP 777, London: Ministry of
Defence.
Weber, Cynthia (2006) Imagining America at War: Morality, Politics and Film, London:
Routledge.
For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
CHAPTER 25
What can we do to stop people
harming others?
Anne Orford
■ The question
INTERVENING FOR HUMANITY?
■ Illustrative example
SAVING TIMOR-LESTE
■ General responses
LAW AND THE EXCEPTIONAL
■ Broader issues
LEGALITY, LEGITIMACY AND THE POLITICS OF
INTERVENTION
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
INTERVENING FOR HUMANITY?
The question of ‘what can we do to stop people harming others?’ has animated much
public engagement with international politics since the end of the Cold War. During
the 1990s, this question was discussed in terms of the legitimacy of humanitarian
intervention. The resort to force in international relations began to achieve a new
respectability, not least because for many it seemed to offer a means for the international
community, or at least a liberal alliance of democratic states, to bring human rights and
democracy to protect people suffering in situations of genocide, civil war or large-scale
human rights violations. In 2001, a significant shift in this debate was signalled with
the publication of a report by the International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty (or ICISS) entitled The Responsibility to Protect (ICISS 2001). ICISS was
an initiative, sponsored by the Canadian government, undertaken in response to serious
concerns about the legality and legitimacy of the 1999 NATO action in Kosovo. The
responsibility to protect concept is premised upon the notion, to quote former secretary-
The thinking that took
place around Spanish
colonization is discussed
in Chapter 21. That
chapter also considers
the tensions inherent in
‘helping others’.
See Chapter 1 for more
on the term ‘Third
World’.
Leonid Brezhnev was
leader of the Soviet
Union from 1964 to
1982. Ronald Reagan was
president of the United
States from 1981 to 1989.
The Cold War is also
discussed in Chapter 26.
540 ANNE ORFORD
general Kofi Annan, that ‘the primary raison d’être and duty’ of every state is to protect
its population (United Nations Secretary-General 2005: para. 135). If a state manifestly
fails to protect its population, the responsibility to do so shifts to the international
community. The responsibility to protect concept has since colonized internationalist
debates about conflict prevention, humanitarian action, peacekeeping and territorial
administration, and has garnered the support of a strikingly diverse range of states,
international and regional organizations and civil society groups.
The idea that force should be used to relieve the suffering of others of course
predates the 1990s. Christian Europe was for many centuries inspired to take action by
the idea of saving the souls or rescuing the bodies of people elsewhere, and the self-
appointed civilizing mission of European empire was premised upon the idea that
benevolent tutelage in the art of European civilization was the answer to the suffering
of those outside the community of faith. Even in the modern age of the United Nations
(UN) Charter, in which states have theoretically renounced recourse to war as an
instrument of foreign policy, there are many doctrinal and practical precursors to the
concept of humanitarian intervention. Peacekeeping, for example, does not appear in
the UN Charter as one of the grounds upon which recourse to force may be authorized.
It emerged in the early 1950s, alongside the process of decolonization, as a means of
responding to conflict over territory, threats to the sanctity of former colonial
investments and civil war in post-colonial states. The use of force against states in Africa,
the Middle East and Latin America was also justified during the Cold War on the basis
that intervention was necessary to defend citizens of the home state who were abroad.
Such doctrines served to justify armed intervention against Third World states, in the
name of defending individuals at risk of harm. Nonetheless, during the Cold War period,
the notion that a powerful state or a coalition of allies might intervene to rescue or
protect the people of another state could not easily be represented as an apolitical action.
The Brezhnev doctrine of intervention to protect the self-determination of socialist
countries in the face of capitalist threats, and the Reagan doctrine advocating the
legitimacy of pro-democratic invasion, were met with protest and derision. It was the
institutional and ideological conditions of the post-Cold War period which led to the
growth of support, amongst policy makers and academics, for the idea that force can
legitimately be used as a response to humanitarian challenges.
The institutional conditions which made possible the shift in support for the notion
of humanitarian intervention included the post-Cold War revitalization of the Security
Council and the corresponding expansion of its role in maintaining international peace
and security. For many years the coercive powers vested by the UN Charter in the
Security Council seemed irrelevant. During the Cold War, the Security Council was
paralysed by reciprocal use of the veto exercisable by the five permanent members (the
P5) – China, France, the United Kingdom, the United States and what was then the
Soviet Union. Under Article 27(3) of the Charter, decisions of the Security Council
require the affirmative vote of nine members, and the concurring votes of the permanent
members. The P5 regularly made use of that veto power during the Cold War to protect
against international interference in their spheres of interest. The ending of the Cold
War meant an end to that automatic use of the veto power. The range and nature of
resolutions passed by the Security Council in the decade following the end of the Cold
War suggested that the Council was willing to treat the failure to guarantee democracy
BOX 25.1 THE UN AND USE OF FORCE
The UN Charter was adopted by the fifty founding member states of the new organization at San
Francisco in June 1945. Under Article 24 of the UN Charter, the Security Council is the organ charged with
the primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security. Under Chapters VI and VII of
the UN Charter, the Security Council is granted powers to facilitate the pacific settlement of disputes, and
to decide what measures, including the use of armed force, should be taken to maintain or restore
international peace and security. UN member states renounce the use of force as a tool of foreign policy,
except in self-defence or where such action is authorized by the Security Council. The jurisdiction of the
Security Council under Chapter VII is triggered by the existence of a threat to the peace, a breach of the
peace or an act of aggression. Since 1989, the Security Council has proved itself willing to interpret the
phrase ‘threats to the peace’ broadly, to include situations of civil war or humanitarian crises.
FIGURE 25.1
The UN Security Council, United Nations, New York. Photo: Eskinder Debebe
HOW CAN WE STOP PEOPLE HARMING OTHERS? 541
or human rights, or to protect against humanitarian abuses, as a threat to peace and
security. The enthusiastic embrace of multilateral intervention (interventions involving
more than one intervening country) extended to support for military action undertaken
by regional organizations without Security Council authorization, most notably in the
case of the 1999 intervention in Kosovo by NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization), but also the intervention by the Economic Community of West African
States in Sierra Leone.
The ideological climate of the 1990s contributed to the plausibility of the notion
that military intervention might be benevolent and disinterested – that powerful states
might really come to liberate and not to occupy. A new kind of international law and
internationalist spirit seemed to have been made possible in the changed conditions of
a world no longer structured around the struggle between communism and capitalism.
During the 1990s, many international lawyers suggested that the process of globalization
was contributing to the emergence of an international community by creating the
conditions for an increasingly interdependent world, linked by new technologies and
the movement of goods, capital and people. In addition, globalization was thought to
promise a degree of integration into a common or harmonized legal system, an increased
move towards institutionalization, and a commitment to shared values of free trade,
security, human rights and democracy. While international legal texts still invoke
interdependence as a fact and the coming community of shared values as a destination,
interdependence post-September 11 is more likely to be figured in terms of a shared
vulnerability, and the coming community in terms of the fragility of faith and belief.
In this context, the idea that military intervention might be a means of responding to
the suffering of others has not disappeared, but it has shifted form, as we shall see. In
order to try to think about the stakes of different approaches to the question of ‘What
can we do to stop people harming others?’ I turn to look at an example of humanitarian
intervention in action – the case of Timor-Leste.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
SAVING TIMOR-LESTE
Timor was colonized by Portugal in the sixteenth century, and remained under
Portuguese occupation until 1942, when it was invaded by Japan. At the end of World
War II, the Portuguese resumed control over the territory. In 1960, the UN General
Assembly placed Timor on its list of non-self-governing territories, with Portugal as
the administering power. Following the leftist overthrow of Portugal’s authoritarian
government in 1974, the new social democratic government in Lisbon reacted
favourably to the call by Timorese nationalist movements for independence, but did
little to oversee or facilitate the process of Timorese self-determination. The Timorese
were left to resolve the difficulties that arose in the preparation for independence, in
particular the contest between rival groups advocating independence on the one hand
and integration with Indonesia on the other. The most popular among these groups
was the pro-independence FRETILIN (Frente Revolucionária do Timor-Leste Inde –
pendente or Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor), which Indonesian
542 ANNE ORFORD
The Cold War was
seen as a struggle
not only between
different states but
the ideologies that
they subscribed to.
Chapter 26 looks at
the role of ideology
in conflict, and
Chapter 22 discusses
competing ideologies
as an explanation
for war.
For what happened
on 11 September
2001, see Chapter 23;
for its impact on
security policy see
Chapter 24; for its
impact on immi –
gration policy in the
US, see Chapter 10;
and for changes in
perceptions of the
place of religion in
global politics after
September 11 see
Chapter 6.
Colonialism and its
continuing impact today
are examined in
Chapters 15 and 16.
HOW CAN WE STOP PEOPLE HARMING OTHERS? 543
President Suharto was to characterize in conversation with US president Gerald Ford
as ‘communist-influenced’.
On 28 November 1975, in the context of repeated cross-border attacks by
Indonesian special forces seeking to provoke civil war and thus provide an alibi for
intervention, FRETILIN declared Timor’s independence. A little over a week later, on
7 December 1975, Indonesia launched a general invasion of Timor, carried out with
the knowledge and tacit support of the US, UK and Australian governments. This
support was motivated by issues of regional security, concern that an independent Timor
might align itself with China and, in the case of Australia, the desire to secure access to
Timor Sea oil and gas. Indonesia was to remain in military occupation of Timor for the
next 25 years. During that period, an estimated 200,000 Timorese people were killed,
and human rights violations were widespread and brutal. Resistance to Indonesian
occupation was sustained throughout this period, perhaps most dramatically through
the activities of FALANTIL (Forças Armadas de Libertação Nacional de Timor-Leste
or Armed Forces for the National Liberation of East Timor) guerrillas based in the
mountains, but also through diplomatic activity by the Timorese diaspora, widespread
non-cooperation with Indonesian officials and clandestine resistance activities through –
out Timor. The UN condemned Indonesia’s aggression and continued to recognize
Portugal as the administering authority over the territory. Australia, however, recog-
nized de facto (factual) Indonesian occupation of Timor in 1978, and through the
commencement of negotiations over maritime delimitation in the Timor Sea gave de
jure (legal) recognition to the occupation. The result was the 1989 conclusion of the
P a c i f i c
O c e a n
I n d i a n O c e a n
P h i l i p p i n e
S e a
S o u t h C h i n a
S e a
C e l e b e s S e a
B a n d a S e a
A r a f u r a S e a
T i m o r S e a
F l o r e s S e a
C e r a m S e a
J a v a S e a
LAOS
CAMBODIA
MYANMAR
MALAYSIA
SINGAPORE
Pontianak
Manado
Samarinda
Balikpapan
Banjarmasin
Ujungpandang
Barito
Mahakam
Jarnbi
Palembang
Surabaya
Bogor
Bandung
Mataram
Medan
Pematangsiantar
Pekanbaru
Padeng Sumatra
Surnbawa
Lornbok
Madura
Sunawesl
Moluccas Is.
New Guinea
Puncak Jaya
Timor
Kupang
Jayapura
Flores
BaliJava
Yogyakarta
BARSIAN MTS
MAOKE MTS
IRIAN
JAYA
Mount
Merapi
Borneo
JAKARTA
KALIMANTAN
Sunda Strait
BRUNEI
AUSTRALIA
INDONESIA
EAST TIMOR
PHILIPPINES
PAPUA
NEW GUINEA
VIETNAM
THAILAND
Halmahera
FIGURE 25.2
Map of Timor-Leste in
context of Asia and
Australia
Timor Gap Treaty with Indonesia, the terms of which were very favourable to Australia
and allowed Australian access to oil and gas fields which would later become the subject
of claims by an independent Timor-Leste.
The 1999 intervention and trusteeship
In 1998, Indonesia proposed that Timor be granted limited special autonomy within
the Republic of Indonesia. The resulting talks involving Indonesia, Portugal and the
UN secretary-general saw the secretary-general entrusted with the organization and
conduct of a popular consultation to ascertain whether the Timorese people accepted
Indonesia’s special autonomy proposal. When the vote rejecting the autonomy proposal
in favour of independence resulted in a campaign of violence and destruction waged
against the Timorese, the international community responded by sending a multinational
force (the International Force for East Timor or INTERFET) to restore peace and
security. International financial institutions also exerted pressure on Indonesia by
freezing payments during the post-ballot period. In the following months, the
Indonesian armed forces and police withdrew from the territory and militia attacks were
controlled. UN secretary-general Kofi Annan saw these events as significant. For Annan,
‘[t]he tragedy of East Timor, coming so soon after that of Kosovo, has focused atten –
tion once again on the need for timely intervention by the international community
when death and suffering are being inflicted on large numbers of people’ (Annan 1999:
49). He welcomed the ‘developing international norm in favour of intervention to
protect civilians from wholesale slaughter’ (Annan 1999: 50). Richard Holbrooke, then
US permanent representative to the UN, described it as ‘the textbook realization of
Churchill and Roosevelt’s dream when they laid out the principles of the UN’ (Traub
2000: 80). Australia’s foreign minister Alexander Downer also lauded the role played
by Australian troops as part of INTERFET in supporting self-determination and
relieving suffering in the territory.
We saw an opportunity to allow East Timorese to decide their own future, and we
helped them realize that chance. And when those who lost the ballot sought to
overturn it through violence and intimidation, we put Australian lives on the line
to end that suffering.
(Downer 1999)
Following the intervention, the UN and the World Bank adopted a major trustee-
ship role, taking over responsibility for administration in Timor during the period of
transition to independence. The idea that the international community has a legitimate
role as administrator of post-conflict territories and manager of the reconstruction
process gained increasing acceptance at the international level during the 1990s. These
developments in international relations flowed from a new faith in the international
community as a benign, even civilizing, administrator. On 25 October 1999, Security
Council Resolution 1272 established the UN Transitional Administration in East
Timor (UNTAET) as a peacekeeping operation ‘endowed with overall responsi-
bility for the administration of East Timor and . . . empowered to exercise all legislative
and executive authority, including the administration of justice’. The UN’s view of its
544 ANNE ORFORD
Chapter 15 explains how
international financial
institutions came to be
set up.
When we say ‘inter –
national community’ we
sometimes mean all the
states in the world,
sometimes a group of
rich and powerful states,
sometimes the UN
Security Council or –
sometimes – the UN
General Assembly.
We imply that members
of the international
community share values
and obligations. This
can ignore or gloss over
strong divisions and
disagreements, and
create legitimacy for a
particular view that is not
in fact shared by
everyone.
HOW CAN WE STOP PEOPLE HARMING OTHERS? 545
role in East Timor was well illustrated by Jean-Christian Cady, the Deputy Transitional
Administrator of East Timor. Cady commented that the UN had to ‘create a State,
with a constitution, administrative, judicial and financial institutions, and a Public
Service’ and train police, ‘not only on police methods and techniques but also on the
ethics of a democratic police and respect for human rights, which is of course a new
idea in East Timor’. Creating a bureaucracy was portrayed as equally difficult: ‘What
UNTAET wants to achieve is a Civil Service independent from political affiliations and
cronyism, competent and not corrupt. These are ambitious goals anywhere but perhaps
more so in this part of the world’ (Cady 2000). Hans Strohmeyer, counsel to the transi –
tional administrator, understood it as his job to ‘invent a Timorese legal system’ (Traub
2000: 82). These officials saw Timor as a blank slate in terms of existing knowledge
and experience, marked by cronyism, incompetence and corruption. The UN’s role was
understood in the pedagogical terms that marked colonial discourse – the international
community was to bring its tutees in East Timor to political and economic maturity
through the creation and transfer of the bureaucratic machinery of the modern nation-
state, and the training of the functionaries required to operate that machinery.
The World Bank also played a major role in the administration of East Timor,
administering a multilateral trust fund to finance reconstruction and working with
Timorese and UNTAET representatives to facilitate economic development. The Bank
made clear that certain familiar Bank programmes and priorities were to be implemented
FIGURE 25.3
Australian troops,
members of INTERFET,
disarm and arrest
members of the Aitarak
Militia. Dili, East Timor,
21 September 1999.
Photo: David Dare
Parker
in the management of East Timor. It determined as early as 1999 that East Timor was
to have a small public sector, with a concomitant contracting out of many areas of service
provision to the private sector, and particularly to foreign investors. According to critics,
East Timor under UN and World Bank management was overrun by foreign, mainly
Australian, companies making large profits out of contracts negotiated with INTERFET
or UNTAET (Aditjondro 2000). NGOs such as East Timor’s La’o Hamutuk argued
that the combination of UN paternalism, World Bank development models and
unrestrained foreign investment was creating a new form of colonialism, and deepening
divisions within the East Timorese community (La’o Hamutuk 2000).
Independence
In August 2001, during the period of UN administration, democratic elections for a
Constituent Assembly were held. FRETILIN won 57 per cent of the vote, and its
secretary-general Mari Alkatiri became chief minister. On 20 May 2002, Timor-Leste
formally gained its independence and Alkatiri became prime minister of the new state.
Much of the period following independence was spent in difficult and protracted
negotiations with Australia over maritime delimitation in the Timor Sea. Australia was
reluctant to lose the access to resources it had secured in negotiations with Indonesia
during its occupation of the territory. Two months before Timor-Leste became
independent, Australia withdrew from the juris diction of the International Court of
Justice on maritime issues and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (Downer
2002). The Australian government continued to issue licenses for fields in disputed
territories where Australian and Timorese claims overlapped (see Figure 25.4). The
Australian government also refused to put revenues estimated at $1 million a day from
these fields into a trust account pending resolution of the disputed claims to the territory.
According to international lawyers from the Australian Attorney-General’s department,
Australia had no obligation to negotiate claims to these disputed territories, as Australia
had exercised ‘active jurisdiction’ over them while Timor-Leste was occupied (Cleary
2007: 124). After four years of negotiations, the Treaty on Certain Maritime Arrange –
ments in the Timor Sea (CMATS) between Australia and Timor-Leste was signed on
12 January 2006.
Eruption of violence and the 2006 intervention
In April 2006, violence between military factions, the police and militias broke out in
Timor-Leste. The immediate trigger to this unrest was the dismissal of a group of
personnel from within the Timorese defence force or FALINTIL – Forças Armadas de
Defesa de Timor-Leste (F-FDTL). Most of those dismissed were soldiers who were on
strike claiming that they had been discriminated against in favour of former members
of FALINTIL. Prime Minister Alkatiri characterized the violence in Dili (capital of
Timor-Leste) as an attempted coup and stated that the attacks were directed at ‘blocking
the democratic institutions’ and preventing them from functioning, so that ‘the only
solution would be for national parliament to be dissolved by the President . . . which
would provoke the fall of the Government’ (ABC News Online 2006a). On 12 May,
the prime minister of Australia announced that Australia was deploying two warships
546 ANNE ORFORD
For a discussion of
profiteering and the
ambiguities of
development under
structural adjustment
regimes put in place by
the World Bank in Côte
d’Ivoire, see Chapter 15.
HOW CAN WE STOP PEOPLE HARMING OTHERS? 547
to Australia’s northern waters ‘in case East Timor requested international troops’ (ABC
News Online 2006b), a move protested by the Timorese government. However, on
24 May, in the context of escalating violence, Timor-Leste sent an official request for
military assistance to Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand and Portugal, with the first inter –
national forces arriving in response the next day. A new UN peacekeeping force, the
United Nations Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT), was created by Security
Council Resolution 1704 in August 2006, to operate under Australian command. The
renewed unrest and subsequent military intervention had a significant impact on
Timorese and Australian politics. Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri resigned on 26 June 2006,
as a result of claims aired on Australian media that he had been involved in distributing
guns to militias. In February 2007, the Timorese prosecutor-general announced that
he and international advisors had found no evidence in support of these claims, and
that the investigation into this matter was closed (Cleary 2007: 255). José Ramos Horta
was appointed by President Gusmão as the new prime minister on 8 July 2006, and in
Perpendicular to the
G
eneral direction of the coast
AUSTRALIA
INDONESIA
AUSTRALIA
1972 INDONESIA-AUSTRALIA
SEABED BOUNDARY
JPD
A
INDONESIA
TIM
OR-
LES
TE
IN
DO
NE
SIA
Timor Sea
Lam
inar
ia
197
2 IN
DO
NE
SIA
-AU
STR
ALI
A
SEA
BED
BO
UN
DA
RY
Bay
u-U
nda
n
Gre
ate
r
Sun
rise
Eq
uid
ist
an
ce
FIGURE 25.4
Map of the Timor Sea. Shaded sections of the map represent the areas of overlapping claims, in which Timor-Leste has asked that
Australia exercise restraint in exploiting resources in accordance with its obligations under international law. Timor Sea Office, Office
of the Prime Minister, Government of Timor-Leste
FIGURE 25.6
East Timor gas, Bush oil.
Cartoon by Nicholson
from The Australian.
www.nicholson.com.au
his first press conference announced that he would ratify the
CMATS treaty with Australia. The Australian Defence Depart –
ment has since announced plans to build a permanent military
base in the centre of Dili (Cleary 2007: 258).
While the 1999 UN intervention in Timor was understood
within the narrative of humanitarian intervention, the 2006
intervention was quickly characterized in terms of the language
of failed states and corrupt governance familiar to the new
millennium. The UN treated the outbreak of violence as the
expression of ‘deep-rooted problems inherent in fragile State
institutions and a weak rule of law’, and proposed that attention
should be paid to ‘capacity-building and strengthening of state
institutions’ (United Nations Independent Special Commission of Inquiry, 2006: paras
221–2). In his August 2006 report on the situation in Timor-Leste, the UN secretary-
general focused on the need for ‘security sector reform’, promotion of the rule of law
and increased ‘capacity-building’ as responses to the civil unrest. The Timorese leadership
was condemned by Australian prime min ister John Howard: ‘There is no point beating
around the bush. The country has not been well-governed and I do hope that the
sobering experience for those in elected positions of having to call for outside help will
induce the appropriate behaviours inside the country’ (Cleary 2007: 256). According
to such inter national commentators, the eruption of violence revealed that the Timorese
leadership had either failed to understand how a state should function properly, or had
failed to implement certain technical aspects of governance. Neither the UN nor
international experts considered the involvement of outsiders in contributing to the
unrest, whether through taking sides in the factional disputes within the military and
bureaucracy, or through draining government resources and attention into protracted
Timor Sea negotiations.
The 2006 military revolt in Timor-Leste has been interpreted as simply a technical
matter – a sign that yet another group of post-colonial tutees require further training
548 ANNE ORFORD
FIGURE 25.5
José Ramos Horta. Photo: Glenn Campbell
http://www.nicholson.com.au
For a discussion of the
problems with the idea
that democracy is the
right way of organizing
politics and that the
West knows best how to
do this see Chapter 14.
Chapter 11 examines how
the state emerged in
Europe.
BOX 25.2 THE STATE AND REVOLUTION
In the months prior to the October revolution of 1917, from his exile in Helsinki,
Vladimir Lenin finished work on an extraordinary manifesto entitled The State
and Revolution (Lenin 1951). In this book, Lenin broke dramatically with the long
tradition of European political thought and practice concerning the relation
between church, state and individual (Harding 1996; Žižek 2002). The State and
Revolution, and the Bolshevik seizure of power which this text anticipates,
challenged existing conceptual frameworks for thinking about the proper form of
the state and its relation to law.
Lenin argued, following Friedrich Engels, that the state is a form of power
which ‘arose from society, but places itself above it and alienates itself more and
more from it’ (Lenin 1951: 17). The chief instruments of this state power are a
standing army, a police force and a bureaucracy, all separate from the people.
The state requires such special bodies of armed men because if the population
were armed under conditions of irreconcilable class division and antagonism,
armed struggle would result. Lenin argued that in the early twentieth century,
these aspects of executive power – the military and the bureaucracy – had been strengthened enormously
and that repressive measures against the proletariat had intensified. In response, Lenin called for this
state machinery to be ‘smashed’ (Lenin 1951: 53). The State and Revolution offers a challenge to the
conceptualization of the form of the state as a technical rather than a political question – a
conceptualization underpinning the international project of state-building in Timor-Leste and elsewhere.
Lenin’s tract serves as a reminder that the relation between the military, the bureaucracy and the people
themselves is not a technical question, but one which is at the heart of politics.
FIGURE 25.7
Lenin disguised as
‘Vilén’, wearing a wig
and with his beard
shaved off. Finland,
11 August 1917
HOW CAN WE STOP PEOPLE HARMING OTHERS? 549
in how a state should function and in tenets of the rule of law. For example, the
Economist describes the situation in May 2006 as resulting from an ‘incompetent and
faction-ridden government’ which ‘led to chaos and the dispatch of fresh peace-
keepers (Economist 2007). Such analyses strip this situation of any political content
and represent Timor-Leste as an inadequate version of a European state, one that ‘will
need years more babysitting from the UN’. It is as if there is only one form of the state,
such that we can no longer remember that this uniform model of political order might
itself be subject to challenge (see Box 25.2). Yet this armed struggle could also be
interpreted as a political event – as part of a conflict over the theory of the state which
was involved in turning a revolutionary front into the Timor defence force. FALANTIL
was initially created in August 1975 as the military arm of FRETILIN. With the creation
of the independent state of Timor-Leste, the armed forces were named the F-FDTL
(FALINTIL – Força Defensa Timor-Leste). As this name suggests, the military were
envis aged as inheriting the political mantle of the revolutionary defenders of an
independent Timor-Leste (La’o Hamutuk 2005). The dispute in 2006 resulted from
tensions within the military between those soldiers from the western part of the country
who claimed they were being discriminated against in favour of soldiers from the eastern
part of the country who were active in FALINTIL and the resistance movement.
For a discussion of why
politics turns to violence
in the first place, see
Chapter 22, which
discusses war in Europe.
See also Chapter 26 for
the argument that
moving on after conflict
is a difficult and
long-term process.
Chapter 21 explains what
is meant by a ‘just war’.
550 ANNE ORFORD
In addition, tension between the military and the police force was fuelled by the ties
between the police force and former members of the Indonesian military. Thus the stakes
of the unrest in 2006 were in part about a theory of the state which did not treat military
power as somehow technical or neutral, and which resisted a vision of the military as
somehow above or separate from the people.
GENERAL RESPONSES
LAW AND THE EXCEPTIONAL
The question – what can we do to stop people harming others – can be approached as
both a political and a legal question. In political terms, we might want to ask – what
can we realistically or legitimately do to force or persuade people to stop hurting each
other? What is the most effective form of action to achieve this end? What kind of
political organization or world order would best ensure that people are protected from
harm? We might also consider this to raise matters of law – what can we do, what are
we permitted or authorized or obliged to do, to stop people hurting each other?
This is a question about the scope and limits of lawful authority in times of emergency
or states of exception. In this section, I will introduce a series of ways of thinking about
the relation between legality and legitimacy, or norm and exception, which have
informed the theory and practice of humanitarian intervention.
Metaphysical account of law
The first such theory of the relation between legality and legitimacy involves a
metaphysical account of law. It is well illustrated by the dominant legal and political
response to the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999. Commentators such as Bruno
Simma and Antonio Cassese argued that the Kosovo intervention was illegal but legit –
imate (Simma 1999; Cassese 1999). For Simma, Cassese and many others at the time,
the question of the legality of the Kosovo intervention was quickly answered – it was
illegal as it did not conform to any of the authorized grounds upon which states could
have recourse to force under the UN Charter. However, they felt that a commitment
to justice required the international community to support the NATO intervention in
Kosovo, despite its illegality. Determining whether the intervention was legitimate
involved asking whether it was in conformity with universal values which transcended
any given legal order.
These interpretations of the legitimacy of the NATO intervention underpinned the
position put by then British prime minister Tony Blair. Blair portrayed the NATO
intervention in Kosovo as a ‘just war, based not on territorial ambitions, but on values’
(Blair 1999a).
This war was not fought for Albanians against Serbs. It was not fought for territory.
Still less for NATO aggrandisement. It was fought for a fundamental principle
necessary for humanity’s progress: that every human being, regardless of race,
religion or birth, has the inalienable right to live free from persecution.
(Blair 1999b)
Compare the account
of the ticking-bomb
scenario in Chapter 2.
See the discussion of
colonial encounters in
Chapter 21.
HOW CAN WE STOP PEOPLE HARMING OTHERS? 551
Such accounts are based upon the appeal to a universal law which transcends the rules
of any existing legal system. It is reference to this universal law which gives legitimacy
to the act of intervention. In such formulations, we see played out what Jennifer Beard
has characterized as the metaphysics of modern Western identity (Beard 2006). Such
a conception of humanitarian intervention is metaphysical in that it is based on notions
of universal values and ideal forms, of which actually existing political communities
represent only imperfect copies. Beard has argued compellingly that the impetus for
the development of this metaphysics has been the encounters between the Old World
and the New, or in contemporary language, the developed and the developing worlds.
The developed world is represented as the embodiment on earth of ‘an infinitely distant
reality’ and a ‘potential state of fulfilment’, the promise of which will be fulfilled once
the peoples of the New World are redeemed (Beard 2006: 3, 4, 11).
Realist account of law
A second account of the role of law in the global politics of intervention is not
concerned with universal norms (as in the metaphysical account) and resists ‘any
assertion of a place for legitimate authority in the international order’ (Carty 2006).
This realist approach understands international law purely as an expression of the
interests and will of sovereign states. In this familiar vision, global politics is portrayed
as anarchic (that is, lacking an over-arching authority), and individual entities such as
states are left ‘to act instrumentally and calculate power in relative rather than absolute
terms’ (Huysmans 2006: 154). While norms may be gen erated by agreement between
sovereigns, such norms are not the expression of moral values or of an objectified legal
system, but rather of ‘an existing historical political order’ (Huysmans 2006: 155). Such
an account, which finds support from both the left and the right of politics in debates
over intervention, dismisses any portrayal of the systematic nature of the international
order or any suggestion that international law may bring into being a political com –
munity. Instead, the realist approach privileges bilateral relations as at the heart of the
existing inter national order. The international realm in this view is by definition
exceptional – the lack of a legal system or a guarantor of law leaves only alienated entities
engaged in functional encounters. International lawyers fulfil their tasks when they find
ways for these entities to express their national interests or their instrumental objectives
in the law they bring into being. In the case of Timor-Leste, this law might include the
resolutions of the Security Council authorizing intervention in 1999, but the series of
treaties that enabled the exploitation of maritime resources in an area subject to
conflicting territorial claims would be seen as equally legitimate and valid expressions
of national interest and sovereign will.
Decisionist account of law
A third account of the relation between legality and legitimacy is the decisionist
account. Key to this account are the claims that the primary role of the state is to protect
its citizens, and that the state depends for its survival upon the existence of a sovereign
who can guarantee the values and law of the state. In order to begin to analyse the
effects of this account of law, I want to turn to the writings of Carl Schmitt.
BOX 25.3 CARL SCHMITT
Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) was a German jurist and political
theorist whose anti-liberal and anti-parliamentary views
provided ideological support for the totalitarian state of Nazi
Germany. Schmitt argued that the state has a responsibility to
protect its citizens.
[I]t must be taken into consideration that the totality of
this kind of state power always accords with the total
responsibility for protecting and securing the safety of
citizens and that obedience as well as the renunciation of
every right of resistance that can be demanded by this
god is only the correlate of the true protection that he
guarantees.
(Schmitt 1996: 96)
However, for Schmitt, the state could not – and indeed
should not – retain authority if it had no claims to legitimacy
other than its capacity to provide protection. Civil society
would continually regroup to challenge a state imagined as a
kind of soulless, security machine. Schmitt sought to develop
a theory of legality and legitimacy which would ground the
political authority of the state.
FIGURE 25.8
Carl Schmitt
Chapters 12 and 13 raise
questions about the view
of a state as populated
by a homogeneous
group of people forming
a nation.
Thomas Hobbes is
discussed in Chapter 7.
Two aspects of Schmitt’s solution are relevant to contemporary debates about
humanitarian intervention.
First, Schmitt argued that for the law and governance of a democratic state to be
effective, that state must represent a homogeneous and unified nation. In order for the
state to survive, there must exist a sovereign capable of properly distin guishing between
friend and enemy and thus preserving the national homogeneity that was for Schmitt
the necessary condition of effective government. The state must be willing to defend
the values that bound together the members of a given political community of ‘friends’.
It was the defence of these particular values, and not some set of universal values that
could be determined in advance, that gave legitimacy to the state. In order to protect
the state against those who did not share such values, the qualitatively total state must
control all aspects of the life of those within it. Thus Schmitt argued, pace Hobbes,
that the state could not afford to respect individual freedoms such as freedoms of thought
or conscience.
Second, Schmitt developed the related argument that an individual could only
submit to the law where certain political conditions were in place (Schmitt 2004 [1932]:
20). In particular, there must be only one lawmaker, and that lawmaker must be ‘the
final guardian of all law, ultimate guarantor of the existing order, conclusive source of
all legality, and the last security and protection against injustice’ (Schmitt 2004 [1932]:
552 ANNE ORFORD
HOW CAN WE STOP PEOPLE HARMING OTHERS? 553
19). In addition, for a ‘“formal” concept of law’ to be ‘conceivable and acceptable’,
there must be ‘congruence between the parliamentary majority and the will of the homo –
geneous people’ (Schmitt 2004 [1932]: 24). Underpinning this conception was the
assumption that ‘every democracy rests on the presupposition of the indivisibly similar,
entire, unified people’ (Schmitt 2004 [1932]: 28). If parliament did not represent the
will of a unified people, respect for legislation would descend into sterile proceduralism.
Schmitt argued that it made no sense to obey statutes passed by a (socialist) parliament
simply on the grounds that as a matter of formal process they had been passed by a
representative assembly. If the parliament had ceased to represent the will of an
‘indivisibly similar, entire, unified people’, then the sovereign law-maker who could act
as guarantor of the legal order would have to be found elsewhere.
It is in this context that Schmitt wrote perhaps his most famous sentence: ‘Sovereign
is he who decides on the exception’ (Schmitt 2005 [1934]: 5). For Schmitt, the essence
of the legal form ‘lies in the concrete decision, one that emanates from a particular
authority’ (Schmitt 2005 [1934]: 34). And every decision in turn ‘contains a constitu-
tive element’ (Schmitt 2005 [1934]: 26). The law ‘cannot realize itself ’, this realization
occurs through the decision, and yet the law does not prescribe ‘who should decide’
(Schmitt 2005 [1934]: 33). This is the constitutive element contained within each
decision, and indeed secreted within every legal order. According to this conception of
law, whenever ‘the legally highest authority does not have the actual capacity to make
a decision and impose it according to the established procedures’, the legal order comes
under pressure (Huysmans 2006: 148). The problem of who can and should guarantee
that a decision is made, and thus ‘rescue the essence of the legal form’, is central to
Schmitt’s theory of legality and legitimacy (Huysmans 2006: 149). Schmitt argued that
in times of emergency, such as is experienced by people caught up in civil war, the
preservation of the legal and political order depends upon the existence of a sovereign
who can restore the legal form. The essence of the legal form in this conception is the
decision. For a legal system to remain legitimate, it must allow for this sovereign decision
to be taken if the existing order is under threat. A legal system needs a guarantor of its
fundamental values to make such decisions in times of emergency. As we will see in the
next section, this decisionist conception of the relation between law and sovereignty
emerges in many contemporary arguments about the legitimacy of humanitarian
intervention.
Democratic account of law
The fourth and final account of law which is relevant to understanding the debates about
humanitarian intervention we might call democratic. This account of law was developed
explicitly in response to Schmitt’s constitutional theorizing in 1930s Germany. In
particular, David Dyzenhaus has argued that the political theory of law developed in
the work of Hermann Heller during this period offers a major challenge to Schmittian
decisionism (Dyzenhaus 1997). Heller accepted that the question of whether law is valid
is a political – rather than a technical or a metaphysical – question. He agreed with
Schmitt that the question of the legitimacy of a constitutive law ‘cannot, of course, be
answered by referring to its coming into existence in accordance with some previously
valid positive propositions’ (Heller 2002 [1934]: 278). Rather, the determination of
the legitimacy and thus the validity of a law requires a justification from principles that
are immanent to the law itself. For Dyzenhaus, Heller’s account of law requires that
the determination of validity involve a consideration of whether any particular law ‘is
the product of a properly functioning democratic legal order’ (Dyzenhaus 1997: 254).
Law is understood to constitute and be itself constituted by the (idealized) commitment
to understanding relations between individuals (or states) in terms of a political
community of equals. In this account of law, all claims to authority or truth, even those
made on behalf of law, must remain visible and contestable. Power cannot and should
not be made to disappear ‘into rational and logical relationships of legality’ – rather,
there is no outside to politics, including the politics of law (Dyzenhaus 1997: 256–7).
BROADER ISSUES
LEGALITY, LEGITIMACY AND THE POLITICS OF
INTERVENTION
How do these different accounts of the relation between legitimacy and legality, or norm
and exception, help us to think about what can be done – effectively, responsibly, lawfully
– to stop people hurting each other? During the 1990s, a metaphysical account of
law often underpinned the answer to this question. From this perspective, the way to
stop people harming others is to bring into being a new global community capable of
fully representing universal values of justice, peace, human rights and development.
Those advocating increased intervention in the name of human rights often sought to
elevate certain priorities, decisions or values above political debate. In this new age of
wars on terror and in the context of the rise of competing forms of religious militancy,
those advocating the use of force are far less likely to make use of universalist claims to
be acting in the name of universal values or a common humanity. It is difficult to argue
convincingly in such a climate that there exists a stable set of common values animating
all states and peoples, or that coalitions of the willing might intervene in the name of
defending such values.
In many ways, this is not a bad thing. Metaphysical accounts of humanitarian
intervention as illegal but legitimate make it difficult to take responsibility for the
practices that are authorized by the claim that one is acting on behalf of universal values
to bring into being a global civil society. Where action is understood to be motivated
by the need to redeem the lack of law, rights or development in another society, the
measure of whether the action is proper will not be its immediate effects upon that
society. Rather, the gaze will be upon the coming community which the action is
designed to bring into being.
Let me give one example of the way in which this focus upon the future creates
problems in the present. The international human rights tradition is committed to
constraining executive government, regulating and confining the exercise of emergency
or discretionary powers. And yet the approach taken by human rights activists in the
debate about humanitarian intervention has been to call for military action to be taken
in extreme circum stances to redeem universal values that may transcend particular legal
orders. This call for increased intervention by powerful states necessarily relies upon
executive governments, militaries and multinational corporations as its agents. While
554 ANNE ORFORD
For more on how
religion and politics mix
see Chapter 6. For an
account of how the
suspicion of religious
militancy can hamper
humanitarian assistance
see Chapter 23.
The idea of human rights
is also more contentious
than is often admitted:
see Chapter 27.
HOW CAN WE STOP PEOPLE HARMING OTHERS? 555
much of the human rights movement has been properly appalled by the abuses carried
out by US military and security forces in the war on terror, advo cates of humanitarian
intervention do not ask whether increased intervention by the US military under its
current rules of engagement offers the best strategy for the protection of individuals in
Third World states. While much human rights activism has focused on the exploita-
tive practices of multinational corporations in their operations in the Third World,
advocates of humanitarian intervention do not ask whether enabling an increased
presence by foreign con tractors in the post-conflict period offers the best strategy for
ending suffering in the Third World. These concerns are forgotten in the support for
increased resort to military action and increased multinational corporate presence
implicit in the call for greater international intervention. The metaphysical question –
how can we bring into being a civil society to ensure that universal values are guaranteed
to all of humanity? – provides an inadequate grounding for analysing whether humani –
tarian intervention is in fact a good thing for the people it is designed to serve.
This approach to intervention also makes it difficult to take responsibility for
the violence of practices authorized by the international community in the name of
ending suffering. The desire to ‘do something’ to save those at risk of harm in far
off places is often a response to viewing televised images of suffering in the Third
World. Images of suffering functioned throughout the 1990s to explain the need for
institutional intervention, and in so doing operated also as forms of entertainment and
spiritual enrichment for their audiences. The publics of militarily powerful states watched
nameless starving, weeping, mourning strangers who appeared as part of a narrative in
which the audience was persuaded of the superiority of its nation-state and its capacity
to rescue and redeem these others. In contrast, the military actions undertaken by
BOX 25.4 HABERMAS AND COSMOPOLITANISM
A focus on the coming cosmopolitan community is
illustrated well by the work of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas
endorsed the Kosovo intervention on the basis that it was
understood by Continental European states ‘as an
“anticipation” of an effective law of world citizenship – as a
step along the path from classical international law to what
German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
envisioned as the “status of world citizen” which would
afford legal protection to citizens against their own
criminal regimes’ (Habermas 2004). The measurement of
the propriety of this action is then in terms of the extent to
which it represents a further step along the path to world
citizenship and the coming cosmopolitan order.
Habermas has spelt out his vision of the Kantian
project of international law in a series of essays published
as The Divided West (Habermas 2006).
FIGURE 25.9
Jürgen Habermas
Media representations of
wars impact on how we
see the world: Chapter 8.
The problem of doing
something about what is
wrong in the world is
explored in Chapter 28.
Chapter 20 examines our
emotional response to
the poor who are also
imagined as living in far
away places.
For a discussion of
torture and detention see
Chapter 2.
556 ANNE ORFORD
powerful states in the name of humanitarian intervention, such as that undertaken by
NATO in response to the Kosovo crisis in 1999, are represented as bloodless. Body
counts by intervening forces are often not made available, and the high-tech violence
involved in bombing is portrayed in televised reports as spectacular rather than brutal.
Images of peacekeepers often portray them as fatherly figures – talking to children,
building schools or fixing roads.
And yet, having pointed to the problems associated with the metaphysical account
of law, the sceptical climate of the new millennium has its own dangers. The first of
these is that the tendency to dismiss claims to universalism strengthens a national-interest
based approach to foreign policy and a realist account of law. If all law is merely a
reflection of the interests of powerful states, there is no reason to hope that anything
can or will be done to ensure that the international order is premised upon a commi t-
ment to justice, human rights or equality. In this vision, law offers no constraint or limit
to guide our thinking about what we can do in the world – according to this realist
account, we can do whatever we have the military and economic power to do in
situations where this will further our national interest. To the extent that law ceases to
provide an expression of our national interest, we will withdraw from it, just as Australia
withdrew from the jurisdiction of international tribunals in the context of the Timor
Gap negotiations discussed above. Where such a vision of international law prevails,
humanitarian intervention may serve merely to militarize relations between powerful
and less powerful states. Law may offer some resources for stopping people harming
each other, but only where this end is an expression of the interests of the entities who
make up the existing order.
The sceptical environment also fuels the decisionist account of law. Indeed, this
approach to law underpins much of the discussion of the emerging notion of the
responsibility to protect, which has gradually colonized legal and political debate about
FIGURE 25.10
This photograph appears
on many UN and
national government
websites. The image is of
a United Nations
peacekeeping soldier, a
member of UNTAET’s
Portuguese contingent,
accompanied by a group
of local children as he
conducts a security
patrol in the Becora
district of Dili, East
Timor.
For more on the problem
of counting the dead see
Chapter 28.
People who talk in
terms of the national
interest imagine that
courses of action that are
good for the state are
also good for the people
within it.
HOW CAN WE STOP PEOPLE HARMING OTHERS? 557
Our responsibilities to
those beyond our own
political community are
discussed in Chapter 2.
Chapters 21 and 28 also
explore responsibility.
intervention since its development by the International Commission on Interven-
tion and State Sovereignty (ICISS), in 2001. ICISS was an international initiative
designed to respond to the perceived tension between state sovereignty and humani-
tarian intervention in the aftermath of the NATO action. Its report proposed a
re-characterization of the humanitarian intervention debate, ‘not as an argument about
any right at all but rather about a responsibility – one to protect people at grave risk’
(Evans 2006: 708). According to ICISS, thinking of sovereignty in those terms enabled
a clearer focus upon the ‘functions’ of ‘state authorities’. Sovereignty as responsibility
‘implies that the state authorities are responsible for the functions of protecting the safety
and lives of citizens and promotion of their welfare’ (ICISS 2001: 13). In circumstances
where the state does not have the power, the capacity or the will to perform those
functions, a ‘fallback’ responsibility to protect on the part of the ‘broader community
of states’ is activated (ICISS 2001: 17). The ICISS report thus offered a theory of
authority to justify the exercise of governmental functions by international actors
(Orford 2011a). ICISS set out three responsibilities incorporated by the responsibility
to protect, namely the responsibility to prevent conflict or risk to populations; the
responsibility to react, including in extreme cases with military intervention; and the
responsibility to rebuild, particularly after military intervention.
The concept of the responsibility to protect was taken up in the report of the UN
High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. The Panel argued that what is
needed today is a new security consensus.
FIGURE 25.11
Kosovars returning from
the forced expulsions of
1999. Photo: Gilles
Peress
How does the idea of
‘responsibility to protect’
work in practice?
Can you think of a
recent case where there
might have been a
‘responsibility to protect’
but where nothing was
done? Or one where
something was done but
it turned out to bring
more harm to the people
involved?
Is this transfer of a form
of sovereignty to the
Security Council, the
United States of America
or a random grouping of
concerned states a new
form of world govern –
ment? Or merely a new
imperial power? In
whose interests is it
likely to operate? To
whom is it accountable?
558 ANNE ORFORD
The essence of that consensus is simple: we all share responsibility for each other’s
security. And the test of that consensus will be action.
(United Nations High-Level Panel 2004: 16)
Like ICISS, the Panel developed this notion of a shared responsibility by reference to
notions of protection. The Panel endorsed what it referred to as ‘the emerging norm
that there is a collective international responsibility to protect, exercisable by the
Security Council authorizing military intervention as a last resort’. The primacy of
protection to the purpose of the state was taken up in the report of the UN secretary-
general to the 2005 World Summit session of the General Assembly. The secretary-
general there stated: ‘I believe that we must embrace the responsibility to protect, and,
when necessary, we must act on it’ (United Nations Secretary-General 2005: para. 135).
He continued: ‘This responsibility lies, first and foremost, with each individual State,
whose primary raison d’être [or reason for being] and duty is to protect its population’.
According to the secretary-general, if ‘national authorities’ are not able to ‘protect their
citizens’, this responsibility ‘shifts to the international community’. The responsibility
to protect was enshrined in the World Summit Outcome unanimously adopted by the
General Assembly in September 2005, and has since been reaffirmed by the Security
Council in resolutions dealing with the protection of civilians in armed conflict, the
deployment of peacekeepers in Darfur, and the authorization of intervention against
Libya (Orford 2011c).
A decisionist conception of the need for a sovereign guarantor of law emerges in
much of the responsibility to protect literature. This literature assumes that where
existing order threatens to break down, a sovereign must be found who can in fact take
the decision that a state of emergency exists. Advocates of humanitarian intervention
in these terms focus much of their attention on calling for a decision to be made in
times of emergency. So Thomas Weiss, a strong supporter of the notion of humanitarian
intervention, comments that ‘even if none of the choices are ideal, victims still require
decisions about outside help’ (Weiss 1999: 2). And the ICISS report states:
The most compelling task now is to work to ensure that when the call goes out to
the community of states for action, that call will be answered.
(International Commission on Intervention
on State Sovereignty 2001: 70)
To this degree, the responsibility to protect literature adopts Schmitt’s solution to the
dilemmas of legitimacy – the need for there to be a guarantor of the values of the legal
order. The one who decides on the exception – the Security Council, the United States,
the coalition of the willing – is the sovereign guarantor in this sense. This prioritizing
of the role of the executive as guarantor of the legal order also manifests itself in the
post-conflict phase. Intervention is often followed by the creation and legitimization of
strong authoritarian administrations in which executive power is almost unrestrained.
Here again we see an echo of 1930s Europe. As Alexander Somek suggests, the effect
of authoritarian state theory was to diminish the space for parliamentary participation
and expand the space for executive governance in the name of achieving social and
economic integration (Somek 2003). This is precisely the nature and effect of post-
For a more extensive
view of how democracy
might work, other
than through the
standard institutional
arrangements, see
Chapter 14.
This shift is reflected in
the existence of a new
literature on state-
building, as opposed to
peace-building or peace-
keeping. This again
raises the question of
how we know what is
good for others
(Chapter 21).
HOW CAN WE STOP PEOPLE HARMING OTHERS? 559
conflict governance in the aftermath of international interventions in places such as
Timor-Leste, where international administrators suspend democratic participation until
political order and economic integration are secured.
At times, the responsibility to protect literature also draws on a more democratic
politics of law. This account of the politics of international law treats issues of
participation, representation and accountability as essential to establishing the legitimacy
of particular forms of authority or of particular decisions. Attention to such questions
of political practice have already emerged as a feature of institutional discussion of the
responsibility to protect and collective security since 2001. For example, while the High-
Level Panel endorsed the responsibility to protect, it spelt out that it is for the Security
Council to decide whether or not resort to force is justified. It then stated that such
decisions must not only be legal, but there must also be ‘the common perception of
their legitimacy – their being made on solid evidentiary grounds, and for the right
reasons, morally as well as legally’ (United Nations High Level Panel 2004). In its
discussion of the question of legitimacy of the global collective security system, the High-
Level Panel notes:
If the Security Council is to win the respect it must have as the primary body in
the collective security system, it is critical that the most important and influential
decisions, those with large-scale life-and-death impact, be better made, better
substantiated and better communicated.
(United Nations High Level Panel 2004)
The High-Level Panel here seeks to expand the justificatory obligations of the Security
Council. It assumes that the Security Council as a political organ repre senting the
otherwise secretive security interests of powerful states is nonetheless part of a political
community, to which it must account publicly for the bases of its decisions to authorize
(or refuse to authorize) the use of force against Third World states. Arguments about
the need for the international community to exercise responsibility while protecting were
made strongly by states such as Brazil in the aftermath of the NATO intervention against
Libya (Government of Brazil 2011).
As noted above, the responsibility to protect concept also directs attention to
decisions other than those involved in the resort to force. According to the ICISS report,
decisions about protection now involve not simply the decision about whether to use
force, but the myriad decisions authorized by the notion that the responsibility to protect
involves not just a responsibility to react, but also a responsibility to prevent and to
rebuild. Although the scope of the responsibility to protect concept as endorsed in the
World Summit Outcome is narrow, being limited to the responsibility to protect
populations against genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity,
the practices envisaged for the implementation of the concept are broad. According to
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, implementation will involve ‘utilizing the whole
prevention and protection tool kit available to the United Nations system’, with the
aim of ‘integrating the system’s multiple channels of information and assessment’
(United Nations Press Release 2008), adopting a ‘unifying perspective’ and facilitating
‘system-wide coherence’ (United Nations Secretary-General 2009). This will require
an expansion and refocusing of the UN’s ‘early warning and assessment capacities’, to
Does the doctrine of
responsibility to protect
have overtones of
neo-colonialism?
Chapters 15 and 16 discuss
similar questions.
Examples of restrictions
on movement are
discussed in Chapter
10 and economic
exploitation in
Chapter 15.
560 ANNE ORFORD
ensure that the UN ‘acts as one in the flow and assessment of information’ (United
Nations Secretary-General 2010).
The responsibility to protect concept it thus being used to consolidate established
practices of international executive rule, such as surveillance, peacekeeping, and civilian
administration, and to provide a coherent normative framework for those practices
(Orford 2011a, 2011b). The effects of the responsibility to protect will depend on the
actions taken in relation to these other aspects of protection. Who will decide what
protection will mean in a particular time and place, how it can be realized and which
claim ant to authority is able to provide it? What laws will govern questions of resource
ownership, contract allocation and economic restructuring in post-conflict states?
How will the powers and responsibilities of the (international) executive and the (local)
parlia mentary government be determined? Such issues will shape the political orders –
both national and international – brought into being through these ongoing acts of
intervention.
CONCLUSION
The question – What can we do to stop people harming others? – registers the demand
for justice in an age dominated by internationalist narratives, whether of globalization
and harmonization, or of high-tech wars on terror and for humanity. In this chapter,
I have suggested that there is both a political and a legal aspect to this question.
In political terms, the question of what we can effectively do to stop people harming
others asks us to reflect upon what measures or actions are demanded of the international
community in the name of humanitarian action in the post-Cold War era. This chapter
has been critical of the tendency to answer this question by advocating resort to force
as the means of protecting people in the Third World. Despite the prohibition against
the use of force enshrined in the UN Charter, there has been a persistent trend to
militarize the relationship between First and Third worlds, usually on the basis that an
emergency exists justifying, if not requiring, resort to force. The focus on military action
as the means for protecting those at risk of direct violence at the hands of the state,
militias or insurgents detracts attention from the ways in which our world order is built
upon other policies and practices which harm people – severe restrictions on asylum,
strict controls over immigration, ruthless economic exploitation and an unjust inter –
national division of labour. Whether we ‘can’ change these policies raises questions of
our own political capacity to participate in shaping the conditions of our lives and those
whose lives we touch.
In legal terms, the question of what we can lawfully do to stop people harming
others raises issues of the legal authority to take action and the protocols or procedures
for making decisions about matters that affect the lives of others. It also raises questions
about who has the name to speak in the name of law in a particular territory, and how
different laws should encounter each other (McVeigh 2007; Orford 2007). In this sense,
what ‘we’ can do is not something that can lawfully be determined only by ‘us’. Rather
than seeing politics as somehow separate from legality, decision-making about protection
must be informed by a concept of law that is itself strongly political. Such a concept of
law would assume that in order to be valid, law must be the product of a particular kind
of political order and must in turn place obligations upon the members of the community
HOW CAN WE STOP PEOPLE HARMING OTHERS? 561
it constitutes. At the least, these obligations would include a commitment to equal
participation in the making of law as essential to establishing the legitimacy of particular
forms of authority. Bringing decisions about what ‘we’ can do to help others within a
fully political, and thus contestable, account of international law, offers some possibility
of justice for those the international community claims to protect.
FURTHER READING
Critical legal readings of humanitarian intervention in the 1990s can be found in Orford (1999,
2003), Koskenniemi (2002) and Charlesworth (2002). Analyses of the significance of the
responsibility to protect concept include Thakur (2011), Orford (2011a) and Evans (2008). A
key text on the legacy of the civilizing mission for inter national law is Anghie (2004). Beard (2006)
develops a rich account of international law as metaphysics, while Dyzenhaus (1997) provides
a detailed analysis of the major constitutionalist theories of law that emerged in Weimar Germany.
An analysis of the relationship between these constitutional accounts and the framing of
contemporary global politics can be found in Huysmans (2006). Cleary (2007) is a revealing
insider’s account of the negotiations between Australia and Timor-Leste concerning the Timor
Sea oil and gas fields.
WEBSITES
International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, http://www.ictsd.org/
News and information relating to trade and development issues and place to subscribe to
the excellent Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest email service.
International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect, http://www.responsibilitytoprotect.org/
Website of a coalition of non-governmental organizations that support the strengthening of
the responsibility to protect concept.
La’o Hamatuk, www.laohamutuk.org
The website of a Timorese NGO, offering incisive analysis of the politics of contemporary
international engagement with Timor-Leste.
National Security Archive, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/
The website of a non-governmental research institute which collects and publishes declassified
US government documents, particularly relating to US security and economic policies.
Timor-Leste official government site, http://www.timor-leste.gov.tl/
Official website of the Timorese government, providing historical material about Timor-Leste
and covering all areas of governmental responsibility.
United Nations Peace and Security website, http://www.un.org/peace/
UN website providing access to material relating to peace and security.
REFERENCES
ABC News Online (2006a) ‘E. Timor Unrest an Attempted Coup: PM’, 9 May, http://www.
abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200605/s1634598.htm.
––––(2006b) ‘East Timor Rejects Need for Peacekeepers’, 12 May, http://www.abc.net.au/
news/newsitems/200605/s1637481.htm.
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CHAPTER 26
Can we move beyond conflict?
Roland Bleiker
■ The question
DEALING WITH SEEMINGLY INTRACTABLE CONFLICTS
■ Illustrative example
THE CONFLICT IN KOREA
■ General responses
CONFRONTATION AND ENGAGEMENT: TWO
APPROACHES TO CONFLICT
■ Broader issues
DEALING WITH ANTAGONISM
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
DEALING WITH SEEMINGLY INTRACTABLE CONFLICTS
This chapter examines one of the oldest and most difficult political problems: how to
deal with conflicts that are so deeply entrenched that they seem virtually inevitable.
Prospects for peace are particularly slim in societies that have experienced a major trauma,
such as genocide or a war. From the Middle East to Afghanistan, from Sri Lanka to
Somalia, from Iraq to East Timor and from Rwanda to Kashmir, years and often decades
of conflict have left societies deeply divided and traumatized. New forms of violence
constantly emerge, generating yet more hatred. Commentators speak of so-called
intractable conflicts: situations where antagonisms have persisted for so long that they
have created a vicious cycle of violence. A particularly influential example of such a
position is Robert Kaplan’s (2005) analysis of the ethnic conflict that devastated the
Balkan region during the first part of the 1990s. Kaplan believes that the political
volatility that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia was linked to old ethnic and religious
hatreds between Croats, Serbs and Muslims. These deeply seated antagonisms, he
There is another
discussion of the
break-up of Yugoslavia
in Chapter 5.
David Campbell’s
understanding of
violence is explored in
Chapter 23.
Chapter 27 explains what
multiculturalism is and
why it has become
controversial recently in
some Western states.
Chapter 22 considers
the opposite question:
What brings about the
move from politics to
violence in the first
place? How does armed
conflict or organized
violence come about?
CAN WE MOVE BEYOND CONFLICT? 565
stresses, go back hundreds of years to the clash between the Ancient Roman and
Byzantine empires, between a Christian European West and a Muslim Ottoman East.
How can societies that have been torn apart by war and trauma ever become peaceful
again? Politicians and scholars are deeply divided about how to answer this question.
Numerous commentators strongly oppose the very notion of intractable conflicts. They
locate the roots of violence not in ancient hatreds, but in much more recent political
manipulations (see Naimark 2002). David Campbell, for instance, provides an inter –
pretation of the conflict in the Balkans that differs fundamentally from Kaplan’s. For
Campbell (1998: xi) the problem did not lie in ancient ethnic hatreds. The conflict, he
believes, was linked to the recent actions of political elites. They opposed multiculturalism
and actively generated fear in an attempt to gain and retain power. Ethnicity then became
politicized in a way that turned once peaceful neighbours into enemies.
The examples shown here are brief and necessarily incomplete. But they reveal an
important point: each conflict is situated in a unique political, social and historical setting.
The nature of a conflict can only be understood in the context of its unique environment.
No general theory can ever do justice to these complexities. Violence and hatred do
not appear without a reason. They emerge as a result of specific grievances and historical
struggles. As a result there are no ready-made solutions that can restore order and
stability.
Although each conflict is unique, one can still learn from how particular societies
have dealt with their political challenges. There are, indeed, numerous cases where
seemingly intractable conflicts have eventually given way to more peaceful or at least
more stable situations. For instance, many conflicts linked to racial segregation, from
the United States to South Africa, have meanwhile been replaced by political orders
that promote racial equality, at least at the formal, institutional level. Or look at the
situation in Northern Ireland. After several decades of violence and terror the situation
today is more stable than it has been for a long time. Another example is the Cold War.
After half a century of intense and global confrontations between a communist East
and a capitalist West we now live in a world no longer dominated by the competition
between two ideologically motivated superpowers.
What, then, can one learn from these positive and negative examples? Why can some
conflicts be solved or at least managed while others generate ever more hatred and
violence? Expressed in other words: what is the key to moving beyond conflict? Given
the uniqueness of each conflict, this chapter examines the issues at stake not in an abstract
manner, but in a concrete political setting: the deeply entrenched conflict on the divided
Korean peninsula, where hatred and constant tension continue to dominate politics
even half a century after the Korean War. But there is progress too. There are occasional
break throughs: diplomatic agreements, cross-border visits, gestures of goodwill. And
there are setbacks. Again and again. But hope emerges precisely from a more thorough
understanding of what actually drives these patterns of progress and regress, conflict
and co-operation, hatred and empathy.
Although the chapter illustrates the issues at stake through a case study on Korea
it does not seek to provide an update on the most recent events. Doing so would be
impossible, particularly in Korea, where politics is rapidly changing all the time. New
events keep happening and the various actors involved regularly reposition themselves.
Policy makers in North and South Korea, for instance, often alter their diplomatic
These ‘ideological
visions’ are like the
language games that
were discussed in
Chapter 2. They
influence people’s
thinking about the world.
The Cold War was often
seen as based on
competing ideologies.
Compare this with the
view of contemporary
conflicts as a ‘clash of
civilizations’ or as
derived from different
religious views:
Chapter 6.
attitudes depending either on strategic choices or domestic political struggles. Or look
at how the stance of the United States, which plays a key role in Korea, has gone back
and forth between an uncompromising confrontational position and a more tolerant
attitude, reflecting respective policy debates in Washington. Rather than seeking to
capture the latest stage of these ever changing political struggles, the purpose of this
chapter is to illuminate the underlying dynamics that have shaped conflict in Korea for
decades.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
THE CONFLICT IN KOREA
For the last half a century the Korean peninsula has been divided between a communist
North and a capitalist South, each viewing the other as its ideological arch-rival. Over
the years these antagonisms have become so deeply entrenched in societal consciousness
that hatred and tension are seen as an inevitable aspect of politics. The reasons for this
seemingly intractable conflict are located in particular historical events.
Historical background
Japan occupied Korea in the 1890s and formally annexed the country in 1910. At the
end of the Second World War the two dominant victorious countries, the United States
and the Soviet Union, dismantled the defeated Japanese colonial empire. In this context
they divided the Korean peninsula into two parts along the 38th parallel. The US
occupied the southern part and the Soviets the northern one. Separate political regimes
were established on each side, reflecting the ideological standpoints of the two
superpowers. In the south the Republic of Korea was formed in August 1948. The new
country, led by its first president, the Korean expatriate Syngman Rhee, became a close
ally of the US. The northern part of the peninsula then became the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea. Its first head of state was Kim Il Sung, an anti-Japanese
guerrilla fighter. The country adopted a unique nationalist form of communist ideology
and became a close ally of both the Soviet Union and China.
The roots of the ongoing conflict in Korea are located not only in the division of
the country but also, and above all, in the three-year war that devastated the peninsula
from 1950 to 1953. More than a million people died as a result of the conflict that saw
the North and the South confronting each other. The war also involved several external
powers. China intervened on behalf of the North while the South was supported by
a United Nations Command, led by the US. The trauma and hatred that the war
generated continues to dominate virtually all aspects of politics today. Feelings of anger
and revenge remain deep-seated.
On each side, an unusually strong state emerged and was able to promote a
particular ideological vision of politics and society: a vision that constructs the other
side of the dividing line as an enemy and a source of fear and instability. A passionate
anti-capitalist attitude dominates the reclusive North while a more moderate but still
pronounced anti-communist orientation prevails in the South (see Grinker 1998; Hart
1999; Cumings 1997).
566 ROLAND BLEIKER
Najin
Ch’ongjin
Kimch’aek
Hyesan
Manp’o
Kanggye
Kusong
Yongbyon
Namp’o
Sariwon
Changyon
Haeju
Ongjin
Sinuiju
Hamhung
Wonsan
Ch’orwon
Munsan Ch’unch’on
WonjuInch’on
Y e l l o w S e a
S e a o f J a p a n
K o r e a
B a y
Suwon
Ch’onan
Ch’ongju
Taejon
ChonjuKunsan
Kwangju Masan
JAPAN
CHINA
CHINA
RUSSIA
NORTH
KOREA
SOUTH
KOREA
Taegu
Ulsan
Pusan
Yosu
Cheju-do
Ullung-do
Chin-do
Koje-do
Tsushima
Mokp’o
Cheju
0 50 100 Kilometers
100500 Miles
Andong
Kangnung
P’ohang
P’YONGYANG
SEOUL
Musan
K o
r e
a
S
t
r
a
i
t
P’yonggang
Kaesong
Demarcation
Line
FIGURE 26.1
Map of the Korean
Peninsula
CAN WE MOVE BEYOND CONFLICT? 567
Geographical context
The conflict scenario in Korea has been fuelled even more by the unusually important
geographical location of the peninsula. Constituting a natural link between the Asian
mainland and Japan, Korea has always been an important factor in the security policy
of the surrounding powers. In the nineteenth century, two major wars were fought for
control of the peninsula, one between Japan and China (1894/5), the other between
Japan and Russia (1904/5). With the development of military technology in the
twentieth century, the geographical importance of Korea has increased further.
The division of the peninsula must to a substantial part be attributed to the strategic
and symbolic importance of Korea in the emerging Cold War power struggle between
568 ROLAND BLEIKER
the United States and the Soviet Union. But the competition over the Korean peninsula
did not remain a Soviet-American affair. In the early 1960s China became increasingly
independent of its communist ally, the Soviet Union. As a result, both of these
important powers started to compete for influence over North Korea. Add to this that
Japan’s post-war reconstruction was so successful that it developed into an important
economic force. The political situation in Korea thus became directly linked to the
security and economic interests of four great powers, the United States, the Soviet
Union, China and Japan.
Developments since the end of the Cold War
Much has changed over the last decades. The Soviet-led global alliance system fell apart
in the early 1990s and the Cold War gave way to a new form of international politics.
But in Korea strikingly much remains the same. The peninsula is still divided between
a communist North and a capitalist South.
BOX 26.1 THE KOREAN WAR, 1950–53
The Korean War lasted from June 1950 until the signing of an armistice agreement in July 1953. It killed
more than a million people. The most commonly accepted explanation for the war holds that there were
constant political tensions on the peninsula ever since its division at the end of the Second World War.
Then, in June 1950, a full-scale war broke out when North Korea launched a surprise attack on the South,
trying to bring the entire peninsula under its control. Although the conflict started as a civil war it soon
involved, on opposing sides, two of the great powers of the Cold War: first the United States, which
intervened, together with other nations through a United Nations mandate designed to roll back the
Northern occupation of the South; and then China, whose involvement saved the North from defeat and
secured a military stalemate along the original dividing line at the 38th parallel.
The Korean Armistice Agreement of July 1953, which was never signed by South Korea, constitutes
only a cease fire. A clause called for a political conference, on the basis of which the terms of a peace
treaty were supposed to have been discussed. This conference, which took place in Geneva in 1954,
failed in its prime task. In juridical terms, the two Koreas have thus remained in a state of war ever since.
Half a century after the events, an estimated 10 million individuals are still separated from their families.
The wounds of the Korean War have dominated politics on the peninsula for half a century now.
The two opposed Korean states have sponsored black-and-white accounts of the war: accounts that put all
blame for the conflict on the other side. The antagonistic historical narratives then became essential
elements in the creation of two diametrically opposed notions of nationhood, thus contributing
substantially to fuelling conflict on the peninsula. An increasing number of revisionist historians have
recently been trying to see beyond the black and white images that make up most accounts of conflict on
the peninsula. Bruce Cumings (1997), for instance, stresses that intense fighting had already taken place
for the 9 months prior to June 1950. Without denying North Korea’s responsibility, Cumings presents the
war as a complex set of events with multiple causes. Such revisionist positions on the origins of the war
are controversial but also constitute an essential element in coming to terms with such a traumatic event.
Chapter 12 explains
political developments in
China.
CAN WE MOVE BEYOND CONFLICT? 569
The North remains an authoritarian communist regime. It is perhaps the world’s
most reclusive country. Travel to and from North Korea is severely restricted. The
country’s population has no access to foreign information sources and the government
controlled media network is tightly censored. More information has recently become
available about life within North Korea (Demick 2009; Hassig and Oh 2009; Myers
2010). But this does not change the country’s seclusion and the highly secretive nature
of its political power structure and decision making process. Add to this a set of
MONGOLIA
CHINA
KOREA
TAIWAN
RUSSIA
JAPAN
YELLOW SEA
EAST SEA
KO
RE
A
ST
RA
IT
BEIJING
TAIPEI
P’YONGYANG
SEOUL TOKYO
Shanghai
Pusan
Vladivostock
Chabarovsk
Fukuoka
Osaka
Tokdo
Ullŭngdo
FIGURE 26.2
Map of the geographical
location of the Korean
Peninsula
BOX 26.2 THE COLD WAR, 1947–1989
During the Cold War global politics was largely dominated by the competition between two rival alliance
systems. One was led by the United States and advocated democracy and free-market capitalism. The
other revolved around the Soviet Union and was driven by communist principles. Although the US and the
Soviet Union were allies during the Second World War, an intense ideological rivalry emerged between
these two so-called superpowers in the late 1940s.
The Cold War was cold because it did not involve a direct military confrontation between the two
superpowers. But for four decades global politics was dominated by an intensive and often dangerous
stand-off between them. In most parts of the world politics was driven by the superpowers’ attempt to
increase and maintain their respective spheres of influence (the areas of the world that they dominated).
Numerous regional wars, such as the ones in Korea (1950–53) and Vietnam (1964–75), opposed capitalist
and communist alliance partners. Equally problematic was an increasingly intense arms race, which
developed because each side was preoccupied with containing and deterring the other. On numerous
occasions the arms race threatened to provoke a global conflict. A key event here is the Cuban Missile
Crisis of 1962, which nearly led to an open nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union.
There were moments, as in the 1970s, when the two superpowers adopted a more conciliatory
approach. This led to a period of so-called détente. There were also moments when some countries
refused to submit to the dictate of either superpower. China, for instance, retained communist policies but
started to distance itself increasingly from its communist ally and superpower, the Soviet Union.
The Cold War only ended once the Soviet-led alliance system started to crumble in the late 1980s. By
the early 1990s the Soviet Union had disintegrated and most of its allies, particularly in Eastern Europe,
abandoned their communist policies and embarked on moves to adopt democratic and free-market
oriented forms of government. As a result, the US emerged as the most powerful global state, a type of
sole superpower.
FIGURE 26.3
President John F. Kennedy at the Berlin Wall,
Germany, June 1963. Photo: Robert Knudsen,
White House. Courtesy of the John F.
Kennedy Library, Boston
570 ROLAND BLEIKER
Economic problems like
these are not restricted
to communist regimes.
Compare the account of
strategic adjustment and
development in the Ivory
Coast in Chapter 15.
FIGURE 26.4
A North Korean soldier looks through a pair of
binoculars as a South Korean solider stands guard in
the demilitarized zone dividing the two Koreas, in the
village of Panmunjom, on the North–South border,
2007. Photo: Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images
CAN WE MOVE BEYOND CONFLICT? 571
unimaginable daily challenges for the population. Having been devastated by several
years of famine and economic mismanagement, North Korea is also one of the world’s
poorest countries.
The South, by contrast, has embarked on a successful path of democratization and
economic development. Here too, the geographical situation has accentuated
differences. With the collapse of the Soviet-led alliance system the communist regime
in the North became even more isolated. It lost one of its strongest allies and trading
partners, the Soviet Union. Even China, which intervened in the Korean War on behalf
of the North and has remained a strong supporter ever since, is now distancing itself
increasingly from the regime in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital. Add to this that the
US, as the sole remaining superpower, has meanwhile become the single most influential
external actor on the peninsula, substantially shaping the security issues at stake.
Neither the collapse of the global Cold-War system nor North Korea’s increas ingly
isolated position have eased tension on the peninsula. Quite the contrary, the situation
is as volatile as ever. At regular intervals tensions risk escalating into a more direct
confrontation.
CAN WE MOVE BEYOND CONFLICT? 573
BOX 26.3 NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATY
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, often referred to as the NPT, emerged in the late 1960s and entered
into force in 1970. It was designed to stop the spread of nuclear weapons in an effort to reach a more
stable and peaceful world. The treaty acknowledges that the five permanent members of the United
Nations Security Council are so-called nuclear weapons states, because they had tested nuclear devices
prior to 1967. These are the United States, the Soviet Union (now in the form of Russia), France, China
and the United Kingdom. These five states sought to prevent all other states from acquiring nuclear
weapons. In return for agreeing not to develop nuclear weapons, the states that signed up to the NPT
were promised assistance from the nuclear weapons states to develop nuclear technology for energy,
medical and other peaceful purposes. The nuclear weapons states also promised, under Article VI, to
eliminate their nuclear weapons. As this has not happened, the discriminatory nature of the treaty,
whereby five states continue to possess nuclear weapons, while others are prevented from doing so, has
made the NPT controversial. The treaty was extended indefinitely in a landmark review conference in 1995.
A total of 189 countries have ratified the Non-Proliferation Treaty. India, Pakistan and Israel have not
signed the treaty. The former two are confirmed nuclear powers while the latter is known to possess
nuclear weapons but has not officially confirmed their existence. At numerous points during the last
decades smaller states sought to develop nuclear weapons. These included Libya, which has subsequently
renounced its programme, and North Korea, which withdrew from the NPT in 2003 and tested its first
nuclear device in 2006. Iran’s covert uranium enrichment programme has also caused controversy and
political tension, so much so that, in November 2011, the International Atomic Energy Agency expressed
‘increasing concern’ about the programme and its destabilizing influence on the regional security
situation.
The International Atomic Energy Agency is the recognized authority that deals with such disputes.
As a UN agency based in Vienna, its mission is to ensure that non-nuclear weapons states do not develop
nuclear weapons, and to promote
the peaceful use of nuclear
technology. More specifically, it
foresees that all
non-nuclear states that want to
develop nuclear technology need
to put in place certain safeguards.
The respective procedures include
opening up nuclear facilities for
regular inspections by the
International Atomic Energy
Agency. These inspections are
designed to make sure that the
state in question is not diverting
its nuclear technology programme
to weapons purposes.
FIGURE 26.6
Non-proliferation Treaty signing ceremony, July 1968, Moscow. US
Ambassador Llewellyn E. Thompson, left, signs the treaty with Soviet Foreign
Minister Andrei A. Gromyko. Among US embassy and Soviet government
officials witnessing the ceremony is Soviet Premier Alexei N. Kosygin, standing
third from right. Photo: AP Wide World Photos
574 ROLAND BLEIKER
Once the nuclear crisis of 1994 was solved all parties concerned embarked on a
more co-operative route. The inauguration of Kim Dae-jung (2000) as South Korea’s
president in early 1998 signalled the advent of a policy that was more conciliatory,
or at least more willing to engage the arch-enemy across the dividing line. The US
administration under President Clinton was strongly supportive of this approach. Of
particular significance here is an official policy review, conducted by former defense
secretary William Perry. This report located the main threat in North Korea’s ambition
to acquire nuclear weapons or to develop, test and deploy long-range missiles. At the
same time, though, the Perry Report called for a fundamental review of US policy
towards Pyongyang, advocating a position that rests not only on military deterrence,
but also on a ‘new, comprehensive and integrated approach’ to negotiations with North
Korea (Perry 1999: 8).
The new policy attitudes in Washington and Seoul, capital of South Korea, soon
led to several breakthroughs, including the lifting of restrictions on trade with,
investment in and travel to North Korea. Pyongyang responded in turn with a variety
of gestures, such as a gradual (although still very timid) opening of its borders,
agreements on family exchanges with the South and a tuning down of its hostile rhetoric.
The process of détente culminated in June 2000 with a historic summit meeting between
the two Korean heads of state, Kim Jong-il and Kim Dae-jung. But détente in Korea
did not last long.
By early 2002 the fragile security arrangement started to break down. The new US
president, George W. Bush, adopted a more confrontational policy, which sharply
reversed the conciliatory approach pursued during the Clinton administration. In his
first State of the Union Address, Bush singled out North Korea, together with Iraq and
Iran, as one of three nations belonging to an axis of evil. He cited as evidence
Pyongyang’s export of ballistic missile technology and its lingering ambition to become
a nuclear power. Soon afterwards, the Defense Department, in a report to Congress,
included North Korea in a group of seven nations that were potential targets of pre-
emptive nuclear strikes. Pyongyang reacted in an angry manner, warning that it would
abandon the agreed freeze of its nuclear weapons programme, which it subsequently
did. The situation then rapidly deteriorated. North Korea officially announced that it
would restart its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. It withdrew from the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty and forced inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency
to leave the country. In October 2006 the world community reacted with strong and
unanimous protest against Pyongyang’s announcement that it had successfully
completed a nuclear test.
Tensions were partly diffused in 2007, when North Korea agreed to dismantle its
nuclear programme. But by mid-2009 the situation was as dangerous as ever after North
Korea conduced several new nuclear and missile tests and announced, yet again, that it
would renege on its commitment to nuclear disarmament. The crisis reached an unpre –
cedented level in 2010: a North Korean torpedo attack killed forty-six South Korean
sailors, and the shelling of the island of Yeonpyeong killed four people and wounded
twenty. Even moderate commentators now feared that ‘for the fist time in decades, a
new war on the Korean peninsula appears to be a distinct probability’ (Lankov, 2010).
The most recent turn of events has only increased the unpredictable and potentially
destabilizing situation in Northeast Asia. On 17 December 2011 the North Korean
When we say ‘inter –
national community’ we
sometimes mean all the
states in the world,
sometimes a group of
rich and powerful states,
sometimes the UN
Security Council or –
sometimes – the UN
General Assembly. The
term ‘international
community’ is used
frequently in Chapter 25.
CAN WE MOVE BEYOND CONFLICT? 575
leader, Kim Jong-il, died of a heart attack. Just as he had assumed power after his father’s
death in 1994, Kim Jong-il was succeeded by his third son, Kim Jong-un. Thought to
be in his late twenties, Kim Jong-un looks likely to continue his father’s policies:
embarking on occasional provocations designed to coerce the international community
into providing North Korea with desperately needed aid. Given that Kim Jong-un still
has to consolidate his power base, the chance of miscalculations and corresponding
escalations is unusually high.
GENERAL RESPONSES
CONFRONTATION AND ENGAGEMENT: TWO
APPROACHES TO CONFLICT
How is it possible to find a way out of the seemingly intractable conflict in Korea? Have
decades of antagonisms and hatred created a pattern of conflict that can no longer be
overcome? There are, certainly, no easy solutions.
One of the most difficult – and important – tasks is figuring out how to deal with
North Korea. Totalitarian and reclusive, ideologically isolated and economically ruined,
it is a very unusual country in today’s liberal world order. But North Korea manages
to survive, not least because its leaders periodically rely on threats, such as nuclear
blackmail, to gain concessions from the international community. The dangers of these
policies are evident and much discussed. Miscalculations or a sudden escalation could
precipitate a human disaster at any moment.
Equally dangerous, although much less evident, are some of the attitudes with which
key regional and global countries, such as the United States, seek to contain the volatile
situation. Debates about how to deal with North Korea – and the Korean conflict in
general – can be located at two ends of opposing poles. The prevailing approach
advocates a confrontational attitude. It relies on economic sanctions and the projection
of military threats in an attempt to contain the situation and bring about change within
North Korea (Cha 2002; Eberstadt 1997; Rice 2000). Advocates of confrontation felt
vindicated by the most recent crises, noting, as Edward Luttwak (2010) did, that ‘it’s
time South Korea started shooting back’. The second approach favours engaging North
Korea in political, economic and cultural interactions. It assumes that a peaceful solution
emerges not from forcing North Korea into submission, but from integrating it into
the world community (Harrison 1997; Dujarric 2001; Moon 2001). Advocates of
engagement too believe that the most recent crises have only underlined the primacy
of their position (Lankov 2010).
Confrontation
First to the most commonly practised stance, which seeks to confront and undermine
North Korea through a mixture of military threats and economic sanctions. ‘If the North
Korean regime is irredeemable’, Marcus Noland (2000: 8) asks, ‘should not the rest of
the world act to hasten its demise?’ Withdrawing support would, undoubtedly, worsen
the economic situation in the North and precipitate yet another famine. But is this not
the price to pay for bringing about necessary change? Providing Pyongyang with trade
The question ‘Why do
some people think they
know what is good for
others?’ which is dealt
with in Chapter 21, is
interesting here.
FIGURE 26.7
The British nuclear test
code-named Hurricane.
Photo: The National
Archives, Kew,
Richmond, Surrey.
ref.: ADM280/966
It is important to
consider who and what
comes to be seen as
dangerous and why:
see Chapter 24.
576 ROLAND BLEIKER
possibilities and humanitarian aid would, according to this logic, not only sustain a
dictatorial and dangerous regime but also prolong the suffering of the North Korean
people. Several non-governmental organizations (NGOs for short) that provided
humanitarian aid, such as Oxfam and Médecins sans Frontières, left North Korea because
they were prevented from adequately monitoring and evaluating the impact of their
aid, which they feared did not reach the most vulnerable part of the population.
In the realm of security policy the confrontational approach is exemplified by the
foreign policy of the United States under the administration of President George W.
Bush. In his first State of the Union Address, Bush identified Pyongyang as one of several
‘evil’ rogue states. With the transition to a post-Cold War order, so-called rogue states
replaced the Soviet Union as the main threat. North Korea, together with Iraq and
Iran, were seen as the most dangerous of these rogues: totalitarian states that disrespected
human rights and aspired to posses weapons of mass destruction. As had already been
the case during the Cold War, military means are considered the key methods through
which the threat of rogue states is to be opposed. Illustrative here is a US Nuclear Posture
Review which became public in June 2002. It stipulated that the new US strategic
doctrine relied on the possibility of employing pre-emptive nuclear strikes against
terrorists and rogue states. North Korea was explicitly cited with regard to two possible
scenarios: countering an attack on the South and halting the proliferation of weapons
of mass destruction. A few months later Washington made its threats official. The
National Security Strategy (2002), released in September 2002, outlined in detail how
pre-emptive strikes are legitimate and would be employed as a way to ‘stop rogue states
and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass
destruction against the United States’.
BOX 26.4 THE WAR ON TERROR
Terrorism is as old as politics. But over the last decade or so the phenomenon has gained renewed
political significance. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 marked a key turning point in
international politics. The death toll alone would not necessarily render the event so central, for many
other recent conflicts, from Bosnia to Rwanda, produced far more casualties. September 11 is significant
because it fundamentally questioned the prevailing sense of security in the West. The terrorist attack of
September 11 represents a type of threat that cannot easily be anticipated, nor prevented, through
prevailing state-based structures of security. The danger stemmed not from another state, but from a non-
state organization, and one that cannot be precisely defined and located. The conflict was not launched
with conventional military equipment, but with simple means. The attack itself took place in surprise,
revealing a fundamental weakness in the state’s intelligence apparatus. The attack neither involved
opposing forces nor was it directed at a battlefield or a military target. It struck at the very heart of
political, economic and civilian life.
The response by the US and its allies, most notably the UK, was swift and determined. The ensuing
so-called war on terror was meant to punish those responsible for the attacks of September 11 and prevent
a similar future attack from occurring. An invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 targeted terrorist cells directly.
But soon the war on terror was expanded to include so-called rogue states: states that were said to be
sympathetic to terrorism or have the ambition to develop nuclear arms and other weapons of mass
destruction. The US identified Iraq, Iran and North Korea as rogue states and termed them the axis of evil.
In 2003, the US and its allies invaded Iraq with the objective of preventing the regime from further
developing and using weapons of mass destruction. But no such weapons were ever discovered, nor was
there any evidence that could connect the country to the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks of
September 11.
Although heralded as a new form of conducting international politics, the war on terror was
characterized by a striking similarity with thinking patterns that dominated foreign policy during the Cold
War. Once again the world was divided into ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and once again military means occupied the
key, if not the only role in protecting the former against the latter. Since the election of Barack Obama as
US president in 2008, the term ‘war on terror’ has dropped from official usage, but arguably the way of
thinking remains much the same.
FIGURE 26.8
The heavily mined demilitarized zone between North and
South Korea seen from a South Korean military observation
post. The zone has become a haven for wildlife.
Photo: Seokyong Lee for the New York Times
CAN WE MOVE BEYOND CONFLICT? 577
FIGURE 26.9
‘Maybe you should
reconsider those place cards.’
Artist: Dave Carpenter.
CartoonStock ref.: dcr0435h
www.CartoonStock.com
The confrontational and militaristic attitude to security does not necessarily exclude
negotiations. Diplomacy and dialogue are seen as continuously import ant, but they
occupy only a supporting role. On numerous occasions President Bush publicly declared
a willingness to engage Pyongyang in diplomatic negoti ations. At the same time, though,
the projection of threats towards North Korea was carefully maintained, even intensified.
Ever since the latest nuclear crisis emerged in Korea, officials in Washington have kept
stressing that military power is always an option.
Prevailing approaches to security, based on deterrence and the projection of military
threats, have failed to deal successfully with the key security challenges in Korea. There
are various reasons why the confrontational approach has not worked. Four of them
stand out particularly.
First, the use of military power as an instrument of deterrence and pressure has
proven to be relatively ineffective with regard to North Korea. The US has, of course,
threatened and used military power quite frequently to achieve political goals, most
recently in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Such actions were aimed at either pressuring
a regime to change its behaviour or at actually removing it from power altogether. But
strategic experts largely agree that a military solution to the nuclear crisis in Korea is
highly problematic. One of the world’s biggest cities, Seoul, is only 50 kilometres away
from the heavily militarized Demilitarized Zone. Even if pre-emptive strikes were to
neutralize North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal, they would not be able to destroy
all its conventional weapons. The latter alone could easily trigger a second Korean war
with disastrous consequences on all sides. Intensifying threats against North Korea would
also provide its regime with a welcome source of legitimacy. The result might be a
population rallying around its threatened government, no matter how despotic it is.
578 ROLAND BLEIKER
http://www.CartoonStock.com
See Chapter 2 for a
discussion of the
importance of language
and rhetoric in another
case, that of torture.
For a detailed
examination of how
colonialism works and
what its legacies can be
see Chapter 16.
People who advocate
engagement with
apparently hostile
regimes are sometimes
accused of being too
‘soft’. This can translate
into an accusation of
not being ‘masculine’
enough.
The second element of the confrontational approach is economic sanctions. Such
sanctions were pronounced against North Korea by the UN Security Council in a
unanimously accepted resolution on 14 October 2006. Taken in direct response to
Pyongyang’s nuclear test, these sanctions were the most far-reaching ones imposed
against North Korea since the end of the Korean War in 1953. They included not only
any material that could be used to produce nuclear, biological and chemical weapons,
but also bans on international travel and a freeze of assets held by people associated
with Pyongyang’s contentious weapons programmes. The problem with sanctions is
that they have historically been of very limited use. Miroslav Nincic (2005) stresses that
failure is the norm, as in the cases of Iran, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and North
Korea. In fact, Nincic goes as far as believing that comprehensive economic sanctions
often had a counter-productive effect, leading to a modification of a regime’s ideology
and economy that actually ended up strengthening its grip on power.
Third, despite paying lip service to the idea of negotiations, a confrontational
approach forecloses most options other than those based on military means and
economic sanctions. ‘The opposition between good and evil is not negotiable’, Allan
Bloom (1987: 142) already noted at the time of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. It is a
question of principles, and thus ‘a cause of war’. Expressed in other words, the rhetoric
of evil moves the phenomena of rogue states into the realm of irrationality. Evil is in
essence a term of condemnation for a phenomenon that can neither be fully compre –
hended nor addressed, except through militaristic forms of power politics. This is why
various commentators believe that the rhetoric of evil prevents rather than encourages
understanding. They go as far as arguing that it evades accountability, for it leads to
policy positions that ‘deny negotiations and compromise’ (Klusmeyer and Suhrke
2002: 27–9, 35–7; Euben 2002: 4). How is it, indeed, possible to negotiate with evil
without being implicated in it?
Fourth, the confrontational approach fails to take into account the interactive nature
of conflicts. Very few policy makers, security analysts and journalists ever make the effort
to imagine how threats are perceived from the North Korean perspective, and how these
perceptions are part of an interactive security dilemma in which the West is implicated
too. North Korea does not exist in a vacuum. It cannot be understood outside the
insecurities and fear left by four decades of Japanese colonialism, followed by the Korean
War and half a century of national division and Cold War tension (Cumings 2004: ix,
151). Particularly significant is the current policy of pre-emptive strikes against rogue
states, for it reinforces half a century of American nuclear threats towards North Korea.
Engagement
There are alternatives to confrontation. A second, opposing approach holds that
engaging North Korea and integrating it into the world community is the best
opportunity to prevent a military escalation and create a more peaceful political environ –
ment. Several humanitarian organiza tions, for instance, stayed behind in North Korea,
believing that the possibility of providing humanitarian assistance and develop ment co-
operation was essential, even if the conditions were far from ideal. Withdrawing aid,
they feared, would only heighten the danger of a confrontation and worsen the situation
of the population but not necessarily bring about change for the better. Underlying
CAN WE MOVE BEYOND CONFLICT? 579
FIGURE 26.10
Demilitarized Zone
opens for train passage,
Paju, South Korea, 17
May 2007. Photo: Chung
Sung-Jun/Getty Images
the logic of this position was the recognition that there are very few cases where famines
have brought down an authoritarian regime (Savage 2002: 155).
South Korea has become the strongest proponent of a policy of engagement with
the North. Starting with his inaugural speech in February 1998, South Korea’s president,
Kim Dae-jung, called for a new approach towards the North. Kim’s initiative revolved
around moving from a deeply entrenched politics of confrontation towards an attitude
that promotes reconciliation and co-operation (Kihl 1998: 23; Moon and Steinberg
1999). Kim’s successor, Roh Moo-hyun, supported and continued this approach.
The engagement policy is driven by a key emphasis on dialogue. The notion of
dialogue goes substantially further than the diplomatic positioning advocated by the
confrontational approach. The attempt, rather, consists of engaging the parties to the
conflict in genuine negotiations. The most spectacular result of this policy was an
unprecedented summit meeting between the two Korean heads of state in June 2000.
The most recent success of engagement is an agreement reached in February 2007
between North Korea, South Korea, the US, China, Russia and Japan. The agreement
ended, at least temporarily, the tense standoff that culminated four months earlier with
North Korea’s first nuclear test. Resembling the agreement reached in 1994, the 2007
deal foresees North Korea abandoning its nuclear weapons programme in exchange for
fuel oil, food aid and other economic assistance. The agreement, which was strongly
critiqued by con servative policy analysts in Washington, also constitutes an implicit
acknow ledg ment by the Bush administration that confrontation did not work: that
engagement offers the most promising approach to solving the security crisis on the
Korean peninsula. Half a year after this agreement, in October 2007, there was a second
historic summit meeting between the two Korean heads of state, Kim Jong-il and Roh
Moo-hyun.
Perhaps even more important than high level diplomatic negotiations is the fact
that Kim and Roh’s engagement policy generated various forms of low-level cross-border
580 ROLAND BLEIKER
CAN WE MOVE BEYOND CONFLICT? 581
exchanges, from tourist visits, cultural and sports engagements to family reunions.
Central here was a substantial increase in cross-border economic activities, which had
been all but non-existent until recently. The 2007 Agreement foresees further cross-
border economic activities, such as cooperative shipbuilding complexes, common fish –
ing zones and the opening of a cargo rail service. By international standards these
economic activities may be insignificant. But they are spectacular in the context of the
hermetically sealed Korean peninsula.
The engagement policy is based on the traditional liberal assumption that increased
economic interactions will eventually engender common interest and understanding.
In a context where commercial activities are at stake, the key actors have a strong interest
in reducing the likelihood of conflict since it would jeopard ize profit and investment
(Moon 2001: 188–89). But there is more to cross-border activities than mere inter –
dependence. The ensuing contacts may also help to reduce the deeply entrenched
stereotypical perceptions that Koreans have of their compatriots across the dividing line
(Chung 1999: 125). They may also bring North Koreans in contact with the outside
world. There is, in fact, evidence that North Korea’s tightly sealed borders are becom-
ing more porous. As a result of North Korea’s desperate economic situation, starving
refugees go to China in search for food. They bring back information about the outside
world. Videos, DVDs and tuneable radios are smuggled in. Alternative news sources,
such as ‘Open Radio for North Korea’, also bring in information that allows the popu –
lation to compare its situation with the outside world (Lankov 2008).
BROADER ISSUES
DEALING WITH ANTAGONISM
Engagement and dialogue offer viable alternatives to confrontation. But they are not
without problems either. The Sunshine Policy of South Korean presidents Kim Dae-
jung and Roh Moo-hyun might have been more effective in bringing North Korea to
the negotiating table, but there are major ethical dilemmas in negotiating with and
delivering aid to an authoritarian regime that commits widespread human rights
violations. Not surprisingly, North Korea frequently ‘cheated’, pursing nuclear pro –
grammes in secret while negotiating in seeming good faith with the international
community. This is one of the reasons why after a decade of engagement South Korea
reversed course. The latest president, Lee Myung Bak, was inaugurated in 2008 and
opted for a much more confrontational approach to the North. He did so even though
the new US president, Barack Obama, pursued a more conciliatory diplomacy.
Both confrontation and engagement leave unaddressed larger questions about how
to develop the type of tolerance necessary to live with deep seated antagonisms that
inevitably exist after major traumas. Wars, genocides or terrorist attacks shape people
and societies for decades to come. They not only become an essential component of
individual and collective identities, but also risk re-igniting new forms of tension and
violence.
When facing seemingly intractable conflicts, one of the most difficult challenges
consists of accepting the existence of deep seated wounds and grievances without letting
them degenerate into violence. The promotion of dialogue is important in this process,
but not enough. Just as crucial is a certain level of tolerance: an acceptance that there
are – and for the foreseeable future will be – major differences between the conflicting
parties and their attitudes.
In Korea this challenge largely revolves around coming to terms with the traumatic
past, most notably with the legacy of the Korean War. The memory of pain and death
is far too present for a single unified understanding of history to emerge. Each side
does, in essence, blame the other for causing the war. And each side has rehearsed and
institutionalized its particular understanding of the past while making every effort to
shield their respective populations from the diametrically opposed position promoted
by the other side. Little does it matter that some of the respective historical perspectives,
such as North Korea’s hero worship of its first leader, Kim Il Sung, are based far more
on fiction than on fact. The different understandings of history and society are so deeply
entrenched that they cannot easily be overcome, at least not in the near future.
Recognizing the existence of historical differences is a crucial element in moving
beyond conflict. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1999: 13) stresses that by
‘acknowledging that the history of an event involves a conflict of several interpretations
and memories, we in turn open up the future’. Susan Dwyer (1999: 89) takes this idea
further and offers a useful way of conceptualizing what is at stake in the process of
reconciliation. Three steps, she argues, are necessary. The first consists of an effort to
find agreement on ‘the barest of facts’. The second stage involves an effort to identify
a range of different interpretations of the respective events. And the third stage would
entail narrowing things down to a limited set of interpretations that the two sides can
tolerate. While such a goal of agreeing to disagree seems modest, the path towards it
is littered with seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The first hurdle alone is already
very difficult, for Dwyer defines agreeing on ‘the barest of facts’ as finding a clear view
on ‘who did what to whom and when’. In Korea, these ‘bare facts’ are, of course,
precisely the major point of contention – and the source of trauma and hatred.
Moving beyond conflict requires a compromise between a search for justice and the
ability to forgive – a compromise that is all too often neglected by prevailing con –
frontational approaches. Holding people accountable for past wrongdoings is essential.
But so is a willingness to ‘forget’ some aspects of the traumatic past that continuously
fuel conflict. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1981: 118) stresses that the
past suffocates the present unless we forget it. He calls upon people to have the courage
to ‘break with the past in order to live’. Forgetting, in this sense, does not mean ignoring
what happened. Forgetting, after all, is a natural process, an inevitable aspect of
remembering; we all do it, whether we want to or not. We cannot possibly remember
everything. We cannot give every event the same weight. Our memory of the past is the
result of a process through which certain events and interpretations are remembered and
prioritized, while others are relegated to secondary importance or forgotten altogether.
This is particularly the case with a major event like the Korean War, which is far too
complex to be remembered in its totality. The task of historians is to select the few facts,
perspectives and interpretations that ought to be remembered. The combination of
forgetting and remembering is as inevitable as it is political. Being aware of this
inevitability is to explore possibilities for reshaping the past and using this process in the
service of creating a better future (Nietzsche 1981: 100). Nietzsche is particularly critical
of periods when historical understandings lack critical awareness of this process –
582 ROLAND BLEIKER
Collective memory after
the world wars in
Europe is contentious
and contested too:
see Chapter 22.
It has been pointed out
that we forget much
more than we remember:
most of what happens is
in this sense ‘forgotten’.
CAN WE MOVE BEYOND CONFLICT? 583
situations, say, when illegitimate rulers misappropriate historical events and mythologies
to justify their form of dominance (Nietzsche 1981: 106–7, 111). Such is undoubtedly
the case in contemporary Korea, where history has been geared far more towards support –
ing particular regimes than towards actually representing what happened in the past.
Politics in Korea also displays signs of what Nietzsche calls ‘critical histories’:
attempts to challenge the notion of a single historical reality and create the political
space in which diverging understandings of the past can co-exist in an atmosphere
of tolerance. A recent example of a breakthrough in this direction, timid as it may
well be, can be found in revisions of history school textbooks in South Korea. The com –
position and use of school textbooks has always been very tightly controlled by the
government. These texts, in turn, were then used to legitimize and spread an ideo –
logically driven perspective on history, society and politics. Several generations of
history texts have, for instance, studiously avoided even mentioning the role that north –
ern communist guerrillas played in the fight against the Japanese colonial occupiers.
Doing so would have been seen as sym pathizing with the communist North, even if
the presented facts are historically accurate. One of six new secondary school history
textbooks, released in 2003, for the first time mentions the existence of communist
resistance. It does so in a passage dealing with a 1937 clash between Japanese colonial
forces and resistance fighters allegedly led by Kim Il Sung, the future leader of North
Korea. In addition to these textbook revisions there is an increasing willingness by school
administrators, teachers and students to open up a cross border-dialogue about the past.
Some government officials have suggested that the North and South could exchange
‘narrative memories’ by making available, on both sides, a range of commonly agreed
upon historical documents and teaching materials, which could then be used in addition
to the official textbooks that each side employs. Young teachers in particular appear
willing to move beyond existing patterns of hatred. They often supplement the use of
the prescribed textbooks with alterna tive methods, such as historical simulation,
television documentaries, cartoons and newspapers (Hoang 2002).
BOX 26.5 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Friedrich Nietzsche is a German philosopher (1844–1900) whose work has
shaped a range of contemporary thinkers. Nietzsche’s influence has less to
do with the particular political views he held than with the manner in which
he approached more fundamental questions of knowledge. In particular, he
challenged the deeply entrenched modern search for universal forms of truth,
whether they be based in Christian morals or scientific foundations.
Nietzsche believed that the search for truth always contained a will to power.
Seen from such a vantage point, a critical investigation into a political issue
would need to pay attention to processes of inclusion and exclusion, to how
knowledge and power are always intertwined.
FIGURE 26.11
Friedrich Nietzsche
This is a small example that demonstrates how South and North Korea may be able
to open up political spaces in which it becomes possible to contemplate the other’s
memory of the past, even if this memory appears distorted and inherently wrong. But
this small example highlights two very important points.
First: an effort to accept deep seated differences is an important addition to dia –
logue. But it too is not enough. Accepting difference must go beyond acknow ledging
that people or societies in conflict have diverging understandings of the past. Leaving
it at that would only entrench existing antagonisms, and thus legitimize or even inten –
sify the existing conflict. Keith Krause and Michael Williams (1997: xv) draw atten tion
to this danger, pointing out that in places like Bosnia and Rwanda an awareness of
difference led ‘not to celebration but destruction’. The objective, much rather, would
be a political attitude that is based on tolerance but that can also generate the type of
understanding and respect needed for a commonly acceptable and non-violent
relationship between former arch-enemies.
Second: the greatest push forward towards reconciliation often comes not from
politicians, diplomats or generals, but from the realm of the everyday: from normal
citizens, grassroots organizations or popular culture. There have been an increasing
number of South Korean films that defy the deeply entrenched tendency to vilify the
North. Early and influential examples of this trend include Heuk Su Seon (‘Last Witness’,
2001), Swiri (1999) and Joint Security Area (or ‘JSA’, 2000). The domestic and
international success of the latter is particularly important, for the film is one of the rare
public features that clearly resists perpetuating the entrenched stereotypical image of
cold and evil North Koreans. Instead, JSA narrates how a small group of soldiers from
both sides develop a friendship, secretly and against all odds. In the end conflict becomes
inevitable and the respective soldiers must choose country over friendship. But the film
is nevertheless a milestone, for it portrays soldiers on both sides as normal Koreans,
with a variety of similar emotions, concerns and interests. This contrasts quite sharply
with the confrontational approach that prevails among security experts in Korea.
Poets and novelists from both sides of the dividing line have embarked on a similarly
innovative grassroots attempt at healing the wounds of national division and war. In
2005 a group of North and South Korean writers issued a joint declaration, aiming to
promote reconciliation on the peninsula. Numerous activities followed, such as a visit
to the North by ninety-eight South Korean writers – a first in more than 60 years. The
delegation was led by one of the country’s most famous poets, Ko Un. Projects that
have already emerged from these efforts include plans for a joint magazine, a literary
prize, and the first unified Korean dictionary.
Ko Un has not only played a leading role in bringing together writers from both
South and North Korea, but also expressed a vision of moving beyond conflict in his
own poetry. Having experienced the trauma of war and national division, Ko Un (2002:
20) writes of ‘birds that all flew away at the sound of a gun’. He recalls the senseless
violence he witnessed as a young man (Ko Un 1996):
Every morning heaven and earth
are piled with dead things.
Our job is to bury them all day long.
584 ROLAND BLEIKER
Novels that resist
stereotypes of national
identity and that deal
with stories of exile and
the complicated sense
of allegiance and
estrangement that many
people have in relation
to a national community
are explored in
Chapter 13.
There are many cases
where poets have
influenced global
politics. The war poets
in England after the
First World War are
one example; dissident
writers in the Soviet
Union are another.
Can you think of more?
Other forms of cultural
output are also
important – not only
‘high culture’ but things
like rock music or reggae
for example.
CAN WE MOVE BEYOND CONFLICT? 585
In an attempt to show a way out of the ensuing cycle of violence, Ko Un believes
in a vision for peace, a vision that views security not only in terms of a military-based
defence of the state apparatus, but also as a comprehensive endeavour that promotes
the rights and well-being of people. In the same vein as his accessibly written poems,
Ko Un implies that the key impetus of genuine transformation often stems from the
mass of people and not from their leaders. But he also knows that this process is inevitably
slow and littered with obstacles. Deeply entrenched hatred and mistrust cannot disappear
overnight. But a policy of engagement, combined with a respect for difference, can offer
a way forward. Or so suggests one of Ko Un’s (2002: 7) poems:
Peace is waves.
Waves breaking, alive
and beneath those waves
swim fish of every kind, alive.
CONCLUSION
This chapter has sought to address a political problem that is as old as it is of contem –
porary relevance: how is it possible to deal with and perhaps even overcome conflicts
that are so deeply entrenched that they seem intractable? There are no easy answers to
the problems at stake, nor is there a general theory that can offer a compre hensive
explanation of conflict and its possible resolution. Each conflict is rooted in particular
BOX 26.6 KOREAN POET KO UN
Ko Un is one of South Korea’s best known poets. Born in 1933, he was
shortlisted for the Nobel Prize several times. As a young man, Ko Un
directly experienced the atrocities of the Korean War, including the
death of several relatives and friends. He then spent 10 years as a
Buddhist monk, eventually holding several high ranks in monastic life.
In 1966 he rejoined the secular world to set up a charity on the Korean
island of Jejudo. A few years later he moved to Seoul in the context of
struggling with alcoholism and making several suicide attempts.
During the 1970s and 1980s Ko Un was active in the democracy
movement, gaining prominence as an outspoken nationalist poet. As a
result he spent two years in prison under the regime of general Chun
Doo-Hwan. Released in 1982 as part of a general pardon, Ko Un
devoted himself to a life of poetry. Most recently he used his reputation to advance the cause of
reconciliation with North Korea. Ko Un’s literary output comprises over a hundred volumes of poetry,
novels, autobiography, dramas, essays, travel books and translations. His is particularly known for a style
that brings everyday language to poetry.
FIGURE 26.12
Ko Un
historical circumstances. Understanding and dealing with these circumstances is essential
if conflict is to give way to a more peaceful environment.
The chapter has illustrated the issues at stake by focusing on the seemingly
intractable conflict on the divided Korean peninsula, where mutual hatred and con stant
tensions have dominated politics for over half a century now. One of the most difficult
questions today is how to approach a North Korean regime that clearly violates the
human rights of its citizens and poses a threat to regional and even global peace. Should
one engage in a dialogue with North Korea? Should one try to reach a compromise in
order to avoid a dangerous escalation of tension or even a possible war on the peninsula?
Or is such an approach merely a policy of appeasement that prolongs the suffering of
people and renders the situation in the long run more dangerous? The prevailing
approach certainly believes that the latter is the case: it advocates a confrontational stance
which relies on military threats and economic sanctions to coerce North Korea into
compliant behaviour. Dialogue and negotiations play a role in this policy only to the
extent that they reinforce the underlying political and strategic objectives.
The prevailing confrontational approach, which is exemplified by US policy during
the administration of President George W. Bush, has not been able to solve the conflict
in Korea. Instead, it has rendered the situation in Korea more volatile than it already
was, triggering a new nuclear crisis. The two key instru ments of the confrontational
approach, namely the threat of a military inter vention and the use of economic sanctions,
have been ineffective policy instru ments. Given North Korea’s predictable foreign policy
behaviour, no amount of threat will convince Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear pro –
gramme. To the contrary, American projection of military might, including the explicit
threat of pre-emptive nuclear strikes against North Korea, only fuelled Pyongyang’s
perceived need for a nuclear based defence.
A policy of engagement, as practised by the South Korean government between
1998 and 2008, offers a viable alternative to the US-sponsored confrontational approach.
The engagement policy advocates genuine negotiations with the North in an attempt
to integrate the isolated country into the world community. Essen tial to this process
is the promotion of cultural and economic exchanges across the hermetically sealed
dividing line. The ensuing face-to-face encounters between average Koreans have the
potential to dismantle at least some of the deeply entrenched antagonistic attitudes that
have fuelled conflict in Korea for decades.
Dialogue is crucial in the process of moving beyond conflict. But it is not enough.
Just as important is the development of a certain level of tolerance: a willingness to
accept that after years of conflict the former enemies will have developed deep seated
differences that cannot easily be removed. Key here is an attempt to come to terms with
the influence of traumatic past events: an effort to find a com promise between remem –
ber ing past atrocities and moving beyond them in a spirit of reconciliation. This can
only work if all parties concerned engage questions of tolerance and forgiveness in an
attempt to establish a political climate in which former enemies can interact in a respect –
ful, or at least non-violent manner.
Sustained engagement and a genuine acceptance of difference cannot, of course,
not offer ready-made solutions to deeply entrenched conflicts. No conflict is alike. Each
has different causes and thus requires different solutions. Not all lessons learned from
Korea can automatically be applied to other situations. But at least some aspects of the
586 ROLAND BLEIKER
Korean experience can provide important insights that are of a general nature. This
applies as well to the following limits to engagement.
First, there will always be suspicion and mistrust in a political situation that has
been dominated by conflict. There is deep and very justified suspicion that North Korea
may simply misuse offers of engagement, that it may, for instance, ‘cheat’ and pursue
a nuclear programme in secret, independently of the assurances it gives in public. Dealing
with an authoritarian regime also poses a range of difficult moral dilemmas. This is
particularly the case when humanitarian aid is involved. But no matter how problematic
and porous a policy of dialogue may be, it still offers more opportunity to diffuse conflict
than the situation engendered by the confrontational approach, which sees North Korea
openly pursuing a nuclear weapons programme that destabilizes the entire region.
Second, promoting a policy of engagement and reconciliation inevitably takes time.
Entrenched antagonisms cannot be uprooted over night. But the lessons learned from
Korea show that it is crucial to think about the values and implications of different
approaches to security and conflict. Based on historical evidence, the engagement policy
has the best track record of diffusing tension on the peninsula. The fact that it has only
been partially successful cannot be held against it, for the confrontational approach has
always played an important and all too often a dominant role. Be it in a realist, neo-
conservative or communist version, confrontational attitudes are so deeply entrenched
that they have come to fulfil their own promises of doom and gloom.
Third and finally: no amount of engagement and tolerance can absolve decision
makers, commentators and individuals from making choices, from separating right from
wrong. For instance, engaging North Korea in negotiations and accepting that several
decades of conflict have deeply divided the peninsula, is not the same as agreeing with
or supporting the authoritarian regime in Pyongyang. Even an ethics of difference must,
at times, decide about the type of values that are to play a central role in political projects.
But the process of articulating and defending these values is likely to be more successful,
and less violent, if it is done with the knowledge of and sensitivity towards the complex
factors that cause and fuel seemingly intractable conflicts.
FURTHER READING
Bell, Duncan S. A. (ed.) (2006) Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship
between Past and Present, New York: Palgrave.
A collection of scholarly investigations that illuminate how traumatic events shape political
dynamics and how the ensuing conflicts may be understood and overcome.
Cha, Victor D. and David C. Kang (2003) Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement
Strategies, New York: Columbia University Press.
An accessibly written exchange between two scholars and policy advisors.
Cumings, Bruce (1997) Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, New York: W. W. Norton.
A brief and engagingly presented history of modern Korea, written by one of the most
authoritative historians. Cumings’ positions are controversial, particularly for challenging the
prevailing black-and-white understandings of the Korean War, but they offer very insightful
background information about the ongoing conflict in Korea.
Hassig, Ralph and Kongdan, Oh (2009) The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the
Hermit Kingdom, Baltimore, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
An account of life in North Korea, based on numerous sources, including interviews with
hundreds of defectors.
CAN WE MOVE BEYOND CONFLICT? 587
Kim, Samuel S. (2006) The Two Koreas and the Great Powers, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
An analysis by a leading scholar of how the conflict in Korea is intertwined with regional and
global political patterns. Focuses in particular on questions of identity.
Lankov, Andrei (2010) ‘How to Stop the Next Korean War’, Foreign Policy, December 16.
A concise essay by one of the most innovative scholars on the topic, advocating the need to
open up North Korea to the outside world.
Moon, Chung-in (2001) ‘The Kim Dae Jung Government’s Peace Policy towards North Korea’,
Asian Perspective 25, 2: 177–98.
A concise summary of the engagement policy towards North Korea, articulated by one of
the most influential South Korean scholars and policy advisors.
WEBSITES
The Korea Herald, http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/
This is South Korea’s most popular English language newspaper.
KCNA, or the Korean Central News Agency, http://www.kcna.co.jp/index-e.htm
This is North Korea’s news agency. It publishes a bulletin of news reflecting North Korea’s
position.
The Korea Web-Weekly, http://www.kimsoft.com/korea.htm
A site that aims to be independent and non-partisan, offering a range of useful information
and links about Korea, including the political situation.
Ko Un, http://www.koun.co.kr/
The website of the Korean poet Ko Un, offering a portrayal of him and his work.
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Chung, Oknim (1999) ‘The US-ROK Private Sector Role in Peace and Security on the Korean
Peninsula’, The Korean Journal of Defense Analysis 11, 1: 101–26.
Cumings, Bruce (1997) Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, New York: W. W. Norton.
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High School and Keumjeon High School, South Korea, March and April.
588 ROLAND BLEIKER
http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/
http://www.kcna.co.jp/index-e.htm
http://www.kimsoft.com/korea.htm
http://www.koun.co.kr/
CAN WE MOVE BEYOND CONFLICT? 589
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Moon, Chung-in (2001) ‘The Kim Dae Jung Government’s Peace Policy towards North Korea’,
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Nietzsche, Friedrich (1981) ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben’, in Unzeit –
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Noland, Marcus (2000) Avoiding the Apocalypse: The Future of the Two Koreas. Washington, DC:
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Perry, William J. (1999) Review of United States Policy Toward North Korea: Findings and
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––––(2000) ‘The United States and the Future of East Asian Security: Korea – Quo Vadis?’, in
Woo Keun-Min (ed.) Building Common Peace and Prosperity in Northeast Asia, Seoul: Yonsei
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For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
CHAPTER 27
Who has rights?
Giorgio Shani
■ The question
WHOSE RIGHTS?
■ Illustrative example
THE FRENCH HEADSCARF BAN
■ General responses
HUMAN RIGHTS AND UNIVERSALITY
■ Broader issues
BARE LIFE, HUMAN RIGHTS AND SOVEREIGN POWER
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
WHOSE RIGHTS?
Human rights are part of the common sense of our modern world; to be against human
rights – and the associated values of freedom and equality – is to be against humanity
(Žižek 2005). The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR)
has been ratified by the vast majority of states, irrespective of culture or
ideology, and human rights are enshrined in the constitutions of most.
Protection of human rights has recently been made an international
obligation for all states, and violations are subject to prosecution by the
International Criminal Court and various international tribunals convened
to investigate crimes against humanity, most notably in the former Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The notion that all human beings
have rights by virtue of their common humanity is, however, a recent
development.
The first institutionalization of rights was in post-Enlightenment
revolutionary France and the United States of America. In the French
Chapter 1 discusses the
way certain assumptions
underlie what we think of
as common sense. What
assumptions underlie
the idea that we all know
what we mean by
‘human’ and that
knowing what counts as
a human being is
unproblematic? The idea
of human nature is
discussed in Chapter 7.
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), all men – regardless of
nationality – were seen as endowed with natural rights. However, in practice, rights are
not always given to all human beings but only to citizens. The contradiction of rights
discourse is that, despite its proclamations of universality, rights are enjoyed only within
the context of a particular community. The classical, early modern answer to the question
of who has rights was connected to thinking that brought the modern state into
existence. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan guaranteed rights through a framework of law.
Obedience to the Leviathan would be binding since its origins lie in a mythical social
contract between governors and the governed. The alternative to the order of the
Leviathan was anarchy: a war of everyman against everyman (Hobbes [1651] 2006).
John Locke later argued that it would be irrational of men as citizens to surrender their
natural rights to life, liberty and estate unless they received guarantees from the state
(Locke [1689] 1988). Thus, legal rights were substituted for natural rights. In order
to ensure that the state fulfilled its contractual obligations to those it governed, the
state’s power was limited by a constitution that guaranteed a separation of powers and,
much later, by representative democracy.
Questions, however, remain: is the state the best guarantor of human rights given
its violent history? More fundamentally, who has rights? I will suggest in the course of
this chapter that human rights cannot be assumed a priori as something we should all
be entitled to by virtue of a common humanity but, rather, ideas of human rights help
define what it is to be human. The answer to the question of who has rights therefore
depends on what we consider to be worthy of protection. In order to answer this
question, I look at the ban on the display of external religious symbols in public places
WHO HAS RIGHTS? 591
BOX 27.1 THE UNITED NATIONS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN
RIGHTS
Unanimously adopted by the General Assembly in December
1948, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (UNDHR) has come to symbolize, more that any
other legal document, the international community’s
commitment to protecting human rights. Arising out of the
experiences of the Second World War, the Declaration was
the first systematic attempt to extend the concept of legal
rights beyond the nation-state.
Following the adoption of the UNDHR, the fundamental
rights spelled out in the Declaration have subsequently been
elaborated in the International Covenant of Civil and Political
Rights and International Covenant on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights, both adopted by the General Assembly in
1966 and institutionalized within the UN system respectively
through the Human Rights Committee and Economic and
Social Council (United Nations 1948).
FIGURE 27.1
Eleanor Roosevelt regarded the Universal
Declaration as her greatest accomplishment.
http://www.udhr.org/history/images/hr18.GIF;
http://www.udhr.org/history/Biographies/
bioer.htm
Who counts as a citizen
and what rights they
have is something that is
also considered in
Chapter 10.
Chapter 7 discusses
Hobbes’ notion of the
social contract; Chapter
13 also comments on the
mythical social contract.
http://www.udhr.org/history/images/hr18.GIF
http://www.udhr.org/history/Biographies/bioer.htm
http://www.udhr.org/history/Biographies/bioer.htm
in France before examining general responses to the ban and broader issues relating to
the purported universality of human rights. Contemporary conceptions of human
rights are based on a particular vision of humanity as bare life (Agamben 1998). The
origins of human rights discourse stretch beyond the Enlightenment and are rooted in
the Judaeo-Christian tradition. This makes their extension to different cultures
problematic.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
THE FRENCH HEADSCARF BAN
Immigration by Muslims from former French colonies has posed a challenge to the
principle of laïcité or secularism enshrined in the French constitution. The presence of
Muslim headscarves, hijabs, in public places has given rise to a controversial debate. On
the one hand are those who consider the hijab to constitute a threat to the secularity
of the public sphere and the egalitarianism of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man
and the Citizen, which states that all citizens are equal in the eyes of the law. On the
other hand are people who believe wearing the hijab is a fundamental human right
guaranteed by the Declaration and the UNDHR. In French, this debate is termed
L’Affaire du foulard.
L’ Affaire du foulard, a series of long and drawn-out public confrontations between
students and school authorities, first arose in 1989 as a result of the exclusion of three
students from a school in Creil, a Parisian banlieue (suburb), for wearing a headscarf
(foulard). It continued to the mass exclusion of twenty-three Muslim girls from their
schools in November 1996 upon the decision of the highest legislative body in France,
the Conseil d’etat (Benhabib 2002: 95). Until then, public schools had mostly tolerated
the wearing of the veil by students but not by teachers. Although wearing the hijab is
an integral part of many women’s lives in the Islamic world, it is mainly viewed as a
cultural practice and not a religious stipulation. Few Muslim women seeking to assimilate
into French society initially chose to wear a veil, since it carried a stigma of backward –
ness. However, the increasing assertiveness of Muslims globally following the rise of
political Islam resulted in a shift in the public perception of the hijab: from being a
symbol of conservatism it became one of rebellion. For Seyla Benhabib, the initial
decision to wear a headscarf by the three schoolgirls in Creil was a ‘conscious political
gesture on their part, a complex act of identification and defiance’ (Benhabib 2002:
96). Wearing the veil in a public place came to be invested with political significance.
The events of 11 September 2001, and the purported threat of terrorism from
radical Islamic groups, led the French state to attempt decisive action to protect the
public sphere from what they considered manifestations of an Islamic fundamentalist
identity. An Act passed in 2004 outlawed the wearing in state schools of signs or dress
by which pupils ‘overtly’ manifest a religious affiliation. The term ‘overt’ (ostensible in
French) was preferred to visible, since ‘overt’ implies that the wearer wants to be seen
whereas ‘visible’ was deemed to be in conformity with the European Convention of
Human Rights which guarantees the right to freely manifest one’s religion (Joppke 2009:
51). This Act was followed in 2010 with the passing of a law banning face-covering
garments – the niqab and burqa – in public spaces such as restaurants, schools and public
592 GIORGIO SHANI
What Agamben means
by bare life is explained
in the final section and in
Chapter 20.
The rise of political Islam
and the politics of
secularism are discussed
in Chapter 6.
Islam, and fundament –
alism in all religions, is
discussed in Chapter 6.
WHO HAS RIGHTS? 593
transportation. Under the bill’s provisions, women wearing a face-covering veil in public
spaces could be fined 150 euros or asked to take classes on the values of French citizen –
ship. More recently still, a law was passed banning praying in the street, a directive clearly
aimed at Muslims. The French state evidently believes the ‘overt’ manifestation of the
Islamic faith publicly to be incompatible with the core values of the Republic.
According to official republican discourse, the ban on Muslim headscarves in schools
helps further five central values of laïcité: the preservation of a shared, non-sectarian
public sphere; the distinction between the private and the public identities of individuals;
equality before the law and non-discrimination; universal civic education in common
schools; and the guarantee of equal religious rights for all. In the first place, Muslim
headscarves are deemed to introduce signs of private difference and religious divisiveness
in the public sphere. They constitute an ‘ostensible’ intrusion of religious identities into
public schools, which should be protected from their destabilizing effects. As a religious
obligation, they symbolize the primacy of the believer over the citizen. Muslims, it is
argued, should make more effort to reconcile their faith with the demands of national
integration. Furthermore, headscarves and other clearly visible religious symbols infringe
upon difference-blind equality in two ways: by introducing ostensible distinctions
in public schools which threaten the neutrality of the public sphere; and by creating an
unjustified exemption from a general requirement of religious restraint on the part of
BOX 27.2 THE VEIL
The term ‘the Islamic veil’ refers to a variety of forms of female clothing of which the most commonly
worn by Muslims in Western Europe are the hijab, niqab and burqa.
Derived from the Arabic for veil, the hijab is a scarf which covers the head and neck but leaves the face
clear. Frenchwomen are allowed to wear the hijab in public places but not in schools.
The niqab is a veil for the face that leaves the area around the eyes clear. In September 2011, two
Frenchwomen were fined for wearing the niqab in public.
The burka (burqa) is the most restrictive, covering the entire face, leaving just a mesh screen to see
through. It is illegal to publicly wear it in France (BBC 2011).
FIGURE 27.2
Hijab, image from: http://www.bbc.co.
uk/news/world-europe-15013383
FIGURE 27.3
Niqab, image from: http://www.bbc.co.
uk/news/world-europe-15013383
FIGURE 27.4
Burka, image from: http://www.bbc.co.
uk/news/world-europe-15013383
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15013383
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15013383
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15013383
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15013383
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15013383
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15013383
BOX 27.3 LAÏCITÉ
In France, laïcité is an ideological form of secularism that has developed on two levels and encompasses
both legal and philosophical implications. In the first place, it involves a very strict separation of church
and state, a legacy of the political conflict between the state and the Catholic Church that resulted in the
1905 Law on the Separation of Churches and the State regulating the presence of religion in public life.
The guiding principles of the law are contained in the first two articles. Under Article 1 the Republic
‘ensures freedom of conscience’, whereas under Article 2 the Republic ‘does not recognize, fund or
subsidize any religion’.
Second, laïcité claims to provide all citizens with an ideological and philosophical value system by
effectively privatizing religion and excluding it from the public sphere. Laïcité defines ‘national cohesion by
asserting a purely political identity that confines to the private sphere any specific religious or cultural
identities’ and protects the neutrality of the public sphere (Roy 2007: xiii). Article 1 of the 1946
Constitution defines France as an ‘indivisible, laïque, democratic and social republic’. Between 1946 and
1980 the main challenge to laicism came from the demand from private schools, which were mainly
Catholic, for public subsidies. It was only later, with increased Muslim immigration, that manifestations of
the Islamic faith came to be seen as problematic.
FIGURE 27.5
Women protesting against the
headscarf ban in France. http://4.bp.
blogspot.com/_ab8YFYIB-5U/
SWO7sbThwSI/AAAAAAAAAJ4/
Dwh8-Y-PQGo/s400/040202_
france_headscarves_hmed1p.h2
believers. Moreover, they undermine the civic mission of schools based on a national
curriculum that is universal in scope and, more generally, undermine the overall scheme
of religious freedoms (Laborde 2008: 53–5).
However, there are problems with these arguments. First, the difference-blind
egalitarianism of the French state’s position belies an inequality of treatment between
the religion of the majority and those of migrant communities. In the first place,
although Article 2 of the 1905 Law stipulates that the state shall not ‘recognize or
subsidize’ any specific religion, it provides public funds for the maintenance of the public
buildings owned by Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues. It does not, however,
594 GIORGIO SHANI
BOX 27.4 MUSLIMS IN FRANCE
It is estimated that France has the highest percentage of Muslims in the EU, although no accurate figures
are available since the census does not include a separate category for religion. Muslims account for
between 5 and 10 per cent of the French population, with the latest estimates being approximately 5
million out of a total of 60 million (Pew Forum 2011).
Most Muslim migrants came to France in the aftermath of the Second World War and the war of
independence in Algeria. France recruited immigrant workers from their former colonies in Muslim
countries such as Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, as well as Turkey. The first generation of Muslim
immigrants, who arrived in the 1960s and early 1970s, did not bring their families with them and confined
their religious practices to makeshift facilities. Islam only became more visible in the 1970s when this first
generation decided to stay and bring their families to join them. From then on the French government
shifted from simply policing immigration flows to a policy of assimilation (Fetzer and Soper 2005). In
order to be considered French, immigrants were (and still are) expected to assimilate to secular culture,
confining their differences to the private sphere. In the assimilationist view, cohesion is attained when the
nation lives under the Republic as one and indivisible, in other words, when differences are not visible and
everybody is equal and the same in the public sphere.
WHO HAS RIGHTS? 595
make these funds available for the 1,600 Muslim mosques and prayer halls, arguing that
Islam was not covered in the 1905 Law (McGoldrick 2006: 37).
Second, not all religious communities are equally affected by the 2004 ban.
Although the law does not explicitly target any one religious community, the imple –
mentation of the law left no doubt that it was intended to target the Muslim community
since hijabs, unlike crucifixes, were deemed ‘overt’ religious symbols by most school
authorities. In the first year of the ban, some forty-four students were expelled for
wearing the hijab. A much larger number agreed to take the hijab off to attend school
after being summoned for a talk with the head teacher (McGoldrick 2006: 92).
However, the tiny Sikh community was most affected by the ban since Sikh religio-
cultural identity is an embodied entity. Orthodox or Khalsa (usually male) Sikhs wear
a turban and maintain five ‘signs’ or symbols of Sikh identity. The wearing of these
symbols is seen as an integral part of Khalsa Sikh identity, which means that members
of the 7,000-strong French Sikh community have been faced with a stark dilemma: either
to cease wearing the religious symbols which are the very embodiment of their faith,
or to face exclusion from state schools and the public sphere in general. The ban on
religious symbols in the classroom has already resulted in the expulsion of six Sikh
schoolboys. Furthermore, two adult French Sikh citizens were unable to renew
important documents because they declined to remove their turbans for the ID photo;
they subsequently lost their appeal in the Conseil d’Etat (Shani 2007, 2010).
The French headscarf ban, and its unintended effects upon Sikh communities living
in France, clearly illustrates the contentious nature of human rights. On the one hand,
the French authorities have argued that displaying religious symbols compromises the
integrity and secularity of the public sphere. By wearing a headscarf or a turban, female
Secularism is discussed
in Chapter 6.
FIGURE 27.6
Sikhs in France protesting against the
ban on wearing turbans in schools.
http://www.sikhnet.com/files/
news/2009/February/France
596 GIORGIO SHANI
Muslims and male Sikhs are perceived by the state to be making a statement: that they
are Muslim or Sikh first and French second. The French authorities place emphasis on
the ideals of the French Revolution, which gave rise to modern human rights discourse,
and see the expression of religious beliefs in the public sphere as undermining the
egalitarianism on which revolutionary France is based. The public expression of religious
difference introduces distinctions into the French body politic and compromises the
French state’s ability to secure due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms
of others in accordance with Article 29 of the UNDHR.
Opponents of the ban, including leading international human rights groups such
as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Minority Rights Group, and the
International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, argue that it severely curtails the
rights of citizens to express their own religious beliefs. This is explicitly guaranteed by
Article 18 of the UNDHR which unequivocally states:
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right
includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in
community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief
in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
(UN 1948)
However, Article 18 of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights
(ICCPR) is more ambiguous, providing ammunition for both supporters and opponents
of the ban. Whereas Paragraph 1 guarantees the same rights to ‘thought, conscience
and religion’ as stated in the UNDHR, it is qualified by Paragraph 3:
Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations
as prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health or
morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.
(ICCPR 1966)
Questions of identity are
discussed in relation to
feminist politics in
Chapter 5, the role of
women in democratic
politics in Argentina in
Chapter 14 and
questions of gender in
the global political
economy in Chapter 17.
FIGURE 27.7
Hind Ahmas, one of two French
women facing a fine for wearing the
niqab in a town near Paris. Photograph:
Magali Delporte for the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/
2011/sep/19/battle-for-the-burqa
WHO HAS RIGHTS? 597
Furthermore, French authorities may justify the ban on human rights grounds by citing
Paragraph 2 which states that:
No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to
adopt a religion or belief of his choice.
(ICCPR 1966)
The argument presumably would be that many Muslim girls, and presumably Sikh boys,
are forced to manifest the external symbols of their faith by their elders and are not in
a position to be free to choose their religion. This is a position advocated by many liberals
and some feminists, who would agree with Christian Joppke (2009: ix) that ‘the Islamic
headscarf is a challenge to liberalism’ because it inevitably and incontestably signals the
subordination of women. It needs to be pointed out that the French Muslim Council
(Le Conseil Français du Culte Musulman) supported the 2004 ban, declaring itself
against the veil and stating that many French Muslim women regard the hijab and
especially burqa as a symbol of patriarchal oppression within Islam. Indeed, Patrick Weil,
who was on the Stasi Commission which first proposed the ban, argues that in the
schools the commission visited ‘a strong majority of Muslim girls who did not wear the
headscarf called for the protection of the law and asked for the commission to ban all
exterior religious signs’ (Weil 2009: 2707). Even critics of the ban, such as Fadela Amara,
founder of a women’s group representing the interests of predominately Islamic women,
Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissives), regard the veil as a ‘tool of
oppression, of alienation, of discrimination, an instrument of the power of men over
women’ (quoted in Joppke 2009: 14).
However, many Muslim women consciously decide to wear the veil and regard it
as symbol of their faith and, consequently, their identity. Indeed, Hind Ahmas, who
was arrested for wearing a face-covering garment in public, is an educated single mother
from a ‘secular’ background who freely chose to wear the niqab. She has vowed to
challenge the ban in the European Court of Human Rights (BBC 2011).
GENERAL RESPONSES
HUMAN RIGHTS AND UNIVERSALITY
Revolutionary France is known as the birthplace of human rights as an institution. The
1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (La Déclaration des droits de
l’homme et du citoyen) was the first modern, secular articulation of human rights. Unlike
the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, the French declaration grounds
rights in human nature rather than divine authority. However, in contrast with the
American Bill of Rights (1789), which concerns itself primarily with the rights of
the European settlers of the newly independent state, it is unclear who the subjects
of the rights espoused by the French declaration are. Are they men in general or citizens?
The authors of the Declaration considered the rights to be universal: that is applicable
to all human beings irrespective of location or even the time when they lived. This can
clearly be seen in Article 1, which claimed that ‘Men are born and remain free and equal
in rights’. However, Article 3 declares that ‘the principle of all sovereignty resides
essentially in the nation’ and that ‘[No] body nor individual may exercise any authority
which does not proceed directly from the nation’ (National Assembly 1789). Whereas
the French state was assigned the responsibility of protecting the rights of its citizens,
it was not (and is still not) clear at all who was responsible for the protection of the
rights of man in general.
This gave rise to the view first expressed by Edmund Burke that the only real rights
were those of citizens, not man in general (Waldron 1987: 96–118). As another con –
servative critic of the revolution, Joseph de Maistre put it, ‘I have met Italians, Russians,
Spaniards, Englishmen, Frenchmen, but I do not know man in general’ (cited in
598 GIORGIO SHANI
Note that at the time
these discussions were
taking place, no one
even noticed that women
were not included. It was
so obvious that they
didn’t count politically.
Demands that women
be given the vote are
discussed in Chapter 5.
FIGURE 27.8
Opening of the National
Assembly at Versailles of
5 May 1979, where on
26 August 1789, the
Deputies publish La
Déclaration des droits de
l’homme et du citoyen.
http://www.pyepimanla.
com/mars-2009–2/
politique/Leonce-lebrun/
image/etats_generaux.
jpg
WHO HAS RIGHTS? 599
Douzinas 2007: 93). The subject of the Rights of Man appeared as an abstract entity:
an individual without gender or nationality ‘unencumbered’ (Hopgood 2000) by
attach ments to culture, class, family, tradition or religion. Subsequently, more radical
critics concurred. Marx wrote that the individual who enjoyed these abstract entitlements
was ‘an egoistic man, man separated from other men and community’ (Marx [1844]
1977: 54). He shared the secular world-view brought into being by the French
Revolution and believed that man’s self-realization could only come about through
emancipation from religious belief, which he famously regarded as the ‘opium of the
people’ in that its intoxicating effects concealed real social relations.
One of the objectives of the French Revolution (1789–95) was to contest the
political, social and cultural hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church. To this end,
the Constituent Assembly nationalized Church property and the Constitution of 1795
replaced divine right with popular sovereignty as the source of state legitimacy. The
Vatican objected to these changes and resisted attempts by the Revolutionaries to export
their republican ideals to neighbouring countries in Europe. The 1801 Concordat
between Napoleon Bonaparte and Pope Pius VII brought an uneasy truce between
Church and state; Catholicism was recognized as the religion of the great majority of
the French people yet the Church itself was brought under the tutelage of the state
which appointed bishops, paid the salaries of the clergy and, in turn, required them to
swear an oath of allegiance to the French state. This truce was to last over a century,
until the Law of 1905.
There are two standard responses to the question of whether ‘rights’ are universal.
The first asserts the universality of human rights on the basis of a purported universal
human nature. Human beings everywhere, it is argued, are the same, so each human
being should be equally deserving of the same rights, guaranteed by the protection
of the state. This is the position of most liberals and of the French state as outlined
above. The assumption that we all share a common human nature a priori, however,
is problematic in that it ignores the culturally contested nature of human identities.
BOX 27.5
EDMUND BURKE (1729–97)
Edmund Burke is regarded as one of the founders of the British conservative
tradition. While he supported the American Revolution, calling for a pragmatic
approach that accepted the need for change whilst affirming traditional values, he
was notable for his opposition to the French Revolution. In his ‘Reflections on the
Revolution in France’, published in 1790, he emphasized the dangers of mob rule;
the Revolution was, as he saw it, destroying French society.
FIGURE 27.9
Edmund Burke. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/
historic_figures/burke_edmund.shtml
The authority of the
Roman Catholic Church
was challenged during
the Reformation in
Europe, which took place
from the late fifteenth to
early eighteenth century:
see Chapters 6 and 7.
The Peace of Westphalia
is discussed in
Chapter 11.
The umma is discussed
in Chapter 6, as is
Edward Said’s concept
of Orientalism and his
work more broadly.
Islamic conceptions of
modernity are discussed
in Chapter 20.
600 GIORGIO SHANI
There are many different attributes and implications of being ‘human’. Consequently,
a common human nature cannot be considered a given but can only be discerned by
seriously engaging with different culturally defined notions of what it is to be human.
The second position, however, may be seen as equally problematic. It asserts the
radically incompatible nature of human values and identities (Huntington 1996). For
Anthony Pagden (2003), human rights are based on an essentially Western European
understanding of the human that evolved in the context of the European struggle to
legitimate its overseas empires through the notion of the ‘civilizing mission’. Human
rights are tied not only to a specific ethico-legal code but also implicitly to a particular
kind of political system – liberal democracy – both of inescapably European origin.
For Pagden, the principles which underpin the UNDHR are based ‘squarely on
“Western” notions of human agency’, that is, of persons as beings able to conduct their
relations with one another through reasoned argument. Their implementation, Pagden
argues, can only be realized in a specific political order – liberal democracy – which is
also of ‘Western’ origin (Pagden 2003: 193). This is a position held by many non-
Western critics of human rights discourse. At the Vienna Conference on Human Rights
(1993) an attempt was made to contrast implicitly Western human rights with so-called
Asian values. Asians, it was argued, value order, community and social harmony over
individual freedom and democracy. Consequently, emphasis was placed on sovereignty,
self-deter mination and non-intervention – all constitutive features of the Westphalian
international order – at the expense of individual human rights.
Notwithstanding the fact that Asia itself, as well as the values espoused by the Asian
leaders, are Western constructs, such a view mistakes the content for the institution of
rights. Although the institution of rights may have had its origins in Western Europe,
the content of rights – freedom and equality – has deep roots in many non-Western
cultures. Indeed, both Buddhist and Hindu religious philosophies have had as their
ultimate goal the liberation of the individual from the endless cycle of suffering and
rebirth (karma) millennia before the Enlightenment discovery of freedom. Freedom
and equality are equally at heart of Muslim notions of the umma as a universal
community of believers and the Sikh concept of the Khalsa Panth. In both collectivities,
the individual experiences freedom and dignity as an equal member of a community
(Shani 2008). To argue that the West values freedom and equality and Asians order
and stability is to reproduce an Orientalist stereotype that served to legitimize imperial
expansion in the first place. Furthermore, it essentializes the different cultures of Europe
and Asia and ignores the role which the non-Western world played in the co-constitution
of modernity.
Human rights are the global language of modernity and the human is supposed
to be a universal category which cannot be appropriated exclusively by any one specific
culture. If Pagden is right and the institution of human rights is based on a Western
European concept of the human, then instead of rejecting human rights as the
authoritarian advocates of the Asian values discourse suggest, an alternative strategy
would be to reconceptualize them in order to take into account other culturally
informed notions of the human. As our example of the headscarf ban illustrates, the
headscarf or turban is central to the humanity of many Islamic women and Sikh men.
Why, therefore, should the Western secular concept of the human be privileged? Do
not other cultures also have values they consider to be universal?
BOX 27.6 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHIES
FIGURE 27.10
Tabulated comparison of religious philosophies
Community Entitlements
Secularism
Christianity
Islam
Hinduism
Buddhism
Sikhism
Humanity
Christendom
Umma
Different communities
Sangha
Khalsa Panth
Everyone
Everyone/Christians
Muslims/Everyone
Caste-based Hindus
All sentient beings
Everyone
Reasons
Birth/Rationality
Imago Dei
Shari’a/Jizya
Karma
Karma
Ek O-aankar
Philosophy
Different secular and religious philosophies understand the notion of community
and entitlements differently. Whereas secular notions of human rights consider
rights to be entitlements which derive from the mere fact of birth or our capacity
to think (which are thought to distinguish us from other sentient beings), other
religious philosophies have differing views on the origins of these entitlements.
For most Christians, all human beings have rights because we are created in
the image of God (Imago Dei in Latin). This is the position of the Catholic
Church after the Second Vatican Council in 1962, which discussed the place of
the Church in the modern world. However, Catholicism and other forms of
Christianity were previously hostile to the notion of rights and in particular to the
‘right’ to one’s own religious beliefs which was denied to religious minorities in
Europe and the colonial subjects of European empires until the time of the
French Revolution. In contrast, religious minorities in Islamic societies and
empires were allowed to keep their religions upon payment of a tax (jizya). This
was levied on those whom Muslims considered to be ‘people of the book’ (i.e.
Christians and Jews) but not on all religious minorities. Muslims were supposed
to follow Shari’a law which regulated relations between members of the universal
community of believers, the umma, and prescribed rights and duties. Women
within Islamic societies are widely seen as not having the same rights as men but,
even if this is the case, it may have little to do with Islam itself. Hinduism, which
was the religion of the majority of the population of South Asia during the time of
the Islamic Mughal Empire, is traditionally seen as more tolerant of religious
diversity. However, different castes are seen as having different rights and duties
as a result of what they have done in their previous lives (karma). Brahmans and
other ‘twice-born’ castes have more ‘rights’ than those of other castes as they are
nearer to achieving moksha (liberation from suffering). Finally, both Buddhism
and Sikhism regard all human beings as equally able to achieve liberation from
suffering and, although they don’t explicitly use the language of rights, are firmly
committed to human equality. Gender equality is particularly emphasized in
Sikhism, whereas Buddhism extends the principle of equality to all sentient beings
while questioning the uniqueness of individual identity through the doctrine of
anatman (no self).
WHO HAS RIGHTS? 601
602 GIORGIO SHANI
BOX 27.7 STRATEGIES FOR INCORPORATING MIGRANTS
The UNDP estimates that approximately 200 million people – 2 per cent of the world’s population – are
international migrants, that is to say they live outside the state of their birth (UNDP 2009: 5). During the
colonial period a majority of these international migrants came from Europe to settle in the New World
and Australasia, but following decolonization, migration was encouraged into Europe from former colonial
territories. In recent years, there has been a marked increase in migration from South to North, from the
developing to the developed world. In many cases, migrants have no historical connection to their place of
settlement and may not speak the language, participate in the political process or understand local laws or
customs. Three main strategies are used to incorporate migrants: exclusion, assimilation, and
multiculturalism (Modood 2005).
Exclusion refers to the incorporation of migrants into selected and marked-off sectors of the host
society, such as the Gastarbeiter (guest workers) in Germany or migrant labour in Japan. The assumption
is that migrants are temporary residents of host societies and will eventually return to their place of origin
once their contract is over. Therefore, no attempt is made to integrate migrants into their host societies.
Although exclusion is still practised in many states – particularly in the Middle East – changes in the laws
governing citizenship in the EU have conferred rights to many migrants and their families. Consequently,
many migrants are now citizens and are expected to take part in social or political life.
Assimilation refers to the process whereby migrants are expected to assimilate to the dominant
culture if they are to be accepted as citizens. They are expected to familiarize themselves with the
dominant language, the local customs and laws and, importantly, to participate in national and local
institutions as equal citizens. In return, migrants can expect to enjoy the same rights as their fellow
citizens and protection from discrimination on ethnic or racial grounds through the law. The assumption
is that the national community is a ‘melting pot’ (Glazer and Moynihan 1970) where cultural and ethnic
differences will dissolve over time. Barack Obama’s election as president of the US is seen by some as a
vindication of the success of the ‘melting pot’ in creating equality of opportunity. Laicism, as in France, is
a distinctive form of assimilation where migrants are expected assimilate to a secular national culture and
to confine their religious or cultural identities to the private sphere.
Multiculturalism is where processes of integration are seen both as two-way and as working
differently for different groups. It differs from assimilation because it recognizes the social reality of ethno-
cultural groups, not just of individuals and organizations. As Tariq Modood points out, this reality can be
of different kinds; for example, a sense of solidarity with people of similar origins or faith or mother
tongue. It might be an act of imagination but may also be rooted in lived experience and embodied in
formal organizations dedicated to fostering group identity and keeping it alive (Modood 2005). Politically,
a commitment to multiculturalism tends to involve active state policies designed to accommodate
immigrants through equal opportunities legislation, granting full access to social service, education and
housing and, finally, access to citizenship whilst not requiring immigrants to give up or privatize their pre-
existing ethno-cultural identities.
In the post-9/11 world, many states have watered down or abandoned multicultural approaches to
immigration and sought to promote policies which would lead to greater integration of immigrants into
the host culture through the privatization of cultural identities. This is particularly true of the Netherlands,
which may be considered a pioneer of multiculturalism in the EU through its Ethnic Minorities Policy, and
of the UK after the terrorist attacks on London of 7 July 2005. The London suicide bombers were British
WHO HAS RIGHTS? 603
BROADER ISSUES
BARE LIFE, HUMAN RIGHTS AND SOVEREIGN POWER
Returning to our question, it seems that the ambiguity of institutionalized human rights
makes them very difficult to deal with. For what is at stake in our example are two
fundamentally different conceptions of human subjectivity. On the one hand, the French
state considers the subject of human rights to be a citizen endowed with equal rights,
unencumbered by primordial attachments to religion or culture. On the other hand,
many opponents of the ban consider religion, culture and tradition to be integral to
the bios of Muslim and Sikh immigrants.
The term bios in Ancient Greece denoted a qualified life: a life with dignity, endowed
with meaning, in contrast to zōe which expresses the simple fact of living. In recent
years, this Aristotelian distinction has been elaborated by Giorgio Agamben to critique
the concept of human rights. For Agamben, the subject of institutionalized human rights
is zōe, which he considers as ‘bare life’: a life which can be killed but yet not sacrificed.
In the classical world, zōe was excluded from the polis, the political community or public
sphere, and confined to the sphere of the oikos, the home. Indeed, the concept of zōe
made politics possible: ‘There is politics because man is the living being who, in language,
separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains
himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion’ (Agamben 1998: 8,
emphasis added). Agamben contends that it is ‘the entry of zōe into the sphere of the
polis – the politicization of bare life as such’ which ‘constitutes the decisive event of
modernity’ (Agamben 1998: 4).
This entry of bare life into politics can be seen in La Déclaration des droits de
l’homme et du citoyen (1789), where Agamben contends that ‘it is precisely bare natural
life – which is to say, the pure fact of birth – that appears here as the source and bearer
of rights’ (Agamben 1998: 81):
‘Men’, the first article declares, ‘are born and remain free and equal in rights’ . . .
At the same time, however, the very natural life that, inaugurating the biopolitics
of modernity, is placed at the foundation of the order vanishes into the figure of
the citizen, in whom rights are ‘preserved’ (according to the second article: ‘The
goal of every political association is the preservation of the natural and indefeasible
rights of man’). And the Declaration can attribute sovereignty to the ‘nation’
(according to the third article: ‘The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially
in the nation’) precisely because it has already inscribed this element of birth in the
citizens from Muslim backgrounds. They were seen as home-grown children of Britain’s multicultural
society (Modood 2007: 10–14). This view, however, overstates the extent to which Britain was indeed a
multicultural society, particularly in light of the hostile reaction to the publication of the Parekh Report,
which called for a rethinking of Britain’s national identity as a multi-ethnic ‘community of communities’
(Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000).
The notion of something
being primordial also
comes up in connection
with ideas about
nationalism in
Chapter 12.
What Agamben calls
homo sacer, or, roughly
translated, sacred man,
is a life taken out of the
ordinary rule of law,
where killing counts as
murder, but not taken
into the divine or sacred
realm, where killing
could be regarded as a
sacrifice. Homo sacer and
‘bare life’ or zoē are
arguably not quite the
same but are often
equated, as here.
Agamben’s work is also
discussed in Chapter 20.
very heart of the political community. The nation – the term derives etymologically
from nascere (to be born) – thus closes the open circle of man’s birth.
(Agamben 1998: 127–28)
So, the first article of the Declaration gives ‘men’ rights by virtue of the ‘pure fact of
birth’. However, according to the second article, these rights can only be exercised by
citizens. And the third article defines citizens as citizens of a sovereign ‘nation’. But the
nation, Agamben points out, is already defined by the notion of birth, thus closing the
circle: ‘bare natural life’, is the main criterion for entry into the ‘nation’ and, therefore,
citizenship. So birth is equated with citizenship.
Equating birth with citizenship has profound consequences for immigrant
communities. It makes them ‘bare life’ subject to the power of the state. The state can
decide whether to include them or exclude them from the nation and, even in a modern
democracy, can invoke a ‘state of exception’ to deprive them of their ‘natural’ human
rights. Thus, there is no contradiction between the power of the state and the Rights
of Man for it is precisely the Rights of Man which legitimizes the power of the state
over ‘bare life’ and it is the state in turn which produces the ‘bare life’ which is the
subject of the Rights of Man.
For Agamben, modern democracy has more in common with the totalitarianism
of the Nazi regime than classical democracy, as it shares a similar conception of human
subjectivity. Whereas classical democracy seeks to exclude zōe from the polis, ‘modern
democracy presents itself from the beginning as a vindication and liberation of zōe, and
. . . is constantly trying to transform its own bare life into a way of life and to find, so
to speak, the bios of zōe’ (Agamben 1998: 9).
Seen in this light, rather than being considered a restriction of individual freedom,
the banning of the veil in public spaces may be seen as an attempt by the state to ‘liberate’
zoe, to produce ‘a bios of zōe’. In the words of one of its leading intellectual defenders
in France, the ban ‘is not an attack upon liberty but, on the contrary, a subtle art not
only of proclaiming it, but of permitting its concrete practice’ (Weil 2009: 2714). The
state must not only protect but also empower its citizens if they are to really exercise
their right to freedom of thought and conscience.
The Republic, founded on the purportedly universal values of Liberté, Égalité,
Fraternité, needs, following Agamben, a constitutive outside in order to permit its
particularization as a bounded, political community. After all, if everybody everywhere
were free, then there would be no rationale for the establishment of the Republic as a
territorialized, sovereign state. In order to be a sovereign community, the Republic needs
to locate sources of unfreedom within, for it is only through the emancipation and
empowerment of those enslaved by patriarchal customs and traditions that the Republic
can embody the ideals upon which it is founded. Since covering one’s head on the
grounds of religion is an affront to the dignity of all women in the Republic as citizens,
the bios of the pious Muslim woman needs to be sacrificed in order for the zōe of all
French to be liberated. Thus, saving ‘brown women from brown men’ (Spivak 1999)
helps produce a Republican bios, a secularized body, empowered yet rendered docile
(Foucault 1991) and compliant with the wishes of the state.
Indeed, the very constitution of the secular Republic and its protection from
religious fanaticism and the patriarchal values of unassimilated communities in a post
604 GIORGIO SHANI
This means that
human rights can’t
be used as a defence
against the state or
any abuse of its
power, because the
state itself is
produced by and
responsible for
defining and
defending those
rights.
A constitutive outside is
something that, whilst
it is outside the concept
or institution or practice,
is necessary to produce
or enable the concept.
For example, if we talk
of memory, we need to
have an idea of
forgetting for the term
memory to be
meaningful. ‘Forgetting’
is the constitutive
outside of memory –
forgetting constitutes
memory, although it is
outside memory.
WHO HAS RIGHTS? 605
FIGURE 27.11
‘Zis unifurm durz nurt
allow . . . ‘ Artist: Wilbur.
CartoonStock ref.:
wda2189.
www.CartoonStock.com
9/11 world can only be achieved through the securitization of the bodies of ‘brown’
women from the body politic. The French state’s decision to prohibit the display of
religious symbols in the classroom and ban the niqab and burqa from the public sphere
simultaneously politicizes and depoliticizes the wearing of the veil. In the first place, it
politicizes the veil in that the wearing of the veil in a public place is invested with political
significance. Women who wear the veil are seen as directly challenging the main
principle upon which the Republic is based: laïcité. Consequently, the veil must be de-
politicized by expelling it from the public sphere. This de-politicization can only be
achieved by extending the regulatory power of the state over mainly female bodies in
the name of national security.
BOX 27.8 GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK
A professor at Columbia University in New York,
Gayatri Spivak’s most famous work, her first article,
which was called ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’
(Spivak 1999), discussed the practice of sati in
India – the tradition, not regularly observed, where
a widow would immolate herself on the pyre of her
husband. She described the attempts of the English
colonizers to halt this practice as white men ‘saving
brown women from brown men’. She is considered
as a pioneer of post-colonial feminism.
FIGURE 27.12
Gayatri Spivak speaking at Goldsmiths
College, University of London, 2007
Patriarchy is a structure
of male domination, a
system where control
and authority is vested
in men; it is a system
where the assignment of
rights – such as political
rights – to men alone
can go unquestioned.
See also Chapter 5.
http://www.CartoonStock.com
BOX 27.9 SECURITIZATION AND POLITICIZATION
Securitization may be understood as an extreme form of politicization, whereby an issue comes to be
either politicized or placed above politics. Following Buzan et al., ‘security’ denotes the move which takes
politics beyond ‘the established rules of the game and frames the issue either as a special kind of politics
or as above politics’ (Buzan et al. 1998: 23).
A securitized issue is something which is of vital importance to the national interest as defined by the
state and which, therefore, cannot be subject to the same critical scrutiny by the media, politicians and
citizens as other issues deemed less important. It is treated as an existential threat requiring emergency
measures and justifying ‘exceptional’ responses by the state. In this sense, a securitized issue can be seen
as de-politicized in that it is no longer seen as part of public discourse but is articulated in technical terms
(Edkins 1999: 10).
How then should one’s rights to freely manifest one’s religious or cultural identity
or identities be protected? What unites both the advocates and opponents of the ban
is the logic of making the state primarily responsible for the protection of its subjects,
even in cases where the state itself is the principal source of insecurity for its citizens.
As the experience of the last century teaches us, the modern state – through its
monopoly of the use of violence – has a historically unprecedented capacity to inflict
harm on a massive scale on those who live within its borders. Is the state really best
suited to protect the rights of its citizens? Moreover, are rights themselves an adequate
safeguard to protect the individual from the power of the state? Do they not serve instead
to legitimize the state’s monopoly of the use of violence against its citizens? Indeed,
do they not make the sovereign power of the state possible? As Agamben has argued,
The spaces, the liberties and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with
certain powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of
individual’s lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful
foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate
themselves.
(Agamben 1998: 121)
Seen from this perspective, the extension of rights from a minority of white, Christian,
property (and in some cases slave) owning men to subaltern groups such as the working
classes, women and so-called people of colour have not brought freedom but
strengthened the hegemony of the state over the populations it controls. The best way
to protect human rights, therefore, may be to liberate the content of rights, a demand
to equal freedom, from its specific form – institutionalized human rights – which has
been instituted to legitimize the power of the state. Human rights, therefore, may need
to be protected from their own institutionalization in order for everyone to enjoy the
equal freedom and dignity that ought to come from being human.
606 GIORGIO SHANI
WHO HAS RIGHTS? 607
CONCLUSION
This chapter has attempted to examine the question: who has rights? It has showed
how the ambiguity or contradictory nature of a human rights discourse, which claims
to be universal yet makes human beings subjects of a particular political community,
makes thinking about human rights difficult and conten tious. As an illustrative example,
it took the French state’s decision to prohibit the display of religious symbols in public
as a case study. Arguments were made for and against the ban being in compliance with
domestic and international human rights legislation. It was suggested that both
arguments were based upon different views of human subjectivity. For the French state,
the subject of rights discourse is the citizen, endowed with equal rights and unen –
cumbered by prior identification with a religious or cultural community that may inhibit
her or his participation in the public affairs of the Republic. The objective of the ban,
therefore, was to liberate women from the veil – a symbol of patriarchal culture – and
safeguard the democratic, public sphere. For many opponents of the ban, including
many French citizens from non-minority backgrounds, one’s religious or cultural
identity is precisely what permits one to be human. By banning the veil, the French state
literally and metaphorically strips its citizens of their bios and reduces them to what
Agamben refers to as bare life. In conclusion, it is not clear who has rights. However,
if rights are to be considered universal, there needs to be an acceptance that there is
more than one way to be ‘human’. Culture remains an important attribute of human
identity and cannot be removed like a veil in order to promote greater integration
without dehumanizing the individual.
FURTHER READING
Each year a series of internationally reputed scholars are invited to deliver a lecture on
an aspect of human rights at Oxford University, with the proceeds going to Amnesty
International. The resulting lectures are subsequently published as the Oxford Amnesty
Lectures. Some of the most interesting volumes have been:
Shute, Stephen and Susan Hurley (ed.) (1994) On Human Rights: Oxford Amnesty Lectures, 1993,
New York: Basic Books.
The second volume examines the philosophical basis of human rights including contributions
by John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Stephen Lukes and Jean- François Lyotard.
Tunstall, Kate E. (ed.) (2006) Displacement, Asylum, Migration: Oxford Amnesty Lectures, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
This volume contains a fascinating exchange between Slavoj Žižek and Michael Ignatieff.
Other suggestions for further reading include two articles critical of contemporary
human rights discourse:
Rancière, Jacques (2004) ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, South Atlantic Quarterly
103, 2–3: 307–9.
Žižek, Slavoj (2005) ‘Against Human Rights’, New Left Review 34, July–August: 115–133.
Finally, the following two books contain chapters examining the relationship between
biopolitics, human rights and international relations:
Douzinas, Costas (2007) Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism,
Abingdon and New York: RoutledgeCavendish.
Shani, Giorgio, Makoto Sato and Mustapha Kamal Pasha (eds) (2007) Protecting Human Security
in a Post 9/11 World: Critical and Global Insights, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
WEBSITES
Declaration of Independence, http://www.constitution.org/usdeclar.htm
Text of the American Declaration of Independence (1776) which introduced the concept
of ‘inalienable rights’.
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, http://www.hrcr.org/docs/frenchdec.html
English translation of the original 1789 declaration.
Oxford Amnesty Lectures, http://www.oxford-amnesty-lectures.org/
See further reading for details.
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, http://www.un.org/en/
documents/udhr/index.shtml
Full text of the original 1948 declaration of human rights.
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15013383.
Benhabib, Seyla (2002) The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, Princeton,
NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Buzan, Barry, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde (1998) Security: A New Framework of Analysis,
Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000) The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain,
London: Profile Books.
Douzinas, Costas (2007) Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism,
Abingdon and New York: RoutledgeCavendish.
Edkins, Jenny (1999) Poststructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back
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Fetzer, Joel. S. and Christopher J. Soper (2005) Muslims and the State in Britain, France, and
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Foucault, Michel (1991) ‘Governmentality’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller
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Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, Cambridge, MA: Harvard–MIT
Joint Center for Urban Studies Series.
Hobbes, Thomas [1651] (2006) The Leviathan, new edn, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
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ICCPR (1966) International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, http://www2.ohchr.org/
english/law/ccpr.htm.
Joppke, Christian (2009) Veil: Mirror of Identity, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Laborde, Cécile (2008) Critical Republicanism. The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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WHO HAS RIGHTS? 609
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McGoldrick, Dominic (2006) Human Rights and Religion: The Islamic Headscarf Debate in
Europe, Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart Publishing.
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Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Modood, Tariq (2005) Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain,
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––––(2007) Multiculturalism, Cambridge: Polity Press.
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www.hrcr.org/docs/frenchdec.html.
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Political Theory 31: 171–99.
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Future-of-the-Global-Muslim-Population.aspx.
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Shani, Giorgio (2007) Sikh Nationalism and Identity in a Global Age, London: Routledge.
––––(2008) ‘Toward a Post-Western IR: The Umma, Khalsa Panth, and Critical International
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––––(2010) ‘Securitizing “Bare Life”: Critical Perspectives on Human Security Discourse’, in
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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the
Vanishing Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Waldron, Jeremy (ed.) (1987) Nonsense Upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of
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Žižek, Slavoj (2005) ‘Against Human Rights’, New Left Review 34, July–August: 115–33.
For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
CHAPTER 28
Conclusion
What can we do to change the world?
Maja Zehfuss
■ The question
CHANGING WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WORLD
■ Illustrative example
THE IRAQ WAR
■ General responses
NO RIGHT WAY FORWARD
■ Broader issues
CHANGE AND COMPLICITY
■ CONCLUSION
THE QUESTION
CHANGING WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WORLD
Many of the questions we have about global politics are borne of a sense of dissatisfaction
with the state of the world. We want to know why some people are better off than
others because the unequal distribution of wealth seems to us unfair. More than that,
many of us will be appalled at widespread poverty and its very serious
implications for people’s lives. Similarly, we want to know why politics
turns to violence because it would be better, we think intuitively, if it did
not. We are unsettled by the thought that so many should die, and often
at a young age, due to such violence. If we ask whether we can move
beyond conflict, we do so because we can think of many cases where this
has not happened, often despite people trying very hard. So one question
that seems to really vex many of us and that motivates us to study global
politics is how to change what’s wrong with the world. Put differently,
Not everyone wants to
find out about global
politics in order to
change things; some
people in fact treat the
world as something we
should seek to
understand, rather than
change, as they consider
it beyond our control.
Often the Occupy
movement or other
groups take over private
space too. Is the point
that all space could be
claimed as public, as the
commons? That space
isn’t a commodity, to be
bought and sold?
WHAT CAN WE DO TO CHANGE THE WORLD? 611
we would like to know how to respond – and respond effectively – to the sorts of things
that we object to: poverty, war, slavery, environmental degradation and so on.
These are extraordinarily important questions. Yet, at the same time, our desire to
change the world – to make it a better place – raises all sorts of difficult questions and
some of them are often overlooked. After all, how do we decide what is wrong? And
why do we think we can – or should – change the world? The question of what we can
do to change the world makes some huge assumptions about the world and our role
in it. In this conclusion, I want to examine what might be wrong with the idea of
changing what’s wrong with the world.
Most of us are pretty good at identifying problems with the world. Global politics
is certainly replete with states of affairs that we object to: child labour; war; vastly
differential access to resources; people having to live in conditions of poverty and violence
that many of us find difficult to even imagine; famine; disease; and so on. Thinking
about this can be quite frustrating. This is not just because the list of wrongs in the
world seems to be very long, but also because it can be difficult to figure out what to
do about them. Some of these things seem to be happening in far away places and it is
not clear how, if at all, we could do anything about it. Many of us try, however. Across
the world people occupied public spaces in order to protest against the way in which
the global financial system benefits the few at the expense of the many. But even those
of us who do not set up camp somewhere to make our views known often work towards
change. We attempt to reduce our ‘carbon footprint’ in order to make a contribution
to fighting climate change. We give money to charities supporting people suffering
from poverty in order to help, in a small way, to alleviate the effects of the unequal
distribution of resources. At times, we may participate in demonstrations to express our
dissatisfaction, for example to protest against war. Often this feels quite unsatisfactory:
our contribution appears too small. The world does not change in the way we have
envisaged, and we may therefore lose courage. We may begin to think that thinking
about the problems of global politics is quite futile: what is the use of identifying wrongs
if we cannot rectify them?
This sense of frustration reveals some really interesting underlying assumptions
about the world and our role in it. The expectation that we must be able to rectify
wrongs, that this is what in a sense justifies our thinking about them, reveals a very
particular attitude towards the world. In this vision of the world, we are at its centre
and very much in charge. The world is there for us to do with as we please. This seems
to go back all the way to the Old Testament: God created man and woman and charged
them to ‘subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of
the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’ (Genesis 1: 27–28).
Chapter 3 asked what it would mean to think in terms of the anthropocene: there might
be more to this world than just us.
But we approach the world from our point of view. For many of us, the centrality
of the human is firmly lodged at the heart of our thought. This attitude is, if anything,
underlined by the way in which God has been displaced from the political universe.
As Chapter 7 explained, authority or sovereignty now derives from within our world
rather than from a God who is transcendent, somehow beyond our human world.
The centrality of the human is therefore reinforced through the Reformation. The
Enlightenment, with its ideas of human reason and liberty, further translated this shift
The Enlightenment is
discussed in Chapter 6.
Chapter 7 discusses
Michel Foucault’s work
on power which develops
these ideas further.
FIGURE 28.1
Occupy Wall Street protesters in Los Angeles. Photo: Reuters. http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/228298/20111010/occupy-wall-street-
jobs-banks-financial-crisis-protest-protesters-activists-unemployment-unemploymen.htm
612 MAJA ZEHFUSS
into the political sphere. The idea of sovereign ‘man’ as somehow independent of the
world and yet in control of it has proved to be extremely powerful. ‘Man’ is no longer
just central as God’s creation, but because ‘he’ can use reason to decide what to do.
‘He’ has an impact on the world.
It is important to ask who we think we are when we think that we want to change
the world. Put differently, the idea of changing what’s wrong with the world seems to
imply that we humans are doing the changing and therefore that we have some kind
of control over the world. It implies an idea of sovereign ‘man’ and with it a rather
simplistic idea of power. We can fix things. Chapter 7 discussed the limitations of such
a way of conceptualising power and showed that the problem of power in fact raises
complex questions about who influences whom and in what way, and indeed about
how we would know. It is not just about the ability to make others do what we want
them to do or, in terms of our current question, about whether we have the ability to
change the world. Power is not something that we ‘have’ and that we can then use to
achieve change. Rather power is something that happens in all social relations, and that
happens precisely because we never have full control. Power relations are productive,
not just repressive. This makes the world interesting, but also messy. It’s not easy to
see how ‘we’ can simply change the world with others bringing their own views and
resources to the world, creating a complicated set of ever-changing power relations.
WHAT CAN WE DO TO CHANGE THE WORLD? 613
The idea that we need to change what’s wrong with the world of course also implies
that we are able to identify how the world should be in order for it to be better. This,
again, is not easy. We may think that it is obvious that war is a pretty bad idea because
of all its negative effects, but there are of course those who believe that some wars are
just (Chapter 21). Often the devil is in the detail. We might spontaneously subscribe
to the idea that fighting a war against the Third Reich was right, but does that mean
that we approve of civilians being burned to death as their cities were bombed (Chapter
1)? Chapter 2 talks about the very fundamental questions about who we are and what
politics is about that arise and are resolved in some way when we make claims about
what it is right to do.
Despite these profound questions and difficulties, many of us do have deeply held
convictions about what we should do. There may well be some who endorse war, but
that does not mean that you cannot be passionately opposed to it. Because we are not
alone in the world, having a clear idea about the right way forward almost always involves
having ideas about what others should do and what is good for them. It is altogether
likely, for example, that you are opposed to war (if you are), not merely because of what
it might be doing to you (you wouldn’t have the opportunity to read this book,
probably, if you lived in a war zone or were fighting a war, though you may well know
and love people who do), but also – and perhaps even primarily – because of what it is
doing to others: the families whose lives are disrupted, the women who are raped, the
children who go hungry, miss out on education and might even be killed, the soldiers
who have horrifying experiences, might be seriously injured and, again, might be killed,
to name just a few examples. So you might think war has to be avoided or overcome
because it would be better for these others if war did not exist. This line of thinking,
of course, involves us in the kinds of problems that have been discussed in Chapter 21.
Why is it actually that we think we know what is good for others? You may think that
it is obvious that people would prefer not to live in a war zone (or that developing
countries ought not to be crippled by debt or that we should make real efforts to reduce
carbon emissions, for example) but as we propose our solution we need to be mindful
of whether we are not making assumptions about others’ needs and our knowledge
that are more problematic than we would like to admit.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
THE IRAQ WAR
In March 2003 a coalition of approximately forty countries led by the United States
supported an invasion of Iraq. Most of the troops actually involved in the operation
came from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. The war was initially
declared to be over on 1 May 2003 but fighting very much continued. Now the war
is considered to have ended in December 2011 with the withdrawal of the remaining
US troops, but violence within the country continues to lead to fatalities. The invasion
was of course seen by its supporters to promote change of a sort we should support.
In their view, it was about changing what was wrong with the world. But at the same
time many people passionately opposed the war. I want to look at this particular example
in a little more detail.
614 MAJA ZEHFUSS
Chapter 8 says more
about war and the
media.
In Chapter 1, we briefly looked into the question of why there are wars and we
examined in particular the problem that people get killed, often in gruesome ways. You
may recall the story of a survivor of the bombing of Dresden that we recounted: he
tells of discovering the bodies of the many people from his street, including his
immediate family, who had been killed – asphyxiated – in the air raid shelter during the
bombing of Dresden. Having heard this story and perhaps media reports about the
impact of contemporary military operations, you may well decide that war is not a very
good idea. Many people are opposed to war, and they often express their anger at wars
being fought by their countries. Protest against the war in Vietnam was widespread in
the 1960s and 1970s, especially amongst students in the United States. In May 1965
a group of students publicly burnt their draft cards (the documents that informed them
that they were being conscripted into the US armed forces) and it was subsequently
made a crime to do so. There were also mass demonstrations against the 1991 Gulf
War. ‘No blood for oil’ was one of the protestors’ common slogans. Even though the
Federal Republic of Germany, for example, did not deploy its military to the war, many
young men there registered as conscientious objectors at the time, to ensure that they
could not be compelled to fight. The proposed US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 met
with fierce opposition across the globe. Protests were often coordinated such that
FIGURE 28.2
London, 15 February 2003. Photo: Jenny Edkins
demonstrations would occur simultaneously in different places. On 15 February 2003
millions of people in over 600 cities across the world went on marches in order to make
their profound opposition to this war heard. Groups continued to campaign and
demonstrate against the war all over the world long after it had started.
Many of these campaigns have sought to get us to acknowledge and remember the
human cost of war. They have employed different strategies to do so. Sometimes
campaigners have been relatives of soldiers killed on duty in Iraq and their actions have
drawn attention to the troops’ deaths. Military Families Against the War (www.mfaw.
org.uk), for example, was founded by Rose Gentle and Reg Keys. Both have sons who
were killed in Iraq. The group campaigned to end the involvement of UK troops in the
war in Iraq which they considered to be ‘based on lies’; they reminded us of their loved
ones killed – or at risk to be killed or injured – in Iraq. Both the militaries of the UK
(Ministry of Defence 2008) and the US (www.defendamerica.mil/fallen.html) have
maintained websites to memorialise individual fallen soldiers, often giving some details
about their lives. We learn, for example, that Corporal Paul Joszko, who died in Basra
on 28 June 2007, ‘always looked scruffy, had a cheeky smile and a cigarette in his hand,
but he never failed to deliver the goods’ (Ministry of Defence 2007).
In contrast, those killed by these militaries have not been remembered in the same
way. Neither the US nor the UK military make any count available of the fatalities that
they have caused. The failure to provide the public with information about the death
toll has been seized upon by critics of the war. Judith Butler (2004), for example, has
drawn attention to how Western lives are construed as ‘grievable’, whilst those of the
civilians they kill are not. Through this idea of grievability she wants to pursue larger
questions: ‘Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?’ (Butler 2004: 20). She
points out that the failure to grieve some lives – those of Iraqi civilians – suggests that
other lives are regarded as more valuable.
Various groups have attempted to make up for the militaries’ failure to tell us how
many people they have killed in Iraq. Iraq Body Count (www.iraqbodycount.org)
maintains a database of violent civilian deaths both during the 2003 invasion (the official
war which lasted from 20 March until 1 May 2003) and since. Their count covers non-
combatants killed by military or paramilitary action and as a consequence of the
breakdown of law and order in the aftermath of the invasion. The count continues,
despite attempts to declare the war to have ended. If you go to their website, you will
see their current estimate. As I write this, it is 105,721–115,476. In other words, it is
not a precise figure. So the first thing we notice, even looking at only this one count,
is that it is difficult to come up with a reliable figure. In fact, this is what the US and
the UK say: it’s really difficult to know how many civilians you’ve killed in a military
operation. Our troops can’t be expected to go around counting the dead when they
are busy protecting themselves against attack.
Indeed often they may not even know that they have killed someone: if you blow
up a building from a distance, how are you to know how many people were in it and
whether they were combatants? So, how do groups such as Iraq Body Count figure out
how many have been killed? Iraq Body Count relies on media reports (which are cross-
checked), figures from hospitals, mortuaries and NGOs and any official figures that are
available. Their website does more than count, though: it is an attempt to memorialise
the forgotten civilians killed by the war (Zehfuss 2007). This has also been attempted
WHAT CAN WE DO TO CHANGE THE WORLD? 615
Even over 60 years after
the fact it is not clear
how many people were
killed by the bombing of
German cities during the
Second World War: see
Chapter 1.
http://www.mfaw.org.uk
http://www.mfaw.org.uk
http://www.defendamerica.mil/fallen.html
http://www.iraqbodycount.org
FIGURE 28.3
Boots for ‘Eyes Wide Open: The Human Cost of War’
exhibition. The exhibition comprised a pair of boots for each of
the US military personnel killed in Iraq, and pairs of shoes
symbolising the estimated civilian deaths, and was organised
by the American Friends Service Committee.
See http://www.afsc.org/eyes/.
Photo: Terry Foss, AFSC/Photographer
by the ‘Eyes Wide Open’ exhibition which showed a pair of boots for each of the US
military personnel killed in the current war in Iraq and pairs of shoes symbolising civilian
deaths.
War has a very serious effect on people, both on combatants and on civilians. Those
opposed to war have often drawn attention to this human cost of war. Yet this does
not mean that supporters of war deny the death and destruction caused by war or that
they callously disregard it. They may well agree that this is one of the wrongs in the
world that we would like to change. In the next section I examine some of the problems
that arise in trying to respond to such wrongs.
GENERAL RESPONSES
NO RIGHT WAY FORWARD
In Chapter 1 we observed that being confronted with the fate of individual people in
war – the gruesomeness of their deaths, for example – may produce in you a strong
emotional reaction and therefore a desire to do something about it, to respond in some
way. But how precisely you will react depends on the circum stances of the particular
616 MAJA ZEHFUSS
http://www.afsc.org/eyes/
The argument that the
overthrow of Saddam
Hussein following the
military intervention in
Iraq constitutes a
liberation of the Iraqi
people is also made in
the Euston Manifesto:
see Chapter 21.
WHAT CAN WE DO TO CHANGE THE WORLD? 617
case. You might disapprove of the UK’s role in the Iraq War and approve of its
contribution to the Second World War. You might approve of a particular war, but feel
profoundly unsettled by a particular incident within it. Your reaction might also depend
on an assessment of what your chances are of making a difference. As a rule, there will
be a lot of things that you don’t actually know. And, worst of all, there is unlikely to
be a solution that will be unambig uously good. These things are messy. They don’t
usually fit in with general rules. Even if you don’t think we should kill people, you might
struggle with what this means when people are already being killed by others.
There are therefore at least two underlying problems in thinking through the
dilemma of war, and it is useful to make them explicit. The first concerns the problem
that in any given situation we will have responsibilities towards a range of people and
we cannot fulfil them all simultaneously. The second is to do with the impossibility of
knowing everything before making a decision.
All sorts of claims have been made about the necessity of the war in Iraq by the
countries that were part of the invasion. On the one hand it was claimed that Iraq was
in illegal possession of weapons of mass destruction and was therefore a threat to the
security of Western countries. On the other hand it was argued that the Iraqi leader
Saddam Hussein was a cruel dictator and that the Iraqi people had to be liberated from
his oppressive rule. US secretary of state Colin Powell explained in September 2002
that the administration ‘would hope that [. . .] rather than [the war] being seen as an
assault, it would be seen as a liberation and it would be seen as the beginning of a new
era in that part of the world’ (‘US Policy Towards Iraq’ 2002: 17). His colleague US
secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed that the ‘goal is to free those people’
(United States Department of Defense 2002). And indeed Saddam Hussein was toppled
by the invasion, tried for particular crimes against his own population and sentenced
to death. However, the country was plunged into a state of war, endangering people
and their livelihoods.
I don’t want to examine here what the reasons for going to Iraq actually were or
whether they made any sense. But I would like to draw attention to one aspect of both
of the arguments mentioned above. Both propose, in one way or another, to sacrifice
some lives in order to achieve, or so it is claimed, the protection of others. Soldiers of
the US-led coalition as well as Iraqi soldiers were put into harm’s way. So were Iraqi
civilians. The first argument suggests that this will protect Western civilians, the second
that it will protect Iraqi civilians from a different sort of harm, that inflicted by Saddam
Hussein and his supporters. This is of course what makes the question of war so difficult:
people die. Many of us don’t like this idea. But supporters of wars often claim that
people will also die if there is no war, in this case Iraqi civilians killed by their own
regime and Western civilians at risk from weapons of mass destruction allegedly in Iraq’s
possession. So there is no obvious way forward that does not involve some wrongs, that
is, in this case, people getting killed. To overcome this impasse, some claims to life are
privileged over others. If we grant for a moment that the war in Iraq serves to protect
Western civilians (which is of course an enormously problematic claim, not least because
it is difficult to see what evidence would be used to prove this either way), then we have
a situation where Western civilians’ lives are apparently valued more highly than the
lives of those who, for one reason of another, find themselves in the war zone. The war
is to protect their lives by sacrificing other lives. As I noted earlier, this privileging of
some lives over others can to an extent be seen in the way in which some deaths are
grieved whilst others appear not to be grievable in the same way, as Butler (2004) puts
it. Yet arguably things are complicated: some of the lives that are officially grieved –
those of the US-led coalition’s soldiers – are treated as more expendable than other
lives – those of the Western civilians that are to be protected (Zehfuss 2009a).
This apparent need to sacrifice some lives to protect others makes for a tricky moral
dilemma. People often try to resolve these sorts of dilemmas by arguing for a general
rule that will settle the matter. One could argue, for example, that we have duties towards
members of our own community that we do not have towards others (Chapter 2). So
if a choice has to be made between protecting US civilians and Iraqi civilians (and,
remember, this is what is claimed by some, but that does not necessarily make it true),
the US government is right to opt for the former. I do not think that this sort of
argument works.
The dilemma we seem to confront when contemplating the possibility of war seems
based on something that Jacques Derrida calls an aporia: there is no way forward, the
path is blocked (2006: 63). There is no course of action that would resolve or escape
the dilemma. In such a situation, anything you might do involves you in committing
some wrong. Put differently, if you take responsibility towards one person or group of
people – say Iraqi civilians who will be liberated from an oppressive regime – this involves
you in not taking responsibility towards others – the combatants and Iraqi civilians killed
in the process. More generally speaking, if you expend your resources on this conflict,
you might not be able to intervene in another, say in Darfur, and thereby you fail your
responsibility towards those others affected by the other conflict. This is a problem we
constantly face: To whose call do we respond? And whom do we end up ignoring? It
is not possible to act responsibly towards everyone at the same time. We simply do not
have the capacity. In Derrida’s words, ‘I cannot respond to the call, the request, the
obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other
others’ (Derrida 1995: 68). Whilst we give our support to one person, for example,
another may be in need of our attention, too, but we are already occupied. So there is
a paradox at the heart of responsibility:
As soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look, request, love,
command, or call of the other, I know that I can respond only by sacrificing ethics,
that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me also to respond, in the same way, in the
same instant, to all the others.
(Derrida 1995: 68)
Acting responsibly therefore does not mean doing good rather than evil. It means
negotiating a difficult situation in which no purely good way forward is possible.
This is why you have to make a decision: there are many demands on you, and you
cannot respond to them all simultaneously. Some of them may contradict each other.
Moreover, you often have to respond under less than ideal circumstances because the
matter is urgent (Derrida 2002: 296). Urgency means not least that you will be unable
to gather all the knowledge that you might want before making your decision. Whilst
you are gathering more information about the precise circumstances of a conflict, for
example, people could already be dying. At some point, you need to make your choice,
618 MAJA ZEHFUSS
Another way of deciding
whether the human
cost of war is justified
involves applying the
criteria of just war
thinking, explained in
Chapter 21.
The idea of taking
responsibility for others
also raises a host of
further tricky questions:
see Chapter 21.
WHAT CAN WE DO TO CHANGE THE WORLD? 619
even if you do not know everything that could be useful in helping you make your
decision. Derrida also points out that it is anyway a mistake to think that there is some
piece of knowledge that will somehow settle the matter and tell us the right way forward.
For him knowledge is one thing, but an ethico-political decision is quite another. We
should certainly try to know as much as possible, but knowledge is not enough. An
ethico-political decision involves a leap of faith (Derrida 2003: 118). Although we may
be under pressure to make a decision, at times it actually feels like the decision has already
taken place. So the idea of a decision is tricky and Derrida has quite a bit to say about
it. What is important here is that the decision that we may make in response to others’
demands is not under our control. I have already mentioned that it involves a leap of
faith. Derrida also talks of a decision being ‘the Other’s decision in me, or through me’
(2006: 103). That is, even when we make a decision, we are not somehow separate
from the world that we respond to. I will say more about our inextricable involvement
in the world and what that means in the next section.
A decision involves committing to one way, despite not knowing the right way
forward. It is not possible to keep all the options open. The invasion of Iraq on
20 March 2003 closed down the possibility of non-intervention. Waiting and not
intervening often looks like it keeps more options open, and in some ways it does. But
if you wait you cannot go back. You may choose what looks like the same option later,
but by then the situation will already have changed. Whatever you do, you will have
made a choice. Nevertheless, making a choice, under these circumstances, is not for the
faint-hearted. You know that it is impossible to act responsibly towards everyone. On
top of that, whatever you may know about the situation is actually not enough to lead
to the right decision. So you cannot get this entirely right. You need some courage to
make a decision despite knowing this, though you cannot actually avoid a decision
altogether either. After all, you are involved. You need some courage to admit that your
position – where you stand – is not determined by secure knowledge. Whilst you might
be prepared to passionately stand up for your views, you know that you don’t know
BOX 28.1 JACQUES DERRIDA
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) is one of the most important
contemporary philosophers. His work is a radical critique of the
inescapable tensions within Western thought (Derrida 1998).
His strategy of ‘deconstruction’ involves showing how
arguments rely on assumptions that at the same time
undermine them. This has profound political implications.
Derrida shows that accepted institutions such as the state
monopoly of power are logically unfounded and that it is
impossible to arrive at justice through applying rules (1992).
Rather justice or responsibility becomes necessary when
knowledge does not provide an answer. It requires a leap, what
he calls the madness of decision (Zehfuss 2009b).
FIGURE 28.4
Jacques Derrida. Photo: Joel Robine,
AFP/Getty Images
This is similar to the
situation in Chapter 21
where the ‘stretch’
inherent in thinking
about ‘exclusive
knowledge’ is explored.
620 MAJA ZEHFUSS
whether you are right. You could be wrong. No: you are wrong, at least in part, because
there is no option that makes everything all right. More generally, there is no way
forward that you could take that would rectify all that is wrong with the world and
change it for the better.
BROADER ISSUES
CHANGE AND COMPLICITY
I want now to turn to different and broader issues the idea of change entails. When we
ask how to change what’s wrong with the world we make a number of assumptions about
the world and our role in it, and I want to use this section to draw some of them out
more explicitly. We seem not only to think that we can identify what is wrong with the
world, but we also seem to expect that we should be able to rectify what is wrong. So
there is an assumption here about what we know, but also about what we are in control
of, the sort of power that we might have in relation to the world. These are assumptions
about how the world works and about our role within that world. In some way, the
question seems to suggest that we are separate from this world – able to step back and
diagnose the problem. But at the same time we seem to expect to be able to act upon
the world – able to act on the diagnosis and solve the problem. These are assumptions
about knowledge and power, about thought and action. They are also assumptions about
identity: who is the ‘we’ that we assume has the ability to change the world?
In Chapter 1 we talked about Robert Cox’s ideas about different sorts of theories,
which he calls problem-solving theory and critical theory. Problem-solving theory
assumes that the world is as it is, with particular power and social relationships that
frame the possibility for action; it is ‘a guide to solve the problems posed within the
terms of the particular perspective which was the point of departure’ (Cox 1981: 128).
Critical theory, in contrast, calls the prevailing institutions and power relationships into
question; it is ‘directed towards an appraisal of the very framework for action’ (Cox
1981: 128). Problem-solving theory seems to be just the thing we need when we want
to fix what’s wrong with the world. This sort of theory should be able to tell us how
the global economy works and what we therefore need to do if we want to reduce
inequality, for example. Or it should tell us what causes wars and what we need therefore
do to avoid them. This is what many scholars studying global politics have in fact tried
to do, but they don’t seem to have succeeded. Cox thinks that this way of thinking is
based on a false premise. It involves looking at particular problems in isolation and fails
to appreciate the larger picture. It assumes that the social order is fixed and that we
must solve problems within this fixed order.
Cox argues that the social and political order changes, at least in the longer term
(1981: 129). Chapter 7 examined some very fundamental changes in the political order
in Europe that were related to changes in the way people conceived of their own being
in the world. How we think and how we act within the world are deeply connected.
After the Enlightenment, the legitimacy of the political order could no longer be derived
from God and therefore had to come from somewhere within our world. This makes
a very big difference and historically we therefore saw a shift towards democracy.
Problem-solving theory seems to be unable to cope with such change. Cox argues that
The idea of an
‘international
community’ that shares
values is often used to
support claims in favour
of intervention, but this
is quite problematic.
For more on this see
Chapter 25.
Chapter 7 discusses
different ways of thinking
about power; this is also
relevant to the issues of
involvement and control
raised here.
WHAT CAN WE DO TO CHANGE THE WORLD? 621
such theory is conservative. By acting as a guide to action within the prevailing order
it implicitly accepts this order and therefore reinforces the status quo. Measures such
as debt relief or development aid may alleviate global inequality in a small way. They
may appear to rectify what’s wrong with the world, but they achieve only very limited
change. Such ‘solutions’ seem to assume that the system of global capitalism is
malfunctioning in a particular way and that this can be fixed. They make the global
economy run more smoothly. But what if the global economy as we know it is the cause
of global inequality in the first place? Then this is not a very good solution. If we want
to reduce global inequality and if global capitalism produces such inequality not when
it is malfunctioning but when it is working perfectly, then we need to do something
other than propose measures that take the system of global capitalism as given. This is
what the Occupy movement is suggesting, and it is what makes their cause so
challenging. Similarly, the idea that there are some bad states that are violent towards
their own citizens and others – sometimes called ‘rogue states’ – and that this is in some
way against the values of the international community which must therefore intervene
to bring such states back into the fold, makes out that the system is just fine. Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq was a problem that needed to be fixed. But what if the existence of such
regimes is an inevitable outcome of the system of state sovereignty? Then we would
need to change something far more fundamental to get away from politics turning to
violence. This is where critical theory is important.
Critical theory is concerned with possible alternative orders. As Cox puts it, ‘critical
theory can be a guide to strategic action for bringing about an alternative order, whereas
problem-solving theory is a guide to tactical actions which, intended or unintended,
sustain the existing order’ (1981: 130). So critical theory is interested in how we might
actually get out of the system that is causing the problems that we then need to fix.
Cox works this through in one particular way, and you might wish to follow up these
arguments by reading his article. What is important here is that how we think about
the world and how we act within it are not two separate issues. They are inextricably
linked. Sometimes we cannot see an alternative, but that does not mean that there can
never be one. What is conceivable has changed over time and therefore there is no reason
to assume that the world as we know it now will or must remain as it is. One of our
problems is that we are caught up in the world as it is. We cannot step back from the
world and identify its problems objectively: what appears to us to be a problem is already
related to who we are and where we are situated in the world. We are in a sense part
of the problem that we are trying to respond to.
Nevertheless we do, of course, respond. Acting is not an optional extra, a choice
we make after identifying a problem and figuring out a solution. Often we do not quite
know what to do. As I noted earlier, we might not have all the information that we
might wish to have before acting. And we might be quite unable to identify a right way
forward. But we are involved, whether we like it or not. In fact, this is what makes us
so frustrated at times. You may have been against the war in Iraq and yet, if you paid
tax in one of the countries that were part of the US-led coalition, you were in some
way contributing to the war effort. Or you might feel passionately that the conditions
under which people have to work in some parts of the developing world are appalling,
but it is altogether likely that you have bought products made by them. The issue is
not that you have control over war or exploitation. But you are involved.
622 MAJA ZEHFUSS
BOX 28.2 THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT
In September 2011 Occupy Wall Street set up in Zuccotti Park, in New York’s financial district, in order to
protest against economic inequality, greed and the influence of corporations on government, in particular
by the financial services industry. Instigated by individuals associated with the Canadian-based Adbusters
Media Foundation, the protest was inspired by the student protests in the UK in 2010, the anti-austerity
protests in Greece and Spain and the protests and revolutions across the Middle East that have come to
be known as the Arab Spring. Occupy protests later spread across all continents (though there are more of
them in North America and Europe than elsewhere) and their slogan ‘We are the 99%’ – designed to
highlight the income inequality between the wealthiest 1 per cent and the rest of the people in the United
States – came to be used well beyond the Occupy movement itself. It is seen as one of the most successful
protest slogans ever.
The movement is notable not only because it spread across the world, but also for its distinctive style.
The protest in Manhattan formed the New York General Assembly which meets regularly. Although the
meetings are facilitated, no leaders were appointed or elected and anyone can speak. The outdoors
location with large numbers of people in attendance also required the development of distinctive
communication mechanisms, with short phrases being passed on relay-style from the speaker to the back
and people waggling their hands in agreement rather than applauding.
What perhaps led to most comment from outside the movement is that Occupy did not formulate
concrete lists of demands, leading to the suggestion that without a strategy or clear plans for the future the
movement might be unable to accomplish change and indeed fizzle out. Others, however, see Occupy and
other similar recent demonstrations and protests as reflecting changes in society that amount to
something new (Mason 2012).
Judith Butler took up the issue of the lack of demands directly when she spoke at Occupy Wall Street
in October 2011:
People have asked, so what are the demands? What are the demands all of these people are making?
Either they say there are no demands and that leaves your critics confused, or they say that the
demands for social equality and economic justice are impossible demands. And the impossible
demands, they say, are just not practical. If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the
impossible — that the right to shelter, food and employment are impossible demands, then we
demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the recession
redistribute their wealth and cease their greed, then yes, we demand the impossible.
(cited in Elliott 2011)
Elsewhere Butler thinks through in more detail what broader issues arise around the question ‘So, what are
the demands?’ She points out not least that formulating demands that are capable of being satisfied
necessitates attributing legitimacy to the institutions the demands would be directed at, a profoundly
problematic move if these same institutions are complicit in producing the system that generates the
inequality that the protests are directed against (Butler, 2012: 10). In other words, the demand that there
should be demands implies that the protestors should operate within the existing system.
The Occupy movement is seen by some as uninterested in or even opposed to theory (Mason 2012).
Nevertheless, academics and intellectuals have sought to make a positive contribution not only by
participating in protests but also, for example, through offering ‘theory and strategy as a means of
empowering occupiers’ (Tidal 2012; see also Coombs et al. 2012).
WHAT CAN WE DO TO CHANGE THE WORLD? 623
Thinking through what it means to respond from this position of being involved
but not in control helps us to understand more about what Cox means when he talks
of critical theory. We observed in Chapter 1 that there seem to be two ways in which
one might think of responding to a question: by thinking it through or by taking some
form of action in response to it. We noted then that different chapters seemed to
emphasise one or other way of conceptualising response but that these two are by no
means quite as different or separate as might appear to be the case. Thinking about
something in a different way can already be an intervention, part of changing the world.
Chapter 5 showed, for example, how the ways in which feminists rethought the world
had significant political implications. That is not to say that you can just think differently
about something and expect that the world will suddenly be different: after all, it took
a committed feminist movement – the efforts of many women and indeed men – in
order to bring about changes. Change is difficult precisely because we are already
involved. We are always already part of a social context and our critique, our attempt
at change, is part of it too. We, as people, or subjects, who think and speak, confront
language as a system that already exists (Edkins 1999). When we speak we draw on this
system: the system is what allows us to communicate. Therefore language also limits
what may be said. If we try to say something that is not envisaged in the system,
something for which there is literally no language, this is very difficult and we risk
FIGURE 28.5.
Occupy Halifax protest sign, October 2011. http://images.ctv.ca/archives/CTVNews/img2/20111015/
800_occupy_halifax_cp_111015 ; http://chewychunks.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/occupy-wallstreet-
protest-signs/
This way in which
language or discourse
always already exists
is also discussed in
Chapter 5.
Chapter 24 explores the
issue of certainty and
uncertainty in the context
of thinking about
security.
624 MAJA ZEHFUSS
becoming unintelligible. Over time, of course, language and its rules may and do change.
This happens, for example, when language users persist in doing something new, say,
in using a new word, such as ‘blog’. The new word or rule becomes part of the system
and can then be used by others. But you can’t just change the language on your own,
by thinking about the language differently. Language can change if others are involved.
Your new use of language only works if it is understood by others. In fact, all social
action is like this. We, as social beings, are always already part of a context that both
enables action and circumscribes what we may do. It is possible to move things, to
change work patterns such that they allow for people having family commitments at
the same time, for example, but it takes effort. Such change is often actively resisted
and sometimes people are stuck in their ways and cannot see how what they are doing
is creating difficult conditions for others.
So changing what is wrong with the world is difficult, but that is not because change
is impossible. Significant change involves changing the prevailing order. Problem
solving as defined by Cox may appear to be easier and indeed more effective because
it seems that you can know what can be done within the prevailing order. When we
start talking about really changing the world, then things can be quite uncertain. What
exactly would be put in the place of global capitalism? Would any alternative not have
its own problems? Even if it was possible to have a different system, would it end global
inequality? You can see how someone proposing a shift to the whole system could be
in a difficult position. Such a shift would only be possible if others agreed to it, and
how do you persuade someone to contribute to an outcome that you can’t be quite
certain is better in any respect than what we already have?
No doubt being able to convince people that you are certain about something is
a powerful political move. There are those, for example, who have undermined
environmental policy for years with the argument that there isn’t really enough scientific
evidence that climate change is happening. But the debate about climate change,
discussed in Chapter 3, is very interesting in this context, because of course many people
argue that we need to do something even if we might not be entirely sure. Certainty
about the precise mechanisms underpinning climate change really is neither here nor
there for them, as the consequences of not doing anything might just be devastating.
Certainty can even be dangerous. When people are very certain about something
we do not agree with, we often see them as fanatics. More pragmatically, if you are
completely convinced that you are right, then you might see no need to talk to and
listen to others. But this can seriously damage your chances of implementing your policy.
In politics you typically need to get people to cooperate with you and, whilst you may
persuade some with the strength of your convictions (your certainty that you are right),
those who disagree with you will be likely to feel disrespected and have little desire to
cooperate.
Sometimes people have come together, fought for change to the prevailing order,
and accomplished something. I have mentioned the feminist movement already. The
Black power movement would be another such example (Chapter 5). You may also
think of the waves of protest that have collectively come to be known as the Arab Spring
(Chapter 9). Successfully promoting change often involves many people doing things
in some way together. If great numbers of people were to decide to avoid behaviours
and products that are damaging to the environment, this would have some impact, not
WHAT CAN WE DO TO CHANGE THE WORLD? 625
least because companies want to sell us their products and services and so they’ll play
to our preferences. Sometimes the actions of ordinary people dramatically alter the
expected course of events. This effect is often called ‘people power’.
Chapter 7 examined one such example, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This
was something that was considered quite unthinkable at the time. So it’s really unlikely
that this is what all the people who went to checkpoints between East and West Berlin
on the evening of 9 November 1989 had in mind. They took considerable risks to go
into the border area, and yet from the stories that Chapter 7 examines it seems that
people just wanted to find out whether it really was possible to travel to the other part
of the city as the press release earlier that day had seemed to suggest. They were not
planning on changing the world, or at any rate not all of them were. A number of them
had left their children asleep in their beds (Hertle and Elsner, n.d.: 145): they clearly
intended to be back to the routine of their lives later in the night. Some just wanted
to see for a couple of hours what ‘the West’ was really like. Some only turned up because
there were so many people already and they went to figure out what the fuss was about.
They challenged the authorities at no small risk to themselves, but they did not expect
to set off German unification or the end of the Cold War. Yet if so many people had
not turned up at the checkpoints on that one night in November 1989, it is possible
that the authorities in the GDR might have been able to persist with their plan to issue
visas to a limited number of people who would have had to apply for them in an orderly
fashion with the correct government authority (Hertle and Elsner, n.d.). Things could
have turned out differently.
On 9 November 1989 no one had the outcome under their control, neither the
authorities nor the people. But as it turned out life happened and significant change
ensued. This is important because we have still been talking here of change and
response as though we are at the centre of the universe and somehow in control of it.
This view of the world is rather limited – we have seen that social action and power are
much more complex – and it also makes it easy for us to slide into a conceptualisation
of the world where ‘we’ are responsible for ‘them’. We have to be really careful so that
this does not end up as just another way of suggesting that we know what is good for
them. The problem that we face is that we are so used to thinking of us as separate
from the world that surrounds us that we find it really difficult to absorb the insight
that it makes really no sense to imagine ourselves as separate from the social world. We
are always already within it, subject to demands from others, but also to what they offer.
It is difficult to see ourselves as always already tied into the social world because we
have no fully-developed language for it. In contrast, we do have a language for being
in charge. The subject that we outlined at the beginning of the chapter is at the heart
of English and other Western languages: it acts. But who is this subject? Who is this
‘we’ that is to change the world? I have observed that the question seems to assume a
‘we’ that can know what is wrong and know how to put it right, a ‘we’ that is separate
from the world and able to act upon it. But when we thought this through we found
something quite different. We found that our knowledge of the wrongs is imperfect as
is our ability to identify a right way forward. We found that we are not in control but
that we are always already implicated in the social and political order that produces the
wrongs that we want to rectify. We found that we cannot respond to the wrongs in the
world in a way that would allow us to know that we have done the right thing.
626 MAJA ZEHFUSS
The idea of ‘saving the
planet’ would be like
that, as discussed in
Chapter 4.
So there is actually something wrong with the idea of changing what’s wrong with
the world. It is a question that envisages us at the centre of the universe, able to make
things all right. It imagines us as potential heroes, and if we lived up to this idea of
ourselves we would be able to feel really good. But of course we realise that this is not
how things are, and so at times we get frustrated at our apparent inability to change
what’s wrong with the world. Yet what we may experience as an incapacity is in many
ways no bad thing. Being heroes who change what’s wrong with the world would mean
imposing our views on others, disregarding them. So when we find that we cannot be
such heroes, that instead we are involved in creating the problems in the first place –
that we are complicit – this is no reason to despair. For if you accept that this is the
deal, you can stop throwing your energies at the futile attempt to escape this situation.
Then you can use your creativity, your intelligence and your passion to figure out how
to be in this world – how to live despite not being able to bring about or even know
‘the good’.
CONCLUSION
We are, all of us, already involved in global politics. We often treat the question of how
to respond as a really big issue that causes us considerable anxiety. Yet whenever we
look closely at issues – in particular those that involve the sort of wrongs that we might
want to fix – we find that people are already there, responding, every day. People drop
water in the US–Mexico border region to save those trying to cross without authorisation
from dying of dehydration. They set up alternative banking schemes to provide
opportunities to those who traditionally find it difficult to get credit (Chapter 20). They
try to move beyond conflict (Chapter 26). And just occasionally something happens
that is totally unexpected and at the same time quite wonderful – such as the peaceful
FIGURE 28.6
‘The world would be a
better place.’
Artist: Betsy Streeter.
CartoonStock ref.:
bstn29h. www.Cartoon
Stock.com
http://www.CartoonStock.com
http://www.CartoonStock.com
opening of the Berlin Wall – to remind us that things may happen without a mastermind
planning it and indeed that it is our being with others that makes life exciting and
worthwhile in the first place.
Many of us have a passionate interest in global politics precisely because we think
there are things wrong with the world. Even though it is often difficult to know what
to do, it is good that we care. What we have tried to show is that in responding to
global politics we have to tackle many large and fascinating questions. Many of them
remain unresolved. Over some we may disagree in the strongest possible terms. The
problem is, of course, that the world is full of other people and they do not always agree
with us. So one really difficult question that we often face in global politics is how we
know the right way forward when things are contested. Often other people think quite
differently from us. But at the same time this is what makes global politics endlessly
fascinating. Other people are, after all, also the best bit about our world. Learning about
different ways of thinking about and tackling a problem can be quite an experience.
Being able to do that requires remembering that others’ views are important, even if
we may disagree with them or if they appear to be strange. Our ‘solutions’ will not
work if we cannot get others to join in and cooperate. Learning from and about global
politics requires therefore a certain generosity or hospitality, if you will. Sometimes we
find that hard because we cannot see what assumptions we are making in our own views,
whilst it is apparent to us that others do make assumptions, at times ones we might
wish to contest. The answers to larger questions flow from the answers we give to the
question of ‘life, the universe and everything’. In the end, this is what makes politics,
and in particular global politics, so important: it is an arena in which hugely important
questions are raised, on which people disagree.
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Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso.
––––(2012) ‘So What Are the Demands? And Where Do They Go From Here?’, Tidal: Occupy
Theory, Occupy Strategy, issue 2: 8–11.
Coombs, Nathan, Amin Samman and Pepijn van Houwelingen (eds) (2012) ‘Imperialism,
Finance, #Occupy’, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, issue 5.
Cox, Robert W. (1981) ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders’, Millennium: Journal of
International Studies 10, 2: 126–55.
Derrida, Jacques (1992) ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, in David Gray
Carlson, Drucilla Cornell and Michel Rosenfeld (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of
Justice, London: Routledge.
––––(1995) The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
––––(1998) Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected edn, Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
––––(2002) Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001, ed. and trans. Elizabeth
Rottenberg, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
––––(2003) ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides’, in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in
a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
––––(2006) Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars, ed. Paul Patton and Terry Smith,
Sydney: Power Publications.
Edkins, Jenny (1999) Poststructualism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back
In, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
WHAT CAN WE DO TO CHANGE THE WORLD? 627
628 MAJA ZEHFUSS
Elliott, Justin (2011) ‘Judith Butler at Occupy Wall Street’, salon.com, 24 October (http://
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Hertle, Hans-Hermann and Kathrin Elsner (n.d.) Mein 9. November: Der Tag an dem die Mauer
fiel, Berlin: Nicolai.
Mason, Paul (2012) Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, London: Verso.
Ministry of Defence (2007) ‘Corporal Paul Joszko and Privates Scott Kennedy and James Kerr
killed in Basra roadside bomb attack on 28 June 2007’, http://www.mod.uk/Defence
Internet/DefenceNews/MilitaryOperations/CorporalPaulJoszkoAndPrivatesScottKennedy
AndJamesKerrKilledInBasraRoadsideBombAttackOn28June2007.htm.
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FactSheets/OperationsFactsheets/OperationsInIraqBritishFatalities.htm.
Tidal (2012) mission statement (http://occupytheory.org/).
United States Department of Defense (2002) News Transcript: Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with
Fox Affiliate – WGA Channel 5, Atlanta, Ga., 27 September.
‘US Policy Towards Iraq: Administration Views’ (2002) Hearing before the Committee on Inter –
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Zehfuss, Maja (2007) ‘Subjectivity and Vulnerability: On the War with Iraq’, International Politics
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Theorists and International Relations, Abingdon: Routledge.
For a range of further resources supporting this chapter, please visit the companion
website for Global Politics, 2nd Edition at www.routledge.com/cw/edkins/
Figures
0.1 ‘Tiger food’ xxiii
0.2 The Sorbonne University, Paris, occupied by students, 14 May 1968 xxiv
0.3 ‘A religion’ xxvi
0.4 Map of the world xxvii
1.1 Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent and Mos Def as Ford Prefect in
Touchstone Pictures’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 2
1.2 ‘Like all of us, he asked many different questions throughout his life’ 3
1.3 Tahrir Square, Cairo, during 8 February 2011, at the height of the
protests in Egypt 4
1.4 The three ‘worlds’ 5
1.5 Dresden, 1945: Cremation on Altmarkt 9
1.6 Antonio Gramsci 15
2.1 Iraqi Graffiti mural depicting prisoner abuse on wall in Sadr City,
Baghdad 24
2.2 Guantánamo Bay: A detainee is escorted for interrogation in 2002 24
2.3 ‘I found out what makes him tick . . .’ 26
2.4 John Rawls 30
2.5 Table summary of Walzer and Beitz 31
2.6 Ludwig Wittgenstein 32
2.7 Samrong Military Hospital, Cambodia 35
3.1 ‘Human Watch: conference’ 40
3.2 CO2 concentrations from the Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii 42
3.3 Traffic congestion 43
3.4 Image of smokestacks producing hurricanes from An Inconvenient
Truth 46
3.5 Demonstration on climate change, London November 2006 47
3.6 Oil refinery 51
3.7 ‘There is nobody else’ 54
3.8 ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’. Cover illustration of The Economist
Magazine on 26 May 2011 57
4.1 Green Party MP Caroline Lucas was elected to Brighton Pavilion in
the 2010 UK general election 62
4.2 South African president Thabo Mbeki signing the Political Declaration
at the end of the summit negotiations, 4 September 2002 65
4.3 Greenpeace activists who scaled the Koeberg Nuclear Power Plant
near Cape Town, during the World Summit on Sustainable
Development in August 2002 69
4.4 Social movement protestors march from Alexandra township to
the World Summit on Sustainable Development to protest against
unsustainable development 70
4.5 South Africa under apartheid 72
4.6 Outgoing South African president F. W. De Klerk and Nelson
Mandela in 1994 73
4.7 Garrett Hardin 75
4.8 The German Green Party unveiling a campaigning slogan in 2009 78
4.9 ‘Environment policy’ 79
5.1 Former Yugoslavia, based on 1991 census 87
5.2 Women’s liberation march 89
5.3 ‘I heard they spent all day arguing’ 90
5.4 Carol Gilligan 91
5.5 Betty Friedan 92
5.6 bell hooks 92
5.7 This Bridge Called My Back. Book cover 94
5.8 The depiction of supposed essences, as imagined in natural history 96
5.9 Jacques Lacan 99
5.10 Judith Butler 100
5.11 The Black Power salute in the 1968 Summer Olympics 102
5.12 Patricia Hill Collins 103
6.1 ‘Do you believe in God?’ 111
6.2 Distribution of Muslim population by country and territory 113
6.3 Ayatollah Khomeini returns from exile on 1 February 1979 115
6.4 Women demonstrate: At Ramallah’s Al Manara plaza, two schoolgirls
take part in a solidarity demonstration of Palestinian women 116
6.5 A general view of the first Egyptian parliament session after the
revolution that ousted former president Hosni Mubarak in Cairo,
23 January 2012 120
6.6 An example of ‘Orientalist’ art in Edward Said’s sense: The Snake
Charmer, Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1870 125
6.7 President Bush dressed as Bin Laden on the cover of Tariq Ali’s
The Clash of Fundamentalisms 127
7.1 ‘I am going to close my eyes’ 133
7.2 Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China, 1989 137
7.3 Berlin and the division of Germany at the end of the Second
World War 138
7.4 Berlin/Checkpoint Bornholmer Strasse, 9 November 1989 140
7.5 Title page from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) 145
7.6 The hole in the Romanian Flag, 1989 149
8.1 Portrait of a shell-shocked marine, Hue, Vietnam, 1968 159
8.2 Napalm attack 160
8.3 At war: Rumsfeld and liberal media bias 164
630 FIGURES
8.4 You write what you’re told 166
8.5 Stuart Hall 168
8.6 A simple formulation of Hall’s model of encoding/decoding 168
8.7 Tom Hanks, Matt Damon and Ed Burns in Saving Private Ryan
(1998) 171
9.1 Subcommandante Marcos on twitter 177
9.2 TeleGeography: map 2010 179
9.3 Arab Spring – Yemen: a girl raises her hand with her fingers painted
with flags of Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and Libya 181
9.4 Map of Middle East and North Africa 181
9.5 Protestors use mobile phones in Tunisia 182
9.6 From poster for Cet obscur objet du désir, Luis Buñuel 187
9.7 ‘Cyberpolice!’ 188
9.8 Donna Haraway with Cayenne, 2006 193
9.9 Selçuk, Le Monde diplomatique (2010) 194
10.1 Map of world migration routes since 1700 202
10.2 Aerial photo-map of US–Mexico border 203
10.3 Map showing US and Mexico in context 204
10.4 Martin Margas Posadas, 18, from Puebla, Mexico, right, and another
man wait in the US Border Patrol holding cell 206
10.5 Day of the Dead, 2 November 2004, Anapra, Mexico. Mass
celebrated at the border in memory of undocumented migrants 208
10.6 Los Angeles immigration demonstration, 25 March 2006 211
10.7 Australian citizenship test 214
11.1 Map of Central Europe in 1360 222
11.2 Map of Africa in 1892 223
11.3 Map of Botswana and Central Kalahari Game Reserve 224
11.4 Max Weber 225
11.5 The Swearing of the Oath of Ratification of the Treaty of Westphalia
at Munster, 24th October 1648 by Gerard Ter Borch (1648) 228
11.6 Map of ethnic distribution of the Habsburg Empire, 1914 230
11.7 Paris. 1973. Demonstration in support of immigrant workers.
In the foreground: the French philosopher Michel Foucault 233
11.8 Member states of the European Union 2007 235
11.9 Map of mainland USA 239
12.1 Imperial China: Ming and Manchu dynasties 247
12.2 Sun Yatsen on the balcony of his house in Guangzhou, China,
1923 248
12.3 Chinese Civil War: South Park philosophy 249
12.4 Mao Zedong announcing the foundation of the PRC in 1949 251
12.5 Ethnolinguistic map of China 1983 252
12.6 Children representing all of China’s ethnic groups, dressed in regional
costume, march with the national flag at the Beijing Olympics 254
12.7 ‘We can’t stay here, and your father has connections in China’ 256
12.8 Table of accounts of nationalism 258
12.9 Chinese Diaspora map 260
FIGURES 631
12.10 Overseas Chinese youth learn Chinese calligraphy during the
Chinese Root Seeking Tour Summer Camp in Hangzhou,
July 19, 2012 262
12.11 Lou Jing 263
12.12 Homi Bhabha 264
13.1 Congress adopting the Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull
(1756–1843) 271
13.2 Pierre Bourdieu 272
13.3 Michelle Cliff 273
13.4 Sherman Alexie 274
13.5 Toni Morrison 275
13.6 Paris Opera, architect Charles Garnier, 1857–1874 277
13.7 Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London 278
13.8 Youths in Paris suburb, Le Blanc Mesnil, 3 November 2005 279
13.9 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 282
13.10 David Hume, by and published by David Martin, after portrait by
Allan Ramsay, 1766 284
14.1 US secretary of state Hillary Clinton (left) holds hands with Burma’s
pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi 290
14.2 Latin America 291
14.3 Juan and Evita Perón, shown in 1950 294
14.4 The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo 296
14.5 Children pass a community centre painted with images of Eva and
Juan Domingo Perón, in Buenos Aires 302
14.6 Afro-Cultural Movement protesters march to the beats of candombé
drumming 304
14.7 In 2010 demonstrations against austerity measures and calling for
democracy were taking place in Greece 306
14.8 The president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, with indigenous priests
during a ritual at the pyramid of Akapana 309
15.1 The global trade in slaves 315
15.2 Children in a police vehicle after being apprehended at the border
on their way out of Nigeria to the Republic of Benin 317
15.3 Map of Côte d’Ivoire 319
15.4 Felix Houphouet-Boigny 320
15.5 US Commodity Price Index adjusted for consumer price inflation 322
15.6 General structure of the global coffee-marketing chain 328
15.7 Kwame Nkrumah 333
15.8 Andre Gunder Frank 334
16.1 Joseph Conrad 339
16.2 Ashis Nandy 339
16.3 Jahangir investing a courtier with a robe of honour watched by
Sir Thomas Roe, English ambassador to the court of Jahangir
at Agra 341
16.4 Head office of the East India Company, Leadenhall Street, London,
about 1800 343
632 FIGURES
16.5 Map of India in 1937 344
16.6 Lin Zexu supervising the destruction of 2.6 million tons of opium
in 1839 346
16.7 Villagers in Rajputana in 1899 347
16.8 Free India, 20 May 1947 349
16.9 Map of the Colonial Empires, 1907 351
16.10 George Orwell 355
17.1 Textile mill in Lancashire, England 365
17.2 Portrait of Adam Smith 366
17.3 Gender segmentation of the informal economy 368
17.4 Injusticia Global 370
17.5 Average size of informal economy around the world measured
as a percentage of GDP 371
17.6 ‘Don’t stop believing’ 373
17.7 Karl Marx 375
17.8 Informal economic activity 377
17.9 ‘The wider informal economy’ 380
18.1 Henri Lefebvre 386
18.2 ‘Do we want to apply for a credit card . . .’ 388
18.3 ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ 389
18.4 Jacques Rancière 390
18.5 Women carrying boxes leave the Lehman Brothers HQ in 2008 392
18.6 Icelanders voting in referendum in Reykjavik, Iceland, on
Saturday 6 March 2010, on approving the use of taxpayers’ money
to repay international debts 393
18.7 A woman shouts while taking part in an anti-austerity rally in Athens’
Syntagma Square, 18 October 2011 394
18.8 The Occupy London Stock Exchange protesters at St Paul’s 395
18.9 Jonathan Jarvis clip from YouTube 399
18.10 David Harvey clip from YouTube 400
19.1 Table of US average incomes, 2005 407
19.2 Top 0.1 per cent income shares across countries 409
19.3 Income inequality in ten developed countries 411
19.4 Inequality and dynamic growth in Russia, Brazil, China, and India 414
19.5 Chinese workers labour on the construction of the Shanghai World
Financial Centre, 2006 415
19.6 Zuccotti Park in Manhattan’s financial district during the Occupy
Wall Street protests in 2011 418
19.7 Protestors on a San Francisco beach 419
19.8 Alberto Korda’s famous photograph of Che Guevara 421
19.9 ‘We Are the 99%’ – image widely circulated on the internet 424
20.1 A visualization of global income distribution 430
20.2 Structural adjustment 431
20.3 Map of South Asia and neighbouring regions 433
20.4 Muhammad Yunus visits Grameen Bank centres and loan holders,
who are mostly women 435
FIGURES 633
20.5 Make Poverty History wristbands 437
20.6 Price of poverty: Pakistani farmers in Jandala, near Multan, show the
scars left after operations to remove their kidneys for cash 441
20.7 Giorgio Agamben 442
20.8 Islamic banking today in the Gulf States and in Malaysia, where Islamic
and ‘conventional’ banks compete freely 445
20.9 Activists of Workers Women’s Association chant slogans during a
rally to mark International Women’s Day, Thursday 8 March 2007,
in Lahore, Pakistan 447
21.1 Francisco de Vitoria 453
21.2 The Mexica (Aztec) peoples, followers of Moctezuma, face a powerful
Spanish force under Hernando Cortés in the 1519–21 campaigns 454
21.3 ‘Oh let them go.’ 455
21.4 Innocent IV 457
21.5 Letter of Güyük Khan to Pope Innocent IV 460
21.6 Map of colonial powers, 1914 464
22.1 Carl von Clausewitz 473
22.2 Wars, massacres and atrocities of the twentieth century: year by year
death toll 474
22.3 Colour photograph showing damage in Hiroshima 475
22.4 Supporting infantry walk forward up the slope into the bombardment
during the First World War, the Battle of Ginchy, 9 September 1916 477
22.5 Milgram experiment 479
22.6 US Army trainees practise hand-to-hand combat using pugil sticks
during basic combat training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina 481
22.7 Soviet soldiers raise the red flag over the Reichstag in Berlin on
2 May 1945 486
22.8 The ‘Bronze Soldier’, a Soviet soldier inscribed ‘To the fallen of the
Second World War’ in Tallinn, Estonia 490
23.1 Afghanistan–Pakistan borderlands: A US Government map from
the 1980s 499
23.2 A drone 501
23.3 Reporting suspicions 504
23.4 Areas affected by 2010 floods in Pakistan 506
23.5 Floods in Pakistan in 2010 507
23.6 Hannah Arendt 511
23.7 Slavoj Žižek: Still from the movie Žižek! 514
24.1 A reflective view of the Blue Force Tracker (BFT) networking tool 521
24.2 Airmen with the 67th Network Warfare Wing monitor internet activity
to maintain security of Air Force computer networks 522
24.3 Admiral Arthur Cebrowski 523
24.4 Joint Vision 2020 525
24.5 Critical Infrastructures 526
24.6 Donald Rumsfeld as US Defense Secretary 529
24.7 Still from Steven Spielberg’s science fiction film Minority Report 533
24.8 ‘Well . . . at least we don’t have to worry about anarchy any more’ 535
634 FIGURES
25.1 The UN Security Council, United Nations, New York 541
25.2 Map of Timor-Leste in context of Asia and Australia 543
25.3 Australian troops, members of INTERFET, disarm and arrest
members of the Aitarak Militia. Dili, East Timor, 21 September
1999 545
25.4 Map of the Timor Sea 547
25.5 José Ramos Horta 548
25.6 East Timor gas, Bush oil 548
25.7 Lenin disguised as ‘Vilén’, wearing a wig and with his beard shaved
off. Finland, 11 August 1917 549
25.8 Carl Schmitt 552
25.9 Jürgen Habermas 555
25.10 United Nations peacekeeping soldier accompanied by a group of
local children 556
25.11 Kosovars returning from the forced expulsions of 1999 557
26.1 Map of the Korean Peninsula 567
26.2 Map of the geographical location of the Korean Peninsula 569
26.3 President John F. Kennedy at the Berlin Wall, Germany, June 1963 570
26.4 A North Korean soldier looks through a pair of binoculars as a
South Korean solider stands guard in the demilitarized zone dividing
the two Koreas 571
26.5 Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons proliferation status in
2005 572
26.6 Non-proliferation Treaty signing ceremony, July 1968, Moscow 573
26.7 The British nuclear test code-named Hurricane 576
26.8 The heavily mined demilitarized zone between North and South
Korea seen from a South Korean military observation post 577
26.9 ‘Maybe you should reconsider those place cards’ 578
26.10 Demilitarized Zone opens for train passage, Paju, South Korea,
17 May 2007 580
26.11 Friedrich Nietzsche 583
26.12 Ko Un 585
27.1 Eleanor Roosevelt regarded the Universal Declaration as her greatest
accomplishment 591
27.2 Hijab 593
27.3 Niqab 593
27.4 Burka 593
27.5 Women protesting against the headscarf ban in France 594
27.6 Sikhs in France protesting against the ban on wearing turbans in
schools 596
27.7 Hind Ahmas, one of two French women facing a fine for wearing
the niqab in a town near Paris 597
27.8 On 26 August 1789, the Deputies publish La Déclaration des droits
de l’homme et du citoyen 598
27.9 Edmund Burke 599
FIGURES 635
27.10 Tabulated comparison of religious philosophies 601
27.11 ‘Zis unifurm durz nurt allow . . .’ 605
27.12 Gayatri Spivak speaking at Goldsmiths College, University of
London, 2007 605
28.1 Occupy Wall Street protesters in Los Angeles 612
28.2 London, 15 February 2003 614
28.3 Boots for ‘Eyes Wide Open: The Human Cost of War’ exhibition,
2 July 2004, Philadelphia, PA 616
28.4 Jacques Derrida 619
28.5. Occupy Halifax protest sign, October 2011 623
28.6 ‘The world would be a better place’ 626
636 FIGURES
Boxes
1.1 The Third World 5
1.2 Antonio Gramsci 15
2.1 Torture after 9/11 24
2.2 John Rawls 30
2.3 Ludwig Wittgenstein 32
3.1 Growth and the environment 41
3.2 Climate change controversy 44
3.3 Greenhouse gases 45
3.4 The UN and the environment 48
3.5 Carbon offsets and trading 54
3.6 The Stern Report 56
4.1 The environmental movement 63
4.2 Timeline of modern environmentalism 64
4.3 Sustainable development 66
4.4 South Africa: from apartheid to rainbow nation 72
4.5 Tragedy of the commons 75
4.6 Mitchell Dean’s analytics of government 80
5.1 The break-up of Yugoslavia 87
5.2 Carol Gilligan 91
5.3 Privilege 93
5.4 Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda 97
5.5 Jacques Lacan 99
5.6 Judith Butler and performativity 100
5.7 Black Power 102
5.8 Patricia Hill Collins: intersectionality 103
6.1 Definitions of religion 109
6.2 The Danish Cartoon Affair 110
6.3 Sunni and Shi’ite Islam 118
6.4 Key Enlightenment thinkers 122
6.5 Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ 124
7.1 Human nature 134
7.2 The Berlin Wall 138
7.3 The Reformation in Europe 144
8.1 Neil Postman 155
8.2 Don McCullin, war photographer 159
8.3 The CNN Effect 161
8.4 James Der Derian’s MIMENET 163
8.5 Stuart Hall 168
9.1 Zapatistas 177
9.2 What is Web 2.0? 178
9.3 The Arab Spring 181
9.4 Ten Punchy Principles 190
9.5 Donna Haraway 193
9.6 What if the Internet ground to a halt? 195
10.1 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 207
10.2 Race and culture 213
11.1 Max Weber 225
11.2 The Peace of Westphalia 228
11.3 Michel Foucault 233
11.4 The European Union 235
11.5 Geometric territorial division 238
12.1 Sun Yatsen 248
12.2 Chinese Civil War and Communist Revolution 249
12.3 Mao Zedong and communism in China 251
12.4 Homi Bhabha and hybridity 264
13.1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 282
13.2 David Hume 284
14.1 Democracy in Latin America timeline 292
14.2 How politics works at the Peronist grassroots 301
14.3 Gender tensions in the direct democracy 303
15.1 Felix Houphouet-Boigny 320
15.2 Structural adjustment 323
15.3 Colonialism’s division of labour 327
15.4 Definitions of postcolonialism 330
15.5 Definitions of neo-colonialism 333
16.1 Colonizer and colonized 339
16.2 Britain 343
16.3 Opium Wars and the impact of colonialism on China 346
16.4 ‘Shooting an Elephant’ by George Orwell 355
16.5 Resurrecting empire 359
17.1 Adam Smith and political economy 366
17.2 Gender and feminization 369
17.3 Karl Marx 375
17.4 World-systems analysis 379
18.1 Politics and aesthetics: Jacques Rancière 390
19.1 Measuring and comparing inequality 412
19.2 Wealth and inequality in the US 413
19.3 Liberal globalism 416
19.4 Global developmentalism 417
19.5 Historical materialism 422
20.1 Lifeboat ethics 431
638 BOXES
20.2 Classification of poverty 431
20.3 Moral economy 434
20.4 The Grameen Bank 436
20.5 Structural adjustment programmes 438
20.6 Giorgio Agamben 442
20.7 Murabaha 446
21.1 Francisco de Vitoria 453
21.2 Exclusive knowledge 457
21.3 The just war tradition 459
21.4 Güyük Khan 460
21.5 Exclusive knowledge at different points in history 462
21.6 Euston Manifesto 463
21.7 Imperialism and colonialism 464
22.1 Carl von Clausewitz 473
22.2 Milgram experiment 479
22.3 War and collective memory 489
22.4 The Bronze Soldier 490
23.1 The events of 11 September 2001 498
23.2 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones 501
23.3 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 503
23.4 FATF’s Nine Special Recommendations on Terrorist Financing 503
23.5 Hannah Arendt 511
23.6 Slavoj Žižek and 9/11 514
24.1 Network-centric warfare 523
24.2 The Rumsfeld Doctrine 531
25.1 The UN and use of force 541
25.2 The state and revolution 549
25.3 Carl Schmitt 552
25.4 Habermas and cosmopolitanism 555
26.1 The Korean War, 1950–53 568
26.2 The Cold War, 1947–89 570
26.3 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 573
26.4 The war on terror 577
26.5 Friedrich Nietzsche 583
26.6 Korean poet Ko Un 585
27.1 The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights 591
27.2 The veil 593
27.3 Laïcité 594
27.4 Muslims in France 595
27.5 Edmund Burke (1729–97) 599
27.6 Religious philosophies 601
27.7 Strategies for incorporating migrants 602
27.8 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 605
27.9 Securitization and politicization 606
28.1 Jacques Derrida 619
28.2 The Occupy movement 622
BOXES 639
the estimated civilian deaths and was organized by the American Friends
Service Committee, see http://www.afsc.org/eyes/. Photo: Terry Foss,
AFSC/Photographer.
Figure 28.4 Getty Images for permission to reprint Jacques Derrida. Photo: Joel
Robine, AFP/Getty Images.
Figure 28.5 The Canadian Press for permission to reprint Occupy Halifax protest sign,
October 2011.
Figure 28.6 The world would be a better place. Artist: Betsy Streeter. CartoonStock.
Ref: bstn29h www.CartoonStock.com.
656 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND PERMISSIONS
http://www.afsc.org/eyes/
http://www.CartoonStock.com
Abraham, Sunil 186–7, 196
Abrahmsen, Rita 330, 334
Adams, Douglas 1
Adams, W.M. 66
Adas, Michael 354
Agamben, Giorgio 434, 442, 592, 603–4,
606
Agnew, John 238–9, 259
Aguiar, Marian 274
Ahmas, Hind 597
Ai Weiwei 183
Al Sadat, Anwar 114
Al-Banna, Hassan 114
Al-Yasseri, Nori Samir Gunbar 489
Alberts, David S. et al. 521
Alexie, Sherman 274
Ali, Tariq 126–7
Alkatiti, Mari 546, 547
Alley, Richard B. 9, 43, 53
Alston, Phillip 500
Altbach, Philip G. 201
Althusser, Louis 109
Amin, Samir 318, 320–2
Anderson, Benedict 257–8, 277, 279
Anderson, Perry 232–3
Andreas, Peter 205
Andrews, C.F. 468–9
Andrews, George Reid 304
Annan, Kofi 539–40, 544
Anzaldua, Gloria 204
Appadurai, Arjun 260, 261, 430
Appiah, K. Anthony and Gutman, Amy 96,
102
Arendt, Hannah 354, 475, 511–12
Aristotle 212
Arpaio, Joe 215
Arquilla, John and Ronfeldt, David 524
Asad, Talal 108, 123, 141
Attali, Jacques 277
Augé, Marc 492
Aung San Suu Kyi 290
Auyero, Javier 295, 301
Ayer, Pico 285
Azuma, Shiro 488
Bacall, Aaron 133, 388
Bacevich, Andrew 52
Bajada, Christopher and Schneider, Friedrich
367
Baker, Raymond 120
Baldwin, Mike 26
Bales, Kevin 316, 326; and Robbins, Peter T.
316
Balibar, Etienne 216, 259; and Wallerstein,
Immanuel 213, 215
Ballentine, K. and Sherman, J. 374
Ban Ki-moon 559–60
Banerji, Abhijit and Piketty, Thomas 415
Banfield, Edward C. 432
Banner, George 195, 196
Bannon, Anthony 159
Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo 536
Barker, Drucilla and Feiner, Susan F. 368
Barker, Martin 215
Barnett, Clive and Scott, Dianne 81
Barry, Andrew 81
Bartholemew, Brian 111
Bassett, Thomas J. 319
Baumann, Zygmunt 134
Beard, Jennifer 551
Beck, Glenn 399
Bedie, Henri Konan 324, 325
Index of names
Page numbers in italics refer to figures.
Beitz, Charles 27, 29–31, 33, 34, 36
Belaala, Selma 441
Bellamy, Alex J. 459
Beneria, Lourdes 368
Benhabib, Seyla 100, 592
Benjamin, Walter 192
Berger, Peter 123
Berik, Günseli et al. 374
Berlant, Lauren 283
Bermingham, Ann 277
Bernal, Paul 191
Bernard, Thomas 272
Bernstein, Henry et al. 314, 332
Best, Jacqueline 375; and Paterson, Matthew
372
Bhabha, Homi 264, 265, 330, 356, 357
Bigelow, Kathryn 515
Billeaud, Jacques 215
Bin Laden, Osama 116–17, 118, 119, 126–7,
526
Bitterli, Urs 467
Black, Robert 475
Blair, Tony 359, 497, 527, 550
Bloom, Alan 579
Blühdorn, Ingolfur 77; and Welsh, Ian 77
Blunden, Edmund 480–1
Bodin, Jean 239
Bogacz, Ted 481
Bond, Patrick 71, 75–6
Boot, Max 465
Booth, Ken 530
Bosco, Fernando J. 296
Bourdieu, Pierre 272, 275, 276
Bourke, Joanna 11, 481, 483
Boykoff, Max 44, 55
Brandolini, Andrea and Smeeding, Timothy
M. 411, 413
Brenton, Tony 75
Breuilly, John 257, 258
Brewer, Jan 208
Brown, David 258
Brown, J.F. 477
Brown, Paul 70
Brundtland, Gro Harlem 41
Buchanan, Pat 215
Buñuel, Luis 187
Burgoyne, Robert 277
Burke, Edmund 598–9
Burns, Ed 171
Burrows, Larry 158
Burton, Graeme 156–7
Buruma, Ian and Margalit, Avishai 126
Bush, George W. 24, 126–7, 164, 166–7,
359, 500, 527, 574, 576, 578
Butler, Judith 100, 513, 515, 615, 618, 622
Buzan, Barry et al. 606
Byrd, Jodi 352–3
Cady, Jean-Christian 544–5
Caesar, Julius 234
Callejas, Antonio Dominguez 200
Cameron, Craig M. 488
Cammack, Paul 420
Campbell, Bonnie 319, 320, 321
Campbell, David 162, 510, 511, 512, 530,
565
Campbell, Glenn 548
Camus, Albert 354
Carlos, John 102
Carpenter, David 578
Carson, Rachel 63
Carty, Anthony 551
Casanova, Jose 123
Cassese, Antonio 550
Castell, Manuel 240, 536
Ceausescu, Nicolae 148
Cebrowski, Arthur 523; and Gartska, John
521
Cerf, Vint 178, 191
Cerny, Philip G. 368
Césaire, Aime 354
Cha, Victor D. 575
Chang, Grace 368
Chant, Sylvia and Pedwell, Carolyn 370
Charbonneau, Louis and Bases, Daniel 326
Charlemagne 227
Chasek, Pamela S. and Sherman, Richard 66,
68
Chatterjee, Partha 123, 278
Chatterjee, Pratap and Finger, Matthias 48,
68, 75
Chaudary, A.P. 447
Cheng, Xi 253
Chisholm, Roderick 482
Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward 166
Chwieroth, Jeffrey M. 372
Clapp, Jennifer and Dauvergne, Peter 55
Clarke, Peter 111
Clauswitz, Carl von 472, 473, 509, 512
Cleary, Paul 546, 547–8
Cliff, Michelle 273–4
Clinton, Bill 164, 359, 574
Clinton, Hillary Rodham 178, 193, 290
Coates, A.J. 459
658 INDEX OF NAMES
Cobb, Ron 535
Codrescu, Andrei 149
Cohen, Elliot 465
Collins, Patricia Hill 103, 104
Collinson, Patrick 144
Columbus, Christopher 338, 350
Compton, John C. 478
Confino, Alon 492
Connell, R.W. 98
Connolly, William E. 111, 123
Conrad, Joseph 339, 354
Cook, Captain James 351
Cooper, Robert F. 463–5, 466
Copernicus 41
Costello, John 492
Coward, Martin 509
Cowell, Alan 328, 329
Cox, Robert 14, 15, 620–1, 623, 624
Cressey, George B. 252
Crick, Bernard 290
Cronon, William 49
Crook, David M. 482
Crook, Richard C. 321, 322, 323, 324
Crosby, Alfred 49
Cumings, Bruce 568, 579
Dadrian, Vahakn N. 489
Dalby, Simon 47
Damon, Matt 171
Daniels, Stephen 277
Danner, Mark 489
Darby, Philip 125
Darier, Eric 80
Darwin, Charles 96–7
Dauvergne, Peter 44, 50; Clapp, Jennifer and
55
Davis, Mike 9, 43, 53, 345, 347, 348
Dawson, Christopher 460–1
De Alva, Jorge K. 314, 333
De Klerk, Frederik Willem 73
de Soto, Hernando 443
Dean, Mitchell 80, 440
Death, Carl 67, 68, 71, 81
Debrix, Francois and Weber, Cynthia 156
Def, Mos 2
Deibert, Ronald J. 194; and Rohozinski, Rafal
180
Deleuze, Gilles 282–3; and Guattari, Felix
282
Demick, Barbara 569
Der Derian, James 162, 163; and Shapiro,
Michael 125
Derrida, Jacques 100, 618–19
Descartes, René 237, 239
Deutsch, Barry 373
Diamond, Jared 45
Dillon, Michael 524, 527; and Reid, Julian
526
Ditchburn, John 214
Dollar, David 417, 423–4; and Kray, Art 416
Doty, Roxanne Lynn 125, 215
Douglas, Mike 379
Dower, John W. 488
Downer, Alexander 544, 546
Doyle, Timothy; and Doherty, Brian 76; and
McEachern, Doug 70, 77
Drakulic, Slavenka 510
Dresner, Simon 66
Dryzek, John S. 66, 74
Du Gay, Paul et al. 168
Dubey, Madhu 275
Duff, Alexander 356–7
Duffield, Mark 508
Dujarric, Robert 575
Duncan, Jane 71
Dunn, John 141
Dunn, Timothy J. 205
Durkheim, Emile 141, 142, 143–5
Dwyer, Susan 582
Dyzenhaus, David 553, 554
Eagleton, Terry 127
Eales, Stan 54
Eberstadt, Nicholas 575
Eckstein, Susan 297
Edkins, Jenny 606, 623
Eichmann, Adolf 475
El Dahshan, Mohamed 184
Elden, Stuart 239, 498, 500
Elizabeth I 340, 343
Elliot, Justin 622
Elshtain, Jean Bethke 91, 459
Eltis, David 271
Engels, Friedrich 549; Marx, Karl and 232,
422–3, 426
Evans, Gareth 557
Ewen, John Henry 476
Fairbank, Richard D. 406
Fanon, Frantz 354
Ferguson, Niall 358, 465
Fetzer, Joel S. and Soper, Christopher J. 595
Fieschi, Sinibaldo see Pope Innocent IV
Filkins, Dexter and Mekhennet, Souad 506
INDEX OF NAMES 659
Fink, Bruce 466
Fisher, Jo 296
Fiske, John 156
Flannery, Tim 43, 46
Foucault, Michel 16, 78, 80, 81, 100, 147–8,
149, 233, 265, 512–13, 530, 535–6, 604
Foweraker, Joe et al. 291
Franco, Francisco 485
Frank, Andre Gunder 333–4, 352
Frank, Robert 407
Franklin, M.I. 183, 191
Franklin, Stuart 137
Fraser, George MacDonald 488
Fraser, Nicholas and Navarro, Marysa 295,
300
Frears, Stephen 270
Freeman, Martin 2
Freeman, Richard B. 201, 212
Freire, Paulo 443
Freud, Sigmund 99
Friedan, Betty 91–2
Friedrich, Jörg 9
Friman, H. Richard and Andreas, Peter 370
Furman, Katherine 329
Galileo 239
Gallagher, John and Robinson, Ronald 332
Gbagbo, Laurent 325–6
Gedicks, Al 52
Geertz, Clifford 108, 109, 255, 467
Gelatt, Julia 216
Gellner, Ernest 257–8, 277
Gentle, Rose 615
George III 352–3
Gerges, Fawas 119
Gerth, H.H. and Mills, C. Wright 142, 143
Ghandi, Indira 66
Ghandi, Mohandas (Mahatma) 354, 468, 469
Giacomello, Giampiero et al. 178, 180, 184,
193
Giddens, Anthony 223, 277, 279
Gilligan, Carol 91
Gilroy, Paul 97, 102
Glazer, Nathan and Moynihan, Patrick 602
Glick Schiller, Nina et al. 260
Goldman, Michael 80
Goldsmith, Jack and Wu, Tim 180, 183, 193
Gorbachev, Mikhail 138
Gordillo, Gastón and Hirsch, Silvia 304, 309
Gore, Al 55
Gottmann, Jean 222, 239
Graham, Stephen 477–8, 509
Gramsci, Antonio 15–16, 375
Gray, John 98
Grayling, A.C. 9
Greenblatt, Stephen J. 467
Greenfeld, Liah 258
Greenspan, Alan 399
Greenwald, Robert 166–7
Grugel, Jean 290, 308
Guarnizo, Luis E. and Smith, Michael P.
260–1
Guei, General 325–6
Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’ 421
Gurr, Ted 141
Gutman, Pablo 67
Güyük Khan 459–61, 465, 466
Haas, Peter 74
Habermas, Jürgen 270, 555
Halbwachs, Maurice 489
Hall, Martin and Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus
124
Hall, Stuart 103, 104, 167–9, 172
Hallin, Daniel C. 159
Hamid, Moshir 500
Hanks, Tom 171
Haraway, Donna 180, 191, 192, 193
Hardin, Garrett 75, 79, 431
Harding, Neil 549
Harrison, Selig S. 575
Harvey, David 393, 397–8, 399–400, 401
Hassell, Ulrich von 486
Hassig, Ralph and Oh, Kongdan 569
Hastings, Adrian 255, 258
Hastrup, Kirsten 441
Hedetoft, Ulf 170
Held, David 290; et al. 366
Held, Virginia 91
Heller, Hermann 553–4
Hellinger, Daniel 293, 297, 309, 310
Herbert, Zbigniew 492
Hermant, Emilie 150
Hertle, Hans-Hermann and Elsner, Kathrin
625
Hickey, Patrick 40
Hilsum, Lindsay 476
Hilton, Christopher 139, 140
Himmler, Heinrich 490
Hindess, Barry 146, 149
Hitchens, Christopher 276
Hitler, Adolph 214, 474, 484–5, 486, 487
Hjort, Mette and MacKenzie, Scott 277
Hoang, Young-ju 583
660 INDEX OF NAMES
Hobbes, Thomas 145, 239, 279, 307, 591
Hobsbaum, Eric 257, 258, 270
Holbrooke, Richard 236, 544
Hollifield, James F. 201
Holmes, Brian 178, 180, 194
Homer 281
Honecker, Erich 138
Hoogvelt, Ankie 333
hooks, bell 92, 94
Hopgood, Stephen 599
Horowitz, Donald L. 255
Horta, José Ramos 547–8
Hoskyns, Catehrine and Rai, Shirin M. 370
Houphouet-Boigny, Felix 320, 321, 323–4
Howard, John 548
Howell, Jude and Lind, Jeremy 508
Hubbard, Arthur H. 483
Hulme, Mike 44
Hume, David 122, 283, 284
Huntington, Samuel 123–4, 215, 216, 600
Huysmans, Jef 551, 553
Ignatieff, Michael 465
Illingworth, Leslie Gilbert 349
Inayatullah, Naeem 17–81
Ip, Greg 407
Irigaray, Luce 274
Isbister, John 201
Jacques, Peter J. et al. 44
Jäger, Harald 139–41
Jahangir, Emperor 340, 341
James, Daniel 295
Jarvis, Jonathan 396, 397, 398–9, 400
Jayadev, Arjun 423
Jefferson, Thomas 352
Jørgensen, Rikke F. 177, 184, 191
Johnson, Richard G. 240
Jolley, Richard 3
Jones, Stephen B. 238
Joppke, Christian 592, 597
Joszko, Paul 615
Kagan, Robert 465
Kahn, Joseph 261–2
Kajuga, Robert 476
Kaldor, Mary 508, 509
Kammen, Michael 275
Kant, Immanuel 122, 555
Kaplan, Robert D. 456, 564–5
Kauffmann, L.A. 91, 93, 94
Kelly, James 434
Kelman, Herbert C. and Lawrence, Lee H.
478–80
Kennedy, John F. 570
Keynes, John Maynard 397, 399
Keys, Reg 615
Khalidi, Rashid 359
Khomeini, Ayatollah 115
Kihl, Young Whan 580
Kim Dae-jung 574, 580
Kim Il Sung 566, 582, 583
Kim Jong-il 574–5, 580–1
Kim Jong-un 575
Kincaid, Jamaica 271–2
King, Martin Luther 354
Kipling, Rudyard 468
Klare, Michael 52
Klusmeyer, Douglas and Suhrke, Astri 579
Ko Un 584–5
Kolbert, Elizabeth 41
Kolker, Robert Phillip 172
Korda, Alberto 421
Kothari, Rajni 434
Krause, Keith and Williams, Michael 584
Krenz, Egon 138
Kruger, Loren 277
Kudva nad Beneria 367
Kundera, Milan 280–5
Kureishi, Hanif 270
La Ru, Frank 176, 177, 191
Laborde, Cécile 594
Lacan, Jacques 99
LaDuke, Winona 50
Laidi, Zaki 123
Langer, Sergio 370
Lankov, Andrei 575, 581
Lanzmann, Claude 134
Las Casas 468
Lash, Jonathan 67
Latour, Bruno 150, 187, 196
Lean, Geoffrey 68
Lee Myung Bak 581
Lefebvre, Henri 386, 387
Leibniz, Gottfried 239
Leibold, James 247, 253
Lenin, Vladimir 333, 549
Lerner, Daniel 122
Lessig, Lawrence 178
Levitsky, Steven 294; and Murillo, Maria
Victoria 298, 303
Lewis, Daniel K. 293, 294
Libicki, Martin 522
INDEX OF NAMES 661
Lien Kuan 252
Lifton, Robert Jay 488
Lin Zexu 346, 347
Lindbeck, George 109
Linklater, Andrew 234
Lipschutz, Ronnie D. 55
Locke, John 122, 239, 279, 591
Lockwood, Sydney 480
Lohmann, Larry 53, 54
López Levy, Marcela 298
Lorde, Audre 102
Lou Jing 263
Lucas, Caroline 61, 62
Lugones, María C. and Spelman, Elizabeth V.
92, 103
Lukas, Richard C. 474
Luke, Timothy W. 80
Luther, Martin 144
Lutwak, Edward 575
MacBride, Sean 184, 189
McCullin, Don 158, 159
MacCulloch, Diarmaid 144
McDonald, David A. 71
McDonald, Edward 487
MacFarquhar, Neil 505
McGoldrick, Dominic 595
Machiavelli, Niccolo 239
McIntosh, Peggy 93
McLane, Brendan R. 162
McLuhan, Marshall 158
McNeill, J.R. 50
McVeigh, Shaun 560
Maistre, Joseph de 598–9
Mallaby, Sebastian 358
Malthus, Thomas 41
Mamdani, Mahmood 360
Mandela, Nelson 73
Mani, Lata 357
Mann, Michael 233–4
Manzo, Kate 316, 323, 334
Mao Zedong 249, 250, 251
Marcos, Subcommandante 177
Marshall, S.L.A. 481
Martin, Philip 207
Marx, Karl 142, 375, 425, 599; and Engels,
Friedrich 232, 422–3, 426
Mason, Paul 622
Mathews, Ron and Treddernick, Jack 521
Matondi, Prosper B. et al. 55
Maud, General F. S. 359
Mauss, Marcel 467
Mavelli, Luca 142
Mazian, Florence 488
Mbeki, Thabo 65
Mbembe, Achille 324, 325
Meadows, Donella et al. 41, 63
Metcalf, Roy 170, 171
Meyer, Birgit and Geschiere, Peter 260–1
Middleton, Neil and O’Keefe, Phil 66
Mignolo, Walter 307
Milgram, Stanley 134, 478, 479
Miller, Angela 277
Milosevic, Slobodan 240
Milosz, Czeslaw 493
Milward, Bob 323
Minsky, Hyman 397, 399
Modood, Tariq 602, 603
Moghadam, Valentine M. 88
Mohammad, Robina 498; and Sidaway, James
498
Molloy, Sean 527
Monbiot, George 54
Moon, Chung-in 575, 581; and Steinberg,
David I. 580
Moraga, Cherríe and Anzaldua, Gloria 93
Morales, Evo 309–10
Moretti, Franco 273, 277
Morris, John 90
Morrison, Toni 275–6, 352–3
Mueller, Milton 178, 193
Mukherjee, Madhusree 348
Muldoon, James 456–7, 458, 460
Mumford, Lewis 43
Murdoch, Rupert 166–7
Mussolini, Benito 485, 491
Myers, B.R. 569
Nagle, William 481–2
Nandy, Ashis 123, 339, 354, 358, 441, 467,
468–9
Nanez, Dianna M. 212
Napoleon Bonaparte 359
Nasr, Vali 118, 119
Nasser, Gamal Abdel 113, 114
Navarro, Marysa 297; Fraser, Nicholas and
295, 300
Naylor, R.T. 370, 374
Nehru, Jawaharlal 421
Neihardt, John G. 274
Nevins, Joseph 204, 205
Newell, Peter and Paterson, Matthew 56
Newton, Isaac 239
Nietzsche, Friedrich 281, 582–3
662 INDEX OF NAMES
Nincic, Miroslav 579
Nkrumah, Kwame 333
Noble, David 275
Noland, Marcu 575
Nora, Pierre 282
Norman, Peter 102
Nye, Joseph S. 178, 180
Ó Tuathai, Geraoid 126
Obama, Barack 24, 581, 602
O’Leary, Shawn 483
Ong, Aihwa 253
Oomen, Thom K. 258
Orford, Anne 557, 558, 560
O’Rourke, P.J. 160
Orwell, George 355, 468
O’Sullivan, Tim 165
O’Toole, Gavin 291
Owen, Wilfred 480–1
Ozkirimli, Umut 265
Pagden, Anthony 543, 600
Page, Tim 158
Papademetriou, Demetrios G. 212
Parenti, Christian 55
Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar 368
Paterson, Matthew 44, 75; Best, Jacqueline
and 372; Newell, Peter and 56; and
Stripple, Johannes 78–9, 80
Patton, George S. 478
Pax, Salam 162
Peel, Robert 315–16
Peet, Richard 329
Perón, Evita 293, 294, 295, 300, 302,
303
Perón, Juan 293, 294, 295, 300, 302
Perrow, Charles 536
Perry, William 572, 574
Peterson, V. Spike 366, 367, 370, 379; and
Runyan, Anne Sisson 378
Pettai, Vello 490
Pfau, Michael et al. 161
Pieterse, Jan Nederveen 126
Piketty, Thomas and Saez, Emmanuel 409,
410
Pinochet, Augusto 492
Polanyi, Karl 439
Polkinghorne, Donald E. 86
Pope Alexander VI 453
Pope Innocent IV 456–61, 462, 463, 465,
466
Posadas, Martin Margas 206
Postman, Neil 155–6
Potter, David 332
Powell, Colin 617
Power, Marcus 330
Prakash, Gyan 354
Prins, Gwyn 137, 138
Proust, Marcel 283
Putnam, Robert 75
Quillin, Viv 455
Qutb, Sayyid 114
Ramos, Andreas 141
Ranciere, Jacques 280, 390
Ranger, Terence 270
Rawls, John 29, 30
Ray, Leslie 304
Reid, Julian 526; Dillon, Michael and
526
Reimers, David M. 215
Remak, Joachim 484
Resid, Mehmed 489
Resnais, Alain 491
Reyes, Silvestre 205
Rhee, Syngman 566
Ricardo, David 342
Rice, Condoleezza 575
Rice, Xan and Watt, Nicholas 326
Richards, Paul 510, 512
Ricketts, Victor 480
Ricoeur, Paul 582
Ridler, Neil B. 321, 393–4
Robertson, Ian 492
Robinson, Fiona 91
Robinson, Piers 161
Rock, David 293
Rodney, Walter 325, 327
Roe, Sir Thomas 340, 341
Roh Moo-hyun 580–1
Romero, Luis Alberto 293, 294
Romo, David Dorado 214
Rose, Nikolas 80
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 279, 280
Roy, Olivier 119, 594
Rubio-Goldsmith, Raquel et al. 200, 206
Rumpf, Hans 474
Rumsfeld, Donald 34, 164, 359, 523, 528,
529, 531–2, 534, 617
Rupert, Mark and Solomon, M. Scott 365,
375
Rushdie, Salman 285
Rutherford, Paul 70
INDEX OF NAMES 663
Sachs, Jeffrey 431
Sachs, Wolfgang and Santarius, Tilman
53
Sack, Robert David 232
Saddam Hussein 162, 236, 617, 621
Sahlins, Peter 467
Said, Edward 125–6
Sandbach, Francis 40
Sassen, Saskia 369
Sassoon, Seigfried 480–1
Sautman, Barry 249
Savage, Timothy 580
Scarry, Elaine 22
Schabowski, Günter 139
Schellnhuber, H.J. et al. 41
Schlesinger, James R. et al. 34
Schmitt, Carl 551–3, 558
Schröter, Hans 10
Schwedler, Jilian 119
Schweller, Randall L. 486
Sebald, W.G. 8, 9
Seguino, Stephanie 374
Sen, Amartya 432, 443
Shani, Giorgio 595, 600
Shapiro, Ian and Hacker-Cordón, Casiano
305, 308
Shapiro, Michael J. 270, 278–9; Der Derian,
James and 125
Shearer, David 526
Shepherd, J. Marshall and Knutson,
Thomas 47
Shiva, Vandana 77
Short, Clare 68
Silva, Lula de 399
Simma, Bruno 550
Sims, Holly and Vogelman, Kevin 47
Sitrin, Marina 298, 303
Skocpol, Theda 136
Slater, David 330, 331, 334
Smeeding, Timothy M. 406, 407;
Brandolini, Andrea and 411, 413
Smelser, Neil J. 480
Smil, Vaclav 39
Smith, Adam 55, 122, 342, 366, 371
Smith, Anthony D. 255, 256, 258
Smith, Tommie 102
Soja, Edward 237
Somek, Alexander 558
Soroos, Marvin 48
Spielberg, Stephen 170, 171, 172, 533
Spinoza, Baruch 239
Spivak, Gayatri 270–1, 604, 605
Sreberny, Annabelle and Khiabany, Gholam
183
Stalin, Joseph 252, 486, 487
Stannard, David 351
Stavrianos, L.S. 352
Steffen, W. et al. 41
Stigson, Björn 70
Storey, David 223
Stouffer, Samual A. 482
Streeter, Betsy 626
Strohmeyer, Hans 545
Sun Yatsen 248, 249
Tabak, Faruk and Crichlow, Michaeline A.
367, 374
Taguieff, Pierre-Andre 215
Talbot, Chris 326
Taylor, A.J.P. 483
Taylor, Frederick 10
Tennyson, Alfred Lord 281
Ter Borch, Gerard 228
Thatcher, Margaret 414
Thomas, Anthony 137
Thompson, E.P. 434
Thorn, William 201
Thrift, Nigel 513
Thucydides 234
Thunø, Mette 253
Tiffen, Pauline 329
Tilly, Charles 141, 277, 278, 279, 509–10,
512
Todorov, Tzvetan 467, 468
Tran, My-Thuan 207
Traub, James 544, 545
Tronto, Joan 91
Trumbull, John 271
Tumber, Howard and Palmer, Jerry 160,
162
Tutu, Desmond 73
Twine, Winddance 86
Ut, Nick 158, 160
Uvin, Peter 381
Valverde, Mariana and Mopas, Michael
508
Van den Berghe, Pierre L. 255, 257
Vanden, Harry and Prevost, Gary 293
Vasquez, Carmen 94–5
Verma, Nirmal 467
Victoria, Queen 342
Viswanathan, Gauri 357
664 INDEX OF NAMES
Vitoria, Francisco de 452–6, 459, 462, 463,
465, 466, 468
Voltaire 122, 227
Wade, Robert 417–19, 423
Wagner, Denis 215
Waldron, Jeremy 598
Wallerstein, Immanuel 379
Walzer, Michael 27, 28–9, 31, 36, 459, 462,
497
Wapner, Paul 40, 68, 74, 76
Ward, Anthony 328–9
Ward, A.W. et al. 144
Ward, Barbara and Dubos, Rene 40, 48
Weber, Cynthia 533; Debrix, Francois and
156
Weber, Max 141, 142, 146, 224, 225, 233,
500
Weil, Patrick 597
Weingartner, James J. 478
Weiss, Linda 418
Wells, S. 96
Wheeler, Mark 166
White, Alan 281
Wilkins, Lucy 8
Willet, Susan 441
Willets, Peter 68
William the Conquerer 234
Williams, Kevin 159
Williams, Robert A. 457, 460
Winchester, Simon 45
Winter, Jay and Sivan, Emmanuel 489
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 16, 32–3
Wolf, Martin 416, 417
Wolfendale, Jessica 34–5
Wright, Micah 166, 167
Xi Jinping 262
Xiang, Biao 253
Yates, Frances Amelia 489
Young, Robert 314, 330, 331–2, 332, 333,
351
Yunus, Muhammad 435, 436
Yuval-Davis, Nira 95
Zehfuss, Maja 508, 615, 618, 619
Zhang Ke 249
Zhao Gang 247
Zheng He 261–2
Zhou Enlai 252
Zhuang Guotu 253
Ziegenhorn, Colonel 139
Zinn, Howard 170, 171, 352–3
Žižek, Slavoj 148, 149, 466, 514–15, 549,
590
INDEX OF NAMES 665
Page Intentionally Left Blank
Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq 24, 34–5, 162,
489
aerial unmanned vehicles (AUVS) see
drones/drone strikes
aesthetics and politics 280, 390
Afghanistan 577; Bagram airbase 24; colonial
history 345, 360; development of Al-
Qaeda 116–18; German coalition
government 77; media reporting 161,
167; and Pakistan border region (AfPak)
225, 498–500; Taliban 110, 236
Africa: anti-IMF riots 389; borders 225;
colonial history 221, 223, 229, 345, 353;
famines 345; North see Arab Spring;
Organisation of African Unity 229;
Pentecostal Christianity 111; see also
specific countries
African Agricultural Union 320
African American perspectives 102, 275–6
African Chinese 261–2, 263, 264
African National Congress (ANC) 71, 73
African slaves 351, 366
Afro-Argentines 304–5
agency and identity 100, 101
agriculture: export-oriented see cash crops and
specific cash crops; history of 50, 364
Al-Qaeda 116–19, 162, 497
Alexandra township: World Summit
demonstration 70, 71
Algeria 595
Amazon 194
ambivalence and mimicry in colonial
psychology 354–6
American exceptionalism 275, 276
Amnesty International 24, 596
Ancient Greece 164; city-states 226, 306–7
Anthropocene 41, 48, 57
anti-austerity demonstrations 389, 394–5,
622
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
(ACTA) 186
anti-globalization protests: Internet 177;
see also Occupy (Wall Street) movement
anti-war protests 614–15
aporia 618
Apple 194
Arab Spring 135, 162; and anti-austerity
demonstrations 394–5; Egypt 4, 180–2,
183–4, 189–90, 290; Internet governance
issues 180–5, 189; and Occupy (Wall
Street) movement 622
Argentina 293–9; crisis of representation
(2001) 298–9; equality issues 302–5;
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo: social
movements and human rights 296–7,
300; Peronism 294–5, 300–2, 303,
305
Armenia 231; genocide 475, 476, 488,
489
arts: and nation-building 276–8; role in
reconciliation 584–5
Asia: Central 231; South 432–6; see also
specific countries
Asian economies 53, 408
Asian values 600
assimilation of migrants 602
assumptions 13–17
Australia 49, 50; citizenship test 214; and
East Timor 543–4, 545, 546–8;
indigenous population 50, 351; Iraq
war 613
Austria 230, 411
General index
Page numbers in italics refer to figures.
author and reader needs 17–18
authority: and legitimacy 141–6; religious
sources of 141–2; society as source of
143–5; types of 143
Azerbaijan 231
Bagram airbase, Afghanistan 24
Bahrain 181, 182
Bangladesh, microfinance in 435–6
banks: financial crisis 391–3, 394–5, 397;
Grameen Bank, Bangladesh 435–6;
Islamic 445, 446
‘bare facts’ 582
‘bare life’ 434, 592; human rights and
sovereign power 603–6
battlespace, changing conceptions of
526–7
Belarus 231
Belgium 230, 411, 474; colonial history 97,
353
Bengal famine (1943-4) 348
Berlin: replica 9; strike and demonstrations
(1953) 137
Berlin Wall 138, 141, 570, 625; Bornholmer
Strasse checkpoint 139–41
bias, media 157–63
biofuels 55
biology and identity 95–7
biopolitics of modernity 603–4
black athletes 102, 168
Black Power 102
blogs/blogosphere 162, 177, 182, 183, 191,
192
Bolivia 309–10
borders 225, 226, 227; Afghanistan-Pakistan
(AfPak) 225, 498–500; crossing 200–3;
see also United States (US) immigration
crisis
Bosnia 161, 231, 236, 239–40, 510‘
Botswana 221–2, 224
boundary making process 238
Brazil: and BRIC countries 414–15; famines
345; impact of colonialism 345, 351;
participatory budgeting 310; responsibility
to protect 559; Rio+20 Conference on
Sustainable Development 68
Bretton Woods system 323
BRIC countries 414–15; see also specific
countries
Britain: abolition of slavery 315–16; Bretton
Woods system 323; English Civil War 145,
148; Hadrian’s Wall 227; history of
division and unity 343; impact of
Reformation 145–6; income redistribution
and welfare programmes 420–1; Industrial
Revolution 342–5, 352, 365; Leftist
interventionist perspective 461–3; Rightist
interventionist perspective 463–5; Second
World War 8–9, 491–2; see also London;
United Kingdom (UK)
British colonialism 351; Burma 345, 355;
China 345, 346–7; former Ottoman
territories 112, 113; free trade agreements
327, 332, 342; India 340–50, 354–8,
468–9
British East India Company 340–2, 343, 345,
346, 347
British Indian army 342, 345
‘Bronze Soldier’, Estonia 490
Brundtland Report (Our Common Future)
41, 66
Burma 182, 189, 290; British colonialism
345, 355
business travel 201
Cambodia: Samrong Military Hospital 35
Canada 411; NAFTA 207; national income
408–10
Capetown: Greenpeace anti-nuclear
demonstration 69–70
capitalism: carboniferous 43, 52–6, 76; and
colonialism 352; historic expansion of
307; and industrialisation 43–4, 365–7,
371–2; Marxist perspective 422–3; print-
capitalism 257–8; Protestant ethic and
142–3; see also economics; neo-liberal
economics
carbon dioxide 42, 45–6
carbon emissions 44, 53, 54
carbon offsets 54, 79
carbon trading 54, 55–6
carboniferous capitalism 43, 52–6, 76
Carolingian Empire 227
cars 43–4, 53
cartographic techniques 237–40
cash crops: colonial India 345; see also cocoa;
coffee-marketing chain; cotton and textile
manufacture
Catholicism/Catholic Church 110–11;
colonialism and rights of indigenous
populations 452–3, 456–9; Danish
Cartoon Affair 119; France 594, 599;
Holy Roman Empire 227; Reformation
in Europe 144, 145–6, 227
668 GENERAL INDEX
censorship 158; Internet 186, 187–9
Central Asia 231
CFCs 45
change 610–13; and complicity 620–6
charismatic authority 143
charity: Christian 443; Islamic organizations
505–6, 507
Chechnya 231, 236
child trafficking 317–18, 326, 331
China: in Africa and novel nation-building
261–5; and BRIC countries 414–15;
Civil War 249; communist nationalism
250–3; communist revolution 249;
conquest of neighbouring lands 236;
European colonial era 345, 346–7, 353;
Falung Gong 111; from empire to nation
246–50; inequality 417, 418–19;
Internet 183, 184, 185; and Korea 566,
567, 568, 571, 580, 581; Opium Wars
346–7; post-Mao nation-building 253–5;
religion 142; Sino-Japanese war 249,
488; and Soviet Union 570; Tiananmen
Square pro-democracy demonstration
(1989) 136–7, 251; Western capitalist
model 53
Chinese: African 261–2, 263, 264;
overseas/diaspora 249–50, 253, 254–5,
260; unauthorized immigrants, US 205
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 249, 250,
251
chocolate slavery debate 317–18, 329;
see also Ivory Coast
Christianity 110–11; foreign aid and charity
443; ‘fundamentalism’ 126; and Hinduism
356–8; history of interventions 452–61,
462, 468; Middle Ages 364; Old
Testament 611; and secularism 121;
see also Catholicism/Catholic Church;
Protestantism (Lutheranism)
citizen journalism 162, 177, 182
citizen-subjects 270
citizenship: and migration 202–3, 226; rights
278–9; US 209
city-states 232; Greek 226, 306–7; Italian
Renaissance 229
‘civil disobedience’ 133
civil and military uses of Internet 193–4
civil society 67
civil wars: Chinese 249; English 145, 148;
Ivory Coast 325–6; Spanish 485, 490–1
civilian deaths 9, 11, 473–5, 476; military
and 358–60, 615–16
‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis 123–4
class: struggles 422; see also middle class;
working class
clientelism 301
climate change 42–9; accelerating change and
unpredictable effects 44–9; capitalism and
industrialisation 43–4; carbon offsets and
trading 54, 55–6, 79; carboniferous
capitalism 43, 52–6, 76; controversy 44;
UN 48
‘CNN effect’ 161
coal 42–3, 44, 71
cocoa: child trafficking to plantations 317–18,
326, 331; and chocolate production
328–9; production and markets 323, 324,
325, 326, 327
coffee-marketing chain 328
Cold War 540–2, 565, 567–8, 570, 579
collective memories 489–92
collective violence 509–10
Cologne 9
colonial boundaries 238
colonialism 331–2; ambivalence and mimicry
354–6; decolonisation 229, 331–2, 358,
360; division of labour 327; empires
(1914) 351; hybridity 264, 356–8; impact
of industrial capitalism 366; and
imperialism 464; modern 350–4; neo-
colonialism 332–4; postcolonialism 330–1,
334; psychology of 354–8; revival of
463–5; and slavery see slavery; and
underdevelopment 338–40; violence of
358–60; see also European colonialism;
specific countries
colonizer and colonized perspectives 339
commodity prices 322–3, 324
common sense 14, 15–16; neo-liberal
capitalism as 381
communication see Internet; media
communist regimes: resistance and overthrow
137–41, 148–9; see also China
communitarian ethics 27, 28–9, 31
conflicts: approaches to 575–81; seemingly
intractable 564–6; see also war
confrontational approach to conflict 575–9
Congo, Belgian 353
‘Congo Basin Forest Partnership’ 67
consciousness-raising 95
copyright protection 186
correspondence theory of truth 31–2
cosmopolitan ethics 27, 29–31
cosmopolitanism 555
GENERAL INDEX 669
cotton and textile manufacture 318–19, 342,
344–5, 365, 366
critical approaches: environment 75–6, 77;
media 165–7; security 529–31
critical theory/thinking 14, 15, 17, 620, 621,
623
Cuba: colonialism 331; Guantánamo Bay 24;
Missile Crisis (1962) 570
cultural institutions 276–8
culture: fundamentalism and religious
identities 125–9; and race (cultural racism)
213–15
‘cyberwar’ 523
Czechoslovakia 138, 230; Prague Spring
(1968) 137; Velvet Divorce 231
Dacca 344
danger 519–20; see also security
Darwinism 96–7; Social 358, 484
debt/sovereign debt 323, 389, 438; World
Bank framework 420
decisionist account of law 551–3, 556–9
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Citizen 590–1, 592, 598, 603–4
decolonisation 229, 331–2, 358, 360
Deep Packet Inspection 188–9
democracy 289–91; classical vs modern 604;
and equality 390; Islamic 119–21; media,
power and 163–9; Western model and
problems of universalization 305–10; see
also Argentina
democratic account of law 553–4, 559
Denmark 411; Cartoon Affair 110, 119
deportation of undocumented immigrants,
US 211–12
deproletarianisation 326–7
deterritorialisation and supra-territorialisation
234, 240–1
Diet of Augsburg (1555) 227
divine right of kings 145, 146
division of labour: colonial 327; gendered
378–9
dot-com boom and bust 177
Dresden 9–10, 614
drones/drone strikes 500, 501–2, 504, 508
Durban: UN climate change negotiations 48
Earthlife Africa 71
East Germany (1989) 137–8, 139–41
East India Company 340–2, 343, 345, 346,
347
East Timor see Timor-Leste
East Turkistan see Xinjiang province
Eastern Europe 137–9, 148–9, 408
eco-governmentality, post-ecologicalism and
77–81
ecological imperialism 49
economic migration 201
economics: climate change regulation 55–6;
and environment 41, 66; explaining global
political economy 371–6; formal and
informal work 367–70, 371, 374, 376,
377–8, 379; local markets to global
political economy 363–7; Second World
War 483–4; see also capitalism; inequality;
neo-liberal economics
education: international students 201; tertiary
405–6
Egypt: Arab Spring (Tahrir Square
demonstration) 4, 180–2, 183–4, 189–90,
290; British Indian army in 345;
extraordinary rendition 24; impact of
globalisation 114; Islamic democracy 120;
Islamism 114; secular-nationalist model
113
Electronic Frontier Foundation 184
embedded journalism 161–2
emotional manipulation by media 172–3
engagement approach to conflict 579–81
English Civil War 145, 148
English language 349
English literature 357
Enlightenment 121–2, 307
Enspire Learning 396, 397, 398, 400
entrepreneurism 370, 374
environment 39–42; climate change see
climate change; and economic growth 41,
66; geopolitics 51–2; historical perspective
49–50; indigenous perspectives 50–1;
environmental governance 74–7; green
revolution 76–7; post-ecologicalism and
eco-governmentality 77–81;
supraterritorial initiatives 236; tragedy of
the commons 74–6, 79
environmental movement/environmentalism
63, 64, 76–8, 80, 81; see also sustainable
development
Estonia 138, 231; ‘Bronze Soldier’ 490
ethico-political space 28–9, 30, 31, 36
ethics: approaches 27–31; dilemmas of Iraq
war 616–20, 621; lifeboat 431, 434; and
politics 21
Ethiopia 331, 345, 485
‘ethnic cleansing’ 231
670 GENERAL INDEX
ethnic conflicts 245–6, 564–5
ethnic groups: China 252–5, 261; see also
primordialism
ethnic hyphenated identities 264
euphemism 488
Europe: attempted immigration 200;
environmental movement 63; history of
territorial divisions 221, 222; Muslim
world in 127–8; Reformation 144, 145–6,
227, 307; see also Middle Ages
European colonialism 307–8; and Darwinism
96–7; and environment 50, 53; see also
specific countries
European development 338–9
European territorial state, development of
226–31; Ancient Greece, Roman Empire
and Middle Ages 226–7; imperialism and
empire 229–31; religious wars and rise of
the state 227–9
European Union (EU) 234, 235, 420; online
pornography 183; protectionism 417;
Schengen Agreement 216
Euston Manifesto 461–3, 465, 466
everyday life, politics and 385–6, 387,
396–401
evil, rhetoric of 579
evil leader, as cause of war 484–5
exclusion: costs of 379–81; of migrants 602
exclusive knowledge 457, 458–9, 462, 466–9
export-oriented agriculture see cash crops and
specific cash crops
extraordinary rendition 24, 504
‘Eyes Wide Open’ exhibition 615–16
Facebook 178, 182, 184, 188, 194
Falung Gong 111
famines/starvation 53, 345–8, 432
‘fascism’ 485
feminist economics 378
feminist movement, US 89–95; emergence of
activism 90–2; intensification of identity
politics 93–5
feminist perspective on Islamic headscarf
597
feminization of workforce 368, 369
feudalism 232–3, 364
financial crisis: Argentina 298, 389; finance
and 386–9; politics and everyday life
385–6, 387, 396–401; politics of 391–6
financial institutions 323, 388–9, 419–20;
see also banks; International Monetary
Fund (IMF); World Bank
financial markets 177
financial sanctions: and foreign aid, Pakistan
505–8; North Korea 579
financial targeting of terrorists 502–4
‘financialization’ 387, 388, 389
Finland 491
First World War 230, 351, 477, 483;
origins of Second World War 483, 484
flexibilization of work 368–9, 370
floods, Pakistan 505, 507–8
foreign aid: and Christian charity 443; and
financial sanctions, Pakistan 505–8
foreign investment 322
France: Catholic Church 594, 599;
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Citizen 590–1, 592, 598, 603–4;
headscarf ban and human rights 592–7,
604–5; inequality 411; military
intervention, Ivory Coast 326; Muslim
population 595; national income 408–10;
Peace of Westphalia (1648) 228;
‘regularization’ of unauthorized migrants
212; Second World War 8, 491, 492;
Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) 227, 233;
Yahoo! 184; see also Paris
‘free market’ model 366
free trade agreements 327, 332, 342
French colonialism 229; former Ottoman
territories 112, 113; see also Ivory Coast
French Revolution 590–1, 596, 598–9
French Textile Development Company
(CFDT) 319
fundamentalism: Christian 126; Islamic
109–10, 116–19, 126–7; neo-conservative
126–7
game theory 75
Gaza Strip 86, 182
gender: discrimination, Argentina 303–4;
division of labour 378–9; feminization
of workforce 368, 369; segmentation in
informal economy 368; static and
normative perspective 98–9; see also
women
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) 240
geographical and political organisation 220–6
geometric territorial divisions 237, 238
geopolitics and environment 51–2
Georgia 231, 236
Germany: borders 225, 227; colonialism 97;
Green Party 61, 77, 78; historic unification
233; inequality 411; International Brigade,
GENERAL INDEX 671
Spain 490–1; ISPs 184; Lutheranism 144;
Peace of Westphalia (1648) 228; post-First
World War 230; Weimar Constitution
225; see also Berlin; Berlin Wall; Second
World War
Ghana 320, 333
Glasgow Media Group 170
global developmentalism 417–19
Global Justice movement 128–9
global original position 29–30, 34
global political economy see under economics
globalization: border crossings 201; and
citizenship 212; as deterritorialisation and
supra-territorialisation 234, 240–1; and
international law 542; transnational
identities 261
Globe Theatre, London 278
Google 183, 184, 187, 188, 194; privacy
policy 195–6
governmentality 78–81
Grameen Bank, Bangladesh 435–6
Greece: financial crisis 389, 393, 394–5;
see also Ancient Greece
green political parties 61, 62, 77, 78
green revolution 76–7
greenhouse gases 42, 45, 48, 49, 54, 71
Greenpeace anti-nuclear demonstration,
Capetown 69–70
Groundwork 71
group identity 101–4
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba 24
Gulf: oil production 52
Gulf War (1990-91) 118, 160–1, 166,
358–60
Hadrian’s Wall 227
HAMAS 117
Hamitic myth 97
Hapsburg Empire (1914) 230
Hawaii 345; Mauna Loa Observatory 42
headscarf ban, France 592–7, 604–5
hegemonic position 88
Hinduism: and Buddhism 600; and
Christianity 356–8
Hiroshima 475
historical materialism 422
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
1, 2
Hizbullah 117
Holocaust 474, 476, 490, 491
‘homeworkers’ 270–2
Hong Kong 345, 347, 395
housing market, US 391–2
human nature 134
human rights 590–2; bare life and sovereign
power 603–6; Euston Manifesto, UK 462;
and headscarf ban, France 592–7, 604–5;
international law 331; and Internet
governance 185, 189–91; and social
movements, Argentina 296–7, 300; and
universality 598–600; see also under
United Nations (UN)
human rights movement 554–5
Human Rights Watch 596
humanitarian intervention 539–42; legal
perspectives 550–4; legality and legitimacy
554–60; see also Timor-Leste
humanitarian relief see foreign aid
Hungary 138, 230
hurricanes 46, 47, 53
The Hurt Locker (film) 515
Hutu and Tutsi, Rwanda 97, 475, 476, 489
hybridity 264, 356–8
hyphenated identities 94; ethnic 264
Iceland: financial crisis 393, 394, 395
ICISS see International Commission on
Intervention and State Sovereignty
‘ideal types’ 143
identity: biology and natural history concepts
95–7; group 101–4; race and culture
(cultural racism) 213, 214–15; religious
and political 127–9; static and dynamic
approaches 97–100
identity politics 85–9; privilege 93; see also
feminist movement, US
ideology 127
IGF see Internet Governance Forum
‘imagined communities’ 277
IMF see International Monetary Fund
immigration see migration; United States (US)
immigration crisis
imperialism: and colonialism 464; ecological
49; and empire 229–31
income, national 408–10
income inequality 430; measurement 412–13
income redistribution 410, 420–1
independence of former colonies 331–2; and
neo-colonialism 332–4
India: and BRIC countries 414–15; British
colonialism 340–50, 354–8, 468–9;
independence 331, 350; national
developmentalism 421; Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty 573; and Pakistan
672 GENERAL INDEX
225; pharmaceutical industry 434; religion
142; rise of middle class 434; Western
capitalist model 53
indigenous populations: Americas 50–1, 307,
351, 353–4, 452–6, 468; Australia 50,
351; contemporary Latin America 304–5,
309–10; contemporary US 274; and
environment 50–1; impact of colonialism
351, 353–4; lands and borders 226
Indonesia 120, 128; and East Timor 236,
542–4; Krakatoa volcano 44–5
Industrial Revolution 43, 342–5, 352, 365
industrialisation and capitalism 43–4, 365–7,
371–2
Indymedia 177
inequality: changes in global economy
408–10; developing and emerging
economies 414–15; historical materialism
and expansion of global working class
420–4; liberal and developmental
perspectives 416–20, 421–2, 423–4;
measuring and comparing 410–14; and
neo-liberalism 377–81, 408–15; sources
of 405–7; US 406–7, 410–11, 413, 414;
see also poverty; poverty alleviation
infidels and Christians 456–9
informal economy 367–70, 371, 374, 376,
377–8, 379
injustice: contemporary interventions 461–5;
diagnosing need for exclusive knowledge
466–9; giving and receiving 450–2,
466–9; history of Christianity 452–61,
462, 468
instinctive violence 510
intellectual property 186
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) 44, 48
International Atomic Energy Agency 573
International Brigade, Spain 490–1
International Commission on Intervention
and State Sovereignty (ICISS) 539–40,
557, 558, 559
International Convention on Civil and
Political Rights 596–7
International Helsinki Federation for Human
Rights 596
international institutions 290; financial 323,
388–9, 419–20
international interventions 236
International Labour Rights Fund 326
international law 236, 527, 542; slavery 316,
331
International Monetary Fund (IMF) 126,
323, 324, 329, 388, 394, 420, 438
Internet 176–80; activists/advocacy groups
192, 196; Charter of Rights and Principles
189–91; filtering and censorship 187–9;
futures and pasts 191–2; governance issues
180–5, 189; news sources 162; public
privacy matters 195–6; regulation 186–7;
rethinking world order 192–3;
spontaneous and strategic uses 193–5;
what if it ground to a halt? 195
Internet Governance Forum (IGF) 184–5,
189
Internet Rights and Principles (IRP) Charter
189–91
Internet service providers (ISPs) 183–4
intersectionality 103, 104
IPCC see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change
Iran 52, 110, 182, 183, 236; ‘Islamic
revolution’ 115; as rogue state 576,
577
Iraq: embargo 359–60; Gulf War (1990–91)
118, 160–1, 166, 358–60; oil production
52; as rogue state 576, 577
Iraq Body Count 615–16
Iraq war 7, 8; Abu Ghraib prison 24, 34–5,
162, 489; casualties 615–16; The Hurt
Locker (film) 515; Inquiry (2010) 497;
media reporting 161–2, 167; moral
dilemmas of 616–20, 621; opposition to
462–3, 613–16
IRP see Internet Rights and Principles
Charter
Islam: charity organizations 505–8; headscarf
ban, France 592–7, 604–5; Sunni and
Shi’ite 118; veil 593; and West,
relationship between 124, 125–6; see also
entries beginning Muslim
Islamic conception of modernity 444–5
Islamic Cultural Zones 445–6
Islamic movements: moderate 119–21;
political (Islamism) 113–14;
radical/fundamentalist 109–10, 116–19,
126–7
Islamic states 115–16
Islamic world, history of 112–13, 121
Israel: invasion of Lebanon (1982) 117;
as Jewish state 115–16, 353; Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty 573; Palestine
conflict 117, 240; school textbooks
476
GENERAL INDEX 673
Italy: financial crisis 395; historic unification
233; inequality 411; invasion of Ethiopia
(1935) 485; Second World War 478,
485
Ivory Coast 317–18, 319; colonial production
and unequal exchange 318–20;
development crises 321–3; post-
independence economic development
320–1; structural adjustment and its effects
323–9
Japan: inequality 411; and Korea 567, 568,
571, 580; and Korea (colonial era) 566,
579, 583; national income 408–10;
protectionism 417; resistance to Western
colonialism 342–4; Second World War 8,
474–5, 476, 492; Sino-Japanese war 249,
488; US atomic bombing 474–5
Jawad-ud-Dawa 506
Jews: antisemitism 484; Holocaust 474, 476,
490, 491; Vichy regime, France 491;
see also Israel
jihad 114
Johannesburg see World Summit on
Sustainable Development (2002)
Joint Security Area (JSA) (film) 584
Joint Vision 2020 524–5, 532
Jordan 24, 119
just war tradition 459
justice: principle of 29, 30; see also injustice
Kashmir 225, 506
Kazakhstan 231
Kent State University, Ohio National Guard
shootings 135
kidneys for cash 441
knowledge: Enlightenment 122; exclusive
457, 458–9, 462, 466–9; and power 16,
233, 530–1
Korea (North and South) 565–6, 567;
confrontational approach 575–9;
continuing challenges 581–5;
demilitarized zone 577, 578, 580;
engagement 579–81; financial crisis 395;
geographical context 567–8, 569;
historical background 566, 582–3;
nationality 229; nuclear weapons 572,
574, 576, 578–9; post-Cold War
developments 568–75
Korean War (1950-3) 568, 570, 579, 582,
585
Kosovo 161, 226, 231, 236, 542, 550, 557
Kuwait 119
Kyoto Protocol 48, 53, 70
labour: impact of industrialization 365;
surplus 376; see also work
laïcité 594, 605
land: indigenous populations 226; private
property 345
Landless Peoples Movement 71
language: and colonialism 273–4; English
349; and identity 100; knowledge and
power 16; thinking and 20–2, 623–4;
vernacular 257; of war 487–9
language games 16, 32–3
Latin America 291; capitalism and
underdevelopment 334; colonialism
331, 353–4; liberal democracy 309–10;
timeline 292, 293; see also Argentina;
Brazil
latitude, measurement of 237
Latvia 231
League of Nations 316
Lebanon 236; Hizbullah 117
legal-rational authority 143
legality: humanitarian intervention 550–60;
migration 202–3
legitimacy: and authority 141–6;
humanitarian intervention 554–60
Lehmann Brothers 391–2
Leviathan (Hobbes) 145, 146
liberal democracy 308–10
liberal globalism 416–17
liberal institutionalism 74, 76, 77
liberal and neo-liberal economics 372–5
liberal perspective: and developmental
perspective 416–20, 421–2, 423–4; on
Islamic headscarf 597
liberalism, history of 123, 365–6
Libya 181, 182, 188, 236, 331, 558, 559
Lithuania 231
London: 7/7 suicide bombers 602–3; anti-
war protest 614; Globe Theatre 278;
multiple allegiances 270; riots (2011) 183
longitude, measurement of 237
Lutheranism see Protestantism
Luxembourg 221, 406, 411
Make Poverty History, UK campaign 437
Mali 317, 331
Marxism: capitalist critique 422–3; and
environmental governance 75–6, 77; and
feminist economics 378; global political
674 GENERAL INDEX
economy 375–6; and identity 168; and
international human rights 331; neo-
Marxism 333
materialities and interactions 150
Maya civilisation 45
media 154–7; audience power 167–9; bias
157–63; critical perspective 165–7; Gulf
War (1990-91) 160–1, 166; Iraq War
(2003) 161–2; ownership 166–7; pluralist
perspective 164–5; power and democracy
163–9; print-capitalism 257–8; reading
169–73; Vietnam War (1960-75) 158–9,
160, 161
memories of wartime 489–92, 582–3
mercantilism 340, 364, 366
metaphysical account of law 550–1, 554–6
Mexica (Aztec) peoples 454
Mexico: NAFTA 207; Zapatista movement
177
Mexico–US border see United States (US)
immigration crisis
microenterprises 370
microfinance 435–6
Microsoft 194
Middle Ages 221, 222, 227, 232, 234, 364
middle class, modernization and rise of
432–4
Middle East: oil 52, 53, 115; Ottoman
Empire 112–13, 118, 230; postcolonial
period 113–14; secular-nationalist states
113, 118; history of Western military
interventions 359; see also Arab Spring;
specific countries
migration: border crossings 200–3; Chinese
249–50, 253, 254–5, 260; EU Schengen
Agreement 216; historic routes 202;
identity issues for émigrés and returnees
280–5; incorporation strategies 602–3;
race and culture (cultural racism) 213–15;
states and citizenship, concepts of 209–12;
see also United States (US) immigration
crisis
Migration Policy Institute 201, 210
migration rights demonstrations, US 211, 212
military and civil uses of Internet 193–4
Military Families Against War 615
military targeting of terrorists 498–502, 504,
508
military thinking: network-centric warfare
523; Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)
521, 525, 531
military-industrial complex 163
military-media relations 160–3
Millennium Development Goals 437, 443
MIMENET 163
mimicry and ambivalence in colonial
psychology 354–6
Ming dynasty 346
Minority Report (film) 533
Minority Rights Group 596
mirror stage of identification process 99
mobile phones 182, 183
modern colonialism 350–4
modern slavery 326–7, 331
modern vs classical democracy 604
modernity: alternative visions of 442–6;
biopolitics of 603–4; nationalism studies
257–9; ‘post-modern state’ 463–5
modernization 122–3, 180; impact of
432–4
Moldova 231
Mongolia 247, 254
Mongols and Christianity 459–61
moral economy 434, 443–4
morality see ethics
Morocco 120, 595
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Argentina
296–7, 300
Mughal Empire 340, 342
multiculturalism 602–3
multinational companies 329
multiple allegiances 270
multiple identities 104, 128
murabaha, concept of 446
Murshidabad 344
Muslim Brotherhood 114, 119, 120
Muslim Democracy 119
Muslim world in Europe 128–9
My Lai massacre, Vietnam War 159
NAFTA 206, 207
napalm attack, Vietnam War 158, 160
narratives 86; media 156
nation-building: alternative perspective
271–2; China 253–5; Chinese in Africa
261–5; role of arts 276–8
nation-states 269–70; alternative political
imaginary 280–5; coherence 276–80;
problematic concept of 229; writers’
perspectives 272–6
national affiliations/allegiances 245–6, 270
national developmentalism, India 421
national identities: and hybridity 264, 356–8;
and transnationalism 259–65
GENERAL INDEX 675
national incomes 408–10
nationalism 246; communist 250–3; studies
255–9; transnationalism 259–65
native peoples see indigenous peoples
NATO 231, 542, 550, 557
natural history and identity 95–7
Nazism (National Socialism) 484, 485,
491
negotiated approach of media audience
167–9, 172
neo-colonialism 332–4
neo-conservatism 126–7
neo-liberal economics: as common sense
381; and flexibilization of work 368–9,
370; and inequality 377–81, 408–15;
liberal and 372–5; poverty alleviation
strategy and critique 438–42
neo-racism 215
Netherlands 233, 394, 411, 474, 602
network society 240–1, 536
network-centric warfare 521–7, 528–9, 531;
changing conceptions of battlespace
526–7; equipment 521–3; military
thinking 523; network thinking 523–4,
529–30; Revolution in Military Affairs
(RMA) 521, 525, 531; strategic debate
524–5
New York: Occupy Wall Street movement
622; unauthorized immigrants 205; World
Trade Center bombing (1993) 204
News Corporation 166–7
news media see media
Nigeria 119, 317
non-governmental organizations (NGOs):
East Timor 546; environmental 67,
68–71, 76–7; Korea 576; opposition to
Internet regulation 186, 189
North Africa see Arab Spring
North America: environmental history 49, 50;
environmental movement 63
North Korea see Korea (North and South)
North-South relations 128; climate change
53–5; democracy 308; development
338–9; environment 66; Internet 176,
186–7
Northern Ireland 110, 111, 565
Norway 411
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons
proliferation status 572
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 572, 573
nuclear weapons: North Korea 572, 574, 576,
578–9; US bombing of Japan 474–5
obedience: authority and legitimacy 141–6;
killing in wartime 477–80; Milgram
experiment 134, 478, 479; and power
146–50; resistance and force 132–5; and
revolutions of 1989 135–41
Occupy (Wall Street) movement 135, 395,
418, 419, 612, 621, 622, 623
oil/petroleum 42, 43, 44, 51–2, 53, 115
Opium Wars 346–7
Organization for Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD) 503; Financial
Action Task Force (FATF) 502, 503;
inequality 420, 423–4, 425; Internet
regulation 186
organized crime 374
Oriental Exclusion Act (1924), US 215
Orientalism 125–6
‘others’ 125–6, 213
Ottoman empire 112–13, 118, 230
Our Common Future (Brundtland Report)
41, 66
Pacific Islands 351
pacifism 77
Pakistan: and Afghanistan border region
(AfPak) 225, 498–500; and India 225,
350; International Women’s Day
demonstrations 447; Islam 114, 115–16,
120; kidneys for cash 441; Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty 573; targeting in
war on terror 498–508; unauthorized
immigrants, US 204
Palestinians: Israeli conflict 117, 240;
‘occupied territories’ 86, 225
Pan-Islamism 112, 113
Parekh Report 603
Paris: network of interactions study 150;
Peace of 230–1; riots (1968), xxii;
riots (2006) 128
Paris Opera 276–7
patriarchy 91, 92, 378; Islamic 597, 604–5,
607; writers’ perspectives 274, 275,
276
Peace of Paris 230–1
Peace of Westphalia (1648) 122–3, 227,
228, 229
peer-to-peer (P2P) networks 186, 191
performativity, identity as 100, 264215
Peronism 294–5, 300–2, 303, 305
petroleum/oil 42, 43, 44, 51–2, 53, 115
pharmaceutical industry, India 434
photojournalism 158, 159
676 GENERAL INDEX
pictures/picturing 28–36
plantations: child trafficking to 317–18, 326,
331; as climate change solution 53, 54,
55; colonial era 345
Poland 138, 230, 474, 486, 487
political community 149
‘political economy’ 366; see also global
political economy under economics
political and religious identities 127–9
political violence 510–12
polysemic media texts 167
‘poor’, conceptualization of 440–2
populism see Peronism
Portugal: colonialism 229, 331, 353–4, 542;
financial crisis 395; and Timor-Leste 542,
544, 547
positivism 98
post-ecologicalism and eco-governmentality
77–81
‘post-modern state’ 463–5
postcolonial subcultures 358
postcolonialism 330–1, 334
poverty 429–30; classification of 430–2
poverty alleviation: alternative visions of
modernity 442–6; campaigns 437; lifeboat
ethics 431, 434; neoliberal solution and
critique 438–42; South Asia 432–6
Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, World
Bank 420
power: and democracy in media 163–9; and
knowledge 16, 233, 530–1; and obedience
146–50; and violence 508–12
power relations 147, 148, 150
Prague Spring (1968) 137
primordialism 255–7, 258, 259–60
print-capitalism 257–8
prisoners of war (POWs) 478, 491; reluctance
to take 476–7
privacy matters, Internet 195–6
private sector 67
private/public dichotomy 91
privilege 93
problem-solving theory 14, 620–1, 624
proletarianisation 326, 332, 376
proletariat, global 423, 424
propaganda 480–1
Protect IP Act (PIPA), US 186
protectionism 417
Protestantism (Lutheranism) 142–3, 144,
227
psychoanalytical theory 99, 100
Puerto Rica 331
Qing dynasty 346
race: biology and natural history conceptions
of 96–7; and culture (cultural racism)
213–15
racism: Argentina 304–5; and colonialism
307; cultural 213–15; neo-racism 215
racist language in wartime 488–9
railways, India 348–9
rape in wartime 488, 492
realist tradition 74–5, 527, 528, 529–30;
account of law 551
reason, picture of 28, 29–30, 31, 33–5,
36
Reformation 144, 145–6, 227, 307
religion: comparison of philosophies 601;
contemporary role of 108–11; culture,
fundamentalism and identities 125–9;
definitions of 109; native cosmologies
50–1; and politics, mixing of 121–4;
Protestant ethic and capitalism 142–3;
Reformation in Europe 144, 145–6, 227,
307; see also specific religions
religious sources of authority 141–2
religious wars and rise of the state 227–9
Renaissance 229, 239, 307
‘Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency
Partnership’ 67
republicanism 123
resistance: and dissent 81; and force 132–5
responsibility to protect 539–40, 557–60
Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) 521,
525, 531
revolutions: 1989 135–41; Chinese
communist 249; role of Internet 177, 180;
and state 549
Rio Earth Summit (UNCED) 41, 47–9, 65,
66, 68
Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable
Development 68
rogue states 576, 577, 579, 621
Roman Empire 226–7, 228, 350
Romania 138; revolution 148, 149
Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts,
Manufacturers, and Commerce (RSA)
393, 397, 399–400
Russia: and BRIC countries 414–15;
inequality 417; and Korea 567, 580;
Kyoto Protocol 48; separatism 231, 236;
see also Soviet Union
Rwanda 161, 226, 236; Hutu and Tutsi 97,
475, 476, 489
GENERAL INDEX 677
Salafis 120
Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (film) 270
Samrong Military Hospital, Cambodia 35
sati, colonial India 357–8, 605
Saudi Arabia 112, 115, 116, 182
Saving Private Ryan (film) 170–2
Say It Visually 387, 396, 397, 398, 400
Scandinavia: measuring and comparing
inequality 410–11
Schengen Agreement 216
sea levels, rising 46, 47
Second World War: Bengal famine (1943-4)
348; bombing of German cities 8–10, 11,
474, 614; Britain 8–9, 491–2; competing
political ideologies 485; economics 483–4;
and European colonialism 354; evil leader
484–5; France 8, 491, 492; Holocaust
474, 476, 490, 491; income redistribution
410; Italy 478, 485; Japan 8, 474–5, 476;
National Socialism (Nazism) 484, 485,
491; Soviet Union 8, 486–7, 491;
strategic concerns 485–7; territorial
ambitions 484; US 8–9, 170–2, 474–5,
478, 482; see also prisoners of war (POWs)
secular-nationalist states, Middle East 113,
118
secularism 109, 113, 121–3; Europe 142,
145; laïcité, France 594, 605
securitization and politicization 606
security 519–20; becoming-dangerous 534–5;
being-in-formation 534; critical studies
529–31; perfect vision 532–4; and
strategic studies 527–9; unknown
unknowns 531–5; see also network-centric
warfare; terrorism
Security Council 540–2, 558, 559, 579
self-determination 230–1, 417
Serbia 77, 231, 236
settler colonies 352–4
Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims 118
Sierra Leone 542
Sikhism 600; France 595–6
situated-ness of media 157
Skype 194
slave trade routes 315
slavery: abolition and continuation 314–18;
African 351, 366; and colonial labour
regime 332; definitions of 316–17; Latin
America 304; modern 326–7, 331; US
271–2
Slovakia 231
social contract, mythic 279–80
Social Darwinism 358, 484
social media 162–3, 178, 182, 191
social sciences 123–4, 142
society, as source of authority 143–5
Somalia 119, 161, 236
South Africa: apartheid to Rainbow Nation
72–3; Truth and Reconcilliation
Commission 493; see also World Summit
on Sustainable Development (2002)
South Sudan 236
sovereign debt see debt/sovereign debt
sovereignty: Islamic Cultural Zones 445–6;
Reformation 145–6; republican model
123; state 224–5, 229, 442; territorial
236; Western conception of 445
Soviet Union: and Afghanistan 116, 117;
collapse of 137, 231; former 408; and
Korea 566, 567–8; Second World War 8,
486–7, 491; see also Cold War; Russia
Spain: ‘amnesty’ granted to unauthorized
migrants 212; civil war 485, 490–1;
colonialism 229, 331, 353–4;
conquistadors 452–6, 459, 468; financial
crisis 395; Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659)
227, 233
Sri Lanka 110, 129
state power 136
state sovereignty 29, 224–5, 229, 442
states: belligerent 483–7; and citizenship
209–12; Islamic 115–16; as moral subjects
29–30; and non-state actors 75, 76; ‘post-
modern state’ 463–5; and revolutions 549;
rogue 576, 577, 579, 621; secular-
nationalist 113, 118; and territory, relation
between 221–6; transnational politics of
260–1; see also city-states; nation-states;
territorial state
Stern Report 55, 56
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), US 186
Straits of Gibraltar 200
structural adjustment 323–4, 438; effects of
324–9
subject, picture of 28, 30, 31, 35–6
subjectification 265
subjectivity 98, 99–100
Sudan 226; British Indian army in 345;
Darfur 558; South 236
Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims 118
supra-territorial environmental initiatives
236
supra-territorialisation, deterritorialisation
and 234, 240–1
678 GENERAL INDEX
sustainable development 61–3, 66;
postcolonial subcultures 358; UN 48;
see also World Summit on Sustainable
Development (2002)
Sweden 228, 411
Syria 24, 181, 188
Tahrir Square demonstrations, Cairo 4, 181,
183, 290
Taiwan 247
Taliban 110, 236
television: US 155; see also media
territorial state: changing importance of
234–7; techniques and future of 237–41;
see also European territorial state,
development of
‘territorial trap’ 238–9, 259
territory: boundaries and nationalism 258–9;
definitions of 222–3; emergence of 231–7;
political and geographical organisation
220–6; political-economic approach
232–3, 234; political-strategic approach
233–4; and state, relation between
221–6
terrorism/counter-terrorism: 9/11 attacks
497, 498, 514; role of Internet 180; war
on terror 109–10, 498–508, 577
textile manufacture, cotton and 318–19, 342,
344–5, 365, 366
theory-practice relationship 16, 34
thinking: about ethics 27–31; about thinking
31–6; example: torture 22–7; and
language 20–2, 623–4
Third World: capitalism and socialism 421;
terminology 5; see also North-South
relations
Thirty Years War (1618-48) 227, 228
Tiananmen Square pro-democracy
demonstration (1989) 136–7, 251
Tibet 236, 247, 254
Timor-Leste 542–4; 1999 intervention
and trusteeship 544–6; independence
546; violence and 2006 intervention
546–50
torture: post 9/11 24; racist justification for
489; ticking bomb scenario 22–7, 33–6
totalitarianism 485
tourism 201
traditional authority 143
tragedy of the commons 74–6, 79
‘transmission model’ of media
communications 156–7
transnationalism 259–65; NGO networks
68–70
Treaty of Nanking 347
Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) 227, 233
Treaty of Versailles (1919) 225, 230, 483,
484
Tunisia 120, 180–2, 183–4, 185, 188–9,
595
Turkey 112–13, 114, 119, 120, 128, 230,
595; Armenian genocide 475, 476, 488,
489
Tutsi and Hutu, Rwanda 97, 475, 476, 489
Twitter 178, 182, 183–4, 194
Ukraine 138, 231
unauthorized immigrants, US 204–5, 206–7,
208, 209, 210–12, 213
underdevelopment 334, 338–40
United Kingdom (UK): Charity Commission
505; financial crisis 389, 393, 394, 395;
Green Party 61; historic development 343;
inequality 411–14; Iraq war 497, 613;
Make Poverty History campaign 437;
migration 201; national income 408–10;
news media 157–8; Treasury Department
55, 56; see also Britain; London
United Nations (UN): agencies 176, 184–5;
Charter 540, 541; climate change 48;
Convention Against Torture and Other
Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment
or Punishment 22–3, 26; on drone strikes
500; ECLAC 420; High-Level Panel on
Threats, Challenges and Change 557–8,
559; Human Rights Council 191; Human
Rights Resolutions 309; International
Atomic Energy Agency 573; International
Convention on Civil and Political Rights
596–7; Internet Governance Forum
184–5, 189; Iraq embargo 359–60; Ivory
Coast intervention 326; Millennium
Development Goals 437, 443; Pakistani
floods 505–8; Rio Earth Summit
(UNCED) 41, 47–9, 65, 66, 68; Rio+20
Conference on Sustainable Development
68; Security Council 540–2, 558, 559,
579; Timor-Leste 544–6, 547, 548, 549,
556; UNCTAD 414, 420; UNDP 56, 67,
420, 602; UNEP 48; UNESCO 200, 405;
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(UNDHR) 316, 590, 591, 592, 596, 600;
see also World Summit on Sustainable
Development (2002)
GENERAL INDEX 679
United States (US) 239; 9/11 attacks 497,
498, 514; Army trainees 481; Bill of Rights
and Declaration of Independence 598;
Bretton Woods system 323; capitalism and
colonialism 352; climate change 44;
Declaration of Independence 271–2, 352;
drone strikes 500, 501–2; feminist
movement see feminist movement, US;
financial crisis 391–2, 395, 397, 399;
Founding fathers and ‘homeworkers’
271–2; hurricane Katrina, New Orleans
47; immigration 201; immigration crisis
see United States (US) immigration crisis;
immigration policy, historic 214–15;
inequality 410–11, 413, 414; Internet,
military and civil uses of 193–4; Internet
regulation 186; and Iraq see Iraq; Iraq
war; Johannesburg World Summit on
Sustainable Development (2002) 66–7,
68; Kent State University, Ohio National
Guard shootings 135; and Korea 566,
567–8, 572, 574, 576, 577, 578, 580;
and Middle East 52, 115; Minority Report
(film) 533; national income 408–10; New
York see New York; postwar economic
boom 387; protectionism 417; religious
institutions 111; San Francisco protestors
419; Saving Private Ryan (film) 170–2;
Second World War 8–9, 170–2, 474–5,
478, 482, 491–2; settler colonies 352–3;
television 155; use of torture (ticking
bomb scenario) 24, 33, 34–5, 36; Vietnam
see Vietnam War (1960-75); war on terror
109–10, 498–508, 577; see also Cold War;
network-centric warfare
United States (US) immigration crisis 200,
203–9, 210–12, 215; border control
strategies 205–7; legislation 207–9, 212;
vigilante groups 209
universalization problems: human rights
598–600; Western democratic model
305–10
unknown unknowns (security issues) 531–5
urbanization-ruralization 344–5
Uzbekistan 231
veil, Islamic 593
Velvet Divorce, Czechoslovakia 231
Vichy regime, France 491
videos see YouTube
Vietnam War (1960-75) 158–9, 160, 161,
475, 476, 488, 570
vigilante groups 209
violence: of colonialism 358–60; definition of
496–7; and power, relationship between
508–12; visible and invisible 512–15; see
also conflicts; war
Vodafone 183, 184
Wahhabism 115
war: as cultural phenomenon 472–6;
explanations for 7–8, 483–7; memories of
489–92, 582–3; as political instrument
509; reasons for killing in 476–83;
reporting see media; ‘warblogs’; see also
conflicts
war on terror 109–10, 498–508, 577
‘warblogs’ 162
watchdog role: of civil society 297; and
mouthpiece role of news media 158, 159,
160, 162, 163–7
water resources 67
weapons technology: language of 487–8;
see also drones/drone strikes; network-
centric warfare
Web 2.0 177, 178, 191
welfare programmes, postwar 420–1
Western conception of modernity
443–4
Western democratic model 305–10
Western individualism 439–40
Westphalian treaties (1648) 122–3, 227, 228,
229
Wikileaks 24
Wikipedia 194, 396
women: in informal economy 378;
International Women’s Day 447;
microfinance 435, 436; parliamentary
quotas, Latin America 310; see also gender;
entries beginning feminist
word–object relationship 31–2
work: formal and informal 367–70, 374,
376, 377–8, 379; see also labour
working class: Argentina 303; historical
materialism and expansion of 420–4
World Bank 309, 323, 329, 417, 419, 420,
424, 438; Timor-Leste 544, 545–6
World Business Council for Sustainable
Development (WBCSD) 70
World Commission on Environment and
Development 41, 66
World Resources Institute 67
World Summit on the Information Society
(WSIS) 184–5
680 GENERAL INDEX
World Summit on Sustainable Development
(2002) 65–74, 75–6; grassroots NGO
movements 70–1; inter-governmental
negotiated outcomes and bilateral
partnerships 66–8; and South African
political development 72–4; transnational
NGO networks 68–70
World Tourism Organization 201
World Trade Organization 126, 329
world-systems analysis 379
Worldwatch Institute 53
Xinjiang province (East Turkistan) 236, 247,
254
Yahoo! 183
Yemen 119, 182, 501
YouTube 183, 387, 396–401
Yugoslavia: break-up of 87–8, 110, 231,
564–5; creation of 230
GENERAL INDEX 681
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Notes on contributors
Teaching with Global Politics: A New Introduction
1 Introduction
THE QUESTION What does this introduction to global politics do?
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE How do we use illustrative examples?
GENERAL RESPONSES What sorts of responses might there be?
BROADER ISSUES What assumptions do we start from?
CONCLUSION
2 How do we begin to think about the world?
THE QUESTION Thinking and language
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE Thinking about torture: the ticking bomb scenario
GENERAL RESPONSES Thinking about ethics: two responses
BROADER ISSUES Thinking about thinking
CONCLUSION
3 What happens if we don’t take nature for granted?
THE QUESTION From environment to biosphere
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE Climate change
GENERAL RESPONSES How do we frame the issue in terms of global politics?
BROADER ISSUES Challenging carboniferous capitalism
CONCLUSION
4 Can we save the planet?
THE QUESTION Environmental politics and sustainable development
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE The World Summit in 2002
GENERAL RESPONSES Existing analyses of global environmental governance
BROADER ISSUES Post-ecologism and eco-governmentality
CONCLUSION
5 Who do we think we are?
THE QUESTION Narratives and politics
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE The US feminist movement
GENERAL RESPONSES How can we conceptualize identity?
BROADER ISSUES Do we need to identify with a group?
CONCLUSION
6 How do religious beliefs affect politics?
THE QUESTION The role of religion today
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE Islamic states and movements
GENERAL RESPONSES Do religion and politics mix?
BROADER ISSUES Culture, fundamentalism and religious identities
CONCLUSION
7 Why do we obey?
THE QUESTION Obedience, resistance and force
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE The revolutions of 1989
GENERAL RESPONSES Authority and legitimacy
BROADER ISSUES Thinking about power
CONCLUSION
8 How do we find out what’s going on in the world?
THE QUESTION The mediation of information
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE Media bias: news representations of war
GENERAL RESPONSES The media, power and democracy
BROADER ISSUES How to read the media
CONCLUSION
9 How does the way we use the Internet make a difference?
THE QUESTION What is the Internet?
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE The Arab Spring and Internet governance
GENERAL RESPONSES Regulation, censorship and rights
BROADER ISSUES Internet futures
CONCLUSION
10 Why is people’s movement restricted?
THE QUESTION Border crossings
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE The US—Mexico border and the immigration crisis
GENERAL RESPONSES Ideas of states and citizenship
BROADER ISSUES Cultural racism
CONCLUSION
11 Why is the world divided territorially?
THE QUESTION Forms of political and geographical organisation
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE The development of the European territorial state
GENERAL RESPONSES The emergence of territory
BROADER ISSUES Techniques and the future of the territorial state
CONCLUSION
12 How do people come to identify with nations?
THE QUESTION National affiliations
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE The margins of the Chinese nation
GENERAL RESPONSES Nationalism studies
BROADER ISSUES Transnationalism and hybridity
CONCLUSION
13 Does the nation-state work?
THE QUESTION States, nations and allegiance
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE Worlds of unease within the nation-state
GENERAL RESPONSES Stories of coherent nationhood
BROADER ISSUES An alternative political imaginary
CONCLUSION
14 Is democracy a good idea?
THE QUESTION Democracy
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE Democracy in Argentina
GENERAL RESPONSES Elections and equality
BROADER ISSUES Whose democracy?
CONCLUSION
15 Do colonialism and slavery belong to the past?
THE QUESTION Slavery: abolition and continuation
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE Colonialism and capitalist development in Ivory Coast
GENERAL RESPONSES The effects of adjustment: deproletarianisation and modern slavery
BROADER ISSUES Is today’s world postcolonial or neo-colonial?
CONCLUSION
16 How does colonialism work?
THE QUESTION Colonialism and underdevelopment
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE India and Britain
GENERAL RESPONSES What is modern colonialism?
BROADER ISSUES The psychology of colonialism
CONCLUSION
17 How is the world organized economically?
THE QUESTION From local markets to global political economy
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE Formal and informal work
GENERAL RESPONSES Explaining the politics of economics
BROADER ISSUES The hidden costs of neoliberalism
CONCLUSION
18 Is the financial crisis part of everyday life?
THE QUESTION Politics and everyday life
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE Finance and the financial crisis
GENERAL RESPONSES The politics of the financial crisis
BROADER ISSUES Re-politicizing finance, re-politicizing everyday life
CONCLUSION
19 Why are some people better off than others?
THE QUESTION Sources of inequality
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE Inequality in the age of neoliberal reform
GENERAL RESPONSES Liberal and developmental perspectives on inequality
BROADER ISSUES Historical materialism and the expansion of the global working class
CONCLUSION
20 How can we end poverty?
THE QUESTION The global poor and campaigns to end poverty
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE Modernization and microfinance in South Asia
GENERAL RESPONSES The neoliberal project and the export of an ideology
BROADER ISSUES Alternative visions of modernity
CONCLUSION
21 Why do some people think they know what is good for others?
THE QUESTION Giving and receiving
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE God’s purpose: early Christian incursions
GENERAL RESPONSES History’s progress: contemporary interventions
BROADER ISSUES Diagnosing the need for exclusive knowledge
CONCLUSION
22 Why does politics turn to violence?
THE QUESTION Mass killing as a cultural phenomenon
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE Killing in wartime
GENERAL RESPONSES Belligerent states
BROADER ISSUES Language and memory
CONCLUSION
23 What counts as violence?
THE QUESTION What is violence?
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE Violence and targeting in the war on terror
GENERAL RESPONSES The relationship between violence and power
BROADER ISSUES Visible and invisible violence
CONCLUSION
24 What makes the world dangerous?
THE QUESTION Living dangerously?
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE Network-centric warfare
GENERAL RESPONSES Thinking in terms of strategy and security
BROADER ISSUES Unknown unknowns
CONCLUSION
25 What can we do to stop people harming others?
THE QUESTION Intervening for humanity?
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE Saving Timor-Leste
GENERAL RESPONSES Law and the exceptional
BROADER ISSUES Legality, legitimacy and the politics of intervention
CONCLUSION
26 Can we move beyond conflict?
THE QUESTION Dealing with seemingly intractable conflicts
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE The conflict in Korea
GENERAL RESPONSES Confrontation and engagement: two approaches to conflict
BROADER ISSUES Dealing with antagonism
CONCLUSION
27 Who has rights?
THE QUESTION Whose rights?
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE The French headscarf ban
GENERAL RESPONSES Human rights and universality
BROADER ISSUES Bare life, human rights and sovereign power
CONCLUSION
28 Conclusion: What can we do to change the world?
THE QUESTION Changing what’s wrong with the world
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE The Iraq War
GENERAL RESPONSES No right way forward
BROADER ISSUES Change and complicity
CONCLUSION
List of figures
List of boxes
Acknowledgements and permissions
Index of names
General index
Seminar Preparation Week 3: Empire Critical Perspectives on Global Politics
4PIRS008W.2
Learning Portfolio Task 1
Complete the following reading notes for the essential reading,
Reading Title:
Read Krishna S. How does Colonialism Work? Chapter 16 in Global Politics: A New Introduction.
Key Words:
Research Question:
Summary of Argument:
Core Arguments:
Position:
Questions:
Learning Portfolio Task 2
Please listen to Episode 5, Part 1 and Part 2 ‘The Land of our Fathers’ of the New York Times podcast, and answer the following questions.
1) Colonialism created institutions that were racialised: created to maintain white supremacy and the unfair treatment of non-whites. Can you give evidence of this from the podcast?
2) What are the impacts of this racialised system for the people in the podcast? (bonus question, what does this mean for their access to the means of production).
3) Krishna talks about the Rail Way in India and the Opium Wars in China as two examples of British colonialism. Please choose one of these examples and explain in your own words how it is an example of colonialism. Please feel free to do some your own research into these events. Thanks!
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You don’t have to wait for an update for hours; you can track the progress of your order any time you want. We share the status after each step.
From brainstorming your paper's outline to perfecting its grammar, we perform every step carefully to make your paper worthy of A grade.
Preferred Writer
Hire your preferred writer anytime. Simply specify if you want your preferred expert to write your paper and we’ll make that happen.
Grammar Check Report
Get an elaborate and authentic grammar check report with your work to have the grammar goodness sealed in your document.
One Page Summary
You can purchase this feature if you want our writers to sum up your paper in the form of a concise and well-articulated summary.
Plagiarism Report
You don’t have to worry about plagiarism anymore. Get a plagiarism report to certify the uniqueness of your work.
Free Features $66FREE
Most Qualified Writer
$10FREE
Plagiarism Scan Report
$10FREE
Unlimited Revisions
$08FREE
Paper Formatting
$05FREE
Cover Page
$05FREE
Referencing & Bibliography
$10FREE
Dedicated User Area
$08FREE
24/7 Order Tracking
$05FREE
Periodic Email Alerts
$05FREE
Our Services
Join us for the best experience while seeking writing assistance in your college life. A good grade is all you need to boost up your academic excellence and we are all about it.
On-time Delivery
24/7 Order Tracking
Access to Authentic Sources
Academic Writing
We create perfect papers according to the guidelines.
Professional Editing
We seamlessly edit out errors from your papers.
Thorough Proofreading
We thoroughly read your final draft to identify errors.
Thorough Proofreading
We thoroughly read your final draft to identify errors.
Delegate Your Challenging Writing Tasks to Experienced Professionals
Work with ultimate peace of mind because we ensure that your academic work is our responsibility and your grades are a top concern for us!
We Analyze Your Problem and Offer Customized Writing
We understand your guidelines first before delivering any writing service. You can discuss your writing needs and we will have them evaluated by our dedicated team.
Clear elicitation of your requirements.
Customized writing as per your needs.
We Mirror Your Guidelines to Deliver Quality Services
We write your papers in a standardized way. We complete your work in such a way that it turns out to be a perfect description of your guidelines.
Proactive analysis of your writing.
Active communication to understand requirements.
We Handle Your Writing Tasks to Ensure Excellent Grades
We promise you excellent grades and academic excellence that you always longed for. Our writers stay in touch with you via email.
Thorough research and analysis for every order.
Deliverance of reliable writing service to improve your grades.
