For two inter-linked, consecutive workshops under the theme of Subjects and Practices of Resistance to be held 9-11 September 2013 at University of Sussex.

The first workshop (9-10 Sept) is on Discipline(s), Dissent and Dispossession and the second on Counter-Conduct in Global Politics (10-11 Sept).  The workshop convenors encourage attendance at both workshops.  However, paper proposals should specify the intended workshop and which days participants would be able to attend.

The workshops are generously sponsored and supported by the BISA Poststructuralist Politics Working Group (PPWG) and the Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT) at the University of Sussex 

Workshop 1: Discipline(s), Dissent and Dispossession

9-10 September 2013

Contemporary struggles against dispossession – from the 2011 Occupy movement to ongoing land rights conflicts in the Ecuadorian rainforest – not only remind us of existing forces of domination and exploitation, but also challenge the ready-made concepts and frameworks through which such struggles are often interpreted.   Building on a previous project – “Disciplining Dissent”* – this workshop aims to open up discussion on the intersections between the politics of resistance and the politics of knowledge. How might we conceptualise dissent or resistance in ways that are sensitive to the social and epistemic relations within which anti-systemic struggles are embedded? How might we frame the complementarity and tensions between political dissent and intellectual critique? How might available concepts and frameworks occlude the complex interplay between resistance and repression, discipline and dissent, obscuring what is at stake politically in existing practices of struggle?

We welcome contributions that consider these themes from diverse theoretical perspectives and academic disciplines, including international relations, international political economy, sociology, philosophy, geography and anthropology.

Questions that might be addressed include (but are not limited to): how is dissent rendered intelligible in ways that serve to contain, nullify or depoliticize struggles; the politics of knowledge in political dissent; the place of normative political critique in the absence of universal categories or emancipatory blueprints; the ways in which dissenting communities are building their own theories of dissent or are theorising out of their own dissenting practices; the forms of subjectivisation incited, subverted or arrested through practices of dissent and/or their relation to the types of dissenting subjects assumed by intellectuals and experts; the ways in which academic disciplines interpret, appropriate and discipline both dissent and critique; the nature and purpose of academic critique at a moment of austerity and economic “crisis”.

It is hoped that the workshop will serve as a basis for a journal special issue, as well as for further collobarations around these themes.

Abstracts of approx. 300 words should be sent to L.Coleman@sussex.ac.uk and cait@sussex.ac.uk by 31 May 2013 (please indicate whether or not you plan to attend both workshops).

Convenors:

Lara Montesinos Coleman, University of Sussex

Doerthe Rosenow, Oxford Brookes University

Karen Tucker, University of Bristol

*published as Lara Montesinos Coleman and Karen Tucker (eds.), Situating Global Resistance: Between Discipline and Dissent (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012) and as a special issue of Globalizations 8:3 (2011).

Workshop 2: Counter-Conduct in Global Politics: Theories and Practices

10-11 September 2013

Resistance, and its study, is on the rise. Protesting, agitating, dissenting, and occupying inter alia have received increased attention and theorisation in the past tumultuous decade since 11 September 2001. However, such academic and public attention has tended to focus on the visible and politically discernible practices of dissent against sovereignty, economic exploitation, dispossession and other forms of oppression. Little systematic attention has been paid to potentially less visible practices of resistance or those who do not participate in an expressly political register but that attempt to resist ‘power that conducts’ (Foucault 2007). To this end, the Counter-Conduct in Global Politics workshop has four main, interconnected, aims. First, to theoretically develop, refine and critically interrogate the concept and theorisation of ‘counter-conduct(s)’, a term that, until recently, has received scant attention within the social sciences. We encourage the further critique, development and modification of Foucault’s initial attempts to understand subjects’ ‘possible inventions’ as counter-conduct (1982, 2007). Second, to provide a space in which empirical, multi-disciplinary investigations of counter-conduct in a variety of thematic areas and spaces of global politics can be presented. Third, to facilitate reflection on the variable and contingent forms of counter-conduct, examining its close relationship with conducting power and revealing the processes of invigilation of resistance and adjustment of conducting strategies. Finally, to reflect on the methodological implications and issues, which affect the study of the variegated practices of counter-conduct.

We welcome contributions that consider these themes not only from a Foucaultian perspective but also that bring diverse theoretical perspectives  – and views from a variety of academic disciplines, including politics, international relations, international political economy, sociology, political theory and philosophy, geography and anthropology – to bear on the study of counter-conduct.

Format: consisting of longer paper presentations, followed by substantial constructive feedback from discussants and audience, the format of the Counter-Conduct in Global Politics workshop aims to facilitate intensive and extensive engagement among participants with a view to producing article length contributions to a significantly placed journal special issue. Given the lack of systematic focus on practices and subjects of counter-conduct, it is hoped that such a special issue will engender further debate and consideration of the study of counter-conduct in global politics and potentially act as a reference for postgraduate and doctoral research as well. Abstracts of approx. 300 words should be sent to L.Odysseos@sussex.ac.uk and cait@sussex.ac.uk by 31 May 2013 (please indicate whether or not you plan to attend both workshops).

Convenors:

Carl Death, University of Manchester (as of August 2013)

Helle Malmvig, Danish Institute of International Studies

Louiza Odysseos, University of Sussex

Antigua was settled by human rubbish from Europe, who used enslaved but noble and exalted human beings from Africa (all masters of every stripe are rubbish, and all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted; there can be no question about this) to satisfy their desire for wealth and power, to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they could be less lonely and empty – a European disease … Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master … you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.

Jamaica Kincaid suggests that abolition and emancipation are bitter-sweet affairs. For the enslaved, freedom furnishes them with a human being that nevertheless awaits a meaningful personhood. Out of slavery the master fares better, redeeming his human being from being human rubbish. Kincaid’s suggestion is insightful. After all, abolition had a vibrant nineteenth century afterlife. White abolitionists enthusiastically allowed their humanitarianism to colonize Africa so that God’s chosen could sanctify themselves through the act of saving the natives from their selves. Meanwhile, William Wilberforce et al, convinced that slaves were human biologically yet lacked the social and cultural competencies of humanity, looked on fascinated at the experiment of self-government in Haiti. From this point onwards all future failings would be attributed to the epidermis, not the colonial relation. Presently, argues Kincaid, the landscapes of the old Caribbean plantations have been consumed by a white tourist gaze that has once again disavowed the living legacies of enslavement and colonization and denied meaningful personhood to its peoples. What remains of these places and peoples is only an “unreal”, picture-book beauty.

What are our narratives of race and racism? Whom do we follow in order to tell the tale: the masters or the enslaved – the humanitarians or the “sufferers”? Which tale confesses the episteme –the scientifically valid study – of race?

The 1950-51 UNESCO “statements on race” answered such questions in favour of the master’s narrative. Announcing a new era in human understanding after the terrors of war and irrationalities of genocide, the main purpose of the statements was to separate the “biological fact” of race from its “social myth”. The biological fact in and of itself was rendered harmless, pertaining only to “physical and physiological” classifications. Thus genetic inheritance, it was affirmed, could have no bearing on mental or cultural competencies and capabilities. Conversely, the social myth of race was considered extremely dangerous in that it rendered cultural difference as biological thus sundering the “unity of mankind”. This myth had to be dispensed with; hence ethnicity – as a social/cultural classifier – was proposed as a preferable classificatory regime to that of race. Ethnicity, after all, had not been tainted with supremacist hierarchy and could signify instead non-hierarchical diversity.

Although the scientists who collectively produced the statements on race were by no means all white, the majority hailed from Western academies. And the particular kind of anti-racism evident in UNESCO’s statements had already been formulated by famous Western anthropologists such as Franz Boas. They had sought to undermine scientific racism on its own grounds, i.e. by proving the un-scientific nature of the social myth of race. And this endeavour required debunking racialized identity – that which confessed their legal and natural inequality – as myth not fact. However, as part of this manoeuvre these identities had to be subsumed under a harmless social science of ethnic categorization. While this move redeemed white identities, it de-politicized the meanings of the sufferers’ cultural complexes and complexions, extricated them from inherited hierarchies of power, and thus segregated them from the inherited and living struggles against (post-/neo-)masters. In short, as Alana Lentin puts it, the effect of the statements was to separate race from politics.

But I would like to add to this point a further provocation: that the episteme of race announced by UNESCO allowed little room for the ongoing story of the sufferers and their epistemic and practical strategies for meaningful re-humanization and reclamation of personhoods. Instead, the UNESCO research agenda on race and racism first and foremost promoted a science that enabled the master to sweep away his rubbish and redeem his humanity.

Care should be taken in assuming that the 1950-51 statements were primarily focused upon scientific racism and the Shoah. Just as important was the fact that the colonial subjects of European empires had paid the blood-sacrifice for keeping Europe free of Nazism, as had African-American troops, and yet racialized rule had survived the end of the war at home and abroad. While no nation post-war could dispute the judgement upon Nazism, it was a different matter with European colonialism and Jim Crow. Hence, prudence dictated that the living and ongoing struggles against racial rule would not appear in the 1950-51 statements. But this modus vivendi was broken in 1967 when certain newly independent states entering into the UN system, and buoyed by the global ideological confluence of liberation struggle, Black Power, and civil rights, impelled UNESCO to revisit the race question.

The fourth UNESCO statement on race once more denied any biological origin to the social problem of race. However, this time the seedbed of racial discrimination was traced explicitly to the global legacies of slavery and colonial rule, as well as to anti-Semitism. Moreover, the 1967 statement acknowledged anti-colonial struggles to be the mechanism for “eliminating the scourge of racism” while also decrying the way in which “ethnic groups” inhabiting western countries were pressured to give up their cultural identity in order to assimilate. While the term “ethnicity” was still used, the interlocutory intent of the 1967 statement was far less to redeem the master’s humanity from his past crimes, and much more to valorise the sufferers’ ongoing struggles for re-humanization and re-personalization (often against the same master cultures and societies). Therefore, unlike its earlier articulations, the 1967 statement acknowledged that racialization had never been a passive project, a technology that moulded a blank object. And in this respect, the hermeneutic of the 1967 statement allows for a number of considerations to enter the research agenda that were excluded from the 1950-51 statements.

In order to flesh out these considerations I confess to using a particular departure point (as will already be evident), namely, the legacies of the struggles against enslavement by Africans in the Americas. Colonialism never moved into blank spaces, and slavery never, phenomenologically speaking, created slaves – i.e. empty bodies. Concomitantly, the master has never been the only scientist; the sufferers have always had their own sciences, despite the fact that sometimes they have also practiced the science of the master at a professional level. Moreover, I do not say any of this romantically; I do not attribute a natural nobility or goodness to the very diverse and often clashing sciences of the sufferers. But sciences they nevertheless had, and have. Sciences that keep particular parts of their stories, being and practices unspoken, hidden and camouflaged from the master even as he dominates (or evacuates) their meanings in the public sphere; and sciences that allow the brunt of racial rule to be at least partially transmogrified into a creative force wherein identification processes mobilize the European constructs of race in order to redeem extant personhoods and cultural complexes and complexions under the sign, precisely, of race.

Occasionally, these sciences reveal themselves in the public spaces of the master through visible insurrections that are aesthetic at the same time as they are directly political. The master’s science can only conjure slaves or incompetent humans; yet even the master’s bards can occasionally sense that there is something at work other than brute resistance. Witness, for example, Wordsworth’s sonnet to Toussaint L’Ouverture, one of the famed leaders of the Haitian Revolution: “Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies; there’s not a breathing of the common wind that will forget thee; thou hast great allies”. But most importantly, the sciences of the sufferers require us to consider that there might be, in the words of Artwell Cain, not just one “blackness” – the tool of the master – but also a blackness other-wise, one that “seeks to reconstruct through knowledge of self an individual and a collective identification with others carrying similar markers while fostering a sense of togetherness geared at liberating humanity”.

Polynesians Against the Vietnam War. No Vietcong Ever Called me a Coconut

This other science of blackness is not important just for its nobility and heroism, but far more so for its hermeneutics and their attendant cognitive, aesthetic and political practices. True, the fourth UNESCO statement on race marks the zenith of the Third World project before its political defeat in the 1970s. Nevertheless, the sciences of the sufferers that ultimately supported this project have genealogies that prefigure, pre-empt and succeed temporal defeat.  And yet, all the same, these sciences still tend to be disavowed, excluded or re-forgotten in the Western Academy’s research agenda on race.

In keeping with the 1950-51 UNESCO statements on race, the current agenda is predominantly framed through two key thematic of contestation: the separation of the biological and social facts of race (re-animated recently due to the science of bio-engineering), and the horizontalization/de-politicization of race into ethnicity. In philosophies of race the two thematic contestations are much more likely to interact, while the majority of critical work in the humanities and social sciences has engaged primarily with the second. With especial regards to this work, I suggest that there remains a consistent implied preference for the master’s science to set the epistemic grounds of debate, propelled, moreover, by a particular anti-racism that is obsessed with the question as to whether the master can clean up his own rubbish and make good. And this preference is structural, not individual.

When does whiteness studies become yet another narcissistic mirror for the priviliged?

Take, for instance, the case of critical race studies, which has recently been flooded with “whiteness studies”. Initially designed as a political intervention to abolish white privilege such studies now tend to fixate whiteness as the dominant cultural complex and complexion to be explored. Or consider how poststructural and postcolonial approaches – genealogies in general – have increasingly interrogated colonial rule and liberation struggles through the hollowed-out post-humanist subject of the subaltern, conceived as an effect or trace of the master’s power. It is important to acknowledge that historical materialist scholarship has consistently thrown up exceptions to these preferences; however, in their key bastions historical materialist scholars remain unwilling to rethink the Eurocentric points of departure that allow for provincial assumptions as to the causal relationship between capitalism, colonialism and race.

I acknowledge that, in and of themselves, all these approaches and investigations are necessary and valuable, both intellectually and politically. Indeed, my argument is in part dependent upon them, although I qualify this dependence with another acknowledgement that these resources can also be mined with the sciences of the sufferers. But, to return to the considerations made by Jamaica Kincaid at the start of this blog post, my main point is this: that this research agenda is dominated by one story – what the master does unto the sufferers – and addressed to one politics – can the master redeem the detritus of his humanity?

What of the sufferers and their stories and politics? Are they merely fragments of raw data? Or do they have an epistemic part to play in the research agenda on race and racism?

Omar El-Khairy’s Sour Lips deftly weaves together the impulses of benevolence, ventriloquism and celebrity that are the principal lineaments of this troubling story. El-Khairy’s MacMaster (played by Simon Darwen) is a complex figure, driven by a desire to counter Orientalist stereotypes of Arabs, a desperate need to occupy the positionality and authenticity of the native so as to be taken seriously in the online communities in which he seems to spend most of his life, and a more prosaic hunger for fame, book deals and everything else a PhD candidate might want. Yet in some ways, true life was stranger than the narrative that El-Khairy conjures up. MacMaster’s elaborate hoax was uncovered, in part, through information provided by a Paula Brooks, executive editor of the US-based lesbian and gay news site LezGetReal, with whom ‘Amina’ had been in contact. Thank fuck, I hear you say, except that Brooks was herself a fake identity created by Bill Graber, a 58-year old former air force pilot and retired construction worker based in Dayton, Ohio, who claimed to have been inspired to create his online avatar after a lesbian couple with whom he was friendly had been mistreated by an Ohio hospital. Convinced that the mainstream media did a poor job of representing LGBT folks, Graber created Brooks because he felt that ‘the best way to do it was to have people who were in the life, living the life, tell the story.’ Clearly more than lone eccentrics, the uncanny simultaneity of MacMaster and Graber’s performance as putatively liberal straight men getting off on playing spunky lesbians speaking truth to power begs a gigantic WTF?!

There is something slightly discomfiting about El-Khairy’s portrayal of Arraf. The ‘real’ Amina was an empty signifier—a vessel into whom everyone poured their desires for intersectional harmony. On stage, Amina is an active subject, speaking back to Tom, troubling his authorial sovereignty. Eschewing a possible Spivakian move in which the silenced subaltern might have been placed centre stage with no words of her own, this device in effect sets up a battle between two Aminas—MacMaster’s hoax and El Khairy’s desire for an authentic subject who emancipates herself—leaving this member of the audience wondering whether the playwright was complicit with MacMaster in writing his preferred version of Amina. (I wonder if George Bernard Shaw contemplated possibilities other than having Eliza Doolittle storm off or live happily ever after with Henry Higgins; in a postmodern time in which character development takes place through mass viral endorsement, there were a million Aminas floating around in the ether: she was everything we wanted her to be.) But perhaps I am being reductionist and too literal, for the violent eroticism of the interaction between Tom and Amina performs all sorts of other representational work: in these most dramatic scenes, we see the inner conflict that one supposes MacMaster experienced in the course of perpetrating his extraordinary fraud, and, more fundamentally, the always fraught relationship between author and character.

Most compelling and disturbing about the staging of Sour Lips is its three-member chorus (Takunda ‘TK’ Kramer, Celine Rosa Tan, Eden Vik) whose herd-like, frenzied canonization of Amina and equally frenzied demonization of Tom—‘share to Twitter, share to Facebook, share to Google plus’—are the motor driving the plot. Who were these people in real life? The sorts who would trek to a fringe theatre in south London to watch plays about the Arab Spring. If this is what civil society looks like, it’s enough to make you shudder.

Sour Lips is showing at the Ovalhouse Theatre 29 Jan – 16 February.

It’s often been said that this is not only a socio-economic crisis of systemic proportions, but also a crisis of the imagination. And how could this be otherwise? Decades of being told There Is No Alternative, that liberal capitalism is the only rational way of organizing society, has atrophied our ability to imagine social forms of life that defy the bottom line. Yet positive affirmations of another world do exist here and there, in neighbourhood assemblies, community organizations, art collectives and collective practices, the Occupy camps… It is only difficult to tell what exactly the notion of progress is that ties these disparate small-is-beautiful alternatives together: What type of utopias can we imagine today? And how do concrete representations or prefigurations of utopia incite transformative action?

Javier Lozano Jaén

First thing one has to notice about utopia is its paradoxical position: grave anxiety about having lost sight of utopia (see Jameson’s famous quote: “it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”) meets great scepticism about all efforts to represent utopia. The so-called “Jewish tradition of utopianism,” featuring Adorno, Bloch, and later on Jameson, for instance, welcomes utopianism as an immanent critique of the dominant order, but warns against the authoritarian tendencies inherent in concrete representations of utopia. Excessively detailed pictures of fulfilment or positive affirmations of radiance reek of “bourgeois comfort.” With one sweep, these luminaries rid utopianism of utopia, reducing it to a solipsistic exercise of wishing another world were possible without the faintest suggestion of what that world might look like.

But doing away with the positive dimension of utopia, treating utopia only as a negative impulse is to lose the specificity of utopia, namely, its distinctive affective value. The merit of concrete representations of utopia, no matter how imperfect or implausible, is to allow us to become emotionally and corporeally invested in the promise of a better future. As zones of sentience, utopias rouse the desire for another world that might seem ridiculous or illusory when set against the present, but which is indispensable for turning radical politics into something more than just a thought exercise. Even a classic like “Workers of the World Unite!” has an undeniable erotic (embodied) quality to it, which, if denied, banishes politics to the space of boredom and bureaucracy. It is one thing to tell people that another world is possible and another entirely to let them experience this, for however shortly.

Most concrete representations and prefigurations of utopia from the past half century or so have been of the anti-authoritarian sort. Whether we look at the literary utopias of the ‘70s (Ursula le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Sally Miller Gaerhart’s Wanderground (1984)) or the concrete utopias of intentional communities and anti-war affinity groups from the same period, the soup kitchens and street parties of the anti-globalization movement, Argentina’s occupied factories, or the Occupy camps from last year, all of these examples bring into relief an egalitarian, bottom-up, democratic socialist vision very different from the socialist realist aesthetics that preceded it. The strong emphasis on cooperation, equality, mutual aid, liberation, ecological wisdom, feminism, and creative living informing them is traceable to the New Left counterculture, but even more so to its anarcho-communist and ecofeminist declinations present in the work of people like André Gorz, Ivan Illich, Murray Bookchin, Paolo Freire, Silvia Federici, Maria Mies, Vandana Shiva, and in a host of anti-hegemonic social movements like the Italian Autonomia, the MST, Via Campesina, the Zapatista, etc.

1 Soil-Erg bill by Claire Pentecost, Documenta 13

This intersection is not coincidental. The prefigurative bent in anti-authoritarian politics makes it ripe for utopian exploration. Unlike mass political utopias, like liberalism or socialism (whose utopian elements serve as ideological cover for various models of organization and representation), anti-authoritarian politics is not interested in seizing power or implementing a specific political program with mass support. This doesn’t mean that it shies away from engaging power, only that it is not interested in conquering or reforming it. The goal of anti-authoritarian politics is rather to relax the grip of power for people to determine their own conditions of existence in more inclusive and egalitarian ways. This rather modest concern allows anti-authoritarians to dispense with many of the distinctions and considerations typical of instrumental politics: the separation between strategy and utopia, present and future, means and ends, the ascetic postponement of the good life until “after the revolution,” or getting political representation right. Even the class antagonism found at the root of all revolutionary politics can be put aside since building a counter-hegemonic bloc is not an immediate priority.

This is no easy position to take. The courage to act as if we already lived under conditions of freedom, as if our dreams were not threatened by domination or repression, and, therefore, did not require the careful choosing of an appropriate strategy for long-term success, invites more scorn than applause. Utopia is for fools! Without a way to generalize and democratize utopia, its radical content will sooner or later become a lifestyle choice only a handful of people (activists) can embrace and enjoy. There is some truth to this indictment, but it misses entirely the function of utopian representation, which should be judged less in terms of its strategic, long-term efficacy than in terms of its equally strategic and long-term affective resonance.

Banned from “mature” politics, the task of representing utopia has generally been women’s work. As feminists distanced themselves from the ’68 macho revolutionary culture (be it party politics or guerilla tactics), they turned to the politics of everyday life. Whether in literature or in intentional communities and affinity groups, women risked the cardinal sin of politics – being unrealistic and impractical, by building utopias from the ground up around activities they were told did not have a proper place in politics: eating, cleaning, housing, care and education. If the material foundation of capitalist domination was to be found in the home, utopia would also have to start at home, from the basic activities that reproduce the body in all its difference and social relationality. Science fiction turned out to be the most comfortable home for this exercise, with most critical utopias of the 70s being written by women. (The genre is, after all, by definition, concerned with dramatizing what dress, work, food, personal relations, and social institutions might look like under different social conditions and intentional communities.)

In the most famous example, The Dispossessed (1974), Ursula Le Guin’s writes about a resource-scarce planet, Anarres, where a syndicalist economy ensures the satisfaction of basic needs with the help of highly sophisticated technology. Its inhabitants (Odonians) live modest, communal yet highly self-directed lives. They work out of passion and conviction, consume goods only for their use value and do away with luxuries. They live and take meals communally, education and health care are universal, energy is renewable and used with great care, and art, celebrations and rituals are integrated into the everyday. Le Guin borrows generously from Murray Bookchin’s radical libertarianism, Kropotkin’s principles of mutual aid, voluntarism and individual freedom, anarcho-syndicalist practices of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and various elements from the civil rights movement, the ‘68 student revolts as well as socialist China, Cuba and Yugoslavia to offer an alien of a counter-image as possible to the Cold War America of her time.

An even better example is Marge Piercy’s equally famous Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), which blends together elements from peasant societies, creole and indigenous cultures, and the American counter-culture into a profoundly anti-sexist, anti-racist and anti-ageist utopia. Piercy’s strength is that, rather than basing female liberation on the elimination of domestic work, as many feminists have done, she makes female forms of action and knowledge into the formative element of her social vision. Parenting and farming are the most esteemed and valorised types of work, everything else being mechanized; everyone is involved in child rearing and is technically a “mother”; and there are dozens of festivities celebrating women’s roles. This utopia starts not with grand ambitions of liberation, equality and justice, but ends up there, nonetheless, by having the patience to first attend to the unrecognised and unrewarded work that makes life possible in the first place.

The concrete utopia of the OWS camps was, of course, never as detailed or complex. The camps did, however, take the anti-authoritarian sensibility seen in Le Guin and Piercy out into the streets, where it acquired concrete social and spatial dimensions. The camps were probably the most heavily disputed and criticized part of Occupy. Accused of breeding power differentials and exclusions, cultivating a cliquish and alienating activist aesthetics, and becoming ends-in-themselves that diverted attention from important questions of strategy and organization, they were also considered a threat to rational discourse and, not least, “health and safety.” Had these camps not existed, however, as sentience zones where people could experience first-hand the lessons of direct democracy, the joys of being together, and the advantages of a post-capitalist utopia where communication was open, work was shared, and goods were exchanged freely, the critique informing them would have remained a purely theoretical exercise without the kind of mass resonance we’ve witnessed.

The camps brought together people formerly disillusioned with (parliamentary) politics as well as people who had only known each other via social networks. They brought back the body to the public sphere of politics – not the smooth body from billboard ads or the criminalized body of the homeless, not the broken body of the worker or the isolated body of the consumer, but the collective body of unalienated cooperation and public enjoyment. Organized around activities deemed tasteless (cooking, sleeping, child care) or dangerous (assembling, celebrating) in public, the camps infused politics with a corporeal and even sensuous (non-rational) dimension shunned in modern politics, even in its anti-capitalist form. For many people this was a restorative experience. Isolated, depressed and discouraged by the ethos of personal responsibility, rediscovering the pleasure of being (effective) together offered immediate psychological relief and was perhaps the most important political lesson of the camps. Feminists have been saying this for years, that we should move the basic activities of social reproduction to the centre of anti-capitalist struggle, and put an end to the separation between the personal and the political, between political activism and the reproduction of everyday life. Turning protest into a way of living-in-common, turning the camps into self-reproducing “round-the-clock bodily presence,” was a far more effective strategy than anything one-off demos and strikes could have achieved. The camps practically became a vision of life after austerity.

The question, of course, is how to turn countercultural practices such as these into enduring counter-institutions. How exactly do concrete representations of utopia incite transformative action? Radical events, like the Occupy camps, where the normal order of things dissolves, divisions of labour and hierarchies get suspended, time moves faster, events seems more real, experiences arrive unmediated, and people live beyond their usual emotional, intellectual and sensorial limits are, by definition, impatient with time. When politics becomes sensuous there is not a lot of room for pragmatic questions of strategy and organization. Instead of waiting for some blueprint version of “revolution” or paving its way with ascetic and sacrificial struggles, radical events rush to live the future we desire now. Foolish as this may seem, it is not incorrect to say that change has never come from the “realists” (rationality is the language of liberal capitalism) or that for change to be effective it must be affective.

Radical politics cannot just offer a critique of the present, no matter how correct or convincing, but must also substantiate this critique with an affirmative experience people can relate to and have a stake in. Of course, there is always the danger for the utopian feeling to eclipse the difficult work needed to generalize and normalize utopia. But the solution is not to erase or deny the contribution of the camps. When the forces of reaction are engaged in a systemic campaign of erasing any collective memory of victories past, it is up to us to remember that other forms of living and cooperating are possible (or were possible for a brief period of time). It is not by the amount of change but by the courage to act for change that we should judge instances of concrete utopia.

‘Social Media Drawing’ by Tjarko Van Der Pol

This year’s general conference theme for ISA in San Diego centred on ‘Power, Principles and Participation in the Global Information Age’ and, expectedly, gave rise to a proliferation of papers on the value, consequences and effectiveness of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and other social media in the context of international relations and global politics. Having spent the past three years trying to disentangle the thoughts of one of the more intriguing political theorists on power and politics – Hannah Arendt – it has always struck me that she might have had a word or two to say about the supernova that is social networking as such. I couldn’t help picturing her vigorously engaging with a medium like Twitter, firing off Tweets to relevant interlocutors – @karlmarx no, I think that’s where you’re wrong and dangerous: #history is not ‘made’ by men and #violence not the midwife for a new society! Perhaps even: Yep: RT @karljaspers When #language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself – hashtag and all. Or, on the other hand, flatly dismissing platforms such as Facebook as vanity spheres of little or no substance for political interaction. So I pitched in my paper as a playful thought experiment as to how she might have loved or loathed online social networks as viable platforms and public spheres for the creation of power and conduct of politics proper. This is a somewhat abbreviated version of the full-length paper, which can be found here.

The potency of social networking sites, as channels of communication and a medium for people from all corners of the world to meet in a virtual realm and engage with shared ideas – political or otherwise – has become indisputable. Not least since the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, where bodies and voices were galvanized to part-take in various acts of revolt and revolution in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and Libya, facilitated through online networks like Twitter and Facebook, have people discovered the enormous potential for a transnational coming-together in a shared cause. These networks thus appear to present themselves as a global public realm in a virtual space, transcending geographic limitations and boundaries, broadening the scope of possible political impact considerably. But with such a young medium it is perhaps wise to take a step back from the hype and ask how effective are these networks in creating actual political power? In how far can we understand the possibility to mobilize and plan in a non-spatial realm, through social networks, to constitute the generation of power and the actualization of political action? My paper sought to address these questions with an Arendtian lens – for better or for worse.

Inside the Political Twittersphere. Sysomos

Twitter-Gewitter and Facebook Fads?

Network platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube reach an online community of millions and have been growing at an exponential rate. Twitter has shot up to become one of the fastest growing Internet sites since its inception in 2006 – the possibilities for global connections and mobilization seem endless and chime somewhat with studies that have shown that an increased use of the Internet facilitates civic participation.  Specifically in the contemporary context, where a decline in political engagement among young people has been diagnosed and much documented, the potential of social networks to reignite shared social and political interests seems potent. Indeed, as some have noted, the Internet has widely been hyped as the ultimate, if not only, channel that holds the potential to garner young people’s interest in politics and public affairs today. However, it seems that studies offer mixed evidence and opinions are highly divided as to whether online social networks have the capacity to spur people into political participation or not. While some consider the mobilizing capacity of Facebook and Twitter an indispensable asset for political action in today’s web-oriented social and political context, others maintain that it cannot lead to an increase in political action proper as the consequences of assembling in a virtual realm for a social or political cause rarely translates into offline action. In other words, it is not entirely clear how virtual online activism affects the reality that is to be acted upon in an offline context. All too frequent, perhaps, the conflation of political information exchange with political action per se in this context.

In the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings, social networks have been attributed as instrumental factors in the removal and / or overturn of dictatorships and bringing about democracy in its basic shape – as technology scholar Evgeny Morozov sardonically puts it: “Tweets were sent. Dictators were toppled. Internet = Democracy. QED.” It is often suggested that Facebook and Twitter have played not only a peripheral but indeed a pivotal role in the uprisings in the Arab world, in line with Wael Ghonim’s claim that the “power of the people is greater than the people in power” in Revolution 2.0. Egypt is the case in point, where the power of social networks is said to not only have initiated but also facilitated the overthrow of the Mubarak regime in 2011. In this view, the very roots of the revolution stem from demonstrations and are linked to the use of online social networks, based on the sheer numbers of socially networked potential participants. Social networks, and Facebook here specifically, thus crystallize as a proxy realm for a free public space, occluded in a totalitarian regime. Within this proxy realm of communicative freedom, social network users in Egypt (and beyond) have developed ties and relations with one another in solidarity for a shared struggle for change. But not so fast.

As the name suggests, social networks are primarily used for social purposes. Facebook specifically aims to connect people that have already existing relationships, as peripheral as they might be, and where a distinct social association is already in place. Twitter, on the other hand, has the capacity to connect hitherto un-associated and unaffiliated people from a much wider spectrum and without the explicit demand of reciprocity. Research has also shown that social networks are chiefly used for entertainment and staying connected with existing affiliations. A 2009 PearAnalytics study suggests that the core content of Twitter feeds is personal with either conversational tweets (37.5%) or ‘pointless babble’ (40%). Informational tweets follow at a distance with 8.7%, self-promoting tweets made up 5.7% and only 3.6% tweets relate to news – almost as many as spam tweets with 3.75%. Granted, the speed with which these platforms and their reach develop render them inherently tricky to capture statistically. Nonetheless, the ratio is indicative.

All this to say: based on existing studies and research, it remains obscure what online social networks can do that does not rely on offline social networks, specifically in the context of creating political action and power.

Enter: Hannah Arendt.

Hannah Arendt

Arendt in the Cybersphere, or what of Revolution 2.0?

By looking through an Arendtian lens, I am focussing on some of the key aspects in the formation of political action and power: plurality and the existence of a global public sphere. At first glance there are a considerable number of characteristics constituting social networks that naturally seem to fall into the often-strict categories that Arendt assessed in the context of the human condition: they offer a public space within which an essentially plural (global) humanity can come together in difference, they work essentially through the medium of speech, which is the constitutive character for political action in the widest Arendtian sense and, in their character as a meeting place, carry the potential for people to actualize power in a political pursuit. But we’d be amiss in taking these congruences on face value without looking at least a little more closely into the nuances.

Twitter et al as a Global Public Sphere

On a cursory reading it would seem that social networks, as a human artefact, are a natural extension of what Hannah Arendt would approvingly consider as a human made world within which all aspects of the human condition can unfold. Arendt attached great importance to this: humans are unlikely to be fully human unless they live in a duality of human-made worldly facets and the natural aspects of the earth as an environment. This human-made world of artifice also provides, in a quite literal sense, the space (as in distance as well as in sphere) for humans to interact, take up different positions and reflect in plurality upon the common world from varying perspectives. It is only in this artificial world that people, in their togetherness, can gain a “grasp of reality that nobody can achieve on their own” – Arendt’s words. The artificiality here is crucial as it provides a structure upon which the human narrative of a shared world can unfold and, unlike the perpetual cyclicality and circularity of nature and life processes, creates shared meaning and ties to a common world. In the broadest sense, social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, built by and on human-made artifice, do just that. They offer an artificial architectural structure within which humans can trade different views, perspectives, and experiences and come to constitute new beginnings for a shared world. It serves as the inter-esse, the in-between for speech and action upon which the web of human relationships is built. Furthermore, this virtual realm can serve, as we have seen in the Egyptian example, as a proxy realm to resort to when the physic public sphere has been tyrannically restricted.

However, as with most things, it’s not as easy as that. For Arendt, a shared world of human-made artifice is much more cultural than technological. She relates the artifice to its original root – art – as a model for human fabrication, rather than the scientifically rooted constructions of technology. This stems in part from a deep skepticism toward an increasingly technocratic modernity that she saw as highly problematic in a political and social context. So, as a feature of a man-made world within which humans can fully unfold, such artifices as social networks don’t meet one of the key requirements she stipulates for artefacts as constitutive of a shared and common world: durability. The ever-fluctuating and dynamic nature of an online social network architecture, may come and go in various incarnations and remain entirely intangible. Arendt has something much more graspable in mind when she considers this public sphere of human exchange and inter-action. She would be critical of the temporary nature of this realm – it is erected for the here and now, the speed with which this realm develops, enters and leaves the realities of men makes it inherently non-transcendent, it is planned for the living only. In her words: “Without this transcendence into a potential earthly immortality, no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm is possible”.

Another aspect might be problematic in this context: the actual scope and ability of social networks to truly connect people on a larger scale. Recent studies have shown that despite carrying unlimited potential for possible connections, both Facebook and Twitter actually appear to have immanent limitations that relate to our limitations as humans to connect. The apparent unlimited scope of social networks as global networks thus stands in question. As Chris Taylor highlights, even social networks tend toward tribalism. A study conducted by the University of Indiana has shown that Twitter users can only maintain between 100-200 contacts in order to not get overwhelmed – despite being theoretically connected to thousands more users. In other words, Twitter users only converse meaningfully with a few hundred other users before it becomes simply too much. Furthermore, as the Pearanalytics study, among others, shows, the number of people contributing within and to the global public Twittersphere is considerably less than those who consume the tweets, with 5% of Twitter users contributing 75% of the tweets. This raises the question as to how equal, egalitarian and political (in the Arendtian sense) this sphere can possibly be. It furthermore calls into question the condition of plurality in this context.

Twitter Ties: Data analysed by Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and Cornell University shows “Twitter users interact with a small number of friends compared with the total number of friends and followers declared”

Social or Political: The Problem with Plurality

When considering social networks as potentially political power creating (or facilitating) structures, we should remember that they are primarily social platforms, and not political ones. To conflate the two does not do justice to the potential efficacy (or lack thereof) of social networks as instruments. As we have seen earlier, the chief use of social networks is for entertainment and to connect with friends and acquaintances. When considering plurality in this context we must keep this distinction in mind. In society, people gravitate toward association, in a discriminatory (in the most literal sense of the word) manner, equality is not granted but rather people seek to associate homogenously – like with like.

For Arendt, perhaps controversially, there is an inherent right to discriminate in the social realm. Arendt’s argument to the right to discrimination in the social (public) realm is based on her understanding of the individual uniqueness of each person as a comprehensive ‘who’, not merely a ‘what’. This plurality in the public realm is, as I have outlined, the very cornerstone of politics in the public sphere for Arendt – it is not required for the social spaces. Only if we are to understand the social realm as a pre-political condition does her argumentation remain in line with her priority for plurality. In the social sphere, we tend to gravitate toward sameness. A social realm dominated exclusively by the drive toward association with the homogeneous thus must be primarily considered as not belonging to the political sphere per se and carries the potential to become the most treacherous realm in modernity as, in its extreme potential for conformity, difference is always in danger of becoming diminished, leaving those natural attributes that can not be made ‘conform’ an obvious parameter for inclusion/exclusion practices in societies. It is in the conflation, or perhaps confusion, of the social with the political that an inherently exaggerated assumption of the political potential of social network lurks. In other words, when heterogeneity (or plurality) is not observed and homogeneity dominates, behaviour is substituted for action and true politics can thus not emerge, in Arendt’s account. Given that, as we have seen earlier, social network users tend to have a more active exchange among a homogeneous group of people, the efficacy of social networks for political purposes remains doubtful. But even if plurality is not entirely ensured in the social network sphere – what of social networks as a channel to appear and reveal oneself to others through speech?

Could Tweets be Considered Speech?

Speech is a key aspect of politics and political action in the Arendtian account. In her writing she frequently refers to speech as essential and as action as constituted in word and deed, however, the content of what constitutes speech as political action remains obscured and we could only guess at what Arendt might think of tweets as speech acts. The social networking sphere as a disembodied realm for humans to come together in a revelatory capacity would perhaps be appealing to Arendt, while the restrictive nature of confining oneself to ‘speaking’ within 140 characters would almost certainly have fallen on def ears in the Arendtian account. Given that the majority of tweets relate to personal, conversational or trivial issues, located entirely in a social sphere, it is likely that Arendt would have considered such content not to constitute revelatory speech at all. Facebook as a medium is perhaps even less appropriate to consider as constituting true speech acts. While ‘speech’is a much broader category than action, and could or may comprise social aspects, Arendt had no time for speech acts as self-expression as contributing anything to the creation of a shared world. It is precisely this aspect of self-expression that is central to the use of Facebook and, to a degree, Twitter.

Artwork by Tang Yau Hoong

Being with others takes places only remotely and in a mediated fashion and constitutes often predominantly a broadcasting rather than an in-depth engagement – granted, there are exceptions. This begs the question: in a virtual existence, are we truly among humans? Can we be among humans in the virtual realm? Is not the scope of appearance so vastly limited that it cannot possibly be considered as a public/political act? And is not the radical selectivity as to how much we reveal (and are able to do so) inherently an obstacle to politics proper and authentic political action in contemporary society? And with all these limitation, can power truly be created through social networks? I imagine Arendt would answer these questions with a resounding “Nein”!

The Problem with Virtual Power

As with the public sphere, there are some obvious matching features of social networks in light of Arendt’s understanding of what constitutes power. Social networks are inherently contingent, exchanges are ephemeral and power created through and within social networks is actualized and only appears to last momentarily. The seemingly unlimited scope of the social network appears to be boundless, supporting the boundlessness of power as such. Activity generated through such networks appear to have a basis in potentiality as well. They adhere to dynamics that are in themselves contingent and ephemeral. During high profile events, such as sporting events or a celebrity misfortune, Twitter use skyrockets, causing servers to crash and online services to slow down. Twitter use, for example, shot up disproportionately when the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death broke. A similar phenomenon can be observed with Facebook. Similarly, as we have seen with the #Kony2012 campaign, activity can flare up in flurries, raising awareness and perhaps mobilizing people to become engaged and active in a relatively short period of time, yet dissipating almost as quickly as the phenomenon occurred.

However, the creation of power among people coming together in a virtual realm is severely dependent on access to the platform. This in turn may very well be influenced by governments who have an interest in limiting the scope of virtual assembly and the gathering and dissemination of information, as has been the case in Egypt, China and other societies on the cusp of popular flare-ups. It is also a platform that is not independent of interests – not only can governments shut down or censor or otherwise interfere with the “freedom” of this particular virtual space, but with an endless potentiality of information flow we only ever receive a selection of issues that are intended to be highlighted. The alleged limitless freedom of the cybersphere may, then, be somewhat deceiving.

The fundamental role of social networks in the creation of popular power for political revolutions may not be entirely clear at this stage. It remains questionable whether online activity in the political context can possibly translate into veritable offline activity and therein lies the crux and misunderstanding in the use of social networks for political activity.  What transpires is then essentially not a coming together of equals in a political cause but rather a flashpublic, a term Jack Bratich has coined, whereby the entertainment value and the initial “great ecstasy of fraternity”, to quote Arendt, outweigh the actual political act. Such a flashpublic relies, to a certain extent on both, homogeneity and mimicry, thus occluding the possibility for politics proper as Arendt would have it. With its call to action, the #Kony2012 flashpublic campaign resembles, here I quote Bratich, a “funhouse grotesquely exaggerating the proportions of the body politic involved”. Why? Bratich answers, “because the mobilization for action is one already determined as an instrument for someone else’s goals”.

KONY2012 network locations

It becomes increasingly clear that social networks and the political campaigns that are run on social network platforms can facilitate the information flow related to political events, but are, and can only be by their immanent limitations, one aspect, one tool in the bringing about of political proper and power. There is a difference between using social networks such as Twitter and Facebook for planning a revolution and executing a revolution. As Morozov argues, while the internet broadly is instrumental (in the most literal sense) for bringing about power and revolutions, it is merely that: an instrument, a tool. Social change, on the other hand “continues to involve many painstaking, longer-term efforts to engage with political institutions and reform movements”. And for that, it requires more permanent structures as a public sphere than the virtual realm has to offer – this would most likely be Arendt’s argument.

In conclusion, I venture to claim that Arendt would certainly have had an appreciation for the medium as a political channel to inform, transmit knowledge and information and  mobilize the power of the people and would find some redeeming aspects in social networks in that they serve as a proxy realm in which freedom may come to pass and humans can engage in speech acts for the exchange of information and appearances. But: within limits. It is a realm that is characterized by the potentiality for multiple pluralities to come together and exchange in word and create narratives. However, as a public sphere that binds human in a shared and common world and that facilitates politics proper the virtual realm is insufficient. As it related to the social aspects of human interaction much more directly than the political realm, such networks would have been albeit of limited interest and I suspect that, in the context of revolutions Hannah Arendt would have wholeheartedly concurred with Morozov that: “Facebook and Twitter are just places revolutionaries go”.

Who Are Human Rights For?

All of the authors take account of the ambiguous history of human rights, in which they can be said to have inspired the Haitian, American and French revolutions, while also justifying the counterrevolutionary post-Cold War order dominated by the United States. Yet recognising this ambiguity without also acknowledging the distinctive reconstruction of contemporary human rights that makes them part of a neo-liberal international order and the unequal power that makes such a quasi-imperial order possible would be irresponsible. A primary contribution made collectively by these texts is that they clearly diagnose the way human rights have been used to consolidate a particular form of political and economic order while undercutting the need for, much less justification of, revolutionary violence. Williams says of Amnesty International’s prisoners of conscience, who serve as archetypal victims of human rights abuse,

the prisoner of conscience, through its restrictive conditions, performs a critical diminution of what constitutes “the political.” The concept not only works to banish from recognition those who resort to or advocate violence, but at the same time it works to efface the very historical conditions that might come to serve as justifications – political and moral – for the taking up of arms.

Human rights, then, are for the civilised victims of the world, those abused by excessive state power, by anomalous states that have not been liberalised – they are not for dangerous radicals seeking to upset the social order.

This does more than limit human rights to a moral minimalism, it creates a damaging division between liberal nations who are already civilised and illiberal states beset by evil barbarism and in need of salvation, by limiting the claims for justice that can be backed by force to those underwritten by the authoritative institutions of the powerful. This is the demand that liberal human rights make for the avoidance of evil. As Meister notes, ‘Unlike earlier versions of human rights that sought to hasten the advance of social equality, today’s commitment to human rights often seeks to postpone large-scale redistribution. It is generally more defensive than utopian, standing for the avoidance of evil rather than a vision of the good.’ This is a powerful construction because it becomes very difficult to oppose the limited vision enabled by human rights – who, for example, wants to argue against the prevention of cruelty and the avoidance of evil – but it also cynically uses beautiful revolutionary dreams of human rights to uncritically legitimate a political order still beset by violence in many forms, and still calling out for greater justice.

     The liberal account of human rights impoverishes our understanding of politics; as Williams suggests it renders the politics of human rights as a morality play between saviours, victims and savages, which obscures the pervasive hierarchy and force that uphold the ideal and institutions of human rights.

As an increasingly critical legitimizing instrument for contemporary imperialism, human rights, and its imperial modes of intervention – humanitarian war and humanitarian aid – relies heavily upon the production of subjects in need – in need of rights, in need of democracy, in need of rescue. This subject-in-need, in turn, interpellates, organizes, and mobilizes subjects who come to see themselves as bearers of the responsibility to rescue – good humanitarians who, however critical of imperialism, come to participate in the ethos of empire. (2010, p.64)

It is the way that human rights fit into a wider imperial politics that is at issue here, not the failings of particular individuals trying to do good. Of special importance is how the victims that human rights are supposed to protect are treated. Meister, for example, is excellent at analysing the way victims along with perpetrators of human rights abuse must be pacified, as the experience of repression and exclusion may give victims reason to demand the upsetting of the established order. Therefore, it becomes important that victims are seen as needy and powerless, not active and engaged. Victims, constructed in this way – abused, in need, voiceless, without agency – then require particular types of saviours, not only who are empowered by the existing order of things but also who are not to blame for the excesses and violence of that order.

That Human Rights Discourse addresses us as bystanders, and not beneficiaries, is indicative of the transposition of human rights itself from the register of political mobilization to that of global popular culture. In this culture, apathy – our natural response to the pain of others – is to be replaced by empathy, the morally induced ability to feel the pain of others as our own. If consumers of our popular culture only felt less apathy toward (and thus empathy for) victims, the argument goes, they would hold themselves responsible for what they allow to happen. The culture also assures them, however, that they were not really responsible – that their true failing did not arise in any particular relation to perpetrators or victims but rather from a simple lack of compassionate feelings combined, perhaps, with willed inattention to the facts. (Meister 2011, p.213)

Goodale traces a related obfuscation in the misrepresentation of anthropology’s resistance to the idea of human rights, which he argues is not based on crude moral relativism, but rather on the very real danger that universal politics, through their assimilative tendencies, present to marginalised peoples. Ironically, rejecting the real concerns about assimilation as immoral and irresponsible relativism does not prevent privileged consumers of human rights culture from ignoring the suffering of others, such that universal morality guarantees assimilation but not concern. The stability of the contemporary liberal international order depends on that passivity, which is not easily or quickly converted into action, as indifference to everyday human suffering punctuated by outrage at those events presented as exceptional evils both preserves the status quo and justifies forceful interventions.

The practical import of this construction of the moral drama of human rights is that the fundamental architecture of international politics is affirmed and made incontestable – the exclusivity of the nation, backed up by violence, is rendered necessary; the violence inherent in the legal order, both domestic and international, is privileged and rendered legitimate; the deprivation and inequality wrought by capitalism is removed from public view, as its effects are the consequence of private transactions. The harm of this architecture is also felt most severely, and predictably, by those who are from the under-class, from ethnic minorities and victims of patriarchal social structures (it is worth noting that the issue of gender is under-examined by all the authors discussed here, which is unusual because similar pioneering works have focused on this issue to great effect). Baxi’s examination of the difficulty and promise of a human right to development is an important illustration of this. Claiming a right to development must not only contest the idea of what can be made an appropriate object of rights, rejecting the notion that rights are injunctions against the actions of others rather than claims to positive improvements of one’s condition, but such a rights claim must also contest the meaning of development itself. Baxi argues that a right to development that was drawn from the experiences of the impoverished and not beholden to ready made myths of developmentalism, would imply a reconsideration of the relationship between public and private control of production and exchange to guarantee greater welfare and opportunity (both domestically and internationally), as well as a move away from the notion of a single model of development as increasing national wealth.

All these texts dwell on this difficulty, on the dangers and possibilities of engaging with human rights for people struggling against and subject to power – and their reflections converge on the necessity of recognising and naming the complicity of human rights; the struggle to reclaim human rights, understood as a set of ideals about the best way to be human, is as much a matter of how we think as it is of political action. Goodale locates the imperialism of human rights as much in their abstract universalism as in the practices of powerful states and non-state actors, and Baxi suggests that giving up theories of human rights is an act of emancipation in itself, both suggesting that how we think must change if we also want to change who human rights are for and address the violence and injustice not only unresolved but enabled by a quasi-imperial liberal human rights. Williams goes farthest in his critique, suggesting that

Given this, it would seem that we need some means of advancing a new episteme of political violence, one that affords us better ways through which to recognize and map acts and conditions of violence and, we hope, to develop more effective means and strategies through which to confront and contest the global fields of brutality. To these ends, it is useful to reengage the history of postwar human rights praxis and examine in a more critical fashion what other ways of knowing and responding to violence have been used and developed, concurrent with those of human rights, yet largely out of view and grossly underappreciated.

What Do Human Rights Promise?

Given the challenges addressed in these texts, what can human rights achieve? A central line of Meister’s critique is that human rights as we know them today are explicitly intended to limit the promise of justice – both because the horrors of the twentieth-century suggest that such promise might come at too high a cost, and because the promise of justice as greater political and social equality is opposed by the post-Cold War powers. If he’s correct, is the opening that Goodale and Baxi see in human rights practice adequate to restoring the revolutionary promise of human rights? When analysing the importance of the ideal of self-determination, in opposition to colonial domination, Baxi’s suggest that human rights may be adequate to the task.

Far from emerging as any mimetic reproduction of the Enlightenment ‘values’ and its associated progress narrative, movements for national self-determination mark a world-historic rupture, in turn resulting in alternate visions and paths of development.

This claim is, in essence, the wager that all of these authors make: that actually opening up the idea of human rights to all of humanity, rather than a privileged minority that uses the idea to divide up the world, would rupture our political and moral understandings in a profound way. But questions linger in light of such optimistic pronouncement. How can they create such a rupture? Can we break so cleanly with the order of things which define and are defined by human rights?

The ruptures enabled by human rights, the authors suggest, are driven by the tension at the heart of human rights: the affirmation of the moral and political salience of our common humanity, which is itself defined by pluralism and profound difference. As Goodale suggests, ‘It is, rather, a normative response to suffering that reflects a wisdom of a very different and (we might say) anthropological sort: that which comes from an acceptance of the complicated and (to some) endlessly frustrating fact of human multiplicity.’ And while the recognition of profound difference may motivate the well-intentioned to challenge the imperial dialect in which human rights are articulated, there is still a question of what motivates resistance to the order of things. As Meister suggests, seeing in human rather than more particular terms opens the possibility of seeing injustice. ‘Once we recognize that the many unequal advantages in society could not be justified starting now, an obvious question arises: “Why not socialism?”’ Or, given the inequalities of our current world, why not something else? Why not revolution? The idea that human rights can inspire a new pluralist ethos of global order, what Goodale describes as ‘a future transnational or postnational normative framework that is based on the imperatives of ethical restraint, humility, and legal pluralism’, and can motivate a revolutionary politics, which Williams, drawing on Frantz Fanon, insists human rights must do in order to remain relevant for emancipation, creates as many questions and controversies as it resolves. While the call to think more critically and expansively is valuable as such, perhaps the most important contribution these authors make is giving us some markers to use in taking that project forward – as it is not a well-marked or easy path.

While it may be curmudgeonly to end on a pessimistic note, the project of reconstructing human rights requires serious-mindedness. There are two important warnings that we find in these texts. First, human rights is indeed a culture – while this culture is contested and plural, it also dominated by the interest of the powerful and a pervasive social discourse that constructs its subjects in particular ways. Therefore, there is always a risk in taking up human rights, in engaging the language of power. As Goodale presciently warns,

it is much easier for people to appropriate the idea of human rights for specific legal, political, or social purposes than it is for them to embrace the – at times – radically alternative conception of the person that forms the basis for this idea. In other words, in many cases the coming of human rights demands something of identity that the practice of identity is not prepared (or able) to give.

With this warning in mind, our optimism about the potential for human rights to open up the moral and legal order of world politics, and to provide vision of substantive justice, must be tempered by the challenge of building an alternative culture and an alternative political order – especially one that is open to plurality and contestation.

     The second limitation of human rights is that they may have too much historical baggage, they may be tools that are too dull to serve their purpose. Human rights not only inspired struggles to create a secular and national polity, they were also formed by those dynamics and there is an open question of whether than can be reconstructed to serve radically different visions. Meister wonders

Does the present unthinkability of a past wish (for example, to exterminate a perceived enemy) mean that it is gone? Where did it go? In whom do we believe it now resides? Twenty-first-century Human Rights Discourse does not welcome such questions. Its most positive achievement has been to insist that someone is to blame for human rights violations and to reject excuses that deflect blame onto the victim. This technique of keeping the paranoid anxieties of beneficiaries at bay leaves little psychic energy available for a turn toward greater justice. If Human Rights Discourse is what comes after evil, something must come next.

If the limits of human rights can only be overcome by a turn toward the pursuit of justice, the language of human rights and the idea of a universal human subject of politics may prove too limiting – as Baxi suggests in his consideration of what human rights may mean in a posthuman world. The only answer given in these texts, and perhaps the only responsible answer, is that human rights have no claim to be the exclusive mode of political ethics and no guarantee of their future progressive value. In contesting dominant understandings we can explore the possibilities of human rights, but those explorations themselves must be contested, and they may be found wanting. Contesting human rights insists on the possibility that a world without human rights be a better one – which is among these authors’ most significant contribution.

Human Rights in a Posthuman World: Critical Essays by Upendra Baxi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights by Mark Goodale. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.

The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence by Randall Williams. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights by Robert Meister. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011.

The central tension of human rights is that they propagate a universal and singular human identity in a fragmented political world. No one writing about human rights ignores this tension, but the most important question we face in judging the value of human rights is how to understand this tension and the divisions it creates. The expected divisions between good and evil, between moral universalists and dangerous relativist, between dignified interventionists and cowardly apologists, have long given shape to human rights, as both an ideal and a political project. Seeing the problems of (and for) human rights in these habituated ways has dulled our capacity for critical judgment, as few want to defend evil or violent particularisms or advocate passivity in the face of suffering. Even among serious and determined critics our inherited divisions are problematic (and increasingly over rehearsed), whether we think of human rights as the imposition of Western cultural values, or in terms of capitalist ideology serving the interests of neo-liberal elites, or as an expression of exceptional sovereign power at the domestic and global levels. The ways that these divisions deal with the tension at the heart of human rights misses the ambiguity of those rights in significant ways.

     Rather than trying to contain the tensions between singularity and pluralism, between commonality and difference, in a clear and definitive accounting, the authors of the texts reviewed here allow them to proliferate. Rather than trying to resolve the problem of human rights, they attempt to understand human rights in their indeterminate dissonance while exploring what they might become. To create and invoke the idea of humanity is not a political activity that is unique (either now or in the past) to the ‘West’. The people most dramatically injured by global capitalism sometimes fight their oppression by innovating and using the language and institutions of human rights. Political exceptions – the exclusion of outsiders, humanitarian wars and imperialist conceits – are certainly enabled by the same sovereign power that grants rights to its subjects, which is a metaphorical drama all too easily supported by human rights, but it is only a partial telling of the tale, a telling that leaves out how human rights can reshape political authority and enable struggles in unexpected ways. The work of these authors pushes us to reject the familiar divisions we use to understand the irresolvable tension at the centre of human rights and see the productive possibilities of that tension. If human rights will always be invoked in a politically divided world, and will also always create further divisions with each declaration and act that realises an ideal universalism, then our focus should be on who assumes (and who can assume) the authority to define humanity, the consequences for those subject to such power, and the ends toward which such authority is directed.

     Starting from this alternative approach is important for the simple reason that it alters the viewpoint from which we evaluate human rights, as we are no longer stuck, as a matter of the terms of discourse, defending particularism, relativism or passivity in the face of injustice, and instead we are enabled to challenge the idea that some human beings have a unique privilege to intervene and bring salvation to others, to determine the meaning of human rights, while also affirming the active political agency of women and men throughout the world taking up the tool (or weapon) of human rights to preserve their own dignity. All four authors ask us to re-focus in this manner (though the specifics obviously differ in important ways) and for that reason the works themselves are openings rather than definitive statements. I ask three general questions of the authors in order to explore the openings they have provided: How are human rights made? Who are human rights for? What do human rights promise? In answering these questions through these texts I suggest connections and differences, highlight deficiencies and insights, and try to encourage further developments on the beginnings they present to us.

How Are Human Rights Made?

To ask how are human rights made is to already take a position, one that sees human rights as social constructions rather than divine laws or principles of transcendent reason. To start from this position is to be sceptical of metaphysical deductions of moral norms, but this scepticism is broadly accepted at least since Richard Rorty suggested that a human rights culture is just one of the cultures that humanity has made for itself, it represents one of the shapes that the malleable human animal has taken. Secure, tolerant, concerned, and relatively rich liberals make Rorty’s human rights culture; they have used some of their wealth and security to develop a culture that is defined by their desire to prevent the suffering of human beings, wherever they may be located geographically and culturally, and which, he thinks, should be spread as widely as possible. In their own way each author under consideration here picks out inadequacies in Rorty’s ironic liberalism by raising questions about what the human rights culture is, what it is good for, who speaks for it, and how it is made.

     Upendra Baxi begins Human Rights in a Posthuman World by reminding us that

When grassroots postmodernists summon us to a struggle against the “monoculture” of universal human rights and liberation from the re-colonizing “Global Project” of human rights, by “bringing human rights down from its pedestal” and the summons for resituating human rights “amidst other significant cultural concepts which define a “good life” in a pluriverse”, they embark on a different theory project than those rights-weary thinkers who insist that the very idea of human rights is based on a moral mistake.

Baxi’s grassroots postmodernists are not Rorty’s liberal ironists, even if they agree that rationally deduced moral principles are rarely adequate protection; they are often insecure, struggling, poor, abused and ignored, but they are not waiting for wealthy liberals to save them, they are not waiting to be protected up by an ironic rather than divine power. Nor are these grassroots postmodernists critical philosophers like Gorgio Agamben, who deduces an irredeemable wrong written into the logic of human rights that necessarily preserves and justifies the exceptional power of sovereign authority. Rather they are women and men living in varied communities, struggling to live with dignity, making use of human rights when it enables those ends (Baxi’s politics for human rights) and opposing human rights when they are pernicious (Baxi’s politics of human rights). This is the key shift in each of these texts, a move to see human rights not simply as a product of ‘Western’ culture; nor the exclusive domain of lawyers, politicians and international civil society representatives who draft international human rights declarations and treaties; nor as a gift given by moral philosophers, good-hearted activists or imperial powers bringing the benefits of civilisation.

     While Baxi’s work draws both on critical human rights activism and postcolonial legal theory to reorient how we understand human rights, in Surrendering to Utopia Mark Goodale starts from anthropology’s ambiguous historic engagement with human rights to understand how they are made by those far away from centres of elite power, both geographically and ideologically. He suggest that not only are international human rights norms ‘vernacularized’ as they move from elite cosmopolitan centres into the wider (and not necessarily less cosmopolitan) world, but that they are also made through everyday social practices of political struggle in non-elite centres and in marginal spaces of the international system. Further, Goodale argues that we should ‘prioritize human rights in the vernacular’, which is to argue ‘that “human rights” (understood diffusely) must be both theorized and legitimated in terms of the groundedness of social practice, those mundane (yet often transformative) occurrences of what de Certeau called the “practice of everyday life.”’  This suggests looking to how those subject to international human rights law understand and reconstruct legal and moral norms, and to how human rights are made and remade through everyday practices of political struggle. Both Baxi and Goodale go beyond constructivist human rights scholarship that focuses on the diffusion of norms from the international to the local. In place of that top-down model they look to the scepticism, resistance and creativity of ‘grassroots postmodernists’. This move to consider how human rights are used and created by communities that are struggling for dignity, as well as how human rights enable linkages that form an alternative global network, risks appearing naïve, as a romantic narrative of authentic struggle realised through a universal appeal to shared humanity. Neither author succumbs to that risk, but in the critical company I have forced them to keep here, they appear at first glance to be potentially too sanguine.

     Human rights cannot simply be remade through creative acts of ethico-political imagination, they are the artefacts of a particular political history and they have been institutionalised in problematic ways. Remaking human rights is a political project, demanding both struggle and the construction of new institutions – which is of special importance because human rights have been a central pillar of the post-Cold War liberal order and cannot be redeemed easily. As Robert Meister argues in his theoretical and historical study After Evil, ‘Today the invocation of human rights is often part of a political project fundamentally at odds with the revolutionary struggles based on human rights: it is the war cry of a self-described “international community” led by the victors in the cold war.’ Liberal human rights are presented as a higher politics premised on the transcendence of vulgar politics through ethics, which renders violent struggle and political contestation into evils to be avoided because they always risk turning into exceptional and horrific violence and atrocity. Human rights are a politics that comes after evil. In this time after evil, victims and beneficiaries of past violence are reconciled and the individuals responsible for evil are punished, avoiding the need for revolutionary changes that might upset power structures beyond limiting (but not eliminating) their capacity for violence and commit cruelty.

     The limits of this politics of human rights does more than constrain us to a liberal-capitalist framework (beyond which we are repeatedly told we cannot see), it also reinforces the nationalist structure of state authority in contemporary world politics, which Meister ties to the logic of both colonialism and genocide. Colonial settlement makes the question of how the settler can live among ‘savages’ explicit, which is unavoidable so far as the sovereignty of a people is thought in terms of a moral sameness (civilisation) that is unsettled by insistent difference (barbarism). This dynamic not only gives us the civilising mission that continues to resonate in contemporary human rights discourse, but it also makes genocide thinkable.

The settler’s question is, “How can we live among these savages without civilizing them?” For the colonial project of civilization and governance to get under way, however, living without the “savages” must always be a conceivable option. It then follows that living without the settler must also be imaginable for a nationalist liberation struggle to occur as an outcome of colonialism.

What this suggests is that liberal human rights can oppose genocide but not the national and statist order that makes it possible. Human rights act as the redemption of the civilising mission, coming after the evils of colonialism and genocide have been repudiated and punished, but unable to offer any grander account of justice to the victims of a liberal order based on global capitalism and the nation-state. Human rights are disabled in this way because they focus on preventing cruelty and violence in their specific and physical form foremost (rather than on structural violence and social deprivation), while also seeking to reconcile victims to the nationalist state order to pacify them, to make them into citizens capable of living with the beneficiaries of past violence and oppression – if not the perpetrators of injustice. This means that while the most dramatic perpetrators of violence and cruelty will face punishment, the powerful individuals and communities that uphold the existing order are redeemed and their roles as counterrevolutionary saviours confirmed in human rights practice.

     Randall Williams also links human rights to the colonial project and highlights the difficulty of challenging the given coordinates of political and social power within contemporary human rights discourse, of getting beyond The Divided World – which is a theoretical critique of human rights drawing on both historical and cultural sources. Like Meister, he finds explicit linkages between universal human rights as an ideal and the racist ideology of colonialism, suggesting that as ‘long as the power to confer or withhold the recognition of the Other’s humanity remains a decision made elsewhere, there will be no substantial alteration of the material conditions that serve as the basis for the very possibility of a distinction between the human and the inhuman.’ The dominant politics of human rights, then, is not easily contested or surpassed, which Baxi and Goodale also acknowledge, but reading these authors together suggests that finding alternative ways of making human rights is difficult and dangerous work, which may not be worth taking on. Williams is pessimistic about the prospects of human rights to enable political change, such that any transformative potential they have will only be achieved by stepping outside the legal framework of international law, which he argues (invoking China Miéville) can only reaffirm the authority of the state, granting legitimacy to its violence while outlawing the use of violence in opposition. Meister likewise thinks that human rights must become part of a revolutionary politics that can see beyond the nation-state and the inequalities of contemporary capitalism if they are to be more than the ideology of the powerful.

     Its likely Goodale and Baxi would agree with much of this analysis, but the optimism one finds in their work grows out of their engagement with specific oppositional struggles that make use of human rights, by focusing on human rights made outside the direct control of powerful global elites. As Goodale suggests this leads to ‘human rights’ that ‘remain fluid and essentially plural and depend not on a hypothetical set of principles articulated by a small sliver of the global community but on the social actors for whom human rights come to form part of their contextualized legal, moral, and political practices.’ Yet, even if we identify the legacies that have made human rights what they are, while also paying attention to the ways they are (and have been) made and used in pursuit of very different projects, the question of what is to be done remains. The adoption of human rights by abused, marginalised and struggling peoples may be a necessary and at times effective strategy, but can it do anything to alter the order of things in profound ways? Can they be more than political tools that enable the weak to grab the ear of the powerful in hopes of pleading for mercy without demanding substantive justice?

Continued in part II.

Two weeks ago, Karin Fierke presented a paper at our theory workshop on self-immolation as speech act (part of a forthcoming book entitled The Warden’s Dilemma: Self-Sacrifice, Agency and Emotion in Global Politics with Cambridge University Press). She focused principally on Thich Quang Duc, the South Vietnamese Buddhist monk who set himself alight and burned to death, silent and still, in Saigon in June of 1963, and on Norman Morrison, an American Quaker who copied Duc’s example in November 1965 by combusting his own flesh outside the Pentagon office of Robert McNamara, then the United States Secretary of Defence implementing Operation Rolling Thunder, the rain of fire which infamously unleashed a greater tonnage of bombs on Vietnams North and South than the total dispatched during the entirety of the Second World War.

This mimesis, an affinity not only of form but also of sacrificial politics, was cited as a mechanism for rupturing the symbolic order. Both Duc and Morrison engaged in a corporeal self-violence so forceful that it not only offended senses, but in fact extended a certain community. An act, substituting for speech, argument or manifesto, which forced itself on high politics and forged an international sensibility until that point lacking. One more contemporary dimension of that imitation and repetition is that many must have encountered the image the same way I did, which was via the front cover of Rage Against The Machine’s pugnacious, convulsively political eponymous debut in 1992. And not just the image, but a vague sense of the story imparted by sleeve notes (and lyrics today associated both with opposition to the media grip of Simon Cowell and with visions of the riotous encounter).

Self-immolation persists in a certain tradition of struggle, but the relevance of these themes – the body, sacrifice, the edifice of politics and protest, the circulation of images – has coalesced potently in the wake of recent events (on which more in a moment).

The self-sacrifice of burning, essentially irreversible and in that sense ‘suicidal’, is paralleled in the embodied suffering of the hunger strike, slower, more clearly tactical and limited in its ends, but not much less shocking for that. Bobby Sands, a reference both for Rage Against The Machine and for Steve McQueen in the blistering, unforgettable ‘Hunger’, stands as the paradigm for this politicised starvation. A clear resonance is with Gandhi, like Duc emblematic of disciplined physical torment contra colonialism, but the more compelling affinity is with the concentration camp survivors iterated at Bergen-Belsen and Trnopolje, whose image is somehow reincarnated and twisted in images of politically-chosen, if not quite voluntary, emaciation.

To do to oneself (or to appear to do to oneself) what others had forced upon them. To find and stretch the limits of endurance in a deliberately perverse silent howl at power (hunger as politics by other means). The force of these representations is in the way they trouble and traverse that border, demonstrating in their conscious destruction of self an assertion of being. As in the idea that suicide is something that only humans can do. These physical acts, seemingly universal in the feelings they elicit but not requiring language, are often overlaid with statements that seek to turn them into political programs and to make clear their meaning and intent. That in itself makes them more than just body politics.

Surveying the structure of torture (identified as: 1. the infliction of pain; 2. the objectification of the subjective attributes of pain; and 3. the translation of the objectified attributes of pain into the insignia of power) Elaine Scarry diagnosed the special strangeness of physical suffering and the mode of its political movement:

Only when a person throws his head back and swallows three times does he begin to apprehend what is involved in one hundred and three or three hundred and three swallows, what atrocities one’s own body, muscle, and bone structure can inflict on oneself. The political prisoner is, of course, reminded of this in every moment…

…[the denial of pain in torture] occurs…in the conversion of the enlarged map of human suffering into an emblem of the regime’s strength. This translation is made possible by, and occurs across, the phenomenon common to both power and pain: agency. The electric generator, the whips and canes, the torturer’s fists, the walls, the doors, the prisoner’s sexuality, the torturer’s questions, the institution of medicine, the prisoner’s screams, his wife and children, the telephone, the chair, a trial, a submarine, the prisoner’s ear drums – all these and many more, everything human or inhuman that is either physically or verbally, actually or allusively present, has become part of the gutted realm of weaponry, weaponry that can refer equally to pain or power.

Follow Scarry’s advice. Tilt your head back and fully swallow three times in quick succession. In many crucial respects, the spectacular encounter of protest cannot reach these depths. Its time is the brief span of hours or days, not the elongated trap of a confinement without limit. Its space is that of contingency and relative openness rather than the total prison of the police state. Even where the kettle is not immediately broken, dispersal comes soon enough. Its pain is light and fleeting by comparison, a tool of shock and awe, not of systematic, maliciously bastardised surgery. People miscarry in Seattle, and in Tahrir Square people die, but it is not the comprehensive unmaking of the torture chamber. [1]

What the contexts share, and share increasingly as situations escalate, is a certain relation between corporeal suffering and the politics of power/resistance. In the case of torture, it is the unmaking of inchoate physical agony which is re-made into the language of power, which is named (we may risk interpellated) by the generic regime Scarry identifies. The suffering is private and the naming is effective not because activists on the outside see the suffering of the chamber so much as apprehend it as a real possibility to be written on their bodies (and aren’t the best threats those that don’t manifest directly?).

Physical suffering in moments of protest and in the encounter between resistance and regime turn this dynamic. The public and circulated vision of a human acted on by the forces of state power also takes a nameless pain and tries to translate it. The empathetic reaction elicited so broadly (although not quite universally) in response to the clear and uncomplicated exercise of repression is generalised. A kind of bodily commons surfaces in the the visceral recognition of eyes and mouths and flesh like ours in pain. Call this the Orwell reaction: “When I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don’t have to ask whose side I’m on”.

In the conjunction of Tahrir Square and #occupy, the shared objects that act on and contain bodies evoke a common struggle. Riot shields, tents and tear gas as the new universal grammar of politics. An association in many ways too easy, but one which nevertheless attempts in its own way to convert suffering into counter-power. A public sphere, however truncated, in which images circulate and repeat reverses the direction established by the torturer’s chamber, using the corporeal commons to enlarge, rather than restrict the space of possibilities. As when only passingly political art critics begin to discuss the tear gassing of Dorli Rainey in terms of the martyrdom of Jesus Christ.

Certainly, the question of pepper spray and paramilitaries appears to have taken off majorly state-side. By now you will doubtless recognise immediately the snatched image which served as trigger, the weirdly calm parallel to Thich Quang Duc’s immolation portrait, today captured not by the analog precision of a tipped-off photographer but in the 360˚ coliseum of digital cameras, smart phones and iPads. Lt. John Pike (the name itself now close to the status of byword for police brutality) casually manifesting unaccountable power, authority beyond reason, and so providing the substratum of identification which itself seems to establish, without argument, the righteousness of the protest (the video is very difficult to watch, but ends well).

It’s clearly premature to grant these images the status attained by Duc. And it’s hard to imagine the sheer force of a burning man becoming subject to repetition, modification and ever-more free-floating and surreal interpretation the way Pike already has. This gap requires some discussion of compassion fatigue and protest art in the age of virtual reproduction. But not too much. These images have a different quality and move in a different way: jovial and sardonic in the face of callousness, but also now repeated for their own sake.

Megan Gaber identifies the meme-ification of Pepper Spray Cop as the moment #occupy might really take off, moving “beyond its concern with economic justice to espouse, simply, justice”. Since the protests have thus far been about ‘spikey’ moments of spectacle rather than a ‘sticky’ focus on the movement, Gaber sees in the spread of these images a raising of the threshold of popular investment in #occupy. Both emotionally and in terms of putting their own bodies on the line, Lt. Pike’s unintended audience are now more committed. As Linda Katehi has recently discovered.

This is plausible, but the discussion above demands a certain caution. Why? Because the act of translation is a fraught one, and the sense of justice that is brought forth is thin, even negative. Negative solidarity is still solidarity, to be sure, but its limits are real. This is necessarily so, since it is the unnamed, visceral identification with physical pain and with powerlessness before a bully which allows the images to have their effect in the first place. As soon as we introduce a thicker sense of justice, or of politics, the identification begins to recede in scale and scope. Questions arise as to the tactical choices of #occupy, about unity and diversity, about brutality as individualised or systematic, about moving from resistance to program (and what the difference is), and so on.

The speech act of self-suffering, consciously chosen successively in different ways by Duc, Sands, the Tahrir Square occupiers and the students at UC Davis, is a cry, perhaps a scream. It asserts the subject. But its capacity to galvanise and direct larger projects is more complicated. After all, Duc’s protest against US support for its South Vietnamese proxy apparently did move Washington decision-makers to change their policy, but in the direction of military escalation. Bodies carry the political, and rupture it in moments of crisis, and stand as the most basic level at which we recognise and react to oppression, but they remain separated, and in some senses still strangely alien, from it.

[1] Interestingly, I am not yet aware of a single image that captures the Egyptian struggle the way Pepper Spray Cop encapsulates the para-militarised ‘civil’ order of protest in the West. Tahrir Square is live, and it is unfolding on Twitter, and it already has its pantheon of martyrs and heroes, but the frozen image that will serve to symbolise it doesn’t yet seem to exist.

It would be disingenuous to relate events in North Africa and the Middle East (or MENA) today without reference to the media. Here too, there are many possible angles to examine. I will focus on the institutional support that the media provide in shaping consensus in support of foreign policy. In this regard, so-called mainstream Western media and networks (BBC, CNN, Fox, RFI and the like) have played a significant role in generating domestic support for the Libyan campaign. The media find themselves in the contradictory positions of both providing sustenance to foreign policy rationales and reporting on government actions. In this role the media either wittingly or unwittingly assumed the position of justifying contradictory Western foreign policy aims while trying to satisfy the needs of their audiences (especially domestic constituencies and home governments) for information from the front. Consistently, the media often generate sympathy for foreign actors or entities that either support Western interests or have affinities for Western values.

This role is not without a cost, especially when foreign policy actions, including wars, fail to attain their objectives. When the outcome of foreign policy proves disastrous, Western media also have an inexhaustible capacity to either ignore their prior support for the underlying causes or to reposition themselves as mere commentators on events over which they had no control or could not prevent. Increasingly, these tendencies have spread around the world as evidenced in the techniques and styles that have propelled the Qatari-based Al Jazeera into prominence as key contender in the emergent game of production, circulation, and consumption of foreign policy-concordant images for their affective and ideological effects.

So it is not surprising that the backdrop and background scenarios for most reporting on the 2011 revolts in MENA are dimensions of Orientalism, of which they are many. But the most constant is one of autocratic ‘barbarism’. In this regard, the discourses and media techniques for creating and supporting sympathetic figures are just as constant (or invariable) as Western states rationales for intervention. The media-hyped stories of Oriental despotism that preceded Operation Desert Storm, when the US expelled Iraq from Kuwait, have provided the template. During that event, for instance, media feted their viewers with stories of invading Iraqi hordes storming through hospital only to disconnect incubators and let helpless infants die a slow death. These and many stories of heroic bids by US soldiers to prevent such barbarism were later discredited but not the other horrific stories which convinced US citizens of the need to wage war on Saddam Hussein’s occupying army. In the Libyan case today, one of the earlier images of the aura of impunity created by Gaddafi was that of a Libyan female lawyer who was allegedly raped by Gaddafi’s forces. There was also a reported event of military takeover of a hospital.

Obviously, the inclusion of rape among the actions constituting crimes against humanity is one of the greatest achievements of human rights advocates and no one should be excused for committing so vile an act against anyone even in wartime. So too is a military invasion of a hospital an inexcusable act. The point is the media environment in which reported events are readily accepted as truths or summarily discounted or received with skepticism based solely on an affective economy in which sympathies and antipathies are clearly aligned on either side of the conflict. Thus, before it was revealed that the Syrian lesbian blogger was actually in man living outside of Syria, the journalistic practice was to present any incriminating image from a ‘heroic’ Tech-savvy youth who uses Facebook, Twitter, or other social media against the unsympathetic regime as proof of the latter’s barbarism and/or ebbing legitimacy. So it is that the discussions of the creation, distribution (for example, via You-Tube), and interpretation of people-generated clips as symbols of the 2011 Spring will remain its hallmarks. The corollary to the related action is the preparation of Western constituencies for the inevitable: the interposition of the West in the MENA Spring as its necessary conscience and adjudicator of interests, values, and norms.

On this affected and affective terrain, it was predictable, if not inevitable, that the regime of Muhammar Gaddafi would fare worse than Middle Eastern regimes that figured prominently in Western strategic calculations. In a way, Libya under Gaddafi did too but in an antagonistic rather than supportive role. Given the longstanding involvement and entanglement with Libya, one would expect reporting to start with an initial skepticism about the motives, aims, and justifications of the intervening powers: France, Great Britain, and the US. These three leading members of the coalition against the Gaddafi regime have had continuous entanglement with Libya since the advent of the Gaddafi regime over a number of security-related issues. These include Libyan involvement in the downing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie, the explosion of the French-owned UTA flight 772 over the Saharan desert, also attributed to Gaddafi, and the Reagan Administration’s bombing Libya to claim the right of access in the Gulf of Sidra.

To be sure, it is still possible to assign a neutral or positive value to the intervention in any MENA entity at the onset of upheaval. Yet, the history of Western entanglements in Libya should be obvious (or be restated), especially when the media cite the relations between the Gaddafi regime and African states as reason for doubting African neutrality in its approach to the conflict. This was not to be. The actual scenario that unfolded had two predictable parts. The first is one in which the media assumed neutrality and humanitarian motives on the part of the NATO coalition in order to shore up the legitimacy not only of the military intervention but all operational dimensions of the interventions, including specific targeting decisions. Conjointly, the media pointed to the multiple ways in which African states could be conflicted or were so compromised as to not be credibly neutral or objective in their attempted mediation of the Libyan crisis.

In short, the condition of possibility of the ideological justifications of Western intervention was and remains a unidirectional apportionment of blame in the political conducts of the domestic Libyan protagonists (Gaddafi bad; TNC good) but also the discrediting of any position that contrasted with Western objectives – for instance, mediation amounts to supporting Gaddafi or shoring up his power. The condition of possibility of this dualism is a reality of power that is apparent even to human rights organizations and humanitarian networks that are dependent symbolically and materially on Western power, money, and technology. In any case, the erasure of potential Western conflicts of interest necessarily underpins much of the discourses of supposed humanitarians, particularly among liberal cosmopolitan circles where historically human suffering everywhere has been highlighted conveniently to align with foreign policy.

Again, the reference to the past is not intended a priori to impugn official and non-official Western motives. It serves as caution to those who would align reason and rationality on the side of the West and passion and affect on the side of Africans in order to validate the wisdom of military intervention against the desire to foster new kinds of politics in Libya. Specifically, African leaders are no less credible as mediators because of past ties or associations of some member states of the African Union with the regime of Gaddafi. Nor did Western intervention become ‘indispensable’ because morally blemished Africans remained inactive. Such a view belies the fact for instance that, as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, South Africa endorsed Resolution 1973. That resolution also recognized that the actions of the Libyan government had been condemned by the League of Arab States, the African Union, and the Secretary General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. A large number of African states, therefore, protested Gaddafi’s use of force, and the majority did not object to the establishment of the no-fly zone or the idea of an immediate cease-fire.

I know few people or constituencies in Africa that who would argue that the situation in Libya at the time of the insurgency was tenable or that it should have been allowed to persist. I also know few individuals who would pretend that an operation such as the one currently undertaken by the West could be carried out without mistakes or blemish. Yet, these are not arguments against global democracy and the reasonableness that is required to interpret international law, particularly UN Resolutions. Alas, no reputable media outlet provided a sustained investigation into why Africans might so stubbornly oppose Western intervention. In truth, Africans are accustomed to the tendency in the West to instrumentalize international processes in favor of supposed strategic interests. They are also accustomed to being blamed for the disastrous outcomes of Western interventions. One recalls a certain Congo crisis which was settled upon Western intervention, by the removal and assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the installation of Mobutu in his place. Thirty odd years later, Mobutu was forced to resign leaving Congo in a condition that observers liken today to a failed state, blamed in the media on African propensity to fight for resources (the story of dirty diamonds) and/or settle ‘entrenched inter-ethnic animosities’ through civil wars.

Africans are also accustomed to another certainty in Western interventions on the continent: this is that political reconciliation is required only when Western allies are on the losing end of political dynamics while a scenario of total victors and losers is preferred when the victors might be Western allies. Consider US foreign policy in Southern Africa. There in the 1980s, US allies – among them the apartheid regime in South Africa and anti-communist guerillas – seemed on the defensive and unable to gain power against progressive rivals: the Marxist regimes in Angola and Mozambique; the national liberation movement in Namibia, or SWAPO; and the African National Congress in South Africa. To buttress the position of its allies in the context, the US put forth policies such as Constructive Engagement toward Apartheid South Africa. The policy was built on the assumption that effective political settlement in South Africa required an ‘honest broker’ like the US to engage all parties – even in this case, a regime that was ideologically and politically bent on the total subordination of its local black population and the destruction of neighboring states.

In contrast, the US government and civil society groups – religious and businesses alike – provided money, guns, telecommunication equipments, and other technologies of war to anti-communist guerillas in Angola and Mozambique that refused to submit to electoral processes. Even as these groups failed to unseat their respective legitimate governments, the US pressured the latter into accepting political ‘compromises’ to crises created by the refusal of its own allies to participate in free and open elections organized by the departing colonial power: Portugal. The arguments advanced by the US then favored political inclusion in the interest of lasting peace, a position that comes close to the African position in Libya today. So it seems to an African observer of Western interventions in Africa that the strategic goals of those leading the interventions often supersede the internal domestic requirements of a viable constitutional order. In short, Western-friendly entities need not accommodate ‘unsympathetic’ opposing figures or entities: then, communists and, today, an assortment comprising Islamists and unfriendly autocratic ‘Arab’ and ‘Africa’ regimes. In contrast, friends of the West need not bother with democratic niceties as the price for peace. Enemies or adversaries do or they are eliminated from the scene in favour of friends.

The above formula has been the single most enduring constant in US interventions in Africa. It has also drawn a comparatively stark African aversion to the instrumentalization of international morality to ends that are anti-democratic in nature. To those who are undeterred by the idea that Africans may actually formulate coherent views of international morality, including an aversion to war, consider these facts. In 2003, even after dispatching Colin Powell to Africa to seek support for the war in Iraq, the US failed to enlist a single African leader in its efforts. This refusal came on the heels of great sympathy for the US following the 1998 US Embassy Bombings in East Africa and the attacks perpetrated against the US on 9/11. Further, for nearly four years, the US failed to find a single state among fifty three on the continent to host AFRICOM (the US military’s Africa Command) even though all African states endorsed the aims of US anti-terrorism programs. As of today, none of the countries enlisted in the US-initiated Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership, all of them poor and dependent on US aid, has endorsed military intervention in Libya.

In the meantime Africans will remain camped in a metaphorical global Tahrir Square. It is from there, in the public spaces allowed for legislating on behalf of the collective will, that they have succeeded best. In 1960, for instance, the Afro-Asian coalition that emerged from Bandung was sufficiently alarmed by events in Algeria, Vietnam, and the Portuguese colonies of Africa to endorse UN Resolution 1514, acknowledging the right of colonial populations to self-determination. This was the beginning of a quiet revolution at the UN. It was followed by the decisions of Ghana, Guinea, and Egypt (under the rubric then of the United Arab Republic) to dispense with Security Council resolutions in Congo. The most important of these revolutions was the appeal by African states to others to denounce the 1966 ruling by the International Court of Justice favoring colonial arrangements in South West Africa. In response, the UN General Assembly voted massively against the positions of both the Security Council and the International Court of Justice, while revoking the South African mandate over South West Africa, instituting in its place a ‘mandate’ under the UN Council for Namibia. Similar instances of delegitimization exist today in African perceptions of the legality of decisions by the International Criminal Court. The seeming arbitrariness and politicization of the recent indictments of a number of African leaders has once again led the African Union to collectively decide to ignore the ICC’s decisions. The AU’s solution for Libya, together with the emergent African attitude toward the ICC, suggest a continuation of an often-ignored public battle from the continent to restore a modicum of equality, justice and reasonableness to international interventions.

My concern stems from the fact that, in politics as in law, it is axiomatic that states are unequal in their endowments and capacities. But this should not be an argument against global democracy and the reasonableness that is required when interpreting international law, particularly UN Resolutions, to maintain a semblance of legitimacy in the international order. The dissenting opinion of Judge Kotaro Tanaka of Japan in the South West Africa case of the International Court of Justice might be helpful here in explaining why one would object to the current intervention in Libya. In contemplating the fate of international customary law in the postcolonial world, Judge Tanaka took inspiration from the New Haven School when he opined that “different treatment is permitted only when it can be justified by the criterion of justice.” According to him, “one may replace justice by the concept of reasonableness generally referred to by the Anglo-American school of law,’ but he insisted that the criterion for reasonableness does not logically lead to arbitrariness. In short, even a doctrine of reasonableness, which is required of entities that may disagree, does not do away with the question of the (lack of) legal basis for differential treatment in global politics of both the Libyan regime under Gaddafi (which is at the center of the crisis under consideration) and African states (for daring to aspire to a negotiated settlement in the hope of nurturing a different kind of politics in post-crisis Libya).

It is not accurate to say that the African Union has been indifferent to the conflict in Libya. If there has been silence in Africa, it has to do with the extent to which the ‘maverick’ Colonel (Gaddafi) has angered some of his peers over the years by interfering in the affairs of such states as Nigeria, Liberia, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone and others, with disastrous effects. Even when, as in Sudan and Uganda, officeholders have welcomed his entreaties, large segments of the populations have not appreciated them. Yet, regardless of their personal views of Gaddafi and their political differences with him, African elites and populations have yearned for a more positive, conciliatory, and participatory solution to outright regime change or the removal of Gaddafi preferred by the West. This variance, I surmise, comes from a positive understanding of postcoloniality that include forgiveness, solidarity, and democracy and justice, as exhibited in post-apartheid South Africa and post-conflict Liberia, Angola, Mozambique, and the like.

In opting for negotiated mediation and a new constitutional compact, therefore, the African Union (or AU) aimed to foster a different kind of politics in Libya – admittedly one that has escaped many of the states endorsing that position. As articulated by Jean Ping, the Secretary General of the AU, the Libyan crisis offered an opportunity “to enhance a self-nourishing relationship between authority, accountability and responsibility” in order to “reconstitute African politics from being a zero sum to a positive sum game” toward one “characterized by reciprocal behavior and legitimate relations between the governors and the governed.” Mr. Ping added two other dimensions to his vision. The first is an acknowledgement that events in Libya point to the fact that all Africans “yearn for liberty and equality’ and this yearning is “something more consequential than big and strong men.” The second is that Africa’s destiny should be shaped by Africans themselves based on an actualized “sense of common identity based, not on the narrow lenses of state, race or religion, but constructed on Africa’s belief in democracy, good governance and unity as the most viable option to mediate, reconcile and accommodate our individual and collective interests.”

Coming from a politician, these words may read like slogans. But the uniform refusal of the AU to endorse Western intervention tells another story. This story has multiple facets. The first is a convergence among multiple components of the African body politic toward the principle of consensus in decision-making – a practice that has a long history in Africa. Secondly, there is growing unease on the continent about the forms and foundations of outside (principally Western) intervention in time of crisis. In the case of Libya, many African leaders were unsure whether war – as opposed for instance to the interdiction of troop movements from all sides – was the appropriate response to Gaddafi’s and the opposition’s belligerence. Africans were also unsure about the moral and juridical foundations of the war itself, the selection of targets (including the destruction of infrastructure), and the wisdom of singling out one side for punishment (Gaddafi’s) and the other for unquestioned endorsement (the opposition).

The most important of African misgivings about Western intervention is the least reported in the media. This is the fear that, rather than promote democracy, the intervention would produce the opposite effects. The argument is that the West may be a beacon of democracy at home, but that there are few indications in the foreign policies of its constituent entities that they foster the growth of democratic cultures outside the domestic provinces of states. The most notable exceptions are US efforts in Japan after World War II. Otherwise, in regard to regions such as Africa, generations of Western policy makers regarded anti-colonialist and nationalist calls for domestic and global democracy as an implicit attack on Western interests. There was a simple explanation to the seeming paradox. In nearly all these instances, the postcolonial imaginary combined the need for domestic democracy with a desire for the total transformation of the inequities in dimensions of international existence: political, cultural, scientific, military, and otherwise. In the face of the resulting postcolonial challenges, the West and the then Third World alliance – of Afro-Asian and Latin American states – seemingly reversed roles in regard to the openness of the processes, mechanisms, and instruments of global governance. In their new roles, so-called Western democracies sought to stifle global democracy through opposition to transparency and inclusion at the United Nations (particularly at the UN Security Council) and transnational organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. By contrast, although still governed at times and in places by dictators and autocrats, third World entities relished in their role as advocates of global democracy (regarding the operations of the UN), political and economic pluralism (particularly at the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council, and the Decolonization Committee), and cultural and religious tolerance (in proclamations regarding international coexistence and the designation of world heritage at UNESCO).

Now assembled in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), hegemonic Western states resisted radical changes in the international order through active campaigns against the leaders of the ‘guilty’ African states (or those that did not support Western designs) resulting frequently in political overthrow or regime change. To be sure, Western opposition to global democracy was often presented as necessary and understandable; but the arguments never convinced advocates of reform of global institutions in the Third World, the so-called Non-Aligned Movement, and other non-Western majority international organizations and forums. To the return to the earlier paradox, in conjunction with their opposition to global democratic reforms, hegemonic Western states went to inordinate lengths to subvert democratic processes and the rule of law in perceived unfriendly states Africa (from Algeria to South Africa), Latin America (from Central America and the Caribbean to Chile and Argentina), and Asia (from the smallest Pacific Island to Indonesia and the Philippines). In the end, although Western states could point to the fact that they remained governed domestically through consensual or agreeable constitutional arrangements; they were either unable or unwilling to contemplate the extension of their domestically allowed freedom and protected liberties to others, whether as representatives of incorporated political entities or as citizens of formerly colonized entities. In short, the actions undertaken by the West presumably to defend its interests and values stood in stark contrast with those values. Some would claims that those ‘protective’ or ‘pre-emptive’ actions ultimately undermined the long-term interests of the West in the regions and states of interventions.

The events in Libya today (both the revolt and the intervention) exemplify the domestic deficit at the national and global levels that anti-colonialists (and some postcolonial actors) have consistently denounced. The domestic democratic deficit is what has prompted street uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East (or MENA). The process of rectifying this domestic deficit in Libya is also undermined by the convergent actions of the Western coalition and the Transitional National Council, or TNC (the emerging authority in rebel-held areas). Not only is the Western coalition engaged in an active war against Gaddafi on behalf of the rebels, but the coalition has also fomented and condoned intransigence on the part of the rebels against a negotiated settlement. One idea, repeated reflexively by diplomats and reporters, is that negotiation under any circumstance means surrender to Gaddafi. Consequently, the TNC has thus far rebuffed all offers by the African Union to find a political settlement to the Libyan crisis. And offers to find a settlement have, unfortunately, been interpreted as efforts to preserve the Gaddafi regime.

The World Mapped Without The Non-Aligned Movement

The global democratic deficit is embedded in the structures and processes of international organizations as well as the institutions and traditions of self-interested entities bent on preserving their own power. To confront this power, as Gaddafi found out when he challenged Ronald Reagan, is to meet a fate not unlike Gaddafi’s answers to those who rebelled against him. Like the domestic democratic deficit, the global democratic deficit is behavioural and structural or institutional. The connection between the non-democratic behaviour of global hegemonic powers and the possibility of democratic politics at the domestic level is often direct. Take for instance the role of the West in the political culture currently brewing in the Libyan opposition. Since endorsing the TNC as the sole legitimate representative of the Libyan people, the Western coalition backing it has remained silent as the organization grows intolerant by the day not only toward Gaddafi, his family, and allies but also toward Sub-Saharan African migrants accused of sympathy with the regime. And, as stated previously, the TNC has not only excluded negotiation with Gaddafi or his allies; it has snubbed all efforts by the African Union to mediate a political settlement. To either the West or the TNC, there could be only solution: total and unconditional surrender of political opponents.

One wonders why the TNC would want to negotiate, compromise, or reconcile with allies of Gaddafi when the largest armies in the world are committed to eliminating these obstacles to their path to power. President Ahmadou Toumani Touré of Mali, an engaged democrat whose own behaviour in power contrasts dramatically with that of Gaddafi, gave an indication of his own sentiment about the situation in an interview granted to Radio France Internationale. Asked by the reporter why he would not join the West (again dubbed during the interview as the International Community), Touré gave the following answer, which I paraphrase: ‘We are asked to promote democracy in Libya against a man who holds power at the barrel of the gun and you want me to unseat him at the barrel of the gun and seat another group in his place. If Gaddafi’s unwillingness to negotiate and compromise is the problem today why is the other side relying on forced removal?’ Indeed, the current intransigence of the West and the TNC reveal a culture of intolerance that unsettles Africans of all political persuasions – and not just dictators who are destined to the dustbin of history.

It is difficult today to pretend that the Western coalition has acted reasonably in Libya. Having sidelined Africans and blamed Gaddafi for all obstacles preventing conflict resolution, France, Britain, and the US can proceed to install the TNC as the new Libyan government. They are counting on the widespread sympathy for the Arab Spring to be absolved later of all sins of commission and omission. I doubt, however, that all will be forgotten. Since the UN Libyan resolutions were approved, NATO strikes have exceeded the initial mandate which was aimed at blocking Gaddafi’s aggression again civilians. But NATO has not only converted this mission into one conjoined with the rebellion to unseat Gaddafi, its bombs have also targeted some of the nation’s infrastructure. The Western coalition has also openly embraced the idea of assassinating the Libyan leader as policy. For its part, France had delivered weapons to the so-called resistance, despite the putative weapons embargo stipulated by the UN. Great Britain sent Special Forces on the grounds to aid the rebellion at its onset. Finally, having unleashed a conjoined and combined attack with the rebels against Gaddafi, the Western coalition has encouraged participant and non-participant states to recognize the TNC as legitimate representative of the Libyan people. This recommendation also seems to belie the fact that the tribal and clan make-up of Libya suggests that Gaddafi has partisans who may not be represented by the TNC. Meanwhile, while NATO bombs loyalist forces and their positions, the TNC advances militarily. For this reason, the TNC has expressed open contempt for the idea of a cease fire followed by negotiation. Together NATO and the TNC are engaged in a strategy for total military victory.

These actions are not merely troublesome. They are indicative of a world order that appeals to reasonableness to give legitimacy to authoritarianism, discrimination, and partiality in the interpretation of the law and the application of international morality. If the Western coalition succeeds in subverting the spirit of the MENA Spring, which in my understanding included a return of power to the people and the restoration of the dignity of the collective, nothing would prevent it and its local allies from dispensing with other requirements of public life: democracy, the rule of law, and the ethos of pluralism. In addition, who would control the institutional processes that are supposed to help states heal from civil conflict? Who knows whether there would trials of those who ruled Libya for forty years and if so, whether those who just recently defected to the rebellion would be included and on what side? Whose military actions will be prosecuted as war crimes or crimes against humanity? Which lives lost will be deemed innocent and therefore worthy of memorialising? Which interests will be worthy of attention and protection? Only time will tell. The most important question bearing on global governance and international peace, however, is what lesson does the West wish to send to Africans by subverting the authority of the UN and side-lining Africa from a major historical event located in North Africa, and territorially contiguous and historically connected to the sub-Saharan countries of Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Chad? In other words, how is the NATO coalition in Libya remaking the world and why? Again, time will tell.

It remains that the idea embraced by the Western anti-Gaddafi coalition that one can be excluded from the political compact simply because of one’s location or association within an undemocratic regime would lead to a nightmarish scenario. This is understood by generations of activists who have fought for human rights, constitutionalism, and democratic inclusion as well as humanitarians who have tended to the social calamities caused by endless civil wars. So too do Africans. Congolese, for example, may recall that prior to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the US and its European allies had insisted that the elected Prime Minister negotiate with the secessionist Moise Tshombe in contravention of all applicable norms of self-determination and national sovereignty. Mozambicans and Angolans, too, might recall that, while financing the murderous armed bands of UNITA and FRELIMO, the US insisted that the legitimate governments of these countries accommodate these insurgent militia groups. Above all, nationalists in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya before them would definitely recall official lectures from Western chanceries on the need to forgive, reconcile, and negotiate new political compacts as a means to lasting peace. Western cynics might argue today these actions were all constitutive of geopolitics at the time and that the US and its Western allies were merely protecting the interests of local allies. Despite the instrumentalism underlying these US positions, which I discuss in the next section, Africans of goodwill took the call to negotiation as an opportunity for new kinds of politics. A welcome development!

In Libya today, it takes a insidious disingenuousness to deny the utility and legitimacy of forgiveness, reconciliation, and negotiated political compacts when the end is to develop new kinds of politics at the end of the revolution. It is even more contemptuous for the media to lampoon the principal African negotiator appointed by the African Union, President Jacob Zuma of South Africa, for aspiring for a negotiated settlement. In doing so, the military intervention-supporting Western media seem to have succumbed to a momentary but necessary memory lapse. It is after all Zuma’s African National Congress under the leadership of Nelson Mandela that brought racially-divided South Africa back from moral death under apartheid to the much celebrated rainbow nation. One would expect Western leaders, and the media that reflexively repeat their opinions without questions, to allow that the historic heirs to generations of South Africans to whom the West sent liberal constitutionalists for guidance might legitimately resent Western advice to Gaddafi’s opponents today to reject the art and wisdom of forgiveness, toleration, and the rule of law. Ordinarily, these faculties and capacities might seem more germane to a post-conflict culture of coexistence than the current positions taken by the West and the TNC: to demand the surrender of the other side as preconditions to any settlement.