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Several key architects of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq 21 years ago are presenting a plan for rebuilding and "de-radicalizing" the surviving population of Gaza, while ensuring that Israel retains "freedom of action" to continue operations against Hamas and Islamic Jihad.The plan, which was published as a report Thursday by the hard-line neo-conservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, or JINSA, and the Vandenberg Coalition, is calling for the creation of a private entity, the "International Trust for Gaza Relief and Reconstruction" to be led by "a group of Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates" and "supported by the United States and other nations."With regard to Palestinian participation, the report by the "Gaza Futures Task Force," envisages an advisory board "composed primarily of non-Hamas Gazans from Gaza, the West Bank, and diaspora." In addition, the Palestinian Authority, which is based on the West Bank, "should be consulted in, and publicly bless," the creation of the Trust while itself undergoing a process of "revamping."In addition to granting Israel license to intervene against Hamas and Islamic Jihad within Gaza, the plan calls for security to be provided by the Trust's leaders and "capable forces from non-regional states with close ties to Israel," as well as "vetted Gazans." The Trust should also be empowered to "hire private security contractors with good reputations among Western militaries" in "close coordination with Israeli security forces," according to the report.The task force that produced the report consists of nine members, four of whom played key roles as Middle East policymakers under former President George W. Bush and in the run-up to and aftermath of the disastrous Iraq invasion in 2003. The group is chaired by John Hannah, who served as deputy national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney from 2001 to 2005 and then as Cheney's national security advisor (2005-2009), replacing Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who resigned his position after being indicted for perjury. Libby, who was later given a full pardon by former President Donald Trump, is also a member of the Gaza task force. Another prominent member of the task force is the founder and chairman of the hawkish Vandenberg Coalition, Elliott Abrams, who served as the senior director for Near East and North African Affairs in the National Security Council under Bush from 2002 to 2009 and more recently as the Special Envoy for Venezuela and Iran under Trump. Ironically, Abrams, who also served as the NSC's Senior Director for Democracy under Bush, played a key role in supporting an attempted armed coup by Hamas's chief rival, Fatah, in 2007 after Hamas swept the 2006 Palestinian elections. The coup attempt sparked a brief but bloody civil war in Gaza, which eventually resulted in Hamas' consolidation of power in the Strip.Amb. Eric Edelman (ret.), a fourth member of the task force, served as Cheney's principal deputy national security adviser from 2001 to 2003 and then as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, the number three position at the Pentagon, under Rumsfeld and his successor, Robert Gates, from 2005 to 2009, as U.S. troops struggled to contain the mainly Sunni resistance to the U.S. occupation in Iraq.In addition to their collaboration during the Bush administration, the four men have long been associated with strongly pro-Israel neoconservative groups, having served on the boards or in advisory positions for such organizations and think tanks as the Hudson Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the ultra-hawkish Center for Security Policy, as well as the Vandenberg Coalition and JINSA. Indeed, such groups have promoted policies that have been generally aligned with those of the Likud Party led by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.Thus, the report's "key findings" prioritize as considerations: [these are quotes]restoring the deterrence and security needs of Israel, both for its own people and its standing as a powerful regional ally and essential component of resisting Iran's ambitions; and dismantling Hamas as a military and governing force and protecting against its reconstitution through Israel's continued freedom of action against it and against Palestinian Islamic Jihad; and by de-militarizing, de-radicalizing, and improving conditions in Gaza such that major terrorist attacks like October 7 can't and won't happen again…Its proposed Trust, according to the report, should involve the United States and concerned states that accept Israel's role in the region" and "should provide the humanitarian assistance and help to restore essential services and rebuild civil society in Gaza as intense combat and over subsequent months. Its activities should be governed by an international board composed of 3 to 7 representatives from the key states supporting the Trust, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and others. At least one notable omission from the list is Qatar, which has provided tens billions of dollars in assistance to Gaza over the last decade.In an echo of Washington's disastrous de-Baathification campaign in occupied Iraq, the report puts special stress on "deradicalization" efforts. "The Trust, recognizing that years of radicalization by Hamas has complicated the task of reforming and restoring Gaza, should focus on a long-term program for deradicalizing the media, schools and mosques," according to the report which adds that "Gazans and the Gazan diaspora should play an active role in developing and implementing these plans, alongside the Trust's Arab members who have hands-on experience in successful deradicalization efforts in their own societies." Such efforts in Gaza, it goes on, could "serve as a model to encourage a similar program there that will be essential if a credible two-state solution is to be revived."The task force urges the Trust to coordinate with other states' efforts and with those of NGOs and international organizations, including the United Nations. But, in an echo of a key Likud talking point, "it should recognize that the activities of UNRWA serve to perpetuate and deepen the Palestinian crisis." The report said UNRWA's immediate assistance in providing relief may be necessary, but "plans to replace it with local Palestinian institutions or other international organizations committed to peace should be developed and implemented."All of these efforts should be pursued within the more general context of countering "Iran's aggressive campaign to derail regional peace efforts, including by constraining the threat posed by Hezbollah and resuming progress toward normalizing Israel and Saudi Arabia," according to the report.

This bibliography addresses the discourse between Latina/o/xs and various architectural and spatial traditions. In the architectural context of the United States, Latina/o/x communities have struggled to carve a space for themselves, sometimes described as a third, subaltern, or alter/native space. Peoples of Latin American descent have experienced persecution in certain architectural settings, operating in consort with state strategies to stereotype, relegate, and criminalize Latina/o/x bodies. Examples here include the border wall dividing the United States and Mexico, urban development projects that segregate and displace historic populations, prison systems holding disproportionate numbers of minorities, and border facilities designed to control and contain immigrant communities. State-sponsored violence—witnessed historically in public lynchings during the 19th century and police brutality used to suppress the Chicano Movement of the 1960s—has likewise produced a feeling that architectural environments, particularly those in the public sphere, remain out of reach for Latina/o/xs. Yet, the architectural history of Latina/o/xs can be said to precede the formation of the United States by more than a thousand years, particularly if we consider the broader history of architecture in the Americas and the Caribbean. It is a history that reaches back to ancient monumental sites of Indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica, the Andes, Amazon, Caribbean, and US Southwest. It projects forward through Spanish and Portuguese urbanization during the colonial period, including African influences that accompanied the trauma of slavery in the Americas after 1492, and Asian material cultures that followed indentured laborers during the 19th century. It is a history that moves forward through nationalist beaux-arts and neoclassic works of the 19th and early 20th centuries into the international modernist styles of the mid- to late 20th century, associated with notable architects like Luis Barragán of Mexico and Oscar Niemeyer of Brazil, among many others. Those architects of the modern era produced spaces that would include multiple publics in a bid to rethink national identities in places like Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico. Haunted by the socio-racial and gendered hierarchies of the colonial era, modern architects strove toward utopic decolonial solutions in the built environment. We might productively place Latina/o/x architecture within those histories of the wider hemisphere, as a facet of that striving toward a decolonial future. There are political, cultural, and historical reasons, however, to study Latina/o/x architecture on its own terms. To do so requires us to critically assess the limits of categories like "Latin American" and "Latina/o/x," which are often confused, disputed, and in flux. These categories impossibly encompass huge and diverse populations. The term "Latin American" attempts to define peoples and cultures across the Spanish-, French-, and Portuguese-speaking Americas and Caribbean, while "Latina/o/x" describes members of the Latin American diaspora, particularly in the United States. Within these shifting terms of inclusion and exclusion, Latin American architecture has received notably more attention in scholarly literature, to the detriment of Latina/o/x contributions. This is, in part, because of historic discrimination faced by immigrants from Latin America in the United States and elsewhere. It also reveals a lacuna in histories of architecture more broadly, and the practice of architecture itself, which has tended to be dominated by heteronormative, white, Anglo-male norms and narratives. In the early 21st century, Latina/o/xs account for less than 10 percent of registered architects in the United States according to the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Nonetheless, with a population at nearly 40 million, Latina/o/xs are the largest minority group in the United States, projected to comprise a quarter of the population by the year 2050. The lack of representation in the field of architecture, compared to demographic realities, makes clear why the study of Latina/o/x architecture is of critical importance. The following bibliography works against social and historical factors that would ignore or erase Latina/o/xs from architectural discourse. This bibliography will focus on major works of scholarship that discuss Latina/o/xs as both users and producers of architecture. Special attention is paid to the ethnic and cultural diversity of Latina/o/x architecture, from the largest historic populations of Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cuba to the vernacular building practices and decolonial aesthetics of an increasingly transcultural and transregional Latina/o/x population.

Tome 1. - 2014. - XXXII,489 S. : Ill., Kt., Tab. - ISBN 978-2-343-02949-8

Indian history writing owes a lot to a number of keen travellers and envoys since ancient times that came here to seek knowledge, learning and customs and fell in love with diverse Indian traditions and cultures (unlike the European travellers who came in robes of businessmen, but later colonized the nation). A list of such important explorers of ancient and medieval India consists of the travel records of Megasthenes (302-298 BC)1, Fa-Hien (405-411 AD)2, Hiuen-Tsang (630-645 AD)3, I-tsing (671-695 AD)4, Al-Masudi (957 AD)5, Alberuni (1024-1030 AD)6 , Macro Polo (1292-1294 AD)7, Ibn Batuta (1333-1347 AD)8, Shihabuddin al-Umari (1348 AD)9, Nicolo Conti (1420-1421 AD)10, Abdur Razzaq (1443-1444 AD)11, and Athanasius Nikitin (1470-1474 AD)12. Later a category of European travellers came to India, mostly for business purposes, whose documentation helped them to raise the empire. This category may include Ralph Fitch (1583-91), the first traveller from England, gave written accounts about India and created interest among the English to start trade with India; William Hawkins (1608-1611 AD) and Sir Thomas Roe (British) (1615-1619 AD) ambassadors of British King James I, who were sent to the court of Jahangir the Mughal Emperor (1609); Fransciso Palsaert (1620-1627 AD); a Foreign Envoy from Dutch, who lived in Agra and gave a comprehensive account of flourishing trade at Ahmadabad, Surat, Broach Bombay, Multan, Lahore etc.; Peter Mundy (1630-34 AD) an Italian tourist, who gave a vivid account of the living conditions of the people in the reign of Shahjahan and so on. The growing knowledge of India's past glory under the colonial rule inspired another category of spiritual seekers to travel India. The list of such travel writers includes spiritual seekers like Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, 12 August [O.S. 31 July] 1831 – 8 May 1891), a Russian-German occultist, philosopher, author, and co-founder of the Theosophical Society in 1875, who wrote memories about living in India which were published in the book From the Caves and Jungles of Hindustan and Paul Brunton (21 October 1898 – 27 July 1981), a British theosophist and spiritualist, best known as one of the early popularizers of Neo-Hindu spiritualism in western esotericism, notably via his bestselling A Search in Secret India (1934). There is another category of travellers to India who, routed through the generations of migration and hyphenated identities, undertook sojourn in the post colonial India to find their ancestral roots. Unlike other travel writers, whose outside positioning keep them free of the anxiety to search the 'home', the inside/outside relational position of such diasporic travellers is fraught with the indisputable problem of 'home'. Avtar Brah significantly points out that how 'home' generates an indisputable problem in the discourse of the Indian diaspora. …the 'referent' of 'home'… [is] qualitatively different … 'home' in the form of a simultaneously floating and rooted signifier. It is an invocation of narratives of 'the nation'. In racialised or nationalist discourses this signifier can become the basis of claims…that a group settled 'in' a place is not necessarily 'of' it. (3) This 'floating and rooted signifier' has always prompted Indian diasporic writers to invoke, discover and explore the 'narrative of 'the nation'' through their exploration and recreation of history. The travel writings from Indian diasporic writers, which give broader dimensions to understanding of their complex relationship with India are no exception to it. India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990) and A Place Within: Rediscovering India (2008) written by V. S. Naipaul and M.G. Vassanji respectively are examples of nostalgic self encounters with the 'nation' while reconnecting with India after a multi-generational gap intensified by multiple migrations. These reconnections with the nation reconnect them with the history and memory of the nation as well as with their respective communities. The present paper engages with the award-winning travel memoir of M. G. Vassanji A Place Within: Rediscovering India (this book bagged highest literary honour of Canada- The Governor-General's Award in 2009), whose conflicting positions of "familiar and yet so alien; so frustrating and yet so enlightening and humbling" (2008 xiii) function both as subjects and as tools of a meta-textual enquiry into and past and the present of the nation. With a deep penetrating eyes of a historian and with an awareness of the epic proportion of the quest, this Indo-African- Canadian writer is not just a wayward tourist, but is bent on deciphering everything which comes in his ways; be it myths, stories, legends, history, family narratives, unforgettable characters, geographical conditions, riots, politics, religious discourses and finally question of identity. For him history is addiction.

-Sidney W. Mintz, Paget Henry ,C.L.R. James' Caribbean. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. xvi + 287 pp., Paul Buhle (eds)-Allison Blakely, Jan M. van der Linde, Over Noach met zijn zonen: De Cham-ideologie en de leugens tegen Cham tot vandaag. Utrecht: Interuniversitair Instituut voor Missiologie en Oecumenica, 1993. 160 pp.-Helen I. Safa, Edna Acosta-Belén ,Researching women in Latin America and the Caribbean. Boulder CO: Westview, 1993. x + 201 pp., Christine E. Bose (eds)-Helen I. Safa, Janet H. Momsen, Women & change in the Caribbean: A Pan-Caribbean Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Kingston: Ian Randle, 1993. x + 308 pp.-Paget Henry, Janet Higbie, Eugenia: The Caribbean's Iron Lady. London: Macmillan, 1993. 298 pp.-Kathleen E. McLuskie, Moira Ferguson, Subject to others: British women writers and Colonial Slavery 1670-1834. New York: Routledge, 1992. xii + 465 pp.-Samuel Martínez, Senaida Jansen ,Género, trabajo y etnia en los bateyes dominicanos. Santo Domingo: Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo, Programa de Estudios se la Mujer, 1991. 195 pp., Cecilia Millán (eds)-Michiel Baud, Roberto Cassá, Movimiento obrero y lucha socialista en la República Dominicana (desde los orígenes hasta 1960). Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1990. 620 pp.-Paul Farmer, Robert Lawless, Haiti's Bad Press. Rochester VT: Schenkman Press, 1992. xxvii + 261 pp.-Bill Maurer, Karen Fog Olwig, Global culture, Island identity: Continuity and change in the Afro-Caribbean Community of Nevis. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993. xi + 239 pp.-Viranjini Munasinghe, Kevin A. Yelvington, Trinidad Ethnicity. Knoxville: University of Tennesee Press, 1993. vii + 296 pp.-Kevin K. Birth, Christine Ho, Salt-water Trinnies: Afro-Trinidadian Immigrant Networks and Non-Assimilation in Los Angeles. New York: AMS Press, 1991. xvi + 237 pp.-Steven Gregory, Andrés Isidoro Pérez y Mena, Speaking with the dead: Development of Afro-Latin Religion among Puerto Ricans in the United States. A study into the Interpenetration of civilizations in the New World. New York: AMS Press, 1991. xvi + 273 pp.-Frank Jan van Dijk, Mihlawhdh Faristzaddi, Itations of Jamaica and I Rastafari (The Second Itation, the Revelation). Miami: Judah Anbesa Ihntahnah-shinahl, 1991.-Derwin S. Munroe, Nelson W. Keith ,The Social Origins of Democratic Socialism in Jamaica. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. xxiv + 320 pp., Novella Z. Keith (eds)-Virginia Heyer Young, Errol Miller, Education for all: Caribbean Perspectives and Imperatives. Washington DC: Inter-American Development Bank, 1992. 267 pp.-Virginia R. Dominguez, Günter Böhm, Los sefardíes en los dominios holandeses de América del Sur y del Caribe, 1630-1750. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1992. 243 pp.-Virginia R. Dominguez, Robert M. Levine, Tropical diaspora: The Jewish Experience in Cuba. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993. xvii + 398 pp.-Aline Helg, John L. Offner, An unwanted war: The diplomacy of the United States and Spain over Cuba, 1895-1898. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. xii + 306 pp.-David J. Carroll, Eliana Cardoso ,Cuba after Communism. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992. xiii + 148 pp., Ann Helwege (eds)-Antoni Kapcia, Ian Isadore Smart, Nicolás Guillén: Popular Poet of the Caribbean. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. 187 pp.-Sue N. Greene, Moira Ferguson, The Hart Sisters: Early African Caribbean Writers, Evangelicals, and Radicals. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. xi + 214 pp.-Michael Craton, James A. Lewis, The final campaign of the American revolution: Rise and fall of the Spanish Bahamas. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. xi + 149 pp.-David Geggus, Clarence J. Munford, The black ordeal of slavery and slave trading in the French West Indies, 1625-1715. Lewiston NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991. 3 vols. xxii + 1054 pp.-Paul E. Sigmund, Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley, Guerillas and Revolution in Latin America: A comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes since 1956. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. xx + 424 pp.-Robert E. Millette, Patrick A.M. Emmanuel, Elections and Party Systems in the Commonwealth Caribbean, 1944-1991. St. Michael, Barbados: Caribbean Development Research Services, 1992. viii + 111 pp.-Robert E. Millette, Donald C. Peters, The Democratic System in the Eastern Caribbean. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. xiv + 242 pp.-Pedro A. Cabán, Arnold H. Liebowitz, Defining status: A comprehensive analysis of United States Territorial Relations. Boston & Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1989. xxii + 757 pp.-John O. Stewart, Stuart H. Surlin ,Mass media and the Caribbean. New York: Gordon & Breach, 1990. xviii + 471 pp., Walter C. Soderlund (eds)-William J. Meltzer, Antonio V. Menéndez Alarcón, Power and television in Latin America: The Dominican Case. Westport CT: Praeger, 1992. 199 pp.

Siba Grovogui on IR as Theology, Reading Kant Badly, and the
Incapacity of Western Political Theory to Travel very far in Non-Western
Contexts




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The study of International Relations is founded on a
series of assumptions that originate in the monotheistic traditions of the West.
For Siba Grovogui, this realization provoked him to question not only IR but to
broaden his enquiries into a multidisciplinary endeavor that encompasses law
and anthropology, journalism and linguistics, and is informed by stories and
lessons from Guinea. In this Talk, he
discusses the importance of human encounters and the problem with the Hegelian
logic which distorts our understanding of our own intellectual development and
the trajectory of the discipline of IR.




Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal
debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in
this debate?



I don't want to be evasive, but I
actually don't think that International Relations as a field has an object
today. And that is the problem with International Relations since Martin Wight and Stanley Hoffmann and all of
those people debated what International Relations was, whether it was an
American discipline, etc. I believe you can look at International Relations in
multiple ways: if you think of à
la Hoffmann, as a tool of dominant power, International Relations is to this
empire what anthropology was to the last. This not only has to do with the
predicates upon which it was founded initially but with its aspirations, for International
Relations shares with Anthropology the ambition to know Man—and I am using here
a very antiquated language, but that is what it was then—to know Man in certain
capacities. In the last empire, anthropology focused on the cultural dimension
and, correspondingly separated culture from civilization in a manner that
placed other regions of the world in subsidiarity vis-à-vis Europe and European
empires. In the reigning empire, IR has focused on the management and administration
of an empire that never spoke its name, reason, or subject.



Now you can believe all the stories
about liberalism and all of that stuff, but although it was predicated upon
different assumptions, the ambition is still the same: it is actually to know
Man, the way in which society is organized, to know how the entities function,
etc. If you look at it that way, then International Relations cannot be the
extension of any country's foreign policy, however significant. This is not to
say that the foreign policies of the big countries do not matter: it would be
foolish not to study them and take them into account, because they have greater
impact than smaller countries obviously. But International Relations is not—or
should not be—the extension of any country's foreign policy, nor should it be
seen as the agglomeration of a certain restricted number of foreign policies.
International Relations suggests, again, interest in the configurations of
material, moral, and symbolic spaces as well as dynamics resulting from the
relations of moral and social entities presumed to be of equal moral standings
and capacities.



If one sees it that way then we must
reimagine what International Relations should be. Foreign policy would be an
important dimension of it, but the field of foreign policy must be understood primarily
in terms of its explanations and justifications—regardless of whether these are
bundled up as realism, liberalism, or other. Today, these fields provide different
ways of explaining to the West, for itself, as a rational decision, or a
justification to the rest, that what it has done over the past five centuries,
from conquest to colonization and slavery and colonialism, is 'natural' and
that any political entities similarly situated would have done it in that same
manner. It follows therefore that this is how things should be. Those justifications,
explanations, and rationalizations of foreign policy decisions and events are
important to understand as windows into the manners in which certain regions
and political entities have construed value, interest, and ethics. But they still
belong, in some significant way, to a different domain than what is implied by
the concept of IR.



I am therefore curious about the
so-called debates about the nature of politics and the proper applicable
science or approach to historical foreign policy realms and domains, particularly
those of the West: I don't consider those debates to be 'big debates' in
International Relations, because they are really about how the West sees itself
and justifies itself and how it wants to be seen, and thus as rational. For the
West (as assumed by so-called Western scholars), these debates extend the
tradition of exculpating the West and seeing the West as the regenerative,
redemptive, and progressive force in the world. All of that language is about
that. So when you say to me, what are the debates, I don't know what they are,
so far, really, in International Relations. The constitution of the
'international', the contours and effects of the imaginaries of its
constituents, and the actualized and attainable material and symbolic spaces
within it to realize justice, peace, and a sustainable order have thus far
eluded the authoritative disciplinary traditions.



Consider the question of China today, as
it is posed in the West. The China question, too, emerges from a particular
foreign policy rationale, which may be important and particular ways to some
people or constituencies in the West but not in the same way to others, for
instance in Africa. The narrowness of the framing of the China question is why in
the West many are baffled about how Africa has been receiving China, and
China's entry into Latin America, etc. In relation to aid, for instance, if you
are an African of a certain age, or you know some history, you will know that
China formulated its foreign aid policy in 1964 and that nothing has changed.
And there are other elements, such as foreign intervention and responsibility
to self and others where China has had a distinct trajectory in Africa.



In
some regard, China may even be closer in outlook to postcolonial African states
than the former colonial powers. For instance, neither China nor African states
consider the responsibility to protect, to be essentially Western. In this
regard, it is worth bearing in mind for instance that Tanzania intervened in Uganda to depose Idi Amin in
1979; Vietnam ended the Khmer Rouge tyranny in Cambodia in 1979; India
intervened in Bangladesh in 1971—it wasn't the West. So those kinds of
understandings of responsibility, in the way they are framed today in the post-Cold
War period, superimposes ideas of responsibility that were already there and
were formulated in Bandung in 1955: differences between intervention and
interference, the latter of which today comes coded as regime change, were
actually hardly debated. So our imaginaries of the world and how it works, of responsibility,
of ethics, etc., have always had to compete with those that were formulated
since the seventeenth century in Europe, as "international ethics",
"international law", "international theory". And in fact that long history full
of sliding concepts and similar meanings may be one of the problems for
understanding how the world came into being as we know it today. And this is
why actually my classes here always begin with a semester-long discussion of
hermeneutics, of historiography, and of ethnography in IR and how they have
been incorporated.





How
did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?



I came to where I am now essentially
because of a sense of frustration, that we have a discipline that calls itself
"international" and yet seemed to be speaking either univocally or
unidirectionally: univocally in imagining the world and unidirectionally in the
way it addresses the rest of the world, and a lot of problems result from that.




I had trained as a lawyer in Guinea, and
when I came to the US I imagined that International Relations would be taught
at law school, which is the case in France, most of the time, and also in some
places in Germany in the past, because it is considered a normative science
there. But when I came here I was shocked to discover that it was going to be
in a field called Political Science, but I went along with it anyway. In the
end I did a double major: in law, at the law school in Madison, Wisconsin, and
in political science. When I came to America and went the University of
Wisconsin, I first took a class called "Nuclear Weapons and World Politics" or
something of the sort, it was more theology and less science. It was basically
articulated around chosen people and non-chosen people, those who deserve to
have weapons and those who don't. There was no rationale, no discussion of
which countries respected the Non-Proliferation Treaty, no reasoning in terms of which
countries had been wiser than others in using weapons of mass destruction,
etc.: there was nothing to it except the underlying, intuitive belief that if
something has to be done, we do it and other people don't. I'm being crass
here, but let's face it: this was a course I took in the 1980s and it is still
the same today! So I began to feel that this is really more theology and less
science. Yes, it was all neatly wrapped in rationalism, in game theory, all of
these things. So I began to ask myself deeper questions, outside of the ones
they were asking, so my Nuclear Weapons and World Politics class was really
what bothered me, or you could say it was some kind of trigger.



This way of seeing IR is related to the
fact that I don't share the implicit monotheist underpinnings of the
discipline. That translates into my perhaps unorthodox teaching style,
unorthodox within American academia anyway. Teaching all too often tends to be
less about understanding the world and more about proselytizing. In order to
try to explore this understanding I like to bring my students to consider the
world that has existed, to imagine that sovereignty and politics can be
structured differently, especially outside of monotheism with its likening of
the sovereign to god, the hierarchy modeled on the church, Saint Peter, Jesus,
God, uniformity and the power of life (to kill or let live), and to understand
that there have always been places where the sovereign was not in fact that
revered. Think of India, for example, where people have multiple gods, and some
are mischievous, some are promiscuous, some are happy and some are mean, so
there are lots of conceptions and some of these don't translate well into
different cultural contexts. The same, incidentally, goes for the Greek gods.
Of course, we had to make the Greeks Christians first, before we drew our
lineage to them. You see what I mean? Christianity left a very deep impact on
Western traditions. Whether you think of political parties and a parallel to
the Catholic orders: if you are a Jesuit, the Jesuits are always right; if you
are a Franciscan, the Franciscans are always right. The Franciscans for instance
think they have the monopoly on Christian social teaching. In a similar way, it
doesn't matter what your political party does, you follow whatever your party
says. The same thing happens when you study: are you a realist, are you
liberalist, etc. You are replicating the Jesuits, the Franciscans, those monks
and their orders. But we are all caught within that logic, of tying ourselves
into one school of thought and going along with one "truth" over another,
instead of permitting multiple takes on reality..



For me, as a non-monotheist myself,
everything revolves around this question of truth: whether truth is given or
has to be found and how we find it. Truth has to be found, discovered, revealed—we
have to continuously search. The significant point is that we never find it
absolutely. Truth is always provisional, circumstantial, and pertinent to a
context or situation. We all want truth and it is always evading us, but we
must look for it. But I don't think that truth is given. It is in the Bible,
the Quran, and the Torah. And I am
comfortable with that but I am not in the realm of theology. I dwell on human
truths and humans are imperfect and not omniscient, at least not so
individually. 



If I had the truth, then I might be one
of those dictators governing in Africa today. I was raised a Catholic by the
way, I almost went to the seminary. If you just think through the story of the
Revelation in profane terms, you come to the realization that ours are multiple
revelations. Again in theology, one truth is given at a time—the Temple Mount,
the Tablets, and all that stuff—but that is not in our province. I leave that
to a different province and that is unattainable to me. The kind of revelation
I want is the one that goes through observing, through looking, through
deliberating, through inquiry—that I am comfortable with. There can be a
revelation in terms of meeting the unexpected, for example: when I went to the
New World, to Latin America for the first time, I said, 'wow, this is
interesting'. That was through my own senses, but it had a lot to do with the
way I prepared myself in order to receive the world and to interact with the
world. That kind of revelation I believe in. The other one is beyond me and I'm
not interested in that. When I want to be very blasphemous, even though I was
raised a Catholic, I tell my students: the problem with the Temple Mount is
that God did not have a Twitter account, so the rest of us didn't hear it—we
were not informed. I don't have the truth, and I don't really don't want to
have it.





What
would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a
global way?



I am not sure I want to make a canonical
recommendation, if that's what you are asking me for. Let me tell you this: I
have trained about eleven PhD students, and none of them has ever done what I
do. I am not interested in having clones, I don't want to recreate theology,
and in fact I feel this question to betray a very Western disposition, by
implying the need to create canons and theology. I don't want that. What I want
is to understand the world, and understanding can be done in multiple ways:
people do it through music, through art, through multiple things. The problem
for me, however, is actually the elements, assumptions, predicates of studies
and languages that we use in IR, the question to whom they make sense—I am
talking about the types of ethnographies, the ways in which we talk about
diplomatic history, and all of those things. The graduate courses that I was
talking about have multiple dimensions, but there are times in my seminars here
where I just take a look at events like what happened in the New World from
1492 to 1600. This allows me to talk about human encounters. The ones we have
recorded, of people who are mutually unintelligible, are the ones that took
place on this continent, the so-called New World. And what this does is that it
allows me to talk about encounters, to talk about all of the possibilities—you
know the ones most people talk about in cultural studies like creolization,
hybridization, and all those things—and all of the others things that happened
also which are not so helpful, such as violence, usurpation, and so forth.



What that allows me to do is to cut
through all this nonsense—yes I am going to call it nonsense—that projects the
image that what we do today goes back to Thucydides and has been handed down to
us through history to today. There are many strands of thought like that. If
you think about thought, and Western thought in general, all of those
historically rooted and contingent strands of thought have something to do with
how we construct social scientific fields of analysis today—realism,
liberalism, etc.—so I'm not dispensing with that. What I'm saying is that
history itself has very little to do with those strands of thought, and that
people who came here—obviously you had scientists who came to the New World—but
the policies on the ground had nothing to do with Thucydides, nothing to do
with Machiavelli, etc. Their practices actually had more to do with the
violence that propelled those Europeans from their own countries in seeking
refuge, and how that violence shaped them, the kind of attachments they had.
But it also had to do with the kind of cultural disposition here, and the
manner in which people were able to cope, or not. Because that's where we are
today in the post-Cold War era, the age of globalization, we must provide
analyses that are germane to how the constituents (or constitutive elements) of
the historically constituted 'international' are coping with our collective
inheritance. For me, this approach is actually much more instructive. This has
nothing to do with the Melian Dialogue and the like.



All of the stuff projected today as
canonical is interesting to me but only in limited ways. I actually read the
classics and have had my students read them, but try to get my students to read
them as a resource for understanding where we are today and how we were led
there, rather than as a resource for justifying or legitimating the manner in
which European conducted their 'foreign' policies or their actions in the New
World. No. I know enough to know that no action in the New World or elsewhere
was pre-ordained, unavoidable, or inevitable. The resulting political entities
in the West must assume the manners in which they acted. It is history,
literally. And of course we know through Voltaire, we know through Montaigne, we know even through Roger Bacon, that even in those times people realized that in
fact the world had not been made and hence had not been before as it would
become later; that other ways were (and still) are possible; and that the
pathologies of the violence of religious and civil wars in Europe conditioned
some the behaviours displayed in the New World and Africa during conquest and
enslavement.



For the same reason I recommend students
to read Kant: I tell them to read Kant as a resource for understanding how we might
think about the world today, but I am compelled to say often to my students
that before Kant, hospitality, and such cultural intermediaries as theDragomans in the Ottoman Empire, the Wangara in West Africa, the Chinese Diaspora in East and
Southeast Asia, and so forth, enabled commerce across continents for centuries
before Europe was included into the existing trading networks. This is not to
dismiss Kant, it is simply to force students to put Kant in conversation with a
different trajectory of the development of commercial societies, cross-regional
networks, and the movements to envisage laws, rules, and ethics to enable
communications among populations and individual groups.



This approach causes many people to ask
whether the IR programme at Johns Hopkins really concerns IR theory or something
else. I actually often get those kinds of questions, and they are wedded to
particular conceptions of IR. I am never able to give a fixed and quick answer
but I often illustrate points that I wish to make. Consider how scholars and
policymakers relate the question of sovereignty to Africa. Many see African
sovereignty as problem, either because they think it is abused or stands in the
way of humanitarian or development actions by supposed well-meaning Westerners.
I attempt to have my students think twice when sovereignty is evoked in that
way: 'sovereignty is a problem; the extents to which sovereignty is a problem
in Africa; and why sovereignty is unproblematic in Europe or America'. This
questioning and bracketing is not simply a 'postmodernist' evasion of the
question.



Rather, I invite my students to
reconsider the issue: if sovereignty is your problem, how do you think about the
problem? For me, this is a much more interesting question; not what the problem
is. For instance, if you start basing everything around a certain mythology of
the Westphalia model, particularly when you begin to see everything as either
conforming to it (the good) or deviating from it (the bad), then you have lost
me. Because before Westphalia there were actually many ways in which sovereigns
understood themselves, and therefore organized their realms, and how
sovereignty was experienced and appreciated by its subjects. Westphalia is a crucial
moment in Europe in these regards—I grant you that. If you want to say what is
wrong with Westphalia, that's fine too. But if Westphalia is your starting
point, the discussion is unlikely to be productive to me. Seriously!





In
your work on political identity in Africa, such as your contribution to the
2012 volume edited by Arlene Tickner and David Blaney, the terms periphery,
margin, lack of historicity recur frequently. What regional or perhaps even
global representational protagonism can you envisage for IR studies emerging
from Africa and its spokespeople?



The subjects of 'periphery' and 'marginalization'
come into my own thinking from multiple directions. One of them has to do with
the African state and the kind of subsidiarity it has assumed from the
colonization onward. That's a critique of the state of affairs and a commentary
on how Africa is organized and is governed. But I do also use it sometimes as a
direct challenge to people who think they know the world. And my second book, Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy (2006), was actually about that, and that book
was triggered by an account of an event in Africa, that everybody in African
Studies has repeated and still continues to repeat, which is this: in June
1960, Africans went to defend France, because
France asked them to. This is to say that nobody could imagine that
Africans—and I am being careful here in terms of how people describe Africans—understood
that they had a stake in the 'world' under assault during World War II. And so
the book actually begins with a simple question: in 1940, which France would
have asked Africans to defend it: Vichy France which was under German control,
or the Germans who occupied half of France? But the decision to defend France
actually came partly from a discussion between French colonial officers in Chad
and African veterans of World War I, who decided that the world had to be
restructured for Africa to find its place in it. They didn't do it for France,
because it's a colonial power, they did it for the world. That's the thing. And
Pétain, to his credit, is the only French
official who asked the pertinent question about that, in a letter to his
minister of justice (which is an irony, because justice under Pétain was a
different question) he said: 'I am puzzled, that in 1918 when we were
victorious, Africans rebelled; in 1940, we are defeated, and they come to our
aid. Could you explain that to me?' The titular head of Vichy had the decency
to ask that. By contrast, every scholar of Africa just repeated, 'Oh, the
French asked Africans to go fight, and the Africans showed up'.



Our inability to understand that Africa
actually sees itself as a part of the world, as a manager of the world, has so
escaped us today that in the case of Libya for instance, when people were
debating, you saw in every single newspaper in the world, including my beloved Guardian, that the African Union decided
this, but the International Community decided that, as if Africans had
surrendered their position in the international society to somebody: to the
International Community. People actually said that! The AU, for all its 'wretchedness',
after all represents about a quarter of the member states of the UN. And yet it
was said the AU decided this and the International Community decided that. The
implication is that the International Community is still the West plus Japan
and maybe somebody else, and in this case it was Qatar and Saudi Arabia: "good
citizens of the world", very "good democracies" etc. That's how deeply-set that
is, that people don't even check themselves. Every time they talk they chuck
Africa out of the World.  Nobody says,
America did this and the International Community decided that. All I am saying
is that our mindscapes are so deeply structured that nothing about Africa can
be studied on its own, can be studied as something that has universal
consequence, as something that has universal value, as something that might be
universalizing—that institutions in Africa might actually have some good use to
think about anything. Otherwise, people would have asked them how did colonial
populations—people who were colonized—overcome colonial attempts to strip them
of their humanity and extend an act of humanity, of human solidarity, to go
fight to defend them? And what was that about? Even many Africans fail to ask
that question today!



And it could be argued that this
thinking is, to some degree, down to widespread ignorance about Africa. We all
are guilty of this. And oddly, especially intellectuals are guilty of this, and
worse. Let me give you an example: recently I was in Tübingen in Germany, and I
went into a store to buy some shoes—a very fine store, wonderful people—and I
can tell you I ended up having a much more rewarding conversation with the
people working in the shoe shop than I had at Tübingen University. Because
there was a real curiosity. You would like to think that it is not so unusual
in this day and age that a person from Guinea teaches in America, but you
cannot blame them for being curious and asking many questions. At the
university, in contrast, they actually are making claims, and for me that is no
longer ignorance, that is hubris.





Your work presents an original take on the role of
language in International Relations. How is language tied up with IR theory?



The language problem has many, many
layers. The first of these is, simply, the issue of translation. If I were, for
instance, to talk to someone in my father's language about Great Power
Responsibility, they would look totally lost. Because in Guinea we have been what
white people call stateless or acephalous societies, the notion that one power
should have responsibility for another is a very difficult concept to
translate, because you are running up against imaginaries of power, of
authority, etc. that simply don't exist. So when you talk about such social scientific
categories to those people, you have to be aware of all the colonial era
enlightenment inheritances in them. When we talk about International Relations
in Africa, we thus bump into a whole set of problems: the primary problem of
translating ideas from here into those languages; another in capturing what
kind of institutions exist in those languages; and a third issue has to do with
how you translate across those languages. Consider for instance the difference
between Loma stateless societies in the rain forest
in Guinea, and Malinke who are very hierarchical, especially since SundiataKeita came to power in the 13th
century. But the one problem most people don't talk about is the very one that
is obsessing me now, is the question how I, as an African, am able to communicate
with you through Kant, without you assuming that I am a bad reader of Kant.



The difference that I am trying to make
here is actually what in linguistics is called vehicular language which is
distinct from vernacular language. Because a lot of you assume that vehicular language
is vernacular—that there is Latin and the rest is vernacular; that there is a
proper reading of Kant and everything else is vernacular; or you have
cosmopolitan and perhaps afropolitan and everything else is the vernacular of
it. But this is not in fact always the case. The most difficult thing for
linguists to understand, and for people in the social sciences to understand,
is that Kant, Hegel and other thinkers can avail themselves as resources that one
uses to try to convey imaginaries that are not always available to others—or to
Kant himself for that matter. And it is not analogical—it is not 'this is the
African Machiavelli'. It is easy to talk about power using Machiavelli, but to
smuggle into Machiavelli different kind of imaginaries is more difficult.
Nonetheless, I use Machiavelli because there is no other language available to
me to convey that to you, because you don't speak my father's language.



Moreover, there is a danger for instance
when I speak with my students that they may hear Machiavelli even when I am not
speaking of him, and I warn them to be very careful. Machiavelli is a way to
bring in a different stream of understanding of Realpolitik, but it's not entirely Machiavelli. If you spoke my
father's language, I would tell you in my father's language, but that is not
available to me here, so Machiavelli is a vehicle to talk about something else.
Sometimes people might say to me 'what you are saying sounds to me like Kant
but it's not really Kant' then I remind them that before Kant there were
actually a lot of people who talked about the sublime, the moral, the
categorical imperative, etc. in different languages; and if you are patient
with me then we will get to the point when Kant belongs to a genealogy of
people who talked about certain problems differently, and in that context Kant
is no longer a European: I place Kant in the context of people who talk about
politics, morality, etc. differently and I want to offer you a bunch of
resources and please, please don't package me, because you don't own the
interpretation of Kant, because even in your own context in Europe today Kant
is not your contemporary, so you are making a lot of translations and I am
making a lot of translations to get to something else: it is not that I am not
a bad reader.



At an ISA conference I once was attacked
by a senior colleague in IR for being a bad reader of Hegel, and I had to
explain to him that while my using Hegel might be an act of imposition, and a
result of having been colonized and given Hegel, but at this particular moment
he should consider my gesture as an act of generosity, in the sense that I was
reading Hegel generously to find resources that would allow him to understand
things that he had no idea exist out there, and Hegel is the only tool
available to me at this moment. But because all of you believe in one theology
or another, he insisted that if I spoke Hegelian then I was Hegelian, and I
retorted that I was not, but that deploying Hegel was merely an instance of
vehicular language, allowing me to explore certain predicates, certain precepts
and assumptions, and that is all. In this way, I can use Kant, or Hegel, or
Hobbes, or Locke, and my problem when I do this is not with those thinkers—I
can ignore the limitations of their thinking which was conditioned by the
realities of their time—my problem is with those people who think they own
traditions originating from long dead European thinkers. Thus, my problem today
is less with Kant than with Kantians.



Or take Hobbes: Hobbes talked about the
body in the way that it was understood in his time, and about human faculties
in the way that they were understood at that time. Anybody who quotes Hobbes
today about the faculties of human nature, I have to ask: when was the last
time you read biology? I am not saying that Hobbes wasn't a very smart man; he
was an erudite, and I am not joking. It is not his problem that people are
still trivializing human faculties and finding issue with his view of how the
body works—of course he was wrong on permeability, on cohabitation, on what
organs live in us, etc.—he was giving his account of politics through metaphors
and analogies that he understood at that time. When I think about it this way, my
problem is not that Hobbes didn't have a modern understanding of the body, the
distribution of the faculties and the extent of human capacities. Nor is my
problem that Hobbes is Western. My problem is not with Hobbes himself. My
problem is with all these realists who based their understanding of sovereignty
or borders strictly on Hobbes' illustrations but have not opened a current book
on the body that speaks of the faculties. If they did, even their own analogies
may begin to resonate differently. There is new research coming out all the
time on how we can understand the body, and this should have repercussions on
how we read Hobbes today.



The absence of contextualization and
historicization has proved a great liability for IR. Historicity allows one to
receive Hobbes and all those other writers without indulging in mindless
simplicities. It helps get away from simplistic divisions of the world—for
instance, the West here and Africa there—from the assumptions that when I speak
about postcolonialism in Africa I must be anti-Western. I am in fact growing very
tired of those kinds of categories. As a parenthesis, I must ask if some of those
guys in IR who speak so univocally and unidirectionally to others are even
capable of opening themselves up to hearing other voices. I must also reveal
that Adlai Stevenson, not some postcolonialist, alerted me
to the problem of univocality when he stated in 1954 during one UN forum that 'Everybody
needed aid, the West surely needs a hearing aid'. Hearing is indeed the one
faculty that the West is most in need of cultivating. The same, incidentally,
could be said of China nowadays.



One of the things I would like
to deny Western canonist is their inclination to think of the likes of Diderot as Westerners. In his Supplément au Voyage a Bougainville (1772), Diderot presents a
dialogue between himself and Orou, a native Tahitian. Voltaire wrote dialogues,
some real, some imaginary, about and with China. The authors' people were
reflecting on the world. It is hubris and an act of usurpation in the West
today to want to lay claim to everything that is perceived to be good for the
West. By the same token that which is bad must come from somewhere else. This
act of usurpation has led to the appropriation—or rather internal colonization—of
Diderot and Voltaire and like-minded philosophers and publicists who very much
engaged the world beyond their locales. I have quarrels with this act of
colonization, of the incipit parochialization of authors who ought not to be. I
have quarrels with Voltaire's characterization of non-Europeans at times; but I
have a greater quarrel with how he has been colonized today as distinctly European.
Voltaire rejected European orthodoxies of his day and opted explicitly to enter
into dialogue with Chinese and Africans as he understood them. Diderot, too, was
often in dialogue with Tahitians and other non-Europeans. In fact, the
relationship between Diderot and the Tahitian was exactly the same as the
relationship between Socrates and Plato, in that you have an older person
talking and a younger person and less wise person listening. A lot of Western
philosophy and political theory was actually generated—at least in the modern
period—after contact with the non-West. So how that is Western I don't know. I
encounter the same problem when I am in Africa where I am accused of being
Western just because I make the same literary references. It is a paradox today
that even literature is assigned an identity for the purpose of hegemony and/or
exclusion. Francis Galton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton) travelled widely and wrote dialogues from this
expedition in Africa, so how can we say to what extent the substance of such
dialogues was Western or British?





So in sum you are not trying to counter Western
thought, but do you feel that the African political experience and your own
perspective can bring something new to IR studies?



I am going to try and express
something very carefully here, because the theory of the state in Africa
brought about untold horrors—in Sierra Leone, in Liberia, and so on—so I am not
saying this lightly. But I have said to many people, Africans and non-Africans,
that I am glad that the postcolonial African state failed, and I wish many more
of them failed, and I'm sure a lot more will fail, because they correspond to
nothing on the ground. The idea of constitutions and constitutionalism came
with making arrangements with a lot of social elements that were generated by
certain entities that aspired to go in certain directions. What happened in
Africa is that somebody came and said: 'this worked there, it should work here'—and
it doesn't. I'll give you three short stories to illustrate this.



One of the presidents of postcolonial
Guinea, the one I despise the most, Lansana Conté (in office 1984-2008), also gave me one
of my inspirational moments. Students rebelled against him and destroyed
everything in town and so he went on national TV that day and said: 'You know
I'm very disheartened. I am disheartened about children who have become
Europeans.' Obviously the blame would be on Europe. He continued, 'They are
rude, they don't respect people or property. I understand that they may have
quarrels with me, but I also understand that we are Africans. And though we may
no longer live in the village', and it is important for me that he said that, 'though
we may no longer live in the village, when we move in the big city, the council
of elders is what parliament does for us now. We don't have the council of
elders, instead we have parliament. They, the students, can go to parliament
and complain about their father. I am their father, my children are older than
all of them. So in the village, they would have gone to the council of elders,
and they could have done this and I would have given them my explanation'. And
the next morning, the whole country turned against the students, because what
he had succeeded in doing was to touch and move people. They went to the head
of the student government, who said: 'The president was right. We had failed to
understand that our ways cannot be European ways, and we can think about our
modern institutions as iterations of what we had in the past, suited to our
circumstances, and so we should not do politics in the same way. I agree with
him, and in that spirit I want to say that among the Koranko ethnic group,
fathers let their children eat meat first, because they have growing needs, and
if the father doesn't take care of his children, then they take the children
away from the father and give them to the uncle. Our problem at the university
is that our stipends are not being paid, and father has all his mansions in
France, in Spain, and elsewhere, so we want the uncle.' He was in effect asking
for political transition: he was saying they were now going to the council of
elders, the parliament, and demand the uncle, for father no longer merits being
the father. He was able to articulate political transition and rotation in that
language. It was a very clever move.



The second one was my mother who was
completely unsympathetic to me when I came home one day and was upset that one
of my friends who was a journalist had been arrested. She said, 'if you wish
you can go back to your town but don't come here and bother me and be grumpy'. So
I started an exchange with her and explained to her why it is important that we
have journalists and why they should be free, until our discussion turned to
the subject of speaking truth to power. At that moment she said, 'now you are
talking sense' and she started to tell me how the griot functioned in West Africa for the past
eight hundred years, and why truth to power is part of our institutional
heritage. But that truth is not a personal truth, for there is an organic
connection between reporter and the community, there is a group in which they
collect information, communicate and criticize, and we began to talk about
that. And since then I have stopped teaching Jefferson in my constitutional
classes in Africa, as a way of talking about the free press, instead I talk
about speaking truth to power. But it allows me not only to talk about the
necessity of speaking truth to power, but also to criticize the organization of
the media, which is so individualised, so oriented toward the people who give
the money: think of the National Democratic Institute in
Washington, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Germany, they
have no organic connection to the people. And my mother told me, 'as long as
it's a battle between those who have the guns and those who have the pen, then
nobody is speaking to my problems, then I have no dog in that fight'. And
journalists really make a big mistake by not updating their trade and
redressing it. Because speaking truth to power is not absent in our tradition,
we have had it for eight hundred years, six centuries before Jefferson, but we
don't think about it that way. I have to remind my friends in Guinea: 'you are
vulnerable precisely because you have not understood what the profession of
journalism might look like in this community, to make your message more
relevant and effective'. You see the smart young guys tweeting away and how
they have been replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, because we have not made the
message relevant to the community. We are communicating on media and in idioms
that have no real bearing on people's lives, so we are easily dismissed. That
is in fact the tragedy of what happened in Tunisia: the smart, young protesters
have so easily been brushed aside for this reason.



The third story is about how we had a
constitutional debate in Guinea before multipartism, and people were talking about
the separation of powers. And I went to the university to talk to a group of
people and I put it to them: why do you waste your time studying the American
Constitution and the separation of powers in America? I grant you, it is a
wonderful experiment and it has lasted two hundred years, but that would not
lead you anywhere with these people. The theocratic Futa Jallon in Guinea (in the 18th and
19th centuries) had one of the most advanced systems of separation
of powers: the king was in Labé, the constitution was in Dalaba, the people who
interpreted the constitution were in yet another city, the army was based in
Tougué. It was the most decentralised organization of government you can
imagine, and all predicated on the idea that none of the nine diwés, or provinces, should actually
have the monopoly of power. So those that kept the constitution were not
allowed to interpret it, because the readers were somewhere else. But to make
sure that what they were reading was the right document, they gave it to a
different province. So the separation of powers is not new to us.



In sum, the West is a wonderful
political experiment, and it has worked for them.
We can actualize some of what they have instituted, but we have sources here
that are more suited to the circumstances of the people in that region, without
undermining the modern ideas of democratic self-governance, without undermining
the idea of a republic. Without dispensing with all of those, we must not be
tempted to imagine constitution in the same way, to imagine separation of
powers in the same way, even to imagine and practice journalism in the same
way, in this very different environment. It is going to fail. That is my third
story.





Siba N. Grovogui has
been teaching at Johns Hopkins University after holding the DuBois-Mandela
postdoctoral fellowship of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 1989-90 and
teaching at Eastern Michigan University from 1993 to 1995. He is currently
professor of international relations theory and law at The Johns Hopkins
University. He is the author of Sovereigns,
Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-determination in International
Law (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Institutions
and Order (Palgrave, April 2006). He has recently completed a ten-year long
study partly funded by the National Science Foundation of the rule of law in
Chad as enacted under the Chad Oil and Pipeline Project.





Related links




Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins University
Read Grovogui's Postcolonial Criticism: International Reality and Modes of Inquiry (2002 book chapter) here (pdf)
Read Grovogui's The Secret Lives of Sovereignty (2009 book chapter) here (pdf)
Read Grovogui's Counterpoints and the Imaginaries Behind Them: Thinking Beyond
North American and European Traditions (2009 contribution to International Political Sociology) here (pdf)
Read Grovogui's Postcolonialism (2010 book chapter) here (pdf)
Read Grovogui's Sovereignty in Africa: Quasi-statehood and Other Myths (2001 book chapter in a volume edited by Tim Shaw and Kevin Dunn) here (pdf)




Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Performing (for) Survival. Theatre, Crisis, Extremity – schon in diesem Titel spiegelt sich der weite Ansatz des vorliegenden Sammelbandes, der in fünf Teile gegliedert ist. Einleitend erläutern die HerausgeberInnen die Idee der Beiträge, zu erklären, warum sich Menschen in Krisensituationen in "performance communities" organisieren und wie soziale und ästhetische, sanktionierte und "underground" Performances als Überlebensmechanismen eingesetzt werden. "Survival" wird in unterschiedlichsten Bedeutungen verwendet, "ranging from sheer physical survival, to the survival of a social group with its own unique culture and values, to the very possibility of agency and dissent" (S. 1). Die Beiträge zeigen die Funktionen von Performances als Form des politischen Widerstandes sowie als Möglichkeit einer Gesellschaft in der Krise, sich zu definieren. Der Performance-Begriff wird weit gezogen, von "well-made plays" bis zum Hungerstreik. Wichtig ist den HerausgeberInnen jedoch das radikale transformative Potential zu vermitteln, das eine Performance in den unterschiedlichsten Kontexten beinhalten kann. In "Part I Surviving War and Exile: National and Ethnic Identity in Performance" werden Performances während politischer Aufstände in Eritrea bzw. der Tutsis in Verbindung mit ihrer Rückkehr nach Ruanda beschrieben. Christine Matzke analysiert die Funktionen der Theater- und Musikaufführungen der Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) sowie der Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) im Zuge der Befreiungsbewegung von Äthiopien in den 1970er und frühen 1980er Jahren. Beliebt waren Musik und stark verkürzte Theaterstücke, die zur Unterhaltung, für Propaganda und "nation building" eingesetzt wurden. Breed und Mukaka beschreiben die Arbeiten von Tutsi-KünstlerInnen in der Diaspora, die Performances zum kulturellen Überleben sowie zur intendierten Rückkehr nach Ruanda einsetzten; der Fokus liegt auf den Jahren 1959 bis 1994. In der Analyse der Theaterstücke wird der Rückgriff auf eine mythische Vergangenheit zur Stärkung der gegenwärtigen Identität deutlich. Allerdings zeigt sich in diesen Performances auch deren Problem: sobald die Krise vorüber ist, kann es passieren, dass die performativen Mittel die Zensur eines Einparteienstaats stützen. In "Part II A Space Where Something Might Survive: Theatre in Concentration Camps" stehen theatrale Aktivitäten in Theresienstadt und Auschwitz im Fokus. Lisa Peschel untersucht die Beziehung zwischen Theater, Trauma und Resilienz anhand von Berichten ehemaliger Häftlinge in Theresienstadt, die 1963 von der Studentin Eva Šormová interviewt worden waren. Diese Berichte bringt Peschel mit den Thesen der Psychiaterin Judith Herman in Bezug, die drei Punkte nennt, um eine Genesung von traumatischen Erlebnissen zu ermöglichen: "they were able to establish a safe space, to create coherent narratives of potentially traumatizing experiences, and to reconnect with themselves, each other, and the world outside the ghetto." (S. 59) Da im Ghetto Theresienstadt ab Herbst 1942 Theater- und Kabarettaufführungen erlaubt waren, konnte ein "safe space" geschaffen werden, der zumindest kurzzeitig die Möglichkeit bot, dem Lageralltag zu entfliehen. Etwas komplizierter ist Hermans Ansatz "to create coherent narratives of potentially traumatizing experiences" (S. 59) in Bezug auf die in Theresienstadt entstandenen Theaterstücke. In den entsprechenden Texten wird indirekt auf die traumatischen Erfahrungen eingegangen, oft durch komische Allegorien, wie Peschel anhand dreier überlieferter Texte belegt. Vereinzelung und Reduzierung einer Person vom Individuum zu einer namenlosen Nummer (für Transporte) gehörte zu den Maßnahmen des NS-Regimes gegenüber den KZ-Insassen. In der Arbeit an einer Theater-, Kabarett- oder Musikaufführung konnte diese Vereinzelung durch die Erarbeitung von Narrativen über die gemeinsame Erfahrung des Lageralltags überwunden werden. Zu diesem Prozess trug auch der Austausch mit den ZuseherInnen bei, deren Individualität ebenfalls gestärkt wurde. Durch die verwendete Sprache – etwa tschechisch – gelang der Zusammenhang mit der tschechischen Nation und damit eine Anknüpfung zur Welt außerhalb des Ghettos. Die literarischen Werke von Charlotte Delbo, die aufgrund ihres Engagements in der Resistance von 1942 bis zur Befreiung 1945 in verschiedenen Lagern inhaftiert gewesen war, stehen im Fokus von Amanda Stuart Fishers Beitrag. Erst in den 1960er Jahren publizierte Delbo ihre Texte, die weder direkt autobiographisch noch historiographisch sind, sondern als "concentrationary literature" (S. 80) bezeichnet werden. 1982 erschien ihr Theaterstück Who Will Carry the World? über Auschwitz. Durch die Wahl des Dramas als Form wollte Delbo erreichen, dass die hier aufgezeichneten Erinnerungen auch ausgesprochen wurden, was für die/den Rezipienten eine andere Form der Auseinandersetzung ermöglichte. Ausgehend von Delbos weiteren literarischen Arbeiten über das Leben in den Lagern, werden theatrale Aktivitäten beschrieben. Im Versuch, die Zusammenhänge zwischen Überleben und Theater in Delbos "concentrationary world" zu verbinden, arbeitet Fisher heraus, dass es auch hier um das Zusammensein ging, das Dasein mit und für die Anderen, das sich der Vereinzelung und Brutalität der KZs entgegenstellte. Drei sehr unterschiedliche Beiträge finden sich in "Part III Tactics and Strategies: Dissent under Oppressive Regimes". Cariad Astles beschreibt die Funktionen von Puppenspiel während bzw. nach drei politischen Diktaturen. Macelle Mahala geht auf die Theaterstücke des kongolesischen Autors und Regisseurs Sony Labou Tansi (1947–1995) ein, und Samer Al-Saber auf Zensur und weitere Unterdrückungsmaßnahmen, auf die eine palästinensische Theaterproduktion in Israel stieß. Astles' Ausgangspunkt ist die Überzeugung, dass Puppen durch ihre Möglichkeit einer grotesken Darstellungsweise besonders dafür geeignet seien, die Absurdität einer politischen Situation abzubilden. Sie belegt dies anhand dreier historischer Beispiele von Puppenspielen in der Tschechoslowakei während der NS-Zeit, zwischen Diktatur und Demokratie nach dem Tod Francos in Spanien sowie in Chile nach Pinochets Diktatur. Sony Labou Tansis Theaterstücke entstanden zwischen den späten 1970er und der Mitte der 1990er Jahre, während er eine Reihe von politischen Umstürzen und autoritären Regimes erlebte, gegen die er in seinen Werken anzugehen versuchte. Wie Macelle Mahala darstellt, wird er in der Literaturwissenschaft als "African absurd" und "Afro pessimist" bezeichnet, was eine Analyse der Texte jedoch nur teilweise bestätigt. Sehr genau geht Mahala auf die Diktaturkritik sowie den kreativen Widerstand gegen eine repressive Gesellschaft in Tansis Theatertexten ein, die er auf ihre grotesken und humoresken Elemente hin untersucht. Samer Al-Saber beschreibt anhand der palästinensischen Produktion Mahjoob Mahjoob von El-Hakawati die Vorgänge rund um die geplanten Aufführungen dieses Theatertexts, beginnend 1979. Ausgehend von Edward Saids Konzept betreffend der Abwehrhaltung, die zionistische Narrative in der westlichen Öffentlichkeit im Vergleich zu den palästinensischen erfahren, zeichnet Al-Saber die Geschichte der Aufführung von Mahjoob Mahjoob bzw. deren Verbote und Schwierigkeiten nach. "Part IV Coming in from the Outside: Theatre, Community, Crisis" nimmt eine Sonderstellung in diesem Band ein, da hier nicht eine Gesellschaft in der Krise aktiv wird, sondern diese Tätigkeiten von Außenstehenden in eine "depressed community" getragen werden. Ein Beispiel ist die von Katie Beswick beschriebene Arbeit der Specially Produced Innovatively Directed Theatre Company (SPID), einer Gruppe professioneller Film- und Theaterleute, die seit 2005 in den verrufenen Kensal House Estates in West London gemeinsam mit BewohnerInnen an Theaterproduktionen und Filmen arbeitet. Graham Jeffrey, Neill Patton, Kerrie Schaefer und Tom Wakeford stellen in der Folge die Arbeit des Theatro Modo im Nordosten von Schottland vor, einer Region mit hoher Jugendarbeitslosigkeit. Anspruch des Theatro Modo ist "high quality engagement in circus, street theatre and carnival arts as a catalyst for individual and community change" (S. 185). Besonders Jugendliche wurden erfolgreich in dieser Theater- und Kunstinitiative tätig, und Modo konnte Menschen, die kaum eine Perspektive sahen, einen Raum eröffnen. Hungerstreiks sind eine extreme Form von Performances. Sie als solche zu benennen klingt zynisch, aber: Ein Hungerstreik muss sichtbar sein, um seine Absicht erkennen zu lassen und zu erfüllen und wird demgemäß mit allen medialen Mitteln an die Öffentlichkeit getragen. In "Part V Crisis and Extremity as Performance" geht es um Hungerstreiks in zwei unterschiedlichen Kontexten. Aylwyn Walsh analysiert einen Hungerstreik von 300 MigrantInnen in Athen 2011, mit dem versucht wurde, den Umgang mit MigrantInnen in Griechenland zu thematisieren. Ganz anders waren Ausgangspunkt und Ziele der Hungerstreiks im nordirischen Gefängnis HM Prison Maze in den 1980er Jahren, die von Patrick Duggan u.a. in Hinblick auf ihre performative Seite analysiert werden. Nachdem die britische Regierung 1976 den Status der politischen Gefangenen abgeschafft und diese so auf eine Stufe mit anderen Kriminellen gestellt hatte, kam es zu einer Protestwelle im Maze, die in Hungerstreiks endete, welche 1980 und 1981 zum Tod von zehn Häftlingen führten. "Coda: Picturing Charlie Hebdo" von Sophie Nield bildet den Abschluss des Bandes, in dem versucht wird, die Pariser Ereignisse 2015 miteinzubeziehen. Nield weist darauf hin, dass Symbole und Aktionen (hier die Terroranschläge – und Cartoons als ihr angeblicher Auslöser) verknüpft sind. Sie regt dazu an, Formen von Performances auf ihre Materialität hin zu analysieren. Performances in Extrem- und Krisensituationen werden in diesem Band in ihrer Funktion und Wirkungsweise untersucht sowie ihr transformatives Potential (und deren möglicher Missbrauch in geänderten Kontexten) herausgearbeitet. Die Beiträge basieren auf unterschiedlichsten Materialien, vom gedruckten Theaterstück bis hin zu literarischen Quellen sowie aktuellen bzw. historischen Interviews. In allen finden sich theoretische Fundierungen sowie ausführliche Beschreibungen des Kontexts. Die Details der einzelnen Performances in der jeweiligen Krisen- bzw. Extremsituation zu erfassen, muss aufgrund der Fülle und der Breite der Themen und Länder der Leserin/dem Leser des Bandes vorbehalten bleiben.

The purpose of the article is to discuss punishments of kürek, i.e., penal servitude on the galleys, and forced labor at the Imperial Arsenal (Tersâne-i Amire), imposed on Jewish men by kadis and Ottoman governors during the 16th-19th centuries in the Ottoman Empire. The kürek (lit. "oar") punishment was inflicted for serious crimes, e.g., adultery, heresy, prostitution, and coin-clipping, as well as other grave offenses for which the Shari'ah/Kanon prescribed the death penalty. At times it was also administered for lesser crimes. We learn that this punishment was administered particularly when the Ottoman navy needed more working hands, mainly after the Battle of Lepanto in October 1571 and during the campaign for the conquest of Crete in the 1660s. This punishment was meted out mainly to Jewish offenders from Istanbul and Izmir. The article discusses the execution of these punishments in light of many sources and draws conclusions in the light of extensive research literature. 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(eds.), Craft and Craftsmen of the Middle East, London 2005. ; FO – National Archives, Foreign Office Archives, London 78/4; 78/109. ; Galanté A., Histoire des Juifs de Turquie, 7, Istanbul 1980. ; Goldmann I., The Life and Times of Rabbi David ibn Abi Zimra, New York 1970. ; Grunbaum P., Les Juifs d'Orient, "REJ" 1983, vol. 28. ; Grunhaus N., Ha-misuy ba-qheilah ha-yeudit be-Izmir ba-me'ot ha-sheva ve- ha- shemone esre (The Taxation of Izmir's Jewish Community in the 17th and 18th Centuries), Tel Aviv 1997. ; Hacker J.R., Jewish Autonomy in the Ottoman Empire – Its Scope and Limits: Jewish Courts from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, [in:] The Jews of the Ottoman Empire, ed. A. Levy, Princeton 1994. ; Hartley J., Researches in Greece and the Levant, London 1831. ; Hathaway J., The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem, From African Slave to Power-Broker, Cambridge 2018. ; Heyd U., Studies in Old Criminal Law, ed. V.L.Ménage, Oxford 1973. ; Heyd U., Alilot dam beturkiya bame'ot hachamesh esre ve-ha-shesh esre (Blood Libels in Turkey in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries), "Sefunot" 1961, vol. 5. ; Imber C., The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650, London 2002. ; Imber C., The Navy of Suleyman the Magnificent, "Archivum Ottomanicum" 1980, vol. 6. ; Imber C., Studies in Ottoman History and Law, Istanbul 1996. ; Israel R.M., Mas'et moshe, Responsa, 2, Istanbul 1835. ; Isaac b. David R., Diverei emet, Responsa, Istanbul 1760. ; The Jewish Expositor and the Friends of Israel, 12 (1827); 14 (1829). ; Kalderon A.E., Turkish Jews of Istanbul and Missionary Activities during the Reign of Mahmud II, "Turcica" 1991, vol. 14. ; Lewis B., 'al-Ḥaramayn', The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New edition, [in:] B. Lewis, V.L. Ménage, C. Pellat, J. 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From the nostalgia of the Promised Land to the nostalgia of the exile land of the Moroccan Israelites The disappearance of the Jews in Morocco, noticed after the fact, gave rise to a great deal of questioning: were the motives behind this phenomenon mystical or Zionist in nature? Or were they the result of persecution? In the Morocco of the 1980's, the mellah showed the only remnants of the civilization, the testament of a bygone existence. Both recent and distant past in the memories of those living alongside the Jews. In pre-Protectorate Morocco, the Judeo-Arabic coexistence gave way to socio-economic organization that can ultimately be called interdependence. Economically speaking, the Jewish existence was seen as necessary for the Muslim society. It was the result of a coexistence, varying according to the era in question and the reigning symbiosis and hostility. Trades a Muslim could not or did not wish to take on were left to the Jews, from import-export trade to peddling. This division of work, perceived as both discrimination and allocation, is representative of the ambiguity of the Judeo-Arabic relation. This ambiguity disturbs the work of researchers in the field. If Jews were merely tolerated, subject to their discriminatory status, so be it, but their presence was still generally seen as necessary by the Muslim. By the same token, the Jews' political substatus in Muslim society represented a permanent strength against assimilation, and the preservation of an ancestral link with the homeland. The mellah, symbolizing exclusion, also allowed the Jewish community to be a homogenous social, political, economical and cultural group, a micro-society whose religious identity was constant and rigorous growth, through a series of rituals and practices. Tradition kept identity alive: the Jewish identity, alive in a single prayer to return to Holy Land. The fragile Judeo-Arabic equilibrium, little-known by those who dreamt of colonizing North Africa (beginning in the 19th century), was upset by the French Protectorate of Morocco (1912-1956). With its colonialist ideology, the latter imposes a policy that widened the gap between Jews and Muslims, exacerbating their religious differences and affecting their relations. The Protectorate Morocco had a rude awakening to a number of outside influences -the invasion of European capitalism, administrative reforms and modernism- causing rapid destruction of traditional values. The population grew poorer in their inability to maintain the furious pace of this revolution, while the Muslim intellectual youth, deprived of its traditional privileges, took up the struggle against the foreign stranglehold on its country. The spare of early nationalism driven by the Protectorate's so-called Berber politics, whose project was to distinguish between Berbers and Moroccans through possible conversion to Catholicism and the French language. The anticolonialist struggle found its way in a growing Islamic identity which attracted the masses and united Moroccan leaders behind the struggles of North Africa. In the Jewish community, the effect of the Protectorate is more significant. The westernization process attracts an elite aspiring to rise to the European level using the French language and culture, and wishing to legitimately free itself from the demeaning dhimma status. A long way from the parent population whose fate is the same as the Muslims, privileged individuals of the Jewish community distance themselves both from the religious tradition of the Jewish identity as well as the age-old Judeo-Arabic rituals. This distinction manifests itself in education and travel, or simply moving away. The new class of Europeanized Jews abandons the use of the vernacular for French and leaves the mellah to the poor, the uneducated, and the destitute. The tensions between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, intensified by the Balfour Declaration (1917), also feed the Muslim-Arabic identity whose followers include Muslim nationalists. This option distances the Jewish community from the political scene and thus future Moroccan perspectives. While the Muslim mass is won through this struggle, the Jewish mass continues, away from the political upheavals shaking the Arabic world, to dream of the Promised Land and nurture a sense of nostalgia. This nostalgia is fulfilled with the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948, thus launching the Moroccan 'aliya. Exile was the great memory, the mystical nostalgia, wandering and danger, uprooting and spiritual affirmation. Moroccan roots were merely of convenience despite lasting so many generations, though Moroccan Jews had buried there their forefathers, created shared ways and customs, tended to their cherished cemeteries, developed their languages. and nonetheless Morocco spiritually had only ever been a temporary home, a land of transition, a lesser evil in adversity? Once the wandering and danger over, what of this Promised Land? Did some nourishment, for the mind and body, heart and soul, rise from this new breeding ground where the long awaited and conflicted resettlement occurred? The components of the plural memory have come together in the great gathering: places, values and manners, feelings, social perceptions, exposing to all the divide, the diversity and marks of exile, showing the socio-theologico-political disparities. Disparities that Zionism, in its hope for Jewish unity, planned to standardize and smooth into unity. A project impossible without the cultural uprooting and the identity crisis of North Africans. Taken to Israel beginning in 1948, Moroccan Jews met with a Western model established by the pioneers of European socialism: the Ashkenazi. Very early, the Israeli population was divided into two groups; the Ashkenazi, founders of the country they lead, and their recently immigrated coreligionists: the North Africans, who, for the first twenty years of their lives in Israel, would be members of the proletariat. The messianic ideal motivating the Moroccan 'alya confronted the secular conception of the Israeli state. This conception involves the rejection of the Diaspora heritage and the Exile of the Jews in favour of a new "normal" nation in the image of developed Western societies. The secular State based on legitimate representation of the Jewish people, replaces religious identification with a state identification or nationalism, a status unknown to Moroccan immigrants barely removed from their secular status as traditional religious minority. To the Judaism by choice succeeds Judaism by nature and community organization becomes a complex state organization closed to new citizens. For new Moroccan immigrants, the Jewish identity should suffice for integration into the Promised Land, but once arrived, the reality of significant differences regarding religious practice, language, rituals, tradition, and economic differences caused disillusion of the sacred dream: "In Morocco, he was Jewish, Jewish through the heritage of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Jewish tangled in the holy and sacred Law of Moses. (.) In Israel, he became -what a turn of events!- Arabic." Out of this disillusion arose nostalgia, nostalgia for the first nostalgia, nostalgia for the exile that some authors (Ami Bouganim, Erez Bitton) would continue to sing: "She sings the exile, a nostalgic tone in the voice, the exile from Jerusalem, the exile from Spain, the exile from Morocco. (.) She sings a Spanish serenade then a French song, an Arabic threnody then a hymn in Hebrew. (.) Without end, Zohra's songs recreate the fabulous scenery of her past." Recreate the scenery of one's past to struggle against the oblivion of the deads and the depersonalization of the livings. Recalling an identity lost in a process of assimilation imposing the oblivion of the Jewish Diaspora and the rebirth of Modern Hebrew. Memory finds its place once again: recreating an identity and a culture parallel to the national Israeli identity and culture. And this reconstitution is first reactivated through maternal memory, a domestic memory constituting ancestral rituals, smell of cooking, laughters, household tasks, games, festive music, superstitions and rumours, jokes in local dialect. folkloric memories. Because the mother is the character who embodies tradition, who has been the least touched by the maelstrom of the 'alya. It is in the literary expression of Moroccan Israelites that we see this nostalgia, through characters who do not feel they are part of a coherent Israeli entity. The language, the culture and the mentality exacerbate these differences, and allow their particularism take its course. Even though it is an historical fact, the creation of the Israeli society underwent the rules of immigration. More than elsewhere, the Israeli terrain is best suited for a review of immigration issues: integration, acculturation, ethnic mix, as a hypothesis of the future of societies in the growing globalization of our world. ; De la nostalgie de la terre promise à la nostalgie de la terre d'exil chez les Israéliens originaires du Maroc La disparition, constatée après coup, des Juifs du Maroc suscita bien des interrogations : les motivations de cette envolée étaient-elles de nature mystique ou sioniste ? Ou la conséquence de persécution ? Dans le Maroc des années 80, le mellah seul en montrait les vestiges et témoignait d'une existence révolue. Un passé proche et lointain gisant dans les mémoires de ceux pour qui le Juif fut du voisinage. Dans le Maroc d'avant le Protectorat, la coexistence judéo-arabe donnait lieu à une organisation socio-économique que l'on peut, malgré tout, qualifier d'interdépendance. L'existence juive en société musulmane était reconnue nécessaire au plan économique. Il en découlait une coexistence dont la nature variait selon les périodes et les règnes entre symbiose et hostilité. Les corps de métiers qu'un musulman ne pouvait ou ne voulait faire étaient laissés aux Juifs depuis l'import-export jusqu'au commerce itinérant. Ce partage de fonction qui est perçu à la fois comme une discrimination et une répartition, comporte en soi l'ambiguïté du rapport juif-arabe. Cette ambiguïté embarrasse le travail du chercheur dans ce domaine. Que le Juif ne fut que toléré, soumis au statut discriminatoire, soit, il n'en demeure pas moins que sa présence était généralement reconnue nécessaire par le Musulman. Parallèlement, le sous-statut politique du Juif dans la société musulmane lui était une force permanente contre l'assimilation et pour le maintien d'un lien ancestral avec la terre antique. Le mellah qui symbolisait l'exclusion, permettait aussi à la communauté juive d'être un groupe social, politique, économique et culturel homogène, une micro-société dont l'identité religieuse se cultivait continuellement et rigoureusement en un ensemble de rites et de pratiques. La tradition véhiculait l'identité ; celle d'être juif, animée par une seule prière celle de retrouver la Terre Sainte. Le fragile équilibre judéo-arabe, méconnu par ceux qui rêvent de coloniser l'Afrique du Nord (à partir du 19ème siècle), se déstabilise avec le Protectorat français (1912-1956) au Maroc. Par son idéologie colonialiste, ce dernier avance une politique éloignant encore plus les Juifs des Musulmans en exacerbant leurs différences religieuses et en affectant leurs rapports. Le Maroc du Protectorat s'ouvre brutalement aux influences extérieures : invasion du capitalisme européen, réformes administratives et modernisme, causent une destruction accélérée des valeurs traditionnelles. La masse populaire s'appauvrit, faute de pouvoir suivre le rythme effréné de cette révolution, tandis que la jeunesse intellectuelle musulmane, privée de ses privilèges traditionnels, élabore des formes de lutte contre la mainmise étrangère sur son pays. La flamme naissante du nationalisme est attisée par la politique dite --berbère-- du Protectorat, dont le projet est de distinguer les berbères du peuple marocain par une possible conversion française et catholique. La lutte anti-coloniale trouve alors sa voie dans une identité islamique accrue qui attire les masses et rallie les leaders marocains aux luttes d'Orient. Dans la communauté juive, l'effet du Protectorat est plus conséquent. Le processus d'occidentalisation attire une élite qui aspire à s'élever au niveau des Européens par le moyen de la langue et de la culture française, et veut légitimement s'affranchir du statut réducteur de la dhimma. Loin de la population de base qui subit le même sort que les musulmans, les privilégiés de la communauté juive s'écartent à la fois de la tradition religieuse véhiculant l'identité juive et des coutumes judéo-arabes séculaires. Cette distinction se traduit par l'instruction et l'éloignement géographique. La nouvelle classe juive européanisée abandonne l'usage de la langue vernaculaire au profit du français et laisse le mellah aux pauvres, non instruits, démunis. Les tensions entre Juifs et Arabes en Palestine, affûtées par la Déclaration de Balfour (1917), alimentent, par effet sympathique, l'identité arabo-musulmane à laquelle s'identifient et adhèrent les nationalistes musulmans. Cette option éloigne la communauté juive de la scène politique et donc des perspectives marocaines d'avenir. Tandis que la masse musulmane est gagnée au combat, la masse juive continue, à l'écart des bouleversements politiques qui secouent le monde arabe, à rêver de la terre Promise et en cultiver la nostalgie. Nostalgie qui trouve son accomplissement à la déclaration de l'Etat d'Israël en 1948 et commence alors la 'aliya marocaine. L'exil c'était la grande mémoire, la nostalgie mystique, l'errance et la précarité, le déracinement et l'affirmation du spirituel. L'ancrage marocain ne fut que de circonstance quand bien même il perdura tant et tant de générations, quand bien même les Juifs du Maroc y ont enterré la cohorte de leurs aïeux, créé des us et coutumes partagés, entretenus leurs chers cimetières, forgé leurs langues.et néanmoins le Maroc ne fut, spirituellement, qu'une terre d'attente, un lieu transitoire, un moindre mal dans l'adversité ? Errance et précarité ne sont plus, mais qu'en-est-il de cette terre promise ? Une sève nourricière pour le corps et l'esprit, l'âme et le cœur, a-t-elle monté dans ce nouveau terreau où s'est accompli le réenracinement si longtemps différé ? Dans le grand rassemblement se sont affrontées les composantes de la mémoire plurielle : lieux, mœurs, sentiments, perceptions sociétales, dénonçant au grand jour les lignes de partage, les diversités et les empreintes d'exils, faisant apparaître les disparités socio-théologico-politiques. Disparité que le sionisme, dans son aspiration à l'unité du peuple juif, projetait d'uniformiser et de dissoudre dans l'unicité. Projet qui ne parvint pas sans éviter aux Orientaux le déracinement culturel et la crise d'identité. Envolés vers Israël à partir de 1948, les Juifs marocains rencontrent un modèle occidental établi par les pionniers issus du socialisme européen : les Ashkénazes. Très tôt, la population israélienne est divisée en deux classes ; les Ashkénazes, fondateurs du pays dont ils sont l'élite dirigeante, et leurs coreligionnaires récemment immigrés : les Orientaux, qui durant les vingt premières années de leurs vie israélienne en constitueront le prolétariat. L'idéal messianique qui motivait la 'alya marocaine se heurte à la conception laïque de l'état israélien. Conception qui implique le rejet de l'héritage diasporique et du Juif de l'exil pour une nouvelle nation "normale" à l'image des sociétés occidentales évoluées. L'état, laïque, basé sur une représentation légitime du peuple juif, remplace l'identification religieuse par une identification nationale, statut inconnu des immigrants marocains à peine coupés de leur statut séculaire de minorité religieuse traditionnelle. Au judaïsme de condition succède un judaïsme d'élection et à l'organisation communautaire une organisation étatique complexe et hermétique aux nouveaux citoyens. Aux yeux des immigrés marocains, l'identité juive devait suffire à les intégrer en terre promise, mais une fois là, la mise en présence de différences notables concernant la pratique religieuse, la langue, les coutumes, la tradition, les disparités économiques, produisirent la désillusion du rêve sacré confronté à la réalité concrète : "Au Maroc, il était juif, juif de par l'héritage d'Abraham, d'Isaac et de Jacob, juif empêtré dans la sainte et sacré Loi de Moïse. (.) En Israël, il est devenu --ô farce du destin !- arabe". De cette désillusion naquit la nostalgie, nostalgie de la nostalgie première, nostalgie de l'exil que certains auteurs (Ami Bouganim, Erez Bitton) chanteront sans cesse : "Elle chante l'exil, un embrun nostalgique autour de la voix, l'exil de Jérusalem, l'exil d'Espagne, l'exil du Maroc. (.) Elle passe d'une sérénade en espagnole à une chanson en français, d'une mélopée en arabe à un cantique en hébreu. (.)Sans cesse, les chants de Zohra reconstituent les décors fabuleux de son passé." Reconstituer les décors du passé pour lutter contre l'oubli des morts et la dépersonnalisation des vivants. Retrouver une identité perdue au cours d'un processus d'assimilation qui imposait l'oubli du Juif de la diaspora et la renaissance de l'Hébreu moderne. Ainsi la mémoire retrouve son rôle ; celui de reconstituer une identité et une culture parallèle à l'identité et à la culture nationale israélienne. Et c'est par la mémoire maternelle d'abord que se réactive cette reconstitution, une mémoire domestique faite de coutumes ancestrales, d'odeur de cuisine, de rires, de petits devoirs, de jeu, de musique festives, de superstition et de rumeurs, de blagues en parler local.mémoire folklorique. Car la mère est le personnage de la tradition que le maelström de la 'alya a corrodé le moins. C'est dans l'expression littéraire d'Israéliens issus du Maroc que pointe cette nostalgie avec des personnages qui ne se sentent pas dans une entité israélienne cohérente. Le parler, la culture, la mentalité exacerbent leurs différences et laissent agir leur particularisme. Bien que ce soit une particularité historique, la formation de la société israélienne a subi les règles de l'immigration. Plus qu'ailleurs, le terrain israélien est celui qui, le mieux, se prête à l'examen des problèmes posés par l'immigration : intégration, acculturation, mélange ethnique, en tant qu'hypothèse du devenir des sociétés dans la mondialisation.

A survey of official reactions from 11 Global South states outside the Middle East/North Africa region — Brazil, Mexico, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam — reveals a consensus on condemnation of Hamas' attacks. But their statements differ on who's to blame, what's the solution, and what to do next. Most of the states selected in this survey are among the Global South's key middle powers. Four smaller or less influential states — Bangladesh, Kenya, Malaysia, and Singapore — also included.In Latin America, Brazil said it "condemns the series of bombings and ground attacks carried out today in Israel from the Gaza Strip (and) expresses condolences to the families of the victims and expresses its solidarity with the people of Israel.""There is no justification for resorting to violence, especially against civilians," the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote in a statement. "The Brazilian Government urges all parties to exercise maximum restraint in order to avoid escalating the situation."Brazil also "reiterates its commitment to the two-state solution...within mutually agreed and internationally recognized borders" and "reaffirms that the mere management of the conflict does not constitute a viable alternative for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and the resumption of peace negotiations is urgent."Brazilian President Luiz Inacio "Lula" Da Silva also expressed his "rejection of terrorism in any of its forms" and called for a two-state solution. Brazil, as the United Nations Security Council president for October, called a closed emergency session of the Council this weekend. The meeting failed to agree on a statement.Mexico's foreign ministry "condemns the attacks suffered by the people of Israel (and) calls for an end to this inappropriate violence...to avoid an escalation that (will cause) greater...suffering to the civilian population."The Mexican statement also argued that it is "essential to resume the process of direct and good faith negotiations between both parties...within the framework of the two-state solution...within mutually agreed upon and internationally recognized secure borders in accordance with (United Nations resolutions)."Turning to Africa, Kenya's Ministry of Foreign and Diaspora Affairs "condemns, in the strongest terms possible, the unprovoked attack by Hamas militants" and called on both sides to "exercise restraint and seek a negotiated agreement" to the conflict.Nigeria, for its part, said it is "deeply concerned" at the "outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Hamas" and "calls for de-escalation and ceasefire" and a "peaceful resolution of the conflict through dialogue."South Africa called for an "immediate cessation of violence, restraint and peace." "The new conflagration has arisen from...illegal occupation of Palestine land, desecration of Al Aqsa mosque & Christian holy sites and ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people," the South African foreign ministry said in a statement on Saturday, calling for a return to the "1967 internationally recognized borders with East Jerusalem as capital" and also mentioning "the right of return."Looking at Asia, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was quoted as saying he is "deeply shocked by the news of terrorist attacks in Israel, adding that he and his government "stand in solidarity with Israel." The Indian foreign ministry had not issued a press release on the crisis at the time of writing.Bangladesh's Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that it "denounces the ongoing armed conflict between Israel and Palestine and deplores the resultant loss of innocent civilian lives (and) calls for an immediate ceasefire.""Living under the Israeli occupation and forced settlements in Palestinian territory will not bring peace," the statement continued, adding that Bangladesh "supports a two-state solution, Palestine and Israel, living side by side as independent states free of occupation following UN Resolutions No. 242 and 338."Indonesia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it "is deeply concerned with the escalation of conflict between Palestine and Israel.""Indonesia urges the immediate end of violence," the statement said. "The root of the conflict, namely the occupation of the Palestinian territories by Israel, must be resolved, in accordance with the parameters agreed upon by the UN."Vietnam said it is "profoundly concerned" and called "on relevant parties to exercise restraint" and "refrain from taking actions that complicate the situation." Hanoi added that it calls on "relevant parties" to "soon resume negotiations to resolve disagreements through peaceful means, on the basis of international law and the relevant resolutions of the UN Security Council."Meanwhile, Singapore stated that it "strongly condemns the rocket and terror attacks from Gaza on Israel, which have resulted in deaths and injuries of many innocent civilians.""We call for an immediate end to the violence and urge all sides to do their utmost to protect the safety and security of civilians," said a spokesperson for Singapore's foreign ministry.Malaysia said it "is deeply concerned over the loss of so many lives due to the latest escalation of clashes in and around the Gaza Strip. At this critical time...parties must exercise utmost restraint and de-escalate.""The root cause must be acknowledged," the statement continued. "The Palestinians have been subjected to the prolonged illegal occupation, blockade and sufferings, the desecration of Al-Aqsa, as well as the politics of dispossession at the hands of Israel as the occupier.""There should be no...flagrant hypocrisy in dealing with any regime that practices apartheid and blatantly violates...international law," Malaysia's foreign ministry added. "Palestinians have the legal right to live in a state of peace within its own recognised borders based on pre-1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital."While each of these 11 states has, as one could expect, condemned the horrific attack by Hamas, their statements reveal different leanings on Israel. India (though an official foreign ministry statement is still not out) currently seems closest to the Israeli and American position, by invoking terrorism with no mention of de-escalation, the two-state solution, or key UN resolutions on Palestine. Singapore too invokes terrorism. Kenya mentions terrorism indirectly, but calls the Hamas attack "unprovoked." Though the official Brazilian statement does not mention the T word, Lula's comments clearly label the Hamas attacks as terrorism.The seven other states have not characterized the attack as terrorism. Nigeria however avoids criticizing Israel and couches its calls to peace in general terms. Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Africa criticize Israel and specifically cite the Israeli occupation as the root cause. Brazil, Mexico and Vietnam stay focused on restraint, the two-state solution and UN resolutions or relevant international law. If we were to project these reactions on a spectrum of the degree of alignment to U.S. and Israeli positions on the crisis (admittedly a challenging task due to the complexity of the issues involved and the early stage of the responses), India and Kenya seem to be at the end closest to the U.S. and Israel. They are followed by Singapore and Nigeria. Brazil, Mexico, and Vietnam appear to be next.At the other end of this spectrum, and thus relatively the least aligned with Israeli and U.S. positions, lie Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Africa. If the violence in the Middle East escalates much more, as seems likely, expect the diplomatic action to move to the United Nations. We will then know much more about where Global South states stand on the matter.

Professor David Dabydeen is a Guyanese-born writer, critic and academic at the Centre of Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick. In 1993 he became Guyana's ambassador at UNESCO and is still a member of their Executive Board. He has been Guyana's ambassador to China since 2010. Professor Dabydeen has also won several international and national prizes such as the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Quiller-Couch Prize, and the Hind Rattan (Jewel of India). Among his works are Slave Song (1984), The Intended (1991), Disappearance (1993); and Our Lady of Demerara (2004). He also co-edited The Oxford Companion to Black British History in 2007. RB[1]: You are both a writer and a university professor of comparative literature. Do you know yourself first as a writer or a university professor?DD[2]: First as a writer. When I was a boy that is basically all I wanted to be. As a teenager I wrote the usual self-pitying stuff and, at 16 or 17, I attempted a novel in verse, inspired by some story in the Bible, I forgotten which; but gave up after a couple of pages. Why want to be a writer? I don't know. In my youth in Guyana I never encountered a writer. I think it must have been youthful aspiration to emulate the writers of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys novels, which were standard childhood fare in Guyana. Also, since I come from a large family, it must have been the regular escape to the New Amsterdam public library to be alone, and whilst there( the place was usually empty), discovering books in the Ladybird series on great scientists, great politicians etc. I distinctly remember reading about Benjamin Franklin, Madame Curie, Alexander the Great, and others, at the age of nine or ten. There were also the odd books on Greek myths, lavishly illustrated for children. The story of Andromeda chained and naked and threatened by a monster, before being saved by Perseus, awakened unfamiliar boyish erotic feelings… perhaps not 'unfamiliar '( I was 8 or 9 ) but certainly the first time a book had aroused such feelings. When I was about 11 or 12 I came across V.S. Naipaul's MIGUEL STREET and was awed by how it made our lives in Guyana so familiar. It was set in Trinidad but the characters lived down my street. A great contrast to the Andromeda story which was exotic and erotic as opposed to the familiar lives of ordinary folk described by Naipaul.Being an academic has also been important to my writing. Firstly, you get a lot of time to read and discuss books with very bright students. Teaching in seminar groups has been amazingly exciting at times, and that intellectual excitement, sensuous in intensity, inspires the act of writing. I used to teach MA courses on Black British Literature and on Literature and Slavery. Certainly, Olaudah Equiano's autobiography in 1789, which I read multiple times for teaching purposes, left an impact on my writing, which is dotted with 'Equiano' figures ( people who moved from deprivation to the craft of writing, through cunning and an inclination for mischief mostly). Secondly, as an academic, you are exposed to theory, which can fertilised your writing and give it a 'metaphysical' content. Overexposure leads to didacticism, which I am sure my writing suffers from. As Derek Walcott says, you shouldn't "put Descartes before the horse." Most importantly, being an academic pays the bills, so whilst hunger has provoked a lot of writers, I preferred to have a house rather than a hovel. Growing up in Guyana was to exist in relative lack of material things. Many years ago I met Maya Angelou, she had kindly invited me to her house, and she had cooked a lovely Southern meal. She said: "I drive a Cadillac. I don't do bicycles, which were my youth. And I eat meat, because all I had as a child was garden vegetables'. I appreciated her extravagance, though deep down she was a kindly person, and generous. RB: You are also a politician. In 2010 you were appointed as Guyana's Ambassador in China. How have you proved yourself as a politician?DD: I don't belong to any political party in Guyana, but I enjoyed a close friendship with Cheddi and Janet Jagan. Cheddi had been cheated out of office as a result of the CIA and the British Government, in the 1960s, because he was a committed man of the left. In 1984, when I was appointed to Warwick University, I invited Cheddi to lecture there. He had no money, so the University and a travel agent friend, Vino Patel, were persuaded to provide his economy ticket and accommodation whilst at Warwick. We treated him as the true President of Guyana. All the national elections had been fiddled, and he was kept out of office for decades. Warwick offered him a platform, when other places thought of him as a 'has been'. He visited about five times, then in 1992, the Berlin Wall having fallen and the Cold war ended, the Americans allowed us to have free and fair elections, supervised by President Carter and Cheddi Jagan won and became President of Guyana. I was his regular houseguest from 1992 until 1997 when he died. He taught me more about how colonialism behaved than any textbook. He had lived through the colonial period and was jailed by the British in 1953. All his life was dedicated to the betterment of the poor: he was fiercely concerned with reducing and eliminating poverty. In return for his great hospitality, all I could do was to edit and publish some of his political speeches. He also asked me to be his Ambassador at Large and to sit on the UNESCO Executive Board representing Guyana. He had no money, since he inherited a bankrupt country in 1992, so it was an amazing honour to serve him pro bono. One day I will write something more extensive about him… one of the stories he told me was about Fidel Castro. The two of them were friends and political comrades in the late 50s and early 60s. It was Cuba who supplied us with food in the early 1960s when the CIA formented strikes and shortages in Guyana. Castro, however, needed allies in the region, against American embargo, so when Cheddi was manoeuvred out of Office, Castro started to court the friendship of our new autocratic Prime Minister, Forbes Burnham, and more or less dropped his relationship with Cheddi. I learn from this that politics trumps decency; that politicians by and large are opportunists. Learning this first hand from a great and ethical politician like Cheddi Jagan was more powerful than learning this from textbooks.As to Janet Jagan, his wife, who, when he died, was elected President in our national elections, with an enhanced vote, she was an astonishingly generous host. My role was to edit and publish her short stories for children. She was a bit lonely in Guyana, in terms of only a few people to share her passion for the arts, so whenever I showed up, a bottle of wine was uncorked, or better still, a bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream( we had a local equivalent). She too had been jailed by the British in 1953, so, again, I learnt from her intimate details of Guyana's struggle for independence, and the callousness of politicians ( Forbes Burnham had attempted to murder her in the 1964 but his bomb went off in the wrong place in the Party's Headquarters, killing a young activist instead, Michel Forde. Janet suffered from minor injuries.)As to Walter Rodney, Guyana's internationally renowned historian, assassinated by Forbes Burnham and the State apparatus in 1980( the International Commission of Enquiry into his death was issued to Guyana's Parliament last month), it was an enlightened decision on the part of the University of Warwick to set up an annual Memorial Lecture . The Walter Rodney lecture has been given, since 1985, by some of our leading Caribbean scholars, like Hilary Beckles, Carolyn Cooper, Harold Goulbourne, Michael Gilkes, Clem Seecharan, Ken Ramchand, Verene Shepherd and others.I don't think I have proved myself as a politician in any concrete way. My only possible 'political' act was, in 2012-2013 lobbying the Government of Guyana vigorously and regularly to set up an International Commission of Enquiry into the death of Walter Rodney. I took full advantage of my friendship with the then President, Donald Ramotar, who was readily sympathetic to Pat Rodney's written request for such an Inquiry( Walter's widow). As a member of the Walter Rodney Foundation's Advisory Group, I liaised with Pat Rodney and in 2013 the Government of Guyana agreed to set up the Commission. I don't think this was a 'political' act on my part, merely the obligation I felt to Walter Rodney, a fellow academic whose books were monumental. RB: How do you define politics?DD: In a small underdeveloped or developing country, politics normally is about the acquisition of power over state resources for the benefit of family and friends. Idealism goes out of the window as soon as the politician assumes Office; the struggle then is for survival and continuation of Office, so very little good gets done, political energy being spent on maintaining and expanding the arena of privilege. Exceptions are rare, people like CheddiJagan, Nelson Mandela…Cheddi was famous for his frugal lifestyle. He died intestate, owning no property. He never stole from the national treasury, rare for a politician from the developing world. Had Rodney lived, he would have been a leader of exemplary ethics. I should add my admiration for a previous, undemocratically elected President of Guyana, Desmond Hoyte, who, long before the Rio Summit and long before 'Climate Change' was topical, bequeathed a million acres of Guyana's rainforest to the Commonwealth, for the study of sustainable development (the Iwokrama Project). This was in 1989. It was an act of rare vision by a Caribbean politician. So, politicians like Hoyte might have been elected by crookery, but can prove to be significant and visionary leaders. I enjoyed cordial relations with him, when he was President (1985-1992) as well as when he was Leader of the Opposition, again based on books. We talked a lot about Egbert Martin, the first Guyanese poet and short story writer (19th century), and about the Guyana Prize for Literature which he had instituted in 1987, in the hope of bolstering the literary and intellectual life of Guyana and its Diaspora. He had a wonderful library, and he cared deeply for literary achievement. We talked little about party politics, except about the sharing of political power and the Mandela Rainbow ideal. Towards the end of his life he was all for power sharing, though he had enough integrity to worry about where oppositional ideas would come from if we were all in alliance. RB: Do your political affairs affect your creative writing?DD: There is no direct link, though I have written about the dereliction of Guyana under the autocratic rule of Forbes Burnham. My new novel-in-progress, set partly in China, is provoked by the unimaginable cruelty imposed on the people by the Emperors and their warlords. So, politics breeds in me a despair which can stimulate writing. One of the great disappointments, living in Britain, was Tony Blair's loss of idealism ( he seemed abundantly idealistic , which is why people voted him into Office in 1992) and the lies he told about Iraq's military capacity to justify a hideous and bloody invasion of Iraq. On the other hand, in Britain, there were politicians like Jo Cox, who was visionary and full of promise( she was murdered recently), and who made all of us feel hopeful and glad to be alive. If only we had a handful of such politicians in Guyana! I am privileged to enjoy a long-standing friendship with Clare Short, the former Labour politician whose heart is as big as Mount Kilimanjaro.RB: You have often depicted Guyanese characters and settings in your fiction such as Disappearance (1993), The Counting House (1996), and Our Lady of Demerara (2004). Does it mean that you still live in your past? and that you know yourself devoted to your homeland?DD: I do live in the past, in that my childhood in Guyana left indelible memories of family and friends and village landscape. Especially the creole language we spoke at home, and the creative tension with the 'proper' English we spoke at school. The slippages between the two are fascinating, with potential for comedy and pathos. The vigour of creole is always with me.Leaving Guyana as a boy was exciting (the prospect of adventure) but then proved to be lonely and hurtful, since I was never settled in England. On the one hand, England was a world of books but at the same time a world of grunting and guttural 'skinheads' daubing racist slogans on walls and threatening to assault immigrants. London has changed profoundly since the 60's and 70's, it is now a diverse space, enriched by waves of immigrants from the Commonwealth and from Europe. There is still a strong undercurrent of racial hostility, but more in the north of England, hence the recent vote to leave the European Community. Many in the north of England have not got accustomed to the loss of Empire and the new order of the free movement of goods and people. This hostility is at the ideological level, and contradictory, because on a day to day level, people are, by and large, decent to each other, irrespective of ethnicity. London is different; it is run by people of immigrant backgrounds: nurses, doctors, builders, hotel and retail staff, care workers. I am astonished at how much has changed, and I am excited to be living in London. The creative energy of the city is palpable, and the diversity of people is inspiring. I no longer feel culturally or physically threatened, as in the 1960's and 1970's. In other words, I feel London is home, but so is Guyana. I return to Guyana at least once a year, to renew my sense of the past, to be refreshed by creole language and creole ways, and to be awed and terrified by the rainforest. I also keep writing about Guyana partly out of a sense of obligation to the place. We only have a handful of writers, so I feel it is important to write about the place. Guyana came into modern being, in a sense, through literature: I am thinking specifically of Walter Raleigh's DISCOVERIE OF GUIANA (1596), the first text about us. RB: Why do you often depict historical tensions and challenge traditional cultural representations of the slave in your novels?DD: Guyanese history, in relation to contact with Europe, is stark: the decimation of indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans, the system of Indian indentureship. It is stark in terms of the immensity of suffering, and the sheer injustices of colonial rule. Yet, we became acquainted with Samuel Johnson's DICTIONARY and the magical properties of the English language; with the lyricism and storytelling of the Bible, of Shakespeare, of Victorian poetry. These new texts supplemented the ones we brought from Africa and India ( the KORAN, the RAMAYANA) . Ancient and living Carib, Arawak and other Amerindian stories fertilised the situation. We rewrote and reimagined our inheritance, hence Walcott, Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Pauline Melville, Grace Nichols, John Agard, and a host of others. I write about the injustice (historical, but also self-inflicted in our postcolonial condition) but more about the urge to creativity and expression that emerged from being on the margins; the fierce resolve to become educated, literate, creative, venturing beyond boundaries. Our postcolonial politicians may have failed us repeatedly, but I am forever astonished at how resilient Guyanese are. When I visit parts of India, parts of China, the nature of poverty there is brutal and overwhelming. We don't have that level of deprivation, because we have created the means of survival and the prospect of abundance, whether on the plate or on the page. RB: Do you believe that there is any nation on earth that enjoys true freedom and independence?DD: I don't know what true freedom or independence mean, we are all constrained and liberated and catapulted into creativity by being with each other. However, I recall what Walcott said about slavery: that the enslaved African being herded to the cane fields would have seen something sensationally beautiful along the way, given how lush Caribbean landscapes are. A hummingbird or kiskadee or blue-saki or brightly coloured viper…Walcott said that such encounters with beauty were moments of freedom which could only be partially understood, partially described, because they also contained the seeds of tragedy and terror. If you venture into Guyana's rainforest, you will experience the sublime which contain elemental terror and a tragic sense of how life is constantly being destroyed and remade and destroyed by tooth and claw.[1] Ruzbeh Babaee[2] David Dabydeen

ResumenEn este artículo examino la gratitud y la ingratitud como herramientas analíticas valiosas para determinar cómo las desigualdades sociales le dan forma a las prácticas de parentesco. Acusar a un pariente de ingratitud revela los límites y las líneas de falla del parentesco, así como también expectativas estrechamente relacionadas sobre qué debe ser dado, cómo debe ser dado y cómo debe ser recibido. Como tal, este ensayo sigue la línea de una valiosa tradición antropológica de unificar los análisis del don y del parentesco. Argumento que expresiones de y discursos sobre la gratitud y la ingratitud remiten muy de cerca a dimensiones de relaciones sociales tales como el género, la generación y la clase social, y simultáneamente revelan tensiones dentro de las relaciones de parentesco donde el deber y la obligación son cuestionados. Los ejemplos etnográficos son tomados del trabajo de campo en Ayacucho, una pequeña ciudad en los Andes peruanos, donde la crianza adoptiva informal y las relaciones tensas entre hijos adultos y sus padres ancianos suministran dos esferas relacionadas de expresiones de ideas acerca de la gratitud y la ingratitud. Analizando estos dos ejemplos, argumento que la gratitud y la ingratitud son heurísticas analíticas, útiles para identificar y centrarse sobre dimensiones de relaciones que, según se entiende, caen dentro del dominio del parentesco, y son potencialmente útiles también en otros escenarios.Palabras clave: Parentesco, crianza, niñez, el don, Perú. Abstract. Towards an Anthropology of Ingratitude: Notes from Andean KinshipAccusations of ingratitude to kin reveal much about the edges and fault lines of kinship that would otherwise not be apparent. But equally, they reveal much that is unexpected about the gift – about expectations of what should be given and how it should be received. In this article, I bring together anthropological literature on the gift and on kinship in order to argue that expressions of gratitude or ingratitude index dimensions of social relations such as gender, generation, and social class, and simultaneously reveal tensions within kinship relations where duty and obligation are contested. Examples are drawn from fieldwork where informal fostering and the fraught relations between grown children and their aging parents provide arenas for analysis of expressions of gratitude and ingratitude. Analyzing these examples, I argue for gratitude as an analytical heuristic, useful to identify and focus upon dimensions of relations understood to fall within the domain of kinship, and potentially useful in other settings as well.Key words: fostering, childhood, the gift, the Andes. Referencias Alberti, Giorgio y Enrique Mayer (1974). Reciprocidad andina: Ayer y hoy. En G. Alberti y E. Mayer, eds., Reciprocidad e intercambio en los Andes peruanos. Lima, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 13–37. Anderson, Jeanine (2010). Incommensurable Worlds of Practice and Value: A View from the Shantytowns of Lima. En P. Gootenberg y L. Reygadas, eds., Indelible Inequalities in Latin America: Insights from History, Politics, and Culture. Durham, Duke University Press, 81–105. Appadurai, Arjun (1985). "Gratitude as a Social Mode in South India", Ethos 13, 3: 236–45. Arnold, Denise, ed. (1997). Gente de carne y hueso: Las tramas de parentesco en los Andes. La Paz, CIASE/ILCA. Bolin, Inge (2018) [2006]. Creciendo en una cultura de respeto. La crianza de los niños en la sierra peruana. Lima, Universidad de Ciencias y Humanidades. Bolton, Ralph y Enrique Mayer, eds. (1977). Andean Kinship and Marriage. Washington, D.C., American Anthropological Association. Borneman, John (1997). 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Daniel Levine on Hidden Hands, Vocation and Sustainable Critique in International Relations











Daniel Levine is part of a new generation
of IR scholars that takes a more pluralist approach to addressing the hard and
important questions generated by international politics. While many of those
interviewed here display a fairly consistent commitment to a certain position
within what is often referred to as 'the debate' in IR, Levine straddles the boundaries
of a diverse range of positions and understandings. Time to ask for
elaboration.














Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What is, according
to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your
position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?






The
question I'd like us to be asking more clearly than we are is, 'are we a
vocation and, if so, what kind of vocation are we'? This points to a varied set
of questions that we, as scholars, gesture to but spend relatively little
theoretical time developing or unpacking. There's an assumption that the
knowledge we produce is supposed to be put good for something, practical in
light of some praiseworthy purpose. Even theorists who perceive themselves to
be epistemologically value-free hope, I think, at least on an intuitive level, that
some practical good will emerge from what they do. They hope that they are doing
'good work' in the sense that some Christians use this term. But, there is not
really a sustained project of thinking through how those works work: how our notions of vocation might
be different or even mutually exclusive, and how the differences in our notions
of vocation might be bound up in non-obvious ways to our epistemological,
methodological, and theoretical choices.







Moreover,
except for a few very important and quite heroic (and minoritarian) efforts, we
don't really have a way to think systematically about the structure of the
profession: how it influences or intervenes or otherwise acts on particular
ideas as they percolate through it, and how those ideas get 'taken up' into
policy. Brian Schmidt has
done work like that, so has Inanna Hamati-Ataya,
Ole Waever, Ido Oren,
Oded Löwenheim, Elizabeth Dauphinee, Naeem Inayatullah,
and Piki Ish-Shalom; and it's good work, but
they are doing what they are doing with limited resources, and I think without due
appreciation from a big chunk of the field as to why that work is important and
what it means.







When
I started writing Recovering
International Relations, I had wanted to recover the 'view from nowhere'
that many social scientists idealize. You know, that methodological conceit
where we imagine we are standing on Mars, watching the earth through a
telescope, or we're Archimedes standing outside of the world, leveraging it
with distance and dispassion. I had worked on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
for a long time, was living in Tel Aviv, working for a think tank, and was—am—an
Israeli citizen and an American citizen. I had this somewhat shocking discovery
right after the Second Intifada broke
out. Most of my senior colleagues were deploying their expertise in what seemed
to me to be a very tendentious way: to show why the second Intifada was Yassar
Arafat's fault or the Palestinian Authority's fault—or, in a few cases, the
Israelis' fault. There were some very simplistic political agendas that were
driving this research. People were watching the evening news, coming into work
the next morning, and then running Ehud Yaari's commentary through their respective fact-values-methods mill. Or if they were
well-connected, they were talking to their friends on the 'inside', and doing
the same thing.







It
was hard to admit this for a long time, but I was very naïve. I found that very
unsettling and quite disillusioning. That's why the view from nowhere was so
appealing. I wanted to be able to talk about
Israel and Palestine without taking a position on Israel and Palestine—but without eschewing the expertise I had
acquired along the way, in part because I was
a party to this conflict, and cared about its outcome. I was young,
inexperienced, and slightly arrogant to boot—neither yet a scholar, nor an 'expert,'
nor really aware of the game I was playing. So my objections were not well
received, nor did I pose them especially coherently. To their credit, my senior
colleagues did recognize something worthwhile in my diatribes, and they did
their best to help me get into graduate school.







As the
project developed, and as I started engaging with my mentors in grad school, it
appeared that the view from nowhere was essentially impossible to recover. With
Hegel and with the poststructuralists, we can't really think from nowhere; the
idea of it is this kind of intellectual optical illusion, as though thinking
simply happens, without a mind that is conditioned by being in the world. Therefore,
there needs to be a process by which we give account of ourselves.







There
are a variety of different ways to consider how one might do that. There's what
we might call the agentic approach, in which we think through the structure of
thought itself: its limitations, our dependence on a certain image of thinking
notwithstanding those limits—thought's work on us, on our minds. This is closest
to what I do, drawing on Adorno and Kant, and Adorno's account of how concepts
work in the mind; how they pull us away from the things we mean to understand
even as they give us the words to understand them. And drawing on Jane Bennett, William Connolly,
Hannah Arendt, Cornel West, JoanTronto, and JudithButler to think through how one
conditions oneself to accept those limitations from a space of love, humility
and service. Patrick Jackson's (TheoryTalk #44) Conduct of Research in IR is quite
similar to this approach; and so is Colin Wight's Agents, Structures and International
Relations; though they use more philosophy of science than I do.







One
could also do this more 'structurally.' One could say 'this is how the academy
works and this is how the academy interconnects with the larger political
community' and then try to trace out those links: I mentioned Hamati-Ataya,
Oren, and Ish-Shalom, or you could think of Isaac Kamola,
Helen Kinsella, or
Srdjan Vucetic.








Any of
those approaches—or really, some admixture of them—would be pieces of that
project. I would like us to be doing more of that—alongside, not instead of,
all the other things we are already doing, from historical institutionalism to formal
modeling, to large-N and quantitative approaches, and normative, feminist and
critical ones. I would like such self-accounting to be one of the things
scholars do, that they take it as seriously as they take methods, epistemology,
data, etc. Driving that claim home in our field, as it's presently constituted,
is our biggest challenge.






How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?






I'm 42,
so the Cold War was a big deal. I'm American-born, and I was raised in a pretty
typical suburb. John Stewart from the Daily
Show is probably the most famous product of my hometown, though I didn't
know him. My view of history was a liberal and progressive in the Michael
Waltzer/Ulrich Beck/Anthony Giddens, vein, but I was definitely influenced by
the global circumstances of the time, and by the 'End of History' discourse
that was in the air. I thought that the US was a force of good in the world. I
was a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey. I really wanted to live in Israel for
personal reasons, and the moral challenge of living in Israel after the
Intifada seemed to go away with the peace process. So, it seemed to me that it
was a kind of golden moment: you could 'render unto Caesar what was due to Caesar',
and do the same for the Lord. I could actually be a Jewish-Israeli national and
also a political progressive. (That phrase is, of course, drawn from the Gospels,
and that may give you some sense of how my stated religious affiliations might
have differed from the conceptual and theological structures upon which they actually
rested—score one for the necessity of reflexivity. But in any case, those
events were important.)







I moved
to Israel when I was 22 and was drafted into the military after I took
citizenship there. In the IDF, I was a low-level functionary/general laborer—a
'jobnik', someone who probably produces less in utility than they consume in
rations. Our job was to provide support for the combatants that patrolled a
certain chunk of the West Bank near Nablus—Shechem, as we called it, after the
biblical name. I was not a particularly distinguished soldier. But we were cogs
in a very large military occupation, and being inside a machine like that, you
can see how the gears and pieces of it meshed together, and I started taking
notice of this. Sometimes I'd help keep the diary in the operations room. You
saw how it all worked, or didn't work; or rather, for whom it worked and for
whom it didn't. All that was very sobering and quite fascinating.







I once
attended a lecture given by the African politics scholar Scott Straus, and he
said the thing about being present right after genocide is that you come across
these pits full of dead bodies. It's really shocking and horrific—there they
are, just as plain as day. Nothing I saw in the sheer level of violence compares
to that in any way—I should stress this. But that sense of it all just being out there, as plain as day, and being
shocked by this—that resonated with me. Everyone who cared to look could
understand how the occupation worked, or at least how chunks of it worked. So I
would say in terms of events, those things were the big pieces that structured
my thinking.







Here's two
anecdotal examples. Since I was a grade of soldier with very limited skills, I
was on guard duty a lot. We had a radio. I could hear the Prime Minister on the
radio saying we are going to strike so-and-so in response to an attack on such-and-such,
and then I could see helicopters pass overhead to Nablus, and then I could see
smoke. Then I could see soldiers come back from going out to do whatever it was
the helicopter had provided air support for. I'd see ambulances with red
crescents or red Stars of David rush down the main road. It began to occur to
me that there was a certain economy of violence in speech and performance. I
didn't think about it in specifically theoretical terms before I went back to
graduate school, but Israelis had been killed, political outrage had been
generated. There was a kind of affective deficit in Israeli politics that
demanded a response, and some amount of suffering had to be returned—so the
government could say it was doing its job. I found this very depressing. My odd
way of experiencing this—neither fully inside nor outside—is certainly not the
most important or authentic, and I'm not trying to set myself up as an expert
on this basis. I'm only trying to account for how it made me think at the time
and how that shows up in what and how I write now.







Later,
when I was in the reserves, I was in the same unit with the same guys every
year. One year, we were lacing our boots and getting our equipment for our
three weeks of duty in a sector of the West Bank near Hebron, I think it was. I
remember one guy, one of the more hawkish guys, said 'we'll show 'em this time,
we'll show them what's what'. Three weeks later, that same guy said 'Jeez, it's
like we're like a thorn in their backside; no wonder they hate us so much.' (He
actually used some colorful imagery that I can't share with you.) I remember
thinking, 'well, ok, he'll go home and he'll tell his family and his friends;
some good will come of this.' The next year, I saw the same guy saying the same
thing at the start, 'we'll show those SOBs.' And then three weeks later, 'oh my
God, this is so pointless, no wonder they hate us…' So after a few years of
this I finally said to him, 'tagid, ma
yihiyeh itcha?'—Like, dude, what's your deal? 'We've had this conversation every year! What happens to you in
the 48 weeks that you're not here that you forget this?' And I think he looked
at me like, 'what are you talking about?'







I
thought about that afterwards: we have these moments of experience when we're
out of our everyday environment and discourse, the diet of news and fear, PR
and political nonsense—that's when these insights become possible. So, when
this guy comes in and says 'ok, we'll get those SOBs,' he's carrying with him this
discourse that he has from home, from the news and TV, from his 'parliament'
with his friends where they get together and talk about politics and war and
economics and whatever else—and then a few weeks of occupation duty disrupts
all that, makes him see it in a different light, and he has these kinds of
fugitive experiences which give him a weirdly acute critical insight. Suddenly,
he's this mini-Foucault.







In a
few weeks, though, he goes back to his life, there's no space or niche into
which that uncomfortable, fugitive insight can really grow, so it just sort of
disappears or withers on the vine, its power is dissipated. This is a very
real, direct experience of violence and it's covered over by all of this
jibber-jabber. So there's a moment where you start to wonder: what exactly
happens there? What happens in those 48 weeks? What happens to me during those weeks? You can see how a
kind of ongoing critical self-interrogation would evolve out of that. Again,
none of those things are exactly what my book's about, but it gives you a sense
of how you might find Adorno's kind of critical relentlessness and negativity vital
and important and really useful and necessary. You can see how that might
inform my thinking.







In
terms of books, as an undergraduate, I had read, not very attentively, Said and
Foucault, and all of the stuff at the University of Chicago we had to take in
what they called the 'Scosh Sequence,' from sociologists like Elijah Anderson
and William Julius Wilson to Charles Lindblom and Mancur Olsen: texts from the
positive and the interpretive to the post-structural. I had courses with some
very smart Israeli and Palestinian profs—Ephraim Yaar, Salim Tamari, Ariela
Finkelstein. And of course Rashid Khalidi was there at that time. Once I was in
the military, the Foucault and Said suddenly started popping around in my head.
Suddenly, this sort of lived experience of being on guard duty made the
Panopticon and the notion of discipline go from being a rather complicated,
obscure concept to something concrete. 'Oh! That's
what discipline is!'







When I
went back to graduate school, I was given a pretty steady diet of Waltz,
rational deterrence theory, Barry Posen, Stephen Walt (Theory Talk #33), and Robert Jervis (Theory Talk #12). Shai
Feldman was a remarkable teacher, so were Ilai Alon in philosophy, Shlomo
Shoham in sociology and Aharon Shai in History. Additionally I had colleagues
at work who were PhD students at the Hebrew University working with Emanuel Adler;
they gave me Wendt (Theory Talk #3), Katzenstein's (TheoryTalk # 15) Culture of National Security, Adler and
Barnett, and Jutta Weldes' early article on 'Constructing National Interests'
in the EJIR (PDF here).
My job was to help them publish their monographs, so I got really into the guts
of their arguments, which were fascinating. I am not really an agency-centered
theory guy anymore and I am not really a constructivist anymore, but that stuff
was fantastic. I saw that one could write from a wholly different viewpoint,
perspective, and voice. This is all very mainstream in IR now, but at the time,
it felt quite edgy, very novel. Part of the reason why the middle chapters of Recovering IR has these long discussions
about different kinds of constructivism is that I wouldn't have had two
thoughts to rub together if it was not for those books. I do disagree with them
now and strongly, but they were very important to me all the same.






What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the
world in a global way?






I'd be
more comfortable answering that question as someone who was, until relatively
recently, a grad student. I've not been productive long enough to say 'Well,
here's how to succeed in this business and be a theorist of enduring substance
or importance' with any authority. But I can say, 'here's how I'm trying to be
one.' There's a famous article by Albert O. Hirschman called 'The Principle of
the Hiding Hand,' (PDF here)
and in it he says that frequently, the only way one can get through really
large or complicated projects is to delude oneself as to how hard the project
is actually going to be. He takes as an example these ambitious, massively
complicated post-colonial economic projects of the Aswan High Dam variety. The
only way such enormous projects ever get off the ground, he says, is if one
either denies their true complexity or deludes oneself. Otherwise you despair
and you never get it done. From the first day of seminar to dissertation
proposal to job—thank God I had no idea what I was in for, or I might have
quit.







Also,
the job market being what it was, we had to be very, very passionate scholars who
wrote and argued for the sheer intellectual rush and love of writing. And yet,
we also had to be very practical and almost cynical about the way in which the
academic market builds on the prestige of publications and the way in which
prestige becomes shorthand for your commodity value. At least in the US, the
decline of tenure and the emergence of a kind of new class of academics whose
realm of responsibility is specifically to engage in uncomfortable kinds of
political and moral critique—but without tenure, and at the mercy of a sometimes
feckless dean, an overburdened department chair or fickle colleagues—that's very scary. If you're doing 'normal
science', it's a different game and the challenges are different. But if your
job is to do critique, in the last ten years, it's a very big deal. Very
difficult. I'm very fortunate in that regard; at Alabama I've had great support
from my department, my chair, and my college.







I was a
Johns Hopkins PhD, and my department was fantastic in terms of giving me
support, encouragement, getting out of my way while throwing interesting books
at me, reading drafts that were bad and helping me make them good—or at least
telling me why they were bad. We did
not get particularly good professional training, because I think they did not
want us to get professionalized before we found our own voice. I'm really
grateful for that, truly. But then there's this period in which you have to
figure out how to make your voice into a commodity. That's really tough, it's a
little bit disheartening—even to discover that you must be a commodity is dismaying; didn't we go into the academy to avoid
this sort of logic? But just like Marx says, commodities have a double life, and
so do you. The use-value of your scholarship and its exchange-value do not
interlock automatically and without friction. So you spend all this time on the
use-value of it—writing a cool, smart, interesting dissertation—thinking that
will translate into exchange-value, and it turns out that it sort of does, but
a lot of other things translate into exchange-value too that aren't really about
how good your work is necessarily. And many of your colleagues, if what you're
doing is original, won't really understand what you're doing; the value or the
creativity of it won't be apparent to them unless they spend a lot of time sifting
through your bad drafts of it, which only a few—but God bless those—will do. So
how you create exchange-value for yourself is important. So is finding people
who will care about you, your project, your future—and learning when to take
their advice, when to ignore it, and how to do so tactfully.







If all that's
hard, you're probably doing it right. It's unfortunate that that's how it is,
but at all events, that's how it was for me.











Would you elaborate on the concept of
vocation and why this is so important to the view from nowhere? It is important
to say that the view from nowhere is perhaps difficult. So is vocation, or a
kind of Weberian approach, a way to articulate that for you?







There's
a quote in a book from a Brazilian novelist named Machado de Assis. His
protagonist is this fellow Bras Cubas, who's writing a posthumous memoir of his
own life. He's writing from beyond the grave. From there, he can view his whole
life and his entire society from outside; he's finally achieved positivism's
view from nowhere. But the thing about this view—and the book means to be a
sendup of the Comtean positivism that was fashionable in Brazil in those
days—is that it gives him no comfort. He now knows why he lived his life the
way he did; how he failed and what was—and what was not—his fault. The
absurdity of it all makes sense. But it changes nothing: he has died
unfulfilled, unloved, and essentially alone: a minor poet and back-bench politician
who was ultimately of little use to anyone nor of much to himself. All he knows
is how that happened.







In the
end, if we're all playing a role in how a world comes into being and it's in
some sense our job simply to accept this, and our job as scholars merely to
explain it, this gives us no comfort in the face of suffering, in the face of
violence and evil. To some extent as scholars, and to some extent as a
discipline, we exist as a response to evil, to suffering, to foolishness, to
folly; it's not a coincidence that the first professorship of IR is created in
Britain in the wake of WWI, and that it's given to someone like E. H. Carr.







If we
don't have a view from nowhere because we've given up anything like a moral
sense that can't be reduced to fractional, material, or ideological
sensibilities, and if we know that sometimes those 'views from somewhere' can
provide cover for terrible kinds of evil or justify awful kinds of suffering,
then the notion of vocation seems to come in at that point and say well,
'here's what I hope I'm doing', or 'here's what I wish to be doing', or 'here's
what I'd like to think I'm doing', and then allowing others to weigh in and
give their two cents. Vocation, in the sense of Weber's lectures, comes out of
that. It's Kant for social scientists: What can I know? What should I do? For
what may I hope? In other words, what the necessity and obligation of thinking
is on the one hand, and on the other what its limitations are.







This is
a way to save International Relations from two things: one, from relativism and
perspectivism, and the other, from a descent into the technocratic or the
managerial. I am trying to stand between the two. My own intellectual
background was in security studies at Tel Aviv University in the 1990s: the
period immediately after Maastricht, in the period of the Oslo Process, the end
of Apartheid. My hope back in the days when the peace process seemed to me to
be going well was that I'd be able to have a kind of technocratic job in
Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs or Defense. Counting tanks, or something
similar. I thought that would be a pretty good job. I would be doing my part to
maintain a society that had constructed a stable, long-term deterrent by which
to meaningfully address the problem of Jewish statelessness and vulnerability,
but without the disenfranchisement of another people. I could sit down and
count my tanks with a clear conscience, because the specter of evil was being
removed from that work. The problem of the occupation was being be solved.
Again, it's somewhat embarrassing to admit this now.







I would
say in the US academy, there is definitely a balance in favor of the
technocrats. We have enormous machines for the production and consumption of
PhDs in this country. The defense establishment is an enormous player. Groups
like the Institute for Defense Analysis need a lot of PhDs, the NSF funds a lot
of PhDs (for now, at least), and that tips the balance of the profession in a
certain way. My ability to use ideas compellingly at ISA won't change that fact
all by itself, there's a base-superstructure issue in play there.







In
Europe, it's a different story, for a bunch of reasons. The defense
establishments of the EU member states aren't as onerous a presence. And, there
are more of them; so there's a kind of diversity there and a need to think
culturally about how these various institutions interlock and how people learn
to talk to each other: the Martha Finnemore-to-Vincent Pouliot-to-Iver Neumann (Theory Talk #52) study of ideas and institutions and
officials. Plus, you have universities like the EUI and the CEU, which are not
reducible to any particular national interest or education system; creating
knowledge, but for a political/state form that's still emergent. No one knows
exactly what it is, what its institutions and interests will ultimately be.
Because of that, it's hard to imagine the EUI producing scholars with obviously
nationally-inflected research programs, like Halford Mackinder,
Mahan, Ratzel from a century
ago. There will still be reifications and ideologies, but there's more 'give'
since the institutions are still in play. And there's fantastically interesting
stuff happening in Australia, and in Singapore—think of people like Janice
Bialley-Mattern, Tony Burke and Roland Bleiker.











Critique has a long and controversial
history in our discipline. Could you perhaps elaborate, as a kind of background
or setting, how critique can be used in IR and why you've placed it at the
center of your approach to IR theory?







Critique
as term of art comes into the profession through Robert Cox (Theory Talk #37) and through the folks that were writing
after him in the '90s, including Neufeld, Booth, Wyn-Jones, Rengger, Linklater and
Ashley—though pieces of the reflexive practice of critique are present in the
field well before. For Cox, the famous line is that theory is always 'for
something and for someone.' The question is, if that's true how far down does
that problem go? Is it a problem of epistemology and method, or is it a problem
of being as such, a problem of ontology? Is it fundamental to the nature of
politics?







If the
set of processes to which we refer when we speak of 'thinking' is inherently
for someone and for something, and that problem harkens back to the idea that
all thinking is grounded in one's interests and perspectives, i.e., that all
practical or systematic attempts to understand politics are 'virtuous' in the
Machiavellian sense (they serve princely interests) but not necessarily in the Christian
sense (deriving from transcendent values), then we have a real problem in keeping
those two things separate in our minds. Think of Linklater's book Men and Citizens in International Relations
as a key node in that argument, though Linklater ultimately believes (at least
in that book) that a reconciliation between the two is possible. I'm less
convinced.







Now
recall the vocation point we discussed before. IR as a discipline has a deep
sense of moral calling which goes beyond princely interest. And the traditions
on which it draws are as much transcendently normative as anything else. So
encoded in our ostensibly practical-Machiavellian analyses is going to be
something like a sense of Christian virtue; we'll believe we're not merely
correct in our analyses, but really and
truly right in some otherworldly, transcendent way. True or not, that sense
of conviction will attach itself to our thinking, to the political forces and
agendas that we're serving. We'll come to believe that we are citing
Machiavelli in the service of something greater: whether that's 'scientific
truth' or the national interest, or what have you. Nothing could be more
dangerous than that. Critique, as an intervention, comes here: to dispel or
chasten those beliefs. Harry Gould, Brent Steele, and especially Ned Lebow (Theory Talk #53) write about prudence and a sense of
finitude: these are the close cousins of this kind of critique.







If we
take seriously the notion that people sometimes fight and kill in the service
of really awful causes while believing they are doing right, and that scholars
sometimes help them sustain those convictions rather than disabuse them of them—even
if they do not intend this—then critique becomes an awfully big problem and it
really threatens to undermine the profession as such. It opens up a whole new
level of obligation and responsibility, and it magnifies what might otherwise
be staid 'inside baseball'—Intramural scholarly or methodological debates. Part
of the reason why the 'great debates' were so great—so hotly fought—had to do
with this: our scholarly debates were, in fact, ideological ones.







It
undermines the field in another way as well. If we take critique seriously,
there's got to be a lot of moral reflection by scholars. That will make it hard
to produce scholarship quickly, to be an all-purpose intellectual that can
quickly produce thought-product in a policy-appropriate way, because I will
want to be thinking from another space, and of course precisely what
policy-makers want is that you don't
think from some other space; that you present them with 'shovel ready' policy
that solves problems without creating new ones.







So you
now have not just a kind of theoretical or methodological interruption in the
discussion of, say, absolute or relative gains. You now have to give an account
of yourself. And for me, that's what critique in IR means. To unpack the
definition I gave above, it's the attempt to give an account of what the duties
and limits of one's thinking are in the context of politics, given the nature
of politics as we understand it. Because IR comes out of the Second World War,
we're bound to take the most capacious notions of what political evil and
contingency can be; if we are not always in the midst of genocide and ruin,
then we are at least potentially so. And so contingency and complexity and all
the stuff that we're talking about must face that. I want to hold out that Carl
Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau might be
right—in ways which neither they, nor I, can completely fathom. Then I have
to give accounts of thinking that take a level of responsibility commensurate
with that possibility.







In that
vein, when I look at accounts of thinking in the context of the political, when
I look at what concepts are and how they work and how they do work on the world
so that it can be rendered tractable to thought, I realize that what we come up
with when we're done doesn't look very much like politics anymore. We have
tools which, when applied to politics, change it quite dramatically; they reify
or denature it. To be critical in the face of that, you're going to be obliged
to an extensive degree of self-interrogation and self-checking, which I call chastening.







That process
of chastening reason, is, in effect, what remains of the enlightenment obligation
to use practical reason to improve what Bacon called the human estate. What's
left of that obligation is to think in terms of the betterment of other human beings
as best as you can, knowing you can't do that very well, but that you may still
be obliged to try.







That's
really hard to do and it's an odd form of silence and non-silence. After all,
if I were to look at the Shoah while it was happening, or look at what happened
in Rwanda, and say 'well, I don't really have a foundational position on which
to stand so I can't analyze or condemn that'—that would not be a morally
acceptable position. Price and Reus-Smit (TheoryTalk #27) say this
in their 1998 article and they are absolutely right. But then there's the fact
that I don't quite know what to say beyond 'stop murdering people!' The world
is so easy to break with words, and so hard to put back together with them—assuming
anyone cares at all about anything we say. So I am obliged to respond to those
kinds of events when I see them, and I am also obliged to acknowledge that I
can't respond to them well, because my authority comes from the conceptual tools
I have, and they aren't really very good. Essentially, what I'm doing as
scholar of IR is the equivalent is using the heel of my shoe to hammer in a nail.
(That's a nice line, no? I wish it was mine, but it's Hannah Arendt.) It will
probably work, but it will take a while, and the nail won't go in so straight. To
chasten one's thinking is to remind oneself that the heel of one's shoe is not
yet a hammer; that all we're doing is muddling through—even when we do our work
with absolute seriousness and strict attention to detail, context and method—as
of course we should.











You discuss IR theory in terms of different
reifications. In which was does that also lead you to take a stand against a Weberian
understanding of IR?







I think
where I depart from Weber is that he has more faith than I do that, at some
point, disenchantment produces something better. There is faith or hope on
their part that the iron cage that we experience as a result of disenchantment
and as a result of the transformation from earlier forms of charismatic and
traditional authority to contemporary rational ones won't always be oppressive,
not forever. New forms and ways of being will emerge, in which those
disenchanted modes actually will fulfill their promise for a kind of
improvement in the human estate. If it's a long, complicated process—hence the
image of slow boring into hard wood—but faith is still justified, good things
can still happen.







For me,
the question is how would you manage a society that is liable to go insane or
to descend into moments of madness because of the side-effects or intervening
effects of disenchantment and modernization, while holding fast to the notion
that at some point, this is going to get better for most people? I'm a bit less
certain about that than I read Patrick and Weber being. I think that even if
they're right, it makes sense morally as scholars, not necessarily as citizens
or individuals or people, to dwell in the loss of those who fall along the way.








I find
myself thinking about the people who are gone a lot. My ex-wife teaches on
slavery, and I think a lot about this terrible thing she once told me. On slave
ships, when there was not enough food they would throw the people overboard
because ship masters got insurance money if their property went overboard, but
not if human beings succumbed on-ship. There's a scene depicting this in
Spielberg's film Amistad and it
haunts me. I find myself thinking about those people, dragged under with their
chains. I wonder what they looked like, what they had to say. I wonder what
they might have created or how their great-great grandchildren children would
have played with my child. I wonder if my best friend or true love was never
born because her or his ancestor died in this way. An enormous number of people
perished. I can't quite believe this, even if I know it's true.







Yoram
Kaniuk, the recently deceased Israeli novelist, wrote that the Israeli state was
built on the ground-up bones of the Jews who couldn't get there because it was
founded too late. I wonder about them too. And when I taught course modules on
Cambodia, I would find myself looking at the photographs made of the people in
Tuol Sleng before they were killed, the photo archives which the prison kept
for itself. There is a mother, daughter, father, brother, son, and I find
myself drawn into their eyes and faces. I don't want those people to disappear
into zeros or statistics. I want somehow to give them some of their dignity
back, and I want to dwell in the tragic nature my own feeling because it bears
remembering that I cannot ever really do that. If I remember that, I will have
some sense of what life's worth is, and I won't speak crassly about
interventions or bombings or wars—wherever I might come down on them. I would
say that it's almost a religious obligation to attend to the memory of those
people. My desire to abide with them makes me very, very suspicious of hope or
progress. I want this practice of a kind of mourning or grief to chasten such
hope.







There's
a problem with that position. Some will point out to me that this will turn
into its own kind of Manichean counter-movement, a kind of Nietzschean ressentiment. Or else that dwelling in
mourning has a self-congratulatory quality to it. And there are certainly
problems with this position at the level of popular or mass politics. We do see
a lot of ressentiment in our
politics. On the left, there's a lot of angry, self-aggrandizing moral
superiority. And you can think about someone like Sarah Palin in the US as a
kind of populist rejection of guilt and responsibility from the right.







But as social
scientists, we might have space to be the voice for that kind of grief, to take
it on and disseminate the ethics that follow from it; to give that grief a
voice. That kind of relentless self-chastening is what I'm all about. I think
it opens you up to new agendas and possibilities. I think it's a much deeper
way to be 'policy relevant' than most of my colleagues understand this term. If
we are relentlessly self-critical as scholars, and if we relentlessly resist
the appropriation of scholarly narratives to simplistic moral or political ends
and if we, as a society, help to build an intolerance of that and a sense of
the mourning that comes out of that, we also open our society up to say things
like, 'ok, well what's left?'







And
then, well, maybe a lot of things are left, and some of them are not so bad. Maybe
we start to imagine something better. That's where I'd rejoin Jackson and
Weber; after that set of ethical/emotional/spiritual moves. I think, by the
way, that Patrick mostly agrees with me; it's only a question of what his work
emphasizes and what mine has emphasized. On this point, consider Ned Lebow's
notion of tragedy. He and I disagree on some of the details of that notion. But
on top of his remarkable erudition, he's a survivor of the Shoah. I suspect he has thought very deeply about grief and
mourning, and in ways that might not be open to me.











The final question I want to pose to you is
a substantive one: Your understanding of critique somehow does relate to
sustaining progress, in a way. Perhaps on the one hand, you are not so
optimistic as Weber was, but on the other hand, your work conveys the sense
that it is possible to bridge the gap between concepts and things. I'm not sure
if it's possible, but perhaps you can relate it to the substantive example of
how your work relates to concrete political situations. I think the example of
Israel-Palestine comes to mind best.







Again,
I don't think I am as optimistic as that. In my heart of hearts, I desperately
wish this to be the case. To think of the people who were most influential on
my intellectual development—my cohort of fellow grad students at Johns Hopkins
and our teachers, to whom as a group I owe, really, everything in intellectual
terms—I was certainly in the minority view. Most of them were, I think, working
in the Deleuzian vein of making 'theory worthy of the event.' I just don't
believe that's possible; or anyway I think it's really, really, really hard, the work of a generation to tell that
story well and have it percolate out into our discipline and our culture. In
the meantime, we must muddle through. I hope I'm wrong and I hope they're
right. I'm rooting for them, even as I try to give them a hard time—just as I
give Keohane (Theory Talk #9)
and Waltz and Wendt and everyone else I write about a hard time. But I'd be happy, very happy, to
be wrong.







What I
do think can be done is that you can sustain an awareness of the space between
things-in-themselves and concepts, and by extension some sense of the fragility
and the tenuousness of the things that you think and their links to the things
that you do. Out of this emerges a kind of chastened political praxis.







You mentioned
Israel and Palestine, which I care a great deal about and am trying to address
more squarely in the work I'm doing now, partly on my own and partly in pieces I've
worked on with my colleague Daniel Monk. What we observe is that though the diplomatic
negotiations failed pretty badly twelve and a half years ago, we're still
looking at the same people running the show: the same principal advisers and
discussants and interlocutors: in the US and Israel and in the Palestinian Authority.
The same concepts and assumptions too. Just a few days ago, Dennis Ross
published a long op-ed about how we get the peace process back on track, and
you might think that you're reading something from another time—as though the
conflict were a technical challenge rather than a political one. You know that
Prince song about 'partying like it's 1999'?







I don't
know what a peaceful, enriching, meaningful Israeli-Jewish-Arab-Palestinian-Muslim-Christian
collective co-existence or sharing of space or world looks like, but I know
that this pseudo-politics ain't that. When I see something that's just a
re-hashing, I can say, 'come on guys, that is not thinking, that's recycling
the old stuff and swapping out dates, proper nouns and a few of the verbs.' Nor
is it listening to other voices who might inspire us in different ways, or
might help us rethink our interests, categories and beliefs. Lately, I've been
listening to a band called System Ali, hip-hop guys from Jaffa's Ajami quarter,
who sing in four languages. What they say matters less to me than the fact that
they really seem to like another, they trust each other, they let each voice
sing its song and use its words. They have something to teach me about
listening, thinking, acting and feeling—because it's music after all—and that
can produce its own political openings.







Of course,
there are pressure groups, from industry and AIPAC to
whatever else in the US, and those groups merit discussion and debate, but I'm
also wary of the counter-assumption which follows from folks who talk about
this too reductively: that there actually is an American interest, or a
European or Arab or Israeli one, which somehow transcends partisan interest—one
that can be recovered once the diaspora Jews, the oil moguls, the arms dealers
or the Christian 'Left Behind' people are taken out of the picture. That feels
like the same heady brew that Treitschke and Meinecke and the German realpolitik scholars poured and drank:
that the national state has some transcendent purpose to which we gain access
by rising above or tuning out the voices of the polity or its chattering
classes. Only with a light liberal-internationalist gloss: Meinecke meets David
Lake (Theory Talk # 46),
Anne-Marie Slaughter or John Ikenberry.







I can
also go meet starry-eyed idealists who want to hold hands and sing John Lennon,
I can say to them yes, I want to hold your hand and sing John Lennon, but I am
also enough of a social scientist to know that if a policy does not respond to
real and pressing problems—water, land, borders etc.—that any approach that
does not respond to those things will be hopelessly idealist. It will be what
my granny called luftmentsch-nachess—the
silly imaginings of men with their heads in the clouds, like the parable about Thales
and the Thracian maiden. I am not interested in being either a luftmentsch nor a technocrat. So what
does that leave with you with? You need to balance.







You can
look at groups at the margins of political culture to see what they can tell
you. In Israel and Palestine, it's groups like Ta'ayush, Breaking the Silence and Zochrot, and this settler
leader who recently died, Rabbi Frohman, who was going out and meeting every
Palestinian leader he could because for him, being a Jew in the land was not,
in the first instance about his Israeli passport. There were and are
possibilities for discussion that feel really pregnant and feel very different
from the conversation we are sustaining now; which reveal its shallowness and
its limitations and its pretentiousness. These other voices are of course not
ideal either, they are going to have their own problems and limitations, their
own descent into power and exclusion and so on, but they reveal some of the lie
of what we're doing now.







I guess
in the end, social scientists make a living imagining the future on the basis
of the past. I also spend a lot of time reading novels and watching books and
films. Partly because I am lazy and I like them. Partly because I'm looking for
those novels and films to help me imagine other possibilities of being that
aren't drawn from the past. Art, Dewey tells us in The Public and its Problems,
is the real bearer of newness. Maybe then, I get to grab onto those things and
say ok, what if we made those them responsive to an expansive materialist
analysis of what an Israeli-Palestinian peace would need to survive? What if we
held the luftmentsch's feet to the
materialist/pragmatic fire, even as we held the wonk's feet to the luftmentsch's fire? Let them both squeal
for a while. There's possibility there.







Daniel J. Levine is assistant professor at the University of Alabama. Among his recent publications (see below) stands out his book Recovering International Relations.



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Related links








Faculty Profile at U-Alabama
Read the first chapter of Levine's Recovering IR (2012) here (pdf)
Read Barder and Levine's The World is Too Much (Millennium, 2012) here (pdf)
Read Levine's Why Morgenthau was not a Critical Theorist (International Relations, 2013) here (pdf)
Read Monk and Levine's The Resounding Silence here (pdf)




Print version of this Talk (pdf)