Suchergebnisse

Halima Bashir's Tears of the Desert, a memoir co-authored with journalist Damien Lewis, has received critical acclaim for exposing the atrocities that the government of Sudan commits, by proxy, against African animists, Christians and Muslims in the Darfur region in western Sudan. In this article, I examine how Bashir bears witness to the use of wartime rape as a weapon for ethnic cleansing. Drawing on Julia Kristeva's theorisation of the "abject" and on discourse on wartime rape by, among others, Catharine MacKinnon and Ruth Seifert, the article explores the precarious position of women and girls in warzones, highlighting the ways in which the maternal (and feminine) body is used as a site/sight of group struggles.Keywords: Bearing witness; wartime rape; ethnic cleansing; the abject; maternal body

The conflict in erstwhile East Pakistan, especially during 1970-1, was one of the bloodiest and most contested in the post-WWII era. While Bangladesh has always called it genocide, Pakistan has always denied both the intent and the scale of killings. This paper argues that the struggle of East Pakistanis to form their own country was reduced to a civic-political demand and not an ethnic-based claim to distinct nationalism. Revisiting Bangladesh"s claims of genocide based on primary and archival material, this paper posits that the violence unleashed in former East Pakistan amounted to the systematic wiping out of the ethnic distinctiveness of its people through ideological, economic, political and military means. This paper contends that the recognition of the massacre in former East Pakistan during its Liberation Struggle as genocide is not only ethically demanded, but this recognition also demands a qualitative widening of the existing legal understanding of genocide.

This book, first published in 2000, deals with one of the most urgent problems of contemporary times: the political organisation of multi-ethnic states. Most major conflicts of our time are internal to the state and revolve around the claims of access to or the redesign of the state. Responses to ethnic conflicts have ranged from oppression and ethnic cleansing to accommodations of ethnic claims through affirmative policies, special forms of representation, power sharing, and the integration of minorities. One of the most sought after, and resisted, devices for conflict management is autonomy. Within an overarching framework that examines different understandings of ethnic consciousness and the variety of territorial autonomies, the authors examine the experiences of spatial distribution of power in Canada, India, China, South Africa, Ethiopia, PNG, Spain, the former Yugoslavia, Cyprus, Sri Lanka and Australia

Frantz Fanon has been making the rounds lately. The subject of a new biography by Adam Shatz and a recent New Yorker essay, the anticolonial activist is enjoying a sort of intellectual renaissance. Perhaps that's because like so many people today, he lived in a world shaped by violence.
While the formal process of post-World War II decolonization had begun to run its course by 1961, when Fanon died at the age of 36, the Global South remained a violent space. Western powers continued to extract resources from former colonies, to manipulate local economies, and to expand local civil wars by intervening in regions from Latin America to Southeast Asia.
Fanon believed that violence not only begot violence, but that it could serve to uplift peoples long suffering under the colonial system. His 1961 seminal work, The Wretched of the Earth, spared no details on this point. "At the individual level," the revolutionary political philosopher argued, "violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence."
More than sixty years later, we might ask if Fanon's claims on violence still hold merit. While Fanon's writings focused entirely on anti-colonialism in his own time, broader interpretations of all violence as cleansing have entered the intellectual bloodstream. Recent conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East demonstrate the fallacies of perpetually seeing violence as a "cleansing force." All of this is worth examining in context, today.
The Martinique philosopher, it should be noted, did not speak in terms of "ethnic cleansing." In no way was he following in the abominable footsteps of an Adolf Hitler or setting a precedent for Slobodan Milošević, the 1990s "Butcher of the Balkans." Instead, Fanon meant to convey the rehabilitative nature of violence for oppressed peoples still living under the thumb of their former imperial masters. Perhaps this was because, as a psychiatrist, he actually treated victims of colonial violence — and colonizers themselves — during the Algerian war for independence from France.
But war doesn't rehabilitate. It only despoils and destroys. War is not reparative. Instead, it requires costly reconstruction in the wake of what it leaves behind. Policymakers and hawkish intellectuals alike peddle falsehoods when they promise war's therapeutic cures.
If Fanon justified the use of violence as a form of anticolonial self-defense — Shatz argues "cleansing" is better translated as "de-intoxicating" — such views have been extrapolated to rationalize military force for any occasion. In restating Russia's goals in Ukraine, for instance, President Vladimir Putin spoke in cleansing terms. Peace would come, he argued, only after the "denazification, demilitarisation and a neutral status" imposed upon Ukraine. It has been nearly a year since the World Bank estimated the costs of Ukraine's reconstruction at US $411 billion. One wonders if such massive destruction truly will wash away Putin's fears of Western encroachment toward Russian borders.
If Fanon saw violence as redemptive, he also judged it to be reactive, at least for the colonized. Violence could be politically and strategically instrumental in altering power relationships between oppressor and oppressed. In other words, it is a way to contest the infliction of injury by the more powerful when peace failed to deliver.
Did similar thinking underscore Hamas's 7 October 2023 attack against Israel? As the BBC reported, the Islamic Resistance Movement justified its actions as a response to "Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people." But the orgy of violence that followed—French President Emmanuel Macron called the 7 October attacks the "biggest antisemitic massacre of our century"—hardly was cleansing.
Nor did Israel's military response shy away from a Fanonian belief in the virtues of violence. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sidestepped criticisms of the heavy death toll among Palestinian civilians inflicted by the Israeli response, reaching back to the allies' World War II bombing campaign as justification for the "legitimate actions" of a state at war. If Fanon maintained that the colonized individuals could regain their dignity through "counter-violence," a way to liberate themselves from subjugation, surely Netanyahu thought similarly for the Israeli state writ large.
Yet the right-wing Likud party has gone farther than simply opposing violence with violence, with some extremists calling for the annihilation of Gaza and the Palestinians who live there. Can this language of genocidal violence, if not its actual practice, truly lead to the liberation of which Fanon spoke?
Lest Americans think that Fanon's political philosophizing doesn't apply to them, they need look no further than the global war on terror. In the aftermath of 9/11, President George W. Bush landed on a two-pronged strategy for the Middle East that assumed a successful counterterrorism campaign would pave the way for a democratic transformation of the entire region. Turning Fanon on his head, the Bush administration saw violence as a way to bring order back to decolonized locales where disorder—and, to Bush and his supporters, violence—now reigned supreme.
Contemporary critics, of course, voiced their concerns. Not long after the national trauma of 9/11, journalist Chris Hedges contemplated American notions of war as a cleansing force that gave them meaning. Hedges wasn't convinced. He found the language of violence hollow, the implementation of it repugnant.
I think Hedges's doubts were (and are) justified, and not just for Americans. Do Israelis, for instance, who see themselves living in a besieged state consider their lives more meaningful for the violence they both support and endure? Do Palestinians judging themselves victims of a violent settler colonial project feel their world has been cleansed?
If Fanon remains relevant so long after his death in 1961, then perhaps policymakers and publics alike should question their enduring embrace of violence and war as cleansing forces. Historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt certainly did, arguing that the "most probable change [violence] will bring about is the change to a more violent world." Current events in both the Middle East and Eastern Europe seem to be bearing Arendt out.
To his credit, Fanon believed that violence leading to "pure, total brutality" could undermine the very political movements employing violence in the first place. But when policymakers and their people seek to use violence as a cleansing force, brutality itself seems to be the point.

Discusses a number of historically informed insights that might bridge the gap between Anglo-American scholarly discourse on Central Europe & the public's self-confessed ignorance about this region. These insights include (1) the East is different from the West for specific historical reasons; (2) ethnic cleansing has a long history; (3) the Hapsburg-Ottoman frontier is still in existence; (4) multiethnicity is less a problem in the region than a solution; (5) the nation-state is less a solution than a problem; (6) the treaties signed at the end of WWI still cause problems in the region; (7) the creation of nation-states in the region produced dire consequences for the Jews; (8) the US has always deferred to its allies in the region; (9) war crimes trials against Serb criminals are important to maintain a sense of justice in the region; & (10) at the end of the 20th century, the West has another opportunity to play a positive role in the future of the region. Success in the region will be contingent on how well Western leaders have learned these lessons & are able to educate their publics about them. D. Ryfe

East-Central & Eastern Europe was the core zone in the epoch of world wars & revolution. Violence raged in unprecedented form here. The region was caught between the fronts of National Socialism & Soviet Communism; it was the main theatre of wars, policies of social & ethnic cleansing, the genocide against the Jews, a scorched earth policy, & enormous forced population & refugee movements. There is no language capable of finding a single denominator. Only when all the nameless millions of victims of this violence have been named can there be any serious talk of a European memory. Adapted from the source document.

International audience ; To explain war rapes in former Yugoslavia, the work of cultural ideology is never complete, but an unstable relation between cultural activism and cultural norms and practices provides the point of departure to move beyond the stereotyped accounts of mass rapes and develop a neo-structural model of canonical formalization based on discourse analysis and transformational morphodynamics. Methodologically, the new model takes lead from the abstract mathematical operations and canonical transformations suggested by Lévi-Strauss for the structural study of myth. The assumption is that mass rapes are fueled by a specific cultural activism that activates a cultural ideology that makes mass rapes effective in a military strategy of ethnic cleansing.

International audience ; To explain war rapes in former Yugoslavia, the work of cultural ideology is never complete, but an unstable relation between cultural activism and cultural norms and practices provides the point of departure to move beyond the stereotyped accounts of mass rapes and develop a neo-structural model of canonical formalization based on discourse analysis and transformational morphodynamics. Methodologically, the new model takes lead from the abstract mathematical operations and canonical transformations suggested by Lévi-Strauss for the structural study of myth. The assumption is that mass rapes are fueled by a specific cultural activism that activates a cultural ideology that makes mass rapes effective in a military strategy of ethnic cleansing.

In June 2005, the author interviewed five Sudanese men. All but one had been failed by UK asylum procedures. Their stories are related to other examples of similarly desperate asylum seekers throughout the UK and the effects of policies of forced destitution, detention and deportation are described.

Annex 7 of the Dayton Peace Agreement represented a breakthrough in the history of conflict settlement. It stated for the first time that displaced persons should be able not just to repatriate to their country of origin but to return to their actual pre-war homes. The tension between the rights-based approach implied in the Dayton Peace Agreement and the moral imperative of reversing ethnic cleansing becomes clearer when considering the position in which rural returnees were put. There is no doubt that the international community faced a fundamental dilemma regarding minority returns in Bosnia and Herzegovina but, in pursuit of the goal of reversing ethnic cleansing, people's right to choose was, to a large extent, sidelined. This requires a profound re-thinking within the international community, particularly so considering the relatively poor results achieved in terms of reversing ethnic cleansing. A policy which took into account individual motivations and constraints, as well as more in line with the recognition of people's right to choose enshrined in Annex 7. Adapted from the source document.