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"Bibles banned in California moves one step closer to evil reality."

"Canada is passing a bill to essentially ban the idea of Christianity."

World Economic Forum "calls for AI to rewrite Bible, create 'religions that are actually correct'"

State Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker cited the Bible to explain why.

The Southern Baptist Convention's annual gathering in New Orleans just expelled or "disfellowshipped" member churches that allowed women to hold pastoral positions. Among the expelled was the amazingly successful Saddleback Church of Southern California, founded by superstar-Pastor Rick Warren, a church that had grown from a six-person Bible study group in 1980 to 15 campuses […]

 I saw this postDeSantis seems more like Trump each day in his disregard for rules, laws, norms, constitutions, and even the Bible-based Golden Rule. So much for moving past Trump and the threats he poses. My latest at @BulwarkOnline. https://t.co/U27Bh9TGfz— Jill Lawrence (@JillDLawrence) May 31, 2023

and I had a case of deja vu.  I flashed back to when I pondered about when did Trump cross the line of no return.  When did he do something that he couldn't take back, something so awful that he would alienate so many people and couldn't get them back?  I was, of course, wrong about how many people would be alienated, but the point was really that he had revealed enough about himself before that the latest revelation should not have made much of a dent.  People were discussing Trump joking about NRA and death threats against Hillary Clinton way back in August 2016--was that too much?  And I pointed out that he started his campaign with racist stances that should already been too much.Well, the cycle is starting anew and folks are saying that the latest thing DeSantis is doing means that he might not be really an alternative to Trump but another version of him, and my response is: ya think?  Jill responded back to my tweet, asking if I had read it, so, yeah, I hadn't and then I did, and my point remains that her focus was on the very recent stuff--not DeSantis's original "Don't Say Gay" position but his punishing of Disney for opposing that stance (weakly, belatedly but enough to set off this thin-skinned bad faith hater).  At what point did DeSantis cross the line of no return?  Once again, I draw a handy graph:To be fair, there are lots of bad things DeSantis did and anyone of them would be disqualifying if, you know, Republicans had values.  But shipping off immigrants to another state without providing resources or warning is just appalling. So, everything else he has done since then does not really change things much, maybe making him asymptotically closer to Trump in awful, but not very significantly.  Does this mean he is not electable?  Alas, I learned my lesson in 2016--that just because a politician is thoroughly deplorable does not make them unelectable when party id is a hell of a drug.  Trump still polls well among Republicans because they care more about power and domination (what they call freedom) than anything else.  Bill Simmons used to write about the Tyson Zone--that once a person reaches a certain level, nothing they can do should be all that surprising--even biting an ear off an opponent.  Well, in politics, there is the Trump space--that once you get inside of it, no matter what evil thing you do or so should not be that surprising since you have already done enough to be considered thoroughly and completely irredeemable.  Trump is there, Cruz is there, DeSantis is there, as are heaps of other Republicans.  Indeed, Alito, Thomas have lifetime appointments to the Trump space.There is no coming back.  Not even if they showed a hint of remorse, and, no, don't hold your breath for even that.Oh, and for the Canadian equivalent, once you hug extremists occupying Ottawa, you can't go back either, sorrynotsorry, Pierre.

Three and a half years ago, the ASI published a position paper and draft law proposing a "UK Free Speech Act" which would, if enacted, forever remove the regulation of nonviolent political discussion from the remit of law enforcement in the United Kingdom.The censorship provisions of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 (the "Hate Crime Act"), entering into force this week, are deeply offensive to freedom of expression, and the only way to stop them is to implicitly repeal these new rules with UK-wide protection for freedom of speech.The Hate Crime Act contains three provisions in particular – "aggravation of offences by prejudice," "racially aggravated harassment" and "stirring up hatred" – which are, at least as-described, descriptions of the sort of speech that most members of polite society would rightly oppose as a personal, moral matter. However, if we look at the substance of the language employed by the new laws and its derivation from similar, viewpoint-neutral English rules – in the case of the stirring-up offence and the "racially aggravated harassment" offences,  the "alarm or distress" language from the English Public Order Act 1986, and in the case of the stirring-up offence only, the historic "threatening, abusive, or insulting" language from that same law – we know that these rules have proven capable of extremely overbroad application in England, and these new rules will prove just as terrible, if not more so, if allowed to stand in Scotland.The position, outlined in a 2020 paper for the ASI, and the applicable English legal rules, remains entirely unchanged. It suffices for present purposes to note that existing English laws, which are nowhere near as intrusive as the new Scottish ones, have already been used in England to, variously: ·      threaten a schoolboy with prosecution for nonviolently holding up a sign calling the Church of Scientology a dangerous cult;·      arrest republican protestors in the vicinity of King Charles' coronation for nonviolent picketing;·      convict a protestor for nonviolently saying David Cameron had "blood on his hands" for cutting disability benefit at an event where the then-PM was speaking;·      convict protestors against the war in Iraq for nonviolently expressing their points of view in front of soldiers of the British Army returning home from that war;·      arrest students for nonviolently saying "woof" to a dog;·      arrest a woman for nonviolently praying silently; and·      arrest a preacher for nonviolently reading from the Bible, in public, verbatim.The existing rules should have been repealed years ago, but few UK lawyers, being unaccustomed to an American perspective on free speech jurisprudence and thus unable to see that the frog was starting to boil, seemed to notice very much as the English judiciary lost its way after issuing its landmark, pro-free speech decision of Redmond-Bate [1999] EWHC Admin 733. In a few short years, the English courts went from protecting controversial speech to routinely acquiescing to the criminalization of what, pre-1999 at least, would have been entirely lawful, if somewhat controversial, expression (see: Norwood v DPP [2003] EWHC 1564, and Abdul v. DPP  [2011] EWHC 247). The provisions of Article 10 of the European Convention concerning freedom of expression, enshrined in domestic law by the UK Human Rights Act, are little better than window-dressing. They have been of no assistance whatsoever in protecting English speakers of controversial ideas since that law's enactment; indeed, the Human Rights Act may have harmed the cause of free speech in the country by formalising the broad derogations from that right permitted under Article 10(2) which have been abused, time and again, to stifle discourse. Put another way, our experience with the English rules, in particular the Public Order Act 1986 but also the Malicious Communications Act 1988, and Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, is that their application, especially in the last 25 years, has been subjective, unpredictable, inconsistent, politically-motivated, sometimes capricious, and thoroughly chilling to speech.The Scottish law turbocharges all of these problems by abandoning viewpoint-neutrality and expressly targeting "culture war" issues around questions of identity within the four corners of the statute. This is particularly the case when we look at the "aggravation of offences by prejudice" law, which states that age, disability, national or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, and transgender identity are all to be considered when sentencing people in Scotland for criminal offences. The problem with this, of course, is that merely talking about these issues and causing offence is already capable of constituting a public order offence, both in England and substantially equivalent legislation in Scotland, and these provisions were used in both England and Scotland to suppress speech even before the Hate Crime Act entered into force.Only last month transgender activists sought to have J.K. Rowling arrested there after English prosecutors declined to prosecute her for prior "gender critical" remarks. The Hate Crime Act now requires Scottish judges to take into account Rowling's motivations when judging her speech, which we think would be fairly described as emanating from the identitarian, and therefore definitionally "prejudicial," ideology known as second-wave feminism, and would require, in a public order or malicious communications-based prosecution for those feminist remarks, for a Scottish judge to consider a sentencing enhancement.It makes no sense to criminalise these conversations. Indeed it makes sense to expressly legalise them, given that national politics seems, increasingly, to cluster around identity issues and, in a democratic society, require their open discussion in order for these disputes around the proper ordering of society to be satisfactorily resolved. On the gender theory question, in particular, the debate seems to be between, on one side, critical theory-informed intersectional activists who seek to view all power relationships through the lens of what they call immutable characteristics, and on the other, we see a coalition of classical liberals and religiously-minded traditionalists from the usual suspects like the Catholic Church but also newly aggrieved groups such as traditionalist Muslim parents of schoolchildren. As the fact that the Prime Minister himself felt the need to chime in on these matters this week plainly evidences, identity issues, whether we like it or not, now sit squarely at the centre of contemporary UK political discourse. We take no view on the merits of either "side" here, because taking a viewpoint does not matter and, in any case, is inadvisable, to the extent anyone here at the Institute plans on ever setting foot in Scotland again. This is because it is now quite unsafe, legally speaking, to take a vigorously-defended public position on these questions in Scotland from any perspective, as long as there is a hearer who is offended enough to file a police report against the hearer's perceived political enemies, or calculating enough to pretend to be so offended. To see how the Hate Crime Act potentially cuts in all directions, we need look no further than criminal complaints which have already been made under the new law. See, for example, the fact that Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf, the law's primary advocate and promoter, was immediately reported by the Indian Council of Scotland to the police for thoughtcrime contained in a speech he himself delivered in Scottish Parliament in 2023 as soon as the Hate Crime Act entered into force. Under the new regime, even the First Minister will need to take care not to express those same thoughts in the same manner again.There are not many reasonable people who wish to live in a country where the first response to any political disagreement is to call for a speaker's arrest. Nonviolent speech should never warrant a violent response. Yet, as was proven on day 1 of this new law, we already see that the Scottish law will be used, and is being used, to call down state-sanctioned violence, namely arrests and imprisonment, to suppress broad swathes of viewpoints from all political quarters. To the few back-benchers who are engaged by this pertinent issue: This is the hill to die on. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, has said he opposes the Scottish law. Push the Prime Minister to back up that opposition with decisive action. Permanently abolish political censorship enforced at gunpoint. Enact the UK Free Speech Act.

 Bento in the Anthropocene Humanism, and the debates for and against it, is less a perennial philosophical question, returned to again and again, than a moving target, one that reflects the different political, cultural, and economic situation of the moment. The humanism of the renaissance is not the same humanism that was at the center of debates about Stalin and Marx in the sixties. Moreover, I would argue that the question of the human now is profoundly transformed by the Anthropocene, by the awareness that human impact has had an ecological and geological impact on the planet, transforming it for the worst. This does not mean that old debates and discussions of different humanisms in the history of philosophy are relegated to the dustbin of history--just that they take on a different sense and meaning today. Spinoza and Marx's debates with the humanism of their time take on a different sense today. One of Spinoza's central critical statements is against the tendency, shared by rationalists and romantics, philosophers and theologians, to view ourselves as a "kingdom within a kingdom." As Spinoza writes, "Indeed they seem to conceive man in Nature as a dominion within a dominion. For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of Nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself. And they attribute the cause of human impotence and inconstancy, not to the common power of Nature, but I know not what vice of human nature, which they therefore bewail, or laugh at or disdain, or (as usually happens) curse. And he who knows how to censure more eloquently and cunningly the weakness of the human mind is held to be godly."First, a few words about this passage, filled with the rhetorical fire of the scholia, Spinoza weaves together two forms of humanism, two ways of being a kingdom within a kingdom. The first is that of superiority, of humanity as something more than another thing in the world; the second is that of something less, of something fallen from its place in the natural world. These two ideas, humanity as more than nature and humanity as less, rational virtue and depravity, are two sides of the same coin. What would seem to be opposed in the various oppositions of rationalism to romanticism are closer than they would appear. This image of humanity is as much a philosophical position as it is a matter of everyday common sense. It is a spontaneous ideology. It stems from our basic tendency to be conscious of our desires and ignorant of the causes of things. These two things, desires and causes, become two different things, different kingdoms, one governed by causes and the other by our supposed free will. It is primarily as an ideology, an inadequate idea that Spinoza critiques this humanism. It is a way of thinking that makes it difficult to grasp not only what is true, that we are part of nature, but most beneficial. It is only by understanding ourselves as part of nature, as determined like all other things, that we can actively change and improve our condition, rather than alternatively celebrate and bemoan it, by seeing ourselves as part of nature we can transform our nature. As Franck Fischbach has demonstrated, the idea that we are part of nature, and, with it, the notion that it is by seeing ourselves as part of nature that we can increase our capacity to act on it, is a fundamental point shared by Spinoza and Marx. Moreover, as Fischbach also argues, this idea takes on a particular valence in Marx, as Marx often refers to "man's inorganic nature." This idea appears first in the 1844 Manuscripts but continues up through Capital. It is in the latter that we get the formulation "...nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, which he annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite of the Bible." I assume the second part refers to the divine image of man, and, if one wanted to continue the Marx/Spinoza connections, this could be considered Marx's criticism of the anthropocentric universe and the anthropomorphic god. Marx's overall emphasis, however, is on the way in which the history of humanity is constantly adding organs to itself, transforming the limitations and shape of the human body. We add to our own feet the wheels of the railroad, to our own ears the power of the telegraph, and, all in in all, to our own mind, the power of the general intellect. To quote Marx, "Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are the products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge objectified [vergegenständlichte Wissenskraft]. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect."We could add that in capitalism this process of extension of our inorganic body, as tools and machines extend our capacities and actions, is coupled with its opposite, with as Marx also says in the Grundrisse the reduction of human beings, of human labor, to conscious organs of the machine. The formation of industry is both an increase of our capacities, our ability to see, hear, move, and act, and, in current conditions, a reduction of our capacities. That is a matter for another discussion. I would like to tie Marx and Spinoza's criticism together, not by stressing their shared ontology or anthropology, but by instead arguing for the historical intertwining of these two processes, the tendency to see ourselves as a kingdom within a kingdom and the tendency to transform nature and our natural existence. I would say that it is precisely because we extend our capacities beyond our body and mind that we are able to see ourselves, to misrecognize ourselves as kingdom within kingdoms. In other words, it is through our transformation of nature that we are able to see ourselves as separate from nature. We live a dual lives, in our conception of ourselves we see ourselves as something distinct from nature, as a unique being, but in our practical lives, we endlessly act on and transform nature. The famous two cultures, science and the humanities, is as much an anthropological division as anything else, a division between our two sides--one that transcends nature materially, producing a world outside of its rhythms and another that transforms nature conceptually, producing an understanding of ourselves as something apart from it.I know that this is not necessarily a shocking point, but I still think that it is worth pausing over all of the technological transformation and devices that make it possible for us to remove ourselves from natural limitations, cycles, and events. Electric lights make me indifferent to the cycle of day and night, heat and cooling make me indifferent to the seasons, and, now thanks to containerization and shipping, I am unaffected by the climates and conditions that dictate and determine the seasons of food production. I am able to see myself as a kingdom within a kingdom because humanity in general has transformed its inorganic body. Nature still has its effects, the occasional storm that disrupts power or snow day that shuts down a city, but for the most part humanity, especially those within the elite in the global north, live in an artificial kingdom untouched by nature, as a kingdom within a kingdom. This transformation has its effects on nature as well as society. In part we could call the Anthropocene as the period in which our transformation of nature begins to have its unintended effects. It turns out that make nature the background of our little human kingdom entails burning a great deal of fossil fuels, among other transformations, and the end result is a different, more volatile and active nature. It is thus harder and harder to see oneself as a kingdom within a kingdom as heatwaves take hold of entire regions, intense storms become more and more frequent, and even the air we breathe is filled with viruses that did not exist earlier.  The nature we are a part of, that our kingdom collapses into, is not the nature that we left, it is one thoroughly transformed by industry and technology. It is going to be harder and harder to see ourselves as a kingdom within a kingdom. Spinoza and Marx would both remind us, however, that old illusions die hard, a change of circumstances does not entail a change of conception, especially when this idea, of humanity as a kingdom within a kingdom, is how we are governed and ruled. Since I illustrated this with pictures of Bento on our walks. I will tell a brief anecdote that is part a recounting of the initial provocation that became this piece. Walking Bento is a big part of my life, and a bigger part of the summer, where the walks become an excuse to explore local trails and parks. I used to only think about nature before going on walks by checking the temperature and seeing if I needed a raincoat or sunblock. This summer has been different, an abnormally wet June and July has made so that I have to plan our walks around flash flood warnings that threaten the local rivers while also avoiding the beaches that have been contaminated due to storm runoffs. The warmer summers also mean that ponds are now contaminated with toxic algae blooms that used to be foreign to this state. It is not just travel to such places as Greece, beset by forest fires, or Spain, experiencing record high temperatures, that has been changed, but the simple act of walking the dog has been transformed as well. I find myself having to think about nature in a way that I did not before, being aware of risks that previously did not exist or at least where marginal. The idea of nature as the background noise of our artificial lives is transforming, being replaced with something that is harder to ignore. The question is, will we recognize this, change ourselves and our understanding, or will we go on living in our kingdom even as it collapses around us. 

 I am not sure that the past month's headaches and insomnia are due to the challenges of thinking about the Israel-Palestine conflict, but I am going to use that as my intro to this effort to think through this stuff.Usual caveats apply: I am not a political theorist or moral philosopher, I am not an expert on the conflict itself.  Oh, and I was raised Jewish and the education I got at Hebrew school did not adequately present the realities of the past.  I did take one Mideast politics course in college, and I did spend one week on an amazing and amazingly depressing tour of Israel and Palestine with a bunch of other academics four years ago.One of the conversations that disturbed me most this past week was when a rabbi I met on that trip     responded to my criticisms of Israel's attack upon the hospital.  He asked what is the right way to attack a group using a hospital as a shield (and as a trap), and my answer was simplistic: don't.  I get that he and some of my relatives feel as if there are unfair standards being applied to Israel.  And I absolutely get that anti-semitism is on the rise in the US, Canada, and Europe, although I wonder how much of this pro-Palestinian and how much of this opportunist far right folks using this moment (something to discuss another day).  But Israel is fucking up in a major way here, and I want to think through why I think that, and why it is legitimate to criticize Israel at this moment of crisis.  Oh, and one more caveat: Hamas is more evil.  It is bad to target the civilians of the adversary, but it is even worse to deliberately endanger one's own civilians.  Netanyahu has indirectly engaged Israelis by empowering Hamas and by diverting troops to protect expansionist (irredentist!) settlers, leaving communities close to Gaza essentially unguarded.  So, even as I criticize Israel, I am not apologizing for or supporting Hamas.  I want Hamas to be defeated, but in the right way.  More on that below.So, I am starting with first principles:Everyone is deserving of self-determination: Jews, Palestinians, Ukrainians, Taiwanese (oops), Quebecois, etc.  Violence is bad, so it should only be used proportionately.Just because someone did something in the past, such as mass bombing of cities, does not legitimate folks using the same strategy today.  The bible speaks of laws of war that we generally find abhorrent--there has been progress in our moral stances and also in our strategic understanding.  The best way to provide people with self-determination is democracy.  It is better, in my humble opinion, that infinite secession where every group has its own state, because the act of secession or partition will probably increase the grievances of some groups that are left behind. Quebec's separatism had a very small burst of violence largely because Quebecois could and did exert power via voting to get damn near everything they wanted. Not everything, but all the stuff that might have been worth fighting for.One state from sea to river with all Palestinians and all Jews sharing one state with heaps of religious and other rights .... would be cool, but, well, Jews want a Jewish state since bad things have happened in democracies where other groups have more votes.  Alternatively, a single state where Jews have rights and Palestinians don't is inherently problematic and wrong--the apartheid label feels icky but when you run a massive open-air prison with no end in sight, it is hard to think of it in any other way.  I have believed for quite some time that Israeli Jews faced a choice--Israel could remain a theocratic state or it remain a democracy, but not both.  Some of my relatives have said that the Arab countries should welcome the Palestinians.  The thing is: the Palestinians think they are a people, the Arab countries think the Palestinians are a people, and since nationalism is intersubjective, Jews can't wish away Palestinian identity.  However, Netanyahu can use the Israeli military to destroy many symbols that resonate with Palestinian identity, and that gets us to the g word.Threatening a second nabka, which would expel the Palestinians from the occupied territories would be ethnic cleansing.  If the Palestinians were to win and push the Jews out, that too would be ethnic cleansing.  And it would not be legitimate even if one considers all Jews to be settlers-colonizers.  We can't unwind history with heaps of bloodshed and call it justice.  Anyhow, I try to avoid using the word genocide because it is very fraught.  In the past, did Canadians practice genocide against its Indigenous peoples. Yeah.  Now?  I'd say no, as state policies are not aimed at reducing or eliminating these peoples, even if bad policies continue and are harmful.  But I can see why some folks may argue this and I probably need more info to take a clearer stance.Is Israel engaged in genocide right now?  It is using lots of violence to reduce the population of Palestinians in Gaza.  It is not proportionate, and it is not well aimed at achieving military objectives, two of the requirements for the just use of force. Israel is making Gaza uninhabitable. While Israel has not been all that strategic/deliberate--this is mostly about revenge since 10/7--the way force has been used is suggestive--to solve the Gaza problem by getting rid of the residents.  That has some echoes, doesn't it?So, the hospital: Hamas had some stuff based at the hospital?  Does that make it either a legitimate (morally speaking) or sound (strategically speaking) target?  No.  Most of the folks at the hospital had limited agency--they neither voted for Hamas nor had power to remove Hamas, nor much ability to leave.  So, one should not target many vulnerable civilians if the aim is to kill a few Palestinian leaders.  With that specific campaign over, we are learning that the Israelis never had the best intelligence about the threat posed by those in the hospital, which is now a trend--Israeli intelligence failure.  Would it be legitimate and smart to hit the hospital if it had a ticking weapon of mass destruction?  Sure.  Anything short of that?  Not so much.  The Hamas use of human shields is ... a TRAP!  And the Israelis walked right into it.  War is, as they say, politics by other means, and so the Israelis lost big time on the world stage by attacking a hospital  Their strategic communications about all of this has been awful.  International support matters for both sides, and Israel surrendered whatever moral authority and international support it gained on October 7th, much like the US gave up all of the goodwill from 9/11 by attacking Iraq.  Jews are upset because Hamas is not getting as much criticism, and that is for a few reasons.  One is that countries are siding with the Arab world due to strategy or convenience or cheap oil or whatever.  Another is that Hamas being evil is baked in.  It has been held to a lower standard because it is a terrorist group.  Palestinians in Europe and North America support Hamas and cheer on Israeli defeats, including, alas, the attacks on kids.  Jews in Israel and elsewhere are cheering on violence against Palestinians.  Both are wrong--both because the people of both sides deserve human dignity and because the attacks are not going to achieve anything.  We hold Israel to a higher standard because it is a democracy and it is the more powerful side, which means, yes, it has more responsibility.One of the ingredients of just war is whether an attack is actually going to accomplish something.  If you repeatedly use violence with little expectation of changing the situation, that is morally problematic--revenge, for instance, is not a legitimate justification for the use of violence. If some violence can avert more violence and end a conflict, then it is more just (and more sound from a tactical or strategic standpoint).  Ukraine has a morally superior position for continuing the war because Russia has abused those who have been on their side of the lines.  Violence, targeted at Russian troops and Russian military assets, is legitimate and also strategically sound.  Russian attacks on Ukrainian hospitals and other civilian locations is not.  And no, I am not saying Russia and Israel are morally equivalent... but I am saying that Israel's actions are positioning Israel closer to Russia.  And who would want that?  During the insurgencies of the 2000's, scholars and American military folks came to the same conclusion, more or less: that the best way to win (or at least not lose) a counter-insurgency effort is to minimize civilian casualties.  These casualties would undermine the war effort--not just by creating more insurgents--the family and friends of those killed-but also by undermining the legitimacy of the Irag and Afghan governments.  So, a policy of "courageous restraint" was enunciated, although I am not sure how well it was observed.  The basic idea is that if you want to attack a certain military leader or target, and there  are a bunch of kids or other non-combatants present, you wait for a better time.  Indeed, our rules of engagement for air attacks often lead to hitting targets at night when buildings are not as occupied.The point here is that there are ways to deal with a hospital that may have some "bad guys" in it.  Leveling it is not one of them.   Which leads to the question of a cease-fire.  I don't always support cease-fires (I am clearly not a pacifist), as it make give one side a big advantage.  In the case of Russia-Ukraine, a ceasefire with Russia on Ukrainian land would be bad because it would allow Russian to continue to abuse the Ukrainians and it would potentially create a semi-frozen conflict that limits Ukraine's ability to free its territory and enable Russia to fuck with Ukraine in a variety of ways.  In this case?  I think with so many civilians in harm's way, and with a cease-fire perhaps giving time for Israelis to think about what they are doing (like following Netanyahu), it might lead to a better, more humane outcome.  Would Hamas benefit from a cease-fire?  Probably, but so would Israel.  This all has avoided the big questions: what should Israel's objectives be?  Because you can't have a strategy unless you know what the goal is. If the objective is a one-state Israel with the occupied territories full of folks having no rights and no access to power, then buckle up for unending conflict.  Eradicating Hamas should not be an end to itself because removing one organization from the territories will not change the fundamental challenge of two peoples living in this area between river and sea. Removing the Palestinians from Gaza might be the objective now, and, if so, that is horrifying.Until October 7th, Israel focused on tactics to perpetuate the status quo: deterrence by punishment.  Or to put in pop culture terms, the strategy that Sean Connery told Kevin Costner in the Untouchables: they came with a knife, you come with a gun.  They send your guy to the hospital, you send their guy to the morgue.  I will always remember a conversation I had with a retired Israeli special ops general while our group was at the Golan Heights.  He was being critical of Obama for not hitting harder than the US got hit by various attacks.  That Israel's tactic was always to escalate a bit, to hit harder than have been hit.  And I basically asked: how has that worked to end the threat to Israel and stop the violence.  Maybe it was kind of working for Israel, but that ended on October 7th, when Hamas decided it was not just willing to take Israel's punishment for an attack that was far more aggressive and damaging to Israelis than previous ones, but actually eager for that punishment.  Deterrence only works if the costs of punishment are both credible and greater than the costs of the status quo.  To Hamas, they apparently felt the Abraham Accords and other moves were more threatening than getting shellacked by Israel.  Maybe their own domestic political game needed as much distraction as Netanyahu did/has.  Anyhow, it was a limited strategy since it was mostly kicking the can down the road and had episodes of violence priced in.  It may still be working with Hezbollah, but mostly because Hezbollah is in no shape to get into a war with Israel with Lebanon being such a mess (I am guessing here).  But the days of deterring Hamas are gone, so what now?Eradicating Hamas?  Not so easy.  Israel should be doing cost/benefit calculations of the various ways to attack Hamas, which would, yes, mean not attacking hospitals.  I think Israel's old strategy was and is the best option: after the Munich Olympics, Israel went out and targeted each person responsible for that attack and, as far as I recall, killed most of them.  Israel can do the same here with Hamas's leadership--they might miss a few, but better to miss a few awful Hamas leaders than to kill a lot of civilians.  This, of course, requires patience, which Netanyahu does not and cannot have, given the precarity of his political position.And this gets to the one of the key problems: Israelis have voted for various far right parties that have trapped Israel into more and more dangerous paths.  Making Israel more theocratic may be good for the Orthodox, but it is bad for the economy and for the political system.  Destroying the possibility of a two-state solution not only angers Palestinians but reduces bargaining options and exit strategies.  Putting corrupt, awful Netanyahu back into power again and again undermines Israel's democracy, its legitimacy, its military, and its security.  And ultimately its future.I am so angry and frustrated not because this is a hard situation, but because it didn't have to be this bad, it didn't have to be this way.  Netanyahu and the parties backing him have made things worse.  My anger towards Hamas is baked in--never democratic, always autocratic, always determined to wipe Israel from the map.  I never had any hope for that organization.  I had some hope for the Palestinian Authority until I visited Israel and got a better understanding of its limits.  But I had some hope that Israel would see the trap so visibly set in front of it and not hop into it so enthusiastically.  It is hard to kill one's way through a counter-insurgency, it is both wrong and counter-productive to kill so many civilians along the way.  As a scholar who used to study ethnic conflict, I understand that it is hard to end these kinds of disputes.  But I also understand that conflicts end, that violence is not inevitable--that it is a choice.  And as a scholar of civil-military relations, I am so glad I never studied Israel.I am not sure if any of this is coherent, but I am just trying to think through this situation.  Do I feel any better now that I have spewed my thoughts here?  Not really.   

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)